Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

He retreated to his tarp and drew diagrams, thinking, scratching out his failures. He came back to them with a tank design that was far more elegant than their rattletrap. No catapult. No wobbly turret holds. Just one spare and tasteful flamethrower with two thousand pounds of pressure.

“What shall we christen it?” he asked them.

“The Queen !” Valerio shouted, and so it was.

Watching them practice their maneuvers in the Queen, La Mazière contemplated how odd it was that in chess, the consecrated object, the king, on which the entire game hinged, was in fact all but useless, sheer vulnerability, an inert symbol, while the queen was the truly desired object, with powers that were leaps and bounds beyond what any other chess piece possessed. When did this curious reversal of terms take place? And why? And what did it mean? Valerio’s hand-carved coconut queens were obscene caricatures with lusty proportions. But this did not diminish their importance to the game, their innate dignity as instruments of victory. A queen whose maker had beleaguered her with huge breasts and protruding labia could still move in any direction, still glide over the board with thrilling velocity and ease en route to triumph.

Raúl, leader of the Frank País Second Front covering all of northeastern Oriente, was their commander. But they’d seen little of him, until the tractor-tank was perfected and a plot hatched to roll it down into the American region and take gasoline, which they badly needed, and hostages, which they didn’t need, but might prove a brilliant publicity stunt. They would abduct nickel company men and sugar company men and bring them up to the rebel camp. Show them a good time, offer tours of the damage caused by Batista’s bombers, and win the Americans’ sympathy.

This plan, though officially Raúl’s, had actually been hatched by an American — Raúl’s sidekick, the prodigal son of a United Fruit manager. The boy, accompanied by a small detachment, came to La Mazière’s encampment to go over the details. He was a brooding sort who bit his lip, with longish hair that hung into his eyes — perhaps meant to look like Raúl’s mop of hair, except that his was the white-blond of a Scandinavian. When La Mazière first heard about the scheme, he thought it likely to end in disaster, the rebels ambushed by the Rural Guard, or accidentally getting one of their charges killed. But hearing the American boy’s ideas, he grew less skeptical. It wasn’t a bad plan. Actually rather clever, the way this kid — Comandante Stites was his name — proposed dividing one column into two, just at the foothills of the Sierra Cristal, half the men crossing the Levisa River and going around and into Preston to take sugar company employees, the other half descending from the nickel mine, where worker sympathy meant they had all the lookouts and cover they would need, and into Nicaro, to nab unarmed managers like tender chickens and escort them back to camp.

La Mazière worked with Comandante Stites on rearguard maneuvers, offering what knowledge he had on offense and retreat. Both men would be at the rear of a rear line — La Mazière because he was too valuable to be risked, and Stites because it was his own clan on which a front guard would descend. The boy had wanted to lead the operation. Understandable. It was, after all, his creation. But best, La Mazière advised, to give orders invisibly. Luckily, he was able to convince Stites without saying out loud what he saw as a likely outcome, if this boy wound up face-to-face with his own people, his own father, who was the head of the sugarcane operation in Preston. The strategy of keeping him in the rear of the rear line was classic Mao, or maybe Mao by way of Sun Tzu. During peasant uprisings, Mao never sent PLA units to roll tanks over the people of their own prefecture. Instead, he sent them to other prefectures, where the faces and names of the people crushed beneath their tanks were unfamiliar. Separating the American comandante from his American captives was prudent, a way of maintaining the rebel image as an unknowable multitude — not a boy with hair in his eyes, who might be vulnerable to the last-minute bribe of a warm bed and a hot meal, a Jamaican nursemaid drawing his bath. La Mazière could all but see it: “Come on home, son.”

For the most part, Comandante Stites was severe and serious. A good marksman and tidy draftsman of military graphs, who was not fond of loafing or resting. He rose before dawn, as did La Mazière. Stripped, as La Mazière stripped, both men diving into the mountain stream near camp, Stites athletically surging upstream, switching from crawl to backstroke in a stoic but companionable one-upmanship, La Mazière responding with a muscular butterfly technique. Stites would then follow suit and transition to butterfly, the two of them throwing their arms and shoulders forward, propelling themselves through the cold water with everything they had, relishing this predawn agreement between men.

The way the American boy brooded and flipped his hair out of his eyes, occasionally reminded La Mazière of the rich and insolent American teenagers who showed up in Paris with their Swiss boarding school chaperones, lining up outside the Louvre, or occupying too many tables and ruining the ambience at the Café de Flore. But Comandante Stites meant business. The stakes for him were unique, and no doubt fueling his brooding focus. He clearly bore a grudge, perhaps not having outgrown the child’s play of breaking, or simply soiling, the law of the father. Comandante Stites seemed especially keen on having his father’s inner circle taken up to the mountains. Keen on having his father’s steak freezers raided, and cutting off his hometown’s telephone lines and water supply. As if the magnificent cane fire the boy had masterminded was not enough. His reputation had been built on that event, which had occurred just after La Mazière first arrived in the mountains. The other rebels revered the act as a grand sacrifice of the boy’s own paternal empire. La Mazière found it slightly more dubious. Oedipal battles must be waged carefully, not compulsively. Though who was he to say which really was bigger, the cosmos of infantile emotion, or the actual cosmos? Either way, the blaze made a devastating impact, more than the Americans likely realized. Fire, La Mazière knew, is alchemical. It changes everything. And long after it’s extinguished, a fire may continue to burn and corrode.

The Preston and Nicaro abductions were successful. And quite fun, as it turned out. Rebel military posts became theatrical stages, everyone performing for the benefit of the captives and the American journalists who quickly followed. On the day a Life magazine correspondent arrived, La Mazière convened with several men behind a cluster of scrub pines and arranged for the men to crisscross the camp, changing shirts, removing a hat, donning a hat, grouped in different combinations — five men, seven men, and so forth — to create the impression that each time they appeared they were a new battalion passing through. The captives were split into small groups, which were easier to manage and guard. On Raúl’s orders, La Mazière went from unit to unit to supervise security. Some of these units, to his pleasant surprise, were commanded by women. Real women, who smiled and flirted. One was particularly good-looking, and when he saw her swinging hair, her open feminine gaze, smile dimples like two delicate divots in the surface of a pudding, he thought he might be able to engage in softer pleasures in the midst of the more stringent pleasures of war.

He’d been surrounded by men and consumed with military tactics for the past five months, since he’d arrived that rainy afternoon in January, and he’d all but forgotten that intimacy and war occasionally coincided, if in a less than genteel manner. Of course, the Nazi joy division was a myth. One that served, like so many wartime myths, to allow for licentious fantasy under cover of redemptive guilt. There had been no roaming units of Aryan blondes, packed into wagons and delivered like milk. But there had been, of course, a soldier’s “droit du cuissage,” as La Mazière liked to think of it, one of the spoils of war. Over the grueling weeks he’d been trapped behind Russian lines, living like an animal and sleeping in the snow, there was an occasional farmer’s wife who gave herself freely while her husband was marched out back and pistol-whipped in a pig stall. He remembered one in particular, hoisting herself onto the kitchen counter and lifting her muddy skirts. It was a gamy union — this was the war, and bathing a dim memory — but an enjoyable union all the same. Gamy, after all, was sometimes a pleasure of its own. He had even chosen gamy on occasion. But the “base pastoral” of the kitchen-counter screw with the farmer’s wife could exist only as a lesser value, an inferior pleasure, because it had not been selected in lieu of other pleasures, other varieties of feminine grooming or lack thereof. The highest pleasures, he knew, were those for which he gave up another. Not pleasures of opportunity, but of sacrifice.