Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The dimpled commander wore tight-fitting fatigues, her rifle strap bifurcating a decent-looking set, two mounds larger than his two hands could have cupped. Though any set, at that point, would have looked decent to him. When she grazed his arm with her own, he assumed it was a green light. He gestured to the woods, attempting to negotiate a discreet romp with this well-endowed commander. She became angry, almost hysterically so, yelling at him that she was of higher rank, and accusing him of demeaning her and betraying the democratic principles of the revolution, then marched off to “write up” the incident. As if an indispensable leader like himself was not immune to a petty write-up. He was utterly immune. Nonetheless, his heart sank. How disappointing, how tiresome, to be scolded by a woman. Who in any case was dressed like a man, and had suddenly transformed from a warm and receptive female to a power-mad shrew. The incident cast a dreary mood over him.

He reminded himself that he could easily leave, trade in his hammock for a comfortable bed in the Seventh. Fly from Santiago to Port-au-Prince and then direct to Paris, and in three or four days’ time have all the female comforts he wanted. See Dalida, his Miss Egypt, her torpedo bra and long legs, the depression that gripped her in a manner he found fascinating, an interest that wasn’t quite empathy, but not cruelty, either. Something else, a brackish mixture of the two. Dalida suffered acute and sustained anxiety attacks that lasted several weeks and felt, she told him, “Like I’ve dropped something priceless and fragile, and it’s about to hit the floor and smash into a million pieces. There’s nothing I can do — I’ve already dropped it and it’s going to smash into a million pieces. That feeling. It’s just left my hands. It’s just left my hands.”

On second thought, he could avoid Dalida. Not tell her he was back, and embark on simpler engagements. Lurk at the cafés and pick up working-class girls, bring them to his apartment, and eject them just as quickly, explaining that he looked forward to savoring the memory of their company as much as or more than he’d savored the company itself, offering his shopworn theory about passion necessitating absence.

He thought of his indifferent and less predictable zazou. Of course, Hector hadn’t screwed her. La Mazière was simply falling prey to the pathetic notion that everyone must find her desirable because he did. But going to Havana to see her was out of the question. The SIM would put a bullet in his head. And anyway, he’d committed himself to this fugitive world, even if its women, with their prick-teasing attempts to humiliate him, were enough to make him long for an Englishman’s Kabuki drag queen. Even if these soldiers had not quite mastered the mystical potentials of violence, the gifts of merciless discipline, and still could not grasp the basic and vital concept of militiae species amor est — warfare as a kind of love, as Ovid had said. Ovid might have said the reverse, that love was a kind of warfare, but no matter. Both were true.

The rebels controlled most of Oriente at this point. The central province of Las Villas was almost theirs. After its capital, Santa Clara, fell, they would make their push into Havana. Thousands and thousands of acres of sugarcane were burning. Buses and trains were burning. Every tobacco-curing shed in eastern Cuba was burning. He loved revolt. It was his favorite part of revolution. He had to stay, at least for the grand debouchment from the hills.

Fidel Castro visited their camp one afternoon and delivered an impromptu speech about diet and nutrition. In times like this, Castro said, when camps were short on food — La Mazière’s had had none the past two days — it was important to remember that termites were edible. But terribly bitter, La Mazière discovered, when the unit commander ordered the cook to prepare a batch to please Castro. The bitterness of a hundred Fernet-Brancas converging in one spot on the back of his tongue. He covertly spit them out and suggested they borrow a cow from the local campesinos, to be paid back after their triumph. Three rebels set off on this task, but all they managed to rustle up was an emaciated colt. They tied the rangy colt to a post, and it was La Mazière who had to put the thing out of its rangy misery. He shot it and hung it upside down, explaining that this was preferred, so the juices from the head would not drain into their meat. He held a butchering clinic. Skin it warm, but wait for the body to properly cool before cutting. Make one vigorous slice into the armpit, and yank the shoulder. Like this, see, away from the carcass. To remove the round, we locate — here — the ball-and-socket joint that connects the leg to the pelvis. Sever the joint with staccato knife strokes. The neck, by the way, is wonderful for jerky, if you like that sort of thing.

As the horse meat was broiled, Castro and La Mazière sat in the shade and chatted, watching the men cook and bring order to the camp. It was understood that neither Castro nor La Mazière were men who did chores. Both had graceful, uncalloused hands, with trimmed, clean fingernails. La Mazière kept a paper clip in his pocket for this purpose. To have dirt under his fingernails was to lose his sense of self, as he had discovered in that miserable Russian prison, where his paper clip was confiscated.

The meal that evening, like all their meals, was egalitarian in character, everyone sitting together, officers of the highest rank taking their share last. But in this performance of equality, La Mazière knew, his and Castro’s separate and far higher status was all the more preserved.

Late that night, La Mazière heard a rustling of his plastic tarp. He opened one eye but didn’t stir. Castro lay down beside him, quietly, carefully. The camp was silent, soldiers all sleeping, the only sound the rhythmic stridulations of insects.

For a long time, Castro was still and said nothing. La Mazière lay there, in the humid bosom of night, moonless and black, sensing the commander’s concentration, his restive and alert mind discerning the shape of La Mazière’s own alert mind.

“Mazière,” Castro finally said.

“Yes.”

And then Castro was upon him. In one simple roll, the heavy weight of his body over La Mazière’s. A thin, scratchy blanket between them. He smelled the faint scent of garlic on Castro’s breath. His beard was softer than La Mazière would have expected, though he wasn’t generally in the business of expecting beards. He felt a vague throbbing, not his own. It was Castro’s. A pulsing that was unmistakable, persistent, but then again calm. As if they both understood that there was no need to attend to it, this critical mass of blood, a throbbing, and that they would let it throb against La Mazière, who lay on his back under Castro, and under the plastic tarp, no sound except the drone of insects.

Some secrets cannot be said but only sung, like those of La Mazière’s ancestors, the great troubadours of medieval France, who sang the secret heresies and chronicles of the Church of Love, which no one dared speak out loud. Some secrets cannot be said but only danced, like those of the rumba, the licentious dance that Batista kept threatening to outlaw. Other secrets, La Mazière knew, must be felt, and faintly. As possibility, and nothing more.

At some point Castro’s secret throbbing may have become two throbbings. But it can be difficult to discern what is one’s own and what is another’s. As in first aid training at Wildflecken, when La Mazière had learned never to take a pulse with his thumb, which has its own pulse.

In that position, they, or at least he, began to feel the promise of muffled, guerrilla sleep, a deep animal space where no person could follow, not even a man lying upon him.