Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“Not every Cuban man is Daddy,” Pamela yelled back. “That’s your own special problem.”

Suddenly Blythe was standing in the dining room under the blazing lights, still as a mannequin. Carrington had been listening and not looking. It seemed almost as if she’d been there for a while and he hadn’t noticed. She was looking in the direction of the kitchen. What was she looking at?

The house was quiet now. She turned, walked slowly up to the large plate window that faced the backyard, and gazed out.

She was looking right at him!

He froze. But then he realized that the lights were all on, and she probably couldn’t see him. She probably couldn’t see much at all, other than the glare of the lights on the glass.

She would only see him if she turned out the dining room lights. Funny how that was the case. That she’d have to put herself in darkness in order to see.

He stepped from behind the bottle palm and stood facing the house, no tree or shrub between him and the window where his wife stood. He was wearing a white shirt, the same white shirt he’d been wearing since the day he was kidnapped, and despite its filth it was picking up the moonlight and glowing like radium. If she turned out the lights, she’d see him plain as day.

If she wanted to see him, it was all she had to do — turn off the lights.

Keep the lights on, she would not.

She gazed out the window.

What felt like a great deal of time passed. A half hour, an hour, he wasn’t sure, him staring at her and her staring back, still as a mannequin, her face close to the glass.

And then it occurred to him: she was looking at her own reflection .

She stared at the glass and Carrington stared back. Blythe, I’m right here. I’m back. They let me go on account of the migraines.

He put his hand up, palm out. He wasn’t sure of the meaning of this sign. Peace, or hello, or no hard feelings.

She’ll turn out the lights if she wants to see me.

It would have been that simple. Just turn them out.

It was all she had to do.

“Our life here isn’t particularly violent,” Mrs. LaDue said, after Mrs. Billings made the comment that it was.

The LaDues, the Billings, and most of the other Americans were at the Pan-American Club. This was December of 1958, near the end of this in-between era, after the Spanish ate the parrots to extinction, and before the Russians brought Marxism along with their smoked pig’s fat. Built brutalist architecture and ran the nickel plant.

“I’m not saying there isn’t violence,” Mrs. LaDue continued. “But viol ence and viol ent —those are different. It’s the difference between incident and intent .”

Some features of this era : Georgian estates in sugarcane fields, saltwater swimming pools reflecting tessellated rectangles of sunlight, and an open-air movie theater with love seats in the back row.

Although there was the plantation boss, Mrs. LaDue remembered — Hatch Allain. A decent man, really, even if it’s true there was a killing connected to him. It seems he did it, she remembered; that was the connection. But that was in Louisiana and a long time ago. And Mr. Flamm the paymaster was killed, true enough. But that was the blacks, and their love of chopping people up with those horrific machetes they carry around. They really do look like savages, and it’s the strangest thing to hear them speaking French—

Also in this era, after the Spanish, who cooked their parrots so slowly they remained alive as they were pulled from the oven, and before the Russians, who took the scrubbers off the chimneys and let the red dust rain down: Batista with a secret cavity behind a palace wall. The Fuck Room, he called it, though not in mixed company. An aristocrat’s mausoleum with an elevator to the “basement.” And the addition of cheval-de-frise — jagged pieces of bottle glass in brown, green, and clear — mortared into the tops of the low walls around the Spanish colonial buildings, to prevent vagrants from sitting.

Mrs. Billings said loudly, for everyone in the club to hear, that she was sick of all the violence.

“To here, ” she slurred, and put her hand up to her neck.

She’d wanted to leave for some time now, but her husband resisted. They all did. No job in the States would pay them like the nickel company paid them, they said. Or make them mining executives despite the fact that none of them had Ph.D.’s. Or give them enormous ranch-style homes, enroll their children in private school, on the company tab. No salary in the States would buy a staff of seven servants. Where’s the company yacht, her husband asked her, when we’re living in a midwestern shithole?

Also in this era, before the Russians and their brutalist apartments, and after the parrots, who looked up from the dinner plates as their wings were sawed off with serrated knives: a supply of what are called black pineapple grenades — philological proof of destruction’s devotion to the tropics.

The Americans who hadn’t gone to the Pan-American Club that evening were at home. Some watching television, others listening to the faith healer as he made his bootleg radio broadcast. His was the only program on this time of night. Unless you wanted to listen to the rebels, which few Americans did. The rebels, too, broadcast illegally, from their camp up in the mountains. Bearded ruffians who instructed people to burn sugarcane. Who announced, in advance, their own victory.

Mrs. Billings was drunk, as everyone was, most of the time. She was not a person to be taken seriously, the type of woman who bleaches her hair and then dyes it dark again, to get that coarse, ratted, bedroom effect.

“I said I’m sick of all the violence,” she repeated. Then she started an argument with her husband. Some women are very skilled at that. As soon as he began to fight back, she dropped her drink on the floor as a diversion.

A constant in all three eras : syphilis, tobacco, and trees with fruit whose flesh was the pink of healthy mucus membranes, a fruit that smelled like women’s shampoo.

“Put a glass on the radio and my voice will serenade it,” the faith healer told listeners. Those who were lucky enough to go to the studio had their water serenaded with the beam of his green plastic flashlight. “Buy lottery tickets with numbers ending in six. In four. In zero. Drink the agua serenada before you go to sleep.” It was a procedure for winning the lottery. The week before, the finance minister had won the lottery and used the money to buy a house in West Palm Beach. It seemed he expected to be relocating sometime soon.

“Why aren’t we relocating?” Mrs. Billings asked her husband.

“Because we haven’t won the lottery,” he answered drily.

It was almost Christmastime, and there were humans hanging in the trees beyond the security fence. Mrs. Billings had put up a cheerful breadfruit sapling in the living room — the refrigerated shipment of Virginia pine had not been able to get through because the bandits had blocked the roads eastward. She decorated the breadfruit tree with strings of tiny lights and hollow metallic balls and sang “Jungle Bells” and other carols with the children.

Local fragrances, in addition to the flesh-pink shampoo fruit : the feminine traces that lingered in the powder room of the Pan-American Club (Arpège, Fibah, and Colony), and the fetid jungle breath beyond the club’s meticulous gardens (rot, rot, and rot).

The faith healer had been condemned by Batista. Superstition was bad for the country’s image. What they needed was to modernize, to at least appear modern, and thereby regain the confidence of the ultramodern United States, whose support for his presidency was eroding. Batista accused the faith healer of feeding listeners false hope, like baby food, like liquor, a set of baroque and empty promises. He didn’t realize that the faith healer was working in his favor, that faith kept everyone happy, or at least preoccupied. Too busy hoping to be cured of debt, malnutrition, and broken hearts to cause any trouble.