Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

After the business of dropping her drink, Mrs. Billings felt somewhat calmer. She said to her husband in a defeated voice, “I wish everybody would just be quiet. It’s too much. All this talk of phosphorus and ammonia. I can’t keep it straight — what we have, what they have. I’m not a goddamned chemist.”

Her husband was scooping up the remains of her drink, which was now just the base of a glass surrounded by broken shards.

“The rebels have the phosphorus,” he said, “and we’ve got the ammonia.”

“But what the hell does it matter?”

“Because phosphorus is a weapon. The rebels are threatening to drop it from airplanes, to start fires. But it’s just a threat, to get our attention. You know all about threats. Don’t you, dear.”

He set the broken glass on the bar, gesturing to the bartender to make her a new one. “And ammonia is a target. Those tanks near the bay? They’d explode — I mean hypothetically. It’s a scare tactic. Nothing is going to happen. Except that some of us will have hangovers tomorrow.”

“All problems have a solution,” the faith healer announced. “We all have a right to succeed in business, in study, in sports, in gambling, in love.”

There were new laws. Palm readers, hypnotists, and self-appointed gurus were convicted. Also, vendors who sold magic powders, aphrodisiacs, and remedies by mail. Batista banned broadcasts on divination and the interpretation of dreams, on anything that stimulated beliefs opposed to civilization. Only the lottery numbers were okay.

Mrs. Billings had gone to the powder room. She looked at herself in the large mirror above the washbasins.

Sometimes you just have to give in, she knew. She didn’t want to live in a midwestern shithole. What is more beautiful than Oriente? the Americans all said. What air is more tender? What flowers more brilliant and exotic? What company parties more fun and carefree? What life is better than theirs? “If you can just hang on, this is all going to blow over,” the men said to their wives, as if they’d rehearsed these lines. What did she know about what would and would not blow over?

There was plenty of liquor at the Pan-American Club. There was caviar and cream cheese on crackers, with a squeeze of fresh limone —delicious, although she never figured out why the Cubans called them that, since they were not lemons but limes. There were deviled eggs and vol-au-vents. Fetching, tiny electric lights in pink, green, and white, strung along the gleaming mahogany bar. Just for them, their club, their holiday. And she was in a new gown, chiffon, her favorite fabric, that wonderful rustling material that made her want to go home and pretend her husband still—

A thunderous rip of pops erupted from somewhere inside. The chandeliers swung in the rooms where the ceilings hadn’t vaulted, and then sagged, threatening to collapse. Mrs. Billings, Mrs. Mackey, and the Carrington twin, the one who hadn’t run off with the boxing coach, were all in the powder room when the explosion occurred. Better accustomed to their own club back in Nicaro, all three women reeled straight into the enormous mirrors that were mounted on the walls of the powder room lounge. Panicked and confused, they mistook the silvered glass for open space (Euclid still applied, if not to history, at least to the layout of the Pan-American Club) .

The mirrors crashed to the floor. The women ambled aimlessly, sliced up, blood batiking their faces. “It’s broken,” the Carrington twin said, holding her hands over her nose, which flumed garnet down her chin.

Mrs. Billings wandered into the foyer, glass crunching under her heels. There was music in her head, jangly and instrumental, with a high-pitched and chimey aftertrace. Music you’d pump out of a hand-crank organ, she thought, but pictured no monkey. The monkeys here didn’t work — they hung from their cages, blinking at you with their moist, human eyes. The music was getting louder, more high-pitched around the edges. She felt a hand on her arm: her husband’s. But she couldn’t see him. Blood flooded her vision. And she couldn’t hear him, on account of that crazy music.

She said, “Can someone please turn that down? Can someone please turn that down?”

She said it as loud as she could, but the music drowned her out.

Radio Clavelito Independiente 710 AM

December 3, 1958, 10:00 P.M .

Good evening, brothers and sisters.

I have not abandoned you. In fact, the tragic actions of the state have only made me stronger.

They can shut down CMQ, but not Clavelito. The radio band is large. I will keep moving. Discontinued, though only temporarily, are my extrasensory telephones, no longer purchasable by mail order. We hope to make them available again soon. We are aware of the waiting list, and more importantly the need for this vital equipment. But on this issue the state has legislated, and established prohibitive fines.

Should I be fined for offering, at long last, a use of technology that isn’t a lazy convenience? Would you rather have a wafflemaker? That’s what the state would prefer. That you spend your money on waffle-makers.

Clavelito has not abandoned you. This important work, supplying faith where there is little, shall continue. Partly thanks to the support of you, my listeners, who understand what the state does not, that the true condition of radio has only one equivalence: not “imaginary” participation, but the rain outside your window.

Brothers and sisters, collect this rain.

The dance at the Pan-American Club was not a good-bye fete, although some people later thought of it that way.

It was just a Saturday night party — Daddy’s idea. I think Daddy wanted to prove that everything was business as usual, despite the rebels and some of the disturbances we’d experienced. Few people were giving up and leaving. We were staying, of course. The LaDues, I know, were staying — Mr. LaDue was like that, an old workhorse, loyal to Daddy no matter what. The Allains were staying, although they didn’t have the same options as the rest of us.

There was only one twin at the club that night. The other had run off with Luís Galindez. Those sisters always came together to Preston, dressed alike, a thick collusion between them. Seeing just the one gave me this feeling that things might be beginning to unravel. It was Nicaro I thought was unraveling — not Preston. Nicaro was closer to the rebel encampments, and everything there was more complicated because of Gonzalez. We were an American town, and foreign-owned property in a time like that becomes a safe haven. Nicaro should have been a safe haven as well, but they had a Cuban investor, so it wasn’t purely American-owned. There were rumors that Gonzalez was using the nickel mine as collateral, playing Castro off against Batista and cutting deals with both sides. People felt that Gonzalez was up to something, but they didn’t know what.

I’m not sure why I didn’t think Preston was unraveling. Del had been gone for almost a year, and running off to fight with Cuban rebels is a lot more serious than Pamela Carrington falling in love with a boxing coach. The rebels had blocked the main road down to Mayarí. We still had our social life — you could yacht over to Nicaro or Saetía anytime you wanted. Take a company plane to Miami. But if you wanted to go anywhere south or west or east of us, meaning to the rest of the island, you were out of luck. Castro had a lot of power by that point. He could stop our operations anytime he wanted. He was demanding that we pay fifteen cents on every bag of sugar, and yet we couldn’t process the cane to pay him. We had no gasoline to run the mill, no oil to run the railroad. Much of the track was destroyed, making it impossible to get the cane to the mill. And half the blacks we needed to cut it were gone. The rebels were shutting off our water supply intermittently, to demonstrate that they could. They were threatening to burn down every last acre of sugarcane on the island. They could have done it. They had planes and their own airstrips in the mountains, and they’d been starting fires all over the island by dropping payloads of phosphorus-filled Ping-Pong balls from airplanes. Daddy kept telling everyone to be patient. He said gasoline was on its way, oil was on its way, and he was negotiating a deal that would work in our favor. The rail tracks were being repaired. We’d have a cutting season, he said. It would simply start a bit late, a late but fantastically profitable cutting season. If we gave up, he reminded people, we’d have no cutting season.