Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“Go ahead, open it,” Mrs. Carrington said.

They were black-and-white photographs of ports and other industrial sites, mounted on matte black paper, each photo labeled and dated in white pencil. Montevideo, 1942–43. Caracas, 1945–47. Sulaco, 1950. Page after page, hundreds of photos.

“All the projects my husband worked on,” Mrs. Carrington said.

Suddenly Everly envied this instinct to document life as it happened, and wished she’d documented hers. All the ports Mr. Carrington had helped to build, and he had proof. They had been forced to leave, and Everly had documented nothing of the past seven years. She could barely remember Oak Ridge, where she’d lived until she was eight. She only knew Nicaro, and she had nothing of it to show, the clothes on her back, the white purse that for no logical reason she had grabbed at the last minute before they were hustled into the mine. Inside it was the gold faucet handle K. C. Stites had given her from Mr. Stites’s Pullman car. Because Duffy was still upset about her box of coral, Everly gave her the faucet handle. A decade later, she wanted it back, but by that time it was lost. Duffy might have just thrown it away, not understanding what it was or that it was worth keeping. And isn’t that why you gave it to her, she thought, to transfer it to someone for whom it would have no value? But now I’ve changed my mind. They were all grown up by then. Why did Everly suddenly want it? As some sort of proof, though it seemed strange to want proof of affections she’d never been keen on requiting. K.C. had placed the faucet handle in her hand. In that moment she’d felt every moment of every afternoon she’d spent with Mrs. Stites, and the doubts that had traced each of the moments, the unpleasant feeling of being appreciated but not known, not known at all by these people who were too different from her. She’d thanked K.C. and put the faucet handle in her purse, but she had not wanted it. If Willy had given it to her it would have been different, but he never would have. Willy had danced with a broom like he was dancing with her, twirling the broom around, swaying with it from side to side and dipping it like it was a girl, but not just any girl, his hand supporting the small of her back, and the girl trusting him and leaning low. It was either more subtle than a gold faucet handle or more forward, maybe outrageously forward. Either way, it was all she was going to get. She hadn’t even been able to say good-bye to Willy. The servants in the navy barracks were locked in, for “security,” as the evacuation took place. Everyone was being pushed into a group, lumped with the rebels or the government or the Americans. She had to be with the Stiteses and the LaDues and the rest of them, as if they were her people, and separated from Willy and the Cubans, who were not her people.

K.C. had kissed her on the cheek when he and his family left Guantánamo for Haiti. An awkward, dry kiss they both knew meant good-bye, and not the beginning of anything. Maybe she wanted his affection, but not to return it. Yet she sensed that by not returning it, it would dwindle. Everything did.

“He’s probably one of those Bay of Pigs fanatics,” Stevie said when Everly wondered out loud what had become of K.C., two years after they’d left Cuba. “Totally conservative. You can’t even talk to those people. They won’t reason. They’re hysterical with greed.” Tico Leál had become one. Stevie ran into him at a party in New York City in early 1961. Stevie was a beatnik by then. She wore black turtlenecks and white lipstick and talked about exploitation and revolution, quoted Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon. She said Tico Leál pulled her into a bedroom and opened what looked like a violin case to show her his machine gun. “Some of us have a plan,” he’d said.

Everly made her way through Mrs. Carrington’s album, port after port, aerial shots from so high up they looked like maps rather than photographs. When she was finished, Mrs. Carrington placed the second album in front of her, presented it as though there were a formal order, looking intently at Everly. She’s gauging my reaction to something, Everly thought, opening the second album. But what?

A week after the evacuation they were in Miami, staying at a motel across from a Pickin’ Chicken, where they ate dinner at an outdoor table, under a sky the deep pink of women’s crème blush.

Everly would be going to her grandmother’s in St. Louis. Marjorie and George and Duffy would stay with the other grandmother, across town. Neither had room for all of them, and thank goodness Stevie was at boarding school, her mother said, tuition paid by the company through the end of the year. Marjorie Lederer kept announcing that they were ruined in a manner so insistent that Everly began to wonder if there was a certain pleasure in insisting such a thing.

They finished their Pickin’ Chicken and returned to the motel to watch the coin-operated television set mounted in the corner of their room. Fifty cents per hour, which Marjorie Lederer said was highway robbery, but they wanted to see the CBS special report on Cuba and their own evacuation. “The town of Palma Soriano has officially fallen under rebel control, according to Cuban news sources.” There was television footage of roadblocks and tanks, people cheering in the streets. Then an old Hollywood actor, the star of a film Everly had seen in Nicaro, waving from a silver sports coupe with gull-wing doors. Cubans flowed around and past the exotic car as if he and it didn’t matter. The actor told reporters he’d helped rebels take the town, and for his efforts they were awarding him a special combat medal.

Marjorie Lederer sat at the motel room desk, itemizing their belongings from memory, every last appliance and piece of furniture, for which she expected, she said, full compensation.

“From whom?” George Lederer asked her.

“Your employers. The U.S. government. Lito Gonzalez. National Lead.”

“Dear, my employers stand to lose a hundred million dollars on their investment. And Lito Gonzalez ran us out of town, if you believe Hubert Mackey.”

“No one was hurt in the evacuation of American citizens from the Nipe Bay area on the northeastern coast of Oriente Province, ” a CBS reporter said. “ Though one woman, apparently overcome with sadness at being forced from her home, needed medical assistance.”

“That’s not why,” Duffy said. “It’s because Poncho cracked his coconut! He cracked his coconut!”

Everly did as Mrs. Carrington instructed and opened the second of the two photo albums.

The first image was of a woman posing against a rock, wearing a halter shirt and short shorts, Cuban, with hair that looked like it had been ironed flat to tame its curls.

“She’s pretty,” Everly ventured, unsure what she was supposed to say.

“They’re all pretty, dear.”

Everly turned the page. Another woman, in a sheer blouse and tight skirt, also Cuban, posed against what looked like the very same rock. The next page, another, same rock. The next page, yet another, every single one of them smiling like she was smiling for a lover. “We both know I’m sexy to you .”

“He said he wanted the pictures for when he was old and depressed,” Mrs. Carrington said. “To remind himself of the good times he’s had.”

Her husband’s secret catalog of mistresses. Mrs. Carrington seemed strangely proud of the photographs, as if they belonged not to Tip Carrington but to her.

“My husband loved life,” Mrs. Carrington said, as though he were no longer living.

My husband loved life. And she had proof.

They were riding into United Fruit territory, a convoy of jeeps and cars and buses, some forty rebels comprising a handful of units that had converged in the foothills of the Sierra Cristal, outside the city of Holguín. La Mazière was a hero, and there was a designated spot for him in one of the open jeeps.