Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

“Who’s he?” the soldier asked, pointing at La Mazière. “A médico,” the driver said. “He was helping in the East.” La Mazière stayed quiet, impressed at the gentleman’s spontaneous tact, regretful that a devolution into bureaucracy was already taking effect. After a battery of questions, the soldier waved them through.

Gazing at the series of mirages that pooled up ahead on the highway, one after another, La Mazière understood that while he missed Paris, he wasn’t so anxious to return. Paris held no mirages, just familiar comforts, Dalida, whose wet, gleaming eyes offered an alluring violence, and yet her melodramas, silly and uncomplicated, bored him terribly after more than a few hours in her presence. Even her beauty was static and predictable. Rachel K’s, on the other hand, was somehow transitive. It acted upon him.

My Woodsie gives radiant joy.

He thought of the blue-lit body, the firm-jelly breasts. Watching her, pleased and amused, from his table in the back of the Pam-Pam Room.

He’d never conceived of a dalliance with a fellow troublemaker, an insurgent, if that’s what she was. The gulf of secrets he kept seemed disarmingly mirrored in her, a girl who might keep her own gulf of secrets. She was rarely forthcoming about anything. She’d claimed, more than once, that she wasn’t Cuban. “And yet you speak only Spanish,” he’d said. “You say ‘Lucky Strye ’ when you want a cigarette. And the way you operate, friend of this and that politician, thug, and revolutionary…you’re certainly a savvy foreigner.”

“Like I’ve told you,” she’d said, “my grandfather was from Europe. I take after him.”

To which La Mazière had replied that she seemed not only Cuban but quintessentially so. He was lying. He didn’t know what she seemed. If anything, she looked middle European, ghosting some ethnic riddle, a living clue that someone, at some point — a grandfather, perhaps — had been roaming someplace he didn’t belong. You might as well be the brochure cover girl, La Mazière said to her, for — forgive him — that tacky rapture-promising tourist slogan “Caribbean fleshpot.”

“Maybe it’s only your rapture,” she’d said.

“I can’t thank you enough. I think this is where I get out.”

They were caught in a traffic jam, amid the victory cavalcade of cars, trucks, motorcycles, and jeeps. In front of them, a confiscated Sherman tank was being towed on a flatbed truck.

La Mazière waved good-bye and set out walking along Máximo Gomez, a wide boulevard with chipped, pastel-painted porticos. Above the colonnades were enormous Spanish-colonial homes painted in rich creams, custard yellows, pale pinks, and pistachio greens, like rows of éclairs and meringues in a patisserie display case. He walked in the shade of the porticos, passing newspaper stands and lottery ticket hawkers, vendors selling peanuts, cane juice, and candy.

Block after block, he floated in the heady rush that came with reentering a place that was familiar but had been temporarily forgotten. He walked quickly, in a state of euphoric anxiety, as if the city’s existence without him must somehow and suddenly be recaptured.

He stopped at a barbershop for a shave. He’d had the momentous shave after the deprivations of war before. The shave of shaves, more momentous than that first sip of whiskey. The faint gardenia aroma of the lather, a tacit agreement among barbers and men that fragrance was acceptable, even desired, as long as it remained faint. He lay in a green vinyl chair, his feet propped, his arms on the armrests, his eyes closed for this meditation, the passage to a groomed state of being.

As he reached the Prado, patting his smooth cheeks and damp, trimmed hair, he heard an amorandola, the same musician strumming it who seemed always to be there, on a recessed bench under the laurel trees, singing the same song that La Mazière had heard him sing before.

“Bonanza, bonanza, we’ll all be rich! Bonanza, bonanza, the sea is calm—”

The sea was not calm, La Mazière was pleased to observe, as he got closer to the presidential palace and the heart of the old part of town. When he turned onto Zulueta, he encountered an energetic mob of boys and men with sledgehammers, systematically decapitating the parking meters that lined the street. Coins vomited onto the sidewalk and were promptly scooped into plastic bags. A man held the head of a parking meter up in victory, and in one smooth movement, like a javelin thrower, lobbed it through the plate-glass window of a clothing boutique. Others knocked out the remaining jagged shards of glass, and people climbed in and began undressing the mannequins, trying on clothing and taking what they wanted, leaving the mannequins nude, their joints turned in inhuman directions, heads lolling. La Mazière remembered being amused to learn that it had once been illegal in the United States for display window mannequins to go unclothed. A ridiculous and prudish law, and yet he admired it, in its passion for symbolism. That people had faith in a plastic model to carry some threat of real nudity? Marvelous, he thought, it was just marvelous.

He drifted toward Vedado, wondering which way the buoyant looting would go, erupt into mob rule, or be immediately quashed.

Near the Hotel Nacional a house was being ransacked, furniture tossed from second- and third-floor windows, expensive-looking things, and none of it was being salvaged — perfectly good furniture, a television, refrigerator, a tabletop radio. A woman in curlers and house slippers dumped kerosene from a large can onto the home’s defenestrated contents. Someone threw a match, and thin blue flames rolled like liquid over the pile, which quickly grew into a face-warming blaze. The home had belonged to Colonel Ventura, La Mazière overheard, Havana’s police captain.

The looting subsided later in the afternoon, when Castro sent orders that anyone caught stealing would be shot. Castro called a general and immediate strike, which effectively kept people off the streets. The casinos were closed. The shops were closed. The hotels were open. La Mazière “checked in” to the Nacional — he attempted to pay, but the clerk would not accept his money, explaining that he was leaving to honor the strike, and the cash registers were locked. Take a tip, then, said La Mazière, but the boy would take nothing, said to enjoy the hotel, and that everyone should have something gratis this special week. No one, though, would be in to clean the room.

“You can be sure of that,” a voice said. La Mazière turned around. It was his old hotel barmate, the forlorn little maharaja.

“I was given no choice but to break into the linen closet down the hall,” the maharaja said, “and change my own bedsheets.” He’d heard the new government would be sealing hotel safe deposit boxes any day. It was the final straw, he told La Mazière. He was getting a flight to the Dominican Republic and hoping for the best. La Mazière wished him luck, wondering why people who seemed so broken by their own uprootedness would choose to live in hotels.

As the clerk handed him his room key, La Mazière asked if any of the cabarets were open.

Most, the boy said, were closed.

What about the Tokio?

The Tokio was closed. The owner of the club fled the island yesterday. They’re all getting on planes. They’ve had a lot of bad luck at the Tokio, the boy said. The piano player’s hands were blown off earlier in the month, a bomb under the lid of his baby grand, a terrible tragedy. And one of the Pam-Pam Room dancers, murdered by the secret police.

Did the boy know which of the dancers?

He’d heard she was Batista’s mistress, but he didn’t know her name. He didn’t cavort with those kinds of girls, he said, because his mother believed they were harlots and that they all had the pox, and if he ever so much as stepped foot in one of those places—