Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

My Woodsie gives radiant joy. But then she takes it away.

Mother felt that we were abandoning Del. She said nothing tore her up more than the thought of her son coming home, hoping to clean up, be fed a sandwich and reunited with his loving mother, and to find the house empty and locked, the whole town vacated. It broke her heart. But going to Haiti meant at least we weren’t so far away. Haiti was only a hundred miles east of Guantánamo. From the balcony of the Hotel Mont-Joli in Le Cap, where we were staying, Daddy pointed toward the blue horizon and declared to Mother that if she squinted carefully she could see Preston. “Yes, I see it!” Mother exclaimed, “that cluster of green — those are the palm groves of Saetía, right?” Daddy nodded and said he believed she was correct — Saetía, surely.

You couldn’t see Preston or Saetía from the balcony of the Mont-Joli. What Mother saw was Turtle Island, just west of us, and it wasn’t actually so green.

Daddy said the move to Le Cap was temporary, but he had Hilton Hardy and Henry Das pack up and ship us most of our belongings from Preston.

Daddy was optimistic. He’d helped broker the deal with the weapons from England. The Cuban government just needed some support, he said. The State Department had abandoned Batista, but with England’s help he might regain control and stamp out the rebels.

If Batista’s government crumbled, Daddy was prepared for that. He had guys deep in negotiation with Castro. In the middle of a war, there’s always time to stop and talk about taxes and tariffs and who’s going to collect what. Not that different from what he accused Lito Gonzalez of doing, but Daddy didn’t endanger American lives the way Gonzalez did, radioing that the town was being attacked by rebels so that Batista would send bombers over. Gonzalez hoped to take over, but that didn’t last long. I heard he escaped to the Dominican Republic in the Nicaro yacht when Castro and his government started killing Batistianos.

No matter who came out on top, we would wait in Le Cap until things settled down. Life would eventually return to normal. The company had worked with every government, installed or elected, it didn’t matter, since 1898. We’d work with Castro.

If there was nothing to see from the balcony of the Mont-Joli, from the top of the massive fortress south of Le Cap, one could actually glimpse the eastern tip of Cuba on a clear day. I took a trip out there by myself one afternoon and roamed the citadel and the ruins of Sans-Souci, King Henri Christophe’s palace. It was four stories of crumbling pink bricks, grass growing up among its foundation stones and what remained of the enormous stairs. The brick mortar was pink, too, supposedly made of limestone, molasses, and cow’s blood. Sans-Souci had been ravaged by time and a couple of earthquakes, but even pristine it was difficult to imagine that a pink palace built of sugar and blood would be inspiring to a population of freed slaves. They had a new king, black instead of white, on a new gold throne, importing his robes and crown from France, his Lipizzaner stallions from Vienna — the idea of it is absurd and nightmarish. But maybe it’s unfair to blame a black king for mimicking French notions of empire. King Christophe built Sans-Souci while Napoleon was conquering most of Europe, and why should anyone expect democracy in Haiti before it happened in France?

I asked Daddy if we would visit Mr. Bloussé. Didn’t he live in Le Cap? Daddy looked at me and said, “Who?”

My entire childhood, this figure loomed large, I mean mythical, in the jodhpurs, the cuff links, the slicked hair. Adventurous and elegant Mr. Bloussé, who spoke a French that anyone could understand, the pronunciation was so refined, who arranged for so many workers to come over and cut the cane, brought bottles of cognac to Daddy, entertained us with grand tales, always followed by that mysterious boy who ended up working for the Lederers. And the Great Scandal of Bloussé’s colored family.

How could Daddy forget? He brushed me off, and the subject was dropped. Over the weeks we were in Haiti, I wandered the port at Le Cap, watching men unloading the ships that came and went. They were the darkest people I’d ever seen. Their sweat-coated faces shone like black patent leather. And they had these strange haircuts, everything shaved but a tuft on top of their heads, like we were in tribal Africa. I walked the narrow streets, past wrecked mansions that had been built by the French in the eighteenth century, before the blacks deposed them, ripped the white from the flag and left only the blue and the red. I couldn’t get Mr. Bloussé out of my mind. I kept picturing scenes from the stories he told in our parlor. The native voodoo practices, human sacrifice, and ceremonies presided over by an adolescent who was dressed half man, half woman, in a top hat and tails and lace skirts. I suppose it was a hermaphrodite, but I wouldn’t have understood that as a child. People planting a lemon tree at the gate to protect their house from yellow fever. And one fellow who asked Mr. Bloussé to bring him an almanac from Paris. Mr. Bloussé did. He gave this guy an almanac and the fellow hid it from his village and declared he was controlling the sky. “There will be a lunar eclipse on October thirteenth. The sun will set at seven fifty-nine on Thursday. A blue moon will appear in July.” And they all think he’s a god on earth, dictating the heavens.

The life of this exotic gentleman, Mr. Bloussé, seemed dashing and sophisticated, and also savage. It fascinated me. Mr. Bloussé was Haiti. They were the same thing, and I felt him everywhere.

La Mazière told himself there was a chance it wasn’t Rachel K. Batista probably had dozens of mistresses.

He had more than dabbled in this revolution, but he was so much less vulnerable than she. It was a war he engaged in lightly, almost anonymously, and then slipped away, sure that no one would miss him. Now was the time for nationals, not Frenchmen. He understood that for her it was not a game. She was betraying Batista, and moreover, she was disposable. When boys had been murdered by the Rural Guard in Santiago, their mothers flooded the town plaza, demanding justice. In Havana, when a student disappeared, his parents rushed to radio CMQ, where they waited to go on the air and call his name, pleading for his safe release. No one would have called her name or pleaded for her release.

If something had happened to her, he’d go back to Paris as soon as he could get a flight. The Pan Am office in the lobby of the Nacional was still open, but the airport, a clerk told him, was closed for security until after Carlos Prio arrived later in the evening. Only one terminal was functioning. The other had been torched.

He left the hotel, walking in the direction of La Rampa and Rachel K’s apartment.

Certainly his reasons for wanting to see her, for hoping she was unharmed, were selfish and narcissistic. But love was both.

Six years earlier, just after he’d met her, on a trip to Africa he’d watched women wading into the Pink Lake of Dakar with salt pans balanced on their heads. A blissful scene, and yet he’d been unable to truly enjoy the silver opacity of the salty lake, the women nude from the waist up, dipping their pans in the water, because he’d felt a nagging emptiness. “Greetings,” he’d written her, “from the banks of nowhere,” not having realized that nowhere was anywhere she wasn’t. He wasn’t sure if it was the special fate of wounded dreamers or simply what it meant to be alive that he hadn’t understood this until it was perhaps too late. His mind was riddled with remote compartments, like the caves at Lascaux that could be entered only by lowering oneself, dangerously, with ropes, the walls inscribed with nonsensical images of men with erections and bird masks, bison with their guts spilling out. He wanted to see his own birdmen and bison, whatever form they took, and had always told himself love was banal comfort that didn’t lead to any cave, any recess of understanding. It was a mutilation of character that prevented men from reaching greatness, and should be kept minor. Little passions, as insignificant as little deaths, as the French called climax.