Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

The streets were ghostly. The strike had worked surprisingly well. Soldiers had ridden through the city announcing Castro’s message through bullhorns, and aside from a group of boys attacking a pay telephone with baseball bats, La Mazière saw few people.

He walked quickly, suddenly convinced that Rachel K might be the key to something, never mind that the idea of a person as a key was ludicrous sentimentality.

She’d proven herself to be arbitrary and mysterious, even unkind. There were times when he’d appeared, unannounced, and she’d acted as though she wasn’t pleased to see him. Such a love object was no banal comfort. What if he and she could sustain their distance, but in proximity? Veil each other in lovely deceits, and put off the bewildering but highly likely possibility that love’s true object was absence?

My Woodsie gives radiant joy.

The ice cream parlors on La Rampa were closed. The movie theaters as well, their marquees dark. He turned right onto Calle G, her street. She could be the one murdered, he knew, and he better be prepared.

He was so close now.

Little deaths.

There was only one death, and it was grand.

He saw the legs, painted in their prison chain link, dangling from the balcony of her apartment. That crisscross ink, smearable, but perfect and unsmeared.

The legs swung slowly back and forth, as if she were lolling her feet off a boat dock.

He tried to subdue his elation. He had responsibilities, after all, a certain role to play.

He called up to her. “Excuse me — miss?”

She leaned over between the rails of the balcony, blood rushing to her Manouche Gypsy or German Jewish face, the blond hair flopping forward.

She smiled, said nothing.

“I just thought I’d let you know that if you’re waiting on the parade, it isn’t until tomorrow.”

He was calm now, his cool and regular self.

“But I’m enjoying the other parade,” she said.

“Is that so.”

“The invisible parade. Empty streets, silence. Would you like to come up and watch?”

Her apartment was as messy as ever, a joyful mess. “They left me in a room for a long time,” she told him. “Suddenly a guard comes and yanks me up and escorts me out. That’s it, I’m free. But it’s strange, because I don’t know why I got off so easily.”

“I know what you mean.” La Mazière thought of his own unforeseen amnesty, the yellow telex. He’d been thrilled, of course, even if his prison was not the worst. He’d been allowed to exit in street clothes, no escort, no handcuffs. When the prison gates slammed shut behind him, he’d stood under a sky so much more brilliant than he’d imagined that it was too bewildering to enjoy. He hadn’t been prepared for the blue of the sky, how stunning it was.

“¡GRACIAS A FIDEL! ¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN!” someone shouted from below her window, guiding cheers with a bullhorn. A chorus of voices joined in.

She’d been a brave and crucial part of the underground. Fidel had sent a message that there’d be a place for her in his revolution. She hoped so, she told La Mazière, because the casinos and cabarets were closed. No one knew when or if they’d reopen. Thousands of people were out of work.

The United Fruit executive cabled her from Haiti. He’d secured her an apartment in Cap-Haïtien and wanted her to go to the Nacional and retrieve valises full of Cuban pesos he’d left hidden in the closets of his suite. Sew the larger denominations into her clothing, he’d written — hide them wherever women hide things — and get on a plane. CAN’T WAIT. STOP. LIKE OLD TIMES. STOP.

But it wasn’t like old times. A week after she got his letter, the executive’s paper money was worth almost nothing. Castro had named Che Guevara finance minister, inciting panic among businessmen and a run at the banks. The peso plummeted. Prio, who had arrived in Havana on January 7, the same day as La Mazière, fled back to Miami on January 9, when Fidel announced he would expropriate Prio’s country estate and convert it to an asylum for albinos, who desperately needed above all else shade, Fidel announced, from the incinerating tropical sun.

The morning after Prio left, Rachel K had been summoned to Fidel’s headquarters at the Hilton. La Mazière was in her apartment drinking coffee and reading about the ex-ex-president’s departure. Poor Prio, outraged and already condemning Castro, whom he’d helped bring to power. But there was a limit to La Mazière’s sympathy. Toppling governments was not without risks. Prio losing his artificial waterfall was nothing compared to the guillotine.

She returned with an odd expression that La Mazière took for disappointment. Whatever place Fidel had planned for her in his revolution, La Mazière assumed it was a letdown, one that he had been waiting for. He figured she would come around to his own cynical feelings about the promises of revolution. Why couldn’t he just enjoy the flux and tumult of sweeping change? Of history? He did enjoy it, in his own way. He had attended the public trials at the Sports Palace, entertained by the spectacle and ruthlessness of popular justice. That Castro was giving the Americans a run for their money — that was good, quite good. That they’d probably try to invade the Dominican Republic and knock off Trujillo — interesting, a bold tactical move. But logic was absent elsewhere. Castro, for instance, hosting a cookout for the new revolutionary air force at La Cabaña fortress, offering as barbecue a twenty-thousand-dollar breeding bull.

He clasped her face in his hands and said that whatever it was they’d offered her — a job in a lightbulb factory is what he pictured, an ignoble and ridiculous bit part in their drably populist scheme — she shouldn’t worry, that he and she could leave together.

“How would you like to go to Paris?” he asked. “You’ve never been there.”

“I’ve never been anywhere,” she said.

Then he should take her to France, he announced.

He pictured her on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in her fishnets and heels, carrying her parasol on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, near the Sorbonne, a phantom conjuring of zazou in the birthplace of zazou.

I’ll take her, he thought, to the Café de Flore, let her see the place for herself. Let her open the windows of my apartment onto twilit Paris. She’ll stand there, watching the curtains flap around in the wind, moody and graceful apparitions, announcing in their movement — what?

That a certain Christian de La Mazière, occupant of 5B, has detained one final zazou. And if the rest of Paris wants to see her, wave hello or good-bye, all they have to do is look up.

She responded with only an inscrutable, luminous smile. Everything in her room seemed to glow with meaning — her eyes like a silent screen star’s, the synthetic strands of a wig splayed on the floor.

The river of his thoughts flowed around her and the glowing objects in the room.

My Woodsie gives radiant joy.

“Paris,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Why would I want to go to Paris?”

“To see the world.”

But, she said, he talked about “the world” as if it were all relative — no place and anyplace. Greetings, as he put it, from nowhere. This place, Cuba, was where she was from. It was all she knew, and she had no intention of leaving it. She’d spoken to Castro, and just as he’d promised, he’d reserved a special place for her in his revolution.

“Whatever it is, you can’t possibly believe that—”

She was staying, she said. She added, in a gentle but imperious tone, that he might send her a card from his travels.

2004: Tampa

I have a bottle of cognac here, among the boxes that house Daddy’s prized liquor collection from Preston. I ended up with the crates of crème de menthe and the little glass bears filled with kümmel. There’s an entire case of Bacardi — the original Bacardi, made in Cuba, not like the fake stuff they put out now, which is made in Puerto Rico. The old Bacardi bottles are the size and shape of softballs, with nubby-textured glass and ruffle-edged bottle caps like on bottles of cola.