Rachel Kushner - Telex From Cuba

A whole case of the Bacardi, and I’ve never once dipped into any of it.

I don’t think of it as something meant to be drunk, but a relic like all the other relics of our life in Cuba that I keep in this room, my den here in Tampa.

Del didn’t express much interest in Mother and Daddy’s stuff. The older son flies the coop. It’s a classical model. The younger one stays in the nest, his mother’s boy. After Mother and Daddy died, I put everything in here. Del said he would come up and have a look but he never has, even though he lives on Marco Island, a two-and-a-half-hour drive.

Mother kept immaculate records of our life. It’s all here, in an old United Fruit accounting tablet that must weigh a hundred pounds. This morning I had to get the cleaning lady to help me move it.

My wife never came into this room, and I didn’t much, either, the six years we were married. It’s frankly overwhelming, though I hadn’t meant to create any kind of mausoleum.

The big red lamp from the Mollie and Me. My silvered conch shell, which Chatty, the watchman at Saetía, gave me. It was Mother’s idea to have it silvered, probably the very conch that Chatty blew the day I knocked Curtis’s lights out. A framed image of the Black Virgin. I don’t know who gave it to me, somebody who worked for Daddy. You can see the three miners and their capsized boat, the Black Virgin floating above the waves, to save them from drowning. A stack of old home movie reels, a hobby of Daddy’s. I’ve looked at them a few times. Del and me playing catch with Daddy in the yard, riding our bicycles on La Avenida. You can see Annie, Hilton, and Henry in the background here and there. The prints are so scratched that in every scene it looks like it’s raining. In some of them it is raining, and the only difference is that everything in the frame gleams with wet.

I pick up the conch shell, its inner spiral still a vibrant, fleshy pink, its white outer edge plated in silver. All these years and it never broke.

The phone is ringing. My answering machine will pick it up. I finally got one. Everybody was complaining that they’d call and my phone just rang and rang. I said, “Let it ring. Call when I’m home.” But I must say, I like the machine. The phone rings once, the machine picks up, “This is K. C. Stites, please leave a message,” and now I never have to answer. If someone insists on reaching me, they can come to La Teresita, where I take my lunch. Anyone who really needs to talk to me knows where I am. Five days a week, at eleven-thirty, seated at the counter with the green and black tiles, flirting with the waitresses. They call me “Cuba” and I never have to order because it’s the same thing every day.

Suppose you get only fifteen minutes. Would you travel three thousand miles to speak with someone you love for just fifteen minutes, if you know that it’s the last time you’ll ever see that person?

How far would you travel?

Suppose you could speak to someone you love who’s no longer living. Would you cross a continent to speak to that person for just fifteen minutes?

You would.

When it’s someone you love, the answer is that fifteen minutes is limitless if it means getting information about how to proceed without them. The chance of a clue is worth the journey. Because you don’t know what that person will say to you. You can’t guess what you might be turning down.

Just after my wife died, I came into this room and took an ancient phone book of Mother’s from the shelf, black leather with gold lettering on the cover. The spine cracked when I opened it. On each page, twenty different kinds of ink and lots of crossing out. The people we’d known in Oriente moved around a lot after 1959.

The L s—“LaDue”—those folks were surely dead. “Lederer.” They’d moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Everly and I wrote for a while, but like everything, that friendship had its time and place. I’d thought maybe she was the one, but what do you know when you’re fourteen? We were not so alike. I think she knew it all along. I was too square for her, was the truth. I moved here, to Tampa, after college. I taught at a private school, ran the athletic program. I dated a lot of Cuban girls. I think they were a way to fight the homesickness. Weekends, I’d go over to the dances in Ybor City, the Cuban colony here. The music and the atmosphere reminded me of those native functions out in the batey that Curtis and I snuck into. I dated all kinds of girls, old, young, fat, thin. But I didn’t commit until very late in life. I was fifty-four when I met my wife, on a public tennis court. She could murder the ball. Off the court, she was a kitten, ran a philanthropy, and was interested in museums, cultural things. Sharp as a tack and always cheerful, made everybody feel they were something special. Mother would have loved her.

I was in the M s of Mother’s ancient phone book and found the name Charmaine Mackey, Phillip Mackey’s mother. I had no idea if it was still the right telephone number, or if she was alive. As I said, my wife had just died. Twenty years younger, a knockout, and dead of cancer.

I don’t know what drove me, but I picked up the receiver and dialed the number.

It had been disconnected.

Probably a number from 1963! I mean, ridiculous.

Ever since I was a child, old phone numbers have had this magnetic effect on me. Clavelito used to sell special telephones during his faith healing hour on radio CMQ. They were for calling the dead. He sold various things, planchettes and Ouija boards and something called a “volometer,” which was for measuring a person’s willpower. “Psychic telephones,” Clavelito called them. I don’t know how they were supposed to work. I wanted to see one, but it was a thing you mail-ordered, and as you can guess, they were expensive.

I picked up the phone and called information. It’s nationwide now.

I suppose it’s strange that I would want to call Phillip Mackey’s mother, and not, say, any of the Allains. Maybe the Allains were too close to my childhood, and in another way too far.

When the operator answered I asked for Mackey, Charmaine Mackey. There was one listed in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

I felt like I was doing something you aren’t supposed to do. Put it this way, I didn’t go down to the Teresita afterward and start announcing to the guys at the lunch counter that I’d spent the morning stalking people I’d known as a child.

I’ve always been curious to know what went on with Phillip Mackey and Del before Phillip was sent away, how it was he and Del got mixed up with the rebels. I thought it might explain what went on with Del later, his decision to leave home and go up to the mountains to fight. Del does not talk about that period of his life. He said a few things to Mother when he arrived in Haiti a month after the revolution, but as far as I know, that was it. He never brought the subject up again. Now he’s very conservative, very buttoned up. He’s my own brother, but he leaves no opening to ask about the past. It’s like he isn’t the same person. If I ever bring up our childhood, he asks me if I’ve already seen the photos of his new boat. He doesn’t encourage real conversation. His wife offers me a drink and they’ve got a new patio set they want to show off. The three of us sit down together and they smile at me with their dentistry smiles. My brother says he doesn’t know about the rest of us but it’s time for a dip in the pool and leaves me there with the wife. She probably has no idea about Del’s complicated history. He’s in control, and there’s no window to ask questions, certainly not about things that his current life, in every aspect, contradicts.

I figured if I found Charmaine Mackey, I could ask about Phillip’s whereabouts, then maybe call him or write him a letter. We never saw the Mackeys after we left Cuba. They didn’t move to Florida like a lot of people.