William Kennedy - Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

A modest fortune accrued to Margarita, sent as income to her from Spain by the executor of Jaime’s estate, a friend of the Holtz-Otero family. The inheritance came with the proviso that Margarita not remarry, and if she did the inheritance would go to Jaime’s daughter with her, Celia. Margarita was oblivious of such detail, victim of the single-minded disease of love. She dwelt in grief and took pleasure only in the historic passion and memorious fantasy the love letters aroused in her.

Jaime’s uncle tried to reverse her withdrawal by sending his son Evelio, like Jaime a Spanish lieutenant, to comfort and restore her, a gesture so naive that his family thought him demented. Margarita was twenty-nine, Evelio thirty-four. Evelio visited her, offering comfort; returned the next day and the next with new comfort, which begat the word, the soft stroke, the fervor of immediacy. And there you have it.

They began in secret and were interrupted when Evelio was sent into unequal combat against the invading American forces. She welcomed the defeat of the Spanish military by the Americans for it meant the restoration of a lover to her life, a lover who banished all her guilt over the swift relegation of Jaime to memory, just as he banished her melancholy with his passion. Three months after Evelio’s release from the army Evelio secretly married Margarita.

Renata, remembering this, wondered, am I my grandmother? She saw the parallel to Diego and Quinn just as she looked to the doorway and saw Quinn coming toward her.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I just met your cousin Felipe.”

“My coffee,” she said.

“I’ll get you another one.”

“I didn’t pay for it.”

Quinn put money on the table and led her out to the street.

“Those guns of yours,” Felipe told Renata as they moved out of Santiago in his car, “we loaded them into a truck with fake floorboards that made room for them all. There were six Thompsons. Alfie found the truck. He knows how to get things.”

Holtz had been quietly supporting the Directorio with cash infusions until the previous week when two fourteen-year-olds he knew, neither with any connection to the rebels, were tortured and killed by police; and his outrage escalated. He flew to Havana and told his friend Aurelio he wanted to do more. Aurelio took him to a boat basin to meet a gun dealer, since Holtz had offered to buy guns. But neither money nor guns changed hands that day, the transaction aborted by a cruising police car. The transfer was to be the next day, but that afternoon the Palace attack was launched and Holtz went underground, surfacing only when he knew Aurelio had survived the attack; and by then Alfie, through Renata’s and Quinn’s intercession, had delivered the guns to Aurelio and Javier at the gas station.

When Renata mentioned yet more guns in the Sixteenth Street apartment that she and Diego had rented, Aurelio put Holtz together with Alfie to find a way to rescue them. Two nights later Fidel’s people were poised to bomb a major electrical grid; and if it succeeded, much of Havana would go dark, a propitious time for burglary. The weapons’ preliminary destination was an empty warehouse where they would be put on a commercial truck bound for Oriente. But then Holtz said to Aurelio and Alfie, if there are no guards at the Santa Fe landing field, and usually there are not, I could fly them to my father’s airstrip in Palma Soriano and Fidel’s people will unload them.

“So we put them on my plane and took off at dawn,” Holtz said to Quinn and Renata. “Four of Fidel’s peasants met us and took them. Fifteen minutes after our landing the army showed up to search the plane, but there was no contraband to be found.”

“Where is Alfie now?” Quinn asked.

“At the house,” Holtz said. “He’s waiting for us.”

On the road to the Holtz estate, going north out of Santiago, they faced a major army checkpoint with a tanqueta at the ready, a dozen armed soldiers at the barricade, and four cars ready to pursue any vehicle that would try to crash the barrier. Holtz told the soldiers that Renata was his cousin and Quinn her fiancé, and they were visiting at his home. The lieutenant recognized Holtz’s famous name and let them pass.

“These checkpoints are all over the Sierra Maestra,” Holtz said. “If we do go to see Fidel we must have a reason or they’ll turn us back.” Holtz said he’d brought one americano up to meet the rebels, presenting him as a businessman buying land from a defunct sugar mill.

“Can we go as a family, having a reunion?” Renata asked.

“I’d like something more specific. We have an americano here.”

“What if the reunion is a wedding?” Quinn asked.

“Whose?”

“Renata’s and mine. You and Alfie can be cousins in the wedding party. Do you want to get married, Renata?”

“Is this a proposal or just a way to fool the army?”

“One reason is as good as another for marrying you.”

“Do you mean a wedding in a church?” Holtz asked.

“That’s too complicated. Just have a babalawo do it.”

“You are crazy,” Renata said.

“Do babalawos do weddings?” Holtz asked.

“I never heard of it,” Renata said.

“ Babalawos do everything,” Quinn said. “If I marry you I want a babalawo . They read minds, they predict futures, they heal your soul.”

“But they don’t do weddings,” she said.

“All right, we’ll get a priest too,” Quinn said.

“I like this,” Holtz said. “It’s oddball, which makes it real.”

“It will be real. All we need is a babalawo and a priest.”

“A crazy man wants to marry me,” Renata said.

Felipe’s sister Natalia, who had grown plump since Renata last saw her, she is eating for her pleasure instead of having sex, met them in the foyer, the only family member in the house, her parents en route to Mexico. Holtz took Quinn to find Alfie, and Natalia gushed over Renata looking so lovely, and why haven’t you called? Renata said I called three times for Felipe.

“Ah, but that is different,” Natalia said. “Who is this man Quinn?”

“I just met him,” Renata said. “He wants to marry me.”

“Another one?”

“Yes, another. What year did Margarita die? I was thinking of her,” Renata said.

“Of course you were,” Natalia said, “another marriage maniac. I don’t know the year but she lived too long — for her. I don’t want to die like she did.”

“You should worry about not living like she did,” Renata said.

Natalia went to the kitchen to have the cook prepare late lunch for the visitors and Renata roamed the parlors and dining room, loving to feel again the grandness of this house with all its historical elegance, although she now sees decline. It isn’t crumbling, just aging visibly, yet with grace and formidability — its baroque floor-to-ceiling mirrors, the Carrara marble on the floors, walls, and staircase; the chandelier with eighteen globes and uncountable strands of crystal beads, a creation of high elegance made in emulation of the one in the Captain-General’s Palace in Havana; and, in the music room, the grand piano on a small, elegant stage where the music of civilization, written in the old world, was performed in the new.

The house was called a palace when they built it in the 1850s, the Holtz Palace, and how it must have dazzled the elite society of Oriente. Celia grew up amid it all, coming here as an infant when the maddened Margarita stopped functioning as a mother and became the pure enamorada —who lived only for love with her secret second husband, her god-sent lover who was wilder at sex than her first husband, and who lived for the bed the way Margarita did.