Cuba Libre (2008) (14 page)

She said to him, "Tell me something about Mr. Boudreaux. What side is he on?"

Fuentes said, "Excuse me?"

"You know what I mean."

Fuentes looked at her directly and said, "The government or the insurrectos, the insurgents?" Amelia nodded. "Which?" "The wrong side," Fuentes said. "What kind of man is he?"

"Like the rest of them. He knows only his own kind."

The tea this time was served in the inner courtyard of Lorraine's home in Vedado, jade plants in pots, decorative blue tile on the walls, pillars that gave the courtyard the look of a cloister.

"For supper," Amelia said, "we might have soup, rice, eggs, plantain, a crab salad, roast peacock, guava, cheese and some kind of pudding."

"Peacock?" Lorraine said. "Peacock. Like the Romans." "What does it taste like, chicken?"

"Turkey. Then for breakfast we might have soup, rice, eggs, plantain, fried crabs, guava, cheese and coffee. Breakfast is really dinner, the midday meal. The cook's name is Cimbana, she's from the Congo and keeps cigar butts in her turban, among other things."

"It's different here, isn't it?"

"Very different."

"What about the house?"

"There's the sugarhouse," Amelia said, "full of machinery they shove the cane into to make sugar.... " She paused. "If the mill doesn't have a centrifuge it can only make brown sugar. Did you know that? And there's the vivien da the residence, built in 1848. It has a red tile roof, verandas on three sides of both floors--kind of like old plantation homes but not as Greek Revival-looking. More austere, and without trees close around it. The living quarters are upstairsmdining room, sitting room, everything--offices and the servants' quarters downstairs, and a hall full of saddles, bridles and guns locked in cabinets. The kitchen's in back."

Amelia looked up at the courtyard's high ceiling and the second-floor balcony.

"I like your house better. It's warmer."

Lorraine said, "Can I ask you something?"

Amelia was still looking around. "Rollie's house has glass panes in the windows and doors, but they're always open; flies come in and out as they please. There're a few shrubs, tropical plants, a lot of banana trees, a few mango, vegetable plots and twenty thousand acres of sugarcane, three estates Rollie bought and combined into one. They call them estates, but what they are really are little towns with the main house in the center, the sugarhouse with its big ugly smokestacks, and streets of stone houses for the workers, a Negro quarter, a Creole quarter, a street that's all Chinese and a nicer area where the higher-ups, the people in charge, have their homes: the estate manager, another man who's a chemist and runs the sugarhouse--I think he's the one they call the sugar master-and a few others who work directly under him, engineers, machinists.... Rollie has over a million and a half in just the land, and spent another hundred thousand to modernize the sugarhouse, put in all the newest machinery. If it's a good year, you know how much sugar he'll produce and ship?" "Amelia?"

"I've forgotten now how much, but it's an awful lot." She paused and said, "What?"

"Have you slept with him?"

"I have, yes," Amelia said, and had to smile at the way Lorraine was staring at her so intently. "So you're staying?" "For a while anyway." "Where're you going to live?"

"I guess wherever he wants me to."

Lorrainecontinued to stare.

"There's something you're not telling me." "What do you want, intimate details?" "You sound different."

"Well," Amelia said, "nothing happened until we got to the summerhouse. It's smaller than the one on the estate but more comfortable, with a veranda and a view of the Gulf rather than cane fields. The first night we were there, finally, after not saying a word to each other for hours, he took me into the bedroom. Mine; he has his own. And kissed me for the first time. I'm quite sure he thinks he seduced me. He was serious to the point of being grim, sort of ritualistic about it, first you do this and then you do that. It's funny, when we're alone--and this was true of other times, too, on the train or riding horses together---he doesn't seem as confident as he does when he's with people, an audience agreeing with him. It might be me," Amelia said, "or he's just not that comfortable with women. Anyway, Rollie finished, he got off and said, as he stepped into his underwear, "That wasn't entirely unpleasant, was it?""

"He said that?"

"He wasn't kidding, either."

"When I said there's something you're not telling me. Remember, before? I wasn't referring to what you did in bed. It was a feeling I had."

"About what?"

"That something happened you're not telling me about."

They came through rolling hills aboard the sugar train to Matanzas, Boudreaux telling Amelia there were more sugar estates here than in any province in Cuba. "How many, Victor? Four hundred and seventy-eight, if I'm not mistaken?"

"Not anymore," Fuentes said. "Maybe three hundred something. Many of them in the past year burn down, or the owner has enough--wake up in the morning and see black smoke in the sky, over his fields."

"I ask you a question," Boudreaux said, "I like a simple answer, whatever is the fact, not your opinion."

"You want to know exactly how many burn down?" "That's enough, Victor."

The train was creeping through the outskirts of the city, pale stone and steeples and red tile roofs, and now Boudreaux was pointing out to Amelia the villas of the wealthy, the old cathedral, the domed railway station, the ornate bridge that linked the city to the fortress of San Severino on the bay. "The second largest city in Cuba," Boudreaux said, "and some say the most beautiful."

"It's true," Fuentes said, "even though the word rnatanzas means slaughtering place."

"That's enough," Boudreaux said. He turned, shaking his head, to give Amelia a weary look.

"For the slaughter of livestock," Fuentes said, "cows to make biftec for here and for Havana. I don't mean the slaughter of the Indians who lived here--"

"Victor?"

"Or the twenty-three thousand last year, the reconcentrados who were made to starve to death, kept in filthy sheds along the Punta Gorda."

"I said that's enough," Boudreaux said. "Are you becoming restless, Victor, you want to move on?" He said to Amelia, "Victor, at one time, was a reader in a cigar factory. Which one was it, Victor?"

"La Corona."

"Victor ad to the employees while they rolled cigars. He'd read every word of the newspaper including the advertisements while they sat there rolling away. He even read a book once. Wasn't it Marti, Victor, the poet who's become you-all's hero?"

"They wouldn't let me read Marti."

"I can understand why. But Victor did read a book by Marti. A book. Beware, Amelia, of anyone who's read a book and, hence, believes he knows everything."

Amelia watched Fuentes, the way he stood stoop-shouldered, swaying on his feet, as he gazed out the window of this private parlor car, the man not appearing bothered by Boudreaux's remarks. Fuentes even seemed to smile as he shrugged and said to Amelia, "Maybe you like to read Marti sometime. He say a country with only a few rich men is not rich."

"You see," Boudreaux said to her, sounding weary of it, "what I have to put up with?"

He told Amelia they were coming to a village called Varadero and showed her on a map how his rail line went past Matanzas, circled the east side of the harbor and ran along the shore to a peninsula, a finger of land pointing into the Gulf, the Bay of Matanzas on one side, the Bay of Cfirdenas on the other. Varadero was situated at the neck of the peninsula, where Boudreaux's rail line ended and he kept a stable of horses and a squad of his private army he called Boudreaux's Guerrillas--a name, he told Amelia, he'd thought of himself, Boudreaux's Guerrillas--to patrol the finger of land and protect his summerhouse, about six miles from Varadero. Several homes along the beach, he said, had been destroyed by insurgents. And for no reason, perfectly good summer homes burned to the ground.

At Varadero the horses were brought to them as they stepped from the train into afternoon sunlight. Amelia found Victor staying close to her while Boudreaux rode off at the head of his guerrilla column with Novis Crowe--the bodyguard holding on to the saddle horn with both hands--and the officer in charge of the squad. "A young man by the name of Raft Vasquez," Fuentes told Amelia, "a wealthy peninsula re from Havana."

He said, "Peninsulares are the Spaniards living here. All the rest of us, no matter our color, are Cuban. We go to war with the Spanish government and thousands of peninsula res take up arms against us, calling themselves Volunteers. And I can tell you, the Volunteers are as barbaric as the Guardia, or even worse. Thirty years ago in Havana--January 22, 1869, I know, because I was theremthey surround a theatre, the Villanueva, and while the audience is watching the play, the Volunteers fire into them, killing dozens of men, women and children. Only weeks later, Easter Sunday, the assassins perform the same criminal act at the Cafe del Louvre, again killing unarm people. You want to hear about the Volunteers, I can tell you. There was a captain-general name Valmaseda who turned their foul passions loose on the countryside, allowing them to kill whoever they want, without fear of punishment. The Butcher Weyler, during this Ten Years War, was a student of the Butcher Valmaseda. Weyler went home last fall and the new captain-general, Blanco, the loyalists consider a joke. What else do you want to know? Listen, in a military trial thirty-eight students, young boys, were accused of defacing a Spaniard's grave; they wrote something on the stone. Eight were executed and the rest sent to prison for life. You know what the Volunteers say? "Suffer the little children to come unto me that I may strangle their precious young lives." What else? I keep in my head a list of indiscriminate mass murders, rapes, molestations of all kinds and obscene mutilations.

"These men," Fuentes said, indicating Boudreaux's column, his private army, "are known as guerrillas, but they come from the Volunteers. Just as Tavalera the Guardia is a peasant by birth, the son of a prison guard, Raft Vasquez the Volunteer is a gentleman, the son of wealth. And both are criminal assassins.

"Now then, on the side of liberty," Fuentes said, "the revolutionists are insurgents or insurrectos, or you heard them called mambis or mambises."

"Rollie," Amelia said, "calls them that sometimes." "Yes, because he believes he knows everything. He says it's an African word brought here from the Congo by slaves and is from the word mambz'll. I tell him, well, I was a slave at one time and use the word, but it didn't come from Africa." "Really? You were a slave?"

"Until I was sixteen and became a cimarron, what you call a runaway. Before that, part of me was Masungo, related by blood to the Bantu. Now I'm Cuban. I tell Mr. Boudreaux the word mambl came from Santo Domingo. Fifty years ago the people there fighting for their independence had a leader called Eutimio Mambi. So the Spanish soldiers called them the men of Mambi. Then when they came here the Spanish began to call Cuban revolutionists mambis and mambises. I tell Mr. Boudreaux some of this history; he doesn't listen. I ask him has he read the words of Jose Marti, patriot and martyr, first president of the Cuban Revolutionary Party? No, of course not. I leave the essays of Marti in English where Mr. Boudreaux can find them, learn something about human rights. He throws them in the fire. What is right to him is the way things are."

"I believe it," Amelia said.

"Mr. Boudreaux looks at me What do I know of anything?"

They kept to high ground along the finger of land, following a road cut through dense thickets, a road that looked down on mangrove and lagoons, a stretch of white sand, a chimney rising out of brick and stone rubble. Fuentes pointed.

"You think they burn it down for no reason? Your Mr. Boudreaux, his head up there in a cloud, he think so."

"When did he become my Mr. Boudreaux?" "Anytime you want him, he's yours." "Why would I, because he's rich?" "That's a good reason." "Give me a better one."

"You meet famous people with him."

"On a sugar estate?"

"Sure, or here. You know who came to this house where we going? General Weyler himself, the man who made the twenty-three thousand people he sent to Matanzas starve to death. The Butcher came here to visit on someone's yacht. He meets you, he want to come back. Sure, you meet generals and admirals and envoys from Spain, the most important people. Also you hear Mr. Boudreaux talk to his friends, all those rich men who want to invest money with him. You see what they're doing, what the Spanish are doing...."

She could hear the horses ahead of them and the clink of metal. She said, "You're asking me to spy for the mambis."

Fuentes turned his head to look at her. "You like that name?"

"Aren't you?"

"I see you not very busy, so I wonder, what is the point of you?" A good question.

"I haven't yet decided." And then right away she said, "You stay close to Rollie. You hear him talking to people, don't you?"

"I don't get as close as you."

"But you talk about the crimes of the Spanishnyou annoy him with it. Isn't he suspicious?"

"Perhaps in a way he is, yes, but it doesn't worry him. He believe he smarter than I am. He believe he smarter than everybody, and I think is important he continue to believe it." Fuentes looked off at the Gulf and said, "Do you see that ship, what's let of it? A wreck now, but it was once a coastal vessel from Nueva Gerona, on the Isle of Pines, a ship with two masts and two sails, big ones. They carry yucca and tobacco from the Isle of Pines to Havana and sometime to Matanzas and Crdenas, so they know the coast and places to hide. Oh, they smuggle goods, too. But on this day two years ago they came from Key Test, the ship full of rifles and cases of bullets and they get caught in the open by a gunboat that chase the ship and it run aground and break up on that sandbar. You can't see it, but is there. Two years ago to this day, March the seventeenth, 1895. There was seven of them aboard. And now come a company of Volunteers to wait for them on the sand. The men of the ship have no choice but to wade ashore and surrender. When they do this, half the Volunteers continue to aim their Mausers at them, while the others draw machetes and hack the unarmed men to death. Rafi Vasquez was the oflScer, the one who order it to happen. Your Mr. Boudreaux was also here, to watch."