Libra (44 page)

“Didn’t Kennedy know how
big
Cuba is? Didn’t anyone tell him you can’t invade an island that size with fifteen hundred men?”

“Cuba is little.”

“Cuba is
big.
Why did he consent to an invasion if he didn’t mean to follow through? Why did he promise us a military victory and then back off? Because he lost his nerve. He muted everything. He soft-pedaled it. He wanted an invasion that was
subtle.
It’s a wonder Castro realized he was under attack.”

“Cuba is little.”

“I’ll tell you what rankles,” Ferrie said, “and this is something I hear every day from Guy. Guy feels strongly about this. He thinks Kennedy and Castro are talking to each other. They’re writing secret letters, they’re sending emissaries back and forth. Friendly overtures. There’s something they aren’t telling us. Something we don’t know about. There’s more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”

Lee got in a shoving match out on the street with some Latin type who had pockmarks and a dangling silver cross. He didn’t know how it started. Even gripping the man’s biceps and talking into his face, he couldn’t remember how the thing got started. A few people stood around mainly for lack of other amusement. Then he was home in bed.

He read gun magazines in the garage office. One of the coffee heads would appear in the door and tell him he’d better get back. Back to the motors and blowers, the hoppers, grinders, conveyor belts.

His passport arrived the day after he applied.

He walked into the spare room at home and thought some things had been moved. It couldn’t be Marina, who had orders to stay out. He inspected his papers, checked the closet where he kept his guns. Something was different, an invisible whispery difference, like when you know a thing deeply in a dream without knowing how or why.

A woman who looks Seminole somehow, squat-headed, whatever they look like, he doesn’t really know, comes walking out of a crowd in the French market nearly scaring him with the strange flat eyes of some burning saint.

He remained the only member of the Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New Orleans. Didn’t mean a thing. Summer was building toward a vision, a history. He felt he was being swept up, swept along, done with being a pitiful individual, done with isolation.

 

 

Marina pushed the stroller along their street. She tried to read the street names set into the sidewalk in light-blue tile.

Would he try to send his wife and baby to Russia or would they all go to little Cuba, where there was a purer socialism and a true joy among the people?

Last night she got up for a glass of water at 2:00 A.M. and found him sitting on the porch in his underwear with the rifle across his lap.

He had nosebleeds in the night. Once she watched his body shake for half an hour.

She made him translate magazine stories about the Kennedys. He didn’t mind doing it and sometimes added details not’ in the stories.

In pictures taken near the sea, with the wind ruffling his hair, the President looked like her old boyfriend Anatoly, who had unruly hair and kissed her in a way that made her dizzy.

Lee didn’t wash for days at a time. He wore the same clothes and told her not to mend his socks or patch the elbows of threadbare sweaters. This was a complete turnabout. Here I am, he seemed to say. Look at what the system stamps out.

She knew, she was absolutely certain that Mrs. Kennedy would give birth to a boy. It was sure to be a boy, she told Lee, and then they would have a boy themselves, soon after.

She was ashamed to confess she was a woman of moods.

She was pregnant like Mrs. Kennedy but had not been examined by a doctor yet. Lee took her to Charity Hospital, a massive gray building that looked like a place you entered only once, never to emerge. In the marble lobby were enormous portraits of doctors in robes, doctors with the sky behind them, men with more important things on their mind than the gall bladder and kidneys. The trouble started at the information booth. A woman told Lee this was a state hospital and people could be treated free only if they’d been Louisiana residents for a certain period. Marina had not been living here long enough.

All that marble. It made her feel like a refugee. Lee followed a doctor down the corridor, almost begging. He picked up another doctor coming back this way, pleading and arguing at the same time, his face twisted and pale.

They were turned away.

Lee prowled the lobby, talking to people who walked in unaware, telling them the story. It’s just another business. They make a business out of pain and suffering. No one knew what to say to him and finally he just paced the floor in silence, walking off his anger.

It was an anger that Marina did not try to soothe or wish away because she believed in her heart it was correct.

She pushed the stroller past some shops with large signs out front. She sounded the words in her mind. Washateria. One-hour Martinizing. She saw fewer people as they strayed a little north, a little east.

She wondered how many women had visions and dreams of the President. What must it be like to know you are the object of a thousand longings? It’s as though he floats over the landscape at night, entering dreams and fantasies, entering the act of love between husbands and wives. He floats through television screens into bedrooms at night. He floats from the radio into Marina’s bed. There were times when she waited for him, actually listened late at night for a few words of a speech or a news conference recorded earlier in the day, waited for the, voice of the President, the radio on a table near the bed.

They had matching scars on the arm, Marina and Lee.

This was the basic question that didn’t leave her day or night. Would he force her to go back to Russia?

She said to him, “A gloomy spirit rules the house.” “I am not receiving happiness,” she said.

He talked to June about little Cuba. Do you love little Cuba? Do you have sympathy for Uncle Fidel? There was a photograph of Castro on the wall ,that he’d clipped from a Soviet magazine. What do you think of Uncle Fidel? Do you love and support little Cuba?

She thought of the President sometimes, in pictures taken near the sea, while Lee was making love to her.

He kept after her to write to the Soviet embassy in Washington, teary-eyed letters, requesting visas, requesting travel expenses. She knew he was confused about the future.

She was a blind kitten who always returned to the person who caressed her, no matter if he also treated her cruelly.

She took Junie out of the stroller now and let her walk alongside. Junie didn’t like to walk holding anyone’s hand.. She walked along on her own, endless joy and endless toil.

Sitting on the porch at 2:00 A.M. with the rifle across his lap.

They walked down many quiet streets. The houses were old and silent and some had cast-iron galleries and white columns. There was no one else around. The afternoon was heavy and still. She stood on a corner and saw cars going through an intersection about seven blocks away but nothing moved nearby and she wondered if this might be an area closed to normal activity during certain times of day. One-hour Martinizing. They passed homes with carved entrances, with magnolias out front and straight-standing palms. She tried to take Junie’s hand. The heat became oppressive. They passed a house with double galleries and she could see frescoes through the living-room window. She put June back in the stroller, forced her in, stuffed her back in. Then she turned in the direction she thought led home, walking quickly now, no longer looking at the graceful, old and silent homes.

She thought carefully in English, Where are all the people?

 

 

Bateman told him about a group called the Cuban Student Directorate. It was run out of a clothing store a few doors down from the Habana Bar. Confidential Source S-172 walked in one day and talked to a guy named Carlos, about thirty years old, shiny-haired, wearing dark glasses.

He brought along his old Marine Corps training manual to sort of indicate who he was and where he stood. Inside of a minute they were talking about bridges, blowing up bridges, laying powder charges, making homemade explosives, homemade guns.

Carlos, however, did not seem eager to tell him how he might enter the anti-Castro struggle. He wouldn’t accept Lee’s offer to join the organization, wouldn’t even accept a cash contribution. He was wary of infiltrators. He said it straight out. This was a sensitive time.

They had a nice talk anyway. Lee left his training manual behind as a gesture of good will and said he’d come back soon. They shook hands at the door.

What happens? Four days later Lee is on Canal Street wearing his Viva Fidel sign and handing out pro-Castro leaflets. Along comes Carlos with two friends. Lee watches Carlos do a double-take from out of the archives.

He approached in an attitude of menace, taking off his glasses. Lee crossed his arms on his chest and smiled. He didn’t want to fight with Carlos. He liked him. Carlos had that Latin quality of being easy to like.

“Okay, Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me.”

He stood there with his arms crossed, smiling nicely. A small crowd collected, backing Lee toward the entrance of a Walgreen’s. One of the men with Carlos grabbed some handbills out of Lee’s fist and threw them in the air. This caused some scuffling on the fringe. Then a police car rolled up and then another one and soon they were all walking across the sandy parking lot of the first-district station house on North Rampart.

Lee demanded to see Agent Bateman of the FBI.

Half an hour later Bateman walked into the interview room, hands held out, palms showing, a certain rigid set to his features.

Lee said, “They want to know how many members in my Fair Play chapter.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Thirty-five.”

“Fine. But why ,bring me into it?”

“Because what are they liable to do if I don’t show I’m linked to law enforcement?”

“It is only disturbing the peace. So-called creating a scene.”

“Well get me out.”

“I can’t get you out.”

“This wasn’t the deal. Getting me arrested.”

“You got yourself arrested. And if I get you out, it exposes everything. Giving them my name is bad enough. Did they ask why you wanted to see me?”

“They asked about Karl Marx. I told them the real Karl Marx was a socialist, not a communist.”

“I am deeply disappointed, Lee.”

“Well I couldn’t just let them bury me. I have a wife and baby. ”

“One night is all you’ll lose.”

“I had to show there’s someone who knows who I am. A figure of authority.”

“It is only disturbing the peace. Tell them as little as possible. Let them think you’re just a hometown boy with political ideals.”

“I told them I’m a Lutheran.”

“First-rate,” Bateman said, nice and nasty.

They photographed him front, profile and full figure and then took prints of his fingers and palms. They told him to drop his pants and bend over. Later he sat in a holding cell seeing himself as he would appear in the mug shots, dignified and balding. He listened to the drunks and hysterics. They brought more men in as the night progressed. A howler and a dancer. They brought in a Negro with an aluminum-foil hat, a little religious cap made of Reynolds Wrap, with trinkets dangling from the sides.

Trotsky took his name from a jailer in Odessa and carried it into the pages of a thousand books.

 

 

It was Lee who told Marina that Mrs. Kennedy’s baby had died during the night. A boy, born prematurely, with respiratory problems. Marina stood by the window crying. It hit her with the force of something she’d feared all along without letting it surface. Thirty-nine hours of life for the President’s son. She cried for the Kennedys and also for herself and for Lee. How could she grieve for Mrs. Kennedy’s baby and not think about the child she carried in her own womb? This was the future and it was marked.

 

 

Lee went to court. The first thing he noticed was that the room was separated into white and colored. He sat square in the middle of the colored section, waiting for his case to be called. Then he pleaded guilty and paid a ten-dollar fine. He shook hands with Carlos and walked out the door.

You see, none of this really mattered. What mattered was collecting the experiences, documenting the experienes, saving it all for the eyes of Cuban officials. What is it called, dossier?

There was a camera crew from WDSU waiting outside the courtroom and they shot some footage of Lee H. Oswald for the evening news.

Four days later he was back on the street handing out leaflets in front of the International Trade Mart.

The day after that he went on the radio to talk about Cuba and the world.

 

 

Bill Stuckey, the host of Latin Listening Post, was expecting a folk-singer type with a beard and sooty fingernails. Oswald was neat and clean, in.a white shirt and a tie, and carried a looseleaf notebook under his arm.

They sat in the studio, with an engineer to record the interview, and Stuckey began right away, introducing Oswald as the secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

Lee said, “Yes, as secretary, I am responsible for the keeping of the records and the protection of the members’ names so that undue publicity or attention will not be drawn to them, as they do not desire it.”

He said, “Certainly it is obvious to me, having been educated in New Orleans and having been instilled with the ideals of democracy and objectiveness, that Cuba and the right of Cubans to self-determination is more or less self-evident.”

He said, “You know, when our forefathers drew up the Constitution, they considered that democracy was creating an atmosphere of freedom of discussion, of argument, of finding the truth. The right, the classic right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that is my definition of democracy, the right to be in a minority and not to be suppressed.”