As Del was getting up from the table he said, “Don’t you think it’s funny that we teach them agriculture, and none of them own any land?”

That’s when Daddy blew up.

“You got a problem with how things are run around here, then get off your ass and do something about it!” He slammed his fist on the table and made all the silverware jump. “Instead of sitting there with a linen napkin in your lap like a goddamn pantywaist, eating grub I pay for, the flan you asked your nanny to make you like you’re five years old. Go do something. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Nothing but a spoiled goddamn brat.”

I ordered lobster. The lobster they brought me was pregnant, and when I cut into it an orange liquid oozed out—the eggs. I didn’t think I could eat it, but Daddy said I should think of a pregnant lobster as a delicacy. That anything unseemly could be made tolerable if you told yourself it was a special thing, an exclusive thing. Like caviar, he said. I told him I hated caviar, and Daddy said it wasn’t about taste, it was about having things that other people couldn’t have, and there was a certain burden in that.

It was Sosa Blanco’s idea that every native must have his hands waxed with paraffin. If the wax showed traces of nitrate, that person had fired a gun. They didn’t bother arresting people. They shot them on the spot, or worse. On the roadside between Preston and Mayarí, Sosa Blanco burned five people alive, four men and a woman who all had nitrate on their hands. He hung them from trees and started a bonfire underneath like he was roasting five New Year’s pigs. I wasn’t supposed to know about that, but Hatch told Curtis, and Curtis told me. The thing is, anyone who works on a farm and handles fertilizer is going to have nitrate on his hands.

Lost in the Russian steppes, where his Waffen regiment was pulverized and scattered and he became an animal, eating raw horseflesh and sleeping in the snow, he’d seen no sliver of home, only a landscape blanketed in whiteness and death. He’d won a “frozen meat” medal, but he’d as soon eat actual frozen meat than fight Bolsheviks again. He understood painfully well that you couldn’t re-create a moment of ignorance that preceded misery, a luminous winking bubble. Ten thousand soldiers setting off to make fortunes, or one man in his Citroën driving toward the Bavarian town of Wildflecken for elite Waffen officers’ training, his papers stamped with a wet, inky swastika, a profound and electric violation of Frenchness. Confessing publicly, after the war, had meant coming to terms with the stark fact that his luminous winking bubble had floated in a tide of darkness. And yet he still yearned for a luminous bubble, for an impossible time of privilege and turmoil. All he could do was keep going until he found a bubble somewhere on the map.

He found himself in a hallway outside a large room, where three Chinese musicians were playing marvelously atonal music, or what he’d thought was atonal music, until he figured out they were tuning their instruments. [...\

[...] He tried to remind himself that the need for happiness was a mutilation of character, and that comfort and pleasures so quickly turned insipid. [...]

[...] the rebels’ rural habits were laziness and leisure in place of discipline. None was interested in midnight hiking, as the Germans at Wildflecken had been so fond of doing. None was game for a brisk, predawn swim in a cold mountain stream. They had little taste for discipline in itself and the transcendence it promised. [...]

Although there was the plantation boss, Mrs. LaDue remembered—Hatch Allain. A decent man, really, even if it’s true there was a killing connected to him. It seems he did it, she remembered; that was the connection. But that was in Louisiana and a long time ago. And Mr. Flamm the paymaster was killed, true enough. But that was the blacks, and their love of chopping people up with those horrific machetes they carry around. They really do look like savages, and it’s the strangest thing to hear them speaking French—

She’d wanted to leave for some time now, but her husband resisted. They all did. No job in the States would pay them like the nickel company paid them, they said. Or make them mining executives despite the fact that none of them had Ph.D.’s. Or give them enormous ranch-style homes, enroll their children in private school, on the company tab. No salary in the States would buy a staff of seven servants. Where’s the company yacht, her husband asked her, when we’re living in a midwestern shithole?

It was almost Christmastime, and there were humans hanging in the trees beyond the security fence. Mrs. Billings had put up a cheerful breadfruit sapling in the living room—the refrigerated shipment of Virginia pine had not been able to get through because the bandits had blocked the roads eastward. She decorated the breadfruit tree with strings of tiny lights and hollow metallic balls and sang “Jungle Bells” and other carols with the children.