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They crossed the switching yard and walked along the old tracks where disused cars had been abandoned. In one of them they found Rino. He was seated, his eyes were open. His nose seemed enormous, his unshaved beard, still black, covered his face, up to the cheekbones, like an overgrown plant. Stefano, seeing his brother-in-law, forgot his health and had a real fit of rage. He shouted insults at the corpse, he wanted to kick it. You were a shit as a boy — he screamed — and a shit you’ve remained. You deserve this death, you died like a shit. He was angry because he had ruined his sister Pinuccia, because he had ruined his nephews, and because he had ruined his son. Look, he said to Gennaro, look what’s waiting for you. Gennaro grabbed him from behind and gripped him hard to restrain him while, kicking and thrashing, Stefano tried to get free.
It was early morning but already starting to get hot. The car stank of shit and pee, the seats were broken, the windows so dirty you couldn’t see out. Since Stefano continued to struggle and howl, the boy lost his temper and said ugly things to his father. He said that it disgusted him to be his son, that the only people in the whole neighborhood he respected were his mother and Enzo. At that point Stefano began to cry. They sat together for a while beside Rino’s body, not to watch over him, only to calm down. They went home to deliver the news.
We talked into the night, at first about Dede, then also about Elsa and Imma, finally everything: politics, literature, the books I was writing, the newspaper articles, a new essay he was working on. We hadn’t talked so much for a long time. He teased me good-humoredly for always taking, in his view, a middle position. He made fun of my halfway feminism, my halfway Marxism, my halfway Freudianism, my halfway Foucault-ism, my halfway subversiveness. Only with me, he said in a slightly harsher tone, you never used half measures. He sighed: Nothing was right for you, I was inadequate in everything. That other man was perfect. But now? He acted like the rigorous person and he ended up in the socialist gang. Elena, Elena, how you have tormented me. You were angry with me even when those kids pointed a gun at me. And you brought to our house your childhood friends who were murderers. You remember? But so what, you’re Elena, I loved you so much, we have two children, and of course I still love you.
I let him talk. Then I admitted that I had often held senseless positions. I even admitted that he was right about Nino, he had been a great disappointment. And I tried to return to Dede and Rino. I was worried, I didn’t know how to manage the issue. I said that to keep the boy away from our daughter would cause, among other things, trouble with Lila and that I felt guilty, I knew she would consider it an insult. He nodded.
“I didn’t want to hurt Dede, Mamma, I love Rino, it happened.”
“It will happen countless more times.”
“It’s not true.”
“Worse for you. It means you’ll love Rino your whole life.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
I said no, I felt only all the absurdity of that verb in the mouth of a child.
They were complicated years. The order of the world in which we had grown up was dissolving. The old skills resulting from long study and knowledge of the correct political line suddenly seemed senseless. Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, Communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly becoming obsolete labels or, worse, a mark of brutality. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere. Meanwhile, by means legal and illegal, all the accounts that remained open in the state and in the revolutionary organizations were being closed with a heavy hand. One might easily end up murdered or in jail, and among the common people a stampede had begun. People like Nino, who had a seat in parliament, and like Armando Galiani — who was now famous, thanks to television — had intuited for a while that the climate was changing and had quickly adapted to the new season. As for those like Nadia, evidently they had been well advised and were cleansing their consciences by informing. But not people like Pasquale and Enzo. I imagine that they continued to think, to express themselves, to attack, to defend, resorting to watchwords they had learned in the sixties and seventies. In truth, Pasquale carried on his war even in prison, and to the servants of the state said not a word, either to implicate or to exonerate himself. Enzo, on the other hand, certainly talked. In his usual laborious way, weighing every word with care, he displayed his feelings as a Communist but at the same time denied all the charges that had been brought against him.
The story that I later called A Friendship originated in that mildly depressive state, in Naples, during a week of rain. Of course I knew that I was violating an unwritten agreement between Lila and me, I also knew that she wouldn’t tolerate it. But I thought that if the result was good, in the end she would say: I’m grateful to you, these were things I didn’t have the courage to say even to myself, and you said them in my name. There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has ever invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors and yet we are resentful if others say: This little thing you did doesn’t interest me, in fact it bores me, who gave you the right. Within a few days I wrote a story that over the years, hoping and fearing that Lila was writing it, I had imagined in every detail. I did it because everything that came from her, or that I ascribed to her, had seemed to me, since we were children, more meaningful, more promising, than what came from me.
He named the place Kuba, which is what the natives—who appeared to greet him from beyond the green jungle drapery—said it was called. And what the Germans, fond of the letter K, still call it. The Admiral napped in a hammock strung between a palm and a paw-paw, tired after such a long journey, lulled by the syncopated crash of waves and the sultry and healthful air, happy in his own genius and exactly where he wanted to be. True beauty and the unknown are alike, in having no precedents. You recognize them when you see them, if you have such a gift of seeing. Numeric calculations are no match for life’s unrest. Far superior is knowing the world is a pear, a violin, a breast. By such poetic and razor precision, the Admiral mapped an unmappable world.
“A nothing. A stranger who left me here when I was thirteen.” She and her mother had ducked into the Tokio from the blinding sun of midday Havana. It was so dark inside the club that Rachel K could barely see. They waited at the Pam-Pam Room bar until a manager appeared from a back office, trailing Cigar smoke. He breathed audibly and in his labored breath she understood that he’d taken her on. That was ten years ago. She’d been at the Tokio so long now that it was a kind of mother. It gave her life a shape. Other girls passed through, regarded cabaret dancing as momentary and sordid, always hoping for some politician or businessman to rescue them. Because the Tokio gave her life a shape and never sent her fretting over imagined alternatives, Rachel K was free in a way the other girls weren’t. She had longings as well, but they weren’t an illness to be cured. They were part of who she was, and it was these very longings that reinforced the deeper reconciliation to her situation.
An executive of the United Fruit Company, a Mr. something Stites—she couldn’t remember his first name and simply called him “you”—took her east to Oriente in his private plane. She’d been hesitant to go. He seemed like a person who was dangerous because he didn’t know which parts of him were rotten, or even that he harbored rot. “All this belongs to us,” he said, as they hedgehopped over green cane fields. “Three hundred thousand acres. Those are our boats, anchored off shore there. You see them?” Maybe he wasn’t dangerous after all, she decided. He simply wanted a showgirl to marvel over his sugar empire. They landed at company headquarters and she ran through a canopy of banana groves near the airport, trees with long, flat leaves, taller than she was and loaded with dank and heavy clusters of bananas, a strange purple flower dangling off the end of each cluster. She put her hand around a banana stalk. “They’re full of water, pure water,” the executive said. It felt like a chilled human limb with a cold pulse.
im shocked i didnt save this from telex from cuba? i think it's in there? it's so good
Marcel bequeathed his aunt Leonie’s couch to a bordello, and whenever he visited the place, to tease Rachel of my Lord (but never buy her services), it unnerved him to see tarts flopped on its pink crushed velvet cushions, even if there was maybe nothing more perfect and appropriate than pink velvet plush flattening under a whore’s ass. De la Mazière was different. It didn’t matter to him whether he reclined on plush furniture in the lobby of the Ritz or in a squalid St. Denis cathouse. Ate his steak at Maxim’s or at a colonial outpost in Djibouti, a backwater of salt factories and scorching temperatures on the bacterial mouth of the Red Sea. Properly seared steak is everywhere the same. A traitor satisfies his tastes, gets his high- and his low-grade pleasures wherever he can. In Havana, de la Mazière found occupied Paris all over again. Amidst its nude and adorned girls, morphine slushees and luxury hotel suites, he sensed a vague but unshakeable dread darkening the reverie and lawlessness. Despite the city’s obvious, surreal wealth, he sniffed wretched poverty. Tall and neon-pulsing casinos staking the heart of a metropolis ringed in desperation: miles and miles of neighborhoods with no electricity, no running water, and smokily typhoid trash fires. It was occupied Paris, with Americans in Cadillacs instead of Germans in Mercedes. A sultrier climate and starrier nights, purple-mouthed girls, a cinema palace with a retractable roof. They even had Obelisk and Olympia books on Calle Belga, and obsolete French pornography—not sequestered in L’Enfer, on the top floor of the Bibliothèque Nationale, but displayed at the bookstalls, their pages riffling in the damp ocean breeze.
his characterisation is so good
Rachel K was leading President Prio, “Handsome,” she called him, as if it were his name, through the Pam-Pam Room to his own VIP booth. He was not, in truth, so handsome, but he was president and vain. She and Handsome passed the mysterious Frenchman’s table. A Frenchman who might have been, in fact, quite handsome. He seemed confident, amused, self-contained. A perfect loner. He’d been coming back, and each evening he was there, his presence distracted her, like he knew that she knew that he was watching her, though pretending not to, and his gaze colored her every movement. Just walking through the room, she was performing for an audience of one attentive Frenchman. It was strange, like he was whispering something and she could hear it even if she couldn’t translate into language what he said. She sensed a tacit agreement between them, that they would continue for some time with this ritual of him watching her and pretending not to, whispering a silent message more voluminous, airy and complex than language could transmit. She felt sure it was better to draw out the spell than risk breaking it prematurely. And anyway, she was with Handsome, her favorite of the revolving door of presidents. They sat together in a private booth, and he gave her an opal pendant and a silk dress with a secret pocket. She kissed his mustache and let him practice his soliloquies on her.