The House of Rumour A Novel

10

the wheel of fortune

Avenida 9 # 1580 esq. Calle 19

Miramar, Habana

Cuba

15 October 1958





Dear Larry,



Well, I finally met my father. Two days ago, at a party in Vedado for a man who had won the lottery. Such a frenzy of celebration around us that we scarcely had to worry whether or not the two of us had anything to congratulate each other about. This could have been a chance meeting, like everything else in life. The dancing and commotion granted us a sense of stillness, the loud music a moment of silence. For which I was thankful because I had no idea what to say to this man, nor him to me. He shook my hand and named himself as a trumpet blared behind us. People were spilling out onto the street, forming a procession down towards the sea wall, and we were swept along with it all.

Two cops on patrol near by were nervously fingering their holsters, ready to run if things got out of hand. One of the women approached them, explaining that this was a party, not a demonstration. Someone waved a 26 July Movement flag anyhow. The people are becoming bolder now, ready to take to the streets when the time comes. Civil unrest simmers beneath the surface, bubbling up in all sorts of peculiar ways. Last month there was an outcry when the fiesta for the Black Virgin of Regla was banned (her statue was stolen, and a rumour circulates that the authorities have substituted a fake one).

We found some space on the sidewalk, away from this improvised carnival, and as we struggled to converse we soon fell into a rhythm, with similar patterns of speech and diction. And it was as if we were mimicking each other’s gestures and affectations. We don’t look very much alike, my father and me, but it’s astonishing how much we share in mannerism. All the same tics and spasms of character: things one would think were socially learnt, habitual, are to be somehow found in the blood. And all at once I knew that it did not matter much what we really meant to each other. This simple familiarity suddenly made things easy between us.

It looked harder for the man who had won the lottery. He was greeting people with shouts of joy but I saw fear and panic in his eyes, an urgency in his loud insistence that he had known beforehand that his number was going to come up. This zealous belief in our own premonitions, as if we cannot bear for our will to be so diminished by such a random act. It is a disturbing notion that the most important moments of our lives, our greatest successes, are merely a matter of happenstance. As I turned to my newly found father I realised that I didn’t even owe the fact of my birth to him, just to the luck of the draw. The turn of the wheel. The odds of any particular individual’s existence are so narrow that it would be scarcely worth the gamble. It is enough merely to exist and to count our losses to the end. Perhaps that was what was troubling the man.

But I suspect he did not think like this at all. Nor did anyone else for that matter. Only myself, my head spinning like that helter-skelter helix of genetics. As we crossed the Malecón to the water’s edge, I slapped my father on the back and said: ‘Well, we won the lottery.’ He turned and frowned at me. Then smiled. Alien features forming reflective expressions of a curious remembrance. We went to sit on the sea wall and he told me a story.

Larry, I’m afraid this is going to be a long letter but I have much to tell (who was it who said, ‘I’m writing you a long letter because I don’t have time to write you a short one’?). But first let me congratulate you on your incredible novel. I finally got hold of a copy of American Gnostic when I got back from the sierra this year (there’s a bookstall just opened on the Plaza de Armas that stocks a good selection of American science fiction and usually has the latest edition of F&SF). This is the best thing you’ve ever done. You’ve restored my faith in the genre. To be honest, I’ve become bored with so much SF lately, or disappointed (whatever happened to Heinlein? – all this quasi-fascist nonsense he’s writing now; when we first met him he was a libertarian socialist). Maybe I don’t need much speculative fiction at the moment when here everything and everyone is concerned with the future. But not in fantasy, rather in the real possibilities for radical change.

I’ve been all over the island in the last two years. In Guantánamo, helping to organise the railway workers, co-ordinating strike action in support of the Rebel Army in the hills. I was even in the Sierra Maestra, smuggling supplies from Santiago. I came back to Havana in late spring to rejoin the urban underground. The general strike of 9 April proved a complete fiasco with the loss of much of the leadership of all participating oppositional groups. Now we have to completely regroup the mass movements in the city, establish solidarity with the armed struggle and find a common strategy to defeat the dictatorship. At last the 26 July Movement is making constructive overtures to communists and the Marxist left. We’re re-establishing the Revolutionary Workers Party as a challenge to the Stalinists, forming workers’ committees and printing a newspaper once more.

There are many splits in the struggle: between sierra and llano (the Rebel Army in the hills; the working-class movements on the plains and in the towns); between nationalism and socialism; and, of course, among the left. But I fear the more profound schism, that universal dichotomy between the intimate vision and the shared ideal. Everybody has their own idea of what a perfect world is. For the moment we have a common enemy but that’s never enough. We need to find a united front in our imaginations. We are too convivial in our nightmares. We must find a way of dreaming collectively.

I have a job as a waiter (can you imagine?). The Sindicato de Obreras Gastronomico is actually one of the few unions that retains a radical leadership. So much of the labour movement here is in the hands of mujalista gangsters. A week ago a customer called me to his table and asked if I was Angel Carvajal’s son. I nodded, knowing not much more of my father than that he had been in jail when I was born. Then he told me about this party and said that my dad would be there, if I wanted to see him.

So that’s how I ended up on the Malecón, at the age of thirty-six, face to face with paternity for the first time. I have little recollection as to what we talked about at the beginning. I was cautious in my speech, as if waiting for an explanation from him. Then he started to tell me of something that had happened to him.

‘I hear that you’re some kind of a writer,’ he said. ‘Here’s a story for you.’

And this is what he told me:

‘I was born out in Santiago de las Vegas. My father worked on a tobacco plantation. He was a real bastard. Sorry, I suppose he was your grandfather. Anyway, there wasn’t much room, all five of us living in a shack, so I was hardly missed when I left. I was fifteen. I got a job in Marianao, working as a stable hand. I was shovelling horse-shit all day but it wasn’t bad. Horse-shit is better than most kinds of shit, certainly better than human shit. It was a racing stables by the track at Oriental Park. I got there in November and there was plenty of work. American owners brought their horses over to race through the winter season. I earned a dollar a week and slept in the hayloft.

‘There was a girl I worked with, Dominga. A light mulatta with a hard face but an elegant, long-limbed body. About my age but taller than me, more developed: you know how girls grow up quicker than boys. She was proud and haughty, and ordered me about with little mercy. Today I see her as a bossy girl; then she seemed a goddess to me. She showed me the duties of the stable and taught me how to roll a cigarette in one hand.

‘One day I came across two strangers in a box stall. One had a vet’s bag but he clearly wasn’t a vet. They were sticking something into the backside of the horse. I went to tell the manager. I came across Dominga on the way and told her what I had seen. She nodded and asked me where I was going and when I told her she slapped me across the face. What was that for? I asked her. For you to remember, stupid. You see anything, come to me first.

‘She told me all the tricks of the trade that we might witness. A horse might be doped to go fast, or to go slow. Or even be swapped with a ringer. In a race confined to three-year-olds, say, one of the horses entered might be substituted with an older, stronger horse that looked the same. She explained that there was always the possibility of making a dollar here or there. Errands to be run, lookouts to be posted, leaving a bucket of water in a certain stall before a race to load a horse down. When I looked, astonished, at the lengths people would go to to cheat the odds, she pinched my cheek and called me Angelito, the little innocent.

‘One afternoon in the hayloft she showed me another kind of trick. The oldest. She rode me hard and when I begged to have a turn at jockey she shook her head and pushed me down into the straw. Man, whenever I smell horse-shit I think of Dominga. Later I plucked up the courage to tell her I loved her and she slapped my face again. Don’t be stupid, Angelito, she told me. You’re just a stable hand. That’s not going to work, is it? So that was that.

‘Then came the night we helped a gang bring in a ringer for a race the following day. This time it was a substitute for the favourite; this ringer was meant to lose. It was the same size and shape but there was one problem. It was the wrong colour; the tone of its coat was too light. The favourite was a deep chestnut, the ringer was bay. I stood to one side and watched how everybody argued over what was to be done. Dominga suggested that we paint the thing. The men laughed but she assured them she had seen it done. With something called henna. You mix this red pigment in water and it works as a dye. In the end they agreed. We would do it at first light, and then they would come and see the result. They offered five dollars, but Dominga haggled up to seven. She had to go into Havana to get this stuff and at dawn we mixed it in a bucket and started to brush it on. We managed to get some sort of a match, a little blotchy in places maybe, but the gang seemed happy and paid us our money.

‘It was only after they had left that we noticed how frisky the ringer was getting. This could be trouble, Angelito, she told me. Perhaps there was something in this henna that was irritating the horse. By the time it was in the paddock it was fairly jumping around. I asked Dominga for my split of the money and she suddenly gave me this look. No, she said. Get all the money you’ve got and bring it to me. Hurry. I had five dollars and two bits saved that I had stashed by my bedroll. I ran to get it and brought it back to her. What are you going to do? I asked her. She shook her head and told me to meet her later behind the grandstand.

‘You can judge a race easily enough simply by the sound of it. I heard the commentary on the tannoy, the roar building up. I knew that somehow our ringer was coming in as favourite and that we were in a whole pile of shit. The gang would be after our blood, and so would most of the bookies on the track when they learnt what had happened. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt a tap on my shoulder. But it was Dominga, and she told me that we had to get going. What are we going to do? I asked her. She said that we’d think of something. But, look. She showed me the money she had got. With a sudden thought that, in its henna-induced delirium, the ringer might go like the wind, Dominga had staked everything she could scrape together on it at two to one. We had nearly fifty dollars. Time to go, Angelito, she said. Enough of horse-shit for us.’

He smiled and gave a plaintive gesture to indicate that his story was done. ‘And then?’ I asked him.

‘Then we hitched a ride to Havana and found a place to flop in the Barrio Chino. Dominga got a job in a nightclub. And I started getting into real trouble.’

We both gave out the same long sigh. Then I was puzzled and wondered about him meeting my mother and how he ended up in jail. I’d expected somehow that his story would lead to that. We walked back to be part of the crowd once more. I took hold of his hand. It was hard and calloused. For some reason I told him about Juanita, a girl I’ve been seeing for the past few weeks. She’s a waitress at the restaurant and a comrade.

Larry, I’m truly sorry that things did not work out between you and Sharleen. It’s an easy thing to say now but I really never thought that you were right for each other. Of course, I always thought that it would happen between you and Mary-Lou. I remember you telling me about that night you tried to explain quantum mechanics to her. Maybe there’s always been an Uncertainty Principle between you. But even Einstein had problems with quantum theory (and a fear of blind chance, perhaps) – ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ he says. No, not dice but roulette (and none of us likes the house odds). The Wheel of Fortune is one big particle accelerator.

And gambling is certainly a huge problem here. American gangsters use our country as a playground with all their casinos in Havana. Come the day, we will kick every one of them out. But Cubans are not immune to gaming tables themselves. We’ll probably keep the lottery after the revolution (one of the few nationalised industries, after all, though terribly corrupt). And there are so many people involved in the business that there’ll have to be a transitional period. We discussed it in a meeting last week and called for the appointment of a Commissar for Games and Chance (I’m already thinking of applying).

Seriously, though, Cuba’s curse is that it has become a bountiful source of pleasure for others. We are so good at indulging vice in what we produce: sugar, rum, tobacco, prostitution and, of course, betting. This place is a Garden of Earthly Delights for foreign tourists, while so many of our own people live in poverty. But now we have a chance to change everything and create our own utopia. Nowhere has there been a greater opportunity for a genuine revolution, a permanent revolution. I feel such optimism that it almost scares me, Larry. Remember how I said when we first met that I had always been too late, historically speaking. Too late to join the militias in Spain; too late to meet Trotsky in Mexico. Well, now my time is here, I’m sure of it. I’m in absolutely the right place at the right moment. A real jonbar point, if you like. I wish you could be here to see it, my friend. Come, if you can.

Because the struggle has to be international, universal. I truly believe that change here can change everything. The whole world is watching, and maybe beyond too. Remember I told you and Mary-Lou about Tommaso Campanella and his uprising in Calabria. In the dialect there they had this word for it: mutazione (like mutation, remember those ‘mutant’ stories in Astounding?). Anyway, mutazione means not only a worldly revolution but also an astronomical shift, a time of cosmic change. And there are signs of it in the sky.

Yeah, I know you think I’m crazy but I’ve seen them again. There is definitely extraterrestrial activity close by, observing. I’ve seen UFOs over the Florida Straits on a couple of occasions. And I think I know now why they didn’t make contact before, in America. They simply weren’t interested. If they detect a real civilisation that they can communicate directly with, or at least the possibility of one, then we might see something spectacular. Now, with the launch of the Sputniks, and the demonstration that socialism can beat capitalism into orbit, we are surely ready for extraordinary advancements in science and society. Maybe we are not alone (and I’m not alone with my mad interstellar ideas – there has been much discussion of these concepts among the Latin American Bureau of the Fourth International). Perhaps we can solve that old conundrum of ours: we can change the world and build spaceships.

Back on earth the struggle continues. Batista’s regime is collapsing. Castro now controls almost all the countryside in Oriente. Cienfuegos and Guevara are advancing rapidly westwards through Las Villas. The people of Havana are ready to rise up and take control of the city. The future holds many risks and uncertainties in this glorious venture. This has always been the biggest gamble in history. That great spin of the wheel that we call the Revolution.

Hasta la victoria, siempre (a Rebel Army slogan),



And affectionate regards,

Nemo