Her Mother's Daughter (92 page)

I woke damp and hot and terrified from a nightmare. Naptime nightmares are much worse than those at night because they feel so real—at least mine do. They always occur where I actually am in bed in a particular room, and at the actual time, so it feels that what is happening is really happening. What was happening (I dreamed) was that I was asleep in a shabby hot hotel in Miami, and the city was attacked by men in gas masks carrying rifles with bayonets who were at this moment at my door, about to knock it down. What was actually happening was that someone was banging on my door. I pulled myself groggily up, staggered to the door, had trouble unlocking the simple old-fashioned skeleton key.

Woody was standing there. I blinked.

“Dinner,” he announced.

I looked at him dumbly. “Oh.” I looked at my watch. It was seven-thirty. It came to me that this mission must be scheduled like a military exercise: dinner at seven-thirty, bed at eleven, breakfast at six-thirty, like that. I felt apologetic. “I didn't know…” I began.

He nodded, turned, and started to walk away. “Where?” I cried.

“In the bar,” he said, and left.

I tossed off my sweaty clothes and ran into the bathroom and got in the shower. I ignored the cockroach who swiftly evacuated the tub as I entered it. I put on a clean, if somewhat wrinkled wraparound skirt and a cotton jersey and sandals, ran a comb through my hair, and ran downstairs, my heart pounding. Terrible to be so ignorant, to be late….

Woody was alone at the bar, in an alcove off the lobby. The desk clerk was standing behind the bar talking to him in a low voice. He must be one of them, I thought. My heart pounded. It was exactly like being in a spy movie. I approached Woody, who turned, nodded at me, and went back to his conversation with the clerk. I looked around. Neither Alex nor Noel was in the room. The restaurant, a greasy-looking dark room just beyond, was empty except for a middle-aged Cuban couple sitting at a table against the wall.

I waited.

Woody motioned me to take a stool. I did so, thinking I was being trained to obey just as his men were, like the bartender in Mi Tierra. Still talking to the clerk, he gestured toward me with his glass and his eyebrows. “Vodka and tonic,” I replied. The clerk fixed my drink, his head bent low to catch Woody's every word. He put the glass in front of me. The two men continued to talk.

Woody nodded once; the clerk walked away. An old waiter shuffled in on soft-soled shoes, and stood at the end of the bar, waiting. The desk clerk went over to him, poured two ponies of crème de menthe. The waiter put them on a tray and left the room. The desk clerk stood at the end of the bar, staring at the wall.

Woody was now sitting beside me, silent.

“How did things go with the boat?”

“Luna's a fool,” he spat.

I raised my eyebrows in question.

“Oh, it'll be okay, we'll get off all right. Just the waiting now.”

“Where are the others?”

“Taking care of some business for me.”

“Is this the dinner hour or something?”

He frowned.

“I mean, the way you summoned me. I thought we were eating in the officers' mess, and I'd missed the gong.”

For the first time, he smiled. “Just my way, I guess. Women tell me I'm peremptory. Too many years in the military.”

“You mean, that was really an invitation to dinner?”

“Thought I ought to fill you in.”

By the time we entered the dining room, a few other couples were sitting there, and more came in later—Cubans, like the Spanish, eat late. The greasy menus were an omen of the food—the meat was inedible and the salad was swimming in sweet dressing. But the rice and beans were good, and I could live on them forever, so I didn't care. All during dinner, Woody talked and I listened.

He'd enlisted in the Marines as soon as war broke out in 1941, and had fought in Europe and the Pacific in World War II. He loved the Marines; his eyes turned radiant when he talked about “the Corps.” He loved the hardship of the training, the toughness required of the men. He rose to the rank of sergeant before he was sent to the Pacific, and while there was awarded a field lieutenancy. I thought as he talked: he was trained to kill just as women are trained to mother. After five years of doing nothing but fighting, preparing to fight, waiting to fight, recuperating after a fight, years in which he must have learned a great deal, he was completely a soldier, he was probably no longer fit for anything else.

I asked him why he didn't stay in the Marines after the war, and he let his eyes wash over me and a tiny smile dislocate his features. “Money,” he said out of one side of his mouth.

He had to have practiced these expressions.

“You're being paid to…!” I burst out, astonished. What had I imagined? I pressed my lips together. I really had to watch it. If I betrayed my real naïveté about the world, these guys would dump all over me.

But at that moment, Woody seemed to enjoy my ignorance. He leaned one thick arm on the table, he smiled benevolently at me with all-knowing superiority.

“There's a lot of patriots in the States, ma'am,” he enunciated firmly, a government representative addressing a reporter. Then he winked.

“You mean private citizens contribute to what amounts to war against whomever they don't like?” It was hopeless for me to try to pretend: he already knew I was an innocent, and that knowledge was adding to his pleasure. “Isn't that against the law? I mean, doesn't Congress have to declare war?”

He laughed. “War? Who said anything about war?” He lifted his glass to toast me. “You're a sweet kid, Stace, but you shouldn't be covering this story. You should be home having kids or something. This kinda thing's too rough for you.”

I wanted to say I was experienced in war, that I'd covered war in Algeria (but I'd already used that line, and besides it wasn't quite true), I just wasn't experienced about a new kind of corruption, the alliance of private citizens for private wars which the government seemed to tolerate. It had to: my assignment had been okayed by the State Department, which meant so had Woody's. But I thought it politic to shut up and listen.

“So tell me about this kinda thing, Woody. What's so rough about it?”

He did. For hours. He had fought in wars in places I'd never heard of, and he rambled on from story to story: I might have doubted the tales in which he was the hero, except that he told some in which he was the butt, and told of being frightened too. His way of describing fear was to say “I wanted to shit in my pants.” Men often say things like that. I wonder if that's just an expression, or if fear really hits men that way. I've been frightened, but it has never made me feel like that.

I listened. I didn't try to believe or disbelieve. I was listening not just to the stories, which after a while grew repetitious, but to the way Woody saw the world. For him, all of life was power. He loved the Marines—and the United States—not for reasons of principle or even just because he was at home in them, but because to him they represented the most powerful institutions on earth. Power was an automatic good, an absolute almost. There was no one in the world who didn't either have power or want it, and what fascinated him was watching the struggle for it, knowing the behind-the-scenes machinations, the ins and outs, who's in this year who was out two years ago, who was on top a decade ago and is now in the pits. Most of all, obviously, he loved being on the side of someone who won, but in a way, he didn't really care who won or lost, he enjoyed being part of the struggle. It
amused
him. Underneath the bravery, the heroism, the starkness of some of his stories—and I didn't doubt that part, he
had
known incredible physical hardship, he'd lived in filth, infested with vermin, sat in the blood of a dying comrade for hours, waiting for rescue—under that there was a hollowness that terrified me. Because if you weren't fighting for something that mattered—the only thing I could think of that I'd fight for was my kids, my home, my right to think and speak—then what was the reason to live in filth and vermin, what justified that dying comrade's blood, why was Woody's life heroic? As he certainly felt it was.

Oh, I know that governments always paste reasons on wars, label them so they'll appear decent, like whiskey bottles kept in boxes made to look like books one can properly keep on one's bookshelves. But didn't people know better, didn't the men who fought know better? Woody was fighting for fun. What kind of person finds such a life fun?

My ruminations kept me quiet—not that I had anything to add to the conversation (he would surely not be interested in my experience of childbirth). But he was enjoying himself, just like the boys I'd hung out with at college, who loved having me—or any female—for an audience.

We finished late, sitting over brandies. Woody smoked a cigar, still talking. Then almost in midsentence, he stopped, announced, “Enough. Time for bed,” and stood up. Just like that. Orders.

He walked me to my room, patted my head as if I were a child and said, “'Night, kid,” and winked and marched off with his military posture. I stood for a moment at my door watching him, partly regretting and partly relieved that he hadn't made a pass.

Woody had told me he would be busy the next day until two, when the newcomers were to meet us at the café; so I slept late, had coffee and a roll in my room and went out with my camera. I wandered the streets, staying within the Cuban neighborhood, looking for shots that would show the character of the place. I shot old men sitting in the sun, children playing in the streets or lolling, empty-eyed, on the front steps of shabby houses. There were no women around. They must all have been working—at home, in shops, factories, greasy spoons. They would probably appear later in the day, five or five-thirty, looking worn, shabby, shapeless, lugging string bags stuffed with vegetables, giant tins of oil, big cotton bags of rice. The few younger men on the sidewalks mostly paraded around in tight pants with great bulges at the crotch, looking dangerous.

I had lunch in a restaurant no better than the one in the hotel, then went to the café Woody, Alex, and Noel were sitting with two strangers at two tables pushed together in the middle of the room. No one smiled or greeted me, but Woody made Alex move so I could sit beside him. Neither Alex nor Noel showed any reaction to this.

Woody introduced the newcomers, Philip and Cyrus. They were in their mid-thirties, both with deep tans and athletically trim bodies. I studied them, trying to figure out why they were here, what they did, but I sensed that questions about people's backgrounds were taboo. I listened. The men were talking with great familiarity about Indochina, Iran, the Congo. They were apparently soldiers of fortune, adventurers, mercenaries. But Philip and Cyrus looked classy in a way the other three did not; and they sounded as if they'd gone to schools like Groton or Exeter, Princeton or at least Dartmouth.

At two-fifteen, two more men drifted in, middle-aged Cubans in white suits: Clemente and Orlando. Jack, another American, tall, gaunt, with eyes that never met others', arrived a few minutes later. Three younger Cubans appeared at quarter of four, and one of them—Lope—told us that another man, Ettore, would arrive soon. Ettore arrived at five-thirty. I wondered if they would be this cavalier when the time came to attack. I was tired of sitting there, and I was bored.

From the conversation, I deduced that Clemente and Orlando had been prosperous before Castro expropriated their land, and that Lope had had some property. They may have exaggerated their wealth, but these men seemed easy in a way that comes with wealth—they were used to authority, or command, used to being seen as legitimate. Three of the Cubans were heavyset, all had mustaches. And they were intense, serious, driven, almost. Clemente said they had managed to smuggle out some of their money with them, and could afford to buy weapons. Orlando had brought along a paid subordinate, Jose, who came swaggering in a little after I arrived, looking dangerous and suspicious, reached a hand inside his white jacket, and pulled out a package of cigarettes and handed them to Orlando. He was an errand boy; he looked like the boys out on the streets—young and tough, a cock looking for a barnyard to rule. Ettore was a small, plump, voluble man with warm brown eyes that filled with tears whenever he mentioned his wife, his children, his farm, and Cuba. His family was still living outside Havana, and they were to help us in some way.

I was interested in these men although their conversation bored me. It was an argument about the excellences and flaws in an entire range of weapons—semiautomatic guns, rifles, even tanks, planes, military boats. They talked as if they were outfitting a regiment, and I wondered which of these supplies they actually possessed. Woody rarely spoke, but when he did, announcing that C-4 was the best (what was a C-4?), the others shut up.

We broke for dinner at six, and I went back to my room and napped; again I was awakened by a rapping on my door, and again it was Woody. This time I didn't rush getting downstairs. But we all had dinner together at a big round table in the center of the room. A seat had been left vacant for me next to Woody. A handful of hotel guests was scattered around the room. The guys drank and blabbed.

“Me, I gonna blow up the telephone company and after that I go for the radio station,” said Lope.

“Listen, we gotta prioritize,” Jack countered bitterly. “The radio station is number one. We gotta get the police stations, they're up to their asses in weapons. We gotta split into three teams, get the radio station first….”

“What about the barracks?” Orlando screamed.

“The generator, that's the thing,” Philip put in precisely.

“We should get their water! Really fuck the bastards up!” cried Sebastian.

“No!” Ettore pounded the table. “No water!” He had a family in Havana.