Photographs. Many are overexposed, light-blasted, with a faded quality beyond their age, suggesting things barely glimpsed despite the simple nature of the objects and the spare captions.
Curtain rods found on shelf in garage of Ruth Paine.
There they are. The picture shows no more or less. But Branch feels there is a loneliness, a strange desolation trapped here. Why do these photographs have a power to disturb him, make him sad? Flat, pale, washed in time, suspended outside the particularized gist of this or that era, arguing nothing, clarifying nothing, lonely. Can a photograph be lonely?
This sadness has him fixed to his chair, staring. He feels the souls of empty places, finds himself returning again and again to the pictures of the second-floor lunchroom in the Texas School Book Depository. Rooms, garages, streets were emptied out for the making of official pictures. Empty forever now, stuck in some picture limbo. He feels the souls of those who were there and left. He feels sadness in objects, in warehouse cartons and blood-soaked clothes. He breathes in loneliness. He feels the dead in his room.
W. Guy Banister, former special agent of the FBI, collector of anticommunist intelligence, is found dead in his home in New Orleans in June 1964, his monogrammed. 357 Magnum in a drawer by the bed. Ruled a heart attack.
Frank Vdsquez, the former schoolteacher who fought for and against Castro, is found dead in front of El Mundo Bestway, a supermarket on West Flagler Street in Miami, August 1966, shot three times in the head. Reports of a factional dispute among anti-Castro groups in the area. Reports of an argument in a social club earlier in the evening. No arrests in the case.
Ten years later, to the day, also in Miami, police find the decomposing body of John Roselli, born Filippo Sacco, an underworld figure who’d recently testified before a Senate committee investigating CIA-Mafia efforts to assassinate Castro. The body is floating in an oil drum in Dumbfoundling Bay, legs sawed off. No arrests in the case.
Branch sits staring.
The Agency is paying him at the GS level he’d reached at retirement, with periodic cost-of-living increases. They paid for the room he has added to his house, this room, the room of documents, of faded photographs. They paid to fireproof the room. They paid for the desktop computer he uses to scan biographical data. Branch is ill at ease billing them for office supplies and often submits a figure lower than the amount he has spent.
He eats most of his meals in the room, clearing a space on the desk, reading as he eats. He falls asleep in the chair, wakes up startled, afraid for a moment to move. Paper everywhere.
They sat in wooden bleachers in the early evening watching the old men play softball. The players wore short-sleeve white shirts, long white pants and dark bow ties, with baseball caps and white sneakers. It was the bow ties that made Raymo happy. He thought the ties were fantastic, a perfect yanqui touch.
Frank sat one row above him and slightly to the side, drinking an orangeade. He said, “I still think of the mountains.”
“You still think of the mountains. Look at the first baseman. I bet anything he’s seventy-five. He still does a dance around the bag.”
But Raymo thought of the mountains too. He was with Castro in the movement of the 26th of July, the starved army of beards. Fidel was some kind of magical figure then. There was no doubt he carried a force, a myth. Tall, strong, long-haired, dripping filth; mixing theory and raw talk, appearing everywhere, explaining everything, asking questions of soldiers, peasants, even children. He made the revolution something people felt on their bodies. The ideas, the whistling words, they throbbed in all the senses. He was like Jesus in boots, preaching everywhere he went, withholding his identity from the campesinos until the time was dramatically right.
Frank said, “It was miserable because of the sickness and hunger, the rain. But also because I was never sure of my reasons. When I think of the mountains it’s mainly my own confusion I recall. I was pulled in two directions. This made it hard for me.”
It was true. Frank was always a bit of a gusano, with a sneaking admiration for Batista. Now they were all
gusanos,
anti-Castro worms, in the language of the left. But Frank was always half a worm, half a
batistiano,
even fighting for Fidel.
Castro liked to recall the earliest days of the insurrection, before Frank and Raymo went into the Sierra Maestra. Twelve men with eleven rifles. Raymo knows today it was not the 26th of July alone that overthrew the regime. From the first minute, Castro was inventing a convenient history of the revolution to advance his grab for power, to become the Maximum Leader.
The third baseman went into a crouch and bowed his arms wide. The old guy at the plate sent the ball on a line to left center and his teammates watched, half rising from the bench. The sun was in the palms behind the right-field fence.
Frank said, “I think of the mountains more than ever now.”
“Because you’re stupid, man.”
“But I don’t think of the invasion at all.”
“Who wants to think about either one? Besides you were shipwrecked.”
“Run aground. But still our confidence was unshaken.”
“Stupid to the end. From the beach I saw the stern begin to sink. ”
“We still had hope,” Frank said seriously.
“No wonder you think of the mountains. In the mountains we won.”
Frank handed him the orange drink with a couple of swigs left. They watched the old men make a double play, more serious and alert than boys, mechanically correct at seventy, in bow ties. They recalled how Fidel used baseball terms when he talked about operations. We’ll get them in a rundown. We’ll shut the bastards out. They went down the steps and walked to the car. Capitán was sprawled in the back seat like a stolen coat.
Raymo drove his buddy home. Sure, Frank thinks of the mountains all the time. He spent twenty-three days in the mountains. He moaned every day for twenty-three days and when he finished his rosary of complaints he went back to teaching school. Teaching the children of men who cut cane for the sugar bosses, children who cleaned and packed cane without pay.
The building where Raymo lived was between the Miami River and the Orange Bowl. He parked the car, took the dog to the hydrant, then went inside. Stinking hot. The first thing he heard was the groan of traffic over the suspension bridge at Northwest Twelfth Avenue. It was a sound raised slightly above the natural tone of the world, the sound of someone thinking, alone in a room.
The troops of the regime were afraid of the cordillera. The mountains meant death to them. For Raymo there wasn’t a chance in a million that he could die. He was untouchable in the Sierra, fat and rank, even during the last major offensive with repeated waves of napalm scorching the land and air. They were all untouchable in their minds. This was the point of being rebels.
He lay on the bed thinking.
The march to Havana took something like five days. They were greeted with the awe that heroes earn in books. Purify the country was the cry. Raymo watched a number of executions. These were the rapists and torture masters of the regime, drivers of nails into skulls. They were kindly asked to stand at the edge of a knee-deep ditch. They all ended differently, fell sideways, fell backwards, an arm flung wide, an arm tucked in, but all taken unawares, dying deeply surprised.
Then the communists appeared, entering the unions and rural committees. Castro gave them legal status. There were MiGs in crates waiting for Cuban pilots to learn how to fly them. Think in collective terms was the cry. The individual must disappear.
He talked about one revolution and gave us another. Certain areas were off-limits to Cubans. There were Russian and Czech technicians, Russian construction crews everywhere you looked. On highways, at night, students working against the new regime spotted flatbed trucks carrying long objects, canvas-shrouded, of a certain configuration. The joke was that palm trees were being sold on the black market. The cargo was the SA-2, the first of the Soviet missiles to reach Cuba. They were here to defend the heavens against high-altitude spy planes.
By this time Raymo was in La Cabana prison, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs. Yes, like that, the bearded hero is a worm. The yard was flanked by ancient storerooms and magazines, barrel-vaulted galleries now used as cells, and he shared one of these with former Castro guerrillas and Batista officers, with workers, radicals, union officials, student leaders, men who’d been tortured by the old regime and the new one, a perfect Cuban stew. The far end of his cell faced the moat, where executions took place. He waited for John F. Kennedy to get him out.
Some nights they’d hear ten executions. Once Raymo saw a slender man standing in the spotlight in front of the sandbags. He wore white shoes, a dark shirt and lariat tie, a nice-looking panama hat. They were in such a hurry to execute him they didn’t even give him a set of prison grays, much less a hearing or trial. Raymo watched the hat go sailing off his head when they shot him. It went straight up in the air like a cartoon hat. The individual must disappear.
Another car hit the iron grillwork at the center of the bridge and that low groan went up.
He wanted to believe he was out of prison. A one-time fighter in the Sierra and Playa Girón, he was reduced to listening to endless arguments between Castro and Kennedy, arguments that determine where he lives, what he eats, who he talks to. In Oriente he was a skilled worker, a mechanic in a nickel-mining operation, American-owned, and this is where he learned about the movement of the 26th of July from students who spoke convincingly of wide injustice. Now he stands on ladders picking fruit and waiting for the maximum leaders to tell him where he goes next. They carry such a stain of greatness, both these men with their visions and heroic bearing. Each takes a turn as the other’s shadow, his haunted dream. One buys what the other sells. Eleven hundred veterans of the assault brigade were released from prison after the U.S. paid fifty-three million dollars to the Castro government. Raymo stood on a sideline stripe in the Orange Bowl, three blocks from this stinking bed, and heard the renewed pledges, the second wave of emptiness. Six months had passed since then. He did not believe he’d been freed from anything. Training in the wild grass of the Everglades. This was the only time he felt free.
The thing he could not forget was the way the hat jumped from the slim man’s head. The heavy thudding surprise, the sudden insult. Even after you think you’ve seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined. How much force do bullets have to exert if they can hit a man in the chest and make his hat fly four feet in the air, straight up? It was a lesson in the laws of motion and a reminder to all men that nothing is assured.
In Minsk
The plant was an eight-minute walk from his flat. He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled. The plant covered twenty-five acres, employed five thousand people and turned out radios and TV sets.
On his first day he presented a handwritten autobiography to the plant director. “My parents are dead,” he wrote. “I have no brothers or Sisters.”
The director welcomed Citizen Oswald.
At eight sharp the duty orderly rang a bell. Grinding metal. Saws cutting through iron ingots. He hadn’t realized such high-pitched fury went into the making of a radio.
Meetings all the time. A large picture of Lenin looked down on the workers. Fifteen meetings a month, all after work, plus compulsory daily gym.
He took girls to the opera and went sightseeing. There were a number of imposing structures in this industrial city, some of them a little funny, he thought. The trade-union building had a Greek temple facade but the figures carved into the frieze were a bricklayer, a surveyor, a woman shot-putter and a man in a double-breasted suit, with briefcase.
He ate fried cabbage in stand-up cafés.
Each autonomous republic is represented by eleven deputies in the Soviet of Nationalities of the Supreme Soviet. Soviet means council.
I am learning Russian quickly
In his fourth-floor apartment he had his own kitchen and bath. He slept on a sofa bed. There was a private balcony that overlooked a wide bend in the river that runs through Minsk. The fifth day of every month he got his Red Cross check.
He read on the balcony, wrote in Russian in his steno notebook. Thank you, he wrote. Neuter nouns ending in o take a. He wrote the lyrics of a popular song.
Church spires in the distance.
He had money to spend. He was someone interesting, an American, a stranger with a story. America was a rumor down the street, a gleaming place people didn’t quite believe in, and they wanted to hear what he had to say.
Then on May 1, May Day, in the skies over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains, the heart-shaking event took place.
The prisoner stood in a metal cage inside the elevator. Light-proof, soundproof. This was a form of naked awareness he didn’t need right now. Irregular heartbeat. Right leg stinging. An exhaustion settling in over the raw headache, the whistling in his ears.
They marched him down a corridor. Four men, two in uniform. He sensed their grim satisfaction, something meritorious in the air, some old grievance righted at last. He was due to land, just about now, along a fjord in Norway.
They led him into a small room. Time to strip again. All afternoon they’d been telling him to take off his pressure suit, flight suit, long johns, stand still, bend over, give us a look, put on these pants, wear this shirt. Then they’d take him somewhere else and do it all over again.
He knew he was in Lubyanka now, right in downtown Moscow, the local political prison of the KGB. Maybe this was the last of the body searches.