The Strange Case of Rachel K Read online

  “You spent an entire day painting your legs?” he asked.

  “Some girls spend hours plucking their eyebrows,” she said. “Burning sugar cubes and dropping them in absinthe.”

  He nodded. “And you do this instead.”

  “I do lots of things.”

  “I’m sure you do,” he said. “It does say ‘variety’ dancer, after all. French variety dancer, no less.” It was a style of flirting, exposing her fabrications to provoke her into new ones.

  “Maybe my dance is French-style,” she said. “But it’s more than that. My grandfather, Ferdinand K, was French. He came to Cuba to film the Spanish-American war.” Her grandfather, Ferdinand K, had gone east to film not the war but the hardwood fires. Forests of campeachy, purpleheart and mahogany that had been burned to make way for sugar cane, fires so magnificent and hot they cracked his camera lens. He’d decided it was safer to stay in Havana and construct dioramic magic tricks. And so he blew up the USS Maine in a hotel sink with Chinese firecrackers and then sold the reels as war footage.

  The French Nazi examined her in the dim blue light. She had a narrow face, dark eyes, the full lips and large teeth of a Manouche gypsy or German Jew. “K could be a number of things, mademoiselle,” he said, stroking her cheek with the back of his hand. “But K is not French.”

  “They said he was French.”

  “They?”

  “Actually, my mother.”

  “And she was—”

  “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.

  The French Nazi said thirteen seemed rather young for a debut in her line of work. Not in the tropics, Rachel K replied, where girls reach puberty at ten. She told him how the Tokio dressing room attendants had draped her in spangles, pompoms, and gold sartouche trim. They were kind, middle-aged women with smoky voices and thick masks of makeup. They’d crimped her locks and painted her mouth in lipstick imported from Paris, a reddish-black like blood gone dark from asphyxiation. Covered her breasts with tasseled pasties and put her onstage in the Pam-Pam Room. Voilà. Here she was.

  Sometimes it seemed that her entire adolescence had been lived in the dressing room mirrors of the Cabaret Tokio. She’d spent hours gazing into them, locked out and wanting to get inside, where the world was the same, but silvery and greenish, doubled and reversed. The same, but different. When she was alone in the dressing room she’d sidle up and press her cheek to the silver and look sidelong into the mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse—of what?—whatever its invisible secret was. She had faith that there was some secret at the heart of the invisibility, even if faith meant allowing for the possibility that there was no secret, that invisibility had no heart. If she knew the mirror’s secret, she’d know how to pass through to the other side. To a greenish-silver province that was her world, but reversed.

  Now, it occurred to her that she never looked at mirrors as mystery spaces anymore. Maybe she’d passed through without knowing it.

  “From Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!” the announcer calls into the microphone.

  There’s a clatter of applause.

  The French Nazi remembers zazou. It was a jazz thing during the war. Girls in chunky heels and fishnets, with dark lipstick and parasols. Or maybe it was berets, he can’t recall. Boys in zoot suits, an unseemly glisten of salad oil in their hair. They were bohemians who struck poses near the outdoor tables at Café de Flore, bumming cigarettes and slurping whatever broth you left in the bottom of your soup bowl. It wasn’t about poverty. It was a style of dissidence. By the time the zazou were being rounded up by German patrols, he was far away from Paris. Marching waist-deep into a cold apocalypse with a Panzerfaust over his shoulder.

  The accompanist touches a few keys on the piano, the beginning of an old-fashioned danzón. Rachel K floats out from behind a Chinoiserie screen, draped in black chiffon and a cascade of rooster tail feathers that glint metallic green under the lights. The partition and a satin chaise longue transform the stage into a girl’s private dressing room, a feminine alcove of upholstery, unrobing and mirrors with an audience of men watching intently as she drops her feathers and chiffon on the chaise, and steps forward. A tropical wraith with chemical blonde hair. Blue lights illuminate her white skin, white like a body filmed underwater. A body glimpsed across a night-lit swimming pool, or in the glaucous depths of dreams.

  The “variety” of her dance comes after the show: discreet hotel room trysts, unlike the blatant commerce that goes on everywhere in Havana, at all times of day, behind bed sheets strung across vacant lots. She eludes the term “whore” with the smoke and mirrors of “demimondaine.” Girl of the underworld, an in-between space, a twilight, neither light nor dark, but a shimmering, aqueous blue. She makes a life out of twilight.

  Even in her real privacy, in her dressing room or in her alcove apartment, she is never purely alone, but playing the part of alone for some invisible watcher. Her stage partition and parasol are even the same Chinoiserie print, so that walking to buy cigarettes or milk she can’t escape the feeling of standing onstage, dropping the green-glinting feathers in a fluffy pile, a loose feather or two detaching to float by itself. The boundary between her private life and public life has blurred, as has the boundary between engaging her body only in intimate pleasures with people she trusts, and using it as an object she owns. She suspects these boundaries are delicate and probably can’t be repaired. But this is on some level a relief, to a girl who believes only in the present, and certainly not in guilt. There’s no use in fretting, or attempting to fix what cannot be.

  She often went to the Hotel Nacional, to suites flocked in satiny white, with dictators, diplomats, Americans, and on one occasion Havana’s Cadillac dealer, Amadeo Barletta Barletta, an Italian even shorter than she was, with burning eyes, ravaged skin, and currency so freshly minted it seemed like game-board money.

  It was in one of these satin-flocked suites that the French Nazi stayed. This Frenchman, a certain Christian de la Mazière—aristocratic playboy, memoirist, ex-Charlemagne Division Waffen SS—took a jetliner from Paris to Havana and then a limousine from the airport. He bubble-bathed in the sunken marble tub at his suite in the Hotel Nacional. Ordered a split of Perrier-Jouët, two boiled eggs and a saltshaker. Ate his light lunch and then headed for the Cabaret Tokio. He sat at a table in the back of the Pam-Pam Room watching Rachel K dance, her golden sartouche whipping like a lasso as she swung around a pole, no less graceful than a ballerina. But ballet dancers were like porcelain figurines, elegantly molded and coldly unsexed. Rachel K was warm soft-contoured flesh. With a gaudily feminine spill of platinum curls, and those barely bobbing firm-jelly breasts that are not only rare, a happy coincidence of genetics and miracles, but utterly time-sensitive, existing only in a slim window of youth. She spun her tassels left and then right, then one left and one right, miniature roulette wheels swirling in two directions. De la Mazière watched her kneel before the blue lights and smile coyly with her plump Manouche or German Jewish mouth for the men at the front tables. They were serious and stoic, and he understood that the cabaret was their church. Her show, an engrossing sermon they took in with naive and a
bsolute faith. He was serious too, but while the other men watched her with awe—an exotic creature as mysterious as conical rays of divine light coming through a stained-glass window—he’d immediately seen something he was sure they could not. She’d gauzed her person in persona, but as she jiggled her body in the blue light, he sensed the person slipping through, person and persona in a kind of elaborate tangle. With her French theme, her mannered charm, he detected a creature whose mode was duplicity. He knew this mode. It was his own.

  He studied her firm-jelly breasts, the silver sequins of her G-string, and her blue-pale skin with a kind of detached desire, in no hurry to get closer. He was patient, almost perversely so: The delay of pleasure was its own special and more refined category of pleasure. He didn’t offer to buy her a drink after her show. Didn’t even let her catch him staring. He began going to the Tokio nightly, showing up just as it was her turn to dance. He sat in a shadowy back corner of the Pam-Pam Room, where the tables were always empty, and where he had a clear view of the stage, as well as the hallway that led to the curtained private booths. He enjoyed watching drunk and enthusiastic businessmen clumsily swat the booth curtains out of their way, duck in with girls who wore sly, proud looks on their faces. The men and the girls each thinking it was they who’d triumphed over the other. He watched the Tokio bartender, a man with down-turned eyes that made his face melancholy, like a song in a minor key, as the bartender played canasta with two bored and customerless dancers, girls whom de la Mazière guessed had no choice but to bide their time, waiting for specialty clientele. One was much too thin, with an unappealing, shovel-like pelvis. The other, maximally fleshy and pushing six-feet, a regular giantess. After watching the giantess lose at canasta and then circulate the room twice, approaching him on both sweeps, he dug out a couple of pesos for a lap dance. He suspected Rachel K might notice he’d bought company, but that was all part of the game. Because what he waited for felt inevitable, he could sample a giantess, get her squirming and giggling and moving her brown Caribbean hips in just the right way, and do it with full concentration.

  “From Paris!”

  Rachel K steps out. Opening notes float from the piano. The blue lights are angled toward her, mounted on the lip of the stage, and in them she can see mostly a screen of curling smoke, and through the smoky screen, the men in the front two or three rows. The lights block her view of those in the back but those in the back don’t matter. The men near the stage lay down bills, and it’s for them that she dances.

  She drops her feather boa on the chaise. Feathers that are cheaply dyed, and stain her fingers and the back of her neck a faint corpse-gray.

  “Zazou dancer Rachel K!”

  If she says she’s from Paris, she’s from Paris, is her sentiment. Being from Paris means filing her nails to a point and lacquering them in Hemorrhage Red. Drinking beer with grenadine. Carrying a parasol made of rice paper, with a Chinoiserie pattern like her stage partition—a peacock, lotus and reeds. Wearing painted-on fishnets, dressing like a zazou in short skirts and stacked wooden heels. Eating mouthfuls of cocaine. Douching with champagne. She believes that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely. Zazou, and from Paris, are things she does. Things she is by virtue of doing them.

  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.

  The girls had mostly left de la Mazière to himself at his lone back table, having pegged him as quirky, disinterested, and cheap. Until he got the giantess gyrating on his lap. The next evening, girls began fluttering around him. They thought he was German and kept saying, “Das ist gut, ja? Das ist gut?” De la Mazière nodded distractedly, smiled and said “Ja, gut” in his French accent. He ordered a rum drink with crushed mint and morphine crystals dissolving in a slush of ice. Sipped his drink and stole looks at Rachel K, whose white body moved past his table, her little-girl hand in the grip of some high-level politician’s. A Latin tomcat, foppish, with his white dinner jacket, his combed and polished mustache, a wristwatch whose diamonds caught the club lights and sent out angled glints. The politician had been standing in a half-circle of bodyguards, checking his watch. Waiting, as it turned out, for Rachel K. She and the politician—the president, de la Mazière later realized—disappeared into one of the special curtained booths off the Pam-Pam Room. De la Mazière distracted himself by ordering another drink. He tickled the girl on his lap, who erupted in giggles. She straddled him. Took his tinted dictator’s glasses and tried them on. Placed her hand on the crotch of this French SS officer—memoirist, minor aristocrat, dreamer of extremes. “Das ist gut?” she asked, smiling, pressing with her hand, his tinted glasses slipping down her nose. “Ja,” he replied, “gut.”

  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.

  And there was this girl, with the face of a Manouche Gypsy or German Jew. Like a drug that binds to what’s already in the wiring, she seemed formed from his own memories and longings. And yet unknowable—a cipher in pasties, painted like a doll.

  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 perfo
rming 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.

  President Prio liked to have a good time. He was a man of low ambition and lofty ideals. The press ridiculed him for his expensive and ribald tastes: caviar, Russian vodka, and fourteen-carat toilet flush handles. Photos had been leaked of him and his brother Tony jumping over the lime-upholstered sofas in the Green Room of the president’s palace, in pursuit of young girls clad in short-shorts. The accompanying newspaper article told of his notorious white parties. Prio was demoralized, humiliated, persona non grata with even his own cabinet ministers. A popular radio personality, Popo de la Cruz, ranted night after night about Prio’s corruption and vanity, so that people wouldn’t forget. Tony moved to Venezuela and started a construction firm. Prio only went out in dark sunglasses, flanked by bodyguards. His wife wore a black illusion veil, had them sewn to the inside of all her pillbox hats. The two of them and the children got in and out of polished Buick limousines as quickly as they could, turning away from the photographer’s flash.