33

ON NOVEMBER 18, PRESIDENT KENNEDY GAVE A TELEVISED SPEECH AT A dinner of the Inter-American Press Association of Miami, and Dix Butler and I watched in a bar.

I could not help contrasting this evening to the apocalyptic reception Jack Kennedy had had at the Orange Bowl in December, eleven months ago. Tonight, there was no standing ovation when he concluded, and most of his speech was received in silence. The audience, composed in large part of Miami exiles, were exhibiting their suspicions. When Kennedy referred to Cuba’s “small band of conspirators” as a weapon employed “by external powers to subvert the other American republics,” and added, “This and this alone divides us—as long as this is true, nothing is possible—without it, everything is possible,” no large response came back.

Afterwards, Butler gave his verdict. “‘Get rid of the U.S.S.R.,’” said Dix, “‘and you can have your socialism, Mr. Castro,’ is about what he was saying.” Dix gave a wide and wicked grin. “I can think of a lot of Cubans in Miami who are going to stick pins tonight in their wax effigy of Jack Kennedy.”

“I don’t know that many Cubans anymore,” I said.

“You never did.”

I would have paid up at that point and left, half in outrage at what he said and half in gloom at the truth of it, but he put his arm around my shoulder. “Hey, buddy, cheer up, you and me go boom-boom in a boat. Hey? Nay?”

“You are easier to get along with,” I said, “when things are happening too fast to open your mouth.”

“I agree. Go where the wild goose goes.” He nodded. “Hubbard, these are farewell drinks. I’ve worked a transfer to Indochina. I am going back to the best hashish in the world.” At the moment, he was slugging bourbon on the rocks with a beer chaser. “Say my good-byes,” he said, “to Chevi Fuertes.”

Well, turns in conversation with Butler never took long to get around the corner. “Where is Chevi?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Since last we spoke, yes. As a matter of fact, yes. I have seen him. In fact, I had it out with him.” He nodded at the solidity of this fact. “I had him alone in my motel room, and I accused him of being DGI.”

“How did you get him there?”

“That’s a tale to tell. No matter. He just likes to hang around in my company, believe it if you will. He was duded up. Light blue suit, yellow shirt, orange tie. You and me would look like candy cocksuckers, Hubbard, but Chevi has an eye for accommodating pastels. Looked pretty. For a fat double dealer, he looked pretty. He could open a downtown haberdashery. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to him, ‘seeing you is such a wrench that I’ve got to go to the loo.’ Hubbard, it was true. I had a full-gauge movement.”

It was tempting to suggest to Butler that if he ever rose to the higher levels of the Agency, it would be prudent not to get into the periodicity of his bowels, but I resisted the impulse. Just as well. He wanted to talk. He said, “Follow it! When I came out, I sat Chevi down in a chair and began to work him back and forth.”

“Back and forth?”

“A head swivel. A good slap to the left, a good one to the right. I had my ring on, so that pulled the cork. He began to bleed all over the yellow shirt and the orange tie. ‘You are an idiot and a beast,’ he said to me.

“‘No, Chevi,’ I told him, ‘it is a little worse than that. Tonight you are going to admit that you are DGI.’ What a speech he brought forth. The complexities of his work. If I recorded it, I could give lectures at Langley Manor. Chevi had dealings, he admitted. After all, he had done liaison for me into every exile group, MIRR, Alpha 66, Commandos L, DRE, Thirtieth of November, MDC, Interpen, Crusade to Free Cuba, Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. He didn’t stop. He must have figured that so long as he kept talking I wouldn’t work him anymore. He listed each and every reason that he is our highest paid agent in Miami, and I said, ‘Let’s get down to it. You also have dealings with the DGI.’ ‘You know I do,’ he told me, ‘you encourage me to.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘provided you fulfill my instructions to the letter.’ ‘Understood,’ he said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘not understood. You have cut some very dangerous corners. You give the DGI more than I license you to give them.’ He actually nodded. ‘I may extend the boundaries,’ he said.”

“Chevi admitted that?” I asked.

“Of course he did. He was under the gun. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘how far were those boundaries extended?’ ‘You have to understand the game,’ he said. ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Then you understand,’ he said, ‘I have given material to the DGI that would increase their trust in me.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we believe you are a double agent working for us. And maybe they believe you are doubling for them.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but they are in error.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘the DGI is not stupid. Maybe you are giving them as much, or maybe a little more than you are giving us.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘No?’ I asked. ‘At my very worst,’ he said, ‘I am a neutral marketplace.’ ‘Does this extend,’ I asked, ‘to letting them know the night that we will run a raid? Is that why two of my people got picked off, and I was named on Havana television?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am a neutral marketplace. I give clean information to both parties.’ You bet. I saw the key to his action then. ‘You,’ I said, ‘have your man in the DGI. You are thick with him, and he is thick with you. You are both going down on each other, aren’t you, you faggots?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that is bad enough, but why did you give the date of my raid over to the DGI?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’”

Butler blew out his breath and looked at me. My father once remarked that as they die from the hunter’s wound, big game animals go through startling changes of expression. I saw Butler look wicked, woeful, merry, terrified, then pleased with himself over the next twenty seconds. “Hubbard,” he went on, “I lifted him out of his chair, manhandled him into the john, held his head over the toilet bowl which—don’t shy from this, Hubbard—I had not flushed, no, by anticipation and design, not flushed—I am a calculating case officer—and I said to Chevi, ‘Tell me now, or you can taste the truth.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘didn’t do it, Dix baby, believe in Chevi.’ Now, I wasn’t going to force the issue. The threat, I recognize, is invariably greater than the execution—I, too, am witting of Clausewitz—but the force of something that I would call the force of completion came over me, and I shoved his head into that stinking bowl, and rubbed it around there. I was shrieking away: ‘Cuba, sí! Yeah? Castro, sí! Yeah?’”

The bartender came over, “Keep down the Castro talk, can you, gentlemen, there are a couple of Cubans here, my regular customers,” but, seeing the look on Butler’s face, added, “thank you,” and decamped.

“Next time,” said Butler to me, “he better come back with a length of pipe.”

I was silent. I was usually silent around Butler. “Did he confess?” I asked at last.

“No,” Butler said. “Every time I lifted his head, he kept saying, ‘What I keep in me, you will never get.’ He was phenomenal! ‘What I keep in me, you will never get!’ I finally had to throw him into the shower. I actually got in with him. I started to scrub him, and he went berserk. It was like catching a raccoon in a garbage can. I jumped out of the shower. I was laughing. But I wanted to cry. I loved Chevi Fuertes then. I love him now.”

“What!”

“Yes. I am shit-face drunk. But he was shit-face then. By externals. Through coercion. I am shit-face from the misery of having done it to him. Because I enjoyed doing it, and I enjoy suffering remorse, and now, Hubbard, I feel a lot of disquiet. Because he has disappeared with his lover in the DGI. For all I know he is in Cuba, and I am on my way to Indochina. A taste for combat is the only gift God ever gave me.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Was I right or wrong with Fuertes?”

“You know what I will answer.”

“But what if he did betray me?”

“What if you were wrong?”

“Your anger sits up there above your belly button. It’s in your mouth,” said Butler. “So I don’t care how you judge me. Up or down, no matter. I did what I did to Chevi because I decided to. Hubbard, you will never believe this, but I would like to become a calculating case officer like you.” He began to laugh. “Believe that, sucker,” he said, “and I will export opium to Hong Kong.”

I managed to get him home without an episode. That is the only credit I will take for the night. When I returned to my apartment, an envelope had been slid under the door.

the 18th November

Dear Peter (alias Robert Charles),

Can we say I knew you when? One of the first American expressions I learned was “I knew you when.” Yes, I knew you as a decent fellow in Montevideo, Peter, ignorant, astonishingly ignorant on nearly all world matters were you, Peter, but then no more ignorant than your colleagues in Miami—the ignorami cowboys of the CIA. I have had enough. As you read this, I will be in Cuba where I belong, although said decision has dragged me through a personal pilgrimage of disillusions with myself and the seductions of your world, to which I overadhered. You understand? I used to despise Communists because to them I first belonged and knew they were spiritual hypocrites. I could feel all the honesty dying in me while in their company, which in Uruguay was closer to me than always and forever, and I despised their spiritual hypocrisy. They never did anything with a simple understanding that it was for themselves, no, they didn’t enjoy a good meal because they were gluttons and liked being gluttons, no, they ate the good meal because it was their duty to keep up morale for the sake of the cause. Bullshit. Avalanches of bullshit. My wife in Uruguay, the worst. Power, propriety, righteousness. I hated her enough to hate all Communists. I kept wishing I was back in Harlem where I lived with a Negress prostitute. She was greedy, she had a straight line to her stomach and to her pussy. If a man talked in a loud voice, she liked him better than a dude with a nice quiet voice. She was simple. She was capitalism. I decided that capitalism was the lesser evil. When you did something, you did it for yourself alone. And it worked. Minus times minus is plus. A world of greedy people makes a good society. Capitalism was surrealism. I liked that.

But now I have had many months of living under the thumb of a white capitalist, Dix Butler, who will be very rich one day for he is the stuff out of which the fortunes are made. What he does is always for himself alone, and I have come to the conclusion that is even worse. In the name of his principle, which is himself—“That which makes me feel good is the good.” Ernest Hemingway, correct? Subject to that principle, I found my head in a shit bowl. For further information apply to Dix Butler. Excuse me. Frank Castle. Tell Frank Castle the DGI knows his real name. Dix Butler. I gave it to them yesterday. And how do I know it? Because he told it to me when we were making love. Yes, I have had an affair with Dix Butler. Does that amaze you? I, who used to be one of the leading white man studs in Harlem, and totally in Montevideo, have lost the connection to my manhood. Yes, over the last few years, after working for you, in fact. But then I did leave Uruguay in a panic with my cock between my legs. Nothing but a treacherous son of a bitch. In Miami, I got so treacherous it was a daily habit. My asshole grew to have more status for my soul than my penis—why? That may be no mysterious matter. Virility is pride. And I was a bag of shit. What is the apple of the eye in a bag of shit? The asshole, señor. I tell you all this, Peter, I mean Robert Charles of the innocenti, because it will shock you. I wish to do that. You are so naïve. Prodigiously naïve, but you try to run the world. Arrogant, naïve, incompetent, self-righteous. You will judge me adversely for being a homosexual, yet it is you who is more of one than any of us, although you will never admit it to yourself because you never practice! You are a homosexual the way Americans are barbarians although they do not practice openly. They go to church. And you work for your people so that you will not have to scrutinize yourself in the mirror. No, you peek right through your two-way CIA mirror to spy on others.

I go to Cuba full of fear. What if the average Cuban Communists are as stupid as Uruguayan Party members? America is choicer country for shits. Even shits like me. And I worry that Fidel Castro has not matured out of his own wickedness and cannot admit to himself that he was wrong to accept the missiles. But I will find out. I will no longer be able to indulge both sides of my nature. Visualize it therefore as a personal sacrifice. Communism will triumph to the extent that human nature can swim through its own shit. I feel like a pioneer.

Suerte, good fellow. Know that I will always have love for you. Despite all, as the English say.

Adios,

Chevi

I finished reading the letter. Its contents were still boiling in my head when the phone sounded. Was it by some nuance in the ring itself that I knew Señor Eusebio Fuertes was calling?

“Where are you?”

“Across the street. I saw you come in. I was waiting. Have you read my letter?”

“Yes.”

“Can I visit?”

“Yes.” That was all I could manage. I had begun to shake. Once in Maine, on a rock face to the side of the Precipices, I had had a quivering in my knees that Harlot was quick to describe as “sewing-machine leg.” Now my hands were trembling. I knew why Chevi was here.

He looked merry coming through the door as if he had arrived at that freedom from consequence which is indifferent to the verdict. I would now have to make the choice. I could detain him, or give him my sanction to go to Cuba. Each of these options was intolerable.

“Yes,” he said, “I have come to say good-bye. All the while I was writing the letter, I did not think I would. I had contempt for you. I did not wish to see you in person. But now I am finished with all that.” He looked around. “Do you have an añejo?” He gave an evil smile. “A Cuban rum?”

I handed him a bottle with a Puerto Rican label and a glass. My hands, thankfully, were equal to the job.

“Do you know why I have come?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“May I add a thought? You have vices, Roberto, and many faults, but I still perceive you, now that I have emitted my resentments, as a decent man. Therefore, I cannot leave without saying good-bye, for that would violate your decency. That would violate mine. I believe an economy of goodwill exists in the universe. An economy which is not inexhaustible.”

“No,” I said, “you want me to arrest you. Then you can find a little peace. You will feel justifiably bitter. Otherwise, you wish me to give you my blessing. Then you will have all the pleasure of knowing that you were successful at last in getting me to .  .  .” I did not know how to say it—“ .  .  . in getting me to violate the confidence of others.”

“Yes,” he said, “you are my equal.”

“Just get the hell out,” I said.

“You cannot arrest me. I see that you cannot.”

“Go,” I said. “Learn all you can about Cuba. You will come back to us yet, and then you will be worth more.”

“You are wrong,” he said, “I will become the determined enemy of your country. Because if you let me go, I will understand that you no longer believe in your own service.”

Could he be right? I felt an intolerable rage. I may have been as physically powerful at that moment as my father. I certainly had no fear of Chevi other than the fear, true son of Boardman Hubbard, that I might kill him with my bare hands. Yes, I could destroy him, but I could not take him into custody. He was my creation. All the same, I could not rid my mind of a miserable marriage of images—as I looked at his dapper presence in my living room, I still pictured his head in Butler’s toilet bowl.

“Just get out,” I said. “I am not going to take you in.”

He swallowed the rum and stood up. He looked pale. Can I claim it was Christian to wish he was going to Havana with no more than half a heart?

“Salud, caballero,” he said.

I was cursing him ten minutes after he was gone. I had all the misery of knowing that I had delivered a new obsession to myself. I was full of dread. When I went up to Washington a few days later, the capital felt as heavy as hurricane weather in Miami, and that is not a small remark; Washington, whatever its vices, has never been renowned for haunted precincts or eerie moods. Yet, I found it so. I had betrayed the Agency. This sentiment grew so powerful that I entered at last into the mathematics of faith. Sin and penance met each other in the equations of my mind. I took a new vow that from this day on, no matter how halfhearted or quartered by anxiety, I would consecrate myself to the assassination of Fidel Castro.