“Do you find anybody trying to join Castro’s force?” someone asked.
“Nobody is that stupid,” Barreras said. “The army has cut off all traffic to the mountains.”
The Barreras convoy of jeeps and chain-driven lumber trucks, the only vehicles that could navigate these wretched roads, stopped at tiny settlements, none with electricity, to let the press hear peasants talk about their loyalty to Batista (not Castro, as the myth of the day had it), these grateful souls all but genuflecting before the Colonel in praise of the food, medicine, money, and new houses the army had given them.
At the tiny village of La Marea del Portillo Quinn fell back from the press cluster and studied the forest, looking for his grandfather who, in 1870, also set out from Santiago on his journey into rebel domain. A Spanish colonel had told him he could go anywhere in Cuba within Spanish lines; but added with a smile that the army will shoot you with great pleasure as a spy if you cross into Céspedes territory. The officers staging this La Plata playlet today will do the same for anybody trying to see Fidel. But like his grandfather, who made it to Céspedes without getting shot, Quinn was obligated to be here, convinced by a capricious education that he should track what was fundamental; and the fundamentality that was Fidel was now at large in these mountains. That Herbert Matthews of the Times had just been here did not diminish what Quinn was doing. Hemingway might think of it as the left hook after the right cross to prove twice that the hero is alive. Quinn felt exhilarated doing what was in his blood to do. He saw his grandfather — the Cubans called him El Quin — on horseback moving through a plain of high guinea grasses and climbing into these hills.
He was following a trail written out in detail in an anonymous letter to him at his hotel saying, we heard you want to enter Cuba Libre. Was the letter a trap by the Spanish army, or by thieves who knew he traveled with gold? Perhaps, but he was driven to find Céspedes, talk to him and prove his existence, give the lie to the Spaniards who said he was dead, and confront personally this singular fellow who anointed himself as the Cuban messiah and who courted death, avenged it, surrounded himself with the dead, created the dead.
Quinn’s grandfather wore tall boots, a palm-leaf hat, and carried two revolvers and a machete to fend off the marauding robbers the Spaniards warned him about. The warnings were an effort to discourage his daily expeditions toward Cuba Libre; runaway niggers the Spaniards called them, brutal savages, little more than cannibals. He rode four hours to the destination given in the letter, a ceiba tree so large it might have been part of primordial Cuba, and he waited near it till darkness, ready to fight highwaymen with his machete, ready to be shot and found with his pockets inside out. He dismounted and sat in the desolate darkness, nothing to do but trust that all his conversations had made his purpose known and his message had reached the Mambí leaders, who desperately craved the worldwide publicity for their movement that he represented. He could give the lie to the Spaniards’ claim that they had killed most of the rebels and there was no serious war.
Quinn heard a whisper and movement and saw, indistinctly, a man on foot, then, as clouds moved beyond the moon, saw he was brown-skinned, with a straw hat, shirtless, a fragment of tattered linen on his loins. He wore a machete on his side, a cartouche, and a rifle was slung on his back. Quinn spoke the code word mentioned in the letter and then they moved together toward Quinn knew not what — the beginning of something that had taken shape in him long before he ever heard of Céspedes.
Colonel Barreras was telling the news people at La Marea del Portillo about the Batista government’s generosity toward a family of six, and reporters followed him into a rebuilt shack. Quinn walked toward a peasant in tattered clothes who was sitting crosslegged in front of his house, a bohío with thatched roof, earthen floor and two chickens visible inside; and Quinn read in the man’s face something other than gratitude to the army. This house had not been rebuilt. Behind the man sat a near-toothless crone holding a child with what Quinn took to be rickets. The child was drinking water out of a tin can.
“Hola, amigos,” Quinn said to the peasant and his woman. “What did the army do for you?” He spoke in Spanish.
“They gave me beans and rice.”
“What work do you do up here?”
“There is no work.”
“How do you earn money?”
“There is no money.”
“How do you live, how do you eat?”
“I eat what grows. I cut cane last year and I drove a cane truck, worked in the coffee harvest last year, but not this year.”
“I have a relative who drives a truck up here,” Quinn said. “Arsenio Zamora. Do you know him?”
The man cocked an eye with surprise in it, but said nothing.
“Arsenio Zamora is my wife’s cousin. Renata Rivero from Holguín. Her brother is Alfie Rivero. Renata has not seen Arsenio in two years. She very much wants to see him. They are cousins.”
“Arsenio Zamora has five thousand cousins.”
“My wife would stand out among ten thousand. She is called Renata. She is beautiful and Arsenio will remember her. He has an eye for women. If anybody sees Arsenio please tell him Renata, the sister of Alfie Rivero, wants to see him.”
“I do not know people who see Arsenio.”
“If you do, tell them Renata married a reporter from the Miami Herald.”
“What is reporter?”
“Newpaper man. A writer. Miami newspaper.”
“Newspaper?”
“Okay, olvídalo. My wife is a cousin of Alfie Rivera. Se llama Renata. Prima de Arsenio. ¿Entiende?”
“Prima. She want to see Arsenio?”
“Exactamente. Renata. Cousin of Arsenio.”
Lieutenant Cordero came over to them and asked the man, “What are you telling him?”
“He’s telling me,” Quinn said, “how he cuts sugar cane and harvests coffee for a living, but he didn’t work this month because the army helped him and gave him free food. Él está muy feliz, very happy, verdad, señor?”
The man shrugged an ambiguous yes.
“He is very grateful to the army,” Quinn said.
“We’re moving on,” the lieutenant said to Quinn.
Quinn saluted the cross-legged man and went with the lieutenant.
In the forest El Quin and the brown rebel, both on foot, chopped vines and briars with their machetes as they moved, the horse moving with them. They rested in a dry streambed, faces bloody with scratches from trees and thorny overgrowth, and ate berries they had picked. El Quin sipped from his canteen and asked the rebel why he had joined Céspedes as a Mambí warrior. He said if he had not become a warrior he would still be a slave. Whether warrior or slave he would die, but it was better to die as a killer of Spaniards than to let the slave drivers kill you. Quinn wanted to tell the man he had lunch with three slave drivers in a sugar mill at Villa Clara, pretending to seek work as one of them. But then he decided that the warrior might misunderstand his ruse and would only hear this stranger saying he wanted to be a slave driver. He would then swing his machete and slice off Quinn’s head.