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. Capitin 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 Giron, 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.