Libra - Don Delillo [145]
“Do you practice a religion? Do you go to church?”
“I’m an atheist.”
“That’s dumb,” Ferrie told him. “How could you be so stupid?”
“Religion just holds us back. It’s an arm of the state.”
“Dumb. Shortsighted. You have to understand there are things that run deeper than politics. Our political skin is just the thinnest outer crust. I was brought up a Catholic in Cleveland.” Ferrie’s eyes went comically wide as if the remark had taken him by surprise. “Penance was the major sacrament of my adolescence. I used to haunt the confession boxes. I went from one to the other. It felt more like a sin than a way of absolving sin. There was a real sneaky pleasure there. I told my sins, I made up sins, I said my act of contrition, I went to the altar rail and said my penance and then I got back in line again. On Saturday afternoon four confessionals were going full-blast. I made the circuit. Kneeling in the dark and whispering my sins to a man in skirts. I went to seminaries, twice, to learn the trade. Even started my own church. Only a fool rejects the need to see beyond the screen.”
Lee went to the men’s room and stood there with a static around him, like space is crisscrossed with gray lines. He stood for two minutes in the middle of the room. When he got back to the table, Ferrie started right in.
“Didn’t Kennedy know how big Cuba is? Didn’t anyone tell him you can’t invade an island that size with fifteen hundred men?”
“Cuba is little.”
“Cuba is big. Why did he consent to an invasion if he didn’t mean to follow through? Why did he promise us a military victory and then back off? Because he lost his nerve. He muted everything. He soft-pedaled it. He wanted an invasion that was subtle. It’s a wonder Castro realized he was under attack.”
“Cuba is little.”
“I’ll tell you what rankles,” Ferrie said, “and this is something I hear every day from Guy. Guy feels strongly about this. He thinks Kennedy and Castro are talking to each other. They’re writing secret letters, they’re sending emissaries back and forth. Friendly overtures. There’s something they aren’t telling us. Something we don’t know about. There’s more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”
Lee got in a shoving match out on the street with some Latin type who had pockmarks and a dangling silver cross. He didn’t know how it started. Even gripping the man’s biceps and talking into his face, he couldn’t remember how the thing got started. A few people stood around mainly for lack of other amusement. Then he was home in bed.
He read gun magazines in the garage office. One of the coffee heads would appear in the door and tell him he’d better get back. Back to the motors and blowers, the hoppers, grinders, conveyor belts.
His passport arrived the day after he applied.
He walked into the spare room at home and thought some things had been moved. It couldn’t be Marina, who had orders to stay out. He inspected his papers, checked the closet where he kept his guns. Something was different, an invisible whispery difference, like when you know a thing deeply in a dream without knowing how or why.
A woman who looks Seminole somehow, squat-headed, whatever they look like, he doesn’t really know, comes walking out of a crowd in the French market nearly scaring him with the strange flat eyes of some burning saint.
He remained the only member of the Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New Orleans. Didn’t mean a thing. Summer was building toward a vision, a history. He felt he was being swept up, swept along, done with being a pitiful individual, done with isolation.
Marina pushed the stroller along their street. She tried to read the street names set into the sidewalk in light-blue tile.
Would he try to send his wife and baby to Russia or would they all go to little Cuba, where there was a purer socialism and a true joy among the people?
Last night she got up for a glass of water at 2:00 A.M. and found him sitting on the porch in his underwear