Libra - Don Delillo [148]
Trotsky took his name from a jailer in Odessa and carried it into the pages of a thousand books.
It was Lee who told Marina that Mrs. Kennedy’s baby had died during the night. A boy, born prematurely, with respiratory problems. Marina stood by the window crying. It hit her with the force of something she’d feared all along without letting it surface. Thirty-nine hours of life for the President’s son. She cried for the Kennedys and also for herself and for Lee. How could she grieve for Mrs. Kennedy’s baby and not think about the child she carried in her own womb? This was the future and it was marked.
Lee went to court. The first thing he noticed was that the room was separated into white and colored. He sat square in the middle of the colored section, waiting for his case to be called. Then he pleaded guilty and paid a ten-dollar fine. He shook hands with Carlos and walked out the door.
You see, none of this really mattered. What mattered was collecting the experiences, documenting the experienes, saving it all for the eyes of Cuban officials. What is it called, dossier?
There was a camera crew from WDSU waiting outside the courtroom and they shot some footage of Lee H. Oswald for the evening news.
Four days later he was back on the street handing out leaflets in front of the International Trade Mart.
The day after that he went on the radio to talk about Cuba and the world.
Bill Stuckey, the host of Latin Listening Post, was expecting a folk-singer type with a beard and sooty fingernails. Oswald was neat and clean, in.a white shirt and a tie, and carried a looseleaf notebook under his arm.
They sat in the studio, with an engineer to record the interview, and Stuckey began right away, introducing Oswald as the secretary of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Lee said, “Yes, as secretary, I am responsible for the keeping of the records and the protection of the members’ names so that undue publicity or attention will not be drawn to them, as they do not desire it.”
He said, “Certainly it is obvious to me, having been educated in New Orleans and having been instilled with the ideals of democracy and objectiveness, that Cuba and the right of Cubans to self-determination is more or less self-evident.”
He said, “You know, when our forefathers drew up the Constitution, they considered that democracy was creating an atmosphere of freedom of discussion, of argument, of finding the truth. The right, the classic right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that is my definition of democracy, the right to be in a minority and not to be suppressed.”
Stuckey listened to him talk about the United Fruit Company, the CIA, collectivization, the feudal dictatorship of Nicaragua, movements of national liberation. Thirty-seven minutes in all, which Stuckey was compelled to reduce to four and a half for his five-minute show, and this was a shame because Oswald’s presentation was intelligent and clear and his way of leaping out of difficult comers extremely deft.
Stuckey invited Secretary Oswald out for a beer when the interview was over. Then he sent a copy of the tape to the FBI.
That’s how it went, that’s the kind of summer it was. One day he was going after roaches with a pancake flipper, mashing them flat—one of those soft plastic flippers that are always on sale. He’d lost his job. They fired him because he didn’t do the work, which seemed reasonable enough. Storms shaking the city. They shot Medgar Evers dead in Jackson, Miss., a field secretary of the NAACP. Later they would dynamite the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in