Libra - Don Delillo [161]
Cuba and Russia. Russia is not totally out of the question. He could actually go back to Russia if Marina’s visa comes through. He could visit or actually stay. They could be a family again.
Leon asks the Soviet official if there is any reply to the telegram sent to Washington. He tells the man he has information to offer in return for travel expenses to the USSR. He mentions Kirilenko again.
In the afternoon he consults his copy of Esta Semana, which he picked up in the hotel lobby. Events and locations in English and Spanish. Everything here happens in twos and his eyes constantly dart from one language to the other.
The next day they tell him at both embassies that there are no new developments. Once again he shows his documents, his correspondence. Documents are supposed to provide substance for a claim or a wish. A man with papers is substantial.
But this is the bureaucratic trap, in two languages, three languages, and nothing has effect. He is turned down, frozen out. It’s hard to believe the representatives of the new Cuba are treating him this way. It’s a deep disappointment. He feels he is living at the center of an emptiness. He wants to sense a structure that includes him, a definition clear enough to specify where he belongs. But the system floats right through him, through everything, even the revolution. He is a zero in the system.
For the third or fourth time he eats dinner in the small restaurant next to his hotel. It occurs to him that communications are flowing between agencies in the U. S. based on these wiretaps and the pictures taken by these hidden cameras.
Up to now he has been the only North American in the hotel and in the restaurant. But he realizes someone is looking at him, a man at a table near the kitchen, and Leon is fairly certain it is not a Mexican. He thinks he had a glimpse of the man coming in. But he doesn’t want to look that way and see who it is. He senses something about the man that he doesn’t want to know. There is music playing on a radio that sits on a shelf, maybe a fandango. He shifts in his chair, turning his back completely to the comer of the room where the man is sitting. Because the curious thing, the odd and strange and singular thing is that Leon believes the man is T. J. Mackey. He sips his water carefully. He feels the blood sort of surge up his back. He knows the man is not Latin, from the glimpse. He knows he’s broad-shouldered, hair cut close. He takes the dictionary out of his pocket just for something to do, a busyness, flipping through the pages. It was just a glimpse, a blur. He drinks his water slowly, almost formally, aware of himself, holding himself in a correct and serious way, as anyone does who knows he is being watched.
Walking across the square he hears someone call, “Leon,” but the name is pronounced more Spanish than English and he decides it is not meant for him.
The next day he gets on a bus at eight-thirty in the morning and sits in seat number twelve, which he has reserved in the name H. O. Lee. It is not until they approach the International Bridge, seventeen hours later, that Leon realizes he has forgotten to visit Trotsky’s house, the fortified house in Mexico City where Trotsky spent his last years in exile. The sense of regret makes him feel breathless, physically weak, but he shifts out of it quickly, saying so what.
He carries two bananas in a paper bag and he takes them out and gulps them down before the bus reaches customs. He figures fruit is not allowed across the border and the last thing he wants now is another tussle with authority.
4 October
Mary Frances pushed the vacuum cleaner across the living-room floor. She was feeling bloated and hormonal. It was an effort just to exist, to put one heavy foot ahead of the other. Friday, after school, and she had to vacuum around Suzanne, who knelt on the floor watching cartoon rabbits on TV. She vacuumed over the bump between the living room and dining room. She vacuumed around the table and under the oak sideboard. There