Libra - Don Delillo [85]
Frank Vdsquez, the former schoolteacher who fought for and against Castro, is found dead in front of El Mundo Bestway, a supermarket on West Flagler Street in Miami, August 1966, shot three times in the head. Reports of a factional dispute among anti-Castro groups in the area. Reports of an argument in a social club earlier in the evening. No arrests in the case.
Ten years later, to the day, also in Miami, police find the decomposing body of John Roselli, born Filippo Sacco, an underworld figure who’d recently testified before a Senate committee investigating CIA-Mafia efforts to assassinate Castro. The body is floating in an oil drum in Dumbfoundling Bay, legs sawed off. No arrests in the case.
Branch sits staring.
The Agency is paying him at the GS level he’d reached at retirement, with periodic cost-of-living increases. They paid for the room he has added to his house, this room, the room of documents, of faded photographs. They paid to fireproof the room. They paid for the desktop computer he uses to scan biographical data. Branch is ill at ease billing them for office supplies and often submits a figure lower than the amount he has spent.
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