"They wouldn't let me read Marti."
"I can understand why. But Victor did read a book by Marti. A book. Beware, Amelia, of anyone who's read a book and, hence, believes he knows everything."
Amelia watched Fuentes, the way he stood stoop-shouldered, swaying on his feet, as he gazed out the window of this private parlor car, the man not appearing bothered by Boudreaux's remarks. Fuentes even seemed to smile as he shrugged and said to Amelia, "Maybe you like to read Marti sometime. He say a country with only a few rich men is not rich."
"You see," Boudreaux said to her, sounding weary of it, "what I have to put up with?"
He told Amelia they were coming to a village called Varadero and showed her on a map how his rail line went past Matanzas, circled the east side of the harbor and ran along the shore to a peninsula, a finger of land pointing into the Gulf, the Bay of Matanzas on one side, the Bay of Cfirdenas on the other. Varadero was situated at the neck of the peninsula, where Boudreaux's rail line ended and he kept a stable of horses and a squad of his private army he called Boudreaux's Guerrillas-a name, he told Amelia, he'd thought of himself, Boudreaux's Guerrillas-to patrol the finger of land and protect his summerhouse, about six miles from Varadero. Several homes along the beach, he said, had been destroyed by insurgents. And for no reason, perfectly good summer homes burned to the ground.
At Varadero the horses were brought to them as they stepped from the train into afternoon sunlight. Amelia found Victor staying close to her while Boudreaux rode off at the head of his guerrilla column with Novis Crowe-the bodyguard holding on to the saddle horn with both hands-and the officer in charge of the squad. "A young man by the name of Raft Vasquez," Fuentes told Amelia, "a wealthy peninsula re from Havana."
He said, "Peninsulares are the Spaniards living here. All the rest of us, no matter our color, are Cuban. We go to war with the Spanish government and thousands of peninsula res take up arms against us, calling themselves Volunteers. And I can tell you, the Volunteers are as barbaric as the Guardia, or even worse. Thirty years ago in Havana-January 22, 1869, I know, because I was theremthey surround a theatre, the Villanueva, and while the audience is watching the play, the Volunteers fire into them, killing dozens of men, women and children. Only weeks later, Easter Sunday, the assassins perform the same criminal act at the Cafe del Louvre, again killing unarm people. You want to hear about the Volunteers, I can tell you. There was a captain-general name Valmaseda who turned their foul passions loose on the countryside, allowing them to kill whoever they want, without fear of punishment. The Butcher Weyler, during this Ten Years War, was a student of the Butcher Valmaseda. Weyler went home last fall and the new captain-general, Blanco, the loyalists consider a joke. What else do you want to know? Listen, in a military trial thirty-eight students, young boys, were accused of defacing a Spaniard's grave; they wrote something on the stone. Eight were executed and the rest sent to prison for life. You know what the Volunteers say? "Suffer the little children to come unto me that I may strangle their precious young lives." What else? I keep in my head a list of indiscriminate mass murders, rapes, molestations of all kinds and obscene mutilations.
"These men," Fuentes said, indicating Boudreaux's column, his private army, "are known as guerrillas, but they come from the Volunteers. Just as Tavalera the Guardia is a peasant by birth, the son of a prison guard, Raft Vasquez the Volunteer is a gentleman, the son of wealth. And both are criminal assassins.
"Now then, on the side of liberty," Fuentes said, "the revolutionists are insurgents or insurrectos, or you heard them called mambis or mambises."
"Rollie," Amelia said, "calls them that sometimes." "Yes, because he believes he knows everything. He says it's an African word brought here from the Congo by slaves and is from the word mambz'll. I tell him, well, I was a slave at one time and use the word, but it didn't come from Africa." "Really? You were a slave?"
"Until I was sixteen and became a cimarron, what you call a runaway. Before that, part of me was Masungo, related by blood to the Bantu. Now I'm Cuban. I tell Mr. Boudreaux the word mambl came from Santo Domingo. Fifty years ago the people there fighting for their independence had a leader called Eutimio Mambi. So the Spanish soldiers called them the men of Mambi. Then when they came here the Spanish began to call Cuban revolutionists mambis and mambises. I tell Mr. Boudreaux some of this history; he doesn't listen. I ask him has he read the words of Jose Marti, patriot and martyr, first president of the Cuban Revolutionary Party? No, of course not. I leave the essays of Marti in English where Mr. Boudreaux can find them, learn something about human rights. He throws them in the fire. What is right to him is the way things are."
"I believe it," Amelia said.
"Mr. Boudreaux looks at me What do I know of anything?"
They kept to high ground along the finger of land, following a road cut through dense thickets, a road that looked down on mangrove and lagoons, a stretch of white sand, a chimney rising out of brick and stone rubble. Fuentes pointed.
"You think they burn it down for no reason? Your Mr. Boudreaux, his head up there in a cloud, he think so."
"When did he become my Mr. Boudreaux?" "Anytime you want him, he's yours." "Why would I, because he's rich?" "That's a good reason." "Give me a better one."
"You meet famous people with him."
"On a sugar estate?"
"Sure, or here. You know who came to this house where we going? General Weyler himself, the man who made the twenty-three thousand people he sent to Matanzas starve to death. The Butcher came here to visit on someone's yacht. He meets you, he want to come back. Sure, you meet generals and admirals and envoys from Spain, the most important people. Also you hear Mr. Boudreaux talk to his friends, all those rich men who want to invest money with him. You see what they're doing, what the Spanish are doing…"
She could hear the horses ahead of them and the clink of metal. She said, "You're asking me to spy for the mambis."
Fuentes turned his head to look at her. "You like that name?"
"Aren't you?"
"I see you not very busy, so I wonder, what is the point of you?" A good question.
"I haven't yet decided." And then right away she said, "You stay close to Rollie. You hear him talking to people, don't you?"
"I don't get as close as you."
"But you talk about the crimes of the Spanishnyou annoy him with it. Isn't he suspicious?"
"Perhaps in a way he is, yes, but it doesn't worry him. He believe he smarter than I am. He believe he smarter than everybody, and I think is important he continue to believe it." Fuentes looked off at the Gulf and said, "Do you see that ship, what's let of it? A wreck now, but it was once a coastal vessel from Nueva Gerona, on the Isle of Pines, a ship with two masts and two sails, big ones. They carry yucca and tobacco from the Isle of Pines to Havana and sometime to Matanzas and Crdenas, so they know the coast and places to hide. Oh, they smuggle goods, too. But on this day two years ago they came from Key Test, the ship full of rifles and cases of bullets and they get caught in the open by a gunboat that chase the ship and it run aground and break up on that sandbar. You can't see it, but is there. Two years ago to this day, March the seventeenth, 1895. There was seven of them aboard. And now come a company of Volunteers to wait for them on the sand. The men of the ship have no choice but to wade ashore and surrender. When they do this, half the Volunteers continue to aim their Mausers at them, while the others draw machetes and hack the unarmed men to death. Rafi Vasquez was the oflScer, the one who order it to happen. Your Mr. Boudreaux was also here, to watch."
"And you were here," Amelia said.
"Yes, I was here. And you see two men shot in the head. You see how easy it is for the Guardia to do it. I watched you. You don't close your eyes or turn your head to look away. You don't say oh, how can they do that. You accept what you see with your own eyes and you think about it. A crime is committed, the execution without giving it a thought of two innocent men. You don't say oh, no, is none of your business. You see they don't care, they can kill anybody they want, and you begin to wonder is there something you can do about it."