The French Nazi said thirteen seemed rather young for a debut in her line of work. Not in the tropics, Rachel K replied, where girls reach puberty at ten. She told him how the Tokio dressing room attendants had draped her in spangles, pompoms, and gold sartouche trim. They were kind, middle-aged women with smoky voices and thick masks of makeup. They’d crimped her locks and painted her mouth in lipstick imported from Paris, a reddish-black like blood gone dark from asphyxiation. Covered her breasts with tasseled pasties and put her onstage in the Pam-Pam Room. Voilà. Here she was.
Sometimes it seemed that her entire adolescence had been lived in the dressing room mirrors of the Cabaret Tokio. She’d spent hours gazing into them, locked out and wanting to get inside, where the world was the same, but silvery and greenish, doubled and reversed. The same, but different. When she was alone in the dressing room she’d sidle up and press her cheek to the silver and look sidelong into the mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse — of what? — whatever its invisible secret was. She had faith that there was some secret at the heart of the invisibility, even if faith meant allowing for the possibility that there was no secret, that invisibility had no heart. If she knew the mirror’s secret, she’d know how to pass through to the other side. To a greenish-silver province that was her world, but reversed.
Now, it occurred to her that she never looked at mirrors as mystery spaces anymore. Maybe she’d passed through without knowing it.
“From Paris, zazou dancer Rachel K!” the announcer calls into the microphone.
There’s a clatter of applause.
The French Nazi remembers zazou. It was a jazz thing during the war. Girls in chunky heels and fishnets, with dark lipstick and parasols. Or maybe it was berets, he can’t recall. Boys in zoot suits, an unseemly glisten of salad oil in their hair. They were bohemians who struck poses near the outdoor tables at Café de Flore, bumming cigarettes and slurping whatever broth you left in the bottom of your soup bowl. It wasn’t about poverty. It was a style of dissidence. By the time the zazou were being rounded up by German patrols, he was far away from Paris. Marching waist-deep into a cold apocalypse with a Panzerfaust over his shoulder.
The accompanist touches a few keys on the piano, the beginning of an old-fashioned danzón. Rachel K floats out from behind a Chinoiserie screen, draped in black chiffon and a cascade of rooster tail feathers that glint metallic green under the lights. The partition and a satin chaise longue transform the stage into a girl’s private dressing room, a feminine alcove of upholstery, unrobing and mirrors with an audience of men watching intently as she drops her feathers and chiffon on the chaise, and steps forward. A tropical wraith with chemical blonde hair. Blue lights illuminate her white skin, white like a body filmed underwater. A body glimpsed across a night-lit swimming pool, or in the glaucous depths of dreams.
The “variety” of her dance comes after the show: discreet hotel room trysts, unlike the blatant commerce that goes on everywhere in Havana, at all times of day, behind bed sheets strung across vacant lots. She eludes the term “whore” with the smoke and mirrors of “demimondaine.” Girl of the underworld, an in-between space, a twilight, neither light nor dark, but a shimmering, aqueous blue. She makes a life out of twilight.
Even in her real privacy, in her dressing room or in her alcove apartment, she is never purely alone, but playing the part of alone for some invisible watcher. Her stage partition and parasol are even the same Chinoiserie print, so that walking to buy cigarettes or milk she can’t escape the feeling of standing onstage, dropping the green-glinting feathers in a fluffy pile, a loose feather or two detaching to float by itself. The boundary between her private life and public life has blurred, as has the boundary between engaging her body only in intimate pleasures with people she trusts, and using it as an object she owns. She suspects these boundaries are delicate and probably can’t be repaired. But this is on some level a relief, to a girl who believes only in the present, and certainly not in guilt. There’s no use in fretting, or attempting to fix what cannot be.
She often went to the Hotel Nacional, to suites flocked in satiny white, with dictators, diplomats, Americans, and on one occasion Havana’s Cadillac dealer, Amadeo Barletta Barletta, an Italian even shorter than she was, with burning eyes, ravaged skin, and currency so freshly minted it seemed like game-board money.
It was in one of these satin-flocked suites that the French Nazi stayed. This Frenchman, a certain Christian de la Mazière — aristocratic playboy, memoirist, ex-Charlemagne Division Waffen SS — took a jetliner from Paris to Havana and then a limousine from the airport. He bubble-bathed in the sunken marble tub at his suite in the Hotel Nacional. Ordered a split of Perrier-Jouët, two boiled eggs and a saltshaker. Ate his light lunch and then headed for the Cabaret Tokio. He sat at a table in the back of the Pam-Pam Room watching Rachel K dance, her golden sartouche whipping like a lasso as she swung around a pole, no less graceful than a ballerina. But ballet dancers were like porcelain figurines, elegantly molded and coldly unsexed. Rachel K was warm soft-contoured flesh. With a gaudily feminine spill of platinum curls, and those barely bobbing firm-jelly breasts that are not only rare, a happy coincidence of genetics and miracles, but utterly time-sensitive, existing only in a slim window of youth. She spun her tassels left and then right, then one left and one right, miniature roulette wheels swirling in two directions. De la Mazière watched her kneel before the blue lights and smile coyly with her plump Manouche or German Jewish mouth for the men at the front tables. They were serious and stoic, and he understood that the cabaret was their church. Her show, an engrossing sermon they took in with naive and absolute faith. He was serious too, but while the other men watched her with awe — an exotic creature as mysterious as conical rays of divine light coming through a stained-glass window — he’d immediately seen something he was sure they could not. She’d gauzed her person in persona, but as she jiggled her body in the blue light, he sensed the person slipping through, person and persona in a kind of elaborate tangle. With her French theme, her mannered charm, he detected a creature whose mode was duplicity. He knew this mode. It was his own.
He studied her firm-jelly breasts, the silver sequins of her G-string, and her blue-pale skin with a kind of detached desire, in no hurry to get closer. He was patient, almost perversely so: The delay of pleasure was its own special and more refined category of pleasure. He didn’t offer to buy her a drink after her show. Didn’t even let her catch him staring. He began going to the Tokio nightly, showing up just as it was her turn to dance. He sat in a shadowy back corner of the Pam-Pam Room, where the tables were always empty, and where he had a clear view of the stage, as well as the hallway that led to the curtained private booths. He enjoyed watching drunk and enthusiastic businessmen clumsily swat the booth curtains out of their way, duck in with girls who wore sly, proud looks on their faces. The men and the girls each thinking it was they who’d triumphed over the other. He watched the Tokio bartender, a man with down-turned eyes that made his face melancholy, like a song in a minor key, as the bartender played canasta with two bored and customerless dancers, girls whom de la Mazière guessed had no choice but to bide their time, waiting for specialty clientele. One was much too thin, with an unappealing, shovel-like pelvis. The other, maximally fleshy and pushing six-feet, a regular giantess. After watching the giantess lose at canasta and then circulate the room twice, approaching him on both sweeps, he dug out a couple of pesos for a lap dance. He suspected Rachel K might notice he’d bought company, but that was all part of the game. Because what he waited for felt inevitable, he could sample a giantess, get her squirming and giggling and moving her brown Caribbean hips in just the right way, and do it with full concentration.