ONE SUMMER morning Ivy got out of her sleeping bag early, baptized herself from one of the water bags, soaped, rinsed and dried herself, and brushed her teeth. Half of planet Earth lay under the shadow of night. More than half of humanity was asleep. Ivy put her toothbrush down on a board next to the soap and other toiletries just outside the living tent, went in, and came out again in blue jeans and an army shirt, bareheaded. Her medium-long dark hair was very badly cut, because she had trimmed it herself six weeks earlier with heavy shears meant for pruning branches and that sort of thing. She took the water bags, the last drops from which she had just used up, and went to the little stream for fifty liters of water that she carried back with no apparent strain. In Europe it was still night, people were sleeping, and in North Africa likewise.* FLN couriers were crossing the border between Tunisia and Algeria with arms and munitions. In France, in the Seine-Inférieure department, in Samuel Farakhan’s ornate residence, Lajos was sleeping soundly in his own room. The great young trumpeter Clifford Brown had been killed in an automobile accident with his pianist Richie Powell during the night of June 26. There was now no other trumpeter to rival Miles Davis, who had recently recorded several pieces with his new quintet, including the thirty-year-old tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, but who was not satisfied with the session and was thinking of scheduling another to garner enough material for a record. Ivy, young, beautiful, placid, was drinking coffee and eating very hard biscuits and dried apricots. At this hour and at this elevation in the Sierra Maestra the temperature was barely 20º centigrade. Later, such degrees would be called Celsius. Later, John Coltrane and Miles Davis would be as dead as Clifford Brown or Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who at present, in the night, was contemplating Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal.
Before long Ivy collected some equipment and set off into the forest. Her gear included macro photography lenses and connecting rings, for she was feeling lazy and intended to take pictures, slowly, carefully and serenely, of grooves in leaves, orchid petals, anthill activity and all that sort of thing.
Samuel Farakhan was not sleeping. In thrall to the dubious lucidity of insomnia, he was sitting in his private study smoking a Player’s Navy Cut, both hands trembling slightly in the white light of a desk lamp wreathed in the fine smoke of the English cigarettes. In Budapest, Rákosi had resigned under pressure from the Russians and János Kádár and the social democrat György Marosán, long imprisoned for fascist Titoism but recently rehabilitated, had entered the Party’s Political Bureau, while certain spokespeople of the Petőfi Circle were calling for the reinstatement of Imre Nagy. This was why Lajos had said somewhat laughingly that afternoon that “Perhaps I should return to Hungary, perhaps things are really going to budge this time and I should ask my American friends to sneak me back in.” And why Samuel Farakhan was sitting in the basement with his cigarette and a glass of scotch, horribly wakeful and assailed to his very core by an absurd anxiety.
Ivy encountered birds, staked herself out and photographed them with Kodachrome using a telephoto lens. There are three hundred varieties of birds on the island of Cuba, though not all of them are to be found in the Sierra Maestra. Ivy used up almost a whole roll on a trogon that had strayed up there from the wooded lowlands. Late in the morning she was still not far at all from her campsite, so she returned to eat lunch there more comfortably than where she was. Sitting by her little fire she cooked up and tasted a stew in a small aluminum pan. She had to be careful not to burn herself. At one moment she turned her head quickly, like someone who suddenly feels they are being watched. Then she settled down, tossed her badly trimmed hair, straightened up and carried on with her meal. On the small board nearby where she kept her toilet things were their bag, a towel laid out to dry, a bar of soap in a Bakelite dish, a tube of toothpaste and a parrot’s feather, a long red feather.
•
At dawn in London, in a bedroom at the Strand Hotel, Simon Black and Julienne Laqueur were sleeping naked in a large bed. Aaron Black had been up for a few minutes. He was listening to the radio. The news did not mention what interested him, namely the ploy known as the Dump Nixon Campaign, organized by Harold Stassen, who, alarmed by President Eisenhower’s successive health crises and the risk that Vice President Richard Nixon might accede to the summit of power, was pushing for Nixon to be replaced as a candidate in the election at year’s end by Christian Herter, Governor of Massachusetts. Aaron Black and his friends and business associates placed certain hopes on Richard Nixon’s political future. Black was worried. Guido was sitting opposite him as the two men buttered toast. Guido had a prodigious scar across his throat and held the butter knife in his left hand.
In the afternoon Ivy patiently photographed ants and that sort of thing.
Later, back at her camp, she was about to brush her teeth when she found neither toothbrush nor toothpaste on her toiletry board, but only a shiny pine cone and the parrot’s tail feather.
That summer I was thirteen and did not believe that it was impossible to live sheltered from the blows of History. A few years later I changed my mind. But it was only after nearly four decades had passed that I was told the story of Ivory Pearl and Alba Black.
* In point of fact, in Europe and North Africa it would have been the afternoon! It is unlikely that the author would have allowed factual errors of this kind to survive publication. —Trans.