"I've forgotten now how much, but it's an awful lot." She paused and said, "What?"

"Have you slept with him?"

"I have, yes," Amelia said, and had to smile at the way Lorraine was staring at her so intently. "So you're staying?" "For a while anyway." "Where're you going to live?"

"I guess wherever he wants me to."

Lorrainecontinued to stare.

"There's something you're not telling me." "What do you want, intimate details?" "You sound different."

"Well," Amelia said, "nothing happened until we got to the summerhouse. It's smaller than the one on the estate but more comfortable, with a veranda and a view of the Gulf rather than cane fields. The first night we were there, finally, after not saying a word to each other for hours, he took me into the bedroom. Mine; he has his own. And kissed me for the first time. I'm quite sure he thinks he seduced me. He was serious to the point of being grim, sort of ritualistic about it, first you do this and then you do that. It's funny, when we're alone-and this was true of other times, too, on the train or riding horses together-he doesn't seem as confident as he does when he's with people, an audience agreeing with him. It might be me," Amelia said, "or he's just not that comfortable with women. Anyway, Rollie finished, he got off and said, as he stepped into his underwear, "That wasn't entirely unpleasant, was it?"

"He said that?"

"He wasn't kidding, either."

"When I said there's something you're not telling me. Remember, before? I wasn't referring to what you did in bed. It was a feeling I had."

"About what?"

"That something happened you're not telling me about."

They came through rolling hills aboard the sugar train to Matanzas, Boudreaux telling Amelia there were more sugar estates here than in any province in Cuba. "How many, Victor? Four hundred and seventy-eight, if I'm not mistaken?"

"Not anymore," Fuentes said. "Maybe three hundred something. Many of them in the past year burn down, or the owner has enough-wake up in the morning and see black smoke in the sky, over his fields."

"I ask you a question," Boudreaux said, "I like a simple answer, whatever is the fact, not your opinion."

"You want to know exactly how many burn down?" "That's enough, Victor."

The train was creeping through the outskirts of the city, pale stone and steeples and red tile roofs, and now Boudreaux was pointing out to Amelia the villas of the wealthy, the old cathedral, the domed railway station, the ornate bridge that linked the city to the fortress of San Severino on the bay. "The second largest city in Cuba," Boudreaux said, "and some say the most beautiful."

"It's true," Fuentes said, "even though the word rnatanzas means slaughtering place."

"That's enough," Boudreaux said. He turned, shaking his head, to give Amelia a weary look.

"For the slaughter of livestock," Fuentes said, "cows to make biftec for here and for Havana. I don't mean the slaughter of the Indians who lived here-"

"Victor?"

"Or the twenty-three thousand last year, the reconcentrados who were made to starve to death, kept in filthy sheds along the Punta Gorda."

"I said that's enough," Boudreaux said. "Are you becoming restless, Victor, you want to move on?" He said to Amelia, "Victor, at one time, was a reader in a cigar factory. Which one was it, Victor?"

"La Corona."

"Victor ad to the employees while they rolled cigars. He'd read every word of the newspaper including the advertisements while they sat there rolling away. He even read a book once. Wasn't it Marti, Victor, the poet who's become you-all's hero?"

"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."