The Domino Diaries

by Brin-Jonathan Butler

  * * *

  Alfonso lined up for me a meeting with Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway’s former captain of his beloved fishing boat, the Pilar, which he kept in Cuba. Nearly half a century after the last novel Hemingway ever saw published in his lifetime found its way into readers’ hands in 1952, the inspiration for The Old Man and the Sea, Fuentes, with his 103-year-old birthday around the corner, still lived in Cojimar, the tiny fishing village from the story. While Castro was up in the Sierra Maestra, Fuentes supported the revolution by smuggling explosives inside his boat. He still worked for the revolution by speaking with foreigners about his life and friendship with Hemingway. He asked for fifteen dollars from visitors to his home, which he donated to the Cuban government. Fuente’s tale of going up against a marlin was Hemingway’s comeback after the disastrous reception of his World War II novel, Across the River and into the Trees. Critics had savaged the book and relished their ad hominem attacks against Hemingway. The common wisdom was that he was shot as an artist and had become nothing more than a third-rate caricature of a bloated legend.

  Hemingway responded by sitting down at his typewriter. After a handful of weeks writing inside his San Francisco de Paula home, he sheepishly approached his wife, Mary, with the pages of his manuscript. She read the book in one sitting and returned to him with tears in her eyes and told him she forgave him for everything. For different reasons, others seemed to be able to relate: readers weren’t far behind Mary’s reaction, snatching up over five million copies of Life within two days of the novel being featured in the magazine. Forty-five years later I carried a beaten-up copy across Europe, and in every country men and women would stop me, tap an index finger on the cover, and shake their heads smiling. The critics awarded it the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and the following year it was specifically mentioned when Hemingway took home the Nobel Prize in Literature. “All the works of Hemingway,” Fidel Castro once said, “are a defense of human rights.”

  Montalvo picked me up outside Trejo, with Alfonso and Lesvanne in the car. Alfonso, who was riding shotgun, winked at me as he took a sip from a twelve-year-old bottle of Havana Club from his left hand while waving with his right, a copy of Romeo y Julieta wedged between his fingers. His eyes were bloodshot and his face had a sickly pallor.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” Alfonso laughed. “Get in. Today we have a good day. A very, very good day. So what if I’m already celebrating how you’re going to remember this day. I live for days like these.”

  As I got into the backseat with Lesvanne, Montalvo rubbed Alfonso’s shoulder and we began to drive.

  “My friend, celebrating all these days you live for is going to put you in the ground,” Montalvo said.

  “I won’t live for long anyway. That isn’t the point. I leave to go home to a place where everyone reaches old age, and how many really enjoy the life they have? A midlife crisis is the best-case scenario. Of all the species on this planet, you know how many expect to live to old age? Only those that reside in captivity. All the rest are eaten when they no longer have enough life to fight.”

  “So why don’t you move here?” I asked him.

  “My favorite thing is to miss my flight from Havana.” Alfonso laughed, reaching back and slapping my knee in the backseat. “I hate leaving this place. Brinicito, do you have any idea how many flights I’ve missed attempting to leave Havana?”

  “It must be a record.” Montalvo shook his head.

  “Even now when I can’t fuck the pretty girls I always visit, they’re still sweet to me. We still have a good time. Life has always been sweet to me. The only cruelty is saying good-bye. Which reminds me—” Alfonso handed his cigar to Montalvo, who whisked away the smoke from his face and held the cigar at arm’s length out his window. “Brinicito, I want to give you my card before I forget for after you leave so you can always reach me if you need anything here or there.”

  I took the card and put it in my wallet. But of course the next time I tried his number several months later to see if Alfonso wanted to meet in Havana again, he couldn’t answer because he was already there, buried in the Colón cemetery after his liver finally gave out. He’d gotten his wish and never had to say good-bye to Havana ever again.

  “After we visit the old man in Cojimar I will show you all the books I am bringing back. It is a crime to part with them, but for the price I’ll get I will. eBay has made the life of a bookseller so easy. If I collected baseball cards down here, I’d make a fortune. And, by the way, I have figured out a way to pay for your trip and every trip you make down here. Montalvo can get you several Cuban Olympic tracksuits on the mercado negro and you can sell them on eBay to Cuban Americans in Miami. For three hundred dollars apiece, you could sell a handful for fifteen hundred. You get these tracksuits and a couple boxes of Cohibas from the cigar factory, and you’ve paid off all your airfare and rent. Let me show you just a few books I have with me from this morning. First editions! London’s White Fang!”

  The international book fair in Havana was nearly over and moving on to spread out over the rest of Cuba. Alfonso had cleaned up at the old eighteenth-century Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, where the fair attracted tens of thousands of book lovers and collectors. Even an international book fair in Cuba is a touchy thing (beyond the fact that it is permitted to sell only state-sponsored books). After La Cabaña was built by the Spanish in 1774, it was used as a military base and prison for the next two centuries. When the rebels seized the fortress in 1959, after Batista’s troops surrendered without offering any resistance, Che was installed there for five months to oversee a military prison and revolutionary tribunals, which resulted in extensive executions of informants, Batista’s secret police, war criminals, political prisoners, and traitors. These events turned a lot of supporters against the revolutionary agenda. Later on La Cabaña was converted into a historical park with a few museums and a famous cannon, which explodes across the Havana night at 9 p.m. each evening. Then again, a lot of the prettiest plazas in Madrid where tourists sip coffee were once public execution grounds or impromptu bullfighting rings.

  After we reached Cojimar we got temporarily lost. The town was too quiet, almost somber, and both Lesvanne and Montalvo immediately sensed something was wrong. The few people we saw in town refused to make eye contact with our vehicle except for strange men inventorying all movement from street corners. “Joder,” Montalvo moaned, “secret police. Something went down here last night. Can we visit this man another day, Alfonso?”

  “It’s not a crime to visit Fuentes. We’re not doing it in secret. What happened here?”

  The streets were almost completely empty. Lesvanne spotted a face he recognized walking with some waiters in uniform to La Terraza, the most famous tourist bar in town. When Lesvanne hollered to them out the window none of them stopped walking. We pulled over and Lesvanne got out to ask some questions and to double-check our directions to Fuente’s home. When Lesvanne returned to the car he reported that a delegation of three hundred people from across the United States had been visiting and doing volunteer labor in Cuba. Most of the delegation stayed in the dorm facilities athletes had used during the Pan American games near Cojimar. A couple of days before, a young woman with her friends from California had visited a beach outside of town with a video camera. Three men approached her and demanded the bag with the camera inside. She refused. One of the men struck her in the face while another snatched the bag. The police were called. Within two hours Cojimar and two other areas the boys were suspected of living in were under complete lockdown. Scores of police and special police invaded the towns and searched each home, door to door, until they found the perpetrators and the girl’s property. The boys were quickly arrested and the government notified the girl’s family back in the States that the camera, along with the girl, were promptly being sent home.

  “Those boys who took the camera are fucked.” Lesvanne shook his head. “Even a thief could get the draw
ers. But to attack someone before robbing them?”

  “What the hell are the drawers?” I asked.

  “It’s like a morgue, only they put living people into the space of a coffin and push you into the wall. You’re left there for one day, or two days, or three. You shit all over yourself. You lose your mind. Striking a woman is terrible. There is very little violence here and they should know how that will be treated. They must have been truly, truly desperate for some reason. You can be arrested in my country for not carrying your ID card. You can imagine how bloodying a tourist is handled. The tourist dollar is the breathing hole in our little cage.”

  * * *

  We found Gregorio Fuentes’s small apartment on the corner of a narrow, hilly street, and the 103-year-old man answered his own door. He was puffing away on a cigar and refused to wear glasses, but his grandson held his elbow for support just in case. After he sat down, Gregorio looked healthy and alert, his chair surrounded by photographs and paintings of himself and Hemingway. The gift shop feel of the living room didn’t seem to be his idea, but he wasn’t embarrassed by it, either. He was giving you his time for the fifteen dollars and a bottle of rum you were expected to bring. The money went toward the revolution, the rum stayed on the premises.

  I knew that Gregorio Fuentes, who could fish before he could walk, had stopped fishing for the remainder of his life the day he found out Hemingway had committed suicide in 1961. I knew it, but I can’t say it really prepared me for feeling the intensity of that bond in Gregorio’s living room, with him sitting there.

  I told him the day before I’d seen his old boat the Pilar for the first time, and he nodded. “Isn’t she beautiful? I don’t think she’s very happy away from the sea.”

  Which was true. I didn’t think Pilar had much interest parading herself around as a centerfold beside the swimming pool in Hemingway’s backyard. You could tell she missed the action. She’d helped Hemingway catch some of the biggest fish ever caught, was rigged to spot U-boats during World War II, had hidden explosives for the rebels during the revolution, but now she continued to work for Fidel winning him all those cover charges from tourists eager to pose in front of history.

  “I don’t know anyone in the world as identified with their profession as you,” I clumsily began. “But after Hemingway died you never wanted to fish?”

  “After we got news of his death…” Gregorio stared at me, adjusting his ball cap. “I had no desire to fish anymore. I was captain of the Pilar for twenty years. I had fished all my life. I have loved the sea. I have loved all that lives in the sea. But this man was my friend. I had no desire to fish after I knew he was gone. I miss him. He was such … fun.” His crinkly lips curled into a smile as he relit his cigar and took some more drags from it.

  For the next ten minutes his grandson cut into the conversation and elaborated on Hemingway’s love of Cuba, Gregorio’s allegiance to the ideals of the revolution, how the embargo was harming the island, and a few other perfectly interesting things I wasn’t really paying attention to. Gregorio’s face, while he was quietly smoking and thinking, was too captivating to take much else in.

  The last thing I ever asked of Gregorio was why he thought Hemingway had such an effect on people. Especially Cubans.

  His blue eyes looked like cracked, half-frozen puddles. He stared at me and puffed on his cigar for a while. Then he put down the cigar and cleared his throat before saying, and smiling with that century-old face, “He knew who he was.”

  It was late when I got back to my neighborhood. At night conversation and arguments and music were everywhere, with the percussive slap of dominoes hitting the table from the porches of myriad Cuban homes. One of my favorite sounds at night.

  11

  ELEVATOR MUSIC

  The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

  —Milan Kundera

  “I WANT TO TELL YOU my favorite story about Che,” Videliah, Jesús’s seventy-four-year-old mother, told me over coffee on one of my last nights in Havana. “Before his death three years ago, I was married to the love of my life for fifty years, God bless his soul. My husband played the piano, was close friends with Ernesto Lecuona, one of my country’s most beautiful composers. I fell in love with my husband at first listen. I could hear we were soul mates even before I could see his lovely face. Wherever he is, I hope he cannot hear this confession. The only man I would have cheated on him with owned the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen in my life. I saw them when I shared an elevator with Che when I was still young and beautiful. He was with two soldiers, but he couldn’t pay attention to their conversation as the elevator climbed in that office building. He leaned over to confess my beauty was too distracting. It wasn’t a dirty compliment—it was warm. Che never cheated on his wife. He was very respectful of women. He passed very unpopular laws where powerful men were forbidden from sleeping with their secretaries. No other Cuban would ever think to pass such a law. Fidel had many lovers and many children from different women. Che wasn’t that way. But calling me distracting was all he had time to say before it was time for me to leave the elevator. I worked as a secretary in the building and my stop was before Che’s. You have no idea how many times I’ve returned to that brief little climb in the elevator with him. Even as an old woman the wound is fresh. But the story I wish to tell you is when Che left Cuba for the last time. He changed his identity and radically altered his appearance in order to sneak out to Bolivia. It was a suicide mission from the very beginning. He had no illusions. Che was never going to live to be anyone’s grandfather. And the irony of Che’s downfall is that a peasant betrayed him to the police. The police passed on the information to an American-trained and funded army. Che could have been drinking mojitos at the Nacional, but instead spent his last days nearly starving to death trying to help these oppressed people, only to be betrayed by a peasant and executed on the CIA’s orders. The wristwatch Che was wearing when they murdered him is now worn on the wrist of a man in Miami as a trophy. But before Che left he had dinner with his wife and family one last time. His wife introduced him to his children as Ramón, his new identity’s name, and they didn’t recognize him. The disguise was so well done even Che’s children were all fooled. When dinner was served, out of habit, Che sat at his usual place at the head of the table. Instantly one of his small children confronted him and grabbed the chair. ‘You cannot sit here! My father sits here.’”

  Videliah smiled and reached a hand across the table to place over mine. “You don’t have the hands of a boxer, do you?”

  I had to look away at her quinceañera portrait placed over a bookshelf. Along with free birthday cakes for all children delivered to their door by bicycle and a free wedding day, the state offered a party for all girls on their fifteenth birthday celebrating their transition into womanhood. A banquet hall is rented along with a feast and they receive a dress and fancy dress clothes for their family. All the boys in attendance wear rented tuxedos. Fourteen couples dance a waltz around the quinceañera, who is allowed to select a boy of her choosing to dance with. A photographer is hired to commemorate the day. Every Cuban lady lives with an arrestingly beautiful portrait of herself posing dreamily somewhere on the premises of her home. Videliah’s portrait was the most lovely I’ve seen.

  * * *

  My time left of that first trip in Havana was nearing its end. I’ve always been terrible with good-byes. I’ve tried to sneak out of everything before it ends all my life—family, relationships, friendships, even life itself. Cuba as these people knew it had been coming to an end for fifty years, yet it just never actually happened. Castro’s obituary has been on file at the Miami Herald for decades, yet at this point he might end up living longer than that newspaper.

  After my last training session with Héctor on a rooftop in Old Havana (he got tired of having to give a cut to the M
acbeth witches at the front), I paid a visit to Montalvo’s house a few blocks away from the gym. At Alfonso’s suggestion, I’d bought some cigars and tracksuits through Montalvo’s contacts on the black market to help cover some costs of the trip and maybe make it a little easier to come back. His street, like a lot of streets in the baked Old Havana maze, has a vise-like squeeze. The streets are potholed and dusty. The sidewalks are filled with dog shit and trash. Many windows on the homes are barred, with old men and women assuming poses gripping the bars and staring out with docile eyes at the neighborhood. There’s never a bustling morning commute here, everything is clotted and fading or giving out. From the rooftops you feel a lot of eyes watch your movements. There’s no homelessness anywhere, but what roofs people have over their heads leak, the plumbing doesn’t work, food is terrible, electricity is finicky—everything everywhere is continually breaking down.

  I banged on Montalvo’s rotting front door just as I heard a needle drop on a Barry White record inside. Lesvanne was delivering the tracksuits and cigars soon. Typical of Lesvanne and Montalvo, the only cut Lesvanne wanted was a tracksuit for Montalvo to enjoy, and Montalvo wouldn’t take more than a bottle of rum for his father-in-law. They were both insulted at the idea of anything more.

  “¡Oye!” Montalvo hollered. “Te gusta, Barry Blanco?”

  Montalvo’s wife answered the door with their grandchild in her arms. I received and gave a kiss to both while spying Montalvo from the corner of my eye, wearing his pristine Cuban Olympic tracksuit, responding to Barry Blanco with the relish of Bill Cosby cleaning off a spoon of Jell-O.

  “He cheats on me every afternoon with Blanco.” His wife shook her head. “Look at this? I’m not homophobic but to have to watch your husband of thirty years have an orgasm in your living room to Blanco every day? This man has no shame.”