The Domino Diaries

by Brin-Jonathan Butler

  “You cheat on me with Jorge Miguel,” Montalvo volleyed, under his breath, as he swayed. “‘Careless Whisper’? ¡Qué va! Don’t tell me about Blanco. In our open marriage I have my Barry Blanco and you have Miguel.”

  “Lesvanne already delivered everything?”

  “Yes. He just stepped out. Thank you for this tracksuit. Aren’t I a flashy papi chulo in it! Ay! Ay!” Three Cuban wrist snaps accentuated this point. “Brinicito, I have something for you while I cheat on my wife for the next four minutes with Blanco.”

  He reached over and grabbed a massive photo album. Montalvo dropped it like an anvil in my lap but quickly reclaimed it to inspect the pages. For a reason I had significant difficulty determining, he began to show me pictures of people he had known in school or in track who had died. After pointing out four recent deaths, Montalvo gestured at another and shrugged, then almost sang, “Heeeeee’s dead, too.” I looked to his wife for some explanation and she held up her hands and paced off to the kitchen to make some coffee on the stove for us. After he’d introduced me to twenty more dead people, he didn’t bother to lift his finger anymore, simply slid it across the images. “Él también. Dead.” Turned the page. “Él … hmmm … momento.” Montalvo turned toward the kitchen and leaned back in the sofa until I could feel the backrest about to snap off. “¡Mi amor! Marco Antonio Reyes? Four-hundred-meter runner.”

  His wife sang back, “Muerto, ¡mi amor! Dos años atrás.”

  “¡Graaaaacia!” Montalvo turned back to me and paused. “He’s dead, too. Vamos a ver quién más.” He flipped over some more pages and inspected the faces with the tip of his finger against his cheek.

  “Montalvo,” I asked, grinning in the perverse delight of his weirdness. “Why are you showing this to me?”

  “Because Alfonso has just left and I miss my friend. And now you are leaving. I hate good-byes. Good-bye is death. So my revenge against that is to listen to music I love and find all the people of my generation who are dead so I gradually get cheered up realizing how happy I am with everyone still alive in my life. Have you had anyone close to you die?”

  “There were three suicides in school. But I wasn’t close to them.”

  “No, no,” he corrected. “They count. When a good-bye makes you sad, open up your school photos and find them. Keep score. This is better than pretending about heaven. That is the most beautiful thing I can ever offer you to understand about Cuba. If there is a heaven, even as bad as things are here, everyone would know who all the Cubans are.”

  “Why?”

  “They would be the only people asking to go back home.”

  And as we stared at each other in silence, for the first time, I was aware of Montalvo’s ancient father-in-law in a rocking chair across the room from us. I had never seen him in the living room before. His daughter had been nursing him in his room for all of my visits. He stared intently into my eyes while he fanned himself with an exquisite peacock feather. After we made eye contact he nudged his head toward the cabinet.

  “Hijo, ¿quién es él?”

  “Don’t worry about him,” Montalvo said, without looking up. “My father-in-law is crazy.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Who cares? He wants to drink. Photos! Muy importante.”

  “Right.”

  I had trouble calibrating myself to that room. I leaned back in the couch for a second and grandpa was ominously pointing his peacock feather at me. It might as well have been a rocket launcher. He slowly dragged the tip of his feather in the direction of the cabinet. Keeping the feather pointed, he turned his head toward me, with his straw fedora at a maniacal angle all his own.

  “Montalvo,” I pleaded. “What is he trying to show me?”

  “Nothing. He wants the rum we got him. He’s crazy. Even at ninety, all he wants to do is fuck and drink. He was tortured by Batista. After his torturers got the firing squad, he celebrated with his first drink and has been a drunk ever since. He’s crazy. You and your peacock feather are crazy, I tell you,” he said to his father-in-law.

  We spent the following hour going over all Montalvo’s track medals, ribbons, trophies, and press clippings from his glory days. His favorite possession was a photo of Fidel beaming proudly with his Pan American silver medal from the early sixties.

  Lesvanne entered the apartment wearing the searing bright outfit he laundered every day. As he stood in the open doorway with his sideburns as perfect as Cadillac fins, the sun blazed off his fake Versace belt buckle and glazed his freshly polished shoes. He found the cheek of every female in the house to kiss before joining us in the living room.

  “Please tell me why I’m being shown everyone who has died in his album,” I pleaded to Lesvanne.

  “Ah! ¡Él también! Dead. ¡Mira, mira! Chico, ¡mira! Look!”

  Montalvo yanked Lesvanne down beside us on the couch to behold yet another victim.

  “Why is he showing us friends of his who are dead?”

  “It’s his favorite game.”

  “Why does he seem so … festive about it?”

  “He used to do this somberly. But Barry Blanco puts him in a good mood.”

  Montalvo closed the book suddenly and hollered for his wife to get his track medals from his room to show us all again.

  * * *

  A cab dropped me off on the Malecón near the Hotel Nacional. An old woman and a little boy were arguing about which direction they wanted to go. It was that strange hour between the time when the sun sinks out of view and the streetlights turn on, while it’s still muggy out as the colors drain and begin to smear against the rooftops and balconies throughout Centro Habana. From a distance, all the apartments along the Malecón unfold like a Christmas calendar of hurricane-bruised colors. As usual, it felt like a drive-in movie experience to watch the day bleed out.

  The Malecón was crammed with families greeting friends and I watched the handshakes far too closely because I had been told that if you shake hands with someone’s wife and clandestinely run your thumb against her palm during the gesture it meant that you’re asking if she’d like to have an affair. I knew this because I had done it by accident after meeting a boxer’s wife to whom Héctor introduced me. It was roughly the same look I got when at a fruit stand I asked an eighty-year-old woman if she had papaya available, not knowing I was requesting pussy by its slang term. On my second day in the country, I got lost near the Malecón near the Habana Libre hotel—a popular cruising area for gays—and asked if anyone knew where the maricón (“faggot”) was by mistake. Even a stone-faced policeman broke down laughing.

  Bike taxis hustled rides while the fishermen worked barefoot and shirtless, smoking unfiltered cigarettes next to a bucket of the day’s catch. Some worked alone with rum, others in groups with conversation. Jineteros kept their eyes peeled for an easy wallet while their female counterparts arched their backs and hissed, “Warr joo frawm?” Thousands of teenage silhouettes sat flirting on the Malecón like it was one collective sofa. Some people paced, turning over decisions made a little easier by their proximity to the sea as itchy stray dogs roamed in search of handouts. Old women with sacks of candy held out fistfuls of lollipops and bags of popcorn to families sitting against the wall near solitary musicians honing soliloquies on trumpets or guitars, while cruise ships approached the harbor. Somewhere beyond the perfect line where the sky and sea kiss, the shark-infested passage spanned, a three-day float—if you make it—to pay dirt.

  Somebody once said that at the end of the world there’s always a tourist and a whore fucking in a hotel. If that’s here, that whore’s mother probably made the bed and had coffee ready for them. The girls with price tags always ask me why I look so sad and offer me company, but I’m always too shy to accept their advances. Femininity here in any permutation—wife, mistress, mother, grandmother, daughter, friend, stranger—overwhelms and intimidates me. Where I come from, any woman worth her salt knows how to break your balls, but they’re so worn down by a culture per
fected to make them feel like shit that hardly any know how to truly break your heart.

  One more day until flying home.…

  12

  IF SPANISH LACKED A FUTURE TENSE

  It’s a soccer ball covered with ants, to which an unknown player has given a tremendous kick, sending it spinning through space without the ants having the slightest idea where they came from or where they’re going or why. That doesn’t stop the little animals from clinging to the surface or from killing each other so as to keep holding on to the ball and their dreams.

  —Carlos Loveira, Juan Criollo

  MAYBE EVERYTHING HAS BEEN SAID, but how much of it has been heard?

  Of the eighty-two revolutionaries crammed onto the leaky boat that shipwrecked onto Cuban shores on December 2, 1956—twenty-nine years after Loveira’s novel—no more than twenty survived the initial encounter with Batista’s army and succeeded in escaping to the Sierra Maestra mountains. Only twelve men from this group survived to see victory when, on January 1, 1959, Batista fled Cuba for Spain with an estimated three hundred million dollar fortune stolen from the Cuban people. Since that time, some estimates say that there have been 638 attempts on Castro’s life organized on American soil. In 1979, on a historic trip to address the UN General Assembly in New York, Castro was asked about the constant need for protection in light of the assassination attempts.

  “Everybody says you always have a bulletproof vest,” the reporter Jon Alpert remarked on the plane ride.

  “No.” Castro smiled.

  “No?”

  Castro leaned back and struggled to unbutton his shirt and reveal his soft, sparsely haired fifty-three-year-old chest.

  “I will land in New York like this.” Fidel beamed. “I have a moral one. A moral vest. It’s strong.” He held up a fist. “That one has protected me always. It’s too hot in Cuba to have a bulletproof vest.”

  On the afternoon of my last day in Havana, I saw a little girl get bit by a dog in Parque Central in between the tournament fight cards at Kid Chocolate. I watched her from a stone bench beside the Esquina Caliente crowd of men arguing baseball just down the street from the Capitolio. She tried to pet one of these Goya-nightmare stray dogs and it snapped at her hand. She went off like a car alarm, but it was the way she screamed that made the old men give up their arguments and rush over to console her. I had been hypnotized by these men’s bickering my entire visit. I’m convinced that that girl’s ability to distract them from their shouting is the only bona fide miracle I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. You’ll have to take my word for it, but if the Hot Corner heard Slim Pickens himself was falling from the sky straddling an atomic bomb, slapping his cowboy hat against his hip and yee-hawing his way down onto their heads … there wouldn’t have been a flinch. “We’re talking béisbol here, coño.”

  The Esquina Caliente finally cheered her up enough that she smiled and jammed her head against her mom’s shoulder. The men went back to baseball and the mom carried her baby home.

  I closed up my notebook and followed the little girl and her mother to Calle Neptuno, where they caught a cab and disappeared.

  The last thing I had planned before flying home was to catch an Industriales game at Estadio Latinoamericano with Jesús. It was nearing the end of the Cuban National Baseball League’s ninety-game season. Television in Cuba only has three channels and when baseball or Brazilian soap operas are on, the city shuts down to watch. As much as these people loved boxing, if Teófilo Stevenson came out of retirement to fight the heavyweight champion while a little league game was telecast from any corner of the island, people would riot if anyone dared replace it with boxing. I’ve never loved Americans more than when I see them up close watching a baseball game. It distills one side of their culture and national character in a way nothing else does. It’s like they’re watching their daughter at their first dance recital. And the only people on earth who loved America’s game as much as Americans were these people.

  And this was Jesús’s going away present to me. We were going to stop at his dad’s house on the way to say hello. He looked so proud on his way to work, pulling his Industriales cap over his little shaved head after he kissed his wife and boy. That’s when his wife came over to me and told me his dad had terminal cancer and nobody had the heart to tell Jesús yet. It was in his pancreas and there wasn’t much time left. The dread of keeping this information from someone who had been as kind to me as Jesús had been during my stay hung over the rest of my last day. But it’s impossible to hold on to any one feeling for long given the speed that this town dishes them out.

  I’d had a laughing fit at the gym that afternoon because I’d mentioned I wanted to meet Félix Savón, the three-time Olympic heavyweight gold medalist, before I left, if it was possible. Most of the coaches at Trejo were either Olympic or Pan American gold medalists themselves or had coached Olympic gold medalists on the national or Olympic team. They knew and enjoyed Savón—everybody knows everybody in Havana anyway—but he was like a sweet little boy, they said. I got the impression that Cuba’s answer to “the baddest man on the planet” was more like Lenny from Of Mice and Men.

  “Sure you can meet him!” one coach hollered. “We’ve already talked to him about you. He told us he’d like to meet you in the Presidential Suite at the Nacional this evening. He’ll bring his medals to show you but be careful, he probably won’t wear them around his neck!”

  While I was smiling to myself about this, I got to a street corner and noticed a sweaty, filthy old man crawling on the ground like a crab across the intersection. I wasn’t high. I’d been offered plenty of weed by people who, for some unclear reason, insisted on smoking it from their nostrils rather than lips. But I was aware of the years in jail many have spent for so much as a joint and wasn’t keen to tempt fate. Yet, this guy, stone sober as I was, wasn’t evaporating like any mirage under closer inspection. All he had on was a loincloth. It was a busy intersection. Out of maybe two hundred people walking on the sidewalk—the fifteen taxis, ten Chinese bicycle taxis, forty cars, and two horse-drawn carriages on the road—I seemed to possess the only pair of eyes staring. I appeared to be the only person remotely concerned with this man’s role in the universe.

  In New York people had arguments with their horns; in Havana they had operas. As the man progressed to the center of the intersection, still in the middle of the street with the cars patiently waiting for him to pass, I noticed there was a rope attached to his ankle tied to something that remained offstage behind a lamppost. I reached into my breast pocket and took out a cigarette, waiting with my match until I saw what he was dragging: a truck’s tire.

  Maybe everybody was too busy to notice because, like every other day in Havana, it’s Valentine’s Day year round. You can’t walk anywhere without somebody blowing kisses or whistling or hissing at somebody. If this were the States it would be a sexual harassment lawyer’s wet dream. Yet hardly anybody seems to mind. Cupid was supposed to be a screwed-up kid settling scores with grownups anyway, so it makes sense he’d be mistaken for a local patron saint in this place.

  I made my last walk home as I always did, with the sunset glinting off American hubcaps and putting the finishing touches on a stickball game played down an alley, with everyone pleading for just one more out. The sunset got its hooks into the whole overwhelming dripping-wet painting of everything in Havana, and I turned over the same thought I had from the beginning: maybe Cuba is just one dictator’s heartbeat away from becoming like everywhere else. But what if it’s not? How long could this possibly last? How long should it last? It’s a lot easier to theorize about human behavior than it is to look at it.

  * * *

  In the darkness Jesús lit a match and we started down thirteen flights of stairs inside his parents’ apartment complex’s barren stairwell. The elevator had been broken for years and the power had gone out an hour before we arrived. We kept passing whole families sullenly panting up the stairs toward home. They gasped their hel
los.

  “The opening first pitch is only a few minutes away.” Jesús laughed. “We have to hurry!”

  We’d spent twenty minutes with Jesús’s clandestinely dying father and mom in their apartment. Jesús massaged his mother’s feet while pleading for stories from his father about heroic team feats at ball games they’d attended through the years. “Did you bring me any cigars?” the father asked his son.

  Jesús handed over three from his breast pocket and offered a match as his father bit off and chewed the end of a cigar. Halfway through each feat detailed in the story the cigar went out and Jesús had to light another match for his father.

  “So.” His father grinned at me devilishly. “My son’s entire life he’s offered me this service. Don’t think I raised him to be my slave. You can ask my wife, I lost my mind when I saw this boy’s face for the first time and I never got it back. He still convinces me I invented for all the world the pleasure of having a son.”

  “Then you should come with us to watch the game.” Jesús kissed his cheek.

  “I’m a little tired, Jesusito. Another time we’ll go.”

  “This man never missed a baseball game I played in my entire life.” Jesús laughed. “Not a stickball game or a pickup game in the park. Never.”

  “I told him already.” He slapped his cheek gently. “I was a slave to this boy. Now go enjoy the game while I take a nap with my queen and our ugly-as-sin dogs.”

  Right then we all heard the roar of air raid sirens coming from Latinoamericano’s ballpark.

  “Vamos, ¡Jesusito! Venga. I don’t care how poor my country is, if you catch a foul ball you keep it and bring it home to me.”

  When we finally got outside bicycle spokes whirred by as boys accompanied their girlfriends or younger siblings to the ballpark. Hitchhiking families crammed into wheezing jalopies or whining Ladas for the stadium. While I was evaluating again the old man’s choice to keep his illness from his son, Jesús clapped my shoulder. “You know what El Duque told the Americans when they asked him if he was nervous about pitching at Yankee Stadium?”