The Domino Diaries (6 page)

“So you were with daddy?”

“No. Dis is
before
I met your fadder.”

“
Okay
.”

“Let me have some of your jam if you're not using it.”

Little was functioning inside me as I contemplated what she was telling me.

“
Sex
was the only thing that helped you to feel alive?”

“Yes,” she said, fiendishly jamming her knife into the jar of strawberry jam. “Sex was the only t'ing. So every weekend I went to discos and I watched very carefully for the best dancer and I went over to dance. Then after, I would go home with them and we would have sex. On Saturday and Sunday, every week, for an entire year this is what your mother had to do to find any reason to live.”

Multiplication was part of the curriculum that year and, while not having memorized the times tables, I felt confident I had easily gleaned enough to comfortably handle this one. Fifty-two weeks, times two of the best dancers in these clubs every week, equals …

“You slept with
two thousand
men in one
year
?”

“Around a hundred, I would say. But then I got much better just before I met your fadder.”

Four years later, at the same table, pancakes steaming on the plate, she brought up the sexual education pamphlet I'd brought home from school the day before.

“Bwinny, I read what you brought home. We have always been open with each other, right?”

“Yep.”

“Have you ever woken up with the sheets moist? I don't mean pee.”

“I don't think so.”

“You have never had an
or-gasm
? You know what dat is, right?”

“I don't think I have.”

“It might happen soon. All I vant to say, it's very, very
normal
.”

“How old were you when you had your first one?” I asked her.

“I was eleven. In Budapest they have a beautiful park called Margaret Island. Very beautiful place in the summer. I was dere one summer afternoon and saw an old man feeding birds on zee park bench. All the birds were so happy and some flew into his hand to eat the birdseed. So I sat down across from him and asked for some birdseed.”

“Mom,” I interrupted. “What the hell does this have to do with your first orgasm?”

“I tell you. Zee old man was very kind and asked me to cup my hands and reach over so he could give me some seed. I did and he gave me some and then I started to feed zee birds. But zen zee old man did an interesting t'ing. First he put down the birdseed. Then he came over close to me on zee bench. Then as I kept feeding the happy little birds he reached down and put his hand slowly up my dress and he was touching me.”

“Mom.”

“Let me finish the story. You asked, so I am telling you this story.”

“I don't want to hear this story.”

“He was touching me there right on the bench and I had never felt deez sensation in my life. I wasn't scared or hurt, I was confused. But I didn't say anything or do anything. I just felt this new sensation building and building until, finally, an amazing thing happened. And at that
exact
moment, this very old man took his hand away, grabbed his birdseed, and walked off.”

“Your first orgasm was from being molested by an old man on a park bench?”

“It's true.”

“Something like this would scar a woman for life, wouldn't it?”

“Why? He gave me pleasure and I was never hurt. I t'ink it's interesting. Someone else can have it mean somet'ing else. I won't argue with them, they shouldn't waste time arguing with me.”

When I mentioned this story to my father, he ventured that my mother had been denied the kind of love she needed in her childhood. And maybe that desperation was why she was willing to take such risks in finding it, even from this stranger's touch. My father always nursed a grudge against my mother's dad that I adopted very early on. It ended one day after I was back at the breakfast table after my grandfather's death.

“My father and you never had much closeness. I'm sorry for dat. For both of you. He was better than I think you realize.”

“I don't know.” I shrugged.

“I have a silly question.” My mother smiled. “If you could go anywhere in the world. Where do you think you would go?”

I'd just finished reading
The Old Man and the Sea
and a teacher at school had told me that Hemingway's captain and friend from the story was still alive and kicking at 103 years old in Cojimar, the same town as in the story.

“Cuba,” I told her.

“Why Cuba?”

“To find a boxing trainer and to meet the guy from
The Old Man and the Sea
.”

“Okay, then today your grandfather is sending you to Cuba. He didn't leave much, but there's enough to buy you a ticket. I think he would enjoy giving you this present. So you will have to look up many of my friends in Havana.”

“You have friends in Cuba?”

“Don't be ridiculous. Of course I do.”

“I've never heard you mention knowing
anybody
in Cuba.”

“That's because I haven't met them yet. But
they're there
. You'll see, darling.”

 

7

VALET PARKING

It is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all sorts of spoil. This story
[
Heart of Darkness
]
, and one other … are all the spoil I brought out from Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.

—Joseph Conrad

A
WOMAN SITTING
next to me on my first plane ride to Havana was underlining an entire passage from a story she was reading,
La causa que refresca
(
A Cause for All Seasons
) by Jos
é
Miguel S
á
nchez. The story was about a Cuban male prostitute waiting at the airport for a tourist he would spend the next six weeks with. After reading just the first few sentences over this woman's shoulder, I asked if I could copy it into my notebook:

I'm only a guide, but I'm like a priest in a way.… I absolve you, but I leave you with just enough guilt so that you will come back soon to this Cuba, which lies behind the picture postcards, to this game of masks that we play, and you play, too.… I absolve you and rekindle in your heart your faith in the cause, a cause for six weeks of the year of Latin love and forbidden fruits, of sex and idealism. A safe and cozy cause. Easy to carry around. A cause for all seasons.

The philosopher Slavoj
Ž
i
ž
ek once said that fantasy is for those who can't cope with reality, while reality is for those who can't cope with their fantasies. I've gone back and forth my entire life about which, between the two, really triggers the more lasting damage. Some people are homesick the moment they leave their front door, others are homesick from birth for a place they can never find. Some girls enjoy the walk to a new boy's house more than they will ever enjoy the boy himself.

My first trip to Havana was in February of 2000, right in the middle of the Eli
á
n Gonz
á
lez fiasco. As with everything about Cuba, nobody could agree on anything. And now, what the press referred to as “political kiddie porn” had entered into a Cuban civil war fought across ninety miles of ocean. What was portrayed as a custody case by some (and a kidnapping by others) became an existential crisis for millions of Cubans on both sides of the issue. With Eli
á
n's story, millions of Cubans saw their own family's breakup writ large.

At the age of five, Eli
á
n Gonz
á
lez and his mother, along with twelve other passengers, had fled Cuba on a small aluminum boat. The boat's faulty engine gave out after they encountered a storm while attempting to cross the Straits of Florida. Only Eli
á
n and two other passengers managed to survive the journey. Eli
á
n's mother died—
heroically
, some in America said—trying to save her son from the horrors of a life in Cuba. To allow any child to live under Castro's rule in Cuba was tantamount to child abuse, is what seemed to be implied. The survivors were discovered floating at sea by two fishermen. The fishermen handed the survivors over to the U.S. Coast Guard and all hell broke loose in Miami and Cuba. It turned out Eli
á
n's mother had taken Eli
á
n from the boy's father in Cuba, without his knowledge, let alone permission. After some negotiation at the highest levels of government in the United States and Cuba, Eli
á
n would be sent back. The young boy became yet another feather in the cap for Fidel against the United States.

For my own research, I was reading
Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports
by S. L. Price. Price's book was the most current, in-depth breakdown of Cuba's enigmatic powerhouse sports machine. I wanted to learn how to locate boxers and how to properly approach them to see if any would be willing to teach me. I had no idea how to handle negotiation in Cuba or what the risks involved were. But I'd read that the black market economy in Cuba eclipsed its official economy. In the book, Price details how each elite athlete he profiled encountered the same hopelessly impossible decision to stay or leave as every other Cuban on the island, only with a lot more money at stake if they managed to escape. Whereas Te
ó
filo Stevenson had rejected five million dollars in the 1970s to fight Muhammad Ali, the going rate offered to F
é
lix Sav
ó
n, Cuba's latest heavyweight destroyer, was in the neighborhood of twenty million, to defect to America and fight Mike Tyson. Even the act of writing a book exploring the ambiguity of the choice involved had caused Price to be banned from ever returning to Cuba. “You have penetrated an impenetrable system,” he was told by security agents. The bombshell of the book was a Cuban boxer, H
é
ctor Vinent, a two-time Olympic champion, confessing to Price his desire to escape. No Cuban athlete,
in
Cuba, had ever confessed such a thing on the record before. Yet Vinent never managed to escape. He was punished before he'd ever had a chance to try. Vinent only wished to leave Cuba after the government had banned him from boxing for the rest of his life. Price's book didn't say what became of Vinent, whether he remained in Havana or had returned to be with his family in Santiago de Cuba in the east of the island. If Vinent was living in Havana as I flew over, he was twenty-eight, and my guess was he could probably use some extra money training me at a local gym. It was as good a place as any to learn about his island, too.

My mother's prediction about friends I hadn't met yet came true before the plane ride was over. Across the aisle from me a middle-aged Latino, wearing reading glasses that kept falling off his nose, was devouring pages from
For Whom the Bell Tolls
nearly as fast as the rum and Cokes he was ordering. I noticed his hands were getting steadier with each sip of alcohol. There was a casual sense of doom about him that intrigued me. He was ordering rounds for the three people sitting next to him as if they were his friends, and then drinking them all himself. I've always spooked pretty easily around heavy drinkers. They tend to hold up a mirror that I have difficulty turning away from. And this guy was getting
steadier
the more he drank, not sloppier. In his novel
Under the Volcano
, Malcolm Lowry describes this sensation as “the shakes of too little and the abyss of too much.” As I looked across the aisle and tried not to think about the stranger who epitomized this, he smiled at me.

“You don't even seem drunk,” I said.

“Drunk?” He held up his empty glass. “Why would I be drunk?
This
isn't drinking. I'm in
training
.” He reached up and pushed the button for the flight attendant again. When she arrived he ordered another round. “My name is Alfonso.”

“I'm Brin. You're Cuban?”

“No
Brinicito
, I'm Guatemalan, but I've divided my time evenly between Havana and Toronto for many years now. I need to get off this fucking plane and get something to drink.”

Alfonso wasn't kidding. His cirrhosis, I'd find out later, was pretty far along already and his drinking on the plane was small potatoes compared to after we'd landed. After the flight attendant cut him off he asked me to start ordering drinks and pass them over to him.

“What are you looking for in Havana?” he asked me. “A girl?”

“I'd like to meet some of their best boxers and see if I can get some training and maybe meet the guy from
The Old Man and the Sea
. I heard he's still alive over there.”

“Gregorio Fuentes! I'm reading Hemingway now. I love that America's favorite writer is even more popular in his adoptive ‘state sponsor of terror' home in Cuba. I mean the moment he had to go back to America he blew his brains out! But Gregorio is still there. Gregorio is a national treasure. You'll love him. And you have the best boxers in the world to see over there and get to know. Cuba is a wet dream as much as it's a nightmare. That's why America has always been so obsessed with it.”

“Can you hire any of these Olympic boxers to train you? Is that done?”

“That's easy. With a little money and perseverance anything is available to you in Havana if you know the right people. Heroes are for sale everywhere, but in Havana heroes make twenty dollars a month. You know anyone for that?”

“I don't know a soul over there.”