The Domino Diaries (5 page)

When I saw him he'd grown out a beard and his toes poked out of his shoes and he looked broken and lost. I barely recognized him. He barely recognized me. Some part of me kept hoping it was all just wardrobe and makeup for a movie part he'd gotten. As we stood looking at one another, I could almost feel him absorb the sadness between us like some mournful breeze rattling a wind chime.

I didn't know what to say and wasn't sure what to do, either. I'd tried with him as I'd tried to help my own father to quit harming himself with alcohol, but in both cases nothing worked. You have to get past the pain of knowing who someone isn't to accept loving them for who they are.

Finally he did recognize me, without remembering my name.

“Heya, look at this, hey kid?” he said, exposing some lost teeth. “Look where I ended up, huh? Can you believe it? Look where I ended up. Ah, Jesus.
Look
at me.”

“Are you okay, Ronnie?”

“Look where I ended up. Can you believe it?”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm real sorry, 'cause I know I know you. I do. But I can't for the life of me remember your name. My head ain't too good. It would really help me out if you could spare anything. I swear I won't buy any dope.”

I gave him what was in my pocket and he kept repeating the same thing over and over: “Look at me.” Then, instead of saying good-bye, he just moaned with his voice breaking, “Guess I'm all washed up, ain't I?”

 

5

HURRICANES AND BREEZES

In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns on the passing wall.

—Vladimir Nabokov

M
Y HOMETOWN HAD BREEZES
it treated like hurricanes; Havana had hurricanes it treated like breezes.

In 1492, Columbus first described looking upon Cuba as “the most beautiful land that eyes ever beheld.” On the way over, Columbus was the first man from the Old World to record an encounter with a hurricane. The very word “hurricane” was invented by the native Taino population of Cuba as the name of a deity they feared and sought to soothe, Hurakan. Soon enough Columbus and the Spanish were convinced the worsening hurricanes they endured in Cuba were their Christian God's curse for their overwhelming cruelty against the island's inhabitants.

After all those Tyson biographies,
The Old Man and the Sea
was the first novel I ever read. It introduced me to Cuba. I was fifteen and the first keyholes I peeked through toward the island were Ernest Hemingway's novelization of his twenty years there, the enigma of Cuban boxers who casually rejected offers of vast fortunes from American promoters, and Cuba's courage to stand up to the most powerful nation on earth (Fidel was actually carrying Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls
looking for pointers on guerrilla warfare while he was up in the Sierra Maestra mountains during the revolution). These entry points to Cuba were like the Pyramids, but what loomed like the sphinx was the character of the people themselves.

Why had Hemingway—one of America's most beloved writers—spent the last third of his life on the island and declared himself a Cuban? Why, in 1976, when America offered Cuba's greatest boxer, Te
ó
filo Stevenson, five million dollars to leave Cuba and fight Muhammad Ali, had Stevenson turned the tables and instead asked of the offer itself, “What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?” And why would anyone
want
to resist America, let alone wish to assume the role of David against a Goliath only ninety miles away?

Before I ever set foot on Cuban shores, I wondered what Shakespeare might have done with Fidel Castro and his cursed treasure chest of an island Columbus had tried to plunder, along with all the other intruders ever since. And then an hour later after my first visit in 2000, when I was only twenty, it became clear that the better question was what
Fidel Castro and Cuba
would have done with Shakespeare. Everywhere I looked, I was confronted with the same question: Who would believe this society ever existed in the first place, let alone for this long?

During my first week in Havana, I took a gypsy cab over to Cojimar and tracked down Gregorio Fuentes, the still living 103-year-old model for Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea
. I asked him, “If Hemingway wrote about every
other
war he'd chased after around the world, why not the revolution going on in his backyard?” Gregorio shrugged and took a puff from his cigar. “He liked boxing. Maybe Hemingway's knowledge of boxing taught him enough to know to punch your weight.” He smiled. As for a hero like Te
ó
filo Stevenson turning down all that money to leave, on my final trip to Cuba, eleven years after my first visit, Stevenson reluctantly granted me the last filmed interview of his life before his sudden death a year later, in 2012. When the
Miami Herald
ran a front-page feature about that interview, in which Stevenson asking me for a hundred dollars in return for our session somehow overshadowed all the millions he'd turned down during his career, it cost me my ability to ever return to an island I love and greatly admire. I'd handed ammunition to a lot of enemies of the Cuban government by exposing one of its idols. And over half a century after Fidel Castro seemed to be taking a joyride on the
Titanic
, dedicating his life to opposing America, with the latest banking collapse, suddenly our
unsinkable
ship of capitalism was taking on water with a limited supply of lifeboats to go around. Maybe with
The Old Man and the Sea
, a lovingly told story embracing the haunting beauty found in certain failed journeys, Hemingway spoke with equal truth to both sides of the ninety miles separating his adoptive home and his native country.

The first thing that happens when you arrive in Havana is you feel your heart's watch resisting your mind's clock about what time it is. The Cuban poet Dulce Mar
í
a Loynaz once described the shape of her island as “like the drawn bow an invisible archer raises in the shadows, aimed at our hearts.” I was warned like all visitors that books were banned in Cuba. This had the unintended consequence, at least for me, of redoubling my desire to go to a place where books were still that
powerful
. No matter what was written in a book in most places in the modern world, who would think to waste their time banning it? It was hard enough getting people unplugged for long enough to
read
, let alone care enough to rally against one. When the revolution triumphed, four out of five soldiers who marched into Havana with Fidel were illiterate. Forty years later, when I arrived in 2000, the city boasted one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

Havana is a city of bright lights and dark corners I explored as much as I could, on and off, for twelve years. It's very difficult to see anything clearly for long. It never seems to finish what it has to say, and part of its essential mystery and beauty is how you always come away missing something.

 

6

HUNGARIAN JOKES

The formula “two and two make five” is not without its attractions.

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

M
Y INTRODUCTION TO
C
UBA
came in the form of the punch line of a Hungarian joke my grandfather left behind for me after his death. We'd never talked much, but in the last decade before his death we hadn't spoken at all. I lost someone I never really had. Then, after my mother gave me some photographs from his youth and an old cigarette tin from his mandatory service in the Hungarian army, my feelings for him started to change. My mother saved the biggest surprise for the breakfast table not long after he died. She wanted to use what little money he had left her to send me to Cuba.

As far as I can tell, most Hungarian jokes have two central objectives: making you laugh to avoid crying or crying your way into laughter. Alcoholism and suicide rates among Hungarians are some of the highest in the world (and my own family did their part to chip in on both fronts), so perhaps this is to be expected. My deepest connection to my grandfather is through the Hungarian minor chord in music. The composers B
é
la Bart
ó
k and Erik Satie favored the Hungarian minor chord in some of their compositions, whereas most composers avoided it, because too many listeners found the unresolved nature of the melody simply too haunting. Any untrained ear can decipher whether most melodies are happy or sad, but the Hungarian minor chord conjures an ambiguity that leaves you off-balance and unsettled, much like a Hungarian joke.

My grandfather escaped Hungary in 1956 as a refugee while Russian tanks were rolling down the streets outside his family's apartment. One of my mother's first childhood memories was seeing the tanks outside her window. While in Canada, he sent back whatever money he could to support his family and saved in order to bring his family over with him. It was always his intention to reunite with his wife and two children. It didn't work out that way. The distance was too much and finally both my grandparents moved on with their lives and divorced six years after his escape. My grandmother met the love of her life while my grandfather never truly recovered.

My uncle was caught trying to escape Hungary and was sent back, but my mother succeeded ten years after my grandfather's escape and followed him to Canada. At sixteen she reunited with my grandfather but he was a changed man, a drinker, hardened and abusive. She tried to take off three times before she finally got away. That same year she became pregnant with my brother, and married the father. Almost as soon as she gave birth, she was pregnant again. Seven months after giving birth to her second child, he died from crib death. Things kind of spiraled out of control for her after that, until she found God. My grandfather never reached out with any help during that time. She had another child from an affair two years later that ended her first marriage. From then on my mother and brothers lived in the projects while she supported her family on welfare and odd jobs she could get cleaning houses or working with the elderly.

My grandfather, at least while I knew him, was a grumbling, unhappy, standoffish man fastened to the portable whipping post of regret. He shared my mother's enormous pale blue eyes but lacked the kindness and generosity that kept hers lit up. My favorite story my mother told about him centered on a wedding he attended after he divorced my grandmother. He'd fallen in love with a woman already engaged to someone else. After failing to persuade her against the marriage, he showed up at the wedding and hanged himself in revenge during the ceremony. In the banquet hall, my grandfather swayed for two minutes from the noose before anyone was able to cut him down. He spent the next fifty-six days in a coma.

In his old age, my grandfather expected his family to reach out to him, but I could never find much about him to justify bothering. After about the age of ten, we stopped communicating altogether and the last time I ever saw him was when I visited him in the hospital a few days before his death, not long after his eightieth and my twentieth birthday. He'd had a stroke and could no longer communicate verbally. I couldn't get past the doorway to his room as he lay there staring at me.

During the last year of his life, the only times I heard his voice were when he would sing Hungarian and Gypsy folk songs on my mother's answering machine. It was such an uncharacteristically sweet, warm act that I wasn't even sure how to approach asking my mother why he'd begun regularly doing it. My mother visited him at the hospital as often as she could in the last days of his life. There were silly, petty issues with his will where the obvious desire he'd had to look after his two children was complicated by fears of being exploited. He didn't have much money in the first place, yet his wish to offer something to my mother was botched at the end, and she never complained despite always having financial constraints herself. She laughed about how typical it was of him.

She invited me for a
palacsinta
(Hungarian crepes) breakfast a few months after he died.

“
Darrrrling
,” she began in her Count Chocula accent, as I braced myself.

Our breakfast table had always been a dangerous place for me. When I was eight, after having watched her light a candle on the anniversary of my dead brother's birthday, I asked over
palacsinta
how anyone could possibly get over the death of a child.

“Well,
darrrrling
,” she smiled, “your mother lost the will to live.”

I stopped scraping jam over the pancake.

“I couldn't feel
anyt'ing
. The only place I could feel anything was tw'oo sex. Not making love. Just sex. Sex was the only t'ing that made me feel like a human being.”

“Sex?”

“Sex was the only t'ing, Bwinny.”

The week before we'd clarified that sex, making love, and fucking were three
entirely
different things. But it would be another year before I'd seek clarification on which of the distinctly different, obviously designated holes one was supposed to use when seeking to lose one's virginity. Was it insulting to ask for the “fuck hole” or “sex hole” with a girl? Did
all
women expect their first time to be through the “making love hole”? If you lost your virginity to someone who'd already lost theirs, was it insulting to ask for the “making love hole”?

“Sex?” I repeated.

“You asked me so I'm telling you.”

“You were still with the husband before daddy?”

“No.” She smiled. “T'ank God I was free of dat.”