The Domino Diaries Read online

  But after a dozen of these horribly awkward phone calls, I was very familiar with his nasal voice that enjoyed toying with me, using Russian and English sprinkled into the conversation. This wasn’t him or any voice that I recognized. Then it dawned on me.…

  “Héctor?”

  “Sí,” he groaned, clearing his throat. “Lo siento, campeón. But I must come over.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Sofía was glaring at me.

  “Con permiso,” I told Héctor. I turned to Sofía and covered the phone: “He says there’s some kind of family emergency and he has to come over.”

  “He’s drunk?” she asked.

  “He’s drunk or he’s badly injured. He sounds awful.”

  “He knows where we are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Madre mía, Brinicito. There’s no family emergency. He needs money! Don’t let him come over here. Give me the fucking phone,” she demanded, reaching over to grab it.

  “This has never happened before! Héctor’s a friend. What if there is an emergency?”

  “Right,” Sofía lamented. “Decide now how much you want to lose when he’s in our apartment begging and refusing to leave unless you pay him. And keep in mind how it looks having a drunken two-time Olympic champion puking and stumbling his way to our apartment at this hour of the night.”

  I took my hand off the phone. “This is a family emergency?”

  “Please. I must see you. Please. Please, please, please…”

  “I can go to you.”

  “No,” Héctor insisted. “I will be there in thirty minutes. Stay where you are. Please.”

  “Okay.”

  He hung up the phone.

  “You think you’re being a friend right now,” Sofía groaned. “All you’ve done is made yourself a target.”

  I got dressed and left our apartment and went out onto the roof to keep a look out for Héctor’s arrival. Even as late as it was, broken-down American gypsy cabs haunted Calle Neptuno like meandering spirits climbing toward the magnificent front steps of the University of Havana and the bizarre Napoleon museum nearby, only to swing off along the bend toward the Coppelia ice cream stand and under the looming bulk of the Habana Libre, where the city’s increasingly visible homosexual cruising community roamed at night. Fidel used to send them off to gruesome labor camps enclosed in barbwire, but things had slowly improved. Looking out toward Miami, a blackout extended down every street leading down to the Malecón, interrupted in distant pinpricks of light from the ends of cigars smoked by unseen figures. I sat on the edge of my roof dreading Héctor’s arrival while I watched the procession of Fords, Oldsmobiles, and Cadillacs, all with their ghostly, lonesome headlights drifting over the shattered terrain of broken streets toward my apartment until they passed and receded on their way to complete their city-wide circuit. One car honked the theme of The Godfather to warn stray animals of their approach or maybe gently interrupt a couple arguing in the shadows, seeing if they wanted to be picked up. The Hotel Nacional was only a mile or so away, where Michael Corleone met the rest of America’s most powerful fictional gangsters on the rooftop and sliced off pieces of Cuba, frosted over a cake, dividing up ownership until Castro ruined everything. When the car honked the opening bars of the theme again, dogs on a neighbor’s rooftop howled their attempts at harmony as several couples leaned against their wrought iron balconies, under their laundry lines swaying limply in the warm air, and turned in our direction. I noticed a hand-painted portrait of Camilo on the roof of a Buick. One of the most beautiful surprises I’d ever seen was witnessing children across the country observing the anniversary of Camilo’s death from a plane crash shortly after the triumph of the revolution by bringing flowers to the ocean and rivers. Many rumors claimed Fidel was responsible for the crash.

  When you wake up from a bad dream in Havana, it always takes longer than you’ve ever experienced in your life to make sure that you’re really awake. I kept wanting to go back inside my room to ask Sofía if Héctor had really called and was really on the way over. It was only after Héctor finally arrived and spilled out of the cab and fell into the gutter that I knew it was real. A group of men playing dominoes on the corner came over to help him up. Suddenly the streetlight burned out and there was nothing but darkness and urgent voices.

  I ran down several flights of stairs and found Héctor crawling up the fifth stair, having thrown up on the landing. The stench from the vomit and the alcohol wafting off him was overwhelming. He was wearing a bright red Cuban national team volleyball jersey that was soaked around his belly from the puke.

  “Do you need an ambulance?” I asked, taking his arm and flinging it over my shoulder.

  “Todo bien,” Héctor grunted. “Your stairs are an abomination against humanity.”

  “You need a doctor?”

  “No,” Héctor shouted. But he was out of breath. “My daughter … She needs my help. I need your help.… I didn’t know who else to ask. I know how this looks. If you can give me a hundred CUC it could save her life. Please.”

  What the fuck was there to say?

  “Stay here,” I said. “I’ll go up and get it.”

  Héctor retched and his cheeks blew up like Dizzy Gillespie’s for a second before I hoisted him up so he could puke over the side of the stairwell. Dogs inside the apartments just above us sounded their alarms as Sofía’s footsteps cascaded down the stairs toward us.

  A neighbor who opened his door hissed at us behind his barred gate. “Ay … who is this person? You need security?”

  “No,” I said. “This is a friend. Everything is okay.”

  Sofía walked past the neighbor and stopped a couple of stairs above us.

  “Listen,” I told her. “This is a really fucked-up situation that’s going to get a lot worse in a hurry.”

  Sofía ignored me and cast a steely glare at Héctor. “¿Cuánto?” was all she asked.

  * * *

  I took a cab with Héctor to make sure he got home okay, but everything was pointing to the fact I didn’t have much time left in Cuba. Sofía and I left the next morning for Boyeros with Mario’s map. We got dropped off a few blocks from where Rigondeaux’s family lived in their half of a little green duplex. Sofía knocked on the door and Rigondeaux’s wife, Farah Colina Rigondeaux, answered the door. I could see the outline of their two children, Guillermo Jr. and César, now eight and seventeen respectively, behind her in the living room.

  I explained who I was, unsure of how she’d react. I’d spent a lot of time with her husband after his escape and gained a measured respect for him in the process. After a pause she invited me in with a warm smile, as if I were a neighbor. She had spent fourteen years with Rigondeaux before he escaped. The living room looked exactly the same as when the international news crews had covered his famous defection. Small TV in the corner, a red couch, a few pictures on the wall of the family together, some medals and trophies from Rigondeaux’s career, blinds that looked perpetually drawn.

  She broke the ice by telling me she’d originally met him at one of his fights. He noticed her in the crowd while he was sitting on his stool between rounds. She laughed until it was clear she was about to cry.

  Suddenly Farah’s expression changed as she assured me the police were tracking me and asked that I be very careful for the rest of my time in Havana. “Your phone, e-mail, movements, everything. Beeg Brother knows everything.”

  A camerawoman I’d hired had visited a friend who had taken a trip to a central police station and told me that for every two cameras in Havana (which in many areas was nearly every block) there was one policeman assigned to monitor all movements.

  I told Farah that the reason I’d come was to bring footage of her husband to her family and to bring back footage of their family to Rigondeaux. I owed him that much for giving me such access to his life.

  With her children beside her, we looked over the photos and video of her husband I’d brought. Guillermo Jr.
brought photos of his father over from the back of the apartment for me to look at. In the back of my mind I was wondering how much time we had before there might be an ominous knock at the door.

  “He looks very sad, doesn’t he?” Farah said to Sofía. “Obviously what affects us most here is his absence. More than anything, we miss his presence, especially our smallest child, who needs him a lot. Above all, he’s a good father and husband. Regardless of what happens, I have confidence in him. And he will never abandon us for anything. The last time he sent some things to our son, my mother told him, ‘Now you should be happy because your dad sent some stuff.’ He told her, ‘I will only be happy when my dad comes to see me.’ Those were his exact words.”

  Farah told us how on the last day she saw her husband in Cuba, he had stayed home from working some menial job he’d found so that he could play with his small son. He told her he was going east to Santiago, his hometown, but in fact he’d gone west to leave some days later. She told me that he called her the moment he arrived safely in Miami and that the journey—through a horrible storm—had been the most frightening experience of his life. She cried talking about how much Rigondeaux’s mother’s death had affected him shortly after he made it to Miami. Not long after, his son had gotten sick just before Rigondeaux fought for a world championship. Guilt-ridden, he braced himself for losing another family member he was helpless to be with. The trauma outside the ring had nearly derailed his professional career in America on the ironic basis of him not risking enough in front of a paying audience. Farah assured me he called regularly and sent money. She emphasized that he was a decent human being and the love of her life. She assured me again—and also her children at the same time—that he would never abandon them. Farah said Rigondeaux had never discussed the specifics or anything else about leaving, but she insisted the government had left him with no choice.

  I asked Guillermo’s eight-year-old son what he thought of the father he hadn’t seen in more than two years. He gave me a hard look for a second and ran into his room. Before I could apologize to his mother, he ran back out to the living room with a poster of his dad and opened it up for me to see. The poster was bigger than he was. He brushed his cheek against his father’s and looked up at me. “I miss him. I miss watching him fight. My father is my hero.”

  Rigondeaux’s wife rubbed her eyes and turned away from her son to me. “He’s a hero to both of us.”

  “Can I come back to speak with you once more tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Of course. Just be careful.”

  * * *

  Harvey Milk said that although you can’t live on hope alone, without hope life isn’t worth living. I still believed that when I first met Rigondeaux in 2007. Catching up with him in the United States made it harder. No matter what the restrictions were regarding baggage limits on that smuggler’s boat, none were traveling light. Rigondeaux and the rest of the people on that vessel had left everything they’d ever known behind, perhaps forever. Maybe the weight of their hope was their greatest vulnerability. Where could you hide it?

  The following afternoon, on Sofía’s last day in Havana, I hired a cinematographer from Cuban television under the table to come along for our return to Farah Colina’s house. Farah wasn’t answering her phone as we drove over.

  Both Sofía and the cinematographer were dead certain “security” had gotten to her and was closing in on us.

  “If she has not answered the phone, we should not be doing this,” Sofía warned. “We will get arrested. This is a very vindictive system.”

  The cinematographer nodded solemnly. “This is a very dangerous place to go right now.”

  We arrived at Farah’s house and climbed the stairs. Her seventeen-year-old son peeked out the window and told me his mother had left Havana for La Lisa to visit a dying relative. He was a very bad liar. He immediately tried to shut the window before saying anything else. I managed to keep him for long enough to ask him if he’d like to talk for a minute. He subtly gestured in the direction of the camera trained on their house across the street. “You should leave now,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  We drove back down the hill and dropped the cinematographer off along the way before the driver let us out near the Prado.

  I went over to a pay phone and made some calls to Teófilo Stevenson and Cristian Martínez’s coach. Stevenson was pretty clearheaded and actually remembered that I’d asked him for an interview a dozen times before. I told him this was the last time I’d have a chance to meet with him if he was at all willing. “Call me in an hour, campeón. I’ll look at my schedule.” I called a friend of his who worked as a translator for diplomats and asked if he could come over to his house to make a case for the interview. If it was going to happen it had to happen in the next forty-eight hours. Martínez’s coach agreed to bring Cristian over to my apartment that night. I was going to give both Martínez and Stevenson the best shot I could for an interview, and if they panned out take off for the airport with the footage immediately after.

  I was getting horribly paranoid at that point and snagged another car off the street to take us to the Yara movie theater next to the Habana Libre so that I could lay low inside for a couple hours with Sofía. Along with a packed house, we sat in the back of a roasting-hot theater as the curtain rose on a local film called Ticket to Paradise. Five minutes into the matinee it was clear we were watching the most excruciatingly depressing Cuban film ever made. The “ticket to paradise” for the Cuban teenagers struggling to survive during the Special Period in the film was fucking their brains out in every orgy they could find so they could contract HIV and be quarantined along with everyone else infected with the virus and receive three square meals. Once they succeeded in their heartbreaking quest they screamed for joy while what seemed like a third of the theater broke down in tears remembering the era.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Sofía demanded. “I already lived through the Special Period once, I don’t need to revisit it.”

  Whatever path we took across the city where Sofía was born, her whole life seemed to be pressing against her, not just behind and in front of her, but from all directions at once.

  25

  WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD

  A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.

  —Fidel Castro

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I dragged Sofía’s luggage over the potholes of Calle Neptuno to her grandmother’s house to say good-bye. We didn’t look at each other walking down street after street, but we held hands until she’d complain I was squeezing too tightly. Her head was high, while my chin was down against my chest. I saw a dead chick in the gutter that a stray cat was toying with. I don’t remember much else about that walk.

  We stopped outside her grandmother’s apartment and I let go of her hand and told her I couldn’t wait with her for the taxi to take her to the airport. We heard Nat King Cole singing “Nature Boy” out someone’s barred window, “The greatest thing … you’ll ever learn … is just to love … and be loved … in return.”

  She smiled at me when she saw that my eyes were wet.

  “Oh pleeeease. You acting like you never see me again.”

  But I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  “I think it’s a little worse.”

  “Why is that, Brinicito?”

  “I’m crying because I won’t see you tonight.”

  “See? What did I tell you the first time I saw you? No chemistry between us.”

  I kissed her and she bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. With her teeth inside my upper lip, I smiled without being able to look at her and ran my hand through her hair. She let go and I told her that I loved her before stepping away and turning the corner. I caught the first taxi that stopped and told them to drop me off at Colón cemetery in Vedado.

  * * *

  I’ve always loved cemeteries. When my father took me to new places as a kid, for our first stop we’d always stop at the local cem
eteries and make a game of tracking down the first person laid to rest. Colón was the most beautiful cemetery I’d ever seen, filled with all the marvelous people who added their weight, color, and melodies to Havana’s Goya-like dreamscape. After being built in 1876, over a million people had been buried in eight hundred thousand graves, with hundreds of impossibly detailed mausoleums, family vaults, and chapels so white under the sun they blind you when the tropical heat doesn’t blur the air. The first man buried in Colón was the architect, Calixto Arellano de Loira y Cardoso, who never finished building it.

  I’ve never met anyone from Havana—even those who left so young they can’t remember it—who didn’t seem to be sucking life from a bent straw living anywhere else. Part of Havana’s twisted magic is how even visitors aren’t immune to this disease, with some clumsy music inside your own heart playing an off-key karaoke version of the real symphony you observe behind the eyes of locals. The first time I ever visited Madrid and asked a stranger outside the Plaza de Toros who the greatest bullfighter in the world was, he listed off the names and held his hands apart to symbolize how close the matadors allowed the horns to their hearts. His hands got closer with each name until he smiled mischievously before concluding the list. “But José Tomás? He lets the horns come so close to his heart nobody can bear to watch. We all cover our eyes. His genius is so beautiful that nobody in Spain has ever dared to see it.”

  As the cab got closer and the 140-acre cemetery was in view, something besides Sofía or getting arrested gnawed at me. In the back of my mind, I had always yearned to be in Havana when Fidel would be laid to rest in Colón. Ever since I’d first seen The Second of May 1808 in the Prado when I was eighteen, I’d been obsessed by Goya’s take on Napoleon and the most powerful army in the world invading and meeting their downfall in Spain. With Fidel’s passing, I wanted to witness that impossibly strange atmosphere firsthand and see what the air tasted like for Cubans the first day Castro stopped breathing it. “It’s not my fault I haven’t died yet,” Castro once told Ann Louise Bardach, who’d flown over to interview him. She asked Fidel if he was the devil his enemies made him out to be. “If that is the case,” Fidel replied, “then I am a devil who has been protected by the gods.”