The Domino Diaries (9 page)

Just then Lesvanne's name was hollered from down the block. We looked over and saw a large woman smiling as she held the hands of four little girls wearing red scarves and school uniforms at her sides. As I finished another glass of
guarapo
, Lesvanne patted my shoulder and headed in their direction to say hello. “I come right back. This is a close friend of my mother. I
love
this woman.” The construction workers and I watched him kiss the cheek of each member of the group and offer a bear hug to the woman that lifted her off the ground until she squealed and playfully flailed her arms to be put down. The girls all reached over to take Lesvanne's hands as they walked back up the street toward me. Lesvanne introduced the group and each child stared up until I bent down to say hello and offered a cheek for them to kiss. I kissed the cheek of Lesvanne's mother's friend and she apologized before insisting the children were late for school and they had to leave. The construction workers around us waved at the children and the children smiled and waved back.

“Is everyone here so comfortable with strangers?” I asked.

“But you're not a stranger, you're a
visitor
to our home.”

“One of the first things I was taught as a kid was not to talk to strangers. Stranger equals danger.”

“But this is not protection. This is just instilling fear. This is just propaganda. Of course there is a risk to trusting your environment. There are bad people and accidents in life, some are avoidable and some are not. But if you don't trust there is a guarantee you will lose all things available to you only through trust. To sacrifice that for a false sense of security is
protecting
children?”

I shrugged.

“Well.” Lesvanne shrugged back. “If you have something to lose, that is very logical. In Miami I saw many walls protecting houses. Here all the walls are falling down. The nice cars in Miami all had alarms. Here almost nobody can afford a car. There the division is very important in their society and the fear of the poor trespassing on the rich is on everyone's mind. Look at all the guns there people feel they need to defend themselves from their own neighbors. Miami has both extremes. Of course here we are nearly all poor. What is there to steal? Even the most moral believers in the values of the revolution must steal from the government with corruption to support their families, but there is little to steal from each other.”

“If there was something to steal,
would
people steal here?” I asked.

“With this much difficulty and how much we rely on others to survive—I don't think so. Even if you could escape responsibility, you could not escape seeing the damage. There are no strangers for us in Havana.”

“And in Miami?”

“In Miami everyone is your stranger. You would not know who lives next door. Look at the mansions protected from everyone. But I miss many things I saw in Miami tremendously. It is impossible to have anything I saw there here. That is why, when I'm ready, I will make Miami my home. When I am ready. And I could never leave without my wife. Let's go to Centro Habana and I can show you my photos from Gringolandia.”

I offered to pay for a taxi, but Lesvanne insisted we hitchhike. We walked over to a busy street and he flagged down a motorcycle with a sidecar in minutes. He sat behind the driver and pointed for me to take the adjoining seat. Our engine snarled at stray cats darting across the traffic as we headed back to the Plaza and Che's monument.

We took a smoother road into the city with the Havana Libre's penthouse peeking over the palmy skyline as buzzards swerved above us in the early morning cool before the real heat of day arrived. Eli
á
n Gonz
á
lez's face was on signs and T-shirts all throughout the city. Lesvanne pointed toward lone musicians serenading the jungle with trumpets. We drove past a bus station overwhelmed with lines snaking around the block. Hitchhikers were everywhere waiting for rides into work, students to the university, families trying to get home. After a bumpy climb skirting the border of a columned monument worthy of a Roman emperor, Lesvanne mentioned the university was around the corner. The Napoleon museum was just behind it, he shouted. He leaned close to the driver's ear and mentioned Coppelia as our destination. The driver nodded and accelerated toward a red light at an intersection like a kamikaze and picked up speed as we swung past the grandeur of the front steps of the university until we screeched to a stop under the towering shadow of the Habana Libre, just across the street from a ballerina's crossed slippers on Coppelia ice cream stand's famous sign. Under the sign hoards were already lined up to grab a bowl.

“It's a short walk from here to Calle Neptuno, where we can catch a ride into Habana Vieja. You can hail your first Cuban taxi. Hold out two fingers to the first old American car and if the driver has room and stops, you tell him ‘Capitolio.' Say nothing else. I need some more
guarapo
for tonight. After the photos.”

“What's tonight?” I asked.

“After we find you a trainer … This woman who stole my heart last year just arrived on the island again from Oklahoma. This girl is amazing. I can't disappoint this girl. You must see the letter she wrote me.”

“Aren't you married?”

“Of course. To the love of my life. I will show you photos of my wife with the photos of Miami. This area is Vedado, the edge of Vedado and Centro. Centro is very poor. My mother is in a bad part of Centro near the Malec
ó
n where many buildings are falling down. Many have no running water and blackouts happen with frequency. But it's very beautiful there, too.”

As we walked toward the ocean and his mother's house, Lesvanne explained how he supported his family. He slept with wealthy American tourists—preferably middle-aged, large, divorced, and with children back home—for gifts provided they weren't from California. The women of California were to be avoided at all costs no matter how attractive they were. Lesvanne was a man of principle. Californian women never returned his love letters.

“You like this more mature type of woman because they are the most generous with you?” I asked.

“Never.” He laughed. “Because I find this type of woman to be the most desirable! They are real women in their full expression of femininity! And with an American accent, too, that is the ultimate turn-on for me.”

But Lesvanne's biggest problem as a
jinetero
with these female tourists was that he couldn't stop falling in love with his prey. He fell madly in love with all of them and spent most of his life licking his wounds from the heartbreak of them not writing him once they returned home.

“You want them to marry you so you can leave?”

“Never. I'm married already to the love of my life. They should move here until I'm ready to leave for Miami with my wife.”

Lesvanne led us away from the leafy open squares and private homes of Vedado into the cramped, dusty streets of Centro Habana. Chinese bicycles jerked down the street over potholes as stray dogs and cats combed for scraps. Children played stickball with rocks. As we moved deeper into the neighborhood more and more eyes looked out at us behind the bars guarding front doors and windows. A hundred radios blared from apartments. Pedestrians stopped on the sidewalks and hollered “
¡Oye!,
” only to have baskets lowered from balconies with a string offering a wrench or a battery or an article of clothing. The neighborhood gave every indication of being a slum yet the mood was entirely unlike any of the Western ghettos I'd visited in my life. Men hissed at women from all corners, yet the women would just smile coyly and laugh. Nobody appeared to fear anyone else. I'd never seen women walk with such self-possession and pride. But then, of course, there weren't magazine stands anywhere to remind them of how ugly they were.

At Lesvanne's mother's apartment he introduced me to his mother, who had a cold and remained in her rocking chair without getting up. A framed portrait of her at fifteen was behind her, facing me, above a cupboard. The two versions of the same woman's face smiled at me before she turned back to the television. She was intently watching a roundtable discussion on Eli
á
n Gonz
á
lez. They showed images of the boy's father and then cut to a million people gathered to listen to Fidel giving a speech about him.

“What do you make of this Eli
á
n Gonz
á
lez thing?” I asked Lesvanne.

“There's a joke about when the Pope came to Havana a couple of years ago. Fidel rode with him in the pope mobile on the Malec
ó
n. It was such a nice day they opened the roof and the Pope's hat flew off from the sea breeze and blew into the ocean. Fidel jumped out and hopped into the ocean without getting wet. He walked on the water to grab the Pope's hat floating on the waves. After Fidel returned the hat to the Pope the next day's headlines about the event came in from
Granma
, our newspaper: ‘Fidel proves he is a god. He walks on water.' And then the Vatican newspaper: ‘Pope performs miracle allowing Fidel to walk on water.' And in the Miami newspapers: ‘Fidel can't swim.'”

Lesvanne grabbed a scratched, beat-up digital camera, fetched some batteries from a drawer, and kissed his mother good-bye as we left her home.

As we made our way back to Calle Neptuno with him still searching through the camera to find his Miami photos, he was stopped in the street dozens of times. People hollered out from their homes and invited us in for coffee. Kids egged him on to kick a soccer ball around or play
b
é
isbol
. Storekeepers left their shops to reach out and shake his hand and give him a hug. Old women selling sweets and flowers asked about his mother. He kept embracing people over and over with affection and warmth. Every time he tried to show me a photograph people came over to look and ask questions about his trip to Miami. Twice a policeman guarding a corner saw us walking together and asked Lesvanne to produce his identity card. They asked me in broken English if he was following me and if I wanted him to leave me alone.

A few paces away from the police officer Lesvanne gently shook his head. “You see how shamefully we treat our own citizens here?” He returned to his camera and showed me a few photos of his common-law wife and a few hundred photos of the American tourist female “friends” he'd made since he was fifteen. “I love all of these beautiful women. I miss all of them.” Finally he located Miami inside his camera. Nearly all of the photos were an inventory of the materialistic orgy he had partaken of in Miami Beach. There were hardly any people in his photos, just things. They were things Lesvanne saw that he was determined to own once he moved to America and got busy making a success of himself: Hummers, houses, pools, jewelry, plastic-breasted women on posters at gift shops, bars, boats, condos. Lesvanne's favorite outfit, which he bought in Miami, was what he wore nearly every day since his return, and he washed it every night until it was blindingly bright.

I asked him if his American “friends” presented any kind of problem with his “wife” and he asked why it should.

“Would you like to see a video of my wife?” he asked.

I nodded.

All I could make out from the camera monitor were blurs of undulating color.

“What am I looking at here?”

“That's her gallbladder. Isn't she
beautiful
?”

“Come again?”

“Isn't she beautiful?”

“I still don't know what I'm looking at,” I said.

“You're looking inside my wife. This is from an operation I filmed.”

Later, when I could breathe again, I asked him why he would film his wife on the operating table having her gallbladder removed.

“Because I love
all
of her, man. Inside and out. I want to know all of her.”

I didn't say anything until he'd finished showing all the pictures.

I'd lost count of how many people he'd kissed and hugged hello on our walk. It threw me because after ending my first long-term relationship I went months before I realized that I was having no human physical contact. How did that happen?

“So you want all this shit once you're settled in Miami?” I asked him.

“Of course I do. I've never had
anything
here. I'd like to work for these things.”

“Okay. You get all that shit—Hummer, house, pool, hot wife, jewelry, yacht. That whole photo album of other people's stuff becomes
your
stuff. You're loaded. Then you're happier than here?”

“Why not? I could bring the things I love here over there and have the stuff to enjoy also.”

“Okay, so you're loaded but maybe you're also afraid of losing everything all the time. You're afraid your wife is going to take you for half if she divorces you. You have to live in a gated community because you're afraid of everyone. You have no sense of community or even give a fuck about your neighbor. Your kids don't respect you and just want money to buy shit to distract themselves from being bored all the time. All the old people you know are in old folks' homes because nobody wants to deal with them. You can't be friends with any kids because everyone will think you're a pedophile. You can't hug any guys because they're afraid you're gay or
they're
gay or
everyone
is gay. You can't really touch
anybody
without second-guessing it.”

“If I couldn't touch anyone I'd
die
, man. I'd die. This country is a fucking cage. My island is a zoo. Without this contact life would be unlivable.”

*   *   *

Once we crossed the invisible border of Paseo del Prado into Old Havana, Lesvanne led us south, away from the elegant entrance to the Prado promenade guarded by lion statues and past the Hotel Inglaterra, Graham Greene's old stomping grounds. A group of musicians were covering kitschy Buena Vista Social Club hits for sunburned European tourists smoking cigars and sipping mojitos outside the hotel, waited on by locals. Some older bachelors had young local girls at their sides fawning over them.