The Domino Diaries by Brin-Jonathan Butler

Author:Brin-Jonathan Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250043719
Publisher: Picador

15

MUSICAL CHAIRS

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.

“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting.

Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”

Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER I scrounged enough money to take a direct flight from Madrid to Havana. I sat with a girl named Ría on the edge of the Malecón, with Miami somewhere off in the sunset behind us, ignited against the horizon like a lit cigar dropped into a puddle of gasoline.

Ría was a pen pal who had just graduated from the university of Havana. Some Cubans I’d met in Madrid, who had married off the island, had put me in touch with her. They told me she was in love with the same books I was: Cervantes, Calvino, Kundera, Duras. Through her work designing Web sites for the government she was in the coveted position of having access to the Internet. This was exceedingly rare for Cubans. We wrote each other e-mails almost every day. It’s always strange finding someone on the page before you know them anywhere else. Sometimes you get lucky and start off with a curious mutual understanding—“landsman” is the lovely word to describe that sensation. She insisted we write in English so she could improve her grasp of the language. She’d taught herself English by learning the lyrics to seemingly every song ever written. She’d never left Cuba before yet knew, in great detail, about everywhere I’d ever traveled from literature, film, art, and history books. When I told her about my mother’s background she knew all kinds of details about the Hungarian revolution. After Hungary supplied Cuba with all their horribly unreliable humped Camelo buses, she’d gotten curious about the land that gave birth to those monstrosities of dysfunction.

We broke the ice with Ría’s idea of small talk.

“The tourists my friends meet from Gringolandia always try to seduce us with the cars they drive back home.” Ria giggled, wiping dark locks from her black eyes. We had corresponded for months, but I’d never seen a picture of her before. She was waif-thin, swimming in an oversized Terry Fox Marathon of Hope T-shirt, a little pair of battered tennis shoes beneath a white skirt patterned with purple lilacs she’d sewn on herself. She reminded me of a Cuban Audrey Hepburn, hopelessly beautiful in all her delicate features and almost apologetic grace. Over the years I would have the chance to meet several very important people in Cuban society, but I had the most luck in meeting Ría.

That day, she introduced me to her smile that involuntarily tilted her head to one side like the girl Picasso captured in The Dreamer. She’d brought along some peso submarine-sized cigars for us to smoke.

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