I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations—one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.
—Søren Kierkegaard
“MALA SUERTE” WERE THE FIRST WORDS uttered by the formidable stepfather of a Cuban girl I’d fallen for, after casually placing his bishop to pin my queen right in front of my king. He removed the unlit Winston Churchill Romeo y Julieta cigar from his lips that he’d been chewing on since we’d begun playing an hour ago. He gulped the last of his mojito and refilled the glass with a bottle of mud-colored Havana Club. “Another zugzwang. What a feo position, but with such a sensual name it’s hard not to savor it.”
It was the third game in a row he’d taken off me and he’d been playing for both of us every move along the way. It was an ugly feeling to be that easily toyed with, but I was a little more concerned with the interrogation about my relationship to his daughter Sofía that inevitably loomed.
After three years of clandestinely meeting her in hotel rooms around Toronto, on my way to or from Cuba to film the queasy documentary on Rigondeaux I’d begun, it was the first time Sofía had invited me to her home. Thirty minutes earlier she had left us alone to talk while she grabbed some groceries for a meal she wanted to cook that evening. “See you soon, papi!” she hollered innocently from behind the front door. But after her stepfather and I instantly glared at the door to acknowledge her good-bye—and then even faster at each other—I assumed he was going to flip the table and start swinging at me. We both knew he was papi by rank while I knew, and he seemed to suspect, I was papi by sexual confession.
After winning a lump sum of cash a couple weeks before in Ireland by betting on a Rigondeaux victory at twenty to one odds, I convinced Sofía to join me on my next trip to Cuba. Sofía and I were leaving the next day to visit what was left of the Havana their family had left behind ten years earlier, when she was fourteen. She’d left Cuba only a couple years younger than my mother had left communist Hungary. My mother and she had a little more in common, too. They’d both spoken up as kids in school when the Youth Communist League recruited new members to announce their belief that communism was, in fact, bullshit. In other words, they were both preternaturally stubborn and gutsy.
Her stepfather and I were sitting fourteen hundred miles away from Havana, huddled over a chessboard in the dining room of a small apartment in a quiet Toronto suburb. While I was struggling with another zugzwang on the board, I knew from his daughter that he was still reeling from the life back in Cuba he’d chosen to abandon. We were in the same apartment where, his stepdaughter had told me, he had sent his wife, son, and her to live a year ahead of his arrival, a decade before.
After securing a tarjeta blanca (white card) from the government to leave the island, he’d sold on the black market their beautiful Havana family home, just down the street from the Habana Libre hotel in Vedado. He’d sold the house to finance his family’s departure and look after their needs in Canada the best he could until they could gain a foothold. The plan was to give his family a head start in their new life, free of all of Cuba’s crushing restrictions, until he could join them. He had to wait a year after he’d sold the home to not raise any suspicions with the government and endanger any of their extended family. But when he arrived in Toronto the following year to reunite with his family, they weren’t the same people he’d said good-bye to at the airport twelve months before. He couldn’t recognize them from how much they’d changed adjusting to life outside Cuba. His marriage never recovered and his wife eventually left him for a man she’d met online who lived in Miami. Now his teenage son had suffered a nervous breakdown and lived with him down the street while Sofía took over the family’s old apartment after graduating university, working two jobs, and living with a roommate.
“Do you mind if I smoke this?” He held up the cigar between his fingers. “It reminds me of nice things. Proust had his madeleines, we exiles have our cigars to retrieve the past.”
“I don’t mind.” I smiled, tipping over my king.
“Gracias,” the stepfather said, placing the cigar between his teeth while reaching into his pocket for an old Zippo. He made kissy-faces in my direction sucking in the flame while his eyebrows arched teasingly. “You give up so easily.”
“It’s pretty obvious I’ve brought a knife to a gunfight.”
“I’m not bored.” He grinned, chewing on an ice cube. “But I’ve been meaning to ask you since my daughter first mentioned you to me. Wife or mistress?”
“Come again?” I asked.
“Is your preference for a wife or a mistress?”
“You went easier on me with chess.”
“And you left the field of the battle.” He laughed. “So I’m giving chase. Sofía told me you have a wife in New York.”
I nodded.
He nodded back to me, absentmindedly replenishing the chessboard’s rank and file.
“I must admit…” He laughed, flicking some ash off his cigar and resting his fist against his cheek with the smoke curling toward the ceiling. “I find your dynamic quite strange. Three years ago you met a Cuban boxer who told you he melted his Olympic gold medals into his mouth. Even if you made that up, if he didn’t say it, he should have said it. But you’ve been chasing this tortured boxer around the world and to finance this pursuit, Sofía told me you’ve maxed out four credit cards and a line of credit to do this.”
“Maybe the wife or mistress thing is a better question for her to answer,” I suggested.
“Last week our family—what’s left of it—watched Rigondeaux fight in Ireland on the Internet. Sofía told me you bet your last thousand dollars on him winning in the first round at twenty to one after some thugs robbed you of your camera and your footage filming him.”
“Just before the fight I gave Rigondeaux my phone in the dressing room, with Sofía on the other end of the line. I wanted him to hear a friendly Cuban voice before he went out to fight.”
“We were in this dining room when she spoke to him. Do you know what she told him?”
“No,” I admitted. “But whatever it was, I’ve very rarely seen Rigondeaux smile the way he did.”
“She asked him to win so she could see you. And now the proceeds from Rigondeaux’s victory have given you and my daughter a trial marriage in Havana for two weeks.”
I shrugged.
“I see,” he said. “So, wife or mistress?”
“You first.”
“An old communist joke has Marx, Engels, and Lenin asked their preference. Marx immediately said, ‘Wife.’ Engels countered, ‘Mistress.’ Lenin answered, ‘Both.’ Like you have chosen.”
“Why did he choose both?” I asked.
“Because he wanted them to know about each other. That way he’d be free to spend more time learning.”
“One more game before Sofía gets back?”
“Of course.” He reached over and held his pawn suspended over the board. “You’re following one of Fidel’s pawns with Rigondeaux, aren’t you? This boxer trying to escape Cuba in a smuggler’s boat and make it in professional boxing has more in common with a pawn than at first glance, doesn’t he? Pawns are the only pieces on the board that can’t go backwards.”
“That’s true,” I agreed.
“But they’re also the only pieces on the board that, if they can make it all the way to the final row of the enemy’s side, can transform into something more powerful. All the boxers and athletes of tomorrow must be tuned into radio bemba to see how he does. I’m sure Castro’s traitor is Cuba’s martyr for most people.”
“He’s already won a world title and made some serious money. He might earn a million dollars within the next year or so. As his life and career keep unfolding, I’m trying to explore if leaving his whole life behind was worth it.”
“Stories are like sexuality.” He grinned mischievously. “All that matters is the flammability. Whatever the tale is—moral or immoral, tragic or farce, ambiguous or black-and-white—the potency is all in how hot it burns. How hot does this Cuban stranger’s story burn for you?”
“Well,” I said. “I’m bringing all the footage I’ve shot with Rigondeaux to his family so they can see him for the first time since he left. If they’ll speak to me and I’m not arrested interviewing them, I’ll take that footage back to Rigondeaux in Miami.”
“So answer my question,” he persisted.
“Maybe I reject the premise of the question.”
“All the precious things we have in life are fragile. We’ll lose them all one way or another soon enough. Sometimes we’ll lose them for the right reasons, often for the wrong reasons, and occasionally for no reason. Whatever you intentions are, I think you appreciate how precious my daughter is.”
“Yes.”
“I tried to save my family from the suffering we endured in Cuba by bringing them here.” He swept a hand across the room. “In the process I unwittingly destroyed everything I had. I lost everything I cared about. This boxer you follow confronted his own Faustian bargain abandoning his family. But like a lot of writers you remind me of a bullfrog. Do you know what a bullfrog does?”
“I don’t know what a bullfrog is,” I confessed.
“During mating season a bullfrog finds a pond in the swamp to sing his song to lure any females who can hear his voice. And many female bullfrogs turn into groupies the moment they hear it. But nobody falls for his song more deeply than himself. So much so, in fact, that he forgets the reason why he began singing in the first place.”
“Sofía’s a bigger romantic than I am.”
“And romantics pretend they love the hopeless chase when really they’re addicted to suffering. The only woman who really saw me for who I am told me that I was someone who would fall in love ten thousand times. She accepted that before she gave in to being one of those ten thousand, rather than trying to force me into being someone else by stopping with her. She didn’t waste any time trying to prevent me from being who I was. I think you have the same curse and it’s much uglier to see my daughter falling for this than it ever was looking in the mirror.”
“Maybe if you find the right girl you don’t have to fall in love with ten thousand other ones. You can just fall in love with that girl ten thousand times and you sort of fulfill the quota of the curse, no?”
“Okay.” He slapped his forehead. He reached down and picked up his pawn and set it gently back down. “Bueno. Let’s be civil before she gets home and return to some chess. Your move.”