I HAD STARTED PLAYING BACKGAMMON IN URUGUAY. In the café of the Hotel Alhambra in Montevideo, I had been taught to play by a former champion. But Uruguay was expensive—much more expensive than Cuba—which was the main reason I had come to the island. Usually I played with a couple of secondhand booksellers in a café on Havana’s Plaza de Armas, and only for a few centavos. I liked backgammon. I liked the neatness of it—the arrangement of checkers on points and the tidying of them all away that was required to finish the game. The neatness and order of it always struck me as very German. I also liked the mixture of skill and luck; more luck than was needed for bridge and more skill than was needed for a game like blackjack. Above all I liked the idea of taking risks against the celestial bank, of competing against fate itself. I liked the feeling of cosmic justice that could be invoked with every roll of the dice. In a sense my whole life had been lived like that. Against the grain.

It wasn’t García I was playing—he was merely the ugly face of Chance—it was life itself.

So I relit my cigar, rolled it around in my mouth, and waved a waiter toward me. “I’ll have a small carafe of peach schnapps, chilled, but no ice,” I told the man. I didn’t ask if García wanted a drink. I hardly cared. All I cared about now was beating him.

“Isn’t that a woman’s drink?” he asked.

“I hardly think so,” I said. “It’s eighty proof. But you may believe what you like.” I picked up my dice cup.

“And for you, señor?” The waiter was still there.

“A lime daiquiri.”

We continued with the game. García lost the next game on pips, and the one after that when he declined my double. And gradually he became a little more reckless, hitting blots when he should have left them alone and then accepting doubles when he should have refused. He began to lose heavily, and by ten-fifteen I was up by more than a thousand pesos and feeling quite pleased with myself.

There was still no trace of emotion on the argument in favor of Darwinism my opponent called his face, but I knew he was rattled by the way he was throwing his dice. In backgammon, it’s customary to throw your dice in your home board, and both dice have to come to rest there, completely flat. But several times during the last game, García’s hand had got a little overexcited, and his dice had crossed the bar or not landed flat. In each case the rules required him to throw again, and on one occasion this meant he had missed out on a useful double.