Beautiful María of My Soul

Chapter EIGHT

During María’s first year in Havana, she had gotten jobs in places like the Club Pygmalion, the Knock-Knock, the Broadway, some of those stints lasting months, some just weeks. Along the way she had been a Hawaiian hula dancer, a sultry Cleopatra, and, during the Christmas holidays, one of Santa’s Very Wonderful Cuban Ladies. She never earned too much in those days; dancers, however beautiful, were in plentiful supply in that city of music. She didn’t like stripping for the auditions and took offense at any act requiring that she take off her pasties; mainly, she tended to put off some of her bosses by refusing their advances. One manager, a certain Orlando, at the Knock-Knock, off Zayas, fired her when she wouldn’t become his woman-“mi mujer”-but as shabbily as he had treated her, having her thrown out on the street, at least he hadn’t pulled out a knife like that hoodlum who ran a joint-was it the Club Paree?-by Ramparts Street; he cut off the buttons of her dress one by one and would have raped her on his office table had not María fallen to the floor feigning another epileptic fit-forgive me, Sister-her head twisting, teeth chattering, body shaking, as if she were possessed. Or she sometimes broke down crying, pleading that she was religious, and became so disconsolate that even the most heartless and goatish of men gave up their harassments, often thinking, as a trance burned in her beautiful eyes, That woman is crazy.

But there was something about a sad man that always tempted her. In that instance, such tristeza was found in a certain Señor Aponte, proud proprietor of the Versailles in the Vedado, with its Folies-Bergère floor show. A quite rotund fellow and a destroyer of chairs, he always sweated profusely, a kerchief pressed to his damp brow. His dark eyes seemed anxious, as if, in his burly, struggling, short-breathing manner, he might drop dead at any moment. While the other girls made jokes about what an ordeal it would be to go to bed with him, María, liking the man, found his loneliness touching-he kept a cage of parakeets in his office and would be often overheard through his door speaking endearingly with them as if they were children.

Still, it came down to the same thing. Called into his office to discuss a featured spot in the chorus, María had listened to him sing her praises as a dancer when, out of the blue, he pulled from a drawer a pair of elbow-length white satin gloves and then, with boyish reticence, asked her to put those gloves on and fondle him. “Please, I beg you.” Then he made a confession, declaring that it was very hard to go through life loving one of his dancers the way he loved her; that with his days in the world so short-he just knew it-he could go to his grave happily if only she would perform that little act. She almost did-not for a better job, or because of the way he had set aside a twenty-dollar bill on the ink blotter of his desk for her, but because he seemed to be telling the truth-he certainly looked like he was not long for this world. That evening she almost gave in to the inner argument that, far from being a lowly act, it would be one of decency and grace-his sadness cutting into her. In the end, however, even when she had gone so far as to slip those gloves on, the words puta and lowlife flashing through her mind, her kindlier inclinations lost out to her virtuous resolve, and, with tears in her eyes, she fled that room.

A few weeks later, when she heard that Señor Aponte had dropped dead from a heart attack while walking in the arcades of Galliano, she surely had felt bad. When she heard the rumor that a love note written to one of the chorus girls had been found in his pocket, she was certain that it had been intended for her, though she wouldn’t have been able to read it. For days, she wished to God that she had honored that man’s simple request-perhaps a last wish-the money would have been useful and he would have been happy. Who would it have hurt, and who would have known about it?

No, she was not about to become one of those young girls who happen to lie down for money with men. It would have been easy enough to find takers, for she had already been stirring the male juices for a long time in that city, and the expression on María’s nearly ecstatic face as she danced left men seriously fatigued with desire. She’d already received half a dozen marriage proposals from men on her street, a barber and a shoe repairman among them, and a few louts without jobs-maybe they were numbers runners for the races out at the dog track-with nothing more to offer her than the shirts on their backs. A few of her potential courters were wily neighbors at the Hotel Cucaracha who sometimes waited half the night for her to come traipsing up the stairs; but just walking along the streets of Havana, at any hour of the day, she attracted men who’d follow her for blocks and frighten her with the suggestive remarks they’d make. And some, most gentlemanly sorts, in their fine linen suits, adopting a more polite demeanor, doffed their hats at her and, with the utmost politeness, asked if they might accompany her for a while, and other questions followed, along the lines of where she lived and worked. She hardly ever told them the truth, even if she sometimes felt terribly alone.

She so stood out on the streets of Havana that, on many a night, while leaving one club or another at four in the morning, she’d drape a veil or a mantilla over her face, haunting the darkened arcades and alleys through which she passed like a spirit, her high heels clicking against the cobblestones beneath her. In the light of day, however, there was no way of concealing herself-if only she could be more like those carefree cubanas she saw, proudly swaying their big kiss-me culos as they sashayed down the street. But the truth is that María could have been wearing a crown of thorns and dragging a cross behind her and she still would have attracted amorous attention. Strolling along the Malecón in her simple ruffle-skirted dress, she’d slow traffic, the drivers of trucks and automobiles, and even the Havana Police in their cruisers, pumping on their brakes to get a better look at her shapely gait. Bootblacks scrambled to give her shoes a free buffing. Old men did double takes, for that desire’s the last thing to go. So did the street sweepers, window washers, and those fellows who went from door to door with grindstones to sharpen household cutlery. Bicyclists tling-tlinged María. Fruit and produce vendors, selling their goods from carts and stands, refused to take her money or, when they did, never charged her the full amount, often sending María away with more mangoes, avocados, and garlic bulbs than she could possibly have use for. Florists gave her bouquets-chrysanthemums and roses and little bouquets of purple and white mariposas, the national flower of Cuba.

At the intersection of Compostela and O’Reilly, a blind beggar, Mercurio, standing by a newspaper kiosk, seemed to regain his sight whenever she happened to pass by, that sly negrito who sold pencils out of a jar and sang ballads for pennies breaking into a broad grin as if, indeed, through his pitch-black glasses he could see the shapeliness of María’s body inside her dress. And in his goatish white-haired madness, el Caballero de París, as he was known in Havana, a locally famous eccentric of Bohemian habits, wearing a beret and a heavy frock even in the heat of the day, followed her around as well, expounding poetry in praise of María as he strode beside her. Even priests and monsignors, striding solemnly out from one or other of Havana’s myriad churches, abandoned their vows of worldly indifference and, at the sight of María’s nalgitas as they bobbed inside her dress, kissed their scapulars, thanking God for his handiwork.

“Eres una maravilla”-“You are a wonder”-was the kind of thing she heard over and over again.

Her face, in some ways, must have seemed saintly. During her church visits to pray and dream, Havana Cathedral with its musty and timeless interior being a favorite refuge, María received endless (useless) blessings from priests, supplicants, and beggars alike. Now and then, someone in the plaza would make her the gift of a rosary or a vial of holy water or a prayer card-even a relic sometimes. And while she could not have been more polite or gracious, or more thankful for their gifts, María had stopped believing that such religious objects made any difference in this world.

Street urchins, traveling in packs, followed her, tugged at her skirt hems, danced by her feet, and harassed anyone else who looked at her. From their second-floor windows, old women, Spanish fans in hand, smiled, admiring her as well (María, after all, was their own past). As she was cutting through a cul-de-sac alley between apartment buildings, there was always some fellow, bored to death or horny, on his balcony to call down to María, asking, with a sly expression on his face, if she would like to have a drink or go dancing. On the majestic Prado, managers offered her free meals just for sitting by a table in their outdoor cafés. (At least María knew she never had to go hungry.)

Among the suave and easygoing cubanos she encountered daily, who flirted as a matter of basic decorum, it often amounted to a pleasant enough game, the very fact that María, wearing a sphinxlike mask, might occasionally crack a sonrisa, a smile, was enough to send these dandies and caballeros dancing happily off into their futures. Crude sorts, however, also abounded. In a market off Lamparilla, there was a carnicero, a butcher, she tried to avoid. Whenever she passed by his stall, which smelled of fresh-killed meat, he always gave her body an up and down. It didn’t matter if she was just trying to mind her own business. Winking, sucking air in through his teeth, he took delight in waving calves’ tongues, bulls’ testicles, and the biggest chorizos in his stall at her. And sometimes, if she were passing through a crowded marketplace, both disembodied hands and other parts pressed against her.

Worse, however, were the out-and-out obscene gestures that came her way, especially at night, as she went walking home. When the clubs had closed and even the bordellos of la Marina and Colón were winding down, there was always the chance that some borrachero, barely able to stand straight against an arcade column, might grab himself through his trousers, all the while boasting that he had a tremendous malanga awaiting her. (Some of those “caballeros” actually had a romantic gleam in their eyes-as if their ardor was akin to an expression of love, and as if María might actually fall to pieces and succumb to their masculine powers, the shits.) And you would be surprised by the number of times that such sorts of men, stepping towards María from the shadows, actually pulled their stiff pingas out to show her-oh, how María wished she had that butcher’s cleaver with which to cut those chorizos off, may God forgive her for such unkindly thoughts.

On those occasions-twice with the same degenerate whose appendage, enhanced by the glowing penumbra cast by the arcade’s light, seemed shockingly large-she spat and cursed such filthy-minded louses-the chusmas-for not leaving her alone; then she’d march stoically on. And each time she did, María felt her kindly guajira soul hardening a little more, her skin growing thicker, and her patience for the vicissitudes of men wearing thin.

Putting up with a lot, María could have used someone to look after her. And that feeling just grew stronger as time went on. Missing her valle, she sometimes spent her evenings off from the clubs in that hallway with la señora, with her slight urine smell, listening to anything on the radio, so long as she wouldn’t have to sit in her room alone. She dreaded the prospect of sleep-she’d twist and turn thinking about her dead sister and the look of horror on her face when she gave her a beating, kept imagining her drowning in that pool beneath the cascades. She’d get down on her knees to beg Teresita’s spirit for her forgiveness, but no matter what, no sooner did she finally get under the covers of her chinche-ridden bed, hoping for pleasant dreams, than she began to fill with a terrible apprehension that shot through her body like electricity; she’d sit up, trembling, and out of habit, and a feeble hope, she’d pray. And when that didn’t work, though she knew it was a sin, she’d reach between her legs, her fingers dampened by her tongue, fondling herself until, writhing and churning her hips into her own hand’s motion, she lifted out of her own history into the momentary oblivion of pleasure, breaking into pieces. And then, of course, she’d slip back into the gloom of guilt, even more deeply than before. But that was María.

In any event, she was working as a dancer in a new revue-that’s what the professionals called it-at the Club Nocturne, in Vedado, where, one night, fed up with her loneliness, she first met the man who, years later, was to become her daughter, Teresa’s, father.

Chapter NINE

She’d noticed him coming into the club a few times before: he was older, somewhere on the far side of his thirties, had a pock-marked face, clear gray eyes, and a pencil-line mustache. He comported himself with authority, hardly ever looked up at anything, not even at the floor show, and always seemed involved with going over a ledger book, or some volume that he was reading. He always dressed nicely in a white silk suit, wore a lavender cologne, or was it lilac scented? The sort to drink only the best stuff, he ordered the same meal of fried pork chops with onions and papas fritas without fail, then smoked cigar after cigar until some late hour, when, as quietly as he’d come in, he would leave. A man of regular routines, without any interest in wasting his money in an adjoining casino room, where there were gaming tables and a roulette wheel, he seemed almost indifferent to that place-why he went there she didn’t know, nor, in fact, did María particularly care.

That she met him at all was a matter of pure chance. Since part of María’s job was to keep company with the club’s patrons between shows-all the girls had to-she had the misfortune of finding herself at a table with a group of drunk Americans who were beside themselves over the fact that María happened to be wearing so little-just a glittery bandeau and a silvery, tasseled pantalette under a diaphanous chemise. And because the unspoken assumption, the myth (sometimes the truth) had it that such women were often very willing to moonlight as prostitutes, one of these men, a burly fellow, muttering all kinds of drivel she couldn’t understand, had taken the liberty of reaching over to fondle María’s leg under the table. As she, in a fit of pique, stood up to leave, the drunk took hold of her hand and pulled María onto his lap. Just then, before even the club bouncer, a bald black giant named Eliseo, could intercede, this man, Ignacio Fuentes, watching from his table, marched over and grabbed that drunkard’s forearm, forcing it from around María’s belly. Then, looking intently into the drunkard’s eyes and saying a few words in English, and before his friends could make more of a commotion, Ignacio opened his jacket and showed him something that drained the fellow’s ruddy face of color.

“Okay, okay,” the man said, holding up his hands. “I get it.”

“Good,” Ignacio said firmly. “Now apologize to the lady.”

The man mumbled his regrets-and Ignacio, in case María didn’t get the drift, translated: “He says he’s very sorry to have bothered you.” Then, as if his contempt for the fellow had turned to air, and to smooth over the situation, perhaps for the sake of María’s job, he called the waiter over, buying them a round of drinks: “Give those sinvergüenzas whatever they want.” Bowing cordially, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he headed back to his table, and María, who’d had that kind of thing happen to her before without anyone particularly caring, followed him.

They spoke for only a few minutes-she had another show to perform-but in that time, while thanking him, María had decided that this caballero, a gallant, wasn’t the usual sort who came into the club. Despite his macho demeanor, there was something fiercely intelligent about his eyes, intimidating and somehow reassuring at the same time. Perhaps he was a teacher, maybe a university professor, and a very lonely one, a soltero with a preference for that kind of place. But obviously he couldn’t be-how many maestros were so courageous, and for that matter carried inside their jackets the sort of something that so quickly quieted so unruly a man? What most intrigued her was what he wore on the thin gold chain around his neck: a crucifix, a medallion of the Virgin de Cobre, and a third symbol, which she supposed had something to do with los judíos: it was just like the Star of David hanging outside the synagogue on Santa Clara Street in the old city.

(“Oh, these two,” he would later tell her, “are for my faith, and the third I wear in case los judíos were right all along.”)

He didn’t really have too much to say to her: he seemed only obliquely aware of her lusciousness. It was as if her beauty meant nothing to him, which, in a way, she liked and despaired over at the same time. (Was it that he didn’t find her attractive?) Just before going backstage to change into her costume for the second show, an elaborate dance routine staged to the music of Moisés Simóns’ “Cubanacan,” she told him her name-“María…María García y Cifuentes”-and with that, he smiled for the first time. Though he had a few teeth missing, she found his appearance reassuring.

IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN A SURPRISE TO FIND HIM WAITING FOR her on the street afterwards, at four in the morning, María in a raincoat and veil, Ignacio leaning against an alley wall across the way, casually smoking a cigar under the flickering glare of a misspelled neon sign-nigth clubnigth club. She’d come out with three other dancers, one of them, knowing María as a solitary sort (translation: a poor thing scared to death of the city), exhorting María to enjoy herself for a change. (Pero con cuidado, with caution.) So when he offered to accompany her for a while, she didn’t mind. That night, without even attempting to hold her hand or to pull her off into the shadows for a kiss, he seemed a gentlemanly sort, a real caballero, as if he’d never push her up against a wall and take advantage. (Deep down, at the same time, she wanted him to.) Calmly, Ignacio told her about himself: he was a businessman, un trabajador, who’d gotten a little lucky with a going import and export concern, mostly in appliances, based in the harbor. His negocio required that he travel now and then, not just across the island but sometimes to the States-“Tú sabes, pa’ América, y los ciudades de Miami y Nueva York”-but now that they were becoming acquainted, how could he look forward to leaving Havana?

“But, señor…”

“Call me Ignacio, please.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“What should I know?” he asked. “To be honest, María, before tonight, I’d hardly noticed you-not that I haven’t observed what a tremendous dancer you are-but I’m one of those fellows who believes there’s a reason why things happen a certain way. You know that drunkard who was bothering you? I’m almost grateful to him for what happened tonight.” He stopped on the corner of Calle 15 and began fingering the crucifix and the other medallions around his neck. “You see, María, soy viudo-I’m a widower, who once had a wife and una muchachita, a daughter. My wife’s name was Carmen, and she had family up in Tampa, and so I would send them off every so often to visit.” Then, a little sadly: “You remember the hurricane of ’forty-three?”

Of course she did, it was the same year that half their livestock drowned, the year that Teresita, so confused and lost, threw herself into the cascade’s waters.

“Their plane went down in that storm, and since then, well, how may I explain myself-I’ve hardly cared less about normal things. I do my work, I sometimes go out, but little else. I can hardly sleep at night thinking of what happened to them. Do you know that feeling?”

“Sí, señor, I do,” she said.

“That’s the reason I’m always reading. It keeps my mind on other things. That’s why I sit enjoying the company of others without really having to talk with anyone. I can do that in a club like the Nocturne, where the food is good, and, of course, the entertainment exceptional.”

They were only a few blocks from the harbor walk, the Malecón, and because he could have cared less about going home and because María after a night of performances stayed up for hours, she didn’t mind accompanying him there. It usually took her an hour to stroll back to la Cucaracha, and the moon, with a sad, pocked face that always seemed to be watching, had lit up the ocean, a tranquil sight to take in.

“So, María, some parts inside of me-how can I put it-have been asleep for a long time. Fundamentally”-Pero, carajo, he used big words-“I haven’t had much interest in women. Not that I don’t notice, but mi deseo, my desire…for love has vanished.” And he tapped at his heart. “María, don’t you understand? I’ve been a dead man inside.”

Then he grew silent, a somberness overcoming him as if he had been embarrassed by his admission. On that night, automobile head beams flared along the grand curving roadway, a hundred residences and hotels, all aglow, their windows burning with light. It wasn’t until they could see the Morro castle in the distance that he came around again, with a simple question: “Just where is it that you live?” And when she told him that she had been staying at the Residencia Cubana, he could only shake his head. “I know of that place-isn’t it a disgrace?”

“Perhaps,” she answered him, feeling vaguely offended. “But it’s been my only home in Havana. I have my friends there, and the señora who runs it is very good to me.”

“But surely you must know what goes on there?” And when she looked away, he quickly added, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

Along the way, a police cruiser had slowed up and pulled alongside them. Usually when that happened to María at night, she’d feel terrified of being forced inside-who knew where she might end up? Or what might be expected of her?-the prostitutes were always telling her stories. So she felt relieved when Ignacio, approaching the cruiser, a green Oldsmobile, seemed to know the officer. As he bent by the window, he and the policeman spoke, about what she could not say. She had walked over to the seawall, looking out over the bay and wondering how the gulf waters, which appeared to be so majestic, could smell so bad; at the same time, while she was taking in the immensity of that horizon’s expanse, which seemed to go on forever, a queasiness overwhelmed her, as if she feared that it would swallow her whole if she lingered too long. There was something else: as that cruiser took off, Ignacio rapping on its hood in a familiar manner, the policeman, with his visor cocked slyly down, smiled, nodded, and, as it happened, winked at María in an insinuating way that she found unnerving.

It simply offended her-I am not one of them, she thought-and now it was María who became sullen, so sullen that, once they reached the entrance to la Cucaracha, she could hardly wait to get upstairs. Though he mentioned an all-night cafeteria on Obispo where they could go for a while, she told him that if she didn’t soak her feet soon in a pan of salts, she’d suffer the next day.

“Bueno, do as you like,” he told her, though with a slightly wounded look on his face. And then, in a most courtly manner, he bowed. The last she saw of him that night, he was making his way into that quarter and had pulled out of his jacket pocket that book, that mysterious thing in which he took his solace.

Years later, while having lunch in one of those tacky South Beach sidewalk restaurants, all María had really told her daughter about the way she met this Ignacio-it could have been on one of many afternoons when mother and daughter, taking taxis, got slightly sloshed (Teresa, as usual, being a doctor, reminding María to go easy on those margaritas because of the salt) and María, with her own kind of dignity and pride, tended to give, depending on her mood, different versions of the same tale-was that she had first encountered Ignacio, “a very intelligent, hardworking man,” in a club she had been dancing in; and that he was very kind to her at first, a gentleman through and through, at least until he changed into someone she didn’t recognize. But before that they’d had a good enough time.

Chapter TEN

Weeks went by before María heard from him again, and though she had thought about Ignacio now and then, she could really have cared less. One evening, however, when she had arrived at work, there awaited María a bouquet of roses and, with them, a note. Since she couldn’t understand it, and felt ashamed to admit her shortcomings to the girls in her troupe, she had to wait until she got home for Señora Matilda to read it aloud to her:

My dear María,

I haven’t forgotten you and will see you soon at the club.

Ignacio.

That next night, swathed in gossamer, while vaulting across the stage in the midst of a solo, her hips in a deep swivel as if she were trying to wipe a table clean or wash a window with her papaya-that’s how she once explained the motion to her daughter, a wallflower when it came to dance-María, spotting Ignacio sitting at a table, dedicated her performance only to him. He knew it, watching her every move onstage and standing during the applause.

Later, it was María, sitting by his table, who told him about herself: at the heart of it was this: she was just a country girl from Pinar del Río and wouldn’t mind it all if she met a sincere man, honest and of good character, whom she could trust and be good to. And when he had heard her out, Ignacio, smiling, took hold of her hand, and told her, “It is my hope, María, to be everything for you.”

And he seemed to mean what he said, for soon they were going out on María’s nights off, heading here and there around Havana. She loved to take in a movie at the Payret theater, where between the shows singers and comedians entertained the crowds, and more than once they’d go into the kinds of hotels that she used to pass by and find so intimidating: like the Biltmore-Sevilla and the Astor-Havana, in whose fancy restaurants they dined, as well as his favorite bistro, Delmonico’s. Everywhere they went waiters and concierges attended to them with the utmost politeness and respect-it seemed that this Ignacio was an important man-and because he liked the way she looked alongside him, they would sit in the outdoor cafés. Ignacio, in his largesse, set up an account for her at El Encanto, Havana’s premier department store, so that she could buy whatever items of apparel she liked, and indeed, taking her around, he thought that a little jewelry would look nice on her, and soon enough that jewel of Havana went out into the streets wearing pearls around her neck, and gem earrings, for which she’d had her earlobes pierced. When she complained of a bothersome ache in her teeth, he paid for her to visit a dentist, who, falling in love with María, could barely bring himself to drill away the cavities that even the most beautiful of women suffer. Going off on trips, Ignacio saw to it that a florist deliver a weekly bouquet to the club-all the girls buzzing with excitement and jumping, quite easily, to the conclusion that she had become Ignacio’s mistress.

Indeed, he took more than just a little interest in her. It was on a Sunday that he had turned up at la Cucaracha out of the blue-she thought he was away-and told her, taking a look around, that the place made him sick to his stomach, and that he would find her another. But did she really want to go? She had gotten attached to la señora and knew most of the shopkeepers along that street, and most of the other prostitutes besides Violeta, even the two she found out had pee-pees like men. And while she surely would have liked to live in a nicer place, she had made that forlorn room, her first home in Havana, comfortable enough and knew that she’d miss the daily life there, the way her neighbors cooked their meals on pans on their balconies, the caged birds, the barking dogs, the guitar players and drunken singers (Ay, papito!), the crying babies, and even the Peeping Tom across the way-they made her feel anything but alone.

But one day, she left.

Eventually, she allowed him to “make her into a woman,” as they used to say, but it had not been an easy thing to accustom herself to. With her heart in her throat, she first bedded Ignacio down on a brand-new mattress with clean sheets in the bedroom of a sunny third-floor solar that he had gotten her in a better neighborhood, near a marketplace. On that afternoon she discovered the sorrowful history of a man whose body was covered with scars, his back in particular, a mess of claw-shaped welts, his cruel papito’s gift to him as a boy. The actual act of penetration made no great impression on her, it was more or less what she had imagined, a little painful and almost pleasurable, but she had learned from the whores of la Cucaracha that nothing pleased a man more than to hear a woman scream at the top of her lungs as if she were being torn to pieces by a horse.

The whole ritual of it, however, she found discomforting and wished she had covered over the crucifix above her bed with a black cloth.

The moment he had removed her dress and undergarments and stripped down himself, proudly displaying the brutish and tearful proof of his desire-“Go ahead, look and admire it,” he told her proudly-she began to drift outside herself. Fondled, spread open, pulled at, bitten, and feeling the dampish and warm bundle of his inguinal sack-sus huevos-rolling over her taut belly and upwards over her rib cage as he, among first things, smothered his enraged cosita with her breasts, she couldn’t help but think about Christ’s last moments on the cross. As his blunt thrusts raised a wormy vein on his forehead, his eyes turning upwards inside their lids, she envisioned the journey Jesus Christ, upon his death and resurrection, had made, down to Purgatory and then Hell, before ascending to Heaven. And while he buried his head between her thighs, kissing the corona of her femininity, Mary Magdalene went kneeling before Him, to wash His feet with the tresses of her hair.

And so, even as she screamed, she kept praying that God forgive her, for however much she believed Ignacio when he muttered that she was the kind of woman he could really care for, María, dallying in the Holy Land, felt nothing for him beyond pity and a vague gratitude for the way he looked after her, and for his generosity, sentiments which she, being so young, had perhaps confused with the devotions of love.

Chapter ELEVEN

After that afternoon, beautiful María got used to Ignacio’s visits. Was she in love with him? She hardly thought so, but she slept with Ignacio often enough to make him happy. And while María preferred to keep those duties a secret, she found it comforting to know that such arrangements were common. Some of the girls in the troupe were always looking around for men with money, often gossiping about how nice it would be to have someone of means to look after them, no matter his callousness. Most of their would-be suitors weren’t prizes, though they’d hear of dancers who had run off with an American, to places like Cincinnati and Arkansas. At least Ignacio was generous, and he wasn’t ugly, or fat, and he was clean, dapper, and smelled good, even if María didn’t care to believe the rumors that he was a gangster of some sort.

AH, BUT HOW THINGS CHANGE. LETTING IGNACIO DO WITH HER AS he wanted and drowning afterwards in guilt, she eased her conscience by going to church, not just to confess her sins but to feel purified by the sanctity of the altar and the oddly comforting gazes of the saintly statues. As often as she asked herself, while kneeling in prayer on a stony chapel floor, Why Ignacio? she concluded that El Señor, in his mysterious ways, had placed him in her life for a reason. And if she felt sometimes that Ignacio didn’t really care about her-especially when they had gone out to a fancy place and he’d accuse her of chewing her food too loudly and eating like a goat, at least, while she was in his company, other men left her alone. As she’d tell her daughter one day, she needed him. Going anywhere in Havana by herself had become a nuisance, more so as she learned how to dress better and developed a taste for fancy clothes, as well as makeup and perfumes, which she had started using in the clubs. She could rarely go down the street without someone calling out or whistling at her, many a devouring stare attending María’s every step. But when she took walks with Ignacio holding her by the arm, few dared even to glance her way. With his proprietary air, he just looked like the sort you didn’t want to offend. (Men found ways of glimpsing her anyway-they’d look without seeming to look in the Cuban manner, a mirar sin mirar.) Whenever Ignacio happened to catch someone coveting María’s bottom, he’d stop dead in his tracks, excuse himself, and march over to have some words with her admirer.

She appreciated this vigilance but wished he could relax; his severity was sometimes hard to take. He may have been courtly and suave, but, as time went on, he also became quick-tempered, especially in his efforts to teach her things: how to cut food, how she should dress, never to look a man straight in the eye. His moods were sometimes awful, however, and if there was anything María sorely missed, it was the sort of tenderness she had known with her papito. He may not have taught her much of anything about good manners, and his drinking had made her crazy, but he, at least, had a gentle soul. She just missed that guajiro warmth, the sentimentality of his songs, the way her papito sometimes touched her face, but oh so softly, as if she were a flower.

Not so with el señor Fuentes, who rarely smiled and never seemed to feel compassion or pity for anyone. Poor people disgusted him. If lepers or blind men or amputees held out their hands begging for coins, a scowl of contempt exploded across his face. Once, when they were walking along Neptuno to a ladies’ haberdasher’s and she asked him, “But, Ignacio, why are you so hard on those people? They can’t help themselves, los pobres,” he laid out his philosophy of life:

“María, you may think me harsh, but when you’ve come up from nothing, the way we both did, you learn quickly that the only person worth looking out for is yourself, and maybe your family, if they actually give a damn for you.” He turned a deep, frightening red. “And so what if I give those unfortunates a few centavos? How the hell is that going to change a thing for them in the long run?”

“But if you give them a little money, then at least they can have something to eat,” María said, while thinking about the poor children she saw all over the city who begged for pennies. “Isn’t that the right thing to do?”

“The right thing?” he said, laughing. “I’ll tell you what, María.” And he reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet, pulling a ten-dollar bill out. “This was going to pay for your hat, but, what the hell, let me just give it to that fellow over there, okay?”

Marching over to some unfortunate-un infeliz-sitting, one legged and grimy against a wall, Ignacio stuffed that bill into the tin can he held in his filthy hands.

“So there,” he said, “are you satisfied? Now, look around you and tell me something: tell me if you’re seeing this lousy world changing one bit.”

“Ay, pero Ignacio, don’t be so angry at me.”

“All right then, but don’t you ever preach to me again. Understand?”

FOR ALL HER MISGIVINGS ABOUT HIM, THEY HAD THEIR ENJOYMENTS. On a Sunday, Ignacio drove her to a beach resort out in Varadero, where María, glorious in an Esther Williams swimsuit, the sort with fancy seashell pleats accentuating her breasts and midsection (translation, her smooth belly, her fabulous burst of hair, the fig of her heart-shaped pubic mound), parted those warm, clear waters before her. They journeyed to a pueblo by the sea, about three hours east of Havana, their route, along the northern coast, taking them past expanses of marshes, mangrove swamps, and beaches to Matanzas, where Ignacio had been born in utter poverty and received his first scars. He didn’t know if his father was even alive, nor did he care, and his mamacita had died when he was a boy, which was how he ended up in Havana to fend for himself at an early age, he told her. Taking her around-what was there to see in a town that stretched only three or four blocks end to end along the coast?-Ignacio told María, with all sincerity, that it was his dream to construct a house in that place, so that he-and she-would have a wonderful retreat to escape to from Havana, maybe even live there one day as man and wife. Then they returned to the city, and, as he often liked to do, he pulled over to the side of the road and had María undo his white pantalones so that she might attend to him in a manner that he particularly enjoyed: the wonderful sun just beginning to set on the horizon.

On another occasion, he drove her out to Pinar del Río to see her papito, whom she had missed very much. Laden with gifts, and arriving in triumph in Ignacio’s white 1947 Chevrolet, María had the pleasure not only of showing off her nice clothes and prosperous “novio,” whom her papito didn’t particularly like, but also of letting him see just how well she had done for herself in Havana. Olivia, her papito’s haggish paramour, so gloomy in black, couldn’t have been more solemn, or envious. For that alone, María felt thankful to Ignacio, who, for his part, could only feel contempt for the slop of pigs, the filth of an outhouse, and, after a while, even what he called the ignorance of the guajiros.

Chapter TWELVE

She was learning what men can be about, particularly when they like their drink. Her papito had sometimes been that way, that’s why he used to beat her, and, as she got to know Ignacio better, she learned that he could be that way too. In the bedroom, the only place where he actually seemed happy, he could be quite unpredictable. She would almost enjoy it, as long as he wasn’t being too rough with her, and rum sometimes made him that way. Once he had drunk too much, he’d start accusing her of denying him certain pleasures. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, and he’d smash in the door, throw her onto the bed, and take her from behind, all the while calling her nothing better than his little mulatta whore. And if she wept bitterly afterwards, he’d tell her, “Grow up and don’t forget that, if it weren’t for me, María, you’d still be sleeping in that shithole of a hotel and dressing like a tramp.”

Drinking, he became a different man, who made her life a nightmare. Even when he behaved in a reasonable way, taking care of him with her mouth became a labor, not of love but of drudgery. Sober it didn’t take much: just the sight of her lovely face in a posture of voluptuous submission, the proximity of her lips to that blood-engorged thing, and the merest licking of her tongue were often enough to make him gasp and cry out. But when Ignacio had been drinking heavily, because he had suffered a reversal in business or because he was simply getting bored with her, Mary Magdalene herself would have been hard put to make any progress at all. Still, she took care of him just the same, until her neck and jaws ached. And even then, he found ways to insult her: “You’re too careful and look like you’re about to throw up.” And the worst? If he had been displeased with her lovemaking, or if she had even looked at him in a certain way-as if she’d rather leap from her window than spend another moment with him-she’d turn up at the club the next night covered with so many black and blue bruises that she couldn’t go onstage without disguising them with heavy makeup. How the chorus gossiped and felt sorry for her.

It became the kind of situation that she would always remember in the manner of a bad dream. Started out good, ended up bad. A terrible mistake from which there seemed to be no escape. Sometimes after she had seen him and he had treated her poorly, María headed back to that filthy hotel la Cucaracha, which she had since come to regard with fondness, and, finding la señora Matilda at her usual place in the hall, wept on her urine-smelling lap. Recognizing her expression of regret and torment, something she had seen many times before, Violeta the prostitute would hold María in her arms and caress her hair. “Come back here, my love,” she’d tell María. “Come back to your friends.” Such little visits helped sustain her-la señora always told her that she could have her old habitación again-but when she looked around that place, with its click-clack of whores’ heels on the steps, its dingy corners, and remembered the condition in which she sometimes found the toilet-an outhouse, a field was better than that-and of waking in the middle of the night jumping-brincando, brincando-from insect bites, María knew she’d never return. But then something would hit her: Short of going home to Pinar del Río, there would be no way of avoiding Ignacio, not in Havana at any rate. Where else could she go? Heading back to her solar, she’d imagine him lurking behind every arcade column; and once she’d climb the steps to her door, her greatest fear was that she’d find Ignacio, sprawled out on her bed naked, an electric fan turning by his side, waiting.

Chapter THIRTEEN

Not that Ignacio was always so harsh with her. Though she’d tend to remember him as a son of a bitch, y como un abusador, he ran so hot and cold that it always amazed María when they settled into a pleasant period. He might punch her arms and legs a half dozen times in a single afternoon, but within a few days flowers always arrived at the club in his name, so that while María, jamming a modesty pad into the front of her glittering undergarment, fatigued by sadness, softened towards him again. And sometimes he turned up at the Nocturne with a box full of lacy Parisian scarves, just to give away to the ladies of the chorus. And he’d tell anyone willing to listen that if he or she needed a good refrigerator, a nice radio console, or even an air conditioner, he was the man to talk to. And always at steeply discounted prices, given that they all-from the powder room ladies to the shoeshine boy in the back and the women of the chorus-were friends of María.

In a calm and decent mood, Ignacio, always dressed sportily and smelling nicely of cologne, could be incredible. He knew people like the advertising director at El Diario de la Marina, and other papers, who might have use for her as a model in their ads. And now and then, out of nowhere, Ignacio, stuffing a few twenty-dollar bills into a lipstick-stained coffee cup she kept by her makeup mirror, told her: “This is for your poor papito out in Pinar, if you want to give it to him.” Cold with beggars on the street, he seemed to change his mind when it came to her little world. And that sometimes made her feel differently.

On some nights, at about four in the morning, when Ignacio was usually among the last to leave the Nocturne and the floors were already being swept around the tables, even while some patrons lingered, and he asked if he might “escort” her back to her place, María, whatever his recent transgressions, usually told him “Yes.”

In the best of spirits, he even encouraged her about some things. When they were passing by the Palacio Theater along the Prado during a midafternoon Sunday stroll, and beautiful María saw that crowds were queuing in the entranceway for a performance of a ballet, Giselle, he didn’t hesitate to buy tickets for the two o’clock show. The lead dancer of that troupe, one Alicia Alonso, a waifish half-blind brunette, moved so gracefully in the role that María’s hip-swaying rumbera movements seemed crude by comparison. While watching the corps de ballet and feeling stunned by Alonso’s elegance onstage, she could only think about what one of the dancers in her troupe, the aging Berta, had recently told her: “You’re so good looking, it doesn’t matter if you can dance at all.” That remark had bothered her, and especially so after watching that ballet. It so nagged at María that she began to dream about becoming a ballerina.

In this, Ignacio, even while thinking it a bit of a joke, indulged her-paying for twice-weekly classes at an academy off Industria Street. And while she had begun to learn the fundamentals, and worked hard to perfect the placement of her feet, the various pliés, she lacked the classical grace of the others, who were, in most cases, adolescents if not children (and well off ones at that). At five seven and too voluptuous-she weighed one hundred and twenty-seven pounds-María, the oldest of them, seemed preposterously out of place. Still, she kept at it for a few months, until there came the day when she realized that it would take her years to become any good at all. By then, her feet had begun blistering all over again, to the point that they sometimes bled in her shoes while she was dancing in the floor shows at the club, and so, one day, María, putting that pipe dream aside, simply stopped taking those lessons.

At least those lessons helped her performances: she became somewhat more elegant in her stage movements, the nuances of those stances making a difference in her style. To the delight of her salivating audiences, it became easier for María to touch her forehead with her instep, and her contortions became much more fluid, not that she needed to improve on her routines. Having been exposed to her fellow, better off aspirants, who were picked up by chauffeurs and housemaids after classes and, almost to a one, attended a French lyceum (they were always practicing their French with each other during their rest periods), she, envious at first and then inspired by their air of refinement, began thinking about ways to improve herself.

Ignacio always laughed at the fact that she couldn’t read worth much. He caught on right away, noticing that she really didn’t know what she was looking at when handed a restaurant menu. Not once did she ever seem to know that among the books he’d carry around with him was a simple Spanish diccionario. (That’s what he had been studying in the club the night they met.) He used to tell her that he would have written her love letters, but what was the point of bothering? In any case, there was no need to feel too bad, he’d say. Half of all rural Cubans, if not more, were illiterates anyway, he’d read in some newspaper. And what difference would it make to a woman whose chocha, in his opinion, was a national treasure?

But even when Ignacio knew that his jibes bothered her, and he was always talking about finding some brainy fulano to teach her, he just never got around to it: he was too ashamed of her in that way to approach anyone. Besides, he felt content to lord that superiority over her, and in any case, he really didn’t care if María could even spell her name, as long as she had learned to comport herself like a lady in the classy restaurants they went to and took him to bed with abandon.

And María? Living in an incomprehensible world, she often wondered what the newspaper headlines said. Even when she recognized her stage name on a poster outside the club-M-A-R-Í-A R-I-V-E-R-A-she could only guess what the rest of such notices meant. Some words she understood, but not many, the gaps of lost meaning confounding, depressing her. Waking around noon each day and feeling that something was missing in her life-forget love, that always turns to air, doesn’t it?-she resolved to find herself a teacher.

Chapter FOURTEEN

Now below her windows was a thriving market that started up at seven in the morning. Out of canvas-awning-covered stalls, in dense rows that faced each other on either side of the narrow cobblestone street, those vendors sold everything-live chickens, parrots in cages, cut-up sides of pig. There were stalls for household goods and plumbing tools, heaps of old radios and extension cords, books and outdated magazines-even American magazines such as Look and Life, which had been discarded in hotel bins and picked out like used rags for sale. A dozen cheap guitars and as many dented cornets and other instruments hung from wires strung along the canopy of one, and there was a stall that sold nothing but tocadiscos- record players-of every imaginable incarnation. From the old RCA windup Victrolas that played only 78s to the more modern GEs (always worn and used) that employed the speeds of 16½ and 33¹/3 rpm, and around them, where they were stacked on the ground, piles and piles of brittle records. (Oh, if she could only have picked out one of them, during her leisurely strolls through the market, a 78 rpm disco by an Oriente sonero called los Hermanos Castillo, featuring two songs, recorded in 1944 in Santiago, one of which, entitled “Mis sueños”-“My Dreams”-was a plaintive bolero penned and sung by none other than Nestor Castillo, her future love.) There were stalls that sold shoes, men’s apparel, racks of dresses, and much more.

Once María got up in the late morning, and Ignacio had not come around to carouse with her, it was one of her solaces to stroll through the market and say hello to the vendors who had become her friends. She even dallied by the bookseller’s stall, a few steps from her door, picking up one volume or the other and pretending, in case anyone was watching, to read, flipping through their pages, pausing at some, and arching her lovely eyebrows at their supposed contents. The bookseller was such a friendly man that María often bought one or two just to be nice. Among them was an absurdly obtuse volume that contained biographies of the one hundred most prominent Cubans alive in 1902. This she liked for its genteel photographs. Another, more arcane, was a Theosophical Society tome, published in Barcelona in 1928. She picked that one for its cover, featuring a pair of celestial-looking beings flying disembodied, like shredding flames, towards a reddish pearl in the heavens. A third, of the twenty or so she would own and keep on a shelf like porcelain objects, happened to be a moldy edition of Don Quijote. (Its pen and ink illustrations enchanted her.) Otherwise, María sorted through the one-and two-day-old newspapers that the fellow sold for a penny apiece, all the while assuming expressions of interest. The vendor, Isidoro, hardly imagined that María was only going through the motions, but another man, a lanky old negrito with sunken eyes, sitting inside the shaded entranceway of her building, a cane in his large arthritic hands, had watched her going through her charade a hundred times, without saying a single word. All he ever did was smile and tip his hat at María, but one afternoon, he just couldn’t resist and called out to her.

“You there,” he said. And when she turned: “Yes, you my love! Come over here.”

In a florid dress, and with a fan in hand, María approached him.

“I should talk to you,” he told her. “I know what you’re up to.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, almost indignantly.

“Oh, come on now,” he said. “I can tell by your eyes that you really don’t know what you’re looking at. ¿Tengo razón o no?”-“Am I right or wrong?”

She had no response, just looked down at the ground.

“Well, there’s no shame in it. Myself, I didn’t learn to read until I was thirty, and believe you me, my love, that was a long, long time ago.” He laughed, slapping his knee. “But the fact that you even pretend to tells me that you have the desire.” Then he took hold of her right hand. “Dime, mi bonita, how old are you anyway?”

“Eighteen, but I will turn nineteen in October.”

“Now that is young, carajo!” he told her. “You still have all the time in the world. And since I have nothing to do with myself”-he laughed again-“how about if I teach you the basics, you hear? You look like a bright young woman, even if you’re a lousy actress, and like I said, I’ve got nothing else going on.”

She didn’t even hesitate, asking: “Do you want me to pay you?”

“Why, no, my love,” he said, rapping his cane against the steps beneath his feet. “Just tell me your name, that’s all.”

“María,” she said. “María García y Cifuentes.”

“Well, María, I’m Lázaro Portillo, at your service, and a very happy señor I am, and grateful for all the times I’ve seen you lighting up this marketplace with your beauty.”

Then, he moved aside and tapped the steps beside him. Unfurling a clean handkerchief from one of his pockets, he spread it out for her. “Wait here, and I will find some paper and a pencil, and then, my love, we can begin.”

And so those lessons commenced in the midst of a busy market day, the first words he showed María, as she basked in his adoration and kindness, being “Él” for “him” and “Yo” for “I” and, as well, “Ella” for “her.”

After that it became her daily routine to sit with Lázaro for a few hours each afternoon, and she made it a habit to bring along a notebook, in which she wrote everything he instructed her to copy down. In only a few months, this bony-limbed, knob-knuckled negrito angel had opened María’s eyes, teaching her some things. At first, she could barely comprehend what she read, but she got better, bit by bit. And he, basking in the loveliness of her youth, wanted nothing for it, save for a few sandwiches now and then-he was the sort who looked hungry but didn’t act it. In those months, words and their meanings, and the way the letters of the alphabet arranged themselves into words, began to follow her everywhere, along the streets of Havana, while she was soaking in a bath, and even as she danced, shaking her derriere onstage. They followed María like birds, or like those black notes that flew in clusters across a musician’s arrangement charts at the club.

Chapter FIFTEEN

One evening at the club a few months later-it was October-the house band had broken into a tropical jam. A jazzed up version of “Rumba caliente” began the show, and this, to much applause, was followed by a frenetic “El cumbanchero.” But if she’d remember that particular evening of performances, it was because one of the dancers, fifteen-year-old Paulita, in the midst of an acrobatic routine, collapsed midstep, her right foot slipping off a bench as she leapt up to join María atop a piano, the poor thing falling head backwards to the floor. Even before the show, when Paulita, looking pale and drawn and sitting in front of her mirror, her hair in curlers, had complained that her belly ached, they knew what that was about. The girls in the chorus had raised money for the abortion she’d gotten a few days earlier-cost forty dollars, and with a real doctor, not some back-alley hack-but who among them imagined that it could have been botched so badly? For as she lay sprawled on the stage, the music stopping and the emcee, a suave crooner named Ricky Romero, coming out from behind the abruptly closed curtains to advise the muttering, drunken audience in both English and Spanish that all was well, and that momentarily the show would continue, out of the poor girl’s tasseled bottom seeped a widening flower of blood. The boss had her carried off, and even gave one of the stagehands money to rush her to the hospital, muy pronto, the dancers, hysterical, crying, going on with their performance anyway and mostly finding their marks, but without much enthusiasm at all.

A dispiriting night, the kind of evening when María wouldn’t have minded having Ignacio around, for sometimes she found his strength a comfort, even if he beat her, but lately he hadn’t been coming by the club as often as he used to.

As a matter of fact, she hadn’t seen as much of him in general. He’d say that he had to go away, claiming he had business in Miami, or in the Yucatán, or in Santiago de Cuba. But she didn’t know what to believe. Once when Ignacio had left a book on her table, by the window looking out over the street, María, driven by curiosity to see if she could decipher a few of its words, flipped through its pages to find, wedged deep into the spine, a small black-and-white, serrate-edge photograph of a sultry dancer known as the “fabulous Lola Sánchez,” the back of it bearing the imprint of her burgundy-painted lips and an inscription; the only words María could pick out were amor and besitos. And by chance, she had gone to the harbor one afternoon to see one of her fellow dancers, Juanita Méndez, off as she boarded the Havana-Miami ferry to join the chorus of a traveling revue. If her intensely beautiful eyes weren’t failing María, she had spotted Ignacio, on an upper deck, looking like a cat eating a canary, his arms wrapped around a quite stunning brunette who bore an amazing resemblance to the Lola Sánchez of the photograph. A few weeks later María had received a telephone call at the club from Ignacio, announcing that he wouldn’t be coming to her place on Sunday afternoon because he had been detained in Holguín-one of his trucks, carrying a load of electric fans and refrigerators, had apparently been hijacked by thieves. Why then did she happen to come across him, later that same evening, walking in the arcades of Comercio with several men, and an unidentifiable woman, by his side? It wasn’t long before María concluded that Ignacio, like most well-heeled men in Havana, had found someone new to amuse him, another woman whom he might treat well at first and then abuse later, a beauty onto whose body, stretched out on a bed, he might empty the contents of a bottle of rum, laughing at first and then later licking her up and down before concluding that she needed a slap or two across the face.

…your father was a liar!

María should have felt relieved to have Ignacio out of her life, or seemingly so, but, even if she wouldn’t admit it, a bitterness and a kind of jealousy over Lola Sánchez, another queen of Havana nightlife and of shapely culos, overwhelmed her. It left María wondering if Ignacio, after all, had been correct in telling her that, despite her beauty, she was really worthless and stupid, and not worth much at all.

That was María’s state of mind at three thirty in the morning, when she finally left the Club Nocturne the night of Paulita’s incident and went roaming through the streets. Even at that hour Havana, circa 1949, still cooked and sizzled and popped even more than it had years before. Hordes of American servicemen flew headlong through its arcades, crowded its bars, stumbled down its steps, vomited behind its columns and against its flecked walls. In some purlieus, lining up before the brothel doorways, countless men jammed the narrow walkways and sidewalks. Musicians performed everywhere. Barkers tried to lure passersby into their saloon doors, others into their casinos, slot machines glowing everywhere, ching, ching, ching; prostitutes, standing in doorways or leaning over balconies, bared their breasts, nipples pointed out insinuatingly; drums and trumpets (ay, Nestor) blew open the night. One of the chorus-they all smoked and drank-passed María her first cigarette, a Royale, and though she coughed at first, having breathed the purest country air for most of her life, she thought it might turn into a glamorous habit-Joan Crawford always smoked cigarettes in her movies after all. She wasn’t a drinker, hated bars, because even in the most touristic of places, like Sloppy Joe’s, men assumed she was a prostitute like Violeta, though sometimes they mistook her for either the Hollywood actress Lena Horne or Ava Gardner or, in fact, one of her favorites, Sarita Montiel, none of whom, many years later, would mean much to her daughter Teresita’s generation-María, so effortlessly enticing strangers with the radiance of her sculpted face, wouldn’t have lasted as much as five minutes in most of those bars along Obispo, Trocadero, or O’Reilly without someone either propositioning her or making a fool of himself by assuming he had a chance on earth to seduce her. Ignacio, good or bad as he had been, who wasn’t quite what met the eye, who loved to pull her jet-black hair back even while jamming himself into her shapely, quivering behind, that Ignacio, in meeting her, had surely been one of the luckiest men in Havana.

And so when she went along the Paseo del Prado, where many a young couple sat necking in the shadows of the park, María, in making her way over to the Malecón, a balmy breeze sweeping off the churning sea, had only wanted distraction, to take in from the spray-misted pavement the full moon, whose light, in those moments, seemed a river burning through the water. All along the Prado, people were still eating and drinking in the arcade cafés. Strolling about with guitars in hand, musicians, mainly soneros like her papito, serenaded anyone who would toss them a few coins, and, of course, aside from all the catcalls and whistles she heard coming from the side streets and alleys, there were children following behind her, tugging on her skirt and begging for pennies.

As María passed the haunted entranceway of the Centro Gallego and came to a café called El Paraíso (the Paradise), she saw, as might be inevitable in a bolero of dejection-not “Beautiful María of My Soul” but some other like “Te odio” (“I Hate You”) by Félix Caignet-Ignacio sitting by a table beside a woman, and not just any woman, but the dancer Lola Sánchez. Ah yes, Lola, a light-skinned mulatta like María, her tar-baby black hair recently dyed platinum blond, her tetas half bursting out from the top of her dress, and whose skirt, slit up nearly to her hips, revealed thighs and legs that, in their musculature, María almost found herself admiring. And what else? Under the half-light of a Chinese lantern, Ignacio and this Lola Sánchez were locked in a fondling embrace, his mouth pressed against hers, his hand stuck deep inside her skirt. And in that instant, María, without knowing anything about Lola-other than that she sometimes gave interviews on the radio and headlined at the Sans Souci-suddenly despised her, and Ignacio as well. Who knows what possessed María, but when she marched over to their table, she couldn’t help but call out, “Hey you, shit!” And when Ignacio looked up at her, without recognizing María at first, her face was so distorted by anger, he wondered why that very lovely but crazy-looking young woman, esa encantadora loca, had just kicked over their table, platters of mariscos and cocktails toppling onto the pavement. Then it came to him. “María, what are you doing?”

With that Ignacio stood up and took hold of her by the wrists and tried to calm her down, but she just wouldn’t, María breaking from his grip, María cursing him with the kind of language her dead mother, in all her piety, would have found shocking. Which is to say, that beautiful María, sweet guajira from the sticks, dancer and head turner extraordinaire, had become angry at the sight of them in a way that even surprised herself.

Chapter SIXTEEN

She spent the remainder of that night tossing in her bed, suffering from nightmares of sin and humiliation. Incredulous that Ignacio would betray her in so public a fashion, María wished that she could have shat him down the retrete behind their shack in Pinar del Río, so that he might swim among his brothers, wished that he had been swallowed up by the cavern’s waters like her sister. Livid with pain and rage, María couldn’t have cared less if she ever saw that desgraciado again. Yet, in the solitude of her solar, amidst all the furniture and an armario filled with the dresses he had paid for, she slipped into a state of superstitious forlornness. For to be alone made her think about her dead mother and sister, Teresita, and when she thought about them in another world of shadows, María felt more desolate than ever before, tan solita, tan solita, as if the city bustling around her were nothing more than a necropolis through which she wandered.

Still, with the light of day, such dark thoughts thankfully left her; and she had her dancing at the club and those pleasant lessons with Lázaro to occupy her.

About a week later, at dusk, however, she had been sitting by her window studying her notebooks-ay, but so many words to learn-when Ignacio, not wanting to let a good thing go, came knocking at her door. What could she do but allow him inside-he had his own key anyway. And though he had pleaded that she forgive him, María, having her pride, told him to simply take what clothes he had been keeping in that place and go. A slick caballero (the pendejo) by any standard, Ignacio claimed that he loved her, his mood suddenly calmer, contrite.

“I know I’ve done some things to offend you, but with all my heart I’m asking you to forgive me. Please, María,” he said, and he crossed himself. “I am sincere in telling you this. Te juro. I mean it.”

“And that woman?”

“She’s nothing next to you.”

He tried to caress her, to kiss her lovely neck, but his breath reeked of rum, and the touch of that man, which at best she had found tolerable, seemed now repugnant. She threw open the door.

“Vete,” she told him. “I’d rather die than take another day of your joderías, do you understand?”

“I don’t believe you mean that.”

“Just leave me, Ignacio,” she told him. “No soy puta.”

Then, all at once, what tenderness he possessed deserted him. His brows knotted fiercely. “Not my whore? Want to know something? You aren’t even good at it.” His face burned red. “You know why I went off with that other one? It’s because she knows how to behave in the bedroom like a real woman. You may be beautiful and make a lot of noise, but you’re stiff as a cadaver-”

“That’s because you beat me, hombre…”

And then it turned into something else. When he tried to throw her on the bed, she ran screaming into the hallway, Ignacio chasing after her and shouting insults, the two of them spilling down the stairways of her edificio and making so much of a commotion that passersby along that market street began to gather, curious about yet another familial Havana melodrama, drenched in sweat and contorted faces, unfolding before them. A miserable scene that María would probably have preferred to forget, and would have forgotten, if not for the glory that shortly entered her life.

Chapter SEVENTEEN

You see, it happened that a young musician with a most soulful expression and priestly demeanor had been walking home along that street. Wearing a white guayabera and linen slacks, and carrying a beat-up instrument case in hand, he had come upon the scene at the end of an afternoon of both music and dreams in a park on the western outskirts of the city, where along the banks of a river and under the shade of trees he, a trumpeter and singer, had played his heart out with the batá drummers and congueros of Marianao: his name was Nestor Castillo.

Fresh from a stirring tumbao, he could barely believe what he was seeing before him: not just a terrible squabble bursting out onto the street but a woman as beautiful as any he had ever encountered, her face contorted with pain and longing, a cubanita, her dress torn down the front, who instantly spoke to his soul. Just as Ignacio, his face twisted with anger, went lunging after María and chased her, sobbing, into the crowd, Nestor, perhaps possessed by a notion that music had a power of its own, or because he didn’t know what else to do, took out his trumpet and began playing a melody so serene and consoling that even the indignant, foul-tempered Ignacio stopped in his tracks. His fist had been raised as if he was about to hit María when, all at once, like everyone gathered in front of that building, Ignacio seemed to forget for a moment why he was there at all, his attentions turned to the sonorous music echoing against the walls.

“Caballero,” Nestor called out to him. “It’s done. Why don’t you leave the lady alone? Look, she’s only a woman, huh?”

“And who are you to tell me what to do?”

“I’m just a músico, my friend.”

With that Nestor lifted that trumpet to his lips again, another melody flowing forth, but this time, much as with love, the charm of it had worn off. Ignacio strode over to him and poked his trembling hand, his forefinger and index finger jamming into Nestor’s chest.

“Let me tell you something: I would mind my own business if I were you.” With that Ignacio, reeling around, turned his attention to María again.

By then the crowd, of neighbors and passersby, seeing clearly what was going on, became intent upon protecting her. And, as they formed a circle around María, and with shouts accused Ignacio of being a woman beater and a cabrón-a louse of the lowest sort-he, half drunk anyway and having better things to do, lost heart. In the meantime, a policeman, who had been eating a pork chop dinner in a café down the street, took a few last sips of his Hatuey beer and finally decided to see why so many people had gathered. He was approaching when Ignacio, his suit disheveled and feeling his guts twisting into knots, had taken off in another direction; along the way, every few yards, he’d turn around and curse María, then swear that he loved her, Ignacio’s shadow elongating on the cobblestones behind him, Ignacio, in all his ferocity, gradually diminishing inside a forest of columns until, all at once, he disappeared into the recesses of an arcade.

“¿ESTÁS BIEN?” NESTOR CASTILLO ASKED MARÍA. EMBARRASSED from publicly weeping and twisted by shame over her recent troubles, she leaned up against her edificio entranceway, her arms covering her breasts, where the dress had torn. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”

“No, but thank you, señor,” she told him.

Just then, as María started up the stairs, he couldn’t keep himself from following her. “If you would forgive my rudeness, I’m wondering if…if…you’d consider accompanying me out to a little place I know… Perhaps it will make you feel better,” he said.

“When?” she answered, wary but intrigued by this fellow’s sincerity.

“Right now, if you can. Or tomorrow. Or anytime.”

“Now? You must be joking.”

María looked him over but with more clarity, amazed by how, in the heat of the moment, when she saw things with distortion, she’d hardly noticed his good looks. His dark eyes were liquid with mystery; and that mouth, almost too shapely and well formed to belong to a man, a nariz that would have looked perfectly at home on any movie star; even his teeth were pearly, and he had all of them to boot! His largish ears and crests of curly dark hair reminded her of a handsome postal courier she once knew back in Pinar del Río, this quiet fellow who’d come through their valley on a horse without anything to deliver, since nobody received mail, simply to pass the time and fill those guajiros in on what was going on in the outside world. (It was the courier who once told María about the dropping of an atomic bomb on the faraway island of Japan -who could have imagined that?) But there was also just something about this guapito that comforted her-a priestly air, perhaps, or something trustworthy if not beatific, and you know what else? He was so nervous around her and timid seeming, despite his killer looks, that she felt like taking care of him, as if he were one of those forlorn guajiros of her papi’s acquaintance, those salts of the earth who’d never hurt a soul and needed to be looked after by a woman of strength.

“It will make you feel better,” he told her, trying again. “But I don’t want to impose.”

“All right,” María told him finally. “But come upstairs with me. I’m filthy.”

Closing the cast-iron gate behind them, as he followed her up the steps to her solar, dogs barking around them, María could almost feel his eyes alighting upon her rump. She needn’t have been so suspicious; walking into her parlor, with shattered plates and turned-over chairs strewn about the floor, that músico couldn’t have been more noble, more polite. He practically sat on his hands while María went into her bathroom to wash and put on a new dress, and passed his time looking around the place, probably wondering just who that miserable prick had been. All kinds of things would have hit that pobrecito just then. He noticed that she certainly had a lot of nice clothes in her closet; her appliances, including a Frigidaire, were new too, and he guessed that the pictures of the older folks in a frame on her dresser were her mamá y papá-or maybe abuelos-but, in any case, they looked like they’d had a hard time in life. The only thing he made a peep about was the beat-up guitar he saw leaning against a wall. She had gotten it for a few dollars in the market below from the fellow who sold instruments, so that she could practice the chords her papito once taught her.

“Say there, do you mind if I strum on your guitar?” he called to her.

“Do whatever you want, pero es un tareco-it’s a piece of junk.” Passing a sponge over her body, María felt grateful, but somehow sad at the same time, to have Ignacio so suddenly out of her life. She wondered if those little pains inside her heart meant that she’d always have a soft spot for that cruel man anyway. Once Nestor began singing, however, the intimations of his fine baritone, so sincere and somehow pained, got her all quivery inside and she wondered what was going on with her. Dressing quickly-a slip under a florid dress, no nylons, and a pair of low-heeled shoes-she soon joined him again in the room.

“You sing really nicely,” she told him. And in that moment María began to wonder why she was already feeling affection, for a fellow she hardly knew.

Chapter EIGHTEEN

Handsome as hell, Nestor Castillo made the oddest impressions on her. As they walked in Havana vieja, not once had he looked at any of the other women who passed by. He seemed so self-effacing, and beyond this tawdry world, it would not have surprised María if, while blinking her eyes, she had turned around to find him wearing a priest’s vestments and holding one of those things that resemble ice cream scoops, an aspergillum, from which priests sprinkle holy water, Nestor blessing the narrow sidewalks and cobblestones before them. They’d hardly said a word to each other, but once they sat down in that café, up on a terrace, the horizon streaked with plains of conch pink in the sun’s setting glow, and after a few glasses of hearty red Spanish wine, thick as blood, Nestor began to overcome his initial timidity. By their table, and for the first time that night, as he wasn’t one for conversing easily, he broke into a big horsey grin and told her, “You know what? My mother’s name is also María. Now isn’t that something?”

Well, given that practically half of the females in Cuba were Marías, it shouldn’t have seemed so amazing to anyone. But why shouldn’t she smile back at that sweet fellow? While a squat but majestic jukebox glowed away in a corner of that café, playing some nice old romantic ditties-the kind Nestor aspired to write himself-María suddenly found that coincidence of their meeting on such a dismal day to be unimaginably significant, as if foretold by the stars.

Oh, it was all so very poetic, like something out of a bolero. And Nestor could have stepped out of a bolero as well. His outlandishly handsome features, his way of raising his eyebrows when something tasted particularly good, his dark eyes, which glanced at her from time to time, and the slightest of smiles that crossed his mouth now and then, but shyly, as if there was something unmanly about smiling, gave him a tragic air. She didn’t know him well, but María liked his solemnity, as if he were a matador, and the shy manner with which he comported himself-such a pleasant change from how most men regarded her. She couldn’t say he was easygoing or particularly talkative. But the way he looked into her eyes, as if he were seeing something wonderful in them, was more than enough to soothe her nerves.

It wasn’t as if she didn’t notice the way he struggled to look only at her face-surely he must have been aware of her body. And what was that hanging around his neck but a crucifix on a chain? Of course, she told him that she was a dancer at a cabaret, lately a featured performer, which was nice except that she only made a few dollars more a week than the others. She could have spoken about the problems she was having with the floor show manager, who, like most managers, unless they preferred men, eventually got around to expecting certain things from their dancers-how those bosses disgusted her. But she didn’t. Nor did she share with him the tawdrier episodes of her experience, the sort that made a woman, however beautiful, feel cheap and used. In fact, María was sometimes ashamed of her profession, almost as ashamed of her ignorance. No, on that night, as she would remember, María preferred to hear about Nestor’s own life and to take in the soulfulness of his expression, the tenderness of his voice.

AS THEY FEASTED ON A PLATTER OF MARISCOS Y ARROZ, WITH SOME chorizos-a paella-along with heaps of fried plantains, it was Nestor who did the talking at first. “Soy un campesino de Oriente,” he told her. “I’m a country boy from the east, from a quiet farm, tú sabes, near a little pueblo called Las Piñas, and I will tell you something, María. I was pretty happy growing up there amongst the oxen and pigs.” He was chewing on a delicate morsel and looking straight into her eyes. “Not to say that I don’t like Havana. I just miss my family y mi campo-my countryside. El aire puro-the pure air, el perfume de la jungla-the perfume of the woods.”

Por Dios, it was as if María were hearing herself speaking.

“I should have been a farmer, like mi papá, but I was just too sickly as a child. I wasn’t much good for anything when it came to the hard work in the fields. And because of mi enfermedad, I grew up holding on to my mother’s skirt. It wasn’t always easy, María. I practically never left that farm, and what learning I had, I owed to my older brother Cesar, who progressed as far as secondary school in Holguín. He taught me to read and write, and just about everything else I know.”

He wiped his mouth with a napkin, refilled his glass with wine, took another bite, his expression uncertain.

“Cesar is everything to me, even if he can be a pain in the culo. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere. Surely not to Havana. He’s always been much more adventurous than myself. He’s a first-class músico and used to perform with many a conjunto out east, as a singer mainly, and because I was always the closest to him, the youngest-we are four-he took me under his wing and started me out playing different instruments and singing.”

“And he is much older than you?” María, watching Nestor intently, asked.

“Yes, by ten years, but that didn’t stop him from taking me around as a kid to all the pueblos and plantations where his charangas played. Sometimes we were away for days, and that created a problem with my papito, who didn’t want me to waste my time.” He shook his head. “He was always fighting with Cesar, and I was caught in the middle. But you know what? Once my hermano got me going with the music, well, what can I say? It gets in your blood, and there’s no stopping the desire. Do you understand?”

“I do, hombre,” María said. “My papito was a músico too.”

“No, me diga!” said Nestor excitedly. Gulping his wine, he asked, “Is your papito someone I would have heard of?”

“No, just a nobody I’m afraid, el pobre. He was never able to make much of a living at it, and, well”-she shrugged-“Papito did what he had to do to support us, until he couldn’t anymore.”

She looked so sad then, he had to say something. “Is he still alive?” Nestor asked.

“Oh, yes-he lives out in Pinar del Río.”

“Y tu mamá?”-“And your mother?”

She just shook her head.

Out of habit, at the very thought of her mamá, she made a sign of the cross, but quickly. And Nestor? Instead of rolling his eyes, the way Ignacio used to whenever she crossed herself while passing in front of a church entranceway, he sucked a slip of air through his beautiful lips and, shaking his head, said, “That life can be so sad is a tragedy, verdad?”

He went on, María listening. Mostly about how Cesar had first put him on a stage at the age of twelve, a skinny kid playing the trumpet with a band; how it was Cesar who persuaded him to come to Havana in the first place. “That was a few years back, and you know what, María? Since arriving, we’ve made four records, and not a single centavo; we’ve played in some clubs for a few pesos, but not much else. In fact, do you know how I make my money? As a waiter at a gentleman’s club-the Explorers’ Club-have you ever heard of it?”

“No.”

“It’s not far from the Capitolio. I spend my days there looking after its members, not a Cuban among them, bringing them drinks, their cigars, their meals, and tidying up after them. They are mainly Englishmen and Americans, some Germans too. I don’t particularly like it, and I don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time, but it’s a living, you know?”

“Oh, I do, hombre.”

“Well, when I get home I’m always happy to leave that job behind. To be honest, it’s a miracle that I’m even here sitting with you. See, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not your typical fulano.”

Gracias a Dios for that, María thought, nodding.

“Take my brother Cesar. He likes to go here and there and have a good time whenever he has the chance, but me? No, I’m not that way at all. Most of the time I don’t mind staying alone in our little solar at night, tranquilito, tranquilito, as long as it’s not too hot. Then I’ll stay out just to breathe. But,” he said, and he shook his head, “I don’t need the crowds, la locura of the clubs, not at all.”

She just listened, unable to stop staring at Nestor’s mouth and his elegant hands. “I don’t know if there’s something wrong with me, María, but I’m perfectly happy to sit at home with my guitar and trumpet, writing my little melodies and songs. Or sometimes, if there’s a good boxing match on the radio, I’ll listen to that; and if Cesar and me have a job, playing music somewhere, I’ll certainly try my best to put on a show for the audience. But at heart, María, I’ve always been un solitario, a solitary sort, for whom getting to know someone has never been easy, or even worth fussing over.”

He looked off just then, not at the fellow feeding coins into the jukebox, or at the other diners, happily eating their food, but towards the ocean, where the moon had risen, sighing, and the deepest melancholy suddenly emanated from his body like black threads that entangled themselves with María’s heart, María’s soul. To watch his expression in those moments was to witness an angel, fallen from heaven to earth, who, opening his eyes, saw mainly sadness around him.

“In fact, to be honest, María, sometimes when I’m alone and can’t bear to write another note, or a single lyric-they seem so useless to me-I get so homesick that I feel like getting on a bus for Las Piñas. Just the thought of having one of my mother’s plátano stews makes me happy, and then I start missing all the rest; the run of the farm, the harnessing of the oxen to the plow, hanging around with the guajiros. You know here in Havana I mostly play trumpet and sing, but out there, my favorite instrument is a guitar-it’s so easy to carry-and, you know, you can have a pretty nice evening with a bunch of folks, just strumming some chords and singing a few songs. And then, when you get back home, you just lie down under the mosquito netting looking at the stars through your window dreaming, without a worry in the world.” Then he sighed. “¡Qué bueno fue!”

He went on, telling María that he just didn’t know what he was going to do with himself in life. Lately Cesar had been talking a lot about ditching Havana for New York, where they had some cousins living in a neighborhood called Harlem.

“My brother’s been crazy about New York for as long as I can remember,” Nestor told her. “He went there when he was sixteen, working on a ship, and since then it’s been his dream to return, especially now. He thinks we’d have better luck as musicians up there.”

“Do you want to go?” María asked him.

“Me? Hell no! Just the idea of living in a city like that frightens me-I mean, I can barely speak a few words of English, as it is. Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “Here, we have our guaguas and trolleys, but you know what I’ve heard, María? They have trains, hundreds of them, that go from one point in the city to another in underground tunnels. I don’t know if I would like that much-I just don’t like the darkness at all, if I’m not in the right mood, and as I told you, María, I’m not a very adventurous sort at all; in fact, I sometimes feel like a coward, un cobarde, when it comes to life-”

“But you weren’t a coward with Ignacio.”

That almost made him smile.

“And this Ignacio? What’s he to you?” he couldn’t help but ask.

“Oh”-she shrugged, as if he meant nothing to her-“just someone who was once good to me.”

LATER, WHEN THAT SWEET MÚSICO ESCORTED HER HOME AND María had climbed up the stairs and begun to undress, she heard his trumpet from down below: first the melody and Nestor’s voice rising up into her window, Nestor improvising a song of love.

María, I don’t know you well, but I feel that love is in our destiny.

(His trumpet’s notes rising to the stars…)

Now I’m filled with the strongest desires.

(His trumpet’s notes flying towards the sea…)

Even if we’re practically strangers, I adore you already,

(His trumpet’s notes echoing against the walls…)

beyond all reason and without any doubt.

(His trumpet’s notes, so wonderful and filled with feeling, provoking, as well, a voice from another window: “Hey, you, Romeo! Cállate! Quiet down!”)

María, charmed by his little serenade, leaned out her window. “Nestor, but are you crazy?” she called to him.

“With you I am,” he called back, and he bowed like a gentleman. “When will I see you again?”

“Come back next Sunday, at noon,” she told him. “Maybe we’ll go to la playa. Está bien?”

“Okay!”

Then she sent him off into the world, Nestor, walking towards the arcades and turning every so often to see if she was still looking. While he headed home, in a state of pure joy, to the solar he shared with his older brother, María, examining herself as she rested in bed, touched her own dampness.

Chapter NINETEEN

That next Sunday found them on a trolley heading out to an amusement park, west of the city, El Coney, which had been nicknamed by the locals after its famous Brooklyn counterpart to the far north. For the occasion María had put on a sundress and wore a wide-brimmed hat and white-framed sunglasses; she carried a one-piece bathing suit in a bag. Nestor had brought along his own swimsuit and a notebook, which he proudly showed her.

“I always carry this with me, in case I get an idea for lyrics,” he said as they jostled along la Quinta Avenida towards las afueras of the city. “Because you never know when that might happen-you think you can remember a line the next day, but they’re like little dreams that go away unless you write them down. I always use what I call my special pencils. You see, María”-and he pulled one from his pocket that was practically worn to the nub-“I use only pencils that I have found on the sidewalk or on the street and other places; it’s as if I’m inheriting the ideas of the people who owned them. This one I picked up in front of the cathedral-probably belonged to a priest or a nun-and so when I’m writing with it, I feel that I’m getting a little help from Dios. But I also have a pencil that I found outside Ernesto Lecuona’s house in Vedado. I can’t prove that it fell out of his pocket, but just the idea of it gives me a different kind of inspiration. With that one, I write down my notes and the chords of songs.” He smiled. “My older brother Cesar thinks I’m eccentric for believing such things, but I figure, what’s the harm of it, if those notions help me make a beautiful song.” Then smiling, he added: “María, te parece una locura? Do you think that’s odd?”

“No,” María said. “Not if it makes you happy.”

But, my goodness, he was different from Ignacio.

“You think so?” And he flipped open his notebook, showing her a page filled with new lyrics. “I wrote this, thinking about seeing you again, just a few days ago. How do they read to you?”

She pretended to understand what he had written down. Though her lessons with Lázaro had slowly progressed, to the point that she had learned hundreds of words, she had yet to comprehend complete sentences, let alone the lyrics of a song; but it had to be about the majesty of love, though she couldn’t say for sure.

“Son bonitas,” she told him. “Muy, muy preciosas”-“They’re lovely and very, very fine.”

“And the sentiments? Do you feel they are possible?”

“Sí, cómo no,” she told him.

“Oh, but María, if you only knew how happy that makes me feel!”

So perhaps he was already writing about her, María would think years later. Perhaps those lyrics, which she couldn’t decipher, first opened his heart to the notion of their love. Perhaps, without intending to, she was already raising his hopes. What of it? She felt something for him, perhaps just gratitude for his kindness, and maybe a curiosity about his tender soul. What else could she have said without giving her ignorance away? In memory, that trolley floated along the laurel-and palm-lined streets of that avenue, the sea’s air so clear and without any sense of passing time-she was just nineteen after all!-and just like that they were walking along the promenade, too mutually shy even to dare hold hands, but feeling like they wanted to.

The amusement park, just about three blocks long and nestled between the Miramar Yacht Club and the white sands and cabanas of la Playa de Concha, enchanted her, for as a guajira from the countryside, she’d never visited such a place before. She had loved the carousel, whose enameled horses went circling up and down, and left María laughing at the sheer foolishness of adults, among so many children, riding such things. Then they got on La Montaña Rusa -the Russian Mountain-a mousy roller coaster that whipped along its rickety, curved tracks with abandon, María screaming and Nestor holding her tight. (This they rode three times, Nestor feeling the weight of her breasts against his knuckles, María laughing in a way she never could with Ignacio, Nestor growing somewhat nauseated over the motion but not willing to let María go.) They played games of chance. They ate ice cream, sharing their cones like children. Later, as they were standing on the causeway, watching these adventurous and perhaps crazy fellows jumping off a diving board into the sea from atop a three-story-high replica of a Coca-Cola bottle of painted cement, Nestor first took hold of her hand, and she didn’t resist.

Then, because it was such a beautiful day, they headed into the public restrooms, the floors covered with sand, to change. Shortly, out on the beach, María first saw the glory of Nestor’s graceful physique-his broad shoulders and flat belly, the curling hair that flourished upwards from his navel like hands in prayer over his chest-while he, in turn, along with about every other man on the beach, felt like weeping at the sight of her spectacular dancer’s body. In a green bathing suit, she had followed Nestor into the water, the two of them drifting out and splashing in the waves, oblivious to the people around them, when, out of nowhere, God threw them together. Or to put it differently, hit by a wave, she tumbled into Nestor’s arms, and for a moment their warm bodies pressed together, and just like that Nestor lifted her up as if he were about to carry her across a threshold, and then, while holding her, his hand grazed the lower front of her bathing suit and then slipped back so that she could feel his palm against her right nalgita. When he dropped her into the water and she stood up, her dark and curly hair now slickened and falling straight and sparkling over her shoulders, through her bathing suit’s modesty pad bubbles came seeping and popping out, and what surely made his heart beat faster, through the top of her suit jutted her stiffened nipples. Was she embarrassed or ashamed? No: what she felt was that she wanted more of that sweet man.

Soon they were embracing, and that was a mistake, or perhaps it was utterly natural, but once their bodies were touching, she started to feel within his trunks the kind of earthly response that made María gasp. And while part of her wanted to pull away, María, the same more or less pious mujercita who had been at Mass that very morning, let Nestor press even more deeply against her luscious center. The sensation was so pleasurable, and of an intensity she had never felt with Ignacio, that something unraveled inside of her. She forgot the nightclubs, the saintly gazes of church statuary, the very fact that they were only thirty yards or so from a crowded beach. Why she took hold of him through his suit, she could not say. (Here’s something else: sitting with her daughter and watching television, a rerun of Zorro with Tyrone Power playing the hero, pero en español, she’d recall to herself her first impressions of its weight and thickness and how it made her feel, if nothing else, that this hombre, Nestor Castillo, was muy, muy virile y fuerte.) And, God forgive her, the sight of his excited pene, distorted by the amplifying effects of the water, so agitated María that she, floating out of herself, couldn’t help but put her hand inside his trunks.

His face became a mask of pleasure and death at the same time, or, to put it differently, the tenderness in his eyes became overwhelmed by desire.

Okay, in retrospect, perhaps this was an exaggeration; it had happened so long ago that the pieces of that day came to her like snippets of vaguely remembered music; after so many years she couldn’t even recall the timbre of his speaking voice, save that it was mild and gentle, a real tragedy because just hearing him somehow calmed her. One thing was certain: coming out of that water, they were in a state of mutual excitement. It would have been so easy for them to slip into one of the cabanas, which lots of young couples did in those days, to ease off their swimsuits and, in the confines of one of those narrow tents, make furious, hurried love… But, as Maria believed, the heavens were watching-or someone was-maybe her late mamá, Concha, or poor Jesus himself, with the bloodied tears of His sacrifice dripping down his face instead of tears of pleasure, of sea salt and kisses and youthful love, and that thought so rattled María she had to fight herself, for as they, timidly holding hands, waded to shore through that tepid water-so clear she saw mollusks breathing through the bottom sand-all she wanted to do was to fall back into his arms so that Nestor could cover her body with kisses.

Later, after they’d showered and dressed, Nestor suggested they get a bite to eat at the dance club Panchín, which wasn’t too far away. And because that wonderful singer Ignacio Villa, aka “Bola de Nieve,” the raspy-voiced Maurice Chevalier of Cuban crooners, sometimes performed there, Nestor thought they might catch his act afterwards. María, however, just wasn’t interested in visiting any cabaret, no matter how famous the singer. Her many nights in clubs were already enough to last her a lifetime. No, she preferred to sit out in the open air on the patio of a nearby fried seafood place, nothing special at all, taking in the sunset. As for music? It was relaxing to hear the boleros that played from a radio in the back, to drink enough beers to make her almost forget about Ignacio and lose herself in Nestor’s tender eyes. The longer they sat and the more they drank-his side of the table had five empty bottles of beer already sitting there, while hers had two-the more Nestor drifted off into a mood of such sadness that, as he opened yet another bottle, she wanted to wrest it from his hands.

“Just last night I dreamed about you, María, and do you know what I saw?” he asked, taking her hand.

“Tell me.”

“An evening just like the one we’re having here and now. With you sitting across from me.” He smiled tenderly. “I also saw something else: just down there,” Nestor said and pointed towards a little pier where couples went strolling. “I saw us sitting there, on a bench looking out at the water, and we were embracing, besando, besando, with so much happiness, our kisses tasting of the sea, and your face so joyful that I knew that we were surely to fall in love.” Then he crossed his heart and added: “Te juro-I swear-it’s the truth, and, if you believe me, María, it will become the truth.”

Maybe it was the beer she had been drinking, but when Nestor told her “Come on, let’s see,” she didn’t mind going.

They passed the remainder of that evening sitting out on that pier necking, unable to let go of each other.

It’s amazing what a single evening on a beautiful night by the sea will do. On their way back into Havana proper, as the trolley jostled along Fifth Avenue, they were holding each other, mostly in silence, as if, in fact, they were in love. Now and then, he would kiss her hand, and, more than once, she kissed his hand back. Their expressions must have been rapturous. Other passengers, especially the older ones, with their hound-dog jowls and memories of their own pasts, simply nodded their understanding: oh, to be that young again, to be in love, to feel the world expanding, and not diminishing around you. During that ride, Nestor sat beside María with a dumbstruck grin on his face, his notebook of lyrics, incidentally, set upon his lap, where his verses occasionally seemed to rise and fall in accord with Nestor’s sighs and the ardent expansions of that upon which they rested.

OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, THEY WOULD MEET AFTER HER last shows, late into the morning. She got used to finding Nestor waiting for her in the alley outside the backstage door (her fellow dancers, leaving after her, giggling about the buenmoso, the lady-killer, who had won María’s heart). They always ended up embracing against an arcade wall, her right leg jammed between his knees, the pipe inside his trousers nearly bursting its seams every time and Nestor whispering the kind of poetry that made María let him sink his fingers inside her. Light-headed, they’d take a few steps, then begin to kiss and fondle each other against a column, to the point of madness. His eyes rolled up into his head, he’d tell her, “Ay, María, mi María. Sabes que me estás matando?”-“Don’t you know that you’re killing me?” Then he’d drop to his knees, lift up the hem of her skirt, press his face against the dead center of her panties, police sirens in the distance, the world ending-none of it mattering. Still, she always stopped short with Nestor, fearing his poder, that she couldn’t manage him, or that he would think her a puta in the end, that Ignacio would discover them.

But one night while unraveling a dancer’s garter over her leg at the club, and realizing that the thought of Nestor made her feel like touching herself, her sheets at home covered with peacocks’ eyes of her own moisture (or with outlines of the wound in Christ’s side), María decided that she couldn’t take waiting anymore.

A few days later, during the quieter hours of an afternoon, in a sun-soaked room near the harbor, in a solar that Nestor had borrowed from a friend, and on a mattress with springs so far gone that it took her back to la Cucaracha, Maria allowed Nestor to do whatever he pleased with her. The moment he removed her dress, he stripped down himself, proudly displaying his virility, and proceeded to fondle, bite, and spread Maria open in ways that she couldn’t have imagined. She soon learned that romping with Nestor was like riding in her papito’s carriage up into the hills, and not just because of the way Nestor nearly burst her into pieces-the wider she spread and the more capacious she became the more he filled her-but because of his caresses, tender kisses, and endearments-“Sabes que te quiero, María?”-“Don’t you know that I love you?” he’d say again and again, his long-fingered musician’s hands brushing her hair from her eyes. As he’d take hold of a fistful of her hair, she’d raise her head, suckling him, but so differently than she had with Ignacio, who sometimes liked to slap her face or twist her nipple painfully while she was doing it. No, with Nestor she remembered the techniques the prostitutes at la Cucaracha had taught her while sitting around bored in the hallways: to bite and lick and then withdraw, to roll one’s tongue in a certain way, all gently, then almost viciously, as if trying to draw out the last bit of sweetness from a piece of raw sugarcane-and soon enough her knuckles were soaked with him, and licking that off her hand, she tongue-kissed him with it until, just like that, he became excited again. Then, proving that a man’s weeping member could be used like a stylus, he left traces of himself over every inch of her body, writing out the words Amor and Te amo with his seminal fluids on the small of her back and along the plumpness of her nalgitas; and when her upraised rump sent out that exquisite heat, like a woman softly breathing on a man’s neck, Nestor, begging her forgiveness, had to go there too-he couldn’t help himself, and María, despite that impertinence, found that it was a delicious pain and found that if she touched herself at the same time as she raised her haunches, she fell into pieces again. They went at it for hours, and no matter how many times they did, he wanted to go at her again, as if there would be no end of his desire for her. In fact, they hardly knew restraint and only finally stopped when her voice had gotten hoarse from screaming.

They could go hardly anyplace, not even church, without hounds following them in packs. At the Sunday movie matinees they attended, not a few hours after he accompanied her to Mass, they always sat in the darkest corner of the highest balcony, where the fewest people lingered, and in a row above everybody else. Even then they kissed so much and so loudly that there was always someone to snap at them. “Be quiet!” and “Where is your shame?” Once, during a Barbara Stanwyck film with Mexican actors overdubbing the lines (films with Spanish subtitles were more difficult for her to comprehend, but she generally got the drift of the dramatic formulas and, if anything, learned a little English along the way), Nestor, off in his own little world of passion, couldn’t restrain himself any longer. Slumped down, with her eyes set on the screen, Maria, while luxuriating in the theater’s aire condicionado, absently fondled Nestor through his trousers, and with that whatever remained of his sense of saintly behavior gave way. Just like that, with the fingers of one hand deep inside her dress, the priestly Nestor Castillo pulled his thing out with the other-she could hear its struggle against the fabric, its scraping against his zipper’s teeth-and there it stood, silhouetted against the luminous on-screen visage of Stanwyck. Asking María for her forgiveness, as he always did, Nestor further begged her please, in the name of heaven, just to kiss him there, if only that one time. But in the balcony of the Payret? Sighing and hearing cries of “puta” and much worse coming from the audience, she brought Nestor to climax, if only to watch the rest of the movie in peace.

Stupid, sinful, oh, what would Concha have thought? But she could not, for the life of her, get that músico out of her head. She felt him inside her for days after they had parted, and even years and years later, María, sitting around with her daughter watching television, sometimes flashed on the magnificence of his pene; longer than her forearm, thick as her wrist, it was a work of art, which both terrified her and made her smile. But was it love-did she ever feel such wonderful emotions? One thing María knew was that she liked being with Nestor: The reverence with which he looked at her, the way his sex went down in one moment and came back up the next, the ecstatic passage of his tongue lapping at her papaya, licking her until kingdom come-her body quivering and doubling over onto herself, her head shaking-she felt herself the object of his earthly worship. In the end, he was genteel and humble about the whole business, as if there was nothing special about him; and, best of all, he was careful in his treatment of María.

Chapter TWENTY

With María working at night, save for when she had afternoon rehearsals, she never knew when Nestor might rush over from the Explorers’ Club during his lunch hour, which was usually sometime after three, and call up into her window. At first, she didn’t mind seeing him waiting below, among the market stalls, and introducing him as her new novio to her vendor friends. They’d go for walks, sometimes sit in the cool and dusty interior of the Mother of Mercy church, or in the cathedral, holding hands and praying. Sometimes they dallied in the Parque Central or visited the Havana zoo. He never had much money in his pockets, didn’t even own an automobile, but still he bought her little things-ice cream cones from the popular Coppelia’s parlor, mainly, or they’d sip rum and Cokes-Cuba Libres-in a bar, eat cheap meals in waterside fritter joints. As they passed by, men always checked her out, and fiercely so, but he didn’t seem to notice, and if he did, he just wasn’t like Ignacio, who’d never put up with that kind of thing. Nestor, el pobre, was just too good-natured for that. People liked him-old ladies, looking down from their balconies, with fans in their hands, were always nodding approvingly at the very nice looking young fellow with the dazzling belleza by his side. He seemed to know every street musician-“Oye, Negro!” he’d call out to some fellow playing his tres in a placita, “How are you doing?” And when he’d walk over to say hello, he’d introduce María as “mi mujer,” which always made her blush. He always did so with utter pride and, perhaps, disbelief that he could find himself with so glorious a beauty. Just to look at her, he’d say, filled his head with wonderful melodies.

On the weekends, they’d go to the beach and, after a nice swim, find a room for hire by the hour, Nestor never exceeding the limits of what he could afford. (But how delicious those hours were!) Monday nights, when her club closed, they’d sometimes roam the back alleys of the slums, where he’d seek out some of the finest street musicians in Havana, in the midst of drum and horn descargas, jam sessions. Those musicians were something else, and it was a joy for María to watch Nestor, blaring away rapturously on his trumpet, while those old-style rumberos in the crowd, some of the best dancers she’d ever see in her life, filled the alley with motion. The males, bone thin, jaunty, and dressed entirely in white, turned themselves into love-besotted roosters-the rumba was a courtship dance after all. They’d jerk their heads in and out as if wanting to peck the air before them, and flail their elbows behind them, like imaginary wings, their legs jutting up and down, and their steps taking all kinds of turns and backwards struts as if to scratch the dust behind them. The women emulated the movements of love-hectored hens, who didn’t want to be bothered, backing off at one moment and yet, after another, coming forward, heads nipping at the air, hips swerving, then torturing the roosters with the fanning of their skirts, as if to give them their scent. They always ended up dancing as one, a rapturous embracing and twirling taking place; such displays always left beautiful María, standing in the crowd, breathless until, unable to take it, she’d cut loose and, slipping off her shoes, dance one hell of a rumba herself.

And sometimes, late at night, they’d linger by the Malecón, and she’d listen to Nestor, without a practical bone in his body, dreamily play his trumpet for the seagulls, ever so oblivious, as María thought years later, to the world that would eat him alive. He’d tell her that he loved her. They’d kiss, drive themselves into a frenzy, and feel desperate for each other. Yes, all that was so wonderful, but you know what? For all the things they did together, and despite her soft spot for musicians, they never really seemed to have much to talk about: maybe falling in love is just that way, she had thought in those days.

DURING ONE OF THEIR AFTERNOON STROLLS, ALONG THE PRADO, Nestor sat beside María on a bench and, under the shade of a laurel, took her gently by the hand.

“There’s something I want to say to you, María.” He was so timid he could barely bring himself to look into her eyes. “I…I…Nestor Castillo, want you to become my prometida.” And he reached into his pocket, producing a thin gold band. “My fiancée…and then my wife.”

He could barely breathe by then, she’d remember.

“Pero, Nestor.” She was touching his face. “Do you mean it?”

“Yes, with all my heart.”

“But why now, mi querido? Didn’t you tell me that you’re going to New York with your brother? What of that?”

He waved his hand in the air, as if being pestered by a bee.

“That is only a little bit true. It was true before I met you, María, but now, but now, I don’t know. My brother Cesar has got all these crazy ideas about New York, like it’s a paradise, where he thinks earning money will be easy, but the truth is, María, I really don’t want to leave mi país, mi Cuba. And”-he kissed her hand-“you are everything I’d ever want here.”

When María did not answer him, he went on. “We could go back east, to Oriente, to my family farm, to live there, away from all this. Or we could stay here in Havana. If I stay on at the Explorers’ Club, who knows what kind of job I might end up with there-maybe as a waiter. The boss likes me.”

That afternoon, María thought about everything Nestor had just said, every possible equation passing through her guajira mind. He had no real education, no reputation as a musician, and to live on a farm again was beyond her imaginings. She missed the simplicity of life in her valle, but not enough to return to the campo. That’s when a veil fell over her emotions, and María, a practical soul, could only think that with Nestor, for all his handsomeness and the magnificence of his soul and body, she’d end up sharing a poor man’s life.

And so, por fin, that afternoon, she told him, “Te amo, Nestor-please don’t forget that-but you’ve asked me so suddenly that I need time to gather myself before giving you an answer.”

Leaving him that day, she already knew.

STILL, SHE FELT TORMENTED ABOUT NESTOR, AND SOME PART OF her, the kindlier and less selfish María, wanted to stay with him. But hadn’t she already had enough sadness in her life? These were thoughts that came most strongly to her during one of the few nights they had actually spent sleeping side by side, in his friend’s solar, three in all. Nestor, after ravishing her, drifted off peacefully enough, María caressing his brow as if Nestor were an angel, until she too fell asleep. She was dreaming about seeing her sister, Teresita, in a field, picking flowers on a beautiful spring day, so happy that her sister seemed to be alive, the kind of dream that came to her as a pure joy, when Nestor awakened her, with yelps and cries. He sat up, his heart beating rapidly, his body trembling and covered in sweat, shadows, she would swear, swarming over his face. “What is it, Nestor?” she asked him, cradling him in her arms. “Tell me, Nestor.” He opened his eyes, looked away, as if ashamed of himself over such a display of fear, as any man could be, as if no real Cuban macho should ever tremble so in front of a woman. “It’s nothing,” he swore to her. “Nothing, te juro.”

But later that same night he awakened her again, and this time he told María about his dream, which always began as a pure memory: he was a boy again, of five, feverish and sick, on the brink of death, at his family’s farm out in Oriente. A priest stood over him, muttering some gibberish in Latin and rubbing holy oil upon his forehead; his mamá, una santa, by his bedside, wept, her face ravaged by grief; from the yard he could hear his papi sawing wood, hammering nails, for his coffin. Outside, his older brother Cesar, in his stately adolescence, peered in from a window that faced his bed, smiling sadly. All those details, Nestor told María, were true. “You see, I was supposed to die, but I didn’t.” Of course, he was thankful for that, otherwise he would never have had the glorious pleasure of knowing her, of tasting her lips, of drowning in her body… Still, he told her about other dreams. He’d find himself in a narrow and lightless tunnel, so confining that he could barely move, let alone breathe, and he would swear that if he as much swallowed a single gasp of air, he would die.

That’s when he told María that he just didn’t feel long for this world.

“I know it doesn’t make sense, María, but since I cheated death as a boy, I sometimes think that it’s following me, that something terrible is in the room and it’s only a matter of time and that…” His chest was heaving, and he could barely catch his breath, his brow covered with sweat. “…if I just breathe I’ll be swallowing poison and that poison is death-that’s what wakes me up.”

She covered his mouth with her hand, her naked body pressed against him.

“Please Nestor,” she told him, “stop thinking about such things, or you’ll make yourself sick.”

But he went on and on, about the purgatorial sufferings of his past. She wanted to take care of him then, el pobre, as she’d always wanted to take care of her sister and her papito. But at the same time, as much as she felt for Nestor, she had to wonder, Who will take care of me?

Chapter TWENTY-ONE

One Sunday night she finally had the honor of meeting Cesar Castillo in one of those beachside dance bars in Marianao, a dingy, smoky, spilled-beer-and-lard-fried-fish-smelling place called El Oriente, its patrons, mostly black folks, tearing it up with rumbas. When she’d walked in, Nestor and his brother, in their linen slacks and guayaberas, were standing side by side on a narrow plywood stage with some five other musicians, playing, amongst them, double bass, a guitar, a tres, and several drums, in addition to Nestor’s trumpet. If María had a puzzled expression on her face as she made her way through the crowd, the men whistling and sucking air through their teeth at the sight of her in a juicily tight pair of watermelon pink slacks and matching blouse, it was because she had spent most of that very afternoon with Ignacio, her former man.

Just how did this happen?

(“Bueno, it was just one of those things,” María would later think.)

He had been driving through downtown Havana in his white Chevrolet when he saw María, ever unmistakable, strolling along Neptuno on her way back from church. Slowing up, he beeped at her, and wouldn’t you know it, Ignacio, one of those hard Cuban fellows willing to forgive and forget his own faults and transgressions, couldn’t have been more friendly or charming, asking María if she wanted a lift anywhere. She didn’t, but she got in beside him anyway, feeling a nostalgia-not for his abuses or even his money, but for his strength, as well as their “old times.”

In fact, just to see Ignacio again had somehow made her feel happy.

That Sunday morning was gloriously defined by a perfect sky, the ocean looking pristine, and breezes, smelling cleanly of both salt and tropic spices, blowing languidly in. In fact, it was so nice a day that Ignacio suggested they take a drive to the beaches east of the city. At first María told him she wasn’t interested, after all, she had una cita later in the evening-to finally see Nestor and his brother performing-but he promised they’d be away only a few hours.

Soon enough they were driving along the coast, the way they sometimes used to, and as they passed the marshes and mangrove swamps by the sea and came to an overlook, the gulf and sky brilliant before them, Ignacio, pulling over, heart in hand, made his confessions. Penitent, regretful, he told María that things between himself and the infamous Lola Sánchez were over.

“María, I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, “but whenever me and that woman were together, I was really thinking about you.” As for the way he had treated her the last time they’d been together, he claimed that the pressures of business and too much drinking had made his temper get out of hand. That’s why he had gone away from Havana for a time-to Miami and San Juan, where he had come to realize how much he missed her, “his little guajira.” And so he swore that he was a changed man and wouldn’t drink and treat her badly, if only she would come back to him.

“Because I want to be completely honest with you, María,” he told her, “I’m going to tell you everything.” It came down to this: “For years, I’ve made my living dishonestly… There’s not a warehouse in the harbor that I haven’t broken into with my men, or a ship along the Ward Line and E & O wharves where I haven’t found my merchandise. Or a policeman that I haven’t taken care of,” he went on and rubbed one of his medallions. “But I’m giving all that up, María. Not out of any guilt-I’ve always offered all kinds of goods for the people at very affordable prices-there’s no shame in that, is there? God has obviously protected me… Maybe he’s even blessed me, for reasons that only he knows… Along the way I’ve saved more than enough money, María, to open a legitimate negocio…And so I have my plans. There’s a commercial space over on Galiano that I’m going to rent, and I will fill it with the finest clothing from Europe and America. You, of course, can be a model in the photographs that I will put in that window.”

She looked at him, smiling a little sadly.

“Why clothing? you are wondering,” he said, driving on and turning the wheel of bright red leather. “Because Havana is booming these days, packed with tourists who have money in their pockets; the same ones who fill the clubs and brothels have wives they’ll have to please. It’ll be a fancy place. I’m planning to put a little bar in the back-so that my customers can have some drinks while they shop-and I think I’ll put in a lipstick counter too. And that’s just the beginning.” He sounded a little crazy, but at least he wasn’t pushing or slapping her around like he used to. “But above all, María, I want you to understand that I’m putting my life in proper order, and I want you to be a part of that order, como mi mujer- as my woman-if you will have me.” He placed his hand over his heart. “I swear I’m telling you the truth.”

María, in those moments, didn’t know what to think. For all those months with Nestor, Ignacio had continued to pay her rent-but why? And while she had enjoyed Nestor’s company, she had always wondered why Ignacio had not once contacted her at the club.

“ Ignacio, I have someone, un joven, close to my own age,” she finally told him. “He cares for me.”

“Oh, the trumpet player, yes?” He hardly blinked. “His name is Nestor Castillo, and he’s a two-bit musician who works in some nothing job as a lackey busboy at the Explorers’ Club near the Capitolio, doesn’t he? Lives with a relative in a flat off Solares Street near the harbor, number twenty-four, in fact. He leaves for his job about ten in the morning, and has his lunch break about three when he comes to see you, two or three times a week. Am I correct?”

“Ignacio, but how do you know?”

“I just know,” he said, María’s stomach going into knots. Then, before she could say a word, he added, “Mi vida, I wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t think that you deserved better.” Then, “What you do with yourself and some nobody, who will give you nothing in life, is your own business. And so I’ll leave that decision to you and hope that you will come to your senses.”

That’s when Ignacio took out a roll of twenty-dollar bills, thick as Nestor’s pinga, and, unfurling a few, dropped them onto María’s lap. “For your papito,” he told her. Then he pulled her close and gave her a nice kiss on her neck, and because she felt such gratitude that Ignacio hadn’t yelled or insulted her, and it was such a fine day, María didn’t mind when he undid the white felt buttons of her blue church dress, the very one he’d bought for her at El Fin de Siglo, and began to fondle, then suckle her breasts. “Ay, María,” he told her, “if you only knew how much I’ve missed you.” She should have known better, but when he released the buckle of his belt, María, pulling back her hair, with resignation and detachment, took care of Ignacio the way she used to-why, she didn’t know.

“If you give me another chance, María,” he told her afterwards, “I promise that I will make you happy.”

Altogether, it was as if Ignacio had stepped out of a bolero about the possible ruination of another’s love.

That night, as she crossed the crowded dance floor to the bar, Nestor spotted María from the stage, his smile shooting across the room. By then several men had asked María to dance, and though she turned the first few away, this lanky negrito, who moved like a skulking burglar, pulled her out onto the floor, where, without even wanting to, she found herself putting on a show. That’s when Nestor, up on the little stage, pointed her out to his brother, and Cesar, scraping a güiro and in the midst of a few dance steps himself, seeing her for the first time, nodded wildly in approval. “So that’s your darling!”

From that moment on, Cesar and Nestor decided to put on a hell of a performance, the brothers harmonizing during the choruses, and then Cesar stepping back and letting Nestor play his solos. They were a sight to see-each possessing deep-set and soulful, slightly melancholy eyes, the chiseled cheekbones, the cleft chins, the sensitive, well-formed mouths-two buenmosos, lady-killers-but with a difference. Whereas Nestor had a pristine handsomeness about him, an innocence and the pained expression of a saint, and moved modestly onstage, Cesar seemed to revel in a kind of sly majesty-his hair brilliantined to death, so that it crested like an ocean wave, his brow covered with sweat, a pencil-thin mustache in the manner of Gilbert Roland or Xavier Cugat (the fashion of the times) punctuating a visage that was anything but sincere-despite the way he poured his heart into his songs, whether guaguancós, boleros, or rumba-tumbaos.

And María? She’d seen his type before, swaggering cocks of the walk, from guajiro to government functionary, who considered themselves God’s gifts to womankind, the sorts of men she encountered every day of her life, and did her best to avoid. But there Cesar stood, hamming it up on that little stage, while Nestor, occupied with the nuances of his mellifluous scales and melodies, could have not been more deferential, ever so happily allowing his brother the leading role, the way, María imagined, he did in life.

They performed a few of their own compositions; one of them was a lark of a song, no doubt written by Cesar, always at the edge of the stage between numbers sweet-talking any of the unattached women around. It was called “I Forgot It Was My Wedding Day!” and Nestor, strumming a guitar, launched into a romantic bolero that she was fairly certain he had written about her, even if he did not use her name. That song’s title was a bit over her head; Nestor introduced it as “¿Si la vida es sueño, qué es el amor?” Or, “If Life Is a Dream, Then What Is Love?” The heart of the tune was about how some fellow with nothing particularly special going on in his life meets a woman who delights him so much that he is convinced he must be dreaming, or else so much in love he can’t help but wonder if he is losing his common sense.

“Puede ser,” the last lines went, “este sueño es mi destino.”

“Could be that my dream is also my destiny.”

“To love that which I cannot really see.”

“A amar lo que no puedo ver.”

By the time the brothers had gotten to that particular composition, sometime past ten, any sad, tear-jerking bolero-the music of romantic lives-would have pleased the crowd, who, in any case, would have slow-danced to it all night long. Up onstage, Nestor was so sincere in his sentiments that by the last verses of that song he was wiping his eyes and brow with a handkerchief. His expression seemed haunted, a darkness passing over his face.

They’d been onstage for two hours straight; now, leaving the jukebox to take over, the musicians headed to a table in the back. Joining them, María, somewhat shocked by Ignacio’s sudden reappearance in her life, could not quite look Nestor in the eyes. But she greeted him with a kiss while Cesar, standing by his brother’s side and checking her out with X-ray vision, smiled and waited for the introduction.

“So you’re María?” then “Holy cow, Brother!” Cesar cried out, slapping Nestor’s back. “Does she have a sister?” (Oh, but how María wished she had.) Then he sat right down next to her, saying, “So you are the one, huh?” And though Cesar was the sort who would have done anything to get her into bed if it weren’t for the fact that she was with his brother, he behaved kindly towards her, as if he were her uncle, introducing the other musicians and making sure that she had anything she wanted to eat or drink. Then, while Nestor went off to the pestilential men’s room, Cesar, sticking little knives in María’s back, went on and on about how he had never seen his little brother so contented.

“Because you see, María, mi hermanito is a little too serious about life sometimes, and because of that he feels for all the sufrimiento in the world-which, as you know, there’s plenty of it and always will be.” His eyes were filled with nothing but pure appreciation. “But you have made him as happy as a little bird. I’ve never heard Nestor whistling so much in my life. You’ve turned him into a new man, and while there’s still a lot of sadness in his heart-some tipos are just that way, and Nestor’s one of them-he’s now filled with more light, and if I may say so, mi belleza, that light has a name, and it’s yours: María.”

Oh, my lord, he was smooth.

Then he looked at her with the same expression that poor children get when they stare at people eating in fancy cafés. “I don’t know how you feel about my brother, but I will tell you this,” he said, pointing his finger at her, “be good to him, because that brother of mine is everything to me. Everything.”

As María sat back, Cesar, noting her air of distraction, changed the subject: “So, are you enjoying the music?”

“Oh yes,” she said, sincerely.

“Well, this group is something we put together just for tonight, this bar’s owner is an old friend-he comes from Holguín after all-but, even if it’s not a fancy place, you should know that we aren’t slackers. We’ve sat in and performed with some of the best-known bands in Havana, like the Melody Boys! But I’ve got my own ideas for us.” And he told her about the kinds of ambitions that left her feeling sad for that poor lost soul’s dreams. Sooner or later, he believed, they were going to make their mark in Havana, a city already overrun with thousands of first-rate singers and musicians, where music hummed through the walls like water through pipes.

“And if not in Havana,” he added, “then somewhere else!”

Of course, she already knew where that other place might be: New York City. Nestor, with a forlornness that was touching, had not so long before told her, while speaking about Cesar’s ambitions, “If we ever do leave Cuba, María, I want you to accompany me. Because if you don’t, I don’t think I’ll ever go.”

Even then María knew that she never would. It was hard enough to have left the campo for Havana, but to leave Cuba was the last thing to enter her mind. She kept thinking about Nestor, however: if only he were a different sort-the sort to make her feel that she wouldn’t end up living like a pauper.

Later, when Nestor had returned, Cesar ordered more drinks and, downing his rum with one swallow, slapped Nestor’s shoulder. “Brother, why don’t you take the rest of the night off? There are plenty of musicians around here to fill in for you.” Then he winked at Nestor, traipsed off rather swaggeringly, and went back onstage.

Thereafter commenced their usual problems; María, alone with Nestor, really didn’t have much to say to him. Not that she had much to say to anyone in those days, but with Nestor silence was more the rule, except when he would pull out his notebook and recite some of his newly composed verses, which she admittedly liked, despite the way they confounded her. In fact, sometimes at night, when she’d come home from the club, her feet blistered, and she had the peace of mind to think about her week’s lessons with Lázaro, María found herself daring to think in verse herself. If only she could write them down…What those verses tended towards surprised her-her holy trinity: God, love, and death-even if they resided mainly inside her head, but she owed them to Nestor’s inspiration.

With the bar’s lights shining on the stage, Cesar Castillo said a few words into a pitifully sad, often muffled microphone-they had borrowed it from someone’s tape recorder and plugged it into a little RCA amplifier. Then he launched, for Nestor and María’s sake, into “Juventud” by Ernesto Lecuona, an old bolero about how youth is but a fleeting thing, which makes everyone, no matter his or her age, entangle in a tight embrace. Taking María by the hand, Nestor led her out onto the floor. She’d laugh (and curse) the fact one day, but it didn’t take more than the touch of her body against his to excite him-excite them both. With Nestor leaning his handsome face against hers, whispering endearments, like clockwork, from deep inside his trousers rose, as surely as Christ, that which jostled her thighs in the darkness and kissed her belly button through the fabric. (“Ay, pero María, María,” he kept whispering.)

The sensation brought to mind the first verse she had ever composed in secret but did not know how to write down.

Pedazos de bambú tiesos…

Fragmentos de la cruz

Durísimos y llenitos de jugos dulces

Y sangres sagradas

Vosotros queman dentro mis interiores-

(Hard pieces of bamboo,

Fragments of the Cross,

Full of sweet juices and

Sacred blood…

You go burning inside of me…)

AFTERWARDS, STEALING AWAY, THEY SAT BY THE WATERSIDE, surrounded by an aureole of gnats, and as the moon, brilliant as God, looked down on them, Nestor told her about two new songs he had written: “One is called ‘Danzón de los negros,’ the other ‘Perla de mi corazón,’ which is really about you María…” As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he sang one of its lines: “Our love is a weeping ocean, whose tears become the loveliest of jewels.”

“I haven’t gotten it all worked out, María, but I know I will, in the same way I know that we are destined to be together.” Happily he looked up at the sky. “That my brother Cesar likes you very much is really wonderful, María.” Then: “Don’t you know I can’t wait for the day when we will be a family?” With that, taking hold of María’s hand, he swore that he would do anything for her and broached the question he had been asking her for months each time they met: “María, have you considered your answer? Will you become my wife?”

She sighed, looked away, and as the lyrics to a song, a chorus part that went “Y lo aprendí!”-“And I found out!”-came from the club, María, tears in her eyes, told him, “Nestor, please forgive me, but I can’t, my love.”

“But why?” His face was contorted with anguish.

“Nestor, I just don’t want to be a poor woman all my life.”

“And if I were to make something of myself?”

“Oh, but hombre, you dream too much.”

And then, in the most kindly way, she kissed Nestor on his lips. “Forgive me, amor,” she asked him again, his head bowed, eyes filled with disbelief, on that night, long ago, by the sea.

Chapter TWENTY-TWO

Oh, but it wasn’t easy; she had grown fond of that músico. Out of pity, for every time she saw him, he seemed so forlorn, María continued to take Nestor to her bed, and, swearing to herself that it would be their last romp, each time they made love she gave herself to him as if there would be no tomorrow. Along the way, his creative side penetrated María almost as deeply as did his other parts.

In her moments alone, at the club or in her solar or while just finding some quiet spot in el Parque Central (well, for María there was really no such place in public, as she always attracted men to her), his words flowed into her head:

Bésame de nuevo, mi amor

Kiss me again, my love

Aquí, y allá.

Here and over there.

Déjame con el calor de tu lengua

Leave me the heat of your tongue

Cubriendo mi piel.

Covering my skin.

Dame unos besitos

Give me kisses

Hasta no suspiro más

Until I won’t be able to breathe anymore

Y el sabor de tu leche, dulce y salada,

And the taste of your milk, so salted and sweet,

Me manda al cielo

Sends me to paradise

Pero contigo solamente

But only with you

Durante nuestro vuelo hasta el sol.

During our flight to the sun.

No habrá nadie más.

There will be no one else.

Still, it wasn’t enough.

And in the meantime, Ignacio had started to look after her again.

THOUGH SHE HAD REMAINED TORN ABOUT NESTOR, IT ALL CAME down to Ignacio’s automobile. One afternoon, a camionero, a truck driver, in from Pinar del Río, arrived at her solar with noticias malas-bad news-from that horrid woman Olivia, the only way she ever heard from her family in those days. Sweating and half out of breath, this truck driver was practically in tears, for he knew her papito from that crossroads place where he performed sometimes. “Tu papá no está bien”-“He isn’t well,” he told her. What had happened? During a sudden lightning storm a few days before, the horse her papito had been riding across a field had stumbled into a ditch, and he was thrown headfirst against a tree, so many of his bones and internal organs punctured or broken that it was likely he would die. Receiving that sad information on a Friday, just before she was to go into rehearsals for a new show, what else could María do but seek out Ignacio, who had an automobile, and beg him to drive her out to see her papito before it would be too late?

Ignacio, for his part, had his own plans, but, of course, when María called him later from the Nocturne, he dropped everything, and by eleven the next morning, he had picked María up for their drive into the countryside, hours away from the city. When they arrived at her beloved valle, the forests and fields were damp from rain, and as María, trudging through the mud, rushed to his bedside, her papito seemed, indeed, to be dying. A doctor from town had been attending to him. Stretched out on a cot and wrapped up with bandages, her poor guajiro papito could barely breathe. His internal organs too damaged to repair, he had fallen into the delirium of a fever. She did not leave his side that entire day, or the next; out of habit, she prayed over him, prayed until he finally heard her voice and opened his eyes. Smiling, as Manolo took hold of her hand and said, “Ay, María, por favor pórtate bien,” and then, “Y ya está”-“Now here it is,” all María could think was this: Once he’s gone, everyone I have ever loved will have died.

Then, while birds were chirping away outside the bohío, he drifted off into a sleep from which he would never awaken.

She was nineteen years old.

He’d passed away at ten in the morning, and, looking back, what she would be most grateful for was how Ignacio Fuentes had kept his head about the whole business. It was Ignacio who went to San Jacinto that same day to arrange for a proper funeral, Ignacio who paid for the coffin and organized the locals for the burial processional to the local campo santo, that cemetery of soon to be forgotten souls; Ignacio who had paid for a funeral feast; Ignacio who had been a pillar of strength for María. And for that alone María felt a sincere gratitude toward him, no matter his faults, and swore that, whatever her desires for that músico, she would put Nestor Castillo from her mind.

What would it matter? Her life had become a kind of a dancer’s purgatory by then anyway.

Chapter TWENTY-THREE

And Nestor? Unable to accept María’s decision, he sent her notes nearly daily. Naturally they piled up beside her bed, unread, and when he turned up at her solar, whatever hour of the day, she was rarely at home. (By then, María had started to spend more and more time with Ignacio at a house he had bought just outside Havana, along the sea.) At her shows, Nestor became such a distraction that María had to ask Eliseo, the club bouncer, to turn him away at the door, and when she left through the backstage exit at four in the morning, María, head covered by a veil, came to dread the inevitable moment when she encountered Nestor on the street. He’d beg her to just sit with him for a few moments, to hear him out-there were so many things he had to tell her-but she couldn’t because, deep down, she knew what it would lead to. It got to the point that Ignacio himself had to wait for her; failing that, he’d send along one or two of his men to accompany her.

Bodyguards.

By then, María, looking the other way, had come to accept the notion that Ignacio, as her fellow dancers had gossiped all along, happened to be a gangster. It made no difference to her; he had to earn a living after all, and since when had life been good to that man in the first place? Still, she drew lines. Once when Nestor started to get out of hand and Ignacio, as tenderly as possible, suggested that one or two of his colleagues have a “serious talk with the músico,” María, not so entirely cold, told him: “Hurt that joven, and I will never let you touch me again.” So they put up with a lot, especially at night, when Nestor followed behind her and played his trumpet, not dreaming melodies but mocking horse race reveilles. And sometimes, having lost his mind, his voice echoing in the arcades, he’d scream that she was nothing more than some impotent’s whore! All this Ignacio, with enormous patience, ignored; for María, however, it became too much, and she went through days when she wished that Nestor had never come into her life at all.

For months, Nestor continued to sweetly torment her (no, it wasn’t easy) until there came the day when Ignacio, a bookish and, therefore, crafty fellow, seized upon a certain idea. From conversations with María, he had learned a central fact about the brothers’ lives: that the older and vainer one, Cesar Castillo, had ambitions about going to New York, a city Ignacio knew well, having his own cousins there as well as friends in the nightclub and appliance businesses. So why wouldn’t Ignacio have several of his colleagues, surveying the streets in their dark Oldsmobile, bring Cesar down to his office in the harbor, which was just a cluttered and stuffy windowless room off a loading dock, to discuss certain possibilities, the main one being that Ignacio, in his open-minded benevolence and wishing only the best for María, would pay Cesar five hundred dollars to get the hell out of Havana with his brother.

And not just out of Havana, but to a place they wanted to go to anyway: New York. What happened? As Ignacio, flavoring the tip of a cigar in a gimlet of Carlos V brandy, told María some days later: “Once I made the offer, that pretty boy macho, who had walked in wanting to knock my block off, became very friendly and grateful. We got a little drunk together, and, in fact, by the time he left, if we hadn’t hated each other so much in the first place, we might have ended up good friends.”

Nestor, however, never really wanted to leave and became so mournful about losing María that Cesar was sorely tempted to make the journey without him. But he dragged Nestor along, and his brother, that poor lost soul (or, as María would put it one day, the darling sweet pobrecito who deserved every bit of her love) stepped onto a Pan American Clipper to Miami only after being fortified by a night in the whorehouses, a quart of añejo rum, and the assurance that Cesar would beat him to death if he didn’t.

In the meantime, as much as she had felt relieved to hear about Nestor’s departure, María, sitting with Ignacio in an outdoor café along the Prado, could barely wait for the moment when she might be alone again. Christ forgive her, Nestor was the one she thought about now when touching herself, her memories of his fevered masculinity staying with her no matter how cruelly she had treated him.

ON THEIR LAST AFTERNOON TOGETHER IN HAVANA, SPENT IN A dingy hotel room by the harbor, Nestor, sipping rum from a pint bottle, presented her with gifts. Stretched out on that bed, he had reached over to the end table for a box, his body damp with sweat.

“I have some things for you, María,” he told her.

The first was a thin necklace, of fading gold, off which hung a little tarnished silver crucifix, the weight of a peseta.

“It’s the same one I wore as a child, when I thought I was going to die. I feel it should be yours,” he told her. “Wear it for me.”

Gratefully, she put that crucifix and chain around her neck, and with that Nestor began fondling her. But no, she stopped him, pulling his hands away from her. “No puedo,” she said. “I can’t.” But what could she do that afternoon when, happy as a child, he got up and retrieved an envelope from his trousers pocket; it contained a dozen black-and-white photographs, the sort with serrated edges that had been taken here and there in Havana, by friends or passersby. Nestor and María posed by a table, surrounded by flowers in the back garden of a café called Ofelia’s, Nestor and María holding hands in front of the marquee of the America movie house, after taking in a Humphrey Bogart double feature, a look of hopefulness and affection on each of their faces. She was truly touched, almost felt like bursting into tears over the decision she had already made but wasn’t too good at carrying out.

“Son bonitos”-“They’re pretty,” she told him.

“But look at these. Remember the playa at Cojímar?”

They were fine photographs of them frolicking in the waves a few months before, the sorts one would always cherish, even if they were a little blurred: Nestor, eternally handsome with his penetrating gaze, and beautiful María in her clinging bathing suit rising out of the sea like a goddess.

“You see how happy we are, María? How much we are in love!”

“Oh, Nestor,” she said to him. “Why are you so sentimental?”

“I just want to make you happy,” he said, pulling her close. “There are so many things I want to do for you!”

This time, when the kisses started up again, she didn’t resist-it was much easier to go along with that form of speaking than to say any actual words, especially when hers would only be so hurtful. Soon enough that crucifix, dangling from her neck, was pinching Nestor’s thing as he, straddling María with his knees, availed himself of her breasts’ plumpness. Oh, but what that crucifix witnessed! Perhaps because she thought that it might be their last time together, she dallied longer than usual, taking care of the man until she was blissfully sore in her deepest parts, until the harbor cannons began their 8 p.m. booming and night began to fall over the sad city of Havana. What was the last thing he told her?

“María, don’t you know, I’d die without you.”

THAT LAST AFTERNOON WAS HARD ENOUGH TO RECALL; BUT WHAT was harder came down to Maria’s memories of tasting every bit of him, and thinking that Nestor’s body, even his big pinga, was a part of her own. It was intoxicating: as much as she wanted to forget him, as she’d walk through the streets of Havana, everything she laid her eyes upon, even if only vaguely phallic, reminded her of Nestor. She could not put on a pair of soft slippers without recalling the joy with which she would unfurl, slowly and sweetly, a condom over him and the time it took, or glance at a quart bottle of milk or a sweating, tall Hatuey beer with its frosty exhalations and not think of his sweat, his passion, his gushing sperm.