Beautiful María of My Soul

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

In the summer of 1953, some four years after her papito had passed from this world and Nestor Castillo and his brother had commenced a new life in America, María turned around to find that certain things were going on in Cuba that she hadn’t noticed before. Not that she was unusual among her fellow dancers at the Lantern Cabaret, just off San Miguel, where María worked in those days-hardly any of them cared about anything other than pulling in good crowds nightly and keeping their jobs. But when certain events took place and military personnel began patrolling the streets of Havana at night, and foot traffic into the club fell off for a time, even those dancers became aware that an insurrection had broken out. According to the newspaper and radio reports of the day, it came down to the ire and moral indignation of one fellow, whose name María first heard while at the club: Fidel Castro.

(Static) The government of the Republic of Cuba announces the capture of one…(static)…in the aftermath of a failed attack against the forces of our beloved president Fulgencio Batista…(static)…the rebellious corpses were laid out side by side in the courtyard of the Moncada Bar racks, near Santiago, and their leader, one Fidel Castro Ruz…(static)…led away in chains, to await a charge of treason…

She hadn’t made much of that name, Fidel Castro, at the time, or of such events, which, in any case, hardly stirred much of an opinion, one way or the other, in the corridors and dressing rooms backstage.

In fact, the only person of María’s acquaintance who even seemed to take special notice of politics was her faithful teacher Lázaro, whom María still visited at least twice weekly. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be, when all she had to do was step down a few flights to find him sitting near the bookseller’s stall. She and Ignacio had since moved into a nice sunny apartment in a new modern high-rise in Vedado overlooking the sea, and he’d even opened that clothing store along Galiano, a shopping street in Central Havana, an enterprise that had not turned out the way he had envisioned. Still dancing almost nightly, María sometimes worked there in the afternoons, looking breathtakingly exotic and photogenic by the dress racks, before heading off to the club. Occasionally, she took off early to see her friend Lázaro, the one who, in those years, had taught her so much.

As a matter of course, he’d have María read aloud from books and magazines, among them Bohemia, a national weekly, which had published letters from Castro and articles about the nobility of his cause. “Tú verás,” he’d say, tapping a sepia page showing Castro’s photograph. “Sooner or later someone will come along who’s not a crook. This young one, he’ll probably rot in prison for the rest of his life, but there’ll be others. If God is good to me, I will live to see the day.”

She’d nod, she’d smile. Out in her valle, in Pinar del Río, she hadn’t learned much about anything, except for the inevitability of death, and of music and dancing. Even the Second World War had been this distant calamity, which she’d had glimpses of in newsreels at the Chaplin, and what she had known of the goings-on in Havana, of that succession of presidents who came and went as she grew up, amounted to a few names, which those guajiros hardly mentioned. But if she knew anything about Cuban history in those days, she owed that to Lázaro. He’d seen it all. From the 1880s, when he was a boy and the Cuban rebels, fighting for independence, waged pitched battles with the Spaniards in the countryside, to when the Americans first occupied Havana at the turn of the century, the establishment of the Cuban republic in 1902, and life under a succession of presidents, the worst of them, in his youth, having been one Gerardo Machado, in the 1920s, who had been nicknamed a “second Nero” for his suspension of civil liberties, his cruelties, and the ostentation of his greed. And Cuba ’s latest president, Batista, the one whom Castro, a lawyer, opposed? That previous March, of 1952, Batista had staged a military coup to gain his office, a violation of the constitution that had enraged a generation of idealists and muckrakers, among them that fellow Castro. And yet, she felt untouched by any of this; if Batista happened to be particularly corrupt, as rumor had it, she couldn’t really care less. As far as she was concerned, her life would unfold in the same way no matter who happened to be in power. At heart, beautiful María’s stance came down to a shrug that said, “Really, Lázaro, what does any of that matter to me?”

Her attitude always baffled Lázaro, who, knowing about María’s guajira past, and the ignorance and poverty that came with it, forgave her anyway. Besides, he’d seen his beautiful protégée’s demeanor changing before his very eyes. While in the midst of their lessons during those terrible months after her papito’s death, just the thought of his loss brought her quickly to tears. “There, there, mi vida, this pain will soon pass,” Lázaro would tell her, and she would hope that it would be so. Yet, instead of that experience making María a little sweeter and more compassionate about life, the way it sometimes happened with people; instead of becoming more softhearted, María seemed to have gone in the opposite direction, her personality taking on a harsher edge, what María would describe to her daughter, years in the future, in a single sentence: “Me puso muy, muy durita”-“I became harder skinned.”

It was as if María had walked into a room as a naïve nineteen-year-old beauty in need of some seasoning and education in one moment and, five minutes later, left through another door, not as the hopeful child, unrefined as an Ozark hillbilly, she had essentially been but as a woman aged, not in looks but in temperament, way beyond her years. By 1953, the graceful and ever so beautiful María had developed such a haughty and distanced manner around people that even Lázaro, who used to eat greasy chorizo sandwiches in front of her with abandon, now found that she had taken to looking at him disapprovingly the moment any of those delicious amber-red pork juices started dripping through their newspaper wrappings and down his chin. And heaven forbid if he smiled and actually wiped his mouth with his wrist (Lázaro, with his raspy voice always laughing and chortling, “My, my, but what’s better than this!”), because then María, without intending to seem so severe, frowned, as if Lázaro were reminding her just where she had come from: the campo. Even if she’d once chewed her food like a goat, and had the manners of a field hand, loving to eat things with her fingers, and hadn’t known what a flush toilet was until an afternoon in 1938, when she and her younger sister, Teresita-ay, la pobre- had seen their first show at the Chaplin movie house in San Jacinto (how many times they pulled on that overhead chain and jumped up and down at the sight of the vanishing waters!), she now comported herself with so much caution and formality that Lázaro hardly recognized her as the reticent girl he had known.

Or to put it differently: what was sweetest about María had been pulled so deeply into herself that she now seemed as haughty as she was beautiful. Still, Lázaro looked forward to their lessons and took pride in the way that their afternoons of study had paid off. María could read now, but slowly, and she had filled her notebooks with countless words that she had more or less memorized. And her handwriting, ever so careful, had been honed by the hours and hours she’d spent backstage between shows scribbling down rows of the alphabet’s letters, the way schoolchildren did. Practice had gotten María to the point where she could write her name out with such elegant flourishes that it would have been hard for anyone to imagine that she’d come from a family whose father signed his name with a crudely rendered X, or that for years María had only pretended she could read signs while walking along the streets. As they’d sit in their usual spot, near the bookseller’s stall, Lázaro had occasionally taken special joy in advising María what school grade she had graduated into. By the time Nestor had left for America, she had passed through to the second grade; a few years later, in 1951, she had slipped into secondary school, and now, in the days of Batista’s presidency, she could read and write like a fourteen-year-old with certain bad habits-which is to say, she got some things right and some things wrong, spelling never being one of her strengths. Nevertheless, she’d reached a point where she really didn’t need Lázaro any longer, and what more did he have to teach her?

Still, despite dressing as well as the El Encanto window mannequins (Ignacio wanted her always to look her best) and carrying herself as if she were the dueña of Havana, María loved returning to that market street and going from stall to stall to say hello to the merchants, who always joked about this fine uppity lady’s resemblance to someone they once knew. It always pleased her to sort through the bookseller’s selections. She had a weakness for romance novels by a certain Almacita Alvarez from Spain -and just recognizing the titles: Bitter Love, Blood and Passion, Taught to Deceive-filled her with pride. She also liked any books about spiritualism, for she often dreamed about her dead family and believed there had to be a way of contacting them. Though those books rarely cost more than eight or ten cents apiece, or the price of a trolley or bus ride, customers still haggled with the vendor, but never María, who believed each tome invaluable, whatever its tattered condition.

In fact, while María had kept working as a dancer, she didn’t have too many expenses to worry about. Because she was Ignacio Fuentes’s “woman,” her rent and clothing were taken care of, but even if he had turned out to be a stingy man, she would have had sources of income beyond her twenty pesos a week as a dancer. Having caught the eye of more than one art director or advertising executive during her performances, María had started getting jobs as a model, posing beside kitchen appliances, soaking in bubble baths, leaning against the dimpled hood of a shiny Oldsmobile, usually in either a movie starlet’s glistening gown or a tight bathing suit. In advertisements for Polar beer, her face adorned many a poster here and there in the city, and because the company also produced promotional coasters and waiters’ trays, her mysterious and alluring expression was to be found peering up from the half-moon bottoms of frothy drinks and rum glasses at strangers in cafés and bars everywhere. If beautiful María had turned heads before just because of the way her nalgitas swayed inside her dress, and stopped traffic with her unmistakable looks, she now attracted attention for having become so familiar to the general public. She’d even appeared in a rum ad on a television show, broadcast from the CMQ building, but had disliked the sweltering lights, the way they made her diaphragm sweat under the tight binding of her dress, and the unearthly feeling that came from wearing what felt like pounds of makeup on her face. (“Una miseria,” she called that.)

In time, with more money than she needed, María put most of her wages into a savings account at a Chase National Bank on Brasil, her blue passbook something she liked to take out from under her mattress to “read” as if it were a novel. Never forgetting how her own papi never earned very much, she gave a few coins to nearly every beggar she encountered, and when she bumped into her friend El Caballero de París, she’d buy him lunch and a few glasses of first-class rum, sometimes even a Churchill cigar. When it came to Lázaro, who never wanted more payment than a sandwich or two, as well as a radiant smile, María began insisting that he accept a few dollars from her for those lessons.

Having taken to calling Lázaro mi maestro, a title that always made him wince with happiness as he’d spent most of his life as a bootblack, and then a Havana street sweeper, the brunt of that income derived from the largesse of local merchants along Obispo and O’Reilly streets-María had begun to look upon him with a fondness that made her fear for his well-being. He wasn’t her papito, but she had grown attached enough to his laughter and kindly manner that, as surely as the sun began baking the rooftops of Havana in the mornings, she came to believe that he would go the way of everyone she had ever loved. It was the kind of thought that lingered in the back of María’s mind each time he seemed a little tired or had trouble hoisting himself up from those steps, and especially so as he once tried to get to his feet and this old, lanky negrito nearly fell backwards into the hallway’s shadows from whence he had come. (Those were Havana shadows, the temperature cooling with every foot of hallway you stepped into, like entering the recesses of a church baptistery, a scent of ashes, frying fish, and flowers, somehow musty, deepening.)

That was the only time María, accompanying Lázaro home, saw where he lived-inside an inner courtyard, under an awning set out over what must have been some old stone trough from when horses were kept in the alleys, all his possessions, mainly books and a mat, with only a single chair crammed into what amounted to a hole in the wall, his only luxury a solitary lightbulb, which hung off a bent wire, his toilet situated behind a rotted door that led into the back of a store. But did he complain? No; and when she, out of a generous impulse and knowing that la Señora Matilda would have looked after him, offered to put him up in la Cucaracha, he refused. “I’m just used to it here, that’s all,” he told her. “And at my age, I’m waiting for that guagua that goes to where it goes, anyway.”

Pero, hombre, she thought. No te mueras.

She was already attached enough to Lázaro and his lessons that each time María turned up, she couldn’t help but wonder if it would be her last, as if her affection for someone would surely spell his doom. Of course, María was imagining things, but having lost her family at so young an age, as she’d one day explain to her daughter, she became a “little cucka en la cabeza,” without even realizing it…which was probably part of the reason why she had turned away from Nestor.

“And that nice fellow, the handsome one, I used to see you with-whatever happened to him?” Lázaro had once asked her.

“He went off to America, to New York.”

“So, why didn’t you go with him?” Lázaro shook his head. “I saw the way you looked at each other-yes, señorita, I certainly did!”

“I don’t really know why,” she told him, shrugging. “But he was a músico, and you know how musicians can be; they don’t have much common sense.”

Nodding agreeably, as if María were old enough to know what she was talking about, Lázaro punched out the inside of his lacquered cane hat on his lap and smiled. “You mean he didn’t have much money, was that it?”

“No, it wasn’t that at all. He just didn’t seem proper in his thinking.”

“Uh-huh,” Lázaro conceded. “And that older fellow you’re with now, the one who doesn’t smile very much-is he your man?”

“He’s good to me, Lázaro,” she began, but then, not wanting to explain anything, she lost her patience. “Whatever happened between me and that músico is over with, and there’s nothing left to be said or done.”

“Oh, amorcita, don’t you know there’s more to life than money,” Lázaro told her, turning to the next of the lessons. “The goodness in a man’s heart, that’s something else. But who am I to lecture you? I just hope you’re happy.”

She had to admit that the few times Ignacio had seen her with Lázaro, he hadn’t reacted well, accusing her of consorting with a Negro as if that were the worst thing she could do with herself. “Next thing you know,” Ignacio once told her, “you’ll lose what few manners you have.” The few times they met, when she was still living in that edificio, he never deigned to speak with Lázaro and always gave the kindly man, so politely singing her praises and doffing his hat in respect, a look that implied he was no better than riffraff, or the lowest of the low. It didn’t help that Lázaro was black as a crow-Ignacio had no use for such men. In fact, he had filled María’s head with all kinds of sentiments that would have been unthinkable to her back in Pinar del Río, sentiments that were insulting. As a light-skinned mulatta, she surely had black blood on her mother’s side; nevertheless, María couldn’t fault Ignacio for thinking that way; most white Cubans, los blanquitos, did.

“Oh, but that other one,” Lázaro would say. “What was his name again?”

“Nestor-Nestor Castillo.”

“You know, once when you weren’t around, he came over to talk with me, played me a little tune, a sweet melody on his trumpet. Told me he was writing it for you, María. Did you know that?”

“Yes, he liked to write songs, but I suppose all músicos do.”

“Ay, pero, chiquita, I could tell listening to it that the fellow was crazy about you. Pardon me for saying so, I took one look into his eyes and I saw some wonderful things-like a poet’s thoughts. Were I a lovely young woman, that for me would have been enough to throw all common sense out the window.” Then: “Now, I won’t say another word,” though, forgetting, he always would.

She’d put up with his two cents, knowing that Lázaro only meant well, and there were times when she was tempted to explain how Nestor sometimes frightened her, not with his natural armature, a true wonder she’d never forget, but with a sadness that María, carrying enough of her own, found wearisome, as if there would never be any way of making him happy. That Nestor Castillo was such a high-strung tipo seemed a matter of bad luck, the sweet músico with a troubled soul and a doubtful future, the man, so much of a child, whom she’d had no choice but to turn away. He was, after all, a campesino, and like the guajiros, he didn’t put up any barriers between his feelings and how he acted, or what he said-something which, in those days, María, being groomed as a proper lady by Ignacio, had come to forget.

Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

A story: in 1953, the same year that Castro had started what would be known as the July 26th Movement, María, moonlighting, had posed for a four-color “Fly to Cuba ” poster for Pan American airlines. This came about because an American executive with a New York advertising agency, Y & R, had caught her act one night at the Lantern and approached her after the show-which was how she got most of her modeling jobs. The ad itself, shot in the Torrens studio off Cuba Street, featured María, in a snug two-piece cream-colored bathing suit, her nalgitas prominently hanging out, and white-rimmed beach girl sunglasses, standing in juicy splendor before a towering royal palm. Sipping coconut juice from a gourd through a straw with one hand, she held a thick, fuming cigar in the other, its smoke rising into the air and resolving into the shape of a heart as a sleek four-engine Pan Am Clipper flew overhead through the bluest of Cuban skies. An afternoon’s work that paid quite well-twenty-five dollars.

María could hardly have imagined that the finished product would have caught the eye of her former amante, Nestor Castillo, in distant New York. Or to be more precise, that poster, hanging in a travel agency window, had stopped Nestor dead in his tracks one autumn afternoon in 1953 as he passed through the cavernous lobby of the Hotel Biltmore on East Forty-fourth Street, on his way to visit a Cuban friend, José-Pascual, in the Men’s Bar. Oh, poor, poor Nestorito, as she would come to think of him. He was that handsome dark-featured man, dapper in a linen jacket, peering dreamily at her image, his heart aching. Beside himself with rekindled memories of her lusciousness and the romance that had nearly torn him apart, Nestor soon found himself by that agency counter, pleading, if not demanding, in his broken English that the clerk sell him the poster. He was trembling, his hands shaking wildly. To think that every Fred MacMurray-looking fulano passing by that window could see María holding between her elegant fingers that phallic cigar! Such was his agitation that he hardly noticed at first how the clerk, a transplant from Cuba himself, and a rather sympathetic one at that, had started speaking to him in Spanish.

It took him a while to calm Nestor down, and, in the end, he explained that, as much as he wanted to help him out, he just couldn’t sell such things to everyone whose interest that poster had caught. “You see,” he said, “with that one, someone always makes the same request, nearly every day.” Instead, he advised Nestor to visit the local Pan Am office a few blocks north. “Go up to the fourth floor,” he told him. “There’s a customer relations office there, and they’ll be happy to help you. Okay, caballero?” A little while later, in the bar, a few steps away from the hotel’s Palm Court (in the Havana style), and not far from its famous clock and the young couples gathered there, Nestor, brooding over a fried steak with onions sandwich and enough rum to get him dreaming, confided to his friend, a fellow he had befriended at a party on La Salle Street, the mess this woman in Havana had left him in.

“She seemed to love me, and then she didn’t, carajo!” he kept saying, his head shaking. “José-Pascual,” he said, “if you only knew how I hate myself for letting her get away.” Then, with José-Pascual, a good-natured gallego and a transplant from Jiguaní, pouring, mostly for free, he got good and drunk over the matter. By five, as Nestor, making his way a few blocks north, stumbled in through a Madison Avenue skyscraper’s dizzily revolving doors, hundreds of office workers were swarming its lobby, and Nestor, put off by the crowd, and having to make a rehearsal in any case, lost heart and decided to head back uptown instead, sulking all the way. Later that night, tormented as always by the slightest reminder of María, he hardly slept-believing that María was mocking him from afar. And while he tried to forget her, for many a good reason that image of María, with that vaguely lip-shaped shadow dipping through the front cleft of her bathing suit like an orchid’s fold, killed Nestor and distracted him for weeks. But then that was Nestor. On many a night after, he would sit on his living room couch with his guitar, whereupon, strumming chords, he would pour his musings and pained longings into yet another version of his song about her, a bolero he had decided to call “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

She had known about that song for a long time. Thanks to Lázaro’s lessons, María had slowly gained the ability to decipher the nearly weightless airmail letters Nestor had started sending her from New York, weekly at first, then twice monthly, then every other month. The first year, 1950-when María had accepted without regret her status as Ignacio’s mistress and moved into their fourteenth-floor high-rise apartment, with its mirrored walls and sweeping view of the sea, the Hotel Nacional, and the Malecón-she had hardly ever thought about Nestor, except during her most lonely and longing (sexual) moods, his splendid physicality as deeply embedded in her skin’s memory as a nagging melody in a musician’s head.

On the other hand, once his letters started to arrive, at first with Nestor’s musician friends from New York who’d come to Havana for work and would track her down, one way or the other, at the clubs, it was as if he were determined to enter her life again. (Finding María wasn’t hard: on any given day, one was bound to come across a little ad tucked into the back pages of the Havana Gazette or El Diario de la Marina about the “Phenomenally beautiful and enticing María Rivera-The Dancer You Must See!” And many a photograph of María, in a heavy Aztec-looking plumed headdress and scanty costume, was replicated in the posters and half sheets pasted to the crumbling walls and lampposts of the old city.) At first, María couldn’t have cared less about Nestor’s missives. Aside from wanting to avoid the simple labor of deciphering them, she didn’t care to deal with those pangs of guilt about him that occasionally arose to the surface of her dreams, already peopled enough by the ghosts of the guajiro family she had lost. (When she went back to her campo in her sleep, she always saw her mamá sitting on a rocking chair by the doorway to their bohío, her papito riding across the fields on a horse, the farmers and their oxen around him, and her late sister, Teresa, in the years before she fell ill, just ahead of her on that lovely trail through the forest as they headed toward their beloved cascadas, each of them seeming very much alive, a lovely dream until she’d remember that they were dead.)

Yet María couldn’t help but keep those letters together, in a drawer in her dressing room table, beside a jar of Aphrodite pomade (as if she needed that), and the fact remained that she hadn’t the heart to rip up any of the photographs of Nestor and herself that he had given her on their final day together. (On those nights when she grew bored with the routine, the repetitiousness of a show like “Queen Isabella’s Dance with Columbus,” or “A Peek at Marie Antoinette’s Ladies in Waiting,” or “A Cuban Tarzan with His Cuban Janes,” she sometimes lingered over those photographs of Nestor and herself, taken during their excursions to the beach near Cojímar in the days when they could barely keep their hands off each other. In one of them, Nestor was carrying her out of the cresting gulf waters, María’s arms wrapped around his neck, her breasts pressing, through her green bathing suit, against his happy face, his bathing trunks agitated and plump in the right places. In another, María and Nestor were captured necking in the surf, foam rising around them and their bodies so entangled, that their photographer, one of María’s dancer acquaintances from the old days, Elenita Marquez, tagging along for the fun of it, wondered if they were going to do it right there and then. María had other such photographs, taken around Havana, and even if they were out of focus sometimes, they still commemorated their love and, jaded as she sometimes felt, she counted them, along with the crucifix Nestor had given her, among her most precious possessions.)

But the letters eventually provoked her curiosity, and by the summer of 1951, though she would have saved herself time by showing them to la señora Matilda, who often tortured her with the admonition that she should have gone off with Nestor, María made it a part of her studies to decipher them, slowly. By then, thanks to Lázaro, her abilities to read and write had improved greatly, to the point that she had finally begun to understand the myriad neon signs that glowed and blinked along the nightclub strips, and other things had become less of a mystery. Still, it had taken her the longest time to get through Nestor’s letters. Once she did, María discovered that either she had a much longer way to go or Nestor’s own command of the written language was that of a campesino who had been taught to read and write by a suave but barely educated older brother. Nestor’s letters were always brief, however, as if he did not want to waste another page of that nearly weightless airmail paper. Some were written in pencil, others in smudged, light blue running ink, as if they’d been cried upon, sweated upon, or-who knows what men are capable of when they start to get carried away with their emotions and memories? Some were casual, others impassioned, heartbroken, but all of them were either riddled with words that María simply had not yet come to understand or confusing by virtue of Nestor’s phonetic spellings-’ablar for hablar or ’rible for horrible, among others. Nevertheless, through her own painstaking efforts, along with the occasional assistance of a certain ancient ladies’ powder room attendant, Chi-chi, María came to get a general picture of Nestor’s new life en los Estados Unidos.

Nueva York, he wrote, was deathly cold in the winters; from the skies came snow-la nieve, like something out of a dream; and people stared at you for speaking in Spanish, and some streets were unimaginably crowded. “Imagine this, María, thousands of people rushing along on a single sidewalk!…And the people, of so many nationalities-Italians, Greeks, Germans, Chinese, Russians, and Poles, even los judíos-speaking in their own languages, a different world, a city much grander than Havana, but not as beautiful, and with rivers that stink of trash and chimneys that send up smoke and more automobiles and buses than you imagined possible. And the buildings, por Dios! Remember that giant mono, King Kong? That building he climbed really exists, it’s called the Empires [sic] State!” (That name he carefully wrote out in English.) “Y fíjate eso, just looking up, you see more high buildings everywhere-so wonderful and horrible at the same time.” And with every mention of such things, Nestor told her how much he loved María and missed her terribly, that he didn’t know why they had lost something so precious. “But you understand, María, there’s still time… I’m waiting for you, and only you…”

Yes, even if she had treated him foolishly and badly, he knew that in her heart she really loved him. But at least he had ways of keeping himself busy, and not just by trying to learn English, which he called un monstruoso idioma-a monster of a language. He had a job, along with his brother Cesar-“You remember him, don’t you?”-working in a meatpacking plant during the day and playing music with a little conjunto of musicians they’d found here and there in the city at night and on the weekends. They lived in an apartment in a neighborhood called Harlem with their cousins, “really kindly folks, humildes y simpáticos,” up the hill on el calle La Salle from what’s called an “El train” in New York-the rumbling of the tracks that shook their beds made him long for the quiet of the Cuban countryside. He told María he had days when he felt completely lost and ached with the desire to return to Cuba, to please just say the word-nothing was holding him there. (Cesar loved New York, he wrote, while he himself did not always understand what he was doing there, particularly when he still suffered so without her.) They had lively parties in that apartment, hosted by his brother Cesar, but they meant little to him, the cubanas and Puerto Rican women who turned up from all over the boroughs were nice enough, but they had nothing to offer him, simply because he could think only of her-“Besides, they are too ugly compared to you…”

In concluding, he always promised to write her again, “faithfully,” and would await her reply. “Please answer me, even just a few words would make me happy…”

And when María, ashamed of herself, never answered him, he wrote this:

I don’t understand your silence, María, and while my wounds have grown deeper and my love for you even stronger during these past few years, I’ve come to accept why you could not stay with me. And I don’t blame you; in fact, I forgive you, because María, mi vida, mi amor, I know that you have only deserved the best, and what am I but some nobody músico? And that’s why, María, I have vowed to make a success of myself, so that I will have something to give you besides my pure, pure love. Because of that I am writing so many wonderful songs, with hopes to sell them to orchestras. But the best of those songs I have saved for you, and I am only working harder to make it as perfect as you, and deserving of all your admiration. It comes from my heart, from deep inside, and it has a name that always makes me smile, because it makes me think of you… “Bellísima María de mi alma”-una canción that I dedicate to you, my love…

Chapter TWENTY-SIX

Not that she ever got teary eyed over him, in the same way that Nestor did thinking about her-she was too practical minded for that kind of nonsense. There was no point to it-what had finally happened between them would remain in the irretrievable past after all. Besides, it would have been stupid to lose her head over something as ephemeral and useless as love. (“Es como el aire,” María would say. “It’s like air.”) Nevertheless, each night before her shows, while the band was warming up the audience with comic parodies of “Carmen” or with some old big band tunes, à la Tommy Dorsey (the crowds were mostly American), she still found herself thinking about him, as if, in some reversal of destiny, Nestor might come walking in through the stage door. Musicians, after all, were always traveling between New York, Miami, and Havana, wherever their work might take them. There were nights, in fact, when María wished that she had gone off with him; not for love, perhaps, but because her life with Ignacio had become so boring and, in its way, something of a prison.

Or, to put it differently, she found that going to bed with Ignacio had become a matter of duty. The truth be told, during those afternoon and late morning bouts of love, when Ignacio turned María on her side so that he, parting her nalgitas ever so slightly, could enter her from behind or, in the dress shop office, closed the door, took down his trousers, and stood before her with his hands on his hips so that she could take care of him with her mouth, or when he had María, her bathing suit dropped to her knees, lower herself onto him so that her bottom rested on his legs as he sat on a bench in one of those sandy-floored cabanas out at Varadero-seven thrusts and then out, he came so quickly-she hardly felt anything at all, not even the guilt which used to send her on flights to purgatory. But was it his fault? Anatomically speaking, though he couldn’t touch Nestor, he wasn’t bad at all, and there were moments when, pulling back on her hair or suckling on her nipples, he seemed almost tender. And yet María, no matter what Ignacio did, had the misfortune of feeling simply too capacious for him. Besides, he couldn’t really have cared less what she felt, as long as María carried on with the twisting of her head, the screams, her body trembling as if she were imitating poor Teresita’s spells.

Afterwards Ignacio, having had his macho pride attended to, and most satisfactorily, always felt like the king cock of Havana and got into the habit of pinching María’s cheeks as if she were a child. Now and then, if she were lying naked on her stomach on their bed, flipping through the pages of magazines like Hoy or Gente, with their articles about American movie stars, he might slide a few fingers inside her and out, for she always seemed so damp, María crying, “Ay, ay, ay,” as if ready to go at it again, and Ignacio, feeling like Tarzan, pulling up on the waistband of his trousers and checking himself out in the mirror, snorting pridefully, as if he were the greatest lover in Cuba, while she, of course, had been secretly thinking about Nestor.

PUBLICLY, IGNACIO HAD CONTINUED TO SHOW MARÍA OFF AROUND Havana, loving it when they entered a packed house at the Alhambra and caused a stir, even if they slipped in during the prelude of a Lecuona zarzuela, and she hadn’t minded that until she noticed him reverting to his former ways, occasionally staring at other women, and in an obvious manner, as if it were his right to do whatever he pleased. She had long since concluded that he was a petty gangster, but one trying to reform himself, and while Ignacio had opened his clothing store for urban sophisticates and tourists, El Emporio, when it came down to it, he seemed to spend as much time as before attending to his other business at the harbor. (His colleagues were men whom María, in the few times she met them, neither disliked nor liked. Some she had only seen from a distance, usually meeting up with Ignacio on some street corner or in a bar, and on the rare occasion she had noticed a few of them acting like rowdy drunks in the clubs-otherwise she hardly knew them.) And while Ignacio sometimes dropped by the clothing store in the afternoon to check up on that business like a proper boss, she disliked his tendency to hire as salesclerks pretty young habaneras who didn’t seem to know a thing about that trade. As before, for all his promises, he still went off on business trips all across Cuba and to the States, away for weeks at a time, turning into the disembodied voice of a man on the club’s hallway telephone.

Which is to say that María, in those years, without any family of her own, and having sent away the one man who most probably truly loved her (why else would that Nestor Castillo keep writing her?), had begun to discover the castigations of loneliness. She had her friends and acquaintances, of course, particularly among the whores at la Cucaracha, who were always trying to persuade María to join their fold-“Don’t forget, there are men who would pay a lot of money for a few hours of your time,” she’d hear again and again from Violeta-and occasionally, backstage at the club, one or another of her fellow dancers cried on her lap about loves that had never worked out, studs who had gotten away, husbands who abused/cheated/lied, and worries (as always) about money and keeping their looks (no black and blue marks or broken noses, please). Still, some of those dancers took her private and quiet ways as snobbery (if only they could have seen her out in the countryside with the guajiros, or known the way she looked forward to her stolen hours of study with Lázaro and suffered through her lessons).

Walking along the streets of Havana, she continued to attract the attentions of many a habanero, dashing and downtrodden alike. One afternoon, the American movie star Errol Flynn, many a showgirl surely in his harem, had doffed his Panama hat and smiled as she passed by him on a street corner outside the Capitolio. (And, speaking of movie stars, one evening at the club, when the buxom actress Ava Gardner had turned up with some friends to take in the show and María had passed by their table, the famous brunette, who seemed to enjoy her rum and had a somewhat wicked air about her, had nodded approvingly at her, the way beautiful women do with other beautiful women.) But ultimately, for a woman so young and beautiful-possibly the most dazzling woman in Cuba in those years-María spent too much time alone in bed. On such mornings and afternoons, when she had said her prayers and let her mother’s rosary fall from her hand, she’d finally put herself to sleep by touching herself, writhing, her hand covered in her own moisture (Nestor), the pain and solitude in her heart giving way to the condolences of pleasure.

(That was a vanity as well: though she had not yet reached the point when she began to go around with different men, that confusing impulse to find pleasure had been with María for a long time. No, it wasn’t the kind of thing she would ever have talked about with her daughter, Teresita, but the fact remained that, for all the country-girl piety María had been raised with, in some ways she hadn’t been that different from the farm animals she’d watched breeding day in and day out in the yards, in the fields, in the woods. A little history, then, about the habits, in that regard, of a beautiful woman. In the days when her sister, Teresita, first suffered her fits, and María, seeking an escape, found all kinds of ways in which to please herself, she discovered that even her papito’ s shattered shaving mirror could enhance her bodily joys. One afternoon, because she had so little privacy, and had never seen any of her parts in a mirror, she took her papito’s espejo off its post into the woods behind their thatch-roofed house, and there, under the shadow of an acacia, María pulled her skirt up, and with her undies fallen to her knees, held that mirror at such an angle beneath her as to catch a reflection of that which she had never seen before: her second mouth, wearing a crown of bristly black pubic hair, curling and dense and new to the world, which upon the minutest inspection and spread slightly open resembled the interior of a conch shell; and when she expanded herself a little wider, the same folds and whorls rearranged themselves into the opened petals of an orchid. That’s when she discovered a mole on the left side, and that just a little distance away was the puckered eye of her bottom, the same nutlike color as her vagina. At the same time she discovered that, if she used the mirror to catch the sunlight through a break in the foliage above and directed it at herself from yet another angle, God’s radiance, as if a beam from heaven-that’s what it surely had to be-spread through her in such delicious waves of divine heat that with just the touch of her finger she started to have her own kinds of seizures, not of epilepsy, like those of her sister, but of pure and sinful bodily release. She ended that business by pressing the heated mirror’s surface against the dead center of her body as if to swallow the sun and sky and, doubling over, in an agony of unspeakable pleasure, squirmed about as if possessed before falling backwards to the ground. After a few moments she became vaguely aware that a salamander had crawled onto her leg and that, perched atop the gnarled roots of that acacia, a large spider had seemed to be observing her; afterwards, she spent the longest time examining her face and could not help but lick the mirror’s surface, as if to taste the outline of her dampness, which resembled an upturned eye or wound…)

In those days, when Nestor’s presence in her life had been reduced to nothing more than those letters, and María could not put from her mind her memories of their lovemaking, which seemed to become more vivid with the passing of time, that bodily release, much like bathing, eating, and using the toilet, became a part of her daily regimen. Two versions of Nestor existed for her then. The first boiled down to a photograph she had of him-not from the ones of them together in and around Havana but a more recent black-and-white snapshot, circa the spring of 1952, for which he had posed sitting on a stoop in New York City (presumably at La Salle Street) wearing a simple guayabera, his notebook in hand, his expression of tenderness and longing, as if he were about to sing a mournful bolero, tearing into her heart. (The kind of face that trumpet notes were tucked into.) Just looking at him, in all his guileless innocence, made María sigh and think “El pobrecito”-Oh, the sweet, dear man. And: “Sí. Es posible que lo amo”-Yes, it’s possible that I love him. The other involved a memory of Nestor on a bed in that sun-swept room by the harbor and María grasping his glorious pinga with both her hands, removing the hand nestled against his pubic bone and placing that hand above the other; even then it still went on, in a flourish of delicate veins, before finally ending grandly in a bell-shaped fleshly elegance, the size of a peach, from whose opening seeped the clearest of liquids, a dewlike fluid, which tasted both sweet and salty against the tip of María’s tongue and stretched so easily when she pulled its translucence into the air with her finger. Memories of María tugging at him and feeling its strength; of his warmth, that thickness, wide as her wrist, pressed against the side of her face, almost burning against her ear; of just how terrifying and wonderful it seemed every time Nestor lowered himself onto her and, drowning her opening with kisses first, settled himself gradually and then frantically inside her, so deeply that, even those years later, she still felt some sensations lingering in the farthest reaches of her womb, in the vicinity of her heart. It was a sensation that surprised her, as she crossed a room or sat by a terrace restaurant table (salting a piece of crispy plátano), pulled a pair of dark mesh stockings over her thighs, or applied makeup before her mirror, her nipples growing taut inside her brassiere. It seemed akin to a picazón, a nagging spectral itch, a blossoming of desire, of bodily longing, that no man, certainly not Ignacio, had been able to satisfy since Nestor.

But she neither hated nor loved her life in those days, though there were times when María felt such sudden loneliness and misery that certain things made her nervous. She disliked lingering by the terrace railing of their fourteenth-floor solar, as if the magnificent views-Havana breaking up into a dazzling succession of sunlit rooftops and gardens, the ocean so radiant-would draw her over the side; and on those occasions when Ignacio took her out on a friend’s schooner for a sail on the seas off Marianao, that railing, just off the buffeting waters, also tempted her, as if her departed family were awaiting her under the shimmering surface, among the marlins and medusas. Such inexplicable impulses sometimes came over her even while María went strolling in Havana, when just the sight of an oncoming trolley made her wary, and it was only the company of saints, in the churches she visited, that seemed to comfort her. She also found refuge in her bedroom performances for the bluntly prone Ignacio, even if it was a rare day when neither God nor one or another of the ghosts seemed to linger, watching.

Ay, por Dios, but it wasn’t easy to have outlived the little family she once had. Her loneliness was such that one Sunday she even made her way to a little shantytown, near a municipal garbage dump east of the city called Los Humos, where María believed she had some distant cousins on her mother’s side. But her search through that place of misery only made her feel lonelier than before. No sooner had she located the run-down shack in which dwelled a family of twelve who claimed they were her kin than did they overwhelm the well-dressed María with requests for money. And because the air was so bad, with fumes from the dump settling like a mist everywhere, she left Los Humos not only with the feeling that to befriend them further-who were they anyway, but cousins twice removed? And why had the men among them looked her over in an uncousinly manner?-would be more trouble than it could ever be worth, but also with her throat sore and a headache and runny stomach that lasted for days.

María first wanted to get pregnant back then, even when she knew it would probably mean the end of her dancer’s career. She was twenty-three that year of the first insurrection, on the older side of a profession in which the majority were seventeen and eighteen, if not younger. But no matter how carelessly she comported herself with Ignacio, deliberately ripping open the heads of his condoms with her teeth or with her long fingernails during the agitated act of love, she did not become pregnant in those years, a mystery that she blamed on herself, and on God’s castigations, all the while wondering if the more virile Nestor would have easily fathered her child. (That had to do with her guajira upbringing-the largest stud horses and oxen and donkeys, with their outlandishly sized appendages, coupling in the fields and easily siring offspring, had been a common sight.) Yet, despite her splendid, traffic-stopping body, María couldn’t help but wonder if she were barren.

And so, for the sake of diversion, she put her energies into her studies with Lázaro, took up smoking, got herself a cage of feuding songbirds, filled her living room with silk flowers, and, the truth be told, despite her longings for maternity and love, began to find her dancer’s life more agreeable than before. Not the hours, but the nightly applause and the release from the uncertainty that comes with knowing just what you’re doing onstage. (And what they wanted to see in the shimmies and splits and turnrounds; that she had to smile constantly, no matter what else she happened to be thinking.)

But María also took pride in the fact that, bit by bit, she had begun to see her name appearing in magazines, a great honor for a guajira from the countryside who had been the daughter of a nobody músico. Show, an English-language publication out of Havana which most clubs and cabarets sold out of their hatcheck rooms, featured a photograph of María in just about every issue over a two-year period. Life (circa May 1954) showed a winking María in her dressing room hitching up a pair of dark nylons over her shapely legs; and a second one of her onstage at the Lantern in which, from a distance, it seemed as if she was hardly wearing anything but a dark mesh bodysuit, whose seams were dotted with fake gems, a titanic feathery arrangement tottering on her head. (Why had the tailor, she would complain, made the middle seam subdivide her body, her V, her pudendum?) The caption, in English, which her club owner, a fellow of Cuban descent from Boston, translated as they were standing by a newspaper kiosk off the Prado, proclaimed María as “one of the reasons we Americans want to come to Cuba.”

In those years countless photographers went into María’s dressing room to “shoot” her. María putting on one of those impossibly heavy plumed, rhinestone-beaded headdresses; María, in a skimpy outfit, described as “raven haired” with a “Spanish complexion” and “Ava Gardner build.” (The complexion thing was a catchphrase, meaning tawny, swarthy, slightly dark or, let us say, a code for a light-skinned mulatta and therefore acceptably, even tantalizingly, dusky, like the actresses Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne.) In an issue of Show that featured profiles of famous or hoping to be famous dancers, there was a shot of María in a rather revealing and very tight leotard by her dressing table in the Club Tika Tika, eating, for some reason, a bowl of ice cream, the caption: “One Dish Enjoying Another.” (Other copy? Here’s a portion of one caption, which went along with a shot of María lunging across a stage, a mock-jungle backdrop behind her, in a tight leopard-spotted, one-piece bathing suit and four-inch-high heels, as she brandished a whip: “Refined in her features, there’s something of the jungle, or most African and savage, about María Rivera… With dance moves to make men crazy, this Cuban Salome vaults across a stage like an unleashed Tigress!”)

Even Bohemia, otherwise engaged in sympathetic reportage about the imprisonment of that rebel leader Castro on the forested Isle of Pines, a penal colony south of the province in which she had lived, featured María in a one-piece black bathing suit on their “belleza de Cuba” pinup page, and one young fellow from Carteles, on the club beat, whose byline was Cain, fascinated that she had started out as a guajira and had seemed to achieve local stardom, had wanted to interview María “for the record,” but she felt too inarticulate to go through with his request. (Nevertheless, this fellow took a photograph of María which ended up reinterpreted as a pastel cartoon on the margin of one of that magazine’s end pages.)

If she happened to be locally well known, up and down the nightclub strip of la Rampa and in many a cul-de-sac establishment in the city, her renown did not come without the occasional annoyance. Whenever she went into the Lantern, it startled her to see the life-size plywood cutout of herself, in an enticingly revealing costume, set like a lure on the narrow curb by the club entrance: COCKTAILS AND CHA-CHA-CHA’S, TWO DOLLARS COVER PLEASE. Kids were always sticking wads of chewing gum over the top of her bodice, to make María’s breasts and their nipples more prominent; these she’d scrape off with a nail file. After six years as a professional dancer in that city, she had developed an attitude about her image.

Though she had not started out in life as one prone to any sort of vanity, the nature of her profession required that María spend long periods of time before those mirrors, and once that habit formed, it seemed inevitable that her humility and tendency to self-deprecation gave way to self-admiration and, even in its most nascent state, grandiosity. (Oh, but Lordy, what excesses of vanity her daughter would have to put up with one day.) María simply began to believe that she had become someone special, even if she had mainly worked in second-tier clubs and had yet to hit the footlights of the more august venues in Havana, like the Tropicana, with its outdoor proscenium and gardens set out under the stars, in the suburb of Buenavista. She’d caught a few of the Tropicana’s opulent stage revues with Ignacio, including an evening which starred a flamboyant fellow in a white mink coat by the name of Liberace, and had left breathlessly impressed by the sheer grandeur of the floor shows, which included twenty to thirty dancers and featured sets that looked as if they’d come from Hollywood movies. (One spectacular featured a high-society lady strolling in the jungle who, coming across a santería ceremony, is put under a magic spell and, losing her inhibitions, tears away half her clothes, dancing wildly with the negrito rumberos.)

Such spectacles far exceeded the more humble productions with which María had been associated, and toward those dancers she actually felt some pangs of envy, though she found the sheer size of the crowds intimidating. On her behalf, however, Ignacio had approached the owners-in a meeting that, despite María’s beauty and real talents as a performer, never went anywhere: probably because the troupe’s stars didn’t want the competition, or because Ignacio demanded too much money for her, or, most likely, because Ignacio’s reputation as a local tough guy (à la a Cuban George Raft) had preceded him and the owners wanted nothing to do with his sort. (As María would tell her daughter: “They ran one of the few clubs in Havana that didn’t have a connection with the mob; they believed that my señor was in that category-why I don’t know; he was a perfect gentleman.” Sí, Mamá, her daughter often thought. But we know what my papi did for a living, don’t we?)

At twelve noon in her Vedado apartment, María fondling herself until she breaks into pieces. Then María in her dressing room at the Lantern sitting beside a dancer named Gladys, covering her face with powder and pulling over her thighs the black mesh stockings that always make her legs and uppermost parts slightly uncomfortable. Then, turning her back to Gladys, María asking her to help out with the rear clasps of her sequined brassiere, which she has trouble unhooking. María reaching over to Gladys’s ashtray to take a puff off her lipstick-smeared cigarette, and her brassiere slipping off, her engorged nipples, almost the size of wine corks, exposed. It was a bit drafty in there, but not that drafty. So, naturally, Gladys just had to ask in her nosy and singsongy way: “Noooo, Marrrría, who are you thinking about, you naughty girl?”

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

The truth remained that, for all her feelings about Nestor, María’s life in Havana went on without him. Sometimes she agonized about his letters, whether she should attempt to answer him, a question she felt most greatly, for reasons she did not understand, while attending church. But mainly she had allowed Nestor to slip into the realm of memory, though there were times when María heard a sad strain of music or a troubadour’s voice in one of the cafés that reminded her of their days together. By then she had relegated Nestor’s presence to a few dozen nearly weightless letters, half as many photographs, and her bodily recollections of him. With nearly five years having passed since they spent their last afternoon in that solar by the harbor, beautiful María hardly believed it possible that anyone could remain so loyal, or recall her as vividly as he seemed to. (One of his letters, which had arrived around Christmas 1954, not only still professed his undying love for her but, as best as she could comprehend, was of a very filthy nature, the sort of letter that would have caused Ignacio’s wormy forehead vein to burst with anger:

…oh, but María, I almost die at the memory of your taking me into your mouth and kissing me until I spilled my milk onto your precious tongue… Do you remember how I lived to trace every bit of you with my saliva, how much I cherished kissing your fabulous chocha…and how I loved even your culo, María-even that tasted like a flower to me. And if you remember, María, that you loved it when you felt me reaching beyond your tetas to your mouth, and how you just loved the sight of it and my happy face and how I could just come because of the look in your eyes, María-whatever you do, don’t forget that-and think of me now, remembering your lips and that expression you got on your face as you moved on top of me, and how your head fell back and your eyes closed as if you had just died, and you couldn’t help but take me out, and lick con tu lengua just a few of those remaining drops, which you passed back to me in the form of a kiss…

Those letters, smelling faintly of musk cologne, which kept on arriving, though with less frequency, were always filled with his declarations of unending love. She had become so used to them, had so accustomed herself to thinking about Nestor as a poor soltero, a lonely bachelor, whose existence remained dedicated only to her, that María hardly ever imagined that, in those years, Nestor Castillo had begun to find himself a life that she had no inkling about. She knew that he and his older brother Cesar Castillo, the brash one, had formed a band in New York, a group which they called los Reyes del Mambo-the Mambo Kings. Occasionally he’d mail her one of their 78s, recorded with an outfit called Orchestra Records, ditties that consisted of lively dance numbers, along with boleros and songs of love. Receiving their latest, she always expected that his promised song, a monument “to my devotion for you,” would be among them, but, as of the winter of 1954, “Beautiful María of My Soul” did not yet exist, except in Nestor’s forlorn heart.

NOW AND THEN, HOWEVER, WHEN SOME MUSICIANS, DOWN FROM New York, had come by the club to catch the show or moonlight with the house band, she couldn’t help but ask if they happened to know Nestor Castillo. Some did, some didn’t, and what the ones who did usually had to say about Nestor-“Oh yeah, a nice fellow, he’s doing fine” or “A hell of a musician”-was just enough to assuage María’s guilt about the way things had ended between them. But then one night, when a trumpet player with the Mario Bauzá orchestra had come by the Lantern to drop off a package from Nestor and María, pretending to be sheepishly surprised at its arrival, happened to ask about him, this musician, a fellow named Alberto Morales, whom María had never met before, told her: “Oh, Nestor-he’s married to a great lady, a cubana, as a matter of fact, and he’s got two kids, nice children and-”

“You say he’s married?”

“Yes, ma’am, for three or four years now. Está muy feliz,” he added. “He’s very happy.” And then, looking at María, he said, “What are you, a cousin of his or something?”

Her face fell, her soul collapsed, her guajira pride felt offended. “No,” she told him. “I’m just an old amistad, that’s all.”

That night her performance suffered from the revelation; she was surprised by how that little bit of news crushed her. All María wanted to do as she shimmied mambo style across the stage at the center of a row of buxom dancers with half coconut shells covering her breasts was get home by taxi to her and Ignacio’s high-rise apartment on Calle 25 and, as was her recent habit, make herself a magnificent drink of fruit juice and dark Santiago añejo rum from the great mix of bottles that Ignacio, liking his drinks, kept in plentiful supply in a mirrored art deco bar in a sunny corner of their living room overlooking the sea. Her second thought, as she missed one of her marks and scrambled back to shake her hips when several male dancers were about to hoist her up in a watered down parody of a ritual to the thunder god Changó, was to make her way over to la Cucaracha, where she could take refuge with la señora Matilda and the whores whose high heels clicked along those stairways and halls as they went off with their twenty-minute consorts. Surely Violeta, who sometimes sat by la señora in the reception area, would take María into her arms and console her with advice: “Whatever ails you,” she had once told María, “just remember, men are swine and want only one thing, even the decent ones. But if you want to cheer yourself up, my love, just fuck one of them and leave him so quickly he will be desolate.” (Violeta had laughed, and María shrugged.) Her third thought: wishing to God that she were somehow back in Pinar del Río, starting all over again: back in that campo, with her sister, Teresa, by her side-Teresa so alive!-and joining their papito on one of his excursions, guitar slung over his back, to a nearby farm. To be back there would have made her happy-at least she knew what each day would bring: the braying animals, the farmers in the fields, that wonderful waterfall, before her sister drowned…And then there was Nestor, disembodied by then, and reduced to two elements: his handsome, poetic face, and, she was ashamed to admit, his enormous pinga, sturdy as a branch.

Ay, mi amor, she thought over and over again, in a way she had not before, barely making her way through that evening’s show, entitled for the tourists A Night in Havana.

But how quickly things can change. On that same morning, after the finale of her last show, at about 4 a.m., while María was still feeling shocked about Nestor’s marriage, a tall and dapper Havana advertising executive, one Vincente Torres, the fellow who had hired her for the Pan American “Fly to Cuba” poster a few years before, made his way backstage to see her. Taking out a group of his American counterparts from New York to see her dance-they all worked for the same agency, Y & R-he had always admired María’s solemn beauty. Now and then when he’d come by the club, he’d ask her to join him for dinner, but she had never accepted, not even in the days when she had become a Y & R model. Still, his offers had always tempted her. He was handsome, like a Cuban Cary Grant, and though he wore a wedding band, there was something so mirthful and beguiling about his expressions that she found him intriguing. That night he never failed to take his eyes off María and stood up several times to applaud her, even when her performance had been lackadaisical; otherwise he just stared and stared and smiled, winking occasionally in such a jovial manner that María, having sunk into a depth of sadness she had not experienced since her papito died, enjoyed his attentions. In fact, when he went backstage after the show and found her sitting before her mirror, wiping away her running mascara, and asked María, for the hundredth time, if she wouldn’t mind joining him for a drink, she finally agreed; Ignacio was away.

So at four thirty in the morning they went by taxi to the Hotel Nacional, just in time to catch the final song by that evening’s cabaret performer. María, distracted, hardly heard anything that Vincente said to her. Accustomed to compliments, she could think only about Nestor’s deceitfulness: if she was his only love, why had he gotten married? Unsettled, and grateful to be in the company of a gentleman courteous in every way, María found it a natural thing, since she couldn’t have given a damn at that point about Nestor, to take an elevator upstairs and follow Vincente into his suite, whose windows overlooked the diamond-filled harbor. He had a stocked bar. He was charming.

After a few daiquiris, María, so estranged from her humble roots and sincerely taken by Vincente, his scent redolent of a lavender cologne, simply nodded when he, after praising her beauty, begged her to take off her clothes. And María, a little stunned but remembering what the whores of la Cucaracha had told her, first removed a pearl necklace that Ignacio in his largesse had given her (but left Nestor’s crucifix on). Then, after slipping off her dress and standing before the lucky Vincente in her brassiere and underpants, she put her hair up in a flourish over her head, and, as the whores had once taught her, she reached down and dipped her index finger inside herself and rubbed it over her mouth and behind her ears, and then, as Vincente, the brain behind the poster, out of his mind by then after one of her adamant kisses-a “Nestor kiss,” she would think of it-lay back on a bed, undid his trousers, and took out his enraged cubano penis, María attended to his ardor, grasping and suckling him until, with a shout-Mammee!-he doubled over with pleasure. That night María made this dapper fellow’s eyes roll up into his head over and over again. In addition to her captivating beauty and ravishing behavior, there were other ingredients: marijuana, morphine tablets, and cocaine, none of which María indulged in herself, but she did not mind when Vincente did, for they made him a ferocious lover.

Of course, afterwards, she felt low-like una tramposa to use one of her mother’s terms for the loose women of the countryside, a cheap tramp-but did she really care at that point? Not at all. In fact, there would be others to come along and help ease her pain in those days when she had become foolhardy and confused.

(What neither Ignacio nor even Nestor knew were the most hidden reasons María could be indifferent to the feelings of men. It came down to the way her beloved papito sometimes treated her. Not the beatings, or even the other extremes of pure affection, but that strange middle ground that, years later, left María feeling sickly inside, as if a miasma, or an infection, invaded her memories. Only once did she confide this to her daughter, during one of her late afternoon mojito/margarita-fueled chats; as if her educated daughter, by then a medical doctor, could come up with an explanation for her mother’s occasional improper behavior when she was a girl. You see, before her sister, Teresita, fell ill and they were verging on adolescence, she and María used to take naps with their papito on a hammock, the three entangled so peacefully that María easily drifted off to sleep, especially during an aguacero, a rain shower that drenched the forests and fields and sent the lizards scattering and cooled the air, which smelled of the most sweet and bitter scents-of rot and fecundity… And sometimes she laid her head against his chest and listened to his powerful heartbeat while he shifted himself around and his palm rested upon her back or along the curves of her hips; and sometimes-maybe it was a dream-his hand massaged her belly, sometimes ambling downwards so that his knuckles dozed and the weight of his hand pressed against the coarse fabric of her dress, and then nothing more.

But once she had started undergoing her bodily changes and began to smell different to men, and things got crazy because of what had happened to Teresita-la pobrecita-there came that time when her papi asked her to share his hammock and she, feeling reluctant and physically cumbersome, obeyed but found that she couldn’t fall off to sleep the way she used to, after all he was pressing up against her back, and something fleshy and solid seemed to crawl up along the knobs of her spine. And maybe she imagined that his hand had wandered down below, his dense fingers parting the lips of her “special and most delicate flower,” María squirming, her papito asking “¿Qué tenemos aquí?”-“What have we here?” At the same time, her papito’s breath smelled awful, of tobacco and aguardiente and beer, and, like a dream of her own future, she withdrew into herself while his fingers kept on touching her in places where they shouldn’t have, until María, feeling sick inside and sensing that something was very wrong, would finally tear herself away, a terrible shame following her… It didn’t end there. Living in a place where the mothers regularly fondled the privates of their male children to ensure their virility, María couldn’t help but wonder if her papito was doing the same kind of thing with her, or maybe he was just curious. But after a while even she, an ignorant guajira, knew that it didn’t seem right for a papito, no matter how much he loved his daughter, to be doing that-and so, before it could get worse, she started to avoid him, refusing to join him on the hammock and feeling nervous whenever he had been drinking and called her to his side, a puzzled and sad expression upon his face when she refused, as if she had broken his heart…)

Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

One Tuesday evening in 1955, the year that Fulgencio Batista granted Fidel Castro amnesty and the rebel leader, fleeing to Mexico, began to undertake the planning of his revolution; at an hour when Havana’s nightlife was just getting under way and María sat backstage preparing for her first show as usual, some two thousand miles north, snow was softly falling in New York City. It was just past nine, and the Castillo brothers, along with several of their musicians, had come down from La Salle Street to mount the stage at a club called the Mambo Nine on West Fifty-eighth in Manhattan. Among the numbers they had rehearsed for their showcase performance was a bolero that Nestor Castillo had been working on, to his older brother’s exasperation, from the first days they had set foot in that city: some pain in the neck love song called “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

As of that night, Nestor had written so many versions of it that Cesar, getting fed up with hearing every new one, had told him, “Either perform it or let the damned thing go.” He said this in the same tone of voice he used when telling Nestor to wake up and forget about María, beautiful and luscious though she might have been. “No woman is worth the agony,” he’d say, and Nestor would nod, agreeing, but he’d still mess with even more variations of it, until, after six years in that country, even he began to wonder if he’d lost his mind.

On the stage of the Mambo Nine, as Nestor set some sheet music down before their sometime pianist, Gordito, whose exuberant swaying and tremendous weight sometimes broke the benches during their up-tempo mambos, he still winced from his memories of María. They followed him like a dream, as if he were roving again through the streets of Havana, with its dense, bustling confluences of decay, grandeur, and thriving humanity, her high heels tapping on the cobblestones beneath her, and the aroma of fresh-baked bread and crackers from a bakery filling the air, María beaming at him with affection, their bodies, so used to each other by then that, no matter what else he remembered-sitting on a bench in a deserted church plaza, at an early hour of the morning, holding hands with María, or stopping to buy something from an old mustached guajiro standing sadly on a corner with his panniers of bananas and plantains to sell, or the black maids emerging from the doorways with baskets of laundry balanced upon their heads, smiling happily at them-they were in love after all-all such memories, of his times with María in Havana, its windows like sad, drooping eyes, always circled those moments of intimacy that, even those years later, he could still not get out of his head.

Trumpet in hand, his longish fingers testing its valves, he remembered her body and dampened skin, the sight of her opened legs, her knees trembling as she spread them so wide. A stream of notes, fluttering like blackbirds through the room, a slightly pained expression on Nestor’s noble face, the memory of how María’s womb had always felt like damp blossoms, her skin tasting of the salty and sun-swept sea…It gave him an air of distraction sometimes, for behind such recollections a kind of cruel weave curled and twisted through Nestor’s Havana. And not the Havana of travel brochures, or of the seedy and glamorous establishments that reeked of gangsters and molls, and down-on-their-luck gamblers, or displaced American socialites in search of a night out with some handsome Cuban gigolos, but the city where she had thrown him off.

Then the devil, perching like a little bird on his shoulder, asked Nestor, “Who had the finest culo in Cuba?” and he answered, María, of course, as if he could feel her plump and superb nalgitas quivering and nearly slapping his fingers with their sweat again, her rump’s pubic hair brushing juicily against his knuckles. All this even while he reached to bum one of Cesar’s Lucky Strikes and, on his way, almost tripped over a microphone stand.

Lordy, what a pain: his memories of María still nagged at Nestor even when he had a wife, whom he deeply loved, the studious and pretty and sturdy Delores Fuentes, the mother of their two children, Eugenio and Leticia.

Nestor just couldn’t help it. Already away from his beloved Cuba (and María) for too long, he remained divided within himself, the sort of man who believed he could love two women at once and keep it a secret. Too bad he wasn’t very good at that whole business, at least when it came to his wife, Delores. Take his songwriting: for all the boleros with their love-drenched lyrics that Nestor had composed during his years in New York, he had yet to write one especially for her. Even if he often told Delores that every flower, star, and sunset, radiant cardinal, and dulcet nightingale on the wing in his songs was really about her, que ella fue la primavera extravagante, y olía dulce del mar-that she embodied the extravagance of spring, and smelled sweetly of the sea-how could she have believed that this was entirely true? When she’d see Nestor brooding by their living room window and he seemed to be staring out over the rooftops at the moon’s waning crest-his entire body a sigh-she wondered if he really loved her at all. He knew that he sometimes gave her good reason for such doubts, hating himself for those days when, consumed by some inescapable grief and longing, he could hardly say a word to anyone, his own little children mystified by the pain they saw in his eyes. No villain, he really didn’t want to seem so sad, and always found ways to make up for the unhappiness he brought into their home: gifts of candy and toys for his children, flowers and books for Delores, which he’d deliver with sincerity and doting affection.

And then, once again, he became lost to the world.

At least he had music and family to console him. Up on the bandstand, and thinking about them, Nestor made a sign of the cross quickly and kissed the little golden crucifix that, weighing no more than a quarter, hung from his neck, thanking God-or whatever made people dewy eyed when they looked up at the skies-for what he, despite his romantic stupidities, had been given.

Though he had written María dozens of letters over the years and kept his marriage a secret from her, he sincerely worshiped Delores. If Nestor lived in a kind of purgatory in those days because of María, without Delores he would have been in hell, and he thanked God for her good nature, her patience, strength, and the loveliness of her spirit. Passion was a large part of it too. During their courtship, which began one afternoon in 1950 when he met Delores as she, startlingly pretty and buxom in a maid’s dress, sat at a bus stop on Madison Avenue with a bundle of schoolbooks in her arms, he could never have enough of her. At first, a mutual timidity and propriety informed their polite encounters. They went to the movies and to church, fed pigeons and squirrels in the park, ate ice cream and apple pie at the Schrafft’s on Broadway, and attended the local basement church bazaars. Everywhere they went seemed a happy place. Once they crossed a certain line, a naughty delirium took over, and he almost forgot María. They kissed on the rooftops, groped each other in tenement stairwells, and fought frantically in the living room of his and Cesar’s instrument-filled apartment, Nestor trying to lure her to bed. One afternoon, while her older sister and occasional chaperone Ana María was away and Cesar was holed up somewhere in the Bronx with a hatcheck girl he’d met in a ballroom, Delores gave in, and Nestor, drowning in her skin, fell in love again. That ardor lasted for a long time, but after a while, when that radiant period of seemingly insatiable desire passed and they had married and were a family, it came down to this: when he laid his head against his pillow at night and dreamed, for all his wishes not to, he still dreamed of María.

It disturbed him, it rankled his heart, and it made Nestor gloomy in moments when he should have been happy. That emotion of feeling free from the burdens of life came to him only through music, when he and his brother were on a stage performing and he would lose himself in the nameless bliss of harmonies and sonorous trumpet solos. Or else when he was writing songs. Not the crazed mambos that his brash jamoncito of an older brother Cesar relished but those pensive ballads and sad boleros into which Nestor poured his life and soul. These compositions were so heartfelt as to move even the more jaded musicians in their band, the Mambo Kings. Struggling fellows, who’d been around the block many times over, they were touched by the composer’s guileless sincerity. In fact, the band members had a joke amongst themselves, that if he were a king of Spain in the sixteenth century, his name would have been Nestor the Good. (Or with some, “Nestor el Bobón, Nestor the Dopey One.”)

Languishing plaintively over his tunes on a living room couch in their La Salle Street apartment, a guitar by his side, Nestor approached his songwriting with reverence, as if he were stepping into a confessional. Sometimes the emotions such songs engendered in him were so powerful that Nestor secretly wept; fortunately Cesar, the final judge of his lyrics-he never had any problems with the melodies-was on hand to exorcise the more maudlin of their sentiments.

“Little brother,” he would say, Nestor’s pad, dense with his neat, diminutive scribbles, open on his lap, “to be truthful, this line-about the world flooding with tears-stinks, it reeks of self-pity. So get rid of it! You hear me?”

And Nestor, loving and trusting his brother, always went along with his advice. Why wouldn’t he? Cesar, so unreliable in other circumstances, had pretty good judgment about music, particularly when it came to Nestor’s compositions. Despite his preference for earthly rather than spiritual pleasures and his bluntness of character, Cesar, a musician down to his molecules, knew what he was doing. In the end, his arrangements of even his brother’s most soporific and sentimental songs always brought out the best. Songs that might just have made one sigh he enhanced by writing swooning countermelodies, usually for violins or voice, during the choruses and turnarounds, and then those songs, so ably ornamented, made their listeners either weep or fall in love.

Thus from Nestor gushed fine and plaintive tunes such as “¿Porqué me dejaste?”-“Why Did You Leave Me?” and “Sonrisas de amor”-“Smiles of Love,” and a favorite with the crowds of the Bronx and Brooklyn ballrooms their band performed at for peanuts was a bolero called “La vida sin felicidad”-“Life without Happiness.” That last bolero was so good that onstage, Nestor, looking out over the crowds and smiling, would take much pleasure in watching many a rum-happy couple begin to neck and kiss when its sonorous melodies rose into a crescendo. That kind of reaction, more than the scant money the Mambo Kings were making, kept him-and Cesar-going.

And so, in that way, Nestor came to write many a commendable bolero, some of them recorded in a cramped studio on 125th Street off Lenox Avenue, the black and brittle 78s lacquer-covered pressings of those songs mostly selling in the market-day stalls and bodegas of Spanish Harlem. At best, a few hundred of them sold every month, and at royalties of two cents a copy, he and Cesar weren’t making much money at all. In fact, little had changed with the band after four years or so of performing; they remained as obscure and underappreciated as always. Occasional glamour boys by night, the brothers still spent their days nestled under the shadows of the West Side Highway overpass, just north of 125th Street, in the long, frigid vaults of a waterside meatpacking plant, hauling sides of beef to and fro, their long white frocks washed over with blood. The palms of their hands sported not only the calluses that come to guitar, trumpet, and conga players but also the freezer burns and bone-splinter cuts, nicks, and bruises common to men hoisting one-hundred-pound-plus flanks of fat-marbled beef onto their sore, chafed shoulders. It was hard work, but at least they had regular salaries to show for it, and all the pork chops and sirloin steaks they could stash under their musty coats and shirts for home.

They’d performed at the Mambo Nine before, without much fanfare or expectation, their dream, as nobodies from Cuba, to be discovered by some big-time recording executive or talent scout. It had yet to happen. But that evening, a certain couple, causing a stir, walked into the club. A tall, statuesque lady with a great head of red hair and flickering blue eyes so pretty that Cesar noticed them from the stage, and by her side, a dapperly dressed man in a blue serge suit-Desi Arnaz and his wife, Lucille Ball. They’d dropped by because Esmeralda Lopez, the owner of the club, an old friend of Desi’s from Cuba, had told him about two Cuban brothers, fairly new to the States from Havana, who could do it all: They sang like angels, played half a dozen instruments from piano to congas and trumpet, and danced up a storm. Drop-dead handsome, they could also write beautiful songs, particularly the younger brother, Nestor Castillo.

She pointed them out on the stage: Cesar was the strapping, broad-shouldered fellow in the velvet jacket with black lapels and the frilly shirt, a cigarette clenched between his lips, his dark wavy hair, a pompadour at its crest, gleaming with brilliantine. And Nestor, the one holding a trumpet, though a little shorter and far thinner than the majestic Cesar Castillo, had the air of a handsome priest, so good looking that he hardly bothered with the flamboyant grooming and rings that his older brother considered vital to his public image. The show began around ten, and on that night, after Cesar and Nestor and their musicians-Gordito at the piano, Andy on the bass, and Pito on the drums-had knocked themselves out trying to entertain the crowd with several uplifting mambos to little applause, a pissed off Cesar had looked over the room. About twenty people were in the club at that early hour, mainly big-spending corporate types, swilling twenty-dollar bottles of champagne, out to end the night in bed with their secretaries. Tapping his brother on the shoulder and looking out over the room, Cesar said, “What the hell, let’s play that ‘María’ song and see what happens, huh?” Shortly, Gordito, reading off a penciled chart, began improvising a florid introduction. Then the bass came in and the drums. It was written in the key of A minor-la menor-Nestor’s favorite, and like a malagueña, its opening chords descended flamenco style into a major resolve and chorus.

Now from the moment that Cesar, with his cigarette-ruined yet soulful baritone, stood before the microphone and intoned that song’s first words, “Oh, love’s sadness, Why did you come to me?” and with Nestor, so apprehensive at first, joining in during the chorus, their harmonizing lovely to the ear, and playing his trumpet like a man possessed by love, even that booze-soaked and jaded audience had started nodding in appreciation of its haunted melody. Sitting beside Esmeralda, Desi Arnaz, smoking a Havana puro, felt greatly touched by that song. It was so filled with longing that it seemed to be as much about missing Cuba as about missing a former love, a sentiment that Desi, having lived out in California for so long, must surely have shared. He certainly seemed to, for at the song’s conclusion, he stood up and applauded the Castillo brothers enthusiastically.

After the rest of their set, not a bad set at all, when the brothers had come offstage to relax and made their way through the room, they went over to Esmeralda’s table, where she made their introductions.

Lacking the luxury of a television set, the brothers didn’t know anything about his show, but they had heard Desi’s name around and knew he was the most famous cubano in America. In fact, Cesar had some kind of vague recollection of meeting Arnaz, as a very young man, many years before in some hilltop club in Santiago when they were both starting out and working that circuit as singers. Still, they were immediately friendly, shaking hands, rapping each other’s backs, and almost getting teary eyed-with Cubans, that wasn’t an unusual thing. Arnaz was dark featured, handsome, and charismatic in a matinee idol way, and his wife, delicately sipping a mango punch through a straw, was a strikingly lovely woman who hardly blinked through the ensuing conversation. The heart of what they talked about, beyond the niceties of where they had both come from-Oriente, the most easterly province in Cuba-and after they had clicked champagne glasses? It came down to this: Known for employing cubanos and helping many an aspiring musician out, Arnaz asked them if they would ever consider flying out to California to perform that “beautiful María” song for a taping of his TV show.

“It’s called I Love Lucy,” he said.

“Oh yes, of course, I Love Lucy.”

Cesar scratched the back of his head at the offer. They weren’t actors but could surely use a real break, for after years of working second-tier clubs and ballrooms, and playing Catskills gigs, their band, the Mambo Kings, deserving better, hadn’t really gotten anywhere at all. (This was practically Cesar’s fault-he didn’t like the gangsters who ran the best places and had gotten a reputation among them as a difficult and arrogant two-bit singer, way too big for his britches. It didn’t help that he refused to sign any shifty contracts or that he’d bedded down many of their most luscious molls.) Looking over at Nestor, his dark eyebrows raised, Cesar asked: “What do you think, Brother?”

And Nestor, with Esmeralda gently caressing his back as if he was a favorite son, nodded his timid consent. It wasn’t easy. Deep down, the very thought that his lingering pain over and devotion to María-the woman whom Cesar called “a hard-on’s dream”-would be aired before the entire country troubled him. What would Delores think? But his brother was his brother, and there was very little that Nestor wouldn’t do for Cesar.

Smiling, Cesar told Arnaz that nothing would please them more.

“Great! Our show is number one in the country,” Arnaz told them. “When you perform that song, maybe it’ll become a number one tune!” He lit another cigar. Then, slipping into Spanish, he explained that his wife wanted to get back to their hotel, the Plaza, and that they’d had a tiring day, though, confidentially, he wouldn’t mind at all just sitting with them and catching the floor shows, but, oh, his was a demanding schedule, which his wife, Lucille, always tapping upon the tiny face of her diamond-movement watch, kept him to.

As Arnaz was about to leave-Lucille Ball was already by the coat check gathering their garments-he said to the brothers, “I guarantee that you’ll have a good time in Los Angeles. But if you have any problems with the music, my good friend Marco Rizo, my arranger, and pianist on the show, lives right here in town. Give him a call, huh?” He scribbled out a number on a card and dropped it on the table. With that, Arnaz, a broad smile on his face, joined his wife; Cesar followed after them, standing on the curbside without a topcoat, a filterless cigarette in hand, his body shivering in the chill, but still waving at the famous couple as they drove away in their limousine through the falling snow.

LATER, AFTER SEVERAL HOURS OF SITTING UP DRINKING WITH his brother, and driving him crazy with all his doubts-“Was that canción really any good?” (“Yes, Brother, how many times do I have to tell you!”)-Nestor lay beside his wife, Delores, absently fondling her breasts but thinking about María. If he loved her enough to write that song, why did performing it for the first time in public leave him so low? And why was he filled with such utter misery when, for the first time, he and Cesar finally had a chance at some success? And then he slipped back again into that period of darkness in Havana, when María had thrown him off, and remembered what Cesar had later told him again and again: “Why be stupid about that María when you have such a wonderful woman as Delores in your life?” Ah, but Delores. He’d always told her that “Beautiful María of My Soul” was just a song he’d been fooling with, and there he was, after six years in the States, lying beside Delores and wishing he were back in Havana with María. And he hated himself for that thought, for Delores certainly deserved better. “Te amo, Delores,” he whispered to her again and again. But why was that hole in his heart, like a pin shoved through a photograph from one’s happier youth-as if real happiness was never really possible? Why was he wasting his affections on a woman who had turned into air? He didn’t know, he was just a citified campesino at heart, after all, didn’t know anything about the way real Cuban men treated women. “No soy honesto,” he told himself that night. “No soy decente”-“I’m neither honest or decent.” And he hated himself even more. But thank God that his body, in times of such gloom, always faithfully took over. Kept awake by the clanking of steam pipes, he found himself lifting up the hem of Delores’s nightgown and, feeling the heat of her bottom, drew back her underwear and entered her from behind, Delores, half asleep, sighing at first and then pushing back in a grinding motion and gasping, but not too loudly because she didn’t want the children to hear at the far end of the hall, Nestor, in those same moments, still thinking about María. Then he came after several powerful thrusts, and once he floated back down to earth, he hated himself anew for having that name, that face, that body still lingering stubbornly in his dreams-ah yes, y coño!-María, angel of the heavens, delicious as the balmy dawn off the Malecón and, as women are in many a bolero, an unforgettable apparition of love. [1]

Chapter TWENTY-NINE

Some five months later, María happened to be walking along Obispo in the aftermath of a terrible argument with Ignacio. Lately, he had started to accuse her of becoming sexually indifferent to him, while she in turn, without actually coming out and saying so, suspected that he wasn’t virile enough to give her a child, despite the fact that he claimed to have once fathered a daughter that he lost. And even that loss she had come to doubt-he seemed to spend too much time away in Florida, and more than once she had come across letters tucked away in the soft inner pockets of his maletas, his suitcases, letters that she did not have the gumption to read but that seemed on the evidence of the handwriting on the envelopes to have been scripted by a woman; and so, she had come to believe that Ignacio, like so many other Cuban men of a certain age who had taken up with a younger woman, had a family hidden away somewhere. Nevertheless, just to talk about that supposed loss brought out his soft side, though it wasn’t much in evidence those days. With a life that had become more difficult because of what his Hoy horoscope described as the “mounting influence of unseen contrary forces,” his business, once booming in the provinces, had gone into a decline on account of what the government had classified as lapses of security, given that rebels far east in Oriente regularly came down from the hills to loot his trucks as they were en route to the cities and small towns of that province. Nor had that store, El Emporio, proved to be anything but a siphon on his income, though Ignacio did enjoy the air of respectability it gave him. Other matters disturbed Ignacio as well. His chest hair had turned white overnight, and his ticker began to ache. Visiting a clinic, not for anti-impotency and venereal disease treatments, or to experience the wonder cures of acupunctura as advertised in the directorio telefónico de la Habana, he began seeing a certain Doctor Cintron, who found Ignacio, with that wormy vein on his forehead, one of the more tense patients he had ever encountered, his blood pressure in a range that defied his bulb-pumped esfigmomanómetro’s capability to measure.

The doctor’s advice? “Calm down, or you’ll drop dead one day.”

But at this, he often failed. While he still liked to blaze through the crowds of Havana with beautiful María on his arm, Ignacio had started to notice how he couldn’t lord it over her the way he used to. More than once he’d seen her looking over his Spanish editions of Shakespeare and had noted her own growing collection of books-frivolous novels written in simple language for women of a certain frame of mind, but books nevertheless: so that negrito Lázaro was worth something after all! And her sweetness had begun to fall away, for he found that it did not take too much for him to perturb her, that María often complained about being cooped up in that apartment, that she sometimes wished she’d never left Pinar del Río, that she lived a life no better than her snippy parrots in their cages. And even that would have been fine except for the fact that Ignacio had begun to suspect that María had someone else. This, as it happened, was true.

That fellow from Y & R had been the first-their little trysts taking place in his fancy suite at the Nacional every so often. He certainly was as handsome as Nestor, though he lacked that soulfulness, which she missed, among other things, and he was so good to her that María might have taken up with Vincente openly were it not for the fact that Ignacio would probably have killed him (and her), and, in any case, she knew he had his own nice family in New York City, just like Nestor, that cabrón. And once María had learned to conceal her feelings, she also took up with a young teller at the bank where she kept her savings, another handsome fellow whose curly hair, soothing eyes, and fortunate endowment reminded her (almost) of Nestor, their liaisons taking place between seven and eight in the evening out in a house on one of the hills overlooking Havana, not far from the university, where this young man’s deaf aunt lived, hardly aware of the raucously loud acts that made her hounds bark. A third lover, a so-called Spanish count-el conde-whom María had met at the Lantern and slept with in his modestly appointed room at the Ambos Mundos Hotel, with its view of the cathedral (of which she had been quite aware and actually enjoyed, as if God lingered somewhere in the distance, though not as close to her as He used to). She did so with her legs spread wide, then closing them tightly as he approached, taunting him, simply because María enjoyed the idea that a former guajira, whose papito shat with the outhouse door open, could make so lofty and pretentious a personage beg to kiss her fine and shapely rump. Those were just a few, with more to follow in her remaining years in Havana-Violeta’s influence and her own suspicion that goodness wasn’t worth much of anything had a lot to do with the way she now moved through her days (or nights); or, to put it differently, María, as the line of a bolero might go, had lately been stripped of her illusions. Having traded love, if that’s what it was, for comfort, she had hardened inside, and Dios, the savior of mankind, does not thrive in such hearts, not even that of a rather beautiful woman; rather He slowly dies.

And what could Ignacio make of María when she kept grinding her hips in the air, moaning as she slept? Who was she dreaming about? He had her followed, just as he once did with Nestor, by one of his more dissolute and shifty cronies, a fellow named Paco, with a crooked spine and a tendency to drink his way, affably, through half the bars and cafés of Havana. He’d take off behind María when she slipped out of the club or left the apartment building and, in the manner of bad 1940s detective movies, spy on her from the shadows as she entered certain doorways or happened to meet one of those fellows on a street corner or in an arcade. Fortunately for María, the disorder of Paco’s mind left him with only the vaguest of memories of her doings. Nevertheless, the very suspicion deeply wounded Ignacio. Over the past year, in one of the more unfortunate turnarounds in his life, he had, while feeling his age-he was somewhere in his late forties by then-actually convinced himself that he had finally and truthfully fallen in love with her, or with her youth and beauty. He made this recent discovery while carousing with other women-among them his shop clerks, market girls, and prostitutes; no matter how voluptuous their bodies, or lovely their faces, or free spirited and unrestrained their voraciousness in bed (or no matter their fear of him), Ignacio found himself thinking about María ruefully, in the same way that she, in the midst of her fleeting love affairs, could not keep herself from wishing that, truth be told, she hadn’t looked down on Nestor, in whom, perhaps, she sometimes saw her own papito.

By then María would often withdraw into a shell of silence, refusing to as much as look him in the eye and never answering Ignacio when he demanded to know why she couldn’t show him love the way she used to; and she simply shrugged when he’d accuse her of being obviously enamored of someone else. Denying everything, once her patience had worn thin, she’d behave as a man would, shoving her indifference into his possessive face, her response coming down to a few words: “And if I did, ¿Y qué?”-“So what?”

Over the past few months, frightened by the prospect of his own mortality, he’d proposed to María a half dozen times, and on each occasion she told him that she’d marry Ignacio only if she carried his baby. To say the least, in that department, he had been failing lately, his enervating maladies affecting his potency in such a manner that, when he visited his whores, he had to be content with the kind of languorous, time-wasting bouts of love that would have driven him crazy with impatience as a younger man. In other words, he now found it a chore getting it up.

“Who are you, Ignacio, to tell me anything when you can’t even satisfy me?” she’d asked him that afternoon.

It was very sad, and her coldness alone half tempted Ignacio to forget about María altogether, maybe even teach her a lesson (but he wasn’t that cruel, not anywhere as mean-spirited as some of his acquaintances, fellow businessmen of a rough demeanor who might have slashed her face just to spite her). He just couldn’t. In her beauty, and in his memories of what she once had been, and because of his unsteady health-even then as they walked in the arcade, his heart had begun aching and he had felt his loins constricting, along with his gut-he was willing to forgive her everything. María, that delicious beauty, so well dressed in the clothes he had bought her in stores like El Encanto; María, a former hick from a backwards, nothing valle, who had become a modest star of second-tier nightclubs, may have turned into something of a spoiled and temperamental bitch, but he had come to cherish her anyway. Her insults, her stillness, the embarrassment of putting up with passersby, who, seeing her face, on the verge of tears and contorting with pain as they crossed the street, judged him harshly-“Hey you, mind your own business!” he would call out-Ignacio thought best to forget. That afternoon, in the interest of preserving his health and dignity, Ignacio, his breathing labored, decided that it would be a waste of his time to argue with her, and in the face-saving manner of cubano machos, who may or may not have been petty gangsters, he managed to pull her close and, with a firm tug of her body against his own, his hand grasping her right buttock through her dress, kissed her neck and said: “I will see you later, huh?” And with that he went off and left María to go about her business.

MARÍA WAS ON HER WAY TO SEE LÁZARO ON HER OLD STREET, THE market teeming as usual (how she still loved strolling about its stalls), when she happened to pass by a certain Flor de Saturno’s barbershop, opened to the narrow pavement, its tile floors covered with clumps of hair trembling ever so slightly in the fan air of the room, that shop’s interior redolent of musk and lilac scents and cigars, the barber snipping away with his scissors and whistling. Just then, from its cream-colored radio, in all its glory, came the unmistakable voices of Cesar and Nestor Castillo, their tremulous baritone harmonies, stopping María in her tracks. It was the first time she’d ever heard one of their records being played over the air. The melody seemed vaguely familiar, like something she’d listened to before, though surely different, like a cousin of one of those sad yet impassioned songs of love that Nestor, in happier times, had serenaded into her window, hummed into her ears, sang between his kisses from nipple to nipple and quivering tendon to tendon, and in those moments of joy when, declaring that nothing in life made him happier than to look into her eyes, he had whispered, then sung some bit of poetry before jamming himself more deeply into her. But could it really be him? As she stood by that doorway, the barber and his customers all bade her to come in. But María remained outside, catching a verse that went:

Qué dolor delicioso

El amor me ha traído

En la forma de una mujer…

Mi tormento y mi éxtasis…

Bella María de mi Alma…

María, mi vida

(Or in English:

What delicious pain

Love had brought to me

In the form of a woman.

My torment and ecstasy,

Beautiful María of my soul…

María, my life…)

Just as she was about to lean in and ask the barbershop fellows if they happened to know whose recording was playing on the radio, an announcer came on and dispelled all of her doubts: “You’ve just heard Cesar Castillo y los Reyes del Mambo, an orchestra out of Nueva York, performing ‘La bella María de mi alma!’” And that threw María into such a state of distraction that, when she finally sat with Lázaro, who had not been feeling well lately, she could hardly pay attention to her lesson.

“What is it with you today?” he asked her, his voice raspy from a cough that had been plaguing him for months. María had kept looking off, as if she expected Nestor Castillo to come walking down the street.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you remember that músico I once knew?”

“The nice fellow? Sure, what about him?”

“He was always promising to write a song about me, but I never believed it would come to anything. But, just now I heard him on the radio, over CMQ, singing a bolero called ‘La bella María de mi alma.’”

“And you’re sure it’s by him?”

“Yes. It’s his voice,” she said.

“But that should make you happy, huh?” he said, rapping his knee. “Why the long face then, mi vida?”

“Because of the lyrics, Lázaro,” she said, shaking her head. “He calls me his ‘torment and ecstasy’-and cruel, as if I had ever wanted to break his heart.”

Lázaro just smiled, shaking his head. “Oh, youth,” he began. “Don’t you know that most boleros are that way? There’s always heartbreak in them, been that way since the tradition started, way back when. I’m sure that fellow-What was his name?”

“Nestor Castillo,” she said.

“I’m sure that he’s just following that tradition, that’s all. I wouldn’t take it too hard. Unless, of course, you are still harboring feelings for him.” He smiled. “Are you?”

“Some,” she finally admitted. “But, Lázaro, I never wanted to hurt that man, the way he says in that bolero.”

“Ah, you should just feel flattered anyway,” he told her. “However things turned out between you two, he wouldn’t have written that song to spite you. No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I haven’t heard it, but I’m sure he did it out of love-you know those músicos are just that way.” Then, deciding that to continue their lesson was pointless, Lázaro, with a blood-and-spittle-dampened handkerchief dangling from his trouser pocket, held out his hand to María so that she could help him up and into the courtyard and the hovel in which he humbly lived.

That, in any event, is what took place at about three thirty in the afternoon, in the spring of 1956.

FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, MARÍA HEARD THAT SONG EVERYWHERE. It played out of the windows and doorways of buildings, echoed in the courtyards, blared from car radios and bodega entrances, and from speakers over the doors of record shops all over Havana. Out at la playita with some dancer friends, where she enjoyed being free from the company of men, a sidewalk band had added “La bella María de mi alma” to its repertoire, and soon enough she heard “Beautiful María” being performed by arcade musicians and lounge pianists in the palm courts of hotels all over the city. Suddenly, “el exito nuevo de los fabulosos Reyes del Mambo”-or the “newest hit by the fabulous Mambo Kings,” as the radio announcers were calling it-was inescapable. Its melody drifted, in disembodied harmonies, into the Havana night from the prows of casino and cruise ships as they crossed the horizon; and even at the Lantern, the house band had worked up a rendition. Soon enough she got to the point that she’d hear its chorus in the whistle calls that followed her as she’d stroll down the street, in the chirping of sparrows along the Prado, and even in the tremulous clarion of church bells. Altogether she heard “Beautiful María of My Soul” so often in those days that she sometimes thought herself inside a crazy dream.

FOR HIS PART, NESTOR SENT HER A COPY OF THE NEWLY PRESSED long-playing 33¹/₃ rpm album, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, on which that bolero was included. The cover was nothing special-done up in the style of 1950s jackets out of New York, Nestor playing a trumpet while Cesar banged on a conga drum, the two of them, she had to admit as she sat before her dressing room mirror, looking handsome and dapper in their white silk suits as they stood posing against the backdrop of some art director’s abstracted notion of a New York skyline, a flurry of quarter notes raining down around them. He’d also included a glossy head shot of himself, sort of like the ones María had made up of herself to promote her act, Nestor appearing, much like a star, hair and eyes and teeth gleaming with vitality, a smile on his face and a halo of light emanating from his head (in the same way that photographers showed that rebel leader Castro off in the mountains of Oriente at the time in magazines). Having never sent her such a self-promoting photograph before, nor looking so gloriously handsome, he might have seemed to have lost his humility were it not for the carefully rendered and rather self-effacing nature of his inscription, which said: “Para la bella María de mi alma…mi inspiración… Te debo todo, con todo mi amor, Nestor Castillo.”

“…To my inspiration… I owe you everything, with all my love…”

María’s thoughts in those moments at the club? Pleased that she could now read without too much of a struggle-if he only knew!-and amazed to think that Nestor, ese pobre, really seemed to be making something of himself in America. Suddenly, she couldn’t keep herself from coming to the conclusion that Nestor Castillo, whose letters had been fewer and farther between, had become a success after all, instead of just another lost musician soul. And the song itself? The more she heard its sad but moving melody, the more María believed that Nestor still loved her. The letters he had written her were one thing, but this canción, no matter how cruelly its letras portrayed María, was nothing less than a public declaration of his undying love for her.

She imagined him in far-off Nueva York, with money in his pockets, pining away for her. She imagined that this recording was selling like crazy, a feeling that grew stronger when a musician friend, who often traveled to the States, told María that the song had been introduced to the vast American public on a very popular television show there, a program that, in fact, was broadcast in English, but with Spanish subtitles, on the CBS affiliate in Havana, Yo Amo A Lucy, whose star happened to be Cuban, a real success, by the name of Desiderio Arnaz, a fellow originally from Santiago. Even if the show-business people of María’s acquaintance didn’t watch it, the fact remained that her sweet country boy and former amante, with all his dreams and illusions, had no doubt become famous in his new país.

With the record he had sent along a letter “written with tears of regret,” professing that, no matter how his life might change, he still couldn’t forget how much he had loved her. She was, after all, the sum of his happiest memories of Havana, and perhaps of Cuba itself. Not a day had passed, he confessed, when he didn’t think about the life they might have had in Cuba had things not turned out so differently, the sadness of that song something he had carried in his heart from the day she left him. She must have gone over that letter a half dozen times, and with each careful reading, María came to the same conclusion: Nestor still loved her, and she, María García y Cifuentes, in her own unhappiness, owed it to herself-and certainly to Nestor, for the sake of their future and of “destiny,” as he might have put it-to make things right, to do what she-persuaded that what she had always felt for Nestor was love-never had had the inclination to carry out before. This, María decided as she got ready to go onstage that night, would involve a journey to New York.

Chapter THIRTY

It was the kind of decision that, decades later and in the midst of a new life in Miami, would make María shake her head in puzzlement. At least she had asked for her friends’ consejo-advice. And not just the ladies over at la Cucaracha, Violeta among them, who saw such a trip as a golden opportunity for María to find a happier situation-“Follow your heart, and, if he really loves you, you’ll come out with something to show for it to boot!”-but also her dear old teacher, Lázaro, about the only man she really trusted in Havana. She approached him at the marketplace one afternoon with reverence, and great caution. For María did not want Lázaro to think poorly of her.

“There’s something I must ask you,” she said. “I need your advice.”

“About?” Lázaro asked.

“It’s a matter of love.”

He scratched his chin. “Who is the fellow?”

“The one you knew-the musician.”

“Oh, yes, the one who wrote that song?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “So what’s happened with him?” A squeaking noise came from his throat. “Didn’t you tell me that he got married?”

She had, one of those afternoons, when Nestor’s matrimony had seemed a betrayal.

“Yes, but I don’t think he’s really happy.”

“Aha,” he said, knowing her well enough to wonder what she was really up to. “And so, what are you asking me about?”

“I have been thinking about going to see him in New York.”

“ New York? That’s a long way. But why now?”

And she grew excited, sitting down beside him. “Hearing his canción, I realized just how much he’s still in love with me.” Then, touching her heart, she said, “All I know is that I want to see him again, to see for myself if that love is true.”

“After all these years? And with a married man?” He just kept shaking his head. “If I were you, girl, I’d forget about it. All that trouble will just bring you more trouble, can’t you see that?”

“I’ve dreamed that he needs me.”

“A dream?” He sucked in his lower lip. “No, no, no,” he told her. “If I were you, I just wouldn’t go.”

Disappointed, María looked off, forlorn. “Really, I just wanted your blessing, that’s all,” she told him.

“Nope,” he said. “I won’t abide by that kind of foolishness. It always ends up badly for someone.”

“I’m going anyway,” she told him. “It’s what my heart tells me to do.”

He started to get up, rather unsteadily, and without offering his knobby-boned hand to her the way he usually did.

“ New York?…I don’t have a good feeling about that.”

“But will you give me your blessing, please, Lázaro, for good luck?”

“Okay, okay,” he finally said, seeing that some tears had gathered in her eyes, and as he leaned towards her, he began fluttering his hands over her head and reciting some African incantations. It made her feel better. “You have my best wishes,” he said, “but I still think you’re being foolish.” And then, seized by a spasm of coughing, he leaned up against the doorway and closed his eyes.

ABOUT A WEEK LATER, WHEN MARÍA HAPPENED TO MENTION TO Ignacio that several nightclub people in New York City were interested in having her travel there to audition for their shows, she wasn’t concealing any truths. In fact, her friend at Y & R, Vincente Torres, who would have liked to keep María as his mistress in that city, had connections with the owners of the club Marseilles and the Latin Quarter, but, until recently, María had never even considered taking him up on it. The idea of staying in that city, which she mainly knew from Nestor’s letters and from the movies, didn’t hold the least bit of appeal to her. Not just because such a place of concrete and steel and forlorn winters seemed impossible to a girl born in the Cuban countryside but also because the very notion of having to learn English, which she knew a few words of from the clubs, at a time when she was just becoming más o menos comodita with the demands of writing and reading her own language, simply didn’t interest her. It would have been too much. And for other reasons that most sensible people would have found irrational, María, with her superstitious beliefs and hating the very notion of traveling so far away, couldn’t have been dragged off to New York.

And yet, she had suddenly changed her mind.

“Okay, okay,” Ignacio told her one day, when she had asked him for his permission. “You want me to go with you?”

“No, Ignacio, I’m going with my friend Gladys. She has relatives up there, in a place called the Bronx. Ella habla inglés. She speaks English.”

Ignacio probably knew that she had something up her sleeve, but he didn’t object, even though she wouldn’t even accompany him to Miami before that-when he’d say, “Now the Fontainebleau is the sort of high-class place you should be dancing in…” Lately, Ignacio had been treating her more kindly, and though María hadn’t the slightest inkling why, he, like any man connected to her, had come to feel intimations of his mortality. By medical necessity Ignacio had become a calmer man; any aggravation speeding his heartbeat led to dull pains up and down his arms and, with them, a gnarly sensation of misery like worms chewing around inside his chest. “Do as you want,” he told her. “But if you need any help, I know people up there.” And so it was Ignacio, making a few telephone calls, who arranged for María’s passport, even though she had only a cabaret workers’ card, and Ignacio who, in a show of largesse, promised to give María several hundred dollars for her trip. He had the numbers of acquaintances in New York she could look up if she became lonely. Altogether, in his blunt and manly wariness, Ignacio couldn’t have been more kindly-again and again she would say in the future, “He was good to me, even if I behaved like the devil sometimes.”

AND THE BROTHERS? WITH THE SUCCESS OF “BEAUTIFUL MARÍA OF My Soul,” a top ten hit on the easy listening charts, the Mambo Kings orchestra was suddenly in demand. In the spring of 1956 they had embarked on a tour, traveling from coast to coast in a refurbished school bus which they’d had painted a flamingo pink, and for two of the most glorious months of their professional lives they performed nightly in the social clubs and ballrooms of both small towns and major cities. Fresh off his turn as a walk-on character on the Lucy show and comporting himself like a movie star, the older brother, Cesar, relished every moment onstage, hamming it up for crowds from rural Pennsylvania to California, and satisfying a lot of women along the way. But Nestor? Never having easily adjusted to America, he had slipped into a monumental state of gloom. Under the lights and standing beside the ever vibrant Cesar, and always invigorated by the band’s music, Nestor found his moments of joy, but once they returned to their motel rooms, or traveled overnight to their next destination by bus-the stars hanging in the sky just like in Cuba-a profound sadness involving his wife, his children, and María, as well as so many other unattainable longings, overwhelmed him. How could it not, for with every performance there came that moment when the brothers, standing side by side, launched into their touching rendition of “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Each time they came to the line “How can I hate you if I love you so?” countless nights, both before and after he had married the wonderful Delores Fuentes, when, for reasons beyond his reckoning, he could only think about María, came back to him.

How could it be that he still felt the same way after so much time? And did María love him at all? He’d thank God that he hadn’t abandoned Delores, or flown down to Havana to make a fool of himself anew; thank God that he had his family to go home to after the tour. He’d buy the kids presents and with money in his pockets knew there were so many things that he and Delores could look forward to. And yet, each time they performed that bolero, which he’d truly come to hate in his way, Nestor’s heart festered with even greater longing for María. (Cesar, seeing this in his brother’s eyes, had to fight off an urge to rap him in the back of his head.) Why the glorious pain? The memories of her, Nestor’s own soul suffering through every note, every verse, every ascending trumpet solo: but why?

So imagine Nestor’s state of mind when, after years of not hearing as much as a single word from her, he arrived home from the tour to find a letter from María waiting for him. It had taken her two hours to compose, her handwriting, in pencil, erased any number of times but carefully rendered-as was Nestor’s, it was almost like the script of a child-and her spelling and sentences, for all her efforts to be correct, occasionally faltering, as they no doubt would, he thought, with a guajira from the countryside.

It went, in the English equivalent:

My dear Nestor,

Forgive me for my silents: all the years that did go pass, I had to forget you because I did not know what my hombre would have done to me, even if he is not so much a bad man. Pero él es muy macho, sabes? If I not had answer your letters, it was because I have feel very bad for my manera to write, which as you can see is not so very good. But I could not even put two sententcents together, if not because for my friend, un buen negro, que se llama Lázaro-he taught me what I know, even if it is not so good; because of him I had been able to read better your letters to me, but I did not want you to know soo much of my ignorance and stupid mente: and then I found out from your friend Miguel that you was married and then I became angered with you.

But now I have gotten older and know love only comes maybe once in a lifetime, like you have always say. Not long ago, you had send me the song, muy muy bonito, “Bella María,” of me, and I heard it many times on the radio and it has made me think to write you. Listen to it and I know that you must still love me very very much and it has made me think about how much I have love you too: I mean to say Nestor that I also haven’t forgotten what a delicious romance we had. I know you are married, but then I think that you would not have written a song so beautiful or too many cartas tan afeccionadas, did you not really have unhappiness? And because, mi amor, I really don’t have anyone to love me like you, I want to see you again. Even if for a day. I don’t want no more, just I am tired of not seeing you for so long and have thought to come to New York just to be there with you. Is that possible? I would come only for a little while. Would you let me know if you want me to, and I will let you know everything of how and when I would have arrived.

Te quiero mucho Nestor, mucho mucho. With all my heart.

María

He had been sitting in the park, a few blocks from the apartment building where they lived on La Salle, boats passing on the Hudson River, the first summery breezes coming off the water, reminding him of his dalliances with María, la bella María, along the balmy Malecón. Memories of necking passionately with María as she sat on that seawall, Nestor with his hand up her dress, if only for a moment-María had her dignity after all; memories of looking up in bed and seeing María above him, her thick siren’s hair covering her beautiful face, her voice a litany of moans. Just the pain of that memory alone tore Nestor into pieces, and that’s why he, at first, after reading it over, had crumpled the letter up and tossed it into a garbage can in despair. María coming to New York? For all his desires for María, he just couldn’t see himself being unfaithful to Delores. But, no sooner had he started to walk away than Nestor, swatting away a whirl of hornets circling the melted remains of a Popsicle, decide to retrieve the letter. Flattening it out on his lap, he read it again, forgiving her guajira mistakes, read it over until his stomach went into knots, wishing that María had written him such a letter years ago.

He headed off to a local Irish bar, the Shamrock, where the fellows found his quiet manner amusing. Never a hard drinker, he threw back a few rye whiskeys, his heart aching. Then he went home. He must have been a little tipsy when he sat down to write María, telling her that his decision was “yes, come to New York.” They’d have to be very careful, no one was to be told-not even his older brother, or especially his older brother. (“She must have had some kind of papáya, to make you so crazy,” Cesar used to say.) Here was his plan: Knowing that he’d have some free time away from the band the last week of the month of July 1956, when their musicians, by mutual consent, decided to take a vacation break-to hell with the McAlpin ballroom, which had become their usual Sunday afternoon gig-he agreed to meet with María that weekend, but only for an afternoon. (Even that made him nervous.) Planning carefully for the occasion, Nestor gave her the telephone number of the corner pharmacy where for years, before business demanded they get their own phone, the Castillo brothers had received their most important calls-the pharmacist sending a kid up the street to their apartment to fetch them. Treating the situation as if they were spies, he wrote: “When you telephone, María, just say that you have a message from Omar in Havana and leave me the number where you are staying.” Then he’d wait, without knowing if María was really going to keep her word. That’s what killed him-skulking around the apartment, he spent the next three weeks waiting for the day when the kid from the pharmacy would come knocking on his door, and in all that time, while conjuring all kinds of visions of what might happen, he couldn’t look Delores in the eye.

Chapter THIRTY-ONE

Indeed, beautiful María had planned to make that journey with one of the other dancers in her troupe, Gladys. With but a single piece of equipaje each, they left Havana aboard a P & O steamship for Miami on a midmorning in late June. Only a single photograph of María on that particular day survives: in a florid dress and a Saturn-looking sunhat and dark glasses, she leaned over the railing of an upper deck waving a dainty kerchief at her friend below. When the ladies exchanged places and María tottered carefully down the metal stairs in her white high heels (to break an ankle from slipping anywhere-onstage, in a hallway, or on a church staircase-remained any dancer’s greatest fear) to snap Gladys’s picture with that Brownie, she captured in her friend, with her newly dyed blond hair, a Cuban look-alike of Kim Novak, whom the two dancers had recently seen in the movie Picnic. Gladys wore a lipstick so livid it read from even a distance as a darkish patina, and her eyes were also overly adorned, with fake eyelashes and mascara; her sundress, its fabric of peacock colors, was so short that, as Gladys posed, gentlemen made it a point to congregate by that section of the lower deck, newspapers or cigars in hand, and, as if by coincidence, managed many a long glance upwards at the tent formed by her pleated skirt, and at her spider-lace panties. (It just so happened that, despite Gladys’s tackiness, she and María were to remain friends for many years, until they had been living in Miami for decades, and, as they’d tell María’s daughter, Doctor Teresita, during their occasional get-togethers, that journey, despite its later consequence for María, was something of a relajo for them-a great amusement-and bonded them for good.) In fact, men followed them everywhere, even into the casino rooms, where they had gone simply to escape the midday sun, the dancers sitting on banquettes smoking and sipping the drinks that strangers kept sending over to them. Also onboard was a contingent of Catholic priests and nuns from the diocese of Havana, along with some thirty of their young charges, sickly (sadly) Cuban children, most suffering from tuberculosis but a few from nervous disorders (María sighed, recognizing in some the same faint trembling of the hands that her own late sister sometimes exhibited, even with medicine). These unfortunates were on their way, the dancers imagined, to better hospitals in the USA. And among the Cubans onboard, some of whom, they’d learned by eavesdropping, were heading home to different cities along the Eastern Seaboard or to attend to businesses (like Ignacio), there happened to be at least two celebrities. The first was the dapper actor Cesar Romero, said to be José Martí’s grandson, who held forth in a corner before some colleagues, and the second, hard as she found it to believe, seemed to be María herself. For several cubanos, having recognized her unmistakably alluring face from posters and newspaper ads in Havana, approached, seeking not only her autograph (nightly she practiced writing her name) but a simple nod of congenial acknowledgment and a few words as well. On the other hand, the American tourists onboard, in their seersucker suits, loving to play the slot machines or else to sit quietly about reading issues of Life and National Geographic, didn’t seem to notice anything special about her save her spectacular looks. (Somehow that depressed María.)

That leg of the journey lasted some seven hours, and at about four in the afternoon, after clearing customs in Miami, the ladies, following an initial bout of apprehension and confusion, managed, through the kindness of several Tampa-born cubanos whom they had met along the docks, to find inexpensive but clean accommodations near the central rail terminal for the night. The next morning María and Gladys set out on the Silver Star, which left at 9 a.m. for New York City.

IN JUST SHORT OF TWENTY-SIX HOURS, WITH STOPS IN THIRTY-FIVE cities or towns along the way, among them Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Norfolk, and the capital, Washington, D.C., María and Gladys went north. Riding coach class with occasional (and intimidating) strolls along the platforms during the stopovers-Will that train leave without me?-and endless visits to the cramped toilet compartment at the end of their car, along with frequent sojourns in the coach-class passengers’ bar and lounge, María had watched, through “grand panoramic” windows, the sleepy marshlands, swamps, forests, and plantations, with their Negroes in the fields, that constituted the terrain of the American South. Eventually, the greenery gave way to bustling, trestle-bridged cities-the sight of Baltimore, with row after row of soot-faced brick tenement buildings, in its bleakness, halted María’s heart.

Halfway to New York, she succumbed to brief bouts of nostalgia, not only for the maze-ridden streets of Havana, which she had gotten to know so well, but for the sweet birdsongs of Pinar del Río-how Nestor must have suffered himself, for, as she recalled from one of his letters, the Castillo brothers had made a similar trip to New York by train back in 1949, except they had arrived in the winter. On María’s train rode a group of Cuban musicians from Havana, black instrument cases by their sides, playing games of whist and canasta or dominoes for hours on end and drinking away in the lounge. Among them were some first-timers, staring out the windows with the same expression as María, of both hopefulness and dread. It wasn’t as if they were entering into the jaws of a lion, but somehow that whole journey, twisting María’s gut, felt that way, and more than once she wanted to confide in Gladys about just why she had suddenly decided to visit New York-not for show-business reasons at all but to see just what she still felt for that músico, if anything at all. (Bueno, to be entirely truthful, she also believed that he would just fall into her arms at the sight of her.) Each time she fantasized about that, her stomach went into cramps, as if her own selfish thoughts were catching up with her. And off to the bathroom she would go, the mirror’s image of her beautiful face jostling in the serrating yellow light of that urine-smelling compartment seeming, as María looked at herself, to have taken on a deceitful cast she had never seen before. Oh yes, apparently she had a conscience that bothered her, but she didn’t want to let on to anyone that she did. Before leaving that toilet, she’d arrange her hair as nicely as possible-wearing it clipped to the side like a proper schoolgirl with a barrette-touch up the little makeup she put on, and spritz her neck and behind her ears with a spray of Surrender lilac perfume, always smiling sweetly at anyone who happened to catch that beautiful cubana’s gaze, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening within her.

Passing through the car, María noticed that some of the passengers who’d sailed on the Florida out of Havana just the day before had also boarded that train-grandmothers, abuelitas, with their grandchildren, some of those American tourists, but as well another Cuban, a bulbous-headed, middle-aged fellow with a slip of a mustache, in a lacquered Panama and white cotton suit, whose occasional staring, as he looked up from the handful of magazines and newspapers he kept on his lap, unnerved her. He’d tip down the brim of his hat and nod any time he caught her eye, and that further tangled her gut. She wouldn’t have put it past her grand machón Ignacio, so apparently magnanimous about her sudden desire to travel, to have hired someone to follow her, if not out of suspicion to make sure that she would be all right.

Nevertheless, by the time they made it into New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, whose interior was vaster than anything she had ever seen before, after an endless descent through what seemed like the bowels of the earth-so much like a purgatory, but one that smelled of cinders and acrid electric wires-and they had deboarded the train, María, as the crowds and porters thronged around them, had been relieved that Glady’s sister Mireya and her husband, along with a few of their kids, were on the platform waiting. Of course they overwhelmed Gladys with kisses, for they had not seen her for years, and María took such wonderful sentiments in with both joy and envy-to have a family of her own, and people to care about her hit her as another of her reasons for journeying to that strange and distant city.

In other words, she wanted to bear Nestor’s child.

Chapter THIRTY-TWO

Altogether, though the northeast Bronx was not exactly Havana, María found it a pleasant thing to be living with a family again, no matter that the apartment was a fifth-floor railroad walk-up off Allerton Avenue with scarcely any privacy, even if they had given María one of their five kids’ bedrooms. Treated as a special guest by Gladys’s sister, María had no reason to complain about anything, and though she spoke no more than a few words of English, when they were taken around the neighborhood-de los italianos-to their churches, markets, and butcher shops, she was delighted to find that she could speak Spanish and still be understood. María liked that. She spent an afternoon at the Bronx Zoo, which was not far away, and another in the company of Mireya down in the heart of Manhattan, with strolls through Central Park, so much vaster and labyrinthine than any park in Havana; there were excursions to see Macy’s department store and the Empires [sic] State Building-tense and trying to make a joke, María asked: “So where is King Kong?”-and a quick visit to the clothing factory off Seventh Avenue and Thirty-eighth where Mireya’s husband worked as an English-Spanish-speaking floor manager and the owner, a Jewish fellow, laying eyes on María, instantly offered her a job as a foundation garment model. Even after a stroll one night through a neon-lit Times Square, where they had dined for nickels in a Horn & Hardart (whose lemon meringue pie-dispensing machines fascinated her), María had found the city barely tolerable, and not anyplace she could imagine living, with or without Nestor. The noisy and unsettling subway rides from the Bronx alone seemed tedious, and more than once, though María tried to keep to herself, her guarded ways still hadn’t prevented some of those men from reaching out to grasp her nalgitas or to press up against her. And downtown, as it had been in Havana, she experienced the same, men stopping everywhere to stare at her, and while no one treated her badly, María tired quickly of the city-the mad traffic, the teeming sidewalks, the endless buzz of hearing not just English but half a dozen other languages as she walked along, sashaying from corner to corner, her head raised, gawking at the skyscrapers and, often enough, longing for the quieter and more quaint arcades of Havana, the blueness of the Cuban sky.

In that time, she did make an effort to contact a few club managers. Indeed an agent, an affable Cuban transplant named Johnny Tamayo, had taken María around one afternoon, and she had auditioned, in her most lustrous costume, for a possible future engagement as one of the “sexquisite” dancers at the Latin Quarter, where the actress Mae West, supported by a cast of oiled up musclemen, happened to be the featured star of a somewhat bawdy revue that month. María also turned up at La Conga and the Copacabana, but in each instance, because she was so ill equipped to navigate her way through the intricacies of the English language and feeling out of her element, her performances were so halfhearted that María came off as if she didn’t really care if they hired her or not. This, in fact, happened to be the truth.

One late afternoon, however, on her fifth day in the city, when she couldn’t take waiting anymore, María went down to the first-floor lobby, where a pay phone had been installed for the poorer tenants of the building and, dropping a nickel in, dialed the number that Nestor had given her. Three rings, and someone picked up: “ Claremont ’s Pharmacy.” And because she could hardly speak English, it didn’t take long before the red-haired Irish fellow who’d answered the call put her on the phone with the Puerto Rican cook working behind their soda fountain counter, and it was he, Fernando, who later sent a kid up the street to Nestor Castillo’s apartment with a message from “Omar of Havana” along with that number in the Bronx.

THEY FINALLY SPOKE A FEW HOURS LATER, WHEN NESTOR, SLIPPING out of his apartment on the pretext of buying a pack of cigarettes, had walked over to the Shamrock, a block away, to use their pay phone. For her part, while awaiting Nestor’s call, María had sat restlessly with Gladys’s family in their living room, listening to the Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians hour on the radio. As it happened, just as their landlord’s teenage boy came knocking on the door of Apartment 22 with a message that someone had called the building asking to speak to the lady staying with the Delgados, Mr. Lombardo, his selections depending on the latest trends, led his orchestra into a lavish rendition of a certain newly popular song. Since everyone in that building, mostly Italians, listened to that radio program at the same time, the hallways and courtyard echoed, and mockingly so-te juro-with the melody of that current hit “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

The kid had left the telephone receiver dangling.

“Sí?”

“Hola, María…?”

“Nestor?”

It had been so long since she last heard his voice that she was surprised.

“Is it you, María?”

“But you know it is, mi amor. Are you well?”

“I am…well enough, pero, María…”

“Tell me everything, mi corazón… Have you thought about me?”

“Every day since I have been in this country…”

She heard a puzzling sound behind her-two little girls bouncing a ball back and forth at the far end of the hallway, playing just like she and her dead sister, Teresita, used to. María shushed them. Just as distracting was the manner in which their voices, separated by a sea of seven years, though familiar, seemed to belong to strangers: Nestor’s had grown deeper, and though he still had an affectionate tone, he spoke slowly, and not as gushingly as he used to, as if he were guarding something. And María’s-she knew it herself-was devoid of the absolute sweetness that had once informed every syllable she uttered; that voice, formerly so angelic, now had the edge of a more world-weary woman of twenty-six.

“It was the same for me, Nestor… I’ve missed you,” she told him. And when he didn’t answer right away, she added: “I’ve missed you so much that my heart has aches to think about it.”

She heard him sigh, heard the murmurs of voices, the click-clacking of a game of pool, and, from the upper recesses of the building, the strains of that song again. That’s when he asked her: “How long will you be here in New York?”

“I don’t know, maybe a week. I haven’t bought any tickets back yet. I don’t really know anything, right now, but, Nestor, I came here to see you. You remember that, don’t you?” Then: “Please don’t tell me I’ve come all this way for nothing.”

“No, no, María, you haven’t, I promise you that. It’s just that things are not so easy for me as when you and I were together. It’s that-”

But before he could continue, she told him: “Just tell me where and when we can meet, my love.”

He gave it some thought, and perhaps because he didn’t think it a good idea to meet with María anyplace uptown, where they might be seen, he suggested a place reminiscent of where they sometimes went on Sundays back in Havana, not to the bedroom of a friend’s solar, or to one of those couples’ retreats rented by the hours, but to a sanctimonious place that somehow always made them both feel good: a church.

“Please don’t think me crazy, María,” he said after a few moments. “But have you heard of a very special iglesia, downtown-it’s called St. Patrick’s-on Fifty and Fifth?”

“Yes, I have,” she told him. Gladys’s sister had pointed it out to her from a bus.

“Good,” he said. “It’s a very nice church. We can meet there, by the entranceway, yes?”

“But when, Nestor?”

“How is the day after tomorrow? At two o’clock. ¿Está bien?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can stroll around for a bit, but mainly we will get the chance to talk, okay?”

“Yes, Nestor,” she said. “On Wednesday, a las dos de la tarde.”

“So I will see you then. Now, forgive me, María, but I have to go.”

They said their good-byes, and then that was all. María headed up the stairs to rejoin the family.

Chapter THIRTY-THREE

Two days later, at the appointed time, María, in a delicate blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, a floridly embroidered vest, and a tight pair of toreador pants, stood waiting inside the entryway of the cathedral. After having given herself plenty of time for the nerve-racking train ride from the Bronx and the negotiation of the streets, she’d arrived early, and by two thirty, having watched people coming and going through those doors without any sign of him, she had been on the verge of feeling abandoned, when breathlessly Nestor Castillo came bounding up the steps, his face contorted, dabbing the sweat off his handsome brow with a handkerchief. She had been looking inside, and had thought that she might sit for a while taking in the solemn comforts of the nave, but then she heard his voice-“María!” It surprised her to see how he had changed-his face had filled out somewhat, she supposed from all those home-cooked meals, and yes, he seemed prosperous. He wore a fine watch, a gold bracelet, and, she also noticed, a simple wedding band. Dressed casually enough for a mildly warm day in late June, he had turned up in a crisp white guayabera, a pair of pleated pantalones, and laceless shoes of Spanish leather, the sort he had favored in Havana. With his hand clasped over his chest, for he had practically run over from the West Side, he poured forth an explanation about a stalled subway, begging her forgiveness. Somehow, as María smiled meekly at the glorious sight of him, they hadn’t even managed a salutatory kiss on the cheek, but stood facing one another, briefly taking hold of each other’s hands.

“Oh, but María,” he said. “It’s so good to see you.”

Soon enough they were inside the cathedral. Maybe a nostalgia had informed Nestor’s choice, or perhaps he had thought to set a restrained tone for their reunion, but it wasn’t long before they were a few pews back from the altar, kneeling in prayer, like they used to back in Havana before they’d go off to ravish each other like the sinners they became. He had put on enough cologne for her to notice, despite the smell of burning candles and incense that floated in clouds through the nave; and though he seemed intent on his incantations to El Señor, which he whispered with his eyes closed, now and then he’d turn to look at her and smile. After a few minutes, he moved a little closer. Then, in the manner of their earlier times together, Nestor, in the sight of God and his saints and all the angels of heaven, couldn’t help but reach down, while in the midst of his prayers, to feel her leg, his hand moving from above her knee towards where her thigh wouldn’t give way anymore, murmuring, “Oh, but mi María.”

With just his touch she felt her undergarment dampening, God forgive her. And some scent must have risen off her skin, a distinctly female aroma, somewhere between burning sugar and raw meat. His nostrils flared-and they both knew what was bound to happen sooner or later that afternoon. Nestor turned to her and said, “Some things no man can ever forget,” and then he kissed her, and with that they made the sign of the cross and he took hold of her hand, and they went off together.

HE MADE NO MENTION OF HIS WIFE AND TWO CHILDREN, THOUGH she knew that, when he fell into a silence, that’s who he was really thinking about; but he told her much about the fortunes of the Castillo brothers’ orchestra, the Mambo Kings-“I wish you could hear us. We’re sounding fantastic and get crowds everywhere we play.” There was some talk about that television show and how nicely his fellow cubano Desi Arnaz had treated the brothers in California, first class all the way: some real good breaks had come about because of that song-“The one I wrote about you, and only you, María…” Walking downtown towards Macy’s, where she had thought to buy some gifts for la señora Matilda in Havana and her hostess in the Bronx-it was just an excuse, a way of passing time-María was tempted to ask him if he really thought she had treated him cruelly. But she knew the answer. In fact, as they were crossing Sixth Avenue, María being María, which is to say still a poor guajira at heart, no matter how well she now dressed and comported herself, she couldn’t help but ask Nestor: “With such a successful song, you must be making money, yes?”

She meant to pry; or perhaps didn’t mean to, but whatever the case, he laughed and, in a slip, told her: “Some money, María, but I’ve been putting it all away for my kids,” the only time he brought them up. And that inspired a period of glacial silence, which María broke with a simple question.

He turned, trying to pull her towards him, even as she backed off.

“So you have a family now, verdad?”

“Yes, good children and a wife.”

“I’m so happy for you, Nestor,” she told him, looking off, to nowhere.

Changing the subject, she talked about her dancer’s career; nothing about the fact that she was still with Ignacio, or about wanting a child of her own, or of the men she sometimes went off with-for fun, or to forget herself, or to be cruel, María didn’t know why. Occasionally, she’d think about something the older women at the clubs had always told her: “It’s fine to have the memory of a love, but it’s a fairy tale to think that one can ever go back there again.” She ignored that, of course, enjoying the way that Nestor, even for all the miércoles of their small talk, looked at her, so sadly, so priestly, so filled with desire. She loved it when he squeezed her hand and smiled. She loved to think, for that afternoon at least, they could both pretend no one else existed in the world, though he soon shattered that impression. “I am enjoying seeing you again,” he told her, “but one thing. I have an obligation, una cita, this evening, and I must be leaving you by six.”

That offended her, but María smiled anyway.

They went to Macy’s. She bought an Italian silk scarf for Gladys’s sister, a few other items for the rest of that family, a half dozen packages of nylons for la señora Matilda. Afterwards, just past four, Nestor suggested that they might go somewhere for a sandwich and a drink, and that’s how they ended up in the bar of the New Yorker Hotel, just across from the Eighth Avenue subway on Thirty-fourth Street. As a musician, Nestor knew just about every hotel manager, concierge, and bartender in the city, the Cubans among them at least, and so, when they walked in, they were treated royally and seated at a corner table. They ordered two grilled steak sandwiches on toast (though she only picked at hers) and a bottle of red wine, but before that arrived, Nestor asked for a glass of rum, and so did María, mainly to calm their nerves, because they both knew what was bound to happen. Outside the bar doorway, the floor was covered by a red carpet that led to an elevator, a conveyance, which, with the press of a button, could take them to any number of rooms. In one of them, both María and Nestor knew, there would be a bed which destiny had surely intended for them. Neither said as much, at first, but after a few rums, they started holding hands again, gazing deeply into each other’s eyes, and whispering endearments. That’s when Nestor, like some fellow out of a bolero, reached over and, touching her face, said: “You must know, María, how much I still love you.”

And María told him the same, though she wasn’t sure she believed it herself. Nevertheless, after a while, it seemed inevitable that Nestor would have a certain conversation with the barroom manager, who, after going off, came back from a lobby office with a small black tray on which he had set a bill, presumably for their meal and drinks. On the bill he had written, “habitación 223. Buen provecho,” and under it, he had left a room key.

UPSTAIRS, ON THE TWENTY-SECOND FLOOR OF THAT HOTEL, IN A drably adorned, though comfortably enough appointed room, Nestor’s and María’s last memories of each other unfolded. Through the reflections of a closet mirror, María watched herself embracing and kissing Nestor, his hands inside her blouse, his fingers down the front of her toreador pants, a few buttons breaking, Nestor’s own appendage bursting out into the world the moment María, kneeling before him, as if facing an altar, undid his trousers-glory be to God in the highest! It sprang out with such force as to tear the seams of his boxers and nearly sideswiped her face. She suckled him then, and he shot his pearly honey halfway across the room, leaving the wallpaper, of a faded art deco design, speckled with dripping stains, his face like that of a crucified Jesus, wincing with pleasure. No sooner had María removed the barrette from her hair, shaking her head like an animal, than Nestor came around again (with a full and dense erection, in the parlance of her scientific daughter, some forty centimeters long). But this time, María pulled him onto the bed, and sucked him once more until the bell-shaped head of his sex had turned so livid and large that she couldn’t fit him into her mouth without her jaw aching just below her earlobes, so thick she couldn’t close her hand around him. María, her panties by the ankle of her right leg and still wearing her blouse, which had bunched up above her breasts, spread her legs wider, and, slipping her own saliva onto her palm, wet herself further. Looking to see what she could glimpse in that same mirror, María, sinning herself to hell, waited for Nestor, the most virile man she had ever known, to fill her up, bit by bit, all the time thinking, Give me a child, Nestor Castillo, dámelo fuerte!

She screamed with pleasure and shook with his every exertion, the thin crucifix that hung around her neck singeing her with the heat of their bodies pressing together, poor Jesus surely seeing more than most saintly apparitions ever should. Each time Nestor found his release inside her, María, entering paradise of a more earthly sort, and remembering what the whores of la Cucaracha had taught her, employed new ways to arouse him, performing the kinds of acts no daughter would ever want to hear about. An hour went by, then two, and Nestor had come inside her so many times that María thought that, if ever she were to become pregnant, it would have taken place that very afternoon.

So that’s what it was really about, wasn’t it, María?

Afterwards, he sighed, he contorted his body mournfully in that bed and pulled the sheets over himself in shame. And when María, caressing his head, leaned close, and in such a way that her nipples dangled across his earlobes and then brushed slowly across the handsome plains of his face to his mouth, Nestor called out: “Please, María, stop, you’re torturing me.”

“But how, Nestor?”

“You know how,” he said, sitting up. “Tú sabes.”

A funny thing. Even a very decent woman like María, who could have had most any man she wanted and who, at heart, remained the guajira she had once been-the country girl who had loved and lost everyone in her family and had been raised to believe that goodness made a difference-found herself welcoming another way of thinking.

“Oh yes, and so I’m torturing you. ¿Cómo? How?” she asked. And when Nestor turned away and, reaching over to a side table, got his watch, María straddled the small of his back; her burning papáya, like an open and succulent mouth, searing the base of his spine.

“So tell me, Nestor,” she demanded as she ground her hips against him.

“What?” he muttered.

“Me amas, sí? You love me, don’t you?”

“I love and hate you at the same time, María. I love you because you’re mi cubanita. I hate you because of what you have done to my heart.”

She laughed. “¡Ah, sí, lo mismo que tu bolero!” “Just like your bolero!” Then, while smothering him further with the heat and bristled dampness of her wide-open womb, she said, “Tell me who you love most in this world.”

“Don’t ask me that, María, please…”

“Tell me, mi amor. Tell me.”

His neck strained as he turned to her, his ears burning red. “What do you think? That I’m crazy?” he asked her, sitting up. “It’s my family I love the most, María. My wife…y mi hijos. It can’t be any other way.”

And then, unable to help herself, María slapped his face, demanding to know, “Then why, por Dios, did you just cingar me, over and over again?”

With that, even the noble Nestor shook his head, his opal eyes suddenly growing cold. Pushing María away, he got out of bed and began to gather his clothes; and then a whole other thing happened, María and Nestor flailing at each other, María naked and Nestor with just his torn calzoncillos on, pushing her onto the bed…and soon enough, out of that violence, when they both hated each other, arrived a contrary feeling, of the purest animal love, Nestor spreading wide María’s legs again, and María, her head thrown back over the bed like a Salome awaiting the decapitated John the Baptist, wanting more and more; Nestor going at her until, exhaustedly, he laid his face against her breasts and descended into the purgatorial depths of his soul.

Remembering what he had told her about having to leave by six, María noticed that it was half past seven. Nestor, whose body lay sprawled across the bed half asleep, his member still loping in a shapely curve over his belly button, seemed dead to the world. Licking his eyelids open with the tip of her tongue, María awakened him. “Amorcito, amorcito, Nestorito,” she whispered tenderly, but when he opened his eyes and looked around, Nestor, for all his pent-up dreams about María, about having her again, became mournfully sad. By then, in the heart’s sleight of hand, María had decided that no man could make love to a woman in such a way unless he truly loved her-forget about any bolero-and that no woman could soften so after such a physical onslaught of maleness unless she loved him in turn. It was the kind of thinking that would have made the whores laugh-it was only sex, after all-but for María, in those moments, it was everything. But what did Nestor do next?

Even if they had just been carrying on as if they were the bawdiest newlyweds on earth, that didn’t stop him from recognizing the inevitable: “You know, María, that, after today, we’ll never see each other like this again, don’t you?” he said, getting up. “It’s the only way. Do you understand?”

“But why, mi amor?” she asked. “It isn’t fair. And besides, I don’t believe you.”

Then she began to cry for the first time since her papito had died-or at least she pretended to-and that really tore up Nestor’s heart too. “Please, María, please don’t be so sad,” he kept on saying. But the more he pleaded, the more María became unreachable, as if she had become deaf, dumb, and mute at the same moment. Not once did she say a word to Nestor as they dressed, no matter how much Nestor, trying to explain himself, pleaded for her understanding. Yes, he has a wife and children, while I have none. She remained so indifferent to Nestor that when they had left the hotel and were saying their somnambulist farewells while standing on the southeast corner of Thirty-fourth and Eighth, just outside the subway, María’s face did not show the least bit of emotion, and this seemed to torment Nestor even more.

“Well, maybe we’ll see each other in Cuba sometime, huh?” he asked her, as if they had just bumped into each other in the park. “My brother is always talking about taking our orchestra down there. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

He tried to kiss her then, but she pulled away. Passersby, throngs of them, must have wondered why the beautiful woman, with the exotic south-of-the-border looks, seemed to be both wounded and scowling at the same time. Finally, she managed to squeeze out a few words: “Cuídate, mi amor. Take care of yourself, my love, and think about me when you are with your wife,” she told him. (“Yes, I was a little cruel to that man, as he was with me,” she once told her daughter.) And then, just like that, she disappeared into the station, soon losing herself in the crowds and not once turning back to see if Nestor had been watching her.

Chapter THIRTY-FOUR

She had taken some satisfaction in her memory of Nestor’s penitential look as she left him, his features twisted into the expression of a tormented saint. But once that had turned into air, María, wishing that things had played out differently between them, passed her last evenings in New York hoping beyond hope that the first-floor telephone would ring and that she would be called down to answer it. When María didn’t receive any such message, she decided, on an impulse, to telephone her sometime lover in Havana, Vincente Torres of the Y & R company-she had his card. One afternoon when she had met him in the lobby of the plush St. Moritz Hotel for a drink and retired to a suite with him for a few hours of harried lovemaking, it was really Nestor whom María thought about. In the well-appointed strangeness of that room, a small crystal chandelier hanging directly over the bed and an ornate French Empire mirror on the opposite wall, María would have loved to open her eyes and find herself walking across a field in Pinar del Río with Nestor. In the midst of that little dream, she forgot the crudeness of her former guajira life, the toiletless shacks, without electricity or running water, that scent of dung and mangled earth and blood constant in the air; nor did she recall the complete ignorance that had once possessed her as an analfabeta, or the shame of thinking, deep down, that not her mamá or her papito, or the guajiros they knew, were really worth much of anything at all as far as the outside world was concerned. What she remembered instead was la tranquilidad of her valle, its peacefulness and little moments of simple happiness. That’s what she used to see in Nestor Castillo’s eyes, and, well-wouldn’t you know it-in the trail of such a sentiment, María realized that she, despite her lately hardened ways, had actually fallen in love with him.

His glorious physical attributes, his handsomeness, even the fame and fortune María imagined that he had meant nothing next to the heart and soul of the man. The thought that a life with him would never come to be was brutal, and in those moments, beautiful María became lost in a different kind of valley, not of natural gardens and of streams and dense forests, but of regrets.

Later, when Vincente, off to catch a train to a place called New Rochelle, had put her into a taxi for the Bronx, María fell into a period of sustained silence. For days she could hardly say a word to anyone-not even on the night the family threw them a farewell party, a rather pleasant affair during which neighbors came over to partake of their food, music, and hospitality. That evening, despite her pain, María danced many a cha-cha-cha and mambo-she was Cuban after all-and at a certain hour, just when her heart had been lightened somewhat by all the friendliness and music and she was on the verge of enjoying herself, from the family radio ushered forth the opening strains of “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

Hearing Nestor sing “How can I love you if I hate you so?” María swore to herself that it would be well and good with her if she were to never hear that bolero again.

Of course she did, again and again in Havana, nearly every time she walked down the street, or passed by one of those open-air cafés with musicians performing on the sidewalks; and as it happened, she was to hear it for many years afterwards, no matter how María would have liked to forget Nestor, her one true love.

STILL, SHE’D NEVER FORGET THAT LAST AFTERNOON WITH NESTOR, and for a month or so after beautiful María had returned to Havana in poor spirits, she waited to discover if so virile a man had produced in her the beginnings of a child. But her monthlies returned with their usual punctuality. (At such times, she used Lotus de Luxe tampons, the dancers’ preferred choice, to stay her flow.) For his part, whatever Nestor Castillo may have really been feeling, he felt bad enough about the way they had parted to write María a half dozen letters in as many months. When such letters arrived at the club, she refused to open them, all the better to put him from her mind, and he might have slipped away from her for good were it not for that infernal song, and the fact that Nestor Castillo, it seemed, had decided to journey to Havana, after all.

Chapter THIRTY-FIVE

A year later-in December 1957-at about four in the morning, during a fierce downpour, as María left the Club Lantern and had been hurrying through an arcade towards the taxis parked in a row by that busy strip off Neptuno, she saw, or thought she saw through the shimmering cascades of that aguacero, which went rolling like misting walls or apparitions, Nestor, resplendent in a white silk suit, leaning up against a wall, smoking a cigarette. On his chest, radiantly glowing, the crucifix he always wore. But Nestor? How could that be? And yet there he stood, smiling sadly. Then it hit her: perhaps he had left his wife and children and had come to Havana to find her, or perhaps he’d come for professional reasons. It crossed her mind that he might have journeyed there to perform with his brother in one of the upscale venues like the Tropicana or the Sans Souci, but, in any case, he’d already broken her heart, bruised her ego, and sent her packing. And so when he waved, she got into a taxi, thinking, Que te vaya pa’ demonio!-May you go to the devil! and as he started slowly towards her, indifferent to the rain, she tapped the shoulder of the driver, who knew her from around, and told him: “Hurry, let’s go. ¿Me oyes?” As they tore down the streets, in winds that rolled cans and bottles and rags along the cobblestones, María was both relieved and regretful that she hadn’t stopped to talk to Nestor-how hard-hearted she had become! But then, as they turned onto the Malecón Drive, waves flooding the causeway, and just as she was softening-what would a few moments of her time have cost her?-María swore that she saw Nestor Castillo standing by the seawall with his trumpet raised, impervious to the drenching rain, and not a few minutes later, blocks away, María saw him again on the corner of Calle 20, holding his hands out towards her, imploringly, an even sadder expression on his face. Naturally she had to ask the driver, “You see that fellow?” but it seemed he couldn’t hear her too clearly, for it had started thundering.

Later, upstairs in their harbor-side solar, as gales pummeled the windows, María got into bed beside Ignacio, who, under the influence of Rock Hudson, had taken to wearing silken pajamas. But she couldn’t sleep at first, not until she’d swallowed a few tablets of a medicine that many of the dancers, wired from their nights of performance, used to calm themselves, and these tablets, cousins of phenobarbital (which is to say barbiturates), when mixed with a glass of rum, could knock out an elephant, as they used to say. And so she eventually closed her eyes, but, no sooner had she done so than she smelled in that bedroom burning wires and rubber and gasoline, some part of a strange dream. When she buried herself in her pillows, she began to feel someone gently kissing her brow, her eyelids, and then her neck. And she heard a voice: María, María, why didn’t you forgive me? And with that, María just knew, in the way that superstitious people sometimes do, that Nestor Castillo, in the manner of the spirits of the campo, had come to visit her in Havana from the lands of the dead.

IT WAS SUCH A STRANGE THING THAT MARÍA, IN THE LIGHT OF day, hardly believed it had really happened-perhaps that whole ride back from the club had been a dream-but within a few days, in Havana, amongst the musicians who had known the brothers, it became common knowledge that Nestor Castillo, the writer of that famous song, had, on that very night, perished in a highway accident up there in the north near New York. He had been driving a car back from a job during a snowfall, and, somewhere along those icy roads, he’d lost control and collided headlong into a tree, may God bless his soul. She almost lost her mind hearing that news-“please don’t tell me that’s the truth,” María cried on Gladys’s lap. But it was true. A few Havana newspapers had even carried a notice about him, and for weeks afterwards, when that bolero he wrote about her played over the radio, more than one broadcaster solemnly noted the loss of so young a talent, a fellow who knew his way with a song, and played the trumpet as if he were an angel.

Beside herself with that news, María finally opened the letters he had sent her; each breathed with Nestor’s soul. “If I could divide myself into two, I would be with you in Havana,” one of them said. “I know I hurt you, María, but don’t forget, it was you who hurt me first.” And, in another, he confessed that, as much as he loved María, he would never, never leave his wife, Delores. “She’s the mother of mis hijos, as beautiful as you, in her own way, and very kind to me, so please, María, don’t think badly of me.” And in each, he asked her forgiveness, just as his ghost had. Each mirrored the others. The last one he sent kept imploring her to write him. “I know you take pains to write a letter-but please, just write me a few words. It would make me feel less sad-and lonely. Can’t you, María?” It took her hours to go through the letters, to understand what some of his sentences meant, and in the end, it finally hit her that Nestor was gone from this world for good. And so, one night, she purged herself-vomiting often but also contorting on her bed-in misery over Nestor’s loss. What was it about life? How was it that the death of her first love, whom she never really took seriously when it counted, could affect her so? She didn’t know, but the fact that Nestor was gone from this world for good left her so unsettled that María, who rarely missed a night at the club, stayed home, weeping and weeping until she ran out of tears.

Chapter THIRTY-SIX

Thank God, as she would tell her daughter, that when Nestor died beautiful María had the consoling (false) distractions of her professional life and, for all his faults, a man like Ignacio to look after her. He’d even forgiven her for taking off to New York the way she abruptly did. (But why, he must have wondered, did she return in such a solemn mood?) In the year that María’s romantic dreams about Nestor ended, Ignacio, with his newly humbled manners and worming aches in his chest, had begun to bear the further physical indignities of discovering that, while the rest of him had slowly thickened, his wonderful head of hair, with its sea of crests and waves, had started to thin, to the point that he hated taking off his Panama hat in public and disliked it when María, with the slightest curl of a smile at the edge of her mouth, stared at him in a certain way.

Each evening, just as María headed out to the club, he’d attend to his special treatments, applying a botánica-bought remedy of ground bull testicles, dried donkey dung, and paraffin to his scalp. Afterwards he’d wear a hairnet night after night, until he couldn’t take that pomade’s barnyard odors anymore. On some evenings, when a few of his cronies came over to play cards or dominoes, he’d forgo that process until a very early hour of the morning, or not do it at all. Occasionally, however, in the throes of his own kind of vanity, when he was alone, he’d turn up the radio and spend an hour or so massaging his forehead and temples with some other miracle cure, turning from side to side to examine his profile and imagining his receding hairline, in his slightly shady businessman’s way, as proof of some distant affinity to Julius Caesar. (Or, in a moment of patriotic musings, José Martí, poet and father of Cuban independence in long gone days, another great man with a receding hairline, though of decidedly thinner bodily proportions.)

Finding the whole business rather amusing, María, feeling more magnanimously inclined, actually grew fonder of Ignacio and became more playful with him, especially in bed. Like a man who demanded his steak and tostones twice a week, Ignacio expected to romp with María, and on those occasions she took to treating that widening patch, hairless as a Chihuahua ’s belly and reminiscent of a baby’s head, with a tenderness that even the bluntly disposed Ignacio found disarming. She played a game with him, pressing her breasts against his crown, her nipples always hardening, and loved to grind her luscious center against that dome until an even stranger thing happened: María, despite her loss of Nestor forever and forever, amen (except in her dreams), had started to come more easily with Ignacio, though some other memories-of clutching Nestor’s full head of hair as he lost himself while devouring her papáya, of his sweet pinga, may God rest his soul-often helped her along. In that regard, their relations improved, even while María still pursued her other acquaintances.

Ignacio himself, in addition to trying to reverse the processes of nature (eventually giving in, he’d settle for a pompadour wig which almost matched the color of his natural hair), wanting to improve things with María-so much a joy to his eyes that he just about abandoned his own wandering ways-decided to seek a further improvement to their life in bed and started subjecting himself to virility treatments at one of the sex clinics in Havana. These consisted of B₁₂ infusions, administered intravenously, and injections of distilled water into the membranes of his penis, which revolutionized his amplitude in a manner he had never thought possible before. María, remembering the admonitions of the whores of la Cucaracha, on the occasion of the unveiling of his grander stature, gasped and shook her head incredulously, as if he were that fellow Superman from that bawdy show in one of the cocktail rooms of a bordello near the Shanghai which Ignacio had once taken her to with the mistaken notion of inspiring her lustfulness. To the contrary, Superman had nothing on her past love Nestor Castillo, may he rest in peace, one of those surprising facts that expressed itself in a recurring dream. (Set in the jungles of Africa, it was no doubt inspired by her memories of the Tarzan movies she and her sister used to take in at the Chaplin in San Jacinto. In this dream, she’d hear Tarzan’s yodeling cry from the distance, and since she always took on the role of Jane, María would find herself in a tattered leopard-skin dress, standing at the edge of a vast ravine, which she could cross only by sidling along the trunk of a massive fallen acacia tree, and every time she did, the valleys and rivers below would start rushing past her, and she’d have to get down on her belly, straddling that trunk, and slowly inch her way from one end to the other; somehow, that always made her think about Nestor.)

For her part, with a maternal yearning, María never let slip the ruinous notion that, for all her beauty, for all the life in the traffic-stopping bounce of her hips and nalgitas, she, at the ripening age of twenty-seven, might never have a child to love. Looking back, she’d think it foolish to have expected a pregnancy after a single final afternoon’s romp with the late Nestor, but what could account for the disappointment of her bouts with Ignacio, who, in those days, only wanted to make her happy? Not just mourning Nestor and what might have been between them, María managed to comport herself stoically, though, more and more, as she’d finish her last shows at the club, removing her makeup and, while gazing into the mirror, wondering Who am I? she’d almost dread the repetitiousness of her days. Yes, she enjoyed the occasional company of her fellow dancers, her visits with la señora Matilda and the whores of la Cucaracha, with whom she drank beer in the late afternoon even while supposedly watching her figure. During her jaunts with El caballero de París, who, murmuring his poetry as they walked about in Central Havana, noticed the somberness of her moods, she couldn’t help but withdraw into the darkness of her regrets. Her yearly journeys with Ignacio out to Pinar del Río didn’t help much either. She’d ask him to drive her into her beloved countryside, always on a Sunday, so that she might visit the simple graves of her family-which was hard enough to bear, their wooden markers seeming more rotted and overrun with vines each year, as if that fecund earth would one day swallow them up into obscurity for good. But then, despite her joy in breathing the unchanging air of that valle, in seeing again the kindly guajiros she had been raised with, so many of the other Marías and Juanitas and Isabels she had played with as a girl, poor and uneducated as they remained, had their own broods of children. Some, only four or five years older than herself, were already grandmothers.

They’d spend half the day going from shack to shack-she’d always bring along gifts, loving to show off her new prosperity. One of those new families was that of a sometime cane chopper who’d once looked her over with the sincerest longing at dances at the cervecería. He had married a woman named Amalia, and they, with their five children, had taken over the thatch-roofed house where María had once lived, that glorified shack, just a modest bohío with dirt floors, whose doorway exhaled the memories of her own irretrievable past. She had no quarrel with them-in fact, that family had her blessing to stay. Just taking a look inside from the doorway, not steps from where her papito used to sit with his cervezas and strum his guitar, and, quickly glancing through the room at the perpetual half-light in which she had been raised and the corners where, one by one, the two brothers she had never known, her mamá and Teresa and her papito had died, left María so breathless with melancholy that she suddenly understood the sadness she once saw in Nestor’s eyes.

By then, the continent of her religiosity had shrunk to the point that it sometimes carried no more weight than a butterfly’s, and yet, each time she visited the graves, saw the house, or went wandering along the trail into the forest, to la cueva, with its cascades, where she and Teresita used to go, María couldn’t keep herself from making the sign of the cross and kissing the palm of her hand, which she would then set down on each of the family markers, by the doorway of that house, and even on the trunk of the liana-wrapped, star-blossom-entangled trees, as if to seal the fact that she, in from Havana, had visited. And sometimes she’d take in the fields and forest, with its prosperity of birds, insects, and crawling lizards, those flowers that burst out in clusters everywhere, and wonder just what she had done to deserve such a lack of fecundity herself. They’d always stop at la cervecería, to say hello to the owner’s son, his papito having since died, but Ignacio never liked to stay for long, lest María fall into an even more solemn mood. It always took an effort to drag her away, and while they drove back, María, tending towards silence, fell into the anguish of having heard one person after the next inquiring as to whether she had some niños at home in Havana. Such visits always left her with the feeling that leaving her valle in the first place had not been such a good thing, and as they came closer to Havana and saw their first stretches of slums and municipal dumps, she’d half believe that it was that city itself, with its clubs and casinos, whorehouses and dirty-minded men, that had somehow affected her. Ignacio knew better than to get into an argument about that.

Even some of the girls at the club got pregnant despite taking precautions with the thickest of condoms, and that killed her too. Apparently her feelings of disgrace and disappointment, as if she had somehow betrayed her guajira roots, were so transparent that one of the powder room attendants at the club, yet another former flapper beauty or once-known dancer, advised María to put her trust in a well-known Havana diviner, a certain Mayita Dominguez, who ran a mystic santera’s parlor on Virtudes, and to go there when she was having her monthlies. There María submitted herself to the cures of San Lázaro, the healer and savior from death, and as a precaution she knelt before the diviner, who said special prayers to exorcise any curses. As Mayita put it, “A muchachita as beautiful as you must be wished ill by jealous women every day.” That visit left María feeling more hopeful than before, but for further assistance she went to church, reciting just-in-case prayers daily before the altar of the cathedral, where the spirit of her namesake, the Holy Mother, and that of Her Son and those of all the saints breathed and every porphyry, marble, and limestone surface exuded the promises of salvation. In the midst of such religious trappings-eternal life? why not?-María begged God to forgive her for any of her chicanery when it came to Nestor Castillo, to absolve her of the sins of vanity and of selfishness: therefore, with her newly pure soul, perhaps he would grant her wish to have a child.

“Mi hija,” she once told her daughter. “You have no notion of what a church can be. Back where I came from, in my valle, ours was just a little shack of pine-plank walls at the edge of a field with floors of pounded down dirt, and an altar that was nothing more than a lacquered pine table with a cross, a few feet high. There were no pews-we had to kneel on that dusty floor, or else just stand during the Mass. But you know what? It was a glorious thing for us to believe we were in the consecrated presence of the Lord. And even when I saw much nicer churches in Havana, every time I knelt down to pray, I always thought that the best church I had ever entered was the one I knew as a girl.”

It may have been a coincidence, but not a month after taking such measures, María missed her menses and, after a visit to an obstetrician, learned that God had indeed answered her prayers early in the new year of 1958.

THINGS ARE GIVEN, THINGS ARE TAKEN AWAY. JOYFUL THAT SHE carried within her the baby who would become her daughter, María had, at a certain hour of the day, gone to find her old friend Lázaro, seated as usual by his doorway. The last time she had visited him, about a month before, and not to resume her lessons with him but simply to see how he was faring, he’d refused María’s offer to take him to a doctor. Remaining in his courtyard abode, he had resigned himself to the slow and languishing waning of some old animal of the forest-“Just leave me alone and let me go with dignity,” he used to tell anyone who tried to help him. He treated María no differently, and though she could see fear in his eyes-which were wise and innocent in their way-he spoke, almost cheerfully, of the world to come: “I’m really not afraid. I just hope, if there’s reincarnation, that I come back as a cat-they get everything. That would make me happy!” he joked, slapping his knee before convulsing suddenly with a cough that made him lean his weary shoulder against the wall.

“Wherever I go,” Lázaro told her, recovering, “I hope you will think of me, María… Think of old Lázaro every time you open a book and see what the words mean.”

“Maestro,” she tried one last time. “Why won’t you let me take you to the hospital?”

He just shook his head. “When you are my age, you’ll understand,” he told her. “When your dreams are nothing more than memories of earlier days, you’ll know what I am feeling.” Then he stretched out his bony hand so that María might help him get to his feet, and she followed him down the cooler hallway to the back door, which opened to the courtyard, to his little home, the place where he somehow had managed to sleep for years on nothing more than a blanket-covered mat. Whatever his malady, Lázaro couldn’t let her go without some heartening words. As she left him asking, “I will see you again soon, yes?” he nodded, smiled, and, surely suppressing another cough, told her, “Oh, you will, my dear girl, but I know one thing. Your life is going to be fine, with or without me.”

And that was all. She’d intended to return the next day, or the day after, until a week had gone by and that week had turned into the month of her happiness. Finally, with such good news to share with Lázaro, beautiful María had gone to see him again, but he was nowhere about. It was the bookseller who told her. “We just found him back there one day, sleeping for good.”

“Ay, por Dios,” she cried out, the misery of losing one of her finest friends in Havana, as if one more wonderful part of Cuba had vanished, in her voice.

“But he left something for you,” the bookseller told her, pulling from a carton the kinds of items that would soften anyone’s heart, even María’s. Two books of Cuban poetry, Lázaro’s own copies of the verses of the poets Plácido and José Martí. In one of them, he had scribbled: “To my favorite pupil, María, perhaps now I will finally see you dance!”

NOTHING COULD BE SAID OR DONE ABOUT LÁZARO, EL POBRE. HIS death was inevitable; she had that touch, after all. Still, María enjoyed her felicitous state, despite its encumbrances, though she knew that, within a few months, once she started to show, she’d have to leave her dancing behind. But could María complain? After years of working here and there, she was tiring of that business: the hours, the ogling patrons, the late-night worries that someone somewhere would drag her into an alley and take advantage (at least two of the dancers at the Lantern carried straight razors in their purses because of what had once happened to them). The sore feet, the pulled tendons, the rehearsals, the pinches on the ass, and especially the dietary restrictions. Because she was still a guajira at heart, her mouth watered in the way she made men’s mouths water at the sight of her, but only over the sights and aromas of a crispy-skinned helping of suckling pork, with sides of sweet plátanos and rice and black beans. Now, at least, despite all the calories María burned nightly during the shows, she’d be free to eat whatever she liked: those delicious whipped-cream-topped lemon-and mango-flavored pastries with the maraschino cherries that always made her lick her lips when she passed the festive windows of De Leon’s bakery, three-and four-scoop bowls of ice cream at the Louvre parlor, and no end of the chocolate bonbons which club patrons were always sending her backstage, the sorts of sweets which she always reluctantly passed off to the other dancers for their kids. And now? She’d be free to fill her belly to her heart’s content, appreciating all the maternity ads she saw in the newspapers about comiendo por dos-eating for two. So what if María put on a few pounds?

The manner with which Ignacio looked at her had become more tender. It wouldn’t matter, at least for a while, if she stopped resembling a sex kitten à la a cubana Marilyn Monroe, whom half of the bombshell American lounge singers and dancers in Havana tried to emulate (when not mimicking Ava Gardner). Soon enough, she’d become a burgeoning mamacita with even more succulent breasts, her nipples distended and swollen. Lately, he had actually become more delicate about making love to her (now that Ignacio considered himself so much larger, thanks to his treatments, he entered her only from behind) and treated her tenderly, as if María, in her embarazada state, had become the most fragile creature in the world. That suited her fine. She lasted two months before the management at the Lantern started to notice her pregnancy, and, in any case, though María could have kept working as an assistant choreographer, after so much time spent under the lights, she welcomed the idea of becoming a señora of leisure, like the fine ladies at the department stores, with their maids following behind them, or the ones she used to see heading up the Malecón in their sedans to the yacht club (unfortunately, for all her beauty, her skin was of a color unacceptable to its members). And she would have time to further improve herself, to take up, as she had always wanted to, a pen in order to record, even with her lapses in spelling, some of the thoughts that came to her, in the spirit of what the décima singers and versifiers wrote (and that made her vaguely ache, thinking about her papito, Lázaro, and, yes, Nestor, the one she’d let get away).

As for that bolero? Nearly a year and a half after it had first reached Cuba, “Beautiful María of My Soul” still occasionally played over the radio, and it had become a minor standard of sorts, a part of street musicians’ repertoires. But now when she heard it, María no longer felt the melancholy that had come over her strongly in the months just after Nestor died. Hearing it made her feel somewhat proud for having been the inspiration behind that lovely tune. At the same time, it still provoked her to think about Nestor, something that, with a baby coming, she thought best to avoid. Besides, she had no room left for tears. With all the leisure hours she spent either strolling in the Parque Central or sunning herself at the playas where they used to romp, or alone in her high-rise apartment-yet not quite so alone, the little being forming inside of her keeping her company-María came up with what she considered a most generous notion. She’d write a letter of condolence to Nestor’s older brother Cesar Castillo. María knew his address-the brothers had lived in the same building on La Salle Street.

And so, in the same labored and careful manner in which she composed any note, María penned a respectful carta in her much practiced handwriting, conveying her immense sadness at having heard about Nestor’s passing-for she had loved him very much.

Believe me, Cesar, I wish it had turned out differently, but I am still so happy that at least Nestor and me were something for a time: and I am proud that he thought to compose that canción about me.

She described her state of impending motherhood and, while not lingering on it, ended on what María hoped would be a high note: “To you and Nestor’s family, I send my affection.”

It took her a few days to mail that carta off. She felt so confident about having done the right thing that, a few weeks later, when Cesar’s response arrived, María truly lamented her ability to read. Once she got around to deciphering its wild handwriting-so bad it was nearly illegible-this is what (she thought) it said:

Dear María-

With all due respect, fuck you and fuck everything about you for throwing my brother into hell-and fuck yourself for even thinking that I can give a shit about your feelings, if you ever really had any for Nestor. Now that he’s dead, I want you to know that he suffered a lot of grief thinking about you. And don’t think he didn’t tell me about how you came up to New York to take him away from his wife and kids. Shame on you, woman! The poor innocent actually felt bad about sending you off to wherever whores like you go… I know it because I had to live with him, and though I can’t prove it, something muy jodido got worse inside him after he saw you. He just wasn’t the same after that, and I have this feeling that, if it weren’t for you, he’d probably still be walking around now, taking care of his wife-a real lady, in case you didn’t know-and his fine kids, who I’ll have to look after now. As for your baby-felicitaciones!-I hope you give birth to a blind crocodile, because that’s what you deserve.

Sincerely yours,

Cesar Castillo