In her moments alone, at the club or in her solar or while just finding some quiet spot in el Parque Central (well, for María there was really no such place in public, as she always attracted men to her), his words flowed into her head:
Bésame de nuevo, mi amor
Kiss me again, my love
Aquí, y allá.
Here and over there.
Déjame con el calor de tu lengua
Leave me the heat of your tongue
Cubriendo mi piel.
Covering my skin.
Dame unos besitos
Give me kisses
Hasta no suspiro más
Until I won’t be able to breathe anymore
Y el sabor de tu leche, dulce y salada,
And the taste of your milk, so salted and sweet,
Me manda al cielo
Sends me to paradise
Pero contigo solamente
But only with you
Durante nuestro vuelo hasta el sol.
During our flight to the sun.
No habrá nadie más.
There will be no one else.
Still, it wasn’t enough.
And in the meantime, Ignacio had started to look after her again.
THOUGH SHE HAD REMAINED TORN ABOUT NESTOR, IT ALL CAME down to Ignacio’s automobile. One afternoon, a camionero, a truck driver, in from Pinar del Río, arrived at her solar with noticias malas—bad news—from that horrid woman Olivia, the only way she ever heard from her family in those days. Sweating and half out of breath, this truck driver was practically in tears, for he knew her papito from that crossroads place where he performed sometimes. “Tu papá no está bien”—“He isn’t well,” he told her. What had happened? During a sudden lightning storm a few days before, the horse her papito had been riding across a field had stumbled into a ditch, and he was thrown headfirst against a tree, so many of his bones and internal organs punctured or broken that it was likely he would die. Receiving that sad information on a Friday, just before she was to go into rehearsals for a new show, what else could María do but seek out Ignacio, who had an automobile, and beg him to drive her out to see her papito before it would be too late?
Ignacio, for his part, had his own plans, but, of course, when María called him later from the Nocturne, he dropped everything, and by eleven the next morning, he had picked María up for their drive into the countryside, hours away from the city. When they arrived at her beloved valle, the forests and fields were damp from rain, and as María, trudging through the mud, rushed to his bedside, her papito seemed, indeed, to be dying. A doctor from town had been attending to him. Stretched out on a cot and wrapped up with bandages, her poor guajiro papito could barely breathe. His internal organs too damaged to repair, he had fallen into the delirium of a fever. She did not leave his side that entire day, or the next; out of habit, she prayed over him, prayed until he finally heard her voice and opened his eyes. Smiling, as Manolo took hold of her hand and said, “Ay, María, por favor pórtate bien,” and then, “Y ya está”—“Now here it is,” all María could think was this: Once he’s gone, everyone I have ever loved will have died.
Then, while birds were chirping away outside the bohío, he drifted off into a sleep from which he would never awaken.
She was nineteen years old.
He’d passed away at ten in the morning, and, looking back, what she would be most grateful for was how Ignacio Fuentes had kept his head about the whole business. It was Ignacio who went to San Jacinto that same day to arrange for a proper funeral, Ignacio who paid for the coffin and organized the locals for the burial processional to the local campo santo, that cemetery of soon to be forgotten souls; Ignacio who had paid for a funeral feast; Ignacio who had been a pillar of strength for María. And for that alone María felt a sincere gratitude toward him, no matter his faults, and swore that, whatever her desires for that músico, she would put Nestor Castillo from her mind.
What would it matter? Her life had become a kind of a dancer’s purgatory by then anyway.
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
And Nestor? Unable to accept María’s decision, he sent her notes nearly daily. Naturally they piled up beside her bed, unread, and when he turned up at her solar, whatever hour of the day, she was rarely at home. (By then, María had started to spend more and more time with Ignacio at a house he had bought just outside Havana, along the sea.) At her shows, Nestor became such a distraction that María had to ask Eliseo, the club bouncer, to turn him away at the door, and when she left through the backstage exit at four in the morning, María, head covered by a veil, came to dread the inevitable moment when she encountered Nestor on the street. He’d beg her to just sit with him for a few moments, to hear him out—there were so many things he had to tell her—but she couldn’t because, deep down, she knew what it would lead to. It got to the point that Ignacio himself had to wait for her; failing that, he’d send along one or two of his men to accompany her.
Bodyguards.
By then, María, looking the other way, had come to accept the notion that Ignacio, as her fellow dancers had gossiped all along, happened to be a gangster. It made no difference to her; he had to earn a living after all, and since when had life been good to that man in the first place? Still, she drew lines. Once when Nestor started to get out of hand and Ignacio, as tenderly as possible, suggested that one or two of his colleagues have a “serious talk with the músico,” María, not so entirely cold, told him: “Hurt that joven, and I will never let you touch me again.” So they put up with a lot, especially at night, when Nestor followed behind her and played his trumpet, not dreaming melodies but mocking horse race reveilles. And sometimes, having lost his mind, his voice echoing in the arcades, he’d scream that she was nothing more than some impotent’s whore! All this Ignacio, with enormous patience, ignored; for María, however, it became too much, and she went through days when she wished that Nestor had never come into her life at all.
For months, Nestor continued to sweetly torment her (no, it wasn’t easy) until there came the day when Ignacio, a bookish and, therefore, crafty fellow, seized upon a certain idea. From conversations with María, he had learned a central fact about the brothers’ lives: that the older and vainer one, Cesar Castillo, had ambitions about going to New York, a city Ignacio knew well, having his own cousins there as well as friends in the nightclub and appliance businesses. So why wouldn’t Ignacio have several of his colleagues, surveying the streets in their dark Oldsmobile, bring Cesar down to his office in the harbor, which was just a cluttered and stuffy windowless room off a loading dock, to discuss certain possibilities, the main one being that Ignacio, in his open-minded benevolence and wishing only the best for María, would pay Cesar five hundred dollars to get the hell out of Havana with his brother.
And not just out of Havana, but to a place they wanted to go to anyway: New York. What happened? As Ignacio, flavoring the tip of a cigar in a gimlet of Carlos V brandy, told María some days later: “Once I made the offer, that pretty boy macho, who had walked in wanting to knock my block off, became very friendly and grateful. We got a little drunk together, and, in fact, by the time he left, if we hadn’t hated each other so much in the first place, we might have ended up good friends.”
Nestor, however, never really wanted to leave and became so mournful about losing María that Cesar was sorely tempted to make the journey without him. But he dragged Nestor along, and his brother, that poor lost soul (or, as María would put it one day, the darling sweet pobrecito who deserved every bit of her love) stepped onto a Pan American Clipper to Miami only after being fortified by a night in the whorehouses, a quart of añejo rum, and the assurance that Cesar would beat him to death if he didn’t.
In the meantime, as much as she had felt relieved to hear about Nestor’s departure, María, sitting with Ignacio in an outdoor café along the Prado, could barely wait for the moment when she might be alone again. Christ forgive her, Nestor was the one she thought about now when touching
herself, her memories of his fevered masculinity staying with her no matter how cruelly she had treated him.
ON THEIR LAST AFTERNOON TOGETHER IN HAVANA, SPENT IN A dingy hotel room by the harbor, Nestor, sipping rum from a pint bottle, presented her with gifts. Stretched out on that bed, he had reached over to the end table for a box, his body damp with sweat.
“I have some things for you, María,” he told her.
The first was a thin necklace, of fading gold, off which hung a little tarnished silver crucifix, the weight of a peseta.
“It’s the same one I wore as a child, when I thought I was going to die. I feel it should be yours,” he told her. “Wear it for me.”
Gratefully, she put that crucifix and chain around her neck, and with that Nestor began fondling her. But no, she stopped him, pulling his hands away from her. “No puedo,” she said. “I can’t.” But what could she do that afternoon when, happy as a child, he got up and retrieved an envelope from his trousers pocket; it contained a dozen black-and-white photographs, the sort with serrated edges that had been taken here and there in Havana, by friends or passersby. Nestor and María posed by a table, surrounded by flowers in the back garden of a café called Ofelia’s, Nestor and María holding hands in front of the marquee of the America movie house, after taking in a Humphrey Bogart double feature, a look of hopefulness and affection on each of their faces. She was truly touched, almost felt like bursting into tears over the decision she had already made but wasn’t too good at carrying out.
“Son bonitos”—“They’re pretty,” she told him.
“But look at these. Remember the playa at Cojímar?”
They were fine photographs of them frolicking in the waves a few months before, the sorts one would always cherish, even if they were a little blurred: Nestor, eternally handsome with his penetrating gaze, and beautiful María in her clinging bathing suit rising out of the sea like a goddess.
“You see how happy we are, María? How much we are in love!”
“Oh, Nestor,” she said to him. “Why are you so sentimental?”
“I just want to make you happy,” he said, pulling her close. “There are so many things I want to do for you!”
This time, when the kisses started up again, she didn’t resist—it was much easier to go along with that form of speaking than to say any actual words, especially when hers would only be so hurtful. Soon enough that crucifix, dangling from her neck, was pinching Nestor’s thing as he, straddling María with his knees, availed himself of her breasts’ plumpness. Oh, but what that crucifix witnessed! Perhaps because she thought that it might be their last time together, she dallied longer than usual, taking care of the man until she was blissfully sore in her deepest parts, until the harbor cannons began their 8 p.m. booming and night began to fall over the sad city of Havana. What was the last thing he told her?
“María, don’t you know, I’d die without you.”
THAT LAST AFTERNOON WAS HARD ENOUGH TO RECALL; BUT WHAT was harder came down to Maria’s memories of tasting every bit of him, and thinking that Nestor’s body, even his big pinga, was a part of her own. It was intoxicating: as much as she wanted to forget him, as she’d walk through the streets of Havana, everything she laid her eyes upon, even if only vaguely phallic, reminded her of Nestor. She could not put on a pair of soft slippers without recalling the joy with which she would unfurl, slowly and sweetly, a condom over him and the time it took, or glance at a quart bottle of milk or a sweating, tall Hatuey beer with its frosty exhalations and not think of his sweat, his passion, his gushing sperm.
PART III
Songs of Despair and Love Havana, New York, 1953–1958
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 ba
ffled 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.