“There are women who think they are beautiful,” she once told her daughter, “and while they may be pleasant in some ways, real beauty doesn’t come along too often.” She’d laugh. “That real beauty was me, even if I didn’t know it, back then.”

With so many men stopping into the shop to inquire about the “pretty girl,” it wasn’t long before that face caught the attention of one Rudy Morales, the photographer’s friend, who happened to own a cabaret on one of the side streets off the Prado, the Monte Carlo. It was Rudy who gave María her first dancing job, her audition held in the Lysol-scrubbed reception area of the hotel. Matilda turned up the radio, and to the music of el Trío Matamoros, María performed in the rumba style of her childhood, so fluid, so Congolese, so rapturously sensual-and sexual-her hips swaying so convincingly and her skin giving off a feminine scent so profound that, how to put it, Mr. Morales, the sort to wear dark glasses in the middle of the night, breaking into a sweat, decided to hire her on the spot. “I would have given you a job just because of the way you look,” he told María. “But I’m happy to see that you can actually dance, and beautifully.”

Within a few days she had joined a chorus of seven dancers, the stage shows dominated by the fabulous Rosalita Rivera (from whom María would borrow her stage surname), an affable third-tier star on her way down from a not too glorious height, with thighs and belly far too fleshly to be appearing in the spare costumes those shows required (she was, of course, the owner’s mistress, bedding him at his convenience in the small flat he kept upstairs). The club itself, like so many María would work in, was a dump, selling water booze to a clientele of mischievous-minded tourists and servicemen, out for a night of oblivion and tarty entertainment. Its amenities were not elegant-its toilet was a disgrace, and their dressing area, with its speckled mirrors and pungent odors, of leaking pipes and kitchen grease, saw as much traffic as a street corner, the house band’s musicians, waiters, and busboys drifting by their tables casually, as if, in fact, the ladies were wearing something more than just panties and brassieres, sometimes less. (“Get used to it,” Susannah, one of the nicer dancers, told her as María scrambled to cover up her breasts when one of the musicians, a fellow named Rodrigo, happened by and, getting an eyeful of her nicely taut nipples, winked.)

She did not enjoy the cockroaches that sometimes crawled across the mirror, or the rats that skittered in through the stage door and in the early hours of the morning delighted in eating the cotton balls and pomades that the dancers left out, and it was disgusting to find their droppings inside their shoes and makeup kits. (It struck her as a gloomy and claustrophobic way to live: To be indoors at night, separated from nature by walls and passageways and doors, left María missing the countryside and the woods-the very air that seemed as delicious as anything in the world.) And it didn’t make her happy to learn that she had to pay for her own costumes, for every flimsy sequined top with its gossamer meshing, for those bottoms that were two sizes too small and exposed her goose-pimpled nalgitas to the air-conditioned, smoke-filled chill; for the high heels that lifted her stately rump higher and left her feet sore for weeks, her toes growing horns and her soles covering over with scales like a lizard’s. (Thank God that la señora Matilda, having become her friend, allowed María to soak in her bathtub with Epsom salts; that pleasure was a pure luxury, and the kind that she never knew back in Pinar del Río.)

The other dancers, who were all about María’s age-Rosalita, at thirty, was practically an ancient by cabaret standards-were nice enough, happy to show María the ropes, but their choreographer, Gaspar, was of a different order altogether. A little fellow, he was one of those fulanos who, working so closely with women, seemed to have acquired some of their coquettish mannerisms; at the same time he liked to lord over them like a tyrant. With his tiny frame, muscular arms, and dyed blond hair, wavy as the sea, he was either constantly clapping his hands, to speed up their pace (flamenco-inspired numbers were the worst) or else putting on a show by tapping at the ladies’ heads with his dense forefinger if they made any mistakes. He worked on their postures, constantly lifting chins higher with his knuckles, and, while holding their bellies flat with one hand, ran the other up from the nubs of their spines to the bottoms of their necks; along the way, he held, brushed, pressed, and touched parts of their bodies with the kind of casualness that they would have objected to were he a more manly, and therefore lascivious, sort. (If he was acting, by pretending to show no interest in them, then he was a good actor.) Sometimes he’d fire someone on the spot for flubbing her steps, send her out into the street in tears, run after her, then bring her back, without as much as an apology about the matter.

He didn’t mince words. “You are the worst dancer I’ve ever worked with-a disaster of the first order. You should go back to the sticks,” he once told María, who would have slapped his face had she not needed the job. “You put my stomach in knots, entiendes? Now, do it over again!”

Not that María disliked him-he was the first to let you know if your work was good, but, God, just getting to that point amounted to a daily trial. For one thing, she learned that there was quite a difference between the limberness of an amateur and that of a professional: the stretches alone were a misery that she never quite got used to. Constantly scolding them about one thing or the other, Gaspar would tell the chorus that they were useless unless, in the midst of a dance, they could raise their insteps to touch their foreheads, because then, as he’d bluntly put it, the gawking tourists might have their dreams come true and catch a glimpse of their young and succulent Cuban vaginas through the glittering fabric of their garments. Such a display of feminine charms, he reminded them again and again, was the backbone of their business. “Now, never forget that, señoritas!”

So for several afternoons a week, María became a reluctant ballerina in training, her long legs rising slowly and her body contorting as she tried to touch her forehead with the high arch of her shapely foot. All that work, which she hated at the time, she’d remember with fondness-given the distance of years, even the moody Gaspar would seem a most simpático teacher-and while it may have been true that María, a sight to see in a skimpy bodice and leotard, could have wrung a chicken’s neck and still drawn applause from the audience, a certain fact remained. During her seven months’ apprenticeship at the Monte Carlo, she, in fact, proved herself an exceptional dancer and probably could have been the star of that show, except for the fact that, as such things went-It is very true, Teresita, that men will take advantage when you are so very attractive-she didn’t want to put Rosalita out on the street, the boss having gotten in the habit of removing his dark glasses and looking at María in a way that disturbed her during those shows. Or, to put it differently, she couldn’t see herself spreading her legs for him just for the sake of becoming a headliner, and so, feeling his eyes drilling into her backside each time she crossed the stage, María simply stopped showing up, even if she would miss those dancers, some of whom were to remain her friends.