Chapter TWELVE
She was learning what men can be about, particularly when they like their drink. Her papito had sometimes been that way, that’s why he used to beat her, and, as she got to know Ignacio better, she learned that he could be that way too. In the bedroom, the only place where he actually seemed happy, he could be quite unpredictable. She would almost enjoy it, as long as he wasn’t being too rough with her, and rum sometimes made him that way. Once he had drunk too much, he’d start accusing her of denying him certain pleasures. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, and he’d smash in the door, throw her onto the bed, and take her from behind, all the while calling her nothing better than his little mulatta whore. And if she wept bitterly afterwards, he’d tell her, “Grow up and don’t forget that, if it weren’t for me, María, you’d still be sleeping in that shithole of a hotel and dressing like a tramp.”
Drinking, he became a different man, who made her life a nightmare. Even when he behaved in a reasonable way, taking care of him with her mouth became a labor, not of love but of drudgery. Sober it didn’t take much: just the sight of her lovely face in a posture of voluptuous submission, the proximity of her lips to that blood-engorged thing, and the merest licking of her tongue were often enough to make him gasp and cry out. But when Ignacio had been drinking heavily, because he had suffered a reversal in business or because he was simply getting bored with her, Mary Magdalene herself would have been hard put to make any progress at all. Still, she took care of him just the same, until her neck and jaws ached. And even then, he found ways to insult her: “You’re too careful and look like you’re about to throw up.” And the worst? If he had been displeased with her lovemaking, or if she had even looked at him in a certain way-as if she’d rather leap from her window than spend another moment with him-she’d turn up at the club the next night covered with so many black and blue bruises that she couldn’t go onstage without disguising them with heavy makeup. How the chorus gossiped and felt sorry for her.
It became the kind of situation that she would always remember in the manner of a bad dream. Started out good, ended up bad. A terrible mistake from which there seemed to be no escape. Sometimes after she had seen him and he had treated her poorly, María headed back to that filthy hotel la Cucaracha, which she had since come to regard with fondness, and, finding la señora Matilda at her usual place in the hall, wept on her urine-smelling lap. Recognizing her expression of regret and torment, something she had seen many times before, Violeta the prostitute would hold María in her arms and caress her hair. “Come back here, my love,” she’d tell María. “Come back to your friends.” Such little visits helped sustain her-la señora always told her that she could have her old habitación again-but when she looked around that place, with its click-clack of whores’ heels on the steps, its dingy corners, and remembered the condition in which she sometimes found the toilet-an outhouse, a field was better than that-and of waking in the middle of the night jumping-brincando, brincando-from insect bites, María knew she’d never return. But then something would hit her: Short of going home to Pinar del Río, there would be no way of avoiding Ignacio, not in Havana at any rate. Where else could she go? Heading back to her solar, she’d imagine him lurking behind every arcade column; and once she’d climb the steps to her door, her greatest fear was that she’d find Ignacio, sprawled out on her bed naked, an electric fan turning by his side, waiting.
Chapter THIRTEEN
Not that Ignacio was always so harsh with her. Though she’d tend to remember him as a son of a bitch, y como un abusador, he ran so hot and cold that it always amazed María when they settled into a pleasant period. He might punch her arms and legs a half dozen times in a single afternoon, but within a few days flowers always arrived at the club in his name, so that while María, jamming a modesty pad into the front of her glittering undergarment, fatigued by sadness, softened towards him again. And sometimes he turned up at the Nocturne with a box full of lacy Parisian scarves, just to give away to the ladies of the chorus. And he’d tell anyone willing to listen that if he or she needed a good refrigerator, a nice radio console, or even an air conditioner, he was the man to talk to. And always at steeply discounted prices, given that they all-from the powder room ladies to the shoeshine boy in the back and the women of the chorus-were friends of María.
In a calm and decent mood, Ignacio, always dressed sportily and smelling nicely of cologne, could be incredible. He knew people like the advertising director at El Diario de la Marina, and other papers, who might have use for her as a model in their ads. And now and then, out of nowhere, Ignacio, stuffing a few twenty-dollar bills into a lipstick-stained coffee cup she kept by her makeup mirror, told her: “This is for your poor papito out in Pinar, if you want to give it to him.” Cold with beggars on the street, he seemed to change his mind when it came to her little world. And that sometimes made her feel differently.
On some nights, at about four in the morning, when Ignacio was usually among the last to leave the Nocturne and the floors were already being swept around the tables, even while some patrons lingered, and he asked if he might “escort” her back to her place, María, whatever his recent transgressions, usually told him “Yes.”
In the best of spirits, he even encouraged her about some things. When they were passing by the Palacio Theater along the Prado during a midafternoon Sunday stroll, and beautiful María saw that crowds were queuing in the entranceway for a performance of a ballet, Giselle, he didn’t hesitate to buy tickets for the two o’clock show. The lead dancer of that troupe, one Alicia Alonso, a waifish half-blind brunette, moved so gracefully in the role that María’s hip-swaying rumbera movements seemed crude by comparison. While watching the corps de ballet and feeling stunned by Alonso’s elegance onstage, she could only think about what one of the dancers in her troupe, the aging Berta, had recently told her: “You’re so good looking, it doesn’t matter if you can dance at all.” That remark had bothered her, and especially so after watching that ballet. It so nagged at María that she began to dream about becoming a ballerina.
In this, Ignacio, even while thinking it a bit of a joke, indulged her-paying for twice-weekly classes at an academy off Industria Street. And while she had begun to learn the fundamentals, and worked hard to perfect the placement of her feet, the various pliés, she lacked the classical grace of the others, who were, in most cases, adolescents if not children (and well off ones at that). At five seven and too voluptuous-she weighed one hundred and twenty-seven pounds-María, the oldest of them, seemed preposterously out of place. Still, she kept at it for a few months, until there came the day when she realized that it would take her years to become any good at all. By then, her feet had begun blistering all over again, to the point that they sometimes bled in her shoes while she was dancing in the floor shows at the club, and so, one day, María, putting that pipe dream aside, simply stopped taking those lessons.
At least those lessons helped her performances: she became somewhat more elegant in her stage movements, the nuances of those stances making a difference in her style. To the delight of her salivating audiences, it became easier for María to touch her forehead with her instep, and her contortions became much more fluid, not that she needed to improve on her routines. Having been exposed to her fellow, better off aspirants, who were picked up by chauffeurs and housemaids after classes and, almost to a one, attended a French lyceum (they were always practicing their French with each other during their rest periods), she, envious at first and then inspired by their air of refinement, began thinking about ways to improve herself.