Chapter FIFTEEN

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

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

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

…your father was a liar!

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

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

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

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