Later, after they’d showered and dressed, Nestor suggested they get a bite to eat at the dance club Panchín, which wasn’t too far away. And because that wonderful singer Ignacio Villa, aka “Bola de Nieve,” the raspy-voiced Maurice Chevalier of Cuban crooners, sometimes performed there, Nestor thought they might catch his act afterwards. María, however, just wasn’t interested in visiting any cabaret, no matter how famous the singer. Her many nights in clubs were already enough to last her a lifetime. No, she preferred to sit out in the open air on the patio of a nearby fried seafood place, nothing special at all, taking in the sunset. As for music? It was relaxing to hear the boleros that played from a radio in the back, to drink enough beers to make her almost forget about Ignacio and lose herself in Nestor’s tender eyes. The longer they sat and the more they drank-his side of the table had five empty bottles of beer already sitting there, while hers had two-the more Nestor drifted off into a mood of such sadness that, as he opened yet another bottle, she wanted to wrest it from his hands.
“Just last night I dreamed about you, María, and do you know what I saw?” he asked, taking her hand.
“Tell me.”
“An evening just like the one we’re having here and now. With you sitting across from me.” He smiled tenderly. “I also saw something else: just down there,” Nestor said and pointed towards a little pier where couples went strolling. “I saw us sitting there, on a bench looking out at the water, and we were embracing, besando, besando, with so much happiness, our kisses tasting of the sea, and your face so joyful that I knew that we were surely to fall in love.” Then he crossed his heart and added: “Te juro-I swear-it’s the truth, and, if you believe me, María, it will become the truth.”
Maybe it was the beer she had been drinking, but when Nestor told her “Come on, let’s see,” she didn’t mind going.
They passed the remainder of that evening sitting out on that pier necking, unable to let go of each other.
It’s amazing what a single evening on a beautiful night by the sea will do. On their way back into Havana proper, as the trolley jostled along Fifth Avenue, they were holding each other, mostly in silence, as if, in fact, they were in love. Now and then, he would kiss her hand, and, more than once, she kissed his hand back. Their expressions must have been rapturous. Other passengers, especially the older ones, with their hound-dog jowls and memories of their own pasts, simply nodded their understanding: oh, to be that young again, to be in love, to feel the world expanding, and not diminishing around you. During that ride, Nestor sat beside María with a dumbstruck grin on his face, his notebook of lyrics, incidentally, set upon his lap, where his verses occasionally seemed to rise and fall in accord with Nestor’s sighs and the ardent expansions of that upon which they rested.
OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, THEY WOULD MEET AFTER HER last shows, late into the morning. She got used to finding Nestor waiting for her in the alley outside the backstage door (her fellow dancers, leaving after her, giggling about the buenmoso, the lady-killer, who had won María’s heart). They always ended up embracing against an arcade wall, her right leg jammed between his knees, the pipe inside his trousers nearly bursting its seams every time and Nestor whispering the kind of poetry that made María let him sink his fingers inside her. Light-headed, they’d take a few steps, then begin to kiss and fondle each other against a column, to the point of madness. His eyes rolled up into his head, he’d tell her, “Ay, María, mi María. Sabes que me estás matando?”-“Don’t you know that you’re killing me?” Then he’d drop to his knees, lift up the hem of her skirt, press his face against the dead center of her panties, police sirens in the distance, the world ending-none of it mattering. Still, she always stopped short with Nestor, fearing his poder, that she couldn’t manage him, or that he would think her a puta in the end, that Ignacio would discover them.
But one night while unraveling a dancer’s garter over her leg at the club, and realizing that the thought of Nestor made her feel like touching herself, her sheets at home covered with peacocks’ eyes of her own moisture (or with outlines of the wound in Christ’s side), María decided that she couldn’t take waiting anymore.
A few days later, during the quieter hours of an afternoon, in a sun-soaked room near the harbor, in a solar that Nestor had borrowed from a friend, and on a mattress with springs so far gone that it took her back to la Cucaracha, Maria allowed Nestor to do whatever he pleased with her. The moment he removed her dress, he stripped down himself, proudly displaying his virility, and proceeded to fondle, bite, and spread Maria open in ways that she couldn’t have imagined. She soon learned that romping with Nestor was like riding in her papito’s carriage up into the hills, and not just because of the way Nestor nearly burst her into pieces-the wider she spread and the more capacious she became the more he filled her-but because of his caresses, tender kisses, and endearments-“Sabes que te quiero, María?”-“Don’t you know that I love you?” he’d say again and again, his long-fingered musician’s hands brushing her hair from her eyes. As he’d take hold of a fistful of her hair, she’d raise her head, suckling him, but so differently than she had with Ignacio, who sometimes liked to slap her face or twist her nipple painfully while she was doing it. No, with Nestor she remembered the techniques the prostitutes at la Cucaracha had taught her while sitting around bored in the hallways: to bite and lick and then withdraw, to roll one’s tongue in a certain way, all gently, then almost viciously, as if trying to draw out the last bit of sweetness from a piece of raw sugarcane-and soon enough her knuckles were soaked with him, and licking that off her hand, she tongue-kissed him with it until, just like that, he became excited again. Then, proving that a man’s weeping member could be used like a stylus, he left traces of himself over every inch of her body, writing out the words Amor and Te amo with his seminal fluids on the small of her back and along the plumpness of her nalgitas; and when her upraised rump sent out that exquisite heat, like a woman softly breathing on a man’s neck, Nestor, begging her forgiveness, had to go there too-he couldn’t help himself, and María, despite that impertinence, found that it was a delicious pain and found that if she touched herself at the same time as she raised her haunches, she fell into pieces again. They went at it for hours, and no matter how many times they did, he wanted to go at her again, as if there would be no end of his desire for her. In fact, they hardly knew restraint and only finally stopped when her voice had gotten hoarse from screaming.
They could go hardly anyplace, not even church, without hounds following them in packs. At the Sunday movie matinees they attended, not a few hours after he accompanied her to Mass, they always sat in the darkest corner of the highest balcony, where the fewest people lingered, and in a row above everybody else. Even then they kissed so much and so loudly that there was always someone to snap at them. “Be quiet!” and “Where is your shame?” Once, during a Barbara Stanwyck film with Mexican actors overdubbing the lines (films with Spanish subtitles were more difficult for her to comprehend, but she generally got the drift of the dramatic formulas and, if anything, learned a little English along the way), Nestor, off in his own little world of passion, couldn’t restrain himself any longer. Slumped down, with her eyes set on the screen, Maria, while luxuriating in the theater’s aire condicionado, absently fondled Nestor through his trousers, and with that whatever remained of his sense of saintly behavior gave way. Just like that, with the fingers of one hand deep inside her dress, the priestly Nestor Castillo pulled his thing out with the other-she could hear its struggle against the fabric, its scraping against his zipper’s teeth-and there it stood, silhouetted against the luminous on-screen visage of Stanwyck. Asking María for her forgiveness, as he always did, Nestor further begged her please, in the name of heaven, just to kiss him there, if only that one time. But in the balcony of the Payret? Sighing and hearing cries of “puta” and much worse coming from the audience, she brought Nestor to climax, if only to watch the rest of the movie in peace.