Even then María knew that she never would. It was hard enough to have left the campo for Havana, but to leave Cuba was the last thing to enter her mind. She kept thinking about Nestor, however: if only he were a different sort-the sort to make her feel that she wouldn’t end up living like a pauper.

Later, when Nestor had returned, Cesar ordered more drinks and, downing his rum with one swallow, slapped Nestor’s shoulder. “Brother, why don’t you take the rest of the night off? There are plenty of musicians around here to fill in for you.” Then he winked at Nestor, traipsed off rather swaggeringly, and went back onstage.

Thereafter commenced their usual problems; María, alone with Nestor, really didn’t have much to say to him. Not that she had much to say to anyone in those days, but with Nestor silence was more the rule, except when he would pull out his notebook and recite some of his newly composed verses, which she admittedly liked, despite the way they confounded her. In fact, sometimes at night, when she’d come home from the club, her feet blistered, and she had the peace of mind to think about her week’s lessons with Lázaro, María found herself daring to think in verse herself. If only she could write them down…What those verses tended towards surprised her-her holy trinity: God, love, and death-even if they resided mainly inside her head, but she owed them to Nestor’s inspiration.

With the bar’s lights shining on the stage, Cesar Castillo said a few words into a pitifully sad, often muffled microphone-they had borrowed it from someone’s tape recorder and plugged it into a little RCA amplifier. Then he launched, for Nestor and María’s sake, into “Juventud” by Ernesto Lecuona, an old bolero about how youth is but a fleeting thing, which makes everyone, no matter his or her age, entangle in a tight embrace. Taking María by the hand, Nestor led her out onto the floor. She’d laugh (and curse) the fact one day, but it didn’t take more than the touch of her body against his to excite him-excite them both. With Nestor leaning his handsome face against hers, whispering endearments, like clockwork, from deep inside his trousers rose, as surely as Christ, that which jostled her thighs in the darkness and kissed her belly button through the fabric. (“Ay, pero María, María,” he kept whispering.)

The sensation brought to mind the first verse she had ever composed in secret but did not know how to write down.

Pedazos de bambú tiesos…

Fragmentos de la cruz

Durísimos y llenitos de jugos dulces

Y sangres sagradas

Vosotros queman dentro mis interiores-

(Hard pieces of bamboo,

Fragments of the Cross,

Full of sweet juices and

Sacred blood…

You go burning inside of me…)

AFTERWARDS, STEALING AWAY, THEY SAT BY THE WATERSIDE, surrounded by an aureole of gnats, and as the moon, brilliant as God, looked down on them, Nestor told her about two new songs he had written: “One is called ‘Danzón de los negros,’ the other ‘Perla de mi corazón,’ which is really about you María…” As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he sang one of its lines: “Our love is a weeping ocean, whose tears become the loveliest of jewels.”

“I haven’t gotten it all worked out, María, but I know I will, in the same way I know that we are destined to be together.” Happily he looked up at the sky. “That my brother Cesar likes you very much is really wonderful, María.” Then: “Don’t you know I can’t wait for the day when we will be a family?” With that, taking hold of María’s hand, he swore that he would do anything for her and broached the question he had been asking her for months each time they met: “María, have you considered your answer? Will you become my wife?”

She sighed, looked away, and as the lyrics to a song, a chorus part that went “Y lo aprendí!”-“And I found out!”-came from the club, María, tears in her eyes, told him, “Nestor, please forgive me, but I can’t, my love.”

“But why?” His face was contorted with anguish.

“Nestor, I just don’t want to be a poor woman all my life.”

“And if I were to make something of myself?”

“Oh, but hombre, you dream too much.”

And then, in the most kindly way, she kissed Nestor on his lips. “Forgive me, amor,” she asked him again, his head bowed, eyes filled with disbelief, on that night, long ago, by the sea.

Chapter TWENTY-TWO

Oh, but it wasn’t easy; she had grown fond of that músico. Out of pity, for every time she saw him, he seemed so forlorn, María continued to take Nestor to her bed, and, swearing to herself that it would be their last romp, each time they made love she gave herself to him as if there would be no tomorrow. Along the way, his creative side penetrated María almost as deeply as did his other parts.

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.