Then, while birds were chirping away outside the bohío, he drifted off into a sleep from which he would never awaken.
She was nineteen years old.
He’d passed away at ten in the morning, and, looking back, what she would be most grateful for was how Ignacio Fuentes had kept his head about the whole business. It was Ignacio who went to San Jacinto that same day to arrange for a proper funeral, Ignacio who paid for the coffin and organized the locals for the burial processional to the local campo santo, that cemetery of soon to be forgotten souls; Ignacio who had paid for a funeral feast; Ignacio who had been a pillar of strength for María. And for that alone María felt a sincere gratitude toward him, no matter his faults, and swore that, whatever her desires for that músico, she would put Nestor Castillo from her mind.
What would it matter? Her life had become a kind of a dancer’s purgatory by then anyway.
Chapter TWENTY-THREE
And Nestor? Unable to accept María’s decision, he sent her notes nearly daily. Naturally they piled up beside her bed, unread, and when he turned up at her solar, whatever hour of the day, she was rarely at home. (By then, María had started to spend more and more time with Ignacio at a house he had bought just outside Havana, along the sea.) At her shows, Nestor became such a distraction that María had to ask Eliseo, the club bouncer, to turn him away at the door, and when she left through the backstage exit at four in the morning, María, head covered by a veil, came to dread the inevitable moment when she encountered Nestor on the street. He’d beg her to just sit with him for a few moments, to hear him out-there were so many things he had to tell her-but she couldn’t because, deep down, she knew what it would lead to. It got to the point that Ignacio himself had to wait for her; failing that, he’d send along one or two of his men to accompany her.
Bodyguards.
By then, María, looking the other way, had come to accept the notion that Ignacio, as her fellow dancers had gossiped all along, happened to be a gangster. It made no difference to her; he had to earn a living after all, and since when had life been good to that man in the first place? Still, she drew lines. Once when Nestor started to get out of hand and Ignacio, as tenderly as possible, suggested that one or two of his colleagues have a “serious talk with the músico,” María, not so entirely cold, told him: “Hurt that joven, and I will never let you touch me again.” So they put up with a lot, especially at night, when Nestor followed behind her and played his trumpet, not dreaming melodies but mocking horse race reveilles. And sometimes, having lost his mind, his voice echoing in the arcades, he’d scream that she was nothing more than some impotent’s whore! All this Ignacio, with enormous patience, ignored; for María, however, it became too much, and she went through days when she wished that Nestor had never come into her life at all.
For months, Nestor continued to sweetly torment her (no, it wasn’t easy) until there came the day when Ignacio, a bookish and, therefore, crafty fellow, seized upon a certain idea. From conversations with María, he had learned a central fact about the brothers’ lives: that the older and vainer one, Cesar Castillo, had ambitions about going to New York, a city Ignacio knew well, having his own cousins there as well as friends in the nightclub and appliance businesses. So why wouldn’t Ignacio have several of his colleagues, surveying the streets in their dark Oldsmobile, bring Cesar down to his office in the harbor, which was just a cluttered and stuffy windowless room off a loading dock, to discuss certain possibilities, the main one being that Ignacio, in his open-minded benevolence and wishing only the best for María, would pay Cesar five hundred dollars to get the hell out of Havana with his brother.
And not just out of Havana, but to a place they wanted to go to anyway: New York. What happened? As Ignacio, flavoring the tip of a cigar in a gimlet of Carlos V brandy, told María some days later: “Once I made the offer, that pretty boy macho, who had walked in wanting to knock my block off, became very friendly and grateful. We got a little drunk together, and, in fact, by the time he left, if we hadn’t hated each other so much in the first place, we might have ended up good friends.”
Nestor, however, never really wanted to leave and became so mournful about losing María that Cesar was sorely tempted to make the journey without him. But he dragged Nestor along, and his brother, that poor lost soul (or, as María would put it one day, the darling sweet pobrecito who deserved every bit of her love) stepped onto a Pan American Clipper to Miami only after being fortified by a night in the whorehouses, a quart of añejo rum, and the assurance that Cesar would beat him to death if he didn’t.
In the meantime, as much as she had felt relieved to hear about Nestor’s departure, María, sitting with Ignacio in an outdoor café along the Prado, could barely wait for the moment when she might be alone again. Christ forgive her, Nestor was the one she thought about now when touching herself, her memories of his fevered masculinity staying with her no matter how cruelly she had treated him.
ON THEIR LAST AFTERNOON TOGETHER IN HAVANA, SPENT IN A dingy hotel room by the harbor, Nestor, sipping rum from a pint bottle, presented her with gifts. Stretched out on that bed, he had reached over to the end table for a box, his body damp with sweat.
“I have some things for you, María,” he told her.
The first was a thin necklace, of fading gold, off which hung a little tarnished silver crucifix, the weight of a peseta.
“It’s the same one I wore as a child, when I thought I was going to die. I feel it should be yours,” he told her. “Wear it for me.”
Gratefully, she put that crucifix and chain around her neck, and with that Nestor began fondling her. But no, she stopped him, pulling his hands away from her. “No puedo,” she said. “I can’t.” But what could she do that afternoon when, happy as a child, he got up and retrieved an envelope from his trousers pocket; it contained a dozen black-and-white photographs, the sort with serrated edges that had been taken here and there in Havana, by friends or passersby. Nestor and María posed by a table, surrounded by flowers in the back garden of a café called Ofelia’s, Nestor and María holding hands in front of the marquee of the America movie house, after taking in a Humphrey Bogart double feature, a look of hopefulness and affection on each of their faces. She was truly touched, almost felt like bursting into tears over the decision she had already made but wasn’t too good at carrying out.
“Son bonitos”-“They’re pretty,” she told him.
“But look at these. Remember the playa at Cojímar?”
They were fine photographs of them frolicking in the waves a few months before, the sorts one would always cherish, even if they were a little blurred: Nestor, eternally handsome with his penetrating gaze, and beautiful María in her clinging bathing suit rising out of the sea like a goddess.
“You see how happy we are, María? How much we are in love!”
“Oh, Nestor,” she said to him. “Why are you so sentimental?”
“I just want to make you happy,” he said, pulling her close. “There are so many things I want to do for you!”
This time, when the kisses started up again, she didn’t resist-it was much easier to go along with that form of speaking than to say any actual words, especially when hers would only be so hurtful. Soon enough that crucifix, dangling from her neck, was pinching Nestor’s thing as he, straddling María with his knees, availed himself of her breasts’ plumpness. Oh, but what that crucifix witnessed! Perhaps because she thought that it might be their last time together, she dallied longer than usual, taking care of the man until she was blissfully sore in her deepest parts, until the harbor cannons began their 8 p.m. booming and night began to fall over the sad city of Havana. What was the last thing he told her?