“María, don’t you know, I’d die without you.”

THAT LAST AFTERNOON WAS HARD ENOUGH TO RECALL; BUT WHAT was harder came down to Maria’s memories of tasting every bit of him, and thinking that Nestor’s body, even his big pinga, was a part of her own. It was intoxicating: as much as she wanted to forget him, as she’d walk through the streets of Havana, everything she laid her eyes upon, even if only vaguely phallic, reminded her of Nestor. She could not put on a pair of soft slippers without recalling the joy with which she would unfurl, slowly and sweetly, a condom over him and the time it took, or glance at a quart bottle of milk or a sweating, tall Hatuey beer with its frosty exhalations and not think of his sweat, his passion, his gushing sperm.

PART III. Songs of Despair and Love Havana, New York, 1953-1958

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR

In the summer of 1953, some four years after her papito had passed from this world and Nestor Castillo and his brother had commenced a new life in America, María turned around to find that certain things were going on in Cuba that she hadn’t noticed before. Not that she was unusual among her fellow dancers at the Lantern Cabaret, just off San Miguel, where María worked in those days-hardly any of them cared about anything other than pulling in good crowds nightly and keeping their jobs. But when certain events took place and military personnel began patrolling the streets of Havana at night, and foot traffic into the club fell off for a time, even those dancers became aware that an insurrection had broken out. According to the newspaper and radio reports of the day, it came down to the ire and moral indignation of one fellow, whose name María first heard while at the club: Fidel Castro.

(Static) The government of the Republic of Cuba announces the capture of one…(static)…in the aftermath of a failed attack against the forces of our beloved president Fulgencio Batista…(static)…the rebellious corpses were laid out side by side in the courtyard of the Moncada Bar racks, near Santiago, and their leader, one Fidel Castro Ruz…(static)…led away in chains, to await a charge of treason…

She hadn’t made much of that name, Fidel Castro, at the time, or of such events, which, in any case, hardly stirred much of an opinion, one way or the other, in the corridors and dressing rooms backstage.

In fact, the only person of María’s acquaintance who even seemed to take special notice of politics was her faithful teacher Lázaro, whom María still visited at least twice weekly. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be, when all she had to do was step down a few flights to find him sitting near the bookseller’s stall. She and Ignacio had since moved into a nice sunny apartment in a new modern high-rise in Vedado overlooking the sea, and he’d even opened that clothing store along Galiano, a shopping street in Central Havana, an enterprise that had not turned out the way he had envisioned. Still dancing almost nightly, María sometimes worked there in the afternoons, looking breathtakingly exotic and photogenic by the dress racks, before heading off to the club. Occasionally, she took off early to see her friend Lázaro, the one who, in those years, had taught her so much.

As a matter of course, he’d have María read aloud from books and magazines, among them Bohemia, a national weekly, which had published letters from Castro and articles about the nobility of his cause. “Tú verás,” he’d say, tapping a sepia page showing Castro’s photograph. “Sooner or later someone will come along who’s not a crook. This young one, he’ll probably rot in prison for the rest of his life, but there’ll be others. If God is good to me, I will live to see the day.”

She’d nod, she’d smile. Out in her valle, in Pinar del Río, she hadn’t learned much about anything, except for the inevitability of death, and of music and dancing. Even the Second World War had been this distant calamity, which she’d had glimpses of in newsreels at the Chaplin, and what she had known of the goings-on in Havana, of that succession of presidents who came and went as she grew up, amounted to a few names, which those guajiros hardly mentioned. But if she knew anything about Cuban history in those days, she owed that to Lázaro. He’d seen it all. From the 1880s, when he was a boy and the Cuban rebels, fighting for independence, waged pitched battles with the Spaniards in the countryside, to when the Americans first occupied Havana at the turn of the century, the establishment of the Cuban republic in 1902, and life under a succession of presidents, the worst of them, in his youth, having been one Gerardo Machado, in the 1920s, who had been nicknamed a “second Nero” for his suspension of civil liberties, his cruelties, and the ostentation of his greed. And Cuba ’s latest president, Batista, the one whom Castro, a lawyer, opposed? That previous March, of 1952, Batista had staged a military coup to gain his office, a violation of the constitution that had enraged a generation of idealists and muckrakers, among them that fellow Castro. And yet, she felt untouched by any of this; if Batista happened to be particularly corrupt, as rumor had it, she couldn’t really care less. As far as she was concerned, her life would unfold in the same way no matter who happened to be in power. At heart, beautiful María’s stance came down to a shrug that said, “Really, Lázaro, what does any of that matter to me?”

Her attitude always baffled Lázaro, who, knowing about María’s guajira past, and the ignorance and poverty that came with it, forgave her anyway. Besides, he’d seen his beautiful protégée’s demeanor changing before his very eyes. While in the midst of their lessons during those terrible months after her papito’s death, just the thought of his loss brought her quickly to tears. “There, there, mi vida, this pain will soon pass,” Lázaro would tell her, and she would hope that it would be so. Yet, instead of that experience making María a little sweeter and more compassionate about life, the way it sometimes happened with people; instead of becoming more softhearted, María seemed to have gone in the opposite direction, her personality taking on a harsher edge, what María would describe to her daughter, years in the future, in a single sentence: “Me puso muy, muy durita”-“I became harder skinned.”

It was as if María had walked into a room as a naïve nineteen-year-old beauty in need of some seasoning and education in one moment and, five minutes later, left through another door, not as the hopeful child, unrefined as an Ozark hillbilly, she had essentially been but as a woman aged, not in looks but in temperament, way beyond her years. By 1953, the graceful and ever so beautiful María had developed such a haughty and distanced manner around people that even Lázaro, who used to eat greasy chorizo sandwiches in front of her with abandon, now found that she had taken to looking at him disapprovingly the moment any of those delicious amber-red pork juices started dripping through their newspaper wrappings and down his chin. And heaven forbid if he smiled and actually wiped his mouth with his wrist (Lázaro, with his raspy voice always laughing and chortling, “My, my, but what’s better than this!”), because then María, without intending to seem so severe, frowned, as if Lázaro were reminding her just where she had come from: the campo. Even if she’d once chewed her food like a goat, and had the manners of a field hand, loving to eat things with her fingers, and hadn’t known what a flush toilet was until an afternoon in 1938, when she and her younger sister, Teresita-ay, la pobre- had seen their first show at the Chaplin movie house in San Jacinto (how many times they pulled on that overhead chain and jumped up and down at the sight of the vanishing waters!), she now comported herself with so much caution and formality that Lázaro hardly recognized her as the reticent girl he had known.