Or to put it differently: what was sweetest about María had been pulled so deeply into herself that she now seemed as haughty as she was beautiful. Still, Lázaro looked forward to their lessons and took pride in the way that their afternoons of study had paid off. María could read now, but slowly, and she had filled her notebooks with countless words that she had more or less memorized. And her handwriting, ever so careful, had been honed by the hours and hours she’d spent backstage between shows scribbling down rows of the alphabet’s letters, the way schoolchildren did. Practice had gotten María to the point where she could write her name out with such elegant flourishes that it would have been hard for anyone to imagine that she’d come from a family whose father signed his name with a crudely rendered X, or that for years María had only pretended she could read signs while walking along the streets. As they’d sit in their usual spot, near the bookseller’s stall, Lázaro had occasionally taken special joy in advising María what school grade she had graduated into. By the time Nestor had left for America, she had passed through to the second grade; a few years later, in 1951, she had slipped into secondary school, and now, in the days of Batista’s presidency, she could read and write like a fourteen-year-old with certain bad habits-which is to say, she got some things right and some things wrong, spelling never being one of her strengths. Nevertheless, she’d reached a point where she really didn’t need Lázaro any longer, and what more did he have to teach her?

Still, despite dressing as well as the El Encanto window mannequins (Ignacio wanted her always to look her best) and carrying herself as if she were the dueña of Havana, María loved returning to that market street and going from stall to stall to say hello to the merchants, who always joked about this fine uppity lady’s resemblance to someone they once knew. It always pleased her to sort through the bookseller’s selections. She had a weakness for romance novels by a certain Almacita Alvarez from Spain -and just recognizing the titles: Bitter Love, Blood and Passion, Taught to Deceive-filled her with pride. She also liked any books about spiritualism, for she often dreamed about her dead family and believed there had to be a way of contacting them. Though those books rarely cost more than eight or ten cents apiece, or the price of a trolley or bus ride, customers still haggled with the vendor, but never María, who believed each tome invaluable, whatever its tattered condition.

In fact, while María had kept working as a dancer, she didn’t have too many expenses to worry about. Because she was Ignacio Fuentes’s “woman,” her rent and clothing were taken care of, but even if he had turned out to be a stingy man, she would have had sources of income beyond her twenty pesos a week as a dancer. Having caught the eye of more than one art director or advertising executive during her performances, María had started getting jobs as a model, posing beside kitchen appliances, soaking in bubble baths, leaning against the dimpled hood of a shiny Oldsmobile, usually in either a movie starlet’s glistening gown or a tight bathing suit. In advertisements for Polar beer, her face adorned many a poster here and there in the city, and because the company also produced promotional coasters and waiters’ trays, her mysterious and alluring expression was to be found peering up from the half-moon bottoms of frothy drinks and rum glasses at strangers in cafés and bars everywhere. If beautiful María had turned heads before just because of the way her nalgitas swayed inside her dress, and stopped traffic with her unmistakable looks, she now attracted attention for having become so familiar to the general public. She’d even appeared in a rum ad on a television show, broadcast from the CMQ building, but had disliked the sweltering lights, the way they made her diaphragm sweat under the tight binding of her dress, and the unearthly feeling that came from wearing what felt like pounds of makeup on her face. (“Una miseria,” she called that.)

In time, with more money than she needed, María put most of her wages into a savings account at a Chase National Bank on Brasil, her blue passbook something she liked to take out from under her mattress to “read” as if it were a novel. Never forgetting how her own papi never earned very much, she gave a few coins to nearly every beggar she encountered, and when she bumped into her friend El Caballero de París, she’d buy him lunch and a few glasses of first-class rum, sometimes even a Churchill cigar. When it came to Lázaro, who never wanted more payment than a sandwich or two, as well as a radiant smile, María began insisting that he accept a few dollars from her for those lessons.

Having taken to calling Lázaro mi maestro, a title that always made him wince with happiness as he’d spent most of his life as a bootblack, and then a Havana street sweeper, the brunt of that income derived from the largesse of local merchants along Obispo and O’Reilly streets-María had begun to look upon him with a fondness that made her fear for his well-being. He wasn’t her papito, but she had grown attached enough to his laughter and kindly manner that, as surely as the sun began baking the rooftops of Havana in the mornings, she came to believe that he would go the way of everyone she had ever loved. It was the kind of thought that lingered in the back of María’s mind each time he seemed a little tired or had trouble hoisting himself up from those steps, and especially so as he once tried to get to his feet and this old, lanky negrito nearly fell backwards into the hallway’s shadows from whence he had come. (Those were Havana shadows, the temperature cooling with every foot of hallway you stepped into, like entering the recesses of a church baptistery, a scent of ashes, frying fish, and flowers, somehow musty, deepening.)

That was the only time María, accompanying Lázaro home, saw where he lived-inside an inner courtyard, under an awning set out over what must have been some old stone trough from when horses were kept in the alleys, all his possessions, mainly books and a mat, with only a single chair crammed into what amounted to a hole in the wall, his only luxury a solitary lightbulb, which hung off a bent wire, his toilet situated behind a rotted door that led into the back of a store. But did he complain? No; and when she, out of a generous impulse and knowing that la Señora Matilda would have looked after him, offered to put him up in la Cucaracha, he refused. “I’m just used to it here, that’s all,” he told her. “And at my age, I’m waiting for that guagua that goes to where it goes, anyway.”

Pero, hombre, she thought. No te mueras.

She was already attached enough to Lázaro and his lessons that each time María turned up, she couldn’t help but wonder if it would be her last, as if her affection for someone would surely spell his doom. Of course, María was imagining things, but having lost her family at so young an age, as she’d one day explain to her daughter, she became a “little cucka en la cabeza,” without even realizing it…which was probably part of the reason why she had turned away from Nestor.

“And that nice fellow, the handsome one, I used to see you with-whatever happened to him?” Lázaro had once asked her.

“He went off to America, to New York.”

“So, why didn’t you go with him?” Lázaro shook his head. “I saw the way you looked at each other-yes, señorita, I certainly did!”

“I don’t really know why,” she told him, shrugging. “But he was a músico, and you know how musicians can be; they don’t have much common sense.”

Nodding agreeably, as if María were old enough to know what she was talking about, Lázaro punched out the inside of his lacquered cane hat on his lap and smiled. “You mean he didn’t have much money, was that it?”