“No, it wasn’t that at all. He just didn’t seem proper in his thinking.”

“Uh-huh,” Lázaro conceded. “And that older fellow you’re with now, the one who doesn’t smile very much-is he your man?”

“He’s good to me, Lázaro,” she began, but then, not wanting to explain anything, she lost her patience. “Whatever happened between me and that músico is over with, and there’s nothing left to be said or done.”

“Oh, amorcita, don’t you know there’s more to life than money,” Lázaro told her, turning to the next of the lessons. “The goodness in a man’s heart, that’s something else. But who am I to lecture you? I just hope you’re happy.”

She had to admit that the few times Ignacio had seen her with Lázaro, he hadn’t reacted well, accusing her of consorting with a Negro as if that were the worst thing she could do with herself. “Next thing you know,” Ignacio once told her, “you’ll lose what few manners you have.” The few times they met, when she was still living in that edificio, he never deigned to speak with Lázaro and always gave the kindly man, so politely singing her praises and doffing his hat in respect, a look that implied he was no better than riffraff, or the lowest of the low. It didn’t help that Lázaro was black as a crow-Ignacio had no use for such men. In fact, he had filled María’s head with all kinds of sentiments that would have been unthinkable to her back in Pinar del Río, sentiments that were insulting. As a light-skinned mulatta, she surely had black blood on her mother’s side; nevertheless, María couldn’t fault Ignacio for thinking that way; most white Cubans, los blanquitos, did.

“Oh, but that other one,” Lázaro would say. “What was his name again?”

“Nestor-Nestor Castillo.”

“You know, once when you weren’t around, he came over to talk with me, played me a little tune, a sweet melody on his trumpet. Told me he was writing it for you, María. Did you know that?”

“Yes, he liked to write songs, but I suppose all músicos do.”

“Ay, pero, chiquita, I could tell listening to it that the fellow was crazy about you. Pardon me for saying so, I took one look into his eyes and I saw some wonderful things-like a poet’s thoughts. Were I a lovely young woman, that for me would have been enough to throw all common sense out the window.” Then: “Now, I won’t say another word,” though, forgetting, he always would.

She’d put up with his two cents, knowing that Lázaro only meant well, and there were times when she was tempted to explain how Nestor sometimes frightened her, not with his natural armature, a true wonder she’d never forget, but with a sadness that María, carrying enough of her own, found wearisome, as if there would never be any way of making him happy. That Nestor Castillo was such a high-strung tipo seemed a matter of bad luck, the sweet músico with a troubled soul and a doubtful future, the man, so much of a child, whom she’d had no choice but to turn away. He was, after all, a campesino, and like the guajiros, he didn’t put up any barriers between his feelings and how he acted, or what he said-something which, in those days, María, being groomed as a proper lady by Ignacio, had come to forget.

Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

A story: in 1953, the same year that Castro had started what would be known as the July 26th Movement, María, moonlighting, had posed for a four-color “Fly to Cuba ” poster for Pan American airlines. This came about because an American executive with a New York advertising agency, Y & R, had caught her act one night at the Lantern and approached her after the show-which was how she got most of her modeling jobs. The ad itself, shot in the Torrens studio off Cuba Street, featured María, in a snug two-piece cream-colored bathing suit, her nalgitas prominently hanging out, and white-rimmed beach girl sunglasses, standing in juicy splendor before a towering royal palm. Sipping coconut juice from a gourd through a straw with one hand, she held a thick, fuming cigar in the other, its smoke rising into the air and resolving into the shape of a heart as a sleek four-engine Pan Am Clipper flew overhead through the bluest of Cuban skies. An afternoon’s work that paid quite well-twenty-five dollars.

María could hardly have imagined that the finished product would have caught the eye of her former amante, Nestor Castillo, in distant New York. Or to be more precise, that poster, hanging in a travel agency window, had stopped Nestor dead in his tracks one autumn afternoon in 1953 as he passed through the cavernous lobby of the Hotel Biltmore on East Forty-fourth Street, on his way to visit a Cuban friend, José-Pascual, in the Men’s Bar. Oh, poor, poor Nestorito, as she would come to think of him. He was that handsome dark-featured man, dapper in a linen jacket, peering dreamily at her image, his heart aching. Beside himself with rekindled memories of her lusciousness and the romance that had nearly torn him apart, Nestor soon found himself by that agency counter, pleading, if not demanding, in his broken English that the clerk sell him the poster. He was trembling, his hands shaking wildly. To think that every Fred MacMurray-looking fulano passing by that window could see María holding between her elegant fingers that phallic cigar! Such was his agitation that he hardly noticed at first how the clerk, a transplant from Cuba himself, and a rather sympathetic one at that, had started speaking to him in Spanish.

It took him a while to calm Nestor down, and, in the end, he explained that, as much as he wanted to help him out, he just couldn’t sell such things to everyone whose interest that poster had caught. “You see,” he said, “with that one, someone always makes the same request, nearly every day.” Instead, he advised Nestor to visit the local Pan Am office a few blocks north. “Go up to the fourth floor,” he told him. “There’s a customer relations office there, and they’ll be happy to help you. Okay, caballero?” A little while later, in the bar, a few steps away from the hotel’s Palm Court (in the Havana style), and not far from its famous clock and the young couples gathered there, Nestor, brooding over a fried steak with onions sandwich and enough rum to get him dreaming, confided to his friend, a fellow he had befriended at a party on La Salle Street, the mess this woman in Havana had left him in.

“She seemed to love me, and then she didn’t, carajo!” he kept saying, his head shaking. “José-Pascual,” he said, “if you only knew how I hate myself for letting her get away.” Then, with José-Pascual, a good-natured gallego and a transplant from Jiguaní, pouring, mostly for free, he got good and drunk over the matter. By five, as Nestor, making his way a few blocks north, stumbled in through a Madison Avenue skyscraper’s dizzily revolving doors, hundreds of office workers were swarming its lobby, and Nestor, put off by the crowd, and having to make a rehearsal in any case, lost heart and decided to head back uptown instead, sulking all the way. Later that night, tormented as always by the slightest reminder of María, he hardly slept-believing that María was mocking him from afar. And while he tried to forget her, for many a good reason that image of María, with that vaguely lip-shaped shadow dipping through the front cleft of her bathing suit like an orchid’s fold, killed Nestor and distracted him for weeks. But then that was Nestor. On many a night after, he would sit on his living room couch with his guitar, whereupon, strumming chords, he would pour his musings and pained longings into yet another version of his song about her, a bolero he had decided to call “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

She had known about that song for a long time. Thanks to Lázaro’s lessons, María had slowly gained the ability to decipher the nearly weightless airmail letters Nestor had started sending her from New York, weekly at first, then twice monthly, then every other month. The first year, 1950-when María had accepted without regret her status as Ignacio’s mistress and moved into their fourteenth-floor high-rise apartment, with its mirrored walls and sweeping view of the sea, the Hotel Nacional, and the Malecón-she had hardly ever thought about Nestor, except during her most lonely and longing (sexual) moods, his splendid physicality as deeply embedded in her skin’s memory as a nagging melody in a musician’s head.