On the other hand, once his letters started to arrive, at first with Nestor’s musician friends from New York who’d come to Havana for work and would track her down, one way or the other, at the clubs, it was as if he were determined to enter her life again. (Finding María wasn’t hard: on any given day, one was bound to come across a little ad tucked into the back pages of the Havana Gazette or El Diario de la Marina about the “Phenomenally beautiful and enticing María Rivera-The Dancer You Must See!” And many a photograph of María, in a heavy Aztec-looking plumed headdress and scanty costume, was replicated in the posters and half sheets pasted to the crumbling walls and lampposts of the old city.) At first, María couldn’t have cared less about Nestor’s missives. Aside from wanting to avoid the simple labor of deciphering them, she didn’t care to deal with those pangs of guilt about him that occasionally arose to the surface of her dreams, already peopled enough by the ghosts of the guajiro family she had lost. (When she went back to her campo in her sleep, she always saw her mamá sitting on a rocking chair by the doorway to their bohío, her papito riding across the fields on a horse, the farmers and their oxen around him, and her late sister, Teresa, in the years before she fell ill, just ahead of her on that lovely trail through the forest as they headed toward their beloved cascadas, each of them seeming very much alive, a lovely dream until she’d remember that they were dead.)

Yet María couldn’t help but keep those letters together, in a drawer in her dressing room table, beside a jar of Aphrodite pomade (as if she needed that), and the fact remained that she hadn’t the heart to rip up any of the photographs of Nestor and herself that he had given her on their final day together. (On those nights when she grew bored with the routine, the repetitiousness of a show like “Queen Isabella’s Dance with Columbus,” or “A Peek at Marie Antoinette’s Ladies in Waiting,” or “A Cuban Tarzan with His Cuban Janes,” she sometimes lingered over those photographs of Nestor and herself, taken during their excursions to the beach near Cojímar in the days when they could barely keep their hands off each other. In one of them, Nestor was carrying her out of the cresting gulf waters, María’s arms wrapped around his neck, her breasts pressing, through her green bathing suit, against his happy face, his bathing trunks agitated and plump in the right places. In another, María and Nestor were captured necking in the surf, foam rising around them and their bodies so entangled, that their photographer, one of María’s dancer acquaintances from the old days, Elenita Marquez, tagging along for the fun of it, wondered if they were going to do it right there and then. María had other such photographs, taken around Havana, and even if they were out of focus sometimes, they still commemorated their love and, jaded as she sometimes felt, she counted them, along with the crucifix Nestor had given her, among her most precious possessions.)

But the letters eventually provoked her curiosity, and by the summer of 1951, though she would have saved herself time by showing them to la señora Matilda, who often tortured her with the admonition that she should have gone off with Nestor, María made it a part of her studies to decipher them, slowly. By then, thanks to Lázaro, her abilities to read and write had improved greatly, to the point that she had finally begun to understand the myriad neon signs that glowed and blinked along the nightclub strips, and other things had become less of a mystery. Still, it had taken her the longest time to get through Nestor’s letters. Once she did, María discovered that either she had a much longer way to go or Nestor’s own command of the written language was that of a campesino who had been taught to read and write by a suave but barely educated older brother. Nestor’s letters were always brief, however, as if he did not want to waste another page of that nearly weightless airmail paper. Some were written in pencil, others in smudged, light blue running ink, as if they’d been cried upon, sweated upon, or-who knows what men are capable of when they start to get carried away with their emotions and memories? Some were casual, others impassioned, heartbroken, but all of them were either riddled with words that María simply had not yet come to understand or confusing by virtue of Nestor’s phonetic spellings-’ablar for hablar or ’rible for horrible, among others. Nevertheless, through her own painstaking efforts, along with the occasional assistance of a certain ancient ladies’ powder room attendant, Chi-chi, María came to get a general picture of Nestor’s new life en los Estados Unidos.

Nueva York, he wrote, was deathly cold in the winters; from the skies came snow-la nieve, like something out of a dream; and people stared at you for speaking in Spanish, and some streets were unimaginably crowded. “Imagine this, María, thousands of people rushing along on a single sidewalk!…And the people, of so many nationalities-Italians, Greeks, Germans, Chinese, Russians, and Poles, even los judíos-speaking in their own languages, a different world, a city much grander than Havana, but not as beautiful, and with rivers that stink of trash and chimneys that send up smoke and more automobiles and buses than you imagined possible. And the buildings, por Dios! Remember that giant mono, King Kong? That building he climbed really exists, it’s called the Empires [sic] State!” (That name he carefully wrote out in English.) “Y fíjate eso, just looking up, you see more high buildings everywhere-so wonderful and horrible at the same time.” And with every mention of such things, Nestor told her how much he loved María and missed her terribly, that he didn’t know why they had lost something so precious. “But you understand, María, there’s still time… I’m waiting for you, and only you…”

Yes, even if she had treated him foolishly and badly, he knew that in her heart she really loved him. But at least he had ways of keeping himself busy, and not just by trying to learn English, which he called un monstruoso idioma-a monster of a language. He had a job, along with his brother Cesar-“You remember him, don’t you?”-working in a meatpacking plant during the day and playing music with a little conjunto of musicians they’d found here and there in the city at night and on the weekends. They lived in an apartment in a neighborhood called Harlem with their cousins, “really kindly folks, humildes y simpáticos,” up the hill on el calle La Salle from what’s called an “El train” in New York-the rumbling of the tracks that shook their beds made him long for the quiet of the Cuban countryside. He told María he had days when he felt completely lost and ached with the desire to return to Cuba, to please just say the word-nothing was holding him there. (Cesar loved New York, he wrote, while he himself did not always understand what he was doing there, particularly when he still suffered so without her.) They had lively parties in that apartment, hosted by his brother Cesar, but they meant little to him, the cubanas and Puerto Rican women who turned up from all over the boroughs were nice enough, but they had nothing to offer him, simply because he could think only of her-“Besides, they are too ugly compared to you…”

In concluding, he always promised to write her again, “faithfully,” and would await her reply. “Please answer me, even just a few words would make me happy…”

And when María, ashamed of herself, never answered him, he wrote this:

I don’t understand your silence, María, and while my wounds have grown deeper and my love for you even stronger during these past few years, I’ve come to accept why you could not stay with me. And I don’t blame you; in fact, I forgive you, because María, mi vida, mi amor, I know that you have only deserved the best, and what am I but some nobody músico? And that’s why, María, I have vowed to make a success of myself, so that I will have something to give you besides my pure, pure love. Because of that I am writing so many wonderful songs, with hopes to sell them to orchestras. But the best of those songs I have saved for you, and I am only working harder to make it as perfect as you, and deserving of all your admiration. It comes from my heart, from deep inside, and it has a name that always makes me smile, because it makes me think of you… “Bellísima María de mi alma”-una canción that I dedicate to you, my love…