Chapter TWENTY-SIX

Not that she ever got teary eyed over him, in the same way that Nestor did thinking about her-she was too practical minded for that kind of nonsense. There was no point to it-what had finally happened between them would remain in the irretrievable past after all. Besides, it would have been stupid to lose her head over something as ephemeral and useless as love. (“Es como el aire,” María would say. “It’s like air.”) Nevertheless, each night before her shows, while the band was warming up the audience with comic parodies of “Carmen” or with some old big band tunes, à la Tommy Dorsey (the crowds were mostly American), she still found herself thinking about him, as if, in some reversal of destiny, Nestor might come walking in through the stage door. Musicians, after all, were always traveling between New York, Miami, and Havana, wherever their work might take them. There were nights, in fact, when María wished that she had gone off with him; not for love, perhaps, but because her life with Ignacio had become so boring and, in its way, something of a prison.

Or, to put it differently, she found that going to bed with Ignacio had become a matter of duty. The truth be told, during those afternoon and late morning bouts of love, when Ignacio turned María on her side so that he, parting her nalgitas ever so slightly, could enter her from behind or, in the dress shop office, closed the door, took down his trousers, and stood before her with his hands on his hips so that she could take care of him with her mouth, or when he had María, her bathing suit dropped to her knees, lower herself onto him so that her bottom rested on his legs as he sat on a bench in one of those sandy-floored cabanas out at Varadero-seven thrusts and then out, he came so quickly-she hardly felt anything at all, not even the guilt which used to send her on flights to purgatory. But was it his fault? Anatomically speaking, though he couldn’t touch Nestor, he wasn’t bad at all, and there were moments when, pulling back on her hair or suckling on her nipples, he seemed almost tender. And yet María, no matter what Ignacio did, had the misfortune of feeling simply too capacious for him. Besides, he couldn’t really have cared less what she felt, as long as María carried on with the twisting of her head, the screams, her body trembling as if she were imitating poor Teresita’s spells.

Afterwards Ignacio, having had his macho pride attended to, and most satisfactorily, always felt like the king cock of Havana and got into the habit of pinching María’s cheeks as if she were a child. Now and then, if she were lying naked on her stomach on their bed, flipping through the pages of magazines like Hoy or Gente, with their articles about American movie stars, he might slide a few fingers inside her and out, for she always seemed so damp, María crying, “Ay, ay, ay,” as if ready to go at it again, and Ignacio, feeling like Tarzan, pulling up on the waistband of his trousers and checking himself out in the mirror, snorting pridefully, as if he were the greatest lover in Cuba, while she, of course, had been secretly thinking about Nestor.

PUBLICLY, IGNACIO HAD CONTINUED TO SHOW MARÍA OFF AROUND Havana, loving it when they entered a packed house at the Alhambra and caused a stir, even if they slipped in during the prelude of a Lecuona zarzuela, and she hadn’t minded that until she noticed him reverting to his former ways, occasionally staring at other women, and in an obvious manner, as if it were his right to do whatever he pleased. She had long since concluded that he was a petty gangster, but one trying to reform himself, and while Ignacio had opened his clothing store for urban sophisticates and tourists, El Emporio, when it came down to it, he seemed to spend as much time as before attending to his other business at the harbor. (His colleagues were men whom María, in the few times she met them, neither disliked nor liked. Some she had only seen from a distance, usually meeting up with Ignacio on some street corner or in a bar, and on the rare occasion she had noticed a few of them acting like rowdy drunks in the clubs-otherwise she hardly knew them.) And while Ignacio sometimes dropped by the clothing store in the afternoon to check up on that business like a proper boss, she disliked his tendency to hire as salesclerks pretty young habaneras who didn’t seem to know a thing about that trade. As before, for all his promises, he still went off on business trips all across Cuba and to the States, away for weeks at a time, turning into the disembodied voice of a man on the club’s hallway telephone.

Which is to say that María, in those years, without any family of her own, and having sent away the one man who most probably truly loved her (why else would that Nestor Castillo keep writing her?), had begun to discover the castigations of loneliness. She had her friends and acquaintances, of course, particularly among the whores at la Cucaracha, who were always trying to persuade María to join their fold-“Don’t forget, there are men who would pay a lot of money for a few hours of your time,” she’d hear again and again from Violeta-and occasionally, backstage at the club, one or another of her fellow dancers cried on her lap about loves that had never worked out, studs who had gotten away, husbands who abused/cheated/lied, and worries (as always) about money and keeping their looks (no black and blue marks or broken noses, please). Still, some of those dancers took her private and quiet ways as snobbery (if only they could have seen her out in the countryside with the guajiros, or known the way she looked forward to her stolen hours of study with Lázaro and suffered through her lessons).

Walking along the streets of Havana, she continued to attract the attentions of many a habanero, dashing and downtrodden alike. One afternoon, the American movie star Errol Flynn, many a showgirl surely in his harem, had doffed his Panama hat and smiled as she passed by him on a street corner outside the Capitolio. (And, speaking of movie stars, one evening at the club, when the buxom actress Ava Gardner had turned up with some friends to take in the show and María had passed by their table, the famous brunette, who seemed to enjoy her rum and had a somewhat wicked air about her, had nodded approvingly at her, the way beautiful women do with other beautiful women.) But ultimately, for a woman so young and beautiful-possibly the most dazzling woman in Cuba in those years-María spent too much time alone in bed. On such mornings and afternoons, when she had said her prayers and let her mother’s rosary fall from her hand, she’d finally put herself to sleep by touching herself, writhing, her hand covered in her own moisture (Nestor), the pain and solitude in her heart giving way to the condolences of pleasure.

(That was a vanity as well: though she had not yet reached the point when she began to go around with different men, that confusing impulse to find pleasure had been with María for a long time. No, it wasn’t the kind of thing she would ever have talked about with her daughter, Teresita, but the fact remained that, for all the country-girl piety María had been raised with, in some ways she hadn’t been that different from the farm animals she’d watched breeding day in and day out in the yards, in the fields, in the woods. A little history, then, about the habits, in that regard, of a beautiful woman. In the days when her sister, Teresita, first suffered her fits, and María, seeking an escape, found all kinds of ways in which to please herself, she discovered that even her papito’ s shattered shaving mirror could enhance her bodily joys. One afternoon, because she had so little privacy, and had never seen any of her parts in a mirror, she took her papito’s espejo off its post into the woods behind their thatch-roofed house, and there, under the shadow of an acacia, María pulled her skirt up, and with her undies fallen to her knees, held that mirror at such an angle beneath her as to catch a reflection of that which she had never seen before: her second mouth, wearing a crown of bristly black pubic hair, curling and dense and new to the world, which upon the minutest inspection and spread slightly open resembled the interior of a conch shell; and when she expanded herself a little wider, the same folds and whorls rearranged themselves into the opened petals of an orchid. That’s when she discovered a mole on the left side, and that just a little distance away was the puckered eye of her bottom, the same nutlike color as her vagina. At the same time she discovered that, if she used the mirror to catch the sunlight through a break in the foliage above and directed it at herself from yet another angle, God’s radiance, as if a beam from heaven-that’s what it surely had to be-spread through her in such delicious waves of divine heat that with just the touch of her finger she started to have her own kinds of seizures, not of epilepsy, like those of her sister, but of pure and sinful bodily release. She ended that business by pressing the heated mirror’s surface against the dead center of her body as if to swallow the sun and sky and, doubling over, in an agony of unspeakable pleasure, squirmed about as if possessed before falling backwards to the ground. After a few moments she became vaguely aware that a salamander had crawled onto her leg and that, perched atop the gnarled roots of that acacia, a large spider had seemed to be observing her; afterwards, she spent the longest time examining her face and could not help but lick the mirror’s surface, as if to taste the outline of her dampness, which resembled an upturned eye or wound…)