Even Bohemia, otherwise engaged in sympathetic reportage about the imprisonment of that rebel leader Castro on the forested Isle of Pines, a penal colony south of the province in which she had lived, featured María in a one-piece black bathing suit on their “belleza de Cuba” pinup page, and one young fellow from Carteles, on the club beat, whose byline was Cain, fascinated that she had started out as a guajira and had seemed to achieve local stardom, had wanted to interview María “for the record,” but she felt too inarticulate to go through with his request. (Nevertheless, this fellow took a photograph of María which ended up reinterpreted as a pastel cartoon on the margin of one of that magazine’s end pages.)

If she happened to be locally well known, up and down the nightclub strip of la Rampa and in many a cul-de-sac establishment in the city, her renown did not come without the occasional annoyance. Whenever she went into the Lantern, it startled her to see the life-size plywood cutout of herself, in an enticingly revealing costume, set like a lure on the narrow curb by the club entrance: COCKTAILS AND CHA-CHA-CHA’S, TWO DOLLARS COVER PLEASE. Kids were always sticking wads of chewing gum over the top of her bodice, to make María’s breasts and their nipples more prominent; these she’d scrape off with a nail file. After six years as a professional dancer in that city, she had developed an attitude about her image.

Though she had not started out in life as one prone to any sort of vanity, the nature of her profession required that María spend long periods of time before those mirrors, and once that habit formed, it seemed inevitable that her humility and tendency to self-deprecation gave way to self-admiration and, even in its most nascent state, grandiosity. (Oh, but Lordy, what excesses of vanity her daughter would have to put up with one day.) María simply began to believe that she had become someone special, even if she had mainly worked in second-tier clubs and had yet to hit the footlights of the more august venues in Havana, like the Tropicana, with its outdoor proscenium and gardens set out under the stars, in the suburb of Buenavista. She’d caught a few of the Tropicana’s opulent stage revues with Ignacio, including an evening which starred a flamboyant fellow in a white mink coat by the name of Liberace, and had left breathlessly impressed by the sheer grandeur of the floor shows, which included twenty to thirty dancers and featured sets that looked as if they’d come from Hollywood movies. (One spectacular featured a high-society lady strolling in the jungle who, coming across a santería ceremony, is put under a magic spell and, losing her inhibitions, tears away half her clothes, dancing wildly with the negrito rumberos.)

Such spectacles far exceeded the more humble productions with which María had been associated, and toward those dancers she actually felt some pangs of envy, though she found the sheer size of the crowds intimidating. On her behalf, however, Ignacio had approached the owners-in a meeting that, despite María’s beauty and real talents as a performer, never went anywhere: probably because the troupe’s stars didn’t want the competition, or because Ignacio demanded too much money for her, or, most likely, because Ignacio’s reputation as a local tough guy (à la a Cuban George Raft) had preceded him and the owners wanted nothing to do with his sort. (As María would tell her daughter: “They ran one of the few clubs in Havana that didn’t have a connection with the mob; they believed that my señor was in that category-why I don’t know; he was a perfect gentleman.” Sí, Mamá, her daughter often thought. But we know what my papi did for a living, don’t we?)

At twelve noon in her Vedado apartment, María fondling herself until she breaks into pieces. Then María in her dressing room at the Lantern sitting beside a dancer named Gladys, covering her face with powder and pulling over her thighs the black mesh stockings that always make her legs and uppermost parts slightly uncomfortable. Then, turning her back to Gladys, María asking her to help out with the rear clasps of her sequined brassiere, which she has trouble unhooking. María reaching over to Gladys’s ashtray to take a puff off her lipstick-smeared cigarette, and her brassiere slipping off, her engorged nipples, almost the size of wine corks, exposed. It was a bit drafty in there, but not that drafty. So, naturally, Gladys just had to ask in her nosy and singsongy way: “Noooo, Marrrría, who are you thinking about, you naughty girl?”

Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN

The truth remained that, for all her feelings about Nestor, María’s life in Havana went on without him. Sometimes she agonized about his letters, whether she should attempt to answer him, a question she felt most greatly, for reasons she did not understand, while attending church. But mainly she had allowed Nestor to slip into the realm of memory, though there were times when María heard a sad strain of music or a troubadour’s voice in one of the cafés that reminded her of their days together. By then she had relegated Nestor’s presence to a few dozen nearly weightless letters, half as many photographs, and her bodily recollections of him. With nearly five years having passed since they spent their last afternoon in that solar by the harbor, beautiful María hardly believed it possible that anyone could remain so loyal, or recall her as vividly as he seemed to. (One of his letters, which had arrived around Christmas 1954, not only still professed his undying love for her but, as best as she could comprehend, was of a very filthy nature, the sort of letter that would have caused Ignacio’s wormy forehead vein to burst with anger:

…oh, but María, I almost die at the memory of your taking me into your mouth and kissing me until I spilled my milk onto your precious tongue… Do you remember how I lived to trace every bit of you with my saliva, how much I cherished kissing your fabulous chocha…and how I loved even your culo, María-even that tasted like a flower to me. And if you remember, María, that you loved it when you felt me reaching beyond your tetas to your mouth, and how you just loved the sight of it and my happy face and how I could just come because of the look in your eyes, María-whatever you do, don’t forget that-and think of me now, remembering your lips and that expression you got on your face as you moved on top of me, and how your head fell back and your eyes closed as if you had just died, and you couldn’t help but take me out, and lick con tu lengua just a few of those remaining drops, which you passed back to me in the form of a kiss…

Those letters, smelling faintly of musk cologne, which kept on arriving, though with less frequency, were always filled with his declarations of unending love. She had become so used to them, had so accustomed herself to thinking about Nestor as a poor soltero, a lonely bachelor, whose existence remained dedicated only to her, that María hardly ever imagined that, in those years, Nestor Castillo had begun to find himself a life that she had no inkling about. She knew that he and his older brother Cesar Castillo, the brash one, had formed a band in New York, a group which they called los Reyes del Mambo-the Mambo Kings. Occasionally he’d mail her one of their 78s, recorded with an outfit called Orchestra Records, ditties that consisted of lively dance numbers, along with boleros and songs of love. Receiving their latest, she always expected that his promised song, a monument “to my devotion for you,” would be among them, but, as of the winter of 1954, “Beautiful María of My Soul” did not yet exist, except in Nestor’s forlorn heart.

NOW AND THEN, HOWEVER, WHEN SOME MUSICIANS, DOWN FROM New York, had come by the club to catch the show or moonlight with the house band, she couldn’t help but ask if they happened to know Nestor Castillo. Some did, some didn’t, and what the ones who did usually had to say about Nestor-“Oh yeah, a nice fellow, he’s doing fine” or “A hell of a musician”-was just enough to assuage María’s guilt about the way things had ended between them. But then one night, when a trumpet player with the Mario Bauzá orchestra had come by the Lantern to drop off a package from Nestor and María, pretending to be sheepishly surprised at its arrival, happened to ask about him, this musician, a fellow named Alberto Morales, whom María had never met before, told her: “Oh, Nestor-he’s married to a great lady, a cubana, as a matter of fact, and he’s got two kids, nice children and-”