“You say he’s married?”

“Yes, ma’am, for three or four years now. Está muy feliz,” he added. “He’s very happy.” And then, looking at María, he said, “What are you, a cousin of his or something?”

Her face fell, her soul collapsed, her guajira pride felt offended. “No,” she told him. “I’m just an old amistad, that’s all.”

That night her performance suffered from the revelation; she was surprised by how that little bit of news crushed her. All María wanted to do as she shimmied mambo style across the stage at the center of a row of buxom dancers with half coconut shells covering her breasts was get home by taxi to her and Ignacio’s high-rise apartment on Calle 25 and, as was her recent habit, make herself a magnificent drink of fruit juice and dark Santiago añejo rum from the great mix of bottles that Ignacio, liking his drinks, kept in plentiful supply in a mirrored art deco bar in a sunny corner of their living room overlooking the sea. Her second thought, as she missed one of her marks and scrambled back to shake her hips when several male dancers were about to hoist her up in a watered down parody of a ritual to the thunder god Changó, was to make her way over to la Cucaracha, where she could take refuge with la señora Matilda and the whores whose high heels clicked along those stairways and halls as they went off with their twenty-minute consorts. Surely Violeta, who sometimes sat by la señora in the reception area, would take María into her arms and console her with advice: “Whatever ails you,” she had once told María, “just remember, men are swine and want only one thing, even the decent ones. But if you want to cheer yourself up, my love, just fuck one of them and leave him so quickly he will be desolate.” (Violeta had laughed, and María shrugged.) Her third thought: wishing to God that she were somehow back in Pinar del Río, starting all over again: back in that campo, with her sister, Teresa, by her side-Teresa so alive!-and joining their papito on one of his excursions, guitar slung over his back, to a nearby farm. To be back there would have made her happy-at least she knew what each day would bring: the braying animals, the farmers in the fields, that wonderful waterfall, before her sister drowned…And then there was Nestor, disembodied by then, and reduced to two elements: his handsome, poetic face, and, she was ashamed to admit, his enormous pinga, sturdy as a branch.

Ay, mi amor, she thought over and over again, in a way she had not before, barely making her way through that evening’s show, entitled for the tourists A Night in Havana.

But how quickly things can change. On that same morning, after the finale of her last show, at about 4 a.m., while María was still feeling shocked about Nestor’s marriage, a tall and dapper Havana advertising executive, one Vincente Torres, the fellow who had hired her for the Pan American “Fly to Cuba” poster a few years before, made his way backstage to see her. Taking out a group of his American counterparts from New York to see her dance-they all worked for the same agency, Y & R-he had always admired María’s solemn beauty. Now and then when he’d come by the club, he’d ask her to join him for dinner, but she had never accepted, not even in the days when she had become a Y & R model. Still, his offers had always tempted her. He was handsome, like a Cuban Cary Grant, and though he wore a wedding band, there was something so mirthful and beguiling about his expressions that she found him intriguing. That night he never failed to take his eyes off María and stood up several times to applaud her, even when her performance had been lackadaisical; otherwise he just stared and stared and smiled, winking occasionally in such a jovial manner that María, having sunk into a depth of sadness she had not experienced since her papito died, enjoyed his attentions. In fact, when he went backstage after the show and found her sitting before her mirror, wiping away her running mascara, and asked María, for the hundredth time, if she wouldn’t mind joining him for a drink, she finally agreed; Ignacio was away.

So at four thirty in the morning they went by taxi to the Hotel Nacional, just in time to catch the final song by that evening’s cabaret performer. María, distracted, hardly heard anything that Vincente said to her. Accustomed to compliments, she could think only about Nestor’s deceitfulness: if she was his only love, why had he gotten married? Unsettled, and grateful to be in the company of a gentleman courteous in every way, María found it a natural thing, since she couldn’t have given a damn at that point about Nestor, to take an elevator upstairs and follow Vincente into his suite, whose windows overlooked the diamond-filled harbor. He had a stocked bar. He was charming.

After a few daiquiris, María, so estranged from her humble roots and sincerely taken by Vincente, his scent redolent of a lavender cologne, simply nodded when he, after praising her beauty, begged her to take off her clothes. And María, a little stunned but remembering what the whores of la Cucaracha had told her, first removed a pearl necklace that Ignacio in his largesse had given her (but left Nestor’s crucifix on). Then, after slipping off her dress and standing before the lucky Vincente in her brassiere and underpants, she put her hair up in a flourish over her head, and, as the whores had once taught her, she reached down and dipped her index finger inside herself and rubbed it over her mouth and behind her ears, and then, as Vincente, the brain behind the poster, out of his mind by then after one of her adamant kisses-a “Nestor kiss,” she would think of it-lay back on a bed, undid his trousers, and took out his enraged cubano penis, María attended to his ardor, grasping and suckling him until, with a shout-Mammee!-he doubled over with pleasure. That night María made this dapper fellow’s eyes roll up into his head over and over again. In addition to her captivating beauty and ravishing behavior, there were other ingredients: marijuana, morphine tablets, and cocaine, none of which María indulged in herself, but she did not mind when Vincente did, for they made him a ferocious lover.

Of course, afterwards, she felt low-like una tramposa to use one of her mother’s terms for the loose women of the countryside, a cheap tramp-but did she really care at that point? Not at all. In fact, there would be others to come along and help ease her pain in those days when she had become foolhardy and confused.

(What neither Ignacio nor even Nestor knew were the most hidden reasons María could be indifferent to the feelings of men. It came down to the way her beloved papito sometimes treated her. Not the beatings, or even the other extremes of pure affection, but that strange middle ground that, years later, left María feeling sickly inside, as if a miasma, or an infection, invaded her memories. Only once did she confide this to her daughter, during one of her late afternoon mojito/margarita-fueled chats; as if her educated daughter, by then a medical doctor, could come up with an explanation for her mother’s occasional improper behavior when she was a girl. You see, before her sister, Teresita, fell ill and they were verging on adolescence, she and María used to take naps with their papito on a hammock, the three entangled so peacefully that María easily drifted off to sleep, especially during an aguacero, a rain shower that drenched the forests and fields and sent the lizards scattering and cooled the air, which smelled of the most sweet and bitter scents-of rot and fecundity… And sometimes she laid her head against his chest and listened to his powerful heartbeat while he shifted himself around and his palm rested upon her back or along the curves of her hips; and sometimes-maybe it was a dream-his hand massaged her belly, sometimes ambling downwards so that his knuckles dozed and the weight of his hand pressed against the coarse fabric of her dress, and then nothing more.