But once she had started undergoing her bodily changes and began to smell different to men, and things got crazy because of what had happened to Teresita-la pobrecita-there came that time when her papi asked her to share his hammock and she, feeling reluctant and physically cumbersome, obeyed but found that she couldn’t fall off to sleep the way she used to, after all he was pressing up against her back, and something fleshy and solid seemed to crawl up along the knobs of her spine. And maybe she imagined that his hand had wandered down below, his dense fingers parting the lips of her “special and most delicate flower,” María squirming, her papito asking “¿Qué tenemos aquí?”-“What have we here?” At the same time, her papito’s breath smelled awful, of tobacco and aguardiente and beer, and, like a dream of her own future, she withdrew into herself while his fingers kept on touching her in places where they shouldn’t have, until María, feeling sick inside and sensing that something was very wrong, would finally tear herself away, a terrible shame following her… It didn’t end there. Living in a place where the mothers regularly fondled the privates of their male children to ensure their virility, María couldn’t help but wonder if her papito was doing the same kind of thing with her, or maybe he was just curious. But after a while even she, an ignorant guajira, knew that it didn’t seem right for a papito, no matter how much he loved his daughter, to be doing that-and so, before it could get worse, she started to avoid him, refusing to join him on the hammock and feeling nervous whenever he had been drinking and called her to his side, a puzzled and sad expression upon his face when she refused, as if she had broken his heart…)
Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
One Tuesday evening in 1955, the year that Fulgencio Batista granted Fidel Castro amnesty and the rebel leader, fleeing to Mexico, began to undertake the planning of his revolution; at an hour when Havana’s nightlife was just getting under way and María sat backstage preparing for her first show as usual, some two thousand miles north, snow was softly falling in New York City. It was just past nine, and the Castillo brothers, along with several of their musicians, had come down from La Salle Street to mount the stage at a club called the Mambo Nine on West Fifty-eighth in Manhattan. Among the numbers they had rehearsed for their showcase performance was a bolero that Nestor Castillo had been working on, to his older brother’s exasperation, from the first days they had set foot in that city: some pain in the neck love song called “Beautiful María of My Soul.”
As of that night, Nestor had written so many versions of it that Cesar, getting fed up with hearing every new one, had told him, “Either perform it or let the damned thing go.” He said this in the same tone of voice he used when telling Nestor to wake up and forget about María, beautiful and luscious though she might have been. “No woman is worth the agony,” he’d say, and Nestor would nod, agreeing, but he’d still mess with even more variations of it, until, after six years in that country, even he began to wonder if he’d lost his mind.
On the stage of the Mambo Nine, as Nestor set some sheet music down before their sometime pianist, Gordito, whose exuberant swaying and tremendous weight sometimes broke the benches during their up-tempo mambos, he still winced from his memories of María. They followed him like a dream, as if he were roving again through the streets of Havana, with its dense, bustling confluences of decay, grandeur, and thriving humanity, her high heels tapping on the cobblestones beneath her, and the aroma of fresh-baked bread and crackers from a bakery filling the air, María beaming at him with affection, their bodies, so used to each other by then that, no matter what else he remembered-sitting on a bench in a deserted church plaza, at an early hour of the morning, holding hands with María, or stopping to buy something from an old mustached guajiro standing sadly on a corner with his panniers of bananas and plantains to sell, or the black maids emerging from the doorways with baskets of laundry balanced upon their heads, smiling happily at them-they were in love after all-all such memories, of his times with María in Havana, its windows like sad, drooping eyes, always circled those moments of intimacy that, even those years later, he could still not get out of his head.
Trumpet in hand, his longish fingers testing its valves, he remembered her body and dampened skin, the sight of her opened legs, her knees trembling as she spread them so wide. A stream of notes, fluttering like blackbirds through the room, a slightly pained expression on Nestor’s noble face, the memory of how María’s womb had always felt like damp blossoms, her skin tasting of the salty and sun-swept sea…It gave him an air of distraction sometimes, for behind such recollections a kind of cruel weave curled and twisted through Nestor’s Havana. And not the Havana of travel brochures, or of the seedy and glamorous establishments that reeked of gangsters and molls, and down-on-their-luck gamblers, or displaced American socialites in search of a night out with some handsome Cuban gigolos, but the city where she had thrown him off.
Then the devil, perching like a little bird on his shoulder, asked Nestor, “Who had the finest culo in Cuba?” and he answered, María, of course, as if he could feel her plump and superb nalgitas quivering and nearly slapping his fingers with their sweat again, her rump’s pubic hair brushing juicily against his knuckles. All this even while he reached to bum one of Cesar’s Lucky Strikes and, on his way, almost tripped over a microphone stand.
Lordy, what a pain: his memories of María still nagged at Nestor even when he had a wife, whom he deeply loved, the studious and pretty and sturdy Delores Fuentes, the mother of their two children, Eugenio and Leticia.
Nestor just couldn’t help it. Already away from his beloved Cuba (and María) for too long, he remained divided within himself, the sort of man who believed he could love two women at once and keep it a secret. Too bad he wasn’t very good at that whole business, at least when it came to his wife, Delores. Take his songwriting: for all the boleros with their love-drenched lyrics that Nestor had composed during his years in New York, he had yet to write one especially for her. Even if he often told Delores that every flower, star, and sunset, radiant cardinal, and dulcet nightingale on the wing in his songs was really about her, que ella fue la primavera extravagante, y olía dulce del mar-that she embodied the extravagance of spring, and smelled sweetly of the sea-how could she have believed that this was entirely true? When she’d see Nestor brooding by their living room window and he seemed to be staring out over the rooftops at the moon’s waning crest-his entire body a sigh-she wondered if he really loved her at all. He knew that he sometimes gave her good reason for such doubts, hating himself for those days when, consumed by some inescapable grief and longing, he could hardly say a word to anyone, his own little children mystified by the pain they saw in his eyes. No villain, he really didn’t want to seem so sad, and always found ways to make up for the unhappiness he brought into their home: gifts of candy and toys for his children, flowers and books for Delores, which he’d deliver with sincerity and doting affection.
And then, once again, he became lost to the world.
At least he had music and family to console him. Up on the bandstand, and thinking about them, Nestor made a sign of the cross quickly and kissed the little golden crucifix that, weighing no more than a quarter, hung from his neck, thanking God-or whatever made people dewy eyed when they looked up at the skies-for what he, despite his romantic stupidities, had been given.