Chapter TWENTY-NINE

Some five months later, María happened to be walking along Obispo in the aftermath of a terrible argument with Ignacio. Lately, he had started to accuse her of becoming sexually indifferent to him, while she in turn, without actually coming out and saying so, suspected that he wasn’t virile enough to give her a child, despite the fact that he claimed to have once fathered a daughter that he lost. And even that loss she had come to doubt-he seemed to spend too much time away in Florida, and more than once she had come across letters tucked away in the soft inner pockets of his maletas, his suitcases, letters that she did not have the gumption to read but that seemed on the evidence of the handwriting on the envelopes to have been scripted by a woman; and so, she had come to believe that Ignacio, like so many other Cuban men of a certain age who had taken up with a younger woman, had a family hidden away somewhere. Nevertheless, just to talk about that supposed loss brought out his soft side, though it wasn’t much in evidence those days. With a life that had become more difficult because of what his Hoy horoscope described as the “mounting influence of unseen contrary forces,” his business, once booming in the provinces, had gone into a decline on account of what the government had classified as lapses of security, given that rebels far east in Oriente regularly came down from the hills to loot his trucks as they were en route to the cities and small towns of that province. Nor had that store, El Emporio, proved to be anything but a siphon on his income, though Ignacio did enjoy the air of respectability it gave him. Other matters disturbed Ignacio as well. His chest hair had turned white overnight, and his ticker began to ache. Visiting a clinic, not for anti-impotency and venereal disease treatments, or to experience the wonder cures of acupunctura as advertised in the directorio telefónico de la Habana, he began seeing a certain Doctor Cintron, who found Ignacio, with that wormy vein on his forehead, one of the more tense patients he had ever encountered, his blood pressure in a range that defied his bulb-pumped esfigmomanómetro’s capability to measure.

The doctor’s advice? “Calm down, or you’ll drop dead one day.”

But at this, he often failed. While he still liked to blaze through the crowds of Havana with beautiful María on his arm, Ignacio had started to notice how he couldn’t lord it over her the way he used to. More than once he’d seen her looking over his Spanish editions of Shakespeare and had noted her own growing collection of books-frivolous novels written in simple language for women of a certain frame of mind, but books nevertheless: so that negrito Lázaro was worth something after all! And her sweetness had begun to fall away, for he found that it did not take too much for him to perturb her, that María often complained about being cooped up in that apartment, that she sometimes wished she’d never left Pinar del Río, that she lived a life no better than her snippy parrots in their cages. And even that would have been fine except for the fact that Ignacio had begun to suspect that María had someone else. This, as it happened, was true.

That fellow from Y & R had been the first-their little trysts taking place in his fancy suite at the Nacional every so often. He certainly was as handsome as Nestor, though he lacked that soulfulness, which she missed, among other things, and he was so good to her that María might have taken up with Vincente openly were it not for the fact that Ignacio would probably have killed him (and her), and, in any case, she knew he had his own nice family in New York City, just like Nestor, that cabrón. And once María had learned to conceal her feelings, she also took up with a young teller at the bank where she kept her savings, another handsome fellow whose curly hair, soothing eyes, and fortunate endowment reminded her (almost) of Nestor, their liaisons taking place between seven and eight in the evening out in a house on one of the hills overlooking Havana, not far from the university, where this young man’s deaf aunt lived, hardly aware of the raucously loud acts that made her hounds bark. A third lover, a so-called Spanish count-el conde-whom María had met at the Lantern and slept with in his modestly appointed room at the Ambos Mundos Hotel, with its view of the cathedral (of which she had been quite aware and actually enjoyed, as if God lingered somewhere in the distance, though not as close to her as He used to). She did so with her legs spread wide, then closing them tightly as he approached, taunting him, simply because María enjoyed the idea that a former guajira, whose papito shat with the outhouse door open, could make so lofty and pretentious a personage beg to kiss her fine and shapely rump. Those were just a few, with more to follow in her remaining years in Havana-Violeta’s influence and her own suspicion that goodness wasn’t worth much of anything had a lot to do with the way she now moved through her days (or nights); or, to put it differently, María, as the line of a bolero might go, had lately been stripped of her illusions. Having traded love, if that’s what it was, for comfort, she had hardened inside, and Dios, the savior of mankind, does not thrive in such hearts, not even that of a rather beautiful woman; rather He slowly dies.

And what could Ignacio make of María when she kept grinding her hips in the air, moaning as she slept? Who was she dreaming about? He had her followed, just as he once did with Nestor, by one of his more dissolute and shifty cronies, a fellow named Paco, with a crooked spine and a tendency to drink his way, affably, through half the bars and cafés of Havana. He’d take off behind María when she slipped out of the club or left the apartment building and, in the manner of bad 1940s detective movies, spy on her from the shadows as she entered certain doorways or happened to meet one of those fellows on a street corner or in an arcade. Fortunately for María, the disorder of Paco’s mind left him with only the vaguest of memories of her doings. Nevertheless, the very suspicion deeply wounded Ignacio. Over the past year, in one of the more unfortunate turnarounds in his life, he had, while feeling his age-he was somewhere in his late forties by then-actually convinced himself that he had finally and truthfully fallen in love with her, or with her youth and beauty. He made this recent discovery while carousing with other women-among them his shop clerks, market girls, and prostitutes; no matter how voluptuous their bodies, or lovely their faces, or free spirited and unrestrained their voraciousness in bed (or no matter their fear of him), Ignacio found himself thinking about María ruefully, in the same way that she, in the midst of her fleeting love affairs, could not keep herself from wishing that, truth be told, she hadn’t looked down on Nestor, in whom, perhaps, she sometimes saw her own papito.

By then María would often withdraw into a shell of silence, refusing to as much as look him in the eye and never answering Ignacio when he demanded to know why she couldn’t show him love the way she used to; and she simply shrugged when he’d accuse her of being obviously enamored of someone else. Denying everything, once her patience had worn thin, she’d behave as a man would, shoving her indifference into his possessive face, her response coming down to a few words: “And if I did, ¿Y qué?”-“So what?”

Over the past few months, frightened by the prospect of his own mortality, he’d proposed to María a half dozen times, and on each occasion she told him that she’d marry Ignacio only if she carried his baby. To say the least, in that department, he had been failing lately, his enervating maladies affecting his potency in such a manner that, when he visited his whores, he had to be content with the kind of languorous, time-wasting bouts of love that would have driven him crazy with impatience as a younger man. In other words, he now found it a chore getting it up.