“Who are you, Ignacio, to tell me anything when you can’t even satisfy me?” she’d asked him that afternoon.

It was very sad, and her coldness alone half tempted Ignacio to forget about María altogether, maybe even teach her a lesson (but he wasn’t that cruel, not anywhere as mean-spirited as some of his acquaintances, fellow businessmen of a rough demeanor who might have slashed her face just to spite her). He just couldn’t. In her beauty, and in his memories of what she once had been, and because of his unsteady health-even then as they walked in the arcade, his heart had begun aching and he had felt his loins constricting, along with his gut-he was willing to forgive her everything. María, that delicious beauty, so well dressed in the clothes he had bought her in stores like El Encanto; María, a former hick from a backwards, nothing valle, who had become a modest star of second-tier nightclubs, may have turned into something of a spoiled and temperamental bitch, but he had come to cherish her anyway. Her insults, her stillness, the embarrassment of putting up with passersby, who, seeing her face, on the verge of tears and contorting with pain as they crossed the street, judged him harshly-“Hey you, mind your own business!” he would call out-Ignacio thought best to forget. That afternoon, in the interest of preserving his health and dignity, Ignacio, his breathing labored, decided that it would be a waste of his time to argue with her, and in the face-saving manner of cubano machos, who may or may not have been petty gangsters, he managed to pull her close and, with a firm tug of her body against his own, his hand grasping her right buttock through her dress, kissed her neck and said: “I will see you later, huh?” And with that he went off and left María to go about her business.

MARÍA WAS ON HER WAY TO SEE LÁZARO ON HER OLD STREET, THE market teeming as usual (how she still loved strolling about its stalls), when she happened to pass by a certain Flor de Saturno’s barbershop, opened to the narrow pavement, its tile floors covered with clumps of hair trembling ever so slightly in the fan air of the room, that shop’s interior redolent of musk and lilac scents and cigars, the barber snipping away with his scissors and whistling. Just then, from its cream-colored radio, in all its glory, came the unmistakable voices of Cesar and Nestor Castillo, their tremulous baritone harmonies, stopping María in her tracks. It was the first time she’d ever heard one of their records being played over the air. The melody seemed vaguely familiar, like something she’d listened to before, though surely different, like a cousin of one of those sad yet impassioned songs of love that Nestor, in happier times, had serenaded into her window, hummed into her ears, sang between his kisses from nipple to nipple and quivering tendon to tendon, and in those moments of joy when, declaring that nothing in life made him happier than to look into her eyes, he had whispered, then sung some bit of poetry before jamming himself more deeply into her. But could it really be him? As she stood by that doorway, the barber and his customers all bade her to come in. But María remained outside, catching a verse that went:

Qué dolor delicioso

El amor me ha traído

En la forma de una mujer…

Mi tormento y mi éxtasis…

Bella María de mi Alma…

María, mi vida

(Or in English:

What delicious pain

Love had brought to me

In the form of a woman.

My torment and ecstasy,

Beautiful María of my soul…

María, my life…)

Just as she was about to lean in and ask the barbershop fellows if they happened to know whose recording was playing on the radio, an announcer came on and dispelled all of her doubts: “You’ve just heard Cesar Castillo y los Reyes del Mambo, an orchestra out of Nueva York, performing ‘La bella María de mi alma!’” And that threw María into such a state of distraction that, when she finally sat with Lázaro, who had not been feeling well lately, she could hardly pay attention to her lesson.

“What is it with you today?” he asked her, his voice raspy from a cough that had been plaguing him for months. María had kept looking off, as if she expected Nestor Castillo to come walking down the street.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you remember that músico I once knew?”

“The nice fellow? Sure, what about him?”

“He was always promising to write a song about me, but I never believed it would come to anything. But, just now I heard him on the radio, over CMQ, singing a bolero called ‘La bella María de mi alma.’”

“And you’re sure it’s by him?”

“Yes. It’s his voice,” she said.

“But that should make you happy, huh?” he said, rapping his knee. “Why the long face then, mi vida?”

“Because of the lyrics, Lázaro,” she said, shaking her head. “He calls me his ‘torment and ecstasy’-and cruel, as if I had ever wanted to break his heart.”

Lázaro just smiled, shaking his head. “Oh, youth,” he began. “Don’t you know that most boleros are that way? There’s always heartbreak in them, been that way since the tradition started, way back when. I’m sure that fellow-What was his name?”

“Nestor Castillo,” she said.

“I’m sure that he’s just following that tradition, that’s all. I wouldn’t take it too hard. Unless, of course, you are still harboring feelings for him.” He smiled. “Are you?”

“Some,” she finally admitted. “But, Lázaro, I never wanted to hurt that man, the way he says in that bolero.”

“Ah, you should just feel flattered anyway,” he told her. “However things turned out between you two, he wouldn’t have written that song to spite you. No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I haven’t heard it, but I’m sure he did it out of love-you know those músicos are just that way.” Then, deciding that to continue their lesson was pointless, Lázaro, with a blood-and-spittle-dampened handkerchief dangling from his trouser pocket, held out his hand to María so that she could help him up and into the courtyard and the hovel in which he humbly lived.

That, in any event, is what took place at about three thirty in the afternoon, in the spring of 1956.

FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, MARÍA HEARD THAT SONG EVERYWHERE. It played out of the windows and doorways of buildings, echoed in the courtyards, blared from car radios and bodega entrances, and from speakers over the doors of record shops all over Havana. Out at la playita with some dancer friends, where she enjoyed being free from the company of men, a sidewalk band had added “La bella María de mi alma” to its repertoire, and soon enough she heard “Beautiful María” being performed by arcade musicians and lounge pianists in the palm courts of hotels all over the city. Suddenly, “el exito nuevo de los fabulosos Reyes del Mambo”-or the “newest hit by the fabulous Mambo Kings,” as the radio announcers were calling it-was inescapable. Its melody drifted, in disembodied harmonies, into the Havana night from the prows of casino and cruise ships as they crossed the horizon; and even at the Lantern, the house band had worked up a rendition. Soon enough she got to the point that she’d hear its chorus in the whistle calls that followed her as she’d stroll down the street, in the chirping of sparrows along the Prado, and even in the tremulous clarion of church bells. Altogether she heard “Beautiful María of My Soul” so often in those days that she sometimes thought herself inside a crazy dream.

FOR HIS PART, NESTOR SENT HER A COPY OF THE NEWLY PRESSED long-playing 33¹/₃ rpm album, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, on which that bolero was included. The cover was nothing special-done up in the style of 1950s jackets out of New York, Nestor playing a trumpet while Cesar banged on a conga drum, the two of them, she had to admit as she sat before her dressing room mirror, looking handsome and dapper in their white silk suits as they stood posing against the backdrop of some art director’s abstracted notion of a New York skyline, a flurry of quarter notes raining down around them. He’d also included a glossy head shot of himself, sort of like the ones María had made up of herself to promote her act, Nestor appearing, much like a star, hair and eyes and teeth gleaming with vitality, a smile on his face and a halo of light emanating from his head (in the same way that photographers showed that rebel leader Castro off in the mountains of Oriente at the time in magazines). Having never sent her such a self-promoting photograph before, nor looking so gloriously handsome, he might have seemed to have lost his humility were it not for the carefully rendered and rather self-effacing nature of his inscription, which said: “Para la bella María de mi alma…mi inspiración… Te debo todo, con todo mi amor, Nestor Castillo.”