“…To my inspiration… I owe you everything, with all my love…”

María’s thoughts in those moments at the club? Pleased that she could now read without too much of a struggle-if he only knew!-and amazed to think that Nestor, ese pobre, really seemed to be making something of himself in America. Suddenly, she couldn’t keep herself from coming to the conclusion that Nestor Castillo, whose letters had been fewer and farther between, had become a success after all, instead of just another lost musician soul. And the song itself? The more she heard its sad but moving melody, the more María believed that Nestor still loved her. The letters he had written her were one thing, but this canción, no matter how cruelly its letras portrayed María, was nothing less than a public declaration of his undying love for her.

She imagined him in far-off Nueva York, with money in his pockets, pining away for her. She imagined that this recording was selling like crazy, a feeling that grew stronger when a musician friend, who often traveled to the States, told María that the song had been introduced to the vast American public on a very popular television show there, a program that, in fact, was broadcast in English, but with Spanish subtitles, on the CBS affiliate in Havana, Yo Amo A Lucy, whose star happened to be Cuban, a real success, by the name of Desiderio Arnaz, a fellow originally from Santiago. Even if the show-business people of María’s acquaintance didn’t watch it, the fact remained that her sweet country boy and former amante, with all his dreams and illusions, had no doubt become famous in his new país.

With the record he had sent along a letter “written with tears of regret,” professing that, no matter how his life might change, he still couldn’t forget how much he had loved her. She was, after all, the sum of his happiest memories of Havana, and perhaps of Cuba itself. Not a day had passed, he confessed, when he didn’t think about the life they might have had in Cuba had things not turned out so differently, the sadness of that song something he had carried in his heart from the day she left him. She must have gone over that letter a half dozen times, and with each careful reading, María came to the same conclusion: Nestor still loved her, and she, María García y Cifuentes, in her own unhappiness, owed it to herself-and certainly to Nestor, for the sake of their future and of “destiny,” as he might have put it-to make things right, to do what she-persuaded that what she had always felt for Nestor was love-never had had the inclination to carry out before. This, María decided as she got ready to go onstage that night, would involve a journey to New York.

Chapter THIRTY

It was the kind of decision that, decades later and in the midst of a new life in Miami, would make María shake her head in puzzlement. At least she had asked for her friends’ consejo-advice. And not just the ladies over at la Cucaracha, Violeta among them, who saw such a trip as a golden opportunity for María to find a happier situation-“Follow your heart, and, if he really loves you, you’ll come out with something to show for it to boot!”-but also her dear old teacher, Lázaro, about the only man she really trusted in Havana. She approached him at the marketplace one afternoon with reverence, and great caution. For María did not want Lázaro to think poorly of her.

“There’s something I must ask you,” she said. “I need your advice.”

“About?” Lázaro asked.

“It’s a matter of love.”

He scratched his chin. “Who is the fellow?”

“The one you knew-the musician.”

“Oh, yes, the one who wrote that song?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “So what’s happened with him?” A squeaking noise came from his throat. “Didn’t you tell me that he got married?”

She had, one of those afternoons, when Nestor’s matrimony had seemed a betrayal.

“Yes, but I don’t think he’s really happy.”

“Aha,” he said, knowing her well enough to wonder what she was really up to. “And so, what are you asking me about?”

“I have been thinking about going to see him in New York.”

“ New York? That’s a long way. But why now?”

And she grew excited, sitting down beside him. “Hearing his canción, I realized just how much he’s still in love with me.” Then, touching her heart, she said, “All I know is that I want to see him again, to see for myself if that love is true.”

“After all these years? And with a married man?” He just kept shaking his head. “If I were you, girl, I’d forget about it. All that trouble will just bring you more trouble, can’t you see that?”

“I’ve dreamed that he needs me.”

“A dream?” He sucked in his lower lip. “No, no, no,” he told her. “If I were you, I just wouldn’t go.”

Disappointed, María looked off, forlorn. “Really, I just wanted your blessing, that’s all,” she told him.

“Nope,” he said. “I won’t abide by that kind of foolishness. It always ends up badly for someone.”

“I’m going anyway,” she told him. “It’s what my heart tells me to do.”

He started to get up, rather unsteadily, and without offering his knobby-boned hand to her the way he usually did.

“ New York?…I don’t have a good feeling about that.”

“But will you give me your blessing, please, Lázaro, for good luck?”

“Okay, okay,” he finally said, seeing that some tears had gathered in her eyes, and as he leaned towards her, he began fluttering his hands over her head and reciting some African incantations. It made her feel better. “You have my best wishes,” he said, “but I still think you’re being foolish.” And then, seized by a spasm of coughing, he leaned up against the doorway and closed his eyes.

ABOUT A WEEK LATER, WHEN MARÍA HAPPENED TO MENTION TO Ignacio that several nightclub people in New York City were interested in having her travel there to audition for their shows, she wasn’t concealing any truths. In fact, her friend at Y & R, Vincente Torres, who would have liked to keep María as his mistress in that city, had connections with the owners of the club Marseilles and the Latin Quarter, but, until recently, María had never even considered taking him up on it. The idea of staying in that city, which she mainly knew from Nestor’s letters and from the movies, didn’t hold the least bit of appeal to her. Not just because such a place of concrete and steel and forlorn winters seemed impossible to a girl born in the Cuban countryside but also because the very notion of having to learn English, which she knew a few words of from the clubs, at a time when she was just becoming más o menos comodita with the demands of writing and reading her own language, simply didn’t interest her. It would have been too much. And for other reasons that most sensible people would have found irrational, María, with her superstitious beliefs and hating the very notion of traveling so far away, couldn’t have been dragged off to New York.

And yet, she had suddenly changed her mind.

“Okay, okay,” Ignacio told her one day, when she had asked him for his permission. “You want me to go with you?”

“No, Ignacio, I’m going with my friend Gladys. She has relatives up there, in a place called the Bronx. Ella habla inglés. She speaks English.”

Ignacio probably knew that she had something up her sleeve, but he didn’t object, even though she wouldn’t even accompany him to Miami before that-when he’d say, “Now the Fontainebleau is the sort of high-class place you should be dancing in…” Lately, Ignacio had been treating her more kindly, and though María hadn’t the slightest inkling why, he, like any man connected to her, had come to feel intimations of his mortality. By medical necessity Ignacio had become a calmer man; any aggravation speeding his heartbeat led to dull pains up and down his arms and, with them, a gnarly sensation of misery like worms chewing around inside his chest. “Do as you want,” he told her. “But if you need any help, I know people up there.” And so it was Ignacio, making a few telephone calls, who arranged for María’s passport, even though she had only a cabaret workers’ card, and Ignacio who, in a show of largesse, promised to give María several hundred dollars for her trip. He had the numbers of acquaintances in New York she could look up if she became lonely. Altogether, in his blunt and manly wariness, Ignacio couldn’t have been more kindly-again and again she would say in the future, “He was good to me, even if I behaved like the devil sometimes.”