Chapter THIRTY-ONE

Indeed, beautiful María had planned to make that journey with one of the other dancers in her troupe, Gladys. With but a single piece of equipaje each, they left Havana aboard a P & O steamship for Miami on a midmorning in late June. Only a single photograph of María on that particular day survives: in a florid dress and a Saturn-looking sunhat and dark glasses, she leaned over the railing of an upper deck waving a dainty kerchief at her friend below. When the ladies exchanged places and María tottered carefully down the metal stairs in her white high heels (to break an ankle from slipping anywhere-onstage, in a hallway, or on a church staircase-remained any dancer’s greatest fear) to snap Gladys’s picture with that Brownie, she captured in her friend, with her newly dyed blond hair, a Cuban look-alike of Kim Novak, whom the two dancers had recently seen in the movie Picnic. Gladys wore a lipstick so livid it read from even a distance as a darkish patina, and her eyes were also overly adorned, with fake eyelashes and mascara; her sundress, its fabric of peacock colors, was so short that, as Gladys posed, gentlemen made it a point to congregate by that section of the lower deck, newspapers or cigars in hand, and, as if by coincidence, managed many a long glance upwards at the tent formed by her pleated skirt, and at her spider-lace panties. (It just so happened that, despite Gladys’s tackiness, she and María were to remain friends for many years, until they had been living in Miami for decades, and, as they’d tell María’s daughter, Doctor Teresita, during their occasional get-togethers, that journey, despite its later consequence for María, was something of a relajo for them-a great amusement-and bonded them for good.) In fact, men followed them everywhere, even into the casino rooms, where they had gone simply to escape the midday sun, the dancers sitting on banquettes smoking and sipping the drinks that strangers kept sending over to them. Also onboard was a contingent of Catholic priests and nuns from the diocese of Havana, along with some thirty of their young charges, sickly (sadly) Cuban children, most suffering from tuberculosis but a few from nervous disorders (María sighed, recognizing in some the same faint trembling of the hands that her own late sister sometimes exhibited, even with medicine). These unfortunates were on their way, the dancers imagined, to better hospitals in the USA. And among the Cubans onboard, some of whom, they’d learned by eavesdropping, were heading home to different cities along the Eastern Seaboard or to attend to businesses (like Ignacio), there happened to be at least two celebrities. The first was the dapper actor Cesar Romero, said to be José Martí’s grandson, who held forth in a corner before some colleagues, and the second, hard as she found it to believe, seemed to be María herself. For several cubanos, having recognized her unmistakably alluring face from posters and newspaper ads in Havana, approached, seeking not only her autograph (nightly she practiced writing her name) but a simple nod of congenial acknowledgment and a few words as well. On the other hand, the American tourists onboard, in their seersucker suits, loving to play the slot machines or else to sit quietly about reading issues of Life and National Geographic, didn’t seem to notice anything special about her save her spectacular looks. (Somehow that depressed María.)

That leg of the journey lasted some seven hours, and at about four in the afternoon, after clearing customs in Miami, the ladies, following an initial bout of apprehension and confusion, managed, through the kindness of several Tampa-born cubanos whom they had met along the docks, to find inexpensive but clean accommodations near the central rail terminal for the night. The next morning María and Gladys set out on the Silver Star, which left at 9 a.m. for New York City.

IN JUST SHORT OF TWENTY-SIX HOURS, WITH STOPS IN THIRTY-FIVE cities or towns along the way, among them Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Norfolk, and the capital, Washington, D.C., María and Gladys went north. Riding coach class with occasional (and intimidating) strolls along the platforms during the stopovers-Will that train leave without me?-and endless visits to the cramped toilet compartment at the end of their car, along with frequent sojourns in the coach-class passengers’ bar and lounge, María had watched, through “grand panoramic” windows, the sleepy marshlands, swamps, forests, and plantations, with their Negroes in the fields, that constituted the terrain of the American South. Eventually, the greenery gave way to bustling, trestle-bridged cities-the sight of Baltimore, with row after row of soot-faced brick tenement buildings, in its bleakness, halted María’s heart.

Halfway to New York, she succumbed to brief bouts of nostalgia, not only for the maze-ridden streets of Havana, which she had gotten to know so well, but for the sweet birdsongs of Pinar del Río-how Nestor must have suffered himself, for, as she recalled from one of his letters, the Castillo brothers had made a similar trip to New York by train back in 1949, except they had arrived in the winter. On María’s train rode a group of Cuban musicians from Havana, black instrument cases by their sides, playing games of whist and canasta or dominoes for hours on end and drinking away in the lounge. Among them were some first-timers, staring out the windows with the same expression as María, of both hopefulness and dread. It wasn’t as if they were entering into the jaws of a lion, but somehow that whole journey, twisting María’s gut, felt that way, and more than once she wanted to confide in Gladys about just why she had suddenly decided to visit New York-not for show-business reasons at all but to see just what she still felt for that músico, if anything at all. (Bueno, to be entirely truthful, she also believed that he would just fall into her arms at the sight of her.) Each time she fantasized about that, her stomach went into cramps, as if her own selfish thoughts were catching up with her. And off to the bathroom she would go, the mirror’s image of her beautiful face jostling in the serrating yellow light of that urine-smelling compartment seeming, as María looked at herself, to have taken on a deceitful cast she had never seen before. Oh yes, apparently she had a conscience that bothered her, but she didn’t want to let on to anyone that she did. Before leaving that toilet, she’d arrange her hair as nicely as possible-wearing it clipped to the side like a proper schoolgirl with a barrette-touch up the little makeup she put on, and spritz her neck and behind her ears with a spray of Surrender lilac perfume, always smiling sweetly at anyone who happened to catch that beautiful cubana’s gaze, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening within her.

Passing through the car, María noticed that some of the passengers who’d sailed on the Florida out of Havana just the day before had also boarded that train-grandmothers, abuelitas, with their grandchildren, some of those American tourists, but as well another Cuban, a bulbous-headed, middle-aged fellow with a slip of a mustache, in a lacquered Panama and white cotton suit, whose occasional staring, as he looked up from the handful of magazines and newspapers he kept on his lap, unnerved her. He’d tip down the brim of his hat and nod any time he caught her eye, and that further tangled her gut. She wouldn’t have put it past her grand machón Ignacio, so apparently magnanimous about her sudden desire to travel, to have hired someone to follow her, if not out of suspicion to make sure that she would be all right.

Nevertheless, by the time they made it into New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, whose interior was vaster than anything she had ever seen before, after an endless descent through what seemed like the bowels of the earth-so much like a purgatory, but one that smelled of cinders and acrid electric wires-and they had deboarded the train, María, as the crowds and porters thronged around them, had been relieved that Glady’s sister Mireya and her husband, along with a few of their kids, were on the platform waiting. Of course they overwhelmed Gladys with kisses, for they had not seen her for years, and María took such wonderful sentiments in with both joy and envy-to have a family of her own, and people to care about her hit her as another of her reasons for journeying to that strange and distant city.