UPSTAIRS, ON THE TWENTY-SECOND FLOOR OF THAT HOTEL, IN A drably adorned, though comfortably enough appointed room, Nestor’s and María’s last memories of each other unfolded. Through the reflections of a closet mirror, María watched herself embracing and kissing Nestor, his hands inside her blouse, his fingers down the front of her toreador pants, a few buttons breaking, Nestor’s own appendage bursting out into the world the moment María, kneeling before him, as if facing an altar, undid his trousers-glory be to God in the highest! It sprang out with such force as to tear the seams of his boxers and nearly sideswiped her face. She suckled him then, and he shot his pearly honey halfway across the room, leaving the wallpaper, of a faded art deco design, speckled with dripping stains, his face like that of a crucified Jesus, wincing with pleasure. No sooner had María removed the barrette from her hair, shaking her head like an animal, than Nestor came around again (with a full and dense erection, in the parlance of her scientific daughter, some forty centimeters long). But this time, María pulled him onto the bed, and sucked him once more until the bell-shaped head of his sex had turned so livid and large that she couldn’t fit him into her mouth without her jaw aching just below her earlobes, so thick she couldn’t close her hand around him. María, her panties by the ankle of her right leg and still wearing her blouse, which had bunched up above her breasts, spread her legs wider, and, slipping her own saliva onto her palm, wet herself further. Looking to see what she could glimpse in that same mirror, María, sinning herself to hell, waited for Nestor, the most virile man she had ever known, to fill her up, bit by bit, all the time thinking, Give me a child, Nestor Castillo, dámelo fuerte!

She screamed with pleasure and shook with his every exertion, the thin crucifix that hung around her neck singeing her with the heat of their bodies pressing together, poor Jesus surely seeing more than most saintly apparitions ever should. Each time Nestor found his release inside her, María, entering paradise of a more earthly sort, and remembering what the whores of la Cucaracha had taught her, employed new ways to arouse him, performing the kinds of acts no daughter would ever want to hear about. An hour went by, then two, and Nestor had come inside her so many times that María thought that, if ever she were to become pregnant, it would have taken place that very afternoon.

So that’s what it was really about, wasn’t it, María?

Afterwards, he sighed, he contorted his body mournfully in that bed and pulled the sheets over himself in shame. And when María, caressing his head, leaned close, and in such a way that her nipples dangled across his earlobes and then brushed slowly across the handsome plains of his face to his mouth, Nestor called out: “Please, María, stop, you’re torturing me.”

“But how, Nestor?”

“You know how,” he said, sitting up. “Tú sabes.”

A funny thing. Even a very decent woman like María, who could have had most any man she wanted and who, at heart, remained the guajira she had once been-the country girl who had loved and lost everyone in her family and had been raised to believe that goodness made a difference-found herself welcoming another way of thinking.

“Oh yes, and so I’m torturing you. ¿Cómo? How?” she asked. And when Nestor turned away and, reaching over to a side table, got his watch, María straddled the small of his back; her burning papáya, like an open and succulent mouth, searing the base of his spine.

“So tell me, Nestor,” she demanded as she ground her hips against him.

“What?” he muttered.

“Me amas, sí? You love me, don’t you?”

“I love and hate you at the same time, María. I love you because you’re mi cubanita. I hate you because of what you have done to my heart.”

She laughed. “¡Ah, sí, lo mismo que tu bolero!” “Just like your bolero!” Then, while smothering him further with the heat and bristled dampness of her wide-open womb, she said, “Tell me who you love most in this world.”

“Don’t ask me that, María, please…”

“Tell me, mi amor. Tell me.”

His neck strained as he turned to her, his ears burning red. “What do you think? That I’m crazy?” he asked her, sitting up. “It’s my family I love the most, María. My wife…y mi hijos. It can’t be any other way.”

And then, unable to help herself, María slapped his face, demanding to know, “Then why, por Dios, did you just cingar me, over and over again?”

With that, even the noble Nestor shook his head, his opal eyes suddenly growing cold. Pushing María away, he got out of bed and began to gather his clothes; and then a whole other thing happened, María and Nestor flailing at each other, María naked and Nestor with just his torn calzoncillos on, pushing her onto the bed…and soon enough, out of that violence, when they both hated each other, arrived a contrary feeling, of the purest animal love, Nestor spreading wide María’s legs again, and María, her head thrown back over the bed like a Salome awaiting the decapitated John the Baptist, wanting more and more; Nestor going at her until, exhaustedly, he laid his face against her breasts and descended into the purgatorial depths of his soul.

Remembering what he had told her about having to leave by six, María noticed that it was half past seven. Nestor, whose body lay sprawled across the bed half asleep, his member still loping in a shapely curve over his belly button, seemed dead to the world. Licking his eyelids open with the tip of her tongue, María awakened him. “Amorcito, amorcito, Nestorito,” she whispered tenderly, but when he opened his eyes and looked around, Nestor, for all his pent-up dreams about María, about having her again, became mournfully sad. By then, in the heart’s sleight of hand, María had decided that no man could make love to a woman in such a way unless he truly loved her-forget about any bolero-and that no woman could soften so after such a physical onslaught of maleness unless she loved him in turn. It was the kind of thinking that would have made the whores laugh-it was only sex, after all-but for María, in those moments, it was everything. But what did Nestor do next?

Even if they had just been carrying on as if they were the bawdiest newlyweds on earth, that didn’t stop him from recognizing the inevitable: “You know, María, that, after today, we’ll never see each other like this again, don’t you?” he said, getting up. “It’s the only way. Do you understand?”

“But why, mi amor?” she asked. “It isn’t fair. And besides, I don’t believe you.”

Then she began to cry for the first time since her papito had died-or at least she pretended to-and that really tore up Nestor’s heart too. “Please, María, please don’t be so sad,” he kept on saying. But the more he pleaded, the more María became unreachable, as if she had become deaf, dumb, and mute at the same moment. Not once did she say a word to Nestor as they dressed, no matter how much Nestor, trying to explain himself, pleaded for her understanding. Yes, he has a wife and children, while I have none. She remained so indifferent to Nestor that when they had left the hotel and were saying their somnambulist farewells while standing on the southeast corner of Thirty-fourth and Eighth, just outside the subway, María’s face did not show the least bit of emotion, and this seemed to torment Nestor even more.

“Well, maybe we’ll see each other in Cuba sometime, huh?” he asked her, as if they had just bumped into each other in the park. “My brother is always talking about taking our orchestra down there. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

He tried to kiss her then, but she pulled away. Passersby, throngs of them, must have wondered why the beautiful woman, with the exotic south-of-the-border looks, seemed to be both wounded and scowling at the same time. Finally, she managed to squeeze out a few words: “Cuídate, mi amor. Take care of yourself, my love, and think about me when you are with your wife,” she told him. (“Yes, I was a little cruel to that man, as he was with me,” she once told her daughter.) And then, just like that, she disappeared into the station, soon losing herself in the crowds and not once turning back to see if Nestor had been watching her.