Chapter THIRTY-FOUR

She had taken some satisfaction in her memory of Nestor’s penitential look as she left him, his features twisted into the expression of a tormented saint. But once that had turned into air, María, wishing that things had played out differently between them, passed her last evenings in New York hoping beyond hope that the first-floor telephone would ring and that she would be called down to answer it. When María didn’t receive any such message, she decided, on an impulse, to telephone her sometime lover in Havana, Vincente Torres of the Y & R company-she had his card. One afternoon when she had met him in the lobby of the plush St. Moritz Hotel for a drink and retired to a suite with him for a few hours of harried lovemaking, it was really Nestor whom María thought about. In the well-appointed strangeness of that room, a small crystal chandelier hanging directly over the bed and an ornate French Empire mirror on the opposite wall, María would have loved to open her eyes and find herself walking across a field in Pinar del Río with Nestor. In the midst of that little dream, she forgot the crudeness of her former guajira life, the toiletless shacks, without electricity or running water, that scent of dung and mangled earth and blood constant in the air; nor did she recall the complete ignorance that had once possessed her as an analfabeta, or the shame of thinking, deep down, that not her mamá or her papito, or the guajiros they knew, were really worth much of anything at all as far as the outside world was concerned. What she remembered instead was la tranquilidad of her valle, its peacefulness and little moments of simple happiness. That’s what she used to see in Nestor Castillo’s eyes, and, well-wouldn’t you know it-in the trail of such a sentiment, María realized that she, despite her lately hardened ways, had actually fallen in love with him.

His glorious physical attributes, his handsomeness, even the fame and fortune María imagined that he had meant nothing next to the heart and soul of the man. The thought that a life with him would never come to be was brutal, and in those moments, beautiful María became lost in a different kind of valley, not of natural gardens and of streams and dense forests, but of regrets.

Later, when Vincente, off to catch a train to a place called New Rochelle, had put her into a taxi for the Bronx, María fell into a period of sustained silence. For days she could hardly say a word to anyone-not even on the night the family threw them a farewell party, a rather pleasant affair during which neighbors came over to partake of their food, music, and hospitality. That evening, despite her pain, María danced many a cha-cha-cha and mambo-she was Cuban after all-and at a certain hour, just when her heart had been lightened somewhat by all the friendliness and music and she was on the verge of enjoying herself, from the family radio ushered forth the opening strains of “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

Hearing Nestor sing “How can I love you if I hate you so?” María swore to herself that it would be well and good with her if she were to never hear that bolero again.

Of course she did, again and again in Havana, nearly every time she walked down the street, or passed by one of those open-air cafés with musicians performing on the sidewalks; and as it happened, she was to hear it for many years afterwards, no matter how María would have liked to forget Nestor, her one true love.

STILL, SHE’D NEVER FORGET THAT LAST AFTERNOON WITH NESTOR, and for a month or so after beautiful María had returned to Havana in poor spirits, she waited to discover if so virile a man had produced in her the beginnings of a child. But her monthlies returned with their usual punctuality. (At such times, she used Lotus de Luxe tampons, the dancers’ preferred choice, to stay her flow.) For his part, whatever Nestor Castillo may have really been feeling, he felt bad enough about the way they had parted to write María a half dozen letters in as many months. When such letters arrived at the club, she refused to open them, all the better to put him from her mind, and he might have slipped away from her for good were it not for that infernal song, and the fact that Nestor Castillo, it seemed, had decided to journey to Havana, after all.

Chapter THIRTY-FIVE

A year later-in December 1957-at about four in the morning, during a fierce downpour, as María left the Club Lantern and had been hurrying through an arcade towards the taxis parked in a row by that busy strip off Neptuno, she saw, or thought she saw through the shimmering cascades of that aguacero, which went rolling like misting walls or apparitions, Nestor, resplendent in a white silk suit, leaning up against a wall, smoking a cigarette. On his chest, radiantly glowing, the crucifix he always wore. But Nestor? How could that be? And yet there he stood, smiling sadly. Then it hit her: perhaps he had left his wife and children and had come to Havana to find her, or perhaps he’d come for professional reasons. It crossed her mind that he might have journeyed there to perform with his brother in one of the upscale venues like the Tropicana or the Sans Souci, but, in any case, he’d already broken her heart, bruised her ego, and sent her packing. And so when he waved, she got into a taxi, thinking, Que te vaya pa’ demonio!-May you go to the devil! and as he started slowly towards her, indifferent to the rain, she tapped the shoulder of the driver, who knew her from around, and told him: “Hurry, let’s go. ¿Me oyes?” As they tore down the streets, in winds that rolled cans and bottles and rags along the cobblestones, María was both relieved and regretful that she hadn’t stopped to talk to Nestor-how hard-hearted she had become! But then, as they turned onto the Malecón Drive, waves flooding the causeway, and just as she was softening-what would a few moments of her time have cost her?-María swore that she saw Nestor Castillo standing by the seawall with his trumpet raised, impervious to the drenching rain, and not a few minutes later, blocks away, María saw him again on the corner of Calle 20, holding his hands out towards her, imploringly, an even sadder expression on his face. Naturally she had to ask the driver, “You see that fellow?” but it seemed he couldn’t hear her too clearly, for it had started thundering.

Later, upstairs in their harbor-side solar, as gales pummeled the windows, María got into bed beside Ignacio, who, under the influence of Rock Hudson, had taken to wearing silken pajamas. But she couldn’t sleep at first, not until she’d swallowed a few tablets of a medicine that many of the dancers, wired from their nights of performance, used to calm themselves, and these tablets, cousins of phenobarbital (which is to say barbiturates), when mixed with a glass of rum, could knock out an elephant, as they used to say. And so she eventually closed her eyes, but, no sooner had she done so than she smelled in that bedroom burning wires and rubber and gasoline, some part of a strange dream. When she buried herself in her pillows, she began to feel someone gently kissing her brow, her eyelids, and then her neck. And she heard a voice: María, María, why didn’t you forgive me? And with that, María just knew, in the way that superstitious people sometimes do, that Nestor Castillo, in the manner of the spirits of the campo, had come to visit her in Havana from the lands of the dead.

IT WAS SUCH A STRANGE THING THAT MARÍA, IN THE LIGHT OF day, hardly believed it had really happened-perhaps that whole ride back from the club had been a dream-but within a few days, in Havana, amongst the musicians who had known the brothers, it became common knowledge that Nestor Castillo, the writer of that famous song, had, on that very night, perished in a highway accident up there in the north near New York. He had been driving a car back from a job during a snowfall, and, somewhere along those icy roads, he’d lost control and collided headlong into a tree, may God bless his soul. She almost lost her mind hearing that news-“please don’t tell me that’s the truth,” María cried on Gladys’s lap. But it was true. A few Havana newspapers had even carried a notice about him, and for weeks afterwards, when that bolero he wrote about her played over the radio, more than one broadcaster solemnly noted the loss of so young a talent, a fellow who knew his way with a song, and played the trumpet as if he were an angel.