Beside herself with that news, María finally opened the letters he had sent her; each breathed with Nestor’s soul. “If I could divide myself into two, I would be with you in Havana,” one of them said. “I know I hurt you, María, but don’t forget, it was you who hurt me first.” And, in another, he confessed that, as much as he loved María, he would never, never leave his wife, Delores. “She’s the mother of mis hijos, as beautiful as you, in her own way, and very kind to me, so please, María, don’t think badly of me.” And in each, he asked her forgiveness, just as his ghost had. Each mirrored the others. The last one he sent kept imploring her to write him. “I know you take pains to write a letter-but please, just write me a few words. It would make me feel less sad-and lonely. Can’t you, María?” It took her hours to go through the letters, to understand what some of his sentences meant, and in the end, it finally hit her that Nestor was gone from this world for good. And so, one night, she purged herself-vomiting often but also contorting on her bed-in misery over Nestor’s loss. What was it about life? How was it that the death of her first love, whom she never really took seriously when it counted, could affect her so? She didn’t know, but the fact that Nestor was gone from this world for good left her so unsettled that María, who rarely missed a night at the club, stayed home, weeping and weeping until she ran out of tears.

Chapter THIRTY-SIX

Thank God, as she would tell her daughter, that when Nestor died beautiful María had the consoling (false) distractions of her professional life and, for all his faults, a man like Ignacio to look after her. He’d even forgiven her for taking off to New York the way she abruptly did. (But why, he must have wondered, did she return in such a solemn mood?) In the year that María’s romantic dreams about Nestor ended, Ignacio, with his newly humbled manners and worming aches in his chest, had begun to bear the further physical indignities of discovering that, while the rest of him had slowly thickened, his wonderful head of hair, with its sea of crests and waves, had started to thin, to the point that he hated taking off his Panama hat in public and disliked it when María, with the slightest curl of a smile at the edge of her mouth, stared at him in a certain way.

Each evening, just as María headed out to the club, he’d attend to his special treatments, applying a botánica-bought remedy of ground bull testicles, dried donkey dung, and paraffin to his scalp. Afterwards he’d wear a hairnet night after night, until he couldn’t take that pomade’s barnyard odors anymore. On some evenings, when a few of his cronies came over to play cards or dominoes, he’d forgo that process until a very early hour of the morning, or not do it at all. Occasionally, however, in the throes of his own kind of vanity, when he was alone, he’d turn up the radio and spend an hour or so massaging his forehead and temples with some other miracle cure, turning from side to side to examine his profile and imagining his receding hairline, in his slightly shady businessman’s way, as proof of some distant affinity to Julius Caesar. (Or, in a moment of patriotic musings, José Martí, poet and father of Cuban independence in long gone days, another great man with a receding hairline, though of decidedly thinner bodily proportions.)

Finding the whole business rather amusing, María, feeling more magnanimously inclined, actually grew fonder of Ignacio and became more playful with him, especially in bed. Like a man who demanded his steak and tostones twice a week, Ignacio expected to romp with María, and on those occasions she took to treating that widening patch, hairless as a Chihuahua ’s belly and reminiscent of a baby’s head, with a tenderness that even the bluntly disposed Ignacio found disarming. She played a game with him, pressing her breasts against his crown, her nipples always hardening, and loved to grind her luscious center against that dome until an even stranger thing happened: María, despite her loss of Nestor forever and forever, amen (except in her dreams), had started to come more easily with Ignacio, though some other memories-of clutching Nestor’s full head of hair as he lost himself while devouring her papáya, of his sweet pinga, may God rest his soul-often helped her along. In that regard, their relations improved, even while María still pursued her other acquaintances.

Ignacio himself, in addition to trying to reverse the processes of nature (eventually giving in, he’d settle for a pompadour wig which almost matched the color of his natural hair), wanting to improve things with María-so much a joy to his eyes that he just about abandoned his own wandering ways-decided to seek a further improvement to their life in bed and started subjecting himself to virility treatments at one of the sex clinics in Havana. These consisted of B₁₂ infusions, administered intravenously, and injections of distilled water into the membranes of his penis, which revolutionized his amplitude in a manner he had never thought possible before. María, remembering the admonitions of the whores of la Cucaracha, on the occasion of the unveiling of his grander stature, gasped and shook her head incredulously, as if he were that fellow Superman from that bawdy show in one of the cocktail rooms of a bordello near the Shanghai which Ignacio had once taken her to with the mistaken notion of inspiring her lustfulness. To the contrary, Superman had nothing on her past love Nestor Castillo, may he rest in peace, one of those surprising facts that expressed itself in a recurring dream. (Set in the jungles of Africa, it was no doubt inspired by her memories of the Tarzan movies she and her sister used to take in at the Chaplin in San Jacinto. In this dream, she’d hear Tarzan’s yodeling cry from the distance, and since she always took on the role of Jane, María would find herself in a tattered leopard-skin dress, standing at the edge of a vast ravine, which she could cross only by sidling along the trunk of a massive fallen acacia tree, and every time she did, the valleys and rivers below would start rushing past her, and she’d have to get down on her belly, straddling that trunk, and slowly inch her way from one end to the other; somehow, that always made her think about Nestor.)

For her part, with a maternal yearning, María never let slip the ruinous notion that, for all her beauty, for all the life in the traffic-stopping bounce of her hips and nalgitas, she, at the ripening age of twenty-seven, might never have a child to love. Looking back, she’d think it foolish to have expected a pregnancy after a single final afternoon’s romp with the late Nestor, but what could account for the disappointment of her bouts with Ignacio, who, in those days, only wanted to make her happy? Not just mourning Nestor and what might have been between them, María managed to comport herself stoically, though, more and more, as she’d finish her last shows at the club, removing her makeup and, while gazing into the mirror, wondering Who am I? she’d almost dread the repetitiousness of her days. Yes, she enjoyed the occasional company of her fellow dancers, her visits with la señora Matilda and the whores of la Cucaracha, with whom she drank beer in the late afternoon even while supposedly watching her figure. During her jaunts with El caballero de París, who, murmuring his poetry as they walked about in Central Havana, noticed the somberness of her moods, she couldn’t help but withdraw into the darkness of her regrets. Her yearly journeys with Ignacio out to Pinar del Río didn’t help much either. She’d ask him to drive her into her beloved countryside, always on a Sunday, so that she might visit the simple graves of her family-which was hard enough to bear, their wooden markers seeming more rotted and overrun with vines each year, as if that fecund earth would one day swallow them up into obscurity for good. But then, despite her joy in breathing the unchanging air of that valle, in seeing again the kindly guajiros she had been raised with, so many of the other Marías and Juanitas and Isabels she had played with as a girl, poor and uneducated as they remained, had their own broods of children. Some, only four or five years older than herself, were already grandmothers.