They’d spend half the day going from shack to shack-she’d always bring along gifts, loving to show off her new prosperity. One of those new families was that of a sometime cane chopper who’d once looked her over with the sincerest longing at dances at the cervecería. He had married a woman named Amalia, and they, with their five children, had taken over the thatch-roofed house where María had once lived, that glorified shack, just a modest bohío with dirt floors, whose doorway exhaled the memories of her own irretrievable past. She had no quarrel with them-in fact, that family had her blessing to stay. Just taking a look inside from the doorway, not steps from where her papito used to sit with his cervezas and strum his guitar, and, quickly glancing through the room at the perpetual half-light in which she had been raised and the corners where, one by one, the two brothers she had never known, her mamá and Teresa and her papito had died, left María so breathless with melancholy that she suddenly understood the sadness she once saw in Nestor’s eyes.
By then, the continent of her religiosity had shrunk to the point that it sometimes carried no more weight than a butterfly’s, and yet, each time she visited the graves, saw the house, or went wandering along the trail into the forest, to la cueva, with its cascades, where she and Teresita used to go, María couldn’t keep herself from making the sign of the cross and kissing the palm of her hand, which she would then set down on each of the family markers, by the doorway of that house, and even on the trunk of the liana-wrapped, star-blossom-entangled trees, as if to seal the fact that she, in from Havana, had visited. And sometimes she’d take in the fields and forest, with its prosperity of birds, insects, and crawling lizards, those flowers that burst out in clusters everywhere, and wonder just what she had done to deserve such a lack of fecundity herself. They’d always stop at la cervecería, to say hello to the owner’s son, his papito having since died, but Ignacio never liked to stay for long, lest María fall into an even more solemn mood. It always took an effort to drag her away, and while they drove back, María, tending towards silence, fell into the anguish of having heard one person after the next inquiring as to whether she had some niños at home in Havana. Such visits always left her with the feeling that leaving her valle in the first place had not been such a good thing, and as they came closer to Havana and saw their first stretches of slums and municipal dumps, she’d half believe that it was that city itself, with its clubs and casinos, whorehouses and dirty-minded men, that had somehow affected her. Ignacio knew better than to get into an argument about that.
Even some of the girls at the club got pregnant despite taking precautions with the thickest of condoms, and that killed her too. Apparently her feelings of disgrace and disappointment, as if she had somehow betrayed her guajira roots, were so transparent that one of the powder room attendants at the club, yet another former flapper beauty or once-known dancer, advised María to put her trust in a well-known Havana diviner, a certain Mayita Dominguez, who ran a mystic santera’s parlor on Virtudes, and to go there when she was having her monthlies. There María submitted herself to the cures of San Lázaro, the healer and savior from death, and as a precaution she knelt before the diviner, who said special prayers to exorcise any curses. As Mayita put it, “A muchachita as beautiful as you must be wished ill by jealous women every day.” That visit left María feeling more hopeful than before, but for further assistance she went to church, reciting just-in-case prayers daily before the altar of the cathedral, where the spirit of her namesake, the Holy Mother, and that of Her Son and those of all the saints breathed and every porphyry, marble, and limestone surface exuded the promises of salvation. In the midst of such religious trappings-eternal life? why not?-María begged God to forgive her for any of her chicanery when it came to Nestor Castillo, to absolve her of the sins of vanity and of selfishness: therefore, with her newly pure soul, perhaps he would grant her wish to have a child.
“Mi hija,” she once told her daughter. “You have no notion of what a church can be. Back where I came from, in my valle, ours was just a little shack of pine-plank walls at the edge of a field with floors of pounded down dirt, and an altar that was nothing more than a lacquered pine table with a cross, a few feet high. There were no pews-we had to kneel on that dusty floor, or else just stand during the Mass. But you know what? It was a glorious thing for us to believe we were in the consecrated presence of the Lord. And even when I saw much nicer churches in Havana, every time I knelt down to pray, I always thought that the best church I had ever entered was the one I knew as a girl.”
It may have been a coincidence, but not a month after taking such measures, María missed her menses and, after a visit to an obstetrician, learned that God had indeed answered her prayers early in the new year of 1958.
THINGS ARE GIVEN, THINGS ARE TAKEN AWAY. JOYFUL THAT SHE carried within her the baby who would become her daughter, María had, at a certain hour of the day, gone to find her old friend Lázaro, seated as usual by his doorway. The last time she had visited him, about a month before, and not to resume her lessons with him but simply to see how he was faring, he’d refused María’s offer to take him to a doctor. Remaining in his courtyard abode, he had resigned himself to the slow and languishing waning of some old animal of the forest-“Just leave me alone and let me go with dignity,” he used to tell anyone who tried to help him. He treated María no differently, and though she could see fear in his eyes-which were wise and innocent in their way-he spoke, almost cheerfully, of the world to come: “I’m really not afraid. I just hope, if there’s reincarnation, that I come back as a cat-they get everything. That would make me happy!” he joked, slapping his knee before convulsing suddenly with a cough that made him lean his weary shoulder against the wall.
“Wherever I go,” Lázaro told her, recovering, “I hope you will think of me, María… Think of old Lázaro every time you open a book and see what the words mean.”
“Maestro,” she tried one last time. “Why won’t you let me take you to the hospital?”
He just shook his head. “When you are my age, you’ll understand,” he told her. “When your dreams are nothing more than memories of earlier days, you’ll know what I am feeling.” Then he stretched out his bony hand so that María might help him get to his feet, and she followed him down the cooler hallway to the back door, which opened to the courtyard, to his little home, the place where he somehow had managed to sleep for years on nothing more than a blanket-covered mat. Whatever his malady, Lázaro couldn’t let her go without some heartening words. As she left him asking, “I will see you again soon, yes?” he nodded, smiled, and, surely suppressing another cough, told her, “Oh, you will, my dear girl, but I know one thing. Your life is going to be fine, with or without me.”
And that was all. She’d intended to return the next day, or the day after, until a week had gone by and that week had turned into the month of her happiness. Finally, with such good news to share with Lázaro, beautiful María had gone to see him again, but he was nowhere about. It was the bookseller who told her. “We just found him back there one day, sleeping for good.”
“Ay, por Dios,” she cried out, the misery of losing one of her finest friends in Havana, as if one more wonderful part of Cuba had vanished, in her voice.
“But he left something for you,” the bookseller told her, pulling from a carton the kinds of items that would soften anyone’s heart, even María’s. Two books of Cuban poetry, Lázaro’s own copies of the verses of the poets Plácido and José Martí. In one of them, he had scribbled: “To my favorite pupil, María, perhaps now I will finally see you dance!”