“Surely, you understand what I’m saying, huh?”
“¿Cómo no?” María answered. “Even my daughter, Teresita-even she knows that we Cubans didn’t want to leave. But we had to, right, hija?”
By then, he’d turned up Twenty-sixth. “Our house is the fourth one on the right, over there under the big tree,” she told him. And when he had pulled up, he asked them to wait, and, like a gentleman, this Rafael Murillo got out and walked over to the passenger side of the car, opening the door for each of them.
“Your carriage has arrived, mi condesa,” he said to Teresita, bowing. Then to María, “I will see you soon, next week. I’ll bring you both to the restaurant-we have a little band that performs there on Friday nights-okay?”
And with that Rafael Murillo, winking at them both in a pleasant way, got into his car and drove off into the balminess of the evening.
A FEW THINGS ABOUT THIS RAFAEL: HE HAD A PLACE UP IN FORT Lauderdale, a condominium, to which he would sometimes take María for a weekend afternoon. He was separated from his second wife, whom María, finding him so handsome and genteel, thought must surely have something wrong in la cabeza, for he would sadly say that he missed his kids on a daily basis, and that it wasn’t his idea at all. He belonged to an anti-Castro organization which met in a downtown hall twice monthly. He wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist, inscribed with the words “ Liberty or death. Viva Cuba Libre!” and was furious about the American cowards of the Kennedy administration who had betrayed the Cuban cause during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, even if it had taken place over a decade before. He regularly telephoned María at night from his restaurants, calls that she took only in her bedroom. He was generous, and never came to visit their house without some gifts for María and Teresita. (“Tell me what you need, and it will be yours,” he said.) Finding it unusual that María did not own a car and depended on slow public transportation or rides with friends to get where she needed to go, he offered to buy her a car so that he wouldn’t always have to pick her up for their citas. Learning that she didn’t know how to drive, he promised to pay for lessons, but she refused, having a phobia about cars, not only because she had grown up among horses and donkeys, and had always regarded automobiles with wonderment, as if the driving of such machines was intended only for men, but because they made her think about Nestor Castillo’s death.
He tended to come by the house very late at night, after his restaurants had closed-usually with packages of food, aluminum-foil-wrapped platters of fried chuletas and steaks and of paella, which would feed them for the next three or four days. When he’d arrive, Teresita knew; their voices were always hushed, and she could also tell from the faint aroma of the coronas he smoked that wafted into her room, and then by the whisperings that came from María’s bedroom down the hall. At first, he never stayed the night, but after a few months, on some mornings Teresita would find him sitting by their kitchen table, in Gustavo’s former chair, María always smoking her Virginia Slims and attending to him dutifully. As Teresita waited for the school bus, he’d always inquire about what she was studying, her chemistry and biology and French textbooks beyond him. He’d say things like “I can tell that your daughter is going to go far.”
On the weekends, when he happened to drop by and Teresita, having examinations, would have preferred to stay home and study-she did her best thinking in her pink-decorated bedroom-he’d give her a twenty-dollar bill so that she might take some of her friends off to the movie theater in the sprawling mall, across a wide boulevard a few sweltering avenues away. Sometimes she went to the movies, but, just as often, she sat in a McDonald’s eating juicy hamburgers and studying. She always waited until past four thirty, when Rafael had taken off for work, before finally heading back. But one afternoon, when she came home and saw the DeVille still parked by the curb, she made the mistake of going inside anyway. That’s when she heard them through the door: beautiful María, in her ferocious widowed way, screaming in pleasure, the bed frame slamming against the wall, and Rafael moaning and crying out, “Así, así, así!” as if the world were about to end. It was so disquieting that Teresita, without daring to make any noise herself, slipped back outside, took a walk down the street to where some of the kids were playing a game of dodgeball, and let an hour pass before she finally made her way to their door again, fearful that they would still be going at it. That it had gone on in kindly Gustavo’s bed seemed awfully wrong, and the notion put Teresita in a rather solemn frame of mind, as if something sacred had been violated; he had been her mother’s husband and the only papito she had really known, after all. But Teresita dared not say a word, and later, as she sat out waiting on the patio, when Rafael finally left, she just smiled when he pinched her on the cheek.
FOR A TIME, MARÍA, IT SHOULD BE SAID, SEEMED HAPPY, OR AS happy as a woman like her could be, at least when it came to the physical act of love. Amorously speaking, Rafael was a most enthusiastic partner, who, in possessing María, seemed to be playing out some dream. She was his cubanita caliente, his cubanita de la noche, his cubana with a chocha muy fabulosa. The man kissed every inch of her body, and every curvaceous dip and valley of her flesh, fucked her so adamantly that it was as if, with his wildly glaring pupils, he were making love to Cuba itself. (Well, he had reinforced the notion by showing her a piece of arcane Cuban currency with an image of the goddess Athena to which she seemed to bear a close resemblance.) For her part, she ran with this new breath of passion, buying the most scandalous of transparent undergarments from a boutique called Los Dainties. He just loved her sexiness. At a costume ball held at carnival time, he asked María to dress up as a showgirl, with plumed headdress and a rented outfit so diaphanous and scanty that her arrival set all the older women, las ancianas, who in some other age would have been chaperones, grumbling, every male head turning, perhaps enviously, their wives fuming. But did they care? They came home laughing, throwing each other around, drunkenly happy, and the racket that María and Rafael made later that night-“I’m going to devour you!”-not only woke Teresita up but provoked the neighborhood hounds to bark.
But as the year went by, even María, lacking any relatives of her own-a very sad thing for Teresita more than for herself-began to wonder why Rafael, with two brothers and a sister, each with their own large family, and birthday and holiday parties to attend, never once invited them to any of their gatherings; that did not sit well with her at all. “You know I don’t want to just be your little pajarita, that you hide away,” she told him. “If you don’t think of me as anyone special to you, then don’t expect anything special from me.”
Growing aloof and withholding from him the favors of her perfectly ripened body, and that luscious papayún that had driven Nestor Castillo crazy, María finally got Rafael to concede that perhaps he had been keeping her too much a secret. (That is to say, María, strong willed by then, harangued Rafael into admitting it.) And so, one delightful Sunday afternoon, in a somewhat guarded mood, Rafael brought María and Teresita along with him to his brother Miguel’s house, out in Fort Lauderdale, where his kin and their in-laws had gathered to celebrate one of his tías’ seventieth birthday. It seemed, at first, yet another cheerful, jammed-with-kids-and-older-folks affair typical of extended Cuban families in Miami. And while he had taken María around, sheepishly introducing her as “a friend” to various relatives, from the very start they regarded her as if she were a leper.