(In that sort of mood, she’d recall the accusatory letter that Cesar Castillo had sent her. That her impulsive journey to New York in 1956 could have contributed, in any way, to Nestor’s passing was the sort of notion that sometimes made her jump up in her sleep, her heart beating rapidly, just like he used to make it. Then that guilt would sting her like a wasp, pains she would feel for days, until that too eventually faded.)

So María had to be careful, because even she, with her somewhat hardened shell, could find herself adrift on a sea of regrets. On such nights, she’d go through her cache of keepsakes-what were they but ordinary photographs, most of them fading, of her mamá and papito, of herself as a young beauty, and yes, of Nestor Castillo, that joven, whom she came to believe had been the love of her life: that which she had thrown away? In such a mood, she’d read his letters over again, and not just the tender ones but also those letters that overheated her skin with reminiscences of their lovemaking.

(If she could have seen Teresita’s expression one evening when she, home from Florida International University, had, out of curiosity, dug them out of her closet and read each and every one. My God! is what she had thought.)

Then months would go by without her once playing that song. And while María, at a certain hour, tuned in to Miami ’s Channel Five to see if that particular episode of I Love Lucy in which Nestor and his brother had appeared happened to be showing, for the most part she kept her little secret to herself. Teresita knew about it, and so did her former dancing colleague from the Lantern Club, Gladys, who, since moving to Miami from Havana, had become an occasional close companion. (They had spotted each other in a mall, around 1980, in the days just before Miami had gotten a little crazy over the influx of the Marielitos. It had been a happy reunion, and, yes, Gladys believed her when it came to that song-María had told her about Nestor.) But the few times María had mentioned this to anyone else, like her neighbors, her claim was met with more than a little skepticism. Because to call yourself the inspiration behind what Cubans of a certain generation had come to regard as something of a minor classic fell into a category of self-aggrandizement that only invited ridicule and, in María’s opinion, unspoken accusations of vanity and silliness.

Nevertheless, beautiful María sometimes wished that everyone knew. What was she, after all, but just another exile lady, a former dancer from the glory days of Havana, whom no one would ever remember, save perhaps for her daughter?

Chapter FORTY-FIVE

During those long months in the 1980s while Teresita lived away, María had her routines. She and her old friend Gladys, married with her own grown children, met occasionally on the weekends, usually Sundays, to make forays to the restaurants and shopping centers of the city. María would join Gladys on excursions to the beach, where, baking in the sun and sipping drinks of rum and pineapple juice, she passed those pleasant hours under an umbrella, taking in the escapades of frolicking youth on the white sands. Gladys, it should be said, though a few years younger than María, had ballooned appreciably while living the good life, becoming one of those immense cubanas who, however portly, still sashayed with a former dancer’s sexy pride. They’d sit and look out over the water-and inevitably the horizon’s oceanic murmurings, soporific in effect, whispered that to the south, just a few hundred miles away, lay Havana, portal to Cuba itself. But it may as well have been China -oceans off-for neither of them knew of any Cubans who had gone back. (“Remember when those cruise boats would leave Havana at six in the morning and come back late at night from Miami, loaded up with the tourists?” María would say. “Remember the trip we made?”)

Miami had changed since the days María first arrived. It was all fancied up, prospering in ways that the first exiles could not have imagined. If there had been any blot on the mark the Cubans left on the city, it came down to the scattering of criminals and asylum inmates that ese loco Fidel had unleashed on Florida when he allowed the Mariel boat lifts. Though most weren’t criminals-Gladys’s husband, Ramón, had been on one of those boats in the Florida-bound flotilla, returning with six of his relatives-there had been a spike in crime; one had to be more careful at night in certain neighborhoods. But over all, as María and Gladys warmed their bottoms, enjoying their spiked refrescos, they were accepting enough of their life in that city. Miami wasn’t Havana, at least the one they knew, and, for María, it seemed a million miles away from Pinar del Río-just thinking about that, and the great internal distances she had traveled from that tranquil valle, sometimes left her so quietly disposed that she wouldn’t say much at all.

Though she had enjoyed those outings-Ramón always dropped her off at the house in Northwest Terrace-the hardest thing for María was to come home to an empty house: on with the radio in the kitchen, on with the television in her living room. A glass of rum with diet Coke usually smoothed her over, and gloriously so, as she showered-didn’t that bring her closer to God? Then, having gotten the sand off, she’d attend to her only companion, the little black cat with the white paws María had found mewing inside a garbage can down the street, Omar, the name that had popped into her head. She felt so much affection for the creature she sometimes wondered why she had bothered with men at all, and this Omar seemed to know, for he followed her around wherever she went, curled up next to her on the couch when she watched TV and smoked, and jumped into bed with her, the way men had once always wanted to, at night.

And sometimes, settled on the kitchen table, just purring away, and with an Oriental wisdom burning in his eyes, Omar watched María as she would sit writing what she called her versitos. It was a vocation that she, a former analfabeta, had only dabbled in over the years but, to which, with Teresita away in school, she had lately devoted herself. Her interest was helped by a poetry-writing course that she had enrolled in at an adult education center at Dade Community College. Meeting on Wednesday evenings at eight o’clock and lasting for two hours, it had become the high point of her week. Conducted in Spanish by an Ichabod Crane-looking fellow named Luis Castellano, a former native of Holguín, the class consisted of a dozen Cuban women, mostly well into their fifties if not older, no men, and the poems were shared aloud, often to laughter and sometimes to tears. For to hear spoken the pure emotions of such ladies in that intimate setting, as expressed in poems with titles like “Mi Cuba preciosa”-“My Precious Cuba”-or “El jardín de mis abuelos”-“My Grandparents’ Garden”-or “Un domingo por la mañana en Cienfuegos”-“A Sunday Morning in Cienfuegos”-was to be steeped, as María herself had put it to Teresita in a letter, “in the honey of our bees.” Plump, aged, still shapely, kindly disposed or enraged by what life had dealt them, each week they held forth, their voices cracking sometimes, their hands trembling. And you know what? Not a one of their poems was bad, or could be bad; their plainspoken utterances, like songs without music, just took everyone back to what they felt and envisioned when remembering, ever so bittersweetly, that which they had lost and wished to recover: the very notion of Cuba, which hung over the room like the branches of a blossom-heavy tree.

They wrote about street life in Havana, with its singing vendors, and of their small towns in the provinces, or some colorful fulano they knew, or of a local rake, a first love, or the sea, the siren songs they heard as echoes in conch shells found on a beach, of smelling fresh morning bread from a bakery next door, muy sabrosito siempre, of chameleons and roosters running wild in an auntie’s living room, of el campo en Oriente, with its blossomed air after a rainfall, of the mists rising along the ridged foothills of the Escambray mountains, and the stars that rose, one by one, like diamonds over that horizon; of watching the impeccably dressed, straight-backed planters of Matanzas riding regally by their porches on their silver-spurred white stallions, of singing barbers and lovestruck morticians, of childhood negrita nannies; of husbands, and sons, and beautiful daughters; of distant Spanish ancestors from Vigo or Fonsagrada, or Asturias or Barcelona, Madrid and more-all this turned that ordinary classroom into something of a chapel in which everyone prayed to the same heaven.