Chapter TWELVE
She was learning what men can be about, particularly when they like their drink. Her papito had sometimes been that way, that’s why he used to beat her, and, as she got to know Ignacio better, she learned that he could be that way too. In the bedroom, the only place where he actually seemed happy, he could be quite unpredictable. She would almost enjoy it, as long as he wasn’t being too rough with her, and rum sometimes made him that way. Once he had drunk too much, he’d start accusing her of denying him certain pleasures. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, and he’d smash in the door, throw her onto the bed, and take her from behind, all the while calling her nothing better than his little mulatta whore. And if she wept bitterly afterwards, he’d tell her, “Grow up and don’t forget that, if it weren’t for me, María, you’d still be sleeping in that shithole of a hotel and dressing like a tramp.”
Drinking, he became a different man, who made her life a nightmare. Even when he behaved in a reasonable way, taking care of him with her mouth became a labor, not of love but of drudgery. Sober it didn’t take much: just the sight of her lovely face in a posture of voluptuous submission, the proximity of her lips to that blood-engorged thing, and the merest licking of her tongue were often enough to make him gasp and cry out. But when Ignacio had been drinking heavily, because he had suffered a reversal in business or because he was simply getting bored with her, Mary Magdalene herself would have been hard put to make any progress at all. Still, she took care of him just the same, until her neck and jaws ached. And even then, he found ways to insult her: “You’re too careful and look like you’re about to throw up.” And the worst? If he had been displeased with her lovemaking, or if she had even looked at him in a certain way—as if she’d rather leap from her window than spend another moment with him—she’d turn up at the club the next night covered with so many black and blue bruises that she couldn’t go onstage without disguising them with heavy makeup. How the chorus gossiped and felt sorry for her.
It became the kind of situation that she would always remember in the manner of a bad dream. Started out good, ended up bad. A terrible mistake from which there seemed to be no escape. Sometimes after she had seen him and he had treated her poorly, María headed back to that filthy hotel la Cucaracha, which she had since come to regard with fondness, and, finding la se?ora Matilda at her usual place in the hall, wept on her urine-smelling lap. Recognizing her expression of regret and torment, something she had seen many times before, Violeta the prostitute would hold María in her arms and caress her hair. “Come back here, my love,” she’d tell María. “Come back to your friends.” Such little visits helped sustain her—la se?ora always told her that she could have her old habitación again—but when she looked around that place, with its click-clack of whores’ heels on the steps, its dingy corners, and remembered the condition in which she sometimes found the toilet—an outhouse, a field was better than that—and of waking in the middle of the night jumping—brincando, brincando—from insect bites, María knew she’d never return. But then something would hit her: Short of going home to Pinar del Río, there would be no way of avoiding Ignacio, not in Havana at any rate. Where else could she go? Heading back to her solar, she’d imagine him lurking behind every arcade column; and once she’d climb the steps to her door, her greatest fear was that she’d find Ignacio, sprawled out on her bed naked, an electric fan turning by his side, waiting.