Chapter THIRTEEN
Not that Ignacio was always so harsh with her. Though she’d tend to remember him as a son of a bitch, y como un abusador, he ran so hot and cold that it always amazed María when they settled into a pleasant period. He might punch her arms and legs a half dozen times in a single afternoon, but within a few days flowers always arrived at the club in his name, so that while María, jamming a modesty pad into the front of her glittering undergarment, fatigued by sadness, softened towards him again. And sometimes he turned up at the Nocturne with a box full of lacy Parisian scarves, just to give away to the ladies of the chorus. And he’d tell anyone willing to listen that if he or she needed a good refrigerator, a nice radio console, or even an air conditioner, he was the man to talk to. And always at steeply discounted prices, given that they all—from the powder room ladies to the shoeshine boy in the back and the women of the chorus—were friends of María.
In a calm and decent mood, Ignacio, always dressed sportily and smelling nicely of cologne, could be incredible. He knew people like the advertising director at El Diario de la Marina, and other papers, who might have use for her as a model in their ads. And now and then, out of nowhere, Ignacio, stuffing a few twenty-dollar bills into a lipstick-stained coffee cup she kept by her makeup mirror, told her: “This is for your poor papito out in Pinar, if you want to give it to him.” Cold with beggars on the street, he seemed to change his mind when it came to her little world. And that sometimes made her feel differently.
On some nights, at about four in the morning, when Ignacio was usually among the last to leave the Nocturne and the floors were already being swept around the tables, even while some patrons lingered, and he asked if he might “escort” her back to her place, María, whatever his recent transgressions, usually told him “Yes.”
In the best of spirits, he even encouraged her about some things. When they were passing by the Palacio Theater along the Prado during a midafternoon Sunday stroll, and beautiful María saw that crowds were queuing in the entranceway for a performance of a ballet, Giselle, he didn’t hesitate to buy tickets for the two o’clock show. The lead dancer of that troupe, one Alicia Alonso, a waifish half-blind brunette, moved so gracefully in the role that María’s hip-swaying rumbera movements seemed crude by comparison. While watching the corps de ballet and feeling stunned by Alonso’s elegance onstage, she could only think about what one of the dancers in her troupe, the aging Berta, had recently told her: “You’re so good looking, it doesn’t matter if you can dance at all.” That remark had bothered her, and especially so after watching that ballet. It so nagged at María that she began to dream about becoming a ballerina.
In this, Ignacio, even while thinking it a bit of a joke, indulged her—paying for twice-weekly classes at an academy off Industria Street. And while she had begun to learn the fundamentals, and worked hard to perfect the placement of her feet, the various pliés, she lacked the classical grace of the others, who were, in most cases, adolescents if not children (and well off ones at that). At five seven and too voluptuous—she weighed one hundred and twenty-seven pounds—María, the oldest of them, seemed preposterously out of place. Still, she kept at it for a few months, until there came the day when she realized that it would take her years to become any good at all. By then, her feet had begun blistering all over again, to the point that they sometimes bled in her shoes while she was dancing in the floor shows at the club, and so, one day, María, putting that pipe dream aside, simply stopped taking those lessons.
At least those lessons helped her performances: she became somewhat more elegant in her stage movements, the nuances of those stances making a difference in her style. To the delight of her salivating audiences, it became easier for María to touch her forehead with her instep, and her contortions became much more fluid, not that she needed to improve on her routines. Having been exposed to her fellow, better off aspirants, who were picked up by chauffeurs and housemaids after classes and, almost to a one, attended a French lyceum (they were always practicing their French with each other during their rest periods), she, envious at first and then inspired by their air of refinement, began thinking about ways to improve herself.
Ignacio always laughed at the fact that she couldn’t read worth much. He caught on right away, noticing that she really didn’t know what she was looking at when handed a restaurant menu. Not once did she ever seem to know that among the books he’d carry around with him was a simple Spanish diccionario. (That’s what he had been studying in the club the night they met.) He used to tell her that he would have written her love letters, but what was the point of bothering? In any case, there was no need to feel too bad, he’d say. Half of all rural Cubans, if not more, were illiterates anyway, he’d read in some newspaper. And what difference would it make to a woman whose chocha, in his opinion, was a national treasure?
But even when Ignacio knew that his jibes bothered her, and he was always talking about finding some brainy fulano to teach her, he just never got around to it: he was too ashamed of her in that way to approach anyone. Besides, he felt content to lord that superiority over her, and in any case, he really didn’t care if María could even spell her name, as long as she had learned to comport herself like a lady in the classy restaurants they went to and took him to bed with abandon.
And María? Living in an incomprehensible world, she often wondered what the newspaper headlines said. Even when she recognized her stage name on a poster outside the club—M-A-R-í-A R-I-V-E-R-A—she could only guess what the rest of such notices meant. Some words she understood, but not many, the gaps of lost meaning confounding, depressing her. Waking around noon each day and feeling that something was missing in her life—forget love, that always turns to air, doesn’t it?—she resolved to find herself a teacher.