Chapter SIXTEEN
She spent the remainder of that night tossing in her bed, suffering from nightmares of sin and humiliation. Incredulous that Ignacio would betray her in so public a fashion, María wished that she could have shat him down the retrete behind their shack in Pinar del Río, so that he might swim among his brothers, wished that he had been swallowed up by the cavern’s waters like her sister. Livid with pain and rage, María couldn’t have cared less if she ever saw that desgraciado again. Yet, in the solitude of her solar, amidst all the furniture and an armario filled with the dresses he had paid for, she slipped into a state of superstitious forlornness. For to be alone made her think about her dead mother and sister, Teresita, and when she thought about them in another world of shadows, María felt more desolate than ever before, tan solita, tan solita, as if the city bustling around her were nothing more than a necropolis through which she wandered.
Still, with the light of day, such dark thoughts thankfully left her; and she had her dancing at the club and those pleasant lessons with Lázaro to occupy her.
About a week later, at dusk, however, she had been sitting by her window studying her notebooks—ay, but so many words to learn—when Ignacio, not wanting to let a good thing go, came knocking at her door. What could she do but allow him inside—he had his own key anyway. And though he had pleaded that she forgive him, María, having her pride, told him to simply take what clothes he had been keeping in that place and go. A slick caballero (the pendejo) by any standard, Ignacio claimed that he loved her, his mood suddenly calmer, contrite.
“I know I’ve done some things to offend you, but with all my heart I’m asking you to forgive me. Please, María,” he said, and he crossed himself. “I am sincere in telling you this. Te juro. I mean it.”
“And that woman?”
“She’s nothing next to you.”
He tried to caress her, to kiss her lovely neck, but his breath reeked of rum, and the touch of that man, which at best she had found tolerable, seemed now repugnant. She threw open the door.
“Vete,” she told him. “I’d rather die than take another day of your joderías, do you understand?”
“I don’t believe you mean that.”
“Just leave me, Ignacio,” she told him. “No soy puta.”
Then, all at once, what tenderness he possessed deserted him. His brows knotted fiercely. “Not my whore? Want to know something? You aren’t even good at it.” His face burned red. “You know why I went off with that other one? It’s because she knows how to behave in the bedroom like a real woman. You may be beautiful and make a lot of noise, but you’re stiff as a cadaver—”
“That’s because you beat me, hombre….”
And then it turned into something else. When he tried to throw her on the bed, she ran screaming into the hallway, Ignacio chasing after her and shouting insults, the two of them spilling down the stairways of her edificio and making so much of a commotion that passersby along that market street began to gather, curious about yet another familial Havana melodrama, drenched in sweat and contorted faces, unfolding before them. A miserable scene that María would probably have preferred to forget, and would have forgotten, if not for the glory that shortly entered her life.