Chapter SEVENTEEN
You see, it happened that a young musician with a most soulful expression and priestly demeanor had been walking home along that street. Wearing a white guayabera and linen slacks, and carrying a beat-up instrument case in hand, he had come upon the scene at the end of an afternoon of both music and dreams in a park on the western outskirts of the city, where along the banks of a river and under the shade of trees he, a trumpeter and singer, had played his heart out with the batá drummers and congueros of Marianao: his name was Nestor Castillo.
Fresh from a stirring tumbao, he could barely believe what he was seeing before him: not just a terrible squabble bursting out onto the street but a woman as beautiful as any he had ever encountered, her face contorted with pain and longing, a cubanita, her dress torn down the front, who instantly spoke to his soul. Just as Ignacio, his face twisted with anger, went lunging after María and chased her, sobbing, into the crowd, Nestor, perhaps possessed by a notion that music had a power of its own, or because he didn’t know what else to do, took out his trumpet and began playing a melody so serene and consoling that even the indignant, foul-tempered Ignacio stopped in his tracks. His fist had been raised as if he was about to hit María when, all at once, like everyone gathered in front of that building, Ignacio seemed to forget for a moment why he was there at all, his attentions turned to the sonorous music echoing against the walls.
“Caballero,” Nestor called out to him. “It’s done. Why don’t you leave the lady alone? Look, she’s only a woman, huh?”
“And who are you to tell me what to do?”
“I’m just a músico, my friend.”
With that Nestor lifted that trumpet to his lips again, another melody flowing forth, but this time, much as with love, the charm of it had worn off. Ignacio strode over to him and poked his trembling hand, his forefinger and index finger jamming into Nestor’s chest.
“Let me tell you something: I would mind my own business if I were you.” With that Ignacio, reeling around, turned his attention to María again.
By then the crowd, of neighbors and passersby, seeing clearly what was going on, became intent upon protecting her. And, as they formed a circle around María, and with shouts accused Ignacio of being a woman beater and a cabrón—a louse of the lowest sort—he, half drunk anyway and having better things to do, lost heart. In the meantime, a policeman, who had been eating a pork chop dinner in a café down the street, took a few last sips of his Hatuey beer and finally decided to see why so many people had gathered. He was approaching when Ignacio, his suit disheveled and feeling his guts twisting into knots, had taken off in another direction; along the way, every few yards, he’d turn around and curse María, then swear that he loved her, Ignacio’s shadow elongating on the cobblestones behind him, Ignacio, in all his ferocity, gradually diminishing inside a forest of columns until, all at once, he disappeared into the recesses of an arcade.
“?ESTáS BIEN?” NESTOR CASTILLO ASKED MARíA. EMBARRASSED from publicly weeping and twisted by shame over her recent troubles, she leaned up against her edificio entranceway, her arms covering her breasts, where the dress had torn. “Is there anything I can do to help you?”
“No, but thank you, se?or,” she told him.
Just then, as María started up the stairs, he couldn’t keep himself from following her. “If you would forgive my rudeness, I’m wondering if…if…you’d consider accompanying me out to a little place I know…. Perhaps it will make you feel better,” he said.
“When?” she answered, wary but intrigued by this fellow’s sincerity.
“Right now, if you can. Or tomorrow. Or anytime.”
“Now? You must be joking.”
María looked him over but with more clarity, amazed by how, in the heat of the moment, when she saw things with distortion, she’d hardly noticed his good looks. His dark eyes were liquid with mystery; and that mouth, almost too shapely and well formed to belong to a man, a nariz that would have looked perfectly at home on any movie star; even his teeth were pearly, and he had all of them to boot! His largish ears and crests of curly dark hair reminded her of a handsome postal courier she once knew back in Pinar del Río, this quiet fellow who’d come through their valley on a horse without anything to deliver, since nobody received mail, simply to pass the time and fill those guajiros in on what was going on in the outside world. (It was the courier who once told María about the dropping of an atomic bomb on the faraway island of Japan—who could have imagined that?) But there was also just something about this guapito that comforted her—a priestly air, perhaps, or something trustworthy if not beatific, and you know what else? He was so nervous around her and timid seeming, despite his killer looks, that she felt like taking care of him, as if he were one of those forlorn guajiros of her papi’s acquaintance, those salts of the earth who’d never hurt a soul and needed to be looked after by a woman of strength.
“It will make you feel better,” he told her, trying again. “But I don’t want to impose.”
“All right,” María told him finally. “But come upstairs with me. I’m filthy.”
Closing the cast-iron gate behind them, as he followed her up the steps to her solar, dogs barking around them, María could almost feel his eyes alighting upon her rump. She needn’t have been so suspicious; walking into her parlor, with shattered plates and turned-over chairs strewn about the floor, that músico couldn’t have been more noble, more polite. He practically sat on his hands while María went into her bathroom to wash and put on a new dress, and passed his time looking around the place, probably wondering just who that miserable prick had been. All kinds of things would have hit that pobrecito just then. He noticed that she certainly had a lot of nice clothes in her closet; her appliances, including a Frigidaire, were new too, and he guessed that the pictures of the older folks in a frame on her dresser were her mamá y papá—or maybe abuelos—but, in any case, they looked like they’d had a hard time in life. The only thing he made a peep about was the beat-up guitar he saw leaning against a wall. She had gotten it for a few dollars in the market below from the fellow who sold instruments, so that she could practice the chords her papito once taught her.
“Say there, do you mind if I strum on your guitar?” he called to her.
“Do whatever you want, pero es un tareco—it’s a piece of junk.” Passing a sponge over her body, María felt grateful, but somehow sad at the same time, to have Ignacio so suddenly out of her life. She wondered if those little pains inside her heart meant that she’d always have a soft spot for that cruel man anyway. Once Nestor began singing, however, the intimations of his fine baritone, so sincere and somehow pained, got her all quivery inside and she wondered what was going on with her. Dressing quickly—a slip under a florid dress, no nylons, and a pair of low-heeled shoes—she soon joined him again in the room.
“You sing really nicely,” she told him. And in that moment María began to wonder why she was already feeling affection, for a fellow she hardly knew.