Chapter TWENTY-TWO
Oh, but it wasn’t easy; she had grown fond of that músico. Out of pity, for every time she saw him, he seemed so forlorn, María continued to take Nestor to her bed, and, swearing to herself that it would be their last romp, each time they made love she gave herself to him as if there would be no tomorrow. Along the way, his creative side penetrated María almost as deeply as did his other parts.
In her moments alone, at the club or in her solar or while just finding some quiet spot in el Parque Central (well, for María there was really no such place in public, as she always attracted men to her), his words flowed into her head:
Bésame de nuevo, mi amor
Kiss me again, my love
Aquí, y allá.
Here and over there.
Déjame con el calor de tu lengua
Leave me the heat of your tongue
Cubriendo mi piel.
Covering my skin.
Dame unos besitos
Give me kisses
Hasta no suspiro más
Until I won’t be able to breathe anymore
Y el sabor de tu leche, dulce y salada,
And the taste of your milk, so salted and sweet,
Me manda al cielo
Sends me to paradise
Pero contigo solamente
But only with you
Durante nuestro vuelo hasta el sol.
During our flight to the sun.
No habrá nadie más.
There will be no one else.
Still, it wasn’t enough.
And in the meantime, Ignacio had started to look after her again.
THOUGH SHE HAD REMAINED TORN ABOUT NESTOR, IT ALL CAME down to Ignacio’s automobile. One afternoon, a camionero, a truck driver, in from Pinar del Río, arrived at her solar with noticias malas—bad news—from that horrid woman Olivia, the only way she ever heard from her family in those days. Sweating and half out of breath, this truck driver was practically in tears, for he knew her papito from that crossroads place where he performed sometimes. “Tu papá no está bien”—“He isn’t well,” he told her. What had happened? During a sudden lightning storm a few days before, the horse her papito had been riding across a field had stumbled into a ditch, and he was thrown headfirst against a tree, so many of his bones and internal organs punctured or broken that it was likely he would die. Receiving that sad information on a Friday, just before she was to go into rehearsals for a new show, what else could María do but seek out Ignacio, who had an automobile, and beg him to drive her out to see her papito before it would be too late?
Ignacio, for his part, had his own plans, but, of course, when María called him later from the Nocturne, he dropped everything, and by eleven the next morning, he had picked María up for their drive into the countryside, hours away from the city. When they arrived at her beloved valle, the forests and fields were damp from rain, and as María, trudging through the mud, rushed to his bedside, her papito seemed, indeed, to be dying. A doctor from town had been attending to him. Stretched out on a cot and wrapped up with bandages, her poor guajiro papito could barely breathe. His internal organs too damaged to repair, he had fallen into the delirium of a fever. She did not leave his side that entire day, or the next; out of habit, she prayed over him, prayed until he finally heard her voice and opened his eyes. Smiling, as Manolo took hold of her hand and said, “Ay, María, por favor pórtate bien,” and then, “Y ya está”—“Now here it is,” all María could think was this: Once he’s gone, everyone I have ever loved will have died.
Then, while birds were chirping away outside the bohío, he drifted off into a sleep from which he would never awaken.
She was nineteen years old.
He’d passed away at ten in the morning, and, looking back, what she would be most grateful for was how Ignacio Fuentes had kept his head about the whole business. It was Ignacio who went to San Jacinto that same day to arrange for a proper funeral, Ignacio who paid for the coffin and organized the locals for the burial processional to the local campo santo, that cemetery of soon to be forgotten souls; Ignacio who had paid for a funeral feast; Ignacio who had been a pillar of strength for María. And for that alone María felt a sincere gratitude toward him, no matter his faults, and swore that, whatever her desires for that músico, she would put Nestor Castillo from her mind.
What would it matter? Her life had become a kind of a dancer’s purgatory by then anyway.