Chapter TWENTY-SIX
Not that she ever got teary eyed over him, in the same way that Nestor did thinking about her—she was too practical minded for that kind of nonsense. There was no point to it—what had finally happened between them would remain in the irretrievable past after all. Besides, it would have been stupid to lose her head over something as ephemeral and useless as love. (“Es como el aire,” María would say. “It’s like air.”) Nevertheless, each night before her shows, while the band was warming up the audience with comic parodies of “Carmen” or with some old big band tunes, à la Tommy Dorsey (the crowds were mostly American), she still found herself thinking about him, as if, in some reversal of destiny, Nestor might come walking in through the stage door. Musicians, after all, were always traveling between New York, Miami, and Havana, wherever their work might take them. There were nights, in fact, when María wished that she had gone off with him; not for love, perhaps, but because her life with Ignacio had become so boring and, in its way, something of a prison.
Or, to put it differently, she found that going to bed with Ignacio had become a matter of duty. The truth be told, during those afternoon and late morning bouts of love, when Ignacio turned María on her side so that he, parting her nalgitas ever so slightly, could enter her from behind or, in the dress shop office, closed the door, took down his trousers, and stood before her with his hands on his hips so that she could take care of him with her mouth, or when he had María, her bathing suit dropped to her knees, lower herself onto him so that her bottom rested on his legs as he sat on a bench in one of those sandy-floored cabanas out at Varadero—seven thrusts and then out, he came so quickly—she hardly felt anything at all, not even the guilt which used to send her on flights to purgatory. But was it his fault? Anatomically speaking, though he couldn’t touch Nestor, he wasn’t bad at all, and there were moments when, pulling back on her hair or suckling on her nipples, he seemed almost tender. And yet María, no matter what Ignacio did, had the misfortune of feeling simply too capacious for him. Besides, he couldn’t really have cared less what she felt, as long as María carried on with the twisting of her head, the screams, her body trembling as if she were imitating poor Teresita’s spells.
Afterwards Ignacio, having had his macho pride attended to, and most satisfactorily, always felt like the king cock of Havana and got into the habit of pinching María’s cheeks as if she were a child. Now and then, if she were lying naked on her stomach on their bed, flipping through the pages of magazines like Hoy or Gente, with their articles about American movie stars, he might slide a few fingers inside her and out, for she always seemed so damp, María crying, “Ay, ay, ay,” as if ready to go at it again, and Ignacio, feeling like Tarzan, pulling up on the waistband of his trousers and checking himself out in the mirror, snorting pridefully, as if he were the greatest lover in Cuba, while she, of course, had been secretly thinking about Nestor.
PUBLICLY, IGNACIO HAD CONTINUED TO SHOW MARíA OFF AROUND Havana, loving it when they entered a packed house at the Alhambra and caused a stir, even if they slipped in during the prelude of a Lecuona zarzuela, and she hadn’t minded that until she noticed him reverting to his former ways, occasionally staring at other women, and in an obvious manner, as if it were his right to do whatever he pleased. She had long since concluded that he was a petty gangster, but one trying to reform himself, and while Ignacio had opened his clothing store for urban sophisticates and tourists, El Emporio, when it came down to it, he seemed to spend as much time as before attending to his other business at the harbor. (His colleagues were men whom María, in the few times she met them, neither disliked nor liked. Some she had only seen from a distance, usually meeting up with Ignacio on some street corner or in a bar, and on the rare occasion she had noticed a few of them acting like rowdy drunks in the clubs—otherwise she hardly knew them.) And while Ignacio sometimes dropped by the clothing store in the afternoon to check up on that business like a proper boss, she disliked his tendency to hire as salesclerks pretty young habaneras who didn’t seem to know a thing about that trade. As before, for all his promises, he still went off on business trips all across Cuba and to the States, away for weeks at a time, turning into the disembodied voice of a man on the club’s hallway telephone.
Which is to say that María, in those years, without any family of her own, and having sent away the one man who most probably truly loved her (why else would that Nestor Castillo keep writing her?), had begun to discover the castigations of loneliness. She had her friends and acquaintances, of course, particularly among the whores at la Cucaracha, who were always trying to persuade María to join their fold—“Don’t forget, there are men who would pay a lot of money for a few hours of your time,” she’d hear again and again from Violeta—and occasionally, backstage at the club, one or another of her fellow dancers cried on her lap about loves that had never worked out, studs who had gotten away, husbands who abused/cheated/lied, and worries (as always) about money and keeping their looks (no black and blue marks or broken noses, please). Still, some of those dancers took her private and quiet ways as snobbery (if only they could have seen her out in the countryside with the guajiros, or known the way she looked forward to her stolen hours of study with Lázaro and suffered through her lessons).
Walking along the streets of Havana, she continued to attract the attentions of many a habanero, dashing and downtrodden alike. One afternoon, the American movie star Errol Flynn, many a showgirl surely in his harem, had doffed his Panama hat and smiled as she passed by him on a street corner outside the Capitolio. (And, speaking of movie stars, one evening at the club, when the buxom actress Ava Gardner had turned up with some friends to take in the show and María had passed by their table, the famous brunette, who seemed to enjoy her rum and had a somewhat wicked air about her, had nodded approvingly at her, the way beautiful women do with other beautiful women.) But ultimately, for a woman so young and beautiful—possibly the most dazzling woman in Cuba in those years—María spent too much time alone in bed. On such mornings and afternoons, when she had said her prayers and let her mother’s rosary fall from her hand, she’d finally put herself to sleep by touching herself, writhing, her hand covered in her own moisture (Nestor), the pain and solitude in her heart giving way to the condolences of pleasure.
(That was a vanity as well: though she had not yet reached the point when she began to go around with different men, that confusing impulse to find pleasure had been with María for a long time. No, it wasn’t the kind of thing she would ever have talked about with her daughter, Teresita, but the fact remained that, for all the country-girl piety María had been raised with, in some ways she hadn’t been that different from the farm animals she’d watched breeding day in and day out in the yards, in the fields, in the woods. A little history, then, about the habits, in that regard, of a beautiful woman. In the days when her sister, Teresita, first suffered her fits, and María, seeking an escape, found all kinds of ways in which to please herself, she discovered that even her papito’ s shattered shaving mirror could enhance her bodily joys. One afternoon, because she had so little privacy, and had never seen any of her parts in a mirror, she took her papito’s espejo off its post into the woods behind their thatch-roofed house, and there, under the shadow of an acacia, María pulled her skirt up, and with her undies fallen to her knees, held that mirror at such an angle beneath her as to catch a reflection of that which she had never seen before: her second mouth, wearing a crown of bristly black pubic hair, curling and dense and new to the world, which upon the minutest inspection and spread slightly open resembled the interior of a conch shell; and when she expanded herself a little wider, the same folds and whorls rearranged themselves into the opened petals of an orchid. That’s when she discovered a mole on the left side, and that just a little distance away was the puckered eye of her bottom, the same nutlike color as her vagina. At the same time she discovered that, if she used the mirror to catch the sunlight through a break in the foliage above and directed it at herself from yet another angle, God’s radiance, as if a beam from heaven—that’s what it surely had to be—spread through her in such delicious waves of divine heat that with just the touch of her finger she started to have her own kinds of seizures, not of epilepsy, like those of her sister, but of pure and sinful bodily release. She ended that business by pressing the heated mirror’s surface against the dead center of her body as if to swallow the sun and sky and, doubling over, in an agony of unspeakable pleasure, squirmed about as if possessed before falling backwards to the ground. After a few moments she became vaguely aware that a salamander had crawled onto her leg and that, perched atop the gnarled roots of that acacia, a large spider had seemed to be observing her; afterwards, she spent the longest time examining her face and could not help but lick the mirror’s surface, as if to taste the outline of her dampness, which resembled an upturned eye or wound…)
In those days, when Nestor’s presence in her life had been reduced to nothing more than those letters, and María could not put from her mind her memories of their lovemaking, which seemed to become more vivid with the passing of time, that bodily release, much like bathing, eating, and using the toilet, became a part of her daily regimen. Two versions of Nestor existed for her then. The first boiled down to a photograph she had of him—not from the ones of them together in and around Havana but a more recent black-and-white snapshot, circa the spring of 1952, for which he had posed sitting on a stoop in New York City (presumably at La Salle Street) wearing a simple guayabera, his notebook in hand, his expression of tenderness and longing, as if he were about to sing a mournful bolero, tearing into her heart. (The kind of face that trumpet notes were tucked into.) Just looking at him, in all his guileless innocence, made María sigh and think “El pobrecito”—Oh, the sweet, dear man. And: “Sí. Es posible que lo amo”—Yes, it’s possible that I love him. The other involved a memory of Nestor on a bed in that sun-swept room by the harbor and María grasping his glorious pinga with both her hands, removing the hand nestled against his pubic bone and placing that hand above the other; even then it still went on, in a flourish of delicate veins, before finally ending grandly in a bell-shaped fleshly elegance, the size of a peach, from whose opening seeped the clearest of liquids, a dewlike fluid, which tasted both sweet and salty against the tip of María’s tongue and stretched so easily when she pulled its translucence into the air with her finger. Memories of María tugging at him and feeling its strength; of his warmth, that thickness, wide as her wrist, pressed against the side of her face, almost burning against her ear; of just how terrifying and wonderful it seemed every time Nestor lowered himself onto her and, drowning her opening with kisses first, settled himself gradually and then frantically inside her, so deeply that, even those years later, she still felt some sensations lingering in the farthest reaches of her womb, in the vicinity of her heart. It was a sensation that surprised her, as she crossed a room or sat by a terrace restaurant table (salting a piece of crispy plátano), pulled a pair of dark mesh stockings over her thighs, or applied makeup before her mirror, her nipples growing taut inside her brassiere. It seemed akin to a picazón, a nagging spectral itch, a blossoming of desire, of bodily longing, that no man, certainly not Ignacio, had been able to satisfy since Nestor.
But she neither hated nor loved her life in those days, though there were times when María felt such sudden loneliness and misery that certain things made her nervous. She disliked lingering by the terrace railing of their fourteenth-floor solar, as if the magnificent views—Havana breaking up into a dazzling succession of sunlit rooftops and gardens, the ocean so radiant—would draw her over the side; and on those occasions when Ignacio took her out on a friend’s schooner for a sail on the seas off Marianao, that railing, just off the buffeting waters, also tempted her, as if her departed family were awaiting her under the shimmering surface, among the marlins and medusas. Such inexplicable impulses sometimes came over her even while María went strolling in Havana, when just the sight of an oncoming trolley made her wary, and it was only the company of saints, in the churches she visited, that seemed to comfort her. She also found refuge in her bedroom performances for the bluntly prone Ignacio, even if it was a rare day when neither God nor one or another of the ghosts seemed to linger, watching.
Ay, por Dios, but it wasn’t easy to have outlived the little family she once had. Her loneliness was such that one Sunday she even made her way to a little shantytown, near a municipal garbage dump east of the city called Los Humos, where María believed she had some distant cousins on her mother’s side. But her search through that place of misery only made her feel lonelier than before. No sooner had she located the run-down shack in which dwelled a family of twelve who claimed they were her kin than did they overwhelm the well-dressed María with requests for money. And because the air was so bad, with fumes from the dump settling like a mist everywhere, she left Los Humos not only with the feeling that to befriend them further—who were they anyway, but cousins twice removed? And why had the men among them looked her over in an uncousinly manner?—would be more trouble than it could ever be worth, but also with her throat sore and a headache and runny stomach that lasted for days.
María first wanted to get pregnant back then, even when she knew it would probably mean the end of her dancer’s career. She was twenty-three that year of the first insurrection, on the older side of a profession in which the majority were seventeen and eighteen, if not younger. But no matter how carelessly she comported herself with Ignacio, deliberately ripping open the heads of his condoms with her teeth or with her long fingernails during the agitated act of love, she did not become pregnant in those years, a mystery that she blamed on herself, and on God’s castigations, all the while wondering if the more virile Nestor would have easily fathered her child. (That had to do with her guajira upbringing—the largest stud horses and oxen and donkeys, with their outlandishly sized appendages, coupling in the fields and easily siring offspring, had been a common sight.) Yet, despite her splendid, traffic-stopping body, María couldn’t help but wonder if she were barren.
And so, for the sake of diversion, she put her energies into her studies with Lázaro, took up smoking, got herself a cage of feuding songbirds, filled her living room with silk flowers, and, the truth be told, despite her longings for maternity and love, began to find her dancer’s life more agreeable than before. Not the hours, but the nightly applause and the release from the uncertainty that comes with knowing just what you’re doing onstage. (And what they wanted to see in the shimmies and splits and turnrounds; that she had to smile constantly, no matter what else she happened to be thinking.)
But María also took pride in the fact that, bit by bit, she had begun to see her name appearing in magazines, a great honor for a guajira from the countryside who had been the daughter of a nobody músico. Show, an English-language publication out of Havana which most clubs and cabarets sold out of their hatcheck rooms, featured a photograph of María in just about every issue over a two-year period. Life (circa May 1954) showed a winking María in her dressing room hitching up a pair of dark nylons over her shapely legs; and a second one of her onstage at the Lantern in which, from a distance, it seemed as if she was hardly wearing anything but a dark mesh bodysuit, whose seams were dotted with fake gems, a titanic feathery arrangement tottering on her head. (Why had the tailor, she would complain, made the middle seam subdivide her body, her V, her pudendum?) The caption, in English, which her club owner, a fellow of Cuban descent from Boston, translated as they were standing by a newspaper kiosk off the Prado, proclaimed María as “one of the reasons we Americans want to come to Cuba.”
In those years countless photographers went into María’s dressing room to “shoot” her. María putting on one of those impossibly heavy plumed, rhinestone-beaded headdresses; María, in a skimpy outfit, described as “raven haired” with a “Spanish complexion” and “Ava Gardner build.” (The complexion thing was a catchphrase, meaning tawny, swarthy, slightly dark or, let us say, a code for a light-skinned mulatta and therefore acceptably, even tantalizingly, dusky, like the actresses Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne.) In an issue of Show that featured profiles of famous or hoping to be famous dancers, there was a shot of María in a rather revealing and very tight leotard by her dressing table in the Club Tika Tika, eating, for some reason, a bowl of ice cream, the caption: “One Dish Enjoying Another.” (Other copy? Here’s a portion of one caption, which went along with a shot of María lunging across a stage, a mock-jungle backdrop behind her, in a tight leopard-spotted, one-piece bathing suit and four-inch-high heels, as she brandished a whip: “Refined in her features, there’s something of the jungle, or most African and savage, about María Rivera…. With dance moves to make men crazy, this Cuban Salome vaults across a stage like an unleashed Tigress!”)
Even Bohemia, otherwise engaged in sympathetic reportage about the imprisonment of that rebel leader Castro on the forested Isle of Pines, a penal colony south of the province in which she had lived, featured María in a one-piece black bathing suit on their “belleza de Cuba” pinup page, and one young fellow from Carteles, on the club beat, whose byline was Cain, fascinated that she had started out as a guajira and had seemed to achieve local stardom, had wanted to interview María “for the record,” but she felt too inarticulate to go through with his request. (Nevertheless, this fellow took a photograph of María which ended up reinterpreted as a pastel cartoon on the margin of one of that magazine’s end pages.)
If she happened to be locally well known, up and down the nightclub strip of la Rampa and in many a cul-de-sac establishment in the city, her renown did not come without the occasional annoyance. Whenever she went into the Lantern, it startled her to see the life-size plywood cutout of herself, in an enticingly revealing costume, set like a lure on the narrow curb by the club entrance: COCKTAILS AND CHA-CHA-CHA’S, TWO DOLLARS COVER PLEASE. Kids were always sticking wads of chewing gum over the top of her bodice, to make María’s breasts and their nipples more prominent; these she’d scrape off with a nail file. After six years as a professional dancer in that city, she had developed an attitude about her image.
Though she had not started out in life as one prone to any sort of vanity, the nature of her profession required that María spend long periods of time before those mirrors, and once that habit formed, it seemed inevitable that her humility and tendency to self-deprecation gave way to self-admiration and, even in its most nascent state, grandiosity. (Oh, but Lordy, what excesses of vanity her daughter would have to put up with one day.) María simply began to believe that she had become someone special, even if she had mainly worked in second-tier clubs and had yet to hit the footlights of the more august venues in Havana, like the Tropicana, with its outdoor proscenium and gardens set out under the stars, in the suburb of Buenavista. She’d caught a few of the Tropicana’s opulent stage revues with Ignacio, including an evening which starred a flamboyant fellow in a white mink coat by the name of Liberace, and had left breathlessly impressed by the sheer grandeur of the floor shows, which included twenty to thirty dancers and featured sets that looked as if they’d come from Hollywood movies. (One spectacular featured a high-society lady strolling in the jungle who, coming across a santería ceremony, is put under a magic spell and, losing her inhibitions, tears away half her clothes, dancing wildly with the negrito rumberos.)
Such spectacles far exceeded the more humble productions with which María had been associated, and toward those dancers she actually felt some pangs of envy, though she found the sheer size of the crowds intimidating. On her behalf, however, Ignacio had approached the owners—in a meeting that, despite María’s beauty and real talents as a performer, never went anywhere: probably because the troupe’s stars didn’t want the competition, or because Ignacio demanded too much money for her, or, most likely, because Ignacio’s reputation as a local tough guy (à la a Cuban George Raft) had preceded him and the owners wanted nothing to do with his sort. (As María would tell her daughter: “They ran one of the few clubs in Havana that didn’t have a connection with the mob; they believed that my se?or was in that category—why I don’t know; he was a perfect gentleman.” Sí, Mamá, her daughter often thought. But we know what my papi did for a living, don’t we?)
At twelve noon in her Vedado apartment, María fondling herself until she breaks into pieces. Then María in her dressing room at the Lantern sitting beside a dancer named Gladys, covering her face with powder and pulling over her thighs the black mesh stockings that always make her legs and uppermost parts slightly uncomfortable. Then, turning her back to Gladys, María asking her to help out with the rear clasps of her sequined brassiere, which she has trouble unhooking. María reaching over to Gladys’s ashtray to take a puff off her lipstick-smeared cigarette, and her brassiere slipping off, her engorged nipples, almost the size of wine corks, exposed. It was a bit drafty in there, but not that drafty. So, naturally, Gladys just had to ask in her nosy and singsongy way: “Noooo, Marrrría, who are you thinking about, you naughty girl?”