Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
The truth remained that, for all her feelings about Nestor, María’s life in Havana went on without him. Sometimes she agonized about his letters, whether she should attempt to answer him, a question she felt most greatly, for reasons she did not understand, while attending church. But mainly she had allowed Nestor to slip into the realm of memory, though there were times when María heard a sad strain of music or a troubadour’s voice in one of the cafés that reminded her of their days together. By then she had relegated Nestor’s presence to a few dozen nearly weightless letters, half as many photographs, and her bodily recollections of him. With nearly five years having passed since they spent their last afternoon in that solar by the harbor, beautiful María hardly believed it possible that anyone could remain so loyal, or recall her as vividly as he seemed to. (One of his letters, which had arrived around Christmas 1954, not only still professed his undying love for her but, as best as she could comprehend, was of a very filthy nature, the sort of letter that would have caused Ignacio’s wormy forehead vein to burst with anger:
…oh, but María, I almost die at the memory of your taking me into your mouth and kissing me until I spilled my milk onto your precious tongue…. Do you remember how I lived to trace every bit of you with my saliva, how much I cherished kissing your fabulous chocha…and how I loved even your culo, María—even that tasted like a flower to me. And if you remember, María, that you loved it when you felt me reaching beyond your tetas to your mouth, and how you just loved the sight of it and my happy face and how I could just come because of the look in your eyes, María—whatever you do, don’t forget that—and think of me now, remembering your lips and that expression you got on your face as you moved on top of me, and how your head fell back and your eyes closed as if you had just died, and you couldn’t help but take me out, and lick con tu lengua just a few of those remaining drops, which you passed back to me in the form of a kiss…
Those letters, smelling faintly of musk cologne, which kept on arriving, though with less frequency, were always filled with his declarations of unending love. She had become so used to them, had so accustomed herself to thinking about Nestor as a poor soltero, a lonely bachelor, whose existence remained dedicated only to her, that María hardly ever imagined that, in those years, Nestor Castillo had begun to find himself a life that she had no inkling about. She knew that he and his older brother Cesar Castillo, the brash one, had formed a band in New York, a group which they called los Reyes del Mambo—the Mambo Kings. Occasionally he’d mail her one of their 78s, recorded with an outfit called Orchestra Records, ditties that consisted of lively dance numbers, along with boleros and songs of love. Receiving their latest, she always expected that his promised song, a monument “to my devotion for you,” would be among them, but, as of the winter of 1954, “Beautiful María of My Soul” did not yet exist, except in Nestor’s forlorn heart.
NOW AND THEN, HOWEVER, WHEN SOME MUSICIANS, DOWN FROM New York, had come by the club to catch the show or moonlight with the house band, she couldn’t help but ask if they happened to know Nestor Castillo. Some did, some didn’t, and what the ones who did usually had to say about Nestor—“Oh yeah, a nice fellow, he’s doing fine” or “A hell of a musician”—was just enough to assuage María’s guilt about the way things had ended between them. But then one night, when a trumpet player with the Mario Bauzá orchestra had come by the Lantern to drop off a package from Nestor and María, pretending to be sheepishly surprised at its arrival, happened to ask about him, this musician, a fellow named Alberto Morales, whom María had never met before, told her: “Oh, Nestor—he’s married to a great lady, a cubana, as a matter of fact, and he’s got two kids, nice children and—”
“You say he’s married?”
“Yes, ma’am, for three or four years now. Está muy feliz,” he added. “He’s very happy.” And then, looking at María, he said, “What are you, a cousin of his or something?”
Her face fell, her soul collapsed, her guajira pride felt offended. “No,” she told him. “I’m just an old amistad, that’s all.”
That night her performance suffered from the revelation; she was surprised by how that little bit of news crushed her. All María wanted to do as she shimmied mambo style across the stage at the center of a row of buxom dancers with half coconut shells covering her breasts was get home by taxi to her and Ignacio’s high-rise apartment on Calle 25 and, as was her recent habit, make herself a magnificent drink of fruit juice and dark Santiago a?ejo rum from the great mix of bottles that Ignacio, liking his drinks, kept in plentiful supply in a mirrored art deco bar in a sunny corner of their living room overlooking the sea. Her second thought, as she missed one of her marks and scrambled back to shake her hips when several male dancers were about to hoist her up in a watered down parody of a ritual to the thunder god Changó, was to make her way over to la Cucaracha, where she could take refuge with la se?ora Matilda and the whores whose high heels clicked along those stairways and halls as they went off with their twenty-minute consorts. Surely Violeta, who sometimes sat by la se?ora in the reception area, would take María into her arms and console her with advice: “Whatever ails you,” she had once told María, “just remember, men are swine and want only one thing, even the decent ones. But if you want to cheer yourself up, my love, just f*ck one of them and leave him so quickly he will be desolate.” (Violeta had laughed, and María shrugged.) Her third thought: wishing to God that she were somehow back in Pinar del Río, starting all over again: back in that campo, with her sister, Teresa, by her side—Teresa so alive!—and joining their papito on one of his excursions, guitar slung over his back, to a nearby farm. To be back there would have made her happy—at least she knew what each day would bring: the braying animals, the farmers in the fields, that wonderful waterfall, before her sister drowned…And then there was Nestor, disembodied by then, and reduced to two elements: his handsome, poetic face, and, she was ashamed to admit, his enormous pinga, sturdy as a branch.
Ay, mi amor, she thought over and over again, in a way she had not before, barely making her way through that evening’s show, entitled for the tourists A Night in Havana.
But how quickly things can change. On that same morning, after the finale of her last show, at about 4 a.m., while María was still feeling shocked about Nestor’s marriage, a tall and dapper Havana advertising executive, one Vincente Torres, the fellow who had hired her for the Pan American “Fly to Cuba” poster a few years before, made his way backstage to see her. Taking out a group of his American counterparts from New York to see her dance—they all worked for the same agency, Y & R—he had always admired María’s solemn beauty. Now and then when he’d come by the club, he’d ask her to join him for dinner, but she had never accepted, not even in the days when she had become a Y & R model. Still, his offers had always tempted her. He was handsome, like a Cuban Cary Grant, and though he wore a wedding band, there was something so mirthful and beguiling about his expressions that she found him intriguing. That night he never failed to take his eyes off María and stood up several times to applaud her, even when her performance had been lackadaisical; otherwise he just stared and stared and smiled, winking occasionally in such a jovial manner that María, having sunk into a depth of sadness she had not experienced since her papito died, enjoyed his attentions. In fact, when he went backstage after the show and found her sitting before her mirror, wiping away her running mascara, and asked María, for the hundredth time, if she wouldn’t mind joining him for a drink, she finally agreed; Ignacio was away.
So at four thirty in the morning they went by taxi to the Hotel Nacional, just in time to catch the final song by that evening’s cabaret performer. María, distracted, hardly heard anything that Vincente said to her. Accustomed to compliments, she could think only about Nestor’s deceitfulness: if she was his only love, why had he gotten married? Unsettled, and grateful to be in the company of a gentleman courteous in every way, María found it a natural thing, since she couldn’t have given a damn at that point about Nestor, to take an elevator upstairs and follow Vincente into his suite, whose windows overlooked the diamond-filled harbor. He had a stocked bar. He was charming.
After a few daiquiris, María, so estranged from her humble roots and sincerely taken by Vincente, his scent redolent of a lavender cologne, simply nodded when he, after praising her beauty, begged her to take off her clothes. And María, a little stunned but remembering what the whores of la Cucaracha had told her, first removed a pearl necklace that Ignacio in his largesse had given her (but left Nestor’s crucifix on). Then, after slipping off her dress and standing before the lucky Vincente in her brassiere and underpants, she put her hair up in a flourish over her head, and, as the whores had once taught her, she reached down and dipped her index finger inside herself and rubbed it over her mouth and behind her ears, and then, as Vincente, the brain behind the poster, out of his mind by then after one of her adamant kisses—a “Nestor kiss,” she would think of it—lay back on a bed, undid his trousers, and took out his enraged cubano penis, María attended to his ardor, grasping and suckling him until, with a shout—Mammee!—he doubled over with pleasure. That night María made this dapper fellow’s eyes roll up into his head over and over again. In addition to her captivating beauty and ravishing behavior, there were other ingredients: marijuana, morphine tablets, and cocaine, none of which María indulged in herself, but she did not mind when Vincente did, for they made him a ferocious lover.
Of course, afterwards, she felt low—like una tramposa to use one of her mother’s terms for the loose women of the countryside, a cheap tramp—but did she really care at that point? Not at all. In fact, there would be others to come along and help ease her pain in those days when she had become foolhardy and confused.
(What neither Ignacio nor even Nestor knew were the most hidden reasons María could be indifferent to the feelings of men. It came down to the way her beloved papito sometimes treated her. Not the beatings, or even the other extremes of pure affection, but that strange middle ground that, years later, left María feeling sickly inside, as if a miasma, or an infection, invaded her memories. Only once did she confide this to her daughter, during one of her late afternoon mojito/margarita-fueled chats; as if her educated daughter, by then a medical doctor, could come up with an explanation for her mother’s occasional improper behavior when she was a girl. You see, before her sister, Teresita, fell ill and they were verging on adolescence, she and María used to take naps with their papito on a hammock, the three entangled so peacefully that María easily drifted off to sleep, especially during an aguacero, a rain shower that drenched the forests and fields and sent the lizards scattering and cooled the air, which smelled of the most sweet and bitter scents—of rot and fecundity…. And sometimes she laid her head against his chest and listened to his powerful heartbeat while he shifted himself around and his palm rested upon her back or along the curves of her hips; and sometimes—maybe it was a dream—his hand massaged her belly, sometimes ambling downwards so that his knuckles dozed and the weight of his hand pressed against the coarse fabric of her dress, and then nothing more.
But once she had started undergoing her bodily changes and began to smell different to men, and things got crazy because of what had happened to Teresita—la pobrecita—there came that time when her papi asked her to share his hammock and she, feeling reluctant and physically cumbersome, obeyed but found that she couldn’t fall off to sleep the way she used to, after all he was pressing up against her back, and something fleshy and solid seemed to crawl up along the knobs of her spine. And maybe she imagined that his hand had wandered down below, his dense fingers parting the lips of her “special and most delicate flower,” María squirming, her papito asking “?Qué tenemos aquí?”—“What have we here?” At the same time, her papito’s breath smelled awful, of tobacco and aguardiente and beer, and, like a dream of her own future, she withdrew into herself while his fingers kept on touching her in places where they shouldn’t have, until María, feeling sick inside and sensing that something was very wrong, would finally tear herself away, a terrible shame following her…. It didn’t end there. Living in a place where the mothers regularly fondled the privates of their male children to ensure their virility, María couldn’t help but wonder if her papito was doing the same kind of thing with her, or maybe he was just curious. But after a while even she, an ignorant guajira, knew that it didn’t seem right for a papito, no matter how much he loved his daughter, to be doing that—and so, before it could get worse, she started to avoid him, refusing to join him on the hammock and feeling nervous whenever he had been drinking and called her to his side, a puzzled and sad expression upon his face when she refused, as if she had broken his heart…. )