Chapter TWENTY-NINE
Some five months later, María happened to be walking along Obispo in the aftermath of a terrible argument with Ignacio. Lately, he had started to accuse her of becoming sexually indifferent to him, while she in turn, without actually coming out and saying so, suspected that he wasn’t virile enough to give her a child, despite the fact that he claimed to have once fathered a daughter that he lost. And even that loss she had come to doubt—he seemed to spend too much time away in Florida, and more than once she had come across letters tucked away in the soft inner pockets of his maletas, his suitcases, letters that she did not have the gumption to read but that seemed on the evidence of the handwriting on the envelopes to have been scripted by a woman; and so, she had come to believe that Ignacio, like so many other Cuban men of a certain age who had taken up with a younger woman, had a family hidden away somewhere. Nevertheless, just to talk about that supposed loss brought out his soft side, though it wasn’t much in evidence those days. With a life that had become more difficult because of what his Hoy horoscope described as the “mounting influence of unseen contrary forces,” his business, once booming in the provinces, had gone into a decline on account of what the government had classified as lapses of security, given that rebels far east in Oriente regularly came down from the hills to loot his trucks as they were en route to the cities and small towns of that province. Nor had that store, El Emporio, proved to be anything but a siphon on his income, though Ignacio did enjoy the air of respectability it gave him. Other matters disturbed Ignacio as well. His chest hair had turned white overnight, and his ticker began to ache. Visiting a clinic, not for anti-impotency and venereal disease treatments, or to experience the wonder cures of acupunctura as advertised in the directorio telefónico de la Habana, he began seeing a certain Doctor Cintron, who found Ignacio, with that wormy vein on his forehead, one of the more tense patients he had ever encountered, his blood pressure in a range that defied his bulb-pumped esfigmomanómetro’s capability to measure.
The doctor’s advice? “Calm down, or you’ll drop dead one day.”
But at this, he often failed. While he still liked to blaze through the crowds of Havana with beautiful María on his arm, Ignacio had started to notice how he couldn’t lord it over her the way he used to. More than once he’d seen her looking over his Spanish editions of Shakespeare and had noted her own growing collection of books—frivolous novels written in simple language for women of a certain frame of mind, but books nevertheless: so that negrito Lázaro was worth something after all! And her sweetness had begun to fall away, for he found that it did not take too much for him to perturb her, that María often complained about being cooped up in that apartment, that she sometimes wished she’d never left Pinar del Río, that she lived a life no better than her snippy parrots in their cages. And even that would have been fine except for the fact that Ignacio had begun to suspect that María had someone else. This, as it happened, was true.
That fellow from Y & R had been the first—their little trysts taking place in his fancy suite at the Nacional every so often. He certainly was as handsome as Nestor, though he lacked that soulfulness, which she missed, among other things, and he was so good to her that María might have taken up with Vincente openly were it not for the fact that Ignacio would probably have killed him (and her), and, in any case, she knew he had his own nice family in New York City, just like Nestor, that cabrón. And once María had learned to conceal her feelings, she also took up with a young teller at the bank where she kept her savings, another handsome fellow whose curly hair, soothing eyes, and fortunate endowment reminded her (almost) of Nestor, their liaisons taking place between seven and eight in the evening out in a house on one of the hills overlooking Havana, not far from the university, where this young man’s deaf aunt lived, hardly aware of the raucously loud acts that made her hounds bark. A third lover, a so-called Spanish count—el conde—whom María had met at the Lantern and slept with in his modestly appointed room at the Ambos Mundos Hotel, with its view of the cathedral (of which she had been quite aware and actually enjoyed, as if God lingered somewhere in the distance, though not as close to her as He used to). She did so with her legs spread wide, then closing them tightly as he approached, taunting him, simply because María enjoyed the idea that a former guajira, whose papito shat with the outhouse door open, could make so lofty and pretentious a personage beg to kiss her fine and shapely rump. Those were just a few, with more to follow in her remaining years in Havana—Violeta’s influence and her own suspicion that goodness wasn’t worth much of anything had a lot to do with the way she now moved through her days (or nights); or, to put it differently, María, as the line of a bolero might go, had lately been stripped of her illusions. Having traded love, if that’s what it was, for comfort, she had hardened inside, and Dios, the savior of mankind, does not thrive in such hearts, not even that of a rather beautiful woman; rather He slowly dies.
And what could Ignacio make of María when she kept grinding her hips in the air, moaning as she slept? Who was she dreaming about? He had her followed, just as he once did with Nestor, by one of his more dissolute and shifty cronies, a fellow named Paco, with a crooked spine and a tendency to drink his way, affably, through half the bars and cafés of Havana. He’d take off behind María when she slipped out of the club or left the apartment building and, in the manner of bad 1940s detective movies, spy on her from the shadows as she entered certain doorways or happened to meet one of those fellows on a street corner or in an arcade. Fortunately for María, the disorder of Paco’s mind left him with only the vaguest of memories of her doings. Nevertheless, the very suspicion deeply wounded Ignacio. Over the past year, in one of the more unfortunate turnarounds in his life, he had, while feeling his age—he was somewhere in his late forties by then—actually convinced himself that he had finally and truthfully fallen in love with her, or with her youth and beauty. He made this recent discovery while carousing with other women—among them his shop clerks, market girls, and prostitutes; no matter how voluptuous their bodies, or lovely their faces, or free spirited and unrestrained their voraciousness in bed (or no matter their fear of him), Ignacio found himself thinking about María ruefully, in the same way that she, in the midst of her fleeting love affairs, could not keep herself from wishing that, truth be told, she hadn’t looked down on Nestor, in whom, perhaps, she sometimes saw her own papito.
By then María would often withdraw into a shell of silence, refusing to as much as look him in the eye and never answering Ignacio when he demanded to know why she couldn’t show him love the way she used to; and she simply shrugged when he’d accuse her of being obviously enamored of someone else. Denying everything, once her patience had worn thin, she’d behave as a man would, shoving her indifference into his possessive face, her response coming down to a few words: “And if I did, ?Y qué?”—“So what?”
Over the past few months, frightened by the prospect of his own mortality, he’d proposed to María a half dozen times, and on each occasion she told him that she’d marry Ignacio only if she carried his baby. To say the least, in that department, he had been failing lately, his enervating maladies affecting his potency in such a manner that, when he visited his whores, he had to be content with the kind of languorous, time-wasting bouts of love that would have driven him crazy with impatience as a younger man. In other words, he now found it a chore getting it up.
“Who are you, Ignacio, to tell me anything when you can’t even satisfy me?” she’d asked him that afternoon.
It was very sad, and her coldness alone half tempted Ignacio to forget about María altogether, maybe even teach her a lesson (but he wasn’t that cruel, not anywhere as mean-spirited as some of his acquaintances, fellow businessmen of a rough demeanor who might have slashed her face just to spite her). He just couldn’t. In her beauty, and in his memories of what she once had been, and because of his unsteady health—even then as they walked in the arcade, his heart had begun aching and he had felt his loins constricting, along with his gut—he was willing to forgive her everything. María, that delicious beauty, so well dressed in the clothes he had bought her in stores like El Encanto; María, a former hick from a backwards, nothing valle, who had become a modest star of second-tier nightclubs, may have turned into something of a spoiled and temperamental bitch, but he had come to cherish her anyway. Her insults, her stillness, the embarrassment of putting up with passersby, who, seeing her face, on the verge of tears and contorting with pain as they crossed the street, judged him harshly—“Hey you, mind your own business!” he would call out—Ignacio thought best to forget. That afternoon, in the interest of preserving his health and dignity, Ignacio, his breathing labored, decided that it would be a waste of his time to argue with her, and in the face-saving manner of cubano machos, who may or may not have been petty gangsters, he managed to pull her close and, with a firm tug of her body against his own, his hand grasping her right buttock through her dress, kissed her neck and said: “I will see you later, huh?” And with that he went off and left María to go about her business.
MARíA WAS ON HER WAY TO SEE LáZARO ON HER OLD STREET, THE market teeming as usual (how she still loved strolling about its stalls), when she happened to pass by a certain Flor de Saturno’s barbershop, opened to the narrow pavement, its tile floors covered with clumps of hair trembling ever so slightly in the fan air of the room, that shop’s interior redolent of musk and lilac scents and cigars, the barber snipping away with his scissors and whistling. Just then, from its cream-colored radio, in all its glory, came the unmistakable voices of Cesar and Nestor Castillo, their tremulous baritone harmonies, stopping María in her tracks. It was the first time she’d ever heard one of their records being played over the air. The melody seemed vaguely familiar, like something she’d listened to before, though surely different, like a cousin of one of those sad yet impassioned songs of love that Nestor, in happier times, had serenaded into her window, hummed into her ears, sang between his kisses from nipple to nipple and quivering tendon to tendon, and in those moments of joy when, declaring that nothing in life made him happier than to look into her eyes, he had whispered, then sung some bit of poetry before jamming himself more deeply into her. But could it really be him? As she stood by that doorway, the barber and his customers all bade her to come in. But María remained outside, catching a verse that went:
Qué dolor delicioso
El amor me ha traído
En la forma de una mujer…
Mi tormento y mi éxtasis…
Bella María de mi Alma…
María, mi vida
(Or in English:
What delicious pain
Love had brought to me
In the form of a woman.
My torment and ecstasy,
Beautiful María of my soul…
María, my life…)
Just as she was about to lean in and ask the barbershop fellows if they happened to know whose recording was playing on the radio, an announcer came on and dispelled all of her doubts: “You’ve just heard Cesar Castillo y los Reyes del Mambo, an orchestra out of Nueva York, performing ‘La bella María de mi alma!’” And that threw María into such a state of distraction that, when she finally sat with Lázaro, who had not been feeling well lately, she could hardly pay attention to her lesson.
“What is it with you today?” he asked her, his voice raspy from a cough that had been plaguing him for months. María had kept looking off, as if she expected Nestor Castillo to come walking down the street.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you remember that músico I once knew?”
“The nice fellow? Sure, what about him?”
“He was always promising to write a song about me, but I never believed it would come to anything. But, just now I heard him on the radio, over CMQ, singing a bolero called ‘La bella María de mi alma.’”
“And you’re sure it’s by him?”
“Yes. It’s his voice,” she said.
“But that should make you happy, huh?” he said, rapping his knee. “Why the long face then, mi vida?”
“Because of the lyrics, Lázaro,” she said, shaking her head. “He calls me his ‘torment and ecstasy’—and cruel, as if I had ever wanted to break his heart.”
Lázaro just smiled, shaking his head. “Oh, youth,” he began. “Don’t you know that most boleros are that way? There’s always heartbreak in them, been that way since the tradition started, way back when. I’m sure that fellow—What was his name?”
“Nestor Castillo,” she said.
“I’m sure that he’s just following that tradition, that’s all. I wouldn’t take it too hard. Unless, of course, you are still harboring feelings for him.” He smiled. “Are you?”
“Some,” she finally admitted. “But, Lázaro, I never wanted to hurt that man, the way he says in that bolero.”
“Ah, you should just feel flattered anyway,” he told her. “However things turned out between you two, he wouldn’t have written that song to spite you. No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I haven’t heard it, but I’m sure he did it out of love—you know those músicos are just that way.” Then, deciding that to continue their lesson was pointless, Lázaro, with a blood-and-spittle-dampened handkerchief dangling from his trouser pocket, held out his hand to María so that she could help him up and into the courtyard and the hovel in which he humbly lived.
That, in any event, is what took place at about three thirty in the afternoon, in the spring of 1956.
FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, MARíA HEARD THAT SONG EVERYWHERE. It played out of the windows and doorways of buildings, echoed in the courtyards, blared from car radios and bodega entrances, and from speakers over the doors of record shops all over Havana. Out at la playita with some dancer friends, where she enjoyed being free from the company of men, a sidewalk band had added “La bella María de mi alma” to its repertoire, and soon enough she heard “Beautiful María” being performed by arcade musicians and lounge pianists in the palm courts of hotels all over the city. Suddenly, “el exito nuevo de los fabulosos Reyes del Mambo”—or the “newest hit by the fabulous Mambo Kings,” as the radio announcers were calling it—was inescapable. Its melody drifted, in disembodied harmonies, into the Havana night from the prows of casino and cruise ships as they crossed the horizon; and even at the Lantern, the house band had worked up a rendition. Soon enough she got to the point that she’d hear its chorus in the whistle calls that followed her as she’d stroll down the street, in the chirping of sparrows along the Prado, and even in the tremulous clarion of church bells. Altogether she heard “Beautiful María of My Soul” so often in those days that she sometimes thought herself inside a crazy dream.
FOR HIS PART, NESTOR SENT HER A COPY OF THE NEWLY PRESSED long-playing 331/3 rpm album, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, on which that bolero was included. The cover was nothing special—done up in the style of 1950s jackets out of New York, Nestor playing a trumpet while Cesar banged on a conga drum, the two of them, she had to admit as she sat before her dressing room mirror, looking handsome and dapper in their white silk suits as they stood posing against the backdrop of some art director’s abstracted notion of a New York skyline, a flurry of quarter notes raining down around them. He’d also included a glossy head shot of himself, sort of like the ones María had made up of herself to promote her act, Nestor appearing, much like a star, hair and eyes and teeth gleaming with vitality, a smile on his face and a halo of light emanating from his head (in the same way that photographers showed that rebel leader Castro off in the mountains of Oriente at the time in magazines). Having never sent her such a self-promoting photograph before, nor looking so gloriously handsome, he might have seemed to have lost his humility were it not for the carefully rendered and rather self-effacing nature of his inscription, which said: “Para la bella María de mi alma…mi inspiración…. Te debo todo, con todo mi amor, Nestor Castillo.”
“…To my inspiration…. I owe you everything, with all my love…”
María’s thoughts in those moments at the club? Pleased that she could now read without too much of a struggle—if he only knew!—and amazed to think that Nestor, ese pobre, really seemed to be making something of himself in America. Suddenly, she couldn’t keep herself from coming to the conclusion that Nestor Castillo, whose letters had been fewer and farther between, had become a success after all, instead of just another lost musician soul. And the song itself? The more she heard its sad but moving melody, the more María believed that Nestor still loved her. The letters he had written her were one thing, but this canción, no matter how cruelly its letras portrayed María, was nothing less than a public declaration of his undying love for her.
She imagined him in far-off Nueva York, with money in his pockets, pining away for her. She imagined that this recording was selling like crazy, a feeling that grew stronger when a musician friend, who often traveled to the States, told María that the song had been introduced to the vast American public on a very popular television show there, a program that, in fact, was broadcast in English, but with Spanish subtitles, on the CBS affiliate in Havana, Yo Amo A Lucy, whose star happened to be Cuban, a real success, by the name of Desiderio Arnaz, a fellow originally from Santiago. Even if the show-business people of María’s acquaintance didn’t watch it, the fact remained that her sweet country boy and former amante, with all his dreams and illusions, had no doubt become famous in his new país.
With the record he had sent along a letter “written with tears of regret,” professing that, no matter how his life might change, he still couldn’t forget how much he had loved her. She was, after all, the sum of his happiest memories of Havana, and perhaps of Cuba itself. Not a day had passed, he confessed, when he didn’t think about the life they might have had in Cuba had things not turned out so differently, the sadness of that song something he had carried in his heart from the day she left him. She must have gone over that letter a half dozen times, and with each careful reading, María came to the same conclusion: Nestor still loved her, and she, María García y Cifuentes, in her own unhappiness, owed it to herself—and certainly to Nestor, for the sake of their future and of “destiny,” as he might have put it—to make things right, to do what she—persuaded that what she had always felt for Nestor was love—never had had the inclination to carry out before. This, María decided as she got ready to go onstage that night, would involve a journey to New York.