Chapter THREE
Having gone from hotel to hotel and boardinghouse to boardinghouse for most of that afternoon, she found the cheapest place possible. It was off Virtudes, or perhaps San Isidro, or maybe along one of those narrow winding cobblestone streets near the harbor—a place of such squalor that she’d one day get the shivers just thinking about it. A kindly anciana, la se?ora Matilda Díaz, of portly dimensions, was one of those gallegas whose skin had a yellow pallor from smoking cigarettes from dawn to dusk. With a mustiness that no amount of nicotine could cover, she took a liking to the young woman, an innocent from the countryside with obviously no experience of what living in a city like Havana was about. The men around there, muy suave, or real slick, were not to be believed or trusted.
“You should be careful,” she told María. “I was once as pretty as you, believe it or not. But, as you can see”—and she shrugged—“the passing of the years will wilt even the finest bloom.” Shortly, she took María to a room on the third floor which cost about a peseta a night, or a quarter, a rent that, even in 1947, would have been considered inexpensive (as opposed to two hundred and fifty dollars a night for a suite in the Italian port town of Portofino, where María and her daughter, by then a doctor, were to stay many years later). There wasn’t much to it, just a cot, a lamp, a chair, a washbasin, a speckled doorway mirror, with a toilet and shower down the hall—“Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t”—but, though far from being comfortable, at least it had a high doorway with shutters and a little balcony that looked out onto an inner courtyard and over to other similar rooms.
Used to the countryside, where everyone knew your business, María made nothing of the fact that right across the way she could see one of her neighbors, a lanky dissipated fellow with a wild pompadour and pronounced gut, standing on his balcony in only a pair of calzoncillos. Frying some bacalao over a hot plate, he whistled as soon as their eyes met. From another direction, a woman, obviously a whore, closing her shutters, sent María a kiss off the upturned palm of her hand before going inside to do whatever whores did. (María knew but didn’t let on, while the se?ora, well aware of the quality and livelihood of her tenants, simply shrugged again.)
Still, María took comfort in having neighbors and in the fact that she could at least open her windows to get a breath of air at night. But María, out on her own for the first time, and feeling frightened by the prospect of having to get along in a city she hardly knew, where she’d have to depend on strangers to help her get around—she was an analfabeta, an illiterate, after all—could barely work up the nerve to go out that evening. Just too much was going on—trolley cars clanging, cars honking horns, horses clip-clopping along, distant sirens blaring, radios sounding from a half dozen windows, voices chattering, a river of life out on the street. Coming from the sticks, she found herself feeling far more clueless than she, without knowing anyone, could have predicted. Por Dios, she even started missing that damned campo, where not much ever really happened, and her papito, who could be a pain in the culo, as well as the farmers and their animals; and she missed her younger sister, Teresita, and her mamá, who were both dead.
Lordy, it was a lonely place.
With her stomach queasy from hunger and her gum chewed down to nothing, all she could do was to go downstairs and ask the se?ora for something to eat. La se?ora Matilda was not a stingy woman, and cooked her a tortilla of potatoes and chorizo, but once María followed her into her little suite of rooms, the sight of the absolute filth of her kitchen did not do much for María’s appetite—no wonder, as she later learned, the tenants of that residence had nicknamed it the Hotel Cucaracha. Nevertheless, María thanked her for the meal, devouring it quickly, and, once upstairs, finally unpacked her few possessions: a precious hand mirror, a photograph, cracked and fading, of her mamá y papito on their wedding day years and years ago, a remnant of Teresita’s hair, which she kept in an envelope, along with a picture of them as girls, posed in a photography shop in San Jacinto, the town nearest to their valley, their faces pressed together, María beaming and Teresita showing not an inkling of the afflictions that would take her life. Among the superstitious charms and amulets that really don’t make any difference to the world, she had brought along the rosary that had been her mother’s. Of course, out of old habit, María, before turning in to bed, got down on her knees to pray, her whispers slipping out into the courtyard, from which she could hear many of her neighbors. They were either drunk and shouting or else singing, their voices rising into the night, up towards the sky, with its sprinkling of stars, towards the indifference of heaven.
FINDING A JOB AS A DANCER WAS NOTHING THAT SHE HAD GIVEN thought to, even if her papito had always told María that she was a natural rumbera. At first, it hadn’t entered her mind, but after a month in that city, as a resident of her splendid hotel, with all its chinches and cockroaches, all María had to show for her daily excursions, when she had knocked on every factory and warehouse door, were sore feet and a fanny whose nalgitas had been worn thin by the staring of men. Those habaneros, as she would tell her daughter one day, knew a good thing when they saw it, and being more overtly prone than the guajiros of the countryside, made no bones about letting on to María that she was nothing less than spectacular, as far as the female species goes. In fact, she spent several days toiling at a tobacco factory off Comerciales, another few as a seamstress in a clothing concern, and had found occasional work cleaning up after customers in a café three doors over from the hotel. Now, if she had been hired at all, in a city filled with illiterates looking for work—or else begging, pidiendo limosna—it was because, in the first two instances, those establishments were managed by men who wanted something more than her labors. At the end of the second day’s work, she ran out of the tobacco factory after the floor manager asked her to stay behind once the others had gone and, while pretending to teach her a special technique, pushed himself up against María and reached over to fondle her breast, the pig! The other boss, at the sewing factory, pinched her bottom every time he could, and, because she had her pride, María refused to take much more of that either. (That such a nice-looking man, who wore a medallion bearing an image of la Virgen de la Caridad, could do such a thing!) Her third job, in that little café, el Paraíso, really wasn’t bad. Its gangly, hound-faced proprietor, an older man with a hopelessly immense scrotum, hired María for a few hours a day simply because he recognized her look of hunger; for her troubles, he paid her a couple of reales and, as well, occasionally fried her a thin oxen steak with onions with some papas fritas, which she happily devoured despite that dish’s slightly rancid taste.
But as much as she appreciated his kindness, the dinginess of that café made her feel even more hopelessly lost and sadder than she had before. Something about standing in the doorway of such an establishment, a rag in hand, and peering down the narrow street, half lit by sunlight, with passersby, mostly men, slipping in and out of the shadows and brick or stucco walls in every direction she looked, made her feel wistful and heartsick for the more verdant spaces of her valle. And all the signage—hanging in shop windows, on banners slung across the street on wires, posters and pamphlets stuck on the walls—bewildered María, a sense of stupidity and ignorance churning in her belly. Having no idea of what that café owner wrote in chalk on a slate board behind his counter, left María wishing that all such words would go away. For all her gorgeous looks—Sí, mamá, you’ve told me so a million times before—she envied the brilliant winged birds of the forest back home, who, flying so happily through life, seemed free from such confusions. There in Havana, where every written word seemed a mystery, María’s illiteracy hit her in ways it never had in the countryside.
At least the proprietor of that hole-in-the-wall café never tried anything, but with so little money in her pocket, and having used up the remainder of her paltry savings, she’d head back to la Cucaracha fearful that, because she was falling behind on the rent, her landlady might evict her. After a while she started to pay for her room by cleaning up the place—mopping the halls, scrubbing its toilets, and sweeping out its musty entranceway. Watching life in that hotel unfolding around her, she became aware of all the comings and goings of la Cucaracha’s tenants, especially the professional women who took men up the stairs in the late hours of the afternoon into the night. One of them, a redheaded whore, always winked at María sweetly. On those evenings, terrified to go out by herself—even in the countryside in Pinar del Río nights always made her a little fearful—she’d pass the time sitting on a bench in the reception area, listening to radio melodramas with la se?ora, and nice music, by way of live concerts broadcast by CMQ. A musty bladed fan turning overhead, and moths dissolving into dust in the buzzing ceiling lights, they’d converse, Matilda, a widow, recalling the promise of her youth when she fell in love with the man she eventually married, a simple shoemaker from a town called Cárdenas, who died in her arms at the very foot of the staircase after a fall.
“And what is it that you’d like to do?” she asked María, and because María never gave an answer, la se?ora shook her head disapprovingly. “You should make up your mind, or else find a good man to marry.”
Languishing there in boredom, María was in her room one evening, examining her naked body, smooth and stately and curvaceous in a full-length mirror, something which she’d never had the opportunity to do in the countryside, where the only espejo they had, hanging off a post outside their bohío, was the broken one, the size of a man’s palm, before which her papito shaved himself every third morning. But there she stood, a gorgeous apparition of cinnamon-colored flesh, with breasts so perfectly shaped that even she found their symmetry startling, her nipples dark as raspberries, a shock of black hair, dense as a crow’s nest, shooting out from between her long legs. Surprised by her own grace and voluptuousness, and stepping one way and the other, María had to admit that she looked pretty good, better than she could have imagined. And the mirror? If that mirror were a man, it would have been salivating; if it were a carpet it would have taken flight; if it had been a pile of wood it would have burst into flame, so lovely was María. Of course, she forgot that people could look inside—and, turning, glimpsed her across-the-courtyard neighbor, the fellow with the pompadour, out on his balcón, doing something to himself frantically, a cigarette burning between his lips, his face wincing in ecstasy as she hurriedly closed the shutters.
She came to a decision: seeing that men wanted certain things from a woman like her and that she hadn’t had much luck with finding jobs of a normal sort, María became resigned to taking another route, as so many young girls had before her. And that was to entangle herself in the labyrinthine nightlife of Havana, for which the city was famous.
Oh, if she’d only known just how seedy that could be.
Pero, Mami, didn’t you always tell me how terrible you felt about being alive when your beloved sister, my aunt Teresa, was dead? Didn’t you tell me, after you’d been drinking those Cuba Libres, that you really didn’t give much of a damn about yourself? That even the way you looked seemed a curse to you sometimes, as much as you ride me about my own?…