Chapter THIRTY-FIVE
A year later—in December 1957—at about four in the morning, during a fierce downpour, as María left the Club Lantern and had been hurrying through an arcade towards the taxis parked in a row by that busy strip off Neptuno, she saw, or thought she saw through the shimmering cascades of that aguacero, which went rolling like misting walls or apparitions, Nestor, resplendent in a white silk suit, leaning up against a wall, smoking a cigarette. On his chest, radiantly glowing, the crucifix he always wore. But Nestor? How could that be? And yet there he stood, smiling sadly. Then it hit her: perhaps he had left his wife and children and had come to Havana to find her, or perhaps he’d come for professional reasons. It crossed her mind that he might have journeyed there to perform with his brother in one of the upscale venues like the Tropicana or the Sans Souci, but, in any case, he’d already broken her heart, bruised her ego, and sent her packing. And so when he waved, she got into a taxi, thinking, Que te vaya pa’ demonio!—May you go to the devil! and as he started slowly towards her, indifferent to the rain, she tapped the shoulder of the driver, who knew her from around, and told him: “Hurry, let’s go. ?Me oyes?” As they tore down the streets, in winds that rolled cans and bottles and rags along the cobblestones, María was both relieved and regretful that she hadn’t stopped to talk to Nestor—how hard-hearted she had become! But then, as they turned onto the Malecón Drive, waves flooding the causeway, and just as she was softening—what would a few moments of her time have cost her?—María swore that she saw Nestor Castillo standing by the seawall with his trumpet raised, impervious to the drenching rain, and not a few minutes later, blocks away, María saw him again on the corner of Calle 20, holding his hands out towards her, imploringly, an even sadder expression on his face. Naturally she had to ask the driver, “You see that fellow?” but it seemed he couldn’t hear her too clearly, for it had started thundering.
Later, upstairs in their harbor-side solar, as gales pummeled the windows, María got into bed beside Ignacio, who, under the influence of Rock Hudson, had taken to wearing silken pajamas. But she couldn’t sleep at first, not until she’d swallowed a few tablets of a medicine that many of the dancers, wired from their nights of performance, used to calm themselves, and these tablets, cousins of phenobarbital (which is to say barbiturates), when mixed with a glass of rum, could knock out an elephant, as they used to say. And so she eventually closed her eyes, but, no sooner had she done so than she smelled in that bedroom burning wires and rubber and gasoline, some part of a strange dream. When she buried herself in her pillows, she began to feel someone gently kissing her brow, her eyelids, and then her neck. And she heard a voice: María, María, why didn’t you forgive me? And with that, María just knew, in the way that superstitious people sometimes do, that Nestor Castillo, in the manner of the spirits of the campo, had come to visit her in Havana from the lands of the dead.
IT WAS SUCH A STRANGE THING THAT MARíA, IN THE LIGHT OF day, hardly believed it had really happened—perhaps that whole ride back from the club had been a dream—but within a few days, in Havana, amongst the musicians who had known the brothers, it became common knowledge that Nestor Castillo, the writer of that famous song, had, on that very night, perished in a highway accident up there in the north near New York. He had been driving a car back from a job during a snowfall, and, somewhere along those icy roads, he’d lost control and collided headlong into a tree, may God bless his soul. She almost lost her mind hearing that news—“please don’t tell me that’s the truth,” María cried on Gladys’s lap. But it was true. A few Havana newspapers had even carried a notice about him, and for weeks afterwards, when that bolero he wrote about her played over the radio, more than one broadcaster solemnly noted the loss of so young a talent, a fellow who knew his way with a song, and played the trumpet as if he were an angel.
Beside herself with that news, María finally opened the letters he had sent her; each breathed with Nestor’s soul. “If I could divide myself into two, I would be with you in Havana,” one of them said. “I know I hurt you, María, but don’t forget, it was you who hurt me first.” And, in another, he confessed that, as much as he loved María, he would never, never leave his wife, Delores. “She’s the mother of mis hijos, as beautiful as you, in her own way, and very kind to me, so please, María, don’t think badly of me.” And in each, he asked her forgiveness, just as his ghost had. Each mirrored the others. The last one he sent kept imploring her to write him. “I know you take pains to write a letter—but please, just write me a few words. It would make me feel less sad—and lonely. Can’t you, María?” It took her hours to go through the letters, to understand what some of his sentences meant, and in the end, it finally hit her that Nestor was gone from this world for good. And so, one night, she purged herself—vomiting often but also contorting on her bed—in misery over Nestor’s loss. What was it about life? How was it that the death of her first love, whom she never really took seriously when it counted, could affect her so? She didn’t know, but the fact that Nestor was gone from this world for good left her so unsettled that María, who rarely missed a night at the club, stayed home, weeping and weeping until she ran out of tears.