Chapter THIRTY-SIX
Thank God, as she would tell her daughter, that when Nestor died beautiful María had the consoling (false) distractions of her professional life and, for all his faults, a man like Ignacio to look after her. He’d even forgiven her for taking off to New York the way she abruptly did. (But why, he must have wondered, did she return in such a solemn mood?) In the year that María’s romantic dreams about Nestor ended, Ignacio, with his newly humbled manners and worming aches in his chest, had begun to bear the further physical indignities of discovering that, while the rest of him had slowly thickened, his wonderful head of hair, with its sea of crests and waves, had started to thin, to the point that he hated taking off his Panama hat in public and disliked it when María, with the slightest curl of a smile at the edge of her mouth, stared at him in a certain way.
Each evening, just as María headed out to the club, he’d attend to his special treatments, applying a botánica-bought remedy of ground bull testicles, dried donkey dung, and paraffin to his scalp. Afterwards he’d wear a hairnet night after night, until he couldn’t take that pomade’s barnyard odors anymore. On some evenings, when a few of his cronies came over to play cards or dominoes, he’d forgo that process until a very early hour of the morning, or not do it at all. Occasionally, however, in the throes of his own kind of vanity, when he was alone, he’d turn up the radio and spend an hour or so massaging his forehead and temples with some other miracle cure, turning from side to side to examine his profile and imagining his receding hairline, in his slightly shady businessman’s way, as proof of some distant affinity to Julius Caesar. (Or, in a moment of patriotic musings, José Martí, poet and father of Cuban independence in long gone days, another great man with a receding hairline, though of decidedly thinner bodily proportions.)
Finding the whole business rather amusing, María, feeling more magnanimously inclined, actually grew fonder of Ignacio and became more playful with him, especially in bed. Like a man who demanded his steak and tostones twice a week, Ignacio expected to romp with María, and on those occasions she took to treating that widening patch, hairless as a Chihuahua’s belly and reminiscent of a baby’s head, with a tenderness that even the bluntly disposed Ignacio found disarming. She played a game with him, pressing her breasts against his crown, her nipples always hardening, and loved to grind her luscious center against that dome until an even stranger thing happened: María, despite her loss of Nestor forever and forever, amen (except in her dreams), had started to come more easily with Ignacio, though some other memories—of clutching Nestor’s full head of hair as he lost himself while devouring her papáya, of his sweet pinga, may God rest his soul—often helped her along. In that regard, their relations improved, even while María still pursued her other acquaintances.
Ignacio himself, in addition to trying to reverse the processes of nature (eventually giving in, he’d settle for a pompadour wig which almost matched the color of his natural hair), wanting to improve things with María—so much a joy to his eyes that he just about abandoned his own wandering ways—decided to seek a further improvement to their life in bed and started subjecting himself to virility treatments at one of the sex clinics in Havana. These consisted of B12 infusions, administered intravenously, and injections of distilled water into the membranes of his penis, which revolutionized his amplitude in a manner he had never thought possible before. María, remembering the admonitions of the whores of la Cucaracha, on the occasion of the unveiling of his grander stature, gasped and shook her head incredulously, as if he were that fellow Superman from that bawdy show in one of the cocktail rooms of a bordello near the Shanghai which Ignacio had once taken her to with the mistaken notion of inspiring her lustfulness. To the contrary, Superman had nothing on her past love Nestor Castillo, may he rest in peace, one of those surprising facts that expressed itself in a recurring dream. (Set in the jungles of Africa, it was no doubt inspired by her memories of the Tarzan movies she and her sister used to take in at the Chaplin in San Jacinto. In this dream, she’d hear Tarzan’s yodeling cry from the distance, and since she always took on the role of Jane, María would find herself in a tattered leopard-skin dress, standing at the edge of a vast ravine, which she could cross only by sidling along the trunk of a massive fallen acacia tree, and every time she did, the valleys and rivers below would start rushing past her, and she’d have to get down on her belly, straddling that trunk, and slowly inch her way from one end to the other; somehow, that always made her think about Nestor.)
For her part, with a maternal yearning, María never let slip the ruinous notion that, for all her beauty, for all the life in the traffic-stopping bounce of her hips and nalgitas, she, at the ripening age of twenty-seven, might never have a child to love. Looking back, she’d think it foolish to have expected a pregnancy after a single final afternoon’s romp with the late Nestor, but what could account for the disappointment of her bouts with Ignacio, who, in those days, only wanted to make her happy? Not just mourning Nestor and what might have been between them, María managed to comport herself stoically, though, more and more, as she’d finish her last shows at the club, removing her makeup and, while gazing into the mirror, wondering Who am I? she’d almost dread the repetitiousness of her days. Yes, she enjoyed the occasional company of her fellow dancers, her visits with la se?ora Matilda and the whores of la Cucaracha, with whom she drank beer in the late afternoon even while supposedly watching her figure. During her jaunts with El caballero de París, who, murmuring his poetry as they walked about in Central Havana, noticed the somberness of her moods, she couldn’t help but withdraw into the darkness of her regrets. Her yearly journeys with Ignacio out to Pinar del Río didn’t help much either. She’d ask him to drive her into her beloved countryside, always on a Sunday, so that she might visit the simple graves of her family—which was hard enough to bear, their wooden markers seeming more rotted and overrun with vines each year, as if that fecund earth would one day swallow them up into obscurity for good. But then, despite her joy in breathing the unchanging air of that valle, in seeing again the kindly guajiros she had been raised with, so many of the other Marías and Juanitas and Isabels she had played with as a girl, poor and uneducated as they remained, had their own broods of children. Some, only four or five years older than herself, were already grandmothers.
They’d spend half the day going from shack to shack—she’d always bring along gifts, loving to show off her new prosperity. One of those new families was that of a sometime cane chopper who’d once looked her over with the sincerest longing at dances at the cervecería. He had married a woman named Amalia, and they, with their five children, had taken over the thatch-roofed house where María had once lived, that glorified shack, just a modest bohío with dirt floors, whose doorway exhaled the memories of her own irretrievable past. She had no quarrel with them—in fact, that family had her blessing to stay. Just taking a look inside from the doorway, not steps from where her papito used to sit with his cervezas and strum his guitar, and, quickly glancing through the room at the perpetual half-light in which she had been raised and the corners where, one by one, the two brothers she had never known, her mamá and Teresa and her papito had died, left María so breathless with melancholy that she suddenly understood the sadness she once saw in Nestor’s eyes.
By then, the continent of her religiosity had shrunk to the point that it sometimes carried no more weight than a butterfly’s, and yet, each time she visited the graves, saw the house, or went wandering along the trail into the forest, to la cueva, with its cascades, where she and Teresita used to go, María couldn’t keep herself from making the sign of the cross and kissing the palm of her hand, which she would then set down on each of the family markers, by the doorway of that house, and even on the trunk of the liana-wrapped, star-blossom-entangled trees, as if to seal the fact that she, in from Havana, had visited. And sometimes she’d take in the fields and forest, with its prosperity of birds, insects, and crawling lizards, those flowers that burst out in clusters everywhere, and wonder just what she had done to deserve such a lack of fecundity herself. They’d always stop at la cervecería, to say hello to the owner’s son, his papito having since died, but Ignacio never liked to stay for long, lest María fall into an even more solemn mood. It always took an effort to drag her away, and while they drove back, María, tending towards silence, fell into the anguish of having heard one person after the next inquiring as to whether she had some ni?os at home in Havana. Such visits always left her with the feeling that leaving her valle in the first place had not been such a good thing, and as they came closer to Havana and saw their first stretches of slums and municipal dumps, she’d half believe that it was that city itself, with its clubs and casinos, whorehouses and dirty-minded men, that had somehow affected her. Ignacio knew better than to get into an argument about that.
Even some of the girls at the club got pregnant despite taking precautions with the thickest of condoms, and that killed her too. Apparently her feelings of disgrace and disappointment, as if she had somehow betrayed her guajira roots, were so transparent that one of the powder room attendants at the club, yet another former flapper beauty or once-known dancer, advised María to put her trust in a well-known Havana diviner, a certain Mayita Dominguez, who ran a mystic santera’s parlor on Virtudes, and to go there when she was having her monthlies. There María submitted herself to the cures of San Lázaro, the healer and savior from death, and as a precaution she knelt before the diviner, who said special prayers to exorcise any curses. As Mayita put it, “A muchachita as beautiful as you must be wished ill by jealous women every day.” That visit left María feeling more hopeful than before, but for further assistance she went to church, reciting just-in-case prayers daily before the altar of the cathedral, where the spirit of her namesake, the Holy Mother, and that of Her Son and those of all the saints breathed and every porphyry, marble, and limestone surface exuded the promises of salvation. In the midst of such religious trappings—eternal life? why not?—María begged God to forgive her for any of her chicanery when it came to Nestor Castillo, to absolve her of the sins of vanity and of selfishness: therefore, with her newly pure soul, perhaps he would grant her wish to have a child.
“Mi hija,” she once told her daughter. “You have no notion of what a church can be. Back where I came from, in my valle, ours was just a little shack of pine-plank walls at the edge of a field with floors of pounded down dirt, and an altar that was nothing more than a lacquered pine table with a cross, a few feet high. There were no pews—we had to kneel on that dusty floor, or else just stand during the Mass. But you know what? It was a glorious thing for us to believe we were in the consecrated presence of the Lord. And even when I saw much nicer churches in Havana, every time I knelt down to pray, I always thought that the best church I had ever entered was the one I knew as a girl.”
It may have been a coincidence, but not a month after taking such measures, María missed her menses and, after a visit to an obstetrician, learned that God had indeed answered her prayers early in the new year of 1958.
THINGS ARE GIVEN, THINGS ARE TAKEN AWAY. JOYFUL THAT SHE carried within her the baby who would become her daughter, María had, at a certain hour of the day, gone to find her old friend Lázaro, seated as usual by his doorway. The last time she had visited him, about a month before, and not to resume her lessons with him but simply to see how he was faring, he’d refused María’s offer to take him to a doctor. Remaining in his courtyard abode, he had resigned himself to the slow and languishing waning of some old animal of the forest—“Just leave me alone and let me go with dignity,” he used to tell anyone who tried to help him. He treated María no differently, and though she could see fear in his eyes—which were wise and innocent in their way—he spoke, almost cheerfully, of the world to come: “I’m really not afraid. I just hope, if there’s reincarnation, that I come back as a cat—they get everything. That would make me happy!” he joked, slapping his knee before convulsing suddenly with a cough that made him lean his weary shoulder against the wall.
“Wherever I go,” Lázaro told her, recovering, “I hope you will think of me, María…. Think of old Lázaro every time you open a book and see what the words mean.”
“Maestro,” she tried one last time. “Why won’t you let me take you to the hospital?”
He just shook his head. “When you are my age, you’ll understand,” he told her. “When your dreams are nothing more than memories of earlier days, you’ll know what I am feeling.” Then he stretched out his bony hand so that María might help him get to his feet, and she followed him down the cooler hallway to the back door, which opened to the courtyard, to his little home, the place where he somehow had managed to sleep for years on nothing more than a blanket-covered mat. Whatever his malady, Lázaro couldn’t let her go without some heartening words. As she left him asking, “I will see you again soon, yes?” he nodded, smiled, and, surely suppressing another cough, told her, “Oh, you will, my dear girl, but I know one thing. Your life is going to be fine, with or without me.”
And that was all. She’d intended to return the next day, or the day after, until a week had gone by and that week had turned into the month of her happiness. Finally, with such good news to share with Lázaro, beautiful María had gone to see him again, but he was nowhere about. It was the bookseller who told her. “We just found him back there one day, sleeping for good.”
“Ay, por Dios,” she cried out, the misery of losing one of her finest friends in Havana, as if one more wonderful part of Cuba had vanished, in her voice.
“But he left something for you,” the bookseller told her, pulling from a carton the kinds of items that would soften anyone’s heart, even María’s. Two books of Cuban poetry, Lázaro’s own copies of the verses of the poets Plácido and José Martí. In one of them, he had scribbled: “To my favorite pupil, María, perhaps now I will finally see you dance!”
NOTHING COULD BE SAID OR DONE ABOUT LáZARO, EL POBRE. HIS death was inevitable; she had that touch, after all. Still, María enjoyed her felicitous state, despite its encumbrances, though she knew that, within a few months, once she started to show, she’d have to leave her dancing behind. But could María complain? After years of working here and there, she was tiring of that business: the hours, the ogling patrons, the late-night worries that someone somewhere would drag her into an alley and take advantage (at least two of the dancers at the Lantern carried straight razors in their purses because of what had once happened to them). The sore feet, the pulled tendons, the rehearsals, the pinches on the ass, and especially the dietary restrictions. Because she was still a guajira at heart, her mouth watered in the way she made men’s mouths water at the sight of her, but only over the sights and aromas of a crispy-skinned helping of suckling pork, with sides of sweet plátanos and rice and black beans. Now, at least, despite all the calories María burned nightly during the shows, she’d be free to eat whatever she liked: those delicious whipped-cream-topped lemon-and mango-flavored pastries with the maraschino cherries that always made her lick her lips when she passed the festive windows of De Leon’s bakery, three-and four-scoop bowls of ice cream at the Louvre parlor, and no end of the chocolate bonbons which club patrons were always sending her backstage, the sorts of sweets which she always reluctantly passed off to the other dancers for their kids. And now? She’d be free to fill her belly to her heart’s content, appreciating all the maternity ads she saw in the newspapers about comiendo por dos—eating for two. So what if María put on a few pounds?
The manner with which Ignacio looked at her had become more tender. It wouldn’t matter, at least for a while, if she stopped resembling a sex kitten à la a cubana Marilyn Monroe, whom half of the bombshell American lounge singers and dancers in Havana tried to emulate (when not mimicking Ava Gardner). Soon enough, she’d become a burgeoning mamacita with even more succulent breasts, her nipples distended and swollen. Lately, he had actually become more delicate about making love to her (now that Ignacio considered himself so much larger, thanks to his treatments, he entered her only from behind) and treated her tenderly, as if María, in her embarazada state, had become the most fragile creature in the world. That suited her fine. She lasted two months before the management at the Lantern started to notice her pregnancy, and, in any case, though María could have kept working as an assistant choreographer, after so much time spent under the lights, she welcomed the idea of becoming a se?ora of leisure, like the fine ladies at the department stores, with their maids following behind them, or the ones she used to see heading up the Malecón in their sedans to the yacht club (unfortunately, for all her beauty, her skin was of a color unacceptable to its members). And she would have time to further improve herself, to take up, as she had always wanted to, a pen in order to record, even with her lapses in spelling, some of the thoughts that came to her, in the spirit of what the décima singers and versifiers wrote (and that made her vaguely ache, thinking about her papito, Lázaro, and, yes, Nestor, the one she’d let get away).
As for that bolero? Nearly a year and a half after it had first reached Cuba, “Beautiful María of My Soul” still occasionally played over the radio, and it had become a minor standard of sorts, a part of street musicians’ repertoires. But now when she heard it, María no longer felt the melancholy that had come over her strongly in the months just after Nestor died. Hearing it made her feel somewhat proud for having been the inspiration behind that lovely tune. At the same time, it still provoked her to think about Nestor, something that, with a baby coming, she thought best to avoid. Besides, she had no room left for tears. With all the leisure hours she spent either strolling in the Parque Central or sunning herself at the playas where they used to romp, or alone in her high-rise apartment—yet not quite so alone, the little being forming inside of her keeping her company—María came up with what she considered a most generous notion. She’d write a letter of condolence to Nestor’s older brother Cesar Castillo. María knew his address—the brothers had lived in the same building on La Salle Street.
And so, in the same labored and careful manner in which she composed any note, María penned a respectful carta in her much practiced handwriting, conveying her immense sadness at having heard about Nestor’s passing—for she had loved him very much.
Believe me, Cesar, I wish it had turned out differently, but I am still so happy that at least Nestor and me were something for a time: and I am proud that he thought to compose that canción about me.
She described her state of impending motherhood and, while not lingering on it, ended on what María hoped would be a high note: “To you and Nestor’s family, I send my affection.”
It took her a few days to mail that carta off. She felt so confident about having done the right thing that, a few weeks later, when Cesar’s response arrived, María truly lamented her ability to read. Once she got around to deciphering its wild handwriting—so bad it was nearly illegible—this is what (she thought) it said:
Dear María—
With all due respect, f*ck you and f*ck everything about you for throwing my brother into hell—and f*ck yourself for even thinking that I can give a shit about your feelings, if you ever really had any for Nestor. Now that he’s dead, I want you to know that he suffered a lot of grief thinking about you. And don’t think he didn’t tell me about how you came up to New York to take him away from his wife and kids. Shame on you, woman! The poor innocent actually felt bad about sending you off to wherever whores like you go…. I know it because I had to live with him, and though I can’t prove it, something muy jodido got worse inside him after he saw you. He just wasn’t the same after that, and I have this feeling that, if it weren’t for you, he’d probably still be walking around now, taking care of his wife—a real lady, in case you didn’t know—and his fine kids, who I’ll have to look after now. As for your baby—felicitaciones!—I hope you give birth to a blind crocodile, because that’s what you deserve.
Sincerely yours,
Cesar Castillo