Beautiful Maria of My Soul (13 page)

Later, when Nestor had returned, Cesar ordered more drinks and, downing his rum with one swallow, slapped Nestor’s shoulder. “Brother, why don’t you take the rest of the night off? There are plenty of musicians around here to fill in for you.” Then he winked at Nestor, traipsed off rather swaggeringly, and went back onstage.

Thereafter commenced their usual problems; María, alone with Nestor, really didn’t have much to say to him. Not that she had much to say to anyone in those days, but with Nestor silence was more the rule, except when he would pull out his notebook and recite some of his newly composed verses, which she admittedly liked, despite the way they confounded her. In fact, sometimes at night, when she’d come home from the club, her feet blistered, and she had the peace of mind to think about her week’s lessons with Lázaro, María found herself daring to think in verse herself. If only she could write them down…What those verses tended towards surprised her—her holy trinity: God, love, and death—even if they resided mainly inside her head, but she owed them to Nestor’s inspiration.

With the bar’s lights shining on the stage, Cesar Castillo said a few words into a pitifully sad, often muffled microphone—they had borrowed it from someone’s tape recorder and plugged it into a little RCA amplifier. Then he launched, for Nestor and María’s sake, into
“Juventud”
by Ernesto Lecuona, an old bolero about how youth is but a fleeting thing, which makes everyone, no matter his or her age, entangle in a tight embrace. Taking María by the hand, Nestor led her out onto the floor. She’d laugh (and curse) the fact one day, but it didn’t take more than the touch of her body against his to excite him—excite them both. With Nestor leaning his handsome face against hers, whispering endearments, like clockwork, from deep inside his trousers rose, as surely as Christ, that which jostled her thighs in the darkness and kissed her belly button through the fabric. (
“Ay, pero María, María,”
he kept whispering.)

The sensation brought to mind the first verse she had ever composed in secret but did not know how to write down.

AFTERWARDS, STEALING AWAY, THEY SAT BY THE WATERSIDE
, surrounded by an aureole of gnats, and as the moon, brilliant as God, looked down on them, Nestor told her about two new songs he had written: “One is called
‘Danzón de los negros,’
the other
‘Perla de mi corazón,’
which is really about you María…” As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he sang one of its lines: “Our love is a weeping ocean, whose tears become the loveliest of jewels.”

“I haven’t gotten it all worked out, María, but I know I will, in the same way I know that we are destined to be together.” Happily he looked up at the sky. “That my brother Cesar likes you very much is really wonderful, María.” Then: “Don’t you know I can’t wait for the day when we will be a family?” With that, taking hold of María’s hand, he swore that he would do anything for her and broached the question he had been asking her for months each time they met: “María, have you considered your answer? Will you become my wife?”

She sighed, looked away, and as the lyrics to a song, a chorus part that went
“Y lo aprendí!”—
“And I found out!”—came from the club,
María, tears in her eyes, told him, “Nestor, please forgive me, but I can’t, my love.”

“But why?” His face was contorted with anguish.

“Nestor, I just don’t want to be a poor woman all my life.”

“And if I were to make something of myself?”

“Oh, but
hombre,
you dream too much.”

And then, in the most kindly way, she kissed Nestor on his lips. “Forgive me,
amor,
” she asked him again, his head bowed, eyes filled with disbelief, on that night, long ago, by the sea.

O
h, but it wasn’t easy; she had grown fond of that
músico.
Out of pity, for every time she saw him, he seemed so forlorn, María continued to take Nestor to her bed, and, swearing to herself that it would be their last romp, each time they made love she gave herself to him as if there would be no tomorrow. Along the way, his creative side penetrated María almost as deeply as did his other parts.

In her moments alone, at the club or in her
solar
or while just finding some quiet spot in el Parque Central (well, for María there was really no such place in public, as she always attracted men to her), his words flowed into her head:

Still, it wasn’t enough.

And in the meantime, Ignacio had started to look after her again.

THOUGH SHE HAD REMAINED TORN ABOUT NESTOR, IT ALL CAME
down to Ignacio’s automobile. One afternoon, a
camionero,
a truck driver, in from Pinar del Río, arrived at her
solar
with
noticias malas
—bad news—from that horrid woman Olivia, the only way she ever heard from her family in those days. Sweating and half out of breath, this truck driver was practically in tears, for he knew her
papito
from that crossroads place where he performed sometimes.
“Tu papá no está bien”—
“He isn’t well,” he told her. What had happened? During a sudden lightning storm a few days before, the horse her
papito
had been riding across a field had stumbled into a ditch, and he was thrown headfirst against a tree, so many of his bones and internal organs punctured or broken that it was likely he would die. Receiving that sad information on a Friday, just before she was to go into rehearsals for a new show, what else could María do but seek out Ignacio, who had an automobile, and beg him to drive her out to see her
papito
before it would be too late?

Ignacio, for his part, had his own plans, but, of course, when María called him later from the Nocturne, he dropped everything, and by eleven the next morning, he had picked María up for their drive into the countryside, hours away from the city. When they arrived at her beloved
valle,
the forests and fields were damp from rain, and as María, trudging
through the mud, rushed to his bedside, her
papito
seemed, indeed, to be dying. A doctor from town had been attending to him. Stretched out on a cot and wrapped up with bandages, her poor
guajiro papito
could barely breathe. His internal organs too damaged to repair, he had fallen into the delirium of a fever. She did not leave his side that entire day, or the next; out of habit, she prayed over him, prayed until he finally heard her voice and opened his eyes. Smiling, as Manolo took hold of her hand and said,
“Ay, María, por favor pórtate bien,”
and then,
“Y ya está”—
“Now here it is,” all María could think was this:
Once he’s gone, everyone I have ever loved will have died.

Then, while birds were chirping away outside the
bohío,
he drifted off into a sleep from which he would never awaken.

She was nineteen years old.

He’d passed away at ten in the morning, and, looking back, what she would be most grateful for was how Ignacio Fuentes had kept his head about the whole business. It was Ignacio who went to San Jacinto that same day to arrange for a proper funeral, Ignacio who paid for the coffin and organized the locals for the burial processional to the local
campo santo,
that cemetery of soon to be forgotten souls; Ignacio who had paid for a funeral feast; Ignacio who had been a pillar of strength for María. And for that alone María felt a sincere gratitude toward him, no matter his faults, and swore that, whatever her desires for that
músico,
she would put Nestor Castillo from her mind.

What would it matter? Her life had become a kind of a dancer’s purgatory by then anyway.

A
nd Nestor? Unable to accept María’s decision, he sent her notes nearly daily. Naturally they piled up beside her bed, unread, and when he turned up at her
solar,
whatever hour of the day, she was rarely at home. (By then, María had started to spend more and more time with Ignacio at a house he had bought just outside Havana, along the sea.) At her shows, Nestor became such a distraction that María had to ask Eliseo, the club bouncer, to turn him away at the door, and when she left through the backstage exit at four in the morning, María, head covered by a veil, came to dread the inevitable moment when she encountered Nestor on the street. He’d beg her to just sit with him for a few moments, to hear him out—there were so many things he had to tell her—but she couldn’t because, deep down, she knew what it would lead to. It got to the point that Ignacio himself had to wait for her; failing that, he’d send along one or two of his men to accompany her.

Bodyguards.

By then, María, looking the other way, had come to accept the notion that Ignacio, as her fellow dancers had gossiped all along, happened to be a gangster. It made no difference to her; he had to earn a living after all, and since when had life been good to that man in the first place? Still, she drew lines. Once when Nestor started to get out of hand and Ignacio, as tenderly as possible, suggested that one or two of his colleagues have a “serious talk with the
músico,”
María, not so entirely cold, told him: “Hurt that
joven,
and I will never let you touch me again.” So they put up with a lot, especially at night, when Nestor followed behind her and played his trumpet, not dreaming melodies but mocking horse race reveil
les. And sometimes, having lost his mind, his voice echoing in the arcades, he’d scream that she was nothing more than some impotent’s whore! All this Ignacio, with enormous patience, ignored; for María, however, it became too much, and she went through days when she wished that Nestor had never come into her life at all.

For months, Nestor continued to sweetly torment her (no, it wasn’t easy) until there came the day when Ignacio, a bookish and, therefore, crafty fellow, seized upon a certain idea. From conversations with María, he had learned a central fact about the brothers’ lives: that the older and vainer one, Cesar Castillo, had ambitions about going to New York, a city Ignacio knew well, having his own cousins there as well as friends in the nightclub and appliance businesses. So why wouldn’t Ignacio have several of his colleagues, surveying the streets in their dark Oldsmobile, bring Cesar down to his office in the harbor, which was just a cluttered and stuffy windowless room off a loading dock, to discuss certain possibilities, the main one being that Ignacio, in his open-minded benevolence and wishing only the best for María, would pay Cesar five hundred dollars to get the hell out of Havana with his brother.

And not just out of Havana, but to a place they wanted to go to anyway: New York. What happened? As Ignacio, flavoring the tip of a cigar in a gimlet of Carlos V brandy, told María some days later: “Once I made the offer, that pretty boy
macho,
who had walked in wanting to knock my block off, became very friendly and grateful. We got a little drunk together, and, in fact, by the time he left, if we hadn’t hated each other so much in the first place, we might have ended up good friends.”

Nestor, however, never really wanted to leave and became so mournful about losing María that Cesar was sorely tempted to make the journey without him. But he dragged Nestor along, and his brother, that poor lost soul
(or, as María would put it one day, the darling sweet
pobrecito
who deserved every bit of her love)
stepped onto a Pan American Clipper to Miami only after being fortified by a night in the whorehouses, a quart of
añejo
rum, and the assurance that Cesar would beat him to death if he didn’t.

In the meantime, as much as she had felt relieved to hear about
Nestor’s departure, María, sitting with Ignacio in an outdoor café along the Prado, could barely wait for the moment when she might be alone again. Christ forgive her, Nestor was the one she thought about now when touching herself, her memories of his fevered masculinity staying with her no matter how cruelly she had treated him.

ON THEIR LAST AFTERNOON TOGETHER IN HAVANA, SPENT IN A
dingy hotel room by the harbor, Nestor, sipping rum from a pint bottle, presented her with gifts. Stretched out on that bed, he had reached over to the end table for a box, his body damp with sweat.

“I have some things for you, María,” he told her.

The first was a thin necklace, of fading gold, off which hung a little tarnished silver crucifix, the weight of a peseta.

“It’s the same one I wore as a child, when I thought I was going to die. I feel it should be yours,” he told her. “Wear it for me.”

Gratefully, she put that crucifix and chain around her neck, and with that Nestor began fondling her. But no, she stopped him, pulling his hands away from her.
“No puedo,”
she said. “I can’t.” But what could she do that afternoon when, happy as a child, he got up and retrieved an envelope from his trousers pocket; it contained a dozen black-and-white photographs, the sort with serrated edges that had been taken here and there in Havana, by friends or passersby. Nestor and María posed by a table, surrounded by flowers in the back garden of a café called Ofelia’s, Nestor and María holding hands in front of the marquee of the America movie house, after taking in a Humphrey Bogart double feature, a look of hopefulness and affection on each of their faces. She was truly touched, almost felt like bursting into tears over the decision she had already made but wasn’t too good at carrying out.

“Son bonitos”
—“They’re pretty,” she told him.

“But look at these. Remember the
playa
at Cojímar?”

They were fine photographs of them frolicking in the waves a few months before, the sorts one would always cherish, even if they were a
little blurred: Nestor, eternally handsome with his penetrating gaze, and beautiful María in her clinging bathing suit rising out of the sea like a goddess.

“You see how happy we are, María? How much we are in love!”

“Oh, Nestor,” she said to him. “Why are you so sentimental?”

“I just want to make you happy,” he said, pulling her close. “There are so many things I want to do for you!”

This time, when the kisses started up again, she didn’t resist—it was much easier to go along with that form of speaking than to say any actual words, especially when hers would only be so hurtful. Soon enough that crucifix, dangling from her neck, was pinching Nestor’s thing as he, straddling María with his knees, availed himself of her breasts’ plumpness. Oh, but what that crucifix witnessed! Perhaps because she thought that it might be their last time together, she dallied longer than usual, taking care of the man until she was blissfully sore in her deepest parts, until the harbor cannons began their 8 p.m. booming and night began to fall over the sad city of Havana. What was the last thing he told her?

“María, don’t you know, I’d die without you.”

THAT LAST AFTERNOON WAS HARD ENOUGH TO RECALL; BUT WHAT
was harder came down to Maria’s memories of tasting every bit of him, and thinking that Nestor’s body, even his big
pinga,
was a part of her own. It was intoxicating: as much as she wanted to forget him, as she’d walk through the streets of Havana, everything she laid her eyes upon, even if only vaguely phallic, reminded her of Nestor. She could not put on a pair of soft slippers without recalling the joy with which she would unfurl, slowly and sweetly, a condom over him and the time it took, or glance at a quart bottle of milk or a sweating, tall Hatuey beer with its frosty exhalations and not think of his sweat, his passion, his gushing sperm.