“So, María, some parts inside of me—how can I put it—have been asleep for a long time. Fundamentally”—Pero, carajo, he used big words—“I haven’t had much interest in women. Not that I don’t notice, but mi deseo, my desire…for love has vanished.” And he tapped at his heart. “María, don’t you understand? I’ve been a dead man inside.”
Then he grew silent, a somberness overcoming him as if he had been embarrassed by his admission. On that night, automobile head beams flared along the grand curving roadway, a hundred residences and hotels, all aglow, their windows burning with light. It wasn’t until they could see the Morro castle in the distance that he came around again, with a simple question: “Just where is it that you live?” And when she told him that she had been staying at the Residencia Cubana, he could only shake his head. “I know of that place—isn’t it a disgrace?”
“Perhaps,” she answered him, feeling vaguely offended. “But it’s been my only home in Havana. I have my friends there, and the señora who runs it is very good to me.”
“But surely you must know what goes on there?” And when she looked away, he quickly added, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Along the way, a police cruiser had slowed up and pulled alongside them. Usually when that happened to María at night, she’d feel terrified of being forced inside—who knew where she might end up? Or what might be expected of her?—the prostitutes were always telling her stories. So she felt relieved when Ignacio, approaching the cruiser, a green Oldsmobile, seemed to know the officer. As he bent by the window, he and the policeman spoke, about what she could not say. She had walked over to the seawall, looking out over the bay and wondering how the gulf waters, which appeared to be so majestic, could smell so bad; at the same time, while she was taking in the immensity of that horizon’s expanse, which seemed to go on forever, a queasiness overwhelmed her, as if she feared that it would swallow her whole if she lingered too long. There was something else: as that cruiser took off, Ignacio rapping on its hood in a familiar manner, the policeman, with his visor cocked slyly down, smiled, nodded, and, as it happened, winked at María in an insinuating way that she found unnerving.
It simply offended her—I am not one of them, she thought—and now it was María who became sullen, so sullen that, once they reached the entrance to la Cucaracha, she could hardly wait to get upstairs. Though he mentioned an all-night cafeteria on Obispo where they could go for a while, she told him that if she didn’t soak her feet soon in a pan of salts, she’d suffer the next day.
“Bueno, do as you like,” he told her, though with a slightly wounded look on his face. And then, in a most courtly manner, he bowed. The last she saw of him that night, he was making his way into that quarter and had pulled out of his jacket pocket that book, that mysterious thing in which he took his solace.
Years later, while having lunch in one of those tacky South Beach sidewalk restaurants, all María had really told her daughter about the way she met this Ignacio—it could have been on one of many afternoons when mother and daughter, taking taxis, got slightly sloshed (Teresa, as usual, being a doctor, reminding María to go easy on those margaritas because of the salt) and María, with her own kind of dignity and pride, tended to give, depending on her mood, different versions of the same tale—was that she had first encountered Ignacio, “a very intelligent, hardworking man,” in a club she had been dancing in; and that he was very kind to her at first, a gentleman through and through, at least until he changed into someone she didn’t recognize. But before that they’d had a good enough time.
Chapter TEN
Weeks went by before María heard from him again, and though she had thought about Ignacio now and then, she could really have cared less. One evening, however, when she had arrived at work, there awaited María a bouquet of roses and, with them, a note. Since she couldn’t understand it, and felt ashamed to admit her shortcomings to the girls in her troupe, she had to wait until she got home for Señora Matilda to read it aloud to her:
My dear María,
I haven’t forgotten you and will see you soon at the club.
Ignacio.
That next night, swathed in gossamer, while vaulting across the stage in the midst of a solo, her hips in a deep swivel as if she were trying to wipe a table clean or wash a window with her papaya—that’s how she once explained the motion to her daughter, a wallflower when it came to dance—María, spotting Ignacio sitting at a table, dedicated her performance only to him. He knew it, watching her every move onstage and standing during the applause.
Later, it was María, sitting by his table, who told him about herself: at the heart of it was this: she was just a country girl from Pinar del Río and wouldn’t mind it all if she met a sincere man, honest and of good character, whom she could trust and be good to. And when he had heard her out, Ignacio, smiling, took hold of her hand, and told her, “It is my hope, María, to be everything for you.”
And he seemed to mean what he said, for soon they were going out on María’s nights off, heading here and there around Havana. She loved to take in a movie at the Payret theater, where between the shows singers and comedians entertained the crowds, and more than once they’d go into the kinds of hotels that she used to pass by and find so intimidating: like the Biltmore-Sevilla and the Astor-Havana, in whose fancy restaurants they dined, as well as his favorite bistro, Delmonico’s. Everywhere they went waiters and concierges attended to them with the utmost politeness and respect—it seemed that this Ignacio was an important man—and because he liked the way she looked alongside him, they would sit in the outdoor cafés. Ignacio, in his largesse, set up an account for her at El Encanto, Havana’s premier department store, so that she could buy whatever items of apparel she liked, and indeed, taking her around, he thought that a little jewelry would look nice on her, and soon enough that jewel of Havana went out into the streets wearing pearls around her neck, and gem earrings, for which she’d had her earlobes pierced. When she complained of a bothersome ache in her teeth, he paid for her to visit a dentist, who, falling in love with María, could barely bring himself to drill away the cavities that even the most beautiful of women suffer. Going off on trips, Ignacio saw to it that a florist deliver a weekly bouquet to the club—all the girls buzzing with excitement and jumping, quite easily, to the conclusion that she had become Ignacio’s mistress.
Indeed, he took more than just a little interest in her. It was on a Sunday that he had turned up at la Cucaracha out of the blue—she thought he was away—and told her, taking a look around, that the place made him sick to his stomach, and that he would find her another. But did she really want to go? She had gotten attached to la señora and knew most of the shopkeepers along that street, and most of the other prostitutes besides Violeta, even the two she found out had pee-pees like men. And while she surely would have liked to live in a nicer place, she had made that forlorn room, her first home in Havana, comfortable enough and knew that she’d miss the daily life there, the way her neighbors cooked their meals on pans on their balconies, the caged birds, the barking dogs, the guitar players and drunken singers (Ay, papito!), the crying babies, and even the Peeping Tom across the way—they made her feel anything but alone.
But one day, she left.
Eventually, she allowed him to “make her into a woman,” as they used to say, but it had not been an easy thing to accustom herself to. With her heart in her throat, she first bedded Ignacio down on a brand-new mattress with clean sheets in the bedroom of a sunny third-floor solar that he had gotten her in a better neighborhood, near a marketplace. On that afternoon she discovered the sorrowful history of a man whose body was covered with scars, his back in particular, a mess of claw-shaped welts, his cruel papito’s gift to him as a boy. The actual act of penetration made no great impression on her, it was more or less what she had imagined, a little painful and almost pleasurable, but she had learned from the whores of la Cucaracha that nothing pleased a man more than to hear a woman scream at t
he top of her lungs as if she were being torn to pieces by a horse.
The whole ritual of it, however, she found discomforting and wished she had covered over the crucifix above her bed with a black cloth.
The moment he had removed her dress and undergarments and stripped down himself, proudly displaying the brutish and tearful proof of his desire—“Go ahead, look and admire it,” he told her proudly—she began to drift outside herself. Fondled, spread open, pulled at, bitten, and feeling the dampish and warm bundle of his inguinal sack—sus huevos—rolling over her taut belly and upwards over her rib cage as he, among first things, smothered his enraged cosita with her breasts, she couldn’t help but think about Christ’s last moments on the cross. As his blunt thrusts raised a wormy vein on his forehead, his eyes turning upwards inside their lids, she envisioned the journey Jesus Christ, upon his death and resurrection, had made, down to Purgatory and then Hell, before ascending to Heaven. And while he buried his head between her thighs, kissing the corona of her femininity, Mary Magdalene went kneeling before Him, to wash His feet with the tresses of her hair.
And so, even as she screamed, she kept praying that God forgive her, for however much she believed Ignacio when he muttered that she was the kind of woman he could really care for, María, dallying in the Holy Land, felt nothing for him beyond pity and a vague gratitude for the way he looked after her, and for his generosity, sentiments which she, being so young, had perhaps confused with the devotions of love.
Chapter ELEVEN
After that afternoon, beautiful María got used to Ignacio’s visits. Was she in love with him? She hardly thought so, but she slept with Ignacio often enough to make him happy. And while María preferred to keep those duties a secret, she found it comforting to know that such arrangements were common. Some of the girls in the troupe were always looking around for men with money, often gossiping about how nice it would be to have someone of means to look after them, no matter his callousness. Most of their would-be suitors weren’t prizes, though they’d hear of dancers who had run off with an American, to places like Cincinnati and Arkansas. At least Ignacio was generous, and he wasn’t ugly, or fat, and he was clean, dapper, and smelled good, even if María didn’t care to believe the rumors that he was a gangster of some sort.
AH, BUT HOW THINGS CHANGE. LETTING IGNACIO DO WITH HER AS he wanted and drowning afterwards in guilt, she eased her conscience by going to church, not just to confess her sins but to feel purified by the sanctity of the altar and the oddly comforting gazes of the saintly statues. As often as she asked herself, while kneeling in prayer on a stony chapel floor, Why Ignacio? she concluded that El Señor, in his mysterious ways, had placed him in her life for a reason. And if she felt sometimes that Ignacio didn’t really care about her—especially when they had gone out to a fancy place and he’d accuse her of chewing her food too loudly and eating like a goat, at least, while she was in his company, other men left her alone. As she’d tell her daughter one day, she needed him. Going anywhere in Havana by herself had become a nuisance, more so as she learned how to dress better and developed a taste for fancy clothes, as well as makeup and perfumes, which she had started using in the clubs. She could rarely go down the street without someone calling out or whistling at her, many a devouring stare attending María’s every step. But when she took walks with Ignacio holding her by the arm, few dared even to glance her way. With his proprietary air, he just looked like the sort you didn’t want to offend. (Men found ways of glimpsing her anyway—they’d look without seeming to look in the Cuban manner, a mirar sin mirar.) Whenever Ignacio happened to catch someone coveting María’s bottom, he’d stop dead in his tracks, excuse himself, and march over to have some words with her admirer.
She appreciated this vigilance but wished he could relax; his severity was sometimes hard to take. He may have been courtly and suave, but, as time went on, he also became quick-tempered, especially in his efforts to teach her things: how to cut food, how she should dress, never to look a man straight in the eye. His moods were sometimes awful, however, and if there was anything María sorely missed, it was the sort of tenderness she had known with her papito. He may not have taught her much of anything about good manners, and his drinking had made her crazy, but he, at least, had a gentle soul. She just missed that guajiro warmth, the sentimentality of his songs, the way her papito sometimes touched her face, but oh so softly, as if she were a flower.
Not so with el señor Fuentes, who rarely smiled and never seemed to feel compassion or pity for anyone. Poor people disgusted him. If lepers or blind men or amputees held out their hands begging for coins, a scowl of contempt exploded across his face. Once, when they were walking along Neptuno to a ladies’ haberdasher’s and she asked him, “But, Ignacio, why are you so hard on those people? They can’t help themselves, los pobres,” he laid out his philosophy of life:
“María, you may think me harsh, but when you’ve come up from nothing, the way we both did, you learn quickly that the only person worth looking out for is yourself, and maybe your family, if they actually give a damn for you.” He turned a deep, frightening red. “And so what if I give those unfortunates a few centavos? How the hell is that going to change a thing for them in the long run?”
“But if you give them a little money, then at least they can have something to eat,” María said, while thinking about the poor children she saw all over the city who begged for pennies. “Isn’t that the right thing to do?”
“The right thing?” he said, laughing. “I’ll tell you what, María.” And he reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet, pulling a ten-dollar bill out. “This was going to pay for your hat, but, what the hell, let me just give it to that fellow over there, okay?”
Marching over to some unfortunate—un infeliz—sitting, one legged and grimy against a wall, Ignacio stuffed that bill into the tin can he held in his filthy hands.
“So there,” he said, “are you satisfied? Now, look around you and tell me something: tell me if you’re seeing this lousy world changing one bit.”
“Ay, pero Ignacio, don’t be so angry at me.”
“All right then, but don’t you ever preach to me again. Understand?”
FOR ALL HER MISGIVINGS ABOUT HIM, THEY HAD THEIR ENJOYMENTS. On a Sunday, Ignacio drove her to a beach resort out in Varadero, where María, glorious in an Esther Williams swimsuit, the sort with fancy seashell pleats accentuating her breasts and midsection (translation, her smooth belly, her fabulous burst of hair, the fig of her heart-shaped pubic mound), parted those warm, clear waters before her. They journeyed to a pueblo by the sea, about three hours east of Havana, their route, along the northern coast, taking them past expanses of marshes, mangrove swamps, and beaches to Matanzas, where Ignacio had been born in utter poverty and received his first scars. He didn’t know if his father was even alive, nor did he care, and his mamacita had died when he was a boy, which was how he ended up in Havana to fend for himself at an early age, he told her. Taking her around—what was there to see in a town that stretched only three or four blocks end to end along the coast?—Ignacio told María, with all sincerity, that it was his dream to construct a house in that place, so that he—and she—would have a wonderful retreat to escape to from Havana, maybe even live there one day as man and wife. Then they returned to the city, and, as he often liked to do, he pulled over to the side of the road and had María undo his white pantalones so that she might attend to him in a manner that he particularly enjoyed: the wonderful sun just beginning to set on the horizon.
On another occasion, he drove her out to Pinar del Río to see her papito, whom she had missed very much. Laden with gifts, and arriving in triumph in Ignacio’s white 1947 Chevrolet, María had the pleasure not only of showing off her nice clothes and prosperous “novio,” whom her papito didn’t particularly like, but also of letting him see just how well she had done for herself in Havana. Olivia, her papito’s haggish paramour, so gloomy in black, couldn’t have been more solemn, or
envious. For that alone, María felt thankful to Ignacio, who, for his part, could only feel contempt for the slop of pigs, the filth of an outhouse, and, after a while, even what he called the ignorance of the guajiros.
Chapter TWELVE
She was learning what men can be about, particularly when they like their drink. Her papito had sometimes been that way, that’s why he used to beat her, and, as she got to know Ignacio better, she learned that he could be that way too. In the bedroom, the only place where he actually seemed happy, he could be quite unpredictable. She would almost enjoy it, as long as he wasn’t being too rough with her, and rum sometimes made him that way. Once he had drunk too much, he’d start accusing her of denying him certain pleasures. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, and he’d smash in the door, throw her onto the bed, and take her from behind, all the while calling her nothing better than his little mulatta whore. And if she wept bitterly afterwards, he’d tell her, “Grow up and don’t forget that, if it weren’t for me, María, you’d still be sleeping in that shithole of a hotel and dressing like a tramp.”
Drinking, he became a different man, who made her life a nightmare. Even when he behaved in a reasonable way, taking care of him with her mouth became a labor, not of love but of drudgery. Sober it didn’t take much: just the sight of her lovely face in a posture of voluptuous submission, the proximity of her lips to that blood-engorged thing, and the merest licking of her tongue were often enough to make him gasp and cry out. But when Ignacio had been drinking heavily, because he had suffered a reversal in business or because he was simply getting bored with her, Mary Magdalene herself would have been hard put to make any progress at all. Still, she took care of him just the same, until her neck and jaws ached. And even then, he found ways to insult her: “You’re too careful and look like you’re about to throw up.” And the worst? If he had been displeased with her lovemaking, or if she had even looked at him in a certain way—as if she’d rather leap from her window than spend another moment with him—she’d turn up at the club the next night covered with so many black and blue bruises that she couldn’t go onstage without disguising them with heavy makeup. How the chorus gossiped and felt sorry for her.
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