Beautiful Maria of My Soul (17 page)

María first wanted to get pregnant back then, even when she knew it would probably mean the end of her dancer’s career. She was twenty-three that year of the first insurrection, on the older side of a profession in which the majority were seventeen and eighteen, if not younger. But no matter how carelessly she comported herself with Ignacio, deliberately ripping open the heads of his condoms with her teeth or with her long fingernails during the agitated act of love, she did not become pregnant in those years, a mystery that she blamed on herself, and on God’s castigations, all the while wondering if the more virile Nestor would have easily fathered her child. (That had to do with her
guajira
upbringing—the largest stud horses and oxen and donkeys, with their outlandishly sized appendages, coupling in the fields and easily siring offspring, had been a common sight.) Yet, despite her splendid, traffic-stopping body, María couldn’t help but wonder if she were barren.

And so, for the sake of diversion, she put her energies into her studies with Lázaro, took up smoking, got herself a cage of feuding songbirds, filled her living room with silk flowers, and, the truth be told, despite her longings for maternity and love, began to find her dancer’s life more agreeable than before. Not the hours, but the nightly applause and the release from the uncertainty that comes with knowing just what you’re doing onstage. (And what they wanted to see in the shimmies and splits and turnrounds; that she had to smile constantly, no matter what else she happened to be thinking.)

But María also took pride in the fact that, bit by bit, she had begun to see her name appearing in magazines, a great honor for a
guajira
from the countryside who had been the daughter of a nobody
músico. Show,
an English-language publication out of Havana which most clubs and cabarets sold out of their hatcheck rooms, featured a photograph of María in just about every issue over a two-year period.
Life
(circa May 1954) showed a winking María in her dressing room hitching up a pair of dark nylons over her shapely legs; and a second one of her onstage at the Lantern in which, from a distance, it seemed as if she was hardly wearing anything but a dark mesh bodysuit, whose seams were dotted with fake gems, a titanic feathery arrangement tottering on her head. (Why had the tailor, she would complain, made the middle seam subdivide her body, her
V,
her pudendum?) The caption, in English, which her club owner, a fellow of Cuban descent from Boston, translated as they were standing by a newspaper kiosk off the Prado, proclaimed María as “one of the reasons we Americans want to come to Cuba.”

In those years countless photographers went into María’s dressing room to “shoot” her. María putting on one of those impossibly heavy plumed, rhinestone-beaded headdresses; María, in a skimpy outfit, described as “raven haired” with a “Spanish complexion” and “Ava Gardner build.” (The complexion thing was a catchphrase, meaning tawny, swarthy, slightly dark or, let us say, a code for a light-skinned
mulatta
and therefore acceptably, even tantalizingly, dusky, like the actresses Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne.) In an issue of
Show
that featured profiles of
famous or hoping to be famous dancers, there was a shot of María in a rather revealing and very tight leotard by her dressing table in the Club Tika Tika, eating, for some reason, a bowl of ice cream, the caption: “One Dish Enjoying Another.” (Other copy? Here’s a portion of one caption, which went along with a shot of María lunging across a stage, a mock-jungle backdrop behind her, in a tight leopard-spotted, one-piece bathing suit and four-inch-high heels, as she brandished a whip: “Refined in her features, there’s something of the jungle, or most African and savage, about María Rivera…. With dance moves to make men crazy, this Cuban Salome vaults across a stage like an unleashed Tigress!”)

Even
Bohemia,
otherwise engaged in sympathetic reportage about the imprisonment of that rebel leader Castro on the forested Isle of Pines, a penal colony south of the province in which she had lived, featured María in a one-piece black bathing suit on their
“belleza de Cuba”
pinup page, and one young fellow from
Carteles,
on the club beat, whose byline was Cain, fascinated that she had started out as a
guajira
and had seemed to achieve local stardom, had wanted to interview María “for the record,” but she felt too inarticulate to go through with his request. (Nevertheless, this fellow took a photograph of María which ended up reinterpreted as a pastel cartoon on the margin of one of that magazine’s end pages.)

If she happened to be locally well known, up and down the nightclub strip of la Rampa and in many a cul-de-sac establishment in the city, her renown did not come without the occasional annoyance. Whenever she went into the Lantern, it startled her to see the life-size plywood cutout of herself, in an enticingly revealing costume, set like a lure on the narrow curb by the club entrance:
COCKTAILS AND CHA-CHA-CHA’S, TWO DOLLARS COVER PLEASE
. Kids were always sticking wads of chewing gum over the top of her bodice, to make María’s breasts and their nipples more prominent; these she’d scrape off with a nail file. After six years as a professional dancer in that city, she had developed an attitude about her image.

Though she had not started out in life as one prone to any sort of vanity, the nature of her profession required that María spend long periods of time before those mirrors, and once that habit formed, it seemed inevitable that her humility and tendency to self-deprecation gave way to self-admiration and, even in its most nascent state, grandiosity.
(Oh, but Lordy, what excesses of vanity her daughter would have to put up with one day.)
María simply began to believe that she had become someone special, even if she had mainly worked in second-tier clubs and had yet to hit the footlights of the more august venues in Havana, like the Tropicana, with its outdoor proscenium and gardens set out under the stars, in the suburb of Buenavista. She’d caught a few of the Tropicana’s opulent stage revues with Ignacio, including an evening which starred a flamboyant fellow in a white mink coat by the name of Liberace, and had left breathlessly impressed by the sheer grandeur of the floor shows, which included twenty to thirty dancers and featured sets that looked as if they’d come from Hollywood movies. (One spectacular featured a high-society lady strolling in the jungle who, coming across a
santería
ceremony, is put under a magic spell and, losing her inhibitions, tears away half her clothes, dancing wildly with the
negrito rumberos
.)

Such spectacles far exceeded the more humble productions with which María had been associated, and toward those dancers she actually felt some pangs of envy, though she found the sheer size of the crowds intimidating. On her behalf, however, Ignacio had approached the owners—in a meeting that, despite María’s beauty and real talents as a performer, never went anywhere: probably because the troupe’s stars didn’t want the competition, or because Ignacio demanded too much money for her, or, most likely, because Ignacio’s reputation as a local tough guy (à la a Cuban George Raft) had preceded him and the owners wanted nothing to do with his sort.
(As María would tell her daughter: “They ran one of the few clubs in Havana that didn’t have a connection with the mob; they believed that my
señor
was in that category—why I don’t know; he was a perfect gentleman.”
Sí, Mamá,
her daughter often thought. But we know what my
papi
did for a living, don’t we?)

At twelve noon in her Vedado apartment, María fondling herself until she breaks into pieces. Then María in her dressing room at the Lantern sitting beside a dancer named Gladys, covering her face with powder and pulling over her thighs the black mesh stockings that always make her legs and uppermost parts slightly uncomfortable. Then, turning her back to Gladys, María asking her to help out with the rear clasps of her sequined brassiere, which she has trouble unhooking. María reaching over to Gladys’s ashtray to take a puff off her lipstick-smeared cigarette, and her brassiere slipping off, her engorged nipples, almost the size of wine corks, exposed. It was a bit drafty in there, but not that drafty. So, naturally, Gladys just had to ask in her nosy and singsongy way: “Noooo, Marrrría, who are you thinking about, you naughty girl?”

T
he truth remained that, for all her feelings about Nestor, María’s life in Havana went on without him. Sometimes she agonized about his letters, whether she should attempt to answer him, a question she felt most greatly, for reasons she did not understand, while attending church. But mainly she had allowed Nestor to slip into the realm of memory, though there were times when María heard a sad strain of music or a troubadour’s voice in one of the cafés that reminded her of their days together. By then she had relegated Nestor’s presence to a few dozen nearly weightless letters, half as many photographs, and her bodily recollections of him. With nearly five years having passed since they spent their last afternoon in that
solar
by the harbor, beautiful María hardly believed it possible that anyone could remain so loyal, or recall her as vividly as he seemed to. (One of his letters, which had arrived around Christmas 1954, not only still professed his undying love for her but, as best as she could comprehend, was of a very filthy nature, the sort of letter that would have caused Ignacio’s wormy forehead vein to burst with anger:

Those letters, smelling faintly of musk cologne, which kept on arriving, though with less frequency, were always filled with his declarations of unending love. She had become so used to them, had so accustomed herself to thinking about Nestor as a poor
soltero,
a lonely bachelor, whose existence remained dedicated only to her, that María hardly ever imagined that, in those years, Nestor Castillo had begun to find himself a life that she had no inkling about. She knew that he and his older brother Cesar Castillo, the brash one, had formed a band in New York, a group which they called los Reyes del Mambo—the Mambo Kings. Occasionally he’d mail her one of their 78s, recorded with an outfit called Orchestra Records, ditties that consisted of lively dance numbers, along with boleros and songs of love. Receiving their latest, she always expected that his promised song, a monument “to my devotion for you,” would be among them, but, as of the winter of 1954, “Beautiful María of My Soul” did not yet exist, except in Nestor’s forlorn heart.

NOW AND THEN, HOWEVER, WHEN SOME MUSICIANS, DOWN FROM
New York, had come by the club to catch the show or moonlight with the house band, she couldn’t help but ask if they happened to know Nestor Castillo. Some did, some didn’t, and what the ones who did usually had to say about Nestor—“Oh yeah, a nice fellow, he’s doing fine” or “A hell of a musician”—was just enough to assuage María’s guilt about the way things had ended between them. But then one night, when a trumpet
player with the Mario Bauzá orchestra had come by the Lantern to drop off a package from Nestor and María, pretending to be sheepishly surprised at its arrival, happened to ask about him, this musician, a fellow named Alberto Morales, whom María had never met before, told her: “Oh, Nestor—he’s married to a great lady, a
cubana,
as a matter of fact, and he’s got two kids, nice children and—”

“You say he’s married?”

“Yes, ma’am, for three or four years now.
Está muy feliz,
” he added. “He’s very happy.” And then, looking at María, he said, “What are you, a cousin of his or something?”

Her face fell, her soul collapsed, her
guajira
pride felt offended. “No,” she told him. “I’m just an old
amistad,
that’s all.”

That night her performance suffered from the revelation; she was surprised by how that little bit of news crushed her. All María wanted to do as she shimmied mambo style across the stage at the center of a row of buxom dancers with half coconut shells covering her breasts was get home by taxi to her and Ignacio’s high-rise apartment on Calle 25 and, as was her recent habit, make herself a magnificent drink of fruit juice and dark Santiago
añejo
rum from the great mix of bottles that Ignacio, liking his drinks, kept in plentiful supply in a mirrored art deco bar in a sunny corner of their living room overlooking the sea. Her second thought, as she missed one of her marks and scrambled back to shake her hips when several male dancers were about to hoist her up in a watered down parody of a ritual to the thunder god Changó, was to make her way over to la Cucaracha, where she could take refuge with
la señora
Matilda and the whores whose high heels clicked along those stairways and halls as they went off with their twenty-minute consorts. Surely Violeta, who sometimes sat by
la señora
in the reception area, would take María into her arms and console her with advice: “Whatever ails you,” she had once told María, “just remember, men are swine and want only one thing, even the decent ones. But if you want to cheer yourself up, my love, just fuck one of them and leave him so quickly he will be desolate.”
(Violeta had laughed, and María shrugged.)
Her third thought: wishing to
God that she were somehow back in Pinar del Río, starting all over again: back in that
campo,
with her sister, Teresa, by her side—Teresa so alive!—and joining their
papito
on one of his excursions, guitar slung over his back, to a nearby farm. To be back there would have made her happy—at least she knew what each day would bring: the braying animals, the farmers in the fields, that wonderful waterfall, before her sister drowned…And then there was Nestor, disembodied by then, and reduced to two elements: his handsome, poetic face, and, she was ashamed to admit, his enormous
pinga,
sturdy as a branch.

Ay, mi amor,
she thought over and over again, in a way she had not before, barely making her way through that evening’s show, entitled for the tourists A Night in Havana.

But how quickly things can change. On that same morning, after the finale of her last show, at about 4 a.m., while María was still feeling shocked about Nestor’s marriage, a tall and dapper Havana advertising executive, one Vincente Torres, the fellow who had hired her for the Pan American “Fly to Cuba” poster a few years before, made his way backstage to see her. Taking out a group of his American counterparts from New York to see her dance—they all worked for the same agency, Y & R—he had always admired María’s solemn beauty. Now and then when he’d come by the club, he’d ask her to join him for dinner, but she had never accepted, not even in the days when she had become a Y & R model. Still, his offers had always tempted her. He was handsome, like a Cuban Cary Grant, and though he wore a wedding band, there was something so mirthful and beguiling about his expressions that she found him intriguing. That night he never failed to take his eyes off María and stood up several times to applaud her, even when her performance had been lackadaisical; otherwise he just stared and stared and smiled, winking occasionally in such a jovial manner that María, having sunk into a depth of sadness she had not experienced since her
papito
died, enjoyed his attentions. In fact, when he went backstage after the show and found her sitting before her mirror, wiping away her running mascara, and asked María, for the hundredth time, if she wouldn’t mind
joining him for a drink, she finally agreed; Ignacio was away.

So at four thirty in the morning they went by taxi to the Hotel Nacional, just in time to catch the final song by that evening’s cabaret performer. María, distracted, hardly heard anything that Vincente said to her. Accustomed to compliments, she could think only about Nestor’s deceitfulness: if she was his only love, why had he gotten married? Unsettled, and grateful to be in the company of a gentleman courteous in every way, María found it a natural thing, since she couldn’t have given a damn at that point about Nestor, to take an elevator upstairs and follow Vincente into his suite, whose windows overlooked the diamond-filled harbor. He had a stocked bar. He was charming.

After a few daiquiris, María, so estranged from her humble roots and sincerely taken by Vincente, his scent redolent of a lavender cologne, simply nodded when he, after praising her beauty, begged her to take off her clothes. And María, a little stunned but remembering what the whores of la Cucaracha had told her, first removed a pearl necklace that Ignacio in his largesse had given her (but left Nestor’s crucifix on). Then, after slipping off her dress and standing before the lucky Vincente in her brassiere and underpants, she put her hair up in a flourish over her head, and, as the whores had once taught her, she reached down and dipped her index finger inside herself and rubbed it over her mouth and behind her ears, and then, as Vincente, the brain behind the poster, out of his mind by then after one of her adamant kisses—a “Nestor kiss,” she would think of it—lay back on a bed, undid his trousers, and took out his enraged
cubano
penis, María attended to his ardor, grasping and suckling him until, with a shout—
Mammee!
—he doubled over with pleasure. That night María made this dapper fellow’s eyes roll up into his head over and over again. In addition to her captivating beauty and ravishing behavior, there were other ingredients: marijuana, morphine tablets, and cocaine, none of which María indulged in herself, but she did not mind when Vincente did, for they made him a ferocious lover.

Of course, afterwards, she felt low—like
una tramposa
to use one of her mother’s terms for the loose women of the countryside, a cheap
tramp—but did she really care at that point? Not at all. In fact, there would be others to come along and help ease her pain in those days when she had become foolhardy and confused.

(What neither Ignacio nor even Nestor knew were the most hidden reasons María could be indifferent to the feelings of men. It came down to the way her beloved
papito
sometimes treated her. Not the beatings, or even the other extremes of pure affection, but that strange middle ground that, years later, left María feeling sickly inside, as if a miasma, or an infection, invaded her memories. Only once did she confide this to her daughter, during one of her late afternoon mojito/margarita-fueled chats; as if her educated daughter, by then a medical doctor, could come up with an explanation for her mother’s occasional improper behavior when she was a girl. You see, before her sister, Teresita, fell ill and they were verging on adolescence, she and María used to take naps with their
papito
on a hammock, the three entangled so peacefully that María easily drifted off to sleep, especially during an
aguacero
, a rain shower that drenched the forests and fields and sent the lizards scattering and cooled the air, which smelled of the most sweet and bitter scents—of rot and fecundity…. And sometimes she laid her head against his chest and listened to his powerful heartbeat while he shifted himself around and his palm rested upon her back or along the curves of her hips; and sometimes—maybe it was a dream—his hand massaged her belly, sometimes ambling downwards so that his knuckles dozed and the weight of his hand pressed against the coarse fabric of her dress, and then nothing more.

But once she had started undergoing her bodily changes and began to smell different to men, and things got crazy because of what had happened to Teresita—
la pobrecita
—there came that time when her
papi
asked her to share his hammock and she, feeling reluctant and physically cumbersome, obeyed but found that she couldn’t fall off to sleep the way she used to, after all he was pressing up against her back, and something fleshy and solid seemed to crawl up along the knobs of her spine. And maybe she imagined that his hand had wandered down below, his dense fingers parting the lips of her “special and most delicate flower,” María squirming, her
papito
asking
“¿Qué tenemos aquí?”—
“What have we here?” At the same time, her
papito
’s breath smelled awful, of tobacco and
aguardiente
and beer, and, like a dream of her own future, she withdrew into herself while his fingers kept on touching her in places where they shouldn’t have, until María, feeling sick inside and sensing that something was very wrong, would finally tear herself away, a terrible shame following her…. It didn’t end there. Living in a place where the mothers regularly fondled the privates of their male children to ensure their virility, María couldn’t help but wonder if her
papito
was doing the same kind of thing with her, or maybe he was just curious. But after a while even she, an ignorant
guajira,
knew that it didn’t seem right for a
papito,
no matter how much he loved his daughter, to be doing that—and so, before it could get worse, she started to avoid him, refusing to join him on the hammock and feeling nervous whenever he had been drinking and called her to his side, a puzzled and sad expression upon his face when she refused, as if she had broken his heart…. )