Waiting to see her again, he suffered through evenings when he went to work playing the trumpet and singing alongside his brother with the Havana Melody Boys. His María worked in the chorus line of the Havana Hilton, as one in a line of ten “beautiful cream-and-coffee-colored dancers,” and that’s where Nestor wanted to be, his eyes looking off not at the audience or the spotlights but into the distance. He could not help thinking about María. When he was not with her he was miserable, and after playing these jobs he would rush out to meet her.
For his part, Cesar was curious about this Beautiful María who had taken his maudlin, quiet brother and made him happy. So finally Nestor arranged that they meet one night. They chose a bar where a lot of musicians liked to go, up by Maríanao beach. Dios mío! his brother Cesar was surprised by María’s beauty and he gave Nestor his approval, but then, so did everyone else. He stood there trying like every other man to figure out how on earth Nestor had landed her. Not by know-how; his younger brother had never been a womanizer. In fact, he’d always seemed a little frightened of women. And now there he was, with a beautiful woman and a real look of happiness on his face. He hadn’t won her over with his looks, pleasantly handsome, with a long matador’s face and a sensitive, pained expression, large dark eyes, and large fleshy ears. It must have been his brother’s sincerity and innocence, qualities which femmes fatales seemed to appreciate. Watching her dance before a jukebox blaring Beny More, her ass shaking and body wobbling, her beautiful face the center of attention in that room, Nestor felt triumphant because he knew what the others wished they knew: that yes, her breasts were as round and succulent as they appeared to be under her dress, and that her nipples got big and taut in his lips, and yes, her big rumba ass burned, and yes, the fabulous lips of her vagina parted and sang like the big kiss-me lips of her wide lipsticked mouth, and yes, she had thick black pubic hair, and a mole on the right side of her face and a corresponding mole on the second inner fold of her labia minora; he knew the fine black hair that crept up gradually out the crack of her buttocks, and that when she reached orgasm she would whip her head back and grind her teeth, her body shaking in the aftermath.
Standing by the bar proudly, beside his older brother, Nestor sipped his beer, one bottle after another, until the sea’s blueness outside the club windows rustled like a cape and he could shut his eyes and drift like the thick smoke of that room through the crowd of dancers, wrapping himself around the voluptuousness that was María.
Funny, that was their mother’s name too. María. María.
Remembering those days, Nestor would never think about the long silences in their conversations when they’d go for walks in the park. After all, he was just an introspective country boy with a sixth-grade education who knew more about musicians and breeding animals than anything else. Once he’d told her about himself, he had almost nothing to say. “And how are your cousins?” “How is the club?” “Nice day, isn’t it?” “Bueno, what a good day?” “Why don’t we go for a walk and get something good to eat?” What could he say to her? She was beyond human conversation. She liked it when he serenaded her in front of the opera house in the park with his guitar and crowds would gather to listen and applaud him. Some days, she seemed very sad and lost, and that made her even more beautiful. He would walk alongside her, wondering what she was thinking and what he could say to make her laugh.
Gradually, their walks turned into long vigils through the night, until they reached that place where everything would be fine: their bed. But then, somehow, even their spirited romps in bed turned into something else. She would stop and weep in his arms, weep so hard that he didn’t know what to do.
“What is it, María? Can you tell me?”
“You want a good piece of advice, brother?” Cesar would tell Nestor. “If you want a woman, treat her good sometimes, but don’t let her get too used to it. Let her know that you are the man. A little abuse never hurt a romance. Women like to know who’s the boss.”
“But abuse María? My María?”
“Take my word for it . . . Women like to be ordered around and put in their place. Then she will stop her weeping.”
Trying to think what his brother meant, he started to order María around, and during their silent walks in the park he would show her that he was a man, taking her roughly by the wrists and saying to her, “You know, María, you must feel lucky to be with someone like me.”
He’d watch her by the mirror, making herself up, and say, “I never realized that you were so vain. It’s not good, María, you’ll be ugly in old age if you look too long in the mirror.”
He did other things to her which would later make him cringe with unhappiness and the unfairness of it all. Good-looking as she was, he imitated his older brother and took to looking around at all the other women on the street. He had the idea that if he could diminish her, then she would always remain by his side. When things didn’t get better, their silences increased. As things got worse, Nestor became more and more confused.
But during that time when things were bad for them, Nestor sat down and wrote his mother a letter saying, “Mamá, I think I’ve found a girl to marry.”
And once he’d told his mother, his romance took on a magical, inevitable quality. Destiny, he called it. At first, he made a formal proposal to her, on his knees, in a garden behind a social club, with ring and flowers. He bowed his head, waiting for an answer: he shut his eyes, thinking about all the light in heaven, and when he looked up to see her pretty face again, she was running out of the garden, his ring and flowers beside him on the ground.
When he would make love to her, he would think about the man he had seen the day they met and how she had wept afterwards. Making love, he left marks on her legs and on her breasts from gripping them roughly to show her that he was a strong man. He would get up from their bed and say to her, “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?” He had a sick feeling in his gut that something inside him was pushing her away. On those nights he wished for a pinga so huge that it would burst her open, and let fly, like a broken piñata, all her new doubts about him.
Believing that persistence would win out on his behalf, he would say to her, “I’m going to ask you to marry me every day until you tell me yes.”
They’d take walks, go to the movies, her beautiful face pained.
“There’s something I want to tell you . . .” she’d always begin.
“Yes, María, that we are always going to be together?”
“. . . Yes, Nestor.”
“Ah, I knew it. I would die without you.”
One night they were supposed to see a Humphrey Bogart movie and meet at their usual place, in front of a bakery called De Leon’s. When she failed to turn up, he walked the streets looking for her until three in the morning, and when he returned to the solar he told his older brother what had happened and Cesar said that there was probably a good reason why she had missed their date. He always found his brother’s advice sound and felt much better. The next day, he went to María’s house and she was not there, and he went there the next day and she was not there, and then he went to the Havana Hilton and she was not there. What if something had happened to her? He kept returning to her edificio, but she was never there, and each evening Cesar, who was having a rough time himself, consoled him. But by the fifth day his older brother, whose life philosophy had turned into rum, rumba, and rump, told Nestor: “Either something happened to her or else she’s abandoned you. If something happened to her, then you’ll see her, but if she’s left . . . you have to forget her.”
On another morning, he knocked at the door so long that the owner came out. “María Rivera? She’s moved away.”
He returned again and again to the club, even when he was told that she had quit her job and returned to her pueblo.
For weeks he couldn’t eat or drink and he lost weight and his insomnia became worse. He would sit on the rooftop of their solar, watching the stars over the harbor, stars of lamentation, star
s of devotion, stars of infinite love, and ask them, “Why are you mocking me?” He went to his job in a disastrous state of mind, exhausted and solemn. His state of gloom was as ecstatic as his previous state of happiness.
Even the leader of the Havana Melody Boys noticed Nestor’s low spirits. While the other musicians mamboed across the stage, he barely moved. Someone whispered, “He looks like he’s going through a bad affair of the heart.”
“Poor fellow, looks like someone has died.”
“Let him alone. There’s nothing that’s going to cure him. Only time.”
Finally he went to her pueblo, which was about four hours by bus from Havana. He walked the streets, inquiring about a certain María Rivera. He’d left without saying a word to his older brother and had gotten a room in a local inn. He had been there for four days and was drinking a café con leche in a bar when he looked over and saw the man who had been fighting with María the day they met. Now that he could get a good look at him without the distortion of fear, he was surprised to see a handsome man. He was wearing a blue guayabera, white linen pantalones, yellow socks, and white shoes, and he had strong and pleasant, manly features: dark, intense eyes, a thick, virile mustache, a wide neck. The man had been drinking calmly and then abruptly he moved out into the street. Keeping a distance, Nestor followed him. He came to a lovely street, a narrow cobblestone street that went uphill. Old orange and light pink walls, overgrown with flowering vines. Palm trees and acacias throwing their shade over the sidewalk. And in the distance, the sea’s radiance.
There was a house there. A beautiful, tin-roofed house overlooking the water. A smell of pineapple and a garden. A house of happiness and voices. María’s voice, laughing happily, happily.
He waited, tormentedly lingering outside like a ghost, just to catch a glimpse of her. And it made things worse. He would look into her window and hear the chatter of voices and utensils and plates and pans frying up plantain fritters, her life being joyfully pursued without him, and he cringed. At first, he didn’t have the guts to bang on the door and confront her, didn’t want to see the truth. But he later found his strength in a bar and returned at dusk and swaggered over to the door, belly in, chest out. A long, mournful trumpet line, rising high and looping around the stars. Scent of mimosa in the air. Laughter. He kept banging on the door downstairs until the man came out.
“What do you want?”
“My woman.”
“You mean,” he said, “my wife.”
“Don’t tell me?”
“Since a week ago.”
“But she hated you.”
The man shrugged. “It was our destiny.”
Oh, María, why were you so cruel, when I saw the stars washing through your hair and the moon’s pensive glow in your eyes?
Nestor made his way down that hill to a seawall and leaned up against a small statue of the Cuban poet José Martí, watching the sea of dusk. There he daydreamed about how happy he could have been with her, if only he had not been so cruel, or if he had been a better conversationalist or had some real ambition. If only she had not seen the weakness in his soul. As if in a dream, María appeared behind him, and she was smiling. When he went to touch her hand, it was as if he were touching air. Nothing was there. But María was there. She spoke so gently to him and so tenderly about the torments of her heart and soul that when she left his side, he felt oddly calmed.
What was it that she had said to him?
“No matter what, I will love you forever.”
Forever and forever unto death.
He spent that night camped outside her doorway, sighing. In the morning he found that she had left a plate of ham and bread outside by the pavement where he had slept, but it had been overrun by an army of ember-red ants.
He returned to Havana and told Cesar what María had told him.
Around his neck was the crucifix which his mother had given him for his First Communion and which had often touched the fullness of Beautiful María’s breasts. And around his chest, a sensation of stones and earth constricting him, the vague, pulsing feeling in the joints of his bones, which turned to wax, as if any second he would collapse.
“She said she still loves me. She said she thinks about me all the time. She said that she never wanted to hurt me. She says that sometimes when she’s lying in bed at night she thinks about me and can still feel me inside her. She said . . .”
“Nestor, stop it.”
“She said she would have married me except for one thing, this other fellow in her life, an old prometido from her town, where she’s from. That he was just someone she was trying to forget. A country bumpkin who used to ignore her when they were together and who came here to take her back, and”—he cupped his hands over his face—“she felt that she had to go back to him and . . .”
“Nestor, stop it.”
“She said she’ll always remember our times together as being beautiful, but he came along before me, and, well, now our fate is sealed. She said that she married him because of an inner pain. She says she never meant to deceive me, that she really loved me. She says that her heart was broken that we hadn’t met a long time before, but this man had always been her love . . .”
“Nestor, she was like a puta!”
“She said that I was her true love but . . .”
“Nestor, stop it. Where are your balls, man? You’re better off without her.”
“Yes, better off.”
And what happened? After the shattering of this love affair, Nestor just wasn’t the same and took on the fearful expression of his youth when he would cower in the darkness of his room at night, a feeling of doom whirling around him. He would go to his job at the Explorers’ Club on Neptuno like a somnambulist, moving about the wood-paneled rooms with their maps and globes and lions’ and antelopes’ and rams’ heads, carrying his trays of daiquiris and whiskeys for the prosperous British and Americans without ever smiling or saying a friendly word. On one of those days a shot rang out from the fancy toilets there, and the workers in the club rushed to find one of the gentlemen, a certain Mr. Jones, dead, the smoking revolver still in his hand. It would turn out that his real name was Hugo Wuerschner and he’d decided to take his life because of another club member, who had found out that Wuerschner had once acted as an agent in Havana for the Third Reich. Refusing to be blackmailed, Wuerschner, long despondent about the fall of his Führer, preferred to bring his grief to an end. The dead man’s contorted and disillusioned expression was like Nestor’s, so extreme was his suffering.
His older brother took Nestor everywhere, to the movies, the all-night cafés, and the whorehouses, and he told him, “She’s not worth it,” over and over again. “You’re better off being a little hard with these women, because when you’re good, it turns out bad.” And: “Just forget her, she’s worthless . . . not worth a single tear, you understand?”
Whenever he felt pain in his life, the older Mambo King would find himself a woman, and so he thought smothering Nestor with women was the answer. Memory of a drunken evening in the Havana of 1948 which the two brothers spent down by the harbor in a brothel called the Palace, their backs arching and exuberant sexes rising and falling endlessly through the night. Curling tongues, slapping bellies, moist thighs. They fucked and fucked and then roaring drunk made their way down to the harbor, where Nestor threw bottles at some sailors and wanted to confess his sins to a priest. Reaching the harbor, Nestor decided to steal a yacht so they might sail around the world, but when he found a rowboat and took it out thirty yards he lost the oars and vomited in the water. Standing up and laughing, he pissed into the bay, which the moonlight was chopping up into triangle reflections of the red and yellow and blue party lights of the city. In the distance, he heard the booming horn of a ship, crying out, Castillo, Castillo, and he shouted, “To hell with everything!” Laughing, he kept thinking, The hell with María, I am alive!
Then they went home to their solar, Cesar pulling Nestor through the streets and stumb
ling toward buildings that seemed to bow and nod like wise old Chinese men. They found the gate and the stairway up into their solar, up ten steps and back down fifteen, Cesar calming his brother, Nestor laughing loudly.
“To hell with everything!”
But even that night did not penetrate the glorious mask of his suffering. What powers María held over him, no one knew. That would remain a mystery to Cesar.
“You’ve always been that way, crying over nothing,” Cesar said to him. “She’s worthless, bad for you like a bottle of poison. Couldn’t you see that from the beginning?”
“But I love her.”
“Hombre, she’s garbage.”
“Without her, I want to die.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“If you knew my pain . . .”
“Dios mío, you’ve got to stop humiliating yourself this way.”
(Then the voices went on until the last fading trumpet line of “Beautiful María of My Soul,” inhalation of a cigarette, sip of whiskey, and the record-player arm lifts up again.)
ALTHOUGH NESTOR USED THICK World War II-issue prophylactics, he was sometimes very careless and casual about his lovemaking with Delores, doing it without a rubber and withdrawing long after the initial shudder of ejaculation. She would lock herself up in the bathroom and clean out her womb with a douche that resembled a poultry baster, which she’d filled with bicarbonate of soda and seltzer. One afternoon, while waxing the rich man’s parquet floors, she had the sensation that her womb was filling up with light, like stars at dusk rising slowly in the dark sky, and it occurred to her that these intimations of light were those of a soul, a breath, life itself. A hundred-year-old Cuban doctor practicing on Columbus Avenue and 83rd Street diagnosed a pregnancy. She climbed the stairs to the La Salle Street apartment expecting that Nestor would greet the news with ecstatic, lovestruck joy. As she walked in, he was working on the very song he had been whistling when they’d met nearly a year ago. When she heard that melody, it would take her back to that day, and she believed that this bolero was now hers. She approached him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and whispered, “I have something to tell you. I’m pregnant.”
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Page 12