Beautiful Maria of My Soul (11 page)

T
hat next Sunday found them on a trolley heading out to an amusement park, west of the city, El Coney, which had been nicknamed by the locals after its famous Brooklyn counterpart to the far north. For the occasion María had put on a sundress and wore a wide-brimmed hat and white-framed sunglasses; she carried a one-piece bathing suit in a bag. Nestor had brought along his own swimsuit and a notebook, which he proudly showed her.

“I always carry this with me, in case I get an idea for lyrics,” he said as they jostled along la Quinta Avenida towards
las afueras
of the city. “Because you never know when that might happen—you think you can remember a line the next day, but they’re like little dreams that go away unless you write them down. I always use what I call my special pencils. You see, María”—and he pulled one from his pocket that was practically worn to the nub—“I use only pencils that I have found on the sidewalk or on the street and other places; it’s as if I’m inheriting the ideas of the people who owned them. This one I picked up in front of the cathedral—probably belonged to a priest or a nun—and so when I’m writing with it, I feel that I’m getting a little help from Dios. But I also have a pencil that I found outside Ernesto Lecuona’s house in Vedado. I can’t prove that it fell out of his pocket, but just the idea of it gives me a different kind of inspiration. With that one, I write down my notes and the chords of songs.” He smiled. “My older brother Cesar thinks I’m eccentric for believing such things, but I figure, what’s the harm of it, if those notions help me make a beautiful song.” Then smiling, he added: “María,
te parece una locura?
Do you think that’s odd?”

“No,” María said. “Not if it makes you happy.”

But, my goodness, he was different from Ignacio.

“You think so?” And he flipped open his notebook, showing her a page filled with new lyrics. “I wrote this, thinking about seeing you again, just a few days ago. How do they read to you?”

She pretended to understand what he had written down. Though her lessons with Lázaro had slowly progressed, to the point that she had learned hundreds of words, she had yet to comprehend complete sentences, let alone the lyrics of a song; but it had to be about the majesty of love, though she couldn’t say for sure.

“Son bonitas,”
she told him.
“Muy, muy preciosas”
—“They’re lovely and very, very fine.”

“And the sentiments? Do you feel they are possible?”

“Sí, cómo no,”
she told him.

“Oh, but María, if you only knew how happy that makes me feel!”

So perhaps he was already writing about her, María would think years later. Perhaps those lyrics, which she couldn’t decipher, first opened his heart to the notion of their love. Perhaps, without intending to, she was already raising his hopes. What of it? She felt something for him, perhaps just gratitude for his kindness, and maybe a curiosity about his tender soul. What else could she have said without giving her ignorance away? In memory, that trolley floated along the laurel-and palm-lined streets of that avenue, the sea’s air so clear and without any sense of passing time—she was just nineteen after all!—and just like that they were walking along the promenade, too mutually shy even to dare hold hands, but feeling like they wanted to.

The amusement park, just about three blocks long and nestled between the Miramar Yacht Club and the white sands and cabanas of la Playa de Concha, enchanted her, for as a
guajira
from the countryside, she’d never visited such a place before. She had loved the carousel, whose enameled horses went circling up and down, and left María laughing at the sheer
foolishness of adults, among so many children, riding such things. Then they got on
La Montaña Rusa
—the Russian Mountain—a mousy roller coaster that whipped along its rickety, curved tracks with abandon, María screaming and Nestor holding her tight. (This they rode three times, Nestor feeling the weight of her breasts against his knuckles, María laughing in a way she never could with Ignacio, Nestor growing somewhat nauseated over the motion but not willing to let María go.) They played games of chance. They ate ice cream, sharing their cones like children. Later, as they were standing on the causeway, watching these adventurous and perhaps crazy fellows jumping off a diving board into the sea from atop a three-story-high replica of a Coca-Cola bottle of painted cement, Nestor first took hold of her hand, and she didn’t resist.

Then, because it was such a beautiful day, they headed into the public restrooms, the floors covered with sand, to change. Shortly, out on the beach, María first saw the glory of Nestor’s graceful physique—his broad shoulders and flat belly, the curling hair that flourished upwards from his navel like hands in prayer over his chest—while he, in turn, along with about every other man on the beach, felt like weeping at the sight of her spectacular dancer’s body. In a green bathing suit, she had followed Nestor into the water, the two of them drifting out and splashing in the waves, oblivious to the people around them, when, out of nowhere, God threw them together. Or to put it differently, hit by a wave, she tumbled into Nestor’s arms, and for a moment their warm bodies pressed together, and just like that Nestor lifted her up as if he were about to carry her across a threshold, and then, while holding her, his hand grazed the lower front of her bathing suit and then slipped back so that she could feel his palm against her right
nalgita.
When he dropped her into the water and she stood up, her dark and curly hair now slickened and falling straight and sparkling over her shoulders, through her bathing suit’s modesty pad bubbles came seeping and popping out, and what surely made his heart beat faster, through the top of her suit jutted her stiffened nipples. Was she embarrassed or ashamed? No: what she felt was that she wanted more of that sweet man.

Soon they were embracing, and that was a mistake, or perhaps it was utterly natural, but once their bodies were touching, she started to feel within his trunks the kind of earthly response that made María gasp. And while part of her wanted to pull away, María, the same more or less pious
mujercita
who had been at Mass that very morning, let Nestor press even more deeply against her luscious center. The sensation was so pleasurable, and of an intensity she had never felt with Ignacio, that something unraveled inside of her. She forgot the nightclubs, the saintly gazes of church statuary, the very fact that they were only thirty yards or so from a crowded beach. Why she took hold of him through his suit, she could not say.
(Here’s something else: sitting with her daughter and watching television, a rerun of
Zorro
with Tyrone Power playing the hero,
pero en español,
she’d recall to herself her first impressions of its weight and thickness and how it made her feel, if nothing else, that this
hombre,
Nestor Castillo, was
muy, muy virile y fuerte
.)
And, God forgive her, the sight of his excited
pene
, distorted by the amplifying effects of the water, so agitated María that she, floating out of herself, couldn’t help but put her hand inside his trunks.

His face became a mask of pleasure and death at the same time, or, to put it differently, the tenderness in his eyes became overwhelmed by desire.

Okay, in retrospect, perhaps this was an exaggeration; it had happened so long ago that the pieces of that day came to her like snippets of vaguely remembered music; after so many years she couldn’t even recall the timbre of his speaking voice, save that it was mild and gentle, a real tragedy because just hearing him somehow calmed her. One thing was certain: coming out of that water, they were in a state of mutual excitement. It would have been so easy for them to slip into one of the cabanas, which lots of young couples did in those days, to ease off their swimsuits and, in the confines of one of those narrow tents, make furious, hurried love…. But, as Maria believed, the heavens were watching—or someone was—maybe her late
mamá,
Concha, or poor Jesus himself, with the bloodied tears of
His
sacrifice dripping down his face instead of tears
of pleasure, of sea salt and kisses and youthful love, and that thought so rattled María she had to fight herself, for as they, timidly holding hands, waded to shore through that tepid water—so clear she saw mollusks breathing through the bottom sand—all she wanted to do was to fall back into his arms so that Nestor could cover her body with kisses.

Later, after they’d showered and dressed, Nestor suggested they get a bite to eat at the dance club Panchín, which wasn’t too far away. And because that wonderful singer Ignacio Villa, aka “Bola de Nieve,” the raspy-voiced Maurice Chevalier of Cuban crooners, sometimes performed there, Nestor thought they might catch his act afterwards. María, however, just wasn’t interested in visiting any cabaret, no matter how famous the singer. Her many nights in clubs were already enough to last her a lifetime. No, she preferred to sit out in the open air on the patio of a nearby fried seafood place, nothing special at all, taking in the sunset. As for music? It was relaxing to hear the boleros that played from a radio in the back, to drink enough beers to make her almost forget about Ignacio and lose herself in Nestor’s tender eyes. The longer they sat and the more they drank—his side of the table had five empty bottles of beer already sitting there, while hers had two—the more Nestor drifted off into a mood of such sadness that, as he opened yet another bottle, she wanted to wrest it from his hands.

“Just last night I dreamed about you, María, and do you know what I saw?” he asked, taking her hand.

“Tell me.”

“An evening just like the one we’re having here and now. With you sitting across from me.” He smiled tenderly. “I also saw something else: just down there,” Nestor said and pointed towards a little pier where couples went strolling. “I saw us sitting there, on a bench looking out at the water, and we were embracing,
besando, besando,
with so much happiness, our kisses tasting of the sea, and your face so joyful that I knew that we were surely to fall in love.” Then he crossed his heart and added: “
Te juro
—I swear—it’s the truth, and, if you believe me, María, it will become the truth.”

Maybe it was the beer she had been drinking, but when Nestor told her “Come on, let’s see,” she didn’t mind going.

They passed the remainder of that evening sitting out on that pier necking, unable to let go of each other.

It’s amazing what a single evening on a beautiful night by the sea will do. On their way back into Havana proper, as the trolley jostled along Fifth Avenue, they were holding each other, mostly in silence, as if, in fact, they were in love. Now and then, he would kiss her hand, and, more than once, she kissed his hand back. Their expressions must have been rapturous. Other passengers, especially the older ones, with their hound-dog jowls and memories of their own pasts, simply nodded their understanding: oh, to be that young again, to be in love, to feel the world expanding, and not diminishing around you. During that ride, Nestor sat beside María with a dumbstruck grin on his face, his notebook of lyrics, incidentally, set upon his lap, where his verses occasionally seemed to rise and fall in accord with Nestor’s sighs and the ardent expansions of that upon which they rested.

OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, THEY WOULD MEET AFTER HER
last shows, late into the morning. She got used to finding Nestor waiting for her in the alley outside the backstage door (her fellow dancers, leaving after her, giggling about the
buenmoso,
the lady-killer, who had won María’s heart). They always ended up embracing against an arcade wall, her right leg jammed between his knees, the pipe inside his trousers nearly bursting its seams every time and Nestor whispering the kind of poetry that made María let him sink his fingers inside her. Light-headed, they’d take a few steps, then begin to kiss and fondle each other against a column, to the point of madness. His eyes rolled up into his head, he’d tell her,
“Ay, María, mi María. Sabes que me estás matando?”
—“Don’t you know that you’re killing me?” Then he’d drop to his knees, lift up the hem of her skirt, press his face against the dead center of her panties, police sirens in the distance, the world ending—none of it mattering.
Still, she always stopped short with Nestor, fearing his
poder,
that she couldn’t manage him, or that he would think her a
puta
in the end, that Ignacio would discover them.

But one night while unraveling a dancer’s garter over her leg at the club, and realizing that the thought of Nestor made her feel like touching herself, her sheets at home covered with peacocks’ eyes of her own moisture (or with outlines of the wound in Christ’s side), María decided that she couldn’t take waiting anymore.

A few days later, during the quieter hours of an afternoon, in a sun-soaked room near the harbor, in a
solar
that Nestor had borrowed from a friend, and on a mattress with springs so far gone that it took her back to la Cucaracha, Maria allowed Nestor to do whatever he pleased with her. The moment he removed her dress, he stripped down himself, proudly displaying his virility, and proceeded to fondle, bite, and spread Maria open in ways that she couldn’t have imagined. She soon learned that romping with Nestor was like riding in her
papito
’s carriage up into the hills, and not just because of the way Nestor nearly burst her into pieces—the wider she spread and the more capacious she became the more he filled her—but because of his caresses, tender kisses, and endearments—
“Sabes que te quiero, María?”
—“Don’t you know that I love you?” he’d say again and again, his long-fingered musician’s hands brushing her hair from her eyes. As he’d take hold of a fistful of her hair, she’d raise her head, suckling him, but so differently than she had with Ignacio, who sometimes liked to slap her face or twist her nipple painfully while she was doing it. No, with Nestor she remembered the techniques the prostitutes at la Cucaracha had taught her while sitting around bored in the hallways: to bite and lick and then withdraw, to roll one’s tongue in a certain way, all gently, then almost viciously, as if trying to draw out the last bit of sweetness from a piece of raw sugarcane—and soon enough her knuckles were soaked with him, and licking that off her hand, she tongue-kissed him with it until, just like that, he became excited again. Then, proving that a man’s weeping member could be used like a stylus, he left traces of himself over every inch of her body, writing out the
words
Amor
and
Te amo
with his seminal fluids on the small of her back and along the plumpness of her
nalgitas;
and when her upraised rump sent out that exquisite heat, like a woman softly breathing on a man’s neck, Nestor, begging her forgiveness, had to go there too—he couldn’t help himself, and María, despite that impertinence, found that it was a delicious pain and found that if she touched herself at the same time as she raised her haunches, she fell into pieces again. They went at it for hours, and no matter how many times they did, he wanted to go at her again, as if there would be no end of his desire for her. In fact, they hardly knew restraint and only finally stopped when her voice had gotten hoarse from screaming.