Chapter FOURTEEN
Now below her windows was a thriving market that started up at seven in the morning. Out of canvas-awning-covered stalls, in dense rows that faced each other on either side of the narrow cobblestone street, those vendors sold everything—live chickens, parrots in cages, cut-up sides of pig. There were stalls for household goods and plumbing tools, heaps of old radios and extension cords, books and outdated magazines—even American magazines such as Look and Life, which had been discarded in hotel bins and picked out like used rags for sale. A dozen cheap guitars and as many dented cornets and other instruments hung from wires strung along the canopy of one, and there was a stall that sold nothing but tocadiscos— record players—of every imaginable incarnation. From the old RCA windup Victrolas that played only 78s to the more modern GEs (always worn and used) that employed the speeds of 16? and 331/3 rpm, and around them, where they were stacked on the ground, piles and piles of brittle records. (Oh, if she could only have picked out one of them, during her leisurely strolls through the market, a 78 rpm disco by an Oriente sonero called los Hermanos Castillo, featuring two songs, recorded in 1944 in Santiago, one of which, entitled “Mis sue?os”—“My Dreams”—was a plaintive bolero penned and sung by none other than Nestor Castillo, her future love.) There were stalls that sold shoes, men’s apparel, racks of dresses, and much more.
Once María got up in the late morning, and Ignacio had not come around to carouse with her, it was one of her solaces to stroll through the market and say hello to the vendors who had become her friends. She even dallied by the bookseller’s stall, a few steps from her door, picking up one volume or the other and pretending, in case anyone was watching, to read, flipping through their pages, pausing at some, and arching her lovely eyebrows at their supposed contents. The bookseller was such a friendly man that María often bought one or two just to be nice. Among them was an absurdly obtuse volume that contained biographies of the one hundred most prominent Cubans alive in 1902. This she liked for its genteel photographs. Another, more arcane, was a Theosophical Society tome, published in Barcelona in 1928. She picked that one for its cover, featuring a pair of celestial-looking beings flying disembodied, like shredding flames, towards a reddish pearl in the heavens. A third, of the twenty or so she would own and keep on a shelf like porcelain objects, happened to be a moldy edition of Don Quijote. (Its pen and ink illustrations enchanted her.) Otherwise, María sorted through the one-and two-day-old newspapers that the fellow sold for a penny apiece, all the while assuming expressions of interest. The vendor, Isidoro, hardly imagined that María was only going through the motions, but another man, a lanky old negrito with sunken eyes, sitting inside the shaded entranceway of her building, a cane in his large arthritic hands, had watched her going through her charade a hundred times, without saying a single word. All he ever did was smile and tip his hat at María, but one afternoon, he just couldn’t resist and called out to her.
“You there,” he said. And when she turned: “Yes, you my love! Come over here.”
In a florid dress, and with a fan in hand, María approached him.
“I should talk to you,” he told her. “I know what you’re up to.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, almost indignantly.
“Oh, come on now,” he said. “I can tell by your eyes that you really don’t know what you’re looking at. ?Tengo razón o no?”—“Am I right or wrong?”
She had no response, just looked down at the ground.
“Well, there’s no shame in it. Myself, I didn’t learn to read until I was thirty, and believe you me, my love, that was a long, long time ago.” He laughed, slapping his knee. “But the fact that you even pretend to tells me that you have the desire.” Then he took hold of her right hand. “Dime, mi bonita, how old are you anyway?”
“Eighteen, but I will turn nineteen in October.”
“Now that is young, carajo!” he told her. “You still have all the time in the world. And since I have nothing to do with myself”—he laughed again—“how about if I teach you the basics, you hear? You look like a bright young woman, even if you’re a lousy actress, and like I said, I’ve got nothing else going on.”
She didn’t even hesitate, asking: “Do you want me to pay you?”
“Why, no, my love,” he said, rapping his cane against the steps beneath his feet. “Just tell me your name, that’s all.”
“María,” she said. “María García y Cifuentes.”
“Well, María, I’m Lázaro Portillo, at your service, and a very happy se?or I am, and grateful for all the times I’ve seen you lighting up this marketplace with your beauty.”
Then, he moved aside and tapped the steps beside him. Unfurling a clean handkerchief from one of his pockets, he spread it out for her. “Wait here, and I will find some paper and a pencil, and then, my love, we can begin.”
And so those lessons commenced in the midst of a busy market day, the first words he showed María, as she basked in his adoration and kindness, being “él” for “him” and “Yo” for “I” and, as well, “Ella” for “her.”
After that it became her daily routine to sit with Lázaro for a few hours each afternoon, and she made it a habit to bring along a notebook, in which she wrote everything he instructed her to copy down. In only a few months, this bony-limbed, knob-knuckled negrito angel had opened María’s eyes, teaching her some things. At first, she could barely comprehend what she read, but she got better, bit by bit. And he, basking in the loveliness of her youth, wanted nothing for it, save for a few sandwiches now and then—he was the sort who looked hungry but didn’t act it. In those months, words and their meanings, and the way the letters of the alphabet arranged themselves into words, began to follow her everywhere, along the streets of Havana, while she was soaking in a bath, and even as she danced, shaking her derriere onstage. They followed María like birds, or like those black notes that flew in clusters across a musician’s arrangement charts at the club.