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cells of the central police command, where, unbeknownst to her, political agitators—the socialistas, the comunistas, the union organizers—were held, half dead from torture and beatings, in dingy lightless rooms, she would have heard them cursing, weeping, and moaning, not from pleasure but from agony.
    Still reeling from her experience at the Catalán’s, she walked and walked though the streets of a city she had yet to know better. In an arcade, María bought herself a half-stale lechón sandwich from an all-night stand. Its owner, with his one milky eye and tattered flat boater cane hat, left over from the days when he was a 1930s dandy, tried to act as if she wasn’t the most ravishing young woman he had ever seen (even if she seemed a little sad). He checked her out just the same, as María, half starved to death, scoffed down the sandwich and then, meekly smiling, set off again. After roaming in the darkness of an arcade, and hearing thewhistles of passing strangers, María, with her irresistible body, her high and firm buttocks jostling the fabric of her ruffled cotton dress, finally got back to her hotel, with its fifth-rate amenities. Stretching across her bed, she spent the night half feverishly, visited by nightmares and missing the countryside she’d left behind.

Chapter FIVE
    O h, but her story to that point: Just leaving her tranquil valley, midway between the mountains and the sea, would have been enough to rip any heart into pieces; but she hadn’t really been given much choice about the matter. For one thing, in the wake of her beloved mami ’s death, her papito , Manolo, had taken up with the most horrible woman imaginable, a hard case from a town along the gulf coast whom he, still an occasional músico, had met while moonlighting with some of his sonero friends at a wedding dance. Her name was Olivia, and he must have been crazy or desperately lonely to fall for her, or maybe she had bewitched him, because she was neither pretty nor softly feminine nor even funny. If she had any virtues, as far as María could figure, it was that she could really cook and Manolo liked to eat, but, even then, poor María, for the life of her, couldn’t begin to find anything else nice to say about the woman.
    And Olivia must have known it from the moment they first laid eyes on each other, on the very day she moved in, with her horse-drawn cart filled with chairs and what few dresses she owned. After just a short few weeks, Olivia gave up on all her phony smiles and seemed to take a special delight in ordering María around and establishing herself as the new dueña of that household.
    It was the worst for María at night, when she had to listen to them going at it from behind a hanging blanket that separated their sleeping space from the rest of that room, no more than ten feet across. With its floor of pounded down dirt, and its few paltry chairs, its kerosene lamp, and, among their sparse adornments, an altar to the Holy Virgin in a corner, which her mamá had kept, the interior of their bohío did not afford muchprivacy. María’s cot, built of plywood and canvas, with straw-stuffed pillows, the same she had once shared with her younger sister, was near a back door, open to the selva, that dense forest around them, where insects buzzed all night against the mosquito netting. It was bad enough that her papito snored like a beast, and she was used to hearing his every movement, sigh, his dreamer’s mumblings, the capricious workings of his digestive system, but once Olivia had settled in as his woman, those arrangements became a torment. Whereas her mamá, as far as María could remember, hardly ever made any noise at all, just letting out sighs and sometimes crying, “Por Dios, por Dios!” that horrid bruja Olivia, with her groans and yelps and filthy language, could have awakened the dead. That alone was enough to turn María’s stomach, and it killed her to think that her mamá, off in paradise and