Havana Jazz Club Read Free

believe there were people who could say anything bad about such a wonderful person. Once, when she mentioned the rumors about him, Orlando answered with a resounding chuckle.
    “I know, chocolate chip,” he said, growing serious and looking her in the eye. “There are people who have too much time and envy and nothing better to do than criticize everyone else. Just ignore them. All I care about is what you think.”
    She looked down, unsure how to respond, but her heart was pounding and a timid smile danced on her lips. From that moment on, no man existed on earth except her beloved Orlando.
    They started to see each other alone, unaccompanied by her brother. They often went dancing, or to see a movie, or out to eat. Anything was possible with Orlando. Doors opened for him wherever he went, and there was always someone he knew who could make things easier for him. Billie never could have imagined that she would one day find herself strolling proudly down the Malecón on this Adonis’s arm, subjected to the malicious glares and half-whispered comments of passersby. But she held her head high: Orlando was her boyfriend. Soon, he would officially ask for her hand.
    At nightfall, the young suitor always walked her home and bid her good night at the front door with a chaste kiss on the cheek.
    Celia and Nicolás, Billie’s parents, watched uneasily as this relationship blossomed before their eyes. They didn’t care for it. They knew the rumors about the boy, and they were frightened for her. She was only fifteen! They were still paying off the debts from her quinceañera. It had been the most beautiful quinceañera in all Havana. Celia’s eyes still hadn’t recovered from the long nights she’d spent sewing lavish dresses for her daughter by candlelight. But she had pulled it off. The photo album they had made as a keepsake—which she guarded as lovingly as her old records—proved it, and she showed it to her friends and relatives proudly.
    They worried that this parasite of a boy would steal their little girl’s innocence and then abandon her. They didn’t want to see her suffer, but, flushed with love, she didn’t hear their veiled warnings. Meanwhile, Rubén lionized his friend, which only heightened the girl’s emotions and made the parents more suspicious.
     
    Orlando liked to brag about his Spanish origins. He told Billie that his parents had immigrated to Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century, fleeing the hunger and misery that had plagued them in their beloved Spain. The boy had grown up with the tales of witches and enchanted woods that his grandmother told him, and the cruder, more realistic stories of life in Spain relayed by his grandfather, who had died without ever fulfilling his desire to return to the homeland. Orlando had seized on that desire, moved less by the sentimental impulse of realizing the old man’s dream than by a yearning for adventure and a better life than Cuba could offer. He spoke often of Spain to Billie, always making it out to be a kind of promised land.
    “Look at it,” he would say, pointing to a random spot on the horizon as they sat on the wall of the Malecón, staring at the sea. “That’s where Spain is.”
    Billie would nod silently, but her gaze often wandered to the north. She squinted, as though trying to make out the silhouette of America in the distance. That’s where New York was, the most extraordinary city in the world, where anything was possible. That was where she really wanted to go. She dreamed of bringing her family with her and singing with her mother in the legendary jazz clubs.
    Orlando, aware of the girl’s dreams, noticed her silence and hugged her, smiling.
    “We’ll go to New York someday, I promise,” he said. “And to Spain too. We’ll go wherever we want to go. You’ll see. The world is ours!”
    Then he jumped onto the wall and shouted out to the sea, “The world is ours!” He repeated it over and over with his arms