He thought of the little moves and tricks he had learned in brothels, but those seemed out of place now, the techniques of love without its substance. Abandoning himself to instinct, he touched and fondled and kissed her, and then, prying her thighs apart with his face, licked the lips of her sex, breathing in the odor of seabottom, fetid and fragrant, salty and sweet. She stiffened again.

“Should I stop?”

“No.”

He kissed her all the way up to her neck, biting the necklace beads. She moved under him, thrusting her hips, and pressing her lips to his ear, cautioned him not to make a sound.

“Now you must mount me before the orisha. You will be my first husband, he the second. Now,” Elvira said, and turned over onto her belly. Lying with her face on the mat, her hands clasped over the back of her neck, she heaved up on her knees to present her bottom. He kneeled behind her—it seemed fitting to kneel, for this that they were doing seemed sacred—and he gloried in the graceful arch of her back joined to her broad buttocks, shaped like a heart, spread in invitation. He entered her gently, but her body tightened once again, and he held himself for a moment, until she, reaching behind with one hand, shoved him into herself greedily. She was scalding inside—a shaft lined with hot, wet satin. He thrust once and again, burying himself, while his arms enfolded her waist. She hissed, pulled away from him, shoved back, her buttocks writhing against his groin, both of them drenched in a warm, thick dew. Now his hands fell to the floor below her ribs, and they moved for several seconds like stallion and mare, Elvira biting down on the mat to stifle her cries, Will moaning, his jaw clenched as, with exquisite agony, in wild spasms, he filled her with his seed.

They lay for longer than wisdom dictated, bathed in each other’s sweat, gasping softly, neither speaking, beneath the little house in which the ashe of the spirits dwelled, beneath the statue of Christ gazing toward the ceiling with his plaster eyes, his plaster heart dripping plaster blood. Then Elvira rolled over onto her side and embraced and kissed Will.

“Otro vez?” he asked, with pleading in his voice.

“No. It is late. When we get to Havana, then as many times as you wish, but not now, no, not now.…”

She began to cry, softly.

“What is it?” he asked.