Neal Pollack

Zoe had immersed herself so completely in the minutiae of something so incredibly niched that she’d said, as casually as if she were asking a waiter for a tall drink of water, “Destiny, I think you’re even bigger than David de Alba,” who was really the greatest of them all and who, like Destiny, was a Cuban who had gotten his professional start in Chicago. Of course, David had never been to La Caverna; David, who could pass as Judy Garland’s reflection, would have never in his life set foot in La Caverna.

Dago Fors had always been very, very good at one thing: being a drag queen. He wasn'’t a cross-dresser, he wasn'’t a female impersonator; he wasn'’t confused. He was a marvelously talented performer, an impressive six feet tall, with style and imagination and just enough restrain't to give off an air of enduring elegance. No bookkeeping or waiting tables for him, this was all he knew how to do, all that he’d ever done.

In Havana he’d gotten to practice his skills due to uncommon good luck. Sure, there were tons of underground drag shows, something pieced together at somebody’s apartment until an intolerant neighbor turned them in. But his real showcase had been a lunchtime show, performed completely under the auspices of the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. It was conveniently chaired by a friend’s aunt, whose husband was a high-ranking military officer blackmailed to okay the whole thing. It turned out that Dago’s friend’s aunt had found out her husband was having an affair with the wife of an even higher-ranking officer and was now using the info to get him to do pretty much whatever she wanted, including lending his official imprimatur to the lunchtime drag extravaganza. As a result, for two years Dago had been free to be himself—or whomever he wanted to be—for ninety minutes every Monday to Friday.

The show took place at a worker’s cafeteria across the street from the Presidential Palace, right in the middle of the city, accessible to anyone who had the time and inclination to come. There was no stage per se, just a space opened up by pushing the long lunchroom tables together. This discouraged complicated choreography but really put the premium on presence. Moreover, without stage lights, and with the light of day pouring in unfiltered, the queens really had to be extraordinary to make magic in so naked a place. For Dago, it was a grueling but exuberant apprenticeship. Nothing would ever be as hard again. Nothing would ever require so much of his psyche and heart.

In Havana back then, all the girls loved to do Celia Cruz, the exiled queen of salsa. It was not that Celia was particularly beautiful, because she wasn'’t at all, but her music was saucy and her costumes, even then, interplanetary. Lots of queens also liked Garland, of course, and Barbra Streisand and Marilyn Monroe. But the girls of color tended to go for Celeste Mendoza, who wore towering African wraps on her head and rivaled Celia for sheer rhythmic audacity, or Juana Bacallao, who had a nice ghetto thing going and was a lot of fun.

For Dago there really was only one choice: Moraima Secada, also known as La Mora. A gorgeous mulatta, a little richer in color than Dago, she’d begun as a member of a famous quartet but went off on her own to record a style known in Cuba as filin, a kind of over-the-top ballad in which both lyric and melody worked from simple melancholia to unfettered tragedy in about three and a half minutes.

Her style was sui generis: She sang with a stern face, as if she were incandescent with rage. She would tilt her head up, press her lips together, and raise her arm, fist clenched. But as she brought up her trembling limb, her fingers would slowly open, almost against her will, as if all fortune could take flight. La Mora was so intense that after her husband was killed in the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airline on its way back from Panama, she still kept her nightclub engagement that night in Havana, the only crack in her otherwise militant façade a suppressed sob, like a hiccup.

Of course, in Chicago no one knew anything about La Mora. When Dago finally found himself covered by the honeyed lights of a real stage, there wasn'’t a soul in the audience who had a clue about his inspiration. In the long run, it was just as good that way—Dago was able to inhabit her, to fold and tuck and invent without worry. After a while, he came to believe he’d conjured her whole, except for the aching sadness left by the turbulence of love suddenly and unexpectedly lost. That was real, real for both of them, real and terrifying too.

The phone rang. Destiny didn'’t need to glance at the caller ID to know it was Zoe Pino. There was just enough of a yap to give her away.