The only things we know about her is that she used to ride through Havana in a red convertible, the first female to ever do so. The "fingerprint records" proves it: the first Latin American woman to drive, which is why some believe she was mulatto and other Chinese when she was actually white, it was written all over her skin the secret of women of all races … take the wheel of their own lives.
Not all the Guanajay guajiritas (peasants) born in 1892 came to live in Havana, although most dreamed of doing so. None of those who did arrive in Havana was as free as the Macorina, yet so incarcerated.
An article of the time features how she escaped with her boyfriend to the capital when he was only 15. She was still Maria Calvo Nodarse, but soon became what we know today, in a foggy way. Perhaps she knew that the chains of the small town were not the only ones holding back her future, she didn’t want to be a housewife, and housewives despised her because of that…
Everything has a price, that car came up after she was run over, was a gift from the accursed driver, and left her with a slight limp. The price of freedom is marred with another kind of prison.
While some women washed and cooked for men they did not love, trapped in the conventions of an arranged marriage, she let in her bed anyone who could pay her freedom with gold.
"More than a dozen men were rendered to my feet, flooded with money, pleading for love," she told Bohemia magazine when the glamour was already gone. She had four mansions scattered through the best of Havana, one in Linea street, another in Belascoaín … she also had horses, furs, jewelry, nine cars, and got as far as to spend two thousand dollars monthly in tough times.
She attended President Jose Miguel Gomez (the Shark) chamber, and she splashed him with her power as the man trembled during the Chambelona revolt. She had a lot and an unfulfilled dream, a dream that she drew from her body amid lavish parties: the first driver wanted to fly an airplane, and see Cuba under her feet…
"Sometimes, in the middle of a party and surrounded by admirers, my thoughts flew to that plane," she whispers … but shedid not want to escape, only to rescue her lost childhood, wanted to "fill a plane with dolls and distribute it to all Cuban girls ".
But the fate of an era eventually falls on the fate of all, and her bubble burst when she reached the age of forty. Without youth in your body certain doors simply don’t open. And she lost the houses, horses and jewels, like all Cinderellas after midnight.
But some thingsstayed, the nickname Macorina, a drunkard attached to her forever in the Louvre, and and that popular danzón that chased her with it "put your hand here Macorina, put, put, put …" "I hate that music so MUCH! " she once said.
She renounced to all while falling in the deepest poverty. "Maria asked me the day she died to dress her with her yellow gown, a neighbour tells, and not to tell anyone that she was the Macorina. One afternoon she asked me for coffee. When I returned, she was dead. "This fulfilled her will on June 15, 1977 at the funeral in the noisy Zanja street.
There is little of her in that big rag doll dancing every December in the charangas of Bejucal, but the painter Cundo Bermudez did manage to capture the statism of her life, at least on the popular stage, behind the wheel of a car. Maybe he knew the secret of the woman who fled, at full speed, the unbearable gravity of being born on this island.
Author
Justo Planas
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