Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Then came another day when Violeta walked into the lobby with a thin gent, sad faced as José Martí, apostle of Cuba, that fellow, with one dormant eye—made of glass—pulling along a clattering black trunk on wheels, which, as it happened, carried the tools of his trade: a large box camera and various lights. Nearly falling over at the sight of María, who had been filing her nails in the stairwell shadows as they came in, he consulted with the prostitute.

  His name was Enrique.

  “My friend here,” said Violeta, “would like to take your photograph, María, to display in his shop window…. He’ll pay you a few dollars for your trouble, and who knows what other pictures he’ll want to make….”

  Knowing the score, Violeta winked, as if it would be easy—every few months or so she herself posed for this fellow in her room upstairs, at a time of day when the windows flooded with light. Violeta sprawling naked on a bed, Violeta spreading wide her legs, her hairy bush and glinting Venus mound laid bare for the world to see, such shots to be sold as “artistic” photographs out of the back of his shop or by old lottery vendors on the street. Violeta was already mildly famous among the brothel set for an accordion collection of such postcard-size photographs, circa 1933, which she had posed for as a ravishing fourteen-year-old girl, new to Havana and willing to do most anything for money. And so why wouldn’t María? The pay would be helpful, and she simply hadn’t had many photographs taken of her back in her valle; but there was also something about the photographer’s somewhat shattered, world-weary manner that immediately put María at ease. He seemed a harmless sort, one of those habaneros, as Violeta would say, who had fallen through the cracks of life but managed to survive anyway, without hurting a soul.

  And so a few days later, María, having agreed to sit for the photographer in his studio, over at 17A Obispo, set out in the late morning, the ladies of the hotel, Violeta among them, having fussed over her. It was the first time she’d ever had her hair set in curlers, or worn makeup—not that she needed it—and though the face powders and lipstick seemed oddly confining, as she sauntered along those streets, the perfection of her features, along with the grandeur of her figure, stopped more than one habanero in his tracks: at the sight of her, grandly dressed Negroes, dapper in white from head to toe, bowed, smiled, and tipped their hats her way, as if, in fact, they felt blessed to see the most beautiful woman in Havana passing before their eyes.

  At first as she sat before him, in her only good dress, María’s formal side took over. Not a jamoncita—a ham—at all, when he asked her to smile, she could barely manage. For his part, he didn’t really care but put on a show of fumbling about with his camera, making absurd faces, and, with every phrase, praising María’s natural gifts. He, with his one dead eye, allowed the other to swim in hers—dark as opals, almost feline, and mysteriously alluring. “My God,” he kept saying, “the more I look at you the more beautiful you become.” It took him a while, but, as he went about the tedious process of making shot after shot—he used plates—all the while telling her the story of his life—no wife, no family, and never as much as a novia to care for him—his sad and tender manner touched her. No wonder Violeta trusted him. And suddenly she did too, for after an hour or so, María, who’d always mourned the carcasses of dead birds in the countryside, felt that she wanted to make that poor soul happy; and then, finally relaxed, she smiled in a way that seemed beatific.

  After a while she began to enjoy the whole business, and got to the point that she didn’t mind it when Enrique, thinking about a sale to a magazine, asked her to put on a bathing suit—he had racks of all kinds of dressing items in the back. Going behind a Chinese screen she squeezed herself into a blue one-piece and then posed, under the heat of those lights, stretched out like Goya’s Maja on a settee. No comment about her lusciousness would suffice, but it should be said that Enrique, long accustomed to photographing the women of Havana, in various modes of dress and undress, would have gladly dallied that whole afternoon, luxuriating in the viscous femininity that, in the heat of that room—and it was ridiculously hot—escaped like perfume from her skin.

  That, however, was not the photograph he would choose to put in his window. That same afternoon, he posed her in a virginal white lace wedding dress, María clutching a bouquet of roses to her breast, and supposedly dreaming about love. That black-and-white image, of María, her dark eyes looking imploringly out at the world through a lacy veil, soon graced the second tier of the photographer’s window, and, wouldn’t you know it, as María would tell her daughter one day, men gathered before that display just to get a second and third look of her daily.

  “There are women who think they are beautiful,” she once told her daughter, “and while they may be pleasant in some ways, real beauty doesn’t come along too often.” She’d laugh. “That real beauty was me, even if I didn’t know it, back then.”

  With so many men stopping into the shop to inquire about the “pretty girl,” it wasn’t long before that face caught the attention of one Rudy Morales, the photographer’s friend, who happened to own a cabaret on one of the side streets off the Prado, the Monte Carlo. It was Rudy who gave María her first dancing job, her audition held in the Lysol-scrubbed reception area of the hotel. Matilda turned up the radio, and to the music of el Trío Matamoros, María performed in the rumba style of her childhood, so fluid, so Congolese, so rapturously sensual—and sexual—her hips swaying so convincingly and her skin giving off a feminine scent so profound that, how to put it, Mr. Morales, the sort to wear dark glasses in the middle of the night, breaking into a sweat, decided to hire her on the spot. “I would have given you a job just because of the way you look,” he told María. “But I’m happy to see that you can actually dance, and beautifully.”

  Within a few days she had joined a chorus of seven dancers, the stage shows dominated by the fabulous Rosalita Rivera (from whom María would borrow her stage surname), an affable third-tier star on her way down from a not too glorious height, with thighs and belly far too fleshly to be appearing in the spare costumes those shows required (she was, of course, the owner’s mistress, bedding him at his convenience in the small flat he kept upstairs). The club itself, like so many María would work in, was a dump, selling water booze to a clientele of mischievous-minded tourists and servicemen, out for a night of oblivion and tarty entertainment. Its amenities were not elegant—its toilet was a disgrace, and their dressing area, with its speckled mirrors and pungent odors, of leaking pipes and kitchen grease, saw as much traffic as a street corner, the house band’s musicians, waiters, and busboys drifting by their tables casually, as if, in fact, the ladies were wearing something more than just panties and brassieres, sometimes less. (“Get used to it,” Susannah, one of the nicer dancers, told her as María scrambled to cover up her breasts when one of the musicians, a fellow named Rodrigo, happened by and, getting an eyeful of her nicely taut nipples, winked.)

  She did not enjoy the cockroaches that sometimes crawled across the mirror, or the rats that skittered in through the stage door and in the early hours of the morning delighted in eating the cotton balls and pomades that the dancers left out, and it was disgusting to find their droppings inside their shoes and makeup kits. (It struck her as a gloomy and claustrophobic way to live: To be indoors at night, separated from nature by walls and passageways and doors, left María missing the countryside and the woods—the very air that seemed as delicious as anything in the world.) And it didn’t make her happy to learn that she had to pay for her own costumes, for every flimsy sequined top with its gossamer meshing, for those bottoms that were two sizes too small and exposed her goose-pimpled nalgitas to the air-conditioned, smoke-filled chill; for the high heels that lifted her stately rump higher and left her feet sore for weeks, her toes growing horns and her soles covering over with scales like a lizard’s. (Thank God that la señora Matilda, having become her friend, allowed María to soak in her bathtub with Epsom salts; that pleasure was a pure luxury, and the kind that sh
e never knew back in Pinar del Río.)

  The other dancers, who were all about María’s age—Rosalita, at thirty, was practically an ancient by cabaret standards—were nice enough, happy to show María the ropes, but their choreographer, Gaspar, was of a different order altogether. A little fellow, he was one of those fulanos who, working so closely with women, seemed to have acquired some of their coquettish mannerisms; at the same time he liked to lord over them like a tyrant. With his tiny frame, muscular arms, and dyed blond hair, wavy as the sea, he was either constantly clapping his hands, to speed up their pace (flamenco-inspired numbers were the worst) or else putting on a show by tapping at the ladies’ heads with his dense forefinger if they made any mistakes. He worked on their postures, constantly lifting chins higher with his knuckles, and, while holding their bellies flat with one hand, ran the other up from the nubs of their spines to the bottoms of their necks; along the way, he held, brushed, pressed, and touched parts of their bodies with the kind of casualness that they would have objected to were he a more manly, and therefore lascivious, sort. (If he was acting, by pretending to show no interest in them, then he was a good actor.) Sometimes he’d fire someone on the spot for flubbing her steps, send her out into the street in tears, run after her, then bring her back, without as much as an apology about the matter.

  He didn’t mince words. “You are the worst dancer I’ve ever worked with—a disaster of the first order. You should go back to the sticks,” he once told María, who would have slapped his face had she not needed the job. “You put my stomach in knots, entiendes? Now, do it over again!”

  Not that María disliked him—he was the first to let you know if your work was good, but, God, just getting to that point amounted to a daily trial. For one thing, she learned that there was quite a difference between the limberness of an amateur and that of a professional: the stretches alone were a misery that she never quite got used to. Constantly scolding them about one thing or the other, Gaspar would tell the chorus that they were useless unless, in the midst of a dance, they could raise their insteps to touch their foreheads, because then, as he’d bluntly put it, the gawking tourists might have their dreams come true and catch a glimpse of their young and succulent Cuban vaginas through the glittering fabric of their garments. Such a display of feminine charms, he reminded them again and again, was the backbone of their business. “Now, never forget that, señoritas!”

  So for several afternoons a week, María became a reluctant ballerina in training, her long legs rising slowly and her body contorting as she tried to touch her forehead with the high arch of her shapely foot. All that work, which she hated at the time, she’d remember with fondness—given the distance of years, even the moody Gaspar would seem a most simpático teacher—and while it may have been true that María, a sight to see in a skimpy bodice and leotard, could have wrung a chicken’s neck and still drawn applause from the audience, a certain fact remained. During her seven months’ apprenticeship at the Monte Carlo, she, in fact, proved herself an exceptional dancer and probably could have been the star of that show, except for the fact that, as such things went—It is very true, Teresita, that men will take advantage when you are so very attractive—she didn’t want to put Rosalita out on the street, the boss having gotten in the habit of removing his dark glasses and looking at María in a way that disturbed her during those shows. Or, to put it differently, she couldn’t see herself spreading her legs for him just for the sake of becoming a headliner, and so, feeling his eyes drilling into her backside each time she crossed the stage, María simply stopped showing up, even if she would miss those dancers, some of whom were to remain her friends.

  Chapter SEVEN

  Doting on her and knowing just how special she looked, her papito, Manolo, always made a certain joke: “Where’d you come from, chiquita?” It was a mystery. While Concha had been a pleasant-looking woman with a broad African nose and deeply soft dark eyes, there had never been anything particularly remarkable about her looks, save for a certain gentle piety—you’ve seen that on the faces of those sweet churchgoing negritas on Sundays. As for her papito, with his sagging gallego face, his droop-lidded eyes, he was no prize either (even when María thought that he would have been a handsome man if he hadn’t liked his rum so much). Somehow, between the two of them, they had produced this masterpiece, the sort of little girl who, romping through the high grasses, lifted even the lowest and most forlorn of spirits up. Whenever Manolo took her around, guitar in hand, to neighboring farms and valles, she was as good as currency when it came to getting him free drinks and a little food. And, during the glory of her childhood, when she became aware of just how thickly and deliberately sunlight moved across a field, and just the scent of flowers sent her to heaven, there was no escaping the fact that, in a valle with lots of other Marías, and pretty ones at that, she and her younger sister, Teresita, for whom she would have cut off her right hand, surely stood out.

  She was so pretty that whenever she was spotted from the fields tending to her chores in their yard—feeding their livestock from pails of slop mainly—even the most exhausted of those guajiro farmers, faces gnarled, bodies thin as bone, their skin leathery from the sun, would halt their oxen and call out to her, “Oye, princesa!”—“Hello, princess!”—or “Hola, mi vida!”—“Hey there, my life!” all in the effort to get her attention, as if for the first time, even if she had been tagging along with their plows and oxen for as long as she could remember. Well, things had just changed, that’s all. First had come the blood, then the bloating, the terrible lecture about becoming filthy and having to wear a rag so she wouldn’t drip blood everywhere. Then her body had filled out. It had seemed to take only a few months. Her angelic girl’s figure, turning so voluptuous that Concha, fearful a drunkard might try to take advantage of her one night, made María wear a homemade corset tight around her chest, but, with María hating the thing, that lasted only a while, proving too painful and impractical for her to endure.

  In those days, a toothless old guajiro, Macedonio, who slurped through his every saliva-driven utterance, once told her, “Looking at you, I can remember when I could chew.” And when she, Teresa, and her papito went to the nearest town, San Jacinto, some ten miles away, to bring their livestock to market, María suddenly found herself being followed by one or another of the brasher young men, fellows who whistled after her, promised to buy her an ice cream cone if she would only tell them her name, and who, while her papito negotiated with a butcher, asked her out to see a movie in that town’s little theater, El Chaplin. If she refused them all, or hardly seemed to care about hurting anyone’s feelings, it was because María tried to forget about her own bodily changes: which is to say that she didn’t want to let her childhood go.

  They had no schools—not a single one of those guajiros being educated—and their papito just didn’t think it worthwhile to make the two-hour journey back and forth each day to town just so that his daughters might learn to read and write. The best things for them to acquire would be more practical skills—like cooking, skinning animals, and sewing—just what a husband would want. Besides, they had enough work to keep them busy. With one day much like the next, once they finished looking after their livestock—so many pigs, chickens, and randy goats (who stank to high heaven)—María and Teresita, smelling of animals and dung, and with feather remnants in their hair, would make their way down through the woods behind their house, along a twisting path, enormous trees swallowing the light, to a gully and waterfall where rainbows often appeared in the mists. They were so happy then, for everything around them was so beautiful: the lianas and birds of paradise grew densely in that jungla, the fecundity of its earth sending up an endless variety of blossoms, all manner of starflowers and wild orchids sprouting alongside bottle palms, whose thorny fronds cascaded to the ground in clusters, hooded violets dangling like bells off vines around them. (The variety was endless: crimson begonias, red-bulbed flor de euphorbias, flor de majagua, purple jacarandas
, hibiscus, radiantes, and tiny violets, as well as other peculiarly named blossoms—scratch bellies, burst horses, and chicken-dung blooms, not a one deserving such a homely appellation. Perhaps that’s why, years later, María had so many silk flowers in her home, and why certain scents from the little garden she kept outside her house always made her cry, or come close to it, because such natural perfumes made her think about Teresa, Cuba, and her own youth. No matter how jaded she otherwise had become, María still missed the wonderment she had felt as a girl when each morning seemed to bring even more of those incredible flowers into the world, and gushingly so, as if God, peeking out from his religious stillness, had pointed a finger and made their pistils, tendrils, and petals suddenly ooze from the ground and up the moss-covered trunks of trees, all effortlessly coming into existence in the same mysterious manner that her own body had changed.)

  That cascada flowed out of a massive cave, its roof dripping with stalactites, bats flitting in and out of the darkness. While stony drafts of cool air, redolent of guano and clay, came wafting out its entrance—so wonderful on a hot afternoon—they’d slip off their dresses and, down to their breeches, lie on the granite ledge, luxuriating in the torrents, as delicious as any aguacero or tremendous storm. A sheath of water pelting their bodies, the sisters held on to each other the way they did at night while sharing a bed, all the while whispering about how, as little old viejitas, they would remain close forever and forever like angels, amen.

  They must have gone there hundreds of times since they were children, with very little changing in their routine, but on one of those afternoons, as they were walking home, Teresita, then twelve years old, in the midst of a smile and midstride while sidestepping some jasmine blooms—“¡Qué bonitos son!”—stopped suddenly as if she had hit a wall. Her eyes rolling up into their sockets, she bit her tongue, her teeth chattered, and her limbs began shaking so violently she bloodied the knuckles of her right hand while striking it against a rocky ledge—all that even before she dropped like a stone to the ground. And with that María fell to her knees, smothering her younger sister’s body with her own, as if to protect her from los castigos de Dios—the castigations of God, as her mamá used to call such visitations of unexpected misery. But they still came floating down from heaven like the black ashes of a cane field fire, no sweetness in the air, María holding her sister as tightly as she could without hurting her, her right hand cushioning Teresita’s head as it whipped from side to side, María’s own knuckles soon bleeding from smacking against the ground in the effort to keep her sister still, a weeping mist settling around them.