Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  It became the kind of situation that she would always remember in the manner of a bad dream. Started out good, ended up bad. A terrible mistake from which there seemed to be no escape. Sometimes after she had seen him and he had treated her poorly, María headed back to that filthy hotel la Cucaracha, which she had since come to regard with fondness, and, finding la señora Matilda at her usual place in the hall, wept on her urine-smelling lap. Recognizing her expression of regret and torment, something she had seen many times before, Violeta the prostitute would hold María in her arms and caress her hair. “Come back here, my love,” she’d tell María. “Come back to your friends.” Such little visits helped sustain her—la señora always told her that she could have her old habitación again—but when she looked around that place, with its click-clack of whores’ heels on the steps, its dingy corners, and remembered the condition in which she sometimes found the toilet—an outhouse, a field was better than that—and of waking in the middle of the night jumping—brincando, brincando—from insect bites, María knew she’d never return. But then something would hit her: Short of going home to Pinar del Río, there would be no way of avoiding Ignacio, not in Havana at any rate. Where else could she go? Heading back to her solar, she’d imagine him lurking behind every arcade column; and once she’d climb the steps to her door, her greatest fear was that she’d find Ignacio, sprawled out on her bed naked, an electric fan turning by his side, waiting.

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  Not that Ignacio was always so harsh with her. Though she’d tend to remember him as a son of a bitch, y como un abusador, he ran so hot and cold that it always amazed María when they settled into a pleasant period. He might punch her arms and legs a half dozen times in a single afternoon, but within a few days flowers always arrived at the club in his name, so that while María, jamming a modesty pad into the front of her glittering undergarment, fatigued by sadness, softened towards him again. And sometimes he turned up at the Nocturne with a box full of lacy Parisian scarves, just to give away to the ladies of the chorus. And he’d tell anyone willing to listen that if he or she needed a good refrigerator, a nice radio console, or even an air conditioner, he was the man to talk to. And always at steeply discounted prices, given that they all—from the powder room ladies to the shoeshine boy in the back and the women of the chorus—were friends of María.

  In a calm and decent mood, Ignacio, always dressed sportily and smelling nicely of cologne, could be incredible. He knew people like the advertising director at El Diario de la Marina, and other papers, who might have use for her as a model in their ads. And now and then, out of nowhere, Ignacio, stuffing a few twenty-dollar bills into a lipstick-stained coffee cup she kept by her makeup mirror, told her: “This is for your poor papito out in Pinar, if you want to give it to him.” Cold with beggars on the street, he seemed to change his mind when it came to her little world. And that sometimes made her feel differently.

  On some nights, at about four in the morning, when Ignacio was usually among the last to leave the Nocturne and the floors were already being swept around the tables, even while some patrons lingered, and he asked if he might “escort” her back to her place, María, whatever his recent transgressions, usually told him “Yes.”

  In the best of spirits, he even encouraged her about some things. When they were passing by the Palacio Theater along the Prado during a midafternoon Sunday stroll, and beautiful María saw that crowds were queuing in the entranceway for a performance of a ballet, Giselle, he didn’t hesitate to buy tickets for the two o’clock show. The lead dancer of that troupe, one Alicia Alonso, a waifish half-blind brunette, moved so gracefully in the role that María’s hip-swaying rumbera movements seemed crude by comparison. While watching the corps de ballet and feeling stunned by Alonso’s elegance onstage, she could only think about what one of the dancers in her troupe, the aging Berta, had recently told her: “You’re so good looking, it doesn’t matter if you can dance at all.” That remark had bothered her, and especially so after watching that ballet. It so nagged at María that she began to dream about becoming a ballerina.

  In this, Ignacio, even while thinking it a bit of a joke, indulged her—paying for twice-weekly classes at an academy off Industria Street. And while she had begun to learn the fundamentals, and worked hard to perfect the placement of her feet, the various pliés, she lacked the classical grace of the others, who were, in most cases, adolescents if not children (and well off ones at that). At five seven and too voluptuous—she weighed one hundred and twenty-seven pounds—María, the oldest of them, seemed preposterously out of place. Still, she kept at it for a few months, until there came the day when she realized that it would take her years to become any good at all. By then, her feet had begun blistering all over again, to the point that they sometimes bled in her shoes while she was dancing in the floor shows at the club, and so, one day, María, putting that pipe dream aside, simply stopped taking those lessons.

  At least those lessons helped her performances: she became somewhat more elegant in her stage movements, the nuances of those stances making a difference in her style. To the delight of her salivating audiences, it became easier for María to touch her forehead with her instep, and her contortions became much more fluid, not that she needed to improve on her routines. Having been exposed to her fellow, better off aspirants, who were picked up by chauffeurs and housemaids after classes and, almost to a one, attended a French lyceum (they were always practicing their French with each other during their rest periods), she, envious at first and then inspired by their air of refinement, began thinking about ways to improve herself.

  Ignacio always laughed at the fact that she couldn’t read worth much. He caught on right away, noticing that she really didn’t know what she was looking at when handed a restaurant menu. Not once did she ever seem to know that among the books he’d carry around with him was a simple Spanish diccionario. (That’s what he had been studying in the club the night they met.) He used to tell her that he would have written her love letters, but what was the point of bothering? In any case, there was no need to feel too bad, he’d say. Half of all rural Cubans, if not more, were illiterates anyway, he’d read in some newspaper. And what difference would it make to a woman whose chocha, in his opinion, was a national treasure?

  But even when Ignacio knew that his jibes bothered her, and he was always talking about finding some brainy fulano to teach her, he just never got around to it: he was too ashamed of her in that way to approach anyone. Besides, he felt content to lord that superiority over her, and in any case, he really didn’t care if María could even spell her name, as long as she had learned to comport herself like a lady in the classy restaurants they went to and took him to bed with abandon.

  And María? Living in an incomprehensible world, she often wondered what the newspaper headlines said. Even when she recognized her stage name on a poster outside the club—M-A-R-Í-A R-I-V-E-R-A—she could only guess what the rest of such notices meant. Some words she understood, but not many, the gaps of lost meaning confounding, depressing her. Waking around noon each day and feeling that something was missing in her life—forget love, that always turns to air, doesn’t it?—she resolved to find herself a teacher.

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  Now below her windows was a thriving market that started up at seven in the morning. Out of canvas-awning-covered stalls, in dense rows that faced each other on either side of the narrow cobblestone street, those vendors sold everything—live chickens, parrots in cages, cut-up sides of pig. There were stalls for household goods and plumbing tools, heaps of old radios and extension cords, books and outdated magazines—even American magazines such as Look and Life, which had been discarded in hotel bins and picked out like used rags for sale. A dozen cheap guitars and as many dented cornets and other instruments hung from wires strung along the canopy of one, and there was a stall that sold nothing but tocadiscos— record players—of every imaginable incarnation. From the old RCA windup Victrolas tha
t played only 78s to the more modern GEs (always worn and used) that employed the speeds of 16½ and 331/3 rpm, and around them, where they were stacked on the ground, piles and piles of brittle records. (Oh, if she could only have picked out one of them, during her leisurely strolls through the market, a 78 rpm disco by an Oriente sonero called los Hermanos Castillo, featuring two songs, recorded in 1944 in Santiago, one of which, entitled “Mis sueños”—“My Dreams”—was a plaintive bolero penned and sung by none other than Nestor Castillo, her future love.) There were stalls that sold shoes, men’s apparel, racks of dresses, and much more.

  Once María got up in the late morning, and Ignacio had not come around to carouse with her, it was one of her solaces to stroll through the market and say hello to the vendors who had become her friends. She even dallied by the bookseller’s stall, a few steps from her door, picking up one volume or the other and pretending, in case anyone was watching, to read, flipping through their pages, pausing at some, and arching her lovely eyebrows at their supposed contents. The bookseller was such a friendly man that María often bought one or two just to be nice. Among them was an absurdly obtuse volume that contained biographies of the one hundred most prominent Cubans alive in 1902. This she liked for its genteel photographs. Another, more arcane, was a Theosophical Society tome, published in Barcelona in 1928. She picked that one for its cover, featuring a pair of celestial-looking beings flying disembodied, like shredding flames, towards a reddish pearl in the heavens. A third, of the twenty or so she would own and keep on a shelf like porcelain objects, happened to be a moldy edition of Don Quijote. (Its pen and ink illustrations enchanted her.) Otherwise, María sorted through the one-and two-day-old newspapers that the fellow sold for a penny apiece, all the while assuming expressions of interest. The vendor, Isidoro, hardly imagined that María was only going through the motions, but another man, a lanky old negrito with sunken eyes, sitting inside the shaded entranceway of her building, a cane in his large arthritic hands, had watched her going through her charade a hundred times, without saying a single word. All he ever did was smile and tip his hat at María, but one afternoon, he just couldn’t resist and called out to her.

  “You there,” he said. And when she turned: “Yes, you my love! Come over here.”

  In a florid dress, and with a fan in hand, María approached him.

  “I should talk to you,” he told her. “I know what you’re up to.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, almost indignantly.

  “Oh, come on now,” he said. “I can tell by your eyes that you really don’t know what you’re looking at. ¿Tengo razón o no?”—“Am I right or wrong?”

  She had no response, just looked down at the ground.

  “Well, there’s no shame in it. Myself, I didn’t learn to read until I was thirty, and believe you me, my love, that was a long, long time ago.” He laughed, slapping his knee. “But the fact that you even pretend to tells me that you have the desire.” Then he took hold of her right hand. “Dime, mi bonita, how old are you anyway?”

  “Eighteen, but I will turn nineteen in October.”

  “Now that is young, carajo!” he told her. “You still have all the time in the world. And since I have nothing to do with myself”—he laughed again—“how about if I teach you the basics, you hear? You look like a bright young woman, even if you’re a lousy actress, and like I said, I’ve got nothing else going on.”

  She didn’t even hesitate, asking: “Do you want me to pay you?”

  “Why, no, my love,” he said, rapping his cane against the steps beneath his feet. “Just tell me your name, that’s all.”

  “María,” she said. “María García y Cifuentes.”

  “Well, María, I’m Lázaro Portillo, at your service, and a very happy señor I am, and grateful for all the times I’ve seen you lighting up this marketplace with your beauty.”

  Then, he moved aside and tapped the steps beside him. Unfurling a clean handkerchief from one of his pockets, he spread it out for her. “Wait here, and I will find some paper and a pencil, and then, my love, we can begin.”

  And so those lessons commenced in the midst of a busy market day, the first words he showed María, as she basked in his adoration and kindness, being “Él” for “him” and “Yo” for “I” and, as well, “Ella” for “her.”

  After that it became her daily routine to sit with Lázaro for a few hours each afternoon, and she made it a habit to bring along a notebook, in which she wrote everything he instructed her to copy down. In only a few months, this bony-limbed, knob-knuckled negrito angel had opened María’s eyes, teaching her some things. At first, she could barely comprehend what she read, but she got better, bit by bit. And he, basking in the loveliness of her youth, wanted nothing for it, save for a few sandwiches now and then—he was the sort who looked hungry but didn’t act it. In those months, words and their meanings, and the way the letters of the alphabet arranged themselves into words, began to follow her everywhere, along the streets of Havana, while she was soaking in a bath, and even as she danced, shaking her derriere onstage. They followed María like birds, or like those black notes that flew in clusters across a musician’s arrangement charts at the club.

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  One evening at the club a few months later—it was October—the house band had broken into a tropical jam. A jazzed up version of “Rumba caliente” began the show, and this, to much applause, was followed by a frenetic “El cumbanchero.” But if she’d remember that particular evening of performances, it was because one of the dancers, fifteen-year-old Paulita, in the midst of an acrobatic routine, collapsed midstep, her right foot slipping off a bench as she leapt up to join María atop a piano, the poor thing falling head backwards to the floor. Even before the show, when Paulita, looking pale and drawn and sitting in front of her mirror, her hair in curlers, had complained that her belly ached, they knew what that was about. The girls in the chorus had raised money for the abortion she’d gotten a few days earlier—cost forty dollars, and with a real doctor, not some back-alley hack—but who among them imagined that it could have been botched so badly? For as she lay sprawled on the stage, the music stopping and the emcee, a suave crooner named Ricky Romero, coming out from behind the abruptly closed curtains to advise the muttering, drunken audience in both English and Spanish that all was well, and that momentarily the show would continue, out of the poor girl’s tasseled bottom seeped a widening flower of blood. The boss had her carried off, and even gave one of the stagehands money to rush her to the hospital, muy pronto, the dancers, hysterical, crying, going on with their performance anyway and mostly finding their marks, but without much enthusiasm at all.

  A dispiriting night, the kind of evening when María wouldn’t have minded having Ignacio around, for sometimes she found his strength a comfort, even if he beat her, but lately he hadn’t been coming by the club as often as he used to.

  As a matter of fact, she hadn’t seen as much of him in general. He’d say that he had to go away, claiming he had business in Miami, or in the Yucatán, or in Santiago de Cuba. But she didn’t know what to believe. Once when Ignacio had left a book on her table, by the window looking out over the street, María, driven by curiosity to see if she could decipher a few of its words, flipped through its pages to find, wedged deep into the spine, a small black-and-white, serrate-edge photograph of a sultry dancer known as the “fabulous Lola Sánchez,” the back of it bearing the imprint of her burgundy-painted lips and an inscription; the only words María could pick out were amor and besitos. And by chance, she had gone to the harbor one afternoon to see one of her fellow dancers, Juanita Méndez, off as she boarded the Havana-Miami ferry to join the chorus of a traveling revue. If her intensely beautiful eyes weren’t failing María, she had spotted Ignacio, on an upper deck, looking like a cat eating a canary, his arms wrapped around a quite stunning brunette who bore an amazing resemblance to the Lola Sánchez of the photograph. A few weeks later María had received a tel
ephone call at the club from Ignacio, announcing that he wouldn’t be coming to her place on Sunday afternoon because he had been detained in Holguín—one of his trucks, carrying a load of electric fans and refrigerators, had apparently been hijacked by thieves. Why then did she happen to come across him, later that same evening, walking in the arcades of Comercio with several men, and an unidentifiable woman, by his side? It wasn’t long before María concluded that Ignacio, like most well-heeled men in Havana, had found someone new to amuse him, another woman whom he might treat well at first and then abuse later, a beauty onto whose body, stretched out on a bed, he might empty the contents of a bottle of rum, laughing at first and then later licking her up and down before concluding that she needed a slap or two across the face.

  …your father was a liar!

  María should have felt relieved to have Ignacio out of her life, or seemingly so, but, even if she wouldn’t admit it, a bitterness and a kind of jealousy over Lola Sánchez, another queen of Havana nightlife and of shapely culos, overwhelmed her. It left María wondering if Ignacio, after all, had been correct in telling her that, despite her beauty, she was really worthless and stupid, and not worth much at all.