Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Or to put it differently: what was sweetest about María had been pulled so deeply into herself that she now seemed as haughty as she was beautiful. Still, Lázaro looked forward to their lessons and took pride in the way that their afternoons of study had paid off. María could read now, but slowly, and she had filled her notebooks with countless words that she had more or less memorized. And her handwriting, ever so careful, had been honed by the hours and hours she’d spent backstage between shows scribbling down rows of the alphabet’s letters, the way schoolchildren did. Practice had gotten María to the point where she could write her name out with such elegant flourishes that it would have been hard for anyone to imagine that she’d come from a family whose father signed his name with a crudely rendered X, or that for years María had only pretended she could read signs while walking along the streets. As they’d sit in their usual spot, near the bookseller’s stall, Lázaro had occasionally taken special joy in advising María what school grade she had graduated into. By the time Nestor had left for America, she had passed through to the second grade; a few years later, in 1951, she had slipped into secondary school, and now, in the days of Batista’s presidency, she could read and write like a fourteen-year-old with certain bad habits—which is to say, she got some things right and some things wrong, spelling never being one of her strengths. Nevertheless, she’d reached a point where she really didn’t need Lázaro any longer, and what more did he have to teach her?

  Still, despite dressing as well as the El Encanto window mannequins (Ignacio wanted her always to look her best) and carrying herself as if she were the dueña of Havana, María loved returning to that market street and going from stall to stall to say hello to the merchants, who always joked about this fine uppity lady’s resemblance to someone they once knew. It always pleased her to sort through the bookseller’s selections. She had a weakness for romance novels by a certain Almacita Alvarez from Spain—and just recognizing the titles: Bitter Love, Blood and Passion, Taught to Deceive—filled her with pride. She also liked any books about spiritualism, for she often dreamed about her dead family and believed there had to be a way of contacting them. Though those books rarely cost more than eight or ten cents apiece, or the price of a trolley or bus ride, customers still haggled with the vendor, but never María, who believed each tome invaluable, whatever its tattered condition.

  In fact, while María had kept working as a dancer, she didn’t have too many expenses to worry about. Because she was Ignacio Fuentes’s “woman,” her rent and clothing were taken care of, but even if he had turned out to be a stingy man, she would have had sources of income beyond her twenty pesos a week as a dancer. Having caught the eye of more than one art director or advertising executive during her performances, María had started getting jobs as a model, posing beside kitchen appliances, soaking in bubble baths, leaning against the dimpled hood of a shiny Oldsmobile, usually in either a movie starlet’s glistening gown or a tight bathing suit. In advertisements for Polar beer, her face adorned many a poster here and there in the city, and because the company also produced promotional coasters and waiters’ trays, her mysterious and alluring expression was to be found peering up from the half-moon bottoms of frothy drinks and rum glasses at strangers in cafés and bars everywhere. If beautiful María had turned heads before just because of the way her nalgitas swayed inside her dress, and stopped traffic with her unmistakable looks, she now attracted attention for having become so familiar to the general public. She’d even appeared in a rum ad on a television show, broadcast from the CMQ building, but had disliked the sweltering lights, the way they made her diaphragm sweat under the tight binding of her dress, and the unearthly feeling that came from wearing what felt like pounds of makeup on her face. (“Una miseria,” she called that.)

  In time, with more money than she needed, María put most of her wages into a savings account at a Chase National Bank on Brasil, her blue passbook something she liked to take out from under her mattress to “read” as if it were a novel. Never forgetting how her own papi never earned very much, she gave a few coins to nearly every beggar she encountered, and when she bumped into her friend El Caballero de París, she’d buy him lunch and a few glasses of first-class rum, sometimes even a Churchill cigar. When it came to Lázaro, who never wanted more payment than a sandwich or two, as well as a radiant smile, María began insisting that he accept a few dollars from her for those lessons.

  Having taken to calling Lázaro mi maestro, a title that always made him wince with happiness as he’d spent most of his life as a bootblack, and then a Havana street sweeper, the brunt of that income derived from the largesse of local merchants along Obispo and O’Reilly streets—María had begun to look upon him with a fondness that made her fear for his well-being. He wasn’t her papito, but she had grown attached enough to his laughter and kindly manner that, as surely as the sun began baking the rooftops of Havana in the mornings, she came to believe that he would go the way of everyone she had ever loved. It was the kind of thought that lingered in the back of María’s mind each time he seemed a little tired or had trouble hoisting himself up from those steps, and especially so as he once tried to get to his feet and this old, lanky negrito nearly fell backwards into the hallway’s shadows from whence he had come. (Those were Havana shadows, the temperature cooling with every foot of hallway you stepped into, like entering the recesses of a church baptistery, a scent of ashes, frying fish, and flowers, somehow musty, deepening.)

  That was the only time María, accompanying Lázaro home, saw where he lived—inside an inner courtyard, under an awning set out over what must have been some old stone trough from when horses were kept in the alleys, all his possessions, mainly books and a mat, with only a single chair crammed into what amounted to a hole in the wall, his only luxury a solitary lightbulb, which hung off a bent wire, his toilet situated behind a rotted door that led into the back of a store. But did he complain? No; and when she, out of a generous impulse and knowing that la Señora Matilda would have looked after him, offered to put him up in la Cucaracha, he refused. “I’m just used to it here, that’s all,” he told her. “And at my age, I’m waiting for that guagua that goes to where it goes, anyway.”

  Pero, hombre, she thought. No te mueras.

  She was already attached enough to Lázaro and his lessons that each time María turned up, she couldn’t help but wonder if it would be her last, as if her affection for someone would surely spell his doom. Of course, María was imagining things, but having lost her family at so young an age, as she’d one day explain to her daughter, she became a “little cucka en la cabeza,” without even realizing it…which was probably part of the reason why she had turned away from Nestor.

  “And that nice fellow, the handsome one, I used to see you with—whatever happened to him?” Lázaro had once asked her.

  “He went off to America, to New York.”

  “So, why didn’t you go with him?” Lázaro shook his head. “I saw the way you looked at each other—yes, señorita, I certainly did!”

  “I don’t really know why,” she told him, shrugging. “But he was a músico, and you know how musicians can be; they don’t have much common sense.”

  Nodding agreeably, as if María were old enough to know what she was talking about, Lázaro punched out the inside of his lacquered cane hat on his lap and smiled. “You mean he didn’t have much money, was that it?”

  “No, it wasn’t that at all. He just didn’t seem proper in his thinking.”

  “Uh-huh,” Lázaro conceded. “And that older fellow you’re with now, the one who doesn’t smile very much—is he your man?”

  “He’s good to me, Lázaro,” she began, but then, not wanting to explain anything, she lost her patience. “Whatever happened between me and that músico is over with, and there’s nothing left to be said or done.”

  “Oh, amorcita, don’t you know there’s more to life than money,” Lázaro told her, turning to the next of the lessons. “The goodness in a m
an’s heart, that’s something else. But who am I to lecture you? I just hope you’re happy.”

  She had to admit that the few times Ignacio had seen her with Lázaro, he hadn’t reacted well, accusing her of consorting with a Negro as if that were the worst thing she could do with herself. “Next thing you know,” Ignacio once told her, “you’ll lose what few manners you have.” The few times they met, when she was still living in that edificio, he never deigned to speak with Lázaro and always gave the kindly man, so politely singing her praises and doffing his hat in respect, a look that implied he was no better than riffraff, or the lowest of the low. It didn’t help that Lázaro was black as a crow—Ignacio had no use for such men. In fact, he had filled María’s head with all kinds of sentiments that would have been unthinkable to her back in Pinar del Río, sentiments that were insulting. As a light-skinned mulatta, she surely had black blood on her mother’s side; nevertheless, María couldn’t fault Ignacio for thinking that way; most white Cubans, los blanquitos, did.

  “Oh, but that other one,” Lázaro would say. “What was his name again?”

  “Nestor—Nestor Castillo.”

  “You know, once when you weren’t around, he came over to talk with me, played me a little tune, a sweet melody on his trumpet. Told me he was writing it for you, María. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, he liked to write songs, but I suppose all músicos do.”

  “Ay, pero, chiquita, I could tell listening to it that the fellow was crazy about you. Pardon me for saying so, I took one look into his eyes and I saw some wonderful things—like a poet’s thoughts. Were I a lovely young woman, that for me would have been enough to throw all common sense out the window.” Then: “Now, I won’t say another word,” though, forgetting, he always would.

  She’d put up with his two cents, knowing that Lázaro only meant well, and there were times when she was tempted to explain how Nestor sometimes frightened her, not with his natural armature, a true wonder she’d never forget, but with a sadness that María, carrying enough of her own, found wearisome, as if there would never be any way of making him happy. That Nestor Castillo was such a high-strung tipo seemed a matter of bad luck, the sweet músico with a troubled soul and a doubtful future, the man, so much of a child, whom she’d had no choice but to turn away. He was, after all, a campesino, and like the guajiros, he didn’t put up any barriers between his feelings and how he acted, or what he said—something which, in those days, María, being groomed as a proper lady by Ignacio, had come to forget.

  Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

  A story: in 1953, the same year that Castro had started what would be known as the July 26th Movement, María, moonlighting, had posed for a four-color “Fly to Cuba” poster for Pan American airlines. This came about because an American executive with a New York advertising agency, Y & R, had caught her act one night at the Lantern and approached her after the show—which was how she got most of her modeling jobs. The ad itself, shot in the Torrens studio off Cuba Street, featured María, in a snug two-piece cream-colored bathing suit, her nalgitas prominently hanging out, and white-rimmed beach girl sunglasses, standing in juicy splendor before a towering royal palm. Sipping coconut juice from a gourd through a straw with one hand, she held a thick, fuming cigar in the other, its smoke rising into the air and resolving into the shape of a heart as a sleek four-engine Pan Am Clipper flew overhead through the bluest of Cuban skies. An afternoon’s work that paid quite well—twenty-five dollars.

  María could hardly have imagined that the finished product would have caught the eye of her former amante, Nestor Castillo, in distant New York. Or to be more precise, that poster, hanging in a travel agency window, had stopped Nestor dead in his tracks one autumn afternoon in 1953 as he passed through the cavernous lobby of the Hotel Biltmore on East Forty-fourth Street, on his way to visit a Cuban friend, José-Pascual, in the Men’s Bar. Oh, poor, poor Nestorito, as she would come to think of him. He was that handsome dark-featured man, dapper in a linen jacket, peering dreamily at her image, his heart aching. Beside himself with rekindled memories of her lusciousness and the romance that had nearly torn him apart, Nestor soon found himself by that agency counter, pleading, if not demanding, in his broken English that the clerk sell him the poster. He was trembling, his hands shaking wildly. To think that every Fred MacMurray–looking fulano passing by that window could see María holding between her elegant fingers that phallic cigar! Such was his agitation that he hardly noticed at first how the clerk, a transplant from Cuba himself, and a rather sympathetic one at that, had started speaking to him in Spanish.

  It took him a while to calm Nestor down, and, in the end, he explained that, as much as he wanted to help him out, he just couldn’t sell such things to everyone whose interest that poster had caught. “You see,” he said, “with that one, someone always makes the same request, nearly every day.” Instead, he advised Nestor to visit the local Pan Am office a few blocks north. “Go up to the fourth floor,” he told him. “There’s a customer relations office there, and they’ll be happy to help you. Okay, caballero?” A little while later, in the bar, a few steps away from the hotel’s Palm Court (in the Havana style), and not far from its famous clock and the young couples gathered there, Nestor, brooding over a fried steak with onions sandwich and enough rum to get him dreaming, confided to his friend, a fellow he had befriended at a party on La Salle Street, the mess this woman in Havana had left him in.

  “She seemed to love me, and then she didn’t, carajo!” he kept saying, his head shaking. “José-Pascual,” he said, “if you only knew how I hate myself for letting her get away.” Then, with José-Pascual, a good-natured gallego and a transplant from Jiguaní, pouring, mostly for free, he got good and drunk over the matter. By five, as Nestor, making his way a few blocks north, stumbled in through a Madison Avenue skyscraper’s dizzily revolving doors, hundreds of office workers were swarming its lobby, and Nestor, put off by the crowd, and having to make a rehearsal in any case, lost heart and decided to head back uptown instead, sulking all the way. Later that night, tormented as always by the slightest reminder of María, he hardly slept—believing that María was mocking him from afar. And while he tried to forget her, for many a good reason that image of María, with that vaguely lip-shaped shadow dipping through the front cleft of her bathing suit like an orchid’s fold, killed Nestor and distracted him for weeks. But then that was Nestor. On many a night after, he would sit on his living room couch with his guitar, whereupon, strumming chords, he would pour his musings and pained longings into yet another version of his song about her, a bolero he had decided to call “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

  She had known about that song for a long time. Thanks to Lázaro’s lessons, María had slowly gained the ability to decipher the nearly weightless airmail letters Nestor had started sending her from New York, weekly at first, then twice monthly, then every other month. The first year, 1950—when María had accepted without regret her status as Ignacio’s mistress and moved into their fourteenth-floor high-rise apartment, with its mirrored walls and sweeping view of the sea, the Hotel Nacional, and the Malecón—she had hardly ever thought about Nestor, except during her most lonely and longing (sexual) moods, his splendid physicality as deeply embedded in her skin’s memory as a nagging melody in a musician’s head.

  On the other hand, once his letters started to arrive, at first with Nestor’s musician friends from New York who’d come to Havana for work and would track her down, one way or the other, at the clubs, it was as if he were determined to enter her life again. (Finding María wasn’t hard: on any given day, one was bound to come across a little ad tucked into the back pages of the Havana Gazette or El Diario de la Marina about the “Phenomenally beautiful and enticing María Rivera—The Dancer You Must See!” And many a photograph of María, in a heavy Aztec-looking plumed headdress and scanty costume, was replicated in the posters and half sheets pasted to the crumbling walls and lampposts of the old city.) At first, María couldn�
�t have cared less about Nestor’s missives. Aside from wanting to avoid the simple labor of deciphering them, she didn’t care to deal with those pangs of guilt about him that occasionally arose to the surface of her dreams, already peopled enough by the ghosts of the guajiro family she had lost. (When she went back to her campo in her sleep, she always saw her mamá sitting on a rocking chair by the doorway to their bohío, her papito riding across the fields on a horse, the farmers and their oxen around him, and her late sister, Teresa, in the years before she fell ill, just ahead of her on that lovely trail through the forest as they headed toward their beloved cascadas, each of them seeming very much alive, a lovely dream until she’d remember that they were dead.)

  Yet María couldn’t help but keep those letters together, in a drawer in her dressing room table, beside a jar of Aphrodite pomade (as if she needed that), and the fact remained that she hadn’t the heart to rip up any of the photographs of Nestor and herself that he had given her on their final day together. (On those nights when she grew bored with the routine, the repetitiousness of a show like “Queen Isabella’s Dance with Columbus,” or “A Peek at Marie Antoinette’s Ladies in Waiting,” or “A Cuban Tarzan with His Cuban Janes,” she sometimes lingered over those photographs of Nestor and herself, taken during their excursions to the beach near Cojímar in the days when they could barely keep their hands off each other. In one of them, Nestor was carrying her out of the cresting gulf waters, María’s arms wrapped around his neck, her breasts pressing, through her green bathing suit, against his happy face, his bathing trunks agitated and plump in the right places. In another, María and Nestor were captured necking in the surf, foam rising around them and their bodies so entangled, that their photographer, one of María’s dancer acquaintances from the old days, Elenita Marquez, tagging along for the fun of it, wondered if they were going to do it right there and then. María had other such photographs, taken around Havana, and even if they were out of focus sometimes, they still commemorated their love and, jaded as she sometimes felt, she counted them, along with the crucifix Nestor had given her, among her most precious possessions.)