Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  But the letters eventually provoked her curiosity, and by the summer of 1951, though she would have saved herself time by showing them to la señora Matilda, who often tortured her with the admonition that she should have gone off with Nestor, María made it a part of her studies to decipher them, slowly. By then, thanks to Lázaro, her abilities to read and write had improved greatly, to the point that she had finally begun to understand the myriad neon signs that glowed and blinked along the nightclub strips, and other things had become less of a mystery. Still, it had taken her the longest time to get through Nestor’s letters. Once she did, María discovered that either she had a much longer way to go or Nestor’s own command of the written language was that of a campesino who had been taught to read and write by a suave but barely educated older brother. Nestor’s letters were always brief, however, as if he did not want to waste another page of that nearly weightless airmail paper. Some were written in pencil, others in smudged, light blue running ink, as if they’d been cried upon, sweated upon, or—who knows what men are capable of when they start to get carried away with their emotions and memories? Some were casual, others impassioned, heartbroken, but all of them were either riddled with words that María simply had not yet come to understand or confusing by virtue of Nestor’s phonetic spellings—’ablar for hablar or ’rible for horrible, among others. Nevertheless, through her own painstaking efforts, along with the occasional assistance of a certain ancient ladies’ powder room attendant, Chi-chi, María came to get a general picture of Nestor’s new life en los Estados Unidos.

  Nueva York, he wrote, was deathly cold in the winters; from the skies came snow—la nieve, like something out of a dream; and people stared at you for speaking in Spanish, and some streets were unimaginably crowded. “Imagine this, María, thousands of people rushing along on a single sidewalk!…And the people, of so many nationalities—Italians, Greeks, Germans, Chinese, Russians, and Poles, even los judíos—speaking in their own languages, a different world, a city much grander than Havana, but not as beautiful, and with rivers that stink of trash and chimneys that send up smoke and more automobiles and buses than you imagined possible. And the buildings, por Dios! Remember that giant mono, King Kong? That building he climbed really exists, it’s called the Empires [sic] State!” (That name he carefully wrote out in English.) “Y fíjate eso, just looking up, you see more high buildings everywhere—so wonderful and horrible at the same time.” And with every mention of such things, Nestor told her how much he loved María and missed her terribly, that he didn’t know why they had lost something so precious. “But you understand, María, there’s still time…. I’m waiting for you, and only you….”

  Yes, even if she had treated him foolishly and badly, he knew that in her heart she really loved him. But at least he had ways of keeping himself busy, and not just by trying to learn English, which he called un monstruoso idioma—a monster of a language. He had a job, along with his brother Cesar—“You remember him, don’t you?”—working in a meatpacking plant during the day and playing music with a little conjunto of musicians they’d found here and there in the city at night and on the weekends. They lived in an apartment in a neighborhood called Harlem with their cousins, “really kindly folks, humildes y simpáticos,” up the hill on el calle La Salle from what’s called an “El train” in New York—the rumbling of the tracks that shook their beds made him long for the quiet of the Cuban countryside. He told María he had days when he felt completely lost and ached with the desire to return to Cuba, to please just say the word—nothing was holding him there. (Cesar loved New York, he wrote, while he himself did not always understand what he was doing there, particularly when he still suffered so without her.) They had lively parties in that apartment, hosted by his brother Cesar, but they meant little to him, the cubanas and Puerto Rican women who turned up from all over the boroughs were nice enough, but they had nothing to offer him, simply because he could think only of her—“Besides, they are too ugly compared to you….”

  In concluding, he always promised to write her again, “faithfully,” and would await her reply. “Please answer me, even just a few words would make me happy….”

  And when María, ashamed of herself, never answered him, he wrote this:

  I don’t understand your silence, María, and while my wounds have grown deeper and my love for you even stronger during these past few years, I’ve come to accept why you could not stay with me. And I don’t blame you; in fact, I forgive you, because María, mi vida, mi amor, I know that you have only deserved the best, and what am I but some nobody músico? And that’s why, María, I have vowed to make a success of myself, so that I will have something to give you besides my pure, pure love. Because of that I am writing so many wonderful songs, with hopes to sell them to orchestras. But the best of those songs I have saved for you, and I am only working harder to make it as perfect as you, and deserving of all your admiration. It comes from my heart, from deep inside, and it has a name that always makes me smile, because it makes me think of you…. “Bellísima María de mi alma”—una canción that I dedicate to you, my love….

  Chapter TWENTY-SIX

  Not that she ever got teary eyed over him, in the same way that Nestor did thinking about her—she was too practical minded for that kind of nonsense. There was no point to it—what had finally happened between them would remain in the irretrievable past after all. Besides, it would have been stupid to lose her head over something as ephemeral and useless as love. (“Es como el aire,” María would say. “It’s like air.”) Nevertheless, each night before her shows, while the band was warming up the audience with comic parodies of “Carmen” or with some old big band tunes, à la Tommy Dorsey (the crowds were mostly American), she still found herself thinking about him, as if, in some reversal of destiny, Nestor might come walking in through the stage door. Musicians, after all, were always traveling between New York, Miami, and Havana, wherever their work might take them. There were nights, in fact, when María wished that she had gone off with him; not for love, perhaps, but because her life with Ignacio had become so boring and, in its way, something of a prison.

  Or, to put it differently, she found that going to bed with Ignacio had become a matter of duty. The truth be told, during those afternoon and late morning bouts of love, when Ignacio turned María on her side so that he, parting her nalgitas ever so slightly, could enter her from behind or, in the dress shop office, closed the door, took down his trousers, and stood before her with his hands on his hips so that she could take care of him with her mouth, or when he had María, her bathing suit dropped to her knees, lower herself onto him so that her bottom rested on his legs as he sat on a bench in one of those sandy-floored cabanas out at Varadero—seven thrusts and then out, he came so quickly—she hardly felt anything at all, not even the guilt which used to send her on flights to purgatory. But was it his fault? Anatomically speaking, though he couldn’t touch Nestor, he wasn’t bad at all, and there were moments when, pulling back on her hair or suckling on her nipples, he seemed almost tender. And yet María, no matter what Ignacio did, had the misfortune of feeling simply too capacious for him. Besides, he couldn’t really have cared less what she felt, as long as María carried on with the twisting of her head, the screams, her body trembling as if she were imitating poor Teresita’s spells.

  Afterwards Ignacio, having had his macho pride attended to, and most satisfactorily, always felt like the king cock of Havana and got into the habit of pinching María’s cheeks as if she were a child. Now and then, if she were lying naked on her stomach on their bed, flipping through the pages of magazines like Hoy or Gente, with their articles about American movie stars, he might slide a few fingers inside her and out, for she always seemed so damp, María crying, “Ay, ay, ay,” as if ready to go at it again, and Ignacio, feeling like Tarzan, pulling up on the waistband of his trousers and checking himself out in the mirror, snorting pridefully, as if he were the greatest lover in Cuba, while she, of course, had b
een secretly thinking about Nestor.

  PUBLICLY, IGNACIO HAD CONTINUED TO SHOW MARÍA OFF AROUND Havana, loving it when they entered a packed house at the Alhambra and caused a stir, even if they slipped in during the prelude of a Lecuona zarzuela, and she hadn’t minded that until she noticed him reverting to his former ways, occasionally staring at other women, and in an obvious manner, as if it were his right to do whatever he pleased. She had long since concluded that he was a petty gangster, but one trying to reform himself, and while Ignacio had opened his clothing store for urban sophisticates and tourists, El Emporio, when it came down to it, he seemed to spend as much time as before attending to his other business at the harbor. (His colleagues were men whom María, in the few times she met them, neither disliked nor liked. Some she had only seen from a distance, usually meeting up with Ignacio on some street corner or in a bar, and on the rare occasion she had noticed a few of them acting like rowdy drunks in the clubs—otherwise she hardly knew them.) And while Ignacio sometimes dropped by the clothing store in the afternoon to check up on that business like a proper boss, she disliked his tendency to hire as salesclerks pretty young habaneras who didn’t seem to know a thing about that trade. As before, for all his promises, he still went off on business trips all across Cuba and to the States, away for weeks at a time, turning into the disembodied voice of a man on the club’s hallway telephone.

  Which is to say that María, in those years, without any family of her own, and having sent away the one man who most probably truly loved her (why else would that Nestor Castillo keep writing her?), had begun to discover the castigations of loneliness. She had her friends and acquaintances, of course, particularly among the whores at la Cucaracha, who were always trying to persuade María to join their fold—“Don’t forget, there are men who would pay a lot of money for a few hours of your time,” she’d hear again and again from Violeta—and occasionally, backstage at the club, one or another of her fellow dancers cried on her lap about loves that had never worked out, studs who had gotten away, husbands who abused/cheated/lied, and worries (as always) about money and keeping their looks (no black and blue marks or broken noses, please). Still, some of those dancers took her private and quiet ways as snobbery (if only they could have seen her out in the countryside with the guajiros, or known the way she looked forward to her stolen hours of study with Lázaro and suffered through her lessons).

  Walking along the streets of Havana, she continued to attract the attentions of many a habanero, dashing and downtrodden alike. One afternoon, the American movie star Errol Flynn, many a showgirl surely in his harem, had doffed his Panama hat and smiled as she passed by him on a street corner outside the Capitolio. (And, speaking of movie stars, one evening at the club, when the buxom actress Ava Gardner had turned up with some friends to take in the show and María had passed by their table, the famous brunette, who seemed to enjoy her rum and had a somewhat wicked air about her, had nodded approvingly at her, the way beautiful women do with other beautiful women.) But ultimately, for a woman so young and beautiful—possibly the most dazzling woman in Cuba in those years—María spent too much time alone in bed. On such mornings and afternoons, when she had said her prayers and let her mother’s rosary fall from her hand, she’d finally put herself to sleep by touching herself, writhing, her hand covered in her own moisture (Nestor), the pain and solitude in her heart giving way to the condolences of pleasure.

  (That was a vanity as well: though she had not yet reached the point when she began to go around with different men, that confusing impulse to find pleasure had been with María for a long time. No, it wasn’t the kind of thing she would ever have talked about with her daughter, Teresita, but the fact remained that, for all the country-girl piety María had been raised with, in some ways she hadn’t been that different from the farm animals she’d watched breeding day in and day out in the yards, in the fields, in the woods. A little history, then, about the habits, in that regard, of a beautiful woman. In the days when her sister, Teresita, first suffered her fits, and María, seeking an escape, found all kinds of ways in which to please herself, she discovered that even her papito’ s shattered shaving mirror could enhance her bodily joys. One afternoon, because she had so little privacy, and had never seen any of her parts in a mirror, she took her papito’s espejo off its post into the woods behind their thatch-roofed house, and there, under the shadow of an acacia, María pulled her skirt up, and with her undies fallen to her knees, held that mirror at such an angle beneath her as to catch a reflection of that which she had never seen before: her second mouth, wearing a crown of bristly black pubic hair, curling and dense and new to the world, which upon the minutest inspection and spread slightly open resembled the interior of a conch shell; and when she expanded herself a little wider, the same folds and whorls rearranged themselves into the opened petals of an orchid. That’s when she discovered a mole on the left side, and that just a little distance away was the puckered eye of her bottom, the same nutlike color as her vagina. At the same time she discovered that, if she used the mirror to catch the sunlight through a break in the foliage above and directed it at herself from yet another angle, God’s radiance, as if a beam from heaven—that’s what it surely had to be—spread through her in such delicious waves of divine heat that with just the touch of her finger she started to have her own kinds of seizures, not of epilepsy, like those of her sister, but of pure and sinful bodily release. She ended that business by pressing the heated mirror’s surface against the dead center of her body as if to swallow the sun and sky and, doubling over, in an agony of unspeakable pleasure, squirmed about as if possessed before falling backwards to the ground. After a few moments she became vaguely aware that a salamander had crawled onto her leg and that, perched atop the gnarled roots of that acacia, a large spider had seemed to be observing her; afterwards, she spent the longest time examining her face and could not help but lick the mirror’s surface, as if to taste the outline of her dampness, which resembled an upturned eye or wound…)

  In those days, when Nestor’s presence in her life had been reduced to nothing more than those letters, and María could not put from her mind her memories of their lovemaking, which seemed to become more vivid with the passing of time, that bodily release, much like bathing, eating, and using the toilet, became a part of her daily regimen. Two versions of Nestor existed for her then. The first boiled down to a photograph she had of him—not from the ones of them together in and around Havana but a more recent black-and-white snapshot, circa the spring of 1952, for which he had posed sitting on a stoop in New York City (presumably at La Salle Street) wearing a simple guayabera, his notebook in hand, his expression of tenderness and longing, as if he were about to sing a mournful bolero, tearing into her heart. (The kind of face that trumpet notes were tucked into.) Just looking at him, in all his guileless innocence, made María sigh and think “El pobrecito”—Oh, the sweet, dear man. And: “Sí. Es posible que lo amo”—Yes, it’s possible that I love him. The other involved a memory of Nestor on a bed in that sun-swept room by the harbor and María grasping his glorious pinga with both her hands, removing the hand nestled against his pubic bone and placing that hand above the other; even then it still went on, in a flourish of delicate veins, before finally ending grandly in a bell-shaped fleshly elegance, the size of a peach, from whose opening seeped the clearest of liquids, a dewlike fluid, which tasted both sweet and salty against the tip of María’s tongue and stretched so easily when she pulled its translucence into the air with her finger. Memories of María tugging at him and feeling its strength; of his warmth, that thickness, wide as her wrist, pressed against the side of her face, almost burning against her ear; of just how terrifying and wonderful it seemed every time Nestor lowered himself onto her and, drowning her opening with kisses first, settled himself gradually and then frantically inside her, so deeply that, even those years later, she still felt some sensations lingering in the farthest reaches of her womb, in the vicinity of her heart.
It was a sensation that surprised her, as she crossed a room or sat by a terrace restaurant table (salting a piece of crispy plátano), pulled a pair of dark mesh stockings over her thighs, or applied makeup before her mirror, her nipples growing taut inside her brassiere. It seemed akin to a picazón, a nagging spectral itch, a blossoming of desire, of bodily longing, that no man, certainly not Ignacio, had been able to satisfy since Nestor.

  But she neither hated nor loved her life in those days, though there were times when María felt such sudden loneliness and misery that certain things made her nervous. She disliked lingering by the terrace railing of their fourteenth-floor solar, as if the magnificent views—Havana breaking up into a dazzling succession of sunlit rooftops and gardens, the ocean so radiant—would draw her over the side; and on those occasions when Ignacio took her out on a friend’s schooner for a sail on the seas off Marianao, that railing, just off the buffeting waters, also tempted her, as if her departed family were awaiting her under the shimmering surface, among the marlins and medusas. Such inexplicable impulses sometimes came over her even while María went strolling in Havana, when just the sight of an oncoming trolley made her wary, and it was only the company of saints, in the churches she visited, that seemed to comfort her. She also found refuge in her bedroom performances for the bluntly prone Ignacio, even if it was a rare day when neither God nor one or another of the ghosts seemed to linger, watching.