Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  My torment and ecstasy,

  Beautiful María of my soul…

  María, my life…)

  Just as she was about to lean in and ask the barbershop fellows if they happened to know whose recording was playing on the radio, an announcer came on and dispelled all of her doubts: “You’ve just heard Cesar Castillo y los Reyes del Mambo, an orchestra out of Nueva York, performing ‘La bella María de mi alma!’” And that threw María into such a state of distraction that, when she finally sat with Lázaro, who had not been feeling well lately, she could hardly pay attention to her lesson.

  “What is it with you today?” he asked her, his voice raspy from a cough that had been plaguing him for months. María had kept looking off, as if she expected Nestor Castillo to come walking down the street.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you remember that músico I once knew?”

  “The nice fellow? Sure, what about him?”

  “He was always promising to write a song about me, but I never believed it would come to anything. But, just now I heard him on the radio, over CMQ, singing a bolero called ‘La bella María de mi alma.’”

  “And you’re sure it’s by him?”

  “Yes. It’s his voice,” she said.

  “But that should make you happy, huh?” he said, rapping his knee. “Why the long face then, mi vida?”

  “Because of the lyrics, Lázaro,” she said, shaking her head. “He calls me his ‘torment and ecstasy’—and cruel, as if I had ever wanted to break his heart.”

  Lázaro just smiled, shaking his head. “Oh, youth,” he began. “Don’t you know that most boleros are that way? There’s always heartbreak in them, been that way since the tradition started, way back when. I’m sure that fellow—What was his name?”

  “Nestor Castillo,” she said.

  “I’m sure that he’s just following that tradition, that’s all. I wouldn’t take it too hard. Unless, of course, you are still harboring feelings for him.” He smiled. “Are you?”

  “Some,” she finally admitted. “But, Lázaro, I never wanted to hurt that man, the way he says in that bolero.”

  “Ah, you should just feel flattered anyway,” he told her. “However things turned out between you two, he wouldn’t have written that song to spite you. No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I haven’t heard it, but I’m sure he did it out of love—you know those músicos are just that way.” Then, deciding that to continue their lesson was pointless, Lázaro, with a blood-and-spittle-dampened handkerchief dangling from his trouser pocket, held out his hand to María so that she could help him up and into the courtyard and the hovel in which he humbly lived.

  That, in any event, is what took place at about three thirty in the afternoon, in the spring of 1956.

  FOR THE NEXT FEW MONTHS, MARÍA HEARD THAT SONG EVERYWHERE. It played out of the windows and doorways of buildings, echoed in the courtyards, blared from car radios and bodega entrances, and from speakers over the doors of record shops all over Havana. Out at la playita with some dancer friends, where she enjoyed being free from the company of men, a sidewalk band had added “La bella María de mi alma” to its repertoire, and soon enough she heard “Beautiful María” being performed by arcade musicians and lounge pianists in the palm courts of hotels all over the city. Suddenly, “el exito nuevo de los fabulosos Reyes del Mambo”—or the “newest hit by the fabulous Mambo Kings,” as the radio announcers were calling it—was inescapable. Its melody drifted, in disembodied harmonies, into the Havana night from the prows of casino and cruise ships as they crossed the horizon; and even at the Lantern, the house band had worked up a rendition. Soon enough she got to the point that she’d hear its chorus in the whistle calls that followed her as she’d stroll down the street, in the chirping of sparrows along the Prado, and even in the tremulous clarion of church bells. Altogether she heard “Beautiful María of My Soul” so often in those days that she sometimes thought herself inside a crazy dream.

  FOR HIS PART, NESTOR SENT HER A COPY OF THE NEWLY PRESSED long-playing 331/3 rpm album, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, on which that bolero was included. The cover was nothing special—done up in the style of 1950s jackets out of New York, Nestor playing a trumpet while Cesar banged on a conga drum, the two of them, she had to admit as she sat before her dressing room mirror, looking handsome and dapper in their white silk suits as they stood posing against the backdrop of some art director’s abstracted notion of a New York skyline, a flurry of quarter notes raining down around them. He’d also included a glossy head shot of himself, sort of like the ones María had made up of herself to promote her act, Nestor appearing, much like a star, hair and eyes and teeth gleaming with vitality, a smile on his face and a halo of light emanating from his head (in the same way that photographers showed that rebel leader Castro off in the mountains of Oriente at the time in magazines). Having never sent her such a self-promoting photograph before, nor looking so gloriously handsome, he might have seemed to have lost his humility were it not for the carefully rendered and rather self-effacing nature of his inscription, which said: “Para la bella María de mi alma…mi inspiración…. Te debo todo, con todo mi amor, Nestor Castillo.”

  “…To my inspiration…. I owe you everything, with all my love…”

  María’s thoughts in those moments at the club? Pleased that she could now read without too much of a struggle—if he only knew!—and amazed to think that Nestor, ese pobre, really seemed to be making something of himself in America. Suddenly, she couldn’t keep herself from coming to the conclusion that Nestor Castillo, whose letters had been fewer and farther between, had become a success after all, instead of just another lost musician soul. And the song itself? The more she heard its sad but moving melody, the more María believed that Nestor still loved her. The letters he had written her were one thing, but this canción, no matter how cruelly its letras portrayed María, was nothing less than a public declaration of his undying love for her.

  She imagined him in far-off Nueva York, with money in his pockets, pining away for her. She imagined that this recording was selling like crazy, a feeling that grew stronger when a musician friend, who often traveled to the States, told María that the song had been introduced to the vast American public on a very popular television show there, a program that, in fact, was broadcast in English, but with Spanish subtitles, on the CBS affiliate in Havana, Yo Amo A Lucy, whose star happened to be Cuban, a real success, by the name of Desiderio Arnaz, a fellow originally from Santiago. Even if the show-business people of María’s acquaintance didn’t watch it, the fact remained that her sweet country boy and former amante, with all his dreams and illusions, had no doubt become famous in his new país.

  With the record he had sent along a letter “written with tears of regret,” professing that, no matter how his life might change, he still couldn’t forget how much he had loved her. She was, after all, the sum of his happiest memories of Havana, and perhaps of Cuba itself. Not a day had passed, he confessed, when he didn’t think about the life they might have had in Cuba had things not turned out so differently, the sadness of that song something he had carried in his heart from the day she left him. She must have gone over that letter a half dozen times, and with each careful reading, María came to the same conclusion: Nestor still loved her, and she, María García y Cifuentes, in her own unhappiness, owed it to herself—and certainly to Nestor, for the sake of their future and of “destiny,” as he might have put it—to make things right, to do what she—persuaded that what she had always felt for Nestor was love—never had had the inclination to carry out before. This, María decided as she got ready to go onstage that night, would involve a journey to New York.

  Chapter THIRTY

  It was the kind of decision that, decades later and in the midst of a new life in Miami, would make María shake her head in puzzlement. At least she had asked for her friends’ consejo—advice. And not just the ladies over at la Cucaracha, Violeta among them, who saw such a trip
as a golden opportunity for María to find a happier situation—“Follow your heart, and, if he really loves you, you’ll come out with something to show for it to boot!”—but also her dear old teacher, Lázaro, about the only man she really trusted in Havana. She approached him at the marketplace one afternoon with reverence, and great caution. For María did not want Lázaro to think poorly of her.

  “There’s something I must ask you,” she said. “I need your advice.”

  “About?” Lázaro asked.

  “It’s a matter of love.”

  He scratched his chin. “Who is the fellow?”

  “The one you knew—the musician.”

  “Oh, yes, the one who wrote that song?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “So what’s happened with him?” A squeaking noise came from his throat. “Didn’t you tell me that he got married?”

  She had, one of those afternoons, when Nestor’s matrimony had seemed a betrayal.

  “Yes, but I don’t think he’s really happy.”

  “Aha,” he said, knowing her well enough to wonder what she was really up to. “And so, what are you asking me about?”

  “I have been thinking about going to see him in New York.”

  “New York? That’s a long way. But why now?”

  And she grew excited, sitting down beside him. “Hearing his canción, I realized just how much he’s still in love with me.” Then, touching her heart, she said, “All I know is that I want to see him again, to see for myself if that love is true.”

  “After all these years? And with a married man?” He just kept shaking his head. “If I were you, girl, I’d forget about it. All that trouble will just bring you more trouble, can’t you see that?”

  “I’ve dreamed that he needs me.”

  “A dream?” He sucked in his lower lip. “No, no, no,” he told her. “If I were you, I just wouldn’t go.”

  Disappointed, María looked off, forlorn. “Really, I just wanted your blessing, that’s all,” she told him.

  “Nope,” he said. “I won’t abide by that kind of foolishness. It always ends up badly for someone.”

  “I’m going anyway,” she told him. “It’s what my heart tells me to do.”

  He started to get up, rather unsteadily, and without offering his knobby-boned hand to her the way he usually did.

  “New York?…I don’t have a good feeling about that.”

  “But will you give me your blessing, please, Lázaro, for good luck?”

  “Okay, okay,” he finally said, seeing that some tears had gathered in her eyes, and as he leaned towards her, he began fluttering his hands over her head and reciting some African incantations. It made her feel better. “You have my best wishes,” he said, “but I still think you’re being foolish.” And then, seized by a spasm of coughing, he leaned up against the doorway and closed his eyes.

  ABOUT A WEEK LATER, WHEN MARÍA HAPPENED TO MENTION TO Ignacio that several nightclub people in New York City were interested in having her travel there to audition for their shows, she wasn’t concealing any truths. In fact, her friend at Y & R, Vincente Torres, who would have liked to keep María as his mistress in that city, had connections with the owners of the club Marseilles and the Latin Quarter, but, until recently, María had never even considered taking him up on it. The idea of staying in that city, which she mainly knew from Nestor’s letters and from the movies, didn’t hold the least bit of appeal to her. Not just because such a place of concrete and steel and forlorn winters seemed impossible to a girl born in the Cuban countryside but also because the very notion of having to learn English, which she knew a few words of from the clubs, at a time when she was just becoming más o menos comodita with the demands of writing and reading her own language, simply didn’t interest her. It would have been too much. And for other reasons that most sensible people would have found irrational, María, with her superstitious beliefs and hating the very notion of traveling so far away, couldn’t have been dragged off to New York.

  And yet, she had suddenly changed her mind.

  “Okay, okay,” Ignacio told her one day, when she had asked him for his permission. “You want me to go with you?”

  “No, Ignacio, I’m going with my friend Gladys. She has relatives up there, in a place called the Bronx. Ella habla inglés. She speaks English.”

  Ignacio probably knew that she had something up her sleeve, but he didn’t object, even though she wouldn’t even accompany him to Miami before that—when he’d say, “Now the Fontainebleau is the sort of high-class place you should be dancing in….” Lately, Ignacio had been treating her more kindly, and though María hadn’t the slightest inkling why, he, like any man connected to her, had come to feel intimations of his mortality. By medical necessity Ignacio had become a calmer man; any aggravation speeding his heartbeat led to dull pains up and down his arms and, with them, a gnarly sensation of misery like worms chewing around inside his chest. “Do as you want,” he told her. “But if you need any help, I know people up there.” And so it was Ignacio, making a few telephone calls, who arranged for María’s passport, even though she had only a cabaret workers’ card, and Ignacio who, in a show of largesse, promised to give María several hundred dollars for her trip. He had the numbers of acquaintances in New York she could look up if she became lonely. Altogether, in his blunt and manly wariness, Ignacio couldn’t have been more kindly—again and again she would say in the future, “He was good to me, even if I behaved like the devil sometimes.”

  AND THE BROTHERS? WITH THE SUCCESS OF “BEAUTIFUL MARÍA OF My Soul,” a top ten hit on the easy listening charts, the Mambo Kings orchestra was suddenly in demand. In the spring of 1956 they had embarked on a tour, traveling from coast to coast in a refurbished school bus which they’d had painted a flamingo pink, and for two of the most glorious months of their professional lives they performed nightly in the social clubs and ballrooms of both small towns and major cities. Fresh off his turn as a walk-on character on the Lucy show and comporting himself like a movie star, the older brother, Cesar, relished every moment onstage, hamming it up for crowds from rural Pennsylvania to California, and satisfying a lot of women along the way. But Nestor? Never having easily adjusted to America, he had slipped into a monumental state of gloom. Under the lights and standing beside the ever vibrant Cesar, and always invigorated by the band’s music, Nestor found his moments of joy, but once they returned to their motel rooms, or traveled overnight to their next destination by bus—the stars hanging in the sky just like in Cuba—a profound sadness involving his wife, his children, and María, as well as so many other unattainable longings, overwhelmed him. How could it not, for with every performance there came that moment when the brothers, standing side by side, launched into their touching rendition of “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Each time they came to the line “How can I hate you if I love you so?” countless nights, both before and after he had married the wonderful Delores Fuentes, when, for reasons beyond his reckoning, he could only think about María, came back to him.

  How could it be that he still felt the same way after so much time? And did María love him at all? He’d thank God that he hadn’t abandoned Delores, or flown down to Havana to make a fool of himself anew; thank God that he had his family to go home to after the tour. He’d buy the kids presents and with money in his pockets knew there were so many things that he and Delores could look forward to. And yet, each time they performed that bolero, which he’d truly come to hate in his way, Nestor’s heart festered with even greater longing for María. (Cesar, seeing this in his brother’s eyes, had to fight off an urge to rap him in the back of his head.) Why the glorious pain? The memories of her, Nestor’s own soul suffering through every note, every verse, every ascending trumpet solo: but why?

  So imagine Nestor’s state of mind when, after years of not hearing as much as a single word from her, he arrived home from the tour to find a letter from María waiting for
him. It had taken her two hours to compose, her handwriting, in pencil, erased any number of times but carefully rendered—as was Nestor’s, it was almost like the script of a child—and her spelling and sentences, for all her efforts to be correct, occasionally faltering, as they no doubt would, he thought, with a guajira from the countryside.

  It went, in the English equivalent:

  My dear Nestor,

  Forgive me for my silents: all the years that did go pass, I had to forget you because I did not know what my hombre would have done to me, even if he is not so much a bad man. Pero él es muy macho, sabes? If I not had answer your letters, it was because I have feel very bad for my manera to write, which as you can see is not so very good. But I could not even put two sententcents together, if not because for my friend, un buen negro, que se llama Lázaro—he taught me what I know, even if it is not so good; because of him I had been able to read better your letters to me, but I did not want you to know soo much of my ignorance and stupid mente: and then I found out from your friend Miguel that you was married and then I became angered with you.

  But now I have gotten older and know love only comes maybe once in a lifetime, like you have always say. Not long ago, you had send me the song, muy muy bonito, “Bella María,” of me, and I heard it many times on the radio and it has made me think to write you. Listen to it and I know that you must still love me very very much and it has made me think about how much I have love you too: I mean to say Nestor that I also haven’t forgotten what a delicious romance we had. I know you are married, but then I think that you would not have written a song so beautiful or too many cartas tan afeccionadas, did you not really have unhappiness? And because, mi amor, I really don’t have anyone to love me like you, I want to see you again. Even if for a day. I don’t want no more, just I am tired of not seeing you for so long and have thought to come to New York just to be there with you. Is that possible? I would come only for a little while. Would you let me know if you want me to, and I will let you know everything of how and when I would have arrived.