Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Te quiero mucho Nestor, mucho mucho. With all my heart.

  María

  He had been sitting in the park, a few blocks from the apartment building where they lived on La Salle, boats passing on the Hudson River, the first summery breezes coming off the water, reminding him of his dalliances with María, la bella María, along the balmy Malecón. Memories of necking passionately with María as she sat on that seawall, Nestor with his hand up her dress, if only for a moment—María had her dignity after all; memories of looking up in bed and seeing María above him, her thick siren’s hair covering her beautiful face, her voice a litany of moans. Just the pain of that memory alone tore Nestor into pieces, and that’s why he, at first, after reading it over, had crumpled the letter up and tossed it into a garbage can in despair. María coming to New York? For all his desires for María, he just couldn’t see himself being unfaithful to Delores. But, no sooner had he started to walk away than Nestor, swatting away a whirl of hornets circling the melted remains of a Popsicle, decide to retrieve the letter. Flattening it out on his lap, he read it again, forgiving her guajira mistakes, read it over until his stomach went into knots, wishing that María had written him such a letter years ago.

  He headed off to a local Irish bar, the Shamrock, where the fellows found his quiet manner amusing. Never a hard drinker, he threw back a few rye whiskeys, his heart aching. Then he went home. He must have been a little tipsy when he sat down to write María, telling her that his decision was “yes, come to New York.” They’d have to be very careful, no one was to be told—not even his older brother, or especially his older brother. (“She must have had some kind of papáya, to make you so crazy,” Cesar used to say.) Here was his plan: Knowing that he’d have some free time away from the band the last week of the month of July 1956, when their musicians, by mutual consent, decided to take a vacation break—to hell with the McAlpin ballroom, which had become their usual Sunday afternoon gig—he agreed to meet with María that weekend, but only for an afternoon. (Even that made him nervous.) Planning carefully for the occasion, Nestor gave her the telephone number of the corner pharmacy where for years, before business demanded they get their own phone, the Castillo brothers had received their most important calls—the pharmacist sending a kid up the street to their apartment to fetch them. Treating the situation as if they were spies, he wrote: “When you telephone, María, just say that you have a message from Omar in Havana and leave me the number where you are staying.” Then he’d wait, without knowing if María was really going to keep her word. That’s what killed him—skulking around the apartment, he spent the next three weeks waiting for the day when the kid from the pharmacy would come knocking on his door, and in all that time, while conjuring all kinds of visions of what might happen, he couldn’t look Delores in the eye.

  Chapter THIRTY-ONE

  Indeed, beautiful María had planned to make that journey with one of the other dancers in her troupe, Gladys. With but a single piece of equipaje each, they left Havana aboard a P & O steamship for Miami on a midmorning in late June. Only a single photograph of María on that particular day survives: in a florid dress and a Saturn-looking sunhat and dark glasses, she leaned over the railing of an upper deck waving a dainty kerchief at her friend below. When the ladies exchanged places and María tottered carefully down the metal stairs in her white high heels (to break an ankle from slipping anywhere—onstage, in a hallway, or on a church staircase—remained any dancer’s greatest fear) to snap Gladys’s picture with that Brownie, she captured in her friend, with her newly dyed blond hair, a Cuban look-alike of Kim Novak, whom the two dancers had recently seen in the movie Picnic. Gladys wore a lipstick so livid it read from even a distance as a darkish patina, and her eyes were also overly adorned, with fake eyelashes and mascara; her sundress, its fabric of peacock colors, was so short that, as Gladys posed, gentlemen made it a point to congregate by that section of the lower deck, newspapers or cigars in hand, and, as if by coincidence, managed many a long glance upwards at the tent formed by her pleated skirt, and at her spider-lace panties. (It just so happened that, despite Gladys’s tackiness, she and María were to remain friends for many years, until they had been living in Miami for decades, and, as they’d tell María’s daughter, Doctor Teresita, during their occasional get-togethers, that journey, despite its later consequence for María, was something of a relajo for them—a great amusement—and bonded them for good.) In fact, men followed them everywhere, even into the casino rooms, where they had gone simply to escape the midday sun, the dancers sitting on banquettes smoking and sipping the drinks that strangers kept sending over to them. Also onboard was a contingent of Catholic priests and nuns from the diocese of Havana, along with some thirty of their young charges, sickly (sadly) Cuban children, most suffering from tuberculosis but a few from nervous disorders (María sighed, recognizing in some the same faint trembling of the hands that her own late sister sometimes exhibited, even with medicine). These unfortunates were on their way, the dancers imagined, to better hospitals in the USA. And among the Cubans onboard, some of whom, they’d learned by eavesdropping, were heading home to different cities along the Eastern Seaboard or to attend to businesses (like Ignacio), there happened to be at least two celebrities. The first was the dapper actor Cesar Romero, said to be José Martí’s grandson, who held forth in a corner before some colleagues, and the second, hard as she found it to believe, seemed to be María herself. For several cubanos, having recognized her unmistakably alluring face from posters and newspaper ads in Havana, approached, seeking not only her autograph (nightly she practiced writing her name) but a simple nod of congenial acknowledgment and a few words as well. On the other hand, the American tourists onboard, in their seersucker suits, loving to play the slot machines or else to sit quietly about reading issues of Life and National Geographic, didn’t seem to notice anything special about her save her spectacular looks. (Somehow that depressed María.)

  That leg of the journey lasted some seven hours, and at about four in the afternoon, after clearing customs in Miami, the ladies, following an initial bout of apprehension and confusion, managed, through the kindness of several Tampa-born cubanos whom they had met along the docks, to find inexpensive but clean accommodations near the central rail terminal for the night. The next morning María and Gladys set out on the Silver Star, which left at 9 a.m. for New York City.

  IN JUST SHORT OF TWENTY-SIX HOURS, WITH STOPS IN THIRTY-FIVE cities or towns along the way, among them Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Norfolk, and the capital, Washington, D.C., María and Gladys went north. Riding coach class with occasional (and intimidating) strolls along the platforms during the stopovers—Will that train leave without me?—and endless visits to the cramped toilet compartment at the end of their car, along with frequent sojourns in the coach-class passengers’ bar and lounge, María had watched, through “grand panoramic” windows, the sleepy marshlands, swamps, forests, and plantations, with their Negroes in the fields, that constituted the terrain of the American South. Eventually, the greenery gave way to bustling, trestle-bridged cities—the sight of Baltimore, with row after row of soot-faced brick tenement buildings, in its bleakness, halted María’s heart.

  Halfway to New York, she succumbed to brief bouts of nostalgia, not only for the maze-ridden streets of Havana, which she had gotten to know so well, but for the sweet birdsongs of Pinar del Río—how Nestor must have suffered himself, for, as she recalled from one of his letters, the Castillo brothers had made a similar trip to New York by train back in 1949, except they had arrived in the winter. On María’s train rode a group of Cuban musicians from Havana, black instrument cases by their sides, playing games of whist and canasta or dominoes for hours on end and drinking away in the lounge. Among them were some first-timers, staring out the windows with the same expression as María, of both hopefulness and dread. It wasn’t as if they were entering into the jaws of a lion, but somehow that whole journey, twisting María’s gut, felt
that way, and more than once she wanted to confide in Gladys about just why she had suddenly decided to visit New York—not for show-business reasons at all but to see just what she still felt for that músico, if anything at all. (Bueno, to be entirely truthful, she also believed that he would just fall into her arms at the sight of her.) Each time she fantasized about that, her stomach went into cramps, as if her own selfish thoughts were catching up with her. And off to the bathroom she would go, the mirror’s image of her beautiful face jostling in the serrating yellow light of that urine-smelling compartment seeming, as María looked at herself, to have taken on a deceitful cast she had never seen before. Oh yes, apparently she had a conscience that bothered her, but she didn’t want to let on to anyone that she did. Before leaving that toilet, she’d arrange her hair as nicely as possible—wearing it clipped to the side like a proper schoolgirl with a barrette—touch up the little makeup she put on, and spritz her neck and behind her ears with a spray of Surrender lilac perfume, always smiling sweetly at anyone who happened to catch that beautiful cubana’s gaze, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening within her.

  Passing through the car, María noticed that some of the passengers who’d sailed on the Florida out of Havana just the day before had also boarded that train—grandmothers, abuelitas, with their grandchildren, some of those American tourists, but as well another Cuban, a bulbous-headed, middle-aged fellow with a slip of a mustache, in a lacquered Panama and white cotton suit, whose occasional staring, as he looked up from the handful of magazines and newspapers he kept on his lap, unnerved her. He’d tip down the brim of his hat and nod any time he caught her eye, and that further tangled her gut. She wouldn’t have put it past her grand machón Ignacio, so apparently magnanimous about her sudden desire to travel, to have hired someone to follow her, if not out of suspicion to make sure that she would be all right.

  Nevertheless, by the time they made it into New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, whose interior was vaster than anything she had ever seen before, after an endless descent through what seemed like the bowels of the earth—so much like a purgatory, but one that smelled of cinders and acrid electric wires—and they had deboarded the train, María, as the crowds and porters thronged around them, had been relieved that Glady’s sister Mireya and her husband, along with a few of their kids, were on the platform waiting. Of course they overwhelmed Gladys with kisses, for they had not seen her for years, and María took such wonderful sentiments in with both joy and envy—to have a family of her own, and people to care about her hit her as another of her reasons for journeying to that strange and distant city.

  In other words, she wanted to bear Nestor’s child.

  Chapter THIRTY-TWO

  Altogether, though the northeast Bronx was not exactly Havana, María found it a pleasant thing to be living with a family again, no matter that the apartment was a fifth-floor railroad walk-up off Allerton Avenue with scarcely any privacy, even if they had given María one of their five kids’ bedrooms. Treated as a special guest by Gladys’s sister, María had no reason to complain about anything, and though she spoke no more than a few words of English, when they were taken around the neighborhood—de los italianos—to their churches, markets, and butcher shops, she was delighted to find that she could speak Spanish and still be understood. María liked that. She spent an afternoon at the Bronx Zoo, which was not far away, and another in the company of Mireya down in the heart of Manhattan, with strolls through Central Park, so much vaster and labyrinthine than any park in Havana; there were excursions to see Macy’s department store and the Empires [sic] State Building—tense and trying to make a joke, María asked: “So where is King Kong?”—and a quick visit to the clothing factory off Seventh Avenue and Thirty-eighth where Mireya’s husband worked as an English-Spanish-speaking floor manager and the owner, a Jewish fellow, laying eyes on María, instantly offered her a job as a foundation garment model. Even after a stroll one night through a neon-lit Times Square, where they had dined for nickels in a Horn & Hardart (whose lemon meringue pie–dispensing machines fascinated her), María had found the city barely tolerable, and not anyplace she could imagine living, with or without Nestor. The noisy and unsettling subway rides from the Bronx alone seemed tedious, and more than once, though María tried to keep to herself, her guarded ways still hadn’t prevented some of those men from reaching out to grasp her nalgitas or to press up against her. And downtown, as it had been in Havana, she experienced the same, men stopping everywhere to stare at her, and while no one treated her badly, María tired quickly of the city—the mad traffic, the teeming sidewalks, the endless buzz of hearing not just English but half a dozen other languages as she walked along, sashaying from corner to corner, her head raised, gawking at the skyscrapers and, often enough, longing for the quieter and more quaint arcades of Havana, the blueness of the Cuban sky.

  In that time, she did make an effort to contact a few club managers. Indeed an agent, an affable Cuban transplant named Johnny Tamayo, had taken María around one afternoon, and she had auditioned, in her most lustrous costume, for a possible future engagement as one of the “sexquisite” dancers at the Latin Quarter, where the actress Mae West, supported by a cast of oiled up musclemen, happened to be the featured star of a somewhat bawdy revue that month. María also turned up at La Conga and the Copacabana, but in each instance, because she was so ill equipped to navigate her way through the intricacies of the English language and feeling out of her element, her performances were so halfhearted that María came off as if she didn’t really care if they hired her or not. This, in fact, happened to be the truth.

  One late afternoon, however, on her fifth day in the city, when she couldn’t take waiting anymore, María went down to the first-floor lobby, where a pay phone had been installed for the poorer tenants of the building and, dropping a nickel in, dialed the number that Nestor had given her. Three rings, and someone picked up: “Claremont’s Pharmacy.” And because she could hardly speak English, it didn’t take long before the red-haired Irish fellow who’d answered the call put her on the phone with the Puerto Rican cook working behind their soda fountain counter, and it was he, Fernando, who later sent a kid up the street to Nestor Castillo’s apartment with a message from “Omar of Havana” along with that number in the Bronx.

  THEY FINALLY SPOKE A FEW HOURS LATER, WHEN NESTOR, SLIPPING out of his apartment on the pretext of buying a pack of cigarettes, had walked over to the Shamrock, a block away, to use their pay phone. For her part, while awaiting Nestor’s call, María had sat restlessly with Gladys’s family in their living room, listening to the Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians hour on the radio. As it happened, just as their landlord’s teenage boy came knocking on the door of Apartment 22 with a message that someone had called the building asking to speak to the lady staying with the Delgados, Mr. Lombardo, his selections depending on the latest trends, led his orchestra into a lavish rendition of a certain newly popular song. Since everyone in that building, mostly Italians, listened to that radio program at the same time, the hallways and courtyard echoed, and mockingly so—te juro—with the melody of that current hit “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

  The kid had left the telephone receiver dangling.

  “Sí?”

  “Hola, María…?”

  “Nestor?”

  It had been so long since she last heard his voice that she was surprised.

  “Is it you, María?”

  “But you know it is, mi amor. Are you well?”

  “I am…well enough, pero, María…”

  “Tell me everything, mi corazón…. Have you thought about me?”

  “Every day since I have been in this country…”

  She heard a puzzling sound behind her—two little girls bouncing a ball back and forth at the far end of the hallway, playing just like she and her dead sister, Teresita, used to. María shushed them. Just as distracting was the manner in which their voices, separated by a sea of seven years, though fami
liar, seemed to belong to strangers: Nestor’s had grown deeper, and though he still had an affectionate tone, he spoke slowly, and not as gushingly as he used to, as if he were guarding something. And María’s—she knew it herself—was devoid of the absolute sweetness that had once informed every syllable she uttered; that voice, formerly so angelic, now had the edge of a more world-weary woman of twenty-six.

  “It was the same for me, Nestor…. I’ve missed you,” she told him. And when he didn’t answer right away, she added: “I’ve missed you so much that my heart has aches to think about it.”

  She heard him sigh, heard the murmurs of voices, the click-clacking of a game of pool, and, from the upper recesses of the building, the strains of that song again. That’s when he asked her: “How long will you be here in New York?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a week. I haven’t bought any tickets back yet. I don’t really know anything, right now, but, Nestor, I came here to see you. You remember that, don’t you?” Then: “Please don’t tell me I’ve come all this way for nothing.”

  “No, no, María, you haven’t, I promise you that. It’s just that things are not so easy for me as when you and I were together. It’s that—”

  But before he could continue, she told him: “Just tell me where and when we can meet, my love.”

  He gave it some thought, and perhaps because he didn’t think it a good idea to meet with María anyplace uptown, where they might be seen, he suggested a place reminiscent of where they sometimes went on Sundays back in Havana, not to the bedroom of a friend’s solar, or to one of those couples’ retreats rented by the hours, but to a sanctimonious place that somehow always made them both feel good: a church.