Even her mother, beautiful María, when not telling Teresita to stop chewing on her fingers and to sit up straight like a proper girl, seemed apprehensive, looking out the airplane window as if she wanted to lose herself in the silver-bottomed clouds. After landing at Miami International Airport, at the end of a trip that had passed in the snap of a finger, the passengers conversing quietly among themselves—the words “¡Qué lástima!”—“What a pity!” repeated again and again—María showed hardly any emotion at all. Far from behaving like a bewildered guajira of the countryside, she strolled towards passport control, her daughter’s hand in her own, with incredible dignity, the same face, now past thirty, that had graced the billboards and beer trays of Havana, and had provoked a thousand dreams as she walked in the streets of her city, seemingly transformed. American flags, U.S. immigration officials moving about, a framed portrait of the president, John F. Kennedy. Only once did María nearly lose it, as they had passed into the arrivals lounge and not a single person among the hundreds of Cubans—from Tampa, from Miami itself, and from other towns and cities around the state—had been on hand to welcome them with the hugs, embraces, and kisses that made it such an emotional moment for so many others. Looking about, with only twenty dollars to her name and not a clue as to how to proceed, María took a deep breath and squeezed her daughter’s hand tightly, as if she were never going to let it go. Fortunately, a nun of Cuban descent, accompanied by an American priest who happened to speak a pretty passable Spanish, had picked María and her daughter out from the crowd, simply because they seemed so alone, without family to look after them. But while that disorientation and the very strangeness of that new setting may have made a less hardened sort cry a little, that was not María at all.
“Put on your prettiest smile, mi vida,” beautiful María told her daughter.
In fact, if anything, she couldn’t help but laugh, a half mad look in her eyes. For as they were making their way towards the exit doors, to the curbside where a Catholic Relief Services van waited to take them to a motel, little Teresita, hopping daintily along as if to a picnic, as graceful as María had been in the countryside, there trumpeted through the terminal a piece of Muzak which, to her bemusement, happened to be that song of love, as performed by the Lawrence Welk Orchestra. “Beautiful María of My Soul”—as if Nestor, watching her from afar, couldn’t help but say: “I’m still here, my love. Whether you want me or not, I’m still here.”
Chapter THIRTY-EIGHT
After nearly three decades in this country, María’s daughter, Dr. Teresa García, at thirty-two, had but the scantest memories of Cuba. She could remember something of the views from her mother’s terrace in Vedado, of looking up and seeing a sheer plate of endless blue, which was the sky, of looking down and seeing mists and the wakes of boats and ferries curling on the horizon, the crest of the city’s shoreline receding until it vanished into a plain of light, the roofs of countless buildings glowing in the sunsets like so many jewels. Of rain and mercurially changing, bottom-heavy clouds appearing suddenly. And always some business about the sweet bent-over viejita scrubbing the tile floors of their lobby, with its small, somewhat gaudy Rococo fountain (distinctly, a cherub riding a dolphin, water shooting docilely from its spout), that same nice old lady getting up whenever they came out of the elevator and, noisily complaining about her hips and knees (no doubt arthritic), handing Teresita a few hard candies, the most delicious things in the world, a daily ritual. Something too about waiting along the street for a bus, men tipping their hats or winking at her mother, and street vendors nearly demanding that they taste some fresh-scooped coconut or one of their ices dripping with fruit syrups, and marveling over her shiny black patent leather shoes and how those pavestones kept coming as they made their way under the arcades, and more friendly people popping out of the shadows—people she seemed to love now, simply because they were a part of that pleasant sunlit memory, even if she could not attach a single name to any of them.
Sometimes, however, Teresita would make a connection: a framed picture, cut from an old magazine, of El Caballero de París, a famous Havana street personality, a homeless man and itinerant who slept on park benches, and whom her mother had known, hung on their hallway wall, and just looking at it, the doctor would slip back through time and remember some goatish looking fellow bending forward, his bony hands covered with knobs, to pinch her cheeks and say (most kindly, because she wasn’t that way at all), “¡Qué preciosa, la niña!” Otherwise, a generic sort of cubano face, usually male—could be mulatto, could be negrito, could be one of those lighter-skinned gallegos—swirled about inside her head without any true definition. She had no memories of Ignacio, and if it weren’t for a few photographs that María had shown her, of the three of them out at a kiddies’ amusement park somewhere in Havana, Teresita wouldn’t have had the vaguest notion of what her papito looked like: of medium height, pock faced, heavy browed, not particularly handsome but manly looking, which was, in its way, attractive, that man’s genes were responsible for one of her least favorite pictures—of herself at about the age of three, no doubt taken in Havana, about six months before they’d left.
It was a black-and-white photograph beautiful María kept framed on a table in their living room, and misery passed over Teresa each time she sat down to watch TV with her mamá—whom she truly loved—because she couldn’t miss it. Until Teresita had turned ten, there had been a squatness to the shape of her skull, her liquid eyes were too set apart, her arched eyebrows so pronounced and close together that she seemed perpetually apprehensive about something. Even her hair, jet-black, seemed awfully thin, and while María had gone to the trouble of dolling her up in a lovely satin dress, with a crinoline underskirt, for that photograph, she had bunched Teresita’s hair into a central flourish, like a haystack, and tied it with a bow; and although she had meant well, Teresa resembled, to herself at any rate, one of those rubber shrunken heads or that of a smiling troll such as they sold at a carnival. Needless to say, María herself blamed Ignacio for these imperfections and took to regarding Teresita as she invariably would, with both affection and pity. When she said, “¿Sabes que eres muy linda, no?”—“You know that you’re lovely, don’t you?”—her mother’s eyes always conveyed something else, the unspoken “¡Qué feita!—How plain!”
Better to remember sweeter things: as when beautiful María had finally brought Teresa out to Pinar del Río, so that the guajiro community could see that she had come through with her own little child, and some farmer had taken her around the fields on a horse, her face smothered in its mane, this guajiro, with the bluest eyes and toothless gums, just smiling, smiling. Otherwise, what she could recall of that place came down to hens and roosters and pigs—a few goats as well—in the yards, hounds sniffing everywhere, bats flitting through the trees, butterflies the size of her mother’s sunhat; and in the forest she had seen the cascades that María always talked about in later years—a little piece of paradise and apparently a place of death, for her mother had told her the story, years later, of her namesake’s demise…. There wasn’t much else to remember—how could she, when she was only three at the time? Nevertheless, Teresita would swear that she’d seen the mogotes, those limestone camel-mound hills, out in Viñales. “That’s possible,” her mother once told her. “Maybe we did go there.” And perhaps they had gone to the flooded subterranean caves nearby, exploring those caverns in a motorboat…or perhaps that was a dream, just like the idea of Cuba itself.
Nevertheless, in the middle of the day those thoughts comforted her: on the wall of her office in the oncology wing of the Miami Children’s Hospital, near Coral Gables, Teresita kept a professional photograph of Viñales valley, the greenness of the rolling countryside with its majestic royal palms going on forever, and, as well, a charming little painting of a burningly red flamboyán tree, shady and inviting, beside a rustic bohío (to which she sometimes wished she could retreat)—an item she’d bought at a street fair in South Beach. Raise
d by María, who rarely went to church in those days but who told her countless times, “Creo en Dios”—“I believe in God,” Teresita kept a small bronze crucifix, whose Jesus seemed particularly anguished, on the wall over her desk, just above a picture of María herself, at about the age of twenty, looking glamorous as hell, taken on the stage of some flashy Havana club. Her mother was so enticingly sexy, like a movie starlet, that every so often someone, a male nurse or social worker, peeking in, made a point of whistling and saying things like “¡Chévere!” or “That’s your mamá? Qué guapita!” Why Teresita kept it there even when she, not as elegant, long limbed, voluptuous, or pretty as María, suffered by the comparison, came down to a simple fact: as much as Teresa sometimes found it exasperating, her mother’s beauty had always been a source of pride, though she’d never tell María as much.
They were only keepsakes, but they cheered Teresa up on those mornings when she’d notice a nurse pulling taut the corners of a freshly dressed bed in the terminal ward, yet another of those poor children, none older than twelve, taken by leukemia or osteosarcoma or some other unstoppable disease in the middle of the night. That work was so heartbreaking that Teresita often thought about resigning her position, but each time she got into that frame of mind, it took only one look into the eyes of a stricken child, teary with longing for just a little affection and care, to change her mind. And while Teresita had helped cure many of them, it was the children who didn’t make it, Cubans and non-Cubans alike, from all over south Florida, sweet, uncomplaining, and trusting to the end, for whom she inevitably felt the most.
Chapter THIRTY-NINE
It sometimes got to her, no matter how professionally she tried to comport herself, for in a way Teresa loved each of those children without even really knowing them. With an oversize purse that often held caramels, gummy bears, and little plastic Spider-Mans, she’d leave the ward with its fairy-tale-creature and funny-animal decorated hallways around eight most evenings, don a white helmet, and get on her motor scooter, which she preferred to her Toyota because on it she could zip through that traffic when it had stalled along Key Biscayne Boulevard, then make her way home to Northwest Terrace, a neighborhood which, for better or worse, had lately seen an influx of newly arrived Haitians. (Cocks crowed there in the early mornings just like in the countryside of Cuba.) Occasionally, at the end of the week, when she most wanted to forget about work, she’d step out to some trendy bar with some of her single girlfriends, and while they’d carry on happily about love and sex without much prompting at all, Teresa took in, at some distance, their gossiping about boyfriends, fiancés, the dating scene in Miami, the pros and cons of certain kinds of men (the Jews, it was agreed, were the kindest and most generous to their women, Italians were genteel and smooth, but watch out! As for the cubanos, in their finest and most gentlemanly incarnations, nothing could top them, but ten’ cuidado, some were hardheaded and muy machista, and only wanted you know what, which was fine with some of them). She’d always seem the oldest, even when a few others had five or ten years on her, at least in terms of her bottled-up behavior, but Teresa just couldn’t help it—she’d always been overly serious.
To be beautiful María’s daughter wasn’t always easy, a fact that hit Dr. Teresa García every time she looked in a mirror. As she and María would stroll along in Miami, strangers were always hard put to imagine that she, with her slightly plump figure and somewhat pretty but very serious face, had come from her mother’s fabulous cubana womb. As beautiful María’s only child, vintage 1958, she had missed the boat when it came to inheriting the overwhelming gorgeousness, which, as she had heard over and over again, used to stop traffic in Havana, a city that had never lacked attractive women. Among her vague recollections of the revolution, she’d remember standing on a street corner and, as she held her mother’s hand, seeing the bearded Fidelistas, patrolling the streets in their jeeps, with their rifles held up in the air, beeping at her mother, their green caps raised in homage to María as one of the glories of Cuba. And when the Russians, solemn and somewhat stiff, started turning up in Havana, even they couldn’t keep themselves from offering María small gifts—bottles of Yugoslavian perfume, pints of vodka, and rides in their Ladas (she always turned them down). Later on, growing up in Miami, Teresa, even while knowing that she was a very pleasant enough looking young cubana, couldn’t begin to touch her mother in her prime.
She was not at all homely—fixed up and with a few pounds off, the doctor seemed just perfect for the right sort (conservative, not too wild nor demanding) of man. Attractive enough, with long dark hair, pretty almond eyes, and a compactly promising figure, she had just never bothered with men, not even having a real novio in high school, and in college, aside from one fellow, who almost broke her heart, she had been too possessed by her studies to pay attention to such things. More on the quiet side (as pensive as a Nestor Castillo perhaps), Teresita tended to be the first to get up and leave once the conversation started to sound a little too repetitive for her taste—she always had the excuse of work awaiting her at home. (She carried a shoulder bag stuffed with folders to prove it.) Nevertheless, given a few drinks and the right kind of music, she could let loose with the moves she’d learned growing up around the dancers in her mother’s Learn to Mambo and Cha-cha the Cuban Way studio near Calle Ocho, though hip-hop and Latin fusion threw her.
“Pero, chica,” she would hear her mother telling her, as she worked out on the dance floor with a basic Latin three-step, “it’s all the same—remember to move your hips and shake your culo like it’s on fire, that’s all you have to do!”
Even so, Teresita must have had wallflower written all over her face, and after a while she’d get tired of dancing with just ladies. As well as she shimmied, men would just check her out from the bar, their chins on their fists, trying to figure out if it would be worth approaching her, and usually, so Teresita imagined, thinking No way. She just looked too much like serious business. Besides, they wanted women practically half her age—with their toned bodies, smooth, bared navels, and sun-seasoned breasts plump in push-up bras. Miami was full of them. After a while she’d give up the good fight, head home, and pass the night on a couch beside her mother, sipping glasses of red wine or Scotch on the rocks and watching beautiful María’s favorite Spanish-language telenovelas and variety shows on their color TV, the sort of glowing apparition that would have surely dazzled the guajiros of Pinar del Río.
“BUT, MI VIDA,” MARÍA TOLD HER ONE NIGHT. “THE PROBLEM WITH you is that you don’t do anything right. You don’t put on the proper makeup—when you do, you look like a payaso! A clown. And you don’t care about dressing sexy at all. What’s wrong with turning a few heads? I certainly did in my time, and you can too!”
“Come on, Mama,” Teresa told her, looking up from a book. “You know I love you, but you’re wrong. Most men want a certain type, and I’m not that way at all. But it doesn’t bother me, okay? Just leave me alone about that business! Déjame tranquilo, okay?”
“Okay, okay,” María told her, lighting a Virginia Slims cigarette, which always offended her daughter’s medical sensibilities. “But I’ll only say one more thing.”
“What?”
“At your age, no eres una pollita—you’re no longer a young chick—so you should try everything to find someone, because otherwise you will end up alone. You know I won’t always be around, and then you’ll really be lonely. I’ll come and visit you—don’t worry about that—but do you want to spend the rest of your life with a spirit as opposed to a real flesh-and-blood person? And remember, I have you—but who will be there when you’re getting on?” Then, the coup de grâce: “And don’t forget, no tenemos familia. We don’t have any family.”
That made her doctor’s composure unravel.
“Ay, Mamá, but don’t you know you’re hurting me with all that talk? Can’t you stop sometimes?”
“All right, hija, I’m just trying to be helpful,” María said. A few minutes of
silence. And then beautiful María would add: “But listen to me, I’ll only say one more thing. Even if I think you deserve the best, even an ugly man with one leg would be better than none; then at least you can have children! And then you’ll be happy, instead of putting up with that miserable brain of yours that thinks too much!”
“Okay, Mama, I appreciate it, but enough, all right? I’m tired from working and—”
“Hey, chiquita, I’ve got an idea! Why don’t you go to one of those singles nights at the Biltmore, over in Coral Gables? Yes, it’s the ‘Black Bean Society’—they have one every month—I have a friend who went there and met some nice fellow, and maybe, if you fix yourself up the right way, you’ll have a little luck too and—”
That’s when Teresita leaned over and gave her mother a kiss to quiet her down. She owed María too much to stay angry at her for long, but God, when she’d start up with all the nagging about the loveless state of her only daughter’s romantic life, Teresita could only take it for so long. She’d want to drown her sorrows in the worst things possible: pizza, fried plátanos, lechón sandwiches, and dark chocolate truffles (which tasted great with red wine). On many a night, filled with cravings, she’d drive off to some diner and eat her heart out just because she felt like it. (Then a week of weighing herself, of shaking her head.) More often than not, however, if Teresita didn’t head her off at the conversational pass, María might well slip back into the re-recitation of her own history as a poor country girl who’d come to Havana with nothing, and how she had learned her life’s lessons the hard way…and, always, always, just how humble and beautiful she had been in her prime, and the loves of her life. In fact, if she’d had enough to drink, María would go on and on about that muy, muy handsome músico named Nestor Castillo, who’d once written a song about her: “the man who could have been your papito!” she’d say.
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