Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  (Yes, Mama, the one who wrote you those dirty letters that you don’t know I read.)

  That led to a discourse about her other companions who followed over the years—not just Ignacio, whose blood flowed through Teresita’s veins, but the rest, those men she’d grown up regarding as her temporary papitos. She didn’t need to hear more. But she always did. (“Even now, at my age, it’s nearly impossible for a woman like me to stay alone for long.”)

  Teresita always made a point of kissing her mother again, and chiding her if she lit another Virginia Slim, which always followed the kiss, and then it was as if nothing hurtful had been said, their life, on such nights, to repeat itself again and again—both being creatures of habit—María taking in her shows, content (and occasionally saddened) in her memories, and Teresita, or Dr. G as some of the orderlies called her, passing into her bedroom along a corridor of solitude and haunted not by love but by the notion that some in this world, no matter how good-hearted, are more or less destined to be alone.

  Chapter FORTY

  When it came to romance, Teresita’s mother, as opposed to herself, had seemed to lead a charmed life. At least when it came to finding one man or another to pass the time with. Other things, however, did not come so easily. Back in ’61, when they’d first come to Miami, for three of the dreariest months of María’s life they had stayed in a motel near the turnpike that they’d found barely tolerable (two cots, a sputtering black-and-white television, a sometimes running toilet, no air-conditioning, but a fan that, on humid days, barely did the job). The sort of run-down end-of-the-road establishment one used to find in pre–civil rights Miami—in which the motel walkway water fountains and its public restrooms were marked whites only, most of the residents were on the seedy side and somewhat, it seemed to María without her even knowing why, bitterly disposed. (Just a year later, there would be signs up in certain shop windows: help wanted, no cubans please.) Whenever she and Teresita crossed the street and waited for a bus to take them downtown, there was always someone to stare at María, and not for the old “hey beautiful” reasons she had known in Havana. Until Miami became used to seeing thousands of others like her, María, despite her beauty and light mulatta skin, was sometimes regarded as good—or bad—as black. Which was why some folks gave her and Teresita dirty looks or frosty up and downs when they’d stop to drink from those water fountains, and it was no joy to ask or rather beg in broken English for the use of a toilet in a downtown diner when María’s stomach had gone bad from anxiety, the owners grudgingly handing over a key. Teresita accompanied her everywhere rather mutely (what was that strange language people were speaking?), and always did as her mother told her.

  But not all was so bad. To cover their immediate bills, while the resettlement people at the Catholic Relief Services figured out what to do with the beautiful cubana who had no apparent skills beyond dancing, they’d get a hundred dollars monthly from a Cuban exile fund, and they had been promised another several hundred apiece for relocating once a sponsor could be found. María could have stayed in Miami—she’d been told about a job stitching canvases for a Cuban-American-owned sailboat company in Fort Lauderdale, but she hadn’t forgotten about her friend Fausto Morales the magician, in Las Vegas. And so when María sat down with one of the agency’s counselors, an affable fellow named Gustavo, they’d spend their sessions trying to locate the man. A somewhat hound-jowled and heavyset Cuban of middle age, the counselor bore a slight resemblance to an American character actor, Ernest Borgnine, and though a few months went by before he finally located the magician at a residence in the Lawton district of Las Vegas, María hadn’t minded that at all. He himself had first arrived in Miami from Cienfuegos a few decades before, had often gone back to Cuba until most recently. An orphan raised by priests and nuns, he had once almost taken the orders, he told María, but, in the end, it just wasn’t for him. No children, no wife, no family. By then, Gustavo, a forlorn but sensibly self-accepting bachelor somewhere in his forties, of few resentments, who spent half his days making telephone calls on behalf of his clients, had taken such a liking to María and her chiquita that, having helped them in their travel and document arrangements for their journey to that desert city, he seemed wistful about their departure. And so did María. When Gustavo wished them all the best of good fortune, he, with regret in his eyes, had added: “Please, if you should ever come back here, don’t forget to look me up.”

  LAS VEGAS ITSELF: THE DESERT, THE SCORCHING HEAT OF THE summer months, the Arctic temperatures of every indoor enclosure, the glaring strip at night, and yet another motel, near the McCarran Airport. Among the surprises awaiting María? Aside from finding the dry Nevada landscape forebodingly endless, she learned that Fausto had married a showgirl who performed in a troupe at a hotel called the Sands, and, as it turned out, his promises to help María find work were impeded by his own busy schedule, her age, and the fact that she could speak only a handful of words in English. Though there was a contingent of former Havana show-business professionals in Las Vegas, among them a fairly well known choreographer famous for the sumptuous spectaculars he had staged during the glory days of the Tropicana in Havana, María could land only two jobs, as a dancer in a side room of a casino and as an occasional cigarette girl—no doubt about it, she still looked good but just wasn’t young or tall enough to suit the local tastes. And when beautiful María managed to get onstage again with a troupe of second-rung dancers in a succession of shows that began in the midafternoon and lasted until two in the morning, she usually left with sore feet, a headache, and a depression so severe that Teresita, just a child but a sensitive one for her age, having her first taste of backstage life—for María always brought her along with a few toys and coloring books to wait and sleep and wait and sleep while the shows went on—could see that her mamá wasn’t happy at all. Fausto himself was sensitive to this, and when he had time off from his school and his nightly act, in which he, a sleight of hand genius and fine illusionist, could seem to levitate, bisect, and make vanish his assistants, and turn footstools into animals, he took them out, usually on Sundays, with his bored wife, who seemed to subsist on chewing gum and rum and Cokes, to eat in one of the better places in town.

  A massive fellow, with a great bearded head of flame red hair and blue Celtic eyes, Fausto, who did not look particularly Cuban, regularly charmed María by ingratiating himself with her little daughter. He had a way of pulling caramelos from behind Teresita’s ears and could throw his voice so that he could hold a purring alley cat on his lap and make it seem to speak, and in a Mickey Mouse manner that always left little Teresita squealing with delight. For his show, which they went to see, he dressed in the outlandish manner of stage magicians, in high boots and with a velvet cape draped over his shoulders and pirates’ jangles in his ears. On their outings, he wore a simple guayabera and linen slacks and, in the midst of their meals, occasionally glanced at María in a certain way. Looking back at those months, while recalling a few of those Sundays when María paid the motel owner’s daughter to look after her—wonderful afternoons that she spent in a swimming pool, grasping the arms of a dragon float and watching cartoons on the color television!—Teresita wondered if María had ever bedded Fausto down. (She would never say, and why should she?) But she’d remember her mother’s incessant chain-smoking and the way María would stand by their motel room window in the mornings, muttering “Por Dios, esto es un carajo!”—“But Lordy, this is a living hell!”—over and over again. This Teresita distinctly recalled, but little else, except that, come another day, they found themselves on yet another airplane, headed back to Miami.

  Chapter FORTY-ONE

  Upon their return, when María ended up at the Catholic Relief Services office again, Gustavo couldn’t have been happier to see her, and while he, in his professional capacity, attended to her dutifully, helping to find her temporary lodgings—again in a low-end motel—he began to take María and her daughter around the city on the weekends. It wasn�
�t long before these informal outings turned into something else. One evening, as they were eating dinner in a Chinese restaurant, Gustavo, a quiet sort of man who never minced words, took hold of María’s hand from across the table and said, “I’ve been thinking about something, María. And I will say it in front of your daughter. I’ve grown very attached to you both, and, well, how can I put it? Even if we’ve only known each other for a short time, I’m very certain that I could make you and your daughter happy.” He took a deep breath. “I mean to say that I would be honored to have you as my wife.”

  Of course, María was taken aback: Gustavo was not the sort of man María had ever thought she’d end up with—she hadn’t even shared a kiss with him—but, in those moments, though he was not a particularly attractive fellow, it was the kindness in his eyes and his doting manner towards her and Teresita that did her in. Though there were quite a number of more handsome men in Miami—more and more Cubans were pouring into the city in those days—María, considering her daughter’s welfare, made up her mind right then and there that the most important thing was to provide Teresita with a proper home.

  This was how they ended up in their house on Northwest Terrace, where Gustavo lived, a stucco-walled ranch-style tile-roofed affair of late 1920s vintage, surrounded by wildly overgrown bushes and trees, among them a massive acacia that loomed over the front patio and seemed hundreds of years old, a tree that covered the ground with greenish red pods every time there was a storm. After Gustavo and María were married in the church of St. Jude, in 1962, with mostly his friends from the agency in attendance and, it must be said, spent a three-day honeymoon in a nice air-conditioned suite in a hotel along Miami Beach, during which, to her pleasant surprise, she learned that the piously inclined Gustavo, while needing to be broken in, happily abandoned his formality in their bedroom—like the others before him, he could not get enough of her—Teresita and María began their life in their new home.

  It should be added that the decor of Gustavo’s house lacked the female touch. Its furnishings, reeking of past lives, consisted of charity warehouse and Salvation Army castoffs, which Gustavo, a volunteer for such organizations, had acquired cheaply over the years. The best of them was a bed with an art deco headboard, and this María decided to keep, despite the sadness it emanated, for it had been sold to Gustavo by an old Cuban couple at the end of their lives. But the rest eventually had to go. And so for the first few years of their marriage, with Gustavo reluctantly watching a lifetime’s worth of savings vanish, María set out to furnish that house in a manner befitting a newlywed couple. Favoring brightly colored fabrics for her chairs and couch, tables with animal feet, and the most modern of appliances—a new refrigerator and stove, and even a color television, bought on time plans—she also covered one living room wall, over a couch, with mirror tiles, to reflect the natural garden beyond their windows. She filled the house with an abundance of plastic plants and vases, usually of a Chinese motif, in which she arranged silk flowers, and put up on most every wall the brightest paintings of the sea that they could find. And, in memory of her mother, Concha, interspersed here and there, between all kinds of bric-a-brac and the photographs from her Havana career, went portraits of Jesus and the Holy Mother, purchased in the religious shops of Miami.

  Once they were settled, there followed a decade of reasonably unglamorous domestic tranquillity. Gustavo, Teresita would always recall, had never been less than kindly, and in deference to his devoutness, María took up churchgoing again though, as she would remark to Teresita, mainly to “say hello to God.” Working part-time in a laundry, as a counter lady in a Cuban-owned bakery, and then as an occasional dancing instructor at an Arthur Murray studio near the then dilapidated neighborhood of South Beach, María became one of those Cuban ladies whose greatest pride had nothing to do with the song of love that had been written about her but came down to the duties and joys of raising her daughter, Teresita.

  Once she entered school and began to overcome the shock of learning a new language, English, in classrooms filled with other Cuban exile children, who were just as frightened and bewildered as she, Teresita, so capable and bright, flourished, devouring books and skipping grades easily. Her progress was akin to the ravishing changes that were overtaking the formerly maudlin city of Miami. In the early 1960s, as the Cubans began to move there by the thousands, entire neighborhoods, sleepy and long neglected, came back to life, new businesses and restaurants and societies sprouting up everywhere. Their neighborhood’s houses, which had been filled with aging Jewish retirees, with Negroes who tended to stare fiercely at the newcomers, and with longtime residents of working-class roots, now became the cheaply purchased homes of the newly arrived. It was María’s habit to stroll the quiet streets of that neighborhood with her husband, Teresita by their side, in the kind of paseo that families took back in Havana at dusk. In time, beautiful María found her own coterie of friends, ladies of her generation, in their thirties, with their own families, with whom she occasionally played games of canasta and whose conversations at dusk, whether held in the middle of the pavement or at gatherings on someone’s front patio (she’d always say to Teresita that it reminded her of the way neighbors gathered in her valle in Pinar del Río) always tended towards speculation about just how and when the Communist government of Fidel Castro would finally collapse, and the resumption of the lives they once had in Cuba.

  María, however, never had much of that longing or nostalgia: her days as a professional dancer behind her, when she dreamed at all, it was not of Havana but of the sweetness of her former life in her valle, which, with the passage of time, she missed all the more. It was something she always talked about to Teresita, especially after she’d hear a particular song on the radio or happened to bump into someone from her province. But even María knew that it was nothing more than a passing fancy: would she ever live in a bohío again? Not in a million years. What she missed was her family, who sometimes visited her in her sleep, just presences, borne by memory, who were somehow “nearby” in her bedroom. (More than once, she would wake from the most vivid dream, of seeing her papito, Manolo, standing in the corner of the room, his guitar by his side, a look of confusion on his face.) Sometimes she’d get up in the middle of the night, step out into the darkness, smoke a cigarette, and just stand there, for no good reason at all. Teresita always knew: she’d hear her footsteps outside her door but dared not disturb María’s moments of reflection, and it would keep her awake until Gustavo, getting home from his part-time night job, brought her mother back inside. What María thought about out there, when there wasn’t much to look at except for a few houses across the street, with televisions glowing in the windows, and some stars up in the sky, Teresita never knew. It was just her mother’s way.

  (The truth be told, María seemed far removed from her life in America. She had little interest in the war in Vietnam, the space program, the civil rights movement. These were subjects that only occasionally touched her, as when one of their Cuban neighbors from down the street lost their son, a Marine, to the jungles. Gustavo, on the other hand, was more entrenched in American culture. He always spoke sadly of the death of JFK, whom some speculated had been murdered by anti-Castro Cubans as retribution for his bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and his promise to the Russians that, if they pulled their missiles out, America would never invade Cuba. But Gustavo still had a soft spot for Kennedy, a Catholic, who had once visited the relief center, hence the photograph of Gustavo and Kennedy shaking hands on their hallway wall.)

  She had other mild eccentricities. In those days, beautiful María couldn’t care less about mastering English, as if it were an unthinkable imposition on her soul. Besides, most of the people she knew in Miami, especially her local acquaintances, in the same boat, hardly spoke anything but Spanish. Nevertheless, both Gustavo and Teresita did their best to help María out. But because Gustavo, with his job at the relief center by day and as a part-time watchman by night (he’d dress up in a g
ray Armstrong Securities uniform and go off after dinner, toting a club—the relief service never paid well—and come back about three in the morning), wasn’t around as much as he would have liked, Teresita, excelling in school, became beautiful María’s second, female Lázaro: her teacher. A half an hour now and then was all they, seated around their Formica table in the kitchen, could manage—or, to put it differently, it was all that María could take. She preferred to perfect her reading and writing in Spanish, and it seemed incredibly unfair that, in America, she had become an analfabeta all over again. Nevertheless, for all her resistance to that notion, after five or so years of such lessons, even María could begin to understand her daughter when she’d lapse from Spanish into the heavier and coarser intonations of English, a language that always sounded ugly to María’s ears.

  But on those evenings when Gustavo happened to be home and they watched television, María didn’t mind taking in certain popular English-language programs, especially the ones that featured dancing and singing, like The Jackie Gleason Show, which was, in fact, broadcast out of Miami in those days. Knowing the work that went into the ensemble routines, María enjoyed pointing out the difficulties of certain high kicks and turnarounds (on such evenings she’d regret that she hadn’t become a choreographer), and she’d get up from their Castro Convertible sofa and, taking hold of Teresita’s hand, show her a few of those dancers’ steps. Movies amused her as well, and if María had a favorite, Teresita would remember, it was My Fair Lady, with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn playing the roles of Professor Higgins (pronounced by María “eeeeegens”) and Eliza Doolittle, as broadcast in the Spanish version, their voices and singing overdubbed. She particularly liked that story, about the crude but beautiful Eliza’s transformation from street waif and flower seller into a quite proper lady who could read, write, and speak, and comport herself as elegantly as any aristocrat, María always smiling at its happy ending, as if Eliza’s story had some connection to her own.