Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  And sometimes they’d settle for reruns of the older programs—one of them being I Love Lucy, which both Gustavo and Teresita especially liked because Desi was Cuban and quite a funny man. As for María? She’d hardly ever paid much attention to that show until one of those evenings, in 1968 or so, when she happened into the living room just as that episode about Ricky Ricardo’s singing cousins—played by Cesar and Nestor Castillo—came on. Knocks on the Ricardos’ door, Lucy letting them in, and all at once, Nestor himself, back from the dead in all his winsome cubano earnestness, standing beside his brother, a Panama hat in hand and black instrument case by his side.

  At first, María didn’t say a word but just stood by the living room doorway taking in, as if anew, the glorious black-and-white handsomeness of her former love. (“Ay, el pobre, Nestor.”) Only later, when the Castillo brothers, in character as Manny and Alfonso Reyes, came out on the stage of Ricky’s Tropicana nightclub in white silk suits to perform “Beautiful María of My Soul” and Nestor began to sing, did she say, in a most casual manner, “Both of you should know that the song that fellow’s singing was written about me.”

  “That song?” Gustavo asked. “I’ve heard it a million times before. Are you kidding me?”

  “No,” she said. “Soy la bella María de esa canción. That beautiful María is me.”

  Gustavo replied good-naturedly, incredulously: “If that’s so, my love, how come you’ve never mentioned it before?”

  “Why? It’s because I’m a humble woman. Soy una mujer humilde,” she said. “That’s all.”

  Then, as Gustavo raised his eyebrows at Teresita, who gave a little shrug, it hit María that just because she said such a thing people would not necessarily believe her. And though María hadn’t particularly dwelled on that canción in a long time—for she didn’t hear it as often as before—after all she had gone through and all the nights she had dreamed sweetly, erotically, and angrily about what could have been between herself and Nestor, it hurt her pride to think that not even her husband and daughter took what she’d just told them as the truth.

  She left that room offended just as the I Love Lucy theme, that happy homage to pre-Castro Cubans in America, sounded merrily through the halls and rooms of their house.

  LATER, HOWEVER, SHE CALLED TERESITA INTO HER BEDROOM, where she pulled a small lacquered cane suitcase from her closet; it was the same one she had brought with her when they left Cuba, but María now used it for keepsakes and documents. “I’m going to show you something,” she said. And from it she took out a large manila envelope that held, among other things, the letters Nestor had written her, and her beloved photographs, of family, of friends, of Nestor—all that she had left of her past in Cuba. The first she showed to Teresita was the glossy studio portrait that Nestor had once sent her, with an inscription to María scribbled out in his neat and careful hand in black ink.

  “Recognize him? It’s the guapito from that show, isn’t it?”

  “Sí, mamá.”

  “Well, he’s the one who wrote that song about me.” Then: “Now, look at another.”

  It was of María and Nestor holding hands with rapturous expressions on their faces, no doubt madly in love, as they came charging out of the Cuban sea—taken out at la playita back in ’49.

  “That’s him and me,” she said. “We were lovers, you know.” Teresita, just a young girl at the time, nodded as if those words held meaning for her. “He is the one who should have been your father.”

  And she went on, showing her daughter the others, photographs of herself and Nestor taken here and there in Havana, Teresita just listening, in her pensive way.

  “So I hope you will believe me when I tell you something in the future, okay?”

  “Sí, mamá.”

  “Good! Now give your mamá a little kiss.”

  Chapter FORTY-TWO

  As the years passed, the settled life of that household turned into something else, for after a decade of a reasonably happy marriage, during which time Gustavo, working on behalf of the incoming Cubans and doing much good for that ever-growing community, discovered that God, or fate, does not always reward such deeds. María, loving this man, or loving him as much as she could, and never saying a bad word about Gustavo to anyone, sometimes seemed rather bored with their conjugal arrangements. It’s possible that this pious and quiet man, whose worst sin was to say that he felt perfectly fine when he didn’t, or that he wasn’t tired when exhaustion most weighed on him, had, in María, the first woman he had ever possessed. Whatever went on in their bedroom had, over time, begun to fix upon María’s still lovely features a look of amorous resignation.

  She never said as much, but Teresita, with her little bedroom just down the hall from theirs, while quietly making her way to the toilet, sometimes heard through their door beautiful María’s utterances: “Qué te pasa, hombre?”—“What’s going on with you?” and “My God, man, there’s only so much I can do!” and “What am I to make of a husband who shows no interest in a woman like me?” One night, without daring to make a sound herself, Teresita overheard this: “In Cuba, the men wanted me, as if there were no other woman in the world…wanted me so much, Gustavo, that I sometimes went mad, and here we are, Gustavo, and tú haces nada conmigo—you do nothing with me like a real man would…. So tell me, amorcito, what am I to do with you?”

  Teresita would hear his sighs and occasionally, but not very often at all, their bed frame knocking against the walls and María’s voice, guttural as a cat’s, urging him on: “Dámelo fuerte, hombre,” and “More!” and “Just a little longer, please! Give me more, and strongly, carajo!” Suppressed female cries, the sucking in of air, as if inhaling fire, the bed rocking more loudly, and then all such noises abruptly ceasing, Gustavo, portly by then, falling back or rolling to his side and gasping with exhaustion.

  Then nothing more, until the next morning, when the three would share breakfast before Gustavo and María went off to their jobs, and Teresita, an honors student at Miami Northwestern High, awaited her bus. A solemn silence, Gustavo good-naturedly cooking up the eggs with chorizo, María, a bandanna wrapped about her hair, smoking her Virginia Slims, the lady’s preferred cigarette, one after another, and barely eating more than a few bites of her food. Then a voice from a Spanish-language station, WCMQ in Hialeah, chattering away about traffic patterns before introducing yet another old classic Cuban canción while María, straightening out the buttons of Gustavo’s crisp blue shirt, asked him tenderly, “More coffee, my love?” but with her mascara eyes saying something else. Some old Benny Moré heartbreaker, or perhaps a danzón by the Orquesta Aragón, but occasionally, as well, another of those songs from that epoch when “Cuba was Cuba,” sonorous with violins, a flowing piano, and a beatific baritone, Nestor’s own, in his rendition of “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Just then, Gustavo, hearing those strains, rapped the tabletop and, dabbing his mouth, announced, “Well, I’ve got to go.” Kisses for his stepdaughter, a kiss on María’s cheek, the door opening, and the dense humidity of a Miami morning wafting into the air-conditioning of that kitchen like a mist. “Cuídate, amorcito,” María, running hot and cold, would call after him. The door closing, she would stub out a cigarette, click off the radio with a sigh, as if one memory too many had been provoked by that song.

  The discord saddened Teresita. She’d grown close to that man. He may not have been the most dynamic stepfather a girl could have, but he was good to her. And he may have disappointed María lately in some ways, but with Teresita, he never went wrong. She loved their tranquil promenades along the streets at dusk, on their way to get ice cream from a truck that always showed up on a certain corner at seven in the evening. He liked to take her places on his days off, and if some book in a shop window caught her eye, he never hesitated to buy it for her. He smelled nice, never raised his voice against her, and not once, in all those years, had he ever laid a hand on her. Best of all, on his days off, he’d sometimes have his friends over from th
e Relief Services center and cook up a feast, Cuban style. And when it came to celebrating her birthday, he always made that a fiesta too, going to the trouble of getting her a birthday cake, with candles, the kinds of niceties that María, who grew up without such simple rituals, would probably have never bothered with. She was just that way.

  But whatever María and Gustavo lacked, as Teresita would speculate years later, it hardly affected the image they presented during those dance nights sponsored by the Gallego Society or the Cienfuegos Club. Held in the ballrooms of Miami beach hotels, these were merry affairs, packed with people, live bands, and more Cuban food than any such crowd could possibly consume. (Having too much food, as opposed to the paucity of such things back in Cuba, was the point.) Teresita loved to see them out on the floor, most elegantly dressed, dancing to boleros amongst other couples of every possible age, from los ancianos to los nenes; enjoyed observing that ritual of stance and attitude in which, with their faces pressed gently together and heads tilted slightly upwards, both of them smiled, as if seeing something magnificent in the sparkling globes revolving below the ceiling. A good enough dancer, Gustavo never stepped on anybody’s toes, and he even had a certain grace.

  Teresita knew this because, seeing her sitting alone, he’d pull her out into the crowd, that dear and sweet man, who always had something nice to say to her—“If those fellows only knew what they’re missing” and “Don’t be shy, you’re as pretty as your mother,” which she knew was a lie but appreciated anyway. Though she would have preferred to stay home and study, or chat with her friends on the telephone, or simply watch some TV—in those days she really didn’t care about “boys” one way or the other—Teresita, having no choice about the matter, did her best to enjoy herself, mainly by overdoing it with the food, crispy tostones and the rinds of suckling pig—lechón—cooked up in the proper Cuban manner with tons of garlic, salt, and lemon juice, along with a nice heaping plate of rice with black beans, and maybe a little fried yuca. It was food that, as some of her Jewish friends at school would say, was “to die for.” Sucking in her stomach, whenever Teresita felt that someone’s eyes were on her, her greatest downfall came by way of the pastry tables, which were stacked with sweets, the diabolical napoleons being her favorites.

  On one of those nights, Teresita had been sitting off to the side, gingerly nursing each scrumptious bite of one, when she noticed Gustavo coming off the dance floor with a pronounced limp, and when he sat down, María off somewhere in a frenzy, showing off with some young caballero during an upbeat mambo, he kept rubbing his shin and ankle, as if to get something working again. Back home, later that night, he took off his black patent leather shoes to find that both his feet were swollen and lividly purple; the more he rubbed them, the more he groaned in pain. A local doctor, who couldn’t have been very thorough, Teresita would think years later, diagnosed him with gout, but it turned out to be the boiling point of a diabetes-induced heart-related malady that, undiagnosed, only worsened in the following months and culminated in a stroke, which befell him as Gustavo sat in his office, helping a newly arrived exile couple with the paperwork for the government-subsidized purchase of a house.

  That was God’s reward for all his good deeds, María kept thinking. “Gracias pa’ nada, Dios”—“Thanks for nothing, Lord”—she snapped at the sky after the priest had finished leading them in a final benediction and the cemetery workers, hoisting down ropes, lowered his coffin into the ground. Grasping her mother’s hand, Teresita, only fourteen at the time, was in tears. She had been crying for days. From the strange moment when María, late one afternoon, found her reading a book in her bedroom and told her, almost nonchalantly, that her step-papito was no more. And through the three days of his “showing” at the Gomez Brothers funeral home—“formerly located in Havana”—Teresita had been mystified by María’s indifference. For her mother showed hardly any emotion. He may have been only her step-papito, but she missed him.

  The house already seemed emptier without Gustavo, and on one of those evenings after they’d gotten home from his three-day wake, just the sound of the ice cream truck’s chimes at dusk brought her to tears, and every time she worked up the nerve to touch something that had belonged to him, like the plump brown wallet he had in his back pocket the day he died, which the police had returned to them in a plastic bag along with a rosary and comb, it broke her up too. But María? She had hardly shed a tear.

  “Oh, but don’t you understand, mi hijita,” she said to Teresita, “that Gustavo’s passing was God’s will? There is nothing to be done when someone’s time comes—believe me, I know.” And when Teresita, feeling as if that was not enough of an answer, asked her: “But tell me, Mama, did you love him?” María said, “Of course, I cared very much for him, but was it a deep and burning love? No…. If I chose him when I could have looked around for someone else, it was because he was a decent man, and I wanted you to benefit from his decency.” Then: “Did I want him to die? No. Did I want to deprive you of him? No. That was in El Señor’s plans, and nothing changes that. Es el destino— It’s destiny.”

  “But, Mama, why is it that you haven’t even cried?”

  “Why?” María said, getting up to refill a glass with red wine. “Because it doesn’t change a thing. Believe me, I’ve wept enough to last me two lifetimes—just to think of my own mother’s passing makes me cry deep inside at night. But by now—and you will understand this when you are older—I’ve learned that in this world you have to develop a hard skin. I learned this the hard way, and, believe me, you should too.”

  Oh, but the hard skin? Even years later Dr. Teresita wondered if she herself had become muy durita, durita, as her mother used to say, without really intending to.

  That same morning, when Gustavo was laid to rest, to join the others in María’s life who had once meant so much to her—her papito, her mother, her sister and two brothers, old Lázaro, and Nestor Castillo, and likely Ignacio too—and many in that crowd, among them more than a few of the reverent cubanos Gustavo had helped in the darkest days of their early exile, wept unabashedly, only beautiful María, dressed appropriately in black and under a veil, remained curiously unmoved, and that, sharp as a snapshot, was something Teresita would never forget. The ceremony ended, and as the crowd began dispersing, María, perhaps feeling robbed or relieved—it was impossible to tell—tossed a rose onto his coffin, peered down for a few moments, made a sign of the cross, and then, as if it were the most ordinary late Saturday morning, asked her daughter, “What would you like for lunch?” And when Teresita, taken aback by the casualness of that remark, shot her a disquieting glance—Teresita’s large eyes, dark as coals, flaring—María shrugged and just started walking off to a waiting Town Car. Later, on their journey back home, María, always content to watch the world go by, glanced over at her daughter only once, and when she did, she said, “¿Y qué?”—“And what? Tell me, what am I supposed to do?”

  Chapter FORTY-THREE

  Of course, there was soon someone else to fill the void left by Gustavo in that household, a dapper cubano of the old school, with a thin mustache, and gleaming (dyed black) hair, whom beautiful María met about a year later at a quinces celebration for one of Teresita’s amigitas from school. He happened to be the honoree’s uncle. They struck up a conversation because he had kept staring at María from another table, as if trying to place her. When he finally walked over, he said: “Haven’t I seen you somewhere, maybe in Havana?” And then: “Of course, at one of those clubs. Say, didn’t you dance at the Lantern?”

  “Yes, I did,” María answered, with neither pride nor shame. “It was my profession in those days.”

  Nodding happily, he sat beside her, sipped his drink, lit a cigarette. He was a well put together, tautly built fellow, maybe fifty, clouds of some overpowering cologne floating off his skin. He wore a well-fitted light blue suit, a Cuban flag pin on his lapel, with a crisp open-collared shirt, a rush of silvered hair flowing upwards from his chest a
nd just a distinguishing touch of gray at his temples; his eyes were remarkably penetrating. And yes, he was handsome.

  “Well, believe it or not, I caught a couple of your shows, back when; in one of them you were dressed up like an Egyptian—like Cleopatra—is that right?”

  “Yes, that revue was popular for a while.”

  He slapped his knee. “Lordy, I knew it. God, I remember thinking, Now that is one hell of a good-looking woman! And if I didn’t approach you, well, it’s because I didn’t think I had a chance in heaven.” He did not mince words. “Tell me, are you married?”

  “No, soy viuda”—“I’m a widow,” María said in such a downcast way that Teresita, sitting beside her, half rolled her eyes up into her head. “My husband died last year—a good man, you understand. Un santo,” she told him, looking off sadly.