NOW AND THEN, ESPECIALLY DURING THE YEARS WHEN HER BRILLIANT daughter had left Miami to study medicine in New York and she would come from work and indulge in a few five-thirty cocktails, María, feeling lonely, not for men but for her Teresita’s companionship, would turn on their living room phonograph, an RCA console, and play the somewhat weathered Mambo Kings album she had happily found one afternoon at a neighborhood flea market for twenty-five cents. As if putting on a zarzuela or a symphony, she’d listen to each selection in order, from their raucously freewheeling, drum-and-horn-section-driven descargas to their songs of love, and always with the greatest sentimentality each time she heard Nestor’s sweet baritone voice, the climax, of course, reached with the last offering of Side A, “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Some evenings it gave her such a thrill that she’d put it on over and over again, the distance of time having made its melody seem even lovelier than before, and, despite her dislike of certain of its lyrics, she’d feel glorified, as if their love had been immortalized forever and forever, amen. But when she’d had too much to drink, and Nestor’s ghost filled the room, and the particulars of that irretrievable romance came back to her in such a way as to provoke the saddest of emotions, she’d cut it off, lest she begin to wallow in the kinds of sentiments that María still found painful.
(In that sort of mood, she’d recall the accusatory letter that Cesar Castillo had sent her. That her impulsive journey to New York in 1956 could have contributed, in any way, to Nestor’s passing was the sort of notion that sometimes made her jump up in her sleep, her heart beating rapidly, just like he used to make it. Then that guilt would sting her like a wasp, pains she would feel for days, until that too eventually faded.)
So María had to be careful, because even she, with her somewhat hardened shell, could find herself adrift on a sea of regrets. On such nights, she’d go through her cache of keepsakes—what were they but ordinary photographs, most of them fading, of her mamá and papito, of herself as a young beauty, and yes, of Nestor Castillo, that joven, whom she came to believe had been the love of her life: that which she had thrown away? In such a mood, she’d read his letters over again, and not just the tender ones but also those letters that overheated her skin with reminiscences of their lovemaking.
(If she could have seen Teresita’s expression one evening when she, home from Florida International University, had, out of curiosity, dug them out of her closet and read each and every one. My God! is what she had thought.)
Then months would go by without her once playing that song. And while María, at a certain hour, tuned in to Miami’s Channel Five to see if that particular episode of I Love Lucy in which Nestor and his brother had appeared happened to be showing, for the most part she kept her little secret to herself. Teresita knew about it, and so did her former dancing colleague from the Lantern Club, Gladys, who, since moving to Miami from Havana, had become an occasional close companion. (They had spotted each other in a mall, around 1980, in the days just before Miami had gotten a little crazy over the influx of the Marielitos. It had been a happy reunion, and, yes, Gladys believed her when it came to that song—María had told her about Nestor.) But the few times María had mentioned this to anyone else, like her neighbors, her claim was met with more than a little skepticism. Because to call yourself the inspiration behind what Cubans of a certain generation had come to regard as something of a minor classic fell into a category of self-aggrandizement that only invited ridicule and, in María’s opinion, unspoken accusations of vanity and silliness.
Nevertheless, beautiful María sometimes wished that everyone knew. What was she, after all, but just another exile lady, a former dancer from the glory days of Havana, whom no one would ever remember, save perhaps for her daughter?
Chapter FORTY-FIVE
During those long months in the 1980s while Teresita lived away, María had her routines. She and her old friend Gladys, married with her own grown children, met occasionally on the weekends, usually Sundays, to make forays to the restaurants and shopping centers of the city. María would join Gladys on excursions to the beach, where, baking in the sun and sipping drinks of rum and pineapple juice, she passed those pleasant hours under an umbrella, taking in the escapades of frolicking youth on the white sands. Gladys, it should be said, though a few years younger than María, had ballooned appreciably while living the good life, becoming one of those immense cubanas who, however portly, still sashayed with a former dancer’s sexy pride. They’d sit and look out over the water—and inevitably the horizon’s oceanic murmurings, soporific in effect, whispered that to the south, just a few hundred miles away, lay Havana, portal to Cuba itself. But it may as well have been China—oceans off—for neither of them knew of any Cubans who had gone back. (“Remember when those cruise boats would leave Havana at six in the morning and come back late at night from Miami, loaded up with the tourists?” María would say. “Remember the trip we made?”)
Miami had changed since the days María first arrived. It was all fancied up, prospering in ways that the first exiles could not have imagined. If there had been any blot on the mark the Cubans left on the city, it came down to the scattering of criminals and asylum inmates that ese loco Fidel had unleashed on Florida when he allowed the Mariel boat lifts. Though most weren’t criminals—Gladys’s husband, Ramón, had been on one of those boats in the Florida-bound flotilla, returning with six of his relatives—there had been a spike in crime; one had to be more careful at night in certain neighborhoods. But over all, as María and Gladys warmed their bottoms, enjoying their spiked refrescos, they were accepting enough of their life in that city. Miami wasn’t Havana, at least the one they knew, and, for María, it seemed a million miles away from Pinar del Río—just thinking about that, and the great internal distances she had traveled from that tranquil valle, sometimes left her so quietly disposed that she wouldn’t say much at all.
Though she had enjoyed those outings—Ramón always dropped her off at the house in Northwest Terrace—the hardest thing for María was to come home to an empty house: on with the radio in the kitchen, on with the television in her living room. A glass of rum with diet Coke usually smoothed her over, and gloriously so, as she showered—didn’t that bring her closer to God? Then, having gotten the sand off, she’d attend to her only companion, the little black cat with the white paws María had found mewing inside a garbage can down the street, Omar, the name that had popped into her head. She felt so much affection for the creature she sometimes wondered why she had bothered with men at all, and this Omar seemed to know, for he followed her around wherever she went, curled up next to her on the couch when she watched TV and smoked, and jumped into bed with her, the way men had once always wanted to, at night.
And sometimes, settled on the kitchen table, just purring away, and with an Oriental wisdom burning in his eyes, Omar watched María as she would sit writing what she called her versitos. It was a vocation that she, a former analfabeta, had only dabbled in over the years but, to which, with Teresita away in school, she had lately devoted herself. Her interest was helped by a poetry-writing course that she had enrolled in at an adult education center at Dade Community College. Meeting on Wednesday evenings at eight o’clock and lasting for two hours, it had become the high point of her week. Conducted in Spanish by an Ichabod Crane–looking fellow named Luis Castellano, a former native of Holguín, the class consisted of a dozen Cuban women, mostly well into their fifties if not older, no men, and the poems were shared aloud, often to laughter and sometimes to tears. For to hear spoken the pure emotions of such ladies in that intimate setting, as expressed in poems with titles like “Mi Cuba preciosa”—“My Precious Cuba”—or “El jardín de mis abuelos”—“My Grandparents’ Garden”—or “Un domingo por la mañana en Cienfuegos”—“A Sunday Morning in Cienfuegos”—was to be steeped, as María herself had put it to Teresita in a letter, “in the honey of our bees.” Plump, aged, still shapely, kindly disposed or enraged by what life had dealt them, each
week they held forth, their voices cracking sometimes, their hands trembling. And you know what? Not a one of their poems was bad, or could be bad; their plainspoken utterances, like songs without music, just took everyone back to what they felt and envisioned when remembering, ever so bittersweetly, that which they had lost and wished to recover: the very notion of Cuba, which hung over the room like the branches of a blossom-heavy tree.
They wrote about street life in Havana, with its singing vendors, and of their small towns in the provinces, or some colorful fulano they knew, or of a local rake, a first love, or the sea, the siren songs they heard as echoes in conch shells found on a beach, of smelling fresh morning bread from a bakery next door, muy sabrosito siempre, of chameleons and roosters running wild in an auntie’s living room, of el campo en Oriente, with its blossomed air after a rainfall, of the mists rising along the ridged foothills of the Escambray mountains, and the stars that rose, one by one, like diamonds over that horizon; of watching the impeccably dressed, straight-backed planters of Matanzas riding regally by their porches on their silver-spurred white stallions, of singing barbers and lovestruck morticians, of childhood negrita nannies; of husbands, and sons, and beautiful daughters; of distant Spanish ancestors from Vigo or Fonsagrada, or Asturias or Barcelona, Madrid and more—all this turned that ordinary classroom into something of a chapel in which everyone prayed to the same heaven.
From María García’s writings:
If Cuba were a man
He would be so handsome,
I’d faint in his arms.
He would smell so sweetly of flowers,
And of the rain at three o’clock.
His kisses might taste of tobacco, but I wouldn’t mind,
He would be good to me, after all.
He would dance like a rumbero from Cayo Hueso
And speak deliciously like a song…
María wrote other poems, another side of herself coming out, her own sentimentality, at their writing, surprising her. By her kitchen table, one evening, the Frigidaire humming beside her and the GE radio turned low, just scribbling the words “Mi papito, Manolo,” brought him back, and she found herself nearly weeping. Witnessing this sadness, Omar’s ears curled, as if he could understand María; and he seemed almost clairvoyant when she began to write about Nestor, Omar getting up and rubbing his bony, purring head against the knuckles of María’s hand.
Oh, Nestor, I have something
To tell you,
Even if what we had
Was long ago.
Without knowing it
I loved you,
And love you now,
Wherever you are….
So, believe me when I say
I just didn’t know.
SHE WROTE ABOUT HER VALLE OFTEN, A FEW DITTIES ABOUT HER dancer’s life in Havana, and a poem about learning to read, which she called, simply, “For the Negro, Lazarus.” And though she never published those verses anywhere, except in the blue-covered anthologies that their teacher, el Señor Castellano, put together on a Xerox machine for that class, beautiful María just enjoyed the time she spent with her little poetic community. On such nights, when, it should be said, she sometimes felt an attraction for the maestro, despite his incredible homeliness, María always came home with a feeling of accomplishment, among other emotions, that, indeed, she had come a long way from the days she had been an ignorant guajira, unable to read or write a single word.
From another of her verses, which was just a jotting entitled “Mi amiga Eliza”:
She wore rags like me
She was forlorn like me
Knew nothing like me
Had little like me
We look so much alike
That when I see her
In my mirror,
And ask, “Eliza, why the long face?”
She tells me, “Oh, cousin, it’s because
I know that while I am so happy
You are so sad.”
Chapter FORTY-SIX
As much solace as beautiful María took in her verses, the source of her greatest pride in those years was Teresita, about whom she bragged to anyone who would listen. (“Oh, but if only your abuelos could have known—and your papito, Ignacio, whose brains flow in your blood—oh, they would be so happy!”) Teresita had always been one of those cubanitas who, with an exile’s passion, excelled in every subject in school, science being her greatest interest. She was helped by a very high IQ—a measurement that meant little to María. That she had decided to study medicine, all on scholarships, had surely to do with the way María had raised her. When it came to matters of health, a day never passed during Teresita’s early adolescence that María did not find herself worrying that her daughter might come down with the same symptoms of epilepsy that had taken her tía, at so young an age, from this world. Teresita had grown up hearing her mother, at the public health clinics, asking the doctors who examined her if there were special tests for that disease. Nothing came of them—she was always a healthy girl—but any time Teresita suffered from a fever and exhibited the slightest trembling, María, taken back to Pinar del Río and the sufferings of her sister, inevitably rushed her off to the nearest hospital. Early on, epilepsia was a word that Teresita had learned through her mother’s wistful stories about her aunt, may God bless her soul, just so that she would know something of her own past; and it was the first disease that Teresita, in high school, with a burgeoning interest in the sciences, looked up in the library encyclopedia.
And so, it can perhaps be said that Teresita’s interest in pediatric medicine came first to pass because of María.
OF COURSE, MOTHER AND DAUGHTER SPOKE ON THE TELEPHONE at least a few times a week, whenever Teresita’s taxing schedule as an intern in New York, with a specialization in pediatric oncology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, allowed her the time.
“Have you met anyone?” María inevitably asked.
“No, I’m too busy, Mama. If you knew my hours, you’d understand.”
“But there’s no one there you like?”
Teresita sighed. “No, Mama, not yet.”
It was something María always asked her, and it always made Teresita want to get off the phone, or say, “Mama, can’t you just accept who I am?” But she knew that María would simply have thought, Oh, but she’s just become too americana. Still, their conversations jostled along pleasantly, and dutifully, Teresita filling her mother in on the routines of the week, and María occasionally reciting her latest verses over the phone, never once failing to let her daughter know how much she missed her. In fact, though Teresita often sighed during their conversations, she felt the same way. María, after all, had been everything to her, the fount of what she thought of as her “little Cuban-centric world.”
Always too pensive for her own good, and one of those demure and ever obedient cubanita daughters who always seemed to recede into the shadows of the kitchen when María had friends over and things became lively, Teresita, with her 160-something IQ, had, over the years, grown more attached to abstract notions than to the practicalities—and pleasures—of daily existence. In high school, when thrown in with a crowd of rowdy cubanita adolescents who mainly talked about one guapo boy or another, and fretted about whether their asses were too big or their halter tops were sexy enough, Teresita thought them frivolous. Among those friends she was known as somewhat of a wallflower, and so straitlaced that they would chide her with this taunt: “Hey, loosen up, Teresita! Do you think we’re back in the Cuba of our abuelos?” She went to high school dances, but never with any man-killing intentions and, to María’s chagrin, never bothering with makeup. A budding feminist, Teresita refused to wear the clinging, short-skirted dresses of her classmates. Competing on her high school swim team well enough to have once won a bronze medal in a regional meet, she always wore an old-fashioned one-piece suit which the coach claimed, aside from her tendency to suddenly put on weight, slowed her up.
And when María, off in her
own world, spent the evening playing old Cuban records on their phonograph, often that Mambo Kings tune over and over again, Teresita, having a little cassette player, listened to the kind of music that would have made her friends gag. A high school music appreciation class, run by a progressive fellow, had “turned her on” to both Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and jazz. Not that she didn’t like Cuban music, but, having been raised on it, she had come to prefer just about anything else. And yes, she had been taught to dance Latin style by her mother, but there was something about the way her mother pushed her—“Be sexier, move your hips more!”—that put her off. Sweating in her leotard, Teresita would tell her, “Come on, Mama, you know that I’m not you!” And María, shaking her head, would say, “Oh, but I’m just trying to help you, chica.” Teresita knew this, but María worked her so hard sometimes, she couldn’t help but wonder if her mother was trying to put her through the paces of a professional dancer in Havana, 1947. (Well, she’d heard her mother talking about those days often enough, of a nightclub life, both sleazy and glamorous, to know that it surely wasn’t easy for her to have navigated that predatory world. And she’d feel grateful that she had been spared all the difficulties María, as she often reminded her, had endured. Yet, when she’d look at herself in the floor-to-ceiling studio mirror, Teresita, neither as beautiful nor as long-legged as her mother must surely have been at her age, just wanted to run out of that place and head home, to her room and the companionship of books.)
Beautiful Maria of My Soul Page 29
