Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “Yeah, stories—they lived in my neighborhood, in fact.”

  “But did you hear about any María? Was she a real person in your mind?”

  “Only in the way that I imagined her from hearing that song.”

  “Oh, I see,” Teresita said. “I thank you for your answering me.”

  “Well, thank you, and, by the way, what do you do for a living here in Miami?” This was a question he sometimes asked of members of the audience.

  “Soy doctora,” Teresita told him with tremendous dignity, many in the room nodding with appreciation of the fact that she was yet another cubana who had done well for herself.

  A few others inquired about the music in the book, and a few just thanked the author for having made the Cubans proud (such compliments were always his greatest pleasure). Soon enough, the store’s owner went to the podium and announced that Mr. Hijuelos would be signing his novel in the back of the store. It took Teresita about twenty minutes, a copy of that book in hand, to make her way to his table because so many people, Cubans in particular, were asking for inscriptions, often in Spanish. “Make it out this way: ‘Para la bella Tía María,’ please,” or for a cousin or a niece, so many Marías being around. Teresita had to admit that, despite his harried manner, he seemed not to mind taking the time to get each one right, and he seemed friendly enough: “How wonderful, my mother was from Holguín, like yours!” he would say. Or “Yeah, I spent time in Cuba, out in Oriente, when I was a kid, before Fidel of course.” Accumulating business cards from many, he took pains to sign each book carefully.

  Finally, Teresita found herself handing her copy over to him.

  “And who should I make this out to?” he asked.

  She smiled. “My name is Teresa, but please make it out to la Señora María García, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “I haven’t had the chance to read your book, but you should know something,” she went on, leaning over him as he wrote.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “My mother is the María of that song, the one you put in your story. She was very close to Nestor Castillo.”

  He looked up, blushing. “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I will let you know what I think once I’ve read it, okay?”

  “Sure, why not?” he said affably enough, though his expression was not happy.

  “Have you a card, so that I can be in touch with you?” she then asked.

  “Not really, but here,” he replied, and he scribbled out an address on a piece of paper and gave it to Teresita.

  She looked it over. “This is your publisher’s address, I see. Wouldn’t it be better if I had one for your home?”

  He wrote that down, then stood up to shake her hand, which she appreciated, and with that Dr. Teresa García gave him her card and, thanking him again, added: “As I said, I will let you know what I think.” With that she went off, but not before picking up a few books for the sick kids on her ward, and then she got into her Toyota and drove over to Northwest Terrace, where she spent half the night reading that novel most carefully.

  And the author? Satisfied by the evening’s turnout, and gratified to have met so many nice Cubans, while standing outside the bookstore having a smoke, he felt more than a little rattled by what Teresita had told him about the “real” María. He’d already been sued by a female bandleader who claimed her moral reputation had been damaged by the book, just because of a scene in which Cesar Castillo ravaged one of her musicians on a potato sack in a basement hallway of a Catskill resort where the Mambo Kings had been playing. And, though he’d made the whole thing up, he truly regretted the fact that he, for the sake of realism, had carelessly used the real bandleader’s name. The lawsuit had come and gone quickly, dismissed by a judge as a frivolous claim, but it had caused him enough distress that he didn’t want to go through something like it again, and surely not over the María of his book, whose sex scenes with Nestor Castillo, if the truth be told, were decidedly raunchy, though, he thought, presented with a redeeming romantic touch.

  Chapter FORTY-EIGHT

  That night, after coming home with her heavy bag of hospital folders, and after sitting with María and watching television for an hour while sipping whiskey, Teresita, leaving her mother on the couch and kissing her good night, slipped back into her room, past a hallway filled with photographs from the epoch of her mother’s glory, and finally collapsed into bed with that book, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. She actually liked aspects of the story at first, even enjoyed reading about the brash circumstances that brought the Castillo brothers to New York; enjoyed, in fact, and curiously so, the prologue, which involved the fictional character of Eugenio Castillo, Nestor’s son, from whom, it seemed, much of the story seemed to emanate. (His voice seemed so earnest, she wondered if this Eugenio, in fact, was a real person.)

  Of course, she was most anxious to peruse the sections recounting the romance of Nestor and beautiful María, and coming to them after some one hundred pages, she found herself somewhat pleased and repulsed by what she read: One evening, Nestor, so sensitive, so noble, so tormented by his feelings about the sadness of life, encounters beautiful María on a Havana street in the aftermath of an argument she has had with her overbearing, indignantly disposed novio—not Ignacio, of course, but someone like him, and Teresita wondered how the author might have ascertained such a premise. She did not mind the portrayal of a ravishing beautiful María at that point, and, even as she felt a humming annoyance in her gut, she somewhat liked the idea of seeing her mother’s life, however altered, being told in so attentive and mythical a manner; that is, until she began reading a section, tucked away in the thick texture of prose (“too many words!” was her opinion) that began with the sentence “She liked it every which way: from behind, in her mouth, between her breasts, and in her tight bottom.” (These words she underlined.)

  From there the text went on to detail, in a rather heated manner, the kinds of sexual caprices between Nestor and María that, whether true or not, were not rightfully meant for the world to share. Able to take only so much of such high-blown hyperbole about Nestor’s “agonizingly long and plump” pinga, with which the author seemed obsessed, Teresita, to put it bluntly, could barely bring herself to read on. The book to that point had already lingered too much on the supposed sexual grandeur of the Mambo Kings; in fact, the filthy-minded author seemed to dwell excessively on scenes in which a woman’s mere presence could provoke the grandest of erections in its characters. And because María, with a few drinks in her, and with a candidness for which cubanas are famous, used to tell Teresita, as she got older, that Nestor was as long and as wide as “any innocent woman could ever take,” Teresita could not help wondering about how some distant New York City author had tapped into such apparently truthful and intimate information and had, on top of it, the nerve to put it all in a book.

  IT TOOK TERESITA A FEW NIGHTS TO GET THROUGH THAT NOVEL; she still preferred those vampire stories, of course, and yet, whether that book was good or bad, her annoyance had, in any case, so tainted the experience of reading it that she could hardly find anything redeeming about its story. Altogether, with her sad duties at the hospital and with her own loneliness—about Cuban men, she didn’t have a clue as to what “it” would be like—this book’s sudden existence amounted to one hell of a shameful headache: her mother’s life, after all, was being aired like dirty laundry. Spending the next few weeks mulling over her options, and not breathing a word to María, her daughter kept thinking of one thing: to sue that presumptuous hijo de puta. She even left the hospital at lunchtime one afternoon to visit with the attorney, a certain Alfredo Zabalas, whom she had spoken to before. But she did this reluctantly, for Teresita wondered if, by doing so, she would be opening a quite public can of worms. The lawyer, on the other hand, hearing her tale and seeing it as a clear case of defamation, seemed very interested, almost indignant on María’s behalf.

  “The truth remains that, whether i
t’s fiction or not, an unkind reader might read that book and interpret the character of your mother as something of a whore,” he said. Then he wrote down some notes. “You might make a nice amount of money over this matter,” he said. And that held some appeal for Teresita. Her mother didn’t have a retirement fund, and she always worried about what might happen to María if, for whatever reason, Teresita fell out of the picture. Being around dying children will do that to you.

  Nevertheless, as this gentleman began to detail the process of filing such a claim, and all the paperwork and fees and processes involved—among them the eventual deposition of both the author and her mother—Dr. Teresa, a most private sort herself, began to have second thoughts. It just seemed so tawdry and soul destroying, and, in any event, just to sit for an hour in that office depressed her. And so she left it with Mr. Zabalas that she would have to think it over, as much for her own sake as to spare her mother from the inconveniences of a long, protracted hassle, un lío, as they say in español.

  Then, after a while, Teresita cooled down a bit. The book was already out there, and, besides, it occurred to her that hardly anyone knew her mother was beautiful María. Who on earth would equate the sexually voracious María of that novel with the real beautiful María, who wore curlers in her hair each morning as she went out to discard the trash and get her newspapers in Northwest Terrace? Who in their neighborhood read “literary” novels anyway, or ever stopped to consider the book pages of El Nuevo Herald? Not Annabella, their next-door neighbor, or Beatriz of Havana from down the street, or Esmeralda, baker of chicken pies, her mother’s canasta partner. Such books just floated above them like birds, without ever landing. The Cubans they knew just weren’t into that kind of thing, and so, Teresita pondered, even if some of her friends might remember her mother’s claim to have been the inspiration of that song, it was still absolutely possible that the novel would come and go without anyone from their little world even noticing. That notion calmed her somewhat.

  And the author himself, she remembered, hadn’t seemed a bad sort. He was a little uptight perhaps, but apparently he took the deepest pride in his Cuban roots, and, in Teresita’s mind, that was almost enough to outweigh the incredible transgression. Yet, no matter how much she circled around the notion that the author hadn’t really meant any harm, that his María was an invention, she wanted to hear an apology from this Hijuelos himself. So, as the weeks went by, she started to call his New York city telephone number, leaving a half dozen messages without once hearing any response. And that was nearly enough for her to reconsider the legal approach once again. But then, one Saturday afternoon, while María was off somewhere with her friend Gladys, Teresita, considering it a nagging duty, dialed him again.

  He picked up this time. There was loud mambo music playing in the background, which he turned down.

  “Señor Hijuelos?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know if you remember me, but I am Dr. García, the daughter of María—we met a few months ago in Coral Gables.”

  “Oh yes, of course. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. But do you know that you’re a very hard fellow to get ahold of? Did you receive my messages?”

  “Yes, I did. But I’ve been away. I meant to get back to you.”

  “Okay, but the reason I’m calling you is to discuss your book. I will tell you, I was not too happy about your depiction of my mother.”

  He sighed or lit a cigarette—she could not tell which.

  “Look, Dr. García, as I told everybody…as I tell everybody, the book is mostly just invented. Sure there are some things I took from life, but I promise you that the character of María, for example, just came into my head from hearing that song.”

  “I see, and have you ever considered what someone like my mother, the real beautiful María, would feel if she read your book when you have her doing so many things that are improper?”

  “Look, I never even thought the book would get published, and, well, her character was really about the song.”

  “But the sex? Why did you have to put so much in? Did you even consider that someone real might be on the other end?”

  “To be honest,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “if I ever thought that it would offend someone, maybe I would have done some things differently. But it is a fiction, after all.”

  “Come on,” she said. “We both know that you must have gotten some parts of my mother’s love affair with Nestor Castillo from somewhere. Isn’t that the case?”

  “Okay, okay. All I knew is what I was told, just bare bones, by one of the guys in the book, Cesar Castillo,” he finally admitted. “He was the superintendent of my building, and, well, he liked to tell stories, that’s all. The sex was just intended as a kind of music, like saxophones playing during a recording. You know, an effect.”

  There was a momentary silence, during which Teresita coiled the telephone cord in her hand.

  “Whatever you call it, you should know that such things can hurt people’s feelings. Do you understand that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But what do you want me to do?”

  “Well, I will tell you this, Mr. Hijuelos. I was very close to making this a legal matter, but I am not that way. No, what I want from you is to make an apology to my mother one day, like any decent cubano would. The next time you come to Miami, I want you to see for yourself that there is someone on the other end, and not just some anonymous fulana whose reputation you can disparage. Will you do that, for me?”

  “If that would make you happy, yes.”

  “Good, I expect you to honor this request, do you hear me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Hasta luego then,” Teresita said, hanging up.

  Somewhat relieved—for in the interim yet another lawsuit, involving his book’s cover artwork, had been mounted against him—he felt nothing less than pure gratitude that Dr. Teresa García, though obviously (and perhaps rightly) peeved, had taken what he considered the high road. She was surely sparing him—and them both—a lot of grief. As for Teresita? Satisfied that she had made a statement in defense of her mother’s honor, Teresita, who had been trying to drop some weight lately, got dressed in a blue jogging outfit and took off for a half an hour’s amble along her neighborhood’s humid, sweat-inducing, tree-rich streets.

  And that was the last of it, for a long time.

  Chapter FORTY-NINE

  For her part, María remained blissfully unaware that such a book existed. Teresita kept her copy hidden away, with certain pages clipped together, and did not say a word about it to her mother. But it was only a matter of time before María inevitably heard about its existence. Her former writing teacher, el Señor Luis Castellano, with whom María dined from time to time, had, while keeping up with the latest literary trends, particularly works by Cuban Americans, read the novel himself and, knowing a little about María’s connection to that song, went to the trouble of buying her not the novel itself but the audiocassette tapes of that book, as read by the actor E. G. Marshall, in English, of course. (Even Teresita had to scratch her head over that one.) Fortunately, when María finally got around to playing those cassettes one Saturday afternoon, her first impressions were very good: just to hear Nestor Castillo’s name spoken aloud made her gasp, and that book’s early mentions of the song Nestor had written for her, “Beautiful María of My Soul,” naturally piqued her interest. But altogether, though her English had improved out of necessity, as some of her pupils at the dance studio didn’t speak much Spanish, just to listen to its prose was rough going.

  She could follow enough of it to get a general sense of a story, but with the book’s endless references to postwar American popular culture and (for María) its arcane nods at writers like Edgar Allan Poe—“For me, my father’s gentle rapping on Ricky Ricardo’s door has always been a call from the beyond, as in Dracula films, or films of the walking dead, in which spirits ooze out from behind tombstones and through the cracked windows a
nd rotted floors of gloomy antique halls…”— it may as well have been rendered in Mandarin Chinese as far as she was concerned. And when she pushed the fast-forward button and came across these lines about Cesar Castillo’s enormous pinga, which “flourished upwards like the spreading top branches of a tree, or, he once thought while looking at a map of the United States, like the course of the Mississippi River and its tributaries,” María, while finding that just as opaque, understood enough to ascertain that she was not hearing a recitation of the Bible. Nevertheless, she stuck with it for several hours, mostly skipping through it and searching for mentions of herself—“Now he remembers and sighs: the long approach to the farm along the riverbank and forest—” (skip, fast-forward)—“They had their picture taken in front of a movie poster advertising the Betty Grable film Moon over Miami—” (skip, fast-forward)—“The night of the dance, Delores was thinking about what her sister—” (skip, fast-forward)—until, at long last, she stumbled upon the line that went “My name is María—” And with that she made herself a drink, settled on the couch, and did her best to slip into the hearing of a story that she never thought would be told.

  A few hours later, when Teresita had come home after catching up on some work at the hospital and she saw María’s puzzled, dreamy expression, the first thing she said was “Pero, Mamá, didn’t I tell you not to listen to those tapes!”

  “But, mi vida,” María said, “from what I could tell, it’s not so bad a story. Es que no entiendo inglés muy bien. It’s just that I can’t understand English that well. It’s a pity, yes?”

  “Yes, Mama, but you have your ways,” Teresita said. The truth be told, in those moments, at least, she was grateful for the fact that María had never bothered to go to school to improve her English.

  “Have you read that book?” María asked.

  “Well,” Teresita said, and she nodded. “Yes, I have.”