Beautiful Maria of My Soul (14 page)

I
n the summer of 1953, some four years after her
papito
had passed from this world and Nestor Castillo and his brother had commenced a new life in America, María turned around to find that certain things were going on in Cuba that she hadn’t noticed before. Not that she was unusual among her fellow dancers at the Lantern Cabaret, just off San Miguel, where María worked in those days—hardly any of them cared about anything other than pulling in good crowds nightly and keeping their jobs. But when certain events took place and military personnel began patrolling the streets of Havana at night, and foot traffic into the club fell off for a time, even those dancers became aware that an insurrection had broken out. According to the newspaper and radio reports of the day, it came down to the ire and moral indignation of one fellow, whose name María first heard while at the club: Fidel Castro.

She hadn’t made much of that name, Fidel Castro, at the time, or of such events, which, in any case, hardly stirred much of an opinion, one way or the other, in the corridors and dressing rooms backstage.

In fact, the only person of María’s acquaintance who even seemed to
take special notice of politics was her faithful teacher Lázaro, whom María still visited at least twice weekly. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be, when all she had to do was step down a few flights to find him sitting near the bookseller’s stall. She and Ignacio had since moved into a nice sunny apartment in a new modern high-rise in Vedado overlooking the sea, and he’d even opened that clothing store along Galiano, a shopping street in Central Havana, an enterprise that had not turned out the way he had envisioned. Still dancing almost nightly, María sometimes worked there in the afternoons, looking breathtakingly exotic and photogenic by the dress racks, before heading off to the club. Occasionally, she took off early to see her friend Lázaro, the one who, in those years, had taught her so much.

As a matter of course, he’d have María read aloud from books and magazines, among them
Bohemia,
a national weekly, which had published letters from Castro and articles about the nobility of his cause.
“Tú verás,”
he’d say, tapping a sepia page showing Castro’s photograph. “Sooner or later someone will come along who’s not a crook. This young one, he’ll probably rot in prison for the rest of his life, but there’ll be others. If God is good to me, I will live to see the day.”

She’d nod, she’d smile. Out in her
valle,
in Pinar del Río, she hadn’t learned much about anything, except for the inevitability of death, and of music and dancing. Even the Second World War had been this distant calamity, which she’d had glimpses of in newsreels at the Chaplin, and what she had known of the goings-on in Havana, of that succession of presidents who came and went as she grew up, amounted to a few names, which those
guajiros
hardly mentioned. But if she knew anything about Cuban history in those days, she owed that to Lázaro. He’d seen it all. From the 1880s, when he was a boy and the Cuban rebels, fighting for independence, waged pitched battles with the Spaniards in the countryside, to when the Americans first occupied Havana at the turn of the century, the establishment of the Cuban republic in 1902, and life under a succession of presidents, the worst of them, in his youth, having been one Gerardo Machado, in the 1920s, who had been nicknamed a “second
Nero” for his suspension of civil liberties, his cruelties, and the ostentation of his greed. And Cuba’s latest president, Batista, the one whom Castro, a lawyer, opposed? That previous March, of 1952, Batista had staged a military coup to gain his office, a violation of the constitution that had enraged a generation of idealists and muckrakers, among them that fellow Castro. And yet, she felt untouched by any of this; if Batista happened to be particularly corrupt, as rumor had it, she couldn’t really care less. As far as she was concerned, her life would unfold in the same way no matter who happened to be in power. At heart, beautiful María’s stance came down to a shrug that said, “Really, Lázaro, what does any of that matter to me?”

Her attitude always baffled Lázaro, who, knowing about María’s
guajira
past, and the ignorance and poverty that came with it, forgave her anyway. Besides, he’d seen his beautiful protégée’s demeanor changing before his very eyes. While in the midst of their lessons during those terrible months after her
papito
’s death, just the thought of his loss brought her quickly to tears. “There, there,
mi vida,
this pain will soon pass,” Lázaro would tell her, and she would hope that it would be so. Yet, instead of that experience making María a little sweeter and more compassionate about life, the way it sometimes happened with people; instead of becoming more softhearted, María seemed to have gone in the opposite direction, her personality taking on a harsher edge, what María would describe to her daughter, years in the future, in a single sentence:
“Me puso muy, muy durita”
—“I became harder skinned.”

It was as if María had walked into a room as a naïve nineteen-year-old beauty in need of some seasoning and education in one moment and, five minutes later, left through another door, not as the hopeful child, unrefined as an Ozark hillbilly, she had essentially been but as a woman aged, not in looks but in temperament, way beyond her years. By 1953, the graceful and ever so beautiful María had developed such a haughty and distanced manner around people that even Lázaro, who used to eat greasy chorizo sandwiches in front of her with abandon, now found that she had taken to looking at him disapprovingly the moment any of
those delicious amber-red pork juices started dripping through their newspaper wrappings and down his chin. And heaven forbid if he smiled and actually wiped his mouth with his wrist (Lázaro, with his raspy voice always laughing and chortling, “My, my, but what’s better than this!”), because then María, without intending to seem so severe, frowned, as if Lázaro were reminding her just where she had come from: the
campo.
Even if she’d once chewed her food like a goat, and had the manners of a field hand, loving to eat things with her fingers, and hadn’t known what a flush toilet was until an afternoon in 1938, when she and her younger sister, Teresita—
ay, la pobre—
had seen their first show at the Chaplin movie house in San Jacinto (how many times they pulled on that overhead chain and jumped up and down at the sight of the vanishing waters!), she now comported herself with so much caution and formality that Lázaro hardly recognized her as the reticent girl he had known.

Or to put it differently: what was sweetest about María had been pulled so deeply into herself that she now seemed as haughty as she was beautiful. Still, Lázaro looked forward to their lessons and took pride in the way that their afternoons of study had paid off. María could read now, but slowly, and she had filled her notebooks with countless words that she had more or less memorized. And her handwriting, ever so careful, had been honed by the hours and hours she’d spent backstage between shows scribbling down rows of the alphabet’s letters, the way schoolchildren did. Practice had gotten María to the point where she could write her name out with such elegant flourishes that it would have been hard for anyone to imagine that she’d come from a family whose father signed his name with a crudely rendered X, or that for years María had only pretended she could read signs while walking along the streets. As they’d sit in their usual spot, near the bookseller’s stall, Lázaro had occasionally taken special joy in advising María what school grade she had graduated into. By the time Nestor had left for America, she had passed through to the second grade; a few years later, in 1951, she had slipped into secondary school, and now, in the days of Batista’s presidency, she could read and write like a fourteen-year-old with certain bad hab
its—which is to say, she got some things right and some things wrong, spelling never being one of her strengths. Nevertheless, she’d reached a point where she really didn’t need Lázaro any longer, and what more did he have to teach her?

Still, despite dressing as well as the El Encanto window mannequins (Ignacio wanted her always to look her best) and carrying herself as if she were the
dueña
of Havana, María loved returning to that market street and going from stall to stall to say hello to the merchants, who always joked about this fine uppity lady’s resemblance to someone they once knew. It always pleased her to sort through the bookseller’s selections. She had a weakness for romance novels by a certain Almacita Alvarez from Spain—and just recognizing the titles:
Bitter Love, Blood and Passion, Taught to Deceive
—filled her with pride. She also liked any books about spiritualism, for she often dreamed about her dead family and believed there had to be a way of contacting them. Though those books rarely cost more than eight or ten cents apiece, or the price of a trolley or bus ride, customers still haggled with the vendor, but never María, who believed each tome invaluable, whatever its tattered condition.

In fact, while María had kept working as a dancer, she didn’t have too many expenses to worry about. Because she was Ignacio Fuentes’s “woman,” her rent and clothing were taken care of, but even if he had turned out to be a stingy man, she would have had sources of income beyond her twenty pesos a week as a dancer. Having caught the eye of more than one art director or advertising executive during her performances, María had started getting jobs as a model, posing beside kitchen appliances, soaking in bubble baths, leaning against the dimpled hood of a shiny Oldsmobile, usually in either a movie starlet’s glistening gown or a tight bathing suit. In advertisements for Polar beer, her face adorned many a poster here and there in the city, and because the company also produced promotional coasters and waiters’ trays, her mysterious and alluring expression was to be found peering up from the half-moon bottoms of frothy drinks and rum glasses at strangers in cafés and bars everywhere. If beautiful María had turned heads before just because of the way
her
nalgitas
swayed inside her dress, and stopped traffic with her unmistakable looks, she now attracted attention for having become so familiar to the general public. She’d even appeared in a rum ad on a television show, broadcast from the CMQ building, but had disliked the sweltering lights, the way they made her diaphragm sweat under the tight binding of her dress, and the unearthly feeling that came from wearing what felt like pounds of makeup on her face. (
“Una miseria,”
she called that.)

In time, with more money than she needed, María put most of her wages into a savings account at a Chase National Bank on Brasil, her blue passbook something she liked to take out from under her mattress to “read” as if it were a novel. Never forgetting how her own
papi
never earned very much, she gave a few coins to nearly every beggar she encountered, and when she bumped into her friend El Caballero de París, she’d buy him lunch and a few glasses of first-class rum, sometimes even a Churchill cigar. When it came to Lázaro, who never wanted more payment than a sandwich or two, as well as a radiant smile, María began insisting that he accept a few dollars from her for those lessons.

Having taken to calling Lázaro
mi maestro,
a title that always made him wince with happiness as he’d spent most of his life as a bootblack, and then a Havana street sweeper, the brunt of that income derived from the largesse of local merchants along Obispo and O’Reilly streets—María had begun to look upon him with a fondness that made her fear for his well-being. He wasn’t her
papito,
but she had grown attached enough to his laughter and kindly manner that, as surely as the sun began baking the rooftops of Havana in the mornings, she came to believe that he would go the way of everyone she had ever loved. It was the kind of thought that lingered in the back of María’s mind each time he seemed a little tired or had trouble hoisting himself up from those steps, and especially so as he once tried to get to his feet and this old, lanky
negrito
nearly fell backwards into the hallway’s shadows from whence he had come. (Those were Havana shadows, the temperature cooling with every foot of hallway you stepped into, like entering the recesses of a
church baptistery, a scent of ashes, frying fish, and flowers, somehow musty, deepening.)

That was the only time María, accompanying Lázaro home, saw where he lived—inside an inner courtyard, under an awning set out over what must have been some old stone trough from when horses were kept in the alleys, all his possessions, mainly books and a mat, with only a single chair crammed into what amounted to a hole in the wall, his only luxury a solitary lightbulb, which hung off a bent wire, his toilet situated behind a rotted door that led into the back of a store. But did he complain? No; and when she, out of a generous impulse and knowing that
la Señora
Matilda would have looked after him, offered to put him up in la Cucaracha, he refused. “I’m just used to it here, that’s all,” he told her. “And at my age, I’m waiting for that
guagua
that goes to where it goes, anyway.”

Pero, hombre,
she thought.
No te mueras.

She was already attached enough to Lázaro and his lessons that each time María turned up, she couldn’t help but wonder if it would be her last, as if her affection for someone would surely spell his doom. Of course, María was imagining things, but having lost her family at so young an age, as she’d one day explain to her daughter, she became a “little
cucka en la cabeza,
” without even realizing it…which was probably part of the reason why she had turned away from Nestor.