Beautiful Maria of My Soul (15 page)

“And that nice fellow, the handsome one, I used to see you with—whatever happened to him?” Lázaro had once asked her.

“He went off to America, to New York.”

“So, why didn’t you go with him?” Lázaro shook his head. “I saw the way you looked at each other—yes,
señorita,
I certainly did!”

“I don’t really know why,” she told him, shrugging. “But he was a
músico,
and you know how musicians can be; they don’t have much common sense.”

Nodding agreeably, as if María were old enough to know what she was talking about, Lázaro punched out the inside of his lacquered cane hat on his lap and smiled. “You mean he didn’t have much money, was that it?”

“No, it wasn’t that at all. He just didn’t seem proper in his thinking.”

“Uh-huh,” Lázaro conceded. “And that older fellow you’re with now, the one who doesn’t smile very much—is he your man?”

“He’s good to me, Lázaro,” she began, but then, not wanting to explain anything, she lost her patience. “Whatever happened between me and that
músico
is over with, and there’s nothing left to be said or done.”

“Oh,
amorcita,
don’t you know there’s more to life than money,” Lázaro told her, turning to the next of the lessons. “The goodness in a man’s heart, that’s something else. But who am I to lecture you? I just hope you’re happy.”

She had to admit that the few times Ignacio had seen her with Lázaro, he hadn’t reacted well, accusing her of consorting with a Negro as if that were the worst thing she could do with herself. “Next thing you know,” Ignacio once told her, “you’ll lose what few manners you have.” The few times they met, when she was still living in that
edificio,
he never deigned to speak with Lázaro and always gave the kindly man, so politely singing her praises and doffing his hat in respect, a look that implied he was no better than riffraff, or the lowest of the low. It didn’t help that Lázaro was black as a crow—Ignacio had no use for such men. In fact, he had filled María’s head with all kinds of sentiments that would have been unthinkable to her back in Pinar del Río, sentiments that were insulting. As a light-skinned
mulatta,
she surely had black blood on her mother’s side; nevertheless, María couldn’t fault Ignacio for thinking that way; most white Cubans,
los blanquitos,
did.

“Oh, but that other one,” Lázaro would say. “What was his name again?”

“Nestor—Nestor Castillo.”

“You know, once when you weren’t around, he came over to talk with me, played me a little tune, a sweet melody on his trumpet. Told me he was writing it for you, María. Did you know that?”

“Yes, he liked to write songs, but I suppose all
músicos
do.”

“
Ay, pero, chiquita,
I could tell listening to it that the fellow was crazy about you. Pardon me for saying so, I took one look into his eyes and
I saw some wonderful things—like a poet’s thoughts. Were I a lovely young woman, that for me would have been enough to throw all common sense out the window.” Then: “Now, I won’t say another word,” though, forgetting, he always would.

She’d put up with his two cents, knowing that Lázaro only meant well, and there were times when she was tempted to explain how Nestor sometimes frightened her, not with his natural armature, a true wonder she’d never forget, but with a sadness that María, carrying enough of her own, found wearisome, as if there would never be any way of making him happy. That Nestor Castillo was such a high-strung
tipo
seemed a matter of bad luck, the sweet
músico
with a troubled soul and a doubtful future, the man, so much of a child, whom she’d had no choice but to turn away. He was, after all, a
campesino,
and like the
guajiros,
he didn’t put up any barriers between his feelings and how he acted, or what he said—something which, in those days, María, being groomed as a proper lady by Ignacio, had come to forget.

A
story: in 1953, the same year that Castro had started what would be known as the July 26th Movement, María, moonlighting, had posed for a four-color “Fly to Cuba” poster for Pan American airlines. This came about because an American executive with a New York advertising agency, Y & R, had caught her act one night at the Lantern and approached her after the show—which was how she got most of her modeling jobs. The ad itself, shot in the Torrens studio off Cuba Street, featured María, in a snug two-piece cream-colored bathing suit, her
nalgitas
prominently hanging out, and white-rimmed beach girl sunglasses, standing in juicy splendor before a towering royal palm. Sipping coconut juice from a gourd through a straw with one hand, she held a thick, fuming cigar in the other, its smoke rising into the air and resolving into the shape of a heart as a sleek four-engine Pan Am Clipper flew overhead through the bluest of Cuban skies. An afternoon’s work that paid quite well—twenty-five dollars.

María could hardly have imagined that the finished product would have caught the eye of her former
amante,
Nestor Castillo, in distant New York. Or to be more precise, that poster, hanging in a travel agency window, had stopped Nestor dead in his tracks one autumn afternoon in 1953 as he passed through the cavernous lobby of the Hotel Biltmore on East Forty-fourth Street, on his way to visit a Cuban friend, José-Pascual, in the Men’s Bar. Oh, poor, poor Nestorito, as she would come to think of him. He was that handsome dark-featured man, dapper in a linen jacket, peering dreamily at her image, his heart aching. Beside himself with rekindled memories of her lusciousness and the romance that had nearly
torn him apart, Nestor soon found himself by that agency counter, pleading, if not demanding, in his broken English that the clerk sell him the poster. He was trembling, his hands shaking wildly. To think that every Fred MacMurray–looking
fulano
passing by that window could see María holding between her elegant fingers that phallic cigar! Such was his agitation that he hardly noticed at first how the clerk, a transplant from Cuba himself, and a rather sympathetic one at that, had started speaking to him in Spanish.

It took him a while to calm Nestor down, and, in the end, he explained that, as much as he wanted to help him out, he just couldn’t sell such things to everyone whose interest that poster had caught. “You see,” he said, “with that one, someone always makes the same request, nearly every day.” Instead, he advised Nestor to visit the local Pan Am office a few blocks north. “Go up to the fourth floor,” he told him. “There’s a customer relations office there, and they’ll be happy to help you. Okay,
caballero
?” A little while later, in the bar, a few steps away from the hotel’s Palm Court (in the Havana style), and not far from its famous clock and the young couples gathered there, Nestor, brooding over a fried steak with onions sandwich and enough rum to get him dreaming, confided to his friend, a fellow he had befriended at a party on La Salle Street, the mess this woman in Havana had left him in.

“She seemed to love me, and then she didn’t,
carajo
!” he kept saying, his head shaking. “José-Pascual,” he said, “if you only knew how I hate myself for letting her get away.” Then, with José-Pascual, a good-natured
gallego
and a transplant from Jiguaní, pouring, mostly for free, he got good and drunk over the matter. By five, as Nestor, making his way a few blocks north, stumbled in through a Madison Avenue skyscraper’s dizzily revolving doors, hundreds of office workers were swarming its lobby, and Nestor, put off by the crowd, and having to make a rehearsal in any case, lost heart and decided to head back uptown instead, sulking all the way. Later that night, tormented as always by the slightest reminder of María, he hardly slept—believing that María was mocking him from afar. And while he tried to forget her, for many a good reason that
image of María, with that vaguely lip-shaped shadow dipping through the front cleft of her bathing suit like an orchid’s fold, killed Nestor and distracted him for weeks. But then that was Nestor. On many a night after, he would sit on his living room couch with his guitar, whereupon, strumming chords, he would pour his musings and pained longings into yet another version of his song about her, a bolero he had decided to call “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

She had known about that song for a long time. Thanks to Lázaro’s lessons, María had slowly gained the ability to decipher the nearly weightless airmail letters Nestor had started sending her from New York, weekly at first, then twice monthly, then every other month. The first year, 1950—when María had accepted without regret her status as Ignacio’s mistress and moved into their fourteenth-floor high-rise apartment, with its mirrored walls and sweeping view of the sea, the Hotel Nacional, and the Malecón—she had hardly ever thought about Nestor, except during her most lonely and longing (sexual) moods, his splendid physicality as deeply embedded in her skin’s memory as a nagging melody in a musician’s head.

On the other hand, once his letters started to arrive, at first with Nestor’s musician friends from New York who’d come to Havana for work and would track her down, one way or the other, at the clubs, it was as if he were determined to enter her life again. (Finding María wasn’t hard: on any given day, one was bound to come across a little ad tucked into the back pages of the
Havana Gazette
or
El Diario de la Marina
about the
“Phenomenally beautiful and enticing María Rivera—The Dancer You Must See!”
And many a photograph of María, in a heavy Aztec-looking plumed headdress and scanty costume, was replicated in the posters and half sheets pasted to the crumbling walls and lampposts of the old city.) At first, María couldn’t have cared less about Nestor’s missives. Aside from wanting to avoid the simple labor of deciphering them, she didn’t care to deal with those pangs of guilt about him that occasionally arose to the surface of her dreams, already peopled enough by the ghosts of the
guajiro
family she had lost. (When she went back to her
campo
in her sleep,
she always saw her
mamá
sitting on a rocking chair by the doorway to their
bohío,
her
papito
riding across the fields on a horse, the farmers and their oxen around him, and her late sister, Teresa, in the years before she fell ill, just ahead of her on that lovely trail through the forest as they headed toward their beloved
cascadas,
each of them seeming very much alive, a lovely dream until she’d remember that they were dead.)

Yet María couldn’t help but keep those letters together, in a drawer in her dressing room table, beside a jar of Aphrodite pomade (as if she needed that), and the fact remained that she hadn’t the heart to rip up any of the photographs of Nestor and herself that he had given her on their final day together. (On those nights when she grew bored with the routine, the repetitiousness of a show like “Queen Isabella’s Dance with Columbus,” or “A Peek at Marie Antoinette’s Ladies in Waiting,” or “A Cuban Tarzan with His Cuban Janes,” she sometimes lingered over those photographs of Nestor and herself, taken during their excursions to the beach near Cojímar in the days when they could barely keep their hands off each other. In one of them, Nestor was carrying her out of the cresting gulf waters, María’s arms wrapped around his neck, her breasts pressing, through her green bathing suit, against his happy face, his bathing trunks agitated and plump in the right places. In another, María and Nestor were captured necking in the surf, foam rising around them and their bodies so entangled, that their photographer, one of María’s dancer acquaintances from the old days, Elenita Marquez, tagging along for the fun of it, wondered if they were going to do it right there and then. María had other such photographs, taken around Havana, and even if they were out of focus sometimes, they still commemorated their love and, jaded as she sometimes felt, she counted them, along with the crucifix Nestor had given her, among her most precious possessions.)

But the letters eventually provoked her curiosity, and by the summer of 1951, though she would have saved herself time by showing them to
la señora
Matilda, who often tortured her with the admonition that she should have gone off with Nestor, María made it a part of her studies to decipher them, slowly. By then, thanks to Lázaro, her abilities to read and write
had improved greatly, to the point that she had finally begun to understand the myriad neon signs that glowed and blinked along the nightclub strips, and other things had become less of a mystery. Still, it had taken her the longest time to get through Nestor’s letters. Once she did, María discovered that either she had a much longer way to go or Nestor’s own command of the written language was that of a
campesino
who had been taught to read and write by a suave but barely educated older brother. Nestor’s letters were always brief, however, as if he did not want to waste another page of that nearly weightless airmail paper. Some were written in pencil, others in smudged, light blue running ink, as if they’d been cried upon, sweated upon, or—who knows what men are capable of when they start to get carried away with their emotions and memories? Some were casual, others impassioned, heartbroken, but all of them were either riddled with words that María simply had not yet come to understand or confusing by virtue of Nestor’s phonetic spellings—
’ablar
for
hablar
or
’rible
for
horrible,
among others. Nevertheless, through her own painstaking efforts, along with the occasional assistance of a certain ancient ladies’ powder room attendant, Chi-chi, María came to get a general picture of Nestor’s new life
en los Estados Unidos
.

Nueva York, he wrote, was deathly cold in the winters; from the skies came snow—
la nieve,
like something out of a dream; and people stared at you for speaking in Spanish, and some streets were unimaginably crowded.
“Imagine this, María, thousands of people rushing along on a single sidewalk!…And the people, of so many nationalities—Italians, Greeks, Germans, Chinese, Russians, and Poles, even
los judíos
—speaking in their own languages, a different world, a city much grander than Havana, but not as beautiful, and with rivers that stink of trash and chimneys that send up smoke and more automobiles and buses than you imagined possible. And the buildings,
por Dios!
Remember that giant
mono,
King Kong? That building he climbed really exists, it’s called the Empires [
sic
] State!”
(That name he carefully wrote out in English.) “Y fíjate eso,
just looking up, you see more high buildings everywhere—so wonderful and horrible at the same time.”
And with every mention of such things, Nestor told her how much
he loved María and missed her terribly, that he didn’t know why they had lost something so precious
. “But you understand, María, there’s still time…. I’m waiting for you, and only you….”

Yes, even if she had treated him foolishly and badly, he knew that in her heart she really loved him. But at least he had ways of keeping himself busy, and not just by trying to learn English, which he called
un monstruoso idioma
—a monster of a language. He had a job, along with his brother Cesar—“
You remember him, don’t you?”
—working in a meatpacking plant during the day and playing music with a little
conjunto
of musicians they’d found here and there in the city at night and on the weekends. They lived in an apartment in a neighborhood called Harlem with their cousins, “really kindly folks,
humildes y simpáticos,
” up the hill on
el calle
La Salle from what’s called an “El train” in New York—the rumbling of the tracks that shook their beds made him long for the quiet of the Cuban countryside. He told María he had days when he felt completely lost and ached with the desire to return to Cuba, to please just say the word—nothing was holding him there. (Cesar loved New York, he wrote, while he himself did not always understand what he was doing there, particularly when he still suffered so without her.) They had lively parties in that apartment, hosted by his brother Cesar, but they meant little to him, the
cubanas
and Puerto Rican women who turned up from all over the boroughs were nice enough, but they had nothing to offer him, simply because he could think only of her
—“Besides, they are too ugly compared to you….”

In concluding, he always promised to write her again, “faithfully,” and would await her reply.
“Please answer me, even just a few words would make me happy….”

And when María, ashamed of herself, never answered him, he wrote this: