Beautiful Maria of My Soul (27 page)

“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.”

A
s 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 the 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?”

O
f 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 and 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.

“Well, here’s what I think,” he said, shifting his chair towards her. “Life is too short to throw it away by feeling bad about things. What do you say about you and me going out somewhere one night—anywhere you want!” He touched his heart. “It would honor me.” Then, as a waiter brought him another drink, he made a big show of pulling out a thick wad of bills, the way Ignacio used to back in Havana, peeling off a ten, and stuffing it into the waiter’s frock pocket with a wink.

“My name’s Rafael Murillo,” he told her and, like a gallant, withdrew from his jacket pocket a card:
“A sus órdenes.”

When María extended her hand, he turned it palm up, like a reader, examining her lines closely; then he went into all this ecstatic
miércoles
about her youthful appearance and beauty, as if he had just bumped into her on a street in Havana twenty years before. Teresita just listened, knowing that for her mother’s age—past forty, well, forty-three by then—everything he said was true. After all, beautiful María could have passed for a fine-looking woman somewhere in her luscious mid thirties, for she had kept her figure and had the complexion of a lady who, aside from her slowly aging
mulatta
genes, still rubbed palm oil and honey on her face each morning. How good did she look? When mother and daughter went for strolls in South Beach, or along the consoling sidewalks and shops of Little Havana, it was beautiful María, in tight pink or canary yellow slacks, with an unforgettable walk, who drew all the stares.

Once their introductions had been made, she and Rafael danced a few cha-cha-chas and mambos, but mainly they drank, chain-smoked, and shared stories about Cuba, as it used to be. Eventually, he got around to trying out his charms on Teresita. “Looking at you I can see that the
apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” he told her exuberantly at one point, and while Teresita, a sweet girl at heart, smiled at the compliment, she hardly believed him, thinking herself, as she always would, only ordinary looking at best, even if that was far from the truth. (Years later, in her doctorly guise, it would always surprise Teresa when one of the hospital orderlies whistled good-naturedly at her figure.) Later, when they had stepped out from the Holiday Inn by the harbor, into one of those languid, perfume-filled Miami nights, the sort reminiscent of a delicious Havana evening, her mother’s new acquaintance offered to drive them home in his fancy 1972 DeVille. After he’d handed three dollars to the valet, with the windows rolled down, his elbow out the window as he steered with a single hand, María beside him, Teresita in the back, they drove through the velvet night.

Along the way, he spoke about the two restaurants he owned: “One is called El Malecón, up in Coral Gables, have you heard of it?”

“Of course,” María answered. “That’s yours?”

“Yes, indeed, my brother and me opened it about six months after we came to Miami, in ’64,” he began. “It started out as a hole-in-the-wall, we did hardly any business at all at first, but, you know, with things improving in the city, business picked up. We advertise in all the hotels with brochures, and, thanks to taking care of the concierges, we’ve done pretty well. Good enough to open a second place along Key Biscayne Boulevard—that’s my favorite. It’s the Siboney, after Lecuona’s song, and even if it’s not as fancy as the other, which is more upscale,
para la gente con más dinero, sabes,
I love it the most because we’ve done it up like the old seaside
friterías
outside Havana, and I just like its views of the ocean.”

“So you’ve succeeded,” María said. “I’m happy for you.”

“Yes, thank our lucky stars,” he said, tapping the dashboard top. “But, even as good as we’re doing, I still look forward to getting back to Havana one day, you know, after that shit is overthrown.” He shook his head, his suave and happy-go-lucky manner dissipating in that moment. “It’s something I don’t like to think about too much—you know, I put a
lot of faith and hope in that man, and I didn’t want to leave Cuba, but—” And he went on about what happened to him and his family in the same way that so many of the exiles did in those days, things turned upside down, the stomach-churning Russians coming in, the businesses nationalized, the food shortages, the government’s snoops and spies, the assaults on liberty that he and his family just couldn’t take anymore.

“Surely, you understand what I’m saying, huh?”

“¿Cómo no?”
María answered. “Even my daughter, Teresita—even she knows that we Cubans didn’t want to leave. But we had to, right,
hija
?”

By then, he’d turned up Twenty-sixth. “Our house is the fourth one on the right, over there under the big tree,” she told him. And when he had pulled up, he asked them to wait, and, like a gentleman, this Rafael Murillo got out and walked over to the passenger side of the car, opening the door for each of them.

“Your carriage has arrived,
mi condesa,
” he said to Teresita, bowing. Then to María, “I will see you soon, next week. I’ll bring you both to the restaurant—we have a little band that performs there on Friday nights—okay?”

And with that Rafael Murillo, winking at them both in a pleasant way, got into his car and drove off into the balminess of the evening.

A FEW THINGS ABOUT THIS RAFAEL: HE HAD A PLACE UP IN FORT
Lauderdale, a condominium, to which he would sometimes take María for a weekend afternoon. He was separated from his second wife, whom María, finding him so handsome and genteel, thought must surely have something wrong in
la cabeza,
for he would sadly say that he missed his kids on a daily basis, and that it wasn’t his idea at all. He belonged to an anti-Castro organization which met in a downtown hall twice monthly. He wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist, inscribed with the words “Liberty or death.
Viva Cuba Libre!
” and was furious about the American cowards of the Kennedy administration who had betrayed the Cuban
cause during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, even if it had taken place over a decade before. He regularly telephoned María at night from his restaurants, calls that she took only in her bedroom. He was generous, and never came to visit their house without some gifts for María and Teresita. (“Tell me what you need, and it will be yours,” he said.) Finding it unusual that María did not own a car and depended on slow public transportation or rides with friends to get where she needed to go, he offered to buy her a car so that he wouldn’t always have to pick her up for their
citas.
Learning that she didn’t know how to drive, he promised to pay for lessons, but she refused, having a phobia about cars, not only because she had grown up among horses and donkeys, and had always regarded automobiles with wonderment, as if the driving of such machines was intended only for men, but because they made her think about Nestor Castillo’s death.

He tended to come by the house very late at night, after his restaurants had closed—usually with packages of food, aluminum-foil-wrapped platters of fried
chuletas
and steaks and of paella, which would feed them for the next three or four days. When he’d arrive, Teresita knew; their voices were always hushed, and she could also tell from the faint aroma of the coronas he smoked that wafted into her room, and then by the whisperings that came from María’s bedroom down the hall. At first, he never stayed the night, but after a few months, on some mornings Teresita would find him sitting by their kitchen table, in Gustavo’s former chair, María always smoking her Virginia Slims and attending to him dutifully. As Teresita waited for the school bus, he’d always inquire about what she was studying, her chemistry and biology and French textbooks beyond him. He’d say things like “I can tell that your daughter is going to go far.”

On the weekends, when he happened to drop by and Teresita, having examinations, would have preferred to stay home and study—she did her best thinking in her pink-decorated bedroom—he’d give her a twenty-dollar bill so that she might take some of her friends off to the movie theater in the sprawling mall, across a wide boulevard a few sweltering
avenues away. Sometimes she went to the movies, but, just as often, she sat in a McDonald’s eating juicy hamburgers and studying. She always waited until past four thirty, when Rafael had taken off for work, before finally heading back. But one afternoon, when she came home and saw the DeVille still parked by the curb, she made the mistake of going inside anyway. That’s when she heard them through the door: beautiful María, in her ferocious widowed way, screaming in pleasure, the bed frame slamming against the wall, and Rafael moaning and crying out,
“Así, así, así!”
as if the world were about to end. It was so disquieting that Teresita, without daring to make any noise herself, slipped back outside, took a walk down the street to where some of the kids were playing a game of dodgeball, and let an hour pass before she finally made her way to their door again, fearful that they would still be going at it. That it had gone on in kindly Gustavo’s bed seemed awfully wrong, and the notion put Teresita in a rather solemn frame of mind, as if something sacred had been violated; he had been her mother’s husband and the only
papito
she had really known, after all. But Teresita dared not say a word, and later, as she sat out waiting on the patio, when Rafael finally left, she just smiled when he pinched her on the cheek.

FOR A TIME, MARÍA, IT SHOULD BE SAID, SEEMED HAPPY, OR AS
happy as a woman like her could be, at least when it came to the physical act of love. Amorously speaking, Rafael was a most enthusiastic partner, who, in possessing María, seemed to be playing out some dream. She was his
cubanita caliente,
his
cubanita de la noche,
his
cubana
with a
chocha muy fabulosa.
The man kissed every inch of her body, and every curvaceous dip and valley of her flesh, fucked her so adamantly that it was as if, with his wildly glaring pupils, he were making love to Cuba itself. (Well, he had reinforced the notion by showing her a piece of arcane Cuban currency with an image of the goddess Athena to which she seemed to bear a close resemblance.) For her part, she ran with this new breath of passion, buying the most scandalous of transparent undergarments from
a boutique called Los Dainties. He just loved her sexiness. At a costume ball held at carnival time, he asked María to dress up as a showgirl, with plumed headdress and a rented outfit so diaphanous and scanty that her arrival set all the older women,
las ancianas,
who in some other age would have been chaperones, grumbling, every male head turning, perhaps enviously, their wives fuming. But did they care? They came home laughing, throwing each other around, drunkenly happy, and the racket that María and Rafael made later that night—“I’m going to devour you!”—not only woke Teresita up but provoked the neighborhood hounds to bark.

But as the year went by, even María, lacking any relatives of her own—a very sad thing for Teresita more than for herself—began to wonder why Rafael, with two brothers and a sister, each with their own large family, and birthday and holiday parties to attend, never once invited them to any of their gatherings; that did not sit well with her at all. “You know I don’t want to just be your little
pajarita,
that you hide away,” she told him. “If you don’t think of me as anyone special to you, then don’t expect anything special from me.”

Growing aloof and withholding from him the favors of her perfectly ripened body, and that luscious
papayún
that had driven Nestor Castillo crazy, María finally got Rafael to concede that perhaps he had been keeping her too much a secret. (That is to say, María, strong willed by then, harangued Rafael into admitting it.) And so, one delightful Sunday afternoon, in a somewhat guarded mood, Rafael brought María and Teresita along with him to his brother Miguel’s house, out in Fort Lauderdale, where his kin and their in-laws had gathered to celebrate one of his
tías’
seventieth birthday. It seemed, at first, yet another cheerful, jammed-with-kids-and-older-folks affair typical of extended Cuban families in Miami. And while he had taken María around, sheepishly introducing her as “a friend” to various relatives, from the very start they regarded her as if she were a leper.