Beautiful Maria of My Soul (28 page)

It didn’t matter that she had dressed conservatively, in just an ankle-length skirt and a blouse with some frilly workings, and had worn
around her neck both a delicate pearl necklace and a crucifix. She still cut swaths through the coterie of his siblings’ and cousins’ more ordinarily pretty wives with her gorgeousness, all but a few of their expressions asking,
Is this the latest cheap
tramposa
for whom Rafael left his saintly wife and children?
Of course, some, his brothers particularly, were civil enough with María, and the more the other men drank beer and daiquiris, the more María glowed before them. (Translation: “If you’re going to mess around, that’s the sort you do it with.”) But, as had often happened in her life, the women, the younger wives especially, seemed outraged by her presence, none of them saying a word to María when she’d smile at them, their eyes squinting, daggers in their pupils.

What, then, could María do but have a few drinks, when, at a certain point in the afternoon, Rafael made himself scarce? She had watched him huddling with one of his older sons, a good-looking college-age fellow; her eyes had followed Rafael as he later disappeared into the house to have some words with another woman, a petite brunette, seemingly suppressing tears of both anger and righteous indignation, who, as it turned out, happened to be his wife.

“
Por Dios,
I’m bored,” María said to Teresita as she sat down beside her mother in the yard, her expression telling her all.

It was an hour before he finally came out, and when he did, Rafael curtly told her: “We should go.” As they drove back, María did not say a word, trying her best to maintain her dignity, even if she was a little drunk. For his part, Rafael, no doubt burdened by his violation of familial decorum, said to her, “Well, it was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” Once they got back to their house on Northwest Terrace, Teresita locked herself in her room and, for several hours, took in another kind of disturbance: not of two people making love but of Rafael’s shouted recriminations: “What we had was perfectly fine before you had to stick your nose into my family life! Why I allowed this, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for you!” Then he went on and on before storming out, not an iota of tenderness in his voice.

A month went by. One evening, at dusk, Teresita looked out her win
dow and saw them sitting inside his DeVille. He was gesticulating wildly, while María, her arms folded across her lap, didn’t move at all. Until she slapped him in the face and, as María later put it to Teresita, told him to shove his own fingers up his ass. Shortly, as María stepped onto the pavement, he drove off, tossing into the street a bouquet of flowers, which María didn’t bother to pick up.

And that was the last of Rafael.

IT HARDLY RUFFLED MARÍA’S FEATHERS, HOWEVER. THAT SAME
evening, after dinner, she sat by their kitchen table pouring herself a cup of red Spanish wine. Sitting across from her, Teresita put aside a school notebook she had been writing in. “Mama, can I ask you something?”

“Of course,
mi vida.
”

“That man, Rafael—did you even really care about him?”

María laughed. “Are you kidding me? I liked him all right, but did I fall in love with him, is that what you’re asking me? No,
por Dios,
no! And even if I did, what difference would that make? What is love between a man and a woman anyway,
pero un vapor
? Something that comes and goes like the air.”

Snubbing out her cigarette, María held out her arms to her daughter. “Come here,
querida,
” she said, and Teresita went to her side. That’s when María smothered her with kisses, repeating, as she stroked Teresita’s hair: “It’s you I love—
mi Teresita, mi buena
—and no one else. Never, never forget that,
hija.
The hell with everyone else!”

B
ut to say that love was air and to really believe it, deep down, were two different things. For, in the quietude of her bedroom, beautiful María had more than her share of wistful moments, even if there had been others who had come along: The manager of a movie house. A much younger dance instructor she’d met at the Biltmore in Coral Gables, where she sometimes gave group lessons to the tourists. An accountant, missing two front teeth, his jackets flecked with dandruff, had helped her sort through the chaos of her dance studio receipts and was a very nice fellow indeed, but too attached to his overbearing mother and therefore too controlled and timid for her taste.
(“That one, Félix,” she told her daughter, “wanted me to be just like his
mamá
.”)
A construction contractor, who did some work on the house and, without children, left her because she was not of that fecund age anymore. And there were others. Cubans all, they came and went as momentary diversions; a few she took to bed, most often in obscure motels, but never with any expectation of receiving the affections she had known during her
juventud
in Cuba.
(Oh, but
papí, y Nestor, y Ignacio—
yes, even Ignacio!)
In the end, they meant very little to her, and since Teresita, sizing them up, rarely seemed pleased when she brought any of those men home, beautiful María hardly cared about their value as potential step-
papitos.
Occasionally, she considered remarrying—a few had proposed—but since she was more or less
comodita
—most comfortably disposed—in the house that Gustavo had left her, and could not really see herself making room for someone else, despite her loneliness, the notion somehow held out no appeal for her.

BY HER FIFTIES, MARÍA HAD STARTED TO FEEL HER YEARS. SHE
still turned heads, but more so, as time went on, from a distance. Men continued to check her out, surely, but not as often as before; nor did men stare as long as they used to; the sensation that their eyes followed her all the way down the street vanished—a woman like María just knew. And, though she still looked very well preserved, even beautiful, María found herself feeling stunned by how much younger more and more people, both male and female, seemed to her.

Keeping her figure from the days of her youth largely intact by giving dance lessons from ten to five at the studio she had opened downtown and, swallowing her pride, the hour she spent twice weekly sweating away in a pink outfit on a treadmill at a nearby YWCA—where all the local Cuban women gathered in Jacuzzis afterwards to boast about their children and grandchildren—could not compensate for the inevitable and subtle changes of her features: not wrinkles but a general slackening of her skin, which so perturbed María that she took to dwelling more and more on newspaper ads for face tucks, and her cabinet filled with youth-restoring creams, rich with all kinds of so-called miracle enzymes, that she’d heard about on the radio. Yet as wonderful as María looked for her age, there was no concealing the passage of time, which could be read in her eyes, the future, and all its hopes and promises, having ceased to be the endless thing that had once shimmered so brightly in her pupils. Stripped of her illusions about what her romantic life would hold, María, like a character out of a bolero, began to think more and more about the past—how lovely it had been, no matter the difficulties she had endured. And once she did, the more she returned to her memories of that
músico
Nestor Castillo.

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?

D
uring 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:

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.

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”
: