Beautiful Maria of My Soul (33 page)

And in her neighborhood? From just that smattering of publicity, she became a most notable figure; a lot of folks along her street who never used to, suddenly invited María and Teresita in for Sunday dinners. (These she did not mind.) If there occurred any alarming incidents, they had to do with jealousy, when some women, recognizing her in downtown Miami, glanced at María enviously, as some used to back in Havana, and her notoriety induced more men, usually much older ones, to stare at her hopefully, though rarely with lust. (She had even been approached for autographs again!) This lasted for about six months, and in that time as a local celebrity, a silly period as far as Teresita was concerned, beautiful María rarely ventured from her home without putting on a pair of large black sunglasses, even at night, as if she were a movie star, and she had taken to wearing an enormous sunhat by day, with a florid silk scarf tied around its brim, its length trailing unmistakably behind her as if it were the tail of a kite.

But for all of that, and despite the fact that at least people now recognized her as the María of that song, María made the discovery that she simply didn’t care about being better known. Her past life with Nestor, despite that song, that novel, that movie, was most splendidly preserved in the realm of her own memories.

What mattered to her the most? Her daughter, and her motherly concerns over Teresita’s tepid and unromantic existence. While Teresa hardly paid attention to that notion, her workweeks proceeding routinely as before, María’s own love life hadn’t turned out too badly. Once she got used to the idea of Luis, despite his plainness, his bony body, his pocked, unsymmetrical face—those eyes that always seemed to be rheumy behind wire-rimmed glasses—she fell in love with another side of him. In fact, after a while, as in a fairy tale, the more beautiful María looked at Luis, the more his homeliness began to fall away. Though he seemed hardly anything like the handsome Nestor Castillo, with his liquid, soul
ful eyes, María, after so many years of general indifference to men and of few expectations, came to think of that Ichabod Crane–looking Cuban as somewhat handsome. And, in time, given the little comforts she extracted from his presence, María ached more for his company.

For what it’s worth, even Omar the cat, with his Oriental prescience, took a strong liking to that man, perhaps for his poetic soul. On many a night, as María slept in her bed with the homely Luis snoring occasionally by her side, that
gato
would slumber beside her, purring sweetly and approvingly, the pads of his soft paws set gently upon her face, no matter what María happened to be dreaming.

T
wo years later, on an April evening in 1994, something sad happened to Dr. Teresa: this nice kid, the son of Cubans, only twelve years old, had died on her ward, and Teresita, who had had the highest hopes for him—he’d lingered for three months, and whenever she could Teresita read to him from children’s books and could not help but caress his brow whenever he gasped from pain—left the hospital feeling as if her life was sometimes intolerable. Even though she knew that, for all her successes, there was bound to be a heart-wrenching tragedy, all she wanted to do was get drunk that night. Riding her motorcycle, she had stopped off in a bar along the bay, the Sunset Cove, and after downing three double whiskeys, she began to wonder how her life might have turned out had she been born sixty years before, in Pinar del Río, like her mother. She decided that she would have ended up, in all likelihood, an ignorant, maybe happy
guajira.
Without worries, without such heavy responsibilities, and without having to look into the eyes of a child who was dying—what killed her the most was the fading sweetness she read in his pupils. She had a boss who, seeing the hard way she took such “episodes,” suggested that Teresita consider general practice as an internist, but she, for the life of her, couldn’t. Every now and then, as she told those kids they would be all right and felt the ebbing pulse of their soft hands in her own, their eyes, so hopeful and longing, she wanted to believe that all would be well. And at such moments of grief, Teresita daydreamed of another life, of being so good looking and shapely a
cubana
that she could see herself on the stage of a Havana nightclub, circa 1947, performing, for all her mother’s complaints, in so seductive a fashion as to
keep an audience of horny men enthralled. But that hadn’t been her fate at all.

During her fourth whiskey, she had to laugh: over the club’s jukebox had come a version of the movie’s “Beautiful María of My Soul,” as performed by a group called Los Lobos. And that was enough for Teresita to finish her drink and leave: not because she hadn’t found it more or less pleasant but because it had nothing to do with the version she, with her Cuban pride, had grown up with. Wobbly enough, she left a five-dollar bill on the bar and then, heading out, even while in some corners of that flashy bar couples were fondling and kissing one another, mocking her solitary state, Dr. Teresita, beautiful María’s daughter, her helmet on, raced home, almost wiping out on the highway.

MARÍA WAS SITTING BEFORE THEIR GLORIOUS THIRTY-TWO-INCH
RCA color TV watching a
telenovela
when, as Teresita walked in, she said the following: “Tell me,
chica,
what’s with you? Don’t you remember that we’re leaving for New York tomorrow?”

It was then that Teresita, with so many other things on her mind, recalled that she was due the next afternoon, a Saturday, in Manhattan at an oncological conference, the two of them to stay at the Grand Hyatt hotel by Grand Central Terminal. “Of course,” she said to her mother.

“So you should pack a suitcase tonight, yes?”

“I know.”

María, in the glow of the television’s screen, added, “And bring a nice dress. We’re going to a party after all.”

“A party, what’s that about?”

“
Por Dios,
don’t you remember that
yo no sé qué cubano,
that fellow Hijuelos, who wrote that book?”

“Sí, mamá.”

“Well, I called him, and when I told him we were coming to
Nueva York,
he invited us to a fiesta, that’s all.
Una fiesta de cubanos
.”

THEY FLEW UP TO NEW YORK ON A
7
A.M. FLIGHT, ARRIVING AT LA
Guardia about ten thirty, then checking in to the Hyatt. Later, as María strolled north on Fifth Avenue to Central Park, shopping along the way (she had her daughter’s credit card), Teresita spent her time in an auditorium on West Fifty-seventh Street, attending a series of lectures about the neurological terrors and cancers that could, out of the blue, blight children. A cocktail party took place at four. When she came back, exhausted, to their hotel room at about six thirty, the last thing Teresita wanted to do was to head out again. But María insisted; after all, she said, “The author himself has invited us.”

IT WAS A FEW HOURS LATER THAT MARÍA AND HER DAUGHTER
made their way uptown by taxi—the subways were not for María—to a building in the West Eighties and a rambling first-floor affair of some seven rooms, the domicile of none other than Chico O’Farrill, famed composer of Afro-Cuban jazz, whose songs María had often heard in the clubs back in Havana. He was standing by the front door and could not have been friendlier—in fact, he told María that she seemed awfully familiar to him somehow. Had she ever been to Mexico City? Or Havana? And for a few minutes they got to talking about Cuba, and the Havana club scene before Fidel—“I was a dancer back when,” she told him. And he snapped his fingers—it seemed that he was about to place her—but then, before they could go on with this chitchat, so many other folks came streaming in through the front door that, with Teresita feeling a little tired, they just went inside, entering an immense living room jammed with people, their numbers exaggerated by their reflections in the mirror-tiled walls.

So what happened?

Lingering by a buffet table, after moving through a crowd that included many a mambo luminary of the day, beautiful María, Teresita by
her side, happened to spot, across the room, Hijuelos, long ago adopted by the O’Farrill clan as one of their own, walking in with a friend, a tall and handsome fellow whose intensely dark eyes and melancholy expression so reminded María of Nestor Castillo that for a moment she could hardly get her breath. What else could María do but wave to get the author’s attention? Not long after he had come over to greet them—“I’m so happy you could make it,” he said—María, beside herself with curiosity, just had to ask, “And who is that
caballero
standing over there in the corner?”

“Well,” he said. “Guess I should introduce you.”

So, with María waving her over, Teresita made her way across that bustling room, and shortly found herself standing before that rather self-effacing fellow, who had just been contentedly taking things in.

“
This lady here is
la Señora
María García—the one I told you about, who knew your
papi
long ago,” Hijuelos said to his friend. “And this is her daughter, Teresa.”

He just smiled and nodded meekly.

“In any event, this is my childhood pal,
un amigo de hace tiempo,
Eugenio Castillo.”

“Encantada,”
said María, smiling as if she were seeing Nestor again.
“Encantada,”
said Teresita.

Like a gentleman, he shook their hands, told each in a soft voice,
“Con mucho gusto,”
without being so bold as to engage their eyes directly.

With that, he had to put up with María’s onslaught of compliments: “But, my God, you look like your father! But taller and, I think, even better looking, if that’s possible!” Then, as Eugenio Castillo sipped from his drink and simply nodded, as if such words were meaningless, beautiful María turned around to find their hostess, Lupe O’Farrill, standing by her side. Once their acquaintance had been made, she led María away to introduce her around, and Hijuelos went off to get some
lechón,
leaving his friend Eugenio Castillo to converse alone with Teresa.

And what did they talk about? It was not as if each was unaware of
their parents’ importance to one another: Eugenio had grown up with that song about beautiful María incessantly in his ears, and along the way he had occasionally heard his mother, long since remarried, wistfully lamenting just how much that song, about another woman, had bugged her. But his
papi
’s death had taken place so long ago that his mother’s anguish seemed overblown to him, in a Cuban manner. (“Oh, she gets hysterical sometimes.”)

“When my best friend wrote that novel and put me in it, as the narrator, I was pissed off,” he said bluntly. “But you know what? I figured he meant well, and what the hell, he brought my
papito
back to life. But at first, it was rough.” He wiped a fleck of dust from his nose. “And for you?”

“It was very weird.
Muy extraño,
” she told him. “But, you know, my mother, María, doesn’t seem to mind that she was put in a book, even when she thinks the author got rich.”

He nodded, smiling, and shifted his lanky frame, perhaps feeling that in Teresa he had found a kindred spirit.

AN HOUR LATER, AFTER MARÍA HAD MEANDERED THROUGH THAT
apartment, chatting with folks and recognizing, vaguely, as she passed from one hallway into another, Tito Puente, and Ray Barretto, and the American character actor Matt Dillon, a mambo fanatic, holding forth in a cramped vestibule, she plumped down on a leather couch to listen, entirely surrounded by mirrors, to a Cuban-style salon, her face reflecting back at her a hundred times over. With the very dapper and gentlemanly Marco Rizo, Desi Arnaz’s former arranger, sitting before an upright piano playing the melodies of Ernesto Lecuona, Cuba’s Gershwin, if such a comparison can be made, none other than Celia Cruz herself, a most down-to-earth lady, slipped out of the crowd and began to sing, her lovely voice filling the room.

As María felt comfortable, almost to the point of slumber against the couch’s soft leather cushions, she had looked around to see if Eugenio Castillo and her daughter were still conversing. Fortunately—as she
hoped—they were, that gallant, his head bowed low as if in reverence to Teresita, whispering tenderly to her and smiling, as if he had stepped out of a dream.

FOR THE RECORD, EUGENIO CASTILLO AND TERESA GARCÍA, HAVING
met at that party, maintained contact over the next few years. Now and then, when the telephone rang at around nine thirty at night and María answered, with a melodious
“Aquí!”
it was that schoolteacher Eugenio Castillo, asking, in his measured voice, if he might speak to her daughter. Every so often, on the weekends, Teresita would feel the sudden compulsion to go off to New York, where that
buenmozo’s
companionability and, perhaps, his affections awaited her. (“
Por Dios
, if he’s anything like his
papi!
”) And María? Oh, she still ached over her memories of that
músico
from Havana—and for so many other things. It was as if her heart would never allow her mind to forget. But as Nestor Castillo himself, may God preserve his soul, might have put it, even those
delicious pains
began to slowly fade. For in the course of María’s ordinary days, so unnoticed by the world, she and Luis became as close as any sacrosanct couple, fornicating occasionally, and, in the wake of such intimacy, mostly listening to each other’s verses, which, as it turned out, were nothing more than songs of love.