Beautiful Maria of My Soul (6 page)

After that, it was María who kept after Teresa to take her medicine, whether she wanted to or not, but even so, those fits returned, her body contorting in frightening ways, her eyes becoming blank as stone. Looking after her, María preferred to think those seizures, lasting only a few minutes, would soon vanish altogether because of the medicines (and their
mamá
’s constant prayers). But they didn’t. Out in the yard one morning, jumping rope with some of the local girls, Teresita, gleefully yelping as she took her turn, their hounds Blanco and Negro barking at her, died again, her eyes rolling up in her head. On another day, they were feeding the pigs and crying out with delight (and disgust) at the way the sows sniffed their feet and prodded their ankles with their moist and bristled snouts, when Teresita, in the midst of a laugh, suddenly turned to stone and fell right down into the swill, but this time, instead of violently shaking, she simply seemed to stop breathing, her lips and face becoming slightly blue. María, frightened to death, smothered her younger sister’s face with kisses until, by some sleight of God’s hand, she came around again, with a terrible belch that forced open the passageway to her lungs.

When it happened yet another time, while the sisters were accompanying their
papito
to town, it didn’t take María long to figure out that
Teresita, detesting the bitter taste of those pills, only pretended to be taking them. From then on, María made sure Teresita actually swallowed them down, even if she had to force her mouth open by twisting her hair back before shoving one of those
píldoras
in herself. It wasn’t easy. Just slapping Teresa in the face for her own good, in the same way that her
papito
had sometimes slapped hers, nearly brought María to tears—of anger and grief. She came to hate the way Teresita spat that phenobarbital at her face or doubled over, clutching her belly and sinking to the ground, trembling—not from bad nerves but from the very thought that María, who had always loved her so, had started making her life a misery. Every time Teresita told her
“Tú no me quieres”
—“You don’t love me,”—or
“Te odio, hermana”
—“I hate you, sister,” her voice cracking and eyes blistering from the strain of crying, María’s heart broke a little more.
(Long after Teresita was gone, those memories pecked at María like crows.)

Guajira
sisters were never supposed to be at odds, but no matter how much Teresita abhorred those pills, María remained determined about fulfilling her duties—Teresita was her only sister, after all. And when her sister’s condition seemed to improve and she didn’t suffer any attacks for months, María, despite Teresita’s misery and weeping, felt more than a little justified in her actions. Too bad that her younger sister seemed to become nervous and gloomy around her, as if she,
la bella
María, would ever lift a finger to hurt her. It took María a while to understand some other things: that such a medicine affected the
mente,
the heart and soul, in short, that phenobarbital had started to change her younger sister’s sweet nature.

Indeed, that medicine had a bad effect on her younger sister; Teresita’s moods were never the same from day to day. Sometimes she became so timid and afraid of people, trembling not from epilepsy but from the belief, without any reason, that even the most gentle of farmers wanted to hurt her. Her fears followed her to bed: Teresita couldn’t sleep, spending half the night turning from side to side and sighing (and despairing over the aftertaste of that medicine, which lingered in the throat for hours even if she had consumed it with a sweet mango or papaya or mamey or
guineo
). To feel her sister’s heart beating as quickly as a hummingbird’s against her chest in the middle of the night, as she held her tenderly, to hear her breathing, but painfully so, while gasping for air—all that was almost more than María could bear, to the point that on certain days she would have welcomed one of her sister’s fits again—possessed by the devil as Teresita seemed to be—instead of having to watch her turn into someone she didn’t know.

One day Teresita was saintly, the next all she wanted to do was to stick her tongue out at passersby, or torment the animals, tying cords around their necks and pulling them cruelly across the yard. Whereas she used to show appreciation for even the smallest kindness—
“¡Ay, qué bonito!”—
“How pretty!” or
“¡Qué sabroso!”
—“How tasty!”—and never hesitated about saying nice things—
“Te aprecio mucho, hermana”
—“I love you, sister!”—days now passed when she wouldn’t say a word to anyone. Her facial expressions were affected as well: it was as if she refused to smile and took to crying over nothing; and when she wasn’t crying, she withdrew into herself, as if no one else in the world existed, and never lifted a finger to help around the house or yard, not even when her
mamá,
with her slowly failing eyesight, begged Teresita to help her thread a needle.

(“I’ll do it, Mami,” María offered.)

As for prayers? Whenever their
mamá,
in her God-welcoming way, got them down on their knees to give thanks for the salvation that was sure to come, Teresita would refuse, shaking her head and running away—why should she? Neither her mother nor her father lifted a finger against her in punishment.
(
“Niña,”
as María once asked her daughter, “how on earth can you force someone to believe?”)
Still, there came the day when things got out of hand. Teresita, with her own kind of beauty, also entered into puberty—and quickly so—but whereas María had been cautious and could care less about having a
novio,
or any of those birds-and-bees romances, Teresita became obsessed with the idea and started to do anything she could to avoid María’s company, their excursions to the cascades long since behind them.

Well, María couldn’t keep track of her sister every minute of the day,
and she got used to tending to her chores alone. Where could Teresita go anyway, aside from the bodega, where they knew the owner and asked him to keep an eye on her? Most of the young men in their
valle,
respecting her
papito,
just didn’t want to get on his bad side, and so María didn’t think much of it when Teresita took off in her bare feet in the afternoons—to where and what, no one knew. María imagined her sitting in some lonely spot with her knees tucked up under her chin, fretting—as María, her body in its changes baffling her, once used to do herself. And while she often wanted to go after her, she left Teresita, so troubled by that medicine, alone.

One evening as María crossed the fields on her way to Macedonio’s—where her
papito
had gone to borrow a hammer and a handful of nails—something, a blur of entangled figures, bending and weaving inside the forest, caught her attention. At first she assumed it was one of the local
putas
with a farmer—when they weren’t working the bodega, they went wandering from
valle
to
valle,
looking for takers. María’s eyes might be put out by
Dios,
but she moved closer anyway. From behind a bottle palm she saw a stringy
guajiro
standing behind a woman whose skirt had been hitched up above her waist. María wasn’t stupid. She knew about fornication from the animals, the billy goats being the most insatiable, the males mounting the females at will; she’d seen mammoth horses dallying with their mares, and just about every other creature, from hens and roosters to lustrous dragonflies in midair, performing their duties as nature intended. And there they were, the woman holding on to the trunk of a banyan tree, raising her haunches higher, while the man pumped furiously at her from behind, the way María had seen the animals doing.

Desgraciados,
she remembered thinking.

Oh, there was something agonizing and stomach turning about watching it. But she could not look away. She eased closer and, wouldn’t you know it, nearly fainted when, getting a better glimpse of them, as the
guajiro,
in some kind of frenzy, started yanking that woman’s head back
to kiss her neck, and even as a gentle white-winged butterfly alighted upon María’s arm, there was no doubt about it, she saw that the shapely woman was none other than her beloved sister, Teresita.

Two things happened afterwards:

Finding out about that whole business from María, her
papito
nearly beat that big-boned
guajiro
to death with a shovel. And because her mother was too
humilde
and mild, and her
papito
told her to do so, María, dragging Teresa by the hair out of the forest where she had gone to hide, and loving her so, to make a point, had to beat her too—with the branch of a tree, a beating that left her body covered, once again, with bruises.

They didn’t speak to each other ever again, no matter how often María, feeling badly for her sister, followed her around, asking to be forgiven for her severity, even if she had been in the right. Teresa would not say a word, never recanting, nor for that matter did she ease the burden on María’s heart. One of those evenings, when terraces of violet light went spreading across the horizon at dusk, as her
papito,
Manolo, sitting out on a crate in front of their house, picked up his guitar again and while María settled her head against Concha’s lap, and as her mother peeled a few potatoes, the beads of her rosary, dark as black beans, which Concha always kept wrapped around her right hand, dangling down and touching María’s face—while such simple things were going on, Teresa, who had gone off to use the
retrete,
stumbled into the forest and, following that trail to the waterfall, where they had often lingered as children, weighed down the skirt of her dress with stones and leapt off that moss-covered ledge into the depths of beautiful María’s memory and soul.

All of the above occured to her while María had been on her way home to the Hotel Cucaracha one might, with fellows calling out, “Hey, gorgeous, why the long face?”

D
uring María’s first year in Havana, she had gotten jobs in places like the Club Pygmalion, the Knock-Knock, the Broadway, some of those stints lasting months, some just weeks. Along the way she had been a Hawaiian hula dancer, a sultry Cleopatra, and, during the Christmas holidays, one of Santa’s Very Wonderful Cuban Ladies. She never earned too much in those days; dancers, however beautiful, were in plentiful supply in that city of music. She didn’t like stripping for the auditions and took offense at any act requiring that she take off her pasties; mainly, she tended to put off some of her bosses by refusing their advances. One manager, a certain Orlando, at the Knock-Knock, off Zayas, fired her when she wouldn’t become his woman—
“mi mujer”
—but as shabbily as he had treated her, having her thrown out on the street, at least he hadn’t pulled out a knife like that hoodlum who ran a joint—was it the Club Paree?—by Ramparts Street; he cut off the buttons of her dress one by one and would have raped her on his office table had not María fallen to the floor feigning another epileptic fit—
forgive me, Sister
—her head twisting, teeth chattering, body shaking, as if she were possessed. Or she sometimes broke down crying, pleading that she was religious, and became so disconsolate that even the most heartless and goatish of men gave up their harassments, often thinking, as a trance burned in her beautiful eyes,
That woman is crazy.

But there was something about a sad man that always tempted her. In that instance, such
tristeza
was found in a certain
Señor
Aponte, proud proprietor of the Versailles in the Vedado, with its Folies-Bergère floor show. A quite rotund fellow and a destroyer of chairs, he always sweated
profusely, a kerchief pressed to his damp brow. His dark eyes seemed anxious, as if, in his burly, struggling, short-breathing manner, he might drop dead at any moment. While the other girls made jokes about what an ordeal it would be to go to bed with him, María, liking the man, found his loneliness touching—he kept a cage of parakeets in his office and would be often overheard through his door speaking endearingly with them as if they were children.

Still, it came down to the same thing. Called into his office to discuss a featured spot in the chorus, María had listened to him sing her praises as a dancer when, out of the blue, he pulled from a drawer a pair of elbow-length white satin gloves and then, with boyish reticence, asked her to put those gloves on and fondle him. “Please, I beg you.” Then he made a confession, declaring that it was very hard to go through life loving one of his dancers the way he loved her; that with his days in the world so short—he just knew it—he could go to his grave happily if only she would perform that little act. She almost did—not for a better job, or because of the way he had set aside a twenty-dollar bill on the ink blotter of his desk for her, but because he seemed to be telling the truth—he certainly looked like he was not long for this world. That evening she almost gave in to the inner argument that, far from being a lowly act, it would be one of decency and grace—his sadness cutting into her. In the end, however, even when she had gone so far as to slip those gloves on, the words
puta
and
lowlife
flashing through her mind, her kindlier inclinations lost out to her virtuous resolve, and, with tears in her eyes, she fled that room.

A few weeks later, when she heard that
Señor
Aponte had dropped dead from a heart attack while walking in the arcades of Galliano, she surely had felt bad. When she heard the rumor that a love note written to one of the chorus girls had been found in his pocket, she was certain that it had been intended for her, though she wouldn’t have been able to read it. For days, she wished to God that she had honored that man’s simple request—perhaps a last wish—the money would have been useful and he
would have been happy. Who would it have hurt, and who would have known about it?

No, she was not about to become one of those young girls who happen to lie down for money with men. It would have been easy enough to find takers, for she had already been stirring the male juices for a long time in that city, and the expression on María’s nearly ecstatic face as she danced left men seriously fatigued with desire. She’d already received half a dozen marriage proposals from men on her street, a barber and a shoe repairman among them, and a few louts without jobs—maybe they were numbers runners for the races out at the dog track—with nothing more to offer her than the shirts on their backs. A few of her potential courters were wily neighbors at the Hotel Cucaracha who sometimes waited half the night for her to come traipsing up the stairs; but just walking along the streets of Havana, at any hour of the day, she attracted men who’d follow her for blocks and frighten her with the suggestive remarks they’d make. And some, most gentlemanly sorts, in their fine linen suits, adopting a more polite demeanor, doffed their hats at her and, with the utmost politeness, asked if they might accompany her for a while, and other questions followed, along the lines of where she lived and worked. She hardly ever told them the truth, even if she sometimes felt terribly alone.

She so stood out on the streets of Havana that, on many a night, while leaving one club or another at four in the morning, she’d drape a veil or a mantilla over her face, haunting the darkened arcades and alleys through which she passed like a spirit, her high heels clicking against the cobblestones beneath her. In the light of day, however, there was no way of concealing herself—if only she could be more like those carefree
cubanas
she saw, proudly swaying their big kiss-me
culos
as they sashayed down the street. But the truth is that María could have been wearing a crown of thorns and dragging a cross behind her and she still would have attracted amorous attention. Strolling along the Malecón in her simple ruffle-skirted dress, she’d slow traffic, the drivers of trucks and automo
biles, and even the Havana Police in their cruisers, pumping on their brakes to get a better look at her shapely gait. Bootblacks scrambled to give her shoes a free buffing. Old men did double takes, for that desire’s the last thing to go. So did the street sweepers, window washers, and those fellows who went from door to door with grindstones to sharpen household cutlery. Bicyclists tling-tlinged María. Fruit and produce vendors, selling their goods from carts and stands, refused to take her money or, when they did, never charged her the full amount, often sending María away with more mangoes, avocados, and garlic bulbs than she could possibly have use for. Florists gave her bouquets—chrysanthemums and roses and little bouquets of purple and white mariposas, the national flower of Cuba.

At the intersection of Compostela and O’Reilly, a blind beggar, Mercurio, standing by a newspaper kiosk, seemed to regain his sight whenever she happened to pass by, that sly
negrito
who sold pencils out of a jar and sang ballads for pennies breaking into a broad grin as if, indeed, through his pitch-black glasses he could see the shapeliness of María’s body inside her dress. And in his goatish white-haired madness, el Caballero de París, as he was known in Havana, a locally famous eccentric of Bohemian habits, wearing a beret and a heavy frock even in the heat of the day, followed her around as well, expounding poetry in praise of María as he strode beside her. Even priests and monsignors, striding solemnly out from one or other of Havana’s myriad churches, abandoned their vows of worldly indifference and, at the sight of María’s
nalgitas
as they bobbed inside her dress, kissed their scapulars, thanking God for his handiwork.

“Eres una maravilla”
—“You are a wonder”—was the kind of thing she heard over and over again.

Her face, in some ways, must have seemed saintly. During her church visits to pray and dream, Havana Cathedral with its musty and timeless interior being a favorite refuge, María received endless (useless) blessings from priests, supplicants, and beggars alike. Now and then, someone in the plaza would make her the gift of a rosary or a vial of holy water or
a prayer card—even a relic sometimes. And while she could not have been more polite or gracious, or more thankful for their gifts, María had stopped believing that such religious objects made any difference in this world.

Street urchins, traveling in packs, followed her, tugged at her skirt hems, danced by her feet, and harassed anyone else who looked at her. From their second-floor windows, old women, Spanish fans in hand, smiled, admiring her as well (María, after all, was their own past). As she was cutting through a cul-de-sac alley between apartment buildings, there was always some fellow, bored to death or horny, on his balcony to call down to María, asking, with a sly expression on his face, if she would like to have a drink or go dancing. On the majestic Prado, managers offered her free meals just for sitting by a table in their outdoor cafés. (At least María knew she never had to go hungry.)

Among the suave and easygoing
cubanos
she encountered daily, who flirted as a matter of basic decorum, it often amounted to a pleasant enough game, the very fact that María, wearing a sphinxlike mask, might occasionally crack a
sonrisa,
a smile, was enough to send these dandies and caballeros dancing happily off into their futures. Crude sorts, however, also abounded. In a market off Lamparilla, there was a
carnicero
, a butcher, she tried to avoid. Whenever she passed by his stall, which smelled of fresh-killed meat, he always gave her body an up and down. It didn’t matter if she was just trying to mind her own business. Winking, sucking air in through his teeth, he took delight in waving calves’ tongues, bulls’ testicles, and the biggest chorizos in his stall at her. And sometimes, if she were passing through a crowded marketplace, both disembodied hands and other parts pressed against her.

Worse, however, were the out-and-out obscene gestures that came her way, especially at night, as she went walking home. When the clubs had closed and even the bordellos of la Marina and Colón were winding down, there was always the chance that some
borrachero,
barely able to stand straight against an arcade column, might grab himself through his trousers, all the while boasting that he had a tremendous
malanga
awaiting her. (Some of those “caballeros” actually had a romantic gleam in their eyes—as if their ardor was akin to an expression of love, and as if María might actually fall to pieces and succumb to their masculine powers, the shits.) And you would be surprised by the number of times that such sorts of men, stepping towards María from the shadows, actually pulled their stiff
pingas
out to show her—oh, how María wished she had that butcher’s cleaver with which to cut those chorizos off, may God forgive her for such unkindly thoughts.

On those occasions—twice with the same degenerate whose appendage, enhanced by the glowing penumbra cast by the arcade’s light, seemed shockingly large—she spat and cursed such filthy-minded louses—the
chusmas
—for not leaving her alone; then she’d march stoically on. And each time she did, María felt her kindly
guajira
soul hardening a little more, her skin growing thicker, and her patience for the vicissitudes of men wearing thin.

Putting up with a lot, María could have used someone to look after her. And that feeling just grew stronger as time went on. Missing her
valle,
she sometimes spent her evenings off from the clubs in that hallway with
la señora,
with her slight urine smell, listening to anything on the radio, so long as she wouldn’t have to sit in her room alone. She dreaded the prospect of sleep—she’d twist and turn thinking about her dead sister and the look of horror on her face when she gave her a beating, kept imagining her drowning in that pool beneath the cascades. She’d get down on her knees to beg Teresita’s spirit for her forgiveness, but no matter what, no sooner did she finally get under the covers of her
chinche
-ridden bed, hoping for pleasant dreams, than she began to fill with a terrible apprehension that shot through her body like electricity; she’d sit up, trembling, and out of habit, and a feeble hope, she’d pray. And when that didn’t work, though she knew it was a sin, she’d reach between her legs, her fingers dampened by her tongue, fondling herself until, writhing and churning her hips into her own hand’s motion, she lifted out of her own history into the momentary oblivion of pleasure, breaking into pieces. And then, of course, she’d slip back
into the gloom of guilt, even more deeply than before. But that was María.

In any event, she was working as a dancer in a new revue—that’s what the professionals called it—at the Club Nocturne, in Vedado, where, one night, fed up with her loneliness, she first met the man who, years later, was to become her daughter, Teresa’s, father.