Beautiful Maria of My Soul (8 page)

A
fter that afternoon, beautiful María got used to Ignacio’s visits. Was she in love with him? She hardly thought so, but she slept with Ignacio often enough to make him happy. And while María preferred to keep those duties a secret, she found it comforting to know that such arrangements were common. Some of the girls in the troupe were always looking around for men with money, often gossiping about how nice it would be to have someone of means to look after them, no matter his callousness. Most of their would-be suitors weren’t prizes, though they’d hear of dancers who had run off with an American, to places like Cincinnati and Arkansas. At least Ignacio was generous, and he wasn’t ugly, or fat, and he was clean, dapper, and smelled good, even if María didn’t care to believe the rumors that he was a gangster of some sort.

AH, BUT HOW THINGS CHANGE. LETTING IGNACIO DO WITH HER AS
he wanted and drowning afterwards in guilt, she eased her conscience by going to church, not just to confess her sins but to feel purified by the sanctity of the altar and the oddly comforting gazes of the saintly statues. As often as she asked herself, while kneeling in prayer on a stony chapel floor,
Why Ignacio?
she concluded that El Señor, in his mysterious ways, had placed him in her life for a reason. And if she felt sometimes that Ignacio didn’t really care about her—especially when they had gone out to a fancy place and he’d accuse her of chewing her food too loudly and eating like a goat, at least, while she was in his company, other men left her alone. As she’d tell her daughter one day,
she needed him.
Going any
where in Havana by herself had become a nuisance, more so as she learned how to dress better and developed a taste for fancy clothes, as well as makeup and perfumes, which she had started using in the clubs. She could rarely go down the street without someone calling out or whistling at her, many a devouring stare attending María’s every step. But when she took walks with Ignacio holding her by the arm, few dared even to glance her way. With his proprietary air, he just looked like the sort you didn’t want to offend. (Men found ways of glimpsing her anyway—they’d look without seeming to look in the Cuban manner, a
mirar sin mirar
.) Whenever Ignacio happened to catch someone coveting María’s bottom, he’d stop dead in his tracks, excuse himself, and march over to have some words with her admirer.

She appreciated this vigilance but wished he could relax; his severity was sometimes hard to take. He may have been courtly and suave, but, as time went on, he also became quick-tempered, especially in his efforts to teach her things: how to cut food, how she should dress, never to look a man straight in the eye. His moods were sometimes awful, however, and if there was anything María sorely missed, it was the sort of tenderness she had known with her
papito.
He may not have taught her much of anything about good manners, and his drinking had made her crazy, but he, at least, had a gentle soul. She just missed that
guajiro
warmth, the sentimentality of his songs, the way her
papito
sometimes touched her face, but oh so softly, as if she were a flower.

Not so with
el señor
Fuentes, who rarely smiled and never seemed to feel compassion or pity for anyone. Poor people disgusted him. If lepers or blind men or amputees held out their hands begging for coins, a scowl of contempt exploded across his face. Once, when they were walking along Neptuno to a ladies’ haberdasher’s and she asked him, “But, Ignacio, why are you so hard on those people? They can’t help themselves,
los pobres,
” he laid out his philosophy of life:

“María, you may think me harsh, but when you’ve come up from nothing, the way we both did, you learn quickly that the only person worth looking out for is yourself, and maybe your family, if they actually
give a damn for you.” He turned a deep, frightening red. “And so what if I give those unfortunates a few centavos? How the hell is that going to change a thing for them in the long run?”

“But if you give them a little money, then at least they can have something to eat,” María said, while thinking about the poor children she saw all over the city who begged for pennies. “Isn’t that the right thing to do?”

“The right thing?” he said, laughing. “I’ll tell you what, María.” And he reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet, pulling a ten-dollar bill out. “This was going to pay for your hat, but, what the hell, let me just give it to that fellow over there, okay?”

Marching over to some unfortunate—
un infeliz
—sitting, one legged and grimy against a wall, Ignacio stuffed that bill into the tin can he held in his filthy hands.

“So there,” he said, “are you satisfied? Now, look around you and tell me something: tell me if you’re seeing this lousy world changing one bit.”

“
Ay, pero
Ignacio, don’t be so angry at me.”

“All right then, but don’t you ever preach to me again. Understand?”

FOR ALL HER MISGIVINGS ABOUT HIM, THEY HAD THEIR ENJOYMENTS.
On a Sunday, Ignacio drove her to a beach resort out in Varadero, where María, glorious in an Esther Williams swimsuit, the sort with fancy seashell pleats accentuating her breasts and midsection (translation, her smooth belly, her fabulous burst of hair, the fig of her heart-shaped pubic mound), parted those warm, clear waters before her. They journeyed to a pueblo by the sea, about three hours east of Havana, their route, along the northern coast, taking them past expanses of marshes, mangrove swamps, and beaches to Matanzas, where Ignacio had been born in utter poverty and received his first scars. He didn’t know if his father was even alive, nor did he care, and his
mamacita
had died when he was a boy, which was how he ended up in Havana to fend for himself at an early age, he told her. Taking her around—what was there to see in a town that stretched only three or four blocks end to end along the
coast?—Ignacio told María, with all sincerity, that it was his dream to construct a house in that place, so that he—and she—would have a wonderful retreat to escape to from Havana, maybe even live there one day as man and wife. Then they returned to the city, and, as he often liked to do, he pulled over to the side of the road and had María undo his white
pantalones
so that she might attend to him in a manner that he particularly enjoyed: the wonderful sun just beginning to set on the horizon.

On another occasion, he drove her out to Pinar del Río to see her
papito
, whom she had missed very much. Laden with gifts, and arriving in triumph in Ignacio’s white 1947 Chevrolet, María had the pleasure not only of showing off her nice clothes and prosperous
“novio,”
whom her
papito
didn’t particularly like, but also of letting him see just how well she had done for herself in Havana. Olivia, her
papito
’s haggish paramour, so gloomy in black, couldn’t have been more solemn, or envious. For that alone, María felt thankful to Ignacio, who, for his part, could only feel contempt for the slop of pigs, the filth of an outhouse, and, after a while, even what he called the ignorance of the
guajiros.

S
he was learning what men can be about, particularly when they like their drink. Her
papito
had sometimes been that way, that’s why he used to beat her, and, as she got to know Ignacio better, she learned that he could be that way too. In the bedroom, the only place where he actually seemed happy, he could be quite unpredictable. She would almost enjoy it, as long as he wasn’t being too rough with her, and rum sometimes made him that way. Once he had drunk too much, he’d start accusing her of denying him certain pleasures. She’d lock herself in the bathroom, and he’d smash in the door, throw her onto the bed, and take her from behind, all the while calling her nothing better than his little
mulatta
whore. And if she wept bitterly afterwards, he’d tell her, “Grow up and don’t forget that, if it weren’t for me, María, you’d still be sleeping in that shithole of a hotel and dressing like a tramp.”

Drinking, he became a different man, who made her life a nightmare. Even when he behaved in a reasonable way, taking care of him with her mouth became a labor, not of love but of drudgery. Sober it didn’t take much: just the sight of her lovely face in a posture of voluptuous submission, the proximity of her lips to that blood-engorged thing, and the merest licking of her tongue were often enough to make him gasp and cry out. But when Ignacio had been drinking heavily, because he had suffered a reversal in business or because he was simply getting bored with her, Mary Magdalene herself would have been hard put to make any progress at all. Still, she took care of him just the same, until her neck and jaws ached. And even then, he found ways to insult her: “You’re too careful and look like you’re about to throw up.” And the worst? If he had been displeased with her lovemaking, or if she had even
looked at him in a certain way—as if she’d rather leap from her window than spend another moment with him—she’d turn up at the club the next night covered with so many black and blue bruises that she couldn’t go onstage without disguising them with heavy makeup. How the chorus gossiped and felt sorry for her.

It became the kind of situation that she would always remember in the manner of a bad dream. Started out good, ended up bad. A terrible mistake from which there seemed to be no escape. Sometimes after she had seen him and he had treated her poorly, María headed back to that filthy hotel la Cucaracha, which she had since come to regard with fondness, and, finding
la señora
Matilda at her usual place in the hall, wept on her urine-smelling lap. Recognizing her expression of regret and torment, something she had seen many times before, Violeta the prostitute would hold María in her arms and caress her hair. “Come back here, my love,” she’d tell María. “Come back to your friends.” Such little visits helped sustain her—
la señora
always told her that she could have her old
habitación
again—but when she looked around that place, with its click-clack of whores’ heels on the steps, its dingy corners, and remembered the condition in which she sometimes found the toilet—an outhouse, a field was better than that—and of waking in the middle of the night jumping—
brincando, brincando
—from insect bites, María knew she’d never return. But then something would hit her: Short of going home to Pinar del Río, there would be no way of avoiding Ignacio, not in Havana at any rate. Where else could she go? Heading back to her
solar,
she’d imagine him lurking behind every arcade column; and once she’d climb the steps to her door, her greatest fear was that she’d find Ignacio, sprawled out on her bed naked, an electric fan turning by his side, waiting.

N
ot that Ignacio was always so harsh with her. Though she’d tend to remember him as a son of a bitch,
y como un abusador,
he ran so hot and cold that it always amazed María when they settled into a pleasant period. He might punch her arms and legs a half dozen times in a single afternoon, but within a few days flowers always arrived at the club in his name, so that while María, jamming a modesty pad into the front of her glittering undergarment, fatigued by sadness, softened towards him again. And sometimes he turned up at the Nocturne with a box full of lacy Parisian scarves, just to give away to the ladies of the chorus. And he’d tell anyone willing to listen that if he or she needed a good refrigerator, a nice radio console, or even an air conditioner, he was the man to talk to. And always at steeply discounted prices, given that they all—from the powder room ladies to the shoeshine boy in the back and the women of the chorus—were friends of María.

In a calm and decent mood, Ignacio, always dressed sportily and smelling nicely of cologne, could be incredible. He knew people like the advertising director at
El Diario de la Marina,
and other papers, who might have use for her as a model in their ads. And now and then, out of nowhere, Ignacio, stuffing a few twenty-dollar bills into a lipstick-stained coffee cup she kept by her makeup mirror, told her: “This is for your poor
papito
out in Pinar, if you want to give it to him.” Cold with beggars on the street, he seemed to change his mind when it came to her little world. And that sometimes made her feel differently.

On some nights, at about four in the morning, when Ignacio was
usually among the last to leave the Nocturne and the floors were already being swept around the tables, even while some patrons lingered, and he asked if he might “escort” her back to her place, María, whatever his recent transgressions, usually told him “Yes.”

In the best of spirits, he even encouraged her about some things. When they were passing by the Palacio Theater along the Prado during a midafternoon Sunday stroll, and beautiful María saw that crowds were queuing in the entranceway for a performance of a ballet,
Giselle,
he didn’t hesitate to buy tickets for the two o’clock show. The lead dancer of that troupe, one Alicia Alonso, a waifish half-blind brunette, moved so gracefully in the role that María’s hip-swaying
rumbera
movements seemed crude by comparison. While watching the corps de ballet and feeling stunned by Alonso’s elegance onstage, she could only think about what one of the dancers in her troupe, the aging Berta, had recently told her: “You’re so good looking, it doesn’t matter if you can dance at all.” That remark had bothered her, and especially so after watching that ballet. It so nagged at María that she began to dream about becoming a ballerina.

In this, Ignacio, even while thinking it a bit of a joke, indulged her—paying for twice-weekly classes at an academy off Industria Street. And while she had begun to learn the fundamentals, and worked hard to perfect the placement of her feet, the various pliés, she lacked the classical grace of the others, who were, in most cases, adolescents if not children (and well off ones at that). At five seven and too voluptuous—she weighed one hundred and twenty-seven pounds—María, the oldest of them, seemed preposterously out of place. Still, she kept at it for a few months, until there came the day when she realized that it would take her years to become any good at all. By then, her feet had begun blistering all over again, to the point that they sometimes bled in her shoes while she was dancing in the floor shows at the club, and so, one day, María, putting that pipe dream aside, simply stopped taking those lessons.

At least those lessons helped her performances: she became somewhat
more elegant in her stage movements, the nuances of those stances making a difference in her style. To the delight of her salivating audiences, it became easier for María to touch her forehead with her instep, and her contortions became much more fluid, not that she needed to improve on her routines. Having been exposed to her fellow, better off aspirants, who were picked up by chauffeurs and housemaids after classes and, almost to a one, attended a French lyceum (they were always practicing their French with each other during their rest periods), she, envious at first and then inspired by their air of refinement, began thinking about ways to improve herself.

Ignacio always laughed at the fact that she couldn’t read worth much. He caught on right away, noticing that she really didn’t know what she was looking at when handed a restaurant menu. Not once did she ever seem to know that among the books he’d carry around with him was a simple Spanish
diccionario.
(That’s what he had been studying in the club the night they met.) He used to tell her that he would have written her love letters, but what was the point of bothering? In any case, there was no need to feel too bad, he’d say. Half of all rural Cubans, if not more, were illiterates anyway, he’d read in some newspaper. And what difference would it make to a woman whose
chocha,
in his opinion, was a national treasure?

But even when Ignacio knew that his jibes bothered her, and he was always talking about finding some brainy
fulano
to teach her, he just never got around to it: he was too ashamed of her in that way to approach anyone. Besides, he felt content to lord that superiority over her, and in any case, he really didn’t care if María could even spell her name, as long as she had learned to comport herself like a lady in the classy restaurants they went to and took him to bed with abandon.

And María? Living in an incomprehensible world, she often wondered what the newspaper headlines said. Even when she recognized her stage name on a poster outside the club—
M-A-R-Í-A R-I-V-E-R-A
—she
could only guess what the rest of such notices meant. Some words she understood, but not many, the gaps of lost meaning confounding, depressing her. Waking around noon each day and feeling that something was missing in her life—
forget love, that always turns to air, doesn’t it?
—she resolved to find herself a teacher.