Beautiful Maria of My Soul (23 page)

Even if they had just been carrying on as if they were the bawdiest newlyweds on earth, that didn’t stop him from recognizing the inevitable: “You know, María, that, after today, we’ll never see each other like
this again, don’t you?” he said, getting up. “It’s the only way. Do you understand?”

“But why,
mi amor
?” she asked. “It isn’t fair. And besides, I don’t believe you.”

Then she began to cry for the first time since her
papito
had died—or at least she pretended to—and that really tore up Nestor’s heart too. “Please, María, please don’t be so sad,” he kept on saying. But the more he pleaded, the more María became unreachable, as if she had become deaf, dumb, and mute at the same moment. Not once did she say a word to Nestor as they dressed, no matter how much Nestor, trying to explain himself, pleaded for her understanding.
Yes, he has a wife and children, while I have none.
She remained so indifferent to Nestor that when they had left the hotel and were saying their somnambulist farewells while standing on the southeast corner of Thirty-fourth and Eighth, just outside the subway, María’s face did not show the least bit of emotion, and this seemed to torment Nestor even more.

“Well, maybe we’ll see each other in Cuba sometime, huh?” he asked her, as if they had just bumped into each other in the park. “My brother is always talking about taking our orchestra down there. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

He tried to kiss her then, but she pulled away. Passersby, throngs of them, must have wondered why the beautiful woman, with the exotic south-of-the-border looks, seemed to be both wounded and scowling at the same time. Finally, she managed to squeeze out a few words: “
Cuídate, mi amor.
Take care of yourself, my love, and think about me when you are with your wife,” she told him. (
“Yes, I was a little cruel to that man, as he was with me,” she once told her daughter.
) And then, just like that, she disappeared into the station, soon losing herself in the crowds and not once turning back to see if Nestor had been watching her.

S
he had taken some satisfaction in her memory of Nestor’s penitential look as she left him, his features twisted into the expression of a tormented saint. But once that had turned into air, María, wishing that things had played out differently between them, passed her last evenings in New York hoping beyond hope that the first-floor telephone would ring and that she would be called down to answer it. When María didn’t receive any such message, she decided, on an impulse, to telephone her sometime lover in Havana, Vincente Torres of the Y & R company—she had his card. One afternoon when she had met him in the lobby of the plush St. Moritz Hotel for a drink and retired to a suite with him for a few hours of harried lovemaking, it was really Nestor whom María thought about. In the well-appointed strangeness of that room, a small crystal chandelier hanging directly over the bed and an ornate French Empire mirror on the opposite wall, María would have loved to open her eyes and find herself walking across a field in Pinar del Río with Nestor. In the midst of that little dream, she forgot the crudeness of her former
guajira
life, the toiletless shacks, without electricity or running water, that scent of dung and mangled earth and blood constant in the air; nor did she recall the complete ignorance that had once possessed her as an
analfabeta,
or the shame of thinking, deep down, that not her
mamá
or her
papito,
or the
guajiros
they knew, were really worth much of anything at all as far as the outside world was concerned. What she remembered instead was
la tranquilidad
of her
valle,
its peacefulness and little moments of simple happiness. That’s what she used to see in Nestor Castillo’s eyes, and, well—wouldn’t you know it—in the trail of such a
sentiment, María realized that she, despite her lately hardened ways, had actually fallen in love with him.

His glorious physical attributes, his handsomeness, even the fame and fortune María imagined that he had meant nothing next to the heart and soul of the man. The thought that a life with him would never come to be was brutal, and in those moments, beautiful María became lost in a different kind of valley, not of natural gardens and of streams and dense forests, but of regrets.

Later, when Vincente, off to catch a train to a place called New Rochelle, had put her into a taxi for the Bronx, María fell into a period of sustained silence. For days she could hardly say a word to anyone—not even on the night the family threw them a farewell party, a rather pleasant affair during which neighbors came over to partake of their food, music, and hospitality. That evening, despite her pain, María danced many a cha-cha-cha and mambo—she was Cuban after all—and at a certain hour, just when her heart had been lightened somewhat by all the friendliness and music and she was on the verge of enjoying herself, from the family radio ushered forth the opening strains of “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

Hearing Nestor sing “How can I love you if I hate you so?” María swore to herself that it would be well and good with her if she were to never hear that bolero again.

Of course she did, again and again in Havana, nearly every time she walked down the street, or passed by one of those open-air cafés with musicians performing on the sidewalks; and as it happened, she was to hear it for many years afterwards, no matter how María would have liked to forget Nestor, her one true love.

STILL, SHE’D NEVER FORGET THAT LAST AFTERNOON WITH NESTOR
, and for a month or so after beautiful María had returned to Havana in
poor spirits, she waited to discover if so virile a man had produced in her the beginnings of a child. But her monthlies returned with their usual punctuality. (At such times, she used Lotus de Luxe tampons, the dancers’ preferred choice, to stay her flow.) For his part, whatever Nestor Castillo may have really been feeling, he felt bad enough about the way they had parted to write María a half dozen letters in as many months. When such letters arrived at the club, she refused to open them, all the better to put him from her mind, and he might have slipped away from her for good were it not for that infernal song, and the fact that Nestor Castillo, it seemed, had decided to journey to Havana, after all.

A
year later—in December 1957—at about four in the morning, during a fierce downpour, as María left the Club Lantern and had been hurrying through an arcade towards the taxis parked in a row by that busy strip off Neptuno, she saw, or thought she saw through the shimmering cascades of that
aguacero,
which went rolling like misting walls or apparitions, Nestor, resplendent in a white silk suit, leaning up against a wall, smoking a cigarette. On his chest, radiantly glowing, the crucifix he always wore. But Nestor? How could that be? And yet there he stood, smiling sadly. Then it hit her: perhaps he had left his wife and children and had come to Havana to find her, or perhaps he’d come for professional reasons. It crossed her mind that he might have journeyed there to perform with his brother in one of the upscale venues like the Tropicana or the Sans Souci, but, in any case, he’d already broken her heart, bruised her ego, and sent her packing. And so when he waved, she got into a taxi, thinking,
Que te vaya pa’ demonio!
—May you go to the devil! and as he started slowly towards her, indifferent to the rain, she tapped the shoulder of the driver, who knew her from around, and told him: “Hurry, let’s go.
¿Me oyes?
” As they tore down the streets, in winds that rolled cans and bottles and rags along the cobblestones, María was both relieved and regretful that she hadn’t stopped to talk to Nestor—how hard-hearted she had become! But then, as they turned onto the Malecón Drive, waves flooding the causeway, and just as she was softening—what would a few moments of her time have cost her?—María swore that she saw Nestor Castillo standing by the seawall with his trumpet raised, impervious to the drenching rain, and not a few minutes later, blocks away, María saw
him again on the corner of Calle 20, holding his hands out towards her, imploringly, an even sadder expression on his face. Naturally she had to ask the driver, “You see that fellow?” but it seemed he couldn’t hear her too clearly, for it had started thundering.

Later, upstairs in their harbor-side
solar,
as gales pummeled the windows, María got into bed beside Ignacio, who, under the influence of Rock Hudson, had taken to wearing silken pajamas. But she couldn’t sleep at first, not until she’d swallowed a few tablets of a medicine that many of the dancers, wired from their nights of performance, used to calm themselves, and these tablets, cousins of phenobarbital (which is to say barbiturates), when mixed with a glass of rum, could knock out an elephant, as they used to say. And so she eventually closed her eyes, but, no sooner had she done so than she smelled in that bedroom burning wires and rubber and gasoline, some part of a strange dream. When she buried herself in her pillows, she began to feel someone gently kissing her brow, her eyelids, and then her neck. And she heard a voice:
María, María, why didn’t you forgive me?
And with that, María just knew, in the way that superstitious people sometimes do, that Nestor Castillo, in the manner of the spirits of the
campo,
had come to visit her in Havana from the lands of the dead.

IT WAS SUCH A STRANGE THING THAT MARÍA, IN THE LIGHT OF
day, hardly believed it had really happened—perhaps that whole ride back from the club had been a dream—but within a few days, in Havana, amongst the musicians who had known the brothers, it became common knowledge that Nestor Castillo, the writer of that famous song, had, on that very night, perished in a highway accident up there in the north near New York. He had been driving a car back from a job during a snowfall, and, somewhere along those icy roads, he’d lost control and collided headlong into a tree, may God bless his soul. She almost lost her mind hearing that news—“please don’t tell me that’s the truth,” María cried on Gladys’s lap. But it was true. A few Havana newspapers had even carried
a notice about him, and for weeks afterwards, when that bolero he wrote about her played over the radio, more than one broadcaster solemnly noted the loss of so young a talent, a fellow who knew his way with a song, and played the trumpet as if he were an angel.

Beside herself with that news, María finally opened the letters he had sent her; each breathed with Nestor’s soul.
“If I could divide myself into two, I would be with you in Havana,”
one of them said.
“I know I hurt you, María, but don’t forget, it was you who hurt me first.”
And, in another, he confessed that, as much as he loved María, he would never, never leave his wife, Delores.
“She’s the mother of
mis hijos,
as beautiful as you, in her own way, and very kind to me, so please, María, don’t think badly of me.”
And in each, he asked her forgiveness, just as his ghost had. Each mirrored the others. The last one he sent kept imploring her to write him.
“I know you take pains to write a letter—but please, just write me a few words. It would make me feel less sad—and lonely. Can’t you, María?”
It took her hours to go through the letters, to understand what some of his sentences meant, and in the end, it finally hit her that Nestor was gone from this world for good. And so, one night, she purged herself—vomiting often but also contorting on her bed—in misery over Nestor’s loss. What was it about life? How was it that the death of her first love, whom she never really took seriously when it counted, could affect her so? She didn’t know, but the fact that Nestor was gone from this world for good left her so unsettled that María, who rarely missed a night at the club, stayed home, weeping and weeping until she ran out of tears.

T
hank God, as she would tell her daughter, that when Nestor died beautiful María had the consoling (false) distractions of her professional life and, for all his faults, a man like Ignacio to look after her. He’d even forgiven her for taking off to New York the way she abruptly did. (But why, he must have wondered, did she return in such a solemn mood?) In the year that María’s romantic dreams about Nestor ended, Ignacio, with his newly humbled manners and worming aches in his chest, had begun to bear the further physical indignities of discovering that, while the rest of him had slowly thickened, his wonderful head of hair, with its sea of crests and waves, had started to thin, to the point that he hated taking off his Panama hat in public and disliked it when María, with the slightest curl of a smile at the edge of her mouth, stared at him in a certain way.

Each evening, just as María headed out to the club, he’d attend to his special treatments, applying a
botánica
-bought remedy of ground bull testicles, dried donkey dung, and paraffin to his scalp. Afterwards he’d wear a hairnet night after night, until he couldn’t take that pomade’s barnyard odors anymore. On some evenings, when a few of his cronies came over to play cards or dominoes, he’d forgo that process until a very early hour of the morning, or not do it at all. Occasionally, however, in the throes of his own kind of vanity, when he was alone, he’d turn up the radio and spend an hour or so massaging his forehead and temples with some other miracle cure, turning from side to side to examine his profile and imagining his receding hairline, in his slightly shady businessman’s way, as proof of some distant affinity to Julius Caesar. (Or, in a moment of patriotic musings, José Martí, poet and father of Cuban independence in
long gone days, another great man with a receding hairline, though of decidedly thinner bodily proportions.)

Finding the whole business rather amusing, María, feeling more magnanimously inclined, actually grew fonder of Ignacio and became more playful with him, especially in bed. Like a man who demanded his steak and
tostones
twice a week, Ignacio expected to romp with María, and on those occasions she took to treating that widening patch, hairless as a Chihuahua’s belly and reminiscent of a baby’s head, with a tenderness that even the bluntly disposed Ignacio found disarming. She played a game with him, pressing her breasts against his crown, her nipples always hardening, and loved to grind her luscious center against that dome until an even stranger thing happened: María, despite her loss of Nestor forever and forever, amen (except in her dreams), had started to come more easily with Ignacio, though some other memories—of clutching Nestor’s full head of hair as he lost himself while devouring her
papáya,
of his sweet
pinga,
may God rest his soul—often helped her along. In that regard, their relations improved, even while María still pursued her other acquaintances.

Ignacio himself, in addition to trying to reverse the processes of nature (eventually giving in, he’d settle for a pompadour wig which almost matched the color of his natural hair), wanting to improve things with María—so much a joy to his eyes that he just about abandoned his own wandering ways—decided to seek a further improvement to their life in bed and started subjecting himself to virility treatments at one of the sex clinics in Havana. These consisted of B
₁₂
infusions, administered intravenously, and injections of distilled water into the membranes of his penis, which revolutionized his amplitude in a manner he had never thought possible before. María, remembering the admonitions of the whores of la Cucaracha, on the occasion of the unveiling of his grander stature, gasped and shook her head incredulously, as if he were that fellow Superman from that bawdy show in one of the cocktail rooms of a bordello near the Shanghai which Ignacio had once taken her to with the mistaken notion of inspiring her lustfulness. To the contrary, Superman had nothing on her past love Nestor Castillo, may he rest in peace, one of
those surprising facts that expressed itself in a recurring dream. (Set in the jungles of Africa, it was no doubt inspired by her memories of the Tarzan movies she and her sister used to take in at the Chaplin in San Jacinto. In this dream, she’d hear Tarzan’s yodeling cry from the distance, and since she always took on the role of Jane, María would find herself in a tattered leopard-skin dress, standing at the edge of a vast ravine, which she could cross only by sidling along the trunk of a massive fallen acacia tree, and every time she did, the valleys and rivers below would start rushing past her, and she’d have to get down on her belly, straddling that trunk, and slowly inch her way from one end to the other; somehow, that always made her think about Nestor.)

For her part, with a maternal yearning, María never let slip the ruinous notion that, for all her beauty, for all the life in the traffic-stopping bounce of her hips and
nalgitas,
she, at the ripening age of twenty-seven, might never have a child to love. Looking back, she’d think it foolish to have expected a pregnancy after a single final afternoon’s romp with the late Nestor, but what could account for the disappointment of her bouts with Ignacio, who, in those days, only wanted to make her happy? Not just mourning Nestor and what might have been between them, María managed to comport herself stoically, though, more and more, as she’d finish her last shows at the club, removing her makeup and, while gazing into the mirror, wondering
Who am I?
she’d almost dread the repetitiousness of her days. Yes, she enjoyed the occasional company of her fellow dancers, her visits with
la señora
Matilda and the whores of la Cucaracha, with whom she drank beer in the late afternoon even while supposedly watching her figure. During her jaunts with El caballero de París, who, murmuring his poetry as they walked about in Central Havana, noticed the somberness of her moods, she couldn’t help but withdraw into the darkness of her regrets. Her yearly journeys with Ignacio out to Pinar del Río didn’t help much either. She’d ask him to drive her into her beloved countryside, always on a Sunday, so that she might visit the simple graves of her family—which was hard enough to bear, their wooden markers seeming more rotted and overrun with vines each
year, as if that fecund earth would one day swallow them up into obscurity for good. But then, despite her joy in breathing the unchanging air of that
valle,
in seeing again the kindly
guajiros
she had been raised with, so many of the other Marías and Juanitas and Isabels she had played with as a girl, poor and uneducated as they remained, had their own broods of children. Some, only four or five years older than herself, were already grandmothers.

They’d spend half the day going from shack to shack—she’d always bring along gifts, loving to show off her new prosperity. One of those new families was that of a sometime cane chopper who’d once looked her over with the sincerest longing at dances at the
cervecería
. He had married a woman named Amalia, and they, with their five children, had taken over the thatch-roofed house where María had once lived, that glorified shack, just a modest
bohío
with dirt floors, whose doorway exhaled the memories of her own irretrievable past. She had no quarrel with them—in fact, that family had her blessing to stay. Just taking a look inside from the doorway, not steps from where her
papito
used to sit with his
cervezas
and strum his guitar, and, quickly glancing through the room at the perpetual half-light in which she had been raised and the corners where, one by one, the two brothers she had never known, her
mamá
and Teresa and her
papito
had died, left María so breathless with melancholy that she suddenly understood the sadness she once saw in Nestor’s eyes.

By then, the continent of her religiosity had shrunk to the point that it sometimes carried no more weight than a butterfly’s, and yet, each time she visited the graves, saw the house, or went wandering along the trail into the forest, to
la cueva,
with its cascades, where she and Teresita used to go, María couldn’t keep herself from making the sign of the cross and kissing the palm of her hand, which she would then set down on each of the family markers, by the doorway of that house, and even on the trunk of the liana-wrapped, star-blossom-entangled trees, as if to seal the fact that she, in from Havana, had visited. And sometimes she’d take in the fields and forest, with its prosperity of birds, insects, and crawling lizards,
those flowers that burst out in clusters everywhere, and wonder just what she had done to deserve such a lack of fecundity herself. They’d always stop at
la cervecería,
to say hello to the owner’s son, his
papito
having since died, but Ignacio never liked to stay for long, lest María fall into an even more solemn mood. It always took an effort to drag her away, and while they drove back, María, tending towards silence, fell into the anguish of having heard one person after the next inquiring as to whether she had some
niños
at home in Havana. Such visits always left her with the feeling that leaving her
valle
in the first place had not been such a good thing, and as they came closer to Havana and saw their first stretches of slums and municipal dumps, she’d half believe that it was that city itself, with its clubs and casinos, whorehouses and dirty-minded men, that had somehow affected her. Ignacio knew better than to get into an argument about that.

Even some of the girls at the club got pregnant despite taking precautions with the thickest of condoms, and that killed her too. Apparently her feelings of disgrace and disappointment, as if she had somehow betrayed her
guajira
roots, were so transparent that one of the powder room attendants at the club, yet another former flapper beauty or once-known dancer, advised María to put her trust in a well-known Havana diviner, a certain Mayita Dominguez, who ran a mystic
santera
’s parlor on Virtudes, and to go there when she was having her monthlies. There María submitted herself to the cures of San Lázaro, the healer and savior from death, and as a precaution she knelt before the diviner, who said special prayers to exorcise any curses. As Mayita put it, “A
muchachita
as beautiful as you must be wished ill by jealous women every day.” That visit left María feeling more hopeful than before, but for further assistance she went to church, reciting just-in-case prayers daily before the altar of the cathedral, where the spirit of her namesake, the Holy Mother, and that of Her Son and those of all the saints breathed and every porphyry, marble, and limestone surface exuded the promises of salvation. In the midst of such religious trappings—
eternal life? why not?
—María begged God to forgive her for any of her chicanery when it came to Nestor Castillo, to
absolve her of the sins of vanity and of selfishness: therefore, with her newly pure soul, perhaps he would grant her wish to have a child.

“Mi hija,”
she once told her daughter. “You have no notion of what a church can be. Back where I came from, in my
valle,
ours was just a little shack of pine-plank walls at the edge of a field with floors of pounded down dirt, and an altar that was nothing more than a lacquered pine table with a cross, a few feet high. There were no pews—we had to kneel on that dusty floor, or else just stand during the Mass. But you know what? It was a glorious thing for us to believe we were in the consecrated presence of the Lord. And even when I saw much nicer churches in Havana, every time I knelt down to pray, I always thought that the best church I had ever entered was the one I knew as a girl.”

It may have been a coincidence, but not a month after taking such measures, María missed her menses and, after a visit to an obstetrician, learned that God had indeed answered her prayers early in the new year of 1958.

THINGS ARE GIVEN, THINGS ARE TAKEN AWAY. JOYFUL THAT SHE
carried within her the baby who would become her daughter, María had, at a certain hour of the day, gone to find her old friend Lázaro, seated as usual by his doorway. The last time she had visited him, about a month before, and not to resume her lessons with him but simply to see how he was faring, he’d refused María’s offer to take him to a doctor. Remaining in his courtyard abode, he had resigned himself to the slow and languishing waning of some old animal of the forest—“Just leave me alone and let me go with dignity,” he used to tell anyone who tried to help him. He treated María no differently, and though she could see fear in his eyes—which were wise and innocent in their way—he spoke, almost cheerfully, of the world to come: “I’m really not afraid. I just hope, if
there’s reincarnation, that I come back as a cat—they get everything. That would make me happy!” he joked, slapping his knee before convulsing suddenly with a cough that made him lean his weary shoulder against the wall.

“Wherever I go,” Lázaro told her, recovering, “I hope you will think of me, María…. Think of old Lázaro every time you open a book and see what the words mean.”

“Maestro,”
she tried one last time. “Why won’t you let me take you to the hospital?”

He just shook his head. “When you are my age, you’ll understand,” he told her. “When your dreams are nothing more than memories of earlier days, you’ll know what I am feeling.” Then he stretched out his bony hand so that María might help him get to his feet, and she followed him down the cooler hallway to the back door, which opened to the courtyard, to his little home, the place where he somehow had managed to sleep for years on nothing more than a blanket-covered mat. Whatever his malady, Lázaro couldn’t let her go without some heartening words. As she left him asking, “I will see you again soon, yes?” he nodded, smiled, and, surely suppressing another cough, told her, “Oh, you will, my dear girl, but I know one thing. Your life is going to be fine, with or without me.”