Beautiful Maria of My Soul (3 page)

E
ven those jobs didn’t come easily. Warned by her matronly
dueña,
María had to be careful about getting mixed up with the wrong sorts. “And believe me,
querida,
” Matilda told her, “Havana is full of them.”

Nevertheless, for days María went to just about every club and saloon she could find, usually in the late afternoons. And while she overwhelmed most everyone she met with her beauty, there was just something about her too precious for even the most jaded of proprietors to despoil, though there were exceptions, some club managers looking her over so lustfully that they made her nervous. That she had never danced anywhere except in a
cervecería
—beer joint—in the countryside, the sort of place where the men pissed off a back porch, or had any professional training, did not help matters. Most, taking her for a rustic bumpkin or a child of the slums—they just knew from the wide openness of her expression, the gaudiness of her clothes—advised her to go back home, before she wasted any more of her time or, worse, ruined her life. But she had to eat.

You don’t know what that’s like, Teresita, unless you’ve had to go through it yourself,
sabes?

At first the establishments she approached were, so it seemed to her, of the better sort, but she had no luck. And so, instead of going to those nicer clubs along the Prado, or out in Vedado, near Calle 21, she started lowering her sights.

AT ABOUT ELEVEN THIRTY ONE EVENING, SHE FOUND HERSELF
knocking on an alleyway door in la Marina, the brothel district, not far from the harbor. A squat and corpulent Catalán, with a melted wax face and Xavier Cugat mustache, needed only one look at María before inviting her into his establishment. He called it a “gentleman’s club,” but it was just a sad-seeming place, filled with smoke and darkness and lots of drunken men. His office, at the end of a dingy and rank-smelling hallway, was just as bleak, cases of liquor piled against the walls, a haphazard collection of showgirl photographs pinned to a board behind his desk and, alongside it, a sofa, which emanated its own history of grief. There, as he looked her over, he couldn’t have been more blunt: The job, if she really wanted it, would involve showing herself off, he said. There’d be no stage to perform on, just several tables that had been pushed together in a nearly lightless barroom, over which, in her new high heels and with her new dress off, she was to stride before that crowd, enticingly. He would pay her five dollars, just for that.

It wasn’t the kind of thing she’d ever be proud of, but she would do it out of hunger, her stomach prevailing over her pride, may God please forgive her.

Of course, he wanted to see what she had to offer. When María, trembling, disrobed, at first just down to her slip and undies—she wore no brassiere, didn’t own one—the Catalán, having watched her carefully, told María, “Now off with the slip.” And when only one stitch of clothing remained, that was too much as well—
“Quítalo, todo,”
he demanded. Sighing, she did as he had asked and was soon standing naked before him, one hand placed over her breasts, the other over what
cubanos
euphemistically called the
papayún
. Tilting her head back, in shame, she closed her eyes, as if to pray. “Don’t be afraid,
mi guapita,
” he said. “It’s perfectly natural to feel a little shy the first time—but just remember, you have to start somewhere, after all.” Courteously and with an almost avuncular manner, he handed her a black silk robe, reeking of perfume,
its fabric covered with falling purple blossoms, and told her, “Now, come with me.”

Why she somehow trusted him was beyond her future understanding; perhaps she felt protected by God—she had
“la fe”
then, and strongly so. Or, as she often also thought, she just wasn’t thinking too clearly: being young and alone and hoping naïvely for the best, as if people were naturally good, will do that to you,
sabes?
Sighing, her stomach twisted into knots, she followed him into that bar, which, in the style of Spanish taverns, lacked windows, its interior hazy with shifting plains of smoke. Some big band
danzóns
blared from a jukebox. The room itself (in memory) smelled vaguely of urine and spilled beer, sawdust, stale fritters, and flatulence (perhaps), and was so dimly lit that its darkness almost came as a relief to her. Patiently (and out of hunger) she waited beside the Catalán, who, banging on a pot to gain his patrons’ attention, made a quick introduction in what she took as English—“What’s your name anyway?” he asked her. And then, without further adieu, once she had climbed atop the long table, he yanked off her robe, and María, tottering in high heels, revealed her naked graces before a room filled with men, mainly Americans, who, in their cups, whistled and hooted at her.

How did she feel? Slightly humiliated, and certainly ashamed; as María would confess to a priest a few days later, she had never sunk so low in her life. But as she strode unsteadily across that long table, from one end of the room to the other, she didn’t falter, thinking of those men as no better than animals, whose desires and anonymous expressions would, at least, put a few dollars in her pocket.
And so forgive me,
she told herself,
for I have no one to look after me and I am hungry, amen.

What happened? After those strangers had gotten their fill of what no man had ever seen so closely before, María, covering herself with that robe, sat off in a corner daydreaming about what she would do with her pay. (She’d buy a plate of fried
chuletas
—pork chops—and rice and beans for twenty-five cents, along with some plantain fritters from a stand near the hotel, a new blouse from one of the corner stores, and perhaps
take in a Barbara Stanwyck movie in the center for another quarter, and
still
have enough left to give her
señora
some rent money, so that she wouldn’t have to keep on scrubbing floors.) That’s when the Catalán, who had gone from table to table speaking with his patrons, came over to María and, in a rather pleasant tone of voice, told her to come back into his office so that they might discuss some matters of business.

What followed, she never cared to talk about—she’d never tell her daughter, not even during their most earnest talks about her rough beginnings in Havana—only that, once upon a time, it had been her misfortune to have stumbled, and stupidly so, for the sake of earning a few dollars, into a shadowy place. What was it that she’d remember? Back in his office, the Catalán offered her a drink, but she didn’t like her rum in those days—
“I was an innocent”
—and then he sat her down and told María about how everyone in the club had been much taken by her little performance and that, if she so wanted to, there would be other ways that she, a most beautiful young woman, could earn money. How so? she asked.

“By being nice to those fellows, that’s all,” he told her.

“Señor,”
she said, without much deliberation. “All I want is my pay. I’ve done what you wanted me to do.”

But he just smiled and, stepping towards her, his expression changing, grabbed hold of her hair in his fist and, tightening his grip, asked her: “And who the hell do you think you are?” Then he slapped María’s face with the back of his hand and threw her down on the settee near his desk. To her horror, as she looked up to heaven for assistance, he undid his belt. At first she thought he was going to beat her, the way her
papito
sometimes did—she wasn’t always a well-behaved daughter—but, no, he wanted something else. Letting drop his linen trousers and his (rank-smelling) undershorts below his knees, he stood before her with his somewhat dense but not particularly long ardor in hand; truth be told, it seemed dwarfish, compared with the immensity of his belly. He then proceeded to do his best to deflower her, his enormous corpulence slam
ming achingly against her hip bones, his body sweating, his breathing labored—he was one of those grossly overweight men who, because of heft, thought himself a Hercules when it was far from the truth. She’d also recall that he wore a lilac aftershave.

But did he succeed? Screaming—surely, they heard her in the club—she fought him until her body was covered in bruises, his face and back with scratches. She prayed for her life, prayed to El Señor, who watches over the forlorn, until, in an instant, she was reprieved. Or to put it differently, until, in the throes of extreme physical exertion, some horrible and paralyzing pain seized the right side of the Catalán’s body—she was, without knowing it, a
morena fatal
after all. Unable to breathe, or even to lift his arms, he slumped over, beside María. When he asked her desperately for a glass of water,
suspirando mucho, mucho,
María, may God forgive her, told him to go to hell. And when he asked her again, as she gathered her clothes, María, a practical
guajira,
answered, “Okay, but tell me, where are my five dollars?”

“En los bolsillos de mis pantalones,”
he told her, gasping. So she rifled through his trousers pockets, encountering a stiletto, several condoms, some cards for his club—if she had been able to read she would have known that his establishment was called “El Savoy, a place for gentlemans [
sic
]”—and then she came to a clump of bills: from this she removed five American dollar bills. And then, because she’d been struggling lately, she availed herself of the rest, in both Cuban and American currency, which were equal in value, may God forgive her. Then, dressing, she made her way out.

LEAVING THAT ESTABLISHMENT, MARÍA HEARD NEITHER SONOROUS
violins nor longing melodies echoing around her; nor any tremulous baritone voice, with its saintly inflections, confessing the greatest passion for her beauty, as if she were the object of devotion in a song of love. What she heard instead was Havana, circa 1947, at 2 a.m., a
general din of restaurants, clubs, and distant voices coming from every direction and punctuated by the barking of dogs. Firecrackers—or shots heard in the distance; the caw-caws of seagulls alighting upon the slop barges in the harbor, or else swooping low to pick through the offal left in the trails of yachts. From a nearby edifice, a woman shouted at someone,
“Eres un pendejo!”
at the top of her lungs. Her high-heel shoes clacking along the flagstones of a
placita.
A cavalcade of partiers, honking their horns and whistling, in a postwedding procession of automobiles passed along the Malecón. The moon itself, a medallion, with a melancholic face looked down from the northwest, like a sanguine god without a word to say. From some alley, deep in the recesses of la Marina—or was it
el barrio
Colón?—a half dozen
batá
and
quinto
drums were beating. She heard police sirens: then, as the casino boats and cruise ships came into port, buoys and deck bells ringing, smatterings of music here and there from behind the closed doors of the all-night cabarets and bordellos; the skittering of cats and other scavengers foraging through the gutters in search of food. If she could have listened through the walls of some of the less respectable edifices she was passing, a thousand moans of drunken pleasure would have assailed her. If she could have eavesdropped into the cells of the central police command, where, unbeknownst to her, political agitators—the
socialistas,
the
comunistas,
the union organizers—were held, half dead from torture and beatings, in dingy lightless rooms, she would have heard them cursing, weeping, and moaning, not from pleasure but from agony.

Still reeling from her experience at the Catalán’s, she walked and walked though the streets of a city she had yet to know better. In an arcade, María bought herself a half-stale
lechón
sandwich from an all-night stand. Its owner, with his one milky eye and tattered flat boater cane hat, left over from the days when he was a 1930s dandy, tried to act as if she wasn’t the most ravishing young woman he had ever seen (even if she seemed a little sad). He checked her out just the same, as María, half starved to death, scoffed down the sandwich and then, meekly smiling, set off again. After roaming in the darkness of an arcade, and hearing the
whistles of passing strangers, María, with her irresistible body, her high and firm buttocks jostling the fabric of her ruffled cotton dress, finally got back to her hotel, with its fifth-rate amenities. Stretching across her bed, she spent the night half feverishly, visited by nightmares and missing the countryside she’d left behind.

O
h, but her story to that point: Just leaving her tranquil valley, midway between the mountains and the sea, would have been enough to rip any heart into pieces; but she hadn’t really been given much choice about the matter. For one thing, in the wake of her beloved
mami
’s death, her
papito
, Manolo, had taken up with the most horrible woman imaginable, a hard case from a town along the gulf coast whom he, still an occasional
músico,
had met while moonlighting with some of his
sonero
friends at a wedding dance. Her name was Olivia, and he must have been crazy or desperately lonely to fall for her, or maybe she had bewitched him, because she was neither pretty nor softly feminine nor even funny. If she had any virtues, as far as María could figure, it was that she could really cook and Manolo liked to eat, but, even then, poor María, for the life of her, couldn’t begin to find anything else nice to say about the woman.

And Olivia must have known it from the moment they first laid eyes on each other, on the very day she moved in, with her horse-drawn cart filled with chairs and what few dresses she owned. After just a short few weeks, Olivia gave up on all her phony smiles and seemed to take a special delight in ordering María around and establishing herself as the new
dueña
of that household.

It was the worst for María at night, when she had to listen to them going at it from behind a hanging blanket that separated their sleeping space from the rest of that room, no more than ten feet across. With its floor of pounded down dirt, and its few paltry chairs, its kerosene lamp, and, among their sparse adornments, an altar to the Holy Virgin in a corner, which her
mamá
had kept, the interior of their
bohío
did not afford much
privacy. María’s cot, built of plywood and canvas, with straw-stuffed pillows, the same she had once shared with her younger sister, was near a back door, open to the
selva,
that dense forest around them, where insects buzzed all night against the mosquito netting. It was bad enough that her
papito
snored like a beast, and she was used to hearing his every movement, sigh, his dreamer’s mumblings, the capricious workings of his digestive system, but once Olivia had settled in as his woman, those arrangements became a torment. Whereas her
mamá,
as far as María could remember, hardly ever made any noise at all, just letting out sighs and sometimes crying,
“Por Dios, por Dios!”
that horrid
bruja
Olivia, with her groans and yelps and filthy language, could have awakened the dead. That alone was enough to turn María’s stomach, and it killed her to think that her
mamá,
off in paradise and watching them in life the way people watched actors in movies, could take in every bit of that hag’s lascivious grunting.

What her dear departed mother looking down from the stars in heaven and shaking her head must have thought!

Well, at least poor
papito,
drunk half the time or under a spell, seemed not to weep as much as he did before that horrendous creature came along. Just hearing his cries of release and beastly snoring afterwards convinced María that giving one’s body over to a man wasn’t much different from a mother suckling a crying baby at her breasts. Besides, because Olivia seemed to satisfy her
papito
in that way—he was much calmer in the mornings and sometimes even whistled happily—María couldn’t hate her completely, even if it was obvious that Olivia hated her.

Yet, it was hard to forgive her
papito
for taking up with such a woman, so shortly after Mamá had left the world. Not a year had passed since her
mamá,
at the ripe old age of forty-five, had died, slowly, slowly of a cancer that left her blind but still stubbornly whispering about the goodness of the Lord, a rosary burning in her hands (she claimed that the beads of
her
avemarías, nuestro padres,
and those of the mysteries, heated up like embers between her fingers as she prayed). It had been a terrible time for María. She had spent countless hours beside her mother, attending to the messy business of looking after her, and, no matter how much she had prayed, María had watched her mother’s body slowly shrivel up. Before that, Concha had been one of those sturdy no-nonsense
mulattas,
built low to the ground, her hands strong and fingers thick from sewing and plucking feathers and from holding the necks of chickens and the ears of pigs as she slaughtered them in their yard and made the sign of the cross in contrition afterwards. The sort of woman to throw open the door to their shack each and every morning, as if to invite in the grace of God, she believed that her faith would get her through anything. But in her illness, she had practically evaporated, her limp body, in her daughter’s arms, nearly weightless, her hair falling out in clumps. Dutifully, María fed her
mamá
soup, changed her clothes, and attended to the white
palangana
that served as her bedpan.

The most difficult thing for Concha herself, aside from all that waiting, was to have watched the stars slowly fading from the horizon. Even before María’s
papito
had finally gotten around to bringing in a doctor from the sugar mill, she had been complaining about having trouble seeing things, especially her lovely, lovely daughter María’s face. But once the sky itself had started to fade, Concha, so quiet a woman, and demanding little for herself, had begun to sob wistfully over the passing of light from her life. By the time that doctor looked her over, when she had finally piped up, there wasn’t much that could be done. She went slowly, with lots of their
guajiro
neighbors gathering daily around her bed, women mainly, joining hands to say prayers in the old-school there-are-angels-and-saints-and-tongues-of-fire way; and while her
mamá
had been blessed and given her final holy-oiled send-off by their circuit priest, Father Alonso, who would ride into their hamlet on a donkey, clanging a bell, her eyes, which had turned into pearls, sometimes welled over with fear. Nobody, not even the most religious
cubana,
wanted to die.

And she would clutch her daughter’s hand as tightly as she could manage, begging María to hold her close so she wouldn’t feel so alone when the final moment came and she joined her other children in heaven.

Along the way, Concha, despite her unending drowsiness, often reminded her daughter to look after her
papito,
even if he had been a
sinvergüenza
to her sometimes, to never forget what she had been taught about God and sins and the promise of salvation; above all, as she was such a beautiful young woman, never to allow any man to use her like a common whore—
“No eres una puta, me oyes?”

María, nodding, always swore that she would keep those promises, no matter how many times Concha, having become forgetful, mentioned them all over again. There were other things that repeated: Concha’s trembling and weeping in her arms, Concha’s long hours of complete silence, Concha’s milky eyes seemingly looking off into a distance when there was really nothing to see, her dried lips slightly parted as if in wonderment, Concha, forgetting that her daughter was sitting beside her, calling out, “María, María, where did you go?” Looking in at all this from time to time, her
papito,
Manolo, shook his head disbelievingly. Barely able to muster the courage to step into the room, he’d ask María, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to leave her mother alone and cook him some food. “And you let me know when you think her time is coming, huh?” her
papito
added.

María obeyed, day after day, ever so grateful whenever her
papito
managed to pull himself together and, sitting down beside her
mamá,
did something to show his tenderness towards her—brushing back Concha’s thinning hair with his hands, or planting a few kisses on her forehead, but never staying long. He just couldn’t take the sight of Concha suffering so and preferred to sit on a crate outside their doorway, strumming some chords on his guitar and sharing a bottle of rum or paint-thinner-strength
aguardiente
with one of his
guajiro
pals, anything better than owning up to some of the things he had done to Concha over the years, things that involved other women and that used to leave her quietly weeping at night or that left her eyes reddened while feeding the pigs and
sobbing when she thought no one was looking. “Just let me know,
niña,
” he’d tell María again, as if his wife’s passing was akin to waiting for a train to come by, that
guajiro
not having the slightest idea of just how monumentally hard he would take the whole business when her moment finally came.

One day, just as the cocks had started to crow, María had been sleeping beside her
mamá
—well, really dozing, because it’s nearly impossible to sleep next to someone like that—when, all at once, she smelled something like strawberries or perfumed water in the air instead of the rot of her mother’s illness, and then she felt a hand passing gently over her face, the butt of a palm moving over her cheekbone, a thumb pushing upwards against her thick mane of hair—that’s when María opened her eyes, to see that her
mamá
had stopped breathing. Pressing her ear to her mother’s withered chest, as she had seen the farmers doing with their animals, and hearing nothing, María cried out,
“Ven! Ven! Papito! Papito!”

Manolo had taken to sleeping in a hammock under a banyan alongside their
bohío,
mosquito netting draped over his body, and when he didn’t stir, María went outside to rouse him—it was early morning and thousands and thousands of birds, from woodpeckers to thrushes to silver-winged vireos were singing in the forests round them—but because her
papito
had, in his misery the night before, gone off to the local
cervecería,
at a crossroads far beyond the fields,—a place where María sometimes used to dance for pennies—and had come back home only a few hours earlier, he may as well have been dead. Shaking his arms and shouting at him to get up, María nearly started to weep herself. Out of nowhere, as crows began gathering in the sky over their house, he awakened and, hearing the sad news, for reasons she would never understand, got to his feet and, with his mouth twisted into a wince, slapped her so hard that the right side of her beautiful face, already covering in shadows, darkened with black and blue bruises. Her
papito,
his arms shaking, hit her a dozen times more, his face contorted with anger, as if María were somehow to
blame for Concha’s death. Then, coming to his senses and seeing that his daughter, the most precious thing remaining in his life, couldn’t bear to look at him, he fell onto his knees begging her forgiveness. With her eyes swollen by sadness and shock, her jaw aching, María, as a good
cubana
daughter, grabbed him by the crook of his arm and led her
papito
to her mother’s bedside.

There, at the sight of her
mamá
’s corpse, still as a saint’s, her
papito
carried on with such sudden misery that María couldn’t help but wonder where he had really been all those months before, the man crying out that he was worthless and undeserving of having married so wonderful a woman and saying many other things that left María feeling even more sorry for him, María repeating, while caressing his tightened shoulders and back,
“Ay, pero, Papito, Papito…”

Naturally, after Mamá’s funeral, a procession of their
guajiro
neighbors, and even some from farther away, beating drums and chanting, accompanied her pine coffin to the local
campo santo,
at the far end of the fields. María took to wearing a black dress and her
papito,
a black armband, and for weeks, out of respect, he did not once pick up his guitar and sing—nor did any of his neighbors. And, as might happen in any number of rustic enclaves all over Cuba, so obscure as to lack a proper name, where not a single electric light was to be found, once three days had gone by, people began to claim they had seen Concha’s spirit materializing as a floating will-o’-the-wisp in the cane fields at night; and a few of their neighbors, out of pure sympathy and missing Concha, claimed to have seen her translucent spirit drifting through the moonlit hollows of the forest amongst the lianas and star blossoms (those
guajiros,
sobbing and drunk, were always seeing such things). But María herself never saw Concha again, except in her dreams, and in her loneliness and grieving, like any respectable
cubana
daughter, she turned her attentions to her
papito
in his time of distress. Which is to say that María, having made certain promises to her mother on her deathbed, and believing her
papito
when he swore to anyone who listened that he would live out the rest of
his days honoring the memory of his late wife, forgave him for every beating he’d ever given her for no good reason and for every single moment when he had made María feel ashamed of being his daughter: as when she had once watched him, like any other who-could-give-a-shit
guajiro,
dropping his trousers, crouching down, and relieving himself amidst the oxen in a field, or for the way he used to linger in their
retrete,
their squalid outhouse in the back, without bothering to close the door, and thought nothing of calling for her to fetch him a Lucifer match, a thin black cheroot between his lips, while he emptied his guts noisily beneath him.

She had other reasons for detesting and loving him at the same time, but now, with her
mamá
gone, and no one else left in that house—she once had two older brothers, Luis and Miguel, who’d died of typhus and tuberculosis when she was little, and a younger sister, Teresita, gone just a few years before, whose death she blamed herself for—her
papito
constituted her only family, that of her flesh and blood, even though there were other more distant relatives here and there around the island. Just that fact alone made María put up with all kinds of things, mainly her
papito
’s rants that women, even young and beautiful ones like herself, weren’t much use to the world except as adornments, and even then they were destined to grow old and rot (he was a little drunk, his eyes twisted, when he said that). Then her
papito
would say that, as much as he loved her, he would have loved her more had she been born a male. (They would be sitting on crates in front of their
bohío,
her
papi
’s best friends, Apollo and Francisco, poor farmers who sang improvised
décima
lyrics like no one else around there, their already drawn faces further dipped in lacquer after days of drinking the lowest grade of rums, in commiseration with Manolo in his widowed state, just waving off whatever cruel things he said to María and making crazy signs with their big knuckled hands so that María wouldn’t take his cruel ramblings to heart.)