Beautiful Maria of My Soul (9 page)

N
ow below her windows was a thriving market that started up at seven in the morning. Out of canvas-awning-covered stalls, in dense rows that faced each other on either side of the narrow cobblestone street, those vendors sold everything—live chickens, parrots in cages, cut-up sides of pig. There were stalls for household goods and plumbing tools, heaps of old radios and extension cords, books and outdated magazines—even American magazines such as
Look
and
Life,
which had been discarded in hotel bins and picked out like used rags for sale. A dozen cheap guitars and as many dented cornets and other instruments hung from wires strung along the canopy of one, and there was a stall that sold nothing but
tocadiscos—
record players—of every imaginable incarnation. From the old RCA windup Victrolas that played only 78s to the more modern GEs (always worn and used) that employed the speeds of 16½ and 33
¹
/3 rpm, and around them, where they were stacked on the ground, piles and piles of brittle records. (Oh, if she could only have picked out one of them, during her leisurely strolls through the market, a 78 rpm
disco
by an
Oriente sonero
called los Hermanos Castillo, featuring two songs, recorded in 1944 in Santiago, one of which, entitled
“Mis sueños”
—“My Dreams”—was a plaintive bolero penned and sung by none other than Nestor Castillo, her future love.) There were stalls that sold shoes, men’s apparel, racks of dresses, and much more.

Once María got up in the late morning, and Ignacio had not come around to carouse with her, it was one of her solaces to stroll through the market and say hello to the vendors who had become her friends. She even dallied by the bookseller’s stall, a few steps from her door, picking
up one volume or the other and pretending, in case anyone was watching, to read, flipping through their pages, pausing at some, and arching her lovely eyebrows at their supposed contents. The bookseller was such a friendly man that María often bought one or two just to be nice. Among them was an absurdly obtuse volume that contained biographies of the one hundred most prominent Cubans alive in 1902. This she liked for its genteel photographs. Another, more arcane, was a Theosophical Society tome, published in Barcelona in 1928. She picked that one for its cover, featuring a pair of celestial-looking beings flying disembodied, like shredding flames, towards a reddish pearl in the heavens. A third, of the twenty or so she would own and keep on a shelf like porcelain objects, happened to be a moldy edition of
Don Quijote.
(Its pen and ink illustrations enchanted her.) Otherwise, María sorted through the one-and two-day-old newspapers that the fellow sold for a penny apiece, all the while assuming expressions of interest. The vendor, Isidoro, hardly imagined that María was only going through the motions, but another man, a lanky old
negrito
with sunken eyes, sitting inside the shaded entranceway of her building, a cane in his large arthritic hands, had watched her going through her charade a hundred times, without saying a single word. All he ever did was smile and tip his hat at María, but one afternoon, he just couldn’t resist and called out to her.

“You there,” he said. And when she turned: “Yes, you my love! Come over here.”

In a florid dress, and with a fan in hand, María approached him.

“I should talk to you,” he told her. “I know what you’re up to.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, almost indignantly.

“Oh, come on now,” he said. “I can tell by your eyes that you really don’t know what you’re looking at
. ¿Tengo razón o no?
”—“Am I right or wrong?”

She had no response, just looked down at the ground.

“Well, there’s no shame in it. Myself, I didn’t learn to read until I was thirty, and believe you me, my love, that was a long, long time ago.” He laughed, slapping his knee. “But the fact that you even pretend to tells
me that you have the desire.” Then he took hold of her right hand. “
Dime, mi bonita,
how old are you anyway?”

“Eighteen, but I will turn nineteen in October.”

“Now that is young,
carajo
!” he told her. “You still have all the time in the world. And since I have nothing to do with myself”—he laughed again—“how about if I teach you the basics, you hear? You look like a bright young woman, even if you’re a lousy actress, and like I said, I’ve got nothing else going on.”

She didn’t even hesitate, asking: “Do you want me to pay you?”

“Why, no, my love,” he said, rapping his cane against the steps beneath his feet. “Just tell me your name, that’s all.”

“María,” she said. “María García y Cifuentes.”

“Well, María, I’m Lázaro Portillo, at your service, and a very happy
señor
I am, and grateful for all the times I’ve seen you lighting up this marketplace with your beauty.”

Then, he moved aside and tapped the steps beside him. Unfurling a clean handkerchief from one of his pockets, he spread it out for her. “Wait here, and I will find some paper and a pencil, and then, my love, we can begin.”

And so those lessons commenced in the midst of a busy market day, the first words he showed María, as she basked in his adoration and kindness, being
“Él”
for “him” and
“Yo”
for “I” and, as well,
“Ella”
for “her.”

After that it became her daily routine to sit with Lázaro for a few hours each afternoon, and she made it a habit to bring along a notebook, in which she wrote everything he instructed her to copy down. In only a few months, this bony-limbed, knob-knuckled
negrito
angel had opened María’s eyes, teaching her some things. At first, she could barely comprehend what she read, but she got better, bit by bit. And he, basking in the loveliness of her youth, wanted nothing for it, save for a few sandwiches now and then—he was the sort who looked hungry but didn’t act it. In those months, words and their meanings, and the way the letters of
the alphabet arranged themselves into words, began to follow her everywhere, along the streets of Havana, while she was soaking in a bath, and even as she danced, shaking her derriere onstage. They followed María like birds, or like those black notes that flew in clusters across a musician’s arrangement charts at the club.

O
ne evening at the club a few months later—it was October—the house band had broken into a tropical jam. A jazzed up version of
“Rumba caliente”
began the show, and this, to much applause, was followed by a frenetic
“El cumbanchero.”
But if she’d remember that particular evening of performances, it was because one of the dancers, fifteen-year-old Paulita, in the midst of an acrobatic routine, collapsed midstep, her right foot slipping off a bench as she leapt up to join María atop a piano, the poor thing falling head backwards to the floor. Even before the show, when Paulita, looking pale and drawn and sitting in front of her mirror, her hair in curlers, had complained that her belly ached, they knew what that was about. The girls in the chorus had raised money for the abortion she’d gotten a few days earlier—cost forty dollars, and with a real doctor, not some back-alley hack—but who among them imagined that it could have been botched so badly? For as she lay sprawled on the stage, the music stopping and the emcee, a suave crooner named Ricky Romero, coming out from behind the abruptly closed curtains to advise the muttering, drunken audience in both English and Spanish that all was well, and that momentarily the show would continue, out of the poor girl’s tasseled bottom seeped a widening flower of blood. The boss had her carried off, and even gave one of the stagehands money to rush her to the hospital
, muy pronto,
the dancers, hysterical, crying, going on with their performance anyway and mostly finding their marks, but without much enthusiasm at all.

A dispiriting night, the kind of evening when María wouldn’t have minded having Ignacio around, for sometimes she found his strength a
comfort, even if he beat her, but lately he hadn’t been coming by the club as often as he used to.

As a matter of fact, she hadn’t seen as much of him in general. He’d say that he had to go away, claiming he had business in Miami, or in the Yucatán, or in Santiago de Cuba. But she didn’t know what to believe. Once when Ignacio had left a book on her table, by the window looking out over the street, María, driven by curiosity to see if she could decipher a few of its words, flipped through its pages to find, wedged deep into the spine, a small black-and-white, serrate-edge photograph of a sultry dancer known as the “fabulous Lola Sánchez,” the back of it bearing the imprint of her burgundy-painted lips and an inscription; the only words María could pick out were
amor
and
besitos.
And by chance, she had gone to the harbor one afternoon to see one of her fellow dancers, Juanita Méndez, off as she boarded the Havana-Miami ferry to join the chorus of a traveling revue. If her intensely beautiful eyes weren’t failing María, she had spotted Ignacio, on an upper deck, looking like a cat eating a canary, his arms wrapped around a quite stunning brunette who bore an amazing resemblance to the Lola Sánchez of the photograph. A few weeks later María had received a telephone call at the club from Ignacio, announcing that he wouldn’t be coming to her place on Sunday afternoon because he had been detained in Holguín—one of his trucks, carrying a load of electric fans and refrigerators, had apparently been hijacked by thieves. Why then did she happen to come across him, later that same evening, walking in the arcades of Comercio with several men, and an unidentifiable woman, by his side? It wasn’t long before María concluded that Ignacio, like most well-heeled men in Havana, had found someone new to amuse him, another woman whom he might treat well at first and then abuse later, a beauty onto whose body, stretched out on a bed, he might empty the contents of a bottle of rum, laughing at first and then later licking her up and down before concluding that she needed a slap or two across the face.

…your father was a liar!

María should have felt relieved to have Ignacio out of her life, or
seemingly so, but, even if she wouldn’t admit it, a bitterness and a kind of jealousy over Lola Sánchez, another queen of Havana nightlife and of shapely
culos,
overwhelmed her. It left María wondering if Ignacio, after all, had been correct in telling her that, despite her beauty, she was really worthless and stupid, and not worth much at all.

That was María’s state of mind at three thirty in the morning, when she finally left the Club Nocturne the night of Paulita’s incident and went roaming through the streets. Even at that hour Havana, circa 1949, still cooked and sizzled and popped even more than it had years before. Hordes of American servicemen flew headlong through its arcades, crowded its bars, stumbled down its steps, vomited behind its columns and against its flecked walls. In some purlieus, lining up before the brothel doorways, countless men jammed the narrow walkways and sidewalks. Musicians performed everywhere. Barkers tried to lure passersby into their saloon doors, others into their casinos, slot machines glowing everywhere,
ching, ching, ching
; prostitutes, standing in doorways or leaning over balconies, bared their breasts, nipples pointed out insinuatingly; drums and trumpets
(ay, Nestor)
blew open the night. One of the chorus—they all smoked and drank—passed María her first cigarette, a Royale, and though she coughed at first, having breathed the purest country air for most of her life, she thought it might turn into a glamorous habit—Joan Crawford always smoked cigarettes in her movies after all. She wasn’t a drinker, hated bars, because even in the most touristic of places, like Sloppy Joe’s, men assumed she was a prostitute like Violeta, though sometimes they mistook her for either the Hollywood actress Lena Horne or Ava Gardner or, in fact, one of her favorites, Sarita Montiel, none of whom, many years later, would mean much to her daughter Teresita’s generation—María, so effortlessly enticing strangers with the radiance of her sculpted face, wouldn’t have lasted as much as five minutes in most of those bars along Obispo, Trocadero, or O’Reilly without someone either propositioning her or making a fool of himself by assuming he had a chance on earth to seduce her. Ignacio, good or bad as he had been, who wasn’t quite what met the eye, who
loved to pull her jet-black hair back even while jamming himself into her shapely, quivering behind, that Ignacio, in meeting her, had surely been one of the luckiest men in Havana.

And so when she went along the Paseo del Prado, where many a young couple sat necking in the shadows of the park, María, in making her way over to the Malecón, a balmy breeze sweeping off the churning sea, had only wanted distraction, to take in from the spray-misted pavement the full moon, whose light, in those moments, seemed a river burning through the water. All along the Prado, people were still eating and drinking in the arcade cafés. Strolling about with guitars in hand, musicians, mainly
soneros
like her
papito,
serenaded anyone who would toss them a few coins, and, of course, aside from all the catcalls and whistles she heard coming from the side streets and alleys, there were children following behind her, tugging on her skirt and begging for pennies.

As María passed the haunted entranceway of the Centro Gallego and came to a café called El Paraíso (the Paradise), she saw, as might be inevitable in a bolero of dejection—not “Beautiful María of My Soul” but some other like
“Te odio”
(“I Hate You”) by Félix Caignet—Ignacio sitting by a table beside a woman, and not just any woman, but the dancer Lola Sánchez. Ah yes, Lola, a light-skinned
mulatta
like María, her tar-baby black hair recently dyed platinum blond, her
tetas
half bursting out from the top of her dress, and whose skirt, slit up nearly to her hips, revealed thighs and legs that, in their musculature, María almost found herself admiring. And what else? Under the half-light of a Chinese lantern, Ignacio and this Lola Sánchez were locked in a fondling embrace, his mouth pressed against hers, his hand stuck deep inside her skirt. And in that instant, María, without knowing anything about Lola—other than that she sometimes gave interviews on the radio and headlined at the Sans Souci—suddenly despised her, and Ignacio as well. Who knows what possessed María, but when she marched over to their table, she couldn’t help but call out, “Hey you, shit!” And when Ignacio looked up at her, without recognizing María at first, her face was so distorted by anger,
he wondered why that very lovely but crazy-looking young woman,
esa encantadora loca,
had just kicked over their table, platters of
mariscos
and cocktails toppling onto the pavement. Then it came to him. “María, what are you doing?”

With that Ignacio stood up and took hold of her by the wrists and tried to calm her down, but she just wouldn’t, María breaking from his grip, María cursing him with the kind of language her dead mother, in all her piety, would have found shocking. Which is to say, that beautiful María, sweet
guajira
from the sticks, dancer and head turner extraordinaire, had become angry at the sight of them in a way that even surprised herself.