Beautiful Maria of My Soul Read online

  Most happily and with the innocence of a farm girl, María examined the fabric and stitching of dress after dress, pleased to find that the vendors were very kind and not at all what she had expected. For a half an hour she looked around, the women working those stalls and tables complimenting her on the pristine nature of her mulatta skin, nary a pimple or blemish to mar her face (the kind of skin which had its own inner glow, like in the cosmetic ads, except she didn’t use any makeup, not back then, a glow that inspired in the male species the desire to kiss and touch her), the men giving her the up and down, the children running like scamps tugging at her skirt—

  You see, my daughter; if I was incredibly good looking in my twenties, you can’t imagine what I looked like in my prime, as a girl of sixteen and seventeen—I was something out of a man’s dream, with honey skin so glowing and a face so pure and perfect that men couldn’t help wanting to possess me…. But being so young and innocent, I was hardly aware of such things, only that—well, how can I put it my love?—that I was somehow different from your typical cubanita.

  That afternoon, she bought, at quite reasonable prices, certain dainty undergarments, they were so inexpensive, as well as a blouse, a pair of polka-dotted high heels, which she would have to grow accustomed to, and finally, after haggling with the vendor, she decided upon a pink dress of a florid design, said to have been styled after the Parisian fashion, with ruffles cascading over the shoulders and hips; a dress which she, being frugal, would keep for some ten years. With such items in hand and after she and her benefactor, the half toothless Sixto, had eaten a little something from a stand, they proceeded east into Havana, the city of both torments and love.

  Chapter TWO

  Years later, listening to her stories, her daughter, Teresa, long accustomed to a city like Miami, where she and her mother had lived for most of her life, and with her own fleeting remembrances of Havana from infancy, could only think that her mother, arriving from the bucolic countryside, must have found its very enormity overwhelming. Some twenty guajiro families had lived in her valle, in Pinar del Río, perhaps some one hundred and fifty souls at most, while Havana had a population of (roughly) 2.4 million people (in the “greater metropolitan area,” so an antiquated atlas, put out by a steamship line, circa 1946, said). Surely she must have been dumbstruck to see so many people and buildings, and probably trembled at the prospect of spending time there, as if that city would swallow her up.

  And Sixto? Once they had made it to Havana’s famous Malecón Drive, and were rumbling along that crescent-shaped harbor, waves, at high tide, bursting over the seawall and onto the Avenida de Maceo in exploding plumes, Sixto, wanting to keep her around for as long as possible, decided to take María for a little tour of the center. The slaughterhouse district, way east of the harbor, could wait: Those oinking and grunting, pissing and defecating pigs be damned, I’ve got a real queen with me!

  Soon enough María entered a honeycomb, a labyrinth as challenging as the depths of any forest, for Havana, with its salt-eaten walls, was monumental: a myriad of structures, that city had more than thirty thousand buildings, warehouses, hotels, and hovels, a bodega on practically every corner, a bar or saloon or barbershop or haberdashery or shoeshine stand next to it, and an endless array of alleys, courtyards, plazuelas, and more columned arcades and edifices than María could have ever imagined. With its streets of cobblestone, asphalt, and dirt (roosters and goats and hens in cages in the marketplaces, the smell of blood and flowers everywhere), that city of pillars and ornate façades, of winding alleys and cul-de-sac gardens and statuary—that fellow Sixto had told her Havana’s nickname was Paris of the Caribbean—bustled with people and life. So many people, from tourists to policemen to merchants on the street, to crowds of ordinary citizens just going about their business, left María feeling as dizzy as if she had drunk down a cup or two of rum, a bottle of which, incidentally, Sixto had kept in a paper bag under the shredded leather seat of his cab. This he swigged from while showing her the sights—just getting from one end of Obispo Street to the other, in a glut of carts and taxis and lorries, took a half an hour. Driving for so many years, Sixto thought there was nothing to it, so why not a little sip of rum to ease things when the day’s work was practically over?—just like her papito’s philosophy of life.

  And so, as they headed over to the slaughterhouse district, which was at the far end of the harbor, beyond the last of the Ward Line warehouses, Sixto’s manner changed somewhat, though not in a terrible way. He didn’t start rubbing himself or make burning noises, nor for that matter did he try anything with María—she was just a young girl after all, a guajira with the kind of face and figure that make men do and say things that they probably wouldn’t otherwise, and, in Sixto’s case, certainly not back home with the wife, nosireee. He just started looking as if the world was about to end, kept gulping and licking his lower lips, and staring at her like a starved man with a terrible secret. Finally, not able to take it anymore, before turning in to the chain-link-fenced entry to the Gallegos slaughterhouse, he had to pull over; and once he had, he began to cry, tears the color of amber dripping from his eyes and over the ridges of his gargoyle’s face.

  María didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on—wondering if she was at fault for his sudden sadness. In his gruff and rustic manner, the poor man was so much like the guajiros back home that one part of her felt like doing something to please him. Back in her valle that had come down to letting some of the men, so weary from their days in the field, roam their callused hands over her face, so they could feel the softness of her skin; and all she had to do was just smile, and that was sometimes enough to make them happier. (Oh, but then there were the others, who, as she got older and filled out, wanted a little more from her, and, looking at her in the same way as Sixto, begged her to embrace them, or to lift her skirt just high enough so that they could see the shapeliness of her legs, which some, so good-naturedly, as if examining a foal, wanted to touch….)

  “Sixto, are you okay?” she asked. “Sixto, is there something wrong?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all…. It’s just that I wish,” he said, his head lowered, “I wish I could go back in time, and get to know you better in a way that would make you happy, that’s all.”

  “But, Sixto, I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You’re so precious, you make a nobody like me wish he could start over again in life.”

  And he seemed lost to the world, not just because of the rum or the fact he knew that he probably smelled bad to others, but because he had reached inside of himself and taken hold of his own heart, squeezing it until there was nothing left but his own pain, just like her papito used to.

  Or at least that’s what María thought, being such a softhearted girl in those days.

  “I know I’m an ugly man and I smell of animals,” he went on. “But, please, can you do me one little favor?”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “Just give me one little besito—that’s all, doesn’t have to be on my mouth, but here,” he said, tapping his cheek. “Even one on the side of my face would make me feel content.”

  He seemed like an animal in pain, an aging one, like those old hounds she’d see on the farm who, no longer able to roam wildly across the fields, would just lie down on their sides, waiting for someone to caress their heaving bellies. She always did.

  And because María was grateful for that lift into the city, and even if it turned her stomach to do it, she gave that Sixto a cautious nip on the side of his face, saw the bristles in his nostrils, the spiderwebs in his ears, smelled the rawness of his breath, and felt sad for the man; but wouldn’t you know it, at the same time he couldn’t help but take her hand and move it towards his right leg, where something had crept forward, uncoiling gradually, a stony gargoyle’s erection, like a piece of tubing expanding inside his trousers—was it filled with tears or blood? (Of suffering, or of lust?) At the sight—and touch—of it, her k
nuckles having grazed that protuberance, María turned away, pulled back her hand, pretending that nothing had happened.

  They both pretended, Sixto, with a deep breath, starting the truck again and driving it over to a delivery pen. There he had some kind of discussion with a foreman and, letting drop the rear gate, rousted his swine, some forty or so, into their own little compound, where they were to be counted, weighed, and, depending on that, kept to be further fattened up on palmiche or else led immediately to the slaughter. María, it should be said, for all the animals she had (reluctantly) killed herself on the farm, had never experienced such an overwhelming scent of blood and entrails in the air before. Or maybe it was all their suffering that she was feeling—squeals and blurting cattle cries resounded from the long stock houses inside. Somewhere nearby, and much worse, however, was a tannery, which filled the air with a viscous smell like lacquered rotting flesh, so foul as to turn her stomach. She had to get out. Stepping down from the cab, and feeling ashamed of herself, beautiful María, in her first act in Havana, stumbled over to a corner where she emptied her guts into a puddle of stagnant water—her lovely reflection, with her startling eyes, staring back up at her through the muck, her expression bewildered, as if to ask, Chica, what on earth are you doing here?

  Oh, but the workers were nice to her. She cleaned up in one of their washrooms, its flush toilets and spigot taps delighting her. Someone gave María a bottle of Coca-Cola, someone else, a package of chewing gum, and a third offered her a cigarette, which she declined. Then, for an hour or so, she just sat waiting in an office thumbing through magazines that she couldn’t read, though the pictures of Hollywood stars always engaged her. Johnny Weissmuller, still making those Tarzan movies, was the sort of man that always made her wonder just what men in loincloths thought about as they swung through the trees. And Tyrone Power, a dazzlingly good-looking fellow whose teeth were so white she wondered if they were real (though, according to María, as she would tell her daughter a million times, he was not as handsome as her músico.) Once Sixto had settled up, he introduced María to the boss, who, taking one look and caring little about what she could do, offered her a job “cleaning,” as he put it, for a peso a day in the slaughterhouse. She turned him down—it was just too much for her, too much blood and stink, the torrents of flies alone enough to make her sick again.

  Afterwards, Sixto drove her to a cheap hotel near the old quarter. And while she had pretended that everything was fine about staying there, she didn’t feel too good about the way Sixto, with a happy look in his eyes, kept promising to visit her whenever he came back to the city, about three or four times a month, he said. So for the sake of avoiding any hurt feelings, she thanked him for all his help and stood by the doorway of that hotel waving farewell and smiling as if she really hadn’t been offended and frightened by what she had seen in his trousers—men saying one thing, but meaning another. Once his truck had disappeared down a street of whose name she had no inkling, María, with her little cloth sack and her new purchases, excused herself and left the dingy lobby of that hotel. She had nothing against the sunken-eyed proprietor—he seemed nice enough in his forlorn way—she just didn’t want to take a chance of Sixto getting any ideas about coming back to find her.

  Chapter THREE

  Having gone from hotel to hotel and boardinghouse to boardinghouse for most of that afternoon, she found the cheapest place possible. It was off Virtudes, or perhaps San Isidro, or maybe along one of those narrow winding cobblestone streets near the harbor—a place of such squalor that she’d one day get the shivers just thinking about it. A kindly anciana, la señora Matilda Díaz, of portly dimensions, was one of those gallegas whose skin had a yellow pallor from smoking cigarettes from dawn to dusk. With a mustiness that no amount of nicotine could cover, she took a liking to the young woman, an innocent from the countryside with obviously no experience of what living in a city like Havana was about. The men around there, muy suave, or real slick, were not to be believed or trusted.

  “You should be careful,” she told María. “I was once as pretty as you, believe it or not. But, as you can see”—and she shrugged—“the passing of the years will wilt even the finest bloom.” Shortly, she took María to a room on the third floor which cost about a peseta a night, or a quarter, a rent that, even in 1947, would have been considered inexpensive (as opposed to two hundred and fifty dollars a night for a suite in the Italian port town of Portofino, where María and her daughter, by then a doctor, were to stay many years later). There wasn’t much to it, just a cot, a lamp, a chair, a washbasin, a speckled doorway mirror, with a toilet and shower down the hall—“Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t”—but, though far from being comfortable, at least it had a high doorway with shutters and a little balcony that looked out onto an inner courtyard and over to other similar rooms.

  Used to the countryside, where everyone knew your business, María made nothing of the fact that right across the way she could see one of her neighbors, a lanky dissipated fellow with a wild pompadour and pronounced gut, standing on his balcony in only a pair of calzoncillos. Frying some bacalao over a hot plate, he whistled as soon as their eyes met. From another direction, a woman, obviously a whore, closing her shutters, sent María a kiss off the upturned palm of her hand before going inside to do whatever whores did. (María knew but didn’t let on, while the señora, well aware of the quality and livelihood of her tenants, simply shrugged again.)

  Still, María took comfort in having neighbors and in the fact that she could at least open her windows to get a breath of air at night. But María, out on her own for the first time, and feeling frightened by the prospect of having to get along in a city she hardly knew, where she’d have to depend on strangers to help her get around—she was an analfabeta, an illiterate, after all—could barely work up the nerve to go out that evening. Just too much was going on—trolley cars clanging, cars honking horns, horses clip-clopping along, distant sirens blaring, radios sounding from a half dozen windows, voices chattering, a river of life out on the street. Coming from the sticks, she found herself feeling far more clueless than she, without knowing anyone, could have predicted. Por Dios, she even started missing that damned campo, where not much ever really happened, and her papito, who could be a pain in the culo, as well as the farmers and their animals; and she missed her younger sister, Teresita, and her mamá, who were both dead.

  Lordy, it was a lonely place.

  With her stomach queasy from hunger and her gum chewed down to nothing, all she could do was to go downstairs and ask the señora for something to eat. La señora Matilda was not a stingy woman, and cooked her a tortilla of potatoes and chorizo, but once María followed her into her little suite of rooms, the sight of the absolute filth of her kitchen did not do much for María’s appetite—no wonder, as she later learned, the tenants of that residence had nicknamed it the Hotel Cucaracha. Nevertheless, María thanked her for the meal, devouring it quickly, and, once upstairs, finally unpacked her few possessions: a precious hand mirror, a photograph, cracked and fading, of her mamá y papito on their wedding day years and years ago, a remnant of Teresita’s hair, which she kept in an envelope, along with a picture of them as girls, posed in a photography shop in San Jacinto, the town nearest to their valley, their faces pressed together, María beaming and Teresita showing not an inkling of the afflictions that would take her life. Among the superstitious charms and amulets that really don’t make any difference to the world, she had brought along the rosary that had been her mother’s. Of course, out of old habit, María, before turning in to bed, got down on her knees to pray, her whispers slipping out into the courtyard, from which she could hear many of her neighbors. They were either drunk and shouting or else singing, their voices rising into the night, up towards the sky, with its sprinkling of stars, towards the indifference of heaven.

  FINDING A JOB AS A DANCER WAS NOTHING THAT SHE HAD GIVEN thought to, even if her papito had always told María that she was a na
tural rumbera. At first, it hadn’t entered her mind, but after a month in that city, as a resident of her splendid hotel, with all its chinches and cockroaches, all María had to show for her daily excursions, when she had knocked on every factory and warehouse door, were sore feet and a fanny whose nalgitas had been worn thin by the staring of men. Those habaneros, as she would tell her daughter one day, knew a good thing when they saw it, and being more overtly prone than the guajiros of the countryside, made no bones about letting on to María that she was nothing less than spectacular, as far as the female species goes. In fact, she spent several days toiling at a tobacco factory off Comerciales, another few as a seamstress in a clothing concern, and had found occasional work cleaning up after customers in a café three doors over from the hotel. Now, if she had been hired at all, in a city filled with illiterates looking for work—or else begging, pidiendo limosna—it was because, in the first two instances, those establishments were managed by men who wanted something more than her labors. At the end of the second day’s work, she ran out of the tobacco factory after the floor manager asked her to stay behind once the others had gone and, while pretending to teach her a special technique, pushed himself up against María and reached over to fondle her breast, the pig! The other boss, at the sewing factory, pinched her bottom every time he could, and, because she had her pride, María refused to take much more of that either. (That such a nice-looking man, who wore a medallion bearing an image of la Virgen de la Caridad, could do such a thing!) Her third job, in that little café, el Paraíso, really wasn’t bad. Its gangly, hound-faced proprietor, an older man with a hopelessly immense scrotum, hired María for a few hours a day simply because he recognized her look of hunger; for her troubles, he paid her a couple of reales and, as well, occasionally fried her a thin oxen steak with onions with some papas fritas, which she happily devoured despite that dish’s slightly rancid taste.