Beautiful Maria of My Soul Read online

  Still, it came down to the same thing. Called into his office to discuss a featured spot in the chorus, María had listened to him sing her praises as a dancer when, out of the blue, he pulled from a drawer a pair of elbow-length white satin gloves and then, with boyish reticence, asked her to put those gloves on and fondle him. “Please, I beg you.” Then he made a confession, declaring that it was very hard to go through life loving one of his dancers the way he loved her; that with his days in the world so short—he just knew it—he could go to his grave happily if only she would perform that little act. She almost did—not for a better job, or because of the way he had set aside a twenty-dollar bill on the ink blotter of his desk for her, but because he seemed to be telling the truth—he certainly looked like he was not long for this world. That evening she almost gave in to the inner argument that, far from being a lowly act, it would be one of decency and grace—his sadness cutting into her. In the end, however, even when she had gone so far as to slip those gloves on, the words puta and lowlife flashing through her mind, her kindlier inclinations lost out to her virtuous resolve, and, with tears in her eyes, she fled that room.

  A few weeks later, when she heard that Señor Aponte had dropped dead from a heart attack while walking in the arcades of Galliano, she surely had felt bad. When she heard the rumor that a love note written to one of the chorus girls had been found in his pocket, she was certain that it had been intended for her, though she wouldn’t have been able to read it. For days, she wished to God that she had honored that man’s simple request—perhaps a last wish—the money would have been useful and he would have been happy. Who would it have hurt, and who would have known about it?

  No, she was not about to become one of those young girls who happen to lie down for money with men. It would have been easy enough to find takers, for she had already been stirring the male juices for a long time in that city, and the expression on María’s nearly ecstatic face as she danced left men seriously fatigued with desire. She’d already received half a dozen marriage proposals from men on her street, a barber and a shoe repairman among them, and a few louts without jobs—maybe they were numbers runners for the races out at the dog track—with nothing more to offer her than the shirts on their backs. A few of her potential courters were wily neighbors at the Hotel Cucaracha who sometimes waited half the night for her to come traipsing up the stairs; but just walking along the streets of Havana, at any hour of the day, she attracted men who’d follow her for blocks and frighten her with the suggestive remarks they’d make. And some, most gentlemanly sorts, in their fine linen suits, adopting a more polite demeanor, doffed their hats at her and, with the utmost politeness, asked if they might accompany her for a while, and other questions followed, along the lines of where she lived and worked. She hardly ever told them the truth, even if she sometimes felt terribly alone.

  She so stood out on the streets of Havana that, on many a night, while leaving one club or another at four in the morning, she’d drape a veil or a mantilla over her face, haunting the darkened arcades and alleys through which she passed like a spirit, her high heels clicking against the cobblestones beneath her. In the light of day, however, there was no way of concealing herself—if only she could be more like those carefree cubanas she saw, proudly swaying their big kiss-me culos as they sashayed down the street. But the truth is that María could have been wearing a crown of thorns and dragging a cross behind her and she still would have attracted amorous attention. Strolling along the Malecón in her simple ruffle-skirted dress, she’d slow traffic, the drivers of trucks and automobiles, and even the Havana Police in their cruisers, pumping on their brakes to get a better look at her shapely gait. Bootblacks scrambled to give her shoes a free buffing. Old men did double takes, for that desire’s the last thing to go. So did the street sweepers, window washers, and those fellows who went from door to door with grindstones to sharpen household cutlery. Bicyclists tling-tlinged María. Fruit and produce vendors, selling their goods from carts and stands, refused to take her money or, when they did, never charged her the full amount, often sending María away with more mangoes, avocados, and garlic bulbs than she could possibly have use for. Florists gave her bouquets—chrysanthemums and roses and little bouquets of purple and white mariposas, the national flower of Cuba.

  At the intersection of Compostela and O’Reilly, a blind beggar, Mercurio, standing by a newspaper kiosk, seemed to regain his sight whenever she happened to pass by, that sly negrito who sold pencils out of a jar and sang ballads for pennies breaking into a broad grin as if, indeed, through his pitch-black glasses he could see the shapeliness of María’s body inside her dress. And in his goatish white-haired madness, el Caballero de París, as he was known in Havana, a locally famous eccentric of Bohemian habits, wearing a beret and a heavy frock even in the heat of the day, followed her around as well, expounding poetry in praise of María as he strode beside her. Even priests and monsignors, striding solemnly out from one or other of Havana’s myriad churches, abandoned their vows of worldly indifference and, at the sight of María’s nalgitas as they bobbed inside her dress, kissed their scapulars, thanking God for his handiwork.

  “Eres una maravilla”—“You are a wonder”—was the kind of thing she heard over and over again.

  Her face, in some ways, must have seemed saintly. During her church visits to pray and dream, Havana Cathedral with its musty and timeless interior being a favorite refuge, María received endless (useless) blessings from priests, supplicants, and beggars alike. Now and then, someone in the plaza would make her the gift of a rosary or a vial of holy water or a prayer card—even a relic sometimes. And while she could not have been more polite or gracious, or more thankful for their gifts, María had stopped believing that such religious objects made any difference in this world.

  Street urchins, traveling in packs, followed her, tugged at her skirt hems, danced by her feet, and harassed anyone else who looked at her. From their second-floor windows, old women, Spanish fans in hand, smiled, admiring her as well (María, after all, was their own past). As she was cutting through a cul-de-sac alley between apartment buildings, there was always some fellow, bored to death or horny, on his balcony to call down to María, asking, with a sly expression on his face, if she would like to have a drink or go dancing. On the majestic Prado, managers offered her free meals just for sitting by a table in their outdoor cafés. (At least María knew she never had to go hungry.)

  Among the suave and easygoing cubanos she encountered daily, who flirted as a matter of basic decorum, it often amounted to a pleasant enough game, the very fact that María, wearing a sphinxlike mask, might occasionally crack a sonrisa, a smile, was enough to send these dandies and caballeros dancing happily off into their futures. Crude sorts, however, also abounded. In a market off Lamparilla, there was a carnicero, a butcher, she tried to avoid. Whenever she passed by his stall, which smelled of fresh-killed meat, he always gave her body an up and down. It didn’t matter if she was just trying to mind her own business. Winking, sucking air in through his teeth, he took delight in waving calves’ tongues, bulls’ testicles, and the biggest chorizos in his stall at her. And sometimes, if she were passing through a crowded marketplace, both disembodied hands and other parts pressed against her.

  Worse, however, were the out-and-out obscene gestures that came her way, especially at night, as she went walking home. When the clubs had closed and even the bordellos of la Marina and Colón were winding down, there was always the chance that some borrachero, barely able to stand straight against an arcade column, might grab himself through his trousers, all the while boasting that he had a tremendous malanga awaiting her. (Some of those “caballeros” actually had a romantic gleam in their eyes—as if their ardor was akin to an expression of love, and as if María might actually fall to pieces and succumb to their masculine powers, the shits.) And you would be surprised by the number of times that such sorts of men, stepping towards María from the shadows, actually pulled their
stiff pingas out to show her—oh, how María wished she had that butcher’s cleaver with which to cut those chorizos off, may God forgive her for such unkindly thoughts.

  On those occasions—twice with the same degenerate whose appendage, enhanced by the glowing penumbra cast by the arcade’s light, seemed shockingly large—she spat and cursed such filthy-minded louses—the chusmas—for not leaving her alone; then she’d march stoically on. And each time she did, María felt her kindly guajira soul hardening a little more, her skin growing thicker, and her patience for the vicissitudes of men wearing thin.

  Putting up with a lot, María could have used someone to look after her. And that feeling just grew stronger as time went on. Missing her valle, she sometimes spent her evenings off from the clubs in that hallway with la señora, with her slight urine smell, listening to anything on the radio, so long as she wouldn’t have to sit in her room alone. She dreaded the prospect of sleep—she’d twist and turn thinking about her dead sister and the look of horror on her face when she gave her a beating, kept imagining her drowning in that pool beneath the cascades. She’d get down on her knees to beg Teresita’s spirit for her forgiveness, but no matter what, no sooner did she finally get under the covers of her chinche-ridden bed, hoping for pleasant dreams, than she began to fill with a terrible apprehension that shot through her body like electricity; she’d sit up, trembling, and out of habit, and a feeble hope, she’d pray. And when that didn’t work, though she knew it was a sin, she’d reach between her legs, her fingers dampened by her tongue, fondling herself until, writhing and churning her hips into her own hand’s motion, she lifted out of her own history into the momentary oblivion of pleasure, breaking into pieces. And then, of course, she’d slip back into the gloom of guilt, even more deeply than before. But that was María.

  In any event, she was working as a dancer in a new revue—that’s what the professionals called it—at the Club Nocturne, in Vedado, where, one night, fed up with her loneliness, she first met the man who, years later, was to become her daughter, Teresa’s, father.

  Chapter NINE

  She’d noticed him coming into the club a few times before: he was older, somewhere on the far side of his thirties, had a pock-marked face, clear gray eyes, and a pencil-line mustache. He comported himself with authority, hardly ever looked up at anything, not even at the floor show, and always seemed involved with going over a ledger book, or some volume that he was reading. He always dressed nicely in a white silk suit, wore a lavender cologne, or was it lilac scented? The sort to drink only the best stuff, he ordered the same meal of fried pork chops with onions and papas fritas without fail, then smoked cigar after cigar until some late hour, when, as quietly as he’d come in, he would leave. A man of regular routines, without any interest in wasting his money in an adjoining casino room, where there were gaming tables and a roulette wheel, he seemed almost indifferent to that place—why he went there she didn’t know, nor, in fact, did María particularly care.

  That she met him at all was a matter of pure chance. Since part of María’s job was to keep company with the club’s patrons between shows—all the girls had to—she had the misfortune of finding herself at a table with a group of drunk Americans who were beside themselves over the fact that María happened to be wearing so little—just a glittery bandeau and a silvery, tasseled pantalette under a diaphanous chemise. And because the unspoken assumption, the myth (sometimes the truth) had it that such women were often very willing to moonlight as prostitutes, one of these men, a burly fellow, muttering all kinds of drivel she couldn’t understand, had taken the liberty of reaching over to fondle María’s leg under the table. As she, in a fit of pique, stood up to leave, the drunk took hold of her hand and pulled María onto his lap. Just then, before even the club bouncer, a bald black giant named Eliseo, could intercede, this man, Ignacio Fuentes, watching from his table, marched over and grabbed that drunkard’s forearm, forcing it from around María’s belly. Then, looking intently into the drunkard’s eyes and saying a few words in English, and before his friends could make more of a commotion, Ignacio opened his jacket and showed him something that drained the fellow’s ruddy face of color.

  “Okay, okay,” the man said, holding up his hands. “I get it.”

  “Good,” Ignacio said firmly. “Now apologize to the lady.”

  The man mumbled his regrets—and Ignacio, in case María didn’t get the drift, translated: “He says he’s very sorry to have bothered you.” Then, as if his contempt for the fellow had turned to air, and to smooth over the situation, perhaps for the sake of María’s job, he called the waiter over, buying them a round of drinks: “Give those sinvergüenzas whatever they want.” Bowing cordially, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he headed back to his table, and María, who’d had that kind of thing happen to her before without anyone particularly caring, followed him.

  They spoke for only a few minutes—she had another show to perform—but in that time, while thanking him, María had decided that this caballero, a gallant, wasn’t the usual sort who came into the club. Despite his macho demeanor, there was something fiercely intelligent about his eyes, intimidating and somehow reassuring at the same time. Perhaps he was a teacher, maybe a university professor, and a very lonely one, a soltero with a preference for that kind of place. But obviously he couldn’t be—how many maestros were so courageous, and for that matter carried inside their jackets the sort of something that so quickly quieted so unruly a man? What most intrigued her was what he wore on the thin gold chain around his neck: a crucifix, a medallion of the Virgin de Cobre, and a third symbol, which she supposed had something to do with los judíos: it was just like the Star of David hanging outside the synagogue on Santa Clara Street in the old city.

  (“Oh, these two,” he would later tell her, “are for my faith, and the third I wear in case los judíos were right all along.”)

  He didn’t really have too much to say to her: he seemed only obliquely aware of her lusciousness. It was as if her beauty meant nothing to him, which, in a way, she liked and despaired over at the same time. (Was it that he didn’t find her attractive?) Just before going backstage to change into her costume for the second show, an elaborate dance routine staged to the music of Moisés Simóns’ “Cubanacan,” she told him her name—“María…María García y Cifuentes”—and with that, he smiled for the first time. Though he had a few teeth missing, she found his appearance reassuring.

  IT SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN A SURPRISE TO FIND HIM WAITING FOR her on the street afterwards, at four in the morning, María in a raincoat and veil, Ignacio leaning against an alley wall across the way, casually smoking a cigar under the flickering glare of a misspelled neon sign—nigth clubnigth club. She’d come out with three other dancers, one of them, knowing María as a solitary sort (translation: a poor thing scared to death of the city), exhorting María to enjoy herself for a change. (Pero con cuidado, with caution.) So when he offered to accompany her for a while, she didn’t mind. That night, without even attempting to hold her hand or to pull her off into the shadows for a kiss, he seemed a gentlemanly sort, a real caballero, as if he’d never push her up against a wall and take advantage. (Deep down, at the same time, she wanted him to.) Calmly, Ignacio told her about himself: he was a businessman, un trabajador, who’d gotten a little lucky with a going import and export concern, mostly in appliances, based in the harbor. His negocio required that he travel now and then, not just across the island but sometimes to the States—“Tú sabes, pa’ América, y los ciudades de Miami y Nueva York”—but now that they were becoming acquainted, how could he look forward to leaving Havana?

  “But, señor…”

  “Call me Ignacio, please.”

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “What should I know?” he asked. “To be honest, María, before tonight, I’d hardly noticed you—not that I haven’t observed what a tremendous dancer you are—but I’m one of those fellows who believes there’s a reason why thi
ngs happen a certain way. You know that drunkard who was bothering you? I’m almost grateful to him for what happened tonight.” He stopped on the corner of Calle 15 and began fingering the crucifix and the other medallions around his neck. “You see, María, soy viudo—I’m a widower, who once had a wife and una muchachita, a daughter. My wife’s name was Carmen, and she had family up in Tampa, and so I would send them off every so often to visit.” Then, a little sadly: “You remember the hurricane of ’forty-three?”

  Of course she did, it was the same year that half their livestock drowned, the year that Teresita, so confused and lost, threw herself into the cascade’s waters.

  “Their plane went down in that storm, and since then, well, how may I explain myself—I’ve hardly cared less about normal things. I do my work, I sometimes go out, but little else. I can hardly sleep at night thinking of what happened to them. Do you know that feeling?”

  “Sí, señor, I do,” she said.

  “That’s the reason I’m always reading. It keeps my mind on other things. That’s why I sit enjoying the company of others without really having to talk with anyone. I can do that in a club like the Nocturne, where the food is good, and, of course, the entertainment exceptional.”

  They were only a few blocks from the harbor walk, the Malecón, and because he could have cared less about going home and because María after a night of performances stayed up for hours, she didn’t mind accompanying him there. It usually took her an hour to stroll back to la Cucaracha, and the moon, with a sad, pocked face that always seemed to be watching, had lit up the ocean, a tranquil sight to take in.