Beautiful Maria of My Soul

  One Sunday night she finally had the honor of meeting Cesar Castillo in one of those beachside dance bars in Marianao, a dingy, smoky, spilled-beer-and-lard-fried-fish-smelling place called El Oriente, its patrons, mostly black folks, tearing it up with rumbas. When she’d walked in, Nestor and his brother, in their linen slacks and guayaberas, were standing side by side on a narrow plywood stage with some five other musicians, playing, amongst them, double bass, a guitar, a tres, and several drums, in addition to Nestor’s trumpet. If María had a puzzled expression on her face as she made her way through the crowd, the men whistling and sucking air through their teeth at the sight of her in a juicily tight pair of watermelon pink slacks and matching blouse, it was because she had spent most of that very afternoon with Ignacio, her former man.

  Just how did this happen?

  (“Bueno, it was just one of those things,” María would later think.)

  He had been driving through downtown Havana in his white Chevrolet when he saw María, ever unmistakable, strolling along Neptuno on her way back from church. Slowing up, he beeped at her, and wouldn’t you know it, Ignacio, one of those hard Cuban fellows willing to forgive and forget his own faults and transgressions, couldn’t have been more friendly or charming, asking María if she wanted a lift anywhere. She didn’t, but she got in beside him anyway, feeling a nostalgia—not for his abuses or even his money, but for his strength, as well as their “old times.”

  In fact, just to see Ignacio again had somehow made her feel happy.

  That Sunday morning was gloriously defined by a perfect sky, the ocean looking pristine, and breezes, smelling cleanly of both salt and tropic spices, blowing languidly in. In fact, it was so nice a day that Ignacio suggested they take a drive to the beaches east of the city. At first María told him she wasn’t interested, after all, she had una cita later in the evening—to finally see Nestor and his brother performing—but he promised they’d be away only a few hours.

  Soon enough they were driving along the coast, the way they sometimes used to, and as they passed the marshes and mangrove swamps by the sea and came to an overlook, the gulf and sky brilliant before them, Ignacio, pulling over, heart in hand, made his confessions. Penitent, regretful, he told María that things between himself and the infamous Lola Sánchez were over.

  “María, I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, “but whenever me and that woman were together, I was really thinking about you.” As for the way he had treated her the last time they’d been together, he claimed that the pressures of business and too much drinking had made his temper get out of hand. That’s why he had gone away from Havana for a time—to Miami and San Juan, where he had come to realize how much he missed her, “his little guajira.” And so he swore that he was a changed man and wouldn’t drink and treat her badly, if only she would come back to him.

  “Because I want to be completely honest with you, María,” he told her, “I’m going to tell you everything.” It came down to this: “For years, I’ve made my living dishonestly…. There’s not a warehouse in the harbor that I haven’t broken into with my men, or a ship along the Ward Line and E & O wharves where I haven’t found my merchandise. Or a policeman that I haven’t taken care of,” he went on and rubbed one of his medallions. “But I’m giving all that up, María. Not out of any guilt—I’ve always offered all kinds of goods for the people at very affordable prices—there’s no shame in that, is there? God has obviously protected me…. Maybe he’s even blessed me, for reasons that only he knows…. Along the way I’ve saved more than enough money, María, to open a legitimate negocio.…And so I have my plans. There’s a commercial space over on Galiano that I’m going to rent, and I will fill it with the finest clothing from Europe and America. You, of course, can be a model in the photographs that I will put in that window.”

  She looked at him, smiling a little sadly.

  “Why clothing? you are wondering,” he said, driving on and turning the wheel of bright red leather. “Because Havana is booming these days, packed with tourists who have money in their pockets; the same ones who fill the clubs and brothels have wives they’ll have to please. It’ll be a fancy place. I’m planning to put a little bar in the back—so that my customers can have some drinks while they shop—and I think I’ll put in a lipstick counter too. And that’s just the beginning.” He sounded a little crazy, but at least he wasn’t pushing or slapping her around like he used to. “But above all, María, I want you to understand that I’m putting my life in proper order, and I want you to be a part of that order, como mi mujer— as my woman—if you will have me.” He placed his hand over his heart. “I swear I’m telling you the truth.”

  María, in those moments, didn’t know what to think. For all those months with Nestor, Ignacio had continued to pay her rent—but why? And while she had enjoyed Nestor’s company, she had always wondered why Ignacio had not once contacted her at the club.

  “ Ignacio, I have someone, un joven, close to my own age,” she finally told him. “He cares for me.”

  “Oh, the trumpet player, yes?” He hardly blinked. “His name is Nestor Castillo, and he’s a two-bit musician who works in some nothing job as a lackey busboy at the Explorers’ Club near the Capitolio, doesn’t he? Lives with a relative in a flat off Solares Street near the harbor, number twenty-four, in fact. He leaves for his job about ten in the morning, and has his lunch break about three when he comes to see you, two or three times a week. Am I correct?”

  “Ignacio, but how do you know?”

  “I just know,” he said, María’s stomach going into knots. Then, before she could say a word, he added, “Mi vida, I wouldn’t be sitting here if I didn’t think that you deserved better.” Then, “What you do with yourself and some nobody, who will give you nothing in life, is your own business. And so I’ll leave that decision to you and hope that you will come to your senses.”

  That’s when Ignacio took out a roll of twenty-dollar bills, thick as Nestor’s pinga, and, unfurling a few, dropped them onto María’s lap. “For your papito,” he told her. Then he pulled her close and gave her a nice kiss on her neck, and because she felt such gratitude that Ignacio hadn’t yelled or insulted her, and it was such a fine day, María didn’t mind when he undid the white felt buttons of her blue church dress, the very one he’d bought for her at El Fin de Siglo, and began to fondle, then suckle her breasts. “Ay, María,” he told her, “if you only knew how much I’ve missed you.” She should have known better, but when he released the buckle of his belt, María, pulling back her hair, with resignation and detachment, took care of Ignacio the way she used to—why, she didn’t know.

  “If you give me another chance, María,” he told her afterwards, “I promise that I will make you happy.”

  Altogether, it was as if Ignacio had stepped out of a bolero about the possible ruination of another’s love.

  That night, as she crossed the crowded dance floor to the bar, Nestor spotted María from the stage, his smile shooting across the room. By then several men had asked María to dance, and though she turned the first few away, this lanky negrito, who moved like a skulking burglar, pulled her out onto the floor, where, without even wanting to, she found herself putting on a show. That’s when Nestor, up on the little stage, pointed her out to his brother, and Cesar, scraping a güiro and in the midst of a few dance steps himself, seeing her for the first time, nodded wildly in approval. “So that’s your darling!”

  From that moment on, Cesar and Nestor decided to put on a hell of a performance, the brothers harmonizing during the choruses, and then Cesar stepping back and letting Nestor play his solos. They were a sight to see—each possessing deep-set and soulful, slightly melancholy eyes, the chiseled cheekbones, the cleft chins, the sensitive, well-formed mouths—two buenmosos, lady-killers—but with a difference. Whereas Nestor had a pristine handsomeness about him, an innocence and the pained expression of a saint, and moved modestly onstage, Cesar seemed to revel in a kind of sly majesty—
his hair brilliantined to death, so that it crested like an ocean wave, his brow covered with sweat, a pencil-thin mustache in the manner of Gilbert Roland or Xavier Cugat (the fashion of the times) punctuating a visage that was anything but sincere—despite the way he poured his heart into his songs, whether guaguancós, boleros, or rumba-tumbaos.

  And María? She’d seen his type before, swaggering cocks of the walk, from guajiro to government functionary, who considered themselves God’s gifts to womankind, the sorts of men she encountered every day of her life, and did her best to avoid. But there Cesar stood, hamming it up on that little stage, while Nestor, occupied with the nuances of his mellifluous scales and melodies, could have not been more deferential, ever so happily allowing his brother the leading role, the way, María imagined, he did in life.

  They performed a few of their own compositions; one of them was a lark of a song, no doubt written by Cesar, always at the edge of the stage between numbers sweet-talking any of the unattached women around. It was called “I Forgot It Was My Wedding Day!” and Nestor, strumming a guitar, launched into a romantic bolero that she was fairly certain he had written about her, even if he did not use her name. That song’s title was a bit over her head; Nestor introduced it as “¿Si la vida es sueño, qué es el amor?” Or, “If Life Is a Dream, Then What Is Love?” The heart of the tune was about how some fellow with nothing particularly special going on in his life meets a woman who delights him so much that he is convinced he must be dreaming, or else so much in love he can’t help but wonder if he is losing his common sense.

  “Puede ser,” the last lines went, “este sueño es mi destino.”

  “Could be that my dream is also my destiny.”

  “To love that which I cannot really see.”

  “A amar lo que no puedo ver.”

  By the time the brothers had gotten to that particular composition, sometime past ten, any sad, tear-jerking bolero—the music of romantic lives—would have pleased the crowd, who, in any case, would have slow-danced to it all night long. Up onstage, Nestor was so sincere in his sentiments that by the last verses of that song he was wiping his eyes and brow with a handkerchief. His expression seemed haunted, a darkness passing over his face.

  They’d been onstage for two hours straight; now, leaving the jukebox to take over, the musicians headed to a table in the back. Joining them, María, somewhat shocked by Ignacio’s sudden reappearance in her life, could not quite look Nestor in the eyes. But she greeted him with a kiss while Cesar, standing by his brother’s side and checking her out with X-ray vision, smiled and waited for the introduction.

  “So you’re María?” then “Holy cow, Brother!” Cesar cried out, slapping Nestor’s back. “Does she have a sister?” (Oh, but how María wished she had.) Then he sat right down next to her, saying, “So you are the one, huh?” And though Cesar was the sort who would have done anything to get her into bed if it weren’t for the fact that she was with his brother, he behaved kindly towards her, as if he were her uncle, introducing the other musicians and making sure that she had anything she wanted to eat or drink. Then, while Nestor went off to the pestilential men’s room, Cesar, sticking little knives in María’s back, went on and on about how he had never seen his little brother so contented.

  “Because you see, María, mi hermanito is a little too serious about life sometimes, and because of that he feels for all the sufrimiento in the world—which, as you know, there’s plenty of it and always will be.” His eyes were filled with nothing but pure appreciation. “But you have made him as happy as a little bird. I’ve never heard Nestor whistling so much in my life. You’ve turned him into a new man, and while there’s still a lot of sadness in his heart—some tipos are just that way, and Nestor’s one of them—he’s now filled with more light, and if I may say so, mi belleza, that light has a name, and it’s yours: María.”

  Oh, my lord, he was smooth.

  Then he looked at her with the same expression that poor children get when they stare at people eating in fancy cafés. “I don’t know how you feel about my brother, but I will tell you this,” he said, pointing his finger at her, “be good to him, because that brother of mine is everything to me. Everything.”

  As María sat back, Cesar, noting her air of distraction, changed the subject: “So, are you enjoying the music?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, sincerely.

  “Well, this group is something we put together just for tonight, this bar’s owner is an old friend—he comes from Holguín after all—but, even if it’s not a fancy place, you should know that we aren’t slackers. We’ve sat in and performed with some of the best-known bands in Havana, like the Melody Boys! But I’ve got my own ideas for us.” And he told her about the kinds of ambitions that left her feeling sad for that poor lost soul’s dreams. Sooner or later, he believed, they were going to make their mark in Havana, a city already overrun with thousands of first-rate singers and musicians, where music hummed through the walls like water through pipes.

  “And if not in Havana,” he added, “then somewhere else!”

  Of course, she already knew where that other place might be: New York City. Nestor, with a forlornness that was touching, had not so long before told her, while speaking about Cesar’s ambitions, “If we ever do leave Cuba, María, I want you to accompany me. Because if you don’t, I don’t think I’ll ever go.”

  Even then María knew that she never would. It was hard enough to have left the campo for Havana, but to leave Cuba was the last thing to enter her mind. She kept thinking about Nestor, however: if only he were a different sort—the sort to make her feel that she wouldn’t end up living like a pauper.

  Later, when Nestor had returned, Cesar ordered more drinks and, downing his rum with one swallow, slapped Nestor’s shoulder. “Brother, why don’t you take the rest of the night off? There are plenty of musicians around here to fill in for you.” Then he winked at Nestor, traipsed off rather swaggeringly, and went back onstage.

  Thereafter commenced their usual problems; María, alone with Nestor, really didn’t have much to say to him. Not that she had much to say to anyone in those days, but with Nestor silence was more the rule, except when he would pull out his notebook and recite some of his newly composed verses, which she admittedly liked, despite the way they confounded her. In fact, sometimes at night, when she’d come home from the club, her feet blistered, and she had the peace of mind to think about her week’s lessons with Lázaro, María found herself daring to think in verse herself. If only she could write them down…What those verses tended towards surprised her—her holy trinity: God, love, and death—even if they resided mainly inside her head, but she owed them to Nestor’s inspiration.

  With the bar’s lights shining on the stage, Cesar Castillo said a few words into a pitifully sad, often muffled microphone—they had borrowed it from someone’s tape recorder and plugged it into a little RCA amplifier. Then he launched, for Nestor and María’s sake, into “Juventud” by Ernesto Lecuona, an old bolero about how youth is but a fleeting thing, which makes everyone, no matter his or her age, entangle in a tight embrace. Taking María by the hand, Nestor led her out onto the floor. She’d laugh (and curse) the fact one day, but it didn’t take more than the touch of her body against his to excite him—excite them both. With Nestor leaning his handsome face against hers, whispering endearments, like clockwork, from deep inside his trousers rose, as surely as Christ, that which jostled her thighs in the darkness and kissed her belly button through the fabric. (“Ay, pero María, María,” he kept whispering.)

  The sensation brought to mind the first verse she had ever composed in secret but did not know how to write down.

  Pedazos de bambú tiesos…

  Fragmentos de la cruz

  Durísimos y llenitos de jugos dulces

  Y sangres sagradas

  Vosotros queman dentro mis interiores—

  (Hard pieces of bamboo,

  Fragments of the Cross,

  Full of
sweet juices and

  Sacred blood…

  You go burning inside of me…)

  AFTERWARDS, STEALING AWAY, THEY SAT BY THE WATERSIDE, surrounded by an aureole of gnats, and as the moon, brilliant as God, looked down on them, Nestor told her about two new songs he had written: “One is called ‘Danzón de los negros,’ the other ‘Perla de mi corazón,’ which is really about you María…” As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he sang one of its lines: “Our love is a weeping ocean, whose tears become the loveliest of jewels.”

  “I haven’t gotten it all worked out, María, but I know I will, in the same way I know that we are destined to be together.” Happily he looked up at the sky. “That my brother Cesar likes you very much is really wonderful, María.” Then: “Don’t you know I can’t wait for the day when we will be a family?” With that, taking hold of María’s hand, he swore that he would do anything for her and broached the question he had been asking her for months each time they met: “María, have you considered your answer? Will you become my wife?”

  She sighed, looked away, and as the lyrics to a song, a chorus part that went “Y lo aprendí!”—“And I found out!”—came from the club, María, tears in her eyes, told him, “Nestor, please forgive me, but I can’t, my love.”

  “But why?” His face was contorted with anguish.

  “Nestor, I just don’t want to be a poor woman all my life.”

  “And if I were to make something of myself?”

  “Oh, but hombre, you dream too much.”

  And then, in the most kindly way, she kissed Nestor on his lips. “Forgive me, amor,” she asked him again, his head bowed, eyes filled with disbelief, on that night, long ago, by the sea.

  Chapter TWENTY-TWO

  Oh, but it wasn’t easy; she had grown fond of that músico. Out of pity, for every time she saw him, he seemed so forlorn, María continued to take Nestor to her bed, and, swearing to herself that it would be their last romp, each time they made love she gave herself to him as if there would be no tomorrow. Along the way, his creative side penetrated María almost as deeply as did his other parts.