Beautiful Maria of My Soul

  Now from the moment that Cesar, with his cigarette-ruined yet soulful baritone, stood before the microphone and intoned that song’s first words, “Oh, love’s sadness, Why did you come to me?” and with Nestor, so apprehensive at first, joining in during the chorus, their harmonizing lovely to the ear, and playing his trumpet like a man possessed by love, even that booze-soaked and jaded audience had started nodding in appreciation of its haunted melody. Sitting beside Esmeralda, Desi Arnaz, smoking a Havana puro, felt greatly touched by that song. It was so filled with longing that it seemed to be as much about missing Cuba as about missing a former love, a sentiment that Desi, having lived out in California for so long, must surely have shared. He certainly seemed to, for at the song’s conclusion, he stood up and applauded the Castillo brothers enthusiastically.

  After the rest of their set, not a bad set at all, when the brothers had come offstage to relax and made their way through the room, they went over to Esmeralda’s table, where she made their introductions.

  Lacking the luxury of a television set, the brothers didn’t know anything about his show, but they had heard Desi’s name around and knew he was the most famous cubano in America. In fact, Cesar had some kind of vague recollection of meeting Arnaz, as a very young man, many years before in some hilltop club in Santiago when they were both starting out and working that circuit as singers. Still, they were immediately friendly, shaking hands, rapping each other’s backs, and almost getting teary eyed—with Cubans, that wasn’t an unusual thing. Arnaz was dark featured, handsome, and charismatic in a matinee idol way, and his wife, delicately sipping a mango punch through a straw, was a strikingly lovely woman who hardly blinked through the ensuing conversation. The heart of what they talked about, beyond the niceties of where they had both come from—Oriente, the most easterly province in Cuba—and after they had clicked champagne glasses? It came down to this: Known for employing cubanos and helping many an aspiring musician out, Arnaz asked them if they would ever consider flying out to California to perform that “beautiful María” song for a taping of his TV show.

  “It’s called I Love Lucy,” he said.

  “Oh yes, of course, I Love Lucy.”

  Cesar scratched the back of his head at the offer. They weren’t actors but could surely use a real break, for after years of working second-tier clubs and ballrooms, and playing Catskills gigs, their band, the Mambo Kings, deserving better, hadn’t really gotten anywhere at all. (This was practically Cesar’s fault—he didn’t like the gangsters who ran the best places and had gotten a reputation among them as a difficult and arrogant two-bit singer, way too big for his britches. It didn’t help that he refused to sign any shifty contracts or that he’d bedded down many of their most luscious molls.) Looking over at Nestor, his dark eyebrows raised, Cesar asked: “What do you think, Brother?”

  And Nestor, with Esmeralda gently caressing his back as if he was a favorite son, nodded his timid consent. It wasn’t easy. Deep down, the very thought that his lingering pain over and devotion to María—the woman whom Cesar called “a hard-on’s dream”—would be aired before the entire country troubled him. What would Delores think? But his brother was his brother, and there was very little that Nestor wouldn’t do for Cesar.

  Smiling, Cesar told Arnaz that nothing would please them more.

  “Great! Our show is number one in the country,” Arnaz told them. “When you perform that song, maybe it’ll become a number one tune!” He lit another cigar. Then, slipping into Spanish, he explained that his wife wanted to get back to their hotel, the Plaza, and that they’d had a tiring day, though, confidentially, he wouldn’t mind at all just sitting with them and catching the floor shows, but, oh, his was a demanding schedule, which his wife, Lucille, always tapping upon the tiny face of her diamond-movement watch, kept him to.

  As Arnaz was about to leave—Lucille Ball was already by the coat check gathering their garments—he said to the brothers, “I guarantee that you’ll have a good time in Los Angeles. But if you have any problems with the music, my good friend Marco Rizo, my arranger, and pianist on the show, lives right here in town. Give him a call, huh?” He scribbled out a number on a card and dropped it on the table. With that, Arnaz, a broad smile on his face, joined his wife; Cesar followed after them, standing on the curbside without a topcoat, a filterless cigarette in hand, his body shivering in the chill, but still waving at the famous couple as they drove away in their limousine through the falling snow.

  LATER, AFTER SEVERAL HOURS OF SITTING UP DRINKING WITH his brother, and driving him crazy with all his doubts—“Was that canción really any good?” (“Yes, Brother, how many times do I have to tell you!”)—Nestor lay beside his wife, Delores, absently fondling her breasts but thinking about María. If he loved her enough to write that song, why did performing it for the first time in public leave him so low? And why was he filled with such utter misery when, for the first time, he and Cesar finally had a chance at some success? And then he slipped back again into that period of darkness in Havana, when María had thrown him off, and remembered what Cesar had later told him again and again: “Why be stupid about that María when you have such a wonderful woman as Delores in your life?” Ah, but Delores. He’d always told her that “Beautiful María of My Soul” was just a song he’d been fooling with, and there he was, after six years in the States, lying beside Delores and wishing he were back in Havana with María. And he hated himself for that thought, for Delores certainly deserved better. “Te amo, Delores,” he whispered to her again and again. But why was that hole in his heart, like a pin shoved through a photograph from one’s happier youth—as if real happiness was never really possible? Why was he wasting his affections on a woman who had turned into air? He didn’t know, he was just a citified campesino at heart, after all, didn’t know anything about the way real Cuban men treated women. “No soy honesto,” he told himself that night. “No soy decente”—“I’m neither honest or decent.” And he hated himself even more. But thank God that his body, in times of such gloom, always faithfully took over. Kept awake by the clanking of steam pipes, he found himself lifting up the hem of Delores’s nightgown and, feeling the heat of her bottom, drew back her underwear and entered her from behind, Delores, half asleep, sighing at first and then pushing back in a grinding motion and gasping, but not too loudly because she didn’t want the children to hear at the far end of the hall, Nestor, in those same moments, still thinking about María. Then he came after several powerful thrusts, and once he floated back down to earth, he hated himself anew for having that name, that face, that body still lingering stubbornly in his dreams—ah yes, y coño!—María, angel of the heavens, delicious as the balmy dawn off the Malecón and, as women are in many a bolero, an unforgettable apparition of love.*

  Chapter TWENTY-NINE

  Some five months later, María happened to be walking along Obispo in the aftermath of a terrible argument with Ignacio. Lately, he had started to accuse her of becoming sexually indifferent to him, while she in turn, without actually coming out and saying so, suspected that he wasn’t virile enough to give her a child, despite the fact that he claimed to have once fathered a daughter that he lost. And even that loss she had come to doubt—he seemed to spend too much time away in Florida, and more than once she had come across letters tucked away in the soft inner pockets of his maletas, his suitcases, letters that she did not have the gumption to read but that seemed on the evidence of the handwriting on the envelopes to have been scripted by a woman; and so, she had come to believe that Ignacio, like so many other Cuban men of a certain age who had taken up with a younger woman, had a family hidden away somewhere. Nevertheless, just to talk about that supposed loss brought out his soft side, though it wasn’t much in evidence those days. With a life that had become more difficult because of what his Hoy horoscope described as the “mounting influence of unseen contrary forces,” his business, once booming in the provinces, had gone into a decline on account of what the government had
classified as lapses of security, given that rebels far east in Oriente regularly came down from the hills to loot his trucks as they were en route to the cities and small towns of that province. Nor had that store, El Emporio, proved to be anything but a siphon on his income, though Ignacio did enjoy the air of respectability it gave him. Other matters disturbed Ignacio as well. His chest hair had turned white overnight, and his ticker began to ache. Visiting a clinic, not for anti-impotency and venereal disease treatments, or to experience the wonder cures of acupunctura as advertised in the directorio telefónico de la Habana, he began seeing a certain Doctor Cintron, who found Ignacio, with that wormy vein on his forehead, one of the more tense patients he had ever encountered, his blood pressure in a range that defied his bulb-pumped esfigmomanómetro’s capability to measure.

  The doctor’s advice? “Calm down, or you’ll drop dead one day.”

  But at this, he often failed. While he still liked to blaze through the crowds of Havana with beautiful María on his arm, Ignacio had started to notice how he couldn’t lord it over her the way he used to. More than once he’d seen her looking over his Spanish editions of Shakespeare and had noted her own growing collection of books—frivolous novels written in simple language for women of a certain frame of mind, but books nevertheless: so that negrito Lázaro was worth something after all! And her sweetness had begun to fall away, for he found that it did not take too much for him to perturb her, that María often complained about being cooped up in that apartment, that she sometimes wished she’d never left Pinar del Río, that she lived a life no better than her snippy parrots in their cages. And even that would have been fine except for the fact that Ignacio had begun to suspect that María had someone else. This, as it happened, was true.

  That fellow from Y & R had been the first—their little trysts taking place in his fancy suite at the Nacional every so often. He certainly was as handsome as Nestor, though he lacked that soulfulness, which she missed, among other things, and he was so good to her that María might have taken up with Vincente openly were it not for the fact that Ignacio would probably have killed him (and her), and, in any case, she knew he had his own nice family in New York City, just like Nestor, that cabrón. And once María had learned to conceal her feelings, she also took up with a young teller at the bank where she kept her savings, another handsome fellow whose curly hair, soothing eyes, and fortunate endowment reminded her (almost) of Nestor, their liaisons taking place between seven and eight in the evening out in a house on one of the hills overlooking Havana, not far from the university, where this young man’s deaf aunt lived, hardly aware of the raucously loud acts that made her hounds bark. A third lover, a so-called Spanish count—el conde—whom María had met at the Lantern and slept with in his modestly appointed room at the Ambos Mundos Hotel, with its view of the cathedral (of which she had been quite aware and actually enjoyed, as if God lingered somewhere in the distance, though not as close to her as He used to). She did so with her legs spread wide, then closing them tightly as he approached, taunting him, simply because María enjoyed the idea that a former guajira, whose papito shat with the outhouse door open, could make so lofty and pretentious a personage beg to kiss her fine and shapely rump. Those were just a few, with more to follow in her remaining years in Havana—Violeta’s influence and her own suspicion that goodness wasn’t worth much of anything had a lot to do with the way she now moved through her days (or nights); or, to put it differently, María, as the line of a bolero might go, had lately been stripped of her illusions. Having traded love, if that’s what it was, for comfort, she had hardened inside, and Dios, the savior of mankind, does not thrive in such hearts, not even that of a rather beautiful woman; rather He slowly dies.

  And what could Ignacio make of María when she kept grinding her hips in the air, moaning as she slept? Who was she dreaming about? He had her followed, just as he once did with Nestor, by one of his more dissolute and shifty cronies, a fellow named Paco, with a crooked spine and a tendency to drink his way, affably, through half the bars and cafés of Havana. He’d take off behind María when she slipped out of the club or left the apartment building and, in the manner of bad 1940s detective movies, spy on her from the shadows as she entered certain doorways or happened to meet one of those fellows on a street corner or in an arcade. Fortunately for María, the disorder of Paco’s mind left him with only the vaguest of memories of her doings. Nevertheless, the very suspicion deeply wounded Ignacio. Over the past year, in one of the more unfortunate turnarounds in his life, he had, while feeling his age—he was somewhere in his late forties by then—actually convinced himself that he had finally and truthfully fallen in love with her, or with her youth and beauty. He made this recent discovery while carousing with other women—among them his shop clerks, market girls, and prostitutes; no matter how voluptuous their bodies, or lovely their faces, or free spirited and unrestrained their voraciousness in bed (or no matter their fear of him), Ignacio found himself thinking about María ruefully, in the same way that she, in the midst of her fleeting love affairs, could not keep herself from wishing that, truth be told, she hadn’t looked down on Nestor, in whom, perhaps, she sometimes saw her own papito.

  By then María would often withdraw into a shell of silence, refusing to as much as look him in the eye and never answering Ignacio when he demanded to know why she couldn’t show him love the way she used to; and she simply shrugged when he’d accuse her of being obviously enamored of someone else. Denying everything, once her patience had worn thin, she’d behave as a man would, shoving her indifference into his possessive face, her response coming down to a few words: “And if I did, ¿Y qué?”—“So what?”

  Over the past few months, frightened by the prospect of his own mortality, he’d proposed to María a half dozen times, and on each occasion she told him that she’d marry Ignacio only if she carried his baby. To say the least, in that department, he had been failing lately, his enervating maladies affecting his potency in such a manner that, when he visited his whores, he had to be content with the kind of languorous, time-wasting bouts of love that would have driven him crazy with impatience as a younger man. In other words, he now found it a chore getting it up.

  “Who are you, Ignacio, to tell me anything when you can’t even satisfy me?” she’d asked him that afternoon.

  It was very sad, and her coldness alone half tempted Ignacio to forget about María altogether, maybe even teach her a lesson (but he wasn’t that cruel, not anywhere as mean-spirited as some of his acquaintances, fellow businessmen of a rough demeanor who might have slashed her face just to spite her). He just couldn’t. In her beauty, and in his memories of what she once had been, and because of his unsteady health—even then as they walked in the arcade, his heart had begun aching and he had felt his loins constricting, along with his gut—he was willing to forgive her everything. María, that delicious beauty, so well dressed in the clothes he had bought her in stores like El Encanto; María, a former hick from a backwards, nothing valle, who had become a modest star of second-tier nightclubs, may have turned into something of a spoiled and temperamental bitch, but he had come to cherish her anyway. Her insults, her stillness, the embarrassment of putting up with passersby, who, seeing her face, on the verge of tears and contorting with pain as they crossed the street, judged him harshly—“Hey you, mind your own business!” he would call out—Ignacio thought best to forget. That afternoon, in the interest of preserving his health and dignity, Ignacio, his breathing labored, decided that it would be a waste of his time to argue with her, and in the face-saving manner of cubano machos, who may or may not have been petty gangsters, he managed to pull her close and, with a firm tug of her body against his own, his hand grasping her right buttock through her dress, kissed her neck and said: “I will see you later, huh?” And with that he went off and left María to go about her business.

  MARÍA WAS ON HER WAY TO SEE LÁZARO ON HER OLD STREET, THE market teeming as usual (how she still loved strolling
about its stalls), when she happened to pass by a certain Flor de Saturno’s barbershop, opened to the narrow pavement, its tile floors covered with clumps of hair trembling ever so slightly in the fan air of the room, that shop’s interior redolent of musk and lilac scents and cigars, the barber snipping away with his scissors and whistling. Just then, from its cream-colored radio, in all its glory, came the unmistakable voices of Cesar and Nestor Castillo, their tremulous baritone harmonies, stopping María in her tracks. It was the first time she’d ever heard one of their records being played over the air. The melody seemed vaguely familiar, like something she’d listened to before, though surely different, like a cousin of one of those sad yet impassioned songs of love that Nestor, in happier times, had serenaded into her window, hummed into her ears, sang between his kisses from nipple to nipple and quivering tendon to tendon, and in those moments of joy when, declaring that nothing in life made him happier than to look into her eyes, he had whispered, then sung some bit of poetry before jamming himself more deeply into her. But could it really be him? As she stood by that doorway, the barber and his customers all bade her to come in. But María remained outside, catching a verse that went:

  Qué dolor delicioso

  El amor me ha traído

  En la forma de una mujer…

  Mi tormento y mi éxtasis…

  Bella María de mi Alma…

  María, mi vida

  (Or in English:

  What delicious pain

  Love had brought to me

  In the form of a woman.