Beautiful Maria of My Soul

  “Mi hija,” she once told her daughter. “You have no notion of what a church can be. Back where I came from, in my valle, ours was just a little shack of pine-plank walls at the edge of a field with floors of pounded down dirt, and an altar that was nothing more than a lacquered pine table with a cross, a few feet high. There were no pews—we had to kneel on that dusty floor, or else just stand during the Mass. But you know what? It was a glorious thing for us to believe we were in the consecrated presence of the Lord. And even when I saw much nicer churches in Havana, every time I knelt down to pray, I always thought that the best church I had ever entered was the one I knew as a girl.”

  It may have been a coincidence, but not a month after taking such measures, María missed her menses and, after a visit to an obstetrician, learned that God had indeed answered her prayers early in the new year of 1958.

  THINGS ARE GIVEN, THINGS ARE TAKEN AWAY. JOYFUL THAT SHE carried within her the baby who would become her daughter, María had, at a certain hour of the day, gone to find her old friend Lázaro, seated as usual by his doorway. The last time she had visited him, about a month before, and not to resume her lessons with him but simply to see how he was faring, he’d refused María’s offer to take him to a doctor. Remaining in his courtyard abode, he had resigned himself to the slow and languishing waning of some old animal of the forest—“Just leave me alone and let me go with dignity,” he used to tell anyone who tried to help him. He treated María no differently, and though she could see fear in his eyes—which were wise and innocent in their way—he spoke, almost cheerfully, of the world to come: “I’m really not afraid. I just hope, if there’s reincarnation, that I come back as a cat—they get everything. That would make me happy!” he joked, slapping his knee before convulsing suddenly with a cough that made him lean his weary shoulder against the wall.

  “Wherever I go,” Lázaro told her, recovering, “I hope you will think of me, María…. Think of old Lázaro every time you open a book and see what the words mean.”

  “Maestro,” she tried one last time. “Why won’t you let me take you to the hospital?”

  He just shook his head. “When you are my age, you’ll understand,” he told her. “When your dreams are nothing more than memories of earlier days, you’ll know what I am feeling.” Then he stretched out his bony hand so that María might help him get to his feet, and she followed him down the cooler hallway to the back door, which opened to the courtyard, to his little home, the place where he somehow had managed to sleep for years on nothing more than a blanket-covered mat. Whatever his malady, Lázaro couldn’t let her go without some heartening words. As she left him asking, “I will see you again soon, yes?” he nodded, smiled, and, surely suppressing another cough, told her, “Oh, you will, my dear girl, but I know one thing. Your life is going to be fine, with or without me.”

  And that was all. She’d intended to return the next day, or the day after, until a week had gone by and that week had turned into the month of her happiness. Finally, with such good news to share with Lázaro, beautiful María had gone to see him again, but he was nowhere about. It was the bookseller who told her. “We just found him back there one day, sleeping for good.”

  “Ay, por Dios,” she cried out, the misery of losing one of her finest friends in Havana, as if one more wonderful part of Cuba had vanished, in her voice.

  “But he left something for you,” the bookseller told her, pulling from a carton the kinds of items that would soften anyone’s heart, even María’s. Two books of Cuban poetry, Lázaro’s own copies of the verses of the poets Plácido and José Martí. In one of them, he had scribbled: “To my favorite pupil, María, perhaps now I will finally see you dance!”

  NOTHING COULD BE SAID OR DONE ABOUT LÁZARO, EL POBRE. HIS death was inevitable; she had that touch, after all. Still, María enjoyed her felicitous state, despite its encumbrances, though she knew that, within a few months, once she started to show, she’d have to leave her dancing behind. But could María complain? After years of working here and there, she was tiring of that business: the hours, the ogling patrons, the late-night worries that someone somewhere would drag her into an alley and take advantage (at least two of the dancers at the Lantern carried straight razors in their purses because of what had once happened to them). The sore feet, the pulled tendons, the rehearsals, the pinches on the ass, and especially the dietary restrictions. Because she was still a guajira at heart, her mouth watered in the way she made men’s mouths water at the sight of her, but only over the sights and aromas of a crispy-skinned helping of suckling pork, with sides of sweet plátanos and rice and black beans. Now, at least, despite all the calories María burned nightly during the shows, she’d be free to eat whatever she liked: those delicious whipped-cream-topped lemon-and mango-flavored pastries with the maraschino cherries that always made her lick her lips when she passed the festive windows of De Leon’s bakery, three-and four-scoop bowls of ice cream at the Louvre parlor, and no end of the chocolate bonbons which club patrons were always sending her backstage, the sorts of sweets which she always reluctantly passed off to the other dancers for their kids. And now? She’d be free to fill her belly to her heart’s content, appreciating all the maternity ads she saw in the newspapers about comiendo por dos—eating for two. So what if María put on a few pounds?

  The manner with which Ignacio looked at her had become more tender. It wouldn’t matter, at least for a while, if she stopped resembling a sex kitten à la a cubana Marilyn Monroe, whom half of the bombshell American lounge singers and dancers in Havana tried to emulate (when not mimicking Ava Gardner). Soon enough, she’d become a burgeoning mamacita with even more succulent breasts, her nipples distended and swollen. Lately, he had actually become more delicate about making love to her (now that Ignacio considered himself so much larger, thanks to his treatments, he entered her only from behind) and treated her tenderly, as if María, in her embarazada state, had become the most fragile creature in the world. That suited her fine. She lasted two months before the management at the Lantern started to notice her pregnancy, and, in any case, though María could have kept working as an assistant choreographer, after so much time spent under the lights, she welcomed the idea of becoming a señora of leisure, like the fine ladies at the department stores, with their maids following behind them, or the ones she used to see heading up the Malecón in their sedans to the yacht club (unfortunately, for all her beauty, her skin was of a color unacceptable to its members). And she would have time to further improve herself, to take up, as she had always wanted to, a pen in order to record, even with her lapses in spelling, some of the thoughts that came to her, in the spirit of what the décima singers and versifiers wrote (and that made her vaguely ache, thinking about her papito, Lázaro, and, yes, Nestor, the one she’d let get away).

  As for that bolero? Nearly a year and a half after it had first reached Cuba, “Beautiful María of My Soul” still occasionally played over the radio, and it had become a minor standard of sorts, a part of street musicians’ repertoires. But now when she heard it, María no longer felt the melancholy that had come over her strongly in the months just after Nestor died. Hearing it made her feel somewhat proud for having been the inspiration behind that lovely tune. At the same time, it still provoked her to think about Nestor, something that, with a baby coming, she thought best to avoid. Besides, she had no room left for tears. With all the leisure hours she spent either strolling in the Parque Central or sunning herself at the playas where they used to romp, or alone in her high-rise apartment—yet not quite so alone, the little being forming inside of her keeping her company—María came up with what she considered a most generous notion. She’d write a letter of condolence to Nestor’s older brother Cesar Castillo. María knew his address—the brothers had lived in the same building on La Salle Street.

  And so, in the same labored and careful manner in which she composed any note, María penned a respectful carta in her much practiced handwriting, conveying her i
mmense sadness at having heard about Nestor’s passing—for she had loved him very much.

  Believe me, Cesar, I wish it had turned out differently, but I am still so happy that at least Nestor and me were something for a time: and I am proud that he thought to compose that canción about me.

  She described her state of impending motherhood and, while not lingering on it, ended on what María hoped would be a high note: “To you and Nestor’s family, I send my affection.”

  It took her a few days to mail that carta off. She felt so confident about having done the right thing that, a few weeks later, when Cesar’s response arrived, María truly lamented her ability to read. Once she got around to deciphering its wild handwriting—so bad it was nearly illegible—this is what (she thought) it said:

  Dear María—

  With all due respect, fuck you and fuck everything about you for throwing my brother into hell—and fuck yourself for even thinking that I can give a shit about your feelings, if you ever really had any for Nestor. Now that he’s dead, I want you to know that he suffered a lot of grief thinking about you. And don’t think he didn’t tell me about how you came up to New York to take him away from his wife and kids. Shame on you, woman! The poor innocent actually felt bad about sending you off to wherever whores like you go…. I know it because I had to live with him, and though I can’t prove it, something muy jodido got worse inside him after he saw you. He just wasn’t the same after that, and I have this feeling that, if it weren’t for you, he’d probably still be walking around now, taking care of his wife—a real lady, in case you didn’t know—and his fine kids, who I’ll have to look after now. As for your baby—felicitaciones!—I hope you give birth to a blind crocodile, because that’s what you deserve.

  Sincerely yours,

  Cesar Castillo

  PART IV

  Another Life

  Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN

  Though she’d long since torn up Cesar Castillo’s letter, a dozen others, from Nestor himself, were among the items that María chose to take along with her some three years later, in early 1961, when she’d leave Havana for Florida with her little daughter, Teresita. Not that she hated Fidel Castro as much as some of the Cuban exiles she’d meet there over the coming decades—she thought he was doing some good things for the people, especially the guajiros, particularly when it came to his literacy campaign and sending doctors into the sticks; and she supposed that anyone would have been better than Batista, whom everybody knew was some kind of crook. Caught up in the initial jubilation, she had been among the crowds lining the streets of Havana as Fidel and his followers made their triumphant procession on captured tanks and jeeps and trucks through the city in the second week of 1959, after they’d routed Batista’s forces in the wake of their successful guerrilla war. She’d hoisted up her daughter—not even a year old yet—so that the heroic leader might see her as he passed, but it wasn’t long before she, like so many others, as in a fiery romance, started taking a second look.

  At first, though, María had liked him and what he seemed to stand for. She could even lay claim to having met Fidel, however briefly. Five months after María had given birth to Teresita, in a sixteen-hour labor passed in the maternity ward of the Calixto García Hospital, she had returned to work as a fill-in dancer and assistant to the choreographer at the cabaret in the newly constructed Havana Hilton hotel, a spectacular, fully air-conditioned high-rise out in Vedado, its façade boasting of a mosaic mural by the artist Amelia Peláez (for most of that year, 1958, she and Ignacio had watched the construction cranes and their crews at work from their terrace). That’s where Castro established his headquarters, the rebel leader taking a suite on an upper floor. The dancers in the cabaret, María among them, got used to seeing him strolling through the lobby on his way to the hotel diner, where he ate his meals. On one of those evenings, Castro and some of his men took in one of their shows; afterwards he made a point of going backstage and shaking hands with each of the performers and musicians.

  “I have to confess,” she would tell her ever-patient daughter one day, “that it was a thrill. He was tall and broad shouldered, muy bien macho with a handsome enough face, and the way he looked at me, I knew what he was secretly thinking. In fact, even after I had given birth to you, Teresita, I hadn’t lost any of my beauty or my figure—a lot of my friends told me that I looked even better than before. I had added a little to my pecho”—she would pat at her breasts—“and my happiness at having you, even when you don’t think I was happy, made my face even more lovely than before. Of course, I felt flattered by the way he had looked at me, but that was all. I had no interest in him, and I wasn’t imagining things, by the way, hijita…. Later on, when one of his guards approached me to say that the comandante’s door was open to me any time I wanted to speak to him, I had to say to myself, ‘About what?’ He was a man, after all, and so I kept my distance, though I swore that, if I went up there, like some of the other girls—I mean if I was forced to—I would use that old trick I had up my sleeve, you know, the one I told you about with the shaking that I remembered from my beloved sister, but, gracias a Dios, that never came to pass….”

  There had been the summary executions of a number of former Batista henchmen, members of his police force and secret service—their trials were broadcast on the radio and shown on television. And in that atmosphere of quick justice and reform, in which Castro had pledged to rid Havana of its criminal elements, when the casinos were closed and the whores and their pimps rounded up, Ignacio, Teresita’s father, if not by marriage by fact, was arrested after his warehouse in the harbor had been raided and found to contain stolen goods. Or, to put it differently, at the tail end of a happy year as a doting papito to Teresita and a caring enough companion to María, Ignacio went out one morning and did not come home. During a trial, which María could not attend because she simply did not know what had happened to him, Ignacio, whom she considered a good provider and an essentially honest man, however he had made his living, was sentenced to serve ten years at a prison on the Isle of Pines.

  She never saw him again, el pobre. (But how could it have turned out well for Ignacio, when anyone María cared for seemed destined to a miserable fate?)

  Along the way, the clubs, cabarets, and casinos, and every maison de joie, as the bordellos had been sometimes called, were closed down, then reopened, then closed down again. Tourism died, and when María managed to scrounge up work as a dancer, she usually performed to half empty houses. Not all was misery, however: she had been moonlighting at the Parisien cabaret, in the Hotel Nacional, when the dressing rooms began to buzz with excitement over the American celebrity, of Cuban descent, who had come by to catch the heart-wrenching vocalizations of the Mexican singer, the one and only Pedro Vargas—you know, the star of that show, famous in America, the Cuban she’d see again and again on reruns in the future: Desi Arnaz. The performers sort of knew who he happened to be, but before any doubts could set in, their emcee introduced him to the crowd and asked Mr. Arnaz to stand up and take a bow. She could see why he was well known; handsome as hell and with a wonderful smile, he emanated warmth and kindness. At the same time, María happened to notice that, as with Nestor, as with perhaps many a Cuban man of a certain bent of emotion, he seemed a little sad—perhaps he sensed what was to come. In any event, Arnaz had a friend in the house band’s pianist, a fellow named Pepe, and it was he who later told the troupe about why Desi Arnaz had come to Havana just then, in the wake of the Cuban revolution: to gather up orchestrations by his arranger, Marco Rizo, who had kept a backlog of charts in his Vedado apartment—in fact, it would be the last time that the most famous Cuban before Fidel Castro stepped on Cuban soil.

  EVENTUALLY, ONCE THE REVOLUTION CHANGED EVERYTHING, beautiful María started to consider something that had been unthinkable to her before: and that was to leave Cuba for the United States. Not to stay in Miami necessarily, but perhaps to go to a place called Las Vegas, which she’d been told was like a Hava
na in the desert of the American West. She knew this from a magician named Fausto Morales, who used to work the la Rampa circuit and had, like so many other male performers, a fondness for María. The last time she had seen him at the Lantern, in early 1957, he’d told her about his plans to move there, mainly to perform in the big-time nightclubs, where acts like Frank Sinatra and Perry Como were the attractions, but also to open a school for magicians, who were always in demand. (Years later, her daughter, Teresita, would read somewhere that David Copperfield was one of Fausto’s pupils.) He’d left her with an open invitation—any time María wanted a change of scenery, and a good livelihood as well, Las Vegas was an option. Perhaps, she thought, one day she would take him up on his offer.

  In the spring of 1961, when María finally left for Miami aboard a Pan Am Clipper with her little daughter, she took nothing more for herself than a few dresses and some other essentials; everything else—the furnishings of her apartment in Vedado, the money in her bank account (some $2,237)—was confiscated. (She managed to bury several pieces of jewelry in a metal box under the base of an acacia tree out in Pinar del Río, the rest, from earrings to silver and gold chains, save the one that Nestor had given her and a precious Timex, a gift from Ignacio, she gave away.) Without any close family in Cuba, beautiful María stashed what remained of her past in that suitcase: those photographs of her mamá and her papito, of Nestor Castillo and herself taken in the good times; and photos of María in her dancer’s glory, and dressing room shots posed with the comedians, actors, and radio and television performers who used to frequent the places she worked—she brought their pictures as well. And it was not as if she would forget Ignacio. But aside from those items, a crucifix, a handful of precious letters, and one of those notebooks she had filled up for Lázaro were all she managed to bring with her, all that remained of her world. Of course she’d filled an entire suitcase for Teresita, who, not quite four but brainy and alert, if not as pretty as her mother would have wanted—the poor girl taking more after Ignacio—managed to understand that many of the adults on that half-hour flight were very sad….