Beautiful Maria of My Soul

  “Well, here’s what I think,” he said, shifting his chair towards her. “Life is too short to throw it away by feeling bad about things. What do you say about you and me going out somewhere one night—anywhere you want!” He touched his heart. “It would honor me.” Then, as a waiter brought him another drink, he made a big show of pulling out a thick wad of bills, the way Ignacio used to back in Havana, peeling off a ten, and stuffing it into the waiter’s frock pocket with a wink.

  “My name’s Rafael Murillo,” he told her and, like a gallant, withdrew from his jacket pocket a card: “A sus órdenes.”

  When María extended her hand, he turned it palm up, like a reader, examining her lines closely; then he went into all this ecstatic miércoles about her youthful appearance and beauty, as if he had just bumped into her on a street in Havana twenty years before. Teresita just listened, knowing that for her mother’s age—past forty, well, forty-three by then—everything he said was true. After all, beautiful María could have passed for a fine-looking woman somewhere in her luscious mid thirties, for she had kept her figure and had the complexion of a lady who, aside from her slowly aging mulatta genes, still rubbed palm oil and honey on her face each morning. How good did she look? When mother and daughter went for strolls in South Beach, or along the consoling sidewalks and shops of Little Havana, it was beautiful María, in tight pink or canary yellow slacks, with an unforgettable walk, who drew all the stares.

  Once their introductions had been made, she and Rafael danced a few cha-cha-chas and mambos, but mainly they drank, chain-smoked, and shared stories about Cuba, as it used to be. Eventually, he got around to trying out his charms on Teresita. “Looking at you I can see that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” he told her exuberantly at one point, and while Teresita, a sweet girl at heart, smiled at the compliment, she hardly believed him, thinking herself, as she always would, only ordinary looking at best, even if that was far from the truth. (Years later, in her doctorly guise, it would always surprise Teresa when one of the hospital orderlies whistled good-naturedly at her figure.) Later, when they had stepped out from the Holiday Inn by the harbor, into one of those languid, perfume-filled Miami nights, the sort reminiscent of a delicious Havana evening, her mother’s new acquaintance offered to drive them home in his fancy 1972 DeVille. After he’d handed three dollars to the valet, with the windows rolled down, his elbow out the window as he steered with a single hand, María beside him, Teresita in the back, they drove through the velvet night.

  Along the way, he spoke about the two restaurants he owned: “One is called El Malecón, up in Coral Gables, have you heard of it?”

  “Of course,” María answered. “That’s yours?”

  “Yes, indeed, my brother and me opened it about six months after we came to Miami, in ’64,” he began. “It started out as a hole-in-the-wall, we did hardly any business at all at first, but, you know, with things improving in the city, business picked up. We advertise in all the hotels with brochures, and, thanks to taking care of the concierges, we’ve done pretty well. Good enough to open a second place along Key Biscayne Boulevard—that’s my favorite. It’s the Siboney, after Lecuona’s song, and even if it’s not as fancy as the other, which is more upscale, para la gente con más dinero, sabes, I love it the most because we’ve done it up like the old seaside friterías outside Havana, and I just like its views of the ocean.”

  “So you’ve succeeded,” María said. “I’m happy for you.”

  “Yes, thank our lucky stars,” he said, tapping the dashboard top. “But, even as good as we’re doing, I still look forward to getting back to Havana one day, you know, after that shit is overthrown.” He shook his head, his suave and happy-go-lucky manner dissipating in that moment. “It’s something I don’t like to think about too much—you know, I put a lot of faith and hope in that man, and I didn’t want to leave Cuba, but—” And he went on about what happened to him and his family in the same way that so many of the exiles did in those days, things turned upside down, the stomach-churning Russians coming in, the businesses nationalized, the food shortages, the government’s snoops and spies, the assaults on liberty that he and his family just couldn’t take anymore.

  “Surely, you understand what I’m saying, huh?”

  “¿Cómo no?” María answered. “Even my daughter, Teresita—even she knows that we Cubans didn’t want to leave. But we had to, right, hija?”

  By then, he’d turned up Twenty-sixth. “Our house is the fourth one on the right, over there under the big tree,” she told him. And when he had pulled up, he asked them to wait, and, like a gentleman, this Rafael Murillo got out and walked over to the passenger side of the car, opening the door for each of them.

  “Your carriage has arrived, mi condesa,” he said to Teresita, bowing. Then to María, “I will see you soon, next week. I’ll bring you both to the restaurant—we have a little band that performs there on Friday nights—okay?”

  And with that Rafael Murillo, winking at them both in a pleasant way, got into his car and drove off into the balminess of the evening.

  A FEW THINGS ABOUT THIS RAFAEL: HE HAD A PLACE UP IN FORT Lauderdale, a condominium, to which he would sometimes take María for a weekend afternoon. He was separated from his second wife, whom María, finding him so handsome and genteel, thought must surely have something wrong in la cabeza, for he would sadly say that he missed his kids on a daily basis, and that it wasn’t his idea at all. He belonged to an anti-Castro organization which met in a downtown hall twice monthly. He wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist, inscribed with the words “Liberty or death. Viva Cuba Libre!” and was furious about the American cowards of the Kennedy administration who had betrayed the Cuban cause during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, even if it had taken place over a decade before. He regularly telephoned María at night from his restaurants, calls that she took only in her bedroom. He was generous, and never came to visit their house without some gifts for María and Teresita. (“Tell me what you need, and it will be yours,” he said.) Finding it unusual that María did not own a car and depended on slow public transportation or rides with friends to get where she needed to go, he offered to buy her a car so that he wouldn’t always have to pick her up for their citas. Learning that she didn’t know how to drive, he promised to pay for lessons, but she refused, having a phobia about cars, not only because she had grown up among horses and donkeys, and had always regarded automobiles with wonderment, as if the driving of such machines was intended only for men, but because they made her think about Nestor Castillo’s death.

  He tended to come by the house very late at night, after his restaurants had closed—usually with packages of food, aluminum-foil-wrapped platters of fried chuletas and steaks and of paella, which would feed them for the next three or four days. When he’d arrive, Teresita knew; their voices were always hushed, and she could also tell from the faint aroma of the coronas he smoked that wafted into her room, and then by the whisperings that came from María’s bedroom down the hall. At first, he never stayed the night, but after a few months, on some mornings Teresita would find him sitting by their kitchen table, in Gustavo’s former chair, María always smoking her Virginia Slims and attending to him dutifully. As Teresita waited for the school bus, he’d always inquire about what she was studying, her chemistry and biology and French textbooks beyond him. He’d say things like “I can tell that your daughter is going to go far.”

  On the weekends, when he happened to drop by and Teresita, having examinations, would have preferred to stay home and study—she did her best thinking in her pink-decorated bedroom—he’d give her a twenty-dollar bill so that she might take some of her friends off to the movie theater in the sprawling mall, across a wide boulevard a few sweltering avenues away. Sometimes she went to the movies, but, just as often, she sat in a McDonald’s eating juicy hamburgers and studying. She always waited until past four thirty, when Rafael had taken off for work, before finally heading back. But one afternoon,
when she came home and saw the DeVille still parked by the curb, she made the mistake of going inside anyway. That’s when she heard them through the door: beautiful María, in her ferocious widowed way, screaming in pleasure, the bed frame slamming against the wall, and Rafael moaning and crying out, “Así, así, así!” as if the world were about to end. It was so disquieting that Teresita, without daring to make any noise herself, slipped back outside, took a walk down the street to where some of the kids were playing a game of dodgeball, and let an hour pass before she finally made her way to their door again, fearful that they would still be going at it. That it had gone on in kindly Gustavo’s bed seemed awfully wrong, and the notion put Teresita in a rather solemn frame of mind, as if something sacred had been violated; he had been her mother’s husband and the only papito she had really known, after all. But Teresita dared not say a word, and later, as she sat out waiting on the patio, when Rafael finally left, she just smiled when he pinched her on the cheek.

  FOR A TIME, MARÍA, IT SHOULD BE SAID, SEEMED HAPPY, OR AS happy as a woman like her could be, at least when it came to the physical act of love. Amorously speaking, Rafael was a most enthusiastic partner, who, in possessing María, seemed to be playing out some dream. She was his cubanita caliente, his cubanita de la noche, his cubana with a chocha muy fabulosa. The man kissed every inch of her body, and every curvaceous dip and valley of her flesh, fucked her so adamantly that it was as if, with his wildly glaring pupils, he were making love to Cuba itself. (Well, he had reinforced the notion by showing her a piece of arcane Cuban currency with an image of the goddess Athena to which she seemed to bear a close resemblance.) For her part, she ran with this new breath of passion, buying the most scandalous of transparent undergarments from a boutique called Los Dainties. He just loved her sexiness. At a costume ball held at carnival time, he asked María to dress up as a showgirl, with plumed headdress and a rented outfit so diaphanous and scanty that her arrival set all the older women, las ancianas, who in some other age would have been chaperones, grumbling, every male head turning, perhaps enviously, their wives fuming. But did they care? They came home laughing, throwing each other around, drunkenly happy, and the racket that María and Rafael made later that night—“I’m going to devour you!”—not only woke Teresita up but provoked the neighborhood hounds to bark.

  But as the year went by, even María, lacking any relatives of her own—a very sad thing for Teresita more than for herself—began to wonder why Rafael, with two brothers and a sister, each with their own large family, and birthday and holiday parties to attend, never once invited them to any of their gatherings; that did not sit well with her at all. “You know I don’t want to just be your little pajarita, that you hide away,” she told him. “If you don’t think of me as anyone special to you, then don’t expect anything special from me.”

  Growing aloof and withholding from him the favors of her perfectly ripened body, and that luscious papayún that had driven Nestor Castillo crazy, María finally got Rafael to concede that perhaps he had been keeping her too much a secret. (That is to say, María, strong willed by then, harangued Rafael into admitting it.) And so, one delightful Sunday afternoon, in a somewhat guarded mood, Rafael brought María and Teresita along with him to his brother Miguel’s house, out in Fort Lauderdale, where his kin and their in-laws had gathered to celebrate one of his tías’ seventieth birthday. It seemed, at first, yet another cheerful, jammed-with-kids-and-older-folks affair typical of extended Cuban families in Miami. And while he had taken María around, sheepishly introducing her as “a friend” to various relatives, from the very start they regarded her as if she were a leper.

  It didn’t matter that she had dressed conservatively, in just an ankle-length skirt and a blouse with some frilly workings, and had worn around her neck both a delicate pearl necklace and a crucifix. She still cut swaths through the coterie of his siblings’ and cousins’ more ordinarily pretty wives with her gorgeousness, all but a few of their expressions asking, Is this the latest cheap tramposa for whom Rafael left his saintly wife and children? Of course, some, his brothers particularly, were civil enough with María, and the more the other men drank beer and daiquiris, the more María glowed before them. (Translation: “If you’re going to mess around, that’s the sort you do it with.”) But, as had often happened in her life, the women, the younger wives especially, seemed outraged by her presence, none of them saying a word to María when she’d smile at them, their eyes squinting, daggers in their pupils.

  What, then, could María do but have a few drinks, when, at a certain point in the afternoon, Rafael made himself scarce? She had watched him huddling with one of his older sons, a good-looking college-age fellow; her eyes had followed Rafael as he later disappeared into the house to have some words with another woman, a petite brunette, seemingly suppressing tears of both anger and righteous indignation, who, as it turned out, happened to be his wife.

  “Por Dios, I’m bored,” María said to Teresita as she sat down beside her mother in the yard, her expression telling her all.

  It was an hour before he finally came out, and when he did, Rafael curtly told her: “We should go.” As they drove back, María did not say a word, trying her best to maintain her dignity, even if she was a little drunk. For his part, Rafael, no doubt burdened by his violation of familial decorum, said to her, “Well, it was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” Once they got back to their house on Northwest Terrace, Teresita locked herself in her room and, for several hours, took in another kind of disturbance: not of two people making love but of Rafael’s shouted recriminations: “What we had was perfectly fine before you had to stick your nose into my family life! Why I allowed this, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for you!” Then he went on and on before storming out, not an iota of tenderness in his voice.

  A month went by. One evening, at dusk, Teresita looked out her window and saw them sitting inside his DeVille. He was gesticulating wildly, while María, her arms folded across her lap, didn’t move at all. Until she slapped him in the face and, as María later put it to Teresita, told him to shove his own fingers up his ass. Shortly, as María stepped onto the pavement, he drove off, tossing into the street a bouquet of flowers, which María didn’t bother to pick up.

  And that was the last of Rafael.

  IT HARDLY RUFFLED MARÍA’S FEATHERS, HOWEVER. THAT SAME evening, after dinner, she sat by their kitchen table pouring herself a cup of red Spanish wine. Sitting across from her, Teresita put aside a school notebook she had been writing in. “Mama, can I ask you something?”

  “Of course, mi vida.”

  “That man, Rafael—did you even really care about him?”

  María laughed. “Are you kidding me? I liked him all right, but did I fall in love with him, is that what you’re asking me? No, por Dios, no! And even if I did, what difference would that make? What is love between a man and a woman anyway, pero un vapor? Something that comes and goes like the air.”

  Snubbing out her cigarette, María held out her arms to her daughter. “Come here, querida,” she said, and Teresita went to her side. That’s when María smothered her with kisses, repeating, as she stroked Teresita’s hair: “It’s you I love—mi Teresita, mi buena—and no one else. Never, never forget that, hija. The hell with everyone else!”

  Chapter FORTY-FOUR

  But to say that love was air and to really believe it, deep down, were two different things. For, in the quietude of her bedroom, beautiful María had more than her share of wistful moments, even if there had been others who had come along: The manager of a movie house. A much younger dance instructor she’d met at the Biltmore in Coral Gables, where she sometimes gave group lessons to the tourists. An accountant, missing two front teeth, his jackets flecked with dandruff, had helped her sort through the chaos of her dance studio receipts and was a very nice fellow indeed, but too attached to his overbearing mother and therefore too controlled and timid for her taste. (“That one, Félix,” she told her
daughter, “wanted me to be just like his mamá.”) A construction contractor, who did some work on the house and, without children, left her because she was not of that fecund age anymore. And there were others. Cubans all, they came and went as momentary diversions; a few she took to bed, most often in obscure motels, but never with any expectation of receiving the affections she had known during her juventud in Cuba. (Oh, but papí, y Nestor, y Ignacio—yes, even Ignacio!) In the end, they meant very little to her, and since Teresita, sizing them up, rarely seemed pleased when she brought any of those men home, beautiful María hardly cared about their value as potential step-papitos. Occasionally, she considered remarrying—a few had proposed—but since she was more or less comodita—most comfortably disposed—in the house that Gustavo had left her, and could not really see herself making room for someone else, despite her loneliness, the notion somehow held out no appeal for her.

  BY HER FIFTIES, MARÍA HAD STARTED TO FEEL HER YEARS. SHE still turned heads, but more so, as time went on, from a distance. Men continued to check her out, surely, but not as often as before; nor did men stare as long as they used to; the sensation that their eyes followed her all the way down the street vanished—a woman like María just knew. And, though she still looked very well preserved, even beautiful, María found herself feeling stunned by how much younger more and more people, both male and female, seemed to her.

  Keeping her figure from the days of her youth largely intact by giving dance lessons from ten to five at the studio she had opened downtown and, swallowing her pride, the hour she spent twice weekly sweating away in a pink outfit on a treadmill at a nearby YWCA—where all the local Cuban women gathered in Jacuzzis afterwards to boast about their children and grandchildren—could not compensate for the inevitable and subtle changes of her features: not wrinkles but a general slackening of her skin, which so perturbed María that she took to dwelling more and more on newspaper ads for face tucks, and her cabinet filled with youth-restoring creams, rich with all kinds of so-called miracle enzymes, that she’d heard about on the radio. Yet as wonderful as María looked for her age, there was no concealing the passage of time, which could be read in her eyes, the future, and all its hopes and promises, having ceased to be the endless thing that had once shimmered so brightly in her pupils. Stripped of her illusions about what her romantic life would hold, María, like a character out of a bolero, began to think more and more about the past—how lovely it had been, no matter the difficulties she had endured. And once she did, the more she returned to her memories of that músico Nestor Castillo.