LATER, WHEN TERESA’S TREMBLING HAD PASSED, AND MARÍA HAD gotten her papito, who had been strumming on his guitar with a friend, they carried that inocente back through the forest to the shack, where they laid her down on her papito’s cot. Finally coming around, Teresa hadn’t the slightest idea of what had happened—and yet her cuts and bruises and aching teeth and bit up tongue told her otherwise—she just knew. One moment by the grotto, the next in that bohío. The first face she saw, so beautiful and sad and concerned, was María’s, then her papito’s and Mamá’s, a rosary in hand. One of their neighbors—maybe it was Apollo—peered in from the doorway and sipped from a tin cup of whatever her papi had poured to settle his nerves. He smiled broadly, being the rare guajiro with fantastic teeth, as if that would somehow make things better.
Just then that room, where their older brothers had died, seemed the saddest place on earth. Nevertheless, Teresita, always a sweet-natured soul, managed to sit up and ask: “Why’s everyone looking so sad?”
And that made them laugh, even if her sudden illness was yet another of those tragedies they’d have to accustom themselves to. With pure affection, María wiped away her little sister’s tears; and with tenderness kissed her pretty face a dozen times over, telling her, as they later sat out watching the stars, “You see, Teresa, everything’s going to be all right, because I love you, and Papi and Mami love you, and nothing bad is going to happen to you while we’re around.” That’s what they all wanted to believe. Local healers, examining her the next day, provided Teresita with some natural calmantes by means of a specially brewed tea containing equal parts of jute, ginger, and cannabis, among other local herbs, and suggested they sacrifice an animal to San Lázaro, but this advice was ignored. Papito told her to drink a cup of rum, whose taste she found burning and metallic, but, even after she had been administered a santera’s cleansing, by means of burning roots and tobacco, as an added precaution, when she began trembling again a few days later, there remained no doubt that Manolo would have to fetch a doctor from San Jacinto or, failing that, from the sugar mill, a day’s ride away.
He’d do anything for his daughters, of course, and though it made him sad to pay the fee—what was it, a dollar?—he truly believed that the doctor, a certain Bruno Ponce, so sanguine of manner, and slightly jaundiced with sunken eyes behind wire glasses, would find a cure. Her papito’s hopefulness, however, didn’t quite work out. Apprised of her symptoms and examining her, the doctor determined that Teresita had suffered from a grand mal seizure (a tonic-clonic episode or status epilepticus, as her namesake, Doctor Teresita, would identify it, from her mother’s descriptions, decades later), a condition related either to epilepsy or to a tumor within her skull. As treatment, he prescribed a twice daily dose of phenobarbital, a sedative they could find at the farmacia in town. Its proprietor, whom María would never forget for his homely but kind face, Pepito el alto, as he was known to everyone, never even charged them for their monthly amber bottles of the stuff, so sorry did he feel for those guajiros with the lovely daughters. (In fact, that wonderful man, a widower, formed an attachment to María and actually took Manolo aside one afternoon to discuss the possibility of a marriage between them, even if he was in his fifties. While such arranged marriages weren’t unheard of, and it would have made their lives easier, her papito just couldn’t bring himself to subject his thirteen-year-old daughter to life with an old man. To the pharmacist’s credit, he never held anything against them; though, whenever María entered his shop to get Teresa’s pills, he became solemn in his demeanor, and, more often than not, while stepping back into the shadows, he’d let out with a sigh. Years later, with a wistfulness about la Cuba que fue, she’d wonder whatever happened to him.)
For a while several of those bitter pills daily seemed to do the trick. Still, with their foul taste, Teresita dreaded the very idea of having to take any medicine, and whether she took those pills or not as instructed, she seemed just fine.
A few months later, several days before the Christmas of 1943, they were out at the bodega by the crossroads, where trucks from distant cities sometimes stopped, dancing for a crowd of rum-soaked guajiros, who were whooping it up on one of those nights when the poorest of the poor pretended to be rich, the tables covered with all kinds of victuals—succulent lechón and pit-roasted chickens and doves, rivers of aguardiente and beer flowing like the Nile, their roosters and hounds meandering about, droppings left everywhere, as if anyone, some dancing barefooted on those sagging pine floors—covered in sawdust in the corners—gave a damn. On that night with their papito in good voice and on a little makeshift stage with a few of his musician friends from around—what were their names?—oh yes, Alvaro and Domingo, and a third fellow, the one-eared Tomaso, who played a gaita that he’d made from a pig’s belly, his terrible wailings on that primitive bagpipe appreciated just the same, those guajiros were having so much fun.
Among the females were those charming jamoncitas in their best flower-patterned dresses: María and Teresita, displaying their youthful rumbas, white blossoms tucked into their hair, and laughing as they turned, spinning in circles like flowers fallen from a tree. In the midst of all that, with the musicians playing, their papito proudly beaming at them, and with the oldest of the old clapping along, and the other beautiful young women of their valle, usually pregnant or on their way to becoming so, nodding at las muchachitas—with all that going on, Teresita, in the midst of a dance, had the second of her serious attacks, falling stiffly into her older sister’s arms and then, after appearing as if she were dead, trembling so violently on the floor that her limbs were soon black and blue. But, la pobre, even that wasn’t the worst of it—the pretty thing lost control of her bowels, coño, a shame of all shames. That fiesta still went on, though with more restraint in respect to Manolo and his daughter, the pretty one, with the wistful spoon-shaped face, who had nearly died and then come back before their very eyes.
After that, it was María who kept after Teresa to take her medicine, whether she wanted to or not, but even so, those fits returned, her body contorting in frightening ways, her eyes becoming blank as stone. Looking after her, María preferred to think those seizures, lasting only a few minutes, would soon vanish altogether because of the medicines (and their mamá’s constant prayers). But they didn’t. Out in the yard one morning, jumping rope with some of the local girls, Teresita, gleefully yelping as she took her turn, their hounds Blanco and Negro barking at her, died again, her eyes rolling up in her head. On another day, they were feeding the pigs and crying out with delight (and disgust) at the way the sows sniffed their feet and prodded their ankles with their moist and bristled snouts, when Teresita, in the midst of a laugh, suddenly turned to stone and fell right down into the swill, but this time, instead of violently shaking, she simply seemed to stop breathing, her lips and face becoming slightly blue. María, frightened to death, smothered her younger sister’s face with kisses until, by some sleight of God’s hand, she came around again, with a terrible belch that forced open the passageway to her lungs.
When it happened yet another time, while the sisters were accompanying their papito to town, it didn’t take María long to figure out that Teresita, detesting the bitter taste of those pills, only pretended to be taking them. From then on, María made sure Teresita actually swallowed them down, even if she had to force her mouth open by twisting her hair back before shoving one of those píldoras in herself. It wasn’t easy. Just slapping Teresa in the face for her own good, in the same way that her papito had sometimes slapped hers, nearly brought María to tears—of anger and grief. She came to hate the way Teresita spat that phenobarbital at her face or doubled over, clutching her belly and sinking to the ground, trembling—not from bad nerves but from the very thought that María, who had always loved her so, had started making her life a misery. Every time Teresita told her “Tú no me quieres”—“You don’t love me,”—or “Te odio, hermana”—“I hate you, sister,” her voice cracking and eyes blist
ering from the strain of crying, María’s heart broke a little more. (Long after Teresita was gone, those memories pecked at María like crows.)
Guajira sisters were never supposed to be at odds, but no matter how much Teresita abhorred those pills, María remained determined about fulfilling her duties—Teresita was her only sister, after all. And when her sister’s condition seemed to improve and she didn’t suffer any attacks for months, María, despite Teresita’s misery and weeping, felt more than a little justified in her actions. Too bad that her younger sister seemed to become nervous and gloomy around her, as if she, la bella María, would ever lift a finger to hurt her. It took María a while to understand some other things: that such a medicine affected the mente, the heart and soul, in short, that phenobarbital had started to change her younger sister’s sweet nature.
Indeed, that medicine had a bad effect on her younger sister; Teresita’s moods were never the same from day to day. Sometimes she became so timid and afraid of people, trembling not from epilepsy but from the belief, without any reason, that even the most gentle of farmers wanted to hurt her. Her fears followed her to bed: Teresita couldn’t sleep, spending half the night turning from side to side and sighing (and despairing over the aftertaste of that medicine, which lingered in the throat for hours even if she had consumed it with a sweet mango or papaya or mamey or guineo). To feel her sister’s heart beating as quickly as a hummingbird’s against her chest in the middle of the night, as she held her tenderly, to hear her breathing, but painfully so, while gasping for air—all that was almost more than María could bear, to the point that on certain days she would have welcomed one of her sister’s fits again—possessed by the devil as Teresita seemed to be—instead of having to watch her turn into someone she didn’t know.
One day Teresita was saintly, the next all she wanted to do was to stick her tongue out at passersby, or torment the animals, tying cords around their necks and pulling them cruelly across the yard. Whereas she used to show appreciation for even the smallest kindness—“¡Ay, qué bonito!”— “How pretty!” or “¡Qué sabroso!”—“How tasty!”—and never hesitated about saying nice things—“Te aprecio mucho, hermana”—“I love you, sister!”—days now passed when she wouldn’t say a word to anyone. Her facial expressions were affected as well: it was as if she refused to smile and took to crying over nothing; and when she wasn’t crying, she withdrew into herself, as if no one else in the world existed, and never lifted a finger to help around the house or yard, not even when her mamá, with her slowly failing eyesight, begged Teresita to help her thread a needle.
(“I’ll do it, Mami,” María offered.)
As for prayers? Whenever their mamá, in her God-welcoming way, got them down on their knees to give thanks for the salvation that was sure to come, Teresita would refuse, shaking her head and running away—why should she? Neither her mother nor her father lifted a finger against her in punishment. (“Niña,” as María once asked her daughter, “how on earth can you force someone to believe?”) Still, there came the day when things got out of hand. Teresita, with her own kind of beauty, also entered into puberty—and quickly so—but whereas María had been cautious and could care less about having a novio, or any of those birds-and-bees romances, Teresita became obsessed with the idea and started to do anything she could to avoid María’s company, their excursions to the cascades long since behind them.
Well, María couldn’t keep track of her sister every minute of the day, and she got used to tending to her chores alone. Where could Teresita go anyway, aside from the bodega, where they knew the owner and asked him to keep an eye on her? Most of the young men in their valle, respecting her papito, just didn’t want to get on his bad side, and so María didn’t think much of it when Teresita took off in her bare feet in the afternoons—to where and what, no one knew. María imagined her sitting in some lonely spot with her knees tucked up under her chin, fretting—as María, her body in its changes baffling her, once used to do herself. And while she often wanted to go after her, she left Teresita, so troubled by that medicine, alone.
One evening as María crossed the fields on her way to Macedonio’s—where her papito had gone to borrow a hammer and a handful of nails—something, a blur of entangled figures, bending and weaving inside the forest, caught her attention. At first she assumed it was one of the local putas with a farmer—when they weren’t working the bodega, they went wandering from valle to valle, looking for takers. María’s eyes might be put out by Dios, but she moved closer anyway. From behind a bottle palm she saw a stringy guajiro standing behind a woman whose skirt had been hitched up above her waist. María wasn’t stupid. She knew about fornication from the animals, the billy goats being the most insatiable, the males mounting the females at will; she’d seen mammoth horses dallying with their mares, and just about every other creature, from hens and roosters to lustrous dragonflies in midair, performing their duties as nature intended. And there they were, the woman holding on to the trunk of a banyan tree, raising her haunches higher, while the man pumped furiously at her from behind, the way María had seen the animals doing.
Desgraciados, she remembered thinking.
Oh, there was something agonizing and stomach turning about watching it. But she could not look away. She eased closer and, wouldn’t you know it, nearly fainted when, getting a better glimpse of them, as the guajiro, in some kind of frenzy, started yanking that woman’s head back to kiss her neck, and even as a gentle white-winged butterfly alighted upon María’s arm, there was no doubt about it, she saw that the shapely woman was none other than her beloved sister, Teresita.
Two things happened afterwards:
Finding out about that whole business from María, her papito nearly beat that big-boned guajiro to death with a shovel. And because her mother was too humilde and mild, and her papito told her to do so, María, dragging Teresa by the hair out of the forest where she had gone to hide, and loving her so, to make a point, had to beat her too—with the branch of a tree, a beating that left her body covered, once again, with bruises.
They didn’t speak to each other ever again, no matter how often María, feeling badly for her sister, followed her around, asking to be forgiven for her severity, even if she had been in the right. Teresa would not say a word, never recanting, nor for that matter did she ease the burden on María’s heart. One of those evenings, when terraces of violet light went spreading across the horizon at dusk, as her papito, Manolo, sitting out on a crate in front of their house, picked up his guitar again and while María settled her head against Concha’s lap, and as her mother peeled a few potatoes, the beads of her rosary, dark as black beans, which Concha always kept wrapped around her right hand, dangling down and touching María’s face—while such simple things were going on, Teresa, who had gone off to use the retrete, stumbled into the forest and, following that trail to the waterfall, where they had often lingered as children, weighed down the skirt of her dress with stones and leapt off that moss-covered ledge into the depths of beautiful María’s memory and soul.
All of the above occured to her while María had been on her way home to the Hotel Cucaracha one might, with fellows calling out, “Hey, gorgeous, why the long face?”
PART II
The Glory That Entered Her Life
Chapter EIGHT
During María’s first year in Havana, she had gotten jobs in places like the Club Pygmalion, the Knock-Knock, the Broadway, some of those stints lasting months, some just weeks. Along the way she had been a Hawaiian hula dancer, a sultry Cleopatra, and, during the Christmas holidays, one of Santa’s Very Wonderful Cuban Ladies. She never earned too much in those days; dancers, however beautiful, were in plentiful supply in that city of music. She didn’t like stripping for the auditions and took offense at any act requiring that she take off her pasties; mainly, she tended to put off some of her bosses by refusing their advances. One manager, a certain Orlando, at the Knock-Knock, off Zayas, fired her when she wouldn’t become his
woman—“mi mujer”—but as shabbily as he had treated her, having her thrown out on the street, at least he hadn’t pulled out a knife like that hoodlum who ran a joint—was it the Club Paree?—by Ramparts Street; he cut off the buttons of her dress one by one and would have raped her on his office table had not María fallen to the floor feigning another epileptic fit—forgive me, Sister—her head twisting, teeth chattering, body shaking, as if she were possessed. Or she sometimes broke down crying, pleading that she was religious, and became so disconsolate that even the most heartless and goatish of men gave up their harassments, often thinking, as a trance burned in her beautiful eyes, That woman is crazy.
But there was something about a sad man that always tempted her. In that instance, such tristeza was found in a certain Señor Aponte, proud proprietor of the Versailles in the Vedado, with its Folies-Bergère floor show. A quite rotund fellow and a destroyer of chairs, he always sweated profusely, a kerchief pressed to his damp brow. His dark eyes seemed anxious, as if, in his burly, struggling, short-breathing manner, he might drop dead at any moment. While the other girls made jokes about what an ordeal it would be to go to bed with him, María, liking the man, found his loneliness touching—he kept a cage of parakeets in his office and would be often overheard through his door speaking endearingly with them as if they were children.