Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

She did not enjoy the cockroaches that sometimes crawled across the mirror, or the rats that skittered in through the stage door and in the early hours of the morning delighted in eating the cotton balls and pomades that the dancers left out, and it was disgusting to find their droppings inside their shoes and makeup kits. (It struck her as a gloomy and claustrophobic way to live: To be indoors at night, separated from nature by walls and passageways and doors, left María missing the countryside and the woods-the very air that seemed as delicious as anything in the world.) And it didn’t make her happy to learn that she had to pay for her own costumes, for every flimsy sequined top with its gossamer meshing, for those bottoms that were two sizes too small and exposed her goose-pimpled nalgitas to the air-conditioned, smoke-filled chill; for the high heels that lifted her stately rump higher and left her feet sore for weeks, her toes growing horns and her soles covering over with scales like a lizard’s. (Thank God that la señora Matilda, having become her friend, allowed María to soak in her bathtub with Epsom salts; that pleasure was a pure luxury, and the kind that she never knew back in Pinar del Río.)

The other dancers, who were all about María’s age-Rosalita, at thirty, was practically an ancient by cabaret standards-were nice enough, happy to show María the ropes, but their choreographer, Gaspar, was of a different order altogether. A little fellow, he was one of those fulanos who, working so closely with women, seemed to have acquired some of their coquettish mannerisms; at the same time he liked to lord over them like a tyrant. With his tiny frame, muscular arms, and dyed blond hair, wavy as the sea, he was either constantly clapping his hands, to speed up their pace (flamenco-inspired numbers were the worst) or else putting on a show by tapping at the ladies’ heads with his dense forefinger if they made any mistakes. He worked on their postures, constantly lifting chins higher with his knuckles, and, while holding their bellies flat with one hand, ran the other up from the nubs of their spines to the bottoms of their necks; along the way, he held, brushed, pressed, and touched parts of their bodies with the kind of casualness that they would have objected to were he a more manly, and therefore lascivious, sort. (If he was acting, by pretending to show no interest in them, then he was a good actor.) Sometimes he’d fire someone on the spot for flubbing her steps, send her out into the street in tears, run after her, then bring her back, without as much as an apology about the matter.

He didn’t mince words. “You are the worst dancer I’ve ever worked with-a disaster of the first order. You should go back to the sticks,” he once told María, who would have slapped his face had she not needed the job. “You put my stomach in knots, entiendes? Now, do it over again!”

Not that María disliked him-he was the first to let you know if your work was good, but, God, just getting to that point amounted to a daily trial. For one thing, she learned that there was quite a difference between the limberness of an amateur and that of a professional: the stretches alone were a misery that she never quite got used to. Constantly scolding them about one thing or the other, Gaspar would tell the chorus that they were useless unless, in the midst of a dance, they could raise their insteps to touch their foreheads, because then, as he’d bluntly put it, the gawking tourists might have their dreams come true and catch a glimpse of their young and succulent Cuban vaginas through the glittering fabric of their garments. Such a display of feminine charms, he reminded them again and again, was the backbone of their business. “Now, never forget that, señoritas!”

So for several afternoons a week, María became a reluctant ballerina in training, her long legs rising slowly and her body contorting as she tried to touch her forehead with the high arch of her shapely foot. All that work, which she hated at the time, she’d remember with fondness-given the distance of years, even the moody Gaspar would seem a most simpático teacher-and while it may have been true that María, a sight to see in a skimpy bodice and leotard, could have wrung a chicken’s neck and still drawn applause from the audience, a certain fact remained. During her seven months’ apprenticeship at the Monte Carlo, she, in fact, proved herself an exceptional dancer and probably could have been the star of that show, except for the fact that, as such things went-It is very true, Teresita, that men will take advantage when you are so very attractive-she didn’t want to put Rosalita out on the street, the boss having gotten in the habit of removing his dark glasses and looking at María in a way that disturbed her during those shows. Or, to put it differently, she couldn’t see herself spreading her legs for him just for the sake of becoming a headliner, and so, feeling his eyes drilling into her backside each time she crossed the stage, María simply stopped showing up, even if she would miss those dancers, some of whom were to remain her friends.

Doting on her and knowing just how special she looked, her papito, Manolo, always made a certain joke: “Where’d you come from, chiquita?” It was a mystery. While Concha had been a pleasant-looking woman with a broad African nose and deeply soft dark eyes, there had never been anything particularly remarkable about her looks, save for a certain gentle piety-you’ve seen that on the faces of those sweet churchgoing negritas on Sundays. As for her papito, with his sagging gallego face, his droop-lidded eyes, he was no prize either (even when María thought that he would have been a handsome man if he hadn’t liked his rum so much). Somehow, between the two of them, they had produced this masterpiece, the sort of little girl who, romping through the high grasses, lifted even the lowest and most forlorn of spirits up. Whenever Manolo took her around, guitar in hand, to neighboring farms and valles, she was as good as currency when it came to getting him free drinks and a little food. And, during the glory of her childhood, when she became aware of just how thickly and deliberately sunlight moved across a field, and just the scent of flowers sent her to heaven, there was no escaping the fact that, in a valle with lots of other Marías, and pretty ones at that, she and her younger sister, Teresita, for whom she would have cut off her right hand, surely stood out.

She was so pretty that whenever she was spotted from the fields tending to her chores in their yard-feeding their livestock from pails of slop mainly-even the most exhausted of those guajiro farmers, faces gnarled, bodies thin as bone, their skin leathery from the sun, would halt their oxen and call out to her, “Oye, princesa!”-“Hello, princess!”-or “Hola, mi vida!”-“Hey there, my life!” all in the effort to get her attention, as if for the first time, even if she had been tagging along with their plows and oxen for as long as she could remember. Well, things had just changed, that’s all. First had come the blood, then the bloating, the terrible lecture about becoming filthy and having to wear a rag so she wouldn’t drip blood everywhere. Then her body had filled out. It had seemed to take only a few months. Her angelic girl’s figure, turning so voluptuous that Concha, fearful a drunkard might try to take advantage of her one night, made María wear a homemade corset tight around her chest, but, with María hating the thing, that lasted only a while, proving too painful and impractical for her to endure.

In those days, a toothless old guajiro, Macedonio, who slurped through his every saliva-driven utterance, once told her, “Looking at you, I can remember when I could chew.” And when she, Teresa, and her papito went to the nearest town, San Jacinto, some ten miles away, to bring their livestock to market, María suddenly found herself being followed by one or another of the brasher young men, fellows who whistled after her, promised to buy her an ice cream cone if she would only tell them her name, and who, while her papito negotiated with a butcher, asked her out to see a movie in that town’s little theater, El Chaplin. If she refused them all, or hardly seemed to care about hurting anyone’s feelings, it was because María tried to forget about her own bodily changes: which is to say that she didn’t want to let her childhood go.