Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

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?”

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.

Still, it came down to the same thing. Called into his office to discuss a featured spot in the chorus, María had listened to him sing her praises as a dancer when, out of the blue, he pulled from a drawer a pair of elbow-length white satin gloves and then, with boyish reticence, asked her to put those gloves on and fondle him. “Please, I beg you.” Then he made a confession, declaring that it was very hard to go through life loving one of his dancers the way he loved her; that with his days in the world so short-he just knew it-he could go to his grave happily if only she would perform that little act. She almost did-not for a better job, or because of the way he had set aside a twenty-dollar bill on the ink blotter of his desk for her, but because he seemed to be telling the truth-he certainly looked like he was not long for this world. That evening she almost gave in to the inner argument that, far from being a lowly act, it would be one of decency and grace-his sadness cutting into her. In the end, however, even when she had gone so far as to slip those gloves on, the words puta and lowlife flashing through her mind, her kindlier inclinations lost out to her virtuous resolve, and, with tears in her eyes, she fled that room.

A few weeks later, when she heard that Señor Aponte had dropped dead from a heart attack while walking in the arcades of Galliano, she surely had felt bad. When she heard the rumor that a love note written to one of the chorus girls had been found in his pocket, she was certain that it had been intended for her, though she wouldn’t have been able to read it. For days, she wished to God that she had honored that man’s simple request-perhaps a last wish-the money would have been useful and he would have been happy. Who would it have hurt, and who would have known about it?