Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

But one day, she left.

Eventually, she allowed him to “make her into a woman,” as they used to say, but it had not been an easy thing to accustom herself to. With her heart in her throat, she first bedded Ignacio down on a brand-new mattress with clean sheets in the bedroom of a sunny third-floor solar that he had gotten her in a better neighborhood, near a marketplace. On that afternoon she discovered the sorrowful history of a man whose body was covered with scars, his back in particular, a mess of claw-shaped welts, his cruel papito’s gift to him as a boy. The actual act of penetration made no great impression on her, it was more or less what she had imagined, a little painful and almost pleasurable, but she had learned from the whores of la Cucaracha that nothing pleased a man more than to hear a woman scream at the top of her lungs as if she were being torn to pieces by a horse.

The whole ritual of it, however, she found discomforting and wished she had covered over the crucifix above her bed with a black cloth.

The moment he had removed her dress and undergarments and stripped down himself, proudly displaying the brutish and tearful proof of his desire-“Go ahead, look and admire it,” he told her proudly-she began to drift outside herself. Fondled, spread open, pulled at, bitten, and feeling the dampish and warm bundle of his inguinal sack-sus huevos-rolling over her taut belly and upwards over her rib cage as he, among first things, smothered his enraged cosita with her breasts, she couldn’t help but think about Christ’s last moments on the cross. As his blunt thrusts raised a wormy vein on his forehead, his eyes turning upwards inside their lids, she envisioned the journey Jesus Christ, upon his death and resurrection, had made, down to Purgatory and then Hell, before ascending to Heaven. And while he buried his head between her thighs, kissing the corona of her femininity, Mary Magdalene went kneeling before Him, to wash His feet with the tresses of her hair.

And so, even as she screamed, she kept praying that God forgive her, for however much she believed Ignacio when he muttered that she was the kind of woman he could really care for, María, dallying in the Holy Land, felt nothing for him beyond pity and a vague gratitude for the way he looked after her, and for his generosity, sentiments which she, being so young, had perhaps confused with the devotions of love.

After that afternoon, beautiful María got used to Ignacio’s visits. Was she in love with him? She hardly thought so, but she slept with Ignacio often enough to make him happy. And while María preferred to keep those duties a secret, she found it comforting to know that such arrangements were common. Some of the girls in the troupe were always looking around for men with money, often gossiping about how nice it would be to have someone of means to look after them, no matter his callousness. Most of their would-be suitors weren’t prizes, though they’d hear of dancers who had run off with an American, to places like Cincinnati and Arkansas. At least Ignacio was generous, and he wasn’t ugly, or fat, and he was clean, dapper, and smelled good, even if María didn’t care to believe the rumors that he was a gangster of some sort.

AH, BUT HOW THINGS CHANGE. LETTING IGNACIO DO WITH HER AS he wanted and drowning afterwards in guilt, she eased her conscience by going to church, not just to confess her sins but to feel purified by the sanctity of the altar and the oddly comforting gazes of the saintly statues. As often as she asked herself, while kneeling in prayer on a stony chapel floor, Why Ignacio? she concluded that El Señor, in his mysterious ways, had placed him in her life for a reason. And if she felt sometimes that Ignacio didn’t really care about her-especially when they had gone out to a fancy place and he’d accuse her of chewing her food too loudly and eating like a goat, at least, while she was in his company, other men left her alone. As she’d tell her daughter one day, she needed him. Going anywhere in Havana by herself had become a nuisance, more so as she learned how to dress better and developed a taste for fancy clothes, as well as makeup and perfumes, which she had started using in the clubs. She could rarely go down the street without someone calling out or whistling at her, many a devouring stare attending María’s every step. But when she took walks with Ignacio holding her by the arm, few dared even to glance her way. With his proprietary air, he just looked like the sort you didn’t want to offend. (Men found ways of glimpsing her anyway-they’d look without seeming to look in the Cuban manner, a mirar sin mirar.) Whenever Ignacio happened to catch someone coveting María’s bottom, he’d stop dead in his tracks, excuse himself, and march over to have some words with her admirer.

She appreciated this vigilance but wished he could relax; his severity was sometimes hard to take. He may have been courtly and suave, but, as time went on, he also became quick-tempered, especially in his efforts to teach her things: how to cut food, how she should dress, never to look a man straight in the eye. His moods were sometimes awful, however, and if there was anything María sorely missed, it was the sort of tenderness she had known with her papito. He may not have taught her much of anything about good manners, and his drinking had made her crazy, but he, at least, had a gentle soul. She just missed that guajiro warmth, the sentimentality of his songs, the way her papito sometimes touched her face, but oh so softly, as if she were a flower.

Not so with el señor Fuentes, who rarely smiled and never seemed to feel compassion or pity for anyone. Poor people disgusted him. If lepers or blind men or amputees held out their hands begging for coins, a scowl of contempt exploded across his face. Once, when they were walking along Neptuno to a ladies’ haberdasher’s and she asked him, “But, Ignacio, why are you so hard on those people? They can’t help themselves, los pobres,” he laid out his philosophy of life:

“María, you may think me harsh, but when you’ve come up from nothing, the way we both did, you learn quickly that the only person worth looking out for is yourself, and maybe your family, if they actually give a damn for you.” He turned a deep, frightening red. “And so what if I give those unfortunates a few centavos? How the hell is that going to change a thing for them in the long run?”

“But if you give them a little money, then at least they can have something to eat,” María said, while thinking about the poor children she saw all over the city who begged for pennies. “Isn’t that the right thing to do?”

“The right thing?” he said, laughing. “I’ll tell you what, María.” And he reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet, pulling a ten-dollar bill out. “This was going to pay for your hat, but, what the hell, let me just give it to that fellow over there, okay?”

Marching over to some unfortunate-un infeliz-sitting, one legged and grimy against a wall, Ignacio stuffed that bill into the tin can he held in his filthy hands.

“So there,” he said, “are you satisfied? Now, look around you and tell me something: tell me if you’re seeing this lousy world changing one bit.”

“Ay, pero Ignacio, don’t be so angry at me.”

“All right then, but don’t you ever preach to me again. Understand?”

FOR ALL HER MISGIVINGS ABOUT HIM, THEY HAD THEIR ENJOYMENTS. On a Sunday, Ignacio drove her to a beach resort out in Varadero, where María, glorious in an Esther Williams swimsuit, the sort with fancy seashell pleats accentuating her breasts and midsection (translation, her smooth belly, her fabulous burst of hair, the fig of her heart-shaped pubic mound), parted those warm, clear waters before her. They journeyed to a pueblo by the sea, about three hours east of Havana, their route, along the northern coast, taking them past expanses of marshes, mangrove swamps, and beaches to Matanzas, where Ignacio had been born in utter poverty and received his first scars. He didn’t know if his father was even alive, nor did he care, and his mamacita had died when he was a boy, which was how he ended up in Havana to fend for himself at an early age, he told her. Taking her around-what was there to see in a town that stretched only three or four blocks end to end along the coast?-Ignacio told María, with all sincerity, that it was his dream to construct a house in that place, so that he-and she-would have a wonderful retreat to escape to from Havana, maybe even live there one day as man and wife. Then they returned to the city, and, as he often liked to do, he pulled over to the side of the road and had María undo his white pantalones so that she might attend to him in a manner that he particularly enjoyed: the wonderful sun just beginning to set on the horizon.