Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

She was not at all homely-fixed up and with a few pounds off, the doctor seemed just perfect for the right sort (conservative, not too wild nor demanding) of man. Attractive enough, with long dark hair, pretty almond eyes, and a compactly promising figure, she had just never bothered with men, not even having a real novio in high school, and in college, aside from one fellow, who almost broke her heart, she had been too possessed by her studies to pay attention to such things. More on the quiet side (as pensive as a Nestor Castillo perhaps), Teresita tended to be the first to get up and leave once the conversation started to sound a little too repetitive for her taste-she always had the excuse of work awaiting her at home. (She carried a shoulder bag stuffed with folders to prove it.) Nevertheless, given a few drinks and the right kind of music, she could let loose with the moves she’d learned growing up around the dancers in her mother’s Learn to Mambo and Cha-cha the Cuban Way studio near Calle Ocho, though hip-hop and Latin fusion threw her.

“Pero, chica,” she would hear her mother telling her, as she worked out on the dance floor with a basic Latin three-step, “it’s all the same-remember to move your hips and shake your culo like it’s on fire, that’s all you have to do!”

Even so, Teresita must have had wallflower written all over her face, and after a while she’d get tired of dancing with just ladies. As well as she shimmied, men would just check her out from the bar, their chins on their fists, trying to figure out if it would be worth approaching her, and usually, so Teresita imagined, thinking No way. She just looked too much like serious business. Besides, they wanted women practically half her age-with their toned bodies, smooth, bared navels, and sun-seasoned breasts plump in push-up bras. Miami was full of them. After a while she’d give up the good fight, head home, and pass the night on a couch beside her mother, sipping glasses of red wine or Scotch on the rocks and watching beautiful María’s favorite Spanish-language telenovelas and variety shows on their color TV, the sort of glowing apparition that would have surely dazzled the guajiros of Pinar del Río.

“BUT, MI VIDA,” MARÍA TOLD HER ONE NIGHT. “THE PROBLEM WITH you is that you don’t do anything right. You don’t put on the proper makeup-when you do, you look like a payaso! A clown. And you don’t care about dressing sexy at all. What’s wrong with turning a few heads? I certainly did in my time, and you can too!”

“Come on, Mama,” Teresa told her, looking up from a book. “You know I love you, but you’re wrong. Most men want a certain type, and I’m not that way at all. But it doesn’t bother me, okay? Just leave me alone about that business! Déjame tranquilo, okay?”

“Okay, okay,” María told her, lighting a Virginia Slims cigarette, which always offended her daughter’s medical sensibilities. “But I’ll only say one more thing.”

“What?”

“At your age, no eres una pollita-you’re no longer a young chick-so you should try everything to find someone, because otherwise you will end up alone. You know I won’t always be around, and then you’ll really be lonely. I’ll come and visit you-don’t worry about that-but do you want to spend the rest of your life with a spirit as opposed to a real flesh-and-blood person? And remember, I have you-but who will be there when you’re getting on?” Then, the coup de grâce: “And don’t forget, no tenemos familia. We don’t have any family.”

That made her doctor’s composure unravel.

“Ay, Mamá, but don’t you know you’re hurting me with all that talk? Can’t you stop sometimes?”

“All right, hija, I’m just trying to be helpful,” María said. A few minutes of silence. And then beautiful María would add: “But listen to me, I’ll only say one more thing. Even if I think you deserve the best, even an ugly man with one leg would be better than none; then at least you can have children! And then you’ll be happy, instead of putting up with that miserable brain of yours that thinks too much!”

“Okay, Mama, I appreciate it, but enough, all right? I’m tired from working and-”

“Hey, chiquita, I’ve got an idea! Why don’t you go to one of those singles nights at the Biltmore, over in Coral Gables? Yes, it’s the ‘Black Bean Society’-they have one every month-I have a friend who went there and met some nice fellow, and maybe, if you fix yourself up the right way, you’ll have a little luck too and-”

That’s when Teresita leaned over and gave her mother a kiss to quiet her down. She owed María too much to stay angry at her for long, but God, when she’d start up with all the nagging about the loveless state of her only daughter’s romantic life, Teresita could only take it for so long. She’d want to drown her sorrows in the worst things possible: pizza, fried plátanos, lechón sandwiches, and dark chocolate truffles (which tasted great with red wine). On many a night, filled with cravings, she’d drive off to some diner and eat her heart out just because she felt like it. (Then a week of weighing herself, of shaking her head.) More often than not, however, if Teresita didn’t head her off at the conversational pass, María might well slip back into the re-recitation of her own history as a poor country girl who’d come to Havana with nothing, and how she had learned her life’s lessons the hard way…and, always, always, just how humble and beautiful she had been in her prime, and the loves of her life. In fact, if she’d had enough to drink, María would go on and on about that muy, muy handsome músico named Nestor Castillo, who’d once written a song about her: “the man who could have been your papito!” she’d say.

(Yes, Mama, the one who wrote you those dirty letters that you don’t know I read.)

That led to a discourse about her other companions who followed over the years-not just Ignacio, whose blood flowed through Teresita’s veins, but the rest, those men she’d grown up regarding as her temporary papitos. She didn’t need to hear more. But she always did. (“Even now, at my age, it’s nearly impossible for a woman like me to stay alone for long.”)

Teresita always made a point of kissing her mother again, and chiding her if she lit another Virginia Slim, which always followed the kiss, and then it was as if nothing hurtful had been said, their life, on such nights, to repeat itself again and again-both being creatures of habit-María taking in her shows, content (and occasionally saddened) in her memories, and Teresita, or Dr. G as some of the orderlies called her, passing into her bedroom along a corridor of solitude and haunted not by love but by the notion that some in this world, no matter how good-hearted, are more or less destined to be alone.

When it came to romance, Teresita’s mother, as opposed to herself, had seemed to lead a charmed life. At least when it came to finding one man or another to pass the time with. Other things, however, did not come so easily. Back in ’61, when they’d first come to Miami, for three of the dreariest months of María’s life they had stayed in a motel near the turnpike that they’d found barely tolerable (two cots, a sputtering black-and-white television, a sometimes running toilet, no air-conditioning, but a fan that, on humid days, barely did the job). The sort of run-down end-of-the-road establishment one used to find in pre-civil rights Miami-in which the motel walkway water fountains and its public restrooms were marked whites only, most of the residents were on the seedy side and somewhat, it seemed to María without her even knowing why, bitterly disposed. (Just a year later, there would be signs up in certain shop windows: help wanted, no cubans please.) Whenever she and Teresita crossed the street and waited for a bus to take them downtown, there was always someone to stare at María, and not for the old “hey beautiful” reasons she had known in Havana. Until Miami became used to seeing thousands of others like her, María, despite her beauty and light mulatta skin, was sometimes regarded as good-or bad-as black. Which was why some folks gave her and Teresita dirty looks or frosty up and downs when they’d stop to drink from those water fountains, and it was no joy to ask or rather beg in broken English for the use of a toilet in a downtown diner when María’s stomach had gone bad from anxiety, the owners grudgingly handing over a key. Teresita accompanied her everywhere rather mutely (what was that strange language people were speaking?), and always did as her mother told her.