Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

What followed, she never cared to talk about-she’d never tell her daughter, not even during their most earnest talks about her rough beginnings in Havana-only that, once upon a time, it had been her misfortune to have stumbled, and stupidly so, for the sake of earning a few dollars, into a shadowy place. What was it that she’d remember? Back in his office, the Catalán offered her a drink, but she didn’t like her rum in those days-“I was an innocent”-and then he sat her down and told María about how everyone in the club had been much taken by her little performance and that, if she so wanted to, there would be other ways that she, a most beautiful young woman, could earn money. How so? she asked.

“By being nice to those fellows, that’s all,” he told her.

“Señor,” she said, without much deliberation. “All I want is my pay. I’ve done what you wanted me to do.”

But he just smiled and, stepping towards her, his expression changing, grabbed hold of her hair in his fist and, tightening his grip, asked her: “And who the hell do you think you are?” Then he slapped María’s face with the back of his hand and threw her down on the settee near his desk. To her horror, as she looked up to heaven for assistance, he undid his belt. At first she thought he was going to beat her, the way her papito sometimes did-she wasn’t always a well-behaved daughter-but, no, he wanted something else. Letting drop his linen trousers and his (rank-smelling) undershorts below his knees, he stood before her with his somewhat dense but not particularly long ardor in hand; truth be told, it seemed dwarfish, compared with the immensity of his belly. He then proceeded to do his best to deflower her, his enormous corpulence slamming achingly against her hip bones, his body sweating, his breathing labored-he was one of those grossly overweight men who, because of heft, thought himself a Hercules when it was far from the truth. She’d also recall that he wore a lilac aftershave.

But did he succeed? Screaming-surely, they heard her in the club-she fought him until her body was covered in bruises, his face and back with scratches. She prayed for her life, prayed to El Señor, who watches over the forlorn, until, in an instant, she was reprieved. Or to put it differently, until, in the throes of extreme physical exertion, some horrible and paralyzing pain seized the right side of the Catalán’s body-she was, without knowing it, a morena fatal after all. Unable to breathe, or even to lift his arms, he slumped over, beside María. When he asked her desperately for a glass of water, suspirando mucho, mucho, María, may God forgive her, told him to go to hell. And when he asked her again, as she gathered her clothes, María, a practical guajira, answered, “Okay, but tell me, where are my five dollars?”

“En los bolsillos de mis pantalones,” he told her, gasping. So she rifled through his trousers pockets, encountering a stiletto, several condoms, some cards for his club-if she had been able to read she would have known that his establishment was called “El Savoy, a place for gentlemans [sic]”-and then she came to a clump of bills: from this she removed five American dollar bills. And then, because she’d been struggling lately, she availed herself of the rest, in both Cuban and American currency, which were equal in value, may God forgive her. Then, dressing, she made her way out.

LEAVING THAT ESTABLISHMENT, MARÍA HEARD NEITHER SONOROUS violins nor longing melodies echoing around her; nor any tremulous baritone voice, with its saintly inflections, confessing the greatest passion for her beauty, as if she were the object of devotion in a song of love. What she heard instead was Havana, circa 1947, at 2 a.m., a general din of restaurants, clubs, and distant voices coming from every direction and punctuated by the barking of dogs. Firecrackers-or shots heard in the distance; the caw-caws of seagulls alighting upon the slop barges in the harbor, or else swooping low to pick through the offal left in the trails of yachts. From a nearby edifice, a woman shouted at someone, “Eres un pendejo!” at the top of her lungs. Her high-heel shoes clacking along the flagstones of a placita. A cavalcade of partiers, honking their horns and whistling, in a postwedding procession of automobiles passed along the Malecón. The moon itself, a medallion, with a melancholic face looked down from the northwest, like a sanguine god without a word to say. From some alley, deep in the recesses of la Marina -or was it el barrio Colón?-a half dozen batá and quinto drums were beating. She heard police sirens: then, as the casino boats and cruise ships came into port, buoys and deck bells ringing, smatterings of music here and there from behind the closed doors of the all-night cabarets and bordellos; the skittering of cats and other scavengers foraging through the gutters in search of food. If she could have listened through the walls of some of the less respectable edifices she was passing, a thousand moans of drunken pleasure would have assailed her. If she could have eavesdropped into the cells of the central police command, where, unbeknownst to her, political agitators-the socialistas, the comunistas, the union organizers-were held, half dead from torture and beatings, in dingy lightless rooms, she would have heard them cursing, weeping, and moaning, not from pleasure but from agony.

Still reeling from her experience at the Catalán’s, she walked and walked though the streets of a city she had yet to know better. In an arcade, María bought herself a half-stale lechón sandwich from an all-night stand. Its owner, with his one milky eye and tattered flat boater cane hat, left over from the days when he was a 1930s dandy, tried to act as if she wasn’t the most ravishing young woman he had ever seen (even if she seemed a little sad). He checked her out just the same, as María, half starved to death, scoffed down the sandwich and then, meekly smiling, set off again. After roaming in the darkness of an arcade, and hearing the whistles of passing strangers, María, with her irresistible body, her high and firm buttocks jostling the fabric of her ruffled cotton dress, finally got back to her hotel, with its fifth-rate amenities. Stretching across her bed, she spent the night half feverishly, visited by nightmares and missing the countryside she’d left behind.

Oh, but her story to that point: Just leaving her tranquil valley, midway between the mountains and the sea, would have been enough to rip any heart into pieces; but she hadn’t really been given much choice about the matter. For one thing, in the wake of her beloved mami’s death, her papito, Manolo, had taken up with the most horrible woman imaginable, a hard case from a town along the gulf coast whom he, still an occasional músico, had met while moonlighting with some of his sonero friends at a wedding dance. Her name was Olivia, and he must have been crazy or desperately lonely to fall for her, or maybe she had bewitched him, because she was neither pretty nor softly feminine nor even funny. If she had any virtues, as far as María could figure, it was that she could really cook and Manolo liked to eat, but, even then, poor María, for the life of her, couldn’t begin to find anything else nice to say about the woman.

And Olivia must have known it from the moment they first laid eyes on each other, on the very day she moved in, with her horse-drawn cart filled with chairs and what few dresses she owned. After just a short few weeks, Olivia gave up on all her phony smiles and seemed to take a special delight in ordering María around and establishing herself as the new dueña of that household.

It was the worst for María at night, when she had to listen to them going at it from behind a hanging blanket that separated their sleeping space from the rest of that room, no more than ten feet across. With its floor of pounded down dirt, and its few paltry chairs, its kerosene lamp, and, among their sparse adornments, an altar to the Holy Virgin in a corner, which her mamá had kept, the interior of their bohío did not afford much privacy. María’s cot, built of plywood and canvas, with straw-stuffed pillows, the same she had once shared with her younger sister, was near a back door, open to the selva, that dense forest around them, where insects buzzed all night against the mosquito netting. It was bad enough that her papito snored like a beast, and she was used to hearing his every movement, sigh, his dreamer’s mumblings, the capricious workings of his digestive system, but once Olivia had settled in as his woman, those arrangements became a torment. Whereas her mamá, as far as María could remember, hardly ever made any noise at all, just letting out sighs and sometimes crying, “Por Dios, por Dios!” that horrid bruja Olivia, with her groans and yelps and filthy language, could have awakened the dead. That alone was enough to turn María’s stomach, and it killed her to think that her mamá, off in paradise and watching them in life the way people watched actors in movies, could take in every bit of that hag’s lascivious grunting.