Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

She’d finally had a regular novio in college, at least for a time, a pre-med student of mixed Argentine and Lebanese descent, named Tomás, who, breaking the sacred seal of her virginity, could not get enough of her, his favorite part of Teresita’s body lying between her legs, the taste of which he swore intoxicated him. Altogether, their romance seemed to others an instance of cerebral love between two of the best pre-med students in their school. How could it have been otherwise? For Tomás also happened to possess a handsomeness that turned many a female head, and some might have wondered how she, of an ordinary cubanita prettiness, had managed to snag him. (She wondered as well.)

One evening, after they’d been together for about five months, Teresita brought Tomás home to María, on whom his striking looks and intelligence made a wonderful impression. So wonderful that for weeks afterwards, María pestered her daughter about having Tomás in again for dinner. On that second occasion, it startled Teresita to find that María had abandoned her usual blouse and tight evening slacks for an even tighter hip-swallowing red dress with a slit skirt, of such décolletage, that Tomás, during the course of their meal of arroz con pollo, could not avoid taking in the alluring shapeliness of María’s breasts. And she embarrassed Teresita further with her constant compliments of him. “Oh, but how it makes me happy to see my daughter with a fellow as nice looking as you!” and, “Surely, if you don’t want to become a doctor, you can become a movie actor!” Such remarks, abetted by a few cocktails, and María’s later insistence that she show him the steps of a dance called the “mozambique” on their living room floor, left Teresita so peeved afterwards that she resolved never to bring him back there again.

It didn’t matter. A few months later, for reasons Teresita could not comprehend, Tomás began to make himself scarce. Perhaps someone else had entered the picture-she didn’t know-but, in any event, Tomás gradually disappeared from her life. And while Teresita never once mentioned her disappointment to anyone, she began to think that María, whose questions about that “wonderful boy” began to drop away, already knew. If so, María, being María, kept it under her hat-perhaps out of fear of saying the wrong thing to her daughter. And while Teresita, for all her pride, would have loved to have lain her head on María’s lap and cry her eyes out, she never did; and not from any animosity, but simply because, when it came to such moments, they just weren’t that way with each other at all.

And now, an image of Teresita, having taken a shower and drying herself off with a towel in the bedroom mirror of her lowly Fort Washington flat, on West 188th, in a neighborhood of Hasidic Jews, Holocaust survivors, and junkies. What did she see? A young woman, of thirty or so, and about five feet two in height, with cinnamon skin, sometimes a little too chubby in places-she kept her belly sucked in-but nice, a great mane of dark hair falling over her shoulders, a woman with shapely hips and pendulous breasts, their nipples like berries, and a flourish of curling black pubic hair in the shape of a spade between her legs. And her face? Stepping closer to the mirror, in her ordinary prettiness, she could see that her almond eyes were her best feature; but when she tilted her head up at a certain angle, and her cheekbones glowed and the slope of her face elongated, she thought that she looked just like her mother, María.

Actually, in those days when Teresita lived in New York and her mother kept asking, “Is there someone?” there had been an American fellow, a certain Derek Harrison, whom Teresita had met at the hospital during her second year as an intern. They’d had an affair that lasted about six months, their passions enflamed, in part, by their exposure to patients who were dying. It was as if one atmosphere fed the other. With AIDS just coming to light, when Teresita and Derek, a fellow intern, stole some moments between rounds, they’d slip into a vacant operating room to ravish each other at three in the morning, and once-the sort of thing that made even Teresita smile-standing up in a janitors’ closet, she had hitched her skirt over her belly, her panties down, her body writhing, her papaya damp and hungrily drawing him in.

It was wonderful and exciting while it lasted, but Teresa, in her naïveté, confused this fellow’s desire to escape the more funereal side of their profession with affection. She’d almost told María about it as a blossoming kind of love, but before she could, he had started to grow more distant, detached, in fact, and while they had continued to fool around for a while, the boiling heat of their mutual infatuation reduced to a simmer and then cooled to a tepid broth. By then, while doing what he could to avoid her, this sinverguenza Derek finally confessed that he, from a very good WASP family in Philadelphia, happened to be engaged. If there had been any time when Teresita wished a man to hell, it was then.

But, as with Tomás, she never told María about her broken heart. What would her mother have said to console her anyway?

INDEED, ONCE TERESITA RETURNED TO MIAMI, IN ’87, TO BEGIN her post at the children’s hospital, a decision which made María very happy, they resumed a life as mother and daughter (along with Omar, the cat) that, compared with many another Cuban household in Miami, bubbling over with aunts and cousins, uncles and abuelos, was muy callado-quiet. Teresita’s position at the hospital took up a lot of her time; she’d come home exhausted, often finishing up patient reports in her bedroom before joining her mother in the living room. On the weekends, however, María and her daughter were nearly inseparable. They liked to eat lunch at one of those outdoor cafés along South Beach -now jammed with tourists and hustling young people. Amazed by how much things had changed-for the worse in some ways, with all the noise, traffic, and tacky souvenir shops-even she, no prude, never quite got used to seeing, as they’d stroll along the beach, the European women who wore only bikini bottoms playing volleyball or dancing to rap music from boom boxes in the sand. (Yes, Miami was a long way from Havana, 1949.) Sometimes they’d go to an art fair, or church bazaar, or to an afternoon outdoor concert with some friends, but mainly they kept to themselves. And while she was ever grateful for the fact that they had each other, with each passing week María became more distressed to see her only daughter staying at home on Saturday nights when most unmarried women her age were at least trying to find a novio if not a husband.

(Oh, but María’s lectures, while the poor young woman was just trying to mind her own business: lectures about broken hearts and the loneliness of solitude, the stupidity of today’s juventud, squandering their opportunities for life and love, especially the ones who got too many American cucarachas in their heads!)

To please María, Teresa dipped into the crowded, overwrought Miami club scene, singles nights at different venues, and while she occasionally went out on the dates that her mother had cajoled from friends, Teresita had yet to meet anyone, Cuban or not, she thought compatible. (“So what was wrong with that one?” María inevitably asked.) Her mother’s continual urgings, it should be said, occasionally got on Teresita’s nerves, becoming, at a certain point, something Teresita just didn’t want to hear about.

But they had their good times: paid well, living cheaply, Teresita was able to take beautiful María to Italy on a vacation. To Rome, to Florence and Venice, then Naples and Sorrento and back. Her mother loved not only the way Italian men regarded women but the gruff yet kindly vendors in the markets with whom, as during her stay in the Bronx, she could speak Spanish and always be understood. She dissolved in the sunsets, daydreamed in the wisteria-rich gardens, and, touring the ruins of Pompeii, wondered why people bothered to preserve such old things. Roma, in particular, with its self-contained and lively neighborhoods, so reminded María of Havana that she felt completely at home. And she liked the way men gave her daughter the most interested looks, following her every move down the street. “You see,” she’d say, “they know how to appreciate you,” Teresita simply nodding.