Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

What her dear departed mother looking down from the stars in heaven and shaking her head must have thought!

Well, at least poor papito, drunk half the time or under a spell, seemed not to weep as much as he did before that horrendous creature came along. Just hearing his cries of release and beastly snoring afterwards convinced María that giving one’s body over to a man wasn’t much different from a mother suckling a crying baby at her breasts. Besides, because Olivia seemed to satisfy her papito in that way-he was much calmer in the mornings and sometimes even whistled happily-María couldn’t hate her completely, even if it was obvious that Olivia hated her.

Yet, it was hard to forgive her papito for taking up with such a woman, so shortly after Mamá had left the world. Not a year had passed since her mamá, at the ripe old age of forty-five, had died, slowly, slowly of a cancer that left her blind but still stubbornly whispering about the goodness of the Lord, a rosary burning in her hands (she claimed that the beads of her avemarías, nuestro padres, and those of the mysteries, heated up like embers between her fingers as she prayed). It had been a terrible time for María. She had spent countless hours beside her mother, attending to the messy business of looking after her, and, no matter how much she had prayed, María had watched her mother’s body slowly shrivel up. Before that, Concha had been one of those sturdy no-nonsense mulattas, built low to the ground, her hands strong and fingers thick from sewing and plucking feathers and from holding the necks of chickens and the ears of pigs as she slaughtered them in their yard and made the sign of the cross in contrition afterwards. The sort of woman to throw open the door to their shack each and every morning, as if to invite in the grace of God, she believed that her faith would get her through anything. But in her illness, she had practically evaporated, her limp body, in her daughter’s arms, nearly weightless, her hair falling out in clumps. Dutifully, María fed her mamá soup, changed her clothes, and attended to the white palangana that served as her bedpan.

The most difficult thing for Concha herself, aside from all that waiting, was to have watched the stars slowly fading from the horizon. Even before María’s papito had finally gotten around to bringing in a doctor from the sugar mill, she had been complaining about having trouble seeing things, especially her lovely, lovely daughter María’s face. But once the sky itself had started to fade, Concha, so quiet a woman, and demanding little for herself, had begun to sob wistfully over the passing of light from her life. By the time that doctor looked her over, when she had finally piped up, there wasn’t much that could be done. She went slowly, with lots of their guajiro neighbors gathering daily around her bed, women mainly, joining hands to say prayers in the old-school there-are-angels-and-saints-and-tongues-of-fire way; and while her mamá had been blessed and given her final holy-oiled send-off by their circuit priest, Father Alonso, who would ride into their hamlet on a donkey, clanging a bell, her eyes, which had turned into pearls, sometimes welled over with fear. Nobody, not even the most religious cubana, wanted to die.

And she would clutch her daughter’s hand as tightly as she could manage, begging María to hold her close so she wouldn’t feel so alone when the final moment came and she joined her other children in heaven.

Along the way, Concha, despite her unending drowsiness, often reminded her daughter to look after her papito, even if he had been a sinvergüenza to her sometimes, to never forget what she had been taught about God and sins and the promise of salvation; above all, as she was such a beautiful young woman, never to allow any man to use her like a common whore-“No eres una puta, me oyes?”

María, nodding, always swore that she would keep those promises, no matter how many times Concha, having become forgetful, mentioned them all over again. There were other things that repeated: Concha’s trembling and weeping in her arms, Concha’s long hours of complete silence, Concha’s milky eyes seemingly looking off into a distance when there was really nothing to see, her dried lips slightly parted as if in wonderment, Concha, forgetting that her daughter was sitting beside her, calling out, “María, María, where did you go?” Looking in at all this from time to time, her papito, Manolo, shook his head disbelievingly. Barely able to muster the courage to step into the room, he’d ask María, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to leave her mother alone and cook him some food. “And you let me know when you think her time is coming, huh?” her papito added.

María obeyed, day after day, ever so grateful whenever her papito managed to pull himself together and, sitting down beside her mamá, did something to show his tenderness towards her-brushing back Concha’s thinning hair with his hands, or planting a few kisses on her forehead, but never staying long. He just couldn’t take the sight of Concha suffering so and preferred to sit on a crate outside their doorway, strumming some chords on his guitar and sharing a bottle of rum or paint-thinner-strength aguardiente with one of his guajiro pals, anything better than owning up to some of the things he had done to Concha over the years, things that involved other women and that used to leave her quietly weeping at night or that left her eyes reddened while feeding the pigs and sobbing when she thought no one was looking. “Just let me know, niña,” he’d tell María again, as if his wife’s passing was akin to waiting for a train to come by, that guajiro not having the slightest idea of just how monumentally hard he would take the whole business when her moment finally came.

One day, just as the cocks had started to crow, María had been sleeping beside her mamá-well, really dozing, because it’s nearly impossible to sleep next to someone like that-when, all at once, she smelled something like strawberries or perfumed water in the air instead of the rot of her mother’s illness, and then she felt a hand passing gently over her face, the butt of a palm moving over her cheekbone, a thumb pushing upwards against her thick mane of hair-that’s when María opened her eyes, to see that her mamá had stopped breathing. Pressing her ear to her mother’s withered chest, as she had seen the farmers doing with their animals, and hearing nothing, María cried out, “Ven! Ven! Papito! Papito!”

Manolo had taken to sleeping in a hammock under a banyan alongside their bohío, mosquito netting draped over his body, and when he didn’t stir, María went outside to rouse him-it was early morning and thousands and thousands of birds, from woodpeckers to thrushes to silver-winged vireos were singing in the forests round them-but because her papito had, in his misery the night before, gone off to the local cervecería, at a crossroads far beyond the fields,-a place where María sometimes used to dance for pennies-and had come back home only a few hours earlier, he may as well have been dead. Shaking his arms and shouting at him to get up, María nearly started to weep herself. Out of nowhere, as crows began gathering in the sky over their house, he awakened and, hearing the sad news, for reasons she would never understand, got to his feet and, with his mouth twisted into a wince, slapped her so hard that the right side of her beautiful face, already covering in shadows, darkened with black and blue bruises. Her papito, his arms shaking, hit her a dozen times more, his face contorted with anger, as if María were somehow to blame for Concha’s death. Then, coming to his senses and seeing that his daughter, the most precious thing remaining in his life, couldn’t bear to look at him, he fell onto his knees begging her forgiveness. With her eyes swollen by sadness and shock, her jaw aching, María, as a good cubana daughter, grabbed him by the crook of his arm and led her papito to her mother’s bedside.