Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

There, at the sight of her mamá’s corpse, still as a saint’s, her papito carried on with such sudden misery that María couldn’t help but wonder where he had really been all those months before, the man crying out that he was worthless and undeserving of having married so wonderful a woman and saying many other things that left María feeling even more sorry for him, María repeating, while caressing his tightened shoulders and back, “Ay, pero, Papito, Papito…”

Naturally, after Mamá’s funeral, a procession of their guajiro neighbors, and even some from farther away, beating drums and chanting, accompanied her pine coffin to the local campo santo, at the far end of the fields. María took to wearing a black dress and her papito, a black armband, and for weeks, out of respect, he did not once pick up his guitar and sing-nor did any of his neighbors. And, as might happen in any number of rustic enclaves all over Cuba, so obscure as to lack a proper name, where not a single electric light was to be found, once three days had gone by, people began to claim they had seen Concha’s spirit materializing as a floating will-o’-the-wisp in the cane fields at night; and a few of their neighbors, out of pure sympathy and missing Concha, claimed to have seen her translucent spirit drifting through the moonlit hollows of the forest amongst the lianas and star blossoms (those guajiros, sobbing and drunk, were always seeing such things). But María herself never saw Concha again, except in her dreams, and in her loneliness and grieving, like any respectable cubana daughter, she turned her attentions to her papito in his time of distress. Which is to say that María, having made certain promises to her mother on her deathbed, and believing her papito when he swore to anyone who listened that he would live out the rest of his days honoring the memory of his late wife, forgave him for every beating he’d ever given her for no good reason and for every single moment when he had made María feel ashamed of being his daughter: as when she had once watched him, like any other who-could-give-a-shit guajiro, dropping his trousers, crouching down, and relieving himself amidst the oxen in a field, or for the way he used to linger in their retrete, their squalid outhouse in the back, without bothering to close the door, and thought nothing of calling for her to fetch him a Lucifer match, a thin black cheroot between his lips, while he emptied his guts noisily beneath him.

She had other reasons for detesting and loving him at the same time, but now, with her mamá gone, and no one else left in that house-she once had two older brothers, Luis and Miguel, who’d died of typhus and tuberculosis when she was little, and a younger sister, Teresita, gone just a few years before, whose death she blamed herself for-her papito constituted her only family, that of her flesh and blood, even though there were other more distant relatives here and there around the island. Just that fact alone made María put up with all kinds of things, mainly her papito’s rants that women, even young and beautiful ones like herself, weren’t much use to the world except as adornments, and even then they were destined to grow old and rot (he was a little drunk, his eyes twisted, when he said that). Then her papito would say that, as much as he loved her, he would have loved her more had she been born a male. (They would be sitting on crates in front of their bohío, her papi’s best friends, Apollo and Francisco, poor farmers who sang improvised décima lyrics like no one else around there, their already drawn faces further dipped in lacquer after days of drinking the lowest grade of rums, in commiseration with Manolo in his widowed state, just waving off whatever cruel things he said to María and making crazy signs with their big knuckled hands so that María wouldn’t take his cruel ramblings to heart.)

As long as he didn’t hit her, María could care less about what her papito said-she just figured he was drunk, and even if he’d insulted her that made no difference to María, because, no matter what, his eyes were always contrite the next day-they told the truth about how he really felt. And, in any case, as his beloved daughter, the only daughter he had, she believed that he’d fall apart without her. Who else could he sing to in the evenings, out in front of their bohío, when his friends weren’t around? After a night’s restless sleep, who else could cheer him so in the mornings, her papito often declaring, at the sight of her: “When I look at you, María, I forget the misery of my days.” He’d smile, in the same way he once did during their slumbers by the stream behind their hut, or in his hammock (sometimes with Teresita joining them) when she was a little girl, her arms wrapped around him and their limbs all entangled, happily, happily, nothing in the world able to harm them and life itself, poor as they might have been, filled with so many simple pleasures.

…And when he smiled, the journeys they’d made when María was a girl of seven and eight would come back to her. These were daylong excursions to different pueblos in the province, some with barely a road leading to them, and even some big towns like Los Palacios or Esperanza, where he’d find a columned plazuela or shaded arcade in which to perform, Manolo singing and playing his guitar while his daughters, just little girls then, enchanted the passersby, danced to his music, and afterwards collected reales with their papito’s hat. Sometimes, with Manolo riding a horse and pulling along his young daughters in a cart, they’d even go as far north as the foothills of the Órgano mountains, to timber country, and while those trips, taking a day or more in each direction, were intended just as visits with some old musician friends of his, neither María nor her papito could ever forget their tranquil passages through some of the most wonderful tracts of forests and valleys in Cuba. No matter that the going was rugged and sometimes frightening, as when they’d have to sidle along a narrow dirt trail at the edge of a ravine, or it suddenly began to rain torrentially and rivers of mud and stone came sliding towards them from the higher ground, once they reached safety and had entered yet another forest, thick with orchids and air plants, whose luscious scents alone would put them in mind of being inside a dream-they may as well have entered a paradise. And not just of one’s childhood, for their papito himself, with his guitar slung over his back, crossing a meadow of wildflowers, had never seemed so happy as when he was on his horse and in the company of his daughters, his precious loved ones, who, in those days, he introduced to anyone he happened upon as his “little angels.”

This María remembered on her lonely evenings in Havana.

After that night at the Catalán’s place, her body felt dirty for weeks, her thoughts filled with disgust for such establishments, the sorts of places María swore she’d never step inside again. But after a few more attempts to find work-she even went down to the harbor, where the only women to be found seemed to be either saloon girls or putas-she began to miss the feeling of having a few dollars in her pocket, no matter how she had earned them. Despising the Catalán while cherishing the prospect of money, María tried to find her nerve again, but she was too timid to knock on any club doors. Still, she had a bit of luck, if it could be called so: it came down to the kindness of a prostitute, living in the hotel, who knew a photographer with a shop on Obispo Street, the friend of a club owner, an entrepreneur typical of that city.

This is what happened: At a certain hour of the day, around four thirty, if you wandered into the Residencia Cubana, you’d find María, having grown close to la señora Matilda, seated by her side in the hallway, fanning herself and sipping from a bottle of Polar beer, while the landlady, half stewed and always with darning needle in hand, proceeded to regale the young guajira with tales of her own youth (born in Vigo, Spain, a transatlantic journey to Havana at the age of five, love, desperation, faith, and despair), ever so grateful that the poor bewildered beauty from the sticks didn’t mind providing company for such a Cuban relic as herself. In the background hummed the radio, and a calendar of Jesus holding his heart, at the center of the wall, soothed María’s soul, but in any event, the two, like turtles in the sun, didn’t really have to say much to each other to feel companionable.