Beautiful Maria of My Soul

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “Please don’t think me crazy, María,” he said after a few moments. “But have you heard of a very special iglesia, downtown—it’s called St. Patrick’s—on Fifty and Fifth?”

  “Yes, I have,” she told him. Gladys’s sister had pointed it out to her from a bus.

  “Good,” he said. “It’s a very nice church. We can meet there, by the entranceway, yes?”

  “But when, Nestor?”

  “How is the day after tomorrow? At two o’clock. ¿Está bien?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we can stroll around for a bit, but mainly we will get the chance to talk, okay?”

  “Yes, Nestor,” she said. “On Wednesday, a las dos de la tarde.”

  “So I will see you then. Now, forgive me, María, but I have to go.”

  They said their good-byes, and then that was all. María headed up the stairs to rejoin the family.

  Chapter THIRTY-THREE

  Two days later, at the appointed time, María, in a delicate blouse with mother-of-pearl buttons, a floridly embroidered vest, and a tight pair of toreador pants, stood waiting inside the entryway of the cathedral. After having given herself plenty of time for the nerve-racking train ride from the Bronx and the negotiation of the streets, she’d arrived early, and by two thirty, having watched people coming and going through those doors without any sign of him, she had been on the verge of feeling abandoned, when breathlessly Nestor Castillo came bounding up the steps, his face contorted, dabbing the sweat off his handsome brow with a handkerchief. She had been looking inside, and had thought that she might sit for a while taking in the solemn comforts of the nave, but then she heard his voice—“María!” It surprised her to see how he had changed—his face had filled out somewhat, she supposed from all those home-cooked meals, and yes, he seemed prosperous. He wore a fine watch, a gold bracelet, and, she also noticed, a simple wedding band. Dressed casually enough for a mildly warm day in late June, he had turned up in a crisp white guayabera, a pair of pleated pantalones, and laceless shoes of Spanish leather, the sort he had favored in Havana. With his hand clasped over his chest, for he had practically run over from the West Side, he poured forth an explanation about a stalled subway, begging her forgiveness. Somehow, as María smiled meekly at the glorious sight of him, they hadn’t even managed a salutatory kiss on the cheek, but stood facing one another, briefly taking hold of each other’s hands.

  “Oh, but María,” he said. “It’s so good to see you.”

  Soon enough they were inside the cathedral. Maybe a nostalgia had informed Nestor’s choice, or perhaps he had thought to set a restrained tone for their reunion, but it wasn’t long before they were a few pews back from the altar, kneeling in prayer, like they used to back in Havana before they’d go off to ravish each other like the sinners they became. He had put on enough cologne for her to notice, despite the smell of burning candles and incense that floated in clouds through the nave; and though he seemed intent on his incantations to El Señor, which he whispered with his eyes closed, now and then he’d turn to look at her and smile. After a few minutes, he moved a little closer. Then, in the manner of their earlier times together, Nestor, in the sight of God and his saints and all the angels of heaven, couldn’t help but reach down, while in the midst of his prayers, to feel her leg, his hand moving from above her knee towards where her thigh wouldn’t give way anymore, murmuring, “Oh, but mi María.”

  With just his touch she felt her undergarment dampening, God forgive her. And some scent must have risen off her skin, a distinctly female aroma, somewhere between burning sugar and raw meat. His nostrils flared—and they both knew what was bound to happen sooner or later that afternoon. Nestor turned to her and said, “Some things no man can ever forget,” and then he kissed her, and with that they made the sign of the cross and he took hold of her hand, and they went off together.

  HE MADE NO MENTION OF HIS WIFE AND TWO CHILDREN, THOUGH she knew that, when he fell into a silence, that’s who he was really thinking about; but he told her much about the fortunes of the Castillo brothers’ orchestra, the Mambo Kings—“I wish you could hear us. We’re sounding fantastic and get crowds everywhere we play.” There was some talk about that television show and how nicely his fellow cubano Desi Arnaz had treated the brothers in California, first class all the way: some real good breaks had come about because of that song—“The one I wrote about you, and only you, María…” Walking downtown towards Macy’s, where she had thought to buy some gifts for la señora Matilda in Havana and her hostess in the Bronx—it was just an excuse, a way of passing time—María was tempted to ask him if he really thought she had treated him cruelly. But she knew the answer. In fact, as they were crossing Sixth Avenue, María being María, which is to say still a poor guajira at heart, no matter how well she now dressed and comported herself, she couldn’t help but ask Nestor: “With such a successful song, you must be making money, yes?”

  She meant to pry; or perhaps didn’t mean to, but whatever the case, he laughed and, in a slip, told her: “Some money, María, but I’ve been putting it all away for my kids,” the only time he brought them up. And that inspired a period of glacial silence, which María broke with a simple question.

  He turned, trying to pull her towards him, even as she backed off.

  “So you have a family now, verdad?”

  “Yes, good children and a wife.”

  “I’m so happy for you, Nestor,” she told him, looking off, to nowhere.

  Changing the subject, she talked about her dancer’s career; nothing about the fact that she was still with Ignacio, or about wanting a child of her own, or of the men she sometimes went off with—for fun, or to forget herself, or to be cruel, María didn’t know why. Occasionally, she’d think about something the older women at the clubs had always told her: “It’s fine to have the memory of a love, but it’s a fairy tale to think that one can ever go back there again.” She ignored that, of course, enjoying the way that Nestor, even for all the miércoles of their small talk, looked at her, so sadly, so priestly, so filled with desire. She loved it when he squeezed her hand and smiled. She loved to think, for that afternoon at least, they could both pretend no one else existed in the world, though he soon shattered that impression. “I am enjoying seeing you again,” he told her, “but one thing. I have an obligation, una cita, this evening, and I must be leaving you by six.”

  That offended her, but María smiled anyway.

  They went to Macy’s. She bought an Italian silk scarf for Gladys’s sister, a few other items for the rest of that family, a half dozen packages of nylons for la señora Matilda. Afterwards, just past four, Nestor suggested that they might go somewhere for a sandwich and a drink, and that’s how they ended up in the bar of the New Yorker Hotel, just across from the Eighth Avenue subway on Thirty-fourth Street. As a musician, Nestor knew just about every hotel manager, concierge, and bartender in the city, the Cubans among them at least, and so, when they walked in, they were treated royally and seated at a corner table. They ordered two grilled steak sandwiches on toast (though she only picked at hers) and a bottle of red wine, but before that arrived, Nestor asked for a glass of rum, and so did María, mainly to calm their nerves, because they both knew what was bound to happen. Outside the bar doorway, the floor was covered by a red carpet that led to an elevator, a conveyance, which, with the press of a button, could take them to any number of rooms. In one of them, both María and Nestor knew, there would be a bed which destiny had surely intended for them. Neither said as much, at first, but after a few rums, they started holding hands again, gazing deeply into each other’s eyes, and whispering endearments. That’s when Nestor, like some fellow out of a bolero, reached over and, touching her face, said: “You must know, María, how much I still love you.”

  And María told him the same, though she wasn’t sure she believed it herself. Nevertheless, after a while, it seemed inevitable that Nestor would have a certain conversation with the barroom manager, who, afte
r going off, came back from a lobby office with a small black tray on which he had set a bill, presumably for their meal and drinks. On the bill he had written, “habitación 223. Buen provecho,” and under it, he had left a room key.

  UPSTAIRS, ON THE TWENTY-SECOND FLOOR OF THAT HOTEL, IN A drably adorned, though comfortably enough appointed room, Nestor’s and María’s last memories of each other unfolded. Through the reflections of a closet mirror, María watched herself embracing and kissing Nestor, his hands inside her blouse, his fingers down the front of her toreador pants, a few buttons breaking, Nestor’s own appendage bursting out into the world the moment María, kneeling before him, as if facing an altar, undid his trousers—glory be to God in the highest! It sprang out with such force as to tear the seams of his boxers and nearly sideswiped her face. She suckled him then, and he shot his pearly honey halfway across the room, leaving the wallpaper, of a faded art deco design, speckled with dripping stains, his face like that of a crucified Jesus, wincing with pleasure. No sooner had María removed the barrette from her hair, shaking her head like an animal, than Nestor came around again (with a full and dense erection, in the parlance of her scientific daughter, some forty centimeters long). But this time, María pulled him onto the bed, and sucked him once more until the bell-shaped head of his sex had turned so livid and large that she couldn’t fit him into her mouth without her jaw aching just below her earlobes, so thick she couldn’t close her hand around him. María, her panties by the ankle of her right leg and still wearing her blouse, which had bunched up above her breasts, spread her legs wider, and, slipping her own saliva onto her palm, wet herself further. Looking to see what she could glimpse in that same mirror, María, sinning herself to hell, waited for Nestor, the most virile man she had ever known, to fill her up, bit by bit, all the time thinking, Give me a child, Nestor Castillo, dámelo fuerte!

  She screamed with pleasure and shook with his every exertion, the thin crucifix that hung around her neck singeing her with the heat of their bodies pressing together, poor Jesus surely seeing more than most saintly apparitions ever should. Each time Nestor found his release inside her, María, entering paradise of a more earthly sort, and remembering what the whores of la Cucaracha had taught her, employed new ways to arouse him, performing the kinds of acts no daughter would ever want to hear about. An hour went by, then two, and Nestor had come inside her so many times that María thought that, if ever she were to become pregnant, it would have taken place that very afternoon.

  So that’s what it was really about, wasn’t it, María?

  Afterwards, he sighed, he contorted his body mournfully in that bed and pulled the sheets over himself in shame. And when María, caressing his head, leaned close, and in such a way that her nipples dangled across his earlobes and then brushed slowly across the handsome plains of his face to his mouth, Nestor called out: “Please, María, stop, you’re torturing me.”

  “But how, Nestor?”

  “You know how,” he said, sitting up. “Tú sabes.”

  A funny thing. Even a very decent woman like María, who could have had most any man she wanted and who, at heart, remained the guajira she had once been—the country girl who had loved and lost everyone in her family and had been raised to believe that goodness made a difference—found herself welcoming another way of thinking.

  “Oh yes, and so I’m torturing you. ¿Cómo? How?” she asked. And when Nestor turned away and, reaching over to a side table, got his watch, María straddled the small of his back; her burning papáya, like an open and succulent mouth, searing the base of his spine.

  “So tell me, Nestor,” she demanded as she ground her hips against him.

  “What?” he muttered.

  “Me amas, sí? You love me, don’t you?”

  “I love and hate you at the same time, María. I love you because you’re mi cubanita. I hate you because of what you have done to my heart.”

  She laughed. “¡Ah, sí, lo mismo que tu bolero!” “Just like your bolero!” Then, while smothering him further with the heat and bristled dampness of her wide-open womb, she said, “Tell me who you love most in this world.”

  “Don’t ask me that, María, please….”

  “Tell me, mi amor. Tell me.”

  His neck strained as he turned to her, his ears burning red. “What do you think? That I’m crazy?” he asked her, sitting up. “It’s my family I love the most, María. My wife…y mi hijos. It can’t be any other way.”

  And then, unable to help herself, María slapped his face, demanding to know, “Then why, por Dios, did you just cingar me, over and over again?”

  With that, even the noble Nestor shook his head, his opal eyes suddenly growing cold. Pushing María away, he got out of bed and began to gather his clothes; and then a whole other thing happened, María and Nestor flailing at each other, María naked and Nestor with just his torn calzoncillos on, pushing her onto the bed…and soon enough, out of that violence, when they both hated each other, arrived a contrary feeling, of the purest animal love, Nestor spreading wide María’s legs again, and María, her head thrown back over the bed like a Salome awaiting the decapitated John the Baptist, wanting more and more; Nestor going at her until, exhaustedly, he laid his face against her breasts and descended into the purgatorial depths of his soul.

  Remembering what he had told her about having to leave by six, María noticed that it was half past seven. Nestor, whose body lay sprawled across the bed half asleep, his member still loping in a shapely curve over his belly button, seemed dead to the world. Licking his eyelids open with the tip of her tongue, María awakened him. “Amorcito, amorcito, Nestorito,” she whispered tenderly, but when he opened his eyes and looked around, Nestor, for all his pent-up dreams about María, about having her again, became mournfully sad. By then, in the heart’s sleight of hand, María had decided that no man could make love to a woman in such a way unless he truly loved her—forget about any bolero—and that no woman could soften so after such a physical onslaught of maleness unless she loved him in turn. It was the kind of thinking that would have made the whores laugh—it was only sex, after all—but for María, in those moments, it was everything. But what did Nestor do next?

  Even if they had just been carrying on as if they were the bawdiest newlyweds on earth, that didn’t stop him from recognizing the inevitable: “You know, María, that, after today, we’ll never see each other like this again, don’t you?” he said, getting up. “It’s the only way. Do you understand?”

  “But why, mi amor?” she asked. “It isn’t fair. And besides, I don’t believe you.”

  Then she began to cry for the first time since her papito had died—or at least she pretended to—and that really tore up Nestor’s heart too. “Please, María, please don’t be so sad,” he kept on saying. But the more he pleaded, the more María became unreachable, as if she had become deaf, dumb, and mute at the same moment. Not once did she say a word to Nestor as they dressed, no matter how much Nestor, trying to explain himself, pleaded for her understanding. Yes, he has a wife and children, while I have none. She remained so indifferent to Nestor that when they had left the hotel and were saying their somnambulist farewells while standing on the southeast corner of Thirty-fourth and Eighth, just outside the subway, María’s face did not show the least bit of emotion, and this seemed to torment Nestor even more.

  “Well, maybe we’ll see each other in Cuba sometime, huh?” he asked her, as if they had just bumped into each other in the park. “My brother is always talking about taking our orchestra down there. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  He tried to kiss her then, but she pulled away. Passersby, throngs of them, must have wondered why the beautiful woman, with the exotic south-of-the-border looks, seemed to be both wounded and scowling at the same time. Finally, she managed to squeeze out a few words: “Cuídate, mi amor. Take care of yourself, my love, and think about me when you are with your wife,” she told him. (“Yes, I was a little cruel to that man, as he was w
ith me,” she once told her daughter.) And then, just like that, she disappeared into the station, soon losing herself in the crowds and not once turning back to see if Nestor had been watching her.

  Chapter THIRTY-FOUR

  She had taken some satisfaction in her memory of Nestor’s penitential look as she left him, his features twisted into the expression of a tormented saint. But once that had turned into air, María, wishing that things had played out differently between them, passed her last evenings in New York hoping beyond hope that the first-floor telephone would ring and that she would be called down to answer it. When María didn’t receive any such message, she decided, on an impulse, to telephone her sometime lover in Havana, Vincente Torres of the Y & R company—she had his card. One afternoon when she had met him in the lobby of the plush St. Moritz Hotel for a drink and retired to a suite with him for a few hours of harried lovemaking, it was really Nestor whom María thought about. In the well-appointed strangeness of that room, a small crystal chandelier hanging directly over the bed and an ornate French Empire mirror on the opposite wall, María would have loved to open her eyes and find herself walking across a field in Pinar del Río with Nestor. In the midst of that little dream, she forgot the crudeness of her former guajira life, the toiletless shacks, without electricity or running water, that scent of dung and mangled earth and blood constant in the air; nor did she recall the complete ignorance that had once possessed her as an analfabeta, or the shame of thinking, deep down, that not her mamá or her papito, or the guajiros they knew, were really worth much of anything at all as far as the outside world was concerned. What she remembered instead was la tranquilidad of her valle, its peacefulness and little moments of simple happiness. That’s what she used to see in Nestor Castillo’s eyes, and, well—wouldn’t you know it—in the trail of such a sentiment, María realized that she, despite her lately hardened ways, had actually fallen in love with him.