Chapter FORTY-FIVE
During those long months in the 1980s while Teresita lived away, María had her routines. She and her old friend Gladys, married with her own grown children, met occasionally on the weekends, usually Sundays, to make forays to the restaurants and shopping centers of the city. María would join Gladys on excursions to the beach, where, baking in the sun and sipping drinks of rum and pineapple juice, she passed those pleasant hours under an umbrella, taking in the escapades of frolicking youth on the white sands. Gladys, it should be said, though a few years younger than María, had ballooned appreciably while living the good life, becoming one of those immense cubanas who, however portly, still sashayed with a former dancer’s sexy pride. They’d sit and look out over the water—and inevitably the horizon’s oceanic murmurings, soporific in effect, whispered that to the south, just a few hundred miles away, lay Havana, portal to Cuba itself. But it may as well have been China—oceans off—for neither of them knew of any Cubans who had gone back. (“Remember when those cruise boats would leave Havana at six in the morning and come back late at night from Miami, loaded up with the tourists?” María would say. “Remember the trip we made?”)
Miami had changed since the days María first arrived. It was all fancied up, prospering in ways that the first exiles could not have imagined. If there had been any blot on the mark the Cubans left on the city, it came down to the scattering of criminals and asylum inmates that ese loco Fidel had unleashed on Florida when he allowed the Mariel boat lifts. Though most weren’t criminals—Gladys’s husband, Ramón, had been on one of those boats in the Florida-bound flotilla, returning with six of his relatives—there had been a spike in crime; one had to be more careful at night in certain neighborhoods. But over all, as María and Gladys warmed their bottoms, enjoying their spiked refrescos, they were accepting enough of their life in that city. Miami wasn’t Havana, at least the one they knew, and, for María, it seemed a million miles away from Pinar del Río—just thinking about that, and the great internal distances she had traveled from that tranquil valle, sometimes left her so quietly disposed that she wouldn’t say much at all.
Though she had enjoyed those outings—Ramón always dropped her off at the house in Northwest Terrace—the hardest thing for María was to come home to an empty house: on with the radio in the kitchen, on with the television in her living room. A glass of rum with diet Coke usually smoothed her over, and gloriously so, as she showered—didn’t that bring her closer to God? Then, having gotten the sand off, she’d attend to her only companion, the little black cat with the white paws María had found mewing inside a garbage can down the street, Omar, the name that had popped into her head. She felt so much affection for the creature she sometimes wondered why she had bothered with men at all, and this Omar seemed to know, for he followed her around wherever she went, curled up next to her on the couch when she watched TV and smoked, and jumped into bed with her, the way men had once always wanted to, at night.
And sometimes, settled on the kitchen table, just purring away, and with an Oriental wisdom burning in his eyes, Omar watched María as she would sit writing what she called her versitos. It was a vocation that she, a former analfabeta, had only dabbled in over the years but, to which, with Teresita away in school, she had lately devoted herself. Her interest was helped by a poetry-writing course that she had enrolled in at an adult education center at Dade Community College. Meeting on Wednesday evenings at eight o’clock and lasting for two hours, it had become the high point of her week. Conducted in Spanish by an Ichabod Crane–looking fellow named Luis Castellano, a former native of Holguín, the class consisted of a dozen Cuban women, mostly well into their fifties if not older, no men, and the poems were shared aloud, often to laughter and sometimes to tears. For to hear spoken the pure emotions of such ladies in that intimate setting, as expressed in poems with titles like “Mi Cuba preciosa”—“My Precious Cuba”—or “El jardín de mis abuelos”—“My Grandparents’ Garden”—or “Un domingo por la ma?ana en Cienfuegos”—“A Sunday Morning in Cienfuegos”—was to be steeped, as María herself had put it to Teresita in a letter, “in the honey of our bees.” Plump, aged, still shapely, kindly disposed or enraged by what life had dealt them, each week they held forth, their voices cracking sometimes, their hands trembling. And you know what? Not a one of their poems was bad, or could be bad; their plainspoken utterances, like songs without music, just took everyone back to what they felt and envisioned when remembering, ever so bittersweetly, that which they had lost and wished to recover: the very notion of Cuba, which hung over the room like the branches of a blossom-heavy tree.
They wrote about street life in Havana, with its singing vendors, and of their small towns in the provinces, or some colorful fulano they knew, or of a local rake, a first love, or the sea, the siren songs they heard as echoes in conch shells found on a beach, of smelling fresh morning bread from a bakery next door, muy sabrosito siempre, of chameleons and roosters running wild in an auntie’s living room, of el campo en Oriente, with its blossomed air after a rainfall, of the mists rising along the ridged foothills of the Escambray mountains, and the stars that rose, one by one, like diamonds over that horizon; of watching the impeccably dressed, straight-backed planters of Matanzas riding regally by their porches on their silver-spurred white stallions, of singing barbers and lovestruck morticians, of childhood negrita nannies; of husbands, and sons, and beautiful daughters; of distant Spanish ancestors from Vigo or Fonsagrada, or Asturias or Barcelona, Madrid and more—all this turned that ordinary classroom into something of a chapel in which everyone prayed to the same heaven.
From María García’s writings:
If Cuba were a man
He would be so handsome,
I’d faint in his arms.
He would smell so sweetly of flowers,
And of the rain at three o’clock.
His kisses might taste of tobacco, but I wouldn’t mind,
He would be good to me, after all.
He would dance like a rumbero from Cayo Hueso
And speak deliciously like a song…
María wrote other poems, another side of herself coming out, her own sentimentality, at their writing, surprising her. By her kitchen table, one evening, the Frigidaire humming beside her and the GE radio turned low, just scribbling the words “Mi papito, Manolo,” brought him back, and she found herself nearly weeping. Witnessing this sadness, Omar’s ears curled, as if he could understand María; and he seemed almost clairvoyant when she began to write about Nestor, Omar getting up and rubbing his bony, purring head against the knuckles of María’s hand.
Oh, Nestor, I have something
To tell you,
Even if what we had
Was long ago.
Without knowing it
I loved you,
And love you now,
Wherever you are….
So, believe me when I say
I just didn’t know.
SHE WROTE ABOUT HER VALLE OFTEN, A FEW DITTIES ABOUT HER dancer’s life in Havana, and a poem about learning to read, which she called, simply, “For the Negro, Lazarus.” And though she never published those verses anywhere, except in the blue-covered anthologies that their teacher, el Se?or Castellano, put together on a Xerox machine for that class, beautiful María just enjoyed the time she spent with her little poetic community. On such nights, when, it should be said, she sometimes felt an attraction for the maestro, despite his incredible homeliness, María always came home with a feeling of accomplishment, among other emotions, that, indeed, she had come a long way from the days she had been an ignorant guajira, unable to read or write a single word.
From another of her verses, which was just a jotting entitled “Mi amiga Eliza”:
She wore rags like me
She was forlorn like me
Knew nothing like me
Had little like me
We look so much alike
That when I see her
In my mirror,
And ask, “Eliza, why the long face?”
She tells me, “Oh, cousin, it’s because
I know that while I am so happy
You are so sad.”