Chapter FORTY-NINE
For her part, María remained blissfully unaware that such a book existed. Teresita kept her copy hidden away, with certain pages clipped together, and did not say a word about it to her mother. But it was only a matter of time before María inevitably heard about its existence. Her former writing teacher, el Se?or Luis Castellano, with whom María dined from time to time, had, while keeping up with the latest literary trends, particularly works by Cuban Americans, read the novel himself and, knowing a little about María’s connection to that song, went to the trouble of buying her not the novel itself but the audiocassette tapes of that book, as read by the actor E. G. Marshall, in English, of course. (Even Teresita had to scratch her head over that one.) Fortunately, when María finally got around to playing those cassettes one Saturday afternoon, her first impressions were very good: just to hear Nestor Castillo’s name spoken aloud made her gasp, and that book’s early mentions of the song Nestor had written for her, “Beautiful María of My Soul,” naturally piqued her interest. But altogether, though her English had improved out of necessity, as some of her pupils at the dance studio didn’t speak much Spanish, just to listen to its prose was rough going.
She could follow enough of it to get a general sense of a story, but with the book’s endless references to postwar American popular culture and (for María) its arcane nods at writers like Edgar Allan Poe—“For me, my father’s gentle rapping on Ricky Ricardo’s door has always been a call from the beyond, as in Dracula films, or films of the walking dead, in which spirits ooze out from behind tombstones and through the cracked windows and rotted floors of gloomy antique halls…”— it may as well have been rendered in Mandarin Chinese as far as she was concerned. And when she pushed the fast-forward button and came across these lines about Cesar Castillo’s enormous pinga, which “flourished upwards like the spreading top branches of a tree, or, he once thought while looking at a map of the United States, like the course of the Mississippi River and its tributaries,” María, while finding that just as opaque, understood enough to ascertain that she was not hearing a recitation of the Bible. Nevertheless, she stuck with it for several hours, mostly skipping through it and searching for mentions of herself—“Now he remembers and sighs: the long approach to the farm along the riverbank and forest—” (skip, fast-forward)—“They had their picture taken in front of a movie poster advertising the Betty Grable film Moon over Miami—” (skip, fast-forward)—“The night of the dance, Delores was thinking about what her sister—” (skip, fast-forward)—until, at long last, she stumbled upon the line that went “My name is María—” And with that she made herself a drink, settled on the couch, and did her best to slip into the hearing of a story that she never thought would be told.
A few hours later, when Teresita had come home after catching up on some work at the hospital and she saw María’s puzzled, dreamy expression, the first thing she said was “Pero, Mamá, didn’t I tell you not to listen to those tapes!”
“But, mi vida,” María said, “from what I could tell, it’s not so bad a story. Es que no entiendo inglés muy bien. It’s just that I can’t understand English that well. It’s a pity, yes?”
“Yes, Mama, but you have your ways,” Teresita said. The truth be told, in those moments, at least, she was grateful for the fact that María had never bothered to go to school to improve her English.
“Have you read that book?” María asked.
“Well,” Teresita said, and she nodded. “Yes, I have.”
“It’s a little dirty—es un poquito sucio—yes?” she asked with all sincerity.
“Only now and then, but, Mama, you shouldn’t trouble yourself about it.” Then, seeing that her mother seemed a little low, she added, sitting beside her, “Besides, the María in that book isn’t really like you.”
“But isn’t she beautiful?”
“Oh, yes, very beautiful.”
And that made María, who had struggled through that maze of English, smile. The bawdiness of its sex and the details of the story may have passed over her head, but not the notion that it was about her, and in a most flattering way. Now that she was almost sixty, if anything, her vanity spiked, María felt rather proud about the matter, and if she had any regrets at all, it was that so few people knew that she was the María both of that song and now—oh, how proud Lázaro would have been—of a book.
While the Miami newspapers sometimes wrote about its author, who had lately won some kind of big-deal prize (which made the Cubans jubilant with pride), the more important thing in María’s life came down to her mounting involvement with that scarecrow Luis, with whom she not only occasionally dined but also went off now and then for the afternoon to an undisclosed location where, Teresita assumed, they had what she liked to gingerly think of as “relations.”
Thin as a starving guajiro and with a mortally wounded air, he must surely have been overwhelmed by the voluptuousness of María’s ripened body, and yet during his visits to the household, when he would sit quietly with them in the evenings as María watched her favorite shows, Teresita remained amazed by her mother’s serene attentiveness to the man, as if, indeed, he had given her something to be extremely grateful for: affection. Homely as any Cuban man could be (Luis, in one of his running jokes, referred to himself and María as “Beauty and the Beast”), he must have been doing something right, for, if Teresita was not mistaken, María had taken to doting on Luis and with the kind of tenderness she had usually reserved for Omar, their cat. Was it some autumnal rush of love? Or just the companionable dalliance of two poetic souls finding ways to amuse one another? Whatever the case, despite Teresita’s own loneliness, beautiful María, doused with perfume and floating through life in clouds of smoke, seemed happy enough in those days.
EVENTUALLY, TERESITA GOT TO MEET THE AUTHOR AGAIN, WHEN he returned to Miami the following autumn to promote a paperback edition of that work, and this time, at the same venue in Coral Gables, she could not help but notice that this Hijuelos, in the blush of his apparent success, seemed far more world-weary and solemn than she remembered. Somewhat sheepish about facing yet another crowd, and spotting Dr. Teresita with beautiful María by her side in the audience, he made a last-minute change and chose to read a few selections that, while mentioning María in passing, were sweetly clean—spick-and-span, in fact. In one, he told of the Castillo brothers’ meeting with Desi Arnaz and Lucy on the night, in 1955, when they first performed Nestor’s song of love, and then he read from selections that were like sound poems. Once again, the evening followed form—a Q & A, a signing, and afterwards, as he had agreed with Teresita, the author finally met the still startlingly good looking and well preserved María, who, in addition to an ebony comb in her pulled-back hair, wore a dark felt-buttoned, hip-hugging dress of considerable décolletage. Once Teresita made their introductions, María, looking the jittery author over, said, “So you are the one?” And, as an aside, whispered, as she tugged at his arm, “Sabes, joven, que me debes mucho”—“You know that you owe me a lot.”
Shortly they went over to a Spanish restaurant a block or two away, where, as it happened, the affable media personality Don Francisco of the popular Sábado Gigante television show, which María often watched, had turned up with a small entourage. Walking in, they saw him, formidably tall and broad shouldered in a blue serge suit, standing by the piano bar, crooning, a drink in hand, an old Cuban bolero, “Siempre en mi corazón,” into a microphone. That very fact, along with the decorum and stolid Spaniard’s gilded ambience of the restaurant, and with the way that Don Francisco, a consummate showman, bowed, winking at them as they passed inside, impressed the hell out of María and, most fortunately, put her into a good frame of mind. She may have been a guajira in her former life, but as she made her way to their table, María exuded nothing less than an amber dignity. This is what happened: After they ordered the house specialty paella, and a few bottles of good champagne, the evening unfolded agreeably enough. Having recently flown to Sacramento, California, for a deposition regarding the aforementioned second lawsuit, the author had been quiet at first, a certain formality and carefulness attending his every word. But once it became clear that neither Teresita nor María bore him any animosity, and as the champagne lightened spirits, the conversation, mediated by Teresa, who switched from English to Spanish, veered quickly to matters that for María, after so many years, had weighed on her heart.
“Mira, chico, so did you know los hermanos Castillo?” she asked him at a certain point.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “I knew Nestor when I was very little, but Cesar much more.”
“Y Cesar, ?está vivo?”
“No, se?ora, he passed away about ten years ago. In a hotel room in Harlem.”
Yes, of course, thought Teresita, just like in his book.
“A pity,” María said. “They were both very handsome men—and wonderful musicians.” Then: “And Nestor’s family? What can you tell me about them? He had children, yes?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “A boy and a girl—they’re now grown. His daughter’s name is Leticia—she’s married now with three daughters of her own.”
“And the son? What do you know of him?”
“Eugenio Castillo? I still see him. He was my best friend, growing up. We were at his papi’s funeral together, way back when. He’s a public high school teacher now.”
“And does he have a family?”
“No, he never married. Es soltero.”
“And you? ?Estás casado?”
“No, I’m not,” he told her, looking down.
And that made María glance over at Teresa; then she whispered into her daughter’s ear, Teresita smiling. (Later, as they left, when he asked her what that was about, Teresita told him: “She said it was too bad you’re so bald.”)
As María kept staring at this Hijuelos, he could read in her eyes what he read in many Cuban eyes: “a strange fellow.” His New York manner was so pronounced, and his body language so unfluid and earthbound, that, no matter how much Spanish he used, the waiters continued to address him in English. Teresita, somewhat of an outsider herself, reading his weariness, started feeling an empathy for him. And, at one point, she made a toast: “Para nosotros cubanos!”
Then a lull came over the conversation, the three munching away.
“Bueno,” María began, finally breaking the silence. “You—Se?or Hijuelos—are probably wondering what I think about your book”—“librito” she called it—“verdad?” He nodded, and she sipped from a glass of champagne. “If you must know, I found it muy, muy interesante.” She laughed. “And muy sucio sometimes! Very filthy! But, I will tell you this, my real story was very different from what you wrote. I came from el campo del Pinar del Río, really from nothing. I was the daughter of guajiros, una analfabeta, in fact, and whatever I have now, I came by through the grace of God and the sweat of my brow. But my greatest blessing is this one here, mi chiquita, a doctor,” she said, and she kissed her daughter’s hand. “Even if her abuelo couldn’t read a word of anything, she became a doctor, and in a country where she didn’t know at first ni un pío de inglés! Not even one bit of English. Can you imagine that? Forget all the sex, which is only air, that’s what you should put in a book someday, sabes?”
He nodded again.
“As for that buenmoso Nestor Castillo, I will tell you this: I don’t regret that I knew him, and if I regret anything—”
“Mami,” she heard her daughter interjecting.
“—it’s that we didn’t stay together. But it was my fault, understand. I was too worried about comforts. And if you are alert and a real thinker, which you seem to be, you will also know that certain Cubans of my generation were destined to be muy jodido—f*cked—anyway because of the revolution…. Even if Nestor had stayed with me in Cuba and we had made a home for ourselves and had a family, we would have ended up in the States, leaving everything behind.” She paused to sip some champagne. “And sometimes I wonder if he would still be alive if I’d married him those years ago and come with him to Miami or New York. Either way, it would have been our destiny to live away from our patria—Cuba. Does that, Se?or Hijuelos, mean anything to you?”
“Of course it does,” he said.
“Then you know that it brings a sadness of its own.”
She became subdued, staring off into a corner of the room, where a chandelier glowed and music emanated from an electric piano. By then Don Francisco had long since left, and few patrons remained. That’s when beautiful María caught herself speaking, as she would put it, miércoles.
“Can you tell me something, chico?” she asked. “Do you remember Nestor as a happy or a sad man?”
“He seemed nice enough, a quiet fellow, used to sit outside the stoop of my building with his brother, handing out quarters to us kids.”
“But did he ever say anything to you about Cuba?”
“No, se?ora, he kept that to himself.”
“I see. And nothing about me?”
“No, I was just a kid—why would he?” he said, shrugging, and though María was about to say “But you know that I never wanted to hurt him in any way,” she thought better of that and kept it to herself.
The end of the dinner proceeded, with scorched flan desserts served and tacitas of espresso. For his part, the author, so wary of legal matters, was happy that they, as a trio, seemed to have become rather friendly. He’d almost forgotten about his conversation with Teresita the year before when, as a waiter cleared the table, she steered him toward the fulfillment of a certain promise, saying, while María was away using the bathroom, “Isn’t there something you’d like to say to my mother?”
“About?”
“An apology.”
“Of course.”
And then, when she had returned, without looking María directly in the eye, he said, “There’s something I have to tell you, se?ora.”
“Tell me.”
“If there’s anything in my book that offended you in any way, for whatever reason, for all of that I sincerely apologize, se?ora. Con todo mi corazón.”
María was a little surprised by this; it was nothing she had required or expected. “Ay, but why say that? All such things, after all, even books, are soon forgotten. La vida es sue?o, after all, okay? But if it will make you feel better, I will accept your apologies. I promise you.”
With that, María reached across the table and took hold of his wrists. “But you must promise not to forget me. You are as good as family now, and as family”—she made the sign of the cross over him—“you must be loyal, understand?” And with that she surprised Teresita, slapping the author’s right cheek. “Don’t forget it, okay?”
“I won’t,” he said, feeling rather startled himself.
Then they parted: Mr. Hijuelos, who had paid the bill, heading back to his hotel by taxi, and beautiful María driving home with her daughter in their Toyota.