Chapter FIVE
Oh, but her story to that point: Just leaving her tranquil valley, midway between the mountains and the sea, would have been enough to rip any heart into pieces; but she hadn’t really been given much choice about the matter. For one thing, in the wake of her beloved mami’s death, her papito, Manolo, had taken up with the most horrible woman imaginable, a hard case from a town along the gulf coast whom he, still an occasional músico, had met while moonlighting with some of his sonero friends at a wedding dance. Her name was Olivia, and he must have been crazy or desperately lonely to fall for her, or maybe she had bewitched him, because she was neither pretty nor softly feminine nor even funny. If she had any virtues, as far as María could figure, it was that she could really cook and Manolo liked to eat, but, even then, poor María, for the life of her, couldn’t begin to find anything else nice to say about the woman.
And Olivia must have known it from the moment they first laid eyes on each other, on the very day she moved in, with her horse-drawn cart filled with chairs and what few dresses she owned. After just a short few weeks, Olivia gave up on all her phony smiles and seemed to take a special delight in ordering María around and establishing herself as the new due?a of that household.
It was the worst for María at night, when she had to listen to them going at it from behind a hanging blanket that separated their sleeping space from the rest of that room, no more than ten feet across. With its floor of pounded down dirt, and its few paltry chairs, its kerosene lamp, and, among their sparse adornments, an altar to the Holy Virgin in a corner, which her mamá had kept, the interior of their bohío did not afford much privacy. María’s cot, built of plywood and canvas, with straw-stuffed pillows, the same she had once shared with her younger sister, was near a back door, open to the selva, that dense forest around them, where insects buzzed all night against the mosquito netting. It was bad enough that her papito snored like a beast, and she was used to hearing his every movement, sigh, his dreamer’s mumblings, the capricious workings of his digestive system, but once Olivia had settled in as his woman, those arrangements became a torment. Whereas her mamá, as far as María could remember, hardly ever made any noise at all, just letting out sighs and sometimes crying, “Por Dios, por Dios!” that horrid bruja Olivia, with her groans and yelps and filthy language, could have awakened the dead. That alone was enough to turn María’s stomach, and it killed her to think that her mamá, off in paradise and watching them in life the way people watched actors in movies, could take in every bit of that hag’s lascivious grunting.
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, ni?a,” 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.
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.