Chapter FORTY-ONE

Upon their return, when María ended up at the Catholic Relief Services office again, Gustavo couldn’t have been happier to see her, and while he, in his professional capacity, attended to her dutifully, helping to find her temporary lodgings-again in a low-end motel-he began to take María and her daughter around the city on the weekends. It wasn’t long before these informal outings turned into something else. One evening, as they were eating dinner in a Chinese restaurant, Gustavo, a quiet sort of man who never minced words, took hold of María’s hand from across the table and said, “I’ve been thinking about something, María. And I will say it in front of your daughter. I’ve grown very attached to you both, and, well, how can I put it? Even if we’ve only known each other for a short time, I’m very certain that I could make you and your daughter happy.” He took a deep breath. “I mean to say that I would be honored to have you as my wife.”

Of course, María was taken aback: Gustavo was not the sort of man María had ever thought she’d end up with-she hadn’t even shared a kiss with him-but, in those moments, though he was not a particularly attractive fellow, it was the kindness in his eyes and his doting manner towards her and Teresita that did her in. Though there were quite a number of more handsome men in Miami-more and more Cubans were pouring into the city in those days-María, considering her daughter’s welfare, made up her mind right then and there that the most important thing was to provide Teresita with a proper home.

This was how they ended up in their house on Northwest Terrace, where Gustavo lived, a stucco-walled ranch-style tile-roofed affair of late 1920s vintage, surrounded by wildly overgrown bushes and trees, among them a massive acacia that loomed over the front patio and seemed hundreds of years old, a tree that covered the ground with greenish red pods every time there was a storm. After Gustavo and María were married in the church of St. Jude, in 1962, with mostly his friends from the agency in attendance and, it must be said, spent a three-day honeymoon in a nice air-conditioned suite in a hotel along Miami Beach, during which, to her pleasant surprise, she learned that the piously inclined Gustavo, while needing to be broken in, happily abandoned his formality in their bedroom-like the others before him, he could not get enough of her-Teresita and María began their life in their new home.

It should be added that the decor of Gustavo’s house lacked the female touch. Its furnishings, reeking of past lives, consisted of charity warehouse and Salvation Army castoffs, which Gustavo, a volunteer for such organizations, had acquired cheaply over the years. The best of them was a bed with an art deco headboard, and this María decided to keep, despite the sadness it emanated, for it had been sold to Gustavo by an old Cuban couple at the end of their lives. But the rest eventually had to go. And so for the first few years of their marriage, with Gustavo reluctantly watching a lifetime’s worth of savings vanish, María set out to furnish that house in a manner befitting a newlywed couple. Favoring brightly colored fabrics for her chairs and couch, tables with animal feet, and the most modern of appliances-a new refrigerator and stove, and even a color television, bought on time plans-she also covered one living room wall, over a couch, with mirror tiles, to reflect the natural garden beyond their windows. She filled the house with an abundance of plastic plants and vases, usually of a Chinese motif, in which she arranged silk flowers, and put up on most every wall the brightest paintings of the sea that they could find. And, in memory of her mother, Concha, interspersed here and there, between all kinds of bric-a-brac and the photographs from her Havana career, went portraits of Jesus and the Holy Mother, purchased in the religious shops of Miami.

Once they were settled, there followed a decade of reasonably unglamorous domestic tranquillity. Gustavo, Teresita would always recall, had never been less than kindly, and in deference to his devoutness, María took up churchgoing again though, as she would remark to Teresita, mainly to “say hello to God.” Working part-time in a laundry, as a counter lady in a Cuban-owned bakery, and then as an occasional dancing instructor at an Arthur Murray studio near the then dilapidated neighborhood of South Beach, María became one of those Cuban ladies whose greatest pride had nothing to do with the song of love that had been written about her but came down to the duties and joys of raising her daughter, Teresita.

Once she entered school and began to overcome the shock of learning a new language, English, in classrooms filled with other Cuban exile children, who were just as frightened and bewildered as she, Teresita, so capable and bright, flourished, devouring books and skipping grades easily. Her progress was akin to the ravishing changes that were overtaking the formerly maudlin city of Miami. In the early 1960s, as the Cubans began to move there by the thousands, entire neighborhoods, sleepy and long neglected, came back to life, new businesses and restaurants and societies sprouting up everywhere. Their neighborhood’s houses, which had been filled with aging Jewish retirees, with Negroes who tended to stare fiercely at the newcomers, and with longtime residents of working-class roots, now became the cheaply purchased homes of the newly arrived. It was María’s habit to stroll the quiet streets of that neighborhood with her husband, Teresita by their side, in the kind of paseo that families took back in Havana at dusk. In time, beautiful María found her own coterie of friends, ladies of her generation, in their thirties, with their own families, with whom she occasionally played games of canasta and whose conversations at dusk, whether held in the middle of the pavement or at gatherings on someone’s front patio (she’d always say to Teresita that it reminded her of the way neighbors gathered in her valle in Pinar del Río) always tended towards speculation about just how and when the Communist government of Fidel Castro would finally collapse, and the resumption of the lives they once had in Cuba.

María, however, never had much of that longing or nostalgia: her days as a professional dancer behind her, when she dreamed at all, it was not of Havana but of the sweetness of her former life in her valle, which, with the passage of time, she missed all the more. It was something she always talked about to Teresita, especially after she’d hear a particular song on the radio or happened to bump into someone from her province. But even María knew that it was nothing more than a passing fancy: would she ever live in a bohío again? Not in a million years. What she missed was her family, who sometimes visited her in her sleep, just presences, borne by memory, who were somehow “nearby” in her bedroom. (More than once, she would wake from the most vivid dream, of seeing her papito, Manolo, standing in the corner of the room, his guitar by his side, a look of confusion on his face.) Sometimes she’d get up in the middle of the night, step out into the darkness, smoke a cigarette, and just stand there, for no good reason at all. Teresita always knew: she’d hear her footsteps outside her door but dared not disturb María’s moments of reflection, and it would keep her awake until Gustavo, getting home from his part-time night job, brought her mother back inside. What María thought about out there, when there wasn’t much to look at except for a few houses across the street, with televisions glowing in the windows, and some stars up in the sky, Teresita never knew. It was just her mother’s way.

(The truth be told, María seemed far removed from her life in America. She had little interest in the war in Vietnam, the space program, the civil rights movement. These were subjects that only occasionally touched her, as when one of their Cuban neighbors from down the street lost their son, a Marine, to the jungles. Gustavo, on the other hand, was more entrenched in American culture. He always spoke sadly of the death of JFK, whom some speculated had been murdered by anti-Castro Cubans as retribution for his bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion and his promise to the Russians that, if they pulled their missiles out, America would never invade Cuba. But Gustavo still had a soft spot for Kennedy, a Catholic, who had once visited the relief center, hence the photograph of Gustavo and Kennedy shaking hands on their hallway wall.)