She had other mild eccentricities. In those days, beautiful María couldn’t care less about mastering English, as if it were an unthinkable imposition on her soul. Besides, most of the people she knew in Miami, especially her local acquaintances, in the same boat, hardly spoke anything but Spanish. Nevertheless, both Gustavo and Teresita did their best to help María out. But because Gustavo, with his job at the relief center by day and as a part-time watchman by night (he’d dress up in a gray Armstrong Securities uniform and go off after dinner, toting a club-the relief service never paid well-and come back about three in the morning), wasn’t around as much as he would have liked, Teresita, excelling in school, became beautiful María’s second, female Lázaro: her teacher. A half an hour now and then was all they, seated around their Formica table in the kitchen, could manage-or, to put it differently, it was all that María could take. She preferred to perfect her reading and writing in Spanish, and it seemed incredibly unfair that, in America, she had become an analfabeta all over again. Nevertheless, for all her resistance to that notion, after five or so years of such lessons, even María could begin to understand her daughter when she’d lapse from Spanish into the heavier and coarser intonations of English, a language that always sounded ugly to María’s ears.
But on those evenings when Gustavo happened to be home and they watched television, María didn’t mind taking in certain popular English-language programs, especially the ones that featured dancing and singing, like The Jackie Gleason Show, which was, in fact, broadcast out of Miami in those days. Knowing the work that went into the ensemble routines, María enjoyed pointing out the difficulties of certain high kicks and turnarounds (on such evenings she’d regret that she hadn’t become a choreographer), and she’d get up from their Castro Convertible sofa and, taking hold of Teresita’s hand, show her a few of those dancers’ steps. Movies amused her as well, and if María had a favorite, Teresita would remember, it was My Fair Lady, with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn playing the roles of Professor Higgins (pronounced by María “eeeeegens”) and Eliza Doolittle, as broadcast in the Spanish version, their voices and singing overdubbed. She particularly liked that story, about the crude but beautiful Eliza’s transformation from street waif and flower seller into a quite proper lady who could read, write, and speak, and comport herself as elegantly as any aristocrat, María always smiling at its happy ending, as if Eliza’s story had some connection to her own.
And sometimes they’d settle for reruns of the older programs-one of them being I Love Lucy, which both Gustavo and Teresita especially liked because Desi was Cuban and quite a funny man. As for María? She’d hardly ever paid much attention to that show until one of those evenings, in 1968 or so, when she happened into the living room just as that episode about Ricky Ricardo’s singing cousins-played by Cesar and Nestor Castillo-came on. Knocks on the Ricardos’ door, Lucy letting them in, and all at once, Nestor himself, back from the dead in all his winsome cubano earnestness, standing beside his brother, a Panama hat in hand and black instrument case by his side.
At first, María didn’t say a word but just stood by the living room doorway taking in, as if anew, the glorious black-and-white handsomeness of her former love. (“Ay, el pobre, Nestor.”) Only later, when the Castillo brothers, in character as Manny and Alfonso Reyes, came out on the stage of Ricky’s Tropicana nightclub in white silk suits to perform “Beautiful María of My Soul” and Nestor began to sing, did she say, in a most casual manner, “Both of you should know that the song that fellow’s singing was written about me.”
“That song?” Gustavo asked. “I’ve heard it a million times before. Are you kidding me?”
“No,” she said. “Soy la bella María de esa canción. That beautiful María is me.”
Gustavo replied good-naturedly, incredulously: “If that’s so, my love, how come you’ve never mentioned it before?”
“Why? It’s because I’m a humble woman. Soy una mujer humilde,” she said. “That’s all.”
Then, as Gustavo raised his eyebrows at Teresita, who gave a little shrug, it hit María that just because she said such a thing people would not necessarily believe her. And though María hadn’t particularly dwelled on that canción in a long time-for she didn’t hear it as often as before-after all she had gone through and all the nights she had dreamed sweetly, erotically, and angrily about what could have been between herself and Nestor, it hurt her pride to think that not even her husband and daughter took what she’d just told them as the truth.
She left that room offended just as the I Love Lucy theme, that happy homage to pre-Castro Cubans in America, sounded merrily through the halls and rooms of their house.
LATER, HOWEVER, SHE CALLED TERESITA INTO HER BEDROOM, where she pulled a small lacquered cane suitcase from her closet; it was the same one she had brought with her when they left Cuba, but María now used it for keepsakes and documents. “I’m going to show you something,” she said. And from it she took out a large manila envelope that held, among other things, the letters Nestor had written her, and her beloved photographs, of family, of friends, of Nestor-all that she had left of her past in Cuba. The first she showed to Teresita was the glossy studio portrait that Nestor had once sent her, with an inscription to María scribbled out in his neat and careful hand in black ink.
“Recognize him? It’s the guapito from that show, isn’t it?”
“Sí, mamá.”
“Well, he’s the one who wrote that song about me.” Then: “Now, look at another.”
It was of María and Nestor holding hands with rapturous expressions on their faces, no doubt madly in love, as they came charging out of the Cuban sea-taken out at la playita back in ’49.
“That’s him and me,” she said. “We were lovers, you know.” Teresita, just a young girl at the time, nodded as if those words held meaning for her. “He is the one who should have been your father.”
And she went on, showing her daughter the others, photographs of herself and Nestor taken here and there in Havana, Teresita just listening, in her pensive way.
“So I hope you will believe me when I tell you something in the future, okay?”
“Sí, mamá.”
“Good! Now give your mamá a little kiss.”
Chapter FORTY-TWO
As the years passed, the settled life of that household turned into something else, for after a decade of a reasonably happy marriage, during which time Gustavo, working on behalf of the incoming Cubans and doing much good for that ever-growing community, discovered that God, or fate, does not always reward such deeds. María, loving this man, or loving him as much as she could, and never saying a bad word about Gustavo to anyone, sometimes seemed rather bored with their conjugal arrangements. It’s possible that this pious and quiet man, whose worst sin was to say that he felt perfectly fine when he didn’t, or that he wasn’t tired when exhaustion most weighed on him, had, in María, the first woman he had ever possessed. Whatever went on in their bedroom had, over time, begun to fix upon María’s still lovely features a look of amorous resignation.
She never said as much, but Teresita, with her little bedroom just down the hall from theirs, while quietly making her way to the toilet, sometimes heard through their door beautiful María’s utterances: “Qué te pasa, hombre?”-“What’s going on with you?” and “My God, man, there’s only so much I can do!” and “What am I to make of a husband who shows no interest in a woman like me?” One night, without daring to make a sound herself, Teresita overheard this: “In Cuba, the men wanted me, as if there were no other woman in the world…wanted me so much, Gustavo, that I sometimes went mad, and here we are, Gustavo, and tú haces nada conmigo-you do nothing with me like a real man would… So tell me, amorcito, what am I to do with you?”