It didn’t matter that she had dressed conservatively, in just an ankle-length skirt and a blouse with some frilly workings, and had worn around her neck both a delicate pearl necklace and a crucifix. She still cut swaths through the coterie of his siblings’ and cousins’ more ordinarily pretty wives with her gorgeousness, all but a few of their expressions asking, Is this the latest cheap tramposa for whom Rafael left his saintly wife and children? Of course, some, his brothers particularly, were civil enough with María, and the more the other men drank beer and daiquiris, the more María glowed before them. (Translation: “If you’re going to mess around, that’s the sort you do it with.”) But, as had often happened in her life, the women, the younger wives especially, seemed outraged by her presence, none of them saying a word to María when she’d smile at them, their eyes squinting, daggers in their pupils.
What, then, could María do but have a few drinks, when, at a certain point in the afternoon, Rafael made himself scarce? She had watched him huddling with one of his older sons, a good-looking college-age fellow; her eyes had followed Rafael as he later disappeared into the house to have some words with another woman, a petite brunette, seemingly suppressing tears of both anger and righteous indignation, who, as it turned out, happened to be his wife.
“Por Dios, I’m bored,” María said to Teresita as she sat down beside her mother in the yard, her expression telling her all.
It was an hour before he finally came out, and when he did, Rafael curtly told her: “We should go.” As they drove back, María did not say a word, trying her best to maintain her dignity, even if she was a little drunk. For his part, Rafael, no doubt burdened by his violation of familial decorum, said to her, “Well, it was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” Once they got back to their house on Northwest Terrace, Teresita locked herself in her room and, for several hours, took in another kind of disturbance: not of two people making love but of Rafael’s shouted recriminations: “What we had was perfectly fine before you had to stick your nose into my family life! Why I allowed this, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for you!” Then he went on and on before storming out, not an iota of tenderness in his voice.
A month went by. One evening, at dusk, Teresita looked out her window and saw them sitting inside his DeVille. He was gesticulating wildly, while María, her arms folded across her lap, didn’t move at all. Until she slapped him in the face and, as María later put it to Teresita, told him to shove his own fingers up his ass. Shortly, as María stepped onto the pavement, he drove off, tossing into the street a bouquet of flowers, which María didn’t bother to pick up.
And that was the last of Rafael.
IT HARDLY RUFFLED MARÍA’S FEATHERS, HOWEVER. THAT SAME evening, after dinner, she sat by their kitchen table pouring herself a cup of red Spanish wine. Sitting across from her, Teresita put aside a school notebook she had been writing in. “Mama, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, mi vida.”
“That man, Rafael-did you even really care about him?”
María laughed. “Are you kidding me? I liked him all right, but did I fall in love with him, is that what you’re asking me? No, por Dios, no! And even if I did, what difference would that make? What is love between a man and a woman anyway, pero un vapor? Something that comes and goes like the air.”
Snubbing out her cigarette, María held out her arms to her daughter. “Come here, querida,” she said, and Teresita went to her side. That’s when María smothered her with kisses, repeating, as she stroked Teresita’s hair: “It’s you I love-mi Teresita, mi buena-and no one else. Never, never forget that, hija. The hell with everyone else!”
Chapter FORTY-FOUR
But to say that love was air and to really believe it, deep down, were two different things. For, in the quietude of her bedroom, beautiful María had more than her share of wistful moments, even if there had been others who had come along: The manager of a movie house. A much younger dance instructor she’d met at the Biltmore in Coral Gables, where she sometimes gave group lessons to the tourists. An accountant, missing two front teeth, his jackets flecked with dandruff, had helped her sort through the chaos of her dance studio receipts and was a very nice fellow indeed, but too attached to his overbearing mother and therefore too controlled and timid for her taste. (“That one, Félix,” she told her daughter, “wanted me to be just like his mamá.”) A construction contractor, who did some work on the house and, without children, left her because she was not of that fecund age anymore. And there were others. Cubans all, they came and went as momentary diversions; a few she took to bed, most often in obscure motels, but never with any expectation of receiving the affections she had known during her juventud in Cuba. (Oh, but papí, y Nestor, y Ignacio-yes, even Ignacio!) In the end, they meant very little to her, and since Teresita, sizing them up, rarely seemed pleased when she brought any of those men home, beautiful María hardly cared about their value as potential step-papitos. Occasionally, she considered remarrying-a few had proposed-but since she was more or less comodita-most comfortably disposed-in the house that Gustavo had left her, and could not really see herself making room for someone else, despite her loneliness, the notion somehow held out no appeal for her.
BY HER FIFTIES, MARÍA HAD STARTED TO FEEL HER YEARS. SHE still turned heads, but more so, as time went on, from a distance. Men continued to check her out, surely, but not as often as before; nor did men stare as long as they used to; the sensation that their eyes followed her all the way down the street vanished-a woman like María just knew. And, though she still looked very well preserved, even beautiful, María found herself feeling stunned by how much younger more and more people, both male and female, seemed to her.
Keeping her figure from the days of her youth largely intact by giving dance lessons from ten to five at the studio she had opened downtown and, swallowing her pride, the hour she spent twice weekly sweating away in a pink outfit on a treadmill at a nearby YWCA-where all the local Cuban women gathered in Jacuzzis afterwards to boast about their children and grandchildren-could not compensate for the inevitable and subtle changes of her features: not wrinkles but a general slackening of her skin, which so perturbed María that she took to dwelling more and more on newspaper ads for face tucks, and her cabinet filled with youth-restoring creams, rich with all kinds of so-called miracle enzymes, that she’d heard about on the radio. Yet as wonderful as María looked for her age, there was no concealing the passage of time, which could be read in her eyes, the future, and all its hopes and promises, having ceased to be the endless thing that had once shimmered so brightly in her pupils. Stripped of her illusions about what her romantic life would hold, María, like a character out of a bolero, began to think more and more about the past-how lovely it had been, no matter the difficulties she had endured. And once she did, the more she returned to her memories of that músico Nestor Castillo.
NOW AND THEN, ESPECIALLY DURING THE YEARS WHEN HER BRILLIANT daughter had left Miami to study medicine in New York and she would come from work and indulge in a few five-thirty cocktails, María, feeling lonely, not for men but for her Teresita’s companionship, would turn on their living room phonograph, an RCA console, and play the somewhat weathered Mambo Kings album she had happily found one afternoon at a neighborhood flea market for twenty-five cents. As if putting on a zarzuela or a symphony, she’d listen to each selection in order, from their raucously freewheeling, drum-and-horn-section-driven descargas to their songs of love, and always with the greatest sentimentality each time she heard Nestor’s sweet baritone voice, the climax, of course, reached with the last offering of Side A, “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Some evenings it gave her such a thrill that she’d put it on over and over again, the distance of time having made its melody seem even lovelier than before, and, despite her dislike of certain of its lyrics, she’d feel glorified, as if their love had been immortalized forever and forever, amen. But when she’d had too much to drink, and Nestor’s ghost filled the room, and the particulars of that irretrievable romance came back to her in such a way as to provoke the saddest of emotions, she’d cut it off, lest she begin to wallow in the kinds of sentiments that María still found painful.