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 Señor 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.