Beautiful Maria of My Soul (5 page)

D
oting on her and knowing just how special she looked, her
papito,
Manolo, always made a certain joke: “Where’d you come from,
chiquita
?” It was a mystery. While Concha had been a pleasant-looking woman with a broad African nose and deeply soft dark eyes, there had never been anything particularly remarkable about her looks, save for a certain gentle piety—you’ve seen that on the faces of those sweet churchgoing
negritas
on Sundays. As for her
papito,
with his sagging
gallego
face, his droop-lidded eyes, he was no prize either (even when María thought that he would have been a handsome man if he hadn’t liked his rum so much). Somehow, between the two of them, they had produced this masterpiece, the sort of little girl who, romping through the high grasses, lifted even the lowest and most forlorn of spirits up. Whenever Manolo took her around, guitar in hand, to neighboring farms and
valles,
she was as good as currency when it came to getting him free drinks and a little food. And, during the glory of her childhood, when she became aware of just how thickly and deliberately sunlight moved across a field, and just the scent of flowers sent her to heaven, there was no escaping the fact that, in a
valle
with lots of other Marías, and pretty ones at that, she and her younger sister, Teresita, for whom she would have cut off her right hand, surely stood out.

She was so pretty that whenever she was spotted from the fields tending to her chores in their yard—feeding their livestock from pails of slop mainly—even the most exhausted of those
guajiro
farmers, faces gnarled, bodies thin as bone, their skin leathery from the sun, would halt their oxen and call out to her,
“Oye, princesa!”—
“Hello, princess!”—or
“Hola,
mi vida!”
—“Hey there, my life!” all in the effort to get her attention, as if for the first time, even if she had been tagging along with their plows and oxen for as long as she could remember. Well, things had just changed, that’s all. First had come the blood, then the bloating, the terrible lecture about becoming filthy and having to wear a rag so she wouldn’t drip blood everywhere. Then her body had filled out. It had seemed to take only a few months. Her angelic girl’s figure, turning so voluptuous that Concha, fearful a drunkard might try to take advantage of her one night, made María wear a homemade corset tight around her chest, but, with María hating the thing, that lasted only a while, proving too painful and impractical for her to endure.

In those days, a toothless old
guajiro,
Macedonio, who slurped through his every saliva-driven utterance, once told her, “Looking at you, I can remember when I could chew.” And when she, Teresa, and her
papito
went to the nearest town, San Jacinto, some ten miles away, to bring their livestock to market, María suddenly found herself being followed by one or another of the brasher young men, fellows who whistled after her, promised to buy her an ice cream cone if she would only tell them her name, and who, while her
papito
negotiated with a butcher, asked her out to see a movie in that town’s little theater, El Chaplin. If she refused them all, or hardly seemed to care about hurting anyone’s feelings, it was because María tried to forget about her own bodily changes: which is to say that she didn’t want to let her childhood go.

They had no schools—not a single one of those
guajiros
being educated—and their
papito
just didn’t think it worthwhile to make the two-hour journey back and forth each day to town just so that his daughters might learn to read and write. The best things for them to acquire would be more practical skills—like cooking, skinning animals, and sewing—just what a husband would want. Besides, they had enough work to keep them busy. With one day much like the next, once they finished looking after their livestock—so many pigs, chickens, and randy goats (who stank to high heaven)—María and Teresita, smelling of animals and dung, and with feather remnants in their hair, would make their way down through
the woods behind their house, along a twisting path, enormous trees swallowing the light, to a gully and waterfall where rainbows often appeared in the mists. They were so happy then, for everything around them was so beautiful: the lianas and birds of paradise grew densely in that
jungla,
the fecundity of its earth sending up an endless variety of blossoms, all manner of starflowers and wild orchids sprouting alongside bottle palms, whose thorny fronds cascaded to the ground in clusters, hooded violets dangling like bells off vines around them. (The variety was endless: crimson begonias, red-bulbed
flor de euphorbias, flor de majagua,
purple jacarandas, hibiscus,
radiantes,
and tiny violets, as well as other peculiarly named blossoms—scratch bellies, burst horses, and chicken-dung blooms, not a one deserving such a homely appellation. Perhaps that’s why, years later, María had so many silk flowers in her home, and why certain scents from the little garden she kept outside her house always made her cry, or come close to it, because such natural perfumes made her think about Teresa, Cuba, and her own youth. No matter how jaded she otherwise had become, María still missed the wonderment she had felt as a girl when each morning seemed to bring even more of those incredible flowers into the world, and gushingly so, as if God, peeking out from his religious stillness, had pointed a finger and made their pistils, tendrils, and petals suddenly ooze from the ground and up the moss-covered trunks of trees, all effortlessly coming into existence in the same mysterious manner that her own body had changed.)

That
cascada
flowed out of a massive cave, its roof dripping with stalactites, bats flitting in and out of the darkness. While stony drafts of cool air, redolent of guano and clay, came wafting out its entrance—so wonderful on a hot afternoon—they’d slip off their dresses and, down to their breeches, lie on the granite ledge, luxuriating in the torrents, as delicious as any
aguacero
or tremendous storm. A sheath of water pelting their bodies, the sisters held on to each other the way they did at night while sharing a bed, all the while whispering about how, as little old
viejitas,
they would remain close forever and forever like angels, amen.

They must have gone there hundreds of times since they were chil
dren, with very little changing in their routine, but on one of those afternoons, as they were walking home, Teresita, then twelve years old, in the midst of a smile and midstride while sidestepping some jasmine blooms—
“¡Qué bonitos son!”
—stopped suddenly as if she had hit a wall. Her eyes rolling up into their sockets, she bit her tongue, her teeth chattered, and her limbs began shaking so violently she bloodied the knuckles of her right hand while striking it against a rocky ledge—all that even before she dropped like a stone to the ground. And with that María fell to her knees, smothering her younger sister’s body with her own, as if to protect her from
los castigos de Dios
—the castigations of God, as her
mamá
used to call such visitations of unexpected misery. But they still came floating down from heaven like the black ashes of a cane field fire, no sweetness in the air, María holding her sister as tightly as she could without hurting her, her right hand cushioning Teresita’s head as it whipped from side to side, María’s own knuckles soon bleeding from smacking against the ground in the effort to keep her sister still, a weeping mist settling around them.

LATER, WHEN TERESA’S TREMBLING HAD PASSED, AND MARÍA HAD
gotten her
papito,
who had been strumming on his guitar with a friend, they carried that
inocente
back through the forest to the shack, where they laid her down on her
papito
’s cot. Finally coming around, Teresa hadn’t the slightest idea of what had happened—and yet her cuts and bruises and aching teeth and bit up tongue told her otherwise—she just knew. One moment by the grotto, the next in that
bohío.
The first face she saw, so beautiful and sad and concerned, was María’s, then her
papito
’s and Mamá’s, a rosary in hand. One of their neighbors—maybe it was Apollo—peered in from the doorway and sipped from a tin cup of whatever her
papi
had poured to settle his nerves. He smiled broadly, being the rare
guajiro
with fantastic teeth, as if that would somehow make things better.

Just then that room, where their older brothers had died, seemed the
saddest place on earth. Nevertheless, Teresita, always a sweet-natured soul, managed to sit up and ask: “Why’s everyone looking so sad?”

And that made them laugh, even if her sudden illness was yet another of those tragedies they’d have to accustom themselves to. With pure affection, María wiped away her little sister’s tears; and with tenderness kissed her pretty face a dozen times over, telling her, as they later sat out watching the stars, “You see, Teresa, everything’s going to be all right, because I love you, and Papi and Mami love you, and nothing bad is going to happen to you while we’re around.” That’s what they all wanted to believe. Local healers, examining her the next day, provided Teresita with some natural
calmantes
by means of a specially brewed tea containing equal parts of jute, ginger, and cannabis, among other local herbs, and suggested they sacrifice an animal to San Lázaro, but this advice was ignored. Papito told her to drink a cup of rum, whose taste she found burning and metallic, but, even after she had been administered a
santera
’s cleansing, by means of burning roots and tobacco, as an added precaution, when she began trembling again a few days later, there remained no doubt that Manolo would have to fetch a doctor from San Jacinto or, failing that, from the sugar mill, a day’s ride away.

He’d do anything for his daughters, of course, and though it made him sad to pay the fee—what was it, a dollar?—he truly believed that the doctor, a certain Bruno Ponce, so sanguine of manner, and slightly jaundiced with sunken eyes behind wire glasses, would find a cure. Her
papito
’s hopefulness, however, didn’t quite work out. Apprised of her symptoms and examining her, the doctor determined that Teresita had suffered from a grand mal seizure
(a tonic-clonic episode or status epilepticus, as her namesake, Doctor Teresita, would identify it, from her mother’s descriptions, decades later),
a condition related either to epilepsy or to a tumor within her skull. As treatment, he prescribed a twice daily dose of phenobarbital, a sedative they could find at the
farmacia
in town. Its proprietor, whom María would never forget for his homely but kind face, Pepito
el alto,
as he was known to everyone, never even charged them for their monthly amber bottles of the stuff, so sorry did he feel for those
guajiros
with the lovely daughters.
(In fact, that wonderful man, a widower, formed an attachment to María and actually took Manolo aside one afternoon to discuss the possibility of a marriage between them, even if he was in his fifties. While such arranged marriages weren’t unheard of, and it would have made their lives easier, her
papito
just couldn’t bring himself to subject his thirteen-year-old daughter to life with an old man. To the pharmacist’s credit, he never held anything against them; though, whenever María entered his shop to get Teresa’s pills, he became solemn in his demeanor, and, more often than not, while stepping back into the shadows, he’d let out with a sigh. Years later, with a wistfulness about
la Cuba que fue,
she’d wonder whatever happened to him.)

For a while several of those bitter pills daily seemed to do the trick. Still, with their foul taste, Teresita dreaded the very idea of having to take any medicine, and whether she took those pills or not as instructed, she seemed just fine.

A few months later, several days before the Christmas of 1943, they were out at the bodega by the crossroads, where trucks from distant cities sometimes stopped, dancing for a crowd of rum-soaked
guajiros,
who were whooping it up on one of those nights when the poorest of the poor pretended to be rich, the tables covered with all kinds of victuals—succulent
lechón
and pit-roasted chickens and doves, rivers of
aguardiente
and beer flowing like the Nile, their roosters and hounds meandering about, droppings left everywhere, as if anyone, some dancing barefooted on those sagging pine floors—covered in sawdust in the corners—gave a damn. On that night with their
papito
in good voice and on a little makeshift stage with a few of his musician friends from around—what were their names?—oh yes, Alvaro and Domingo, and a third fellow, the one-eared Tomaso, who played a
gaita
that he’d made from a pig’s belly, his terrible wailings on that primitive bagpipe appreciated just the same, those
guajiros
were having so much fun.

Among the females were those charming
jamoncitas
in their best flower-patterned dresses: María and Teresita, displaying their youthful rumbas, white blossoms tucked into their hair, and laughing as they turned,
spinning in circles like flowers fallen from a tree. In the midst of all that, with the musicians playing, their
papito
proudly beaming at them, and with the oldest of the old clapping along, and the other beautiful young women of their
valle,
usually pregnant or on their way to becoming so, nodding at
las muchachitas
—with all that going on, Teresita, in the midst of a dance, had the second of her serious attacks, falling stiffly into her older sister’s arms and then, after appearing as if she were dead, trembling so violently on the floor that her limbs were soon black and blue. But,
la pobre,
even that wasn’t the worst of it—the pretty thing lost control of her bowels,
coño,
a shame of all shames. That fiesta still went on, though with more restraint in respect to Manolo and his daughter, the pretty one, with the wistful spoon-shaped face, who had nearly died and then come back before their very eyes.