Beautiful María of My Soul

Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN

Though she’d long since torn up Cesar Castillo’s letter, a dozen others, from Nestor himself, were among the items that María chose to take along with her some three years later, in early 1961, when she’d leave Havana for Florida with her little daughter, Teresita. Not that she hated Fidel Castro as much as some of the Cuban exiles she’d meet there over the coming decades-she thought he was doing some good things for the people, especially the guajiros, particularly when it came to his literacy campaign and sending doctors into the sticks; and she supposed that anyone would have been better than Batista, whom everybody knew was some kind of crook. Caught up in the initial jubilation, she had been among the crowds lining the streets of Havana as Fidel and his followers made their triumphant procession on captured tanks and jeeps and trucks through the city in the second week of 1959, after they’d routed Batista’s forces in the wake of their successful guerrilla war. She’d hoisted up her daughter-not even a year old yet-so that the heroic leader might see her as he passed, but it wasn’t long before she, like so many others, as in a fiery romance, started taking a second look.

At first, though, María had liked him and what he seemed to stand for. She could even lay claim to having met Fidel, however briefly. Five months after María had given birth to Teresita, in a sixteen-hour labor passed in the maternity ward of the Calixto García Hospital, she had returned to work as a fill-in dancer and assistant to the choreographer at the cabaret in the newly constructed Havana Hilton hotel, a spectacular, fully air-conditioned high-rise out in Vedado, its façade boasting of a mosaic mural by the artist Amelia Peláez (for most of that year, 1958, she and Ignacio had watched the construction cranes and their crews at work from their terrace). That’s where Castro established his headquarters, the rebel leader taking a suite on an upper floor. The dancers in the cabaret, María among them, got used to seeing him strolling through the lobby on his way to the hotel diner, where he ate his meals. On one of those evenings, Castro and some of his men took in one of their shows; afterwards he made a point of going backstage and shaking hands with each of the performers and musicians.

“I have to confess,” she would tell her ever-patient daughter one day, “that it was a thrill. He was tall and broad shouldered, muy bien macho with a handsome enough face, and the way he looked at me, I knew what he was secretly thinking. In fact, even after I had given birth to you, Teresita, I hadn’t lost any of my beauty or my figure-a lot of my friends told me that I looked even better than before. I had added a little to my pecho”-she would pat at her breasts-“and my happiness at having you, even when you don’t think I was happy, made my face even more lovely than before. Of course, I felt flattered by the way he had looked at me, but that was all. I had no interest in him, and I wasn’t imagining things, by the way, hijita… Later on, when one of his guards approached me to say that the comandante’s door was open to me any time I wanted to speak to him, I had to say to myself, ‘About what?’ He was a man, after all, and so I kept my distance, though I swore that, if I went up there, like some of the other girls-I mean if I was forced to-I would use that old trick I had up my sleeve, you know, the one I told you about with the shaking that I remembered from my beloved sister, but, gracias a Dios, that never came to pass…”

There had been the summary executions of a number of former Batista henchmen, members of his police force and secret service-their trials were broadcast on the radio and shown on television. And in that atmosphere of quick justice and reform, in which Castro had pledged to rid Havana of its criminal elements, when the casinos were closed and the whores and their pimps rounded up, Ignacio, Teresita’s father, if not by marriage by fact, was arrested after his warehouse in the harbor had been raided and found to contain stolen goods. Or, to put it differently, at the tail end of a happy year as a doting papito to Teresita and a caring enough companion to María, Ignacio went out one morning and did not come home. During a trial, which María could not attend because she simply did not know what had happened to him, Ignacio, whom she considered a good provider and an essentially honest man, however he had made his living, was sentenced to serve ten years at a prison on the Isle of Pines.

She never saw him again, el pobre. (But how could it have turned out well for Ignacio, when anyone María cared for seemed destined to a miserable fate?)

Along the way, the clubs, cabarets, and casinos, and every maison de joie, as the bordellos had been sometimes called, were closed down, then reopened, then closed down again. Tourism died, and when María managed to scrounge up work as a dancer, she usually performed to half empty houses. Not all was misery, however: she had been moonlighting at the Parisien cabaret, in the Hotel Nacional, when the dressing rooms began to buzz with excitement over the American celebrity, of Cuban descent, who had come by to catch the heart-wrenching vocalizations of the Mexican singer, the one and only Pedro Vargas-you know, the star of that show, famous in America, the Cuban she’d see again and again on reruns in the future: Desi Arnaz. The performers sort of knew who he happened to be, but before any doubts could set in, their emcee introduced him to the crowd and asked Mr. Arnaz to stand up and take a bow. She could see why he was well known; handsome as hell and with a wonderful smile, he emanated warmth and kindness. At the same time, María happened to notice that, as with Nestor, as with perhaps many a Cuban man of a certain bent of emotion, he seemed a little sad-perhaps he sensed what was to come. In any event, Arnaz had a friend in the house band’s pianist, a fellow named Pepe, and it was he who later told the troupe about why Desi Arnaz had come to Havana just then, in the wake of the Cuban revolution: to gather up orchestrations by his arranger, Marco Rizo, who had kept a backlog of charts in his Vedado apartment-in fact, it would be the last time that the most famous Cuban before Fidel Castro stepped on Cuban soil.

EVENTUALLY, ONCE THE REVOLUTION CHANGED EVERYTHING, beautiful María started to consider something that had been unthinkable to her before: and that was to leave Cuba for the United States. Not to stay in Miami necessarily, but perhaps to go to a place called Las Vegas, which she’d been told was like a Havana in the desert of the American West. She knew this from a magician named Fausto Morales, who used to work the la Rampa circuit and had, like so many other male performers, a fondness for María. The last time she had seen him at the Lantern, in early 1957, he’d told her about his plans to move there, mainly to perform in the big-time nightclubs, where acts like Frank Sinatra and Perry Como were the attractions, but also to open a school for magicians, who were always in demand. (Years later, her daughter, Teresita, would read somewhere that David Copperfield was one of Fausto’s pupils.) He’d left her with an open invitation-any time María wanted a change of scenery, and a good livelihood as well, Las Vegas was an option. Perhaps, she thought, one day she would take him up on his offer.

In the spring of 1961, when María finally left for Miami aboard a Pan Am Clipper with her little daughter, she took nothing more for herself than a few dresses and some other essentials; everything else-the furnishings of her apartment in Vedado, the money in her bank account (some $2,237)-was confiscated. (She managed to bury several pieces of jewelry in a metal box under the base of an acacia tree out in Pinar del Río, the rest, from earrings to silver and gold chains, save the one that Nestor had given her and a precious Timex, a gift from Ignacio, she gave away.) Without any close family in Cuba, beautiful María stashed what remained of her past in that suitcase: those photographs of her mamá and her papito, of Nestor Castillo and herself taken in the good times; and photos of María in her dancer’s glory, and dressing room shots posed with the comedians, actors, and radio and television performers who used to frequent the places she worked-she brought their pictures as well. And it was not as if she would forget Ignacio. But aside from those items, a crucifix, a handful of precious letters, and one of those notebooks she had filled up for Lázaro were all she managed to bring with her, all that remained of her world. Of course she’d filled an entire suitcase for Teresita, who, not quite four but brainy and alert, if not as pretty as her mother would have wanted-the poor girl taking more after Ignacio-managed to understand that many of the adults on that half-hour flight were very sad…

Even her mother, beautiful María, when not telling Teresita to stop chewing on her fingers and to sit up straight like a proper girl, seemed apprehensive, looking out the airplane window as if she wanted to lose herself in the silver-bottomed clouds. After landing at Miami International Airport, at the end of a trip that had passed in the snap of a finger, the passengers conversing quietly among themselves-the words “¡Qué lástima!”-“What a pity!” repeated again and again-María showed hardly any emotion at all. Far from behaving like a bewildered guajira of the countryside, she strolled towards passport control, her daughter’s hand in her own, with incredible dignity, the same face, now past thirty, that had graced the billboards and beer trays of Havana, and had provoked a thousand dreams as she walked in the streets of her city, seemingly transformed. American flags, U.S. immigration officials moving about, a framed portrait of the president, John F. Kennedy. Only once did María nearly lose it, as they had passed into the arrivals lounge and not a single person among the hundreds of Cubans-from Tampa, from Miami itself, and from other towns and cities around the state-had been on hand to welcome them with the hugs, embraces, and kisses that made it such an emotional moment for so many others. Looking about, with only twenty dollars to her name and not a clue as to how to proceed, María took a deep breath and squeezed her daughter’s hand tightly, as if she were never going to let it go. Fortunately, a nun of Cuban descent, accompanied by an American priest who happened to speak a pretty passable Spanish, had picked María and her daughter out from the crowd, simply because they seemed so alone, without family to look after them. But while that disorientation and the very strangeness of that new setting may have made a less hardened sort cry a little, that was not María at all.

“Put on your prettiest smile, mi vida,” beautiful María told her daughter.

In fact, if anything, she couldn’t help but laugh, a half mad look in her eyes. For as they were making their way towards the exit doors, to the curbside where a Catholic Relief Services van waited to take them to a motel, little Teresita, hopping daintily along as if to a picnic, as graceful as María had been in the countryside, there trumpeted through the terminal a piece of Muzak which, to her bemusement, happened to be that song of love, as performed by the Lawrence Welk Orchestra. “Beautiful María of My Soul”-as if Nestor, watching her from afar, couldn’t help but say: “I’m still here, my love. Whether you want me or not, I’m still here.”

Chapter THIRTY-EIGHT

After nearly three decades in this country, María’s daughter, Dr. Teresa García, at thirty-two, had but the scantest memories of Cuba. She could remember something of the views from her mother’s terrace in Vedado, of looking up and seeing a sheer plate of endless blue, which was the sky, of looking down and seeing mists and the wakes of boats and ferries curling on the horizon, the crest of the city’s shoreline receding until it vanished into a plain of light, the roofs of countless buildings glowing in the sunsets like so many jewels. Of rain and mercurially changing, bottom-heavy clouds appearing suddenly. And always some business about the sweet bent-over viejita scrubbing the tile floors of their lobby, with its small, somewhat gaudy Rococo fountain (distinctly, a cherub riding a dolphin, water shooting docilely from its spout), that same nice old lady getting up whenever they came out of the elevator and, noisily complaining about her hips and knees (no doubt arthritic), handing Teresita a few hard candies, the most delicious things in the world, a daily ritual. Something too about waiting along the street for a bus, men tipping their hats or winking at her mother, and street vendors nearly demanding that they taste some fresh-scooped coconut or one of their ices dripping with fruit syrups, and marveling over her shiny black patent leather shoes and how those pavestones kept coming as they made their way under the arcades, and more friendly people popping out of the shadows-people she seemed to love now, simply because they were a part of that pleasant sunlit memory, even if she could not attach a single name to any of them.

Sometimes, however, Teresita would make a connection: a framed picture, cut from an old magazine, of El Caballero de París, a famous Havana street personality, a homeless man and itinerant who slept on park benches, and whom her mother had known, hung on their hallway wall, and just looking at it, the doctor would slip back through time and remember some goatish looking fellow bending forward, his bony hands covered with knobs, to pinch her cheeks and say (most kindly, because she wasn’t that way at all), “¡Qué preciosa, la niña!” Otherwise, a generic sort of cubano face, usually male-could be mulatto, could be negrito, could be one of those lighter-skinned gallegos-swirled about inside her head without any true definition. She had no memories of Ignacio, and if it weren’t for a few photographs that María had shown her, of the three of them out at a kiddies’ amusement park somewhere in Havana, Teresita wouldn’t have had the vaguest notion of what her papito looked like: of medium height, pock faced, heavy browed, not particularly handsome but manly looking, which was, in its way, attractive, that man’s genes were responsible for one of her least favorite pictures-of herself at about the age of three, no doubt taken in Havana, about six months before they’d left.

It was a black-and-white photograph beautiful María kept framed on a table in their living room, and misery passed over Teresa each time she sat down to watch TV with her mamá-whom she truly loved-because she couldn’t miss it. Until Teresita had turned ten, there had been a squatness to the shape of her skull, her liquid eyes were too set apart, her arched eyebrows so pronounced and close together that she seemed perpetually apprehensive about something. Even her hair, jet-black, seemed awfully thin, and while María had gone to the trouble of dolling her up in a lovely satin dress, with a crinoline underskirt, for that photograph, she had bunched Teresita’s hair into a central flourish, like a haystack, and tied it with a bow; and although she had meant well, Teresa resembled, to herself at any rate, one of those rubber shrunken heads or that of a smiling troll such as they sold at a carnival. Needless to say, María herself blamed Ignacio for these imperfections and took to regarding Teresita as she invariably would, with both affection and pity. When she said, “¿Sabes que eres muy linda, no?”-“You know that you’re lovely, don’t you?”-her mother’s eyes always conveyed something else, the unspoken “¡Qué feita!-How plain!”

Better to remember sweeter things: as when beautiful María had finally brought Teresa out to Pinar del Río, so that the guajiro community could see that she had come through with her own little child, and some farmer had taken her around the fields on a horse, her face smothered in its mane, this guajiro, with the bluest eyes and toothless gums, just smiling, smiling. Otherwise, what she could recall of that place came down to hens and roosters and pigs-a few goats as well-in the yards, hounds sniffing everywhere, bats flitting through the trees, butterflies the size of her mother’s sunhat; and in the forest she had seen the cascades that María always talked about in later years-a little piece of paradise and apparently a place of death, for her mother had told her the story, years later, of her namesake’s demise… There wasn’t much else to remember-how could she, when she was only three at the time? Nevertheless, Teresita would swear that she’d seen the mogotes, those limestone camel-mound hills, out in Viñales. “That’s possible,” her mother once told her. “Maybe we did go there.” And perhaps they had gone to the flooded subterranean caves nearby, exploring those caverns in a motorboat…or perhaps that was a dream, just like the idea of Cuba itself.

Nevertheless, in the middle of the day those thoughts comforted her: on the wall of her office in the oncology wing of the Miami Children’s Hospital, near Coral Gables, Teresita kept a professional photograph of Viñales valley, the greenness of the rolling countryside with its majestic royal palms going on forever, and, as well, a charming little painting of a burningly red flamboyán tree, shady and inviting, beside a rustic bohío (to which she sometimes wished she could retreat)-an item she’d bought at a street fair in South Beach. Raised by María, who rarely went to church in those days but who told her countless times, “Creo en Dios”-“I believe in God,” Teresita kept a small bronze crucifix, whose Jesus seemed particularly anguished, on the wall over her desk, just above a picture of María herself, at about the age of twenty, looking glamorous as hell, taken on the stage of some flashy Havana club. Her mother was so enticingly sexy, like a movie starlet, that every so often someone, a male nurse or social worker, peeking in, made a point of whistling and saying things like “¡Chévere!” or “That’s your mamá? Qué guapita!” Why Teresita kept it there even when she, not as elegant, long limbed, voluptuous, or pretty as María, suffered by the comparison, came down to a simple fact: as much as Teresa sometimes found it exasperating, her mother’s beauty had always been a source of pride, though she’d never tell María as much.

They were only keepsakes, but they cheered Teresa up on those mornings when she’d notice a nurse pulling taut the corners of a freshly dressed bed in the terminal ward, yet another of those poor children, none older than twelve, taken by leukemia or osteosarcoma or some other unstoppable disease in the middle of the night. That work was so heartbreaking that Teresita often thought about resigning her position, but each time she got into that frame of mind, it took only one look into the eyes of a stricken child, teary with longing for just a little affection and care, to change her mind. And while Teresita had helped cure many of them, it was the children who didn’t make it, Cubans and non-Cubans alike, from all over south Florida, sweet, uncomplaining, and trusting to the end, for whom she inevitably felt the most.

Chapter THIRTY-NINE

It sometimes got to her, no matter how professionally she tried to comport herself, for in a way Teresa loved each of those children without even really knowing them. With an oversize purse that often held caramels, gummy bears, and little plastic Spider-Mans, she’d leave the ward with its fairy-tale-creature and funny-animal decorated hallways around eight most evenings, don a white helmet, and get on her motor scooter, which she preferred to her Toyota because on it she could zip through that traffic when it had stalled along Key Biscayne Boulevard, then make her way home to Northwest Terrace, a neighborhood which, for better or worse, had lately seen an influx of newly arrived Haitians. (Cocks crowed there in the early mornings just like in the countryside of Cuba.) Occasionally, at the end of the week, when she most wanted to forget about work, she’d step out to some trendy bar with some of her single girlfriends, and while they’d carry on happily about love and sex without much prompting at all, Teresa took in, at some distance, their gossiping about boyfriends, fiancés, the dating scene in Miami, the pros and cons of certain kinds of men (the Jews, it was agreed, were the kindest and most generous to their women, Italians were genteel and smooth, but watch out! As for the cubanos, in their finest and most gentlemanly incarnations, nothing could top them, but ten’ cuidado, some were hardheaded and muy machista, and only wanted you know what, which was fine with some of them). She’d always seem the oldest, even when a few others had five or ten years on her, at least in terms of her bottled-up behavior, but Teresa just couldn’t help it-she’d always been overly serious.

To be beautiful María’s daughter wasn’t always easy, a fact that hit Dr. Teresa García every time she looked in a mirror. As she and María would stroll along in Miami, strangers were always hard put to imagine that she, with her slightly plump figure and somewhat pretty but very serious face, had come from her mother’s fabulous cubana womb. As beautiful María’s only child, vintage 1958, she had missed the boat when it came to inheriting the overwhelming gorgeousness, which, as she had heard over and over again, used to stop traffic in Havana, a city that had never lacked attractive women. Among her vague recollections of the revolution, she’d remember standing on a street corner and, as she held her mother’s hand, seeing the bearded Fidelistas, patrolling the streets in their jeeps, with their rifles held up in the air, beeping at her mother, their green caps raised in homage to María as one of the glories of Cuba. And when the Russians, solemn and somewhat stiff, started turning up in Havana, even they couldn’t keep themselves from offering María small gifts-bottles of Yugoslavian perfume, pints of vodka, and rides in their Ladas (she always turned them down). Later on, growing up in Miami, Teresa, even while knowing that she was a very pleasant enough looking young cubana, couldn’t begin to touch her mother in her prime.

She was not at all homely-fixed up and with a few pounds off, the doctor seemed just perfect for the right sort (conservative, not too wild nor demanding) of man. Attractive enough, with long dark hair, pretty almond eyes, and a compactly promising figure, she had just never bothered with men, not even having a real novio in high school, and in college, aside from one fellow, who almost broke her heart, she had been too possessed by her studies to pay attention to such things. More on the quiet side (as pensive as a Nestor Castillo perhaps), Teresita tended to be the first to get up and leave once the conversation started to sound a little too repetitive for her taste-she always had the excuse of work awaiting her at home. (She carried a shoulder bag stuffed with folders to prove it.) Nevertheless, given a few drinks and the right kind of music, she could let loose with the moves she’d learned growing up around the dancers in her mother’s Learn to Mambo and Cha-cha the Cuban Way studio near Calle Ocho, though hip-hop and Latin fusion threw her.

“Pero, chica,” she would hear her mother telling her, as she worked out on the dance floor with a basic Latin three-step, “it’s all the same-remember to move your hips and shake your culo like it’s on fire, that’s all you have to do!”

Even so, Teresita must have had wallflower written all over her face, and after a while she’d get tired of dancing with just ladies. As well as she shimmied, men would just check her out from the bar, their chins on their fists, trying to figure out if it would be worth approaching her, and usually, so Teresita imagined, thinking No way. She just looked too much like serious business. Besides, they wanted women practically half her age-with their toned bodies, smooth, bared navels, and sun-seasoned breasts plump in push-up bras. Miami was full of them. After a while she’d give up the good fight, head home, and pass the night on a couch beside her mother, sipping glasses of red wine or Scotch on the rocks and watching beautiful María’s favorite Spanish-language telenovelas and variety shows on their color TV, the sort of glowing apparition that would have surely dazzled the guajiros of Pinar del Río.

“BUT, MI VIDA,” MARÍA TOLD HER ONE NIGHT. “THE PROBLEM WITH you is that you don’t do anything right. You don’t put on the proper makeup-when you do, you look like a payaso! A clown. And you don’t care about dressing sexy at all. What’s wrong with turning a few heads? I certainly did in my time, and you can too!”

“Come on, Mama,” Teresa told her, looking up from a book. “You know I love you, but you’re wrong. Most men want a certain type, and I’m not that way at all. But it doesn’t bother me, okay? Just leave me alone about that business! Déjame tranquilo, okay?”

“Okay, okay,” María told her, lighting a Virginia Slims cigarette, which always offended her daughter’s medical sensibilities. “But I’ll only say one more thing.”

“What?”

“At your age, no eres una pollita-you’re no longer a young chick-so you should try everything to find someone, because otherwise you will end up alone. You know I won’t always be around, and then you’ll really be lonely. I’ll come and visit you-don’t worry about that-but do you want to spend the rest of your life with a spirit as opposed to a real flesh-and-blood person? And remember, I have you-but who will be there when you’re getting on?” Then, the coup de grâce: “And don’t forget, no tenemos familia. We don’t have any family.”

That made her doctor’s composure unravel.

“Ay, Mamá, but don’t you know you’re hurting me with all that talk? Can’t you stop sometimes?”

“All right, hija, I’m just trying to be helpful,” María said. A few minutes of silence. And then beautiful María would add: “But listen to me, I’ll only say one more thing. Even if I think you deserve the best, even an ugly man with one leg would be better than none; then at least you can have children! And then you’ll be happy, instead of putting up with that miserable brain of yours that thinks too much!”

“Okay, Mama, I appreciate it, but enough, all right? I’m tired from working and-”

“Hey, chiquita, I’ve got an idea! Why don’t you go to one of those singles nights at the Biltmore, over in Coral Gables? Yes, it’s the ‘Black Bean Society’-they have one every month-I have a friend who went there and met some nice fellow, and maybe, if you fix yourself up the right way, you’ll have a little luck too and-”

That’s when Teresita leaned over and gave her mother a kiss to quiet her down. She owed María too much to stay angry at her for long, but God, when she’d start up with all the nagging about the loveless state of her only daughter’s romantic life, Teresita could only take it for so long. She’d want to drown her sorrows in the worst things possible: pizza, fried plátanos, lechón sandwiches, and dark chocolate truffles (which tasted great with red wine). On many a night, filled with cravings, she’d drive off to some diner and eat her heart out just because she felt like it. (Then a week of weighing herself, of shaking her head.) More often than not, however, if Teresita didn’t head her off at the conversational pass, María might well slip back into the re-recitation of her own history as a poor country girl who’d come to Havana with nothing, and how she had learned her life’s lessons the hard way…and, always, always, just how humble and beautiful she had been in her prime, and the loves of her life. In fact, if she’d had enough to drink, María would go on and on about that muy, muy handsome músico named Nestor Castillo, who’d once written a song about her: “the man who could have been your papito!” she’d say.

(Yes, Mama, the one who wrote you those dirty letters that you don’t know I read.)

That led to a discourse about her other companions who followed over the years-not just Ignacio, whose blood flowed through Teresita’s veins, but the rest, those men she’d grown up regarding as her temporary papitos. She didn’t need to hear more. But she always did. (“Even now, at my age, it’s nearly impossible for a woman like me to stay alone for long.”)

Teresita always made a point of kissing her mother again, and chiding her if she lit another Virginia Slim, which always followed the kiss, and then it was as if nothing hurtful had been said, their life, on such nights, to repeat itself again and again-both being creatures of habit-María taking in her shows, content (and occasionally saddened) in her memories, and Teresita, or Dr. G as some of the orderlies called her, passing into her bedroom along a corridor of solitude and haunted not by love but by the notion that some in this world, no matter how good-hearted, are more or less destined to be alone.

Chapter FORTY

When it came to romance, Teresita’s mother, as opposed to herself, had seemed to lead a charmed life. At least when it came to finding one man or another to pass the time with. Other things, however, did not come so easily. Back in ’61, when they’d first come to Miami, for three of the dreariest months of María’s life they had stayed in a motel near the turnpike that they’d found barely tolerable (two cots, a sputtering black-and-white television, a sometimes running toilet, no air-conditioning, but a fan that, on humid days, barely did the job). The sort of run-down end-of-the-road establishment one used to find in pre-civil rights Miami-in which the motel walkway water fountains and its public restrooms were marked whites only, most of the residents were on the seedy side and somewhat, it seemed to María without her even knowing why, bitterly disposed. (Just a year later, there would be signs up in certain shop windows: help wanted, no cubans please.) Whenever she and Teresita crossed the street and waited for a bus to take them downtown, there was always someone to stare at María, and not for the old “hey beautiful” reasons she had known in Havana. Until Miami became used to seeing thousands of others like her, María, despite her beauty and light mulatta skin, was sometimes regarded as good-or bad-as black. Which was why some folks gave her and Teresita dirty looks or frosty up and downs when they’d stop to drink from those water fountains, and it was no joy to ask or rather beg in broken English for the use of a toilet in a downtown diner when María’s stomach had gone bad from anxiety, the owners grudgingly handing over a key. Teresita accompanied her everywhere rather mutely (what was that strange language people were speaking?), and always did as her mother told her.

But not all was so bad. To cover their immediate bills, while the resettlement people at the Catholic Relief Services figured out what to do with the beautiful cubana who had no apparent skills beyond dancing, they’d get a hundred dollars monthly from a Cuban exile fund, and they had been promised another several hundred apiece for relocating once a sponsor could be found. María could have stayed in Miami -she’d been told about a job stitching canvases for a Cuban-American-owned sailboat company in Fort Lauderdale, but she hadn’t forgotten about her friend Fausto Morales the magician, in Las Vegas. And so when María sat down with one of the agency’s counselors, an affable fellow named Gustavo, they’d spend their sessions trying to locate the man. A somewhat hound-jowled and heavyset Cuban of middle age, the counselor bore a slight resemblance to an American character actor, Ernest Borgnine, and though a few months went by before he finally located the magician at a residence in the Lawton district of Las Vegas, María hadn’t minded that at all. He himself had first arrived in Miami from Cienfuegos a few decades before, had often gone back to Cuba until most recently. An orphan raised by priests and nuns, he had once almost taken the orders, he told María, but, in the end, it just wasn’t for him. No children, no wife, no family. By then, Gustavo, a forlorn but sensibly self-accepting bachelor somewhere in his forties, of few resentments, who spent half his days making telephone calls on behalf of his clients, had taken such a liking to María and her chiquita that, having helped them in their travel and document arrangements for their journey to that desert city, he seemed wistful about their departure. And so did María. When Gustavo wished them all the best of good fortune, he, with regret in his eyes, had added: “Please, if you should ever come back here, don’t forget to look me up.”

LAS VEGAS ITSELF: THE DESERT, THE SCORCHING HEAT OF THE summer months, the Arctic temperatures of every indoor enclosure, the glaring strip at night, and yet another motel, near the McCarran Airport. Among the surprises awaiting María? Aside from finding the dry Nevada landscape forebodingly endless, she learned that Fausto had married a showgirl who performed in a troupe at a hotel called the Sands, and, as it turned out, his promises to help María find work were impeded by his own busy schedule, her age, and the fact that she could speak only a handful of words in English. Though there was a contingent of former Havana show-business professionals in Las Vegas, among them a fairly well known choreographer famous for the sumptuous spectaculars he had staged during the glory days of the Tropicana in Havana, María could land only two jobs, as a dancer in a side room of a casino and as an occasional cigarette girl-no doubt about it, she still looked good but just wasn’t young or tall enough to suit the local tastes. And when beautiful María managed to get onstage again with a troupe of second-rung dancers in a succession of shows that began in the midafternoon and lasted until two in the morning, she usually left with sore feet, a headache, and a depression so severe that Teresita, just a child but a sensitive one for her age, having her first taste of backstage life-for María always brought her along with a few toys and coloring books to wait and sleep and wait and sleep while the shows went on-could see that her mamá wasn’t happy at all. Fausto himself was sensitive to this, and when he had time off from his school and his nightly act, in which he, a sleight of hand genius and fine illusionist, could seem to levitate, bisect, and make vanish his assistants, and turn footstools into animals, he took them out, usually on Sundays, with his bored wife, who seemed to subsist on chewing gum and rum and Cokes, to eat in one of the better places in town.

A massive fellow, with a great bearded head of flame red hair and blue Celtic eyes, Fausto, who did not look particularly Cuban, regularly charmed María by ingratiating himself with her little daughter. He had a way of pulling caramelos from behind Teresita’s ears and could throw his voice so that he could hold a purring alley cat on his lap and make it seem to speak, and in a Mickey Mouse manner that always left little Teresita squealing with delight. For his show, which they went to see, he dressed in the outlandish manner of stage magicians, in high boots and with a velvet cape draped over his shoulders and pirates’ jangles in his ears. On their outings, he wore a simple guayabera and linen slacks and, in the midst of their meals, occasionally glanced at María in a certain way. Looking back at those months, while recalling a few of those Sundays when María paid the motel owner’s daughter to look after her-wonderful afternoons that she spent in a swimming pool, grasping the arms of a dragon float and watching cartoons on the color television!-Teresita wondered if María had ever bedded Fausto down. (She would never say, and why should she?) But she’d remember her mother’s incessant chain-smoking and the way María would stand by their motel room window in the mornings, muttering “Por Dios, esto es un carajo!”-“But Lordy, this is a living hell!”-over and over again. This Teresita distinctly recalled, but little else, except that, come another day, they found themselves on yet another airplane, headed back to Miami.

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.)

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?”

Teresita would hear his sighs and occasionally, but not very often at all, their bed frame knocking against the walls and María’s voice, guttural as a cat’s, urging him on: “Dámelo fuerte, hombre,” and “More!” and “Just a little longer, please! Give me more, and strongly, carajo!” Suppressed female cries, the sucking in of air, as if inhaling fire, the bed rocking more loudly, and then all such noises abruptly ceasing, Gustavo, portly by then, falling back or rolling to his side and gasping with exhaustion.

Then nothing more, until the next morning, when the three would share breakfast before Gustavo and María went off to their jobs, and Teresita, an honors student at Miami Northwestern High, awaited her bus. A solemn silence, Gustavo good-naturedly cooking up the eggs with chorizo, María, a bandanna wrapped about her hair, smoking her Virginia Slims, the lady’s preferred cigarette, one after another, and barely eating more than a few bites of her food. Then a voice from a Spanish-language station, WCMQ in Hialeah, chattering away about traffic patterns before introducing yet another old classic Cuban canción while María, straightening out the buttons of Gustavo’s crisp blue shirt, asked him tenderly, “More coffee, my love?” but with her mascara eyes saying something else. Some old Benny Moré heartbreaker, or perhaps a danzón by the Orquesta Aragón, but occasionally, as well, another of those songs from that epoch when “Cuba was Cuba,” sonorous with violins, a flowing piano, and a beatific baritone, Nestor’s own, in his rendition of “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Just then, Gustavo, hearing those strains, rapped the tabletop and, dabbing his mouth, announced, “Well, I’ve got to go.” Kisses for his stepdaughter, a kiss on María’s cheek, the door opening, and the dense humidity of a Miami morning wafting into the air-conditioning of that kitchen like a mist. “Cuídate, amorcito,” María, running hot and cold, would call after him. The door closing, she would stub out a cigarette, click off the radio with a sigh, as if one memory too many had been provoked by that song.

The discord saddened Teresita. She’d grown close to that man. He may not have been the most dynamic stepfather a girl could have, but he was good to her. And he may have disappointed María lately in some ways, but with Teresita, he never went wrong. She loved their tranquil promenades along the streets at dusk, on their way to get ice cream from a truck that always showed up on a certain corner at seven in the evening. He liked to take her places on his days off, and if some book in a shop window caught her eye, he never hesitated to buy it for her. He smelled nice, never raised his voice against her, and not once, in all those years, had he ever laid a hand on her. Best of all, on his days off, he’d sometimes have his friends over from the Relief Services center and cook up a feast, Cuban style. And when it came to celebrating her birthday, he always made that a fiesta too, going to the trouble of getting her a birthday cake, with candles, the kinds of niceties that María, who grew up without such simple rituals, would probably have never bothered with. She was just that way.

But whatever María and Gustavo lacked, as Teresita would speculate years later, it hardly affected the image they presented during those dance nights sponsored by the Gallego Society or the Cienfuegos Club. Held in the ballrooms of Miami beach hotels, these were merry affairs, packed with people, live bands, and more Cuban food than any such crowd could possibly consume. (Having too much food, as opposed to the paucity of such things back in Cuba, was the point.) Teresita loved to see them out on the floor, most elegantly dressed, dancing to boleros amongst other couples of every possible age, from los ancianos to los nenes; enjoyed observing that ritual of stance and attitude in which, with their faces pressed gently together and heads tilted slightly upwards, both of them smiled, as if seeing something magnificent in the sparkling globes revolving below the ceiling. A good enough dancer, Gustavo never stepped on anybody’s toes, and he even had a certain grace.

Teresita knew this because, seeing her sitting alone, he’d pull her out into the crowd, that dear and sweet man, who always had something nice to say to her-“If those fellows only knew what they’re missing” and “Don’t be shy, you’re as pretty as your mother,” which she knew was a lie but appreciated anyway. Though she would have preferred to stay home and study, or chat with her friends on the telephone, or simply watch some TV-in those days she really didn’t care about “boys” one way or the other-Teresita, having no choice about the matter, did her best to enjoy herself, mainly by overdoing it with the food, crispy tostones and the rinds of suckling pig-lechón-cooked up in the proper Cuban manner with tons of garlic, salt, and lemon juice, along with a nice heaping plate of rice with black beans, and maybe a little fried yuca. It was food that, as some of her Jewish friends at school would say, was “to die for.” Sucking in her stomach, whenever Teresita felt that someone’s eyes were on her, her greatest downfall came by way of the pastry tables, which were stacked with sweets, the diabolical napoleons being her favorites.

On one of those nights, Teresita had been sitting off to the side, gingerly nursing each scrumptious bite of one, when she noticed Gustavo coming off the dance floor with a pronounced limp, and when he sat down, María off somewhere in a frenzy, showing off with some young caballero during an upbeat mambo, he kept rubbing his shin and ankle, as if to get something working again. Back home, later that night, he took off his black patent leather shoes to find that both his feet were swollen and lividly purple; the more he rubbed them, the more he groaned in pain. A local doctor, who couldn’t have been very thorough, Teresita would think years later, diagnosed him with gout, but it turned out to be the boiling point of a diabetes-induced heart-related malady that, undiagnosed, only worsened in the following months and culminated in a stroke, which befell him as Gustavo sat in his office, helping a newly arrived exile couple with the paperwork for the government-subsidized purchase of a house.

That was God’s reward for all his good deeds, María kept thinking. “Gracias pa’ nada, Dios”-“Thanks for nothing, Lord”-she snapped at the sky after the priest had finished leading them in a final benediction and the cemetery workers, hoisting down ropes, lowered his coffin into the ground. Grasping her mother’s hand, Teresita, only fourteen at the time, was in tears. She had been crying for days. From the strange moment when María, late one afternoon, found her reading a book in her bedroom and told her, almost nonchalantly, that her step-papito was no more. And through the three days of his “showing” at the Gomez Brothers funeral home-“formerly located in Havana ”-Teresita had been mystified by María’s indifference. For her mother showed hardly any emotion. He may have been only her step-papito, but she missed him.

The house already seemed emptier without Gustavo, and on one of those evenings after they’d gotten home from his three-day wake, just the sound of the ice cream truck’s chimes at dusk brought her to tears, and every time she worked up the nerve to touch something that had belonged to him, like the plump brown wallet he had in his back pocket the day he died, which the police had returned to them in a plastic bag along with a rosary and comb, it broke her up too. But María? She had hardly shed a tear.

“Oh, but don’t you understand, mi hijita,” she said to Teresita, “that Gustavo’s passing was God’s will? There is nothing to be done when someone’s time comes-believe me, I know.” And when Teresita, feeling as if that was not enough of an answer, asked her: “But tell me, Mama, did you love him?” María said, “Of course, I cared very much for him, but was it a deep and burning love? No… If I chose him when I could have looked around for someone else, it was because he was a decent man, and I wanted you to benefit from his decency.” Then: “Did I want him to die? No. Did I want to deprive you of him? No. That was in El Señor’s plans, and nothing changes that. Es el destino- It’s destiny.”

“But, Mama, why is it that you haven’t even cried?”

“Why?” María said, getting up to refill a glass with red wine. “Because it doesn’t change a thing. Believe me, I’ve wept enough to last me two lifetimes-just to think of my own mother’s passing makes me cry deep inside at night. But by now-and you will understand this when you are older-I’ve learned that in this world you have to develop a hard skin. I learned this the hard way, and, believe me, you should too.”

Oh, but the hard skin? Even years later Dr. Teresita wondered if she herself had become muy durita, durita, as her mother used to say, without really intending to.

That same morning, when Gustavo was laid to rest, to join the others in María’s life who had once meant so much to her-her papito, her mother, her sister and two brothers, old Lázaro, and Nestor Castillo, and likely Ignacio too-and many in that crowd, among them more than a few of the reverent cubanos Gustavo had helped in the darkest days of their early exile, wept unabashedly, only beautiful María, dressed appropriately in black and under a veil, remained curiously unmoved, and that, sharp as a snapshot, was something Teresita would never forget. The ceremony ended, and as the crowd began dispersing, María, perhaps feeling robbed or relieved-it was impossible to tell-tossed a rose onto his coffin, peered down for a few moments, made a sign of the cross, and then, as if it were the most ordinary late Saturday morning, asked her daughter, “What would you like for lunch?” And when Teresita, taken aback by the casualness of that remark, shot her a disquieting glance-Teresita’s large eyes, dark as coals, flaring-María shrugged and just started walking off to a waiting Town Car. Later, on their journey back home, María, always content to watch the world go by, glanced over at her daughter only once, and when she did, she said, “¿Y qué?”-“And what? Tell me, what am I supposed to do?”

Chapter FORTY-THREE

Of course, there was soon someone else to fill the void left by Gustavo in that household, a dapper cubano of the old school, with a thin mustache, and gleaming (dyed black) hair, whom beautiful María met about a year later at a quinces celebration for one of Teresita’s amigitas from school. He happened to be the honoree’s uncle. They struck up a conversation because he had kept staring at María from another table, as if trying to place her. When he finally walked over, he said: “Haven’t I seen you somewhere, maybe in Havana?” And then: “Of course, at one of those clubs. Say, didn’t you dance at the Lantern?”

“Yes, I did,” María answered, with neither pride nor shame. “It was my profession in those days.”

Nodding happily, he sat beside her, sipped his drink, lit a cigarette. He was a well put together, tautly built fellow, maybe fifty, clouds of some overpowering cologne floating off his skin. He wore a well-fitted light blue suit, a Cuban flag pin on his lapel, with a crisp open-collared shirt, a rush of silvered hair flowing upwards from his chest and just a distinguishing touch of gray at his temples; his eyes were remarkably penetrating. And yes, he was handsome.

“Well, believe it or not, I caught a couple of your shows, back when; in one of them you were dressed up like an Egyptian-like Cleopatra-is that right?”

“Yes, that revue was popular for a while.”

He slapped his knee. “Lordy, I knew it. God, I remember thinking, Now that is one hell of a good-looking woman! And if I didn’t approach you, well, it’s because I didn’t think I had a chance in heaven.” He did not mince words. “Tell me, are you married?”

“No, soy viuda”-“I’m a widow,” María said in such a downcast way that Teresita, sitting beside her, half rolled her eyes up into her head. “My husband died last year-a good man, you understand. Un santo,” she told him, looking off sadly.

“Well, here’s what I think,” he said, shifting his chair towards her. “Life is too short to throw it away by feeling bad about things. What do you say about you and me going out somewhere one night-anywhere you want!” He touched his heart. “It would honor me.” Then, as a waiter brought him another drink, he made a big show of pulling out a thick wad of bills, the way Ignacio used to back in Havana, peeling off a ten, and stuffing it into the waiter’s frock pocket with a wink.

“My name’s Rafael Murillo,” he told her and, like a gallant, withdrew from his jacket pocket a card: “A sus órdenes.”

When María extended her hand, he turned it palm up, like a reader, examining her lines closely; then he went into all this ecstatic miércoles about her youthful appearance and beauty, as if he had just bumped into her on a street in Havana twenty years before. Teresita just listened, knowing that for her mother’s age-past forty, well, forty-three by then-everything he said was true. After all, beautiful María could have passed for a fine-looking woman somewhere in her luscious mid thirties, for she had kept her figure and had the complexion of a lady who, aside from her slowly aging mulatta genes, still rubbed palm oil and honey on her face each morning. How good did she look? When mother and daughter went for strolls in South Beach, or along the consoling sidewalks and shops of Little Havana, it was beautiful María, in tight pink or canary yellow slacks, with an unforgettable walk, who drew all the stares.

Once their introductions had been made, she and Rafael danced a few cha-cha-chas and mambos, but mainly they drank, chain-smoked, and shared stories about Cuba, as it used to be. Eventually, he got around to trying out his charms on Teresita. “Looking at you I can see that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” he told her exuberantly at one point, and while Teresita, a sweet girl at heart, smiled at the compliment, she hardly believed him, thinking herself, as she always would, only ordinary looking at best, even if that was far from the truth. (Years later, in her doctorly guise, it would always surprise Teresa when one of the hospital orderlies whistled good-naturedly at her figure.) Later, when they had stepped out from the Holiday Inn by the harbor, into one of those languid, perfume-filled Miami nights, the sort reminiscent of a delicious Havana evening, her mother’s new acquaintance offered to drive them home in his fancy 1972 DeVille. After he’d handed three dollars to the valet, with the windows rolled down, his elbow out the window as he steered with a single hand, María beside him, Teresita in the back, they drove through the velvet night.

Along the way, he spoke about the two restaurants he owned: “One is called El Malecón, up in Coral Gables, have you heard of it?”

“Of course,” María answered. “That’s yours?”

“Yes, indeed, my brother and me opened it about six months after we came to Miami, in ’64,” he began. “It started out as a hole-in-the-wall, we did hardly any business at all at first, but, you know, with things improving in the city, business picked up. We advertise in all the hotels with brochures, and, thanks to taking care of the concierges, we’ve done pretty well. Good enough to open a second place along Key Biscayne Boulevard -that’s my favorite. It’s the Siboney, after Lecuona’s song, and even if it’s not as fancy as the other, which is more upscale, para la gente con más dinero, sabes, I love it the most because we’ve done it up like the old seaside friterías outside Havana, and I just like its views of the ocean.”

“So you’ve succeeded,” María said. “I’m happy for you.”

“Yes, thank our lucky stars,” he said, tapping the dashboard top. “But, even as good as we’re doing, I still look forward to getting back to Havana one day, you know, after that shit is overthrown.” He shook his head, his suave and happy-go-lucky manner dissipating in that moment. “It’s something I don’t like to think about too much-you know, I put a lot of faith and hope in that man, and I didn’t want to leave Cuba, but-” And he went on about what happened to him and his family in the same way that so many of the exiles did in those days, things turned upside down, the stomach-churning Russians coming in, the businesses nationalized, the food shortages, the government’s snoops and spies, the assaults on liberty that he and his family just couldn’t take anymore.

“Surely, you understand what I’m saying, huh?”

“¿Cómo no?” María answered. “Even my daughter, Teresita-even she knows that we Cubans didn’t want to leave. But we had to, right, hija?”

By then, he’d turned up Twenty-sixth. “Our house is the fourth one on the right, over there under the big tree,” she told him. And when he had pulled up, he asked them to wait, and, like a gentleman, this Rafael Murillo got out and walked over to the passenger side of the car, opening the door for each of them.

“Your carriage has arrived, mi condesa,” he said to Teresita, bowing. Then to María, “I will see you soon, next week. I’ll bring you both to the restaurant-we have a little band that performs there on Friday nights-okay?”

And with that Rafael Murillo, winking at them both in a pleasant way, got into his car and drove off into the balminess of the evening.

A FEW THINGS ABOUT THIS RAFAEL: HE HAD A PLACE UP IN FORT Lauderdale, a condominium, to which he would sometimes take María for a weekend afternoon. He was separated from his second wife, whom María, finding him so handsome and genteel, thought must surely have something wrong in la cabeza, for he would sadly say that he missed his kids on a daily basis, and that it wasn’t his idea at all. He belonged to an anti-Castro organization which met in a downtown hall twice monthly. He wore a gold bracelet on his right wrist, inscribed with the words “ Liberty or death. Viva Cuba Libre!” and was furious about the American cowards of the Kennedy administration who had betrayed the Cuban cause during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, even if it had taken place over a decade before. He regularly telephoned María at night from his restaurants, calls that she took only in her bedroom. He was generous, and never came to visit their house without some gifts for María and Teresita. (“Tell me what you need, and it will be yours,” he said.) Finding it unusual that María did not own a car and depended on slow public transportation or rides with friends to get where she needed to go, he offered to buy her a car so that he wouldn’t always have to pick her up for their citas. Learning that she didn’t know how to drive, he promised to pay for lessons, but she refused, having a phobia about cars, not only because she had grown up among horses and donkeys, and had always regarded automobiles with wonderment, as if the driving of such machines was intended only for men, but because they made her think about Nestor Castillo’s death.

He tended to come by the house very late at night, after his restaurants had closed-usually with packages of food, aluminum-foil-wrapped platters of fried chuletas and steaks and of paella, which would feed them for the next three or four days. When he’d arrive, Teresita knew; their voices were always hushed, and she could also tell from the faint aroma of the coronas he smoked that wafted into her room, and then by the whisperings that came from María’s bedroom down the hall. At first, he never stayed the night, but after a few months, on some mornings Teresita would find him sitting by their kitchen table, in Gustavo’s former chair, María always smoking her Virginia Slims and attending to him dutifully. As Teresita waited for the school bus, he’d always inquire about what she was studying, her chemistry and biology and French textbooks beyond him. He’d say things like “I can tell that your daughter is going to go far.”

On the weekends, when he happened to drop by and Teresita, having examinations, would have preferred to stay home and study-she did her best thinking in her pink-decorated bedroom-he’d give her a twenty-dollar bill so that she might take some of her friends off to the movie theater in the sprawling mall, across a wide boulevard a few sweltering avenues away. Sometimes she went to the movies, but, just as often, she sat in a McDonald’s eating juicy hamburgers and studying. She always waited until past four thirty, when Rafael had taken off for work, before finally heading back. But one afternoon, when she came home and saw the DeVille still parked by the curb, she made the mistake of going inside anyway. That’s when she heard them through the door: beautiful María, in her ferocious widowed way, screaming in pleasure, the bed frame slamming against the wall, and Rafael moaning and crying out, “Así, así, así!” as if the world were about to end. It was so disquieting that Teresita, without daring to make any noise herself, slipped back outside, took a walk down the street to where some of the kids were playing a game of dodgeball, and let an hour pass before she finally made her way to their door again, fearful that they would still be going at it. That it had gone on in kindly Gustavo’s bed seemed awfully wrong, and the notion put Teresita in a rather solemn frame of mind, as if something sacred had been violated; he had been her mother’s husband and the only papito she had really known, after all. But Teresita dared not say a word, and later, as she sat out waiting on the patio, when Rafael finally left, she just smiled when he pinched her on the cheek.

FOR A TIME, MARÍA, IT SHOULD BE SAID, SEEMED HAPPY, OR AS happy as a woman like her could be, at least when it came to the physical act of love. Amorously speaking, Rafael was a most enthusiastic partner, who, in possessing María, seemed to be playing out some dream. She was his cubanita caliente, his cubanita de la noche, his cubana with a chocha muy fabulosa. The man kissed every inch of her body, and every curvaceous dip and valley of her flesh, fucked her so adamantly that it was as if, with his wildly glaring pupils, he were making love to Cuba itself. (Well, he had reinforced the notion by showing her a piece of arcane Cuban currency with an image of the goddess Athena to which she seemed to bear a close resemblance.) For her part, she ran with this new breath of passion, buying the most scandalous of transparent undergarments from a boutique called Los Dainties. He just loved her sexiness. At a costume ball held at carnival time, he asked María to dress up as a showgirl, with plumed headdress and a rented outfit so diaphanous and scanty that her arrival set all the older women, las ancianas, who in some other age would have been chaperones, grumbling, every male head turning, perhaps enviously, their wives fuming. But did they care? They came home laughing, throwing each other around, drunkenly happy, and the racket that María and Rafael made later that night-“I’m going to devour you!”-not only woke Teresita up but provoked the neighborhood hounds to bark.

But as the year went by, even María, lacking any relatives of her own-a very sad thing for Teresita more than for herself-began to wonder why Rafael, with two brothers and a sister, each with their own large family, and birthday and holiday parties to attend, never once invited them to any of their gatherings; that did not sit well with her at all. “You know I don’t want to just be your little pajarita, that you hide away,” she told him. “If you don’t think of me as anyone special to you, then don’t expect anything special from me.”

Growing aloof and withholding from him the favors of her perfectly ripened body, and that luscious papayún that had driven Nestor Castillo crazy, María finally got Rafael to concede that perhaps he had been keeping her too much a secret. (That is to say, María, strong willed by then, harangued Rafael into admitting it.) And so, one delightful Sunday afternoon, in a somewhat guarded mood, Rafael brought María and Teresita along with him to his brother Miguel’s house, out in Fort Lauderdale, where his kin and their in-laws had gathered to celebrate one of his tías’ seventieth birthday. It seemed, at first, yet another cheerful, jammed-with-kids-and-older-folks affair typical of extended Cuban families in Miami. And while he had taken María around, sheepishly introducing her as “a friend” to various relatives, from the very start they regarded her as if she were a leper.

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.

(In that sort of mood, she’d recall the accusatory letter that Cesar Castillo had sent her. That her impulsive journey to New York in 1956 could have contributed, in any way, to Nestor’s passing was the sort of notion that sometimes made her jump up in her sleep, her heart beating rapidly, just like he used to make it. Then that guilt would sting her like a wasp, pains she would feel for days, until that too eventually faded.)

So María had to be careful, because even she, with her somewhat hardened shell, could find herself adrift on a sea of regrets. On such nights, she’d go through her cache of keepsakes-what were they but ordinary photographs, most of them fading, of her mamá and papito, of herself as a young beauty, and yes, of Nestor Castillo, that joven, whom she came to believe had been the love of her life: that which she had thrown away? In such a mood, she’d read his letters over again, and not just the tender ones but also those letters that overheated her skin with reminiscences of their lovemaking.

(If she could have seen Teresita’s expression one evening when she, home from Florida International University, had, out of curiosity, dug them out of her closet and read each and every one. My God! is what she had thought.)

Then months would go by without her once playing that song. And while María, at a certain hour, tuned in to Miami ’s Channel Five to see if that particular episode of I Love Lucy in which Nestor and his brother had appeared happened to be showing, for the most part she kept her little secret to herself. Teresita knew about it, and so did her former dancing colleague from the Lantern Club, Gladys, who, since moving to Miami from Havana, had become an occasional close companion. (They had spotted each other in a mall, around 1980, in the days just before Miami had gotten a little crazy over the influx of the Marielitos. It had been a happy reunion, and, yes, Gladys believed her when it came to that song-María had told her about Nestor.) But the few times María had mentioned this to anyone else, like her neighbors, her claim was met with more than a little skepticism. Because to call yourself the inspiration behind what Cubans of a certain generation had come to regard as something of a minor classic fell into a category of self-aggrandizement that only invited ridicule and, in María’s opinion, unspoken accusations of vanity and silliness.

Nevertheless, beautiful María sometimes wished that everyone knew. What was she, after all, but just another exile lady, a former dancer from the glory days of Havana, whom no one would ever remember, save perhaps for her daughter?

Chapter FORTY-FIVE

During those long months in the 1980s while Teresita lived away, María had her routines. She and her old friend Gladys, married with her own grown children, met occasionally on the weekends, usually Sundays, to make forays to the restaurants and shopping centers of the city. María would join Gladys on excursions to the beach, where, baking in the sun and sipping drinks of rum and pineapple juice, she passed those pleasant hours under an umbrella, taking in the escapades of frolicking youth on the white sands. Gladys, it should be said, though a few years younger than María, had ballooned appreciably while living the good life, becoming one of those immense cubanas who, however portly, still sashayed with a former dancer’s sexy pride. They’d sit and look out over the water-and inevitably the horizon’s oceanic murmurings, soporific in effect, whispered that to the south, just a few hundred miles away, lay Havana, portal to Cuba itself. But it may as well have been China -oceans off-for neither of them knew of any Cubans who had gone back. (“Remember when those cruise boats would leave Havana at six in the morning and come back late at night from Miami, loaded up with the tourists?” María would say. “Remember the trip we made?”)

Miami had changed since the days María first arrived. It was all fancied up, prospering in ways that the first exiles could not have imagined. If there had been any blot on the mark the Cubans left on the city, it came down to the scattering of criminals and asylum inmates that ese loco Fidel had unleashed on Florida when he allowed the Mariel boat lifts. Though most weren’t criminals-Gladys’s husband, Ramón, had been on one of those boats in the Florida-bound flotilla, returning with six of his relatives-there had been a spike in crime; one had to be more careful at night in certain neighborhoods. But over all, as María and Gladys warmed their bottoms, enjoying their spiked refrescos, they were accepting enough of their life in that city. Miami wasn’t Havana, at least the one they knew, and, for María, it seemed a million miles away from Pinar del Río-just thinking about that, and the great internal distances she had traveled from that tranquil valle, sometimes left her so quietly disposed that she wouldn’t say much at all.

Though she had enjoyed those outings-Ramón always dropped her off at the house in Northwest Terrace-the hardest thing for María was to come home to an empty house: on with the radio in the kitchen, on with the television in her living room. A glass of rum with diet Coke usually smoothed her over, and gloriously so, as she showered-didn’t that bring her closer to God? Then, having gotten the sand off, she’d attend to her only companion, the little black cat with the white paws María had found mewing inside a garbage can down the street, Omar, the name that had popped into her head. She felt so much affection for the creature she sometimes wondered why she had bothered with men at all, and this Omar seemed to know, for he followed her around wherever she went, curled up next to her on the couch when she watched TV and smoked, and jumped into bed with her, the way men had once always wanted to, at night.

And sometimes, settled on the kitchen table, just purring away, and with an Oriental wisdom burning in his eyes, Omar watched María as she would sit writing what she called her versitos. It was a vocation that she, a former analfabeta, had only dabbled in over the years but, to which, with Teresita away in school, she had lately devoted herself. Her interest was helped by a poetry-writing course that she had enrolled in at an adult education center at Dade Community College. Meeting on Wednesday evenings at eight o’clock and lasting for two hours, it had become the high point of her week. Conducted in Spanish by an Ichabod Crane-looking fellow named Luis Castellano, a former native of Holguín, the class consisted of a dozen Cuban women, mostly well into their fifties if not older, no men, and the poems were shared aloud, often to laughter and sometimes to tears. For to hear spoken the pure emotions of such ladies in that intimate setting, as expressed in poems with titles like “Mi Cuba preciosa”-“My Precious Cuba”-or “El jardín de mis abuelos”-“My Grandparents’ Garden”-or “Un domingo por la mañana en Cienfuegos”-“A Sunday Morning in Cienfuegos”-was to be steeped, as María herself had put it to Teresita in a letter, “in the honey of our bees.” Plump, aged, still shapely, kindly disposed or enraged by what life had dealt them, each week they held forth, their voices cracking sometimes, their hands trembling. And you know what? Not a one of their poems was bad, or could be bad; their plainspoken utterances, like songs without music, just took everyone back to what they felt and envisioned when remembering, ever so bittersweetly, that which they had lost and wished to recover: the very notion of Cuba, which hung over the room like the branches of a blossom-heavy tree.

They wrote about street life in Havana, with its singing vendors, and of their small towns in the provinces, or some colorful fulano they knew, or of a local rake, a first love, or the sea, the siren songs they heard as echoes in conch shells found on a beach, of smelling fresh morning bread from a bakery next door, muy sabrosito siempre, of chameleons and roosters running wild in an auntie’s living room, of el campo en Oriente, with its blossomed air after a rainfall, of the mists rising along the ridged foothills of the Escambray mountains, and the stars that rose, one by one, like diamonds over that horizon; of watching the impeccably dressed, straight-backed planters of Matanzas riding regally by their porches on their silver-spurred white stallions, of singing barbers and lovestruck morticians, of childhood negrita nannies; of husbands, and sons, and beautiful daughters; of distant Spanish ancestors from Vigo or Fonsagrada, or Asturias or Barcelona, Madrid and more-all this turned that ordinary classroom into something of a chapel in which everyone prayed to the same heaven.

From María García’s writings:

If Cuba were a man

He would be so handsome,

I’d faint in his arms.

He would smell so sweetly of flowers,

And of the rain at three o’clock.

His kisses might taste of tobacco, but I wouldn’t mind,

He would be good to me, after all.

He would dance like a rumbero from Cayo Hueso

And speak deliciously like a song…

María wrote other poems, another side of herself coming out, her own sentimentality, at their writing, surprising her. By her kitchen table, one evening, the Frigidaire humming beside her and the GE radio turned low, just scribbling the words “Mi papito, Manolo,” brought him back, and she found herself nearly weeping. Witnessing this sadness, Omar’s ears curled, as if he could understand María; and he seemed almost clairvoyant when she began to write about Nestor, Omar getting up and rubbing his bony, purring head against the knuckles of María’s hand.

Oh, Nestor, I have something

To tell you,

Even if what we had

Was long ago.

Without knowing it

I loved you,

And love you now,

Wherever you are…

So, believe me when I say

I just didn’t know.

SHE WROTE ABOUT HER VALLE OFTEN, A FEW DITTIES ABOUT HER dancer’s life in Havana, and a poem about learning to read, which she called, simply, “For the Negro, Lazarus.” And though she never published those verses anywhere, except in the blue-covered anthologies that their teacher, el Señor Castellano, put together on a Xerox machine for that class, beautiful María just enjoyed the time she spent with her little poetic community. On such nights, when, it should be said, she sometimes felt an attraction for the maestro, despite his incredible homeliness, María always came home with a feeling of accomplishment, among other emotions, that, indeed, she had come a long way from the days she had been an ignorant guajira, unable to read or write a single word.

From another of her verses, which was just a jotting entitled “Mi amiga Eliza”:

She wore rags like me

She was forlorn like me

Knew nothing like me

Had little like me

We look so much alike

That when I see her

In my mirror,

And ask, “Eliza, why the long face?”

She tells me, “Oh, cousin, it’s because

I know that while I am so happy

You are so sad.”

Chapter FORTY-SIX

As much solace as beautiful María took in her verses, the source of her greatest pride in those years was Teresita, about whom she bragged to anyone who would listen. (“Oh, but if only your abuelos could have known-and your papito, Ignacio, whose brains flow in your blood-oh, they would be so happy!”) Teresita had always been one of those cubanitas who, with an exile’s passion, excelled in every subject in school, science being her greatest interest. She was helped by a very high IQ-a measurement that meant little to María. That she had decided to study medicine, all on scholarships, had surely to do with the way María had raised her. When it came to matters of health, a day never passed during Teresita’s early adolescence that María did not find herself worrying that her daughter might come down with the same symptoms of epilepsy that had taken her tía, at so young an age, from this world. Teresita had grown up hearing her mother, at the public health clinics, asking the doctors who examined her if there were special tests for that disease. Nothing came of them-she was always a healthy girl-but any time Teresita suffered from a fever and exhibited the slightest trembling, María, taken back to Pinar del Río and the sufferings of her sister, inevitably rushed her off to the nearest hospital. Early on, epilepsia was a word that Teresita had learned through her mother’s wistful stories about her aunt, may God bless her soul, just so that she would know something of her own past; and it was the first disease that Teresita, in high school, with a burgeoning interest in the sciences, looked up in the library encyclopedia.

And so, it can perhaps be said that Teresita’s interest in pediatric medicine came first to pass because of María.

OF COURSE, MOTHER AND DAUGHTER SPOKE ON THE TELEPHONE at least a few times a week, whenever Teresita’s taxing schedule as an intern in New York, with a specialization in pediatric oncology at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, allowed her the time.

“Have you met anyone?” María inevitably asked.

“No, I’m too busy, Mama. If you knew my hours, you’d understand.”

“But there’s no one there you like?”

Teresita sighed. “No, Mama, not yet.”

It was something María always asked her, and it always made Teresita want to get off the phone, or say, “Mama, can’t you just accept who I am?” But she knew that María would simply have thought, Oh, but she’s just become too americana. Still, their conversations jostled along pleasantly, and dutifully, Teresita filling her mother in on the routines of the week, and María occasionally reciting her latest verses over the phone, never once failing to let her daughter know how much she missed her. In fact, though Teresita often sighed during their conversations, she felt the same way. María, after all, had been everything to her, the fount of what she thought of as her “little Cuban-centric world.”

Always too pensive for her own good, and one of those demure and ever obedient cubanita daughters who always seemed to recede into the shadows of the kitchen when María had friends over and things became lively, Teresita, with her 160-something IQ, had, over the years, grown more attached to abstract notions than to the practicalities-and pleasures-of daily existence. In high school, when thrown in with a crowd of rowdy cubanita adolescents who mainly talked about one guapo boy or another, and fretted about whether their asses were too big or their halter tops were sexy enough, Teresita thought them frivolous. Among those friends she was known as somewhat of a wallflower, and so straitlaced that they would chide her with this taunt: “Hey, loosen up, Teresita! Do you think we’re back in the Cuba of our abuelos?” She went to high school dances, but never with any man-killing intentions and, to María’s chagrin, never bothering with makeup. A budding feminist, Teresita refused to wear the clinging, short-skirted dresses of her classmates. Competing on her high school swim team well enough to have once won a bronze medal in a regional meet, she always wore an old-fashioned one-piece suit which the coach claimed, aside from her tendency to suddenly put on weight, slowed her up.

And when María, off in her own world, spent the evening playing old Cuban records on their phonograph, often that Mambo Kings tune over and over again, Teresita, having a little cassette player, listened to the kind of music that would have made her friends gag. A high school music appreciation class, run by a progressive fellow, had “turned her on” to both Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and jazz. Not that she didn’t like Cuban music, but, having been raised on it, she had come to prefer just about anything else. And yes, she had been taught to dance Latin style by her mother, but there was something about the way her mother pushed her-“Be sexier, move your hips more!”-that put her off. Sweating in her leotard, Teresita would tell her, “Come on, Mama, you know that I’m not you!” And María, shaking her head, would say, “Oh, but I’m just trying to help you, chica.” Teresita knew this, but María worked her so hard sometimes, she couldn’t help but wonder if her mother was trying to put her through the paces of a professional dancer in Havana, 1947. (Well, she’d heard her mother talking about those days often enough, of a nightclub life, both sleazy and glamorous, to know that it surely wasn’t easy for her to have navigated that predatory world. And she’d feel grateful that she had been spared all the difficulties María, as she often reminded her, had endured. Yet, when she’d look at herself in the floor-to-ceiling studio mirror, Teresita, neither as beautiful nor as long-legged as her mother must surely have been at her age, just wanted to run out of that place and head home, to her room and the companionship of books.)

So she was a solitary sort. Whereas other cubanitas of her age would look back at the drudgery of their high school studies and prefer to remember their various novios-even Teresita noticed how some of those boys swaggered along the halls with erections bunched up in the fronts of their tight jeans-she, in those years, had only one sort of boyfriend, another brainy cubano exilio, whom she had met in a chemistry lab. Rolando wasn’t bad looking-in fact, at first glance, he was handsome enough, with Elvis sideburns and expressive brows and eyes-but his face was a mess of luridly green, white-topped pimples, which prevented him from thinking he could ever look good. He blamed these outbreaks on the constant pressures that his demanding parents put on him to excel in school. (This she almost envied; María hardly ever bothered to ask Teresita about her studíes.) Nevertheless, it was his general melancholy-shades of María-and his self-effacing ways, that touched Teresita’s heart, and while they never became a couple, meeting here and there in the malls, where they’d find a secluded spot to furtively kiss, she owed her first sexual experience to him. This took place in the bedroom of her house one afternoon while María was off at her dance studio: his trembling hands slipping inside her blouse and caressing the plumpness of her breasts, her nipples (shades of María) shooting up and hardening at his touch, and then, as good as losing her virginity, Teresita let him ease his fingers into her panties, where, feeling him fooling around, she came. In kind, to put it in the most unscientific language, in the midst of a longish kiss, she jerked him off. But that was about all. They went out for a while until Rolando, confusing that afternoon’s frolic with love, not only took to calling her every day but began to behave so mawkishly around her at school that Teresita, finding him bothersome and too much of a distraction from her studies, just had to cut him loose.

She’d finally had a regular novio in college, at least for a time, a pre-med student of mixed Argentine and Lebanese descent, named Tomás, who, breaking the sacred seal of her virginity, could not get enough of her, his favorite part of Teresita’s body lying between her legs, the taste of which he swore intoxicated him. Altogether, their romance seemed to others an instance of cerebral love between two of the best pre-med students in their school. How could it have been otherwise? For Tomás also happened to possess a handsomeness that turned many a female head, and some might have wondered how she, of an ordinary cubanita prettiness, had managed to snag him. (She wondered as well.)

One evening, after they’d been together for about five months, Teresita brought Tomás home to María, on whom his striking looks and intelligence made a wonderful impression. So wonderful that for weeks afterwards, María pestered her daughter about having Tomás in again for dinner. On that second occasion, it startled Teresita to find that María had abandoned her usual blouse and tight evening slacks for an even tighter hip-swallowing red dress with a slit skirt, of such décolletage, that Tomás, during the course of their meal of arroz con pollo, could not avoid taking in the alluring shapeliness of María’s breasts. And she embarrassed Teresita further with her constant compliments of him. “Oh, but how it makes me happy to see my daughter with a fellow as nice looking as you!” and, “Surely, if you don’t want to become a doctor, you can become a movie actor!” Such remarks, abetted by a few cocktails, and María’s later insistence that she show him the steps of a dance called the “mozambique” on their living room floor, left Teresita so peeved afterwards that she resolved never to bring him back there again.

It didn’t matter. A few months later, for reasons Teresita could not comprehend, Tomás began to make himself scarce. Perhaps someone else had entered the picture-she didn’t know-but, in any event, Tomás gradually disappeared from her life. And while Teresita never once mentioned her disappointment to anyone, she began to think that María, whose questions about that “wonderful boy” began to drop away, already knew. If so, María, being María, kept it under her hat-perhaps out of fear of saying the wrong thing to her daughter. And while Teresita, for all her pride, would have loved to have lain her head on María’s lap and cry her eyes out, she never did; and not from any animosity, but simply because, when it came to such moments, they just weren’t that way with each other at all.

And now, an image of Teresita, having taken a shower and drying herself off with a towel in the bedroom mirror of her lowly Fort Washington flat, on West 188th, in a neighborhood of Hasidic Jews, Holocaust survivors, and junkies. What did she see? A young woman, of thirty or so, and about five feet two in height, with cinnamon skin, sometimes a little too chubby in places-she kept her belly sucked in-but nice, a great mane of dark hair falling over her shoulders, a woman with shapely hips and pendulous breasts, their nipples like berries, and a flourish of curling black pubic hair in the shape of a spade between her legs. And her face? Stepping closer to the mirror, in her ordinary prettiness, she could see that her almond eyes were her best feature; but when she tilted her head up at a certain angle, and her cheekbones glowed and the slope of her face elongated, she thought that she looked just like her mother, María.

Actually, in those days when Teresita lived in New York and her mother kept asking, “Is there someone?” there had been an American fellow, a certain Derek Harrison, whom Teresita had met at the hospital during her second year as an intern. They’d had an affair that lasted about six months, their passions enflamed, in part, by their exposure to patients who were dying. It was as if one atmosphere fed the other. With AIDS just coming to light, when Teresita and Derek, a fellow intern, stole some moments between rounds, they’d slip into a vacant operating room to ravish each other at three in the morning, and once-the sort of thing that made even Teresita smile-standing up in a janitors’ closet, she had hitched her skirt over her belly, her panties down, her body writhing, her papaya damp and hungrily drawing him in.

It was wonderful and exciting while it lasted, but Teresa, in her naïveté, confused this fellow’s desire to escape the more funereal side of their profession with affection. She’d almost told María about it as a blossoming kind of love, but before she could, he had started to grow more distant, detached, in fact, and while they had continued to fool around for a while, the boiling heat of their mutual infatuation reduced to a simmer and then cooled to a tepid broth. By then, while doing what he could to avoid her, this sinverguenza Derek finally confessed that he, from a very good WASP family in Philadelphia, happened to be engaged. If there had been any time when Teresita wished a man to hell, it was then.

But, as with Tomás, she never told María about her broken heart. What would her mother have said to console her anyway?

INDEED, ONCE TERESITA RETURNED TO MIAMI, IN ’87, TO BEGIN her post at the children’s hospital, a decision which made María very happy, they resumed a life as mother and daughter (along with Omar, the cat) that, compared with many another Cuban household in Miami, bubbling over with aunts and cousins, uncles and abuelos, was muy callado-quiet. Teresita’s position at the hospital took up a lot of her time; she’d come home exhausted, often finishing up patient reports in her bedroom before joining her mother in the living room. On the weekends, however, María and her daughter were nearly inseparable. They liked to eat lunch at one of those outdoor cafés along South Beach -now jammed with tourists and hustling young people. Amazed by how much things had changed-for the worse in some ways, with all the noise, traffic, and tacky souvenir shops-even she, no prude, never quite got used to seeing, as they’d stroll along the beach, the European women who wore only bikini bottoms playing volleyball or dancing to rap music from boom boxes in the sand. (Yes, Miami was a long way from Havana, 1949.) Sometimes they’d go to an art fair, or church bazaar, or to an afternoon outdoor concert with some friends, but mainly they kept to themselves. And while she was ever grateful for the fact that they had each other, with each passing week María became more distressed to see her only daughter staying at home on Saturday nights when most unmarried women her age were at least trying to find a novio if not a husband.

(Oh, but María’s lectures, while the poor young woman was just trying to mind her own business: lectures about broken hearts and the loneliness of solitude, the stupidity of today’s juventud, squandering their opportunities for life and love, especially the ones who got too many American cucarachas in their heads!)

To please María, Teresa dipped into the crowded, overwrought Miami club scene, singles nights at different venues, and while she occasionally went out on the dates that her mother had cajoled from friends, Teresita had yet to meet anyone, Cuban or not, she thought compatible. (“So what was wrong with that one?” María inevitably asked.) Her mother’s continual urgings, it should be said, occasionally got on Teresita’s nerves, becoming, at a certain point, something Teresita just didn’t want to hear about.

But they had their good times: paid well, living cheaply, Teresita was able to take beautiful María to Italy on a vacation. To Rome, to Florence and Venice, then Naples and Sorrento and back. Her mother loved not only the way Italian men regarded women but the gruff yet kindly vendors in the markets with whom, as during her stay in the Bronx, she could speak Spanish and always be understood. She dissolved in the sunsets, daydreamed in the wisteria-rich gardens, and, touring the ruins of Pompeii, wondered why people bothered to preserve such old things. Roma, in particular, with its self-contained and lively neighborhoods, so reminded María of Havana that she felt completely at home. And she liked the way men gave her daughter the most interested looks, following her every move down the street. “You see,” she’d say, “they know how to appreciate you,” Teresita simply nodding.

What most surprised María, however, was how she felt after that two-week sojourn when they arrived back in Miami. She couldn’t wait to get home, not just to Omar, whom she had left with her next-door neighbor Annabella, but to the city itself, and the familiarity of her neighborhood and house. She’d feel the same when they made their other trips, now and then: to a medical convention in Los Angeles, to a seaside resort along the coast of South Carolina, and to Washington, D.C., where that elegant lady and her daughter acted like happy tourists.

Then back, as always, to the usual routines of their days.