Beautiful Maria of My Soul - By Oscar Hijuelos Page 0,6

that right across the way she could see one of her neighbors, a lanky dissipated fellow with a wild pompadour and pronounced gut, standing on his balcony in only a pair of calzoncillos. Frying some bacalao over a hot plate, he whistled as soon as their eyes met. From another direction, a woman, obviously a whore, closing her shutters, sent María a kiss off the upturned palm of her hand before going inside to do whatever whores did. (María knew but didn’t let on, while the señora, well aware of the quality and livelihood of her tenants, simply shrugged again.)

Still, María took comfort in having neighbors and in the fact that she could at least open her windows to get a breath of air at night. But María, out on her own for the first time, and feeling frightened by the prospect of having to get along in a city she hardly knew, where she’d have to depend on strangers to help her get around—she was an analfabeta, an illiterate, after all—could barely work up the nerve to go out that evening. Just too much was going on—trolley cars clanging, cars honking horns, horses clip-clopping along, distant sirens blaring, radios sounding from a half dozen windows, voices chattering, a river of life out on the street. Coming from the sticks, she found herself feeling far more clueless than she, without knowing anyone, could have predicted. Por Dios, she even started missing that damned campo, where not much ever really happened, and her papito, who could be a pain in the culo, as well as the farmers and their animals; and she missed her younger sister, Teresita, and her mamá, who were both dead.

Lordy, it was a lonely place.

With her stomach queasy from hunger and her gum chewed down to nothing, all she could do was to go downstairs and ask the señora for something to eat. La señora Matilda was not a stingy woman, and cooked her a tortilla of potatoes and chorizo, but once María followed her into her little suite of rooms, the sight of the absolute filth of her kitchen did not do much for María’s appetite—no wonder, as she later learned, the tenants of that residence had nicknamed it the Hotel Cucaracha. Nevertheless, María thanked her for the meal, devouring it quickly, and, once upstairs, finally unpacked her few possessions: a precious hand mirror, a photograph, cracked and fading, of her mamá y papito on their wedding day years and years ago, a remnant of Teresita’s hair, which she kept in an envelope, along with a picture of them as girls, posed in a photography shop in San Jacinto, the town nearest to their valley, their faces pressed together, María beaming and Teresita showing not an inkling of the afflictions that would take her life. Among the superstitious charms and amulets that really don’t make any difference to the world, she had brought along the rosary that had been her mother’s. Of course, out of old habit, María, before turning in to bed, got down on her knees to pray, her whispers slipping out into the courtyard, from which she could hear many of her neighbors. They were either drunk and shouting or else singing, their voices rising into the night, up towards the sky, with its sprinkling of stars, towards the indifference of heaven.

FINDING A JOB AS A DANCER WAS NOTHING THAT SHE HAD GIVEN thought to, even if her papito had always told María that she was a natural rumbera. At first, it hadn’t entered her mind, but after a month in that city, as a resident of her splendid hotel, with all its chinches and cockroaches, all María had to show for her daily excursions, when she had knocked on every factory and warehouse door, were sore feet and a fanny whose nalgitas had been worn thin by the staring of men. Those habaneros, as she would tell her daughter one day, knew a good thing when they saw it, and being more overtly prone than the guajiros of the countryside, made no bones about letting on to María that she was nothing less than spectacular, as far as the female species goes. In fact, she spent several days toiling at a tobacco factory off Comerciales, another few as a seamstress in a clothing concern, and had found occasional work cleaning up after customers in a café three doors over from the hotel. Now, if she had been hired at all, in a