Beautiful María of My Soul by Óscar Hijuelos

Author:Óscar Hijuelos
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction - General, Historical fiction, Brothers, Cuba, Hispanic American Novel And Short Story, Fiction, Literary, Musicians, Historical, General, Cultural Heritage, Musical fiction
ISBN: 9781401323349
Publisher: Hyperion Books
Published: 2010-09-15T07:00:00+00:00

(What neither Ignacio nor even Nestor knew were the most hidden reasons María could be indifferent to the feelings of men. It came down to the way her beloved papito sometimes treated her. Not the beatings, or even the other extremes of pure affection, but that strange middle ground that, years later, left María feeling sickly inside, as if a miasma, or an infection, invaded her memories. Only once did she confide this to her daughter, during one of her late afternoon mojito/margarita-fueled chats; as if her educated daughter, by then a medical doctor, could come up with an explanation for her mother’s occasional improper behavior when she was a girl. You see, before her sister, Teresita, fell ill and they were verging on adolescence, she and María used to take naps with their papito on a hammock, the three entangled so peacefully that María easily drifted off to sleep, especially during an aguacero, a rain shower that drenched the forests and fields and sent the lizards scattering and cooled the air, which smelled of the most sweet and bitter scents—of rot and fecundity…. And sometimes she laid her head against his chest and listened to his powerful heartbeat while he shifted himself around and his palm rested upon her back or along the curves of her hips; and sometimes—maybe it was a dream—his hand massaged her belly, sometimes ambling downwards so that his knuckles dozed and the weight of his hand pressed against the coarse fabric of her dress, and then nothing more.

But once she had started undergoing her bodily changes and began to smell different to men, and things got crazy because of what had happened to Teresita—la pobrecita—there came that time when her papi asked her to share his hammock and she, feeling reluctant and physically cumbersome, obeyed but found that she couldn’t fall off to sleep the way she used to, after all he was pressing up against her back, and something fleshy and solid seemed to crawl up along the knobs of her spine. And maybe she imagined that his hand had wandered down below, his dense fingers parting the lips of her “special and most delicate flower,” María squirming, her papito asking “¿Qué tenemos aquí?”—“What have we here?” At the same time, her papito’s breath smelled awful, of tobacco and aguardiente and beer, and, like a dream of her own future, she withdrew into herself while his fingers kept on touching her in places where they shouldn’t have, until María, feeling sick inside and sensing that something was very wrong, would finally tear herself away, a terrible shame following her…. It didn’t end there. Living in a place where the mothers regularly fondled the privates of their male children to ensure their virility, María couldn’t help but wonder if her papito was doing the same kind of thing with her, or maybe he was just curious. But after a while even she, an ignorant guajira, knew that it didn’t seem right for a papito,

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