Beautiful Maria of My Soul Read Online Free PDF

her horror, as she looked up to heaven for assistance, he undid his belt. At first she thought he was going to beat her, the way her papito sometimes did—she wasn’t always a well-behaved daughter—but, no, he wanted something else. Letting drop his linen trousers and his (rank-smelling) undershorts below his knees, he stood before her with his somewhat dense but not particularly long ardor in hand; truth be told, it seemed dwarfish, compared with the immensity of his belly. He then proceeded to do his best to deflower her, his enormous corpulence slamming achingly against her hip bones, his body sweating, his breathing labored—he was one of those grossly overweight men who, because of heft, thought himself a Hercules when it was far from the truth. She’d also recall that he wore a lilac aftershave.
    But did he succeed? Screaming—surely, they heard her in the club—she fought him until her body was covered in bruises, his face and back with scratches. She prayed for her life, prayed to El Señor, who watches over the forlorn, until, in an instant, she was reprieved. Or to put it differently, until, in the throes of extreme physical exertion, some horrible and paralyzing pain seized the right side of the Catalán’s body—she was, without knowing it, a morena fatal after all. Unable to breathe, or even to lift his arms, he slumped over, beside María. When he asked her desperately for a glass of water, suspirando mucho, mucho, María, may God forgive her, told him to go to hell. And when he asked her again, as she gathered her clothes, María, a practical guajira, answered, “Okay, but tell me, where are my five dollars?”
    “En los bolsillos de mis pantalones,” he told her, gasping. So she rifled through his trousers pockets, encountering a stiletto, several condoms, some cards for his club—if she had been able to read she would have known that his establishment was called “El Savoy, a place for gentlemans [ sic ]”—and then she came to a clump of bills: from this she removed five American dollar bills. And then, because she’d been struggling lately, she availed herself of the rest, in both Cuban and American currency, which were equal in value, may God forgive her. Then, dressing, she made her way out.
     
    LEAVING THAT ESTABLISHMENT, MARÍA HEARD NEITHER SONOROUS violins nor longing melodies echoing around her; nor any tremulous baritone voice, with its saintly inflections, confessing the greatest passion for her beauty, as if she were the object of devotion in a song of love. What she heard instead was Havana, circa 1947, at 2 a.m., ageneral din of restaurants, clubs, and distant voices coming from every direction and punctuated by the barking of dogs. Firecrackers—or shots heard in the distance; the caw-caws of seagulls alighting upon the slop barges in the harbor, or else swooping low to pick through the offal left in the trails of yachts. From a nearby edifice, a woman shouted at someone, “Eres un pendejo!” at the top of her lungs. Her high-heel shoes clacking along the flagstones of a placita. A cavalcade of partiers, honking their horns and whistling, in a postwedding procession of automobiles passed along the Malecón. The moon itself, a medallion, with a melancholic face looked down from the northwest, like a sanguine god without a word to say. From some alley, deep in the recesses of la Marina—or was it el barrio Colón?—a half dozen batá and quinto drums were beating. She heard police sirens: then, as the casino boats and cruise ships came into port, buoys and deck bells ringing, smatterings of music here and there from behind the closed doors of the all-night cabarets and bordellos; the skittering of cats and other scavengers foraging through the gutters in search of food. If she could have listened through the walls of some of the less respectable edifices she was passing, a thousand moans of drunken pleasure would have assailed her. If she could have eavesdropped into the