Beautiful Maria of My Soul - By Oscar Hijuelos Page 0,4

once he had, he began to cry, tears the color of amber dripping from his eyes and over the ridges of his gargoyle’s face.

María didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on—wondering if she was at fault for his sudden sadness. In his gruff and rustic manner, the poor man was so much like the guajiros back home that one part of her felt like doing something to please him. Back in her valle that had come down to letting some of the men, so weary from their days in the field, roam their callused hands over her face, so they could feel the softness of her skin; and all she had to do was just smile, and that was sometimes enough to make them happier. (Oh, but then there were the others, who, as she got older and filled out, wanted a little more from her, and, looking at her in the same way as Sixto, begged her to embrace them, or to lift her skirt just high enough so that they could see the shapeliness of her legs, which some, so good-naturedly, as if examining a foal, wanted to touch….)

“Sixto, are you okay?” she asked. “Sixto, is there something wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing at all…. It’s just that I wish,” he said, his head lowered, “I wish I could go back in time, and get to know you better in a way that would make you happy, that’s all.”

“But, Sixto, I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re so precious, you make a nobody like me wish he could start over again in life.”

And he seemed lost to the world, not just because of the rum or the fact he knew that he probably smelled bad to others, but because he had reached inside of himself and taken hold of his own heart, squeezing it until there was nothing left but his own pain, just like her papito used to.

Or at least that’s what María thought, being such a softhearted girl in those days.

“I know I’m an ugly man and I smell of animals,” he went on. “But, please, can you do me one little favor?”

“What kind of favor?”

“Just give me one little besito—that’s all, doesn’t have to be on my mouth, but here,” he said, tapping his cheek. “Even one on the side of my face would make me feel content.”

He seemed like an animal in pain, an aging one, like those old hounds she’d see on the farm who, no longer able to roam wildly across the fields, would just lie down on their sides, waiting for someone to caress their heaving bellies. She always did.

And because María was grateful for that lift into the city, and even if it turned her stomach to do it, she gave that Sixto a cautious nip on the side of his face, saw the bristles in his nostrils, the spiderwebs in his ears, smelled the rawness of his breath, and felt sad for the man; but wouldn’t you know it, at the same time he couldn’t help but take her hand and move it towards his right leg, where something had crept forward, uncoiling gradually, a stony gargoyle’s erection, like a piece of tubing expanding inside his trousers—was it filled with tears or blood? (Of suffering, or of lust?) At the sight—and touch—of it, her knuckles having grazed that protuberance, María turned away, pulled back her hand, pretending that nothing had happened.

They both pretended, Sixto, with a deep breath, starting the truck again and driving it over to a delivery pen. There he had some kind of discussion with a foreman and, letting drop the rear gate, rousted his swine, some forty or so, into their own little compound, where they were to be counted, weighed, and, depending on that, kept to be further fattened up on palmiche or else led immediately to the slaughter. María, it should be said, for all the animals she had (reluctantly) killed herself on the farm, had never experienced such an overwhelming scent of blood and entrails in the air before. Or maybe it was all their suffering that she was feeling—squeals and blurting cattle cries resounded from the long stock houses inside. Somewhere nearby, and much worse, however, was a tannery, which filled the air with a viscous smell like lacquered rotting flesh, so foul as to turn her stomach. She had to get out. Stepping down from the cab, and feeling ashamed of herself, beautiful María, in her first act in Havana,