Beautiful Maria of My Soul Read Free

merchants on the street, to crowds of ordinary citizens just going about their business, left María feeling as dizzy as if she had drunk down a cup or two of rum, a bottle of which, incidentally, Sixto had kept in a paper bag under the shredded leather seat of his cab. This he swigged from while showing her the sights—just getting from one end of Obispo Street to the other, in a glut of carts and taxis and lorries, took a half an hour. Driving for so many years, Sixto thought there was nothing to it, so why not a little sip of rum to ease things when the day’s work was practically over?—just like her papito ’s philosophy of life.
    And so, as they headed over to the slaughterhouse district, which was at the far end of the harbor, beyond the last of the Ward Line warehouses, Sixto’s manner changed somewhat, though not in a terrible way. He didn’t start rubbing himself or make burning noises, nor for that matter did he try anything with María—she was just a young girl after all, a guajira with the kind of face and figure that make men do and say things that they probably wouldn’t otherwise, and, in Sixto’s case, certainly not back home with the wife, nosireee. He just started looking as if the world was about to end, kept gulping and licking his lower lips, and staring at her like a starved man with a terrible secret. Finally, not able to take it anymore, before turning in to the chain-link-fenced entry to the Gallegos slaughterhouse, he had to pull over; and 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 thatone 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