Free Beautiful Maria of My Soul by Oscar Hijuelos

didn’t suffer any attacks for months, María, despite Teresita’s misery and weeping, felt more than a little justified in her actions. Too bad that her younger sister seemed to become nervous and gloomy around her, as if she, la bella María, would ever lift a finger to hurt her. It took María a while to understand some other things: that such a medicine affected the mente, the heart and soul, in short, that phenobarbital had started to change her younger sister’s sweet nature.
    Indeed, that medicine had a bad effect on her younger sister; Teresita’s moods were never the same from day to day. Sometimes she became so timid and afraid of people, trembling not from epilepsy but from the belief, without any reason, that even the most gentle of farmers wanted to hurt her. Her fears followed her to bed: Teresita couldn’t sleep, spending half the night turning from side to side and sighing (and despairing over the aftertaste of that medicine, which lingered in the throat for hours even if she had consumed it with a sweet mango or papaya or mamey or guineo ). To feel her sister’s heart beating as quickly as a hummingbird’s against her chest in the middle of the night, as she held her tenderly, to hear her breathing, but painfully so, while gasping for air—all that was almost more than María could bear, to the point that on certain days she would have welcomed one of her sister’s fits again—possessed by the devil as Teresita seemed to be—instead of having to watch her turn into someone she didn’t know.
    One day Teresita was saintly, the next all she wanted to do was to stick her tongue out at passersby, or torment the animals, tying cords around their necks and pulling them cruelly across the yard. Whereas she used to show appreciation for even the smallest kindness— “¡Ay, qué bonito!”— “How pretty!” or “¡Qué sabroso!” —“How tasty!”—and never hesitated about saying nice things— “Te aprecio mucho, hermana” —“I love you, sister!”—days now passed when she wouldn’t say a word to anyone. Her facial expressions were affected as well: it was as if she refused to smile and took to crying over nothing; and when she wasn’t crying, she withdrew into herself, as if no one else in the world existed, and never lifted a finger to help around the house or yard, not even when her mamá, with her slowly failing eyesight, begged Teresita to help her thread a needle.
    (“I’ll do it, Mami,” María offered.)
    As for prayers? Whenever their mamá, in her God-welcoming way, got them down on their knees to give thanks for the salvation that was sure to come, Teresita would refuse, shaking her head and running away—why should she? Neither her mother nor her father lifted a finger against her in punishment. ( “Niña,” as María once asked her daughter, “how on earth can you force someone to believe?”) Still, there came the day when things got out of hand. Teresita, with her own kind of beauty, also entered into puberty—and quickly so—but whereas María had been cautious and could care less about having a novio, or any of those birds-and-bees romances, Teresita became obsessed with the idea and started to do anything she could to avoid María’s company, their excursions to the cascades long since behind them.
    Well, María couldn’t keep track of her sister every minute of the day,and she got used to tending to her chores alone. Where could Teresita go anyway, aside from the bodega, where they knew the owner and asked him to keep an eye on her? Most of the young men in their valle, respecting her papito, just didn’t want to get on his bad side, and so María didn’t think much of it when Teresita took off in her bare feet in the afternoons—to where and what, no one knew. María imagined her sitting in some lonely spot with her knees tucked up under her chin, fretting—as María, her body in its changes baffling her, once used to do herself. And while she often