PART V
Oh Yes, That Book
Chapter FORTY-SEVEN
One morning, in the autumn of 1989, while Teresita sat in their kitchen reading The Miami Herald, as she always did before heading to the hospital, Omar the cat purring away on her lap, she came across a book review whose subject matter not only caught her attention but made the fine hairs on the back of her neck bristle, as if a ghost had entered the room. The review was of a recently published novel about two Cuban musicians, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who, as it happened, travel to New York City from Havana in 1949 and end up as walk-on characters on the I Love Lucy show, where, by yet another coincidence, they perform a romantic bolero, “Beautiful María of My Soul.”
With exuberant and often erotic detail, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love serves up enough sex, music, and excitement to keep the pages turning effortlessly…. And when it comes to its descriptions of passion, watch out! Just the scenes between Nestor Castillo and his love in Havana, María, left this reviewer reeling…
Of course, there was more to that rather euphoric review, but it was to that reference that Teresita kept returning. The familiarity of its story so startled Teresita that she was tempted to tell María, off in the living room performing calisthenics to some morning exercise program. But not wanting to agitate her—would María be happy? Or outraged? Or would she care at all?—she finished that review and, taking note of the fact, listed below the piece, that its author, a certain Oscar Hijuelos (a strange enough name, even for a “Cuban-American who makes his home in New York”), was to appear that next Friday evening at a bookstore in Coral Gables, Teresita decided to go.
For the next few days, while attending to her duties, Teresita remained surprised by her annoyance over the fact that, however it may have happened, her mother’s story had, from what she could tell, somehow been co-opted for the sake of a novel. Feeling proprietarily disposed, as most Cubans are about their legacy, she was determined to ascertain by what right the author had to publicize even a “fictional” version of her mother’s life, without first seeking permission. It just made Teresita feel as if her mother’s privacy had been violated, and while she had gone through any number of machinations about the possibilities of pursuing a lawsuit—even calling up an attorney that someone had once recommended over another matter—once she arrived that evening, having rushed to make it by seven, she found the atmosphere in that bookstore, jammed with hundreds of curious people, Cubans and non-Cubans alike, so reverential and kindly disposed towards this Hijuelos that it somewhat calmed her down.
The author himself seemed rather self-effacing—in fact, a little overwhelmed by the crowd—and why wouldn’t he? A balding fellow, more Fred Mertz than Desi Arnaz, of a somewhat stocky build, in glasses and, to judge from his fair skin, blond hair, and vaguely Irish or Semitic face, not very Cuban looking at all, he read aloud from his book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, the title of which he had surely taken from the very same LP María put on the phonograph from time to time (driving Teresita crazy). Stopping to make some aside, he attested to the verisimilitude of the novel, which he said he had written out of a pride and love for the unsung generation of pre-Castro Cubans, the sorts of fellows that he, growing up in New York City, had known.
She couldn’t judge the quality of the prose, which sounded rather colloquial to her ear—Teresita tended to read the vampire novels of Anne Rice—but the thickly packed audience seemed to appreciate the author’s guileless presentation. One section had to do with this drunken musician Cesar Castillo, known as the Mambo King, holed up in a hotel room in Harlem at the end of his life and dreaming about better times, and the next was a longish recitation of how this character’s brother Nestor Castillo had met his wife, a Cuban lady named Delores, in New York in 1950 while nursing all these longings for the love of his life, left back in Cuba, the beautiful María of his soul, for whom he had tormentedly written a song. It was enough to make Teresita tap her low-heeled shoes impatiently on the floor (she was standing in the back), her skin heating up over what she did not know. She experienced not anger, or righteous indignation—he seemed a harmless enough fellow—but she felt annoyed over the intrusion of it all, just the same.
At the conclusion of his reading, the author took questions from the audience, and while some of them were asked in Spanish, usually by the older folks—nicely dressed Cuban ladies, or their husbands—he’d answer in English, which seemed just fine with everyone.
“Why that particular story?” someone asked. “You mentioned earlier something about the two brothers, the Castillos, going on the I Love Lucy show. How is that?”
“Well,” he began, “growing up, that’s a show we all liked in my home; for us, it was Desi Arnaz, and not Lucille Ball, who was the star.” There was laughter, nods of approval from the audience. “You’ve got to remember that it was the only program on television that featured a Cuban in those days…. But, on top of that, I was always wondering about those guys who’d turn up on the show—you know, those walk-on characters who’d always just arrived from Cuba; they reminded me of what we used to go through at home in New York; that’s what got me started.”
“But did you know of any Cubans who were on that show?” the same person, who seemed to be a journalist of some kind, asked, following up.
“Yeah, sort of. I mean, I heard some stories about that kind of thing from time to time…and, well, what can I say, I just ran with it…”
Someone else raised a hand: the question, having nothing to do with the novel, concerned the author’s opinion of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution, “which, as you know, Se?or Hijuelos, has been a tragedy for us all.”
“What happened seems unfair and unjust,” he answered gingerly. “We all know that. I have a lot of cousins who left and stayed with us in our apartment—so I know, that, yeah, it was a tragedy,” he concluded, in his New Yorker’s way, quickly pointing to another hand. It was Teresita’s.
“I understand you have this song that you mention in the book, ‘La bella María de mi alma.’ Are you aware that it was a very well known bolero back in the 1950s?”
“Yeah, I did know that, but there are so many boleros from that epoch I could have chosen. I mean to say that it was one of those songs I heard growing up, and it just never got out of my head.”
“But surely you must know that your story, with that song performed on the Lucy show, the real Lucy show, which I have seen many times, by the way, sounds suspiciously like it was taken from real life. Is that correct?”
“That’s a complicated question,” the writer answered, his face turning rather red as he went into some high-sounding miércoles about literary technique, and the kind of pastiche he employed, mixing up reality and fantasies—“which is what any novel is really about.”
Listening patiently, Teresita nodded. “So I take it that you must have heard from somebody about the Castillo brothers, yes?”
“Yeah, stories—they lived in my neighborhood, in fact.”
“But did you hear about any María? Was she a real person in your mind?”
“Only in the way that I imagined her from hearing that song.”
“Oh, I see,” Teresita said. “I thank you for your answering me.”
“Well, thank you, and, by the way, what do you do for a living here in Miami?” This was a question he sometimes asked of members of the audience.
“Soy doctora,” Teresita told him with tremendous dignity, many in the room nodding with appreciation of the fact that she was yet another cubana who had done well for herself.
A few others inquired about the music in the book, and a few just thanked the author for having made the Cubans proud (such compliments were always his greatest pleasure). Soon enough, the store’s owner went to the podium and announced that Mr. Hijuelos would be signing his novel in the back of the store. It took Teresita about twenty minutes, a copy of that book in hand, to make her way to his table because so many people, Cubans in particular, were asking for inscriptions, often in Spanish. “Make it out this way: ‘Para la bella Tía María,’ please,” or for a cousin or a niece, so many Marías being around. Teresita had to admit that, despite his harried manner, he seemed not to mind taking the time to get each one right, and he seemed friendly enough: “How wonderful, my mother was from Holguín, like yours!” he would say. Or “Yeah, I spent time in Cuba, out in Oriente, when I was a kid, before Fidel of course.” Accumulating business cards from many, he took pains to sign each book carefully.
Finally, Teresita found herself handing her copy over to him.
“And who should I make this out to?” he asked.
She smiled. “My name is Teresa, but please make it out to la Se?ora María García, okay?”
“Sure.”
“I haven’t had the chance to read your book, but you should know something,” she went on, leaning over him as he wrote.
“Uh-huh?”
“My mother is the María of that song, the one you put in your story. She was very close to Nestor Castillo.”
He looked up, blushing. “Seriously?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I will let you know what I think once I’ve read it, okay?”
“Sure, why not?” he said affably enough, though his expression was not happy.
“Have you a card, so that I can be in touch with you?” she then asked.
“Not really, but here,” he replied, and he scribbled out an address on a piece of paper and gave it to Teresita.
She looked it over. “This is your publisher’s address, I see. Wouldn’t it be better if I had one for your home?”
He wrote that down, then stood up to shake her hand, which she appreciated, and with that Dr. Teresa García gave him her card and, thanking him again, added: “As I said, I will let you know what I think.” With that she went off, but not before picking up a few books for the sick kids on her ward, and then she got into her Toyota and drove over to Northwest Terrace, where she spent half the night reading that novel most carefully.
And the author? Satisfied by the evening’s turnout, and gratified to have met so many nice Cubans, while standing outside the bookstore having a smoke, he felt more than a little rattled by what Teresita had told him about the “real” María. He’d already been sued by a female bandleader who claimed her moral reputation had been damaged by the book, just because of a scene in which Cesar Castillo ravaged one of her musicians on a potato sack in a basement hallway of a Catskill resort where the Mambo Kings had been playing. And, though he’d made the whole thing up, he truly regretted the fact that he, for the sake of realism, had carelessly used the real bandleader’s name. The lawsuit had come and gone quickly, dismissed by a judge as a frivolous claim, but it had caused him enough distress that he didn’t want to go through something like it again, and surely not over the María of his book, whose sex scenes with Nestor Castillo, if the truth be told, were decidedly raunchy, though, he thought, presented with a redeeming romantic touch.