For what it’s worth, even Omar the cat, with his Oriental prescience, took a strong liking to that man, perhaps for his poetic soul. On many a night, as María slept in her bed with the homely Luis snoring occasionally by her side, that gato would slumber beside her, purring sweetly and approvingly, the pads of his soft paws set gently upon her face, no matter what María happened to be dreaming.
Chapter FIFTY-TWO
Two years later, on an April evening in 1994, something sad happened to Dr. Teresa: this nice kid, the son of Cubans, only twelve years old, had died on her ward, and Teresita, who had had the highest hopes for him—he’d lingered for three months, and whenever she could Teresita read to him from children’s books and could not help but caress his brow whenever he gasped from pain—left the hospital feeling as if her life was sometimes intolerable. Even though she knew that, for all her successes, there was bound to be a heart-wrenching tragedy, all she wanted to do was get drunk that night. Riding her motorcycle, she had stopped off in a bar along the bay, the Sunset Cove, and after downing three double whiskeys, she began to wonder how her life might have turned out had she been born sixty years before, in Pinar del Río, like her mother. She decided that she would have ended up, in all likelihood, an ignorant, maybe happy guajira. Without worries, without such heavy responsibilities, and without having to look into the eyes of a child who was dying—what killed her the most was the fading sweetness she read in his pupils. She had a boss who, seeing the hard way she took such “episodes,” suggested that Teresita consider general practice as an internist, but she, for the life of her, couldn’t. Every now and then, as she told those kids they would be all right and felt the ebbing pulse of their soft hands in her own, their eyes, so hopeful and longing, she wanted to believe that all would be well. And at such moments of grief, Teresita daydreamed of another life, of being so good looking and shapely a cubana that she could see herself on the stage of a Havana nightclub, circa 1947, performing, for all her mother’s complaints, in so seductive a fashion as to keep an audience of horny men enthralled. But that hadn’t been her fate at all.
During her fourth whiskey, she had to laugh: over the club’s jukebox had come a version of the movie’s “Beautiful María of My Soul,” as performed by a group called Los Lobos. And that was enough for Teresita to finish her drink and leave: not because she hadn’t found it more or less pleasant but because it had nothing to do with the version she, with her Cuban pride, had grown up with. Wobbly enough, she left a five-dollar bill on the bar and then, heading out, even while in some corners of that flashy bar couples were fondling and kissing one another, mocking her solitary state, Dr. Teresita, beautiful María’s daughter, her helmet on, raced home, almost wiping out on the highway.
MARÍA WAS SITTING BEFORE THEIR GLORIOUS THIRTY-TWO-INCH RCA color TV watching a telenovela when, as Teresita walked in, she said the following: “Tell me, chica, what’s with you? Don’t you remember that we’re leaving for New York tomorrow?”
It was then that Teresita, with so many other things on her mind, recalled that she was due the next afternoon, a Saturday, in Manhattan at an oncological conference, the two of them to stay at the Grand Hyatt hotel by Grand Central Terminal. “Of course,” she said to her mother.
“So you should pack a suitcase tonight, yes?”
“I know.”
María, in the glow of the television’s screen, added, “And bring a nice dress. We’re going to a party after all.”
“A party, what’s that about?”
“Por Dios, don’t you remember that yo no sé qué cubano, that fellow Hijuelos, who wrote that book?”
“Sí, mamá.”
“Well, I called him, and when I told him we were coming to Nueva York, he invited us to a fiesta, that’s all. Una fiesta de cubanos.”
THEY FLEW UP TO NEW YORK ON A 7 A.M. FLIGHT, ARRIVING AT LA Guardia about ten thirty, then checking in to the Hyatt. Later, as María strolled north on Fifth Avenue to Central Park, shopping along the way (she had her daughter’s credit card), Teresita spent her time in an auditorium on West Fifty-seventh Street, attending a series of lectures about the neurological terrors and cancers that could, out of the blue, blight children. A cocktail party took place at four. When she came back, exhausted, to their hotel room at about six thirty, the last thing Teresita wanted to do was to head out again. But María insisted; after all, she said, “The author himself has invited us.”
IT WAS A FEW HOURS LATER THAT MARÍA AND HER DAUGHTER made their way uptown by taxi—the subways were not for María—to a building in the West Eighties and a rambling first-floor affair of some seven rooms, the domicile of none other than Chico O’Farrill, famed composer of Afro-Cuban jazz, whose songs María had often heard in the clubs back in Havana. He was standing by the front door and could not have been friendlier—in fact, he told María that she seemed awfully familiar to him somehow. Had she ever been to Mexico City? Or Havana? And for a few minutes they got to talking about Cuba, and the Havana club scene before Fidel—“I was a dancer back when,” she told him. And he snapped his fingers—it seemed that he was about to place her—but then, before they could go on with this chitchat, so many other folks came streaming in through the front door that, with Teresita feeling a little tired, they just went inside, entering an immense living room jammed with people, their numbers exaggerated by their reflections in the mirror-tiled walls.
So what happened?
Lingering by a buffet table, after moving through a crowd that included many a mambo luminary of the day, beautiful María, Teresita by her side, happened to spot, across the room, Hijuelos, long ago adopted by the O’Farrill clan as one of their own, walking in with a friend, a tall and handsome fellow whose intensely dark eyes and melancholy expression so reminded María of Nestor Castillo that for a moment she could hardly get her breath. What else could María do but wave to get the author’s attention? Not long after he had come over to greet them—“I’m so happy you could make it,” he said—María, beside herself with curiosity, just had to ask, “And who is that caballero standing over there in the corner?”
“Well,” he said. “Guess I should introduce you.”
So, with María waving her over, Teresita made her way across that bustling room, and shortly found herself standing before that rather self-effacing fellow, who had just been contentedly taking things in.
“This lady here is la Señora María García—the one I told you about, who knew your papi long ago,” Hijuelos said to his friend. “And this is her daughter, Teresa.”
He just smiled and nodded meekly.
“In any event, this is my childhood pal, un amigo de hace tiempo, Eugenio Castillo.”
“Encantada,” said María, smiling as if she were seeing Nestor again. “Encantada,” said Teresita.
Like a gentleman, he shook their hands, told each in a soft voice, “Con mucho gusto,” without being so bold as to engage their eyes directly.
With that, he had to put up with María’s onslaught of compliments: “But, my God, you look like your father! But taller and, I think, even better looking, if that’s possible!” Then, as Eugenio Castillo sipped from his drink and simply nodded, as if such words were meaningless, beautiful María turned around to find their hostess, Lupe O’Farrill, standing by her side. Once their acquaintance had been made, she led María away to introduce her around, and Hijuelos went off to get some lechón, leaving his friend Eugenio Castillo to converse alone with Teresa.
And what did they talk about? It was not as if each was unaware of their parents’ importance to one another: Eugenio had grown up with that song about beautiful María incessantly in his ears, and along the way he had occasionally heard his mother, long since remarried, wistfully lamenting just how much that song, about another woman, had bugged her. But his papi’s death had taken place so long ago that his mother’s anguish seemed overblown to him, in a Cuban manner. (“Oh, she gets hysterical sometimes.”)
“When my best friend wrote that
novel and put me in it, as the narrator, I was pissed off,” he said bluntly. “But you know what? I figured he meant well, and what the hell, he brought my papito back to life. But at first, it was rough.” He wiped a fleck of dust from his nose. “And for you?”
“It was very weird. Muy extraño,” she told him. “But, you know, my mother, María, doesn’t seem to mind that she was put in a book, even when she thinks the author got rich.”
He nodded, smiling, and shifted his lanky frame, perhaps feeling that in Teresa he had found a kindred spirit.
AN HOUR LATER, AFTER MARÍA HAD MEANDERED THROUGH THAT apartment, chatting with folks and recognizing, vaguely, as she passed from one hallway into another, Tito Puente, and Ray Barretto, and the American character actor Matt Dillon, a mambo fanatic, holding forth in a cramped vestibule, she plumped down on a leather couch to listen, entirely surrounded by mirrors, to a Cuban-style salon, her face reflecting back at her a hundred times over. With the very dapper and gentlemanly Marco Rizo, Desi Arnaz’s former arranger, sitting before an upright piano playing the melodies of Ernesto Lecuona, Cuba’s Gershwin, if such a comparison can be made, none other than Celia Cruz herself, a most down-to-earth lady, slipped out of the crowd and began to sing, her lovely voice filling the room.
As María felt comfortable, almost to the point of slumber against the couch’s soft leather cushions, she had looked around to see if Eugenio Castillo and her daughter were still conversing. Fortunately—as she hoped—they were, that gallant, his head bowed low as if in reverence to Teresita, whispering tenderly to her and smiling, as if he had stepped out of a dream.
FOR THE RECORD, EUGENIO CASTILLO AND TERESA GARCÍA, HAVING met at that party, maintained contact over the next few years. Now and then, when the telephone rang at around nine thirty at night and María answered, with a melodious “Aquí!” it was that schoolteacher Eugenio Castillo, asking, in his measured voice, if he might speak to her daughter. Every so often, on the weekends, Teresita would feel the sudden compulsion to go off to New York, where that buenmozo’s companionability and, perhaps, his affections awaited her. (“Por Dios, if he’s anything like his papi!”) And María? Oh, she still ached over her memories of that músico from Havana—and for so many other things. It was as if her heart would never allow her mind to forget. But as Nestor Castillo himself, may God preserve his soul, might have put it, even those delicious pains began to slowly fade. For in the course of María’s ordinary days, so unnoticed by the world, she and Luis became as close as any sacrosanct couple, fornicating occasionally, and, in the wake of such intimacy, mostly listening to each other’s verses, which, as it turned out, were nothing more than songs of love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Will Balliett, my editor at Hyperion, and his colleagues Ellen Archer and Gretchen Young, as well as Jennifer Lyons, Karen Levinson, and Lori Marie Carlson for their invaluable support during the writing of this book.
ALSO BY
Oscar Hijuelos
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Our House in the Last World
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien
Mr. Ives’ Christmas
Empress of the Splendid Season
A Simple Habana Melody
Dark Dude
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, and places, and all dialogue and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination.
BEAUTIFUL MARÍA OF MY SOUL. Copyright © 2010 by Oscar Hijuelos. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Hyperion e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hijuelos, Oscar.
Beautiful María of my soul / Oscar Hijuelos.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2334-9
1. Musicians—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Cuba—Fiction. 4. Musical fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.I376B43 2010
813'.54—dc22
2009035386
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-1-4013-9594-0
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
* At any rate, that’s basically what happened that night, even as hearsay and the passage of time would embellish that story somewhat differently. According to one of the neighborhood kids, a friend of Nestor’s son, a plump, myopic, and curious fellow who in later years often sat with Cesar Castillo to hear him talk about his glorious dance hall past, that night unfolded differently. Instead of heading straightaway to their hotel on that snowy evening, Desi and his wife decided to visit Nestor’s walk-up apartment on La Salle Street for a midnight meal. Mind you, all those years later, Cesar Castillo was fairly plastered and torn up about all kinds of things in the telling, but even so, with his eyes getting almost teary, he was quite convincing. As Cesar put it, Desi—“a helluva good fellow”—couldn’t have been more gracious, and it wasn’t long before he was sitting in their little kitchen, making himself at home. After savoring a big platter of arroz con pollo and some lemon and garlic and salt–drowned fried tostones, which Delores had prepared in a cloud of sizzling oil and smoke, he strummed Nestor’s guitar and sang a few Cuban songs—“Mama Inéz” and “Guantanamera”—for his new friends. Cesar would swear that Desi himself grew teary eyed over the warmth of their Cuban hospitality and indeed felt perfectly at home, despite the flecking ceiling and hissing steam pipes and half crumpled linoleum floor. Cesar told that story so many times that, in some quarters, it became the official version. In fact, the plump kid went so far as to eventually put it in a book that he would write about the brothers, even if it didn’t get everything right. Whether Desi actually made it there or not, one thing was certain: that wintry night in 1955, the brothers had indeed made Arnaz’s acquaintance at the Mambo Nine club and were promised a chance to appear on his show, where, indeed, as walk-on characters playing Ricky Ricardo’s singing cousins from Cuba, they were to immortalize Nestor’s tormented canción de amor “Beautiful María of My Soul,” a song which his former amante was to hear soon enough on the streets of Havana.
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