Beautiful Maria of My Soul (30 page)

(Oh, but María’s lectures, while the poor young woman was just trying to mind her own business: lectures about broken hearts and the loneliness of solitude, the stupidity of today’s
juventud,
squandering their opportunities for life and love, especially the ones who got too many American
cucarachas
in their heads!)

To please María, Teresa dipped into the crowded, overwrought Miami club scene, singles nights at different venues, and while she occasionally went out on the dates that her mother had cajoled from friends, Teresita had yet to meet anyone, Cuban or not, she thought compatible. (“So what was wrong with that one?” María inevitably asked.) Her mother’s continual urgings, it should be said, occasionally got on Teresita’s nerves, becoming, at a certain point, something Teresita just didn’t want to hear about.

But they had their good times: paid well, living cheaply, Teresita was able to take beautiful María to Italy on a vacation. To Rome, to Florence and Venice, then Naples and Sorrento and back. Her mother loved not only the way Italian men regarded women but the gruff yet kindly vendors in the markets with whom, as during her stay in the Bronx, she could speak Spanish and always be understood. She dissolved in the sunsets, daydreamed in the wisteria-rich gardens, and, touring the ruins of Pompeii, wondered why people bothered to preserve such old things. Roma, in particular, with its self-contained and lively neighborhoods, so reminded María of Havana that she felt completely at home. And she liked the way men gave her daughter the most interested looks, following her every move down the street. “You see,” she’d say, “they know how to appreciate you,” Teresita simply nodding.

What most surprised María, however, was how she felt after that two-week sojourn when they arrived back in Miami. She couldn’t wait to get home, not just to Omar, whom she had left with her next-door neighbor Annabella, but to the city itself, and the familiarity of her neighborhood and house. She’d feel the same when they made their other trips, now and then: to a medical convention in Los Angeles, to a seaside resort along the coast of South Carolina, and to Washington, D.C., where that elegant lady and her daughter acted like happy tourists.

Then back, as always, to the usual routines of their days.

O
ne 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.”

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, Señor 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 Señora 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.

T
hat night, after coming home with her heavy bag of hospital folders, and after sitting with María and watching television for an hour while sipping whiskey, Teresita, leaving her mother on the couch and kissing her good night, slipped back into her room, past a hallway filled with photographs from the epoch of her mother’s glory, and finally collapsed into bed with that book,
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
. She actually liked aspects of the story at first, even enjoyed reading about the brash circumstances that brought the Castillo brothers to New York; enjoyed, in fact, and curiously so, the prologue, which involved the fictional character of Eugenio Castillo, Nestor’s son, from whom, it seemed, much of the story seemed to emanate. (His voice seemed so earnest, she wondered if this Eugenio, in fact, was a real person.)

Of course, she was most anxious to peruse the sections recounting the romance of Nestor and beautiful María, and coming to them after some one hundred pages, she found herself somewhat pleased and repulsed by what she read: One evening, Nestor, so sensitive, so noble, so tormented by his feelings about the sadness of life, encounters beautiful María on a Havana street in the aftermath of an argument she has had with her overbearing, indignantly disposed
novio
—not Ignacio, of course, but someone like him, and Teresita wondered how the author might have ascertained such a premise. She did not mind the portrayal of a ravishing beautiful María at that point, and, even as she felt a humming annoyance in her gut, she somewhat liked the idea of seeing her mother’s life, however altered, being told in so attentive and mythical a manner; that is, until she began reading a section, tucked away in the thick tex
ture of prose (
“too many words!” was her opinion
) that began with the sentence “She liked it every which way: from behind, in her mouth, between her breasts, and in her tight bottom.” (These words she underlined.)

From there the text went on to detail, in a rather heated manner, the kinds of sexual caprices between Nestor and María that, whether true or not, were not rightfully meant for the world to share. Able to take only so much of such high-blown hyperbole about Nestor’s “agonizingly long and plump”
pinga,
with which the author seemed obsessed, Teresita, to put it bluntly, could barely bring herself to read on. The book to that point had already lingered too much on the supposed sexual grandeur of the Mambo Kings; in fact, the filthy-minded author seemed to dwell excessively on scenes in which a woman’s mere presence could provoke the grandest of erections in its characters. And because María, with a few drinks in her, and with a candidness for which
cubanas
are famous, used to tell Teresita, as she got older, that Nestor was as long and as wide as “any innocent woman could ever take,” Teresita could not help wondering about how some distant New York City author had tapped into such apparently truthful and intimate information and had, on top of it, the nerve to put it all in a book.

IT TOOK TERESITA A FEW NIGHTS TO GET THROUGH THAT NOVEL
; she still preferred those vampire stories, of course, and yet, whether that book was good or bad, her annoyance had, in any case, so tainted the experience of reading it that she could hardly find anything redeeming about its story. Altogether, with her sad duties at the hospital and with her own loneliness—about Cuban men, she didn’t have a clue as to what “it” would be like—this book’s sudden existence amounted to one hell of a shameful headache: her mother’s life, after all, was being aired like dirty laundry. Spending the next few weeks mulling over her options, and not breathing a word to María, her daughter kept thinking of one thing: to sue that presumptuous
hijo de puta.
She even left the hospital at
lunchtime one afternoon to visit with the attorney, a certain Alfredo Zabalas, whom she had spoken to before. But she did this reluctantly, for Teresita wondered if, by doing so, she would be opening a quite public can of worms. The lawyer, on the other hand, hearing her tale and seeing it as a clear case of defamation, seemed very interested, almost indignant on María’s behalf.

“The truth remains that, whether it’s fiction or not, an unkind reader might read that book and interpret the character of your mother as something of a whore,” he said. Then he wrote down some notes. “You might make a nice amount of money over this matter,” he said. And that held some appeal for Teresita. Her mother didn’t have a retirement fund, and she always worried about what might happen to María if, for whatever reason, Teresita fell out of the picture.
Being around dying children will do that to you.

Nevertheless, as this gentleman began to detail the process of filing such a claim, and all the paperwork and fees and processes involved—among them the eventual deposition of both the author and her mother—Dr. Teresa, a most private sort herself, began to have second thoughts. It just seemed so tawdry and soul destroying, and, in any event, just to sit for an hour in that office depressed her. And so she left it with Mr. Zabalas that she would have to think it over, as much for her own sake as to spare her mother from the inconveniences of a long, protracted hassle,
un lío,
as they say in
español.

Then, after a while, Teresita cooled down a bit. The book was already out there, and, besides, it occurred to her that hardly anyone knew her mother was beautiful María. Who on earth would equate the sexually voracious María of that novel with the real beautiful María, who wore curlers in her hair each morning as she went out to discard the trash and get her newspapers in Northwest Terrace? Who in their neighborhood read “literary” novels anyway, or ever stopped to consider the book pages of
El Nuevo Herald
? Not Annabella, their next-door neighbor, or Beatriz of Havana from down the street, or Esmeralda, baker of chicken pies, her mother’s canasta partner. Such books just floated above
them like birds, without ever landing. The Cubans they knew just weren’t into that kind of thing, and so, Teresita pondered, even if some of her friends might remember her mother’s claim to have been the inspiration of that song, it was still absolutely possible that the novel would come and go without anyone from their little world even noticing. That notion calmed her somewhat.

And the author himself, she remembered, hadn’t seemed a bad sort. He was a little uptight perhaps, but apparently he took the deepest pride in his Cuban roots, and, in Teresita’s mind, that was almost enough to outweigh the incredible transgression. Yet, no matter how much she circled around the notion that the author hadn’t really meant any harm, that his María was an invention, she wanted to hear an apology from this Hijuelos himself. So, as the weeks went by, she started to call his New York city telephone number, leaving a half dozen messages without once hearing any response. And that was nearly enough for her to reconsider the legal approach once again. But then, one Saturday afternoon, while María was off somewhere with her friend Gladys, Teresita, considering it a nagging duty, dialed him again.

He picked up this time. There was loud mambo music playing in the background, which he turned down.

“
Señor
Hijuelos?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know if you remember me, but I am Dr. García, the daughter of María—we met a few months ago in Coral Gables.”

“Oh yes, of course. How are you?”

“I’m fine. But do you know that you’re a very hard fellow to get ahold of? Did you receive my messages?”

“Yes, I did. But I’ve been away. I meant to get back to you.”

“Okay, but the reason I’m calling you is to discuss your book. I will tell you, I was not too happy about your depiction of my mother.”

He sighed or lit a cigarette—she could not tell which.

“Look, Dr. García, as I told everybody…as I tell everybody, the
book is mostly just invented. Sure there are some things I took from life, but I promise you that the character of María, for example, just came into my head from hearing that song.”

“I see, and have you ever considered what someone like my mother, the real beautiful María, would feel if she read your book when you have her doing so many things that are improper?”

“Look, I never even thought the book would get published, and, well, her character was really about the song.”

“But the sex? Why did you have to put so much in? Did you even consider that someone real might be on the other end?”

“To be honest,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “if I ever thought that it would offend someone, maybe I would have done some things differently. But it is a fiction, after all.”

“Come on,” she said. “We both know that you must have gotten some parts of my mother’s love affair with Nestor Castillo from somewhere. Isn’t that the case?”

“Okay, okay. All I knew is what I was told, just bare bones, by one of the guys in the book, Cesar Castillo,” he finally admitted. “He was the superintendent of my building, and, well, he liked to tell stories, that’s all. The sex was just intended as a kind of music, like saxophones playing during a recording. You know, an effect.”

There was a momentary silence, during which Teresita coiled the telephone cord in her hand.

“Whatever you call it, you should know that such things can hurt people’s feelings. Do you understand that?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But what do you want me to do?”

“Well, I will tell you this, Mr. Hijuelos. I was very close to making this a legal matter, but I am not that way. No, what I want from you is to make an apology to my mother one day, like any decent
cubano
would. The next time you come to Miami, I want you to see for yourself that there is someone on the other end, and not just some anonymous
fulana
whose reputation you can disparage. Will you do that, for me?”

“If that would make you happy, yes.”

“Good, I expect you to honor this request, do you hear me?”

“Of course.”

“
Hasta luego
then,” Teresita said, hanging up.

Somewhat relieved—for in the interim yet another lawsuit, involving his book’s cover artwork, had been mounted against him—he felt nothing less than pure gratitude that Dr. Teresa García, though obviously (and perhaps rightly) peeved, had taken what he considered the high road. She was surely sparing him—and them both—a lot of grief. As for Teresita? Satisfied that she had made a statement in defense of her mother’s honor, Teresita, who had been trying to drop some weight lately, got dressed in a blue jogging outfit and took off for a half an hour’s amble along her neighborhood’s humid, sweat-inducing, tree-rich streets.

And that was the last of it, for a long time.