Beautiful Maria of My Soul (34 page)
Read Beautiful Maria of My Soul Online
Authors: Oscar Hijuelos
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Cultural Heritage
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
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
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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.
