Beautiful María of My Soul

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, 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.

Chapter FORTY-EIGHT

That 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 texture 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.

Chapter FORTY-NINE

For her part, María remained blissfully unaware that such a book existed. Teresita kept her copy hidden away, with certain pages clipped together, and did not say a word about it to her mother. But it was only a matter of time before María inevitably heard about its existence. Her former writing teacher, el Señor Luis Castellano, with whom María dined from time to time, had, while keeping up with the latest literary trends, particularly works by Cuban Americans, read the novel himself and, knowing a little about María’s connection to that song, went to the trouble of buying her not the novel itself but the audiocassette tapes of that book, as read by the actor E. G. Marshall, in English, of course. (Even Teresita had to scratch her head over that one.) Fortunately, when María finally got around to playing those cassettes one Saturday afternoon, her first impressions were very good: just to hear Nestor Castillo’s name spoken aloud made her gasp, and that book’s early mentions of the song Nestor had written for her, “Beautiful María of My Soul,” naturally piqued her interest. But altogether, though her English had improved out of necessity, as some of her pupils at the dance studio didn’t speak much Spanish, just to listen to its prose was rough going.

She could follow enough of it to get a general sense of a story, but with the book’s endless references to postwar American popular culture and (for María) its arcane nods at writers like Edgar Allan Poe-“For me, my father’s gentle rapping on Ricky Ricardo’s door has always been a call from the beyond, as in Dracula films, or films of the walking dead, in which spirits ooze out from behind tombstones and through the cracked windows and rotted floors of gloomy antique halls…”- it may as well have been rendered in Mandarin Chinese as far as she was concerned. And when she pushed the fast-forward button and came across these lines about Cesar Castillo’s enormous pinga, which “flourished upwards like the spreading top branches of a tree, or, he once thought while looking at a map of the United States, like the course of the Mississippi River and its tributaries,” María, while finding that just as opaque, understood enough to ascertain that she was not hearing a recitation of the Bible. Nevertheless, she stuck with it for several hours, mostly skipping through it and searching for mentions of herself-“Now he remembers and sighs: the long approach to the farm along the riverbank and forest-” (skip, fast-forward)-“They had their picture taken in front of a movie poster advertising the Betty Grable film Moon over Miami-” (skip, fast-forward)-“The night of the dance, Delores was thinking about what her sister-” (skip, fast-forward)-until, at long last, she stumbled upon the line that went “My name is María-” And with that she made herself a drink, settled on the couch, and did her best to slip into the hearing of a story that she never thought would be told.

A few hours later, when Teresita had come home after catching up on some work at the hospital and she saw María’s puzzled, dreamy expression, the first thing she said was “Pero, Mamá, didn’t I tell you not to listen to those tapes!”

“But, mi vida,” María said, “from what I could tell, it’s not so bad a story. Es que no entiendo inglés muy bien. It’s just that I can’t understand English that well. It’s a pity, yes?”

“Yes, Mama, but you have your ways,” Teresita said. The truth be told, in those moments, at least, she was grateful for the fact that María had never bothered to go to school to improve her English.

“Have you read that book?” María asked.

“Well,” Teresita said, and she nodded. “Yes, I have.”

“It’s a little dirty-es un poquito sucio-yes?” she asked with all sincerity.

“Only now and then, but, Mama, you shouldn’t trouble yourself about it.” Then, seeing that her mother seemed a little low, she added, sitting beside her, “Besides, the María in that book isn’t really like you.”

“But isn’t she beautiful?”

“Oh, yes, very beautiful.”

And that made María, who had struggled through that maze of English, smile. The bawdiness of its sex and the details of the story may have passed over her head, but not the notion that it was about her, and in a most flattering way. Now that she was almost sixty, if anything, her vanity spiked, María felt rather proud about the matter, and if she had any regrets at all, it was that so few people knew that she was the María both of that song and now-oh, how proud Lázaro would have been-of a book.

While the Miami newspapers sometimes wrote about its author, who had lately won some kind of big-deal prize (which made the Cubans jubilant with pride), the more important thing in María’s life came down to her mounting involvement with that scarecrow Luis, with whom she not only occasionally dined but also went off now and then for the afternoon to an undisclosed location where, Teresita assumed, they had what she liked to gingerly think of as “relations.”

Thin as a starving guajiro and with a mortally wounded air, he must surely have been overwhelmed by the voluptuousness of María’s ripened body, and yet during his visits to the household, when he would sit quietly with them in the evenings as María watched her favorite shows, Teresita remained amazed by her mother’s serene attentiveness to the man, as if, indeed, he had given her something to be extremely grateful for: affection. Homely as any Cuban man could be (Luis, in one of his running jokes, referred to himself and María as “Beauty and the Beast”), he must have been doing something right, for, if Teresita was not mistaken, María had taken to doting on Luis and with the kind of tenderness she had usually reserved for Omar, their cat. Was it some autumnal rush of love? Or just the companionable dalliance of two poetic souls finding ways to amuse one another? Whatever the case, despite Teresita’s own loneliness, beautiful María, doused with perfume and floating through life in clouds of smoke, seemed happy enough in those days.

EVENTUALLY, TERESITA GOT TO MEET THE AUTHOR AGAIN, WHEN he returned to Miami the following autumn to promote a paperback edition of that work, and this time, at the same venue in Coral Gables, she could not help but notice that this Hijuelos, in the blush of his apparent success, seemed far more world-weary and solemn than she remembered. Somewhat sheepish about facing yet another crowd, and spotting Dr. Teresita with beautiful María by her side in the audience, he made a last-minute change and chose to read a few selections that, while mentioning María in passing, were sweetly clean-spick-and-span, in fact. In one, he told of the Castillo brothers’ meeting with Desi Arnaz and Lucy on the night, in 1955, when they first performed Nestor’s song of love, and then he read from selections that were like sound poems. Once again, the evening followed form-a Q & A, a signing, and afterwards, as he had agreed with Teresita, the author finally met the still startlingly good looking and well preserved María, who, in addition to an ebony comb in her pulled-back hair, wore a dark felt-buttoned, hip-hugging dress of considerable décolletage. Once Teresita made their introductions, María, looking the jittery author over, said, “So you are the one?” And, as an aside, whispered, as she tugged at his arm, “Sabes, joven, que me debes mucho”-“You know that you owe me a lot.”

Shortly they went over to a Spanish restaurant a block or two away, where, as it happened, the affable media personality Don Francisco of the popular Sábado Gigante television show, which María often watched, had turned up with a small entourage. Walking in, they saw him, formidably tall and broad shouldered in a blue serge suit, standing by the piano bar, crooning, a drink in hand, an old Cuban bolero, “Siempre en mi corazón,” into a microphone. That very fact, along with the decorum and stolid Spaniard’s gilded ambience of the restaurant, and with the way that Don Francisco, a consummate showman, bowed, winking at them as they passed inside, impressed the hell out of María and, most fortunately, put her into a good frame of mind. She may have been a guajira in her former life, but as she made her way to their table, María exuded nothing less than an amber dignity. This is what happened: After they ordered the house specialty paella, and a few bottles of good champagne, the evening unfolded agreeably enough. Having recently flown to Sacramento, California, for a deposition regarding the aforementioned second lawsuit, the author had been quiet at first, a certain formality and carefulness attending his every word. But once it became clear that neither Teresita nor María bore him any animosity, and as the champagne lightened spirits, the conversation, mediated by Teresa, who switched from English to Spanish, veered quickly to matters that for María, after so many years, had weighed on her heart.

“Mira, chico, so did you know los hermanos Castillo?” she asked him at a certain point.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “I knew Nestor when I was very little, but Cesar much more.”

“Y Cesar, ¿está vivo?”

“No, señora, he passed away about ten years ago. In a hotel room in Harlem.”

Yes, of course, thought Teresita, just like in his book.

“A pity,” María said. “They were both very handsome men-and wonderful musicians.” Then: “And Nestor’s family? What can you tell me about them? He had children, yes?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “A boy and a girl-they’re now grown. His daughter’s name is Leticia-she’s married now with three daughters of her own.”

“And the son? What do you know of him?”

“Eugenio Castillo? I still see him. He was my best friend, growing up. We were at his papi’s funeral together, way back when. He’s a public high school teacher now.”

“And does he have a family?”

“No, he never married. Es soltero.”

“And you? ¿Estás casado?”

“No, I’m not,” he told her, looking down.

And that made María glance over at Teresa; then she whispered into her daughter’s ear, Teresita smiling. (Later, as they left, when he asked her what that was about, Teresita told him: “She said it was too bad you’re so bald.”)

As María kept staring at this Hijuelos, he could read in her eyes what he read in many Cuban eyes: “a strange fellow.” His New York manner was so pronounced, and his body language so unfluid and earthbound, that, no matter how much Spanish he used, the waiters continued to address him in English. Teresita, somewhat of an outsider herself, reading his weariness, started feeling an empathy for him. And, at one point, she made a toast: “ Para nosotros cubanos!”

Then a lull came over the conversation, the three munching away.

“Bueno,” María began, finally breaking the silence. “You-Señor Hijuelos-are probably wondering what I think about your book”-“librito” she called it-“verdad?” He nodded, and she sipped from a glass of champagne. “If you must know, I found it muy, muy interesante.” She laughed. “And muy sucio sometimes! Very filthy! But, I will tell you this, my real story was very different from what you wrote. I came from el campo del Pinar del Río, really from nothing. I was the daughter of guajiros, una analfabeta, in fact, and whatever I have now, I came by through the grace of God and the sweat of my brow. But my greatest blessing is this one here, mi chiquita, a doctor,” she said, and she kissed her daughter’s hand. “Even if her abuelo couldn’t read a word of anything, she became a doctor, and in a country where she didn’t know at first ni un pío de inglés! Not even one bit of English. Can you imagine that? Forget all the sex, which is only air, that’s what you should put in a book someday, sabes?”

He nodded again.

“As for that buenmoso Nestor Castillo, I will tell you this: I don’t regret that I knew him, and if I regret anything-”

“Mami,” she heard her daughter interjecting.

“-it’s that we didn’t stay together. But it was my fault, understand. I was too worried about comforts. And if you are alert and a real thinker, which you seem to be, you will also know that certain Cubans of my generation were destined to be muy jodido-fucked-anyway because of the revolution… Even if Nestor had stayed with me in Cuba and we had made a home for ourselves and had a family, we would have ended up in the States, leaving everything behind.” She paused to sip some champagne. “And sometimes I wonder if he would still be alive if I’d married him those years ago and come with him to Miami or New York. Either way, it would have been our destiny to live away from our patria- Cuba. Does that, Señor Hijuelos, mean anything to you?”

“Of course it does,” he said.

“Then you know that it brings a sadness of its own.”

She became subdued, staring off into a corner of the room, where a chandelier glowed and music emanated from an electric piano. By then Don Francisco had long since left, and few patrons remained. That’s when beautiful María caught herself speaking, as she would put it, miércoles.

“Can you tell me something, chico?” she asked. “Do you remember Nestor as a happy or a sad man?”

“He seemed nice enough, a quiet fellow, used to sit outside the stoop of my building with his brother, handing out quarters to us kids.”

“But did he ever say anything to you about Cuba?”

“No, señora, he kept that to himself.”

“I see. And nothing about me?”

“No, I was just a kid-why would he?” he said, shrugging, and though María was about to say “But you know that I never wanted to hurt him in any way,” she thought better of that and kept it to herself.

The end of the dinner proceeded, with scorched flan desserts served and tacitas of espresso. For his part, the author, so wary of legal matters, was happy that they, as a trio, seemed to have become rather friendly. He’d almost forgotten about his conversation with Teresita the year before when, as a waiter cleared the table, she steered him toward the fulfillment of a certain promise, saying, while María was away using the bathroom, “Isn’t there something you’d like to say to my mother?”

“About?”

“An apology.”

“Of course.”

And then, when she had returned, without looking María directly in the eye, he said, “There’s something I have to tell you, señora.”

“Tell me.”

“If there’s anything in my book that offended you in any way, for whatever reason, for all of that I sincerely apologize, señora. Con todo mi corazón.”

María was a little surprised by this; it was nothing she had required or expected. “Ay, but why say that? All such things, after all, even books, are soon forgotten. La vida es sueño, after all, okay? But if it will make you feel better, I will accept your apologies. I promise you.”

With that, María reached across the table and took hold of his wrists. “But you must promise not to forget me. You are as good as family now, and as family”-she made the sign of the cross over him-“you must be loyal, understand?” And with that she surprised Teresita, slapping the author’s right cheek. “Don’t forget it, okay?”

“I won’t,” he said, feeling rather startled himself.

Then they parted: Mr. Hijuelos, who had paid the bill, heading back to his hotel by taxi, and beautiful María driving home with her daughter in their Toyota.

Chapter FIFTY

María’s opinion of the author was that, though too “Americanized,” he was a decent enough fellow: he helped that notion by sending her a gift basket of chocolates and dried fruits the next Christmas, but beyond that he had become but a recent memory and his book some odd artifact that they’d nearly forgotten. That is, until the waning months of 1991, when they heard that a film called The Mambo Kings had been shot in Hollywood and was slated to open the Miami International Film Festival that coming February. This, of course, sent up red flags with Teresita, who, having read about it in the newspapers, called him in New York to request, at the very least, that he provide three tickets for the premiere-for her mother, herself, and Luis. Though most of her calls were swallowed up by the netherworld of his answering machine, someone from the film’s promotion company eventually forwarded, by overnight mail, an envelope with their tickets for the opening (though without any for the after-party, it should be noted).

And so it was that beautiful María, Teresita, and Luis, he in a nice dark suit and looking very dapper indeed, arrived at the premiere that February evening, the seventh, navigating through the crowds of press and onlookers onto a red-carpeted walkway unnoticed, not a single camera flashing at their approach. The flashbulbs were reserved for the stars, among them the queen of Cuban song, Celia Cruz, who drew the greatest applause from her devoted fans behind the barricades as she got out of her white stretch limousine, a blinding flood of lights exploding around her. They had paused in the lobby as the other stars came in, but then, discouraged from lingering by some charmless security officers, were rushed inside to take their seats, the audience around them quite nicely turned out, and, as the papers would later put it, an air of anticipation buzzing through the hall.

Then the houselights dimmed. A musical prelude, a shot of Havana, a sonorous trumpet playing, and boom-the interior of a Havana nightclub, with a mambo troupe gyrating onstage and then the outraged Cesar Castillo, played by the handsome actor Armand Assante, charging through a dressing room and approaching, rather roughly, a dancer, beautiful María, portrayed by the gorgeous Talisa Soto, whom he accuses of being a whore for the way she had thrown off his younger brother Nestor. Her gangster novio and his cronies intercede, and Cesar ends up with his throat cut in an alley, wherein a bereft, perhaps guilt-ridden beautiful María kneels before him. While he should be bleeding to death, despite a kerchief wrapped around his neck, it was Dr. Teresa’s opinion that, in real life, he wouldn’t have long to live, and María’s opinion that no such thing had ever happened, though she enjoyed the fact that she was being played by so dazzling a woman. Tenderly the film’s beautiful María begs Cesar Castillo to take Nestor away to America, and so the plot’s mechanism begins, for the next scenes are of a well recovered Cesar Castillo, looking sharp in a sporty shirt and shades, dancing the mambo down the narrow aisle of a bus headed north to New York, a charming moment, with a solemn, forlorn, tightly wound Nestor, played by Antonio Banderas, no doubt thinking gloomily about María. Later, while settled in New York in the early 1950s, the brothers form their orchestra the Mambo Kings. And along the way, Nestor is shown working on his bolero “Beautiful María of My Soul,” which, as eventually performed by the brothers in a nightclub and later on the I Love Lucy show, in an episode invented for the film, bore little resemblance to the bolero which María’s former love, Nestor Castillo, had written and recorded with his brother Cesar and actually sung on the real Lucy show those many years before.

It was both an exhilarating and a nerve-racking experience for María to wait and wait for her character to appear again-she does so as a dreamy, sea-soaked memory of Nestor and herself carousing on a beach (she liked that)-but from then on that other beautiful María hardly turned up again at all, save in some photographs. Two scenes María found particularly painful to watch: Nestor’s meeting with his future wife, Delores, at a bus stop while Nestor happens to be working on that canción-which Teresita recalled from the book-a bit of rekindled envy passing through María’s soul, and the film’s depiction of Nestor’s death in a car wreck while driving back from a job in New Jersey through a snowstorm, which had been surely taken from the real Nestor’s life. It was too much for María to bear, even if she knew they were just actors, and handsome ones at that; she got up to use the ladies’ room, where, after urinating, she stood before the mirror to retouch her lipstick.

She liked the film well enough, but she wondered why they couldn’t have done something more in the beginning with Nestor and María in Havana, just walking the streets and sitting in the placitas, holding hands; or portrayed the way he, with his head in the clouds, used to sing up into her window, and how they’d find musicians in the alleys and courtyards of Havana, Nestor playing his trumpet and making her feel proud; or even a scene of the way they’d race up the stairways to his friend’s solar, unable to keep their hands off each other-that would have been nice too. Then, thinking about what went on in that bed-nothing that could be shown in a Hollywood movie-she flew headlong into a vision of the life they might have lived had they stayed together in Havana, maybe raising a little brood of children, or maybe living in the States, in a house with a nice backyard, Nestor, a success or not, as her husband, doting on their children and, even in his sixties, ravishing her nightly with love.

She reached into her purse for her cigarettes. As she lit one, distant music throbbed through the walls, a trumpet solo rising above, voices singing; and then, just like that, in the blink of her mascara eyes, as she dabbed her face with a dampened hand towel and sighed, she saw in the mirror’s reflection Nestor Castillo himself, as gloriously handsome as he was in his youth in Havana, in a white guayabera and linen slacks, standing some ten feet behind her against the Italian-tiled ladies’ room walls.

“¿En qué piensas, Nestor?” she asked him. “Are you happy?” (And behind that, María, unable to forget the love-filled afternoons at the Payret, felt his fingers sinking inside her panties once again.) Nestor just smiled, and rather sadly so, in the way, as María had been taught, lost souls do, envying earthly life. “But the movie, what do you think?” she said to him. “It’s about you!” As an apparition trapped in some other world, he could not comment on such tawdry things, and when Nestor finally spoke, with hardly any voice at all, and so softly, he told her: “¿Pero, no sabes que te quería?” To which she answered, “And I loved you, mucho, mucho…” Just then, however, as Nestor seemed about to step towards her, two women in tight, slinky dresses, talking about how they would die to be fucked by the actor playing Cesar Castillo, strutted in, and with that, in the blink of an eye, Nestor vanished, his sad smile, on that soulful guapito face, as beguiling as Maria remembered. (Ay, pero Nestor.)

Reeling, she got back to her seat in time to watch a distraught Cesar Castillo, unable to perform anywhere since Nestor’s death, milling about the Manhattan club he had opened in his late brother’s memory. Nestor’s widow, Delores, wanting him to get back to the passion that is in his blood, implores him to go onstage and sing, yes, that song about the other love of Nestor’s life, “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Once that music starts, with all its flourishes, though the emotional logic of that moment escaped Teresita, and even María thought the wife surely had some cucarachas in her head to make such a request, Cesar agrees, and, as he belts out the movie version of Nestor’s song of longing for María, in a filmic sleight of hand, Nestor, in a white tuxedo, reappears magically by his brother’s side, as if he had indeed been resurrected from the dead.

Maria trembled, then sighed.

Afterwards, the principals were brought onstage and introduced, among them the author himself, who put on a hammy show of blowing kisses out to the audience. “Por Dios, who does he think he is, Marlon Brando?” Teresita asked her mother. And once the actors had taken their bows and the theater emptied, Teresita, María, and Luis made their way to the Versailles restaurant to eat a dinner of hearty Cuban fare and discuss the film. Luis’s favorite parts featured the character that Celia Cruz played, not just for her performance but because she was the only Cuban who had a major role in it. Teresita was grateful that the film exhibited restraint when it came to the love scenes-it was far less randy than the book-and she thought the sexy actors playing the brothers were exhilarating to watch. As for María? Had she been one of the celebrities interviewed by the press afterwards she would have summarized her reaction with a simple phrase: “Fue muy bonito”-“It was very nice.” But, the truth be told, there was something about the experience of watching the Mambo Kings movie that had left her feeling a little glum. It was if she had been dropped into a dream in which some other version of herself had become nothing more than a watered-down walk-on character in some fantastic show, as if she, the real María, who had just peered into the eyes of Nestor Castillo, had yet to really exist as far as the world was concerned.

Chapter FIFTY-ONE

She’d eventually get her just dues, however: not money but a modicum of recognition. After the film had been released in Miami, a Spanish-language radio station out of Hialeah, WCMQ, had queried its listeners about which version of “Beautiful María of My Soul”-the original, from 1955, or the one composed for the movie-was the better. Opinions were divided along generational lines-the older listeners, having their own memories, preferred the song as it had been written, while the younger folks voted, almost universally, for the one performed in the film. Along the way, while discussing the movie itself, the host of a nostalgia show entitled Cuando Cuba Era Cuba, in recalling that he had once met the Castillo brothers in Havana, wondered on air if anyone out in the listening audience happened to know anything about the woman for whom the original bolero had been composed. (“By all means,” the pitch went, “if you have information, please call in.”)

That query brought in responses by the drove; apparently there were more than just a few women out in south Florida ’s radio land, cubanas all, who called the station claiming to be none other than that grand beauty herself. Out in Northwest Terrace one morning, it happened that María, while preparing to head out to her dance studio, heard the following, as she was removing curlers from her hair.

“Muy buenos días. My name, of course, is María. I know that everyone is wondering who beautiful María is, and, well, I should tell you, señores y señoras, that it is me. I met Nestor Castillo, who in the movie Los Mambo Kings was played by that guapo Antonio Banderas, when I was a young and veerrrry beautiful woman. Yes, that’s true… I was on my way to meet my papi at the Gallego Society in Havana, and walking along the Paseo when my heel broke. And while I was bending over to pick it up, I saw Nestor, so handsome, so elegant, crouching down to get it for me. Well, while he handed over that heel and looked at me with his beautiful eyes, I knew that there was no resisting him. And so we became-how should an abuela put it?-lovers, hee, hee, hee.”

Another call:

“Señoras y señores, soy la Señora María Pena, and, veramente, I am a woman of late middle age now, but in my time, when I was una pollita, I frequented the clubs of Havana. I wasn’t one of those young ladies of easy persuasion to whom any man could suggest anything and win her favors-I would never sleep with a man outside of matrimony, do you understand that? But, I will tell you that men were attracted to me like flies to honey, and these two young Mambo Kings, I swear to you, were no different. Well, one night I happened to be in a club called the Eight Ball of Remedios when these two musicians, the Castillo brothers, and their little combo turned up. One of them, the older one-Cesar, I believe he was called-was very handsome but so arrogant and full of himself that he held no interest for me. I will tell you anyway, in all modesty, that he liked me a lot-and kept smiling my way-because I was very beautiful y tenía una figura fabulosa, round in all the right places, un cuerpo that left men dizzy to look at me… But then his brother Nestor, mi amorcito, came out holding a trumpet, and I can tell you it makes me burst with delight to remember que lindo he was, like a prince and not just any musician. And so refined and delicate in his movements that I nearly died with desire just looking at him… I watched him all night-and Nestorito certainly, and I mean certainly, noticed me… Afterwards he came over to my table, but so shyly, to tell me that my smiles had made him happy. Y bueno, after that he sat down right next to me, and we got to know each other a little; and that very night, after a bit of pleasant conversation, he looked deeply into my eyes, and, like a Valentino, declared that I was the kind of girl he might love. Well, the rest I cannot tell you, as young children might be listening, but I will only say this: when you hear that canción, ‘La bella María de mi alma,’ that María was me.”

That same morning, despite the impossibility of more than one beautiful María existing, still others vied for that role. Bemused, the program host took the calls good-naturedly enough, for there seemed to be no end to the number of late middle-aged cubanas who wanted to believe they were truly María. Oh, they met Nestor while strolling along the Malecón, or in the Cementerio de Colón, or out at the dog track; or they bumped into him in an arcade. There were so many claimants that the host began to have fun assigning these Marías numbers: “Here, on the line, we have María número siete.”

After a while, María, listening to that program over several mornings, finally lost her patience with that whole business and decided that she just had to come forward with her story. She had, after all, photographs of herself and Nestor to offer as proof, as well as a dozen faded letters he had sent her from New York in those days. And so María, in that atmosphere of hoopla-for everyone in Miami was still talking about that movie-called the station, but somewhat reluctantly, for even those years later the very thought of Nestor and what could have been still passed through her heart as a wistful lament.

A telephone interview with a producer, a nice young cubana named Estelle, followed a few days afterwards, and, short of describing Nestor’s pinga in marvelous detail, María could not have been more persuasive. And so as a lark and a possible amusement for the listeners of that show, for in a realm of so many other Marías she seemed the most credible, they invited her to appear live on the show. Crackpot or not, one Saturday morning she set out with Teresita to go on the air.

En route, María, pouting as she did whenever she contemplated the past, hardly said a word, as if she were saving herself for the interviewer, though she occasionally broke her silence over some landmark along the highway, her only utterances being “Eh” and “Sí” and “Mira, allí.” Once they had pulled into the radio station parking lot, which like so many others lacked charm, María, feeling somewhat delighted, put on a show for the roly-poly entranceway guard. Crossing the lot, she broke out into an impromptu rumba, shaking her shoulders and hips as if she were a young girl again, and as if this fellow could possibly have known just who she happend to be. Her daughter sighed, and the roly-poly attendant broke out into the broadest ain’t-that-just-like-my-grandma grin. It was under such circumstances that beautiful María, at the resilient age of sixty-two, más o menos, but still nicely put together, walked into the studio’s greenroom, where she was to wait beside her daughter for an hour before going on.

The young producer handed her a cup of orange juice, which she gratefully accepted, though, to be honest, María, her nerves on edge, would have preferred a drink of rum. To her medically astute daughter’s annoyance, she lit a cigarette (“Pero son Virginia Slims!”) and tapped her feet to the Cuban song the station was playing for its radio audience, “El manicero,” or “The Peanut Vendor,” as performed by Antonio Machín, lead singer of the Don Azpiazú Havana Casino Orchestra, circa 1932, his emphatic voice blaring amicably through the studio’s ceiling speakers. Aside from pointing to a basket of pastries and ordering “Pass me that one,” then “No, that one,” María had hardly a thing to say to Teresita, for when she felt nervous, María tended to descend into herself, her thoughts lost to the world. She passed the time looking over some People magazines while Teresita stayed busy rifling through a stack of hospital folders. A mind-bludgeoning block of advertisements and news stories about world and local events that hardly interested her boomed through the room, and then, finally, when she was nearly at the end of her patience, the producer escorted María into the broadcast booth.

There she took a seat before a foam-padded microphone, which, in its phallic bulk and the way it seemed to stare at her, she found both familiar and obtrusive. After a few more commercials, she waited for the host, this goateed fellow named Emilio Santos, to make his introduction.

As the segment began, he cued up a tape: it began with Marco Rizo’s stirring theme for the I Love Lucy show and then slipped into Desi’s introduction of the Castillo brothers as they had appeared on the mock stage of the program’s Club Tropicana in the spring of 1956 to perform “Beautiful María of My Soul.” With its violins, piano, and the uplifting harmonies of Nestor and Cesar Castillo, that bolero played in its entirety-some three minutes. María listened carefully and, hardly moving at all-she was just staring at her daughter seated in a corner-emanated both dignity and a sense of justly earned entitlement. Finally, it seemed, after so many years of obscurity, her moment was about to arrive.

“Compañeros, amigos, damas y caballeros,” the host excitedly began. “I hope you are enjoying this lovely morning, and speaking of loveliness, for true beauty is never subject to the castigations of age, with us today is the one and only María Rivera, as she called herself for the stage… If this name does not immediately ring any bells with my younger listeners, please go ask your abuelos-your grandfolks-about the 1956 bolero the original ‘Beautiful María of My Soul,’ a cherished song from la Cuba que fue. As my listeners know, we have been up to our necks with other Marías lately-what imaginations some of you ladies have!-but our visitor today, a most elegant and well-preserved woman, surely beautiful, has presented the station with undeniable proof of her claims-mainly letters from Nestor Castillo himself, and some wonderful photos that, well, it breaks one’s heart to see, for this couple was obviously in love.”

Turning his chair towards her and raising a hand as a cue, he said: “Señora María García, muy, muy buenos días, and thank you for coming on this show. So now, we can begin, yes?”

“Sí, señor.”

But before she could say anything, he started reading from a sheet.

“A longtime resident of Miami, María García y Cifuentes hailed originally from our beloved province of Pinar del Río and moved to Havana proper during that city’s golden age, in the late 1940s. There, she was a popular figure in the Havana club scene as a dancer.” (He cleared his throat, seemingly suffering from a cold.) “Performing in some of the best clubs in those heady days before the greatest debacle of Cuban history took place, she also fell passionately in love with the composer of that most famous song. She, the one and only beautiful María herself, is here today to tell us her story.”

María did not say a word for a few moments, the host prompting her. And then, for the next seven minutes, until a commercial break, she spoke slowly, serenely about her valle, her papito, and the little tragedies that led her to Havana even while the program’s host, seemingly exasperated at times, kept interjecting, “But tell us, señora, about Nestor Castillo!”

She finally did, shrugging. “When I met Nestor, on the street where I lived in Havana, he just reminded me of those pure souls I knew from my childhood, the kind of fellow who would never hurt anyone intentionally-he was a romantic sort, loved to sing to me, loved to dream aloud in my presence.” She sipped from a cup of water. “I knew no one else like him. He treated me as if I were made of gold, loved me as if there were no tomorrow-why I let him go to America without me, I cannot say. But he was the one, as the old songs say, who got away.”

Then commercials, and the host, fearing that the segment might be dragging, took another approach. “Now that we’re back, may I ask you a question about the movie, which I understand you’ve seen?”

“Of course.”

“How did that feel to see yourself depicted on-screen?”

She shrugged. “It was okay. I liked the actress who played me well enough-a lovely muchacha. But it wasn’t me, you understand. I just wish that someone would one day make a real story about us Cubans, by Cubans, for this country to see, entiendes?”

And that was all. Thanking María, the program’s host, disappointed in his hope for a saucy story or two, bade her well and reminded his audience that they had just been listening to the real beautiful María, and to please refrain from further calls about the matter of her identity. As a concession to her appearance, he plugged her dance studio in Miami and made sure that she and Teresita left with two coffee mugs, emblazoned with the station’s logo. On the drive back, María did not have much to say about the experience, except that she felt as if she had been trapped in a jar or, more graphically, that someone had shoved a dedo-a finger-up her fundillo- her ass.

“But, Mama, it was you who wanted to go on that show.”

“I know,” María told Teresita. “I was angry that so many women were claiming to be me. But you know what? Even as I sat there talking to that very nice man, I got the feeling I was wasting my time. None of us can go back. All those memories are what? Just little dreams.”

Nevertheless, from that single radio interview, a lot of people became interested in the real María. El Nuevo Herald, stoking the nostalgic embers of its Cuban audience, did a feature article about her for its Sunday Arts supplement. A photograph of a much younger María, her shapely body posed upon a couch-size magenta seashell in one of those glittering showgirl’s outfits, with a ridiculously high plumed fake-gem-studded hat piece balanced precariously atop her head, appeared on the front page. And, while they had provided a brief, more or less accurate biography of her life, along with some quotations, to María’s greater satisfaction, they had ended the piece with one of the verses she had written in Luis’s class: “If Cuba Were a Man.” Cristina Saralegui, who had a very popular talk show on the Univision network, invited María on her program, and while María was most flattered by her interest, she felt too intimidated about appearing on camera and (possibly) shattering her image as an eternal beauty, so she reluctantly refused. Even Don Francisco, of Sábado Gigante, had someone on his staff call María to ask if she would be willing to attend a filming of his program out of Miami, just so he could introduce her from the audience. This she almost did but changed her mind at the last minute, suffering from a terrible headache, or so she claimed. But she agreed to appear alongside the actress Talisa Soto in a print advertisement for Europa perfume, shot in South Beach for a promotion about the “Two Marías, eternally graceful and fragrant.” (The actress was very nice, and María liked the fact that Ms. Soto had brought along her charming Puerto Rican mother, and the fact that she, doted over and dressed up in a wonderful gown, did not come off badly in the photographs and was paid a two-thousand-dollar fee for her troubles.)

And in her neighborhood? From just that smattering of publicity, she became a most notable figure; a lot of folks along her street who never used to, suddenly invited María and Teresita in for Sunday dinners. (These she did not mind.) If there occurred any alarming incidents, they had to do with jealousy, when some women, recognizing her in downtown Miami, glanced at María enviously, as some used to back in Havana, and her notoriety induced more men, usually much older ones, to stare at her hopefully, though rarely with lust. (She had even been approached for autographs again!) This lasted for about six months, and in that time as a local celebrity, a silly period as far as Teresita was concerned, beautiful María rarely ventured from her home without putting on a pair of large black sunglasses, even at night, as if she were a movie star, and she had taken to wearing an enormous sunhat by day, with a florid silk scarf tied around its brim, its length trailing unmistakably behind her as if it were the tail of a kite.

But for all of that, and despite the fact that at least people now recognized her as the María of that song, María made the discovery that she simply didn’t care about being better known. Her past life with Nestor, despite that song, that novel, that movie, was most splendidly preserved in the realm of her own memories.

What mattered to her the most? Her daughter, and her motherly concerns over Teresita’s tepid and unromantic existence. While Teresa hardly paid attention to that notion, her workweeks proceeding routinely as before, María’s own love life hadn’t turned out too badly. Once she got used to the idea of Luis, despite his plainness, his bony body, his pocked, unsymmetrical face-those eyes that always seemed to be rheumy behind wire-rimmed glasses-she fell in love with another side of him. In fact, after a while, as in a fairy tale, the more beautiful María looked at Luis, the more his homeliness began to fall away. Though he seemed hardly anything like the handsome Nestor Castillo, with his liquid, soulful eyes, María, after so many years of general indifference to men and of few expectations, came to think of that Ichabod Crane-looking Cuban as somewhat handsome. And, in time, given the little comforts she extracted from his presence, María ached more for his company.

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.