Beautiful María of My Soul

[1] At any rate, that’s basically what happened that night, even as hearsay and the passage of time would embellish that story somewhat differently. According to one of the neighborhood kids, a friend of Nestor’s son, a plump, myopic, and curious fellow who in later years often sat with Cesar Castillo to hear him talk about his glorious dance hall past, that night unfolded differently. Instead of heading straightaway to their hotel on that snowy evening, Desi and his wife decided to visit Nestor’s walk-up apartment on La Salle Street for a midnight meal. Mind you, all those years later, Cesar Castillo was fairly plastered and torn up about all kinds of things in the telling, but even so, with his eyes getting almost teary, he was quite convincing. As Cesar put it, Desi-“a helluva good fellow”-couldn’t have been more gracious, and it wasn’t long before he was sitting in their little kitchen, making himself at home. After savoring a big platter of arroz con pollo and some lemon and garlic and salt-drowned fried tostones, which Delores had prepared in a cloud of sizzling oil and smoke, he strummed Nestor’s guitar and sang a few Cuban songs-“Mama Inéz” and “Guantanamera”-for his new friends. Cesar would swear that Desi himself grew teary eyed over the warmth of their Cuban hospitality and indeed felt perfectly at home, despite the flecking ceiling and hissing steam pipes and half crumpled linoleum floor. Cesar told that story so many times that, in some quarters, it became the official version. In fact, the plump kid went so far as to eventually put it in a book that he would write about the brothers, even if it didn’t get everything right. Whether Desi actually made it there or not, one thing was certain: that wintry night in 1955, the brothers had indeed made Arnaz’s acquaintance at the Mambo Nine club and were promised a chance to appear on his show, where, indeed, as walk-on characters playing Ricky Ricardo’s singing cousins from Cuba, they were to immortalize Nestor’s tormented canción de amor “Beautiful María of My Soul,” a song which his former amante was to hear soon enough on the streets of Havana.