[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.”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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]