Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
One Tuesday evening in 1955, the year that Fulgencio Batista granted Fidel Castro amnesty and the rebel leader, fleeing to Mexico, began to undertake the planning of his revolution; at an hour when Havana’s nightlife was just getting under way and María sat backstage preparing for her first show as usual, some two thousand miles north, snow was softly falling in New York City. It was just past nine, and the Castillo brothers, along with several of their musicians, had come down from La Salle Street to mount the stage at a club called the Mambo Nine on West Fifty-eighth in Manhattan. Among the numbers they had rehearsed for their showcase performance was a bolero that Nestor Castillo had been working on, to his older brother’s exasperation, from the first days they had set foot in that city: some pain in the neck love song called “Beautiful María of My Soul.”
As of that night, Nestor had written so many versions of it that Cesar, getting fed up with hearing every new one, had told him, “Either perform it or let the damned thing go.” He said this in the same tone of voice he used when telling Nestor to wake up and forget about María, beautiful and luscious though she might have been. “No woman is worth the agony,” he’d say, and Nestor would nod, agreeing, but he’d still mess with even more variations of it, until, after six years in that country, even he began to wonder if he’d lost his mind.
On the stage of the Mambo Nine, as Nestor set some sheet music down before their sometime pianist, Gordito, whose exuberant swaying and tremendous weight sometimes broke the benches during their up-tempo mambos, he still winced from his memories of María. They followed him like a dream, as if he were roving again through the streets of Havana, with its dense, bustling confluences of decay, grandeur, and thriving humanity, her high heels tapping on the cobblestones beneath her, and the aroma of fresh-baked bread and crackers from a bakery filling the air, María beaming at him with affection, their bodies, so used to each other by then that, no matter what else he remembered—sitting on a bench in a deserted church plaza, at an early hour of the morning, holding hands with María, or stopping to buy something from an old mustached guajiro standing sadly on a corner with his panniers of bananas and plantains to sell, or the black maids emerging from the doorways with baskets of laundry balanced upon their heads, smiling happily at them—they were in love after all—all such memories, of his times with María in Havana, its windows like sad, drooping eyes, always circled those moments of intimacy that, even those years later, he could still not get out of his head.
Trumpet in hand, his longish fingers testing its valves, he remembered her body and dampened skin, the sight of her opened legs, her knees trembling as she spread them so wide. A stream of notes, fluttering like blackbirds through the room, a slightly pained expression on Nestor’s noble face, the memory of how María’s womb had always felt like damp blossoms, her skin tasting of the salty and sun-swept sea…It gave him an air of distraction sometimes, for behind such recollections a kind of cruel weave curled and twisted through Nestor’s Havana. And not the Havana of travel brochures, or of the seedy and glamorous establishments that reeked of gangsters and molls, and down-on-their-luck gamblers, or displaced American socialites in search of a night out with some handsome Cuban gigolos, but the city where she had thrown him off.
Then the devil, perching like a little bird on his shoulder, asked Nestor, “Who had the finest culo in Cuba?” and he answered, María, of course, as if he could feel her plump and superb nalgitas quivering and nearly slapping his fingers with their sweat again, her rump’s pubic hair brushing juicily against his knuckles. All this even while he reached to bum one of Cesar’s Lucky Strikes and, on his way, almost tripped over a microphone stand.
Lordy, what a pain: his memories of María still nagged at Nestor even when he had a wife, whom he deeply loved, the studious and pretty and sturdy Delores Fuentes, the mother of their two children, Eugenio and Leticia.
Nestor just couldn’t help it. Already away from his beloved Cuba (and María) for too long, he remained divided within himself, the sort of man who believed he could love two women at once and keep it a secret. Too bad he wasn’t very good at that whole business, at least when it came to his wife, Delores. Take his songwriting: for all the boleros with their love-drenched lyrics that Nestor had composed during his years in New York, he had yet to write one especially for her. Even if he often told Delores that every flower, star, and sunset, radiant cardinal, and dulcet nightingale on the wing in his songs was really about her, que ella fue la primavera extravagante, y olía dulce del mar—that she embodied the extravagance of spring, and smelled sweetly of the sea—how could she have believed that this was entirely true? When she’d see Nestor brooding by their living room window and he seemed to be staring out over the rooftops at the moon’s waning crest—his entire body a sigh—she wondered if he really loved her at all. He knew that he sometimes gave her good reason for such doubts, hating himself for those days when, consumed by some inescapable grief and longing, he could hardly say a word to anyone, his own little children mystified by the pain they saw in his eyes. No villain, he really didn’t want to seem so sad, and always found ways to make up for the unhappiness he brought into their home: gifts of candy and toys for his children, flowers and books for Delores, which he’d deliver with sincerity and doting affection.
And then, once again, he became lost to the world.
At least he had music and family to console him. Up on the bandstand, and thinking about them, Nestor made a sign of the cross quickly and kissed the little golden crucifix that, weighing no more than a quarter, hung from his neck, thanking God—or whatever made people dewy eyed when they looked up at the skies—for what he, despite his romantic stupidities, had been given.
Though he had written María dozens of letters over the years and kept his marriage a secret from her, he sincerely worshiped Delores. If Nestor lived in a kind of purgatory in those days because of María, without Delores he would have been in hell, and he thanked God for her good nature, her patience, strength, and the loveliness of her spirit. Passion was a large part of it too. During their courtship, which began one afternoon in 1950 when he met Delores as she, startlingly pretty and buxom in a maid’s dress, sat at a bus stop on Madison Avenue with a bundle of schoolbooks in her arms, he could never have enough of her. At first, a mutual timidity and propriety informed their polite encounters. They went to the movies and to church, fed pigeons and squirrels in the park, ate ice cream and apple pie at the Schrafft’s on Broadway, and attended the local basement church bazaars. Everywhere they went seemed a happy place. Once they crossed a certain line, a naughty delirium took over, and he almost forgot María. They kissed on the rooftops, groped each other in tenement stairwells, and fought frantically in the living room of his and Cesar’s instrument-filled apartment, Nestor trying to lure her to bed. One afternoon, while her older sister and occasional chaperone Ana María was away and Cesar was holed up somewhere in the Bronx with a hatcheck girl he’d met in a ballroom, Delores gave in, and Nestor, drowning in her skin, fell in love again. That ardor lasted for a long time, but after a while, when that radiant period of seemingly insatiable desire passed and they had married and were a family, it came down to this: when he laid his head against his pillow at night and dreamed, for all his wishes not to, he still dreamed of María.
It disturbed him, it rankled his heart, and it made Nestor gloomy in moments when he should have been happy. That emotion of feeling free from the burdens of life came to him only through music, when he and his brother were on a stage performing and he would lose himself in the nameless bliss of harmonies and sonorous trumpet solos. Or else when he was writing songs. Not the crazed mambos that his brash jamoncito of an older brother Cesar relished but those pensive ballads and sad boleros into which Nestor poured his life and soul. These compositions were so heartfelt as to move even the more jaded musicians in their band, the Mambo Kings. Struggling fellows, who’d been around the block many times over, they were touched by the composer’s guileless sincerity. In fact, the band members had a joke amongst themselves, that if he were a king of Spain in the sixteenth century, his name would have been Nestor the Good. (Or with some, “Nestor el Bobón, Nestor the Dopey One.”)
Languishing plaintively over his tunes on a living room couch in their La Salle Street apartment, a guitar by his side, Nestor approached his songwriting with reverence, as if he were stepping into a confessional. Sometimes the emotions such songs engendered in him were so powerful that Nestor secretly wept; fortunately Cesar, the final judge of his lyrics—he never had any problems with the melodies—was on hand to exorcise the more maudlin of their sentiments.
“Little brother,” he would say, Nestor’s pad, dense with his neat, diminutive scribbles, open on his lap, “to be truthful, this line—about the world flooding with tears—stinks, it reeks of self-pity. So get rid of it! You hear me?”
And Nestor, loving and trusting his brother, always went along with his advice. Why wouldn’t he? Cesar, so unreliable in other circumstances, had pretty good judgment about music, particularly when it came to Nestor’s compositions. Despite his preference for earthly rather than spiritual pleasures and his bluntness of character, Cesar, a musician down to his molecules, knew what he was doing. In the end, his arrangements of even his brother’s most soporific and sentimental songs always brought out the best. Songs that might just have made one sigh he enhanced by writing swooning countermelodies, usually for violins or voice, during the choruses and turnarounds, and then those songs, so ably ornamented, made their listeners either weep or fall in love.
Thus from Nestor gushed fine and plaintive tunes such as “?Porqué me dejaste?”—“Why Did You Leave Me?” and “Sonrisas de amor”—“Smiles of Love,” and a favorite with the crowds of the Bronx and Brooklyn ballrooms their band performed at for peanuts was a bolero called “La vida sin felicidad”—“Life without Happiness.” That last bolero was so good that onstage, Nestor, looking out over the crowds and smiling, would take much pleasure in watching many a rum-happy couple begin to neck and kiss when its sonorous melodies rose into a crescendo. That kind of reaction, more than the scant money the Mambo Kings were making, kept him—and Cesar—going.
And so, in that way, Nestor came to write many a commendable bolero, some of them recorded in a cramped studio on 125th Street off Lenox Avenue, the black and brittle 78s lacquer-covered pressings of those songs mostly selling in the market-day stalls and bodegas of Spanish Harlem. At best, a few hundred of them sold every month, and at royalties of two cents a copy, he and Cesar weren’t making much money at all. In fact, little had changed with the band after four years or so of performing; they remained as obscure and underappreciated as always. Occasional glamour boys by night, the brothers still spent their days nestled under the shadows of the West Side Highway overpass, just north of 125th Street, in the long, frigid vaults of a waterside meatpacking plant, hauling sides of beef to and fro, their long white frocks washed over with blood. The palms of their hands sported not only the calluses that come to guitar, trumpet, and conga players but also the freezer burns and bone-splinter cuts, nicks, and bruises common to men hoisting one-hundred-pound-plus flanks of fat-marbled beef onto their sore, chafed shoulders. It was hard work, but at least they had regular salaries to show for it, and all the pork chops and sirloin steaks they could stash under their musty coats and shirts for home.
They’d performed at the Mambo Nine before, without much fanfare or expectation, their dream, as nobodies from Cuba, to be discovered by some big-time recording executive or talent scout. It had yet to happen. But that evening, a certain couple, causing a stir, walked into the club. A tall, statuesque lady with a great head of red hair and flickering blue eyes so pretty that Cesar noticed them from the stage, and by her side, a dapperly dressed man in a blue serge suit—Desi Arnaz and his wife, Lucille Ball. They’d dropped by because Esmeralda Lopez, the owner of the club, an old friend of Desi’s from Cuba, had told him about two Cuban brothers, fairly new to the States from Havana, who could do it all: They sang like angels, played half a dozen instruments from piano to congas and trumpet, and danced up a storm. Drop-dead handsome, they could also write beautiful songs, particularly the younger brother, Nestor Castillo.
She pointed them out on the stage: Cesar was the strapping, broad-shouldered fellow in the velvet jacket with black lapels and the frilly shirt, a cigarette clenched between his lips, his dark wavy hair, a pompadour at its crest, gleaming with brilliantine. And Nestor, the one holding a trumpet, though a little shorter and far thinner than the majestic Cesar Castillo, had the air of a handsome priest, so good looking that he hardly bothered with the flamboyant grooming and rings that his older brother considered vital to his public image. The show began around ten, and on that night, after Cesar and Nestor and their musicians—Gordito at the piano, Andy on the bass, and Pito on the drums—had knocked themselves out trying to entertain the crowd with several uplifting mambos to little applause, a pissed off Cesar had looked over the room. About twenty people were in the club at that early hour, mainly big-spending corporate types, swilling twenty-dollar bottles of champagne, out to end the night in bed with their secretaries. Tapping his brother on the shoulder and looking out over the room, Cesar said, “What the hell, let’s play that ‘María’ song and see what happens, huh?” Shortly, Gordito, reading off a penciled chart, began improvising a florid introduction. Then the bass came in and the drums. It was written in the key of A minor—la menor—Nestor’s favorite, and like a malague?a, its opening chords descended flamenco style into a major resolve and chorus.
Now from the moment that Cesar, with his cigarette-ruined yet soulful baritone, stood before the microphone and intoned that song’s first words, “Oh, love’s sadness, Why did you come to me?” and with Nestor, so apprehensive at first, joining in during the chorus, their harmonizing lovely to the ear, and playing his trumpet like a man possessed by love, even that booze-soaked and jaded audience had started nodding in appreciation of its haunted melody. Sitting beside Esmeralda, Desi Arnaz, smoking a Havana puro, felt greatly touched by that song. It was so filled with longing that it seemed to be as much about missing Cuba as about missing a former love, a sentiment that Desi, having lived out in California for so long, must surely have shared. He certainly seemed to, for at the song’s conclusion, he stood up and applauded the Castillo brothers enthusiastically.
After the rest of their set, not a bad set at all, when the brothers had come offstage to relax and made their way through the room, they went over to Esmeralda’s table, where she made their introductions.
Lacking the luxury of a television set, the brothers didn’t know anything about his show, but they had heard Desi’s name around and knew he was the most famous cubano in America. In fact, Cesar had some kind of vague recollection of meeting Arnaz, as a very young man, many years before in some hilltop club in Santiago when they were both starting out and working that circuit as singers. Still, they were immediately friendly, shaking hands, rapping each other’s backs, and almost getting teary eyed—with Cubans, that wasn’t an unusual thing. Arnaz was dark featured, handsome, and charismatic in a matinee idol way, and his wife, delicately sipping a mango punch through a straw, was a strikingly lovely woman who hardly blinked through the ensuing conversation. The heart of what they talked about, beyond the niceties of where they had both come from—Oriente, the most easterly province in Cuba—and after they had clicked champagne glasses? It came down to this: Known for employing cubanos and helping many an aspiring musician out, Arnaz asked them if they would ever consider flying out to California to perform that “beautiful María” song for a taping of his TV show.
“It’s called I Love Lucy,” he said.
“Oh yes, of course, I Love Lucy.”
Cesar scratched the back of his head at the offer. They weren’t actors but could surely use a real break, for after years of working second-tier clubs and ballrooms, and playing Catskills gigs, their band, the Mambo Kings, deserving better, hadn’t really gotten anywhere at all. (This was practically Cesar’s fault—he didn’t like the gangsters who ran the best places and had gotten a reputation among them as a difficult and arrogant two-bit singer, way too big for his britches. It didn’t help that he refused to sign any shifty contracts or that he’d bedded down many of their most luscious molls.) Looking over at Nestor, his dark eyebrows raised, Cesar asked: “What do you think, Brother?”
And Nestor, with Esmeralda gently caressing his back as if he was a favorite son, nodded his timid consent. It wasn’t easy. Deep down, the very thought that his lingering pain over and devotion to María—the woman whom Cesar called “a hard-on’s dream”—would be aired before the entire country troubled him. What would Delores think? But his brother was his brother, and there was very little that Nestor wouldn’t do for Cesar.
Smiling, Cesar told Arnaz that nothing would please them more.
“Great! Our show is number one in the country,” Arnaz told them. “When you perform that song, maybe it’ll become a number one tune!” He lit another cigar. Then, slipping into Spanish, he explained that his wife wanted to get back to their hotel, the Plaza, and that they’d had a tiring day, though, confidentially, he wouldn’t mind at all just sitting with them and catching the floor shows, but, oh, his was a demanding schedule, which his wife, Lucille, always tapping upon the tiny face of her diamond-movement watch, kept him to.
As Arnaz was about to leave—Lucille Ball was already by the coat check gathering their garments—he said to the brothers, “I guarantee that you’ll have a good time in Los Angeles. But if you have any problems with the music, my good friend Marco Rizo, my arranger, and pianist on the show, lives right here in town. Give him a call, huh?” He scribbled out a number on a card and dropped it on the table. With that, Arnaz, a broad smile on his face, joined his wife; Cesar followed after them, standing on the curbside without a topcoat, a filterless cigarette in hand, his body shivering in the chill, but still waving at the famous couple as they drove away in their limousine through the falling snow.
LATER, AFTER SEVERAL HOURS OF SITTING UP DRINKING WITH his brother, and driving him crazy with all his doubts—“Was that canción really any good?” (“Yes, Brother, how many times do I have to tell you!”)—Nestor lay beside his wife, Delores, absently fondling her breasts but thinking about María. If he loved her enough to write that song, why did performing it for the first time in public leave him so low? And why was he filled with such utter misery when, for the first time, he and Cesar finally had a chance at some success? And then he slipped back again into that period of darkness in Havana, when María had thrown him off, and remembered what Cesar had later told him again and again: “Why be stupid about that María when you have such a wonderful woman as Delores in your life?” Ah, but Delores. He’d always told her that “Beautiful María of My Soul” was just a song he’d been fooling with, and there he was, after six years in the States, lying beside Delores and wishing he were back in Havana with María. And he hated himself for that thought, for Delores certainly deserved better. “Te amo, Delores,” he whispered to her again and again. But why was that hole in his heart, like a pin shoved through a photograph from one’s happier youth—as if real happiness was never really possible? Why was he wasting his affections on a woman who had turned into air? He didn’t know, he was just a citified campesino at heart, after all, didn’t know anything about the way real Cuban men treated women. “No soy honesto,” he told himself that night. “No soy decente”—“I’m neither honest or decent.” And he hated himself even more. But thank God that his body, in times of such gloom, always faithfully took over. Kept awake by the clanking of steam pipes, he found himself lifting up the hem of Delores’s nightgown and, feeling the heat of her bottom, drew back her underwear and entered her from behind, Delores, half asleep, sighing at first and then pushing back in a grinding motion and gasping, but not too loudly because she didn’t want the children to hear at the far end of the hall, Nestor, in those same moments, still thinking about María. Then he came after several powerful thrusts, and once he floated back down to earth, he hated himself anew for having that name, that face, that body still lingering stubbornly in his dreams—ah yes, y co?o!—María, angel of the heavens, delicious as the balmy dawn off the Malecón and, as women are in many a bolero, an unforgettable apparition of love.*