(Oh, but María’s lectures, while the poor young woman was just trying to mind her own business: lectures about broken hearts and the loneliness of solitude, the stupidity of today’s juventud, squandering their opportunities for life and love, especially the ones who got too many American cucarachas in their heads!)

To please María, Teresa dipped into the crowded, overwrought Miami club scene, singles nights at different venues, and while she occasionally went out on the dates that her mother had cajoled from friends, Teresita had yet to meet anyone, Cuban or not, she thought compatible. (“So what was wrong with that one?” María inevitably asked.) Her mother’s continual urgings, it should be said, occasionally got on Teresita’s nerves, becoming, at a certain point, something Teresita just didn’t want to hear about.

But they had their good times: paid well, living cheaply, Teresita was able to take beautiful María to Italy on a vacation. To Rome, to Florence and Venice, then Naples and Sorrento and back. Her mother loved not only the way Italian men regarded women but the gruff yet kindly vendors in the markets with whom, as during her stay in the Bronx, she could speak Spanish and always be understood. She dissolved in the sunsets, daydreamed in the wisteria-rich gardens, and, touring the ruins of Pompeii, wondered why people bothered to preserve such old things. Roma, in particular, with its self-contained and lively neighborhoods, so reminded María of Havana that she felt completely at home. And she liked the way men gave her daughter the most interested looks, following her every move down the street. “You see,” she’d say, “they know how to appreciate you,” Teresita simply nodding.

What most surprised María, however, was how she felt after that two-week sojourn when they arrived back in Miami. She couldn’t wait to get home, not just to Omar, whom she had left with her next-door neighbor Annabella, but to the city itself, and the familiarity of her neighborhood and house. She’d feel the same when they made their other trips, now and then: to a medical convention in Los Angeles, to a seaside resort along the coast of South Carolina, and to Washington, D.C., where that elegant lady and her daughter acted like happy tourists.

Then back, as always, to the usual routines of their days.

PART V. Oh Yes, That Book

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.”