“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.