Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

Then the houselights dimmed. A musical prelude, a shot of Havana, a sonorous trumpet playing, and boom-the interior of a Havana nightclub, with a mambo troupe gyrating onstage and then the outraged Cesar Castillo, played by the handsome actor Armand Assante, charging through a dressing room and approaching, rather roughly, a dancer, beautiful María, portrayed by the gorgeous Talisa Soto, whom he accuses of being a whore for the way she had thrown off his younger brother Nestor. Her gangster novio and his cronies intercede, and Cesar ends up with his throat cut in an alley, wherein a bereft, perhaps guilt-ridden beautiful María kneels before him. While he should be bleeding to death, despite a kerchief wrapped around his neck, it was Dr. Teresa’s opinion that, in real life, he wouldn’t have long to live, and María’s opinion that no such thing had ever happened, though she enjoyed the fact that she was being played by so dazzling a woman. Tenderly the film’s beautiful María begs Cesar Castillo to take Nestor away to America, and so the plot’s mechanism begins, for the next scenes are of a well recovered Cesar Castillo, looking sharp in a sporty shirt and shades, dancing the mambo down the narrow aisle of a bus headed north to New York, a charming moment, with a solemn, forlorn, tightly wound Nestor, played by Antonio Banderas, no doubt thinking gloomily about María. Later, while settled in New York in the early 1950s, the brothers form their orchestra the Mambo Kings. And along the way, Nestor is shown working on his bolero “Beautiful María of My Soul,” which, as eventually performed by the brothers in a nightclub and later on the I Love Lucy show, in an episode invented for the film, bore little resemblance to the bolero which María’s former love, Nestor Castillo, had written and recorded with his brother Cesar and actually sung on the real Lucy show those many years before.

It was both an exhilarating and a nerve-racking experience for María to wait and wait for her character to appear again-she does so as a dreamy, sea-soaked memory of Nestor and herself carousing on a beach (she liked that)-but from then on that other beautiful María hardly turned up again at all, save in some photographs. Two scenes María found particularly painful to watch: Nestor’s meeting with his future wife, Delores, at a bus stop while Nestor happens to be working on that canción-which Teresita recalled from the book-a bit of rekindled envy passing through María’s soul, and the film’s depiction of Nestor’s death in a car wreck while driving back from a job in New Jersey through a snowstorm, which had been surely taken from the real Nestor’s life. It was too much for María to bear, even if she knew they were just actors, and handsome ones at that; she got up to use the ladies’ room, where, after urinating, she stood before the mirror to retouch her lipstick.

She liked the film well enough, but she wondered why they couldn’t have done something more in the beginning with Nestor and María in Havana, just walking the streets and sitting in the placitas, holding hands; or portrayed the way he, with his head in the clouds, used to sing up into her window, and how they’d find musicians in the alleys and courtyards of Havana, Nestor playing his trumpet and making her feel proud; or even a scene of the way they’d race up the stairways to his friend’s solar, unable to keep their hands off each other-that would have been nice too. Then, thinking about what went on in that bed-nothing that could be shown in a Hollywood movie-she flew headlong into a vision of the life they might have lived had they stayed together in Havana, maybe raising a little brood of children, or maybe living in the States, in a house with a nice backyard, Nestor, a success or not, as her husband, doting on their children and, even in his sixties, ravishing her nightly with love.

She reached into her purse for her cigarettes. As she lit one, distant music throbbed through the walls, a trumpet solo rising above, voices singing; and then, just like that, in the blink of her mascara eyes, as she dabbed her face with a dampened hand towel and sighed, she saw in the mirror’s reflection Nestor Castillo himself, as gloriously handsome as he was in his youth in Havana, in a white guayabera and linen slacks, standing some ten feet behind her against the Italian-tiled ladies’ room walls.

“¿En qué piensas, Nestor?” she asked him. “Are you happy?” (And behind that, María, unable to forget the love-filled afternoons at the Payret, felt his fingers sinking inside her panties once again.) Nestor just smiled, and rather sadly so, in the way, as María had been taught, lost souls do, envying earthly life. “But the movie, what do you think?” she said to him. “It’s about you!” As an apparition trapped in some other world, he could not comment on such tawdry things, and when Nestor finally spoke, with hardly any voice at all, and so softly, he told her: “¿Pero, no sabes que te quería?” To which she answered, “And I loved you, mucho, mucho…” Just then, however, as Nestor seemed about to step towards her, two women in tight, slinky dresses, talking about how they would die to be fucked by the actor playing Cesar Castillo, strutted in, and with that, in the blink of an eye, Nestor vanished, his sad smile, on that soulful guapito face, as beguiling as Maria remembered. (Ay, pero Nestor.)

Reeling, she got back to her seat in time to watch a distraught Cesar Castillo, unable to perform anywhere since Nestor’s death, milling about the Manhattan club he had opened in his late brother’s memory. Nestor’s widow, Delores, wanting him to get back to the passion that is in his blood, implores him to go onstage and sing, yes, that song about the other love of Nestor’s life, “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Once that music starts, with all its flourishes, though the emotional logic of that moment escaped Teresita, and even María thought the wife surely had some cucarachas in her head to make such a request, Cesar agrees, and, as he belts out the movie version of Nestor’s song of longing for María, in a filmic sleight of hand, Nestor, in a white tuxedo, reappears magically by his brother’s side, as if he had indeed been resurrected from the dead.

Maria trembled, then sighed.

Afterwards, the principals were brought onstage and introduced, among them the author himself, who put on a hammy show of blowing kisses out to the audience. “Por Dios, who does he think he is, Marlon Brando?” Teresita asked her mother. And once the actors had taken their bows and the theater emptied, Teresita, María, and Luis made their way to the Versailles restaurant to eat a dinner of hearty Cuban fare and discuss the film. Luis’s favorite parts featured the character that Celia Cruz played, not just for her performance but because she was the only Cuban who had a major role in it. Teresita was grateful that the film exhibited restraint when it came to the love scenes-it was far less randy than the book-and she thought the sexy actors playing the brothers were exhilarating to watch. As for María? Had she been one of the celebrities interviewed by the press afterwards she would have summarized her reaction with a simple phrase: “Fue muy bonito”-“It was very nice.” But, the truth be told, there was something about the experience of watching the Mambo Kings movie that had left her feeling a little glum. It was if she had been dropped into a dream in which some other version of herself had become nothing more than a watered-down walk-on character in some fantastic show, as if she, the real María, who had just peered into the eyes of Nestor Castillo, had yet to really exist as far as the world was concerned.

She’d eventually get her just dues, however: not money but a modicum of recognition. After the film had been released in Miami, a Spanish-language radio station out of Hialeah, WCMQ, had queried its listeners about which version of “Beautiful María of My Soul”-the original, from 1955, or the one composed for the movie-was the better. Opinions were divided along generational lines-the older listeners, having their own memories, preferred the song as it had been written, while the younger folks voted, almost universally, for the one performed in the film. Along the way, while discussing the movie itself, the host of a nostalgia show entitled Cuando Cuba Era Cuba, in recalling that he had once met the Castillo brothers in Havana, wondered on air if anyone out in the listening audience happened to know anything about the woman for whom the original bolero had been composed. (“By all means,” the pitch went, “if you have information, please call in.”)