In this lousy frame of mind, I walked into my building entranceway and got my mail. Occasionally I’d receive a “fan” letter—in the same way I kept every review for that book, so I did the letters, maybe ten in all, which I’d answer with as much grace and gratitude as I could muster. Mainly I’d contend with the same roster of bills—“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” I would say to myself while flipping through them.
That evening the mail included a creamy envelope of some thickness, whose return addressee was an organization I had only just recently heard about, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it might say. I was sitting in my living room, smoking a cigarette, when I tore it open, and even as I reread the thing, I could hardly believe its contents. I must have read it a half dozen times when I finally realized its significance. That letter, quite simply, offered me an extraordinary opportunity: Would I, the recipient, be willing and available to accept, if so offered to him, a paid year’s residence as a writing fellow at the American Academy in Rome? The fellowship would come with a monthly stipend, a travel allowance, living quarters in a villa, all my meals, and a studio. It was to begin in the autumn of 1985. Among the things that hit me in those moments was my recollection of a photograph I had once seen of Ralph Ellison, taken in the sunny courtyard—or cortile—of the academy’s villa. I had always thought that going to a place like that would be a dream, and you know what? I didn’t even have to think twice about it. Would I be available? Who were they kidding?
At the awards ceremony itself, in May, which was held in the institute’s amphitheater, after a rather tony luncheon with various other artists and award recipients on the institute’s stately grounds on 155th Street and Audubon Terrace, I received my Rome Prize. The presenter was a rather plastered, towering, and hunched-over John Galbraith. Beforehand, I’d been told that he would first read a citation about my work and then shake my hand, but either he forgot about it or they had changed their minds. “Oh, to be a young man again, going to Rome,” he told me, with a handshake. “How enviable.” And that was it.
Still I waited for him to say something else, and when he gestured for me to leave the stage, with a shoving motion of his upraised palms, I looked out at the audience and shrugged, cocking my head about, as if he were some kind of nut, and brought down the house. I also remember Jerome Robbins smiling warmly and winking at me as I proceeded offstage, and hearing my mother occasionally, sitting out somewhere in the audience with her friend Chaclita, emoting—“Ay! Ay!”—during the ceremonies. I recall urinating in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mark Twain–era urinals downstairs between Harold Bloom and Robert Penn Warren and feeling as if I had finally arrived!
It was quite a pleasant affair, really the high point of my life to that point, and the first “graduation” ceremony in which I was involved that my mother ever attended. (They even had a photograph of me, along with some samples of my manuscript in a display case, which impressed her very much.) I am not quite sure what my mother made of that rather haughty crowd, but she enjoyed the hors d’oeuvres and wine (unusual for her to drink at all) and nearly fainted at the sight of Jacqueline Onassis, whom, at one point during the reception afterward, she discovered standing just next to her.
“Ay, pero por Dios,” she exclaimed, patting her chest while holding her gold neck chain crucifix in hand. “If only your papá was alive to see this!” Ms. Onassis, for her part, was gracious enough to notice my mother’s genuine excitement and smiled at her. For months, all my mother talked about “Jackie y yo” with whomever she bumped into, and years later, having decided to try her hand at writing a novel, she came up with a wild scenario about time travel, in which Onassis figured as the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, or something crazy like that.
That next summer before my thirty-fourth birthday, after a heartbreaking farewell to my friends at TDI—after nearly nine years with that company, I was too sentimental for my own good and may have broken down at the party they had thrown for me—I went off to Europe for the first time in my life.
Flying to Madrid and lugging a valise that I’d stupidly filled with books, few clothes, and, among other things, a passport holder stuck under my shirt, I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what I was doing. But arriving in the land of my forebears, I felt surprised by just how much my Spanish blood meant to me. It just hadn’t occurred to me before. (These were sentiments that the Spaniards, in their atheism, their newly digested post-Franco freedom, and their hard-nosed somberness probably found quaintly bemusing.) I was stunned to see so many fair-skinned and blond Spaniards, especially in the north (“They look like us,” I wrote my brother.) I lived happily, ineptly on occasion. It thrilled me to hear castellano as only the Spaniards could speak it, with all their Arabic flourishes, the theta and rrrrrrrs rolling like a waterfall (yes, I know I’m pushing things.) While thinking that I couldn’t really speak much Spanish, I found myself forced to use what I knew, and after about two weeks there, while staying in pensions and having to navigate the markets and shops and museums of that city, I started speaking and writing it—even sent my mother a postcard entirely composed in Spanish, detailing my “adventures,” such as they were. The younger women in Spain, it seemed to me, were either femmes fatales, like some of the shapely Guardia Civil ladies I saw standing on the corners in their tight khaki uniforms, holding machine guns, or intellectual, schoolteacherly sorts—at least the ones who spoke to me. It took me a while to let go of certain images in my head—like the electric dusted air of the subways, sleazy Times Square, the projects, the shit of certain neighborhoods, and, of course, that other something that I’d always carried around with me, the baggage I had from my upbringing. I liked it that life in Spain went a certain way, that I didn’t ever have to worry about getting jumped and that I didn’t have to keep my radar turned on or go through all the endless nonsense of seeming perfectly calm when finding myself in a lousy neighborhood, as often happened to me in New York, though once I went south, I couldn’t help but feel a distrust for the inordinately friendly and aggressive Moroccans, who always seemed to be on the make. (I was right, at least about the younger ones, whom I’d encounter hanging around the bus stations or following me down a street, calling out, “You speak English? . . . Etes-vous Français? Esperate, Aleman!”) After years of adhering to an early schedule, I didn’t have to worry about getting up at any particular hour, and when I finally got around to breakfast, I’d usually end up in a bar, where I’d smoke a few cigarettes, eat a buttered roll, and drink brandy with my coffee. (God bless any nation where the workers begin their day in that manner.) For lunch, living off tourist-menu specials, I ate more rosemary grilled merluza and olive-oil-drenched potatoes and drank more cheap red Spanish wine than I ever would again in my life. Along the way, I became grateful for any opportunity to engage with the Spaniards. Once when two young (and very fine) girls came up to me in their school uniforms on the street selling lottery tickets to raise money for some orphanage, I didn’t even hesitate to buy them, so thrilled did I feel that they looked me in the eyes and presumed that I was a Spaniard. In the Prado, where Picasso’s Guernica hung behind a massive plate of glass, protected by two machine gun–bearing soldiers (I’d never seen so many weapons being held out in plain sight before), and where, in the pretentious manner of the daydreaming young, I decided that Velazquez’s Las Meninas had to be my favorite painting of all time, I’d sit around for hours in the overheated rooms, feeling as if I’d won a million dollars in some contest.
At the Escorial, that storied royal residence north of Madrid, I felt the heaviness of Spanish history everywhere around me, and it made me sad. I already tended to think about all the people who had died in this world, and in Spain, perhaps because of the aged cripples and maimed survivors of the civil war who were still to be seen begging on the streets everywhere, the fleeting nature of existence followed me about like a ghost. In Seville, I wandered about the Gypsy neighborhoods, on the ou
tskirts of the city, whose passageways and streets were too narrow for police cars to go through, seeking out bars where I might hear authentic flamenco music. (It was a miracle that someone didn’t rob me.) In Guernica, my heart stopped: I had gone into a slot machine parlor one evening, feeling smugly self-assured that even if I had been rarely accepted as a Cuban Latino in the states, I could at least pass as a Spaniard, más o menos, in Spain when an old man cast a dirty look my way, and then, further shattering my delusions, raised his right arm, his palm held straight up, and saluted me, saying: “Sig Heil!” Then he spat on the floor.
On a long train ride in an acrid car reeking of tobacco, animals, and soot across Gallicia, I ached with an inexplicable feeling of belonging (my pop’s side of the family were Gallegos after all) and yet, at the same time, I could not produce a single name of a relative or a town to visit there. (That ached as well.) On such a train, one couldn’t help but fall into conversation with the farmers who traveled on them: One such farmer, feeling deeply touched (the more educated the Spaniard, the less touched he or she felt by my nostalgia for those roots) by the fact that I was by ancestry a paisano, and thinking me a rich American, offered to sell me a farm of some twenty hectares for (converting from pesetas) roughly fourteen thousand dollars. (How interesting that would have been, had I had that kind of money.) Later, I made like a pilgrim, visiting the sacred cathedral in Santíago, but oddly, though I’d been told that it was a very special place—even some of the guidebooks said that it had a mystical air—I, who considered myself cut very much from my mother’s cloth, and therefore superstitious, felt nothing at all in that place. Among my other excursions in Gallicia, I took a ferry out to la isla de Cies, an island off the Atlantic coast of Spain that had been reconfigured with dunes and trees and white sands and driftwood in the manner of California beaches after Franco, smitten by a visit there and, as a dictator, able to move mountains if he so liked, had ordered it done. I saw my first nude beaches there and narrowly escaped getting beat up by a gaggle of older Spanish women who had happened along the same spot overlooking a cliff where I, el stupido, had stood posing before a camera on which I had set off a timer; as those women approached, and I ducked into the bushes, the camera, set on top of a rock, clicked as if I had been waiting, in fact, to get shots of their tanned, spectacularly drooping bodies. (During the two-hour journey back, I had to contend with their accusations, their scornful expressions, and the fact that they told anyone they could that I was “the one with the filthy mind.” Did I care? All I knew was that I wasn’t standing on a subway platform somewhere deep in Brooklyn on a hot summer afternoon.)
Traveling all around the Iberian Peninsula, I ended my Spanish journey in Barcelona, where, indeed, many of those Catalans were as fair (and sometimes balding) as I. Roaming its streets, I couldn’t help but wonder where my maternal grandfather’s family had once lived, or whether my mother and her sisters had been aware of such landmarks as the Parque Guell or the other insanely ornate buildings Gaudí had designed, during their visits there as children. I wandered the old quarters of the city endlessly, bought countless novels from the kiosks off the Ramblas, editions of works by García Marquez, Borges, Italo Calvino, Vargas Llosa, and Neruda, to name a few, for my planned Spanish library in Rome. (I swore that I would get through every single one of them.) I haunted the guitar shops of Barcelona, trying out one instrument after another, no matter how much it cost, despite a budget of about one hundred dollars. Eventually, I bought a real beauty, manufactured by the House of Struch in 1985, an orange wood, mellow-toned guitar, which sits in this very room behind me as I write.
On the very day I was to leave for Rome with my new guitar in hand, my valise weighing even more from newly purchased books, and my head dense with recent memories, I got a little careless and allowed my radar to turn off. Overdoing the vino (and cigarettes) at lunch, as I made my way to the central station in Barcelona, all the while feeling as if I were Mr. Slick New Yorker, my wallet with all my cash vanished, some fellow having picked my pocket in the crowded square.
Fortunately, though I had nothing more than a few pesetas in change left, I had kept my ticket and passport stashed inside my shirt; brooding, I settled into my second-class compartment and was wondering what I would do over the two-day journey to Rome for food when into that car came four cheerful, not-bad-looking Spanish nurses in their late twenties, from Merida. They were toting picnic baskets filled with food and wine and chocolates, and hearing the story of how I had been pickpocketed, took pity, and tenderly so, on this americano. Europe? God, I loved it!
Though my nearly two-year stay in Italy probably deserves far more space than anyone’s patience should allow, I will frame this little part of the book as a love story of a sort, for no sooner had I arrived in that city than did I become intoxicated with the Latino-ness of Rome and a lifestyle that, every day I lived there, somehow conformed with my memories (perhaps) and fantasies (definitely) of what life must have been like in Cuba before the fall, or, in the machinations of that longish narrative I had been fooling around with, Havana itself.
Rife with birdsong, blossoming gardens, high arching palm trees, and tropical vegetation everywhere, as well as a populace of outspoken, charismatic, friendly, occasionally curmudgeonly, stylish, and earthy people—with no end to the dazzling women, of all ages, there—Rome, that “great outdoor museum,” as Malraux once put it, pressed so many wonderful buttons inside me that for much of my time there, I became a new and improved version of myself, still tightly wound but, for the most part, really enjoying my life for a change.
Just walking those streets, especially in neighborhoods like Trastevere or by the Aventine, I’d stroll through the markets, absorbing, with almost a hunger, not just the scents of the marvelous breads and herbs and flowers that were everywhere, but the bel canto of the Italian language itself, which, for some reason, I felt far more at ease navigating than even my ancestral español. In fact, I used the Spanish I’d more or less improved upon during my recent travels to help me get along with the Italians. (Down in Naples, the Italian almost sounds like Castilian sometimes.) They understood me completely, and, because it was not my emotional turf to defend, I eventually flourished, or at least more easily in a street-friendly getting-around fashion. Though I attempted to decipher the daily newspapers, which were always remarkably slangy, and the writings of Borges, Cortázar, and Calvino in their Mondadori translations—incredibly, as in Spain, “literature” could be found in the racks of the sidewalk kiosks alongside Donald Duck or Paparone comics, religious tomes on Padre Pio, and some of the raunchiest porno I’d ever seen—it wasn’t anything I came close to mastering, at least not in the way that a few good solid years of study would have afforded me.
Nevertheless, I loved visiting the used book shops of Rome, where I indulged my interest in graphics and printing, often coming away, for only a few dollars in lire, with some fantastically illustrated volume, its production values incredible, with colors as deeply realized as those one remembers from childhood. My purchases included an antique edition of Le Avventure di Pinnochio by Carlo Collodi and a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy as told by Topolino (Mickey Mouse), as well as a turn-of-the-century star book, among other items, which I have continued to treasure to this day.
It wasn’t long before my second-floor room at the academy filled with such books, as well as the occasional knickknack from the market. Humble by any standards, it looked out onto a courtyard with a fountain and two high pine trees, its gravel paths often sounding with the footfall of visiting scholars and fellows, Italian voices murmuring upward along with birdsong—it was Borges who said his favorite word in English was nightingale, while I would think that uccello would qualify as mine in Italian. My furnishings included a bed, a desk, a few lamps, two chairs, and dresser. The room had a sink but no toilet, and I depended upon a communal bathroom for showers, etc. On a stand sat a heavy black telephone with a rotary dial, which I used mainly for calling the porti
eres, most of whom spoke quite good English, though one of them, the night man, appropriately named Orfeo, used only a Roman dialect that for some (like myself) was nearly impossible to understand. International calls always had to go through a special operator, and one would have to sometimes wait and wait, before finally giving up. (Though I had no one to call.)
Arriving at the villa, in addition to my room, I had been given my own little studio off the edge of a Tuscan-style garden—a run-down tile-covered shed with cracked windows, endless drafts, spiders, and salamanders, that was wedged up against the ancient Aurelian wall, which the Romans, back when, had built as a defense (it’s been supposed) against the barbarians. (In the spring, it would overflow with wisteria.) My windows had a view of an unbelievably serene and beautiful landscape, of orange-blue Roman skies and umbrella pines, and among the buildings in view, sharply defined like mannerist silhouettes in the twilight, a sixteenth-century domicile that Garibaldi had once used as a headquarters during his defense against the French, and where Galileo, at a time when a country road passed through those grounds, had once stayed. (The walls of such buildings and of those surrounding the garden were riddled with bullet holes.) I’d climb a series of cracked disintegrating steps, the path overgrown, to get to my studio, and there, when I was not wandering the city, I sat by an enormous desk before a little Olivetti. With pads of paper and a pile of manuscript that I’d dragged around Spain in my suitcase (as if they were songs), I’d set out daily, more often than not, to fool around with my second novel, which had already started to take on a new direction.