Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  If you will recall my uncle Pedro, of the Cugat orchestra, then you can perhaps imagine how, in a moment of insight, I transformed my superintendent character, one Cesar Castillo, into a musician whose band, the Mambo Kings, had once performed here and there in New York City in the 1950s.

  Back on 106th Street, long before I’d left for the academy, I’d had this notion for my book—of a superintendent who had once had a glorious past, though just what that past was about, I really could not say. But gradually I got some clues. As I’d ride the elevator, its operator, a soulful and quite melancholic fellow of middle age, from the Dominican Republic, named Rafael Guillon, would begin singing to himself, as if withdrawing into an inward dream. His voice was so moving, so resonant and rich, that I’d sometimes invite him into my apartment during his breaks. Taking hold of one of my guitars, he’d commence upon a bolero—classics like “Solamente Una Vez” or “Historia de un Amor”—and with such a professionalism that I just had to ask if he’d ever performed publicly. To that he answered: “Yes, back in my country, I made a number of records, and I was somewhat well-known.”

  I’d wanted to ask him how on earth he had ended up spending his days in an elevator—the very life my Pop had once cautioned me to avoid—but he preempted me, simply shaking his head and looking forlornly out the window as if at his own past, the way my father used to: “Pero no sé lo que me pasó,” he told me. “But I don’t know what happened to me.”

  Of course his broken heart moved me greatly, and, as a small homage to the man, when I’d later get around to creating an orchestra called the Mambo Kings for that novel, I’d name one of the musicians after him. (The good news about Rafael, by the way, is that he later retired and moved back to the DR, which he had always missed so much.) Then too, my memories of every wonderful Latin band I’d ever heard performing on the nearby streets below—at block parties on 108th and 107th—or rehearsing out of their apartments in the Bronx and Brooklyn and over on Tieman Place came back to me as well. Another inspiration? One of my downstairs neighbors, a first-rate bass player, Raul, with whom I would occasionally jam, worked full-time as a bus driver for the MTA. He too once played in different Latin bands that never quite made it. In his company, I’d think about how unfair it was that so many fine musicians, with chops up their asses, could end up having to scrape by with daytime jobs while they played music to feed their souls. (At the same time, I could not help thinking about the first-rate mambo band that once performed at a Corpus dance, real pros, stoically playing rock tunes like “Tequila” and “Do You Love Me?” for the kiddies, their lead singer shaking his maracas with the most disconsolate expression on his face.)

  Of course, I had my own limited but accurate memories of what it felt like to be playing at two in the morning in a smoky and crowded bar, on some nights when you felt like it and on some when you didn’t. I also knew something of how much young musicians really have dreams of making it, and how easily those dreams can be crushed, the world being, I think, somewhat cruel, and how (so easily) one’s moment could so quickly pass.

  However, without a doubt, the biggest influence on my creation of Cesar Castillo had to be the glamorous career my uncle Pedro once had as a performer with the Cugat orchestra back in the mambo epoch, a life played out in elegant louche café-society venues that, as a source of inspiration, I wore like an inherited glove. (But even Pedro’s story had its own sad ending: In the early 1980s, he had gone into a Miami hospital for the removal of a mole from beneath the lobe of his right ear and the surgeons, messing up, had somehow cut into a major artery, whose bleeding could not be stopped; hence, my image of Pedro, in a white tux and tails, seated by a table in some club with my aunt Maya—in Havana and New York—overflows now with crimson.)

  Along the way, I had attended a Santeria ceremony over on Columbus Avenue with a Cuban playwright friend—I loved those sweet old black ladies, the santeras who, gentle as sparrows, not only exorcized demons but cooked up a storm in the kitchen. It was through that playwright friend that I met Chico O’Farrill, a bandleader, arranger, and composer whose Afro-Cuban jazz pedigree involved working with the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Machito, and Chano Pozo at their peak, and harkened back to the glory times of Havana nightlife in the 1940s. Though one of the Latin greats, he had been reduced to mainly writing jingles and background music for television and radio advertisements, and while he still participated in recording sessions with some quite famous musicians, Celia Cruz among them, the moment of his greatest glory had also passed. Physically slight, with a face that seemed reminiscent of both Salvador Dalí and Xavier Cugat, he was rather curmudgeonly, at least when I first met him, for he valued his privacy and only spoke to me as a favor to his friend. Still, over drinks, he provided me with a sense of Havana’s nightlife circa the Batista era—none of it being anything I hadn’t already suspected, viz., the sleaziness of the mob’s influence in Havana, the bawdiness of certain of its clubs and bordellos, and the hardships of coming up as a musician in a city in which even the finest talents were but a dime a dozen. Then, once he’d decided that enough was enough and politely booted me out, I left his apartment, feeling somewhat grateful for the information, and without the slightest suspicion that years later we would become rather close friends.

  Ultimately, however, it was Cesar Castillo himself who worked his own magic. I conceived him as a cross between my pop (in the sense of his fleshliness and drinking) and a heartthrob (now dated) like Victor Mature, with touches of both Frankie the exterminator and Mr. Martinez the superintendent. He wore the gray utility uniform of my uptown super, Luis (who, a cocaine addict, would do any job for the money, and, constantly wired, died at about age forty from a heart attack), with his smells of plumber’s gum and incinerator ash (as well as tobacco). With so much information floating in my head, I still hadn’t figured out just who Cesar Castillo happened to really be, when, as I sat before my desk one day, I envisioned him coming out of a basement into a courtyard, singing in a wonderful baritone, but, at the same time, carrying in his arms an old record jacket on whose cover I first “saw”—cross my heart—the rubric The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

  Still, I already had a tentative title for that manuscript—The Secrets of a Poor Man’s Life—while the name Mambo Kings, for Cesar’s orchestra, simply occurred to me while noticing how on old mambo recordings, which I’d come by in secondhand shops and places like the Salvation Army, musicians such as Perez Prado would be referred to as the King of Cuban Swing, or the King of the Mambo, and perhaps I had seen in Spanish the phrase “El Rey del Mambo,” but never once “Mambo King,” which I came up with by simply inverting the old terminology from the 1950s.

  Once I’d figured out that my humble super had been a mambo king, or the Mambo King, as he would become known in the novel, I still saw him in terms of a contradictory personality: On the one hand he was rambunctious, wild, life loving, woman chasing, devil-maycare, blatantly sexist, big dicked, and altogether, even when long past his prime, herculean in every way possible (or to put it differently, a man of the earth and of a triumphant body, until his vices got the better of him). At the same time, because I’d always identified that feeling with being Cuban, he had a tendency toward melancholy and so many soulful memories that he seemed to be two “selves,” as it were. That dichotomy puzzled me, until one day I realized that Cesar Castillo was, in fact, two persons: Hence his younger brother, Nestor, came into the world, or, as I thought of him, he had always been there, lingering inside Cesar Castillo’s head.

  A far more measured and poetic soul, but devastatingly sad, Nestor Castillo was an infinitely talented musician, and the sort to sit inside a tenement window strumming a guitar while writing a heartfelt bolero about, at least in the beginning, the Cuba he, as an immigrant living in New York, had left behind. Once I had figured that out, it became a matter of placing the stories of these two Cuban brothers in the context of Cesar’s memories of the past.

  And s
o, as they say, that novel began.

  Without detailing the further processes of that book, at this moment at least, I will say that its writing, which I had pursued so tentatively back in New York, now took on a bloom as radiant and all-consuming as the city of Rome itself. In other words, those wonderful Italo-Latino energies that were flowing into me, so alive, so varied, so intensely felt, began to find their way onto the page. It was as if Rome had become my Havana—and held out such strong resonances for me that I, sitting in my study, a cigarette burning in a tray (MS, an Italian brand, which English speakers had nicknamed for their pungency Massive Stroke), along with the occasional glass of marketplace jug wine (so young that within a few weeks, it would be good only as paint remover), found the words gushing out from me, like so much water from the Acqua Paola down the hill. Though the heating in that shed was faulty and halting at best, and the coolest air seeped in through the cracked windowpanes, I loved every moment of it. Stricken by some romantic notion of being a writer, and thinking of the composer Chopin, I’d even gotten hold of some mittens and cut off the tips so that I could keep my hands warm while typing. On occasion, when it became too damply cold, I’d put a lit candle on my desk and warm my fingers from the flame—so very nineteenth-century that it delighted me. As a wintry twilight fell, and Venus started her ascent over the Aurelian wall, winking at me, I’d sit back and remember that not a year before, at that same hour, I would have been sitting by my desk at TDI, waiting for the clock to count down to five.

  Though the villa and grounds had once seen better times, I learned quickly that coming to the academy was an honor, and for most of the fellows there, a competitively driven one. Among them were pre- and postdoctoral classicists and art historians, architects and architectural scholars, conservationists, city planners, experts in Italian Renaissance literature as well as aspirants in the field of Italian studies, who had been culled from the finest universities in the United States and, in some cases, Europe: Harvard, Princeton, and Yale graduates were well represented at the academy, but even when they came from other universities, there could be no doubt as to their drive and brilliance, for they were the crème de la crème of young scholarship. Added to this mix were returning former fellows, now tenured professors on sabbatical from some of the most prestigious universities in the country, to take up half- and full-year residencies devoted to studies and writing, and, as well, the occasional invited honored guest.

  During my year at the academy, of this group, the two most notable were Dorothea Rockburne, the artist, and one Leon Krier, architect, town planning theorist, and Prince Charles’s right-hand man when it came to London architectural conservation, with whom I became rather friendly—mainly because the two of us had a shared interest in fumetti, comics, which took us all over Rome to visit shops.

  On the other side, among the nonacademics, in a separate class unto themselves, were the fellows in the arts—painting, photography, sculpture, and music. In my year, they were a rather talented but temperamentally uneven group that included one burly older painter, who, having applied to the academy some fifteen times over the years, arrived with a smoldering contempt for the spoiled brat “careerists” surrounding him. He resembled, incidentally, a Thomas Nast rendering of Saint Nicholas, down to his bulbous nose and gray scraggly beard, though he, dressed usually in a lumberjack’s shirt and coveralls, hardly ever behaved in a jolly manner with anyone—and remained particularly belligerent toward me.

  When I’d first turned up at the academy, I’d made the mistake of mentioning to him that my Rome Prize had come out of the blue, awarded to me from afar, from within the mysterious star chambers of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as I’d never applied for it; and though I’d said this so as to separate myself from the ultracompetitive folks there, for I’d never hustled anyone (or ever would) in my life, nor had I ever been one to “look around a room” to make possible connections, it did not go well with this man, who, until we became friends, made my life and that of the other fellows generally miserable. A perpetual presence at the downstairs bar just off the main salone, he tended to linger there without company, as most people, once seeing him, changed their plans. It seems that he was mainly a confrontation junkie, insults (“I’ve got more talent in my pinkie than everyone else here put together”) his general means of communication. But he must have also been crazy—his paintings, mainly portraiture and Roman cityscapes that were constructed by mounting blotchy dashes of paint one upon the other, seemed the work of a madman (at least to me). One day, when I’d shown up at the bar with a nice-looking woman I’d met in Rome, he nearly proved it, almost pushing me over an edge; ogling her body lasciviously, he leaned close to me, asking if I could do him a favor.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like letting me fuck her,” he said, pointing her way.

  I was holding a beer mug at the moment, and if not for the fact that I would have been kicked out of the academy for good, I would have punched him in the face with it.

  But my dealings with him were the worst of that stay, aside from certain moments of the ghastly, unbridled snobbery I occasionally encountered. After my years at TDI, never a hotbed of intellectual activity, and with my plebeian education (“City College? How quaint”), I was unaccustomed to academic speak and the incredibly long-winded conversations I’d overhear at the dining room tables. Though I enjoyed attending the academy lectures, in which one could get up and leave, I found that certain people were best avoided, and, along the way, I may have offended, without intending to, more than a few of them.

  Still, in those days I made the acquaintance of a photographer in her mid-thirties named Barbara Beany, an expat who had married an Italian, whose roundish and expressive face always seemed swollen, her cheeks of a deep rouge coloration: Working for the academy, she had sought me out, and while I hadn’t been aware of just why, I always felt an inexplicable kinship with her, as if I knew much more about her than was possible. But I could never put my finger on it, until I learned that she suffered from bad kidneys. A sunny personality, despite her difficulties, we’d often stroll the academy’s back gardens, talking about her life in Italy and my book, which seemed to have touched her. Ever so quiet and gentle in her manner, I realize now that she, indeed, knew that her days were numbered.

  Leon Krier and I were friendly enough that he invited me to London for New Year’s. My first autumn in Italy, we’d palled around quite a bit in Rome. On the evening of one of that city’s greatest (and rare) snowstorms, we had driven down to the Vatican, its piazza abandoned, and gone hiking in a state of elation through its threefoot-high drifts, talking about the monumentality of its architecture (in fact, we’d drive around Rome to obscure hill towns discussing nothing else). We’d make countryside excursions, his wife, Rita Wolfe, a painter, often joining us. But as I said before, we mainly caroused about for books. He’d invited me to London out of pure kindness, and though I had come down with an awful flu (my annual friend), I kept my assignation, having booked tickets on Ethiopian Airlines, the cheapest fare I could find. The day I left for London, I was on my way out to Fiumicino on a bus when traffic completely stopped on the highway. Suddenly, dozens of police cars, sirens blaring, went whizzing by, followed by ambulances, then military vehicles. As we waited, someone listening to a portable radio mentioned that some kind of attack had taken place in the airport. A few hours later when we were allowed to proceed, I arrived at a chaotic scene—hundreds of people and airline employees wandering about in a daze (so it seemed to me). At one side of the terminal, near the El Al and TWA counters, large paneled screens were being wheeled into place, while airport workers in janitorial coveralls stood on ladders, steam-blasting blood and other matter off the bullet-pocked walls. Even then I had no clear idea of what had happened, nor would I until, after an endless wait, my late-morning flight made it into London’s Heathrow, sometime after ten that night, when, as I recall, tanks were lining the airport route. Only whe
n I made it over to Leon’s place at Belsize Park and turned on the “telly” did I learn that I’d witnessed the aftermath of the terrorist attack known as the Rome Massacre.

  Mainly I enjoyed myself: I learned to play something that vaguely resembled tennis on a court outside the academy library. I’d whack at balls with an ebullient kitchen helper named Rocco, later the operator of an ice cream truck in Rome—“Ciao, Oscareeno,” he’d call out to me, ringing its bells. Every morning, despite my afternoon habit of smoking, I’d go jogging around the scenic grounds of the Villa Doria Pamphili Park, some five miles or so—and effortlessly so; a former aristocrat’s estate, resplendent with a birthday cake mansion, it was one of the more elegant retreats in Rome. I’d run through there daydreaming about the kind of life I’d have if I were to stay there for good, or what a pity it was that my father had never experienced such a day. I enjoyed watching the priests in their meditations and the kind of misted and cool mornings when the park was practically deserted, when you got a sense of how things once used to be.

  One morning while “footing,” as the Italians called it, I thought I was experiencing a hallucination: Rounding an upgrade and coming down upon a stretch that opened to a vast field bordered by a corridor of umbrella pines, before me lay encamped Garibaldi’s army, that is, about two hundred movie extras dressed in period costume and shakos, lolling about the misty greens, with muskets in hand, for a Franco Nero production! On yet another morning, on my way back to the academy from an all-night party, I saw Aguirre himself—Klaus Kinski, standing in front of the Pantheon in an open raincoat whose fabric he began flapping like a bird’s wings, as he turned in circles, obviously stoned out of his mind, in a glory over the gilded sunlight passing like honey over the square.