Though I liked to keep to myself, I loved going on what amounted to the guided tours—or “walks”—that the resident classicist in charge, Russell Scott, who somehow always reminded me of Stan Laurel, conducted to key spots in Rome; and when the academy made an autumn field trip to archeological sites along the Amalfi coast and below—from the baths of Baie to Paestum—I loved every moment of it and found Italy never less than breathtaking, even on the bleakest days.
During that trip, I became quite friendly with our bus driver, and in the evenings, while most of the fellows stayed at the hotel, he, an older man, and I would find the local social club (usually in a tavern) and play the Italian card game of scopas—I forget how it worked now, but playing it well depended on keeping track of numbers, particularly combinations involving the number seven, and since I was good at basic math, I tended to win every time, confounding him. He was another one of those salt-of-the-earth Italians with whom I felt perfectly at ease, and in the small towns we visited, I found myself, without quite knowing why, drawn to the paesani and their way of life—of course, now I realize that in them I saw something of my campesino father.
On that occasion, I roomed with Professor Scott, who told me that I had a propensity for talking in my sleep on those nights, in a jumble of Italian, Spanish, English, and (apparently) some Portuguese (so he said), some other side of me, expressing an almost confident feel for languages, coming out. (On those same evenings, I also got into the habit of composing little quasi-poetic bits, mostly easy rhymes about my day’s observations: One that I remember, about a mythological painting in the Naples museum, went: “Aphrodite in her nightie feeding Aries tasty berries.”)
And breathing all that fresh myth-ridden air scrambled my brains as well. In one of those towns by the southern coast, I had another of my ecstatic moments, for going out to look at the stars one evening, I got caught up by the moonlight’s play upon the horizon and imagined (or saw how people could imagine) the likes of a towering Neptune rising out from under the shadows that went mysteriously swirling under the surface of the restlessly churning “wine-dark” sea. At an academy dig in Tuscany, an Etruscan-Roman-Lombard site known as Cosa, I watched a white mare and a stallion frolicking in a meadow, the late morning light doing strange things to their forms, and saw how easily some imaginative ancient could have taken them from a distance to be centaurs. At the edge of a Bronze Age Garden of Eden called Filotosa, in Sardinia, I saw a field of olive trees and under each a netting of white upon the ground, on which, among the olives that dropped, the peasants, their caps pulled down over their brows, slept as peacefully as if they had always been part of a timeless dream, that spell following me everywhere.
Back in Rome, I spent many a morning in the forum, hanging around classicists and developing an interest in archeology, so much so that in the coming years, for some six seasons, I’d devote my summers to digging out trenches and hauling wheelbarrows of fangi e sassi by the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, in the area sacra, an ongoing excavation supervised by the aforementioned Russell Scott. (If you don’t think a place can be haunted, then I suggest you go prowling through the Roman forum at six thirty in the morning, when the very upturned stone and marble columns seem to ooze spirits—mists literally rising from the corners of long-abandoned villas (at least they would for me). In fact, once the word got out that this Hijuelos was a soft touch when it came to digs, I moonlighted on several others, up in Cosa and in Campania to the south. I was so smitten by the notion of seeing the ancient world that I decided to visit Egypt in the winter. I was in Cairo when the army went into revolt and burned down several Giza hotels, among them one not far from where I had stayed. Later, I made it up the Nile to the island temple of Philae where Antinous, Hadrian’s lover, was said to have drowned himself; and although I fell deathly sick from a stomach malady along the way, by my journey’s end, with Karnak and Abu Simbel and other such marvels behind me, I felt, archeologically speaking, gloriously fulfilled.
And yet, at the same time, throughout those touristic travels, as I went jogging along the dusty palm-lined roads by the Nile in the early mornings, or crawled up a narrow shaft into the antechamber of the Great Pyramid, I had a nagging premonition that something sad had taken place back home, a strange and inexplicable feeling that accompanied me back to Rome. And this, unfortunately, came true. On the evening of my return, I walked up a hill toward the Academy’s back gate, where I bumped into one of my favorite fellows, Josefina, a Sardinian princess, who happened to be a classicist. After we had chatted a bit I made my way through the gardens and the villa complex itself. In my room, I sat down on my bed, when, wouldn’t you know it, the telephone rang. It was about ten thirty on a Sunday night, the world so still. One of my old neighborhood friends was calling me from New York.
“I got something bad to tell you,” he said. “Tommy Muller-Thym’s dead.”
“Oh, man—what happened?”
“Well, you know he had some bad stuff going on with his liver, that’s all,” he told me. “Went out alone and blind in a house upstate.”
The details of our reminiscences about him—as a gifted, funny, and super-bright dude who should have had a good life—aside, the loss of him killed both of us, but what could one conclude except that some things “just bees that way,” as my friend put it.
It took me a long time to get over that; and, though I knew he was gone, I brought Tommy’s jive spirit with me, wherever I went. That next summer, when I traveled all across Turkey visiting archeological sites, the most splendid of which, if one should care to know, were that of mystical Efes, where Saint Paul preached in the amphitheater; Sardis, with its collapsed temple to Saturn; the ruins of Pergamum; and, to the east, Nemrut Dag, the fantastically strange mountain tomb of one of Alexander the Great’s descendants, Antiochus I, whose summit—forgive the tourist-guide speak—afforded one an incomparable view of the rolling steppes of Asia, Tommy came along with me. Then, of course, with time, his presence, as with so many memories, faded—though I am glad that he is with me again, as I write these lines down now.
Okay, so you must be wondering what all of the above has to do with the fact that, at the same time, squeezed out here and there, I had been working on my novel about Cesar Castillo, who, as it turned out, had a brother named Nestor; well, the answer is this: absolutely nothing, except in the sense that such travels and interests set free another part of my heart and soul, which, until then, had been almost entirely bottled up. And that, in a phrase, helped me with the writing of it.
Making the Castillo brothers musicians, like my uncle Pedro, I knew they had left Havana in the late 1940s, to pursue the mambo scene in New York City, and that, as with most immigrants, their first years, while coping with a new language, a strange new environment, prejudice, and an inevitable sense of displacement (as well as elation)—the latter of which I often felt myself in Rome—were difficult. They’d have a moment of triumph, which I could never quite figure out—that is, until one afternoon, on a lusciously fecund spring day, when I was sitting in my studio and trying to decide whether to take a walk down to Trastevere or to remain by my desk searching for a solution. For some reason, just as I was about to leave, I began to recall how as a kid watching television with my pop, we delighted in the I Love Lucy show, and not only because of the comedy and give-and-take between Desi Arnaz’s character of Ricky Ricardo, a Cuban nightclub performer in New York, and his endlessly charming but zany American wife, Lucy (a match-up, incidentally, that I have in the decades since seen duplicated countless times), but because of how familiar it seemed to us whenever Ricky’s relatives turned up at his door from Cuba: I’d always wondered about those folks and the lives they had lived. And while I often entertained the notion of writing something about those walk-on characters, it hadn’t yet dawned on me that such an idea could be of use to me in my novel about a former Mambo King looking back on his life. And yet, right then and there, in my studio in Rome, it occurred to me that the brothers
, fresh from Havana, had once appeared at Ricky’s door and, as musicians and singers, would perform on the stage of the Tropicana nightclub, as did so many of Ricky’s Cuban friends. Of course, as part of their backstory, set in the real world of the novel, he’d have to discover them somehow, and so, at a moment when I still felt greatly tempted to lose myself in the perfumed warmth of a Roman afternoon, I forced myself to type out the following lines:One Tuesday night in 1955 the Cuban bandleader and television personality Desi Arnaz walked into the Mambo Nine Club on 58th Street and Eighth Avenue to check out the talent. Someone had told him about two Cuban brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, that they were good singers and songwriters who might have some material for Arnaz to use on his show....
The song they perform that night is one that Nestor Castillo had written for a love he’d left behind in Cuba, “Beautiful María of My Soul”; in some ways it was strictly a product of my life in Rome, and of my closet religiosity, for the name María first came to mind, in terms of that novel, on the Good Friday evening before Easter of 1986, when I had gone to the Colosseum to watch, among crowds of Romans, Pope John Paul II preside over the procession and ritual known as “La Via Crucis,” or the stations of the cross. Through a sound system that thundered, echoing through the farthest recesses of the ancient center, an Italian cardinal with one of the most resonant and deeply rich voices I’d ever heard, began to recite the story of Jesus’s passion and death. Now and then, the name Maria would burst through the narrative—Allora, Maria, la donna di Gerusalemme. . . .
Gesu, il Figlio di Maria. . . .
Cristo Gesu, nato dall Vergine Maria . . .
Santa Maria, Vergine del silenzio e di misteriosa pace. . . .
Il cuore in piena per l’empatía con la tua morte e il tacito dolore di Maria. . . .
—all the while enchanting me in such a manner that I allowed that name to roll over and over again in my mind, until at a certain moment, long after I’d left that wonderful processional, in the middle of the night, I shot up in bed, not from any bad dreams but from something that came to me as if out of the Roman/Havana air, a simple line, “La Bella María de mi Alma,” which I just had to scribble down lest I forget that subconscious rumination.
But aside from that divine inspiration, it also helped to have a beautiful woman in my life, about whom I will now briefly speak.
One October evening, about a month after I’d arrived at the academy, I’d descended a steep stairway into Trastevere, and there, just before the final steps leading from the Via Scala and the maze of cobblestone streets beyond, I came upon the apparition of a stately Asian princess, perhaps from the court of Kublai Khan, performing the mundane task of walking her little fox terrier. She was rather mysteriously dressed in a cape with cowl and high leather boots, and while I could not quite make out her face, half-hidden under the silken scarf she had wrapped around her mouth against the misty rain, she cut such a spectacular figure that I, deeply under the influence of a Dante lecture at the moment, couldn’t help but ask, “Sei Beatrice?”—“Are you Beatrice?”
But that just made her laugh, and noting my accent, she told me, in quite perfect English, “So you are an American?”
By some miracle (thank you, Lord), I found myself following her into Trastevere, where, among other things, I learned her name—Sojin, or “pearl”—and discovered that my status as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome quite impressed her, as, in fact, it did so many Romans. Later, sitting in a café where the waiters knew and doted on her, I first saw her face and could see just why they—and, as I’d learn, just about every vendor and storekeeper in Rome—did so. Without dwelling excessively on the virtues of her appearance, I will only say that, as I later got to know her and we started going out to places together, it was nearly impossible to walk even a block—in any quarter of the city—without some Italian fellow (and God, half of them were always on the make) coming up alongside us on, foot or on a motorino and sometimes in a car, to make some jovial rascal’s remark to her in Italian along the lines of “Why don’t you lose the four-eyes”—or “the bald guy”—and come and have some fun with me!”
For some reason, though I don’t think it thrilled her, she forgave my flaws (“You are a refreshing change from the usual handsome and superficial Italian men,” she’d told me) and, stranded more or less in a foreign land, far from her home in Seoul, Korea, and perhaps craving the opportunity to end up one day in America, seemed to think me far more intelligent and sophisticated than I happened to be. She loved that I hailed from New York, and the fact that I was a member of the cubani people pleased her as well. While I didn’t conform, in any way, to her notion of what Cubans were supposed to look like, she, having taken the care and effort to read my first novel, out of some mixture of pity and real affection came to idealize me, even if I happened to be going bald and dressed too much, in her opinion, like a beatnik. (To hide my receded hairline, I rarely went anywhere in Rome without wearing a red or black beret, or a baseball cap.) She also liked the fact that I didn’t mind spending money on her—whatever she wanted or needed, it never bothered me to throw her some bucks, especially since I’d have to practically force her to accept the money, as she found it embarrassing, but never so much for her to refuse in the end. Still, I am not so sure what she saw in me, though, in fact, I really did go out of my way to be good to her.
In my eyes, she was something of a James Bond girl, if I may: incredibly sexy—she had posed in various states of undress for a number of Italian magazines, among them Playboy (for the very reason that she never showed me any of them, I’d search for pictures of her in the used magazine shops that were virtually everywhere, in Rome; I never found any). From a well-educated background, she had also an adventurous past. Having run away from a strict boarding school in Korea, she had traveled throughout Asia and, with a German boyfriend, spent a year trying to get rich through the sleight-of-hand export of electronic goods from Hong Kong into India. Somehow, she had ended up in Italy. When we met, she had been keeping company with an older Italian man who wasn’t treating her too well, though she had her own little place, in a sixteenth-century building, off the Via dei Panieri (street of the bakers) in Trastevere. Her downstairs neighbors were three young gay men, two of whom, donning wigs, dressed up as women and worked a trade as oral hookers at the Stazione Termini. They were so convincing as women that I hadn’t the slightest notion that they were men, until one evening when we were visiting, to demonstrate to Sojin some subtlety about the art of love, the prettier girl pulled off the stockings of the other and went down on her who turned out to be a him, even as we were sitting there sipping wine. (“Madonna,” I remember hearing her mutter, under her breath, in embarrassment.)
The Romans were sex crazed in some ways. Up from the academy was a place called the Bar Gianicolo and on Saturday nights, it became a rendezvous point for stylish Roman couples to meet before adjourning to sex parties—orgies, if you like—or so my lady friend told me. I believed her. The few times we went in there together on a Saturday night for a coffee, men always approached her. One evening a couple came by to drop a card on our little bistro table: I don’t think I was part of the deal, but in any case, she, thinking that they, despite their elegant finery, were what the Italians called schifozi—what my mother called gente baja—was not the sort to have ever taken them up on that kind of thing.
She wasn’t very good with money, spending most of it on clothes. At one point, to pay for her tuition in a fashion design school located just off the Piazza Farnese, she worked as a showroom model for designers in the city; another job that kept her in the fashion loop took her down to the Piazza di Spagna, where in a leather goods shop whose name escapes me now, she waited on the wealthiest of tourists, among them, she’d casually mention every so often, the occasional movie star. She drove a Fiat 500, a piggy bank on wheels but commodious enough for us to make a few trips south to Naples, where we scoured the rebranding fashion salons for bargains. Out at
Capri, she almost got me drowned by accepting a boat ride into the bay with a couple of Mafiosi, who kept urging me to try water-skiing—one of those fellows, who could not get his eyes off her, had a perpetual erection inside his gold spandex and kept whispering to his chum what seemed to me some rather sinister notions. But if they were devious hoods, they obviously decided that murdering me wasn’t worth the trouble. (For the record, once we made landfall again, I would not talk to her, beauty that she was, for a day or so. On the other hand, looking back on it now, I find it incredibly funny.)
She was really a cheerful and good-natured woman, bright and outgoing: The gardeners and crew at the academy and all the gatekeepers liked her—every week, someone or other would ask me if we were going to get married. (A funny thing: Even Francine du Plessix Gray, a beautiful woman herself, visiting the academy with her husband, the artist Clive Gray, always seemed unable to take her eyes off of Sojin when she happened to be around.) The only people there, in fact, who seemed to resent her were certain of the female academicians. Though Sojin spoke Japanese, Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, French, and English, one such academician always referred to her as the “bimbo.” I’d look the other way—what did I care? We were having a nice time together, no matter what we happened to be doing. After all, it was all part of the dream I seemed to be living in Italy, whose lovely and quite passionate energies slipped bit by bit into my writing, while my own affections for that woman, later to be displaced and abused, seemed so real and something that I then believed would never be forgotten.
I stayed on in Rome for almost another year after my fellowship ran out, and because I had some money saved and no particular place to go, I rented a largish apartment some ten blocks from the academy, by a marketplace, its back windows looking out over a series of descending terraces and gardens. There we lived as tranquilly and, I think, as happily as possible, though I did have an upstairs neighbor, a red-haired Sicilian actress, who might have wanted to have something with me (or perhaps with Sojin). In another flat in the same building, a kept woman, also of dazzling good looks, who, bored to death with her arrangement with a rather solemn fellow from Milano, would sometimes take me with her to see the opera. (Sojin, I am certain, thought we might have had something between us but didn’t seem to care.)