Growing up in the New York barrios during the late `50s, Oscar Hijuelos loved Lucy, along with the zillions of other Americans hooked on her TV series. But even more than Lucy, Hijuelos loved Desi. As a Cuban-American, he naturally identified with Arnaz and even more naturally assumed that the Cuban-born bandleader, not Lucille Ball, was the star of the show. ”Desi was the man of the house,” he said, ”so it had to be his show. I was really sorry to find out it wasn`t.”
Hijuelos was able to demonstrate his abiding love for Desi and Lucy years later, when he sat down to write his second novel, ”The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” The author assigned the sitcom couple prominent roles in the book, but slyly made sure that traditional Latin machismo was restored to the Arnaz household: He gave Desi top billing and all the best lines, while turning Lucy into a second banana.
Their appearance wasn`t just a prank, however, but a key element in the harmonic structure of ”Mambo Kings,” one of the many bold flourishes that helped put the book at the top of the 1990 literary hit parade. Earlier this year, Hijuelos won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as National Book Critics Circle and National Book Award nominations, for his flamboyant but sorrowful novel, which follows the domestic, musical and sexual fortunes of two Cuban brothers, Nestor and Cesar Castillo, in the barrios, saloons and dance halls of post-World War II America.
In the novel, Desi invites Nestor and Cesar to play on an episode of ”I Love Lucy,” and reruns of the show pop up at crucial moments during the narrative, long after the brothers are dead. That way, Hijuelos explained, Desi is not just a patron to his countrymen but the ”man who holds the key to eternity” by granting them immortality on his TV program.
As the first Hispanic writer to win a Pulitzer, Hijuelos suddenly found himself almost as much of a pop-cultural phenomenon as Desi Arnaz among the Cuban-American population.
”One of the brewing companies puts out a calendar of `prominent Hispanics,` ” Hijuelos said, ”and they`re asking me to be on it. Maybe I`ll be Mr. July or August. But it`s such a strange thing. One day you`re walking down the street, trying to decide whether to buy a slice of pizza, and the next day somebody wants to put you on a calendar.”
While refusing to let the Pulitzer go to his head, Hijuelos said it has made it impossible to keep his feet on the ground and beneath his writing desk. He had no more than recovered from the rigors of having ”Mambo Kings” published in hardcover than the book won the big prize. With ”P.P.W.”
permanently affixed to his name, Hijuelos was asked to hit the road again for the paperback edition (Harper Perennial Library, $9.95), which is how he happened to find himself in Chicago recently.
”I`m writing off this year,” Hijuelos said, during a leisurely lunch break between appearances on the Roy Leonard and Studs Terkel shows, ”just making notes and stuff like that while I`m traveling around. Talking to people is interesting and fun, but it`s so far removed from making the product, the book. I`m looking forward to being quiet again.”
Record spinoff
As one example of the craziness and confusion that came with the Pulitzer, Hijuelos brought along an LP version of ”The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” with a jacket plug for his novel. A collection of Latin favorites by Tito Puente, Jose Fajardo and others, the record was spun off by a British company from the fictitious album that figures in his book.
Born in America of Cuban immigrant parents, Hijuelos, 39, is a
”crossover” novelist, who obviously has deep roots in both countries. As he pointed out, ”Mambo Kings” is ”not just about Cubans. It`s also about American culture, and it was definitely written by a guy who`s seen a lot of Barbara Stanwyck, Rock Hudson and Preston Sturges movies.”
If Hijuelos himself were to be cast in a movie, it wouldn`t be ”West Side Story,” even though it was shot on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he was born, raised and still lives and works in a bachelor apartment. He hasn`t the whisper of a Spanish accent. And rather than the dark and slender Latino of popular myth, he has a reddish complexion, a wreath of thinning sandy hair, and the blocky, foreshortened physique of a New York Giants pulling guard.
Yet for Hijuelos, coming of age near 118th Street and Amsterdam Avenue had its superficial resemblances to ”West Side Story,” a grim facsimile without any pirouetting gangbangers or Romeo-and-Juliet duets on fire escapes. ”It was a very cool, ethnically mixed neighborhood,” he said. ”We used to go up on the roofs and watch the gang fights. The kids were all poor, their fathers were carpenters, hotel workers, firemen, superintendents. We were on the periphery of Columbia University, but without any access to it. We were on the outside-townies.”
Sustained on music
What Hijuelos` neighborhood had in abundance, like most outposts of Latin culture, was music, music, music: boleros, sambas, rumbas and especially the mambos, which provide not only the title but the dominant rhythm and texture for his novel about two Cuban brothers who emigrate to New York in 1949 and form a dance band, playing Manhattan nightclubs and barnstorming the Midwest: the mournful Nestor, who agonizes and writes ballads about his lost love,
”Beautiful Maria of My Soul”; and the joyful Cesar, an insatiable womanizer, who drinks himself to death in the rococo shadows of the Hotel Splendour.
While writing the novel, Hijuelos said, he would frequently unwind by playing the keyboard, trying to get a fix on his characters and the fluctuating tempos of their lives. Whether playing it himself or listening to it on his stereo, the author said the mambo had a liberating effect on his work, just as it does on musicians and those who can respond to its beat.
”People get out there and shake their hips and have a good time,” he said. ”It`s bohemian. It`s punk. It`s postwar. It has to do with the changing world.”
In Cuba only once
With ”Mambo Kings,” and to an even greater extent his autobiographical first novel, ”Our House in the Last World,” Hijuelos was trying to connect with the past, not so much his past as that of his parents, who came to the U.S. in 1943.
”My father has been dead for 20 years,” he said, ”but I always had the impression that he was longing to go back to Cuba. I`m sure he would have, at least to visit, if it hadn`t been for the revolution, which shut the door on him forever. My mother wouldn`t go back if she could. She likes New York and the life she has there. But as much as they and their friends love America, there`s always a sense of displacement.”
Though significant portions of his novels take place in Cuba, Hijuelos has been there only once himself, when he was 4, a memorable journey as it turned out. Taken to visit relatives by his mother, he returned with a severe case of nephritis and had to be hospitalized for a year. He had planned a trip to Cuba last spring, but visa complications prevented it.
That may have been just as well due to a personal political problem, he said, only indirectly related to Castro. ”I have five aunts in Havana who are communists,” he said. ”And I have aunts in this country who aren`t. So it makes for civil war.”
Barthelme`s tutelage
Growing up on New York`s Upper West Side was another form of warfare, not always civil. According to Hijuelos, he was a ”scruffy, rough, street kid who talked funny” before enrolling in City College of New York. There he took a class from Donald Barthelme, the playfully surrealistic short-story writer and novelist, who recognized Hijuelos` talent and became a friend and mentor until he died last year. ”When I was in my 20s, I was involved with an actress and wanted to write plays,” Hijuelos said. ”But I was a lousy playwright, so I drifted into fiction. I just figured I`d write and see what happens.”
What happened was ”Our House in the Last World,” a highly praised novel, published in 1983, about a Cuban couple who migrate to New York with their two boys. Six years later came ”Mambo Kings,” which brought him even more grandiose praise and nominations for a place in the Hispanic pantheon, beside Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and the many other
internationally exalted writers who have emerged in the Latin American boom.
While awed to be in such lofty company, Hijuelos said he thinks he shares little but a Hispanic background with Garcia Marquez and his literary compatriots. His own metier is not magic realism but an exuberant, almost musical rendition of reality, which is not to say he doesn`t take great risks in orchestrating his material.
”With `Mambo Kings,` I felt like I was experimenting with my feelings and the prose,” Hijuelos said. ”I was amazed when I was done because I had tacked togther this crazy thing that had lots of stuff going for it.”
If anything, Hijuelos promised that his next book will be even crazier.
”I`ve been making notes and writing scenes for a novel about biculturalism, trying to figure out how the places you live affect your sense of identity,” said the author, who except for yearlong sabbaticals to the Midwest and Italy has spent his life in New York.
”So I have a family with a Cuban mother and an Irish father who have 14 daughters living in different parts of the country. It`s a big job, I tell you that.”
But he had thousands of miles to go yet before returning home and beginning that job in earnest. One stop, later that day, was Barbara`s Bookstore, where he would read passages from ”Mambo Kings.” Hijuelos said he has to approach such performances with extreme caution, owing to the book`s unblushing carnality. ”I never read those scenes out loud,” he said. ”It would be embarrassing. They`re meant to be read in private.”
No apologies
But Hijuelos doesn`t apologize for his novel`s graphic and buoyant eroticism, which is integral to Cesar Castillo`s lustful character and his boozy reveries. ”I was laughing when I wrote some of those parts, which were a reaction to forumulaic, unfelt writing about sex. It`s not just about one part fitting into another part. It`s about the whole body and mind and soul responding.”
Though most female readers don`t seem offended by the raw sexuality of
”Mambo Kings,” because of its origins in Cuban machismo, it has caused Hijuelos a problem with his mother.
”She wants to read the book, but I`m holding out until the Spanish edition is published,” he said. ”That way I can tell her it`s all in the translation.”
