A Simple Habana Melody (From When the World Was Good)
By Oscar Hijuelos
HarperCollins, 342 pages, $24.95
On the opening page of “A Simple Habana Melody (From When the World Was Good),” Oscar Hijuelos tells us that zarzuela is a form of Spanish opera born of the traveling musicians and actors who wove together the “folk songs, gypsy melodies, bits of poetry and prose, dance and stage trickery that could be organized around the concept of a simple and capricious plot–usually one of love or of the devastation of war.”
Gaining its greatest popularity in late-19th Century Spain, zarzuela’s rhythms reverberated around the world, infecting the hearts of musicians everywhere and shaping the life, in Hijuelos’ tragicomic novel, of one master Cuban composer named Israel Levis. On every page of this slyly masterful book we hear the sound of song, we grow attuned to the feel and form of zarzuela-style pastiche.
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What we have in this novel is a life, the life of a physically imposing and beloved composer. The life of a Catholic with a Jewish name. The life of a moralist who understood of himself that he was “[p]rivately lascivious (for he was a habitue of the brothels)” and “publicly righteous.” The life of a man in love with a woman whom he never has the courage to claim for himself. This is a book in which there is far more telling than showing going on, far more summarization and repetition than most writing teachers would encourage, far more surface giddiness than one would expect to find in a book whose central themes are loss and regret.
One is thrown off kilter straightaway–by the ornate chapter dividers, by the breeziness of the type, by the many campy asides, so many witty explanations stuffed deep inside the text, like captions inserted in an old silent movie: “A few notes on his name and faith.” “That afternoon in 1895 when he had grasped at invisible bells.” “A momentary digression about an unrealized desire regarding the composer and Rita Valladares.” These aren’t the names of chapters but chatty, running subheads, miniature advertisements for the text fragment that is to come.
Spanning a number of decades and drawing a circle around Levis’ life, “A Simple Habana Melody” begins in spring 1947, just as the composer, not yet 60, returns to Habana after more than 10 years away. The once-robust and God-fearing musician has been diminished by the war, by his incarceration at Buchenwald, where he had been taken on account of his Jewish-sounding name. We won’t learn much of Levis’ time in the camp over the pages to come, but we will come to understand the sort of life that Buchenwald robbed him of, the grand dimming of the spirit, optimism and faith that had earlier produced so many romantic songs.
Levis believes he is returning to Cuba “to die in what peace he could find.” His great regret, as he comes ashore, is that Rita Valladares, the woman for whom he’d written his most famous rumba, the woman with whom he never consecrates his great love, is not there to help him home. The man we first meet, the diminished Levis, is a man of few words, a man of yearning:
“On his arm seven numbers in green ink. In his heart, a rancor and disappointment over the way that his pipe dreams about morality, religion and the beauty and importance of music meant nothing; a black cloud of thought, passing through his mind, in such a way as to make him feel that his life as a composer and conductor of orchestras was really the life of a clown, or an impostor, or someone tricked by fate. . . . [H]e had been cheated, throttled by his own failings, and that feeling, along with the disabilities of his physical state, produced in the character of his expression a solemn longing for a better world and a different, rejuvenated self.”
The self that Levis once was is the subject of the story that follows, though “story” seems to be a sloppy term for what is essentially a portrait of a man. There are few plot twists or turns here, no surprises, no suspense, much that happens behind the scrim of retrospect. We begin at the end of Levis’ life and work our way back toward his youth, encountering the same themes over and again: love, loss, music, regret, the mysterious workings of God, the shame and glory of sexuality.
Levis, we learn, entered the realm of music as a child of 5 when, though he “knew nothing about the keys of G and [E-flat], nor of what the black hieroglyphics of his father’s music books meant, his soul separated from the plump and amiable body that was its carrier, drifting into that palace room and grasping the bells as they passed him by, Israel happily floating inside a wondrous and supernatural place, as if through the soft folds of God’s own heavenly cloak.”
Music will become nearly everything to Levis as the years go by, and it will take him geographically far, even, at one point, to the heart of Europe, where he fails to understand that the gathering storm clouds of the war will soon entrap his very soul. Always he is chased by the music he created and by the woman who performed it, by the love he did not make:
” ‘Rosas Puras’ accompanies him everywhere he goes, like the background music of a film. It plays on a piano, or with a full orchestra. Sometimes, as he looks up at the sky, Fred Astaire comes bounding down a staircase, in top hat and tails, dancing a marvelous and highly stylized rumba to it . . . and sometimes . . . he is watching Rita Valladares from the back stage of a theater–it’s Habana or Paris–and she is singing that song better than anyone will ever sing it.”
If at times “A Simple Habana Melody” appears to skitter above its own surface, if the subheads and type treatment conspire to create a somewhat stutter-step experience, if occasionally the chosen point of view imprisons the tale in a perturbing passivity, there is much beauty and much wisdom in this book. Our lives haunt us, and they hunt us down. Hijuelos has the temerity here to set it all to music.
