Now from the moment that Cesar, with his cigarette-ruined yet soulful baritone, stood before the microphone and intoned that song’s first words, “Oh, love’s sadness, Why did you come to me?” and with Nestor, so apprehensive at first, joining in during the chorus, their harmonizing lovely to the ear, and playing his trumpet like a man possessed by love, even that booze-soaked and jaded audience had started nodding in appreciation of its haunted melody. Sitting beside Esmeralda, Desi Arnaz, smoking a Havana puro, felt greatly touched by that song. It was so filled with longing that it seemed to be as much about missing Cuba as about missing a former love, a sentiment that Desi, having lived out in California for so long, must surely have shared. He certainly seemed to, for at the song’s conclusion, he stood up and applauded the Castillo brothers enthusiastically.
After the rest of their set, not a bad set at all, when the brothers had come offstage to relax and made their way through the room, they went over to Esmeralda’s table, where she made their introductions.
Lacking the luxury of a television set, the brothers didn’t know anything about his show, but they had heard Desi’s name around and knew he was the most famous cubano in America. In fact, Cesar had some kind of vague recollection of meeting Arnaz, as a very young man, many years before in some hilltop club in Santiago when they were both starting out and working that circuit as singers. Still, they were immediately friendly, shaking hands, rapping each other’s backs, and almost getting teary eyed-with Cubans, that wasn’t an unusual thing. Arnaz was dark featured, handsome, and charismatic in a matinee idol way, and his wife, delicately sipping a mango punch through a straw, was a strikingly lovely woman who hardly blinked through the ensuing conversation. The heart of what they talked about, beyond the niceties of where they had both come from-Oriente, the most easterly province in Cuba-and after they had clicked champagne glasses? It came down to this: Known for employing cubanos and helping many an aspiring musician out, Arnaz asked them if they would ever consider flying out to California to perform that “beautiful María” song for a taping of his TV show.
“It’s called I Love Lucy,” he said.
“Oh yes, of course, I Love Lucy.”
Cesar scratched the back of his head at the offer. They weren’t actors but could surely use a real break, for after years of working second-tier clubs and ballrooms, and playing Catskills gigs, their band, the Mambo Kings, deserving better, hadn’t really gotten anywhere at all. (This was practically Cesar’s fault-he didn’t like the gangsters who ran the best places and had gotten a reputation among them as a difficult and arrogant two-bit singer, way too big for his britches. It didn’t help that he refused to sign any shifty contracts or that he’d bedded down many of their most luscious molls.) Looking over at Nestor, his dark eyebrows raised, Cesar asked: “What do you think, Brother?”
And Nestor, with Esmeralda gently caressing his back as if he was a favorite son, nodded his timid consent. It wasn’t easy. Deep down, the very thought that his lingering pain over and devotion to María-the woman whom Cesar called “a hard-on’s dream”-would be aired before the entire country troubled him. What would Delores think? But his brother was his brother, and there was very little that Nestor wouldn’t do for Cesar.
Smiling, Cesar told Arnaz that nothing would please them more.
“Great! Our show is number one in the country,” Arnaz told them. “When you perform that song, maybe it’ll become a number one tune!” He lit another cigar. Then, slipping into Spanish, he explained that his wife wanted to get back to their hotel, the Plaza, and that they’d had a tiring day, though, confidentially, he wouldn’t mind at all just sitting with them and catching the floor shows, but, oh, his was a demanding schedule, which his wife, Lucille, always tapping upon the tiny face of her diamond-movement watch, kept him to.
As Arnaz was about to leave-Lucille Ball was already by the coat check gathering their garments-he said to the brothers, “I guarantee that you’ll have a good time in Los Angeles. But if you have any problems with the music, my good friend Marco Rizo, my arranger, and pianist on the show, lives right here in town. Give him a call, huh?” He scribbled out a number on a card and dropped it on the table. With that, Arnaz, a broad smile on his face, joined his wife; Cesar followed after them, standing on the curbside without a topcoat, a filterless cigarette in hand, his body shivering in the chill, but still waving at the famous couple as they drove away in their limousine through the falling snow.
LATER, AFTER SEVERAL HOURS OF SITTING UP DRINKING WITH his brother, and driving him crazy with all his doubts-“Was that canción really any good?” (“Yes, Brother, how many times do I have to tell you!”)-Nestor lay beside his wife, Delores, absently fondling her breasts but thinking about María. If he loved her enough to write that song, why did performing it for the first time in public leave him so low? And why was he filled with such utter misery when, for the first time, he and Cesar finally had a chance at some success? And then he slipped back again into that period of darkness in Havana, when María had thrown him off, and remembered what Cesar had later told him again and again: “Why be stupid about that María when you have such a wonderful woman as Delores in your life?” Ah, but Delores. He’d always told her that “Beautiful María of My Soul” was just a song he’d been fooling with, and there he was, after six years in the States, lying beside Delores and wishing he were back in Havana with María. And he hated himself for that thought, for Delores certainly deserved better. “Te amo, Delores,” he whispered to her again and again. But why was that hole in his heart, like a pin shoved through a photograph from one’s happier youth-as if real happiness was never really possible? Why was he wasting his affections on a woman who had turned into air? He didn’t know, he was just a citified campesino at heart, after all, didn’t know anything about the way real Cuban men treated women. “No soy honesto,” he told himself that night. “No soy decente”-“I’m neither honest or decent.” And he hated himself even more. But thank God that his body, in times of such gloom, always faithfully took over. Kept awake by the clanking of steam pipes, he found himself lifting up the hem of Delores’s nightgown and, feeling the heat of her bottom, drew back her underwear and entered her from behind, Delores, half asleep, sighing at first and then pushing back in a grinding motion and gasping, but not too loudly because she didn’t want the children to hear at the far end of the hall, Nestor, in those same moments, still thinking about María. Then he came after several powerful thrusts, and once he floated back down to earth, he hated himself anew for having that name, that face, that body still lingering stubbornly in his dreams-ah yes, y coño!-María, angel of the heavens, delicious as the balmy dawn off the Malecón and, as women are in many a bolero, an unforgettable apparition of love. [1]
[1] At any rate, that’s basically what happened that night, even as hearsay and the passage of time would embellish that story somewhat differently. According to one of the neighborhood kids, a friend of Nestor’s son, a plump, myopic, and curious fellow who in later years often sat with Cesar Castillo to hear him talk about his glorious dance hall past, that night unfolded differently. Instead of heading straightaway to their hotel on that snowy evening, Desi and his wife decided to visit Nestor’s walk-up apartment on La Salle Street for a midnight meal. Mind you, all those years later, Cesar Castillo was fairly plastered and torn up about all kinds of things in the telling, but even so, with his eyes getting almost teary, he was quite convincing. As Cesar put it, Desi-“a helluva good fellow”-couldn’t have been more gracious, and it wasn’t long before he was sitting in their little kitchen, making himself at home. After savoring a big platter of arroz con pollo and some lemon and garlic and salt-drowned fried tostones, which Delores had prepared in a cloud of sizzling oil and smoke, he strummed Nestor’s guitar and sang a few Cuban songs-“Mama Inéz” and “Guantanamera”-for his new friends. Cesar would swear that Desi himself grew teary eyed over the warmth of their Cuban hospitality and indeed felt perfectly at home, despite the flecking ceiling and hissing steam pipes and half crumpled linoleum floor. Cesar told that story so many times that, in some quarters, it became the official version. In fact, the plump kid went so far as to eventually put it in a book that he would write about the brothers, even if it didn’t get everything right. Whether Desi actually made it there or not, one thing was certain: that wintry night in 1955, the brothers had indeed made Arnaz’s acquaintance at the Mambo Nine club and were promised a chance to appear on his show, where, indeed, as walk-on characters playing Ricky Ricardo’s singing cousins from Cuba, they were to immortalize Nestor’s tormented canción de amor “Beautiful María of My Soul,” a song which his former amante was to hear soon enough on the streets of Havana.