Though my nearly two-year stay in Italy probably deserves far more space than anyone’s patience should allow, I will frame this little part of the book as a love story of a sort, for no sooner had I arrived in that city than did I become intoxicated with the Latino-ness of Rome and a lifestyle that, every day I lived there, somehow conformed with my memories (perhaps) and fantasies (definitely) of what life must have been like in Cuba before the fall, or, in the machinations of that longish narrative I had been fooling around with, Havana itself.
Rife with birdsong, blossoming gardens, high arching palm trees, and tropical vegetation everywhere, as well as a populace of outspoken, charismatic, friendly, occasionally curmudgeonly, stylish, and earthy people — with no end to the dazzling women, of all ages, there — Rome, that “great outdoor museum,” as Malraux once put it, pressed so many wonderful buttons inside me that for much of my time there, I became a new and improved version of myself, still tightly wound but, for the most part, really enjoying my life for a change.
Just walking those streets, especially in neighborhoods like Trastevere or by the Aventine, I’d stroll through the markets, absorbing, with almost a hunger, not just the scents of the marvelous breads and herbs and flowers that were everywhere, but the bel canto of the Italian language itself, which, for some reason, I felt far more at ease navigating than even my ancestral español. In fact, I used the Spanish I’d more or less improved upon during my recent travels to help me get along with the Italians. (Down in Naples, the Italian almost sounds like Castilian sometimes.) They understood me completely, and, because it was not my emotional turf to defend, I eventually flourished, or at least more easily in a street-friendly getting-around fashion. Though I attempted to decipher the daily newspapers, which were always remarkably slangy, and the writings of Borges, Cortázar, and Calvino in their Mondadori translations — incredibly, as in Spain, “literature” could be found in the racks of the sidewalk kiosks alongside Donald Duck or Paparone comics, religious tomes on Padre Pio, and some of the raunchiest porno I’d ever seen — it wasn’t anything I came close to mastering, at least not in the way that a few good solid years of study would have afforded me.
Nevertheless, I loved visiting the used book shops of Rome, where I indulged my interest in graphics and printing, often coming away, for only a few dollars in lire, with some fantastically illustrated volume, its production values incredible, with colors as deeply realized as those one remembers from childhood. My purchases included an antique edition of Le Avventure di Pinnochio by Carlo Collodi and a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy as told by Topolino (Mickey Mouse), as well as a turn-of-the-century star book, among other items, which I have continued to treasure to this day.
It wasn’t long before my second-floor room at the academy filled with such books, as well as the occasional knickknack from the market. Humble by any standards, it looked out onto a courtyard with a fountain and two high pine trees, its gravel paths often sounding with the footfall of visiting scholars and fellows, Italian voices murmuring upward along with birdsong — it was Borges who said his favorite word in English was nightingale, while I would think that uccello would qualify as mine in Italian. My furnishings included a bed, a desk, a few lamps, two chairs, and dresser. The room had a sink but no toilet, and I depended upon a communal bathroom for showers, etc. On a stand sat a heavy black telephone with a rotary dial, which I used mainly for calling the portieres, most of whom spoke quite good English, though one of them, the night man, appropriately named Orfeo, used only a Roman dialect that for some (like myself) was nearly impossible to understand. International calls always had to go through a special operator, and one would have to sometimes wait and wait, before finally giving up. (Though I had no one to call.)
Arriving at the villa, in addition to my room, I had been given my own little studio off the edge of a Tuscan-style garden — a run-down tile-covered shed with cracked windows, endless drafts, spiders, and salamanders, that was wedged up against the ancient Aurelian wall, which the Romans, back when, had built as a defense (it’s been supposed) against the barbarians. (In the spring, it would overflow with wisteria.) My windows had a view of an unbelievably serene and beautiful landscape, of orange-blue Roman skies and umbrella pines, and among the buildings in view, sharply defined like mannerist silhouettes in the twilight, a sixteenth-century domicile that Garibaldi had once used as a headquarters during his defense against the French, and where Galileo, at a time when a country road passed through those grounds, had once stayed. (The walls of such buildings and of those surrounding the garden were riddled with bullet holes.) I’d climb a series of cracked disintegrating steps, the path overgrown, to get to my studio, and there, when I was not wandering the city, I sat by an enormous desk before a little Olivetti. With pads of paper and a pile of manuscript that I’d dragged around Spain in my suitcase (as if they were songs), I’d set out daily, more often than not, to fool around with my second novel, which had already started to take on a new direction.
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.)