As with earlier times, such trips required of me great patience, not only because my mother, as if trapped in a certain groove on a 78 RPM record that skipped, could not restrain herself from going over her life with my father, but because, in her mid-seventies and slowing up from the more typical maladies of advancing years (though her mind remained as sharp as ever), just getting her around — on foot to the subway, and then to the ferry boat — seemed interminable, a two-or-so-hour trek that felt like a day. Oddly, even back then, as I’d walk slowly across the flagstone promenade of Columbia, my mother holding on to me so tightly, the same feelings that dogged me as a sickly child — of wanting to break away and run off to some faraway place — came back to me, and I’d wish to God that I could have somehow managed to have stayed in Italy, or, at any rate, somewhere else. At the same time, I came up with the notion that my Cuban identity, however New Yorkized, required that I do the right thing and never, never turn my back on my family, no matter what other desires drove me. And why?
Even I didn’t have a clue, coño.
Frankly, I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for the literary life, whatever that may have been, in the first place. From what I had observed of it, from my safe distance, it didn’t always treat people kindly. Over the past decade, Donald Barthelme’s reputation, for example, had seemed to sink and sink into a kind of near-oblivion. Where once his books were reviewed on the front page of the almighty New York Times Sunday Book Review and greeted as masterpieces, by 1989, his works had been relegated to a quarter page in the back of that publication. Where his experimental fictions had once been considered timely, relevant, brilliant, and cutting-edge, he had been most recently eclipsed by Raymond Carver, whose surgically precise but often maudlin prose had become the new standard of excellence. (And all the more so after the poor man, a reformed alcoholic who often wrote of those trials so transcendently, died of cancer in 1988.)
Surely this sea change affected Barthelme’s spirits. During my visits with him on Eleventh Street, just as I had returned from Rome and about a year and a half later, he had seemed, in terms of his own creativity, somewhat of a lost soul, a writer trapped by his self-imposed restrictions and obviously perplexed by his own disenchantment. Confessing to a writer’s block, he once told me that he would love to write an autobiographical novel but thought that he couldn’t, as it would be a betrayal of his aesthetic and of what people expected of him. (The closest he came to doing so was a lovely story called “Bishop.”) I didn’t quite understand his resistance to a bit of change, but what concerned me more was the horrific doubling-over cough he had developed by then. On those evenings, keeping up with him as a smoker seemed a stupidity — he had gotten to a point when his episodes became violent, his face turning such a deep red that the only way he could soothe his burning, nearly rupturing throat was to down, in one quick and continuous gulp, a full goblet of Scotch, and only then would that retching abate. Though he didn’t seem to flinch at my suggestion that he should write whatever the fuck he felt like writing, he blew up at me when I suggested that he see a doctor: “Mind your own business,” he snapped, lighting up another cigarette. “I know what I’m doing,” he told me. “Trust me.”
Then, feeling better, he poured me another Scotch and said: “Okay, one more, then you have to go.”
We did speak a few more times and remained on a friendly basis, and when I finally received a galley of the Mambo Kings I almost sent it to him. Despite all the work I’d already put into it, there were a few paragraphs in the novel, as well as some passages, that I just had to rewrite, and because I wanted to impress him, I decided to wait until I’d had a chance to put in my changes and planned to give him the finished version instead. In the meantime, Donald, through his friend and colleague at the University of Houston Ed Hirsch, a poet who had won the Rome Prize in Literature that year, 1989, traveled to Italy and took up a three-month residency at the American Academy, among the happiest and most carefree of Signor Barthelme’s professional life, he and the Eternal City having gotten quite well along. The only caveat is that when Donald finally returned to Houston, with worsening symptoms, he was found to be suffering from throat cancer, by then at an advanced stage. Shortly, the following happened: On a midsummer day in July, while in the hospital, with his wife Marion by his side, and, as I’ve been told, somewhat sedated on morphine, he was sitting up in his bed when, at a certain moment, he slipped into a coma from which he, lingering for two weeks, never awakened.
The craziest thing? When I first heard about it, I kicked myself for having held my novel back from him (as if my changes would have made much difference in his opinion), but beyond that, I kept thinking that he had been one the few people who had ever looked out for me, and that he was about my pop’s age at his passing.
(In fact, Donald passed away on July 23, my father July 26, twenty years before.)
By the time The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love came out that August of 1989, it was already a fairly well-known entity within the industry: FSG, a house so brilliant at creating a buzz about a book — and in a way I have never since encountered — had practically started a riot at the American Booksellers Association meeting that spring by giving out their advance reading copies along with a canvas bag bearing an image of that book’s cover. I’m told that people had swamped the FSG tables and that within a few hours, every last one had been scooped up. Prepub reviews were as good as could be hoped for, and several foreign publishers bought the rights early on. It also seemed that some important newspaper reviews, among them one in The New York Times, were imminent, though the official word within the house was not to expect too much, a notion that they held on to until at a certain point, the Times requested that I meet with one of their staff writers for the Sunday Book Review — I did so in a bar around the corner from where I lived. (Mainly we discussed how I had come up with certain notions behind the book, the I Love Lucy angle, a bridge between American and Cuban cultures, most intriguing him.) Once FSG learned that a little interview would be included with the review, they began to think The Mambo Kings would be given a fair amount of space, though to what extent, they could not predict. (They were already on a roll; two of their books, one by Carlos Fuentes and the other by Mario Vargas Llosa, had landed spectacular front-page reviews, but they did not expect anything like that for me: They were Latin American Boom writers after all, while I, as a homegrown Latino — and therefore of far less interest to the general American public — could hardly expect the same stellar respect.)
And yet, come one Sunday — I do not recall the date; I think it was midmonth — my novel made it to the cover of the book review (the literary equivalent, in those days at least, of a musician getting on the cover of Rolling Stone). The female critic could not have been kinder, despite the book’s high content of macho shenanigans, lauding the work as a great literary immigrant novel, the review accompanied by a dandy pen-and-ink illustration depicting a swirl of Cuban musicians shaking maracas and playing drums in a lively jam. I could not have missed it. For even if I wanted to avoid the subject — and a part of me wanted to — I would have heard about it anyway, for my agent, publicist, and editor, among others, called me as soon as they received the news. That was quickly followed (or preceded, as the Times book review could be had a week in advance) by a Friday review in the daily Times by the star-making/career-withering Michiko Kakutani, who gave me a high-toned rave, though, once again, for my wonderful immigrant novel. I was so naïve as to write both reviewers thankyou notes — as I would have done at the ad agency, where if someone looked out for you, some gesture of appreciation followed. I never heard back from either one of them.