I turned heads there, mainly because, of all the writers on hand that day, I had been the only one to show up wearing a suit and tie. (Norman Mailer, for example, appeared at the podium looking quite hungover and wearing what seemed to be a wine-stained turtleneck sweater.) Sitting down next to Allen Ginsberg, he had nodded, smiling, at me. When his turn came, he got up and read some crazy-sounding poem of easy beatnik rhyme—something that had phrasing along the Nagasaki, Kill the Nazi, Kamikazi line which the audience of diehard lefty aesthetes deeply appreciated, but which I, as usual, didn’t get. (No offense to Allen Ginsberg fans, but I essentially thought the guy had a racket, though I will admit I was about as uptight as any young author could be.) I remember, however, feeling that I had made a connection with Ginsberg, and in what I considered a friendly Cuban manner, I patted him on the shoulder when he came down from the stage and took a seat beside me again.

When my turn came, I threw everyone in that room by reading from my selection of quotes about war and peace from antiquity. And while it was probably not the most exciting thing I could have done, at least it was brief, which, I’ve since learned, crowds really like; Ginsberg himself seemed to appreciate the effort. In fact, if anyone had seemed to have watched me carefully, it was he, with whom I made bespectacled eye contact quite often from the podium, Ginsberg nodding repeatedly at my words. Later, when I returned to my seat, he even tapped me on the knee. Afterward, however, when I got a chance to speak directly to Mr. Ginsberg at the cocktail party, he seemed puzzled that I had even approached him. He asked me two questions: “Which magazine are you with?” To which I answered, “None.” And then, more surprisingly, he asked, “What are you doing here?” which really threw me, since I had been sitting next to him, had been introduced as the Cuban-American author of Our House, and had thought him rather attentive during my little discourse. It was in that moment that I first learned that a lot of pretending went on at such events, and that even writers, not to be confused with anyone else, were required to first and foremost wear the appropriate Bohemian apparel.

And perhaps you’re wondering whether any Cubans ever showed up to my readings. They sometimes did. Even back then, I had a little Cuban fan base, word getting around, mainly among the females, longtime New Yorkers mostly, who, like my parents and aunts, had come here long before the revolution (they were the Cubans I mainly knew). But every so often, as I’d give a reading, I’d look out and spot someone, arms folded severely across his chest and with a no-nonsense seriousness upon his face, a man affiliated with some anti-Castro organization, on hand to check me out: I could always tell—and for years afterward I’d know them from their severe disappointment that my writing rarely commented on or openly attacked Fidel Castro or his regime; my work just wasn’t that way, and as a consequence, I have sometimes seen these kinds of cubanos get up, disgusted, and leave the room while I happened to be in midsentence.

Mainly, I’d become melancholic like him, out of the blue. I have the distinct memory of riding the subway home and thinking, as I held on to one of those poles in the center of the car, that I was probably hanging on to the same one that my pop did as he’d ride back, in a forlorn state of his own, with his scent of meat, cigarettes, and booze, from work. (Same line, same cars, the same passing rush of tunnel girders in the darkness; why not?) And it would hit me that perhaps my life would never really be different from his, and all at once, I’d wish to God that I could become someone else.

I had been feeling especially awful one October night in 1984, another of those cold miserable New York evenings, when the black slickened streets, runny with distending lights and misery (now I’m thinking like Ginsberg, carajo!) seemed to define the world. I’d always found blue Mondays hard to take—like just about everyone else who worked downtown—but after I’d turned thirty-three, an age that held a lot of symbolic weight for me as a Catholic, and my life, after the publication of that book, had seemed to flatten out again, I didn’t really know what the hell to do with myself, except to continue on in a job from which I would never be fired—for they knew they had someone smart on the cheap. With that realization, the prospect of trudging through yet another workweek on automatic pilot, as it were, became more and more of a burden. At thirty-three, I was old enough to feel that I hadn’t a whole lot of time to piss away, and though I thought about quitting nearly every week, the company’s generosity with those transit ads (and well-wishes for my career, such as it was), and the fact that I really didn’t have anything to fall back on, nor the nerve to just say “fuck it,” kept me there, though on some days I’d feel like I was going out of my mind with boredom.

It was one of those evenings when just about everything seemed off, faces elongating in crazy animal ways; the pizzeria guy, stout and sturdy, looking to me like a bull through the glare of his window; the panhandlers coming off like jackals and seeming more devious than usual as I’d just walk on (“Hey, baldy, I’m talking to you!”); the subway stairwells, gutters, and sidewalks smelling pissier (and shittier) than before, and when not even the notion of buying myself a few dollar bottles of wine and smoking half a pack of cigarettes, while watching some bad horror flick on TV, cheered me up. One of those what-on-earth-are-you-doing-with-your-life evenings. I was in the kind of mood where just to hear español spoken on the street irritated me—as in “What the fuck did you all ever do for me?” When I walked into the dollar shop to buy some toilet paper, even the gossiping sweet-natured old Latina ladies by the counter, whom I generally felt charmed by, got on my nerves. (So maybe I was a white motherfucker after all.) Just a lousy night altogether, and on top of it all, I couldn’t believe that I’d have to get up and start all over again the next morning. (I’d leave at eight thirty-five; somehow I’d always get to the office, hustling, by nine.)

In this lousy frame of mind, I walked into my building entranceway and got my mail. Occasionally I’d receive a “fan” letter—in the same way I kept every review for that book, so I did the letters, maybe ten in all, which I’d answer with as much grace and gratitude as I could muster. Mainly I’d contend with the same roster of bills—“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” I would say to myself while flipping through them.

That evening the mail included a creamy envelope of some thickness, whose return addressee was an organization I had only just recently heard about, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it might say. I was sitting in my living room, smoking a cigarette, when I tore it open, and even as I reread the thing, I could hardly believe its contents. I must have read it a half dozen times when I finally realized its significance. That letter, quite simply, offered me an extraordinary opportunity: Would I, the recipient, be willing and available to accept, if so offered to him, a paid year’s residence as a writing fellow at the American Academy in Rome? The fellowship would come with a monthly stipend, a travel allowance, living quarters in a villa, all my meals, and a studio. It was to begin in the autumn of 1985. Among the things that hit me in those moments was my recollection of a photograph I had once seen of Ralph Ellison, taken in the sunny courtyard—or cortile—of the academy’s villa. I had always thought that going to a place like that would be a dream, and you know what? I didn’t even have to think twice about it. Would I be available? Who were they kidding?

At the awards ceremony itself, in May, which was held in the institute’s amphitheater, after a rather tony luncheon with various other artists and award recipients on the institute’s stately grounds on 155th Street and Audubon Terrace, I received my Rome Prize. The presenter was a rather plastered, towering, and hunched-over John Galbraith. Beforehand, I’d been told that he would first read a citation about my work and then shake my hand, but either he forgot about it or they had changed their minds. “Oh, to be a young man again, going to Rome,” he told me, with a handshake. “How enviable.” And that was it.

Still I waited for him to say something else, and when he gestured for me to leave the stage, with a shoving motion of his upraised palms, I looked out at the audience and shrugged, cocking my head about, as if he were some kind of nut, and brought down the house. I also remember Jerome Robbins smiling warmly and winking at me as I proceeded offstage, and hearing my mother occasionally, sitting out somewhere in the audience with her friend Chaclita, emoting—“Ay! Ay!”—during the ceremonies. I recall urinating in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mark Twain–era urinals downstairs between Harold Bloom and Robert Penn Warren and feeling as if I had finally arrived!

It was quite a pleasant affair, really the high point of my life to that point, and the first “graduation” ceremony in which I was involved that my mother ever attended. (They even had a photograph of me, along with some samples of my manuscript in a display case, which impressed her very much.) I am not quite sure what my mother made of that rather haughty crowd, but she enjoyed the hors d’oeuvres and wine (unusual for her to drink at all) and nearly fainted at the sight of Jacqueline Onassis, whom, at one point during the reception afterward, she discovered standing just next to her.

“Ay, pero por Dios,” she exclaimed, patting her chest while holding her gold neck chain crucifix in hand. “If only your papá was alive to see this!” Ms. Onassis, for her part, was gracious enough to notice my mother’s genuine excitement and smiled at her. For months, all my mother talked about “Jackie y yo” with whomever she bumped into, and years later, having decided to try her hand at writing a novel, she came up with a wild scenario about time travel, in which Onassis figured as the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, or something crazy like that.

Flying to Madrid and lugging a valise that I’d stupidly filled with books, few clothes, and, among other things, a passport holder stuck under my shirt, I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what I was doing. But arriving in the land of my forebears, I felt surprised by just how much my Spanish blood meant to me. It just hadn’t occurred to me before. (These were sentiments that the Spaniards, in their atheism, their newly digested post-Franco freedom, and their hard-nosed somberness probably found quaintly bemusing.) I was stunned to see so many fair-skinned and blond Spaniards, especially in the north (“They look like us,” I wrote my brother.) I lived happily, ineptly on occasion. It thrilled me to hear castellano as only the Spaniards could speak it, with all their Arabic flourishes, the theta and rrrrrrrs rolling like a waterfall (yes, I know I’m pushing things.) While thinking that I couldn’t really speak much Spanish, I found myself forced to use what I knew, and after about two weeks there, while staying in pensions and having to navigate the markets and shops and museums of that city, I started speaking and writing it—even sent my mother a postcard entirely composed in Spanish, detailing my “adventures,” such as they were. The younger women in Spain, it seemed to me, were either femmes fatales, like some of the shapely Guardia Civil ladies I saw standing on the corners in their tight khaki uniforms, holding machine guns, or intellectual, schoolteacherly sorts—at least the ones who spoke to me. It took me a while to let go of certain images in my head—like the electric dusted air of the subways, sleazy Times Square, the projects, the shit of certain neighborhoods, and, of course, that other something that I’d always carried around with me, the baggage I had from my upbringing. I liked it that life in Spain went a certain way, that I didn’t ever have to worry about getting jumped and that I didn’t have to keep my radar turned on or go through all the endless nonsense of seeming perfectly calm when finding myself in a lousy neighborhood, as often happened to me in New York, though once I went south, I couldn’t help but feel a distrust for the inordinately friendly and aggressive Moroccans, who always seemed to be on the make. (I was right, at least about the younger ones, whom I’d encounter hanging around the bus stations or following me down a street, calling out, “You speak English? . . . Etes-vous Français? Esperate, Aleman!”) After years of adhering to an early schedule, I didn’t have to worry about getting up at any particular hour, and when I finally got around to breakfast, I’d usually end up in a bar, where I’d smoke a few cigarettes, eat a buttered roll, and drink brandy with my coffee. (God bless any nation where the workers begin their day in that manner.) For lunch, living off tourist-menu specials, I ate more rosemary grilled merluza and olive-oil-drenched potatoes and drank more cheap red Spanish wine than I ever would again in my life. Along the way, I became grateful for any opportunity to engage with the Spaniards. Once when two young (and very fine) girls came up to me in their school uniforms on the street selling lottery tickets to raise money for some orphanage, I didn’t even hesitate to buy them, so thrilled did I feel that they looked me in the eyes and presumed that I was a Spaniard. In the Prado, where Picasso’s Guernica hung behind a massive plate of glass, protected by two machine gun–bearing soldiers (I’d never seen so many weapons being held out in plain sight before), and where, in the pretentious manner of the daydreaming young, I decided that Velazquez’s Las Meninas had to be my favorite painting of all time, I’d sit around for hours in the overheated rooms, feeling as if I’d won a million dollars in some contest.

At the Escorial, that storied royal residence north of Madrid, I felt the heaviness of Spanish history everywhere around me, and it made me sad. I already tended to think about all the people who had died in this world, and in Spain, perhaps because of the aged cripples and maimed survivors of the civil war who were still to be seen begging on the streets everywhere, the fleeting nature of existence followed me about like a ghost. In Seville, I wandered about the Gypsy neighborhoods, on the outskirts of the city, whose passageways and streets were too narrow for police cars to go through, seeking out bars where I might hear authentic flamenco music. (It was a miracle that someone didn’t rob me.) In Guernica, my heart stopped: I had gone into a slot machine parlor one evening, feeling smugly self-assured that even if I had been rarely accepted as a Cuban Latino in the states, I could at least pass as a Spaniard, más o menos, in Spain when an old man cast a dirty look my way, and then, further shattering my delusions, raised his right arm, his palm held straight up, and saluted me, saying: “Sig Heil!” Then he spat on the floor.

On a long train ride in an acrid car reeking of tobacco, animals, and soot across Gallicia, I ached with an inexplicable feeling of belonging (my pop’s side of the family were Gallegos after all) and yet, at the same time, I could not produce a single name of a relative or a town to visit there. (That ached as well.) On such a train, one couldn’t help but fall into conversation with the farmers who traveled on them: One such farmer, feeling deeply touched (the more educated the Spaniard, the less touched he or she felt by my nostalgia for those roots) by the fact that I was by ancestry a paisano, and thinking me a rich American, offered to sell me a farm of some twenty hectares for (converting from pesetas) roughly fourteen thousand dollars. (How interesting that would have been, had I had that kind of money.) Later, I made like a pilgrim, visiting the sacred cathedral in Santíago, but oddly, though I’d been told that it was a very special place—even some of the guidebooks said that it had a mystical air—I, who considered myself cut very much from my mother’s cloth, and therefore superstitious, felt nothing at all in that place. Among my other excursions in Gallicia, I took a ferry out to la isla de Cies, an island off the Atlantic coast of Spain that had been reconfigured with dunes and trees and white sands and driftwood in the manner of California beaches after Franco, smitten by a visit there and, as a dictator, able to move mountains if he so liked, had ordered it done. I saw my first nude beaches there and narrowly escaped getting beat up by a gaggle of older Spanish women who had happened along the same spot overlooking a cliff where I, el stupido, had stood posing before a camera on which I had set off a timer; as those women approached, and I ducked into the bushes, the camera, set on top of a rock, clicked as if I had been waiting, in fact, to get shots of their tanned, spectacularly drooping bodies. (During the two-hour journey back, I had to contend with their accusations, their scornful expressions, and the fact that they told anyone they could that I was “the one with the filthy mind.” Did I care? All I knew was that I wasn’t standing on a subway platform somewhere deep in Brooklyn on a hot summer afternoon.)

Traveling all around the Iberian Peninsula, I ended my Spanish journey in Barcelona, where, indeed, many of those Catalans were as fair (and sometimes balding) as I. Roaming its streets, I couldn’t help but wonder where my maternal grandfather’s family had once lived, or whether my mother and her sisters had been aware of such landmarks as the Parque Guell or the other insanely ornate buildings Gaudí had designed, during their visits there as children. I wandered the old quarters of the city endlessly, bought countless novels from the kiosks off the Ramblas, editions of works by García Marquez, Borges, Italo Calvino, Vargas Llosa, and Neruda, to name a few, for my planned Spanish library in Rome. (I swore that I would get through every single one of them.) I haunted the guitar shops of Barcelona, trying out one instrument after another, no matter how much it cost, despite a budget of about one hundred dollars. Eventually, I bought a real beauty, manufactured by the House of Struch in 1985, an orange wood, mellow-toned guitar, which sits in this very room behind me as I write.

On the very day I was to leave for Rome with my new guitar in hand, my valise weighing even more from newly purchased books, and my head dense with recent memories, I got a little careless and allowed my radar to turn off. Overdoing the vino (and cigarettes) at lunch, as I made my way to the central station in Barcelona, all the while feeling as if I were Mr. Slick New Yorker, my wallet with all my cash vanished, some fellow having picked my pocket in the crowded square.

Fortunately, though I had nothing more than a few pesetas in change left, I had kept my ticket and passport stashed inside my shirt; brooding, I settled into my second-class compartment and was wondering what I would do over the two-day journey to Rome for food when into that car came four cheerful, not-bad-looking Spanish nurses in their late twenties, from Merida. They were toting picnic baskets filled with food and wine and chocolates, and hearing the story of how I had been pickpocketed, took pity, and tenderly so, on this americano. Europe? God, I loved it!

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.)

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.)

Of course, I had my own limited but accurate memories of what it felt like to be playing at two in the morning in a smoky and crowded bar, on some nights when you felt like it and on some when you didn’t. I also knew something of how much young musicians really have dreams of making it, and how easily those dreams can be crushed, the world being, I think, somewhat cruel, and how (so easily) one’s moment could so quickly pass.

However, without a doubt, the biggest influence on my creation of Cesar Castillo had to be the glamorous career my uncle Pedro once had as a performer with the Cugat orchestra back in the mambo epoch, a life played out in elegant louche café-society venues that, as a source of inspiration, I wore like an inherited glove. (But even Pedro’s story had its own sad ending: In the early 1980s, he had gone into a Miami hospital for the removal of a mole from beneath the lobe of his right ear and the surgeons, messing up, had somehow cut into a major artery, whose bleeding could not be stopped; hence, my image of Pedro, in a white tux and tails, seated by a table in some club with my aunt Maya—in Havana and New York—overflows now with crimson.)

Along the way, I had attended a Santeria ceremony over on Columbus Avenue with a Cuban playwright friend—I loved those sweet old black ladies, the santeras who, gentle as sparrows, not only exorcized demons but cooked up a storm in the kitchen. It was through that playwright friend that I met Chico O’Farrill, a bandleader, arranger, and composer whose Afro-Cuban jazz pedigree involved working with the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Machito, and Chano Pozo at their peak, and harkened back to the glory times of Havana nightlife in the 1940s. Though one of the Latin greats, he had been reduced to mainly writing jingles and background music for television and radio advertisements, and while he still participated in recording sessions with some quite famous musicians, Celia Cruz among them, the moment of his greatest glory had also passed. Physically slight, with a face that seemed reminiscent of both Salvador Dalí and Xavier Cugat, he was rather curmudgeonly, at least when I first met him, for he valued his privacy and only spoke to me as a favor to his friend. Still, over drinks, he provided me with a sense of Havana’s nightlife circa the Batista era—none of it being anything I hadn’t already suspected, viz., the sleaziness of the mob’s influence in Havana, the bawdiness of certain of its clubs and bordellos, and the hardships of coming up as a musician in a city in which even the finest talents were but a dime a dozen. Then, once he’d decided that enough was enough and politely booted me out, I left his apartment, feeling somewhat grateful for the information, and without the slightest suspicion that years later we would become rather close friends.

Ultimately, however, it was Cesar Castillo himself who worked his own magic. I conceived him as a cross between my pop (in the sense of his fleshliness and drinking) and a heartthrob (now dated) like Victor Mature, with touches of both Frankie the exterminator and Mr. Martinez the superintendent. He wore the gray utility uniform of my uptown super, Luis (who, a cocaine addict, would do any job for the money, and, constantly wired, died at about age forty from a heart attack), with his smells of plumber’s gum and incinerator ash (as well as tobacco). With so much information floating in my head, I still hadn’t figured out just who Cesar Castillo happened to really be, when, as I sat before my desk one day, I envisioned him coming out of a basement into a courtyard, singing in a wonderful baritone, but, at the same time, carrying in his arms an old record jacket on whose cover I first “saw”—cross my heart—the rubric The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.

Still, I already had a tentative title for that manuscript—The Secrets of a Poor Man’s Life—while the name Mambo Kings, for Cesar’s orchestra, simply occurred to me while noticing how on old mambo recordings, which I’d come by in secondhand shops and places like the Salvation Army, musicians such as Perez Prado would be referred to as the King of Cuban Swing, or the King of the Mambo, and perhaps I had seen in Spanish the phrase “El Rey del Mambo,” but never once “Mambo King,” which I came up with by simply inverting the old terminology from the 1950s.

Once I’d figured out that my humble super had been a mambo king, or the Mambo King, as he would become known in the novel, I still saw him in terms of a contradictory personality: On the one hand he was rambunctious, wild, life loving, woman chasing, devil-maycare, blatantly sexist, big dicked, and altogether, even when long past his prime, herculean in every way possible (or to put it differently, a man of the earth and of a triumphant body, until his vices got the better of him). At the same time, because I’d always identified that feeling with being Cuban, he had a tendency toward melancholy and so many soulful memories that he seemed to be two “selves,” as it were. That dichotomy puzzled me, until one day I realized that Cesar Castillo was, in fact, two persons: Hence his younger brother, Nestor, came into the world, or, as I thought of him, he had always been there, lingering inside Cesar Castillo’s head.

A far more measured and poetic soul, but devastatingly sad, Nestor Castillo was an infinitely talented musician, and the sort to sit inside a tenement window strumming a guitar while writing a heartfelt bolero about, at least in the beginning, the Cuba he, as an immigrant living in New York, had left behind. Once I had figured that out, it became a matter of placing the stories of these two Cuban brothers in the context of Cesar’s memories of the past.

And so, as they say, that novel began.

Though the villa and grounds had once seen better times, I learned quickly that coming to the academy was an honor, and for most of the fellows there, a competitively driven one. Among them were pre- and postdoctoral classicists and art historians, architects and architectural scholars, conservationists, city planners, experts in Italian Renaissance literature as well as aspirants in the field of Italian studies, who had been culled from the finest universities in the United States and, in some cases, Europe: Harvard, Princeton, and Yale graduates were well represented at the academy, but even when they came from other universities, there could be no doubt as to their drive and brilliance, for they were the crème de la crème of young scholarship. Added to this mix were returning former fellows, now tenured professors on sabbatical from some of the most prestigious universities in the country, to take up half- and full-year residencies devoted to studies and writing, and, as well, the occasional invited honored guest.

During my year at the academy, of this group, the two most notable were Dorothea Rockburne, the artist, and one Leon Krier, architect, town planning theorist, and Prince Charles’s right-hand man when it came to London architectural conservation, with whom I became rather friendly—mainly because the two of us had a shared interest in fumetti, comics, which took us all over Rome to visit shops.

On the other side, among the nonacademics, in a separate class unto themselves, were the fellows in the arts—painting, photography, sculpture, and music. In my year, they were a rather talented but temperamentally uneven group that included one burly older painter, who, having applied to the academy some fifteen times over the years, arrived with a smoldering contempt for the spoiled brat “careerists” surrounding him. He resembled, incidentally, a Thomas Nast rendering of Saint Nicholas, down to his bulbous nose and gray scraggly beard, though he, dressed usually in a lumberjack’s shirt and coveralls, hardly ever behaved in a jolly manner with anyone—and remained particularly belligerent toward me.

When I’d first turned up at the academy, I’d made the mistake of mentioning to him that my Rome Prize had come out of the blue, awarded to me from afar, from within the mysterious star chambers of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as I’d never applied for it; and though I’d said this so as to separate myself from the ultracompetitive folks there, for I’d never hustled anyone (or ever would) in my life, nor had I ever been one to “look around a room” to make possible connections, it did not go well with this man, who, until we became friends, made my life and that of the other fellows generally miserable. A perpetual presence at the downstairs bar just off the main salone, he tended to linger there without company, as most people, once seeing him, changed their plans. It seems that he was mainly a confrontation junkie, insults (“I’ve got more talent in my pinkie than everyone else here put together”) his general means of communication. But he must have also been crazy—his paintings, mainly portraiture and Roman cityscapes that were constructed by mounting blotchy dashes of paint one upon the other, seemed the work of a madman (at least to me). One day, when I’d shown up at the bar with a nice-looking woman I’d met in Rome, he nearly proved it, almost pushing me over an edge; ogling her body lasciviously, he leaned close to me, asking if I could do him a favor.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like letting me fuck her,” he said, pointing her way.

I was holding a beer mug at the moment, and if not for the fact that I would have been kicked out of the academy for good, I would have punched him in the face with it.

Still, in those days I made the acquaintance of a photographer in her mid-thirties named Barbara Beany, an expat who had married an Italian, whose roundish and expressive face always seemed swollen, her cheeks of a deep rouge coloration: Working for the academy, she had sought me out, and while I hadn’t been aware of just why, I always felt an inexplicable kinship with her, as if I knew much more about her than was possible. But I could never put my finger on it, until I learned that she suffered from bad kidneys. A sunny personality, despite her difficulties, we’d often stroll the academy’s back gardens, talking about her life in Italy and my book, which seemed to have touched her. Ever so quiet and gentle in her manner, I realize now that she, indeed, knew that her days were numbered.

Leon Krier and I were friendly enough that he invited me to London for New Year’s. My first autumn in Italy, we’d palled around quite a bit in Rome. On the evening of one of that city’s greatest (and rare) snowstorms, we had driven down to the Vatican, its piazza abandoned, and gone hiking in a state of elation through its threefoot-high drifts, talking about the monumentality of its architecture (in fact, we’d drive around Rome to obscure hill towns discussing nothing else). We’d make countryside excursions, his wife, Rita Wolfe, a painter, often joining us. But as I said before, we mainly caroused about for books. He’d invited me to London out of pure kindness, and though I had come down with an awful flu (my annual friend), I kept my assignation, having booked tickets on Ethiopian Airlines, the cheapest fare I could find. The day I left for London, I was on my way out to Fiumicino on a bus when traffic completely stopped on the highway. Suddenly, dozens of police cars, sirens blaring, went whizzing by, followed by ambulances, then military vehicles. As we waited, someone listening to a portable radio mentioned that some kind of attack had taken place in the airport. A few hours later when we were allowed to proceed, I arrived at a chaotic scene—hundreds of people and airline employees wandering about in a daze (so it seemed to me). At one side of the terminal, near the El Al and TWA counters, large paneled screens were being wheeled into place, while airport workers in janitorial coveralls stood on ladders, steam-blasting blood and other matter off the bullet-pocked walls. Even then I had no clear idea of what had happened, nor would I until, after an endless wait, my late-morning flight made it into London’s Heathrow, sometime after ten that night, when, as I recall, tanks were lining the airport route. Only when I made it over to Leon’s place at Belsize Park and turned on the “telly” did I learn that I’d witnessed the aftermath of the terrorist attack known as the Rome Massacre.

One morning while “footing,” as the Italians called it, I thought I was experiencing a hallucination: Rounding an upgrade and coming down upon a stretch that opened to a vast field bordered by a corridor of umbrella pines, before me lay encamped Garibaldi’s army, that is, about two hundred movie extras dressed in period costume and shakos, lolling about the misty greens, with muskets in hand, for a Franco Nero production! On yet another morning, on my way back to the academy from an all-night party, I saw Aguirre himself—Klaus Kinski, standing in front of the Pantheon in an open raincoat whose fabric he began flapping like a bird’s wings, as he turned in circles, obviously stoned out of his mind, in a glory over the gilded sunlight passing like honey over the square.

During that trip, I became quite friendly with our bus driver, and in the evenings, while most of the fellows stayed at the hotel, he, an older man, and I would find the local social club (usually in a tavern) and play the Italian card game of scopas—I forget how it worked now, but playing it well depended on keeping track of numbers, particularly combinations involving the number seven, and since I was good at basic math, I tended to win every time, confounding him. He was another one of those salt-of-the-earth Italians with whom I felt perfectly at ease, and in the small towns we visited, I found myself, without quite knowing why, drawn to the paesani and their way of life—of course, now I realize that in them I saw something of my campesino father.

On that occasion, I roomed with Professor Scott, who told me that I had a propensity for talking in my sleep on those nights, in a jumble of Italian, Spanish, English, and (apparently) some Portuguese (so he said), some other side of me, expressing an almost confident feel for languages, coming out. (On those same evenings, I also got into the habit of composing little quasi-poetic bits, mostly easy rhymes about my day’s observations: One that I remember, about a mythological painting in the Naples museum, went: “Aphrodite in her nightie feeding Aries tasty berries.”)

Back in Rome, I spent many a morning in the forum, hanging around classicists and developing an interest in archeology, so much so that in the coming years, for some six seasons, I’d devote my summers to digging out trenches and hauling wheelbarrows of fangi e sassi by the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, in the area sacra, an ongoing excavation supervised by the aforementioned Russell Scott. (If you don’t think a place can be haunted, then I suggest you go prowling through the Roman forum at six thirty in the morning, when the very upturned stone and marble columns seem to ooze spirits—mists literally rising from the corners of long-abandoned villas (at least they would for me). In fact, once the word got out that this Hijuelos was a soft touch when it came to digs, I moonlighted on several others, up in Cosa and in Campania to the south. I was so smitten by the notion of seeing the ancient world that I decided to visit Egypt in the winter. I was in Cairo when the army went into revolt and burned down several Giza hotels, among them one not far from where I had stayed. Later, I made it up the Nile to the island temple of Philae where Antinous, Hadrian’s lover, was said to have drowned himself; and although I fell deathly sick from a stomach malady along the way, by my journey’s end, with Karnak and Abu Simbel and other such marvels behind me, I felt, archeologically speaking, gloriously fulfilled.

And yet, at the same time, throughout those touristic travels, as I went jogging along the dusty palm-lined roads by the Nile in the early mornings, or crawled up a narrow shaft into the antechamber of the Great Pyramid, I had a nagging premonition that something sad had taken place back home, a strange and inexplicable feeling that accompanied me back to Rome. And this, unfortunately, came true. On the evening of my return, I walked up a hill toward the Academy’s back gate, where I bumped into one of my favorite fellows, Josefina, a Sardinian princess, who happened to be a classicist. After we had chatted a bit I made my way through the gardens and the villa complex itself. In my room, I sat down on my bed, when, wouldn’t you know it, the telephone rang. It was about ten thirty on a Sunday night, the world so still. One of my old neighborhood friends was calling me from New York.

“I got something bad to tell you,” he said. “Tommy Muller-Thym’s dead.”

“Oh, man—what happened?”

“Well, you know he had some bad stuff going on with his liver, that’s all,” he told me. “Went out alone and blind in a house upstate.”

The details of our reminiscences about him—as a gifted, funny, and super-bright dude who should have had a good life—aside, the loss of him killed both of us, but what could one conclude except that some things “just bees that way,” as my friend put it.

It took me a long time to get over that; and, though I knew he was gone, I brought Tommy’s jive spirit with me, wherever I went. That next summer, when I traveled all across Turkey visiting archeological sites, the most splendid of which, if one should care to know, were that of mystical Efes, where Saint Paul preached in the amphitheater; Sardis, with its collapsed temple to Saturn; the ruins of Pergamum; and, to the east, Nemrut Dag, the fantastically strange mountain tomb of one of Alexander the Great’s descendants, Antiochus I, whose summit—forgive the tourist-guide speak—afforded one an incomparable view of the rolling steppes of Asia, Tommy came along with me. Then, of course, with time, his presence, as with so many memories, faded—though I am glad that he is with me again, as I write these lines down now.

Making the Castillo brothers musicians, like my uncle Pedro, I knew they had left Havana in the late 1940s, to pursue the mambo scene in New York City, and that, as with most immigrants, their first years, while coping with a new language, a strange new environment, prejudice, and an inevitable sense of displacement (as well as elation)—the latter of which I often felt myself in Rome—were difficult. They’d have a moment of triumph, which I could never quite figure out—that is, until one afternoon, on a lusciously fecund spring day, when I was sitting in my studio and trying to decide whether to take a walk down to Trastevere or to remain by my desk searching for a solution. For some reason, just as I was about to leave, I began to recall how as a kid watching television with my pop, we delighted in the I Love Lucy show, and not only because of the comedy and give-and-take between Desi Arnaz’s character of Ricky Ricardo, a Cuban nightclub performer in New York, and his endlessly charming but zany American wife, Lucy (a match-up, incidentally, that I have in the decades since seen duplicated countless times), but because of how familiar it seemed to us whenever Ricky’s relatives turned up at his door from Cuba: I’d always wondered about those folks and the lives they had lived. And while I often entertained the notion of writing something about those walk-on characters, it hadn’t yet dawned on me that such an idea could be of use to me in my novel about a former Mambo King looking back on his life. And yet, right then and there, in my studio in Rome, it occurred to me that the brothers, fresh from Havana, had once appeared at Ricky’s door and, as musicians and singers, would perform on the stage of the Tropicana nightclub, as did so many of Ricky’s Cuban friends. Of course, as part of their backstory, set in the real world of the novel, he’d have to discover them somehow, and so, at a moment when I still felt greatly tempted to lose myself in the perfumed warmth of a Roman afternoon, I forced myself to type out the following lines:

The song they perform that night is one that Nestor Castillo had written for a love he’d left behind in Cuba, “Beautiful María of My Soul”; in some ways it was strictly a product of my life in Rome, and of my closet religiosity, for the name María first came to mind, in terms of that novel, on the Good Friday evening before Easter of 1986, when I had gone to the Colosseum to watch, among crowds of Romans, Pope John Paul II preside over the procession and ritual known as “La Via Crucis,” or the stations of the cross. Through a sound system that thundered, echoing through the farthest recesses of the ancient center, an Italian cardinal with one of the most resonant and deeply rich voices I’d ever heard, began to recite the story of Jesus’s passion and death. Now and then, the name Maria would burst through the narrative— —all the while enchanting me in such a manner that I allowed that name to roll over and over again in my mind, until at a certain moment, long after I’d left that wonderful processional, in the middle of the night, I shot up in bed, not from any bad dreams but from something that came to me as if out of the Roman/Havana air, a simple line, “La Bella María de mi Alma,” which I just had to scribble down lest I forget that subconscious rumination.

But aside from that divine inspiration, it also helped to have a beautiful woman in my life, about whom I will now briefly speak.

But that just made her laugh, and noting my accent, she told me, in quite perfect English, “So you are an American?”

By some miracle (thank you, Lord), I found myself following her into Trastevere, where, among other things, I learned her name—Sojin, or “pearl”—and discovered that my status as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome quite impressed her, as, in fact, it did so many Romans. Later, sitting in a café where the waiters knew and doted on her, I first saw her face and could see just why they—and, as I’d learn, just about every vendor and storekeeper in Rome—did so. Without dwelling excessively on the virtues of her appearance, I will only say that, as I later got to know her and we started going out to places together, it was nearly impossible to walk even a block—in any quarter of the city—without some Italian fellow (and God, half of them were always on the make) coming up alongside us on, foot or on a motorino and sometimes in a car, to make some jovial rascal’s remark to her in Italian along the lines of “Why don’t you lose the four-eyes”—or “the bald guy”—and come and have some fun with me!”

For some reason, though I don’t think it thrilled her, she forgave my flaws (“You are a refreshing change from the usual handsome and superficial Italian men,” she’d told me) and, stranded more or less in a foreign land, far from her home in Seoul, Korea, and perhaps craving the opportunity to end up one day in America, seemed to think me far more intelligent and sophisticated than I happened to be. She loved that I hailed from New York, and the fact that I was a member of the cubani people pleased her as well. While I didn’t conform, in any way, to her notion of what Cubans were supposed to look like, she, having taken the care and effort to read my first novel, out of some mixture of pity and real affection came to idealize me, even if I happened to be going bald and dressed too much, in her opinion, like a beatnik. (To hide my receded hairline, I rarely went anywhere in Rome without wearing a red or black beret, or a baseball cap.) She also liked the fact that I didn’t mind spending money on her—whatever she wanted or needed, it never bothered me to throw her some bucks, especially since I’d have to practically force her to accept the money, as she found it embarrassing, but never so much for her to refuse in the end. Still, I am not so sure what she saw in me, though, in fact, I really did go out of my way to be good to her.

In my eyes, she was something of a James Bond girl, if I may: incredibly sexy—she had posed in various states of undress for a number of Italian magazines, among them Playboy (for the very reason that she never showed me any of them, I’d search for pictures of her in the used magazine shops that were virtually everywhere, in Rome; I never found any). From a well-educated background, she had also an adventurous past. Having run away from a strict boarding school in Korea, she had traveled throughout Asia and, with a German boyfriend, spent a year trying to get rich through the sleight-of-hand export of electronic goods from Hong Kong into India. Somehow, she had ended up in Italy. When we met, she had been keeping company with an older Italian man who wasn’t treating her too well, though she had her own little place, in a sixteenth-century building, off the Via dei Panieri (street of the bakers) in Trastevere. Her downstairs neighbors were three young gay men, two of whom, donning wigs, dressed up as women and worked a trade as oral hookers at the Stazione Termini. They were so convincing as women that I hadn’t the slightest notion that they were men, until one evening when we were visiting, to demonstrate to Sojin some subtlety about the art of love, the prettier girl pulled off the stockings of the other and went down on her who turned out to be a him, even as we were sitting there sipping wine. (“Madonna,” I remember hearing her mutter, under her breath, in embarrassment.)

The Romans were sex crazed in some ways. Up from the academy was a place called the Bar Gianicolo and on Saturday nights, it became a rendezvous point for stylish Roman couples to meet before adjourning to sex parties—orgies, if you like—or so my lady friend told me. I believed her. The few times we went in there together on a Saturday night for a coffee, men always approached her. One evening a couple came by to drop a card on our little bistro table: I don’t think I was part of the deal, but in any case, she, thinking that they, despite their elegant finery, were what the Italians called schifozi—what my mother called gente baja—was not the sort to have ever taken them up on that kind of thing.

She was really a cheerful and good-natured woman, bright and outgoing: The gardeners and crew at the academy and all the gatekeepers liked her—every week, someone or other would ask me if we were going to get married. (A funny thing: Even Francine du Plessix Gray, a beautiful woman herself, visiting the academy with her husband, the artist Clive Gray, always seemed unable to take her eyes off of Sojin when she happened to be around.) The only people there, in fact, who seemed to resent her were certain of the female academicians. Though Sojin spoke Japanese, Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, French, and English, one such academician always referred to her as the “bimbo.” I’d look the other way—what did I care? We were having a nice time together, no matter what we happened to be doing. After all, it was all part of the dream I seemed to be living in Italy, whose lovely and quite passionate energies slipped bit by bit into my writing, while my own affections for that woman, later to be displaced and abused, seemed so real and something that I then believed would never be forgotten.

I stayed on in Rome for almost another year after my fellowship ran out, and because I had some money saved and no particular place to go, I rented a largish apartment some ten blocks from the academy, by a marketplace, its back windows looking out over a series of descending terraces and gardens. There we lived as tranquilly and, I think, as happily as possible, though I did have an upstairs neighbor, a red-haired Sicilian actress, who might have wanted to have something with me (or perhaps with Sojin). In another flat in the same building, a kept woman, also of dazzling good looks, who, bored to death with her arrangement with a rather solemn fellow from Milano, would sometimes take me with her to see the opera. (Sojin, I am certain, thought we might have had something between us but didn’t seem to care.)

In that residence, while left alone, I worked on my novel, but it was something that slipped in and out of my life; weeks would go by when I wouldn’t write a word—namely because, quite frankly, I didn’t think anyone would care about such a book—and thusly bored, I’d look around for something to do with myself. That came down to music. Walking along the street, if I heard someone with any kind of chops playing an electric instrument, I somehow mustered the nerve to ring the bell. Eventually, I had my first real success with a bass player, Stefano, who not only invited me up to jam but produced a huge chunk of hashish—or cioccolato (which the Spaniards were also crazy about)—to enhance our performing pleasure. In turn, he knew of a few other musicians, among them a guitarist (with a ton of equipment), a keyboard player, and a drummer, and getting together every weekend in the basement room of a warehouse-sized bakery out by the Via Appia, we started to put together a repertoire of mainly reggae and Eric Clapton covers, which these Italians, hash- and potheads to the core, particularly cherished. But once again, I had a capricious musical career: We played a few gigs in the homes of friends, a blues bar in Trastevere (to a house that would have been empty were it not for our friends), and, that next Christmas, a dance party at the academy, for which we received permission to rehearse on the academy grounds (unheard of, I believe) and whose high point, at least from my group’s perspective, came when they were all invited into the academy dining hall for dinner, a great honor, no matter how spotty the food was in those days. (And our performance? Not too bad, as I recall, and quite nicely dressed up by Sojin swaying to the music.)

I really enjoyed their friendship—but once they found out that I had my own place, with two bedrooms, my apartment became their lovers’ retreat; these Romans, cool as they could be, lived at home with their families, which would pretty much be their story until they’d get married, and even then, having one’s own domicile wasn’t a certainty; housing was so tight in that city, unless you were a foreigner renting, that young couples would go anywhere they could to make it: At night the road behind the academy, a street on which stood religious institutes and priestly housing, was often lined with rocking, bobbing automobiles whose windows always seemed to be steamed up in the winter, and in Trastevere, there was a Thai bar and restaurant right off the Via dei Panieri, a massive joint with bamboo décor, that rented curtained booths to young couples for the evening so that they would have some privacy in which to pass their amorous time—a venue, by the way, that most academy folk did not have a clue about.

My musician pals were no different, and after holding a party in my place, where we just hung out smoking this and that, with lots of wine flowing, most took turns with their girlfriends in the spare bedroom. Having a soft heart, I’d lent my favorite in the band, a great guitar player named Sandro, an extra key, but once that got out—and it did, as he couldn’t help bragging about his special in with me—I’d find myself in the situation of having to use a coded door ring when I’d come home, for copies of the key had been made. But, even then, that didn’t always work: Poor Sojin once came in to find my bassist friend in bed with his girlfriend. After a while, with someone wanting to come over nearly every day, it became an impossible situation, especially in terms of my writing, and I found myself in the unfortunate position of having to dislodge my Italian friends from that apartment—at first they cooperated, though rather sullenly, a moratorium finally agreed upon—then that would fall apart, someone ringing my bell, which could be heard all through the building, at two in the morning. What else could I do but let him and his girlfriend in?

Oh, they were grateful all right, but between that and my discovery that after almost two years in Rome, I had run out of money, a check cashed at a local Banco Nazionale having bounced, it started occurring to me that sometime soon, I would have to leave that city and the wonderful, occasionally cantankerous people who inhabited it.