A Simple Habana Melody

by Oscar Hijuelos

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Hispanic & Latino; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author comes a “masterpiece” about a composer returning to his beloved homeland after WWII (Kirkus, starred review).

The year is 1947. Israel Levis, a Cuban composer whose life once revolved around music and love, is finally returning home. En route to Habana, Cuba from Spain, he is a shadow of his former self, disillusioned after he was mistakenly sent to a camp during the Nazi occupation of France. In Habana, he escapes his anguish by reminiscing about his happiest moments before the war, when he lived a life of pleasure and excitement—and had a loving, if unrequited romance with Rita Valladares, the alluring singer who inspired Levis’s most famous composition, “Rosas Puras.”

A tender homage to music, art, and a vibrant country at the edge of modernity, A Simple Habana Melody is a virtuoso performance from one of America’s most talented writers.

Includes a reading group guide. 

Release date: February 11, 2025

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 368

Sample

In the spring of 1947, when Israel Levis, composer of that most famous of rumbas “Rosas Puras,” returned to Habana, Cuba, from Europe aboard the SS Fortuna, those of his old friends who had not seen him in more than a decade were startled by his appearance. He was not yet sixty, but his hair had turned white and he had grown an unruly beard, so that he resembled a forlorn guajiro of the countryside, or the painter Matisse in his later years. Peering out at the world through the distortions of his thick-lensed wire-rim glasses, his eyes seemed lost, as if under water, and he was gaunt, perhaps too frail, his expression careworn, and, in any event, beyond easy recognition—a bit of a joke because during his heyday in the Habana of the 1920s and early 1930s he had been quite tall and broad-shouldered and so corpulent that while walking along the narrow sidewalks of Habana on his way to the music conservatory or to the Teatro Albisu he would have to stand aside, his back pressed flatly against a wall, or duck into a doorway, to allow the ladies with their parasoles and beaded purses to pass. So great was his girth and imposing physicality that with his trademark mustache he reminded his friends of the silent-film comedian Oliver Hardy, “El Gordo” (of “El Gordo y El Flaco,” “The Fat One and the Skinny One”), which had become one of his affectionately intended nicknames, an appellation that he, in his good nature and with his grand reputation, frequenting the bars and restaurants and concert halls of the city, had always taken in stride.

But by the time Israel Levis sailed past the Morro Castle and its lighthouse toward the rosified fortifications of La Punta and the glories of Habana proper, its blanched neoclassical facades as regal as Cartagena’s, he had undergone certain transformations, for the events of his recent past had not been in keeping with the comforts and pleasures that his bourgeois existence in Paris and fame as a composer and orchestra leader had accustomed him to. With his stooping shoulders and bent back, he seemed to have shrunk to half his original size, and he had lost so much weight during the war that he now floated through the voluminous expanses of his old linen suits. In fact, he, whose idea of a diet had been to forgo a second helping of crème brûlée or strawberry shortcake after a heavy five-course dinner in the Paris Ritz, was now as thin, if not thinner, than Stan Laurel, El Gordo’s dim sidekick, and might have been called “El Flaco” had the clock been turned back to his glory days, and had the events of his recent years not seemed so tragic, or confounding to his soul.

He had never been a handsome man, even in his best days; he did not have the Spanish good looks of his older brother, Fernando; rather, he considered that his charm had once arisen from his gallant manner, his affability and the attention he paid to others, staring directly into their eyes, save when he felt blinded—or outraged—by the most beautiful of women or the most strikingly handsome of men. In those moments a mixture of envy and admiration entered his heart, for these favored daughters and sons of life, moving through the world with effortless grandeur, embodied the very qualities of beauty that he had always aspired to through his music. Some women were like glorious sarabands, their dark and intense eyes mysterious as the deepest tones of an operatic aria; others more lustily disposed—the cheap women whom he had often cherished in his youth—were like jaunty rumbas, the wild gyrations of the Charleston. And men? Some were as graceful as the tango, or surefooted and capricious in their movement through life as the habanera—while he, lumbrous, awkward and ever careful, had always been the equivalent of a waltz or a simple box step. For many years he knew this to be the truth, as most of his grace lingered within, and he had spent so many hours, as a younger man, in private self-ostracism, wishing he could change this or that on his face or some part of his body, as if it were not enough to attract others through the power of his understated personality and a presence that most found enchanting; how foolish he had been, he now thought, to have wasted so much of his time on such petty concerns.

He left the port city of Vigo in northwestern Spain a week before, the ship stopping off for one morning in the Canary Islands to pick up other passengers. He brought along a single black trunk containing what personal effects he had managed to salvage from his last years in Paris during the German occupation: letters that he treasured—among them his correspondences with Stravinsky and Ravel; a dense cache of notes from his old composer friends in Habana, Ernesto Lecuona and Gonzalo Roig to name but two; and of course those correspondences with his own family in the cities of Habana and Santiago, letters whose nostalgic significance and worth increased as he entered into his period of troubles. It should be mentioned that among the treasures he managed to smuggle away with sympathetic friends, among them the kindly but inept Spanish attaché Señor Ramos, were the letters and postcards he’d received over the years from one Rita Valladares, of Habana, with whom he supposed he’d once been in love—or as close to love as so guarded a man could have been. He would sigh thinking about Valladares, the petite singer affectionately known to many as “La Chiquita”—my beloved—and over how so many years had passed without his ever once saying how deeply he felt about her. Even when he belatedly realized just how much he loved her—after his life in Paris had begun and he had moved on into a too-brief romance with a Parisian named Sarah Rubenstein—not a day passed when he failed to remember their times together. A single photograph of Rita, in a Saturn-shaped hat, the photo no larger than a prayer card, remained tucked in his wallet for those years, its surface cracked, edges tearing, Rita smiling, her eyes emanating life and love, a kind of music, like that of a fandango, entering his heart when he beheld that fading but beautiful image. Even though her letters, filled as they were with tender asides and happy memories of their collaborations in the musical theaters of Habana, often disappointed him with their sometimes hurried tone, and even though she married two other men during those years, he always kept them, taking pains to ensure their safekeeping in the event he survived the war.

And what were those letters often about but the occasional discomforts and exaltations of her life: “Hollywood is crazy, but certain stars like Gary Cooper are very nice”; or: “My last tour was barbaric—my promoters are working me like a slave, my dear boy; my throat is hoarse and I think, on top of it all, I’ve caught a cold. I’m tired of living out of a suitcase in a hotel.… I miss my children, and Habana. I can’t wait until I get home.—Love, Chiquita.…”

Why did he treasure those letters so?

In that trunk, aside from a suit and a second pair of shoes that a kindly gallego had given him in Madrid, and a pearl white Bible that had been inscribed by Pope Pius XII some years before during a visit to Rome, there were the fragments of several scores that he had been working on when his blissful but increasingly uneasy life was disrupted. For more than a decade he lived in a well-lighted suite on an upper floor of Le Grand Hôtel, and, in his parlor, with high arching windows that faced the sunny boulevards off Opera Square, he kept a Concert Grand Steinway on which he wrote his music. In late 1943, as he entered into his autumnal years, Levis—or “El Maestro”—had been in the midst of two projects that he believed would finally take him beyond the category of composer of “popular tunes” and light lyric revues into a more serious realm. These were the scores of an opera that was to be based on Zola’s novel Germinal and an impressionistic ballet about Apollo and Daphne, two-thirds completed before Levis had been taken away.

As he sailed aboard the SS Fortuna, Levis could care less about those compositions. They had become the artifacts from a recent past that he’d rather forget. What were those works but the feeble attempts of a mediocre composer who might have been better off as a piano teacher, anyway? And while he had been an affable and pleasant enough passenger, gentlemanly and beyond reproach, and obviously of great importance—for he occupied one of the finer cabins on that ship and dined at the captain’s table—he was mainly thought of as the elderly Cuban who, indulging himself with a game of whist in the common room with some Spaniards, did not have much to say about his life.

Among his fellow passengers were a contingent of black Americans who had volunteered for the Loyalist cause and were now returning from imprisonment in Spain; an Englishman and his proper family; and many Spaniards, mainly asturianos and gallegos, heading to Cuba. Levis was cordial to them all. There were the ship’s musicians who, knowing that the composer was in their midst, one night greeted his entrance into the dining room with a stirring, string-driven rendition of “Rosas Puras,” or “Pretty Roses,” as it was known in English. Ever politely, with his large ears brimming red, he had stood before the small stage, motionless, his hands and the weight of his body resting on his eagle-headed cane, listening to their tribute respectfully but without any joy. Bowing and acknowledging their skills (as he had always loved musicians), he sat down to pick at his meal and drink his wine in silence.

His greatest pleasures were taken by the ship’s railing, where he sipped some brandy from a flask and watched the horizon of the sea by day or the starry heavens by night, his thoughts—his oft repeated murmurings of “¡Esta vida es un carajo!” (“This life is worthless!”)—interrupted only when the young Spaniard Antonio Solar, who’d accompanied him on this journey, appeared by his side with a blanket or to escort him to the dining room for dinner or to help the composer to his cabin.

Often he daydreamed, the horizon turning upside down; at once he was seeing his beloved Habana again, the city dense with its winding streets, great mansions, dust and smoke and horses and carriages and Packard automobiles, and with its alleys and courtyards in which the rumberos gathered past midnight; Habana as it had been, floating in the sky, he and his musical colleagues rushing to the Campoamor theater, circa 1922, where Pablo Casals or Ignacy Paderewski was appearing. Or he would see himself as a boy standing amid a crowd in the Parque Central listening to a municipal band playing a brassy rendition of Gioacchino Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” the epauletted musicians dressed in military regalia, with their plumed and cord-wrapped shakos, brims gleaming in the sun. Or he saw Paris on a lovely spring day with its lilting willow trees and shaded parks; or he was mounting a stage in a grand theater—could have been in Mexico City or Buenos Aires or Paris itself—to lead an orchestra in a recital of his own compositions, the clamorous applause with which he had once been greeted coming back to him, even as so many foam-rimmed waves slapped against the ship’s prow, a rush of water like so many voices calling out to him.

Now and then, Levis would tap the deck with his cane, three times, a signal for the diminutive, quite handsome young man Antonio to assist him. Usually he would send him off to refill his flask, otherwise Levis would offer Antonio the crook of his arm so that he could walk more steadily around the deck for his constitutional. Twice a day, after breakfast and after lunch, he made these rounds. Often he wore a white linen suit, a black-brimmed fedora and a black opera cape that was a remnant of his more prosperous and confident past. As he moved slowly along, cane in hand, with tremendous dignity, nodding to his fellow passengers, he seemed in the harshness of his expressions to be castigating his assistant, which was not the case. He had simply forgotten how to express himself without anger, his tone sharp and strident, even if he was only telling Antonio about some pain in his gut, his stomach destroyed by so many medicines (and from drink), or asking for a few aspirins, as he was prone to the most debilitating of headaches and a lethargy of the soul.

Levis did not speak about the war to his assistant; there was no need to because Solar already knew. Antonio had been an orderly in the Madrid hospital ward where Levis, at war’s end, spent nearly a year recovering from hepatitis and diphtheria, among other maladies. There he might have perished, in a long and cavernous room of unfortunates, not so much from the illnesses of the body but from a flagging of the spirit and the will to live. Day in and day out for months he drifted through a world of dreams and sleep and memories, a scream or a cry of pain from someone in difficulty often awakening him in the middle of the night. Levis, startled, still clinging to the shreds of some lovely recollection of youth—a walk with his father and brother through a field of wildflowers outside of Habana in pursuit of a fleck-wing butterfly, a night spent happily in a Habana or Paris brothel, the pleasures of crafting a song, the coolness of the interior of a church nave alongside his beloved mother, Doña Concepción, and younger sister, Anabella, as they knelt before the altar, crossing themselves, the security of God around them, faith strong in the air.…

The orderly was twenty-three years old when he had become Levis’s attendant in that hospital. Nearly illiterate, good for changing bedsheets and emptying bedpans, Antonio, in his attentiveness and kindly nature, had seen the composer through that harsh time. As something of a musician himself, Antonio considered such duties an honor. In the years of his early adolescence, before the Civil War of 1936–39, when he was a farm boy in Galicia with his own musical aspirations, Antonio played the clarinet in a band that had traveled throughout northwestern Spain, performing in village squares and weddings and fiestas a lively repertoire of popular dance tunes, among them Levis’s own “Rosas Puras,” whose famous melody flew from his clarinet countless times, enrapturing even the most aged of priests, grandmothers and widows.

That Levis had written such a tune, beloved by many, provoked in Antonio a steadfast devotion to the old man’s care, the orderly regarding Levis with reverence and gratitude, whatever the cantankerousness of the composer’s moods, during that stay. Even when Levis shouted “¡Déjame tranquilo!” and was a gruff piece of work, brooding, screaming from lousy nightmares, and preferring to rot away, Antonio found ways to lift his spirits, regaling him with sunny tales of life in Galicia before the Civil War and bringing Levis an occasional honey-drenched or caramelized dulce. Antonio was so cheerful a soul that he once came into the ward with his clarinet and, finding an accordionist among the patients, presented a number of tunes to the infirm, the mad, the hopeless, rendering, on that suffocating afternoon of a blistering heat, an austere but lively version of “Rosas Puras” with which he’d hoped to please the composer. (“If you only knew how that song had been both a blessing and a curse to me,” Levis had thought, while putting on a grateful face.)

All in all, Antonio Solar had been fascinated by the depths of the composer’s talents and religiosity (for in the ward, on the worst of his days, he held on to a rosary, whispering prayers) even if, in that period, Levis often seemed lost to the world.

For his part, Levis liked Antonio from the beginning. Aside from his joyfulness at the proximity of youth, the purity of Solar’s eyes and the pockmarks on his face reminded Levis of his dear late friend and lyricist Manny Cortés, with whom he had once collaborated on many a song and zarzuela—his idealistic friend who was like a beloved brother to him. Such were his feelings of attachment and gratitude to the young man that Levis, upon his repatriation, prevailed upon the Cuban government to pay for Solar’s ship fare to Habana. Lacking plans for the future and without children of his own, Levis hoped, in a small way, to help find Antonio, who had no liking for the fascist government of Franco, a new life in his own country—“Cuba, mi maravillosa Cuba,” he often said. Once in Habana, if he so wanted, Antonio could go to school, learn to read and write, find work and become a proper caballero; or if he wanted to pursue the often hopeless destiny of a performer, Levis, through his connections, could procure him a job as a musician in the city.

“You may stay for as long as you like in my house in Habana,” he told Antonio one day. “Believe me, you will be treated well.” In good humor, and remembering the pleasures of his youth, Levis added, “And you will find the Cuban women unbelievable.”

He patted his young assistant on the shoulder and turned back to the railing, half-smiling, even if when looking out over the water he often trembled with the despair of a man fitful over the inescapable thoughts that haunted his mind. Considering his memories of the war such an affront to all that he believed about himself, the world and God, Levis sometimes thought about throwing himself over the side of that ship into the water. But he still loved life itself and, theologically speaking, he had become something of a coward.

Besides, he believed, simply, that he was returning to Cuba to die in what peace he could find.

WHERE LEVIS ONCE LIVED IN A FLORID AND PLEASANT UNIVERSE, filled with much wondrous music, especially so during his happiest years in Habana, he, with the unavoidable romanticism of an artist, now had to contend with those “contaminants”—to use a Nazi turn of phrase—that violated even the loveliest of his thoughts. How could he, Israel Levis, composer of so many lighthearted zarzuelas and danzones, even consider the delights of a harmonically pleasing major scale when his very thoughts were continually invaded by the unpleasantries of his recent past? Indeed, even if he had remained a part of this world, he still could not as much as look at the sweetest of children playing on the ship’s deck without thinking about the infants and mothers he had seen being herded off to their doom by the “Aryan masters.” What difference had his little compositions, or his lofty plans for aesthetic excellence, or his magnificent penis (to speak of the physical), or his life of luxury, or his faith in God—and a good Catholic God, such as the God his beloved mother had prayed to every morning and night—what difference had any of that made to the workings of history? And how was it that the very same Israel Levis, of the ever-burgeoning stomach, who in his younger days had never passed up a tasty morsel, had now lost his cravings for both food and the exertions of creativity that had once so excited him?

He did not like to dwell upon these things—but such torments came to him, anyway, followed him through his days and often put him in such a perturbed frame of mind that even with someone like Antonio he was severe.

“Forgive me,” he would say, after barking out some order. “It is my unfortunate manner.”

Occasionally, as he watched the sea, he tried hard to think pleasant thoughts. He might utter a telling phrase: “My father, Leo-cadio, was a physician, you know—and a good one—but his first love was nature.” Or, “My late mother believed that the stars were the tears of heaven.” One night, as the sun was setting, Levis pointed to the horizon, a great band of orange and red light and fiery clouds crossing endlessly before them, and said, “Mira, las glorias de Dios”—“Look at the glories of God.”

“It is beautiful, Don Israel,” Antonio answered.

And then Levis said, “Once, long ago, when I was a boy, I was certain that God existed. I saw him in everything—in every flower and plant, in the light of the day itself. And at night, I believed that I could go to sleep protected. I had my good and pure soul, and an angel watching over me. Sometimes, at night, I would look at the sky for hours and feel certain that this wondrous divinity was all around me—even the moon seemed like a manifestation of His being, as if its surface was the face of Jesus Christ. Why, my older brother and I would concoct some wild theories about the moon—that God had hidden all those souls who were waiting for life in our world under its surface, and we concluded that these souls resembled little glowing pearls. Y fíjate”—and imagine this—“because we truly believed in Heaven when we were little, we always wondered where it might be. Of course my mother always said it was located at el Camino de Santiago”—the center of the Milky Way—“and I would look up until my neck ached, hoping to get a clear glimpse of those souls who I believed were pouring through its entrance.” And then, with some other thought intruding, he added: “Such, dear Antonio, were the sweet fairy tales of my youth.”

Once the ship came into harbor, Levis was so filled with joy at seeing Habana again—el Castillo de la Punta on a high hill, the elegant Malecón drive, the Prado boulevard stretching into the center of the city toward the Presidential Palace, the many parks and high royal palms—that he nearly wept. Though eager to return to his house in the Vedado section of Habana, he waited for the other passengers to disembark first; a black portero with his trunk, Antonio with his own suitcase and clarinet beside him. Slowly descending the gangplank, his cane in hand, he found that the quietude of his thoughts, that revelry of memory and expectation then coming over him, was quickly shattered. There gathered on the pier to greet Israel Levis was a group of journalists, representatives from the Municipal Conservatory, and an oficial of the Chamber of Commerce. Preferring to be left alone, he reluctantly agreed to pose on the quayside for a photographer from El Diario de la Marina (Levis standing straight up, in his white three-piece suit, his hands folded over his cane, looking regal, stately, like a founding father of the republic), the picture making it into the next morning’s edition with the caption “A TREASURED SON OF CUBA RETURNS.” Articles would appear in other Habana papers, lauding the return of “that grand composer whose famous ‘Rosas Puras’ had done so much to bring Cuban music to the world.”

Despite his frail condition, he did two brief interviews, rather impatiently (“Of course I am happy to be back in Cuba!” he testily declared, “What do you think?”), breaking off the second interview when he caught sight through his quite myopic eyes of his late older brother Fernando’s son, Victor, then about twenty-two, and behind him his brother’s pretty widow, Gloria. She ran up to him, wrapping her arms around his waist, declaring, “We prayed and prayed for your return. Thanks be to Saint Lázaro!”—as if Levis had come back from the dead. And, “¡Dios mío! What a beard!”

In those moments, he had to contend with his nephew’s expression of pure pity and shock, for the last time Israel saw Victor, back in 1938 in his late brother’s house in Santiago, on the eastern end of the island, the composer seemed buoyantly immense and jovial, well satisfied with his life in Paris and his many travels, even if the political situation in Europe was changing in ways that should have made him wary.

During that visit to Santiago those years before, in 1938, he had sat in the parlor of his brother’s house, coaxing a hug from his nephew. “Reach into my bag, I’ve got something for you,” the composer told him. There his nephew found caramelos—hard candies—and a baseball, and shortly, like any Cuban boy, he ran out into the street to play with his friends, who were soon laughing and shouting with delight. Pleased with himself, Levis quickly downed his glass of orange juice and rum, a lovely diversion in the midst of a sunny day. Elated, he got up to make himself another drink. That’s when his thin and majestic older brother, Doctor Fernando Levis, stood by the doorway with a faint smile on his face, and having assessed his younger brother’s joy, asked: “My goodness, brother, why do you have to live so far away?”—he meant Paris. “It’s obvious that you love being with the family; when are you coming home for good?” And even as he began his answer (“One day, perhaps…”) he could hear his mother castigating him from another room: “You know why he hasn’t come back to us? It’s because now he does just as he pleases! Don’t you know that he’s famous?”

Now the composer seemed a different man, saddened by a knowledge of things that he could not express, his body nearly weightless, as if he would be swept off by the slightest salt-scented wind. Even his movements were different, for his head was thrust slightly forward, his body, it seemed, struggling to follow behind it, as if the gravity of his very thoughts would cause him to suddenly topple over.

As for his nephew, Victor, a “beautiful” youth (for all that was youthful was beautiful to the composer), the young man had yet to get over the fact that his father had passed away from leukemia the year before. A sad period that also saw the death of his grandmother Doña Concepción, from “natural” causes—worry and grief because of what had happened to her sons. Levis himself learned of these events in Spain, long after they had occurred, and had been inconsolable. I was so pained and distraught over the deaths of my mother and brother that I wept secretly like a baby. But at least Victor, so young and with the future before . . .