Dreams Die Hard

In his best novel since his Pulitzer-winning “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” (1989), Oscar Hijuelos tells the story of Lydia Espan~a, a merchant’s daughter from a Cuban seaside town who loves life just a little bit more than it deserves. Having grown up in a well-off middle-class family, Lydia has learned to expect multitudes: great loves, beautiful evenings, fragrant gardens and the eternal rush of the ocean just outside her door. But when this excessive passion for living causes her to succumb to the quick charms of a handsome bandleader, Lydia’s upright father quickly dispatches her to the lowlier provinces of Manhattan, where she is expected to find her own way in the world. For Lydia, the urban grit and haste of America never quite measure up to the past. And she spends the rest of her life trying to recall her intensely beautiful memories of Cuba.

Cast adrift in a strange land, Lydia is prevented from returning home again when Castro takes power, and she sadly grows accustomed to what feels like life on the wrong side of the Cold War. She moves from one unsuccessful job to another (selling toys, cutting hair, hawking candy). And when she’s not dreaming the dreams sold to her in slick magazines and glowing movie theaters, she finds herself drawn to people as excessive and idealistic as herself. It’s no surprise, then, that when she meets her husband-to-be at a Valentine’s Day party in the Bronx, he quickly proves himself a hard-working man with a flair for inflated love poetry:

Lydia, you are the queen of queens of beauty,

the Empress of my love,

and you preside over the splendidness

of my feelings for you,

like the morning sun on the most glorious day

of the most beautiful and splendid season,

which is love. . . .

For people like Lydia and her noble-spirited husband, Raul, the world burns with everlasting promise. Until, of course, the day-to-day grind of real life catches up, mowing down everything, and everyone, that stands in its way.

When Raul suffers a series of debilitating illnesses (his overeager heart, quite appropriately, gives out), Lydia finds herself with more than her fair share of bills to pay, and soon the only suitable job she can get requires her to wield a mop, a bucket and a sponge. Pretty soon, the “Empress of the Splendid Season” is just another “Spanish cleaning woman” making the morning rounds:

“Riding the bus or train to work she would make the acquaintance of many other cleaning ladies and housemaids and delight in their company. She’d say, ‘Oyeme, chica, where’d you get those shoes?’ to strike up a conversation. Or, ‘It’s almost the weekend. What are you going to do?’ . . . She knew the look the tennis shoes, the shopping bag filled with wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches, the thin twelve-carat neck chains with a crucifix or Virgin medallion; the slightly distracted, heartbroken, and day dreamy expression on the ladies’ faces, wistful mascaraed eyes, shoulders primly back, raincoats in the spring and autumn, heavy coats and woolen hats in winter, and high rain boots, especially in the snow. . . . There were the aching hips, the slightly bent backs, the thick nylons with runs in them, bandaged knees and fingers, cracked nails, the lavender perfume, the oversized purses, the change bags--hands held out carefully monitoring the change and counting out the two tokens’ fare--the way the cleaning ladies nervously pressed their purses to their breasts whenever some rough-looking kids came along. . . .”

Like many of Hijuelos’ most memorable creations, Lydia is a woman who never entirely forsakes her illusions, even when they keep leading her from one disappointment to another. This is because Lydia is one of those enviable people who are carried along on the strength of their own momentum. Sustained by memory, poetry and passion, Lydia bravely charges into any situation that will have her, and pretty soon the dubious homes of her employers begin to provide Lydia the ultimate illusion that she can bring order to the world and make it hers. First there’s “the Professor,” who lives on 110th Street amid “the scent of pissy kitty-litter boxes, disintegrating books, bachelorhood, and rotting linoleum.” And the well-manicured attorney with the closetful of S & M toys and the Satanist with a fondness for pentagrams, crucifixes and animal-footed chairs. For Lydia, other people’s homes offer one quality she can’t quite disdain: Eventually they come clean, and everything is apparent. Then Lydia can pack her bags and go home.

But as Lydia finds herself vanishing into other people’s spaces, her own life as an alien on the periphery of Manhattan grows increasingly unreal. Her hard-won home loses its luster; her husband Raul fades into James Bond fantasies of manhood supreme, and her children grow up strangers to everybody, including themselves: While Lydia’s daughter, Alicia, is lured away to an upstate hippie commune, her son, Rico, earns a degree in psychoanalysis and spends the rest of his life exploring the depths of everyone but himself. For Lydia’s children, being Cuban is something they simply hope to outgrow. Otherwise, as Rico reflects, all they can hope for is to live the sort of life they’ve always known:

“You’re born into the world and the next thing you know you’ve got a couple of kids and two jobs: maybe you’re chain-smoking, con~o, and drinking a little too much; people are bugging the shit out of you but you keep at it because it’s the decent thing to do, until the day comes along when you feel a punch to your chest and darkness comes over you and there you are lying on a floor with all these people staring at you, the edges of that world dimming, and either you die and your dream dissolves into mystery, or you survive and, in a state of physical and spiritual disrepair, you have to start all over. . . .”

Nobody writes better about sensual life than Hijuelos, and “Empress” resounds with sights, tastes, textures and even the humming ambience of deep, well-appointed brownstone apartments. And though his latest novel wanes in its second half, and Lydia loses focus as a medley of other lives and voices intervenes, it’s hard to think of a contemporary novelist who writes better about the people he knows than Hijuelos. For even when Lydia’s dreams don’t measure up to reality, Lydia always does, making this a genuinely moving novel about the greatest strength most people can hope for: the one they imagine into existence for themselves.