After the Music Died

The narrative of Oscar Hijuelos’ sixth novel, “A Simple Habana Melody,” mimics the dance of water circling a bathtub drain. Gravity sucks the story down--toward Cuban composer Israel Levis’ ordeal in Buchenwald during World War II--but centrifugal force eddies it away, just as the shattered Levis, returning to Havana in 1947, prefers to dwell on the sweeter years of his youth, when he was a musical prodigy and bon vivant.

Despite his Semitic-sounding name, Levis is not a Jew but a devout Catholic. It’s a bureaucratic mistake that he is arrested in Nazi-occupied Paris late in the war and imprisoned in “a munitions complex that was not a ‘death camp,’ but a place in whose harsh conditions and punitive regimens many perished, anyway .... For the next 14 months, the maestro did not believe the things he saw, nor the sounds he heard.”

Once a famously fat man whose appetite for food and drink reflected his gusto for life, Levis emerges shrunken and frail, old at 57, no longer interested in making music. Like other composers fated to be remembered for what they considered trifles (think of Paul Dukas and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”), Levis is famed not for his operas or concertos but for a rumba, “Rosas Puras” (Pretty Roses), which he dashed off in 20 minutes in 1928 for singer Rita Valladares, the unacknowledged love of his life. The song has brought the world pleasure, but after Buchenwald, can that possibly matter?

Once a modest, kindly man who lived with his widowed mother, gave young musicians free lessons and refused to take sexual advantage of the girls who sang and danced in his theatrical productions, Levis has become grim and short-tempered. He is welcomed home by relatives, and honored by the Cuban government, but as he settles into the old house in Havana where, in the heady early years of the island’s independence, he was the happy child of loving parents, he views the rest of his life as meaningless.

In this novel, Hijuelos has combined the musical lore of his Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” with a spiritual crisis like that in “Mr. Ives’ Christmas,” in which the protagonist’s son, studying for the priesthood, is senselessly killed. His method is to write the novel as a mock biography of the fictional Levis, quickly summarizing his life up to 1947, then (leapfrogging Buchenwald) going back to the beginning, when the 5-year-old Levis, watching his doctor father play Bach on the piano and memorizing the fingering, steps to the keyboard and plays two flawless measures. The biographical approach allows Hijuelos to expand on the history of Cuban music and to digress on political matters that Levis prefers to ignore.

Music is such a complete world for Levis that he is only vaguely troubled by the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado in the late 1920s and early 1930s, though his best friend and lyricist, Manny Cortez, joins a rebel movement and is assassinated. When the Germans march into Paris in 1940, Levis believes that this madness, too, will pass, and doesn’t realize that his affair with a Jewish woman, Sarah Rubenstein, will confirm the authorities’ suspicions about him.

Levis has moved to Paris in the 1930s to stay in contact with Valladares, who, thanks to that city’s craze for “tropical” music, has become a star. She loves Levis, but he maddeningly refuses to treat her as more than a friend. In truth, he can’t believe that a woman so beautiful could love him. And he is unsettled by his attraction to other men, impermissible for a good Catholic. As she diverts herself with four marriages, he consoles himself in brothels, sinning, to be sure, but within the limits a traditional society found acceptable.

As “A Simple Habana Melody” winds down, as traditional societies crumble under the assaults of 20th century nihilism, we wonder whether Hijuelos, after circling Buchenwald for so long, will finally show us more of the place than the weekly parties at camp headquarters for which Nazi leaders dress Levis in a dead man’s suit and compel him to perform.

Will Levis and Valladares, reunited after the war, finally overcome their reticence? Will Levis, shorn of faith in God and music, succumb to silence and despair? The answers, this novel leads us to suspect, lie in its hero’s gentle character; the water, even at the drain’s dark rim, sparkles with nostalgia.