Without doubt, the novels of my late husband, Oscar Hijuelos, especially the Pulitzer-Prize winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, are admired around the world even though his writing is quintessentially American in tone and subject matter. Oscar was born in New York City in 1950s West Harlem. It was during his childhood, in the immigrant neighborhood of Morningside Heights, that Oscar developed the passions that would define his persona as an adult: playing the guitar and piano; collecting comic books; reading voraciously about world history; being a devoted friend; and engaging with his Catholic faith at Corpus Christi Elementary School. (It was there that he was first noticed for his writing ability, as the nuns who were his teachers published a very short piece of his in a Catholic magazine.)
A few months after Oscar tragically died in 2013 of a massive heart attack, I began thinking about how to handle the bulk of his extraordinary archive (a part of which was already at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library). Finding the appropriate repository for his voluminous papers was one of four main objectives I wished to accomplish for the future custody of his work—a multifaceted and complex mission.
Blue Antiquity was Oscar’s capstone novel, a summation of what my husband believed about life, love, death, and eternity.
The truth was I could not enter Oscar’s studio, where he kept most of his professional belongings and manuscripts, because the grief I felt was so debilitating and relentless it prevented me from facing his expansive energy: Oscar might have been taken physically from this earth, but the unseen magnetic element of his soul was as powerful as ever. I decided Oscar’s archives would remain in his studio for only the professionals to peruse and arrange. I would wait until I was able to read his papers without falling apart. Eventually, to my delight, his archives did find the perfect home at the Library of Congress.
When I was informed by an archivist that there were some 2,000 pages of a novel in several boxes among the many, I was relieved and curious. The novel had two titles: So Imagined Mercado and Blue Antiquity. I knew that Oscar had decided on the latter as the final choice because we had discussed, quite often over the years, which of the two was more compelling. I preferred Blue Antiquity, and, in the end, so did he.
Oscar had shown me pages of this searing fiction periodically. It was a work that he kept writing while crafting his other books. In fact, he had begun the opus in the late 1980s, as sketches and detailed notes, when he became a fellow at the American Academy in Rome after winning the Rome Prize for his first novel, Our House in the Last World. What I had not realized was the size of the manuscript, the scope, and the fullness of his thinking about it. I simply hadn’t known that it was so substantive.
One day, quite a few years after his passing, Oscar’s agent and mine, Jennifer Lyons, wrote to tell me that she had found a section—the very first one hundred pages or so—of Blue Antiquity that he had polished, perfected, and had sent to her to read before showing them to his editor, Gretchen Young. He had released these pages by email to Jennifer just a few weeks prior to his death. In the meantime, I had decided to write a memoir about my life with Oscar and had completed enough pages to show to an editor too. After reading both my proposal and Oscar’s pages, Gretchen got in touch with Jennifer and said she would like to publish my memoir under a new imprint that she had started by the name of Regalo (which means “gift” in Spanish and Italian). She had some thoughts about my pages and those written by Oscar, which she wished to share, and she asked to talk to me about her ideas.
Gretchen realized that Blue Antiquity was Oscar’s capstone novel, a summation of what my husband believed about life, love, death, and eternity. It centers on a scholar who is facing his mortality. He senses that his health is seriously failing, while keeping this knowledge to himself. More specifically, Blue Antiquity suggests the fullness of Oscar’s philosophical and spiritual development as articulated by the protagonist, Victor Mercado, an historian and classicist whose dissertation, The Pagan Roots of Christianity, awards him an appointment in the Department of History and Classics at a small liberal arts school by the name of Angerona College. Mercado has a reputation for specializing in the life of Christ.
I wanted to share details about our marriage that would have been lost in time to his readership otherwise. And for very personal reasons, I wanted to be able to hold our marriage in my hands.
In short, he is an academic who has achieved a certain level of success. His ethnic identity, like Oscar’s, is that of the son of Cuban immigrants. His passion—and the source of his intellectual verve—is working on archaeological digs. The cultural upbringing, hobbies, avocations, passions, and beliefs of Mercado and Oscar are virtually the same. In the following excerpt from Blue Antiquity, Oscar could have been talking about himself instead of his fictional counterpart:
In his twenty-five years of European excavations, he had seen mostly everything of antiquity. He knew what it was like to sleep in fields under the stars, on the decks of over-night ferries, on the hard seats of tobacco fume filled train cars; on sea walls, on docks, on the rooftops of one- dollar-a-night Turkish pensions, and in the waiting rooms of dead-end train stations in the middle of nowhere. He knew the crisp air of the Roman forum at seven in the morning, the monuments and temples of that great graveyard of stone, riddled with ghosts. He had battled the mud, the thickets, the hard unyielding ground, the burning stones, the rising templates of heat, the stinging black flies of Turkey, the monotony of repetitious tasks, the inquiries of pushy German tourists peering over the barricades into the trenches dug around the temple of the Vestal Virgins in the Forum, the backaches, pulled tendons and sore feet that come with those exertions. Since his younger days, he was good at yielding a pick and shovel and at judging the weight, in stones and rocks, that he could tolerate while pushing a wheel barrel up a trench plank. He could determine just how high a mound of excavation debris should rise, and of where and how thickly to spread his porcelana, the greenish volcanic “Kilroy-was-here” sediment that archeologists laid down as a demarcation fill at excavation’s end. He knew the workings of surveyors’ instruments to ascertain an elevation, and, as well, how to take core samples of the soil, and to date their levels, as might a geoarchaeologist.
I wrote my memoir, A Writing Marriage, in a Lutheran cathedral in my hometown. I wanted to share details about our marriage that would have been lost in time to his readership otherwise. And for very personal reasons, I wanted to be able to hold our marriage in my hands. Not just remember it but touch it. Getting married in New York City’s Riverside Church was a deeply spiritual and foundational event for both of us. Our nuptials created a protective platform for our lives that neither of us had expected. Essentially, we were blessed beyond measure.
In the end, my recollections of our life together and my husband’s words from Blue Antiquity are woven together in A Writing Marriage. It has been more than a writing exercise for me. It has been an unexpected pilgrimage to the heart of our union. In the years since Oscar’s passing, I have been excavating our marriage and pondering it. The writing of the book has been a soulful examination, a symbolic unearthing of certain memories and stories that Mercado might understand as a labor necessary to capture the fullness of a history, the ephemera and evidence of, in this case, a love story.
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A Writing Marriage by Lori Carlson-Hijuelos is available from Regalo Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
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