In February 1935, actor César Romero received a letter in Hollywood from María Mantilla, his mother, who was writing from New Jersey.
Romero’s press agent needed biographical information about the handsome and elegant Latino artist, hitherto almost unknown, who was beginning to reap success alongside figures like Marlene Dietrich. Precisely, that at that time Romero was starring in a great box office success, The Devil is a Woman. Before, long before Joaquin Phoenix, The guason He had the face that César Romero fixed in the ABC series in 1966.
Before answering the agency’s innocent questions, María Mantilla wanted to tell Romero a secret she had kept since she became a woman.
He began by evoking how the poet and Cuban revolutionary José MartíBarely arrived in New York in 1878, daringly evading deportation to Spain, he stayed in the modest guest house that his parents ran at 337 West 31st Street, in Manhattan.
“He lived with us for seventeen years,” María recounted, writing in English, “until the day he left to fight in Cuba, in 1895.” Just forty days after jumping ashore from a boat, along with five or six other companions, Martí was shot down by Spanish bullets. He was only 42 years old.
“When they killed Martí, a small photo of me, as a child, stained with blood, was found on his chest. He had already written to me that this photo, pinned to his chest, protected him from bullets ”.
The story was accompanied by a succinct biographical note on Martí, intended for the layman in Cuban history that Romero was surely. Only then did María deliver her secret, in words worthy of Félix B. Caignet, famous author of radio soap operas: “I want you to know, dear, that Martí was my real father and I want you to feel proud of it. One day we will talk a lot about all this, which of course is only for you, not for publicity. It’s my secret and your father knows it.”
I only came to know about María Mantilla’s secret more than 30 years ago, when I read The girl from New York: a review of the erotic life of José Martífrom the great Ecuadorian literary critic to José Miguel Oviedo.
On the other hand, Martí’s wife, Carmen Zayas, mother of his first-born José Francisco, at the time a child barely two years old, sniffed at him from the beginning and without a doubt this precipitated the separation of the couple. María’s mother, her rival, was also called Carmen, you calculate the anger. La Zayas was already fed up with the life of chances, surprises and Spanish spies that she had always led with Martí and managed, behind his back, that the Spanish consulate in New York allowed her to return to Cuba with the little one, without express authorization. of her husband.
The officiants of the cult of heroes invariably break down and go out of tune when they come across that “zona pellucida” that can be the love life of their mythologized. The norm is to go by the side of human conflicts like the adultery of 31st Street on tiptoe and with the index finger on the lips.
On reading Oviedo’s book, one is surprised by the prudery of generations of biographers who accepted exculpatory hoaxes such as that Mr. Mantilla, the husband of Carmita Miyares, was a paralyzed old man already incapable of fulfilling the well-known conjugal duties. It is understood: a forger of the homeland should not rudely put the jars on his landlord and, incidentally, make a daughter for his wife.
More surprising may be the harmony with which the family life of the Mantilla-Miyares and Martí, María’s tenant godfather, continued to flow. Carmita – everyone in that small New York community of Cuban exiles called her Carmita – had yet another child with Mantilla who was not a decrepit old man nor was he ever paralyzed. He died a few years later of mitral complications.
It is inconceivable that Carmita and Martí have tricked Mr. Mantilla like a cuckold from Donizetti’s opera buffa. Much less imaginable is that they have had a quiet conversation a trois in the high night of the guest house. How they did it?
The fact is that, after Mantilla’s death a few years later, Martí managed to merge, without a twist, from María Mantilla’s godfather-tenant into Carmita’s husband in a de facto union that all those close to him saw as very natural. He never got over the heartbreaking separation from Pepe, the “dwarf prince” to whom he dedicated La edad de oro, the most beautiful children’s magazine that kids can still read today.
Every January, for many years, I read to Martí. This year, 2023, marks the 170th anniversary of his birth in Havana. This time I read his letters to María Mantilla, many of them already written on a trip to Cuba and to death.
“My María and my Carmita,” he says in a letter to his daughter, “I am suddenly leaving on a long trip, without a pen or ink or a way to write for a long time… And what do I think about now when I hold them in my arms? That this summer they have lots of flowers, that in winter they put the two together in a school: a school for ten girls, at six pesos, with piano and Spanish for nine to one: and they will respect them and the house will have bread. I only have to send you more than my arms. put the school
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