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UC Berkeley Lucero Title When Cuban Meets Irish, it’s Magic: The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0xd1q28c Journal Lucero, 4(1) ISSN 1098-2892 Author Dworkin y Méndez, Kenya C. Publication Date 1993 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Lucero Vol. 4, 1993 W hen Cuban Meets Irish, it’s Magic: The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio M ontez O ’Brien By Oscar Hijuelos New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 484 pages; $22 Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez, University of California at Berkeley Somewhere between the tender longing of escape into the oblivion of memory. He Our House in the Last World and the melan would one day explain to his son, to whom cholic sexuality of The Mambo Kings Play he wanted to bequeath both his passion and Songs of Love , Oscar Hijuelos has found the livelihood: ingredients for a novel in which an intricate web offamily relationships, spanning a cen . this apparatus [the folding- tury and several countries, draws the reader bellows-type camera, with deeper and closer to the essence that is the Thorton-Pickard shutter], in my Montez O ’Brien clan. The Pulitzer Prize opinion, captures not only the winning Cuban-American (first American superficial qualities of its subjects of Hispanic descent to do so) has success but also, because of the time it fully inscribed his epic with the photo takes to properly collect light, graphic preciseness of Alfonso Arau and the their feelings, as they setde on the magically textured baroque of Alejo subject’s expressions: sadness and Carpentier. The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio joy and worry, with variations Montez O ’Brien, among other things is a therein, are collected on the plate. collection of many richly hued snapshots, (Epilogue) each with a detailed description. Above all, it is a book about memory. Nelson’s love affair with pictures takes Memories of mist-ridden, emerald Ire him to the limits of static portraiture and land, or luscious, tropical Cuba, or un beyond to moving pictures. As proprietor equivocally green Pennsylvania, the stuff of the Jewel Box Movie Theater he pro that reality is made of for the Montez vides a narrow window of escape for all the O ’Brien clan. And a clan they are, jealously local townspeople. As for himself, and later guarding each other and the integrity of the his son Emilio, there is no getting away. The family at almost all cost. All seventeen of latter, a fifteenth child, a much-wanted son, them, not including later spouses, children looks for happiness, unsuccessfully, in the and grandchildren, are like contiguous frames nebulous distinction of the B movies. Hav of a movie, revealing the innermost move ing grown up in the limelight of the family ments in their deliciously buzzing Cuban- business soaking in the ‘classics,’ he is later Irish sanctuary, in Cobbleton, Pennsylva doomed to be exiled from them in Holly nia. wood. For Nelson the images just flicker by, Nelson O ’Brien, dreamer and soon-to- as do the years. There is a certain melan be family patriarch, comes from the land of choly in a man who in his youth pursued St. Patrick and the Ollam ftli to humble, innocent dreams that through the years straightforward Cobbleton. He is actually a turned around and put him on the run, like photographer by trade. With the help of a his dead sister’s memory. venerable tripod-and-bellows camera, he A tall, noble-looking Irishman, whose captures fleeting stationary images which smiling public face gives way to a more 76 somber reflection when in the privacy of his door to what would be her personal do own home, in the company of his best main, the aging Victorian in Cobbleton, a friend, liquor. He repeatedly sighs, as if world into which she brings fourteen daugh something were missing in his life, even ters and a son. A space in which she seeks when fourteen times the fecund air of his refuge from the outside, and especially from home is broken with the newborn cry of yet English. Spanish allows her the luxury of another of his beautiful daughters, to whom her own, private world, which she shares he is intensely devoted. Even when Emilio only sometimes with her older daughters, is born, after 23 years of boy-filled inten like Margarita. tion, Nelson cannot comfortably respond to his masculine triumph in the sea of woman They’d come to Cobbleton, hood that is his home, a sentiment that whose streets were lined with would later plague his own son in his rela thick oaks, hickories, maples, tions with other women. Hijuelos tells us as butternuts, and locust willows, much from the very beginning. trees that in the summers pro vided much shade. Her Cuban The house in which the fourteen mother never knew the names of sisters ofEmilio Montez O ’Brien those trees. To her, Margarita lived radiated femininity. Men imagined, they were simply trees, who passed by the white picket great decorative and flower- fence—-the postman, the rag seller, boughed ornaments that sprouted the iceman—were sometimes out of the ground, shedding leaves startled by the strong scent of in the autumn, covered with snow flowers, as if perfume had been and knobby tubes of ice in the poured onto the floorboards and winter, and returning in the ground. And when the door to spring— elms (olmos), oaks (rob the house—a rickety, many- les), and white-barked birch trees roomed Victorian affair some few (abeduls) [sic], among others that miles outside the small Pennsyl she simply thought of as árboles, as vania town of Cobbleton, with in “Look at that pretty tree,” her teetering beams and rain-soaked mother, if she knew them, keep clapboard façade (with gables, ing the Spanish equivalents of rusted hinges, and a fetid out their names to herself. And she house on a foundation that tended was the same way about the names to creak during heavy rains, a of flowers, happy when there was roof that leaked, and with splin an equivalent, rosa for “rose,” but tering surfaces everywhere)— moving through their yard that when their door opened on the would grow thick with claveles, world, the power o f these fe violetas, azucenas, flamenquillas, males, even the smallest infants, hibiscos, and botones de oro, with nearly molecular in its adamancy, out knowing that in English they slipped out and had its transform were called carnations, violets, ing effect upon men. (3) lilies, marigolds, hibiscus, and buttercups. (50) The year is 1900. Mariela Montez, a subdued yet passionate Cuban beauty, re Mariela orchestrates the complicated en luctantly enters Nelson’s studio and his life. terprise of her ever-increasing household, Three years later we see her entering the with its endless meals, clothes and diapers. 77 Lucero Vol. 4, 1993 As the oldest girls near adulthood they join Margarita suffers humiliation at the hands of forces with her in the daily chore of tending her first husband, the right and proper to children who throughout 23 years of businessman who everyone thought was parental fecundity have become so much such a great catch. The shock and tears that younger, they could soon easily be their Emilio shares with you when his “life” own. They derive the greatest pleasure from almost ends in a fiery tragedy, will give you this, from contributing to the massive fam a newly found respect for what seemed a ily project that is the Montez O ’Brien clan. gypsy’s silly premonition. Each of the Everywhere abounds love and happiness, or Montez O ’Briens is a challenge; Maria, so one would think, ifit weren’t for Mariela’s Gloria, Emilio and the others. Hijuelos incessant writing, hidden from all except a helps us to explore each and every one of very special friend, Mr. Garcia. She, the them, as individuals, and as smaller parts of mother of fifteen children, felt loneliness the greater whole. Some you will lose track amidst the throng. A shred of paper hidden of as they disappear into “unmemory.” with all her notebooks would reveal that: “I Others will stay with you forever. am surrounded by life and yet feel alone, with open hands begging ...” (426). And The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez then there is Nelson’s reticent and solitary O ’Brien is ajoumey forward with Margarita, drinking. whose very inheritance is this book of The year is 1898, 1943, 1994, or any of memories. Her entire life has been devoted those in between. In the novel’s hundred- to keeping the family together, organizing year journey you visit Santiago de Cuba, the album, as it were. As she dies we are led Cassino, Italy, New York, Hollywood, back to where the family started, to her own Alaska, and even the Vatican, in a special birth. Leaving her old and wrinkly body, audience with the Pope. As you meet the she returns to the place her mother wrote many members of the Montez O’Brien about: “I want to be transported to a place family, one-by-one (or sometimes two-by- where I will hear the hymn of sleeping birds, two, as with the twins, Olga and Jacqueline), where streams flow with musical waters, you will experience their triumphs and and where I will find majestic trees in whose failures, sexual awakenings and spiritual boughs I will hide my soul” (426). Her longings. You can’t help but chuckle as father takes a picture of a springtime rose in plump and succulent Irene finds a man to the vivid brilliant field the old Mennonite satisfy both her ravenous appetites, sweets farmer always said was the work of the Lord.