The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  On those nights, Nestor went to bed hoping for beautiful dreams about gardens and the early-morning sunlight which he associated with love, but walked instead down a long dark hallway of misfortune into a room of tortures where Beautiful María of His Soul, naked and desirable, placed him on a rack and turned a great wheel whose ropes began to tear out his limbs and debone his member. He would wake with his heart beating as if it would burst and with shadows swirling against the walls. Worked up in this way, he would sit by the side of the bed, his body sweaty, and light a cigarette, wishing he had gone out with his older brother.

  And what would happen then?

  The phone would ring and he’d answer it, hearing something like this:

  “Hey, brother, know we have to go to work tomorrow, but why don’t you get dressed and come down here right away. I’m down at the El Morocco and my friend Eddie here is going to be throwing a little party soon, with lots of nice little girls”—and in the background the delighted squeals of women and the music of a twenty-piece orchestra tearing up the joint.

  Nestor, answering in his quiet manner said: “Yes, give me an hour,” and, despite his practical and introspective nature, got dressed and went to the club.

  Always the more somber and silent of the brothers, he was the big-eared fellow who would have to throw down five drinks before loosening up and showing the world a toothy grin. A woman pressing against him, in a crowd of happy partyers around a champagne-glass-covered table, her breast soft through the silk of her dress, didn’t have a chance with him. It didn’t matter if she was sweet, affectionate, sexually voracious, and pretty; he always seemed somewhere else. A few drinks would fill his face with shadows; in the men’s-room mirror, those shadows would ebb and flow over his features like caressing female hands. When he had first arrived in the States, every woman he looked at had seemed as lifeless as a doll. He could not look at another woman, and the only way he overcame this unbearable pain was by daydreaming about María: Would she suddenly write him the most adoring letter? Would she turn up on the next airplane, a little bag packed with her frilly underthings? Would she weep unabashedly over the telephone, begging his forgiveness?

  Cesar, despite his shortcomings, always thought this: Don’t be an idiot, forget about her! But Nestor couldn’t. He relived their life over again so often that he sometimes had the sensation of being buried by the past, as if the details of this shattered love (and the other sadnesses of his life) had been turned into stone, weeds, and dirt and thrown over him.

  He even took his dreams about María to the meat factory where Pablo had gotten him a job, working over a vat in which the bones and viscera of certain animals were crushed and ground up for making hot dogs and sausage fillers. As the blades churned he would pass the time staring at the whipping entrails—intestines, stomachs, backbones, brains—as if at a sunny garden. The crush of bones, the whirring of machines, memories, music, and his dreams of María. The plant was in a long, flat warehouse alongside the river, with huge metal doors that opened for deliveries and pickups by freezer trucks. He’d work there from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, spending those hours at the vat whistling to himself and trying to improvise a song about María. What did he seek to accomplish? To write a song communicating such pure love and desire that María, far away, would magically reinstate him into the center of her heart. He thought that she would “hear” these melodies in her dreams and that something would possess her: she would sit down and write him a letter begging his forgiveness, a letter admitting to confusion and foolishness, that one day she would leave her husband—if he was her husband—and he would hear a knocking at the door, make his way down the hall, the panting hound behind him, and find María of his soul standing there, this woman who had somehow become the lost key to happiness.

  But as many letters as he wrote her, she never answered him. As many gifts as he sent her, he never received as much as a thank-you. For more than two years, not a day went by that he did not think about flying down to Havana to see her. It was hopeless, he felt his heart drawing in, constricting. He didn’t talk about María of Havana, but he passed most of his days thinking about her.

  He’d carry around a little photograph of her in a cinch-waisted bathing suit, his María rising out of the foamy tides of a Havana sea, take it out, speak to the picture as if she would hear him. After work he’d go on a solitary walk up to Grant’s Tomb to check out the dead President and his wife, then head down a path into Riverside Park, where he would lean up against a stone wall and watch the sparkling ice floes on the river, imagining himself inside. Constriction in his dreams. Under the ground, in tunnels, in blocks of ice. He went over his feelings about María so often they became as mashed up as the innards in the crushing machines at the plant. The more he thought about her, the more mythic she became. Every ounce of love he’d received in his short life was captured and swallowed up by the image of María. (Mamá, I wanted María the way I wanted you when I was a baby feeling helpless in that bed, with welts covering my chest, and lungs stuffed with thick cotton. I couldn’t breathe, Mamá, remember how I used to call you?)

  That was Nestor the young man in the sleeveless T-shirt whose body was like a letter K in the window of the apartment on La Salle Street, one leg bent at the knee on the sill, arm up against the windowframe, smoking a cigarette like a languishing movie star waiting for a call from a studio, and humming a melody line. That was Nestor on the living-room couch, strumming a chord on the guitar, looking up, and writing in a notebook. That was Nestor’s voice heard on the street at night, on La Salle, on Tiemann Place, on 124th Street and Broadway. That was Nestor down on his knees playing with the children, pushing a toy truck into a city of alphabet blocks, the children climbing on his back and riding him like a horse, while in his head there bloomed a thousand images of María: María naked, María in a sun hat, María’s brown nipple filling his mouth, María with a cigarette, María commenting on the beauty of the moon, María dancing long-legged, her body wobbling in perfect rhythm in a chorus of women in feathered turbans, María counting the doves in a plaza, María sucking a pineapple batida through a straw, María writhing, lips damp and face red from kisses, in ecstasy, María growling like a cat, María dabbing her mouth with lipstick, María pulling up a flower . . .

  That was Nestor, eyebrows arched with the scholarly concentration of a physics student, reading science-fiction comic books at the kitchen table. That was Nestor up on the rooftop stretched out on a blanket and sipping whiskey, waking up screaming at night, decked out in a white silk suit, blowing a trumpet on the stage of some dance hall, quietly attending to the drinks, filling a punch bowl during a party in the apartment, dreaming about some of those nights spent with María in Havana, her presence so strong in his memory that around three o’clock in the morning the door to the apartment would open and María would walk like a spirit into the living room and pull off her slip, sliding one knee onto the cot and then the other, lowering herself so that the first thing Nestor felt moving slowly upward over his shinbone and then his knee was María’s vagina. And then she would take hold of his thing and say, “Hombre!”

  He was the man plagued with memory, the way his brother Cesar Castillo would be twenty-five years later, the man with the delusion that the composition of a song about María would bring her back. He was the man who wrote twenty-two different versions of “Bella María de Mi Alma,” first as “The Sadness of Love,” then “María of My Life,” before arriving, with the help of his older brother, Cesar, upon the version they would be singing one night in 1955 in the Mambo Nine Club, “Beautiful María of My Soul,” a song of love, that night when they drew the attention and interest of their fellow Cuban Desi Arnaz.

  SPENDING LATE NIGHTS OUT, they’d find themselves climbing the stairs to their cousin Pablo’s fourth-floor apartment on La Salle Street at five in the morning. Rooftops burning red, and black birds circling the water towers. Cesar was thirty-one years old then and out to have a
good time, preferring to look forward and never back into his past: he’d left a kid, a daughter, behind in Cuba. Sometimes he had pangs for his daughter, sometimes felt bad that things didn’t work out with his former wife, but he remained determined to have a good time, chase women, drink, eat, and make friends. He wasn’t cold-hearted: he had moments of tenderness that surprised him toward the women he went out with, as if he wanted truly to fall in love, and even tender thoughts about his former wife. He had other moments when he didn’t care. Marriage? Never again, he’d tell himself, even though he’d lie through his teeth about wanting to get married to women he was trying to seduce. Marriage? What for?

  He heard a lot about “a family and love” from Pablo’s plump little wife. “That’s what makes a man happy, not just playing the mambo,” she’d say.

  He had moments when he thought about his wife, a hole of sadness through his heart, but it was nothing that a drink, a woman, a cha-cha-cha wouldn’t fix. He had hooked up with her a long time ago because of Julián García, a well-known bandleader in Oriente Province. He was just a young upstart from Las Piñas then, a singer and trumpet player with a wandering troupe of guajiro musicians who would play in the small-town plazas and dance halls of Camagüey and Oriente Provinces. Sixteen years old, he fled to the dance halls, had a good time meeting and entertaining the people of small towns and bedding down poor country girls where he could find them. He was a handsome and exuberant singer, with an unpolished style and a tendency toward operatic flourishes that would take him off-key.

  These musicians never made any money, but one day when they were playing at a dance in a small town called Jiguaní, his youthful exuberance and looks had impressed someone in the crowd who passed his name to Julián García. At the time he was looking for a new crooner and wrote a letter simply addressed “Cesar Castillo, Las Piñas, Oriente.” Cesar was nineteen then, and not yet jaded. He took the invitation to heart and made the journey down to Santiago the week after he’d received it.

  He’d always remember the steep hills of Santiago de Cuba, a city reminiscent in its hilliness, he would think years later, of San Francisco, California. Julián lived in an apartment over a dance hall which he owned. The sun radiating against the cobblestone streets and cool doorways from which one could smell the afternoon lunches and hear the comforting sounds of families dining at their tables. Brooms sweeping out a hallway, salamanders skulking along the arabesque tiles. García’s dance hall was a refuge of shady arcades and a long, cool inner hallway. The place was deserted except for García, who sat in the middle of a colonnaded dance floor tinkling at the piano, stout, sweaty, and with a head damp with running hair dye.

  “I’m Cesar Castillo, and you told me to come and sing for you one day.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  For his audition he opened with Ernesto Lecuona’s “María la O.”

  Nervous about performing for Julián García, Cesar sang his heart out in a flamboyant style, using extended high notes and long, slow phrasing, arms flailing dramatically. When he’d finished, Julián nodded encouragingly and kept him there, singing, until ten o’clock that night.

  “You come back here tomorrow. The other musicians will be here, okay?”

  And in a friendly, paternal manner, his hand on Cesar’s shoulder, Julián led him out of the hall.

  Cesar had a few dollars in his pocket. He was planning to wander around the harbor and have some fun, fall asleep on one of the piers by the ocean, as he had so many times before, arms thrown over his face, in fields in the countryside, in the plazas, on church steps. He was so used to looking out for himself that it surprised him to hear García ask, “And do you have a place to sleep tonight?”

  “No.” And he shrugged.

  “Bueno, you can stay with me upstairs. Huh? I should have told you that in the letter.”

  Remaining that night, the future Mambo King basked in Julián’s kindness. High on that hill and overlooking the harbor, that apartment was a pleasant change for him. He had his own room, which opened up to a balcony, and all the food he could eat. That was the order of the household: all of García’s family, his wife and four sons, lived for their evening meals. His sons, who performed with him, were immense, overfed, with cheerful, angelic dispositions. That was because Julián was so loving, an affectionate man who even challenged Cesar’s macho resolve to need or want no one.

  He began to sing with Julián’s outfit, a twenty-piece orchestra, in 1937. They had a pleasant “tropical” sound, depending heavily on violins and sonorous flutes, and their rhythm section dragged as in the style of fox-trotters of the twenties, and Julián, who conducted and played the piano, had a penchant for dreamlike orchestrations, clouds of music that seemed to float upward on waves of tremolo-choked piano. The Mambo King would have one photograph of that orchestra—and this sat in that envelope in the Hotel Splendour—of himself in a formal black suit, wearing white gloves, sitting in a row with the others. Behind them, a backdrop of Havana Harbor and El Morro Castle, flanked by pedestals on which Julián had placed small statues of antique themes—a wingèd victory and a bust of Julius Caesar, and large ostrich-plume-filled vases. What was that look on Cesar’s face? With his black hair combed back and parted in the middle, he was pleasantly smiling, in commemoration of that happy time in his life.

  Julián’s orchestra packed dance halls all over Oriente and Camagüey. He had conservative tastes, never playing original compositions but relying on the songs of the popular Cuban composers of the day: Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, Manuel Luna, Moisés Simón, Miguel Matamoros, Eliseo Grenet, Lecuona. He was the warmest human being Cesar Castillo would ever meet in his life. That portly orchestra leader exuded pure love for his fellowman—“A family and love, that’s what makes a man happy”—and showed this affection to his musicians. That was a time when the Mambo King was close to becoming a different kind of human being.

  Cesar never let go of his liking for women. He maintained his king-cock strut and manly arrogance, but around Julián and his family, he felt so peaceful that he calmed down. And it showed in his singing. He gained more control, became more lilting, and developed an affectionate tone in his songs, which people liked and responded to. He had not yet found a way of transforming that into the world-weariness of his records in the mid-fifties. (And if you heard the wrecked voice of Cesar in 1978 and compared it to the golden-toned voice of the 1930s and 1940s, you would have a hard time believing they came from the same singer.) They played all over the provinces in towns with names like Bayamo, Jobabo, Minas, Morón, Miranda, Yara, El Cobre, and in the larger cities of Camagüey, Holguín, and Santiago. They traveled in three trucks and they would make their way down dirt roads, struggling through the brush and forests of the countryside, and into the mountains. They played for campesinos, soldiers, bureaucrats, businessmen. They played for people who lived in houses with palm-thatch roofs, for those who lived in grand-style Spanish villas, and in the plantations and sugar mills, and in beautiful citrus groves, for the Americans who had constructed New England frame clapboard houses, with little back gardens and front porches. They played in towns without modern plumbing or electricity where people hardly knew the name of Hitler, in countryside so dark that the stars were a veil of light and where the thready luminescence of spirits moved through the streets and over walls at night and where the arrival of Julián’s orchestra was greeted like the Second Coming of Christ, with children and dogs and crowds of teenagers following behind it, clapping and whistling wherever they went. They played weddings, baptisms, and confirmation parties, fiestas de quince, and fiestas blancas, where the participants dressed in white from head to toe. They’d perform waltzes and danzones for the old people, and floor-sliding tangos and steamy rumbas for the young.

  Julián was a good orchestra leader and a good man. Cesar would have thought of Julián as a “second father” if the word “father” did not make him want to punch a wall. In that time, he learned much about putting together an orchestra
and singing from Julián, and enjoyed the glory of performance. He used to throw himself completely into his songs and lived for the moment when the entire ballroom would be on its feet either dancing or applauding.

  “Just make them feel that you care for them. You don’t have to overdo it, because they know that, but let them know all the same.”

  While singing with Julián’s orchestra the Mambo King became well known. He could walk down the street of many a small town and there would always be someone to come up to him and say, “Aren’t you Cesar Castillo the singer?” He started to acquire a lordly bearing, though one that fell apart when it came to chasing women. Returning to the farm in Las Piñas for his monthly visits, he would feel as if he had come home to a haunted house, the site of many of his fights with his father and the sadness of his mother’s weeping that filled the halls. He would return with presents and advice and with a desire for peace that always erupted, after a day or so, into another fight with his father, Don Pedro, who considered musicians effeminate, doomed men. He’d return and give Nestor music lessons, take Nestor to town. Always impressed with his brother’s musicianship, he had plans to take Nestor into Julián’s orchestra when he was of age and the family would let him leave the house.

  Now he remembers and sighs: the long approach to the farm along the riverbank and forest, the dirt road past the houses and over the water, the sun bursting through the treetops. The Mambo King riding on a borrowed mule, a guitar slung over his shoulders . . .

  He had been in the orchestra for four years when he attended a weekend party at Julián’s apartment in Santiago and there made the acquaintance of his niece, Luisa García. He was the handsome young crooner at the end of the table, reveling in the friendship of this older man, guzzling Spanish brandy all night and feeling light-headed enough to easily fall in love. And there she was, Luisa. Sitting across from her during the meal, he smiled and kept staring into her eyes, but she would turn away. Shy and thin, with a plain face, Luisa had a large beaked nose, pretty eyes, and a kindly expression. She liked to wear simple dresses. Although her body was not spectacular, her skin gave off a nice scent of oils and perfume, and when he stood beside her, filling a glass from a punch bowl, he knew she would turn out to be a passionate lover.