The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  That all changed when they made their famous cross-country Mambo U.S.A. tour. Chosen by the Mambo U.S.A. booking company as one of the orchestras which would spread the mambo across the nation, they set out in the spring of 1956 on a two-month stint that took them to the dance halls and theaters of small towns everywhere, and major cities like Chicago and San Francisco. Typical was a dance they played in an old American Legionnaires Hall in a place called Quincyville, Pennsylvania. The town was nestled out beyond the hills, cows, and tranquil fields of the Amish country. Nestor sat in the front of the bus beside the mambo dance team of Elva and René, delighted by the green countryside and lakes and the elongating silos and trees in the sunlight. He made the trip playing cards with Cesar and reading his little book.

  Whenever they passed a cemetery, Cesar would joke, saying, “Look, brother, there goes the future.”

  As the bus turned down the main street of Quincyville, speakers blaring mambo music, dogs barked, children whistled, kids on bicycles honked their little black horns, and the bells went ching-ching-a-ling. People lined up on the street to get a look at these musicians, and when they climbed off the bus at the Thomas E. Dewey American Legionnaires Hall, they were greeted with friendly nods and smiles. (Though there was that other place in New Jersey, Tanglewood, where they returned to the bus at three in the morning and found the aisles and windows smeared with excrement.)

  That night they played for a crowd of redneck farmers and their wives who didn’t know what was going on with their music. Behind the musicians was a banner saying in big letters: MAMBO USA TOURS PRESENTS: THE FABULOUS CESAR CASTILLO AND HIS MAMBO KINGS!

  Cesar stood before the microphone, saintly under those lights, with vocal cords trembling, his wrecked-by-cigarettes voice crooning, arms spreading wide to embrace the world. The good people of the good Pennsylvania earth had no idea what to make of their music. Cesar was always a joy to watch during the fast dance numbers, the man sliding and bending, flailing his arms into odd configurations—at one moment lilting forward and stomping his heels, at the next jumping bolt-upright like an exclamation point—his face contorting, his mouth in an “O,” in a Vanna Vane “Ooooo” ; his teeth set like a trap, tongue lashing the air; his braceleted and beringed hands jangling; his shoes pirouetting; and he’d shout, “Uhhhhhh!” while conducting the orchestra and clap and shout out the names of his musicians, “Vaya, Pito! Vaya, Nestor!” and “Uhhhhh” again.

  Sometimes this was too much for more conservative crowds and then the group would launch into a mixed set of American and Latin American compositions. He crooned “In the Still of the Night,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” then “Bésame Mucho” and “María la O.” For the “Peanut Vendor,” Cesar came out wearing a baseball cap and pushing a cart that had “Peanuts for Sale” written on its side. Taking to the microphone and shaking a martini mixer filled with shot, Cesar sang an English version of the song: “Oh, why don’t you try my peanuts, you’ll never find peanuts as tasty as mine,” which most of the audience did not get anyway, as Cesar still had a thick Cuban accent. But the musicians knew the meaning of those words and always had a good laugh with the songs. Their other big novelty number was a quasi-tango which Cesar had composed, stealing bits of “Malagueña” and the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen. He’d introduce it to the audience: “Now here’s a song about a cat who has to fight the bull all the time, and I mean bull-you-know-what!”

  In that number Xavier, their bestial trombonist, came charging like a bull toward Cesar, who played the bullfighter, waving a large red cloth and gesturing with bows and waves of the hand to a beautiful woman offstage. The number was set up for a few laughs and to introduce the dance team of Elva and René. At the end of the song, Elva in a bright red dress would come spinning out into the brave matador’s arms. Vamp and out. The audience always broke into applause.

  Whenever Elva came dancing out, Cesar would give her a nice up-and-down, as if to see through the silk of her dress, like Superman. He’d once seen her in a bathing suit when they were playing in the Catskills. She was sunbathing by a lake, and when he saw her, Cesar decided to walk over and ask Elva if she’d like a soda. He took one look at her and blushed; a few strands of pubic hair overrunning her bathing suit broke his heart. He was interested in her, but thought she might be a little crazy. Poor René, word was that he could not satisfy her, that she preferred men with “kingly sticks,” men who were really built . . . or that’s what the musicians speculated.

  He was interested, but wouldn’t touch her. René was his friend and he would never fuck around with a friend’s woman. Still, he spent many a night thinking about her.

  The people loved the music, but these Pennsylvania folk who were used to country dancing had their troubles with the mambo, and because of this, part of the evening included free rumba and mambo and cha-cha-cha lessons.

  René, the male partner, joined Elva on the stage. He was a tiny, thin man, about five-five or so, in three-inch Cuban heels, with big ears, a pointy, pocked nose, thick mustache, bald head, and soft, aristocratic eyes. He was forty-five and had found Elva some ten years before, when she was sixteen and succulent, dancing rumbas out in Maríanao Park in Havana for pennies. René hired her to join his stage act, which consisted of dancing old-fashioned rumbas at the Tropicana nightclub in Havana. They came to New York in 1947 and made a living teaching dancing at the Fred Astaire dance studios, the Palladium, and the Savoy. And sometimes they performed at the Teatro Hispano in Harlem, where René caught the stage manager feeling Elva up in the wings and attacked him with a hammer. That’s when Cesar hired them to work with the Mambo Kings.

  When they’d finished the bullfight song, the Mambo Kings launched into “Mambo Nocturne,” one of their original compositions. The dance couple waltzed around the stage. The next number was “El Bodeguero,” a cha-cha-cha, and Elva and René were out on the dance floor among the crowd, showing them the steps and giving instructions: “And it’s one, two, three, and slide. Stop. One, two, three, slide, and stop . . . Ah, ladies, you look great, but your husbands are stiffs!”

  The men listened to her carefully and were soon bending, spinning, and lurching forward to the music, happy, red-faced, and like shy students at a high-school dance. The men doted on shapely Elva, and their pretty, thick-ankled wives were charmed by the flirtatious splendor that was Cesar Castillo.

  Cesar would use the lessons as a chance to mingle with the crowd. He’d come down off the stage and dance with a dozen different women during a single song, his warm-blooded, thick hands taking the woman by the waist and spinning her like a falling flower. The evening would end with a set of Mambo Kings “songs of love”: “Twilight in Havana,” “Solitude of My Heart,” and “The Sadness of Love.” Cesar would sing about the murmuring seas, the mournful moon, scornful, mocking, deceptive, cruel, playful, entrancing love—eyes closed, his face a mask of thoughtful passion.

  Everyone had a good time, crowd and musicians. The crowd was generous in its applause, and the musicians would head out thinking about the next day’s journey, gather to pass along little cups of rum and prepare for the night’s sleep before heading to the next day’s job, a Sunday-afternoon mambo dance party at the Plainfield auditorium, Plainfield, New Jersey.

  As for women? Even when he was stuck in the middle of nowhere, in a small town where everybody watched him, the Mambo King was always up to his old tricks, dating girls wherever he could, but hardly ever with the kind of success he had back in New York, where the greater difficulties of life promoted a greater pursuit of pleasure. Still, the man never gave up! Sometimes during the dances he would discreetly ask if a certain young lady might show him around town the next morning before he left on the bus. Sometimes he made dates at night and found himself waiting on street corners with names like Maple and Vine at three in the morning, pacing up and down, cigarette in mouth, hands in trousers, waiting for these chancy rendezvous with women named Betty and Mary-Jo and Annett
e. Meeting these women, he would sit for hours talking sincerely with them and musing on the beauty of the stars, and then he would try to make his move: sometimes he petted, tongue-kissed, wrestled, dry-humped women in the parks of these small towns or in the back seat of a car in the local lovers’ lane, but usually his restlessness and voracious ego were satisfied with the amorous tension of these dates.

  (And there were other women that he daydreamed about as he sat drinking his last drinks in the Hotel Splendour. Going down on some girl on Coney Island at ten-thirty at night, the two of them huddled under a blanket. A woman with a broken leg in a cast, standing up in a phone booth during a rainstorm in Atlantic City, the gales whipping against the glass, things so dark around them nobody could see, so that in the ferocity of the winds they started to kiss, his knee pressing between her legs, and this woman saying to hell with it and pulling up her sun skirt and down with her panties, down over her legs and down over the thick plaster cast, so that he lifted her up onto him and she leaned back against the wall, laughing and thinking, This man is insane, laughing and seeing stars while people outside looked like zigzagged pencil doodles running through the deluge. And there was that woman in the crowd watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. She was standing next to him, Leticia, and Eugenio, whose presence certainly made things easier, as this woman seemed to like children very much and smiled each time he hoisted Leticia up over his head so that she would see the bands and floats better. But he really made this woman smile when he said, “And can I lift you up?” Ended up with them walking to the subway together and Cesar making a date with her for a week later. She had a nice body, really a massive woman with pendulous breasts, but, coño, was she motherly and liked to have him suck them and played a game of slapping his face with them, but the woman was too serious, how could he fuck around with a war widow with sadness in her eyes even when she looked fine in one of those lacy Tigress of the Night brassieres, really broke his heart to hurt her so, and she was an office manager in a place downtown, about forty years old but beautiful, she just took everything too seriously, but, man, was she fun, another one who liked her men “built,” as she put it, men with king-sized sticks. And there was that woman in the fancy white coat whom he watched along Fifth Avenue one day, she was the one he followed into Saks Fifth Avenue up to the glove department, where he stood pretending to shop and watched her posing before the mirrors. She had one of those elegant thin model bodies, tall and firm, and he watched her slipping on gloves, nice soft leather gloves, and when he closed his eyes, he imagined the way she would pull on a pair of panties after a shower or play, with dampened fingers, with his thing, slipping a condom on him the same way she put her fingers into that glove. She was impossible, too snotty for him. He followed her all over the store and thought he had a thing going because every now and then she would look deep into his eyes, and he considered that a form of lovemaking, but just as he was about to make his move, to approach her, these two gents stepped out from one of the service departments, store guards, who said to him, “We understand you’re bothering one of our customers, sir,” and that was that, his face blushing with embarrassment, and as he was being led out of the store, he got the last lick in, gave her this look which said, “You don’t know who I am or what you’ve just missed, baby.” And there were others, like the European lady he met on that one-night job moonlighting as a crooner on a harbor tour boat. She was French and not even that good-looking, but she had been staring at him as he sang on the stage. And she was aggressive, joining him by the railing to watch the moonswept sea, because that was when there were many lonely European women, the war had left so many men dead. And she said to him in a thick French accent, “I love the way you use your hands and shake those maracas. You have lovely hands, may I look at them?” And she started to read them and said, “You have a long lifeline, if you want it, and success is here if you want it. But I see trouble ahead, something that you must be prepared for.” She said, “You see that spot here that looks like an exploding star, that means something’s going to explode in your life. I used to see that in Europe all the time, on many, many hands.” She was so thin her Venus mound protruded like a huge fig, and when he made love to her he kept thinking about the city of Paris and the Eiffel Tower and all those newsreels he’d seen of the Free French and Allied troops marching victoriously back into the city. And there were others: Gloria, Ismelda, Juanita, Alice, Conchita, Vivian, Elena, Irene . . .)

  Still, whenever Cesar came back from these dates and he found Nestor, an insomniac, waiting up in the motel-room bed, he would say something: “Oh, man, that chick I picked up, pssssshh, man, you should have seen her body!” And he’d say it to make his brother jealous, because in many ways he was jealous of his brother’s marriage to Delores. Or perhaps he always had to treat Nestor like a poor soul, and therefore tormented him with tales of his amorous exploits.

  . . . When I knew he was in pain . . .

  Poor Nestor, when they were on the road, he would suffer at night with homesickness and ardent longing for María. In those simply furnished motel rooms, he would remain awake half the night, arms tucked behind his pillow, body racked in spiritual pain. Sometimes he would get up and take a walk, lingering against a streetlamp in the motel parking lot, or he’d find some fellows to play cards with for nickels and dimes, but played without caring if he won, outlasting even the most diehard insomniacs. On those nights the thought of looking at the same wistful moon and whispering stars as he used to during his nights of romance with María in Havana destroyed him. He would sit up in bed smoking cigarettes, then clean out his trumpet, jot down a few lyrics, or read from his book, seeking an answer to his woes. He’d feel like crumpling up. Sadness would weaken his knees. He’d pace until his older brother came in with that happy smirk on his face, his older brother whistling, his older brother yawning, his older brother falling quickly to bed. Then, while Cesar snored away on the other side of the room, Nestor passed the time familiarizing himself with the ceiling, faces, roads, stars swirling above him.

  Did he think about Delores and his children, Leticia and Eugenio? Yes, he could not bear the thought of hurting them. But what could he do? He would sit up, sighing, desperate to get rid of those feelings.

  “A cabrón,” he would perhaps tell himself, “would have gone back to Cuba by now. A cabrón would have been unfaithful.”

  Despite his brother’s constant seduction of women, Nestor wore his faithfulness like a badge of sainthood, but he sometimes found it unbearable, wanting to be held, to be comforted, to be told, “Yes, Nestor, I love you, everyone does.” And those feelings would make him angry at the marriage, so that by the time he returned home, he would take it out on Delores.

  He’d only begin falling asleep after the sun had started to rise. Then his dreams would take on a golden glow. “There goes the future,” he would say to himself, falling asleep. “There goes the future.” And he found himself stumbling through a cemetery, exulting in the obelisks, Celtic crosses, and monuments with their carved angels and bursting suns. Christ risen (Save this flesh, Lord), Christ judging (Forgive me, Lord), Christ on the Cross (Please place me in Your Heart). Then he’d wander through the cemetery, feeling very much at home, until some sound, Cesar snoring, Cesar saying, “Oh, baby,” Cesar belching, would stir him from his uneasy sleep and he rejoined the world.

  (And the next day, driving along the hilly countryside near the Delaware Water Gap, the bus overheated and stopped on the side of the highway for an hour. The brothers found themselves walking down a country road with Manny. They came to a field of sheep, and in the distance another field of haystacks. Nature buzzing, alive with insect sounds and birdcalls. They saw a mill and a small stone wall where they thought they might pose for a picture. Cesar had brought along a little Kodak box camera and he told Nestor to pose beside him in front of that wall. They were doing so, arms around each other’s shoulder, when they heard a cowbell. Not a Latin orchestra cowbell counting 3/2 time
, but a cow cowbell. Then they met the cow herself, who had come walking out of the field. Big black spots covered her hide and she moved in a swirl of a hundred flies. The spots inspired the brothers to put on dark glasses. They posed in front of the cow, looking as if they were part of the cow’s family.

  A farmer had been watching the brothers and said to them in a German accent, “Let me take your picture. The three of you.”

  And so Manny, Nestor, and Cesar, three Mambo Kings, posed for posterity.

  That was June 1956.

  Then the farmer invited them to his house, which was down the hill. His front garden was filled with sighing flowers, sighing as they tried to reach higher out of the ground. And the roots of the earth seemed to yawn. In the Hotel Splendour the Mambo King felt the sunniness of that day and poured himself another drink. It was a stone house and its interior smelled of dirt and firewood and cherry pipe tobacco. They drank coffee and had corn bread and ham—“Sabroso!”—grape jelly, and scrambled eggs. Then they drank a glass of beer each. When they offered to pay him, he refused, and when they left, he followed them back up the road to the bus, where Cesar gave him a signed copy of “Mambo Dance Party.” He laughed and they were touched by his insistence that they come back any time to eat with him.)