The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Because of the tour, Cesar spent his thirty-eighth birthday in Chicago. They were holed up in an old twelve-story hotel called the Dover House, on the Northeast Side, overlooking Lake Michigan, and he’d had a good day walking along the shore with his brother and a few of the Mambo Kings, clowning around, eating in nice restaurants, and, as always, trying to kill time before the show. He certainly expected something more from the fellows than what he had gotten. He considered himself their father, their Santa Claus, their spiritual advisor, the butt of their jokes, and there he was, on his birthday, after a show, without any sign that his musicians would celebrate his birthday. So it was not as if he was impervious to pain. On a normal night out, he would have suggested a party, but he resisted the idea of initiating his own birthday celebration. After his fellow musicians had gone their separate ways, and Cesar and Nestor headed for their rooms, Cesar was the solemn one for a change.

  “Well, happy birthday, hermano,” Nestor said, with some embarrassment in his voice. “I guess I should have said something to the band.”

  And that little incident tapped into Cesar’s feeling that went back a long way to Cuba: that no one does a thing for you, so you must do it yourself.

  Feeling downcast about turning thirty-eight, and about being alone on the night of his birthday, Cesar opened his hotel-room door and clicked on the light; he slept in a bed that was up against a wall of mirrored tiles. Stretched in front of those mirrored tiles was a beautiful, long-legged woman, head of thick black hair propped up on an elbow, body luscious and naked.

  Taking in the spectacular curvaceousness of a body that startled the Mambo King and whose shapely bottom, soft and rounded as a swan’s neck, was reflected in the mirror, he said, “Dios mío!”

  And the woman, a brunette with big brown eyes, said, “Feliz cumpleaños,” and smiled.

  She would be another acquaintance of his, an exotic dancer, Dahlia Múñez, who was professionally known as the Argentine Flame of Passion. He and a few of the Mambo Kings had watched her dancing in a club on the South Side. When his fellow musicians saw how Cesar could not take his eyes off her that night, they hired her as a present to him, and there they were: she opening her arms and her legs to him, and Cesar hurrying to strip off all his clothes, which he left in a pile on the floor. Every woman he’d ever bedded down, he would think years later in the Hotel Splendour, had something to distinguish her lovemaking. And for the Argentine Flame of Passion it was the way she enjoyed the act of fellatio, actually liked the spill of his milk inside her mouth—or so she pretended. (And her technique! She would make his spectacular member even more spectacularly huge. She’d take the root of his penis above his testicles, which resembled jowls and were the size of good California plums, squeezing so tightly that his thing turned purple with the rush of blood and then got even bigger: and then she would just roll her tongue around it, take him inside her mouth, lick him all over, pull, prod, and poke his member until he came.) She had other virtues, which kept them busy until past seven in the morning; they slept happily until around ten-thirty, when the Mambo King and this Dahlia fucked one more time, showered together, got dressed, and showed up in the hotel dining room, where his musicians were gathered to wait for their bus. When he walked in, they broke into applause. (For years he sent Dahlia postcards, inviting her to visit him in New York and saying that he might visit her in Chicago.)

  The brothers loved the immensity of the United States and experienced both the pleasures and the monotony of small towns U.S.A. Of the Midwestern states, they found Wisconsin most beautiful, but they also liked the Far West. They played Denver, where Cesar, delighted all his life by cowboy movies, saw his first bowlegged, drawling cowpokes leaning up against a bar, spurred cowboy boots against the foot railing, a rinky-dink player piano jiving through “The Streets of Laredo.” And it was “Howdy, pardner” and “Thank you much” and long-drawled-out English phrases. They bought the family little presents wherever they went. In Denver, cowboy hats and rubber tomahawks and little dolls, and for Delores, a “Genuine Navajo Squaw” dress. They made like tourists and sent home dozens of postcards of everything from Mount Rushmore to the Golden Gate Bridge. Aside from their moments of strangeness and displacement, they had a beautiful trip.

  The guys who had it rough were the black musicians, who were treated in some places like lepers. No violence against them, just a bad silence when they’d go walking into a store, a disenchantment when they’d walk into a lodge for the hunters’ special breakfast, plates slapped down on the table, drinks poured quickly, eyes averted. In one place in Indiana they had a big problem with the owner of a dance hall there. He wanted Desi Arnaz, not these ebony-black Cubans like Pito and Willy. The owner would not allow them to walk onto his premises, and the orchestra canceled, Cesar telling the man, “You go fuck yourself, mister!” In some places they had to come in through the back door and were not allowed to use the toilets with everyone else. Black musicians had to take their pisses out the back stage door. Spirits were dampened, especially when the weather was bad, because in their travels through the heartland of America these fellows sometimes felt an Arctic coldness of spirit that made New York seem like Miami Beach.

  At one point, they spent two weeks on the road without ever meeting up with a single fellow Cuban, and a month when they saw no other blacks.

  San Francisco was different. Cesar liked it immediately because its hilliness reminded him of Santiago de Cuba. He liked to walk up and down its streets, enjoyed looking at its pretty many-colored houses with the curlicue balconies and bay windows. That was the last stop on their tour, where the Mambo Kings were to hook up for a triple bill in Sweet’s Ballroom, with the orchestras of Monto Santamaría and José Fajardo. This was really important for the Mambo Kings, as they were paid two thousand dollars for a single appearance—more than they’d ever gotten before. When Cesar stepped onto the stage that night, to clamorous applause, and the orchestra opened, as they always did, with “Twilight in Havana,” Cesar Castillo was positive that, from then on, things for the band would get better and better and that there would be many more nights in the future when they’d make that kind of money. Why, a fellow could live well making a few hundred dollars a week! Like a rich man. That night would always be a beautiful memory. Every song greeted enthusiastically, the crowds of dancers going wild with appreciation and happiness, and just the honor of sharing the bill with musicians of this caliber! Then, too, there was always that moment when the audience recognized the opening bars of “Beautiful María of My Soul,” their one hit, the song that brought them closest to fame.

  With all this money, the brothers bought themselves new suits, toys for the children, clothing. Nestor bought Delores a fur wrap. For the apartment, he bought a brand-new Castro Convertible sofa and the big RCA black-and-white television that would sit in that living room for the next twenty years. And he was always making trips to the bank, putting money away for a rainy day. His security was his blue American Savings Bank passbook, guaranteed to pay four to five percent interest annually. Manny the bassist saw a trustworthy soul in Nestor and wanted him to go into the bodega business up on 135th Street, but Nestor, disliking risks of any kind, backed away. He was so unsure about the future and so plagued by anxieties that he continued to work at the meat plant, reporting every so often to Pablo to pick up assignments, so that the family always had money coming into the house. Even Cesar, who always let the money fly out of his pockets, managed to put some of it away, though not much. He spent it at the racetracks and in the nightclubs and on his male and female acquaintances. For about three months, he lived a life of opulence. Even after sending a few hundred dollars to his daughter in Cuba, whom he kept promising to visit, he had enough to make a down payment on his dream automobile, a 1956 DeSoto.

  The afternoons would find Cesar out on the street, proudly sponging down his DeSoto with soap and water and then polishing it with wax. Then he’d wipe the chrome with rags, until the whole machine gleame
d radiantly. Cesar would go over that automobile as meticulously as he did his fingernails, with not a mark or a nick anywhere on its great windshield or over its smooth, sloping hood. He derived great pleasure from looking at it and would hold court from its front seat, playing its radio and chatting quietly with his friends until he decided to take someone for a ride up to the George Washington Bridge and back. The thing was so big and shiny that he would attract crowds of poor children, who would stand before it in awe.

  “Yes, sir,” Cesar would think. “That’s my nice car.”

  He was always reluctant to leave it parked in front of the building without someone to watch over it. La Salle was a street where the hoodlum element not only sat on cars; they took flying leaps off cars to catch balls during stickball games and jumped up on top of cars to dance. He’d usually park it over in the garage on 126th Street but sometimes kept it near the building. On those occasions when he was called upstairs, he would often check out that car from the window. He loved his DeSoto. It was big. It was splendid. It was smooth. It had turbo-thrust and was fifteen feet long. It was so fabulous-looking that no woman could resist smiling when she saw it. That DeSoto was so powerful that when he roared down the street and screeched to a halt, his foot on its “touch-sensitive” automatic brake system pedal, driver and machine were one and he would feel as if he were turbo-thrusting through the dense ordinariness of the world.

  He would take everybody for rides, elbow out the window, felt dice dangling off the mirror. His best friends at that time were Manny the bassist, Frankie Pérez the ballroom dandy, Bernardito Mandelbaum, artist, mambo aficionado, and Cubanophile, his fat cousin Pablo, and little Eugenio. They all got to ride around with the Mambo King. One day, he took the family and a date on an outing up north to Connecticut and stopped at a place called Little America, a memorabilia-packed log-cabin lodge whose shelves and walls were filled with animal heads, muskets, medallion-brimmed cowboy hats, tin soldiers, Mohawk Indians, rubber tomahawks, stovepipe hats, “Welcome to Connecticut” ashtrays, miniature American flags, American-flag tablecloths, American-flag pens. Cesar, a rich man, bought the children bundles of this junk. Afterwards they went into the Little America diner, where they drank sodas and chocolate malteds and came away with bags of potato chips and Snickers candy bars. Then they drove for another hour and the road opened to long stretches of meadow, streams, and woods. Cows and horses lolling behind fences, dogs barking from the side of the road. Bing Crosby on the radio singing “Moonlight Becomes You.” Cesar drove his automobile, with its beautiful whitewall tires, screeching around the turns. The family gripped their seats, but Cesar laughed and whistled. Sparks sometimes flew from the friction of hubcaps hitting the highway curb. He drove into a state park, where the forest’s noble pine trees towered over them. Serenely the family made their way down a corridor of these trees, carrying picnic baskets and guitars, a cooler of beer and soda. They were following signs that said, TO THE LAKE.

  Bees hovered closely around Cesar and his date, Vanna Vane. He was wearing so much hair tonic that the bees swarmed around him as if he were a wildflower field. That day she wore a lot of perfume and was dressed in a red plaid dress, very plain and very matronly in its way. They were a happy couple even if they weren’t a real couple. They held hands and whispered, telling little jokes and laughing. She was hoping that things would pick up with him. She liked the fact that he was generous with her. Frankly, a girl her age had to think about getting married, and even though he had told her a hundred times that they were good for a few laughs and for the Hotel Splendour, she believed there was something more to him. On a few occasions, when Miss Mambo had felt some real tenderness from him, she had started to cry in his arms. And it was as if he could not bear to see her pain, and so he told her, “Come on, Vanna. Stop acting like a little girl.” So she kept her distance and waited patiently for Cesar to come around.

  Cesar reminded her of the movie actor Anthony Quinn and she liked the way he would draw all the attention in a room, how other women seemed to envy her when she was out with him. And now he was on top of things, with all kinds of prospects. A Mexican film producer, Anibal Romero, had been talking to the Mambo King about appearing in a cameo part in a film in Mexico, where “Beautiful María of My Soul” was a hit. And he had been on the I Love Lucy show and had enough money that he bought a DeSoto and gave her a gold necklace because he was feeling successful. (Neither of them liked to think about the real circumstance of that necklace, with the Mambo King guilty about having to take Vanna Vane uptown to 155th Street, to that Pakistani fellow with the thick black hair and the inkwell eyes, a doctor who sat Vanna down for a quick surgical procedure, scraping her womb until the child of their conception was taken forever from this world. And Cesar sat outside, chain-smoking because Vanna had been crying, and pissed off about the whole thing. Afterwards he took her down to Brooklyn and bought her a banana split in a corner pharmacy and was startled that she was upset. “A lot of guys,” he said, “wouldn’t have even gone with you.” And that made her leave the pharmacy, sadly, so that it was months before she would speak to him or share a bed with him again.) But to the family they were a regular happy couple, not at all like Delores and Nestor, who had taken to walking solemnly side by side, their remarks addressed to the children: “Come here, nenes!” “Don’t put your fingers in your mouth after touching that!” “Give your Papi a kiss!”

  It was all silence, because since the brothers had come close to fame, Nestor had begun to change. He’d go for long walks by himself, and people were always saying to Delores or Cesar that they had seen Nestor “standing on a street corner without moving.” Or that “he seemed to be there but wasn’t there, you know what I mean?” Then there was something else: the letters she sometimes found folded up in his jacket pockets, letters to María, whose lines Delores could not bear to read. Her eyes would skim the pages and find phrases that cut her heart like a knife: “. . . And despite all my doubts, I still love you . . . It has always been a torment. . . This love will always thrive in my heart . . . If only I had proved my worthiness to you . . .” And other sentences that made her feel like slapping his face and saying, “If your life is not good enough for you, then go back to Cuba!” But how could she? She was trapped by her love for him. The idea of this beautiful dream of their love cracking open because of jealousy would send her into despair. She would take to her books and maintain her silence. For three months this had kept the peace.

  At twenty-seven, Delores was still an attractive woman. But in attending selflessly to Nestor and the family, she’d acquired a puzzled harshness around the eyes. A photograph of her with five other Cubans, the brothers and musician friends of the family, shows a woman of intelligence and beauty literally trapped inside a crush of men. (And in this photograph, taken in front of a statue of Abraham Lincoln on 116th Street, they huddled close. In the crush of machos, she seems to be waiting with annoyance to be lifted out of there.) She had never lost sight of that sad but handsome man she had met years back at the bus stop, and she loved him and the children very much. But there were days when she thought of another life outside of cooking and cleaning and taking care of the family. She sometimes went wandering around Columbia University with the children and would peer into classrooms or stand outside a window, listening to the summer-session lecture. She’d sigh, thinking about all the college people in that neighborhood. For reasons that she was unable to understand, she derived a deep satisfaction from all this learning, but would she ever act upon this?

  There seemed no way out for her. She had quit her job as a paid domestic and had finished her night classes down at Charles Evans Hughes High School, where a teacher, who was half flirtation and half sincerity, suggested that she might enroll in college at least part-time. She always got high marks in her courses and could have gotten into City College, which was only a ten-minute walk from La Salle Street. She always told her teachers, “No.” But when she daydreamed about her life, her knees ac
hed with envy of those professors who lived surrounded by books and by admiring colleagues and students.

  For a time she had thought her interests were unimportant in the scheme of their family life, but whenever the apartment grew thick with Cesar and Nestor’s pals from the dance halls, who expected to be waited upon, she felt like screaming. It hit her that she was intelligent and more so than anyone else she knew. A vague nausea would come over her and she would barely make it through those evenings, so cramped was her stomach.

  She became solemn in the performance of her wifely duties on those nights.

  “What’s wrong with you? Why are you so sad?” Nestor would ask her.

  “I’m sorry,” she’d say. “It’s my stomach. Tengo ganas de arrojar. I feel like throwing up.”

  It so distressed her that, a few weeks later, she approached Nestor to discuss the matter with him. “Querido,” she said to him. “I want to ask you something.”

  “Yes?”

  “How would it be with you if I enrolled in some courses at the college?”

  “And why do you want to?”

  “To better myself.”

  He didn’t say no. But his face flushed and was filled with disappointment. “You can do as you please,” he told her. He let out a sigh. “You go, and that will be the end of normalcy for us!” He was up out of the chair. “Do as you please, see if I care.”