The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “But what is the big deal, Nestor? What’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that I’m the breadwinner here, but if that’s what you want to do, that’s your business.”

  She was silent, hopeful that his expression would change, grow more relaxed.

  Instead, he went on. “Go ahead and humiliate me before the others.”

  “Oh, Nestor, please.”

  “Then don’t suggest such things to me.”

  “I was only trying to get your permission to go to the school.”

  The word “permission” calmed him. “Yes?” And he seemed more pensive about it now. “Well, maybe we should talk about this, someday. But I just want to say that a woman with two children should never spend more time than’s necessary away from home.”

  And then he became very kind, putting his arms around her and giving her a gentle kiss. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “It seems I’m getting a bad temper these days.”

  But after that, it became harder to accept her everyday life. She would go walking down Broadway with her kids, among the students and professors of Columbia. Some of them looked daffy, some looked like geniuses. Some held doors for her and some let doors slam in her face. Some were homosexuals and some gave her lascivious up-and-downs. Why were they students, and not she? She would sometimes leave her children with her sister, Ana María, who loved them, and then go sneaking into the big libraries of the university and sit thumbing through their books. She pretended that she was enrolled in the college and she would nod and say hello to her fellow students. She would daydream about the nature of the world and the way it was set up. Why was it that her father dropped dead on a stairway, in the midst of an exhausting work day, his heart sad from all his troubles? Why did the severe librarian with the bifocals pushed down low on his pointy nose watch her with suspicion? Why wasn’t her Papi standing in one of those classrooms, lecturing about the rise of the Popes of Avignon, instead of rotting in the ground? Why was it that she would walk home, dreading the fact that her husband, whom she loved very much, was lost in his own world of pain and music? Why was it that she would spend long periods of silence around him, because he never seemed to be interested in what she had to say and in the books she read? Why was it that when mambo time came around, when the house filled with musicians and their wives and the record player was turned up, why did she act willingly like a slave, attending to all the men, and yet feel no satisfaction or closeness to the women, like her sister, Ana María, and Pablo’s wife, Miriam, who went happily about the business of cooking and happily rushed into the living room with trays of food? Why did she end up sitting on the couch, watching the crowd of happy dancers, with her arms folded on her lap and shaking no, no, no each time someone like her brother-in-law would take her by the wrist and pull her up to dance? Why did she open the door to her apartment in the Bronx one day and find Giovanni, that nice Italian fellow from the plant, standing there with his face puffy and hat in hand to tell her that her Papi was dead? Why was it that she liked to get lost in books like the one she was reading one night, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, when she felt her husband lying alongside her, his fingers searching between her legs and his mouth suddenly upon her breast? Why was it that she no longer felt the same compulsion to do exactly what he wanted, to lift him out of his pain? She didn’t know why, and she did all the right things for him, opening her robe all the way and planting kisses on his manly chin and chest and down below, where those kisses made him dissolve quickly.

  They just walked in silence, Nestor in his blue guayabera and checkered pantalones, looking at the sunlight playing between the trees of the forest. One hand on Eugenio’s shoulder, the other pulling little frightened Leticia along. No words for Delores except “It’s a beautiful day, huh?” And that was the way they had always been since meeting at the bus stop. The pensive and pained musician who could make simple statements about life and the world, that was all. A good man, still heartbroken over someone else, she would think to herself. And that’s why he wanted me, she would think. Wanted me so that I can help him forget what he hadn’t forgotten. He winced with that awareness. Nothing was ever said about it, but when he would stand close to Delores, he seemed to stop breathing from shame. He was afraid to let her go to school because he thought that she would become wiser, and see through his confusion. He did love her. He would tell her that a million times over and over again if he had to, but something kept tugging at him, and he kept thinking that it was María. Or was it something else?

  As they went walking through the woods, Nestor and Delores were tense. The children felt it, though they were too young to know why, and Cesar knew it. He was always walking over and joking with them. He came across some daisies and picked them for Vanna Vane and for Delorita. A flower slipped from his hand and for a split second was suspended between them, floating there. Like a magnet trick in the circus, Nestor stepped back, and the flower dropped to the ground. Later, Nestor thought he had seen a deer in the forest and went to look for it. As the family watched, he walked into a shaft of sunlight and for a moment he seemed invisible. Then he shouted, “It is a deer!”

  Over a hill was the lake, and in the distance, mountains. There were a few summer vacationers spread out here and there along the shore, and a bathhouse, where the family changed into their bathing suits. The children played in the shallows of the water. Eugenio was five years old, but he’d remember how good the roast chicken tasted that day, the long-legged insects which seemed to float on the surface of the water, and his mother, looking fine as ever, sitting on the side of the blanket, and his father on the other, Nestor repeating, “Why is it that we are being this way? Don’t you understand? Yo te quiero. When you understand that, you will be happy again!”

  But each time she turned away from Nestor, he would look around for support from the others, as if someone should step forward and say, “Yes, don’t be so hard on him, Delorita, he’s a good man.”

  Cesar and Vanna Vane were inseparable. They jumped into the water, which was cold, and charged back to shore, stretching out on towels, drinking Rheingold beer, and enjoying the sunshine. Nestor, the younger Mambo King, watched them attentively, and each time Cesar’s bottle emptied, Nestor would bring him another. Now and then he would say to Delores, “Forgive me?”

  Then, Vanna Vane, in a green bathing suit, nipples pointy, limbs chilled, ran into the water. Cesar followed her, but because he couldn’t swim, he mainly splashed around and laughed like a child. Vanna, being a city girl, really didn’t know how to swim either, and they both went bobbing under the water, held each other by the waist, and played touchy-feely. Enchanted, they kissed. Delores remained on the shore, reading. Nestor was playing with the children when he suddenly felt determined to prove himself a man. There was a small island in the middle of the lake, a few hundred yards out, and he decided to swim there. But he’d only get so far and then sink into the water, churning frantically, his face contorting with the effort to stay afloat. When he started to go under, he felt a fierce constriction in his chest and gut, and from his mouth gushed a stream of bubbles. A few times it looked as if he might drown, as no one there swam well enough to save him, but when Delores put down her book and started to cry out, “Nestor! Nestor! Come back!” he kicked swiftly and with Herculean effort made his way toward the shore. Wrapping a towel around him, Delores covered his shivering body with her own. A chill wind had started to blow across the lake surface, and the greenish water, as if filled by shadows, darkened into black. Then heavy black-bottomed clouds started booming like conga drums in the distance, and just like that, the sunny day, with its hot sunlight brilliant against the lake, grew cold, the air charged up with static energy, and it started to rain. Everyone huddled under the bathhouse awning, watching the rain for about a half hour, and then they got dressed and made their way back to the car. Cesar Castillo took the family back to La Salle and then, with Vanna Vane, drove over to the Hotel Splendour.

  THEY WERE G
OING TO PLAY A JOB out in New Jersey. Cesar was standing before the living-room mirror, looping his tie into the shape of a crouching butterfly. As he started to brush back his slick hair, he noticed the window curtains wavering, and from down La Salle Street he heard fire sirens wailing. Then in the cool air he smelled smoke: in a building down the hill, a burning apartment and three little children screaming at the top of their lungs for help (black smoke swirling through the rooms, the floors growing hot from the fire raging underneath). Just out of the bathtub, Nestor went to the window, too. Then the whole family gathered by the windows to watch the brave firemen with their hooked pikes and fire hoses, balancing themselves on their high ladders. Glass melting, windows bursting from the heat, glass shattering on the street—people were everywhere watching this. The fire made the brothers nervous and they went into the kitchen and poured themselves a few drinks. Something about the screams, the billowing clouds of smoke. A night of smoke and crying in the air. A sadness filled the apartment; death was in the air, and they drank up two beers and two Scotches.

  Cesar, with his thickset face, shrugged his shoulders and tried to forget about the whole business, and Nestor remembered certain principles of positive thinking, but through their minds echoed those children’s screams. The shadows along the walls were jagged, cutting up the light.

  They got dressed and ready to go, black instrument cases by their sides. It was the usual parting, no different from any of the others. Cesar had his black guitar case and a small box filled with percussion instruments out in the hallway by the door. Nestor followed behind with his black trumpet case in hand, hat pulled low over his brow. With his look of intense sadness, he knelt down and called over Eugenio, entranced by the glow of the RCA television, for a goodbye kiss. (You can see that look on his face that time he appeared on the I Love Lucy show, and sometimes you can see that same Cuban melancholy breaking through Ricky Ricardo’s expressions, at once vulnerable and sensitive, the expression of a man who’d been through the mill and wanted no more pain in his life.) Eugenio kissed him goodbye and then hurried back to the television. He was watching Superman. And as Eugenio ran off, Nestor tried to hold on to him for one more kiss.

  He had spoken to Delorita in the kitchen. “Bueno,” he said. “We’re going now.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “Well, you know it’s a coming-out party in New Jersey, una fiesta de quince. We’ll try to be back by five or six.”

  She was smoking a cigarette and, exhaling softly through her nostrils, gave Nestor a desultory kiss. Leticia, who was standing beside her, sank back into the folds of her dress and apron. What could Delores do but nod “Yes.”

  “Okay, Mamá,” Nestor said to her. “See you later.”

  Later she would sit in the living room while the kids watched TV, happy to have the evening more or less to herself so that she could read and do as she liked, maybe take a nice long bath.

  By eight o’clock in the morning she would be damning herself for not having shown him more love. She would watch the walls fall away and like a character in a novel move down the hall amid a swirl of shadows.

  He was whistling—or that’s the way everybody would remember him—whistling “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Already he was fading away, though, his being compromised by memory, like a ghost. It was cool enough outside that the brothers stomped their feet on the ground and wisps of frosty air blew out their nostrils and mouths, the time of the year when some Christmas lights were still blinking in the windows, some still alive in that building. Survivors huddled in coats and blankets below, a spray of water falling in an arch in the glow of the black wrought-iron streetlamps. The moon over the rooftops, a mambo-singer moon with thin pencil-line mustache, stars shiny like glittering dots of gold lamé. They made their way down the stairs and stood for a time among the crowd watching the fire, waiting for Manny in his wood-paneled Studebaker station wagon. Cesar and Nestor would follow in the DeSoto. Breath from Nestor’s lungs, tail-pipe clouds of steam, black and swirling into the dark night. (Like the sky in Cuba from the porch, the Mambo King would reflect in the Hotel Splendour, the stars going on forever and forever.) An hour and a half later they were still thinking about the fire, how things go up in flames. They had arrived at their destination in New Jersey: a caravan of five cars had pulled up to the club, and from the car driven by Ramón the “Jamón” from Brooklyn, out came Vanna Vane, who had gotten a ride so that she’d have a chance to hang around with that “big lug of a guy,” Cesar.

  The Mambo Kings set up inside the club, on a stage under a battery of red lights. Helium balloons everywhere bobbing softly against the ceiling. Half the room was cluttered with long tables and with relatives and friends of the girl of honor. Set against the wall opposite the horseshoe bar, a table of grandmothers in rhinestone brooches and with tiaras in their hair, each throwing back glasses of sangria and maintaining a strict watch on the goings-on of the younger couples in the crowd, slick suavecitos and their young girls, the teenagers at another table looking bored and anxious for the proceedings to begin. Two cooks carried in, as if on a stretcher, two large suckling pigs, their skin brown and crispy, and set them down on a long table that had been covered in a red cloth. Then out came more platters of food, followed by the crowning touch, a three-foot-high chocolate-éclair cake drenched with a honey glaze and topped with the number 15. The guy who was throwing the party was named López, and he handed Cesar a list of songs he wanted the band to play, numbers like “Quiéreme Mucho,” “Andalucía,” and the song of his courtship of his wife, “Siempre en Mi Corazón.”

  And he added, “And can you play a little of that rock-’n’-roll for the nenes?”

  “Seguro.”

  “And one more thing, that song you sang on television?”

  “‘Beautiful María of My Soul’?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  In came Mr. Lopez’s daughter, wearing a five-layer silk dress with an old-fashioned hoop skirt and tottering on high heels, a procession of her girlfriends and aunts behind her. She carried a large bouquet of flowers, wore a crown on her head, and exuded, as she turned to look at the crowd, a blue nobility that was both haughty and grateful.

  In green wrap-around sunglasses, Nestor stepped up to the microphone and, with head tilted back, raised his trumpet and began to play—for the last time in his life—the haunting melody of “Beautiful María.” Then, beside him, the fabulous Cesar Castillo pulled from his pocket a frilly perfume-scented handkerchief, and this he passed over his dampened brow. Eyes shut, Cesar waited for his pianist, Miguel Montoya, to finish his tremolo-pedal-choked introduction, and with his arms spread wide before him, face noble and grinning like a horse, he began to sing.

  With that, Mr. López took hold of his daughter’s slender, white-gloved hand and led her out to the middle of the dance floor. Elegantly, he swung her in circles, eyes proud, a big smile on his face. The crowd applauded and converged upon father and daughter. Then everyone danced.

  During the break, Nestor went off to lean up against a corner to watch the children attacking a piñata, fat with caramelos, toys, and coins; one by one, the children whacked the piñata with a stick, the hitting sounds taking him back to when he was a kid (and he would hear beatings in the other room, his older brother, Cesar, huddled in a corner, his arms held over him, to fend off their Papi). But these blindfolded children were happy, and a strong boy smashed open the piñata, and the children swarmed over the prizes. Eating noises, elderly voices lecturing the young, champagne bottles popping, and on the stage, different acts: a juggler from the local Knights of Columbus, cigarette smoke tearing into his eyes, spinning three torches into a pinwheel of light. Then there were the two little girls in their Shirley Temple hairdos and little red bows, tap-dancing across the stage. Then a comedian in a big red wig and bulbous fake nose presided over a raffle. The prizes were a box of Havana Partagas & Co. cigars, a case of pink champagne, a two-pound box of Schrafft’s chocolates, and m
any smaller prizes, enough for just about everyone to come away with something: ballpoint pens, compact kits, small purses, cigarette cases each stamped with “Congratulations, Carmencita López, Feb. 17, 1957.”

  Miss Vanna Vane won a little seashell compact kit with a pop-up mirror, which she brought back to the table to show her man, Cesar. The Mambo King was drinking that night. Lately he had been that way at some jobs, just belting down a few glasses of booze every so often, when he could get to the bar or would join people at one of the tables. With his arm wrapped around Vanna Vane’s waist, he kissed her behind the ear and then took hold of her chair and pulled it close to him so that he could feel her warm thigh through her slitted skirt against his leg and the slightest pulse there. The pulse in its silent way saying, “Cesar, we’re going to have fun, and I’m going to show you how much I love you.”

  She was a nice and affectionate woman, a great dancer who never gave Cesar a hard time except when it came to her looks. She had little complaints about what going out with him was doing to her figure. Cesar was always taking her to restaurants and parties and she’d end up eating all kinds of fattening things. She could tear through a platter of chicken and rice, another of crispy tostones, and follow up with a few bottles of beer, and yet the next day she would spend hours before a mirror sucking in her belly and later squeezed herself into a Maidenform girdle. That she’d get depressed about it astounded Cesar, who enjoyed her maturing plumpness and the way her body quivered. (He winces, remembering how, when she climbed on top of him, she would like him to squeeze her nalgitas really tight, each squeeze timed to when she’d taken all of him inside: and then she’d grind her hips and everything would feel creamy. Wince again: she’d spray atomizer perfume on her neck, cleavage, and in the damp center of her Lily of Paris panties. In the room in the Hotel Splendour, she performed private stripteases for him and wrapped his member up in her nylons and capped it with her panties. Wince again.)