The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  So for a time his life was a rainfall of frilly panties, bursting girdles, camisoles, slips, brassieres, gartered nylons, thick condoms, baking soda and Coca-Cola douches, curly blond, red, and black pubic hair. He enjoyed the company of pear-bottomed, sweaty-thighed Negresses with silken interiors, powerful mulatas whose legs lifted him up off the bed. He banged Italian beauties who danced in the chorus at the Mambo Nine Club and spinsters whom he met on the dance floor between sets at the Catskill resort hotels where the Mambo Kings sometimes played on the weekends. He made it with cigarette and hatcheck girls, hostesses and twenty-five-cents-a-dance girls from the ballrooms of 43rd and Eighth. He made it with three of the musicians who played with Tiny Tina Maracas and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra, among them a Lithuanian trombone player named Gertie, whom he made love to against a wall of flour sacks in the storage room of the Pan-American Club in the Bronx.

  His lovemaking, which was never a delicate operation, became more blunt and violent. He’d drag Vanna Vane up the stairs of the Hotel Splendour, taking her roughly by the wrists. Usually, by the time he’d opened the door, his thing was already hard. He’d walk behind her, bumping his enraged penis into the dead center of her ass. Then he’d press her up against the wall, sliding his hand into the slit of her silver-sequined skirt, his sensitive musician’s fingers prowling lasciviously over the rough head of her nylons, up onto her thighs, and then under the waistband of her panties and into the tangle of her pubic hair. She was so wiped out by Nestor’s death that she allowed him to do whatever he pleased. They’d get naked: he fucked her in the mouth, between her legs, up her ass. She sometimes wondered if Cesar was crazy, the look he’d get making love to her frightened her, as if not only his penis but also his heart would burst. They must have been crazy, coupled in each other’s arms, it was “I love you, baby,” and “And I love you,” again and again. And he found comfort in it until he’d climb the stairs to the apartment on La Salle Street and realize, once again, that it was Delores and not Vanna Vane he wanted.

  (And poor Vanna, she’d put up with the Mambo King for another three years and then marry this nice guy who worked for the post office. In the last days of Cesar Castillo’s life, spent holed up in the Hotel Splendour, she was living with her husband and two sons up in Co-op City in the Bronx. She had put on a few pounds, but she was still pretty. A lot of people used to tell her, “You look like Shelley Winters.” She would be the first to tell you that she was happy now, especially after all those years of being a wild girl, abused by men. But even though she would say that, Miss Vane, now Mrs. Friedman, would remember those chaotic and dense nights with affection, wondering, like so many others, what ever happened to Mambo King Cesar Castillo.)

  But when he found no release from his pain through women, Cesar started to drink too much. Inside the Palladium, he was the man reeling by the horseshoe bar, the man unable to clearly recognize the faces of the people who came to greet him. Marlon Brando stood next to him for five minutes at the bar, and the Mambo King did not recognize the famous movie actor. He mistook people. A musician named Johnny Bing, who had a thick head of wavy black hair, came over, and Cesar thought he was Desi Arnaz. “If you knew what the family’s been through, Desi,” and he reeled backwards and then forwards, laughing, so ecstatic was his pain.

  Next thing he knew, he would be dragging himself up the stairs to the apartment. When he’d finally reach the landing, the tile floor would be spinning around like a 78 rpm record. Then he’d try to put the key into the lock, but the keyhole kept fading in and out and doubling up like a mirage. When he finally got the key by the hole, it wouldn’t go in, bending all up, like a drunkard’s flaccid penis. Finally he’d have to ring the bell and Delores would come to the door and help him to his bed, a wall-crashing struggle down the hall which always woke and frightened the children.

  His continuing grief was a monument to gallego melancholy. He would struggle down the hall, a heavy weight on his shoulders, as if he were carrying on his back the weight of a dead man. He didn’t understand, he longed for the days when he just did as he pleased. These things will pass, he told himself. He fell asleep and found himself waking in the meat-packing plant, among the hanging, white-fatted sides of beef, moving a startled and frightened Nestor out of that cold place and toward the door where there was sun. He dreamed of examining the U.S. Govt, stamp of approval and within the circle read, “You can love a woman so much it sometimes breaks your heart.”

  He fell in and out of these drunken sleeps longing for Delores. Laughing at himself. He felt he was paying for his brother’s death. He wanted to suffer, he pushed people away from him. He was confused: how could he have known that he was trying to keep his brother alive by becoming like him?

  When they had held something of a memorial dance in Nestor’s honor down at the Imperial Ballroom, which raised fifteen hundred dollars to help with the funeral expenses, Delores turned up looking like a young Hollywood voluptuary. She had borrowed a sexy black dress from Ana María and came in tottering on three-inch stiletto-thin heels. The men parted before her as if she were the Queen of Sheba. (It was a nice benefit, too. Everything fell into place, notice of the event going out in handbills and ads in La Prensa, the Daily News, and the Brooklyn Herald. The dance was emceed by the disc jockey “Symphony” Sid, and the orchestra consisted of some of the best musicians in the city, Maurio Bauza, Mongo Santamaría, and Vicentico Valdez being the most prominent. The ladies, many of them musicians’ wives, brought food—pots of arroz con pollo, black-bean soup, and suckling pig—and they made a vat of sangria, another of the Mambo Kings’ favorites. And there were kegs of beer from the local Rheingold brewery. A big crowd paid $1.04 each to get in the door, and money baskets were passed around.) Followed by her children and Ana María, Delores sat near the stage, surrounded by flowers, her expression pouty and sullen, like a spoiled movie actress.

  At her table she met and greeted family friends. She sat fanning herself and taking an occasional bite from the good food that would appear before her on the table. Well-behaved Eugenio and Leticia were fairly stoic about the whole thing. Leticia was pretty in a pink dress and with a bow in her hair. She watched the bandstand happily and waited for her Papi to appear on the stage. Cesar performed that night. As the orchestra plucked, banged, and blew on their instruments and Cesar stepped to the microphone to sing a bolero, his eyes would settle longingly on Delores.

  That night there was one man to whom Delores paid special attention. Not the Emperor of the Mambo, Pérez Prado, who bowed before Delores and paid his respects, nor Ray Barretto, who sat Leticia on his lap and gave the kids a dollar to buy candies. No, she paid special attention to a bookkeeper by the name of Pedro Ponce. He was a baldheaded, stern-faced fellow of about forty with a toothbrush-bristle mustache. He wore a checkered jacket, a lace bow tie, and suspenders that hoisted his oversized brown trousers halfway up his chest. His sole item of fashionable attire was a pair of tan-and-cream-colored shoes. Pedro lived over on 122nd Street and used to give the brothers advice about keeping books and paying taxes. They had known Pedro from “just around,” as he sometimes went to have his cup of double espresso in the same little Cuban joint where the brothers went for their coffee. The night of the benefit he approached Delores at the table, hat in hand and heart brimming with respect. The fact that he stuttered when he spoke and that he averted his eyes, staring over her shoulder and up the stage, touched her. She thought, “Now here is a man who would never give me trouble.”

  “I share in your pain,” he said to her. “It’s a dreadful thing that has happened to you. My heart and sympathy go out to you.”

  And he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope containing two twenty-dollar bills.

  “A small amount . . . to help,” he said.

  “Que Dios te bendiga,” Delores replied. “May God bless you.”

  That night Cesar had it really bad for Delores. When they returned home and the children were put to bed, he asked he
r to make a cup of coffee for him, and while she was standing at the stove he surprised himself, stepping up behind her and putting his arms around her waist.

  “Delores . . . Delores.”

  Naturally, she turned around and pushed him away, repeating, “Déjame tranquila! Leave me alone.”

  “I’m sorry, Delores. I’m drunk, can’t you see?”

  “Yes. Now go to sleep.”

  She helped him into his room. He sat on the edge of the bed and, rubbing his eyes, said, “That baldy fellow likes you, huh?”

  She helped him off with his shoes and pulled off his socks.

  “Delorita . . . I want to ask you something.” It took him a long time to get that sentence out.

  “Tell me,” and she tried to lift his legs up off the floor and onto the bed. Right then she wished she had the strength of a man. “Lean back,” and with a great heave she got his legs up.

  “Just one question, I only want to ask you one little question, sister. Do you hate me?”

  “No, hombre, I don’t.”

  “Then what is it that you feel for me, sister?”

  “I feel sorry for you sometimes, hombre. I worry about you. Why don’t you go to sleep.”

  “But do you see how I feel for you?”

  “Yes, I can see it, but it doesn’t make sense. Now go to sleep.”

  “A lot of women have liked me, Delorita. I’ve satisfied them all.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  He had curled up and she put the covers over him and then he put his hand around her waist again and said, “Just stay like this with me for a little longer, just show me a little love.”

  Then he started to touch her all over, fondling her breasts, and she told him, “No, hombre, now let me go!” And when he wouldn’t let go, she slapped his face as hard as she could, and was on the verge of getting the broom when his eyes suddenly popped open, in a moment of pure soberness.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” he repeated. Shaking his hands in the air as if everything had been a terrible mistake.

  “Okay?”

  I was so jodido in those days, the Mambo King thought in the Hotel Splendour. I was so fucked up with sadness that I may have crossed the boundary of good manners, but if I did, that was because I wanted so badly to give to her all that God had chosen to take away.

  There was something else. He lost his feeling for music and his soul withered. He wrote no songs, picked up neither guitar nor trumpet. And while the Mambo Kings continued to get work, his heart wasn’t in it. The band’s morale was low: it wasn’t a question of finding a replacement trumpet player—there were a hundred trumpet players who could have played the same lines and solos—but his brother’s absence just took Cesar’s spirit out of everything. He tried hard to be a professional about it, but his performances were so withdrawn and tentative, no one would have guessed he was the same aggressive king cock strutting singer of just a few months before. He suddenly had the look of a man who had not slept in a long, long time. On top of that, he really started to drink, just so he could get up onstage. And that started to show: he’d flub his lyrics and screw up his solos. Sometimes, while trying to dance, he’d fly backwards, as if someone had tipped the stage. He sang entire songs with his eyes shut, repeated the same lines, forgot about turnarounds, and stopped giving and taking cues.

  He would think about his brother, dead in the ground, and say, “If I could change places with you, bro’, I would.”

  Audiences noticed this change and word started to get around that Cesar Castillo was getting a little fucked up.

  Despite this, some nights he’d have a big horse grin, sing and play the trumpet, and even loosened up enough to joke around with the audience. Those were his reefer nights. But they didn’t last long. Once, in the middle of performing at the Imperial Ballroom, Cesar forgot where he was and wandered off the stage in the middle of a song, with a startled expression, as if he had seen something in the wings.

  The worst was that Cesar started to become foul-mooded around others. The Mambo Kings Orchestra went through two replacement trumpet players, who quit because Cesar would deride their talent, making faces at their solos and stopping songs before they were done, shouting insults at them. Then he started picking fights with strangers. Some poor guy had the misfortune of bumping into Cesar while walking out of the men’s room at the Park Palace, and that was it: Cesar was on the man, pounding the shit out of him on the floor. It took four men to calm him down. That kind of thing happened again and again in clubs around the city where the Mambo Kings were playing.

  “I was lost,” Cesar thought as he sat in the Hotel Splendour. “I was fucked up and didn’t know what to do with myself.”

  His behavior seriously upset Miguel Montoya. They went out one night and dined at Violeta’s and that’s when Miguel Montoya said, “Look, everybody knows you’re upset about Nestor—we all are, you know that—the fellows in the band think it would be good for you to take a break for a while.”

  “You mean, leave the band?”

  “For a time.”

  “Yes, you’re right, I have been a son of a bitch lately.”

  But “for a time” turned out to be forever, because the Mambo King Orchestra would never perform again with Cesar Castillo as their singer and leader.

  AFTER LEAVING THE BAND, HE went back to Cuba to visit his family. He had to get out of New York, he told himself. He wasn’t behaving in a correct manner and his enjoyment of life—booze and women and love—was going out the window.

  He retraced the journey he’d made with Nestor back to Cuba: he took the train down to Miami Beach for a few days, visiting with musician friends who worked one of the big hotels there. And then, with his heart in his gut, he made his way back to Havana. The big news down there in 1958 was the revolution against the Batista government. On the afternoon when he went over to Calle 20 to visit his daughter, he stopped to brace himself with a few drinks. It was a beautiful calm street, sunny and quiet—the other Havana of his dreams. The revolution, that’s what the men were talking about in that bar.

  “This fellow Castro, they say he and his men are being beaten out in Oriente. Do you believe it?”

  “Yes, he’s being beaten. You don’t see Batista leaving the country.”

  That’s what the official version was on the radio. And the only change he’d noticed at all was that there were more police and military personnel at the airport. And on the way in from the airport he’d noticed two big military vehicles, a tank and a personnel carrier, on the side of the road. But the soldiers were sitting out on the street beside the vehicles, metal helmets by their side, having lunch. (And here he can’t help imposing a conversation he’d had years later with a woman who had worked as a domestic in Batista’s household: “The problem with Batista was that he wasn’t cruel enough and a little lazy. He could’ve had Fidel executed in ’53 but he let the man go. He was lazy and liked to have a good time with high-society people. He was so out of it that when the revolution came he didn’t have the slightest idea what had really happened, sabe?”) Otherwise, things seemed to have been the same all over the city, from what he could see. The men in their guayaberas and linen jackets leaning at the counter. Cesar smoking a cigarette and sipping from his tacita de espreso and his two Tres Medallas brandies, sunlight bursting against the limestone-and-brick walls across the street, beyond the shade of the awning. And he noticed, as he looked over his tacita, a pretty woman in pink slacks.

  Cuba was making him feel better already. He’d called up his ex-wife from New York, announcing his intention to visit his daughter, Mariela. Luisa, who had married a schoolteacher, was good about extending him that privilege, and soon he was making his way to the solar where they now lived. He’d purchased a big stuffed rag doll for Mariela and a bunch of flowers, hibiscus and chrysanthemums, for Luisa. As he passed into an inner courtyard, entering a winding wrought-iron stairway through a gate, he ached with regret that he’d fucked up things with his wife. So, standin
g before her door, he looked like a wrecked and exhausted version of himself. But they were both surprised by how happy they were to see each other. That is, Luisa opened the door, let him into a nice, big, airy apartment, and smiled.

  “Mariela’s taking a bath, Cesar,” Luisa told him. “She’ll be out to see you soon.”

  And they sat talking by a little table in the kitchen. On the wall, a crucifix and a photograph of Julián García. (Looking at Julián and thinking of his kindness made Cesar go “psssssssh” inside.) Things were well with Luisa. She was newly pregnant. Her husband was running a big school in Havana and they had high hopes when it came to this fellow Fidel Castro.

  “Y Mariela?”

  “She’s a precocious child, Cesar. Artistic.”

  “In what way?”

  “She wants to be a ballet dancer. Studies it at the Lyceum.”

  A few minutes later, intense and pretty, Mariela came out to greet the father she had not seen in so many years. They went out, as they used to, Cesar taking her around to the different stores and for a nice lunch in one of the harbor restaurants. Thirteen years old, she had kissed him, but kept her head bowed as they’d walk along the streets. She was an awkward, thin girl, with wild eyes, and must have been afraid, the Mambo King thought, that he was finding her plain. That’s why he kept telling her, “Mariela, I’m so proud that you turned out so beautifully.” And: “You have your mother’s pretty eyes.” But she also had some of the family’s sadness and did not have much, or know what, to say to her father, who’d abandoned her. He alluded to this abandonment a few times as they walked along Galiano, a street lined with shops.