The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Those were the days when his Papi worked in the fields taking care of his animals. Off in the distance, standing in the shade of breadfruit, papaya, and plantain trees, the stone house where he slaughtered livestock. At midday, one of his boys would carry out a pot of food, which he’d angrily devour. Then he would go back to the business at hand: if he had to slaughter a pig, his white linen pantalones, his cotton guayabera, his skin, his nails, his thick campesino’s mustache smelled of blood. The poor animals kicked and sometimes they ran into the field, galloping for a distance before collapsing to the ground.

  (And now he cuts through everything else, remembering the day when his Papi came after him with a machete. He couldn’t remember what had started the trouble. Was it one of his indignant looks, his usual lack of respect, or was he sitting out on the porch, strumming his guitar?

  All he knew was that his father was chasing him across a wild sugarcane field, the machete raised over his head, shouting, “You come back here.” He ran for his life, ran as fast as he could, down the corridors of sugarcane, his father’s shadow, one hundred feet long, behind him. He was running toward the forest when he heard a terrible scream: his father lay on the ground, clutching his leg.

  “Help me, boy!” his father called to him. “Help me!”

  Then: “Over here, boy. I’ve jammed my foot on a stake.”

  He wanted to help his father, but what if it was a trick? What if he went to his father and the man struck him with the machete? His father called again and again, and slowly the future Mambo King moved closer. Then he moved closer and closer until he could see that his father was telling the truth, saw the bloody stake protruding out of the instep bones of his right foot.

  “Pull it up,” he said to Cesar.

  When he did, pulling up on the foot with all his strength, his father let out a scream that sent all the birds flying off the treetops.

  And when he’d gotten to his feet again, limping, his arms around his son, Cesar thought that things would be different.

  Then they were back in the house and his father was stretched out in a chair. He called to Cesar, saying, “Come here.”

  As his son leaned close, he slapped Cesar in the face, hard, with the back of his hand.

  His father’s face was red, eyes cruel—that’s how he remembered him now.)

  But in 1958 the Mambo King was in such pain that he embraced his father. He did love the man. After so many years away from that house, he hardly felt like a son around his father. The man walked with a limp, from the time he’d impaled his foot on a stake in the field, and he surprised the Mambo King by giving him a strong embrace back. Then they sat in the parlor, in silence, as they used to. His mother waited on him, and the Mambo King sat there drinking. Later that night, he tried to comfort his mother, who’d gotten all weepy about Nestor, holding her in his arms.

  It had been the records. She had listened to his trumpet playing and remembered her sons when they were boys, remembered when Nestor had been so sickly as a kid, pale with asthma.

  “He worshipped you, Cesar,” she told him. “He was always so happy when you did anything for him. Happy to go places with you and to sing and dance and play for the people . . .”

  Then her silence, her tears.

  What else could he remember?

  Visiting his friends in town and riding horses again. He was the rage in the local bars, talking about New York and inviting everyone he knew to come and visit him. He went to see the first woman he’d ever taken to bed (“This was just to see if you like it. Next time you’ll pay, okay?”). And he walked beyond the cemetery, where his old music teacher, Eusebio Stevenson, a movie-pit house musician, used to live. The man had been dead for a long time. (“Mister! Mister! Can you show me how you do that on the piano?”) He walked among the tombstones and felt exhilarated, talking to the spirits.

  Out on the porch those nights in 1958, he sometimes felt that the universe could be peeled away like the skin of an orange, revealing paradise, where his poor brother had gone. The paradise of his mother, his religious mother who believed in all that. Paradise, where the angels and saints and the good souls go, up to the swirling heavens among the luminescent stars and the perfumed clouds . . . Why, then, did she weep? During the day that question would accompany him to town, where he would visit friends, hang around the street corners. He would make the journey back to the farm along dirt roads on a borrowed mule and with a bottle of rum tucked under his arm. This bottle he would drink at night. He drank rum until God hung low in the heavens like a heavy cloak. He drank rum until the rims of his eyes glowed with a pleasant pinkness, like the wing of a nightingale in a flash of light, and until the trees that ringed the farm breathed in, the way that only drunkards can hear. He drank until it was time to get up, and then he would cheerfully make his way into the house, shaving before a mirror in the room of his youth, and afterwards sitting with the women, enjoying the industry of the kitchen.

  It was on one of those mornings that he heard his mother saying to Genebria, “Take this plate of food to my poor drunkard of a son.”

  Then the memory of saying his goodbyes: to Miguel and Eduardo, whom he would not see again for nine years; to Pedrocito, and to his father and his mother, none of whom he would ever see again in this life.

  Holding his mother, he maintained his macho composure, but whispered, “One thing I want you to know about me, no soy borrachón. I’m not a drunk.”

  And his mother nodded, “I know,” but she had a different look in her eye, complacent, stoic, and perhaps convinced that things were destined to go a certain way. But the lingering doubt in her eyes, and his sense that many other things were wrong, too, and that he was at their center, disturbed him.

  This disturbance followed him home from Cuba on the Pan Am flight on which he ate American-cheese sandwiches served in wax-paper bags, and on which he flirted with the stewardess, smiling and winking at her each time she came by, followed him off the train in New York and up the steps to the apartment on La Salle Street, followed him when even his beloved nephew, Eugenio, answered the door and wrapped his arms around his leg, followed him even when Leticia, who was pure affection, came charging down the hall, pigtails bobbing, to embrace him and to see the gifts he had bought for her, followed him on his visits to the Hotel Splendour with Vanna Vane, to the side of his brother’s grave, through many things, through many years, and to the very moment when he sipped yet another glass of whiskey that steamy night in the Hotel Splendour, years later, an indelible and thorny line, memory, forever present.

  DECIDING THAT HE HAD TO DO something to change his life, Cesar went into the Merchant Marine. His connection was Ana María’s boyfriend, Raúl, who worked for the union.

  He worked on a ship for eighteen months and returned in the spring of 1960, looking weather-beaten and sporting a grizzly beard. Around his eyes clustered the swirly deep lines that had formed on those countless nights he spent at the deck railing fighting the queasiness in his stomach and his disappointment over the monotony of his days. He had become nearly bulimic by then. He had a monstrous appetite from his day’s labors as a stoker’s mate, feasting on the ship’s cookery and heaving it over the side by late evening. His illness was enhanced by the huge quantities of Portuguese wine and Spanish brandy that cost the sailors pennies and that the ex-Mambo King guzzled down like water with his meals: it would take a few hours for the acids to wreak havoc with his stomach lining, and then, out on deck to gaze at the stars and to dream, he vomited his suppers into the pretty and phosphorescent Sardinian waters, into the Mediterranean, the Aegean. In Alexandria, Egypt, where he spent three days’ shore leave, he had his picture taken in a Stanley Bay bar, sporting a gleamy-brimmed captain’s hat and sitting on a rattan throne, flanked by a Puerto Rican chum named Ernesto and a cheerful Italian named Ermano, and surrounded by the potted palms that so reminded him of Havana (this, too, in the Hotel Splendour).

  His eyes seemed to be filled with a black liquid of s
orrow; they were contrite, curious; they said: “I have seen a lot.” The Cesar Castillo who looked wistfully into the camera was gaunt, dark-eyed, and world-weary. Now he seemed to have somehow acquired his dead younger brother’s melancholy. He went to an Egyptian bazaar, where in the midst of a surging crowd he saw the ghost of Nestor looking through a street vendor’s table heaped with onyx bracelets and scarab necklaces.

  And in that sweaty brow would also swirl the memory of names of ports-of-call: Marseilles, Cagliari, Lisbon, Barcelona, Genoa, Tangiers, San Juan, Biloxi. (Women, too. He remembered the misty night in Marseilles when he met Antoinette, a delightful woman who loved to suckle his member. Some women didn’t know what to make of it, but she treated his thing like a favorite rag doll. Exhilarated by its elasticity and thickness, she’d rub her big stretchy French lips over its head, as if its seepage were some kind of lotion, until her lips became sheeny with his semen and her nipples, taut as cork, stood out from her breasts and her hot ass left a line of moisture down from his knees to his toes. Viva la France!) He had lost a lot of weight but walked with a bounce in his step. In the duffel bag slung over his shoulder, he’d brought back lots of presents from his journeys: silk scarves, ebony candlesticks, a small Persian rug, a roll of Oriental silk that he had bought for practically nothing from the mate on his tanker, a gift for Ana María, who liked to make dresses. By that time he had been at sea for a year and had not sung a note or touched an instrument.

  Music was far behind him, he would tell himself. Walking up the hill, duffel bag over his shoulder, Cesar Castillo was another man. His hands were callused and cut: he had a scar down his right shoulder from a boiler valve that had burst and scalded him, and though he didn’t like to admit it, the strains of the last few years had made him slightly myopic, because now when he read the newspaper or that book by D. D. Vanderbilt he had to squint, the words were so blurry.

  The biggest item of news in his absence was that Delorita had married the bookkeeper, Pedro, in a quiet City Hall ceremony; the man was now part of the household. He was not a bad fellow; neither flashy nor particularly friendly, he would install himself on a big easy chair in the living room of the apartment on La Salle Street, feet up on a stool, and occasionally glance up from the newspaper at the television. The only sign of Nestor’s previous life in that household were a few photographs left here and there in the hallway and on the mantel in the living room. Otherwise, the apartment on La Salle Street had adapted to the presence of another man, a non-musician, reliable and steady, whose instruments were not congas, or guitars, or trumpets, but rather, ledger books, rulers, and mechanical pencils. Although he was dull, Pedro was nice to the family. He took Delorita and the kids out every Saturday night to a restaurant or a movie: and sometimes he would rent a car and they would take a Sunday drive. He was a private, snippy man with odd bathroom habits. The john was where he would go in the office for peace and quiet, and it was where he would go in the household when Eugenio, trying to torment him, banged and threw his toys against the wall, shouted, gave him dirty looks, and otherwise tried to disturb his leisurely peace. He was not a bad man, but he was also not Nestor, and this provoked in the children a certain weariness and distrust, which the poor beleaguered man stoically accepted and tried to offset with gentleness and demonstrations of concern.

  Cesar came back to all this. No one recognized him on the street. He did not look like the Cesar Castillo who had posed on the cover of “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” nothing like the Alfonso Reyes of the I Love Lucy show. The children were happy to tug on his beard. Eugenio was now nine and had more or less adjusted to the new situation. He had developed something of an introspective, pensive demeanor, not too far removed from his father’s. When he came down the hall and saw his uncle, who smelled of tobacco and the sea, Eugenio’s expression, suspicious and serious, gave way to pure exaltation.

  “Nene!” his uncle called out to him, and Eugenio charged down the hall. When Cesar lifted him up, Eugenio’s feelings of emptiness went away.

  That night the family and friends from the neighborhood gathered to greet his return. He went into the bathroom, where, with Leticia clinging to his side, he shaved off the great beard, and emerged with his face a bright sunburnish red and all squiggly with deep lines, and his slick mustache restored.

  Of course, the family passed the evening hearing about Cesar’s adventures. At nearly forty-two, the man had seen a little bit of the world. He would think about the way he and his brother used to walk down by the docks around Christmastime to buy boxes of Japanese toys, the most exciting items being battery-operated, cable-controlled green-and-white New York City police cars, which they’d pay a quarter apiece for and give out like Santa Clauses to the children they knew on the street and in the building. They’d look at the great steamship lines with their smoking chimneys and the elegant French porters and daydream about something as fanciful as playing the café society of Gay Paree, as his pianist Miguel Montoya called it.

  “Salud!” and a worldly nod were his greetings to the household in those days, his nephew, Eugenio, clinging to his side. Emptying his duffel bag, he offered Eugenio some nice presents: an African ivory-handled hunting knife, purchased in Marseilles and attributed to the Yorubas of the Belgian Congo, and a light Italian silk scarf, which Eugenio would wear for years. Then his uncle gave him a crisp twenty-dollar bill. (Eugenio, looking through the bag, found something startling, a French magazine called Le Monde des “Freaks,” with wavy, out-of-focus photographs of pretty, big-rumped women sucking off and fornicating with sailors, circus performers, and farm boys all over Europe.) This, with a wink and an index finger pressed to his lips, and a rap to his nephew’s shoulder.

  Eugenio was proud of his uncle, having kept close tabs on his journeys. Eugenio had borrowed an atlas from his pal Alvin so that he could look up the cities and ports named on the postcards which would arrive from time to time. (Nearly twenty years later, Eugenio would find one of those postcards and remember how the messages rarely varied, saying, more or less, “Just to let you know that you are always in my thoughts, and that your Uncle Cesar loves you.”) Eugenio kept those postcards in a plastic bag under his bed, with a few hundred rubber cowboys and Indians and a page from a Life magazine article about the Folies-Bergère of Paris (this showed a row of beautiful French women kicking in a line, their pointy, sparkle-covered breasts provoking a concupiscent interest from him) and his collection of baseball and Christmas cards.

  One Christmas card from 1958 was a family portrait of Desi, Lucille, Desi Jr., and Lucie Arnaz, posed in front of a fireplace and a thickly ornamented evergreen tree, prosperity and Christmas cheer glowing all around them. The card for 1959 was more subdued: a wintry scene of a sleigh moving over a countryside—signed, “From the Arnaz family” in bold Roman print. And written under that the words, “With much love and concern, Desi Arnaz.” Cesar always gave the cards to Eugenio, who saved them because Mr. Arnaz was famous: all the kids on the street had made a big deal about his dead father’s appearance with his uncle on that show: this card was further proof of the event. What struck him most and the reason why he showed it around was the word “love.”

  That first night back, his uncle drank until four in the morning, and his face was droopy and livid from the rush of blood and thoughts in his head. When his friend Bernardito had asked the ex-Mambo King, “So tell us, Cesar, when are you going to get another orchestra together? Everybody at the Palladium asks for you.” Cesar, red in the face, answered in an angry voice, “I don’t know!”

  Then it was “Come on, don’t be that way, Cesar, sing us a little bolero,” to which he answered, “I don’t feel like singing much these days.”

  By the time Delores had gone into the kitchen to chase Frankie and Bernardito out because it was already past midnight and Pedro had to go to work the next morning, time had dissolved and the point of existence was to drink down rum and to feel that inward radiance which passed for love.


  “Why do you want to chase my pals out of the house?”

  “Because it’s getting very late.”

  “And who are you, anyway? It was me and Nestor who got this apartment in the first place. It’s my name on the lease!”

  “Please, Cesar, be reasonable.”

  But then Bernardito and Frankie got up from the kitchen table, where they had been sitting for hours, pouring drinks and patting their old friend on the back, and with their manly talk about women, Cuba, baseball, and friendship. They got up because Delorita was shouting now, “Please go.”

  Later that night, Pedro the accountant told Delores, “It’s okay if he stays for a time, but he has to get his own place to live, as soon as he can.”

  When his friends left, Cesar slumped at the table as if he had been betrayed. Eugenio, sitting across from his uncle, loyally remained by his side. While Delorita went down the hall, Eugenio listened to his famous, worldly, slumped-over, macho uncle imparting his little observations about life: “Women, boy, will ruin you if you’re not careful. You offer them love, and what do you get in return? Emasculation. Orders. Heartbreak. Now, everyone, I know what they think about me, that I hurt your father in some way. It was the other way, he put me in a bad way with his unhappiness.”

  Now and then he would realize to whom he was speaking and stop, but then Eugenio, through the gauze of half-shut eyes, vanished.