The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  He wiped the strings of the guitar clean with a handkerchief; the thick gritty strings left traces like gunpowder on the cloth. Pressing down on the fret board hard, he struck an E-minor chord and, clearing his throat, said, “You know, I don’t sing very much these days. It’s a little rough for me now.”

  He started to sing “Bésame Mucho” in a voice that, if anything, was more soulful and vulnerable than it had been before: now his baritone really quivered with melancholy and a desire for release from pain in this life, and his singing made Mrs. Shannon, who’d always had her eye on the musician, absolutely happy.

  “Oh, delightful,” she said. “You should make more records.”

  “Maybe, one day.”

  By the time he had finished the beer, she had told him, “Well, we’ll try you out,” and then, with a broad smile and her huge body, that eternal mass under the soup-stained dress, shaking: “But you gotta promise that you’ll sing every now and then for me. Promise?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, just let me get my slippers on and find the keys for the basement and I’ll take you down and show you the works.”

  Down the stairs and into the basement, and following the hallway past the boiler and washing-machine rooms, he went. Then for the hundredth time—or was it the thousandth?—Cesar Castillo, ex-Mambo King and former star of the I Love Lucy show, found himself before the black bolt-studded fire door that was the entrance to his workroom. A solitary bulb, its filament burning like a tongue of fire above him, the lunar-looking walls filled with cracks out of which seemed to sprout long strands of human hair. He was not wearing a white silk suit or a frilly-sleeved mambo shirt, or sporty golden-buckled shoes, ladies and gentlemen: instead, a gray utility suit, plain thick rubber-soled black shoes, a belt off which dangled a loop of keys for twenty-four apartments, various storage rooms, and electrical closets. In his pockets, crumpled-up receipts from the hardware store, building-complaint slips, and a sheet of yellow lined paper on which after two years of musical inactivity he had started to write down the lyrics for a new song.

  In the basement, his spirits flourished. He whistled, he happily pushed brooms, he liked the idea that metal things like wrenches and pliers hung off his body, clanking like armor; he found himself walking about the building in the same attitude as his captain at sea, arms folded behind him, eyes inquisitive and proprietary. He liked the happy-looking row of electrical meters and the fact that they ticked off in 3/2 time, claves time, that the multiple rows of pipes with their valves whistled, water whirring through them. He liked the crunching noises when faucets were turned on, the conga-drum pounding of the washroom dryer: the thunder of the coal-bin walls. In fact, he was so elated by the perfect realization of a purgatorial existence that better spirits came to him.

  “Me siento contento cuando sufro,” he sang one day. “I feel happy when I’m suffering.”

  In the foyer outside the bolt-studded door to his workroom, his dog Poochie, a wiry, corkscrew-tailed mutt who resembled the famous movie hound Pluto, with his droopy face and long hooked paws, nails like black sea mussels. On the black door itself a calendar, a big-hipped pretty girl with green eyes in a scanty bathing suit, wading in a pool and lifting to her mouth a frosty-tipped, fluted bottle of Coca-Cola.

  Inside, his worktable, a chaos of screw-and-nail, washer-and-nut-filled jars, tin cans, spools of wire and string, dollops of wood compound, solder and paint drops; tagged apartment keys on a wire hanging across the wall; then another calendar, from Joe’s Pizzeria, featuring Leonardo’s Last Supper. Wooden boxes were everywhere, and one paint-speckled telephone into which he would say, “Speak, this is the super.”

  He set down tools everywhere, and these congealed with a resinous-looking paste, so carelessly did he take care of them. A dusty, rusty-bladed fan sat atop a stack of old National Geographics, which he sometimes liked to read. There were two large storerooms, a deep and narrow-shelved room in which he was always finding items of interest: among them, a six-stringed lute, which he now added to the instruments in his apartment upstairs, and a spiked German helmet from the First World War, which he kept on a beauty-salon manikin head as a joke. And he had all kinds of magazines: nudist magazines with names like Sun Beach California which featured sling-shot-testicled men and strawberry-faced women, pictured with watering cans and little plaid sun hats in the garden of life, a strange race, to be sure. Then a stack of scientific and geographical surveys, refuse from the apartment of Mr. Stein, a scholarly fellow from the sixth floor. And Cesar had a big stuffed chair, a stool, an old radio, and a record player salvaged from one of the workrooms.

  A stack of records too, including the fifteen 78s and three long-playing 33s he’d made with Nestor and the Mambo Kings. He never played them, though he heard them from time to time in jukeboxes or over the Spanish-language radio station, the disc jockey introducing a canción in this manner: “And now a little number from that Golden Era of the mambo!” He kept some of those records upstairs, too: up in the small apartment he’d gotten with the job, that joint crammed now with instruments and with the odd collection of souvenirs from his travels and his musician’s life and with the pieces of mismatching furniture which he more or less stoically brought up out of the basement.

  His apartment reflected the bad habits of a jaded, lifelong bachelor, but he would pay Eugenio and Leticia to come down once a week and sweep his floors, wash his dishes, wash his clothes, and so forth. His sister-in-law, happy that he was no longer in the same apartment and willing to forget many things, made it clear that he could take his meals upstairs at any time. He did so three or four times a week, but mainly to make sure that he was around his dead brother’s children and that their stepfather, Pedro, was good to them.

  Settled in, he went about his business happily. He came to know the neighbors, to whom he had rarely said more than a few words. Some people knew that he had been a musician, others did not. Most of his chores involved minor repairs of faucets and electrical sockets, though on occasion he had to bring in outside help, as when Mr. Bernhardt’s living room caved in. He learned his job little by little: he applied himself to an apprenticeship in faucet fixing, boiler maintenance, spackling, plastering, electrical wiring. He would stand before the burning incinerator once every few days, watching the flames consume the cardboard and paper and wax milk containers, hear the bones crackling, singed skin evaporating, all turning to smoke. He tended to remember things, to get a look of lost contemplation as he would stand in front of the open incinerator door, stoking the dying larvae of the embers.

  Often Eugenio wondered about his uncle then. The man staring into the fire and not moving. It wasn’t so much that Cesar Castillo stared into the embers or sometimes murmured to himself; it was that he seemed to be somewhere else.

  What did he see in these ashes? The harbor of Havana? The fields of Oriente? His dead brother’s face floating amid the burning junk?

  It didn’t matter. His uncle would come out of it, tap his nephew’s shoulder, saying: “Come on.” And he would shovel the ashes into the trash cans, dragging them down the cracked concrete floor and up the stairs with mighty heaves and onto the sidewalk to await the garbage truck.

  And he had made the acquaintance of other superintendents. Luis Rivera, Mr. Klaus, Whitey. His tenants were Irish, black, and Puerto Rican, with a few scholars and college students thrown in. His plumber was this one-eyed man named Leo, a Sicilian, who used to play jazz violin with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, lost the eye and the will to play during the Second World War. Cesar was never beyond the generosity of offering a man a drink, so that when Leo finished a job, he and Cesar would retire to the workroom to drink beer while Leo would relate his sorrows.

  The flamboyant Cesar Castillo became a good listener and got the reputation of a man to whom one might tell one’s troubles. His friends who came to visit him were either beset with woes or looking to get something from the ex-Mambo King. Men wanting to borrow money or to pass the night dri
nking his booze. People on the street and in the clubs who used to talk about what a womanizing and insensitive man he had been before his brother’s death now talked about how, perhaps, this tragedy had helped to reform him into a more noble character. Actually, most people felt sorry for him and wished the Mambo King well. His phone was always ringing; other musicians, some of them famous too, were always trying to check him out: the great Rafael Hernández inviting him over to his place on 113th to talk music and have some good food; Machito inviting him to festive gatherings in the Bronx; and so many others, wanting to see if the ex-Mambo King would perform again.

  SİDE B

  Sometime later in the night in the Hotel Splendour

  SOMETIME IN THE MIDDLE OF the night the noises started in the room next door again, chair legs scuffling against the floor and the man’s voice gravelly with self-satisfied laughing. The Mambo King had nodded off for a few minutes, but a pain in his sides jolted him awake and now he sat up in his chair in the Hotel Splendour, the steamy world slowly coming into focus. Two of his fingers smarted because he’d fallen asleep with a cigarette burning between them, and a blistery welt had risen there. But then he noticed the worse, more edemic welts and blisters up and down his arms and on his legs. “Carajo!”

  He got up to urinate, and by the toilet, he could hear the voices from next door. Listening for a moment, he realized they were talking about him.

  The woman’s voice: “Come back here, don’t bother nobody.”

  “But I’ve been hearing music all night from that room next door. I’ll just inquire.”

  Soon there was a knock at the Mambo King’s door. The black man was big-boned and thin, wearing lumpy pinstriped pajamas and a pair of velvet slippers. He had a big pompadour and black-and-blue bite marks on his neck.

  “Yes, what is it that you want?”

  “It’s me, your neighbor. Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Look, I’ve just run out of booze. You got any you can spare until tomorrow, I’ll pay you for it.”

  The Mambo King had pushed open the door just enough to see the man. He considered the request and felt sorry for the couple, stuck in the Hotel Splendour without enough to drink. He could remember a night with Vanna Vane when they’d drunk all their booze. Naked and in bed and too lazy to leave the room, he had leaned out the window of the Hotel Splendour and called down to a little kid passing by: “Go to the corner and tell the liquor-store man that you need a bottle of Seagram’s whiskey for the mambo musician. He’ll know! And get him to give you some ice, too, huh?”

  Gave the kid five bucks for his trouble, later paid the liquor-store owner—that’s how he solved his problem.

  What the hell, he told himself.

  “Just wait a minute.”

  “That’s nice of you, sport.”

  Then the black man looked in and saw how Cesar had trouble walking across the room. “Say, you all right?”

  “No problem.”

  “All right!” Then: “How much?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Mañana.”

  “Yeah? Well, shit, you’re a gentleman.”

  The Mambo King laughed.

  “Looky here,” the black man said in a really friendly manner. “Come over and say hello to my baby. Come on in for a drink!”

  While “Beautiful María of my Soul” played once again, he slowly pulled on a pair of trousers. It would only take three, four hours of drinking to tighten his muscles. Screwing the cap onto the half-full bottle of whiskey he had been drinking—he had two others left on the bed waiting for him—he followed the black man to his door.

  “Baby, got some!” to his woman, and to the Mambo King: “What’s your name, pal?”

  “Cesar.”

  “Uh, like Julius?”

  “My grandfather’s name.”

  Cesar had shuffled into the room, noticing the faint smell of fucking on the sheets. It was funny, he could barely hold his head up. His shoulders felt as if they were being forced to slump forward; his whole posture was that way. He saw himself in the mirror, saw an old man, jowlish and tired. Thank God he dyed his gray hair black.

  “Babe, this is our neighbor come to say hello.”

  On the bed, in a violet negligee, the man’s female companion. Stretched out like that dancer in Chicago, the Argentine Flame of Passion. Her nipples dark, bud-tipped flowers against the cloth. Long-legged, wide-wombed, her hips smooth and curvy like the polished banisters in the Explorers’ Club in Havana. And her toenails were painted gold! There was something else he liked: she’d brushed out her black hair so that it almost touched her shoulders, and looked as if she were wearing a crown or a headdress.

  “You resemble,” said the Mambo King, “a goddess from Arará.”

  “Say what?”

  “Arará.”

  “You all right, man?”

  “Arará. It’s a kingdom in Africa where all magic is born.” He said that, remembering how Genebria had told him this, sitting out in the yard in Cuba when he was six years old.

  “And when the man dies, he enters that kingdom. Its entrance is a cave.”

  “In Africa, he said!”

  The black man instructed her, “That’s what all them spiritist shops are called. Arará this, Arará that.”

  “You’re very beautiful,” Cesar said, but he could hardly hold up his head to look at her. Then, when he managed to, the Mambo King smiled, because even though he felt sick and knew that he must look pathetic, he’d caught her looking and admiring his pretty eyes.

  “Here’s your drink, my friend. You want to sit down?”

  “No. If I sit down, I won’t get up.”

  If he were a young man, he was thinking, he would get down on his knees and crawl over to the bed, wagging his head like a dog. She seemed the type who would be amused and flattered by that. Then he’d take hold of her slender foot, turn it just enough so her leg was perfectly shaped and then run his tongue up from her Achilles’ heel to the round of her dark buttocks: then he’d push her toward the wall, open her legs, and rest his body on hers.

  He imagined an ancient, unchanging taste of meat, salt, and grain, moistened and becoming sweeter, the deeper his tongue would go . . .

  He must have drifted off for a moment, looking as if he might fall, or perhaps his arms started shaking, because suddenly the black man was holding him by the elbows, saying, “Yo? Yo? Yo?”

  Maybe he reeled around or seemed as if he would fall, because the woman said, “Mel, tell the cat it’s two-thirty in the morning. He should go to sleep.”

  “No problem.”

  At the door he turned to look at the woman again and noticed how the hem of her negligee had just hitched higher over her hips. And just as he wanted to see more, she shifted and the diaphanous material slid up a few inches more until he could see most of the right side of her hip and thigh.

  “Well, good night,” he said. “Buenas noches.”

  “Yeah, thanks, man.”

  “You take care.”

  “You take care,” said the woman.

  Walking slowly to his room in the Hotel Splendour, the Mambo King remembered how, toward the end of the year in Cuba, during December and into January, the white men used to form lines into the houses of prostitution so that they might sleep with a black woman, the blacker her skin the better the pleasure. They believed that if they slept with a black woman at that time of year, their penises deep inside those magical wombs, they would be purified. In Las Piñas, he used to go to this old house—bayu—with an overgrown garden at the edge of a field, and in Havana he would visit, along with hundreds of other men, the houses on certain streets in the sections of La Marina, where he and Nestor had lived, and Pajarito. They came back to him, the cobblestone streets closed off to traffic and dense with men knocking on the doors. In every instance, at this time of the year, a huge bull of a man, usually a homosexual, would let the customers in. Their lights low, the houses had dozens of rooms and smell
ed of perfume and sweet-scented oils, and they would enter a parlor where the women waited for their customers, naked on old divans and enormous antique chairs, anxious to be chosen. At that time the white prostitutes sulked because business fell off for them, while the mulatas and the black queens swam in rivers of saliva and sperm, their legs wide open, taking in one man after the other, each man’s bodily hunger sated, each man’s soul cleansed. And it was always funny how, in those days, he would stick his thing back into his trousers and make his way into the street, feeling strong and renewed.

  Now, as he shut the door behind him and made his way toward another bottle of whiskey, the room thick with the trumpets, piano, drums of his old orchestra, the Mambo King, weak of body, daydreamed of making love to the woman next door, and it was then that he could hear their voices again:

  “Pssssst, oh, baby.”

  “Not so hard, honey.”

  “Ohhhh, but I like it!”

  “Then wet me with your mouth.”

  The Mambo King was hearing the bed again, the mattress thumping against the wall, and the woman moaning, the softest music in the world.

  He drank his whiskey and winced with pain, the stuff turning into brittle glass by the time it reached his stomach. Remembered when he could play music and drink all night, come home and devour a steak, a plate of fried potatoes and onions, and finish that off with a bowl of ice cream, and wake up the next morning, four or five hours after the meal, feeling nothing. The thing about one’s body coming apart was that, if anything, you felt more. Leaning back in his chair, he could feel the whiskey burning in the pit of his stomach, and leaking out through the cuts and bruises that he envisioned his ulcers looked like, oozing into his liver and kidneys, which throbbed with pain, as if someone had jammed a fist inside. Then, too, there was the column of heat, long as his penis, shooting back up out of the pit of his stomach and skewering his heart. Sometimes the pain was so bad as he sat drinking in that room in the Hotel Splendour that his hands would shake, but the whiskey helped, and so he could continue on.