The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  He’d had a boyhood friend in Cuba, a certain Dr. Victor López, who had turned up in the States in 1975 and set up an office in Washington Heights. One night, three years later, when the Mambo King was playing a job in a Bronx social club, he found this Dr. López among the crowd. They had not seen each other since 1945 and had a happy reunion, with the two old friends kissing each other and slapping each other’s back, remembering and laughing over their childhood in Las Piñas, Oriente Province.

  Afterwards, his old friend noticed that Cesar’s hands trembled and he said, “Why don’t you come along to my office one day and I’ll give you an examination, gratis, my friend. You know we’re not so young anymore.”

  “I will do that.”

  The doctor and his wife left the crowded, red-lit social club, and the singer made his way over to the bar for another drink and a tasty fried chorizo sandwich.

  He didn’t go see his old friend, but one day, while walking down La Salle Street, he felt certain pains again, like glass shards cutting inside him. Usually, whenever these pains, which he’d been experiencing on and off for years, came to him, he would drink a glass of rum or whiskey, take some aspirin, and take a nap. Then he’d go upstairs to see his brother’s widow and the family, or he’d head out to the street, where he would hang around with his old pals, Bernardito Mandelbaum and Frankie Pérez, “El Fumigador”—the Exterminator. Or if his nephew Eugenio happened to be around, he would take him out for a drink. Best was when he’d hear his doorbell ringing in quick, enthusiastic spurts, because that meant his girlfriend was waiting in the lobby.

  But that day the pain was too much, and so the Mambo King went to see Dr. López. Because he had known the doctor from his old pueblo, he felt all the trust in the world in the man, and thought his fellow cubano would produce a few pills that would make his pains go away. He expected to get out of there in a few minutes, but the doctor kept him for an hour: took his blood, checked his sputum, his urine, listened to his heart, thumped at his back, took his blood pressure, looked in his ears and up his ass, felt his testicles, peered into the dark green eyes that had made him such a lady killer in his youth, and in the end said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, my friend, but your body is something of a mess. I think you should go into the hospital for a while.”

  He turned red, listening to the doctor, felt his pulse quicken. He thought, Victor, how can this be? Just the other day, I screwed the hell out of my young girl . . .

  “You understand, your urine is pink with blood, your blood pressure is way too high, dangerously high, my friend, you have the symptoms of kidney stones, your liver is enlarged, your lungs sound blocked, and who knows what your heart looks like.”

  You see, she was screaming. I was making her come, me, an old man.

  “Look here, Victor, you want to know how I feel about this business? It’s just that I’d rather go out like a man, rather than slowly rotting away like a piece of old fruit, like those viejitos I see in the drugstores.”

  “Well, you’re not so young anymore.”

  He answered the doctor insolently, with the same kind of annoyance as when he was a kid and he’d heard something he didn’t want to hear.

  “Then, coño. If I’m already at death’s door, I’ll die and then I’ll find out a lot of things, won’t I?”

  “My friend, if you don’t do something now, you will rot away slowly like a piece of old fruit. Not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but all these things, unless taken care of, mean the beginning of a lot of physical suffering.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  But he didn’t really believe in his old friend’s advice, and that was why two years later he had said his goodbyes, had written his letters, and had packed up to pass his last days in the Hotel Splendour.

  Now the Mambo King had trouble standing. When it was time for him to get up and turn the record over, his sides ached. But he managed to turn the record over and to make his way across the room in the Hotel Splendour to the little toilet: could have been the same little toilet where Vanna would be standing in front of the mirror, stark naked, dabbing lipstick on her mouth and cheerfully saying, “I’m ready!” He wished his sides didn’t ache so much, that it wasn’t so hot outside, that his brother was not dead. Standing over the toilet, he pulled out his big thing, and his urine went gurgling in the water. Then he heard something, like a man’s fist pounding on the wall, and when he finished, he stood by the dresser and listened carefully. It wasn’t anyone pounding on the wall, it was that couple next door going at it! The man was saying, “Das right, baby. Das right, yeah.” The man was going to have an orgasm and Cesar Castillo, Mambo King and former star of the I Love Lucy show, had shooting pains through his body. Bad kidneys, bad liver, bad everything, except for his pinga, which was working perfectly, though a little more lackadaisically these days. He sat by the bed again and clicked on the record player. Then he took another long, glorious swallow of whiskey, and during that swallow he remembered what they had told him at the hospital some months ago:

  “Mr. Castillo, you’re going to be all right this time. We’ve reduced the edema, but it’s the end of drinking for you, and you’ll have to go on a special diet. Do you understand?”

  He felt like a fool, sitting on a hospital bed with only a smock on. The nurse standing beside the doctor was shapely, though, and he tried to play up to her sympathy, and he did not mind letting his thing show through the slit when he got back into bed.

  “No more,” the doctor said in English. “No más. ¿Comprende?”

  The doctor was a Jewish fellow and was trying hard to relate to the Mambo King, and Cesar nodded, just so he could get the fuck back out. He had been there for a month and been prodded and probed, very much convinced that he was going to die. He’d pulled through, though, and now he had to live with the humiliation that his body was rotting on him. He’d gone through long periods of sleep, then, under the medication. Daydreaming about Cuba, daydreaming about himself and el pobrecito Nestor when they were kids, and about women and booze and good fatty fried foods. He figured that’s what a dead man would think about. That and love. The oddest thing was that he kept hearing music in those deep sleeps. So Dr. Victor López, Jr., was right when he had warned him, as had the doctor in this hospital.

  “You have two choices, only two. One is to behave yourself and live. The other is to abuse yourself. Your body is incapable of processing alcohol, you understand?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “It’s like taking poison, you understand?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “No, Doctor. Thank you, Doctor. And good night, beautiful nurse.”

  When he finished emptying the first bottle, he opened a second and filled up his glass. Then he sat back, enjoying the music, a little number called “A Woman’s Tears,” an earnest ballad written out on the fire escape of Pablo’s apartment during the old days. He always enjoyed Nestor’s trumpet playing, and just then, as the bongos were playing like claps in the forest, the man next door had started to groan, his orgasm deep and rich, and she was moaning, too. The Mambo King decided to light another cigarette.

  When he had gone into the hospital, forcibly taken there by Raúl and Bernardito, his limbs were bloated and he couldn’t keep food down. Even so, it still surprised him, as if all his years of drinking and eating and doing just as he pleased would never catch up with him. He’d had the symptoms for a long time, going back years (to 1968), but he’d always ignored them.

  When he’d think about that hospital stay, he’d remember how much he had slept. For days and days and days, it seemed. He had a lot of dreams at first—dreams about the basement, few about his life as a musician. In one dream the basement walls had started to peel badly and were covered with bubbles that wept a light pink liquid. And he went to work, much as he had for years in his building on La Salle Street, mostly plumbing jobs in the dreams. Pipes burst inside the walls and the softened
plaster and ceilings came down or crumbled at his touch. He’d open closets and a wall of insects, prickly and black, would fall onto him. Investigating a clanking noise in the boiler room, he’d find himself crawling down a tunnel which narrowed, so that, while searching for the pipe, he would find himself wedged into a space, so constricted he could barely move. (These were the straps around his wrists and legs.) When he’d finally find the loose joint, dirty water would drip down on his face and often into his mouth. In his dreams, when he’d touch either metal or wood surfaces, he would feel a shock.

  At times, things seemed very normal. He would be sitting in his basement workroom looking over all the apartment complaint slips that he would accumulate during the day: “Mr. Stein, fix window.” “Mrs. Rivera, toilet.” And, in a good mood, he’d begin to sing, his voice carrying lovingly into the courtyard, the neighbors hearing him.

  And there was always Mrs. Shannon to stick her head out the back window and say, as he’d cross the courtyard, “Ah, you know that you sound just like that Ricky Ricardo fellow.”

  Then he’d go about his business.

  He would sing, “My life is always taking a funny turn.”

  In his dreams (as in life) he’d find junkies working the back windows with screwdrivers and icepicks, he’d shovel snow, fix clogged toilets. Then he’d go to a job and something drastic would go wrong (as in life). A Handi Wipe caught inside a drain beneath a sink, Cesar down on the floor trying to get it out with a bent wire hanger, and then, desperate (as it seems to crawl farther and farther into the pipe), he gets a snake, a whirling cable that will break up anything but which struggles against the cloth: finally, when with a great yank he gets it out, he’s covered with grease and hair and food bits and wants a bath but cannot move.

  He remembered another dream when Mrs. Stein’s kitchen pipe burst, flooding her apartment and caving in the ceiling below, just as it had really happened once, but in the dream he stood out in the courtyard laughing as all the water gushed out of her windows like a waterfall.

  Then there was always the dream in which he felt like a monster. He was so heavy that his feet as they hit the floor sounded like drums being dropped out of the back of a moving truck, the ground beneath him cracking. He was so cumbersome that when he climbed the stairs to the fourth floor he snapped every step in half and could barely move in sideways through his door.

  A more pleasant dream? When all the walls fell away and he could see everything going on inside the building. Beautiful naked college girls (whom he’d sometimes spy from the roof) preparing to take showers, chatting on the telephone, sitting their fine asses down on the toilets and performing the delicate act of defecation. Men urinating, couples fucking, families gathered around their evening meal: life.

  Lots of dreams about music, too, but mainly he dreamed about things crumbling: walls coming down, pipes turning brittle, floors rotten and insect-laden, everything soft and mealy to the touch.

  Once, on a night when his body felt filthy with medication and with sweat and uncleanliness, his mother came to visit him. Sitting beside him, she held a white palangana filled with soap and water and cleaned him slowly and lovingly with a sponge, and then, luxury of luxuries, she washed his hair, her soft, soft hands touching his face again.

  For the first three days he had done nothing but sleep, and when he opened his eyes, his nephew Eugenio was sitting beside his bed.

  The kid was in his late twenties by then. Unmarried, he had the same sad expression as his father. Sitting by his uncle, Eugenio passed the time reading a book. Now and then he would lean close and ask in a loud voice: “Uncle, are you there? Are you there?”

  And even though he could hear his nephew he could not respond, could do no more than open his eyes and then instantly fall back to sleep.

  “Uncle!”

  A nurse: “Please, sir, don’t shout.”

  While thinking about this, Cesar wished he could have said something to the kid. He almost came to tears, touched by the way his nephew sat near him, even when he was feeling impatient, getting up every few minutes to pace in the ward among all the machines.

  “Nurse, can you tell me what’s wrong with my uncle?”

  “Speak to the doctor.”

  “For one thing, his electrolyte functions are out.”

  “Will he wake up?”

  “Time will tell . . .”

  Then one day he noticed the pretty Puerto Rican nurse bending over to give some poor man whose skin had turned yellow an injection. That’s when he sat up for the first time and wanted to shave and wash, to get back together and walk out of there like a young man.

  “We’re all so happy that you feel better,” Delores told him. “I brought you some books.”

  Books on religion, saints, meditation.

  “Thank you, Delores.”

  And when he saw his nephew sitting nearby, he called the boy over—well, he was a man, wasn’t he?—grabbed him by the shoulder and squeezed. “Well, you glad I’m okay? It was really nothing.”

  His nephew was silent.

  (Yes, Uncle, nothing. Just three days of being sick to our stomachs that you were going to die, of sitting beside you and feeling the whole world was going to fall away.)

  “Come on, smile, boy? Smile for your uncle.” But then he grimaced with pain.

  Eugenio’s face passive, unmoved.

  “Help me, boy, to sit up.”

  And silently Eugenio helped him, but not the way he used to as a little kid, when his eyes were sick with worry. Now his expression was cold.

  Eugenio, looking very much like Nestor, left the hospital room without saying a word.

  (And what was it that the others brought him? Some girlie magazines from Frankie, a roast-beef sandwich with mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato from Raúl, a little pink transistor radio from the Aztec-looking lady who owned the bakery across the street, a bouquet of flowers from Ana María, a new black-brimmed cane hat from Bernardito. And his girlfriend Lydia and her children brought him some crayon drawings of children running, with a bright yellow-and-orange sun in the sky. Lydia sitting with him and trying to nod happily.)

  Then, like sunlight filling the ward, he felt more of his strength returning. A heat thickened around his waist, as if he were wading in tropic water, and he woke up one day with an erection. He was wearing only a smock, because of the bedpan business and all the tubes, but when the blond nurse came by to look after him, she was startled by the old musician’s sexual apparatus. Blushing as she went about the business of straightening up the bed sheets around him, she could not help breaking out into a slight “Oh, you bad boy” smile, and it so pleased him that when she left the room, he called out to her: “Thank you, nurse, thank you! Have a good day!”

  That’s when he noticed the other guy. Not the legless man; the bloated man who’d turned up in intensive care, wired up with tubes—liver, kidneys shot, bladder blocked and completely incapable of processing his bodily fluids. For five days he lay next to this man, and despite his own pain, the Mambo King kept thinking, God, I’m glad I’m not him.

  The man kept getting worse. His fingers were puffed up with fluid, his limbs so bloated that his fingernails oozed. His face, too, was like a pink balloon on which a makeup artist had composed a pained expression; fluid dripped from his lips, from his nostrils, from his ears, but nothing from anywhere else. With his own edema problems, the Mambo King would open his eyes to the sight of that poor man, and shake his head over the man’s living nightmare.

  “See him,” one doctor said. “Keep on, and you’ll be like that.”

  Now the pain was very bad, but what the hell, at least he was going out with style. Forget that a few of the veins on his ankles had started to bleed through the skin, forget that he was dizzy and knew, knew for sure, that he was on his way out. Nothing that another belt of whiskey wouldn’t fix up. And to celebrate this drink, he turned up “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.”

  At least he had gotten out of the h
ospital and would never return. That had been in June, and he laughed despite his pain, remembering the nurses. There had been a young Puerto Rican nurse who had seemed like a bitch at first, never smiling at him or even saying hello, but then he softened her up with compliments, and in the days when he seemed to be getting better told Frankie to buy her a bouquet of flowers. (It had nearly killed him when she would lean close to his bed to take his pulse or to check all the tubes and needles they had stuck into his arms and legs, as she wore one of those modern blouses with a zipper down the front that always seemed to open just enough to torture him with her cleavage, slipping all the way open one glorious afternoon as she struggled to shift him over on the bed. The zipper slid down and he could see the front clips of her pink brassiere, its material thin and nearly transparent, and struggling to contain her breasts, squeezed snugly inside and overflowing the soft material, so nice and big and round.) The other nurse, an American girl, and blond like Vanna Vane, had seemed nice from the start, didn’t catch any attitudes when he tried to flirt with her, just smiled and went about her business, perhaps a little shyly in fact, as this nurse was quite tall, nearly six feet in height, with long hands and limbs and broad shoulders, and probably considered herself unfeminine and awkward, but he wouldn’t have thought twice about going to bed with her, all six feet of her shapely nursiness. And she would have felt loved and beautiful and so fucked-out that she would not be able to walk for days. That’s why, when he was awake and his medication had not made him forget how to speak, he’d flirt with her, happy because she would put her hand on her big hips and flirt back, calling him “My favorite and most handsome patient,” and “Sweetheart.” That kept him happy for a while, but the guy next to him, a diabetic fellow who’d lost the use of his legs, kept telling Cesar, “Forget it, hombre. You’re too old, what would a young woman want with you?”