The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  (Among the photographs which the Mambo King had taken with him into the Hotel Splendour, a favorite picture of his daughter in leotards and tutu, beneath an arched window in a room with pilastered walls and ornate tiles. This was at her ballet school in Havana. The picture, taken in 1959, shows a thin, genteel girl with large brown eyes and a teaspoon-shaped face, lively and elegant, in ballet slippers and with a dreamy expression, as if listening to beautiful music. Another picture, taken in 1962, shows her dancing during a rehearsal of Giselle; watching her, Alicia Alonso and her ballet teacher, a pretty Cuban woman named Gloria.)

  Sometimes he found himself hanging around the bars and cantinas of Washington Heights and, on occasion, Union City, New Jersey, where in the early sixties many of the feverish Cubans had settled. Sipping his tacita of café negro, he would listen quietly to the political chitchat. The newly arrived Cubans, bitter and forlorn; the old, established Cubans trying to figure out what was going on in Cuba: a man with a shaking right hand whose older brother, a jeweler, had committed suicide in Havana; a man who had lost a good job as a gardener on the Du Pont estate; a man whose cousin had been sent to prison for walking down the street with a pound of sugar hidden in his shirt. A man who lost his farm. A man whose uncle was sentenced to twenty years for shouting “Fuck Castro!” at a town-hall meeting. A man whose precious and beautiful niece was abducted to frigid Moscow, where she married a humorless, barrel-chested Russian. A man who had been shot through the elbow during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  Voices:

  “And they call us ‘worms.’ ”

  “Castro came to the island owning ten thousand acres of land and now he has the whole thing!”

  “I smuggled arms for that son of a bitch.”

  “Who thinks he would have succeeded had we known he was a Communist?”

  “They say the reason Castro was released by Batista in ’54 was because they castrated him.”

  “They reduce our discontent to our stomachs. They say we have left because we can’t find a good meal in Havana anymore. That’s the truth, because all the Russians are eating the food. But there’s more. They have taken our right to sit with our families in peace, before tables bountiful with the fruit of our labors.”

  “So we left, hombre, and that Castro, mojón guindao, can go to hell!”

  “He’s like Rasputin.”

  “Let them eat cake is his attitude.”

  “He made a deal with the devil.”

  “We’ve been betrayed all around.”

  “Yes, I know it,” the Mambo King used to say. “I have three brothers and my father still living in Oriente, and they all say the same thing, they want to get out.” Sip of coffee. “Except for my father. He’s very old, in his seventies, and not well.”

  And he couldn’t resist: “I have a daughter in Havana. It’s my opinion that her thoughts have been tampered with.”

  The Mambo King would walk up the hill of La Salle Street, head bowed, back slightly stooped, belly hanging over his belt, and thoughts clouded with Cuba. In the clutter of his basement workroom, he would read the anti-Castro pamphlets that his friends gave him. Stuck between the pages of his younger brother’s book, Forward America! (“For whatever your problems may be, remember where there is fortitude and determination there is a way!”), this portion of a pamphlet from 1961–62, circled in red ballpoint ink and set on the table in that room in the Hotel Splendour:

  . . . We cannot deny that in the era of republican government we had political leaders who did not always, through honesty and patriotism, implement the just and splendid laws of our Constitution. Yet we could not have known or even imagined the kind of tyranny unleashed by Fidel Castro and his hordes. Former comic-opera dictatorships at least tried to seek democratic solutions to their moral failings. Their methods only became dictatorial when provoked by Communists, who disturbed the public peace and drove innocent, stupid, and fanatical young people out into the streets, using them as cannon fodder. Some people say Cuba is going to flourish anew under Fidel Castro, that malnutrition, prostitution, illiteracy, corruption, and poverty are going to be stamped out forever, that the island will become a paradise of equality, with a truly humanitarian government. Ask those who have been brutally tortured and lie dead in unmarked graves if this is so. The truth is different: Fidel Castro and his gang of robbers and murderous convicts, like the odious Argentine Che Guevara, the Spanish criminals Lister and Bayo, and expert torturers and killers like Raúl Castro and Ramiro Valdés, the head of G-2, have traded off Cuba to Euro-Asiatic powers. Powers that are geographically, spiritually, and historically far removed from everything Caribbean and that have turned Cuba into a tropical colony and military base for Russia. Since January 1, 1959, Cuba has become a miserable pauper state without resources or freedom and the sincere, happy spirit of Cubans has become replaced by tragic gloom. The gaiety of everyday Cuban life and commerce with its rum and good cigars and its bounty of sugar and all that springs from sugar has been reduced by a severe rationing in the name of Soviet-Cuban trade relations. The average Cuban citizen must brace himself stoically for the bleak future while Fidel himself smokes only the best twenty-dollar Havana cigars, drinks rum, and stuffs his gut with Russian caviar. While thousands of Cubans have begun to live in exile, one hundred thousand others rot in prisons for political crimes. The remaining population is divided up between the Cuban traitors who support the tyranny and those who have chosen to remain behind for personal reasons or cannot leave because the government will not allow them to. Let us not forget them! Long live Jesus Christ and long live freedom!

  Inspired by the fiery prose of these pamphlets and by news from Cuba, the Mambo King would hole up in his basement workroom, drink beer, and write to Mariela—letters which over the years became more imploring in their tone.

  The heart of them said this: “From what I hear about Cuba, I can’t believe that you are happy there. I am not one to tell you what to do, but the day you want to leave and come to the United States, let me know and I will do everything I can, and do it willingly, because you are my flesh and blood.”

  He’d sign them, “Your lonely father who loves you.”

  Never receiving acknowledgment of these offers, he thought, Of course the letters are intercepted and cut to ribbons before she can read them! Instead, her letters spoke about her dance training—“They say I am one of the more promising students”—and about high-toned cultural events, like a performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird by the Bolshoi Ballet on the stage of the opera house (which left him blinking, because the only ballets he had ever attended were the pornographic ballets at Havana’s notorious Shanghai Theater).

  Sometimes (daydreaming, nostalgic) he believed that he would feel some new happiness if Mariela came up from Cuba to live with him, escaping by boat, or miraculously with the permission of the government (“Yes, the poor thing wants to be with her true father. Give her our blessing to leave”). Then she’d look after him, cook his meals, help keep house, and, above all, would receive and give him love, and this love would wrap around his heart like a gentle silk bow, protecting it from all harm.

  In a way, thinking about Mariela helped him to understand why Nestor used to sit on the couch and torment himself for hours singing about his “Beautiful María,” even if it was all a pipe dream. Something about love and the eternal spring, time suspended—so that the Mambo King daydreamed about himself sitting in his living room by the sunny window, head set back and eyes closed while his daughter, Mariela, cut his hair, the way his mother used to, Mariela’s lovely voice (he imagined) humming into his huge ears, her face radiant with happy love for him. Now and then he would feel so inspired by all this that he would take the train to Macy’s and, guessing at Mariela’s size, buy her a half-dozen dresses and blouses, lipsticks, mascaras, and rouge, and, on one occasion, a long silk scarf, yellow like the sunlight in old paintings—rushing hurriedly through the store as if the right choice of gift would make things different. With
these items he would enclose a note: “Just to let you know that your father loves you.”

  And for each November 17, Mariela’s birthday, he’d put together a package of goods generally unavailable to Cubans, things that he thought a teenager would like: chocolate bars, cookies, jam, chewing gum, potato chips, sure evidence of the diversity and abundance of life in America.

  She never came running into his arms.

  ONCE HE GOT OUT OF THE HOSPITAL in June, his strength on the wane, he didn’t care about anything. Yes, everybody was nice to him. Machito came over to the house to pay his respects, and so did many other musician friends. But he felt so weak, walked so slowly (because of the medications), he didn’t want to get out of bed. Was that a life for the fabulous Cesar Castillo? And forget about his job as superintendent. He had to get Frankie and a few other friends to fill in. When Lydia, his young woman, with whom he had been having his troubles, wasn’t over to take care of him, he would head upstairs to eat with Pedro and Delores, the tensions now gone between them, as he wasn’t a frisky bull anymore but an old hound on his way out. On top of that, he had to maintain a boring, low-fat, low-salt, grainy diet, while deep down he craved plátanos and pork and a heaping plate of rice and beans, with a glass of beer or wine or whiskey on the side.

  What pleasures did he have left? Hanging out and going fishing up around Bear Mountain with Frankie, sitting in Bernardito’s house listening to music; hours and hours of watching TV, and reading spicy magazines like Foto Pimienta!, with their grainy black-and-white pornographic photographs and their advertisements for the “Revolutionary European System to Lengthen the Size of Your Penis!” (“My old lady never really thought I was ‘stud’ enough for her, pero ahora la penetro muy profundo—but now I go in really deep—and she can hardly wait to go to bed with me!”) and with their ads for lotions and love potions (“Lubricante Jac-Off, Loción Peter-Licker”), and the personal ads in the back, male and female. (“Honest, clean man from Veracruz, Mexico, 38 years old, with a youthful appearance and a penis of nine inches length and two and one half inches thickness seeking lonely female companions between the ages of twenty and sixty for a love affair.” “Bisexual man from Santurce, Puerto Rico, with a six and one half inch penis, seeking out couples for weekend entertainment, am willing to travel.” “Lonely Cuban man, fifty years old but youthful and well endowed—superdotado—living in Coral Gables and homesick for Cuba, seeks a female partner for romance and life.” “I am an abandoned thirty-four-year-old woman with a six-year-old son, very romantic and feel alone and sad. I am an American citizen, white, gordita—chubby—with big breasts, and I am a passionate lover. If you are a healthy male between the ages of 35 and 50, with a good job and decent character, please send information and photograph.” Her photograph, of a naked woman bending over, was below the ad.)

  “Dios mío!”

  And of course he liked to watch the variety shows on Channel 47 from New Jersey, a Spanish broadcasting station, his favorite being the incredibly voluptuous Iris Chacón, whose jewel-beaded hips and cleavage made the Mambo King a little delirious, and he liked the old musicals from Mexico, like the kind that his former arranger Miguel Montoya used to compose scores for: vampire Westerns and masked wrestler/detective/nightclub singer films and the soap operas about love and family, the women young and beautiful, the men virile and handsome, while he was just an old man now, sixty-two years old but looking seventy-five. Hollywood movies also made him happy, his favorites featuring the likes of Humphrey Bogart, William Powell, and Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, and Marilyn Monroe. (Though he also seemed happy whenever a Laurel and Hardy film turned up. He used to like watching them in the movie house in Las Piñas. But there was one he really liked, The Flying Deuces: Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy escape from the French Foreign Legion in a biplane that crashes, killing Oliver Hardy. At the end of the film Stanley is walking down a road on a beautiful spring day, with a hobo stick and a bundle over his shoulder, sad and wistful that his old pal is dead. Butterflies, trees bending in the breeze, birds chirping, the sun shining, life all around him, and he says, “Gee, Ollie would like a nice day like this,” and just then, as he turns the corner, he comes upon a mule, a mule with a mustache, bangs, and a hat just like Ollie’s, and as Stanley recognizes that Ollie has been reincarnated as a mule, tears come to his eyes, he pats the mule’s back and says, “Gee, Ollie, I’m happy to see you,” and Ollie answers something back like “This is another fine mess you got me into,” but it’s a happy fade-out, and the Mambo King, thinking about resurrection and the way Christ burst through the tomb door, radiant with light, imagines how beautiful it would have been for his younger brother to have returned, and he gets teary-eyed, too.)

  Now and then, he watched the I Love Lucy show, and saw that episode one last time before he made his way to the Hotel Splendour. Saw his brother and wept, thinking how life had become very sad because of his death. Closing his eyes, he heard the rapping at Ricky Ricardo’s door, stood in Lucy and Ricky’s living room one more time, and could swear that if he reached over to his side he could touch his brother’s knee and nod as Lucille Ball came into the room with their coffee and snacks, and it would give him the worst craving for a nice little glass of booze, but he kept thinking about what the doctors had told him and knew that the logical thing would be to improve his health, but he was desolately bored, it seemed that all he had were memories, that where his pleasures resided now was in the past. Everything else was too complicated, even walking across the room, what with arthritis aching in his joints and his fingers still so bloated and stiff that he couldn’t even play the guitar or trumpet anymore.

  (There were countless other episodes besides the one in which he had appeared with his brother. At four in the morning, just a few weeks before he had left for the Hotel Splendour, he had sat up watching two old I Love Lucy reruns:

  The first was an episode about Lucy getting all nervous because Ricky’s sweet mother is coming up from Cuba to visit and Lucy doesn’t know more than a few words of Spanish, which she always botches, and so, when Ricky’s mother turns up, demure and tranquil, to see her loving son, they sit quietly in the living room together, each without knowing what to say and waiting for the other to speak, and they seem to live in this world where everything happens because of the door, and Lucy keeps looking toward the door, waiting for her husband to help her out, and they sit on the couch for a long time, just smiling at one another, Lucy fidgeting and the Cuban mother perfectly content to sit on the couch waiting for her nightclub singer son, of whom she is proud, and you just know that when he walks in she’ll rise and give him a tender kiss, that she will hold him in her arms. Feeling embarrassed because even her four-year-old son, Ricky Jr., speaks better Spanish than she does, Lucy’s really trying to figure out a way around this, because not only has Ricky’s mother come to visit but now some of their cousins from Cuba, other cousins, are coming to join them for dinner. It happens that Ricky has booked a mentalist act for the Tropicana nightclub and this mentalist, a classy fellow with a beautiful Cuban accent, does all his “mind-reading” with a listening device, which Lucy borrows from him, so that the mentalist, hiding in her kitchen, can feed her lines through a microphone. When the family comes over, Lucy’s sudden knowledge of Spanish at first impresses everyone, but then the mentalist has to leave because his wife has just had a baby, and right then and there Lucy begins to fuck everything up, fumbling her Spanish and making a fool of herself. Yet the episode ends happily, with all the Cubans touched by her effort, with everyone embracing, and with Ricky Ricardo lovingly kissing her.

  In the second, Ricky and Lucy are living up in the country far away from the troubles of the city, when Lucy gets the idea to raise chickens and buys a huge supply of eggs, but because she doesn’t have an incubator, she brings them into the house and turns up the temperature, without realizing that all the eggs will hatch suddenly, so that when Desi Arnaz, alias Ricky Ricardo, with his wildly expressive eyes, co
mes home, the living room’s filled with ten thousand chicks, chirping and crawling happily over everything, under the sofa and on top of the tables and chairs, and so Ricky stands astounded in the doorway and does a double take, slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand and his eyes brimming out—his “Lucy! No me digas que compraste un mink coat que costaba $5,000!” expression. And he starts mock-cursing in a thousand-words-a-minute Spanish, and Lucy’s afraid, until Desi’s good mood returns and everybody’s happy again . . .

  Good and funny episodes! he told himself, while drinking in the Hotel Splendour.)

  And Lydia, his last love, whom he’d met in a Bronx nightclub in 1978, could not bring herself to make love to him anymore. That hurt the most. She would come over to check in on him every few days, and he was always happy as a young pup to see her, but when he touched her now, she’d pull away.

  “You’re still not well,” she’d say to him.

  But he’d persist. She’d cook his meals and he would stand behind her, pressing against her back until the heat of her rump aroused him. And without thinking twice, he would undo his trousers and show her his hound-snouted thing, not even fully erect but still able to put many a younger man to shame. “Please,” she’d say, “I’m here to take care of you.”

  He persisted. “Just touch me there.”

  “Dios mío, you’re like a child.”

  And she took hold of his thing, giving him hope, but put it back into his trousers.

  “Now sit down and eat this soup I made for you.”

  She’d clean his house, cook his meals, make his bed, tidy up the magazines and newspapers in his living room, but all he wanted was to strip off her clothes and make love to her. Nothing he tried worked with her. No singing, no jokes, no flowery compliments. Finally he resorted to pitiable behavior. “You never loved me. Now I feel so useless, I may as well die.” That became his song for weeks, until, worn down, she took pity on him, stripped off her dress, and in a black brassiere and panties, kneeled before him, pulled off his trousers, and began to suckle his aged member. Holding her thick black hair and brushing it away from her eyes, he appraised the expression on her face and realized that it was one of pure revulsion and he wilted, asking himself, Am I so old and far gone that she doesn’t want me anymore?