The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  She kept at him until her mouth and jaw were tired and then settled into a rough masturbation of him, finally producing the tremor that he had been waiting for. But when she had finished, it was as if she could not bear to look at him, this old, thickset man with white hair, and she turned away, both her fists pressed against her mouth and biting her knuckles in some agonized judgment of what she had just done. And when he touched her gently, she pulled away, like everybody else in his life.

  “Are you being like this because I haven’t been able to give you and the children money lately? I have money in the bank I can give you. Or if you can wait until I start working again or if a royalty check comes in, I’ll bring you money, okay? If that’s what you want, then I’ll do whatever you want to make you happy.”

  “Hombre, I don’t want to touch you anymore because touching you is like touching death.”

  And then she just started weeping.

  Dressed, she kept saying things like, “I’m sorry I told you this. But you’ve pushed me so much. Please understand.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Now please leave this death house, this sick old man, just go.”

  She left, promising to return, and he stood up, looking at himself in the mirror. His huge, red-snouted pinga hanging down between his legs. Belly gigantic, skin saggy. Why, he almost had breasts like a woman’s.

  He thought: It’s one thing to lose a woman when you’re twenty-five, forty, another when you’re sixty-two years old.

  He thought about his wife, Luisa, in Cuba. His daughter, Mariela.

  The many others.

  Oh, Vanna Vane.

  Lydia.

  “Mamá”

  “. . . like touching death.”

  It took him a long time to make his decisions, the first being “Fuck this shit with special diets and no more booze!” Getting nicely dressed in a white silk suit, he went up to that little joint on 127th Street and Manhattan Avenue and had two orders of fried plantains, one sweet, one green, a plate of yuca smothered in salt, oil, and garlic, an order of roast pork, and a special dish of shrimp and chicken, bread and butter, all washed down with half a dozen beers, so filling and bloating that making his way back up to La Salle Street was one of the great struggles of his life.

  That was when he decided to hell with everything. Took his savings out of the bank and bought everybody presents (among them: a set of false teeth for Frankie, a plumed hat for Pedro, who had been too shy to buy one for himself, an old Don Aziapaú recording entitled “Havana Nights” for Bernardito, and for his nephew, Eugenio, who liked to draw, something he’d learned in college, the thickest art book he could find, one on the works of Francisco Goya), and then spent a month visiting friends here and there. What a bitch to say goodbye to old pals like Manny and Frankie. What a bitch to say goodbye to Delores, to travel out to Flushing, Queens, with a box of pastries and gifts for his cousin Pablo, to eat a nice meal with the family and then give him an abrazo for the last time.

  NOW HE LAUGHS, THINKING ABOUT grinning Bernardito Mandelbaum again and what he had been like when they first met in 1950: skinny, with a thick head of tousled black hair, in baggy hand-me-downs from an older brother, plaid shirts and a pair of scuffed brown Sears, Roebuck shoes and white socks! That’s how he’d dress for his job as a clerk in the office of the Tidy Print plant where Cesar had also worked in the stockroom for a time. In a cavernous room noisy with printing machines they had become friends, Bernardito immediately liking Cesar’s lighthearted and suave demeanor and always doing him favors. In the mornings he’d get the Mambo King coffee, bring him homemade pastries for a snack, and whenever the Mambo King had to leave early for a job, Bernardito would take care of punching out his time card. In exchange for these favors, the Mambo King let Bernardito into his circle of friends at the plant, Cubans and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, who’d sit around at lunch conversing and telling bawdy stories. And Bernardito, an aspiring cartoonist, with his high-school Spanish, would listen attentively, later picking Cesar’s brains about certain words and phrases which he’d collect into a notebook.

  He seemed like a nice enough kid, and that’s why the Mambo King approached him one afternoon and said, “Listen, boy, you’re too young to be missing out on all the fun. Why don’t you come with us tomorrow night after work. Me and my brother, we’re playing this dance in Brooklyn—near where you live—I want you to come with us after work, okay? Just get a little better dressed, wear a nice tie and jacket, like a gentleman.”

  And that was the beginning of a new life, because the next night Bernardito joined the Mambo King and his brother for the evening, eating a steak and a platter of fried sweet plantains and then driving down with them to the Imperial Ballroom, where he fell under the spell of the music and found himself gyrating wildly before the stage like a living hieroglyphic, confusing the ladies with his cryptic moves and strange mode of dress—brown jacket, yellow shirt, green tie, white pants, and brown shoes.

  Taken in by the excitement and glamour of the dance halls, he forgot all about Bensonhurst and started to hang around with the Mambo King on the weekends, rarely coming home before three in the morning. Slowly, under Cesar’s—and Nestor’s—wing, Bernardito became transformed into a high-stepping ballroom suavecito. The first thing that changed was his way of dressing. On a Saturday afternoon, Cesar met Bernardito and they made the rounds of the big department stores and clothing shops. Out went the hand-me-downs from his older brother. With his savings, Bernardito bought the latest in fashion: ten pairs of pleated trousers, wide-lapeled puff-shouldered double-breasted jackets, Italian belts, and sporty two-toned shoes. And he had his hair shaped into a pompadour and grew a wisp of a mustache, after the fashion of his newest friends.

  Then he started to collect Latin records. His Sundays were spent haunting record shops in Harlem and on Flatbush Avenue, so that in time this kid who hadn’t known Xavier Cugat from Jimmy Durante started to accumulate rare recordings by the likes of Ernesto Lecuona, Marion Sunshine, and Miguelito Valdez. And he would have hundreds of these records, enough to fill up three bookcases, one of the best collections in the city.

  He was happy until he started to have fights about his new life with his parents. His parents, he’d told the Mambo King, weren’t too happy about the hours he was keeping and were worried about his new friends. His mother and father, who had emigrated from Russia, must have been quite surprised when, on a Sunday afternoon, they heard their doorbell ring and found the two brothers standing there. They had dressed up in suits, bought flowers and a box of chocolates from the Schrafft’s on 107th Street and Broadway. That afternoon the brothers sat with them, sipping coffee, eating cookies, and behaving so agreeably that Bernardito’s parents changed their minds.

  But, soon afterwards, Bernardito went to a Mambo King party and met Fifi, a thirty-year-old hot tomato, who soon won his heart with affection and with the carnal pleasures of her body. He moved into her apartment on 122nd Street and would spend the next twenty-five years trying to make peace with his parents. Settled in with her, Bernardito began to live his life much as he always would, holding a full-time job by day and working as a freelance illustrator at night: he was the artist for The Adventures of Atomic Mouse comics and had also drawn three Mambo King covers, among them “Mambo Inferno.”

  Then Bernardito’s life fell into the tranquil Cubanophile track of his days. For thirty years he and Cesar Castillo would be friends. And in that time Bernardito not only learned a Latin life-style, speaking a good slangy Cuban Spanish and dancing the mambo and the cha-cha-cha with the best of them, but he also slowly turned his and Fifi’s apartment into a cross between a mambo museum and the parlor of a Havana mansion of the 1920s, with shuttered windows, potted palms, an overhead mahogany fan, animal-footed cabinets and tables, tropical-fish tanks, wicker furniture, a parrot squawking in a cage, candles and candelabra, and, in addition to a big modern RCA television and stereo, a 1920 crank-driven Victrola. Lately he had started to look as if
he had stepped out of that age, parting his hair in the middle, wearing wire-rim glasses and a thin mustache, baggy, suspendered pantalones, bow ties, and flat, black-brimmed straw hats.

  And he had signed photographs of some of the greats: Cesar Castillo, Xavier Cugat, Machito, Nelo Sosa, and Desi Arnaz.

  The day the Mambo King had gone to Bernardito’s house to say goodbye, he found his friend sitting by the window, hunched over a drawing table with a pencil in hand, working out some advertising drawings. A staff artist for the La Prensa syndicate, he also earned extra money as a freelance artist, spicy cartoons for girlie magazines being a quick and easy specialty—a big-assed chick bending over to pick up a rose, her butt out in the world, some man gaping at her, and his matronly wife, beside him, saying, “I didn’t know you liked flowers so much!” That afternoon, he sat beside Bernardito as he worked, the two men talking and drinking. Usually Bernardito listened to music while he worked, and that day had not been different: Nelo Sosa’s orchestra came out of his speakers, sounding beautiful.

  For an hour or so they talked, and then, feeling the sadness of that day, the Mambo King presented his old friend with a package of rare old records from Cuba by the Sexteto Habanero, five 78s he had found in a sidewalk shop in Havana during the 1950s.

  “These are for you, Bernardito.”

  And the Mambo King took a good long look at his friend. The man was in his late forties now but still had this goofy grin of enchantment he’d get when he was nineteen.

  “But why are you giving me these?”

  “Because you’re my friend,” the Mambo King told him. “Besides, I never listen to them anymore. You may as well have them.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Happily, Bernardito Mandelbaum placed upon his old KLH stereo, which had a 78 rpm gear, the Sexteto Habanero’s famed recording of “Mamá Inez.”

  And then he played all the others, and as he did he kept asking, “Are you sure you want to give these to me?”

  “They’re yours.”

  Then they just sat for a time and Cesar asked, “And your señora? When is she coming home?”

  “She should be here soon.”

  Yes, and that was another thing. After waiting twenty-five years for his parents to pass away, he had finally married Fifi.

  It was another hour before Fifi came home, offering to cook the Mambo King a nice healthy dinner of fried steak and plantains, and planting a kiss on his cheek that made him blush.

  But he refused the dinner, saying that he wasn’t feeling well.

  At the door, he said goodbye to Bernardito, giving him a strong embrace and holding it for a long time.

  “Come back on Sunday,” Bernardito told him as the Mambo King made his way down the stairs. “Don’t forget. Sunday.”

  The worst goodbye had been with Eugenio. He didn’t want to leave the kid “behind,” without seeing him one last time. And so, one day, he called Eugenio at his job as a bookkeeper in an artist-supply store on Canal Street, a joint called Pearl Paints, and invited him out to dinner that night, so they could hang around like they used to. They met on 110th Street and ended up in this Dominican place on Amsterdam Avenue, ate a nice meal. Afterwards they made their way out to this little bar called La Ronda, where beers were five dollars apiece but where the stripper dancing in the cage had a nice compact body. They’d come in when she was down to nothing. (Now and then she would go into the back with customers for a price, lie down on a bed, and open her legs.)

  “Mambero,” she called to him when she noticed he had come in. “Are you feeling better?”

  He shrugged. Then she gave Eugenio an up-and-down, and the Mambo King leaned over to his nephew with a twenty-dollar bill in hand, saying, “Do you want to go with her? Makes no difference to me.”

  “You go with her, Uncle.”

  The Mambo King looked at her up in the cage with her firm legs and nice smooth thighs. She’d even shaved her vagina, the slit like a sidewise mouth, which she had made gleamy with some Vaseline and who knew what else. It was tempting, but he said, “No, I’m here to spend the time with you.”

  By then, everybody in the family knew that Cesar had abandoned his special diets and medicines, putting on weight and getting teary-eyed and sluggish. It hit Eugenio bad. As he sat beside his uncle, certain old desires came over him—to run away, go somewhere else, be someone else.

  They listened to music and then there were long periods of silence: the kid seemed so unhappy.

  “Do you remember when we always used to go to places and music jobs together?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “Those were good times, huh?”

  “They were okay.”

  “Well, things change. You’re not a nene anymore and I’m not a young man.”

  Eugenio shrugged.

  “Do you remember when I took you to that woman up on 145th Street?”

  “Yes!”

  “Eugenio, don’t be so cross with me. She was a dish, huh?”

  “She was a pretty woman, Uncle.”

  Then: “Are we going to be here for a long time, Uncle?”

  “No, just for a few drinks, boy.” He sipped. “I just want you to know that . . . you mean a lot here,” and he tapped his chest.

  Eugenio scratching his brow, the dancer leaning forward in her cage and shaking her breasts.

  “I hope you believe me, boy. I want you to believe me.”

  “Uncle . . .”

  “I just wanted to tell you one little thing, man to man, heart to heart.” His whole face was red and immense, his breathing heavy. “Que yo te quiero. I love you, nephew. You understand?”

  “Yes, Uncle, is that why you told me to come here?”

  Then: “Look, Uncle, I really thought something was wrong; I mean, it’s one in the morning and I have to get home.”

  The Mambo King nodded, wanting to let out a cry of excruciating pain. “Well, I appreciate that you have come to see your old mambero uncle,” he said.

  And then they sat in the bar awhile, watching the stripper and not saying much. The jukebox loud with the latest Latin hit-makers’ songs—musicians like Oscar de León and perennial favorites like Tito Puente.

  Later, they were both standing by the subway on 110th Street and Broadway.

  Eugenio had to get down to East 10th Street, where he lived, while the Mambo King would catch the uptown local. The last words he said to his nephew repeated the words he used always to say when he was drunk. “Well, don’t forget about me, huh? And don’t forget that your uncle loves you.” Then he embraced his nephew for the last time.

  Waiting for his train, he had watched his nephew across the platform. Eugenio was sitting on a bench reading a fancy paper, The New York Times. His nephew, who had gone to college, was as melancholic as his father and becoming more so as he got older. As the Mambo King’s train approached, he whistled across to Eugenio, who barely looked up in time to see his uncle waving. Pressed against the window and squinting through his dark green glasses, the Mambo King watched his nephew out of the rushing car until he was swallowed up in the dark tunnel.

  That had been a few nights before, the Mambo King remembered as he sat in the Hotel Splendour.

  Remembering something else, too, he went in this little suitcase and took out some envelopes and letters so that he might look at them one more time, and then he fished through the soft cloth pockets of his suitcase and withdrew a fine black-handled straight razor, the gift of a friend many years ago, and placed it before him on the table, in case he found himself lingering too long into the night in his room in the Hotel Splendour.

  MUSICIAN, SINGER, AND SUPERINTENDENT, he had also become a teacher in the early 1960s. Most of his classes, which would gather on Sunday afternoons, consisted of five or six students, and for a few years included Eugenio, who started trumpet lessons at about the age of twelve. In the nice weather he’d sometimes hold the lessons out in the park, but in the cooler seasons they’d g
ather in his apartment. He gave these lessons for free, because it made him feel a little bit like his old teacher Eusebio Stevenson and the kindly Julián García, who had looked out after him many years ago.

  And because he didn’t like to be alone.

  Happy to have these kids around, he’d usually spring for sodas and cupcakes, but if he had a few extra dollars in his pocket he would send Eugenio out to the bodega across the street with five dollars to buy a few pounds of cold cuts and some loaves of Italian bread and bags of potato chips, so that these boys, some of whom did not always have much to eat, might have a nice lunch afterwards.

  Gathered in his living room, the boys would wait for the maestro to come out with an armful of records and his portable record player. Depending on his mood, he would just teach technique or, as he did on this day, play some mambos and old canciones and drift off into memoryville, relating to them some of the very same things that his teacher, Eusebio Stevenson, had once told him:

  “Now, the rumba is derived from the guaguancó, which goes back to long ago, many hundreds of years ago, when the Spaniards first brought the flamenco style of music to Cuba, and this Spanish style, mixed up with the rhythms of the Africans, played on the drums, led to the early forms of the rumba. The word ‘rumba’ means magnificence. The slaves who first danced this were usually chained up at night by the ankle, so they were forced to limit their movements: when they danced their rumbas, it was with much movement of the hips and little movement of the feet. That’s the authentic rumba from the nineteenth century, with drums and voices and melody lines that sound Spanish and African at the same time . . . And what is the African? The African always sounds to me like people chanting in a forest, or shouting across a river. These rumbas were first played with only trumpets and drums. When you hear modern music and there’s a drum jam session, a descarga, it’s called the rumba section. In any case, these rumbas became popular in the nineteenth century; the small military bands in the towns of Cuba used to spice up their bland waltzes and military marches with rumba rhythms, so that people could let loose and have a good time.