The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “The mambo, that’s another dance. That came along in the 1940s, before you were all born. As a dance it’s like the rumba, but with much more movement of the feet, as if the chains had been removed. That’s why everybody looks crazy, like a jitterbug on fire, when they dance the mambo.”

  And he’d show them a few steps, his lumbering body moving nimbly across the floor, and the kids laughed.

  “The mambo’s freedom comes originally from the guaracha, an old country-style dance of Cuba, always played cheerfully.

  “The stuff we have now like the pachanga is really just a variation. Most of what you are going to play, if you should ever play with a conjunto, will be in 2/4 time, and on top of that you’ll hear the claves rhythm in 3/2, which goes one-two-three, one-two.

  “Now, most orchestras are going to play their arrangements in the following way, the songs being divided into three sections. The first is the ‘head’ or the melody; the second is the coro, or chorus, where you get the singers harmonizing; and then finally the mambo or rumba section. Machito often uses that way of arranging.”

  Then he would go on about the different instruments and time schemes, this whole erudite discussion covering up the fact that he did not know how to read music himself.

  After this, the actual lessons and playing of instruments, with the most attentive pupils being Miguelito, a stringy Puerto Rican, who wanted to learn the saxophone; Ralphie, Leon the one-eyed plumber’s son, and Eugenio, with his decent ear and careful demeanor. Both played the trumpet. Taking turns, each student would get up and play a song and the Mambo King would comment on his technique, and show the student how to correct a flaw. And this method worked, as some of his students excelled and moved on to other teachers who knew how to read music. This was one shortcoming of which the Mambo King was ashamed. While he could sit them down and identify the notes in a written piece, he’d never learned how to read quickly. His face would flush and he would avoid looking into his students’ eyes; and forget about playing through complicated jazz scores like the books that Miguelito would turn up with, thick with Duke Ellington arrangements.

  Still, there was no shortage of new students. There was always some poor kid from La Salle or Harlem or the Bronx who had heard about a Mambo King who gave free music lessons, and sandwiches, too! And the Mambo King never regretted taking them in. His only bad experience involved a kid with a pockmarked face and gruff, fast-talking manner á la Phil Silvers in the Sergeant Bilko television series. Cesar knew Eddie from the neighborhood. In the middle of his second lesson, the kid went into the kitchen to get a glass of water: later, while getting dressed to go out, the Mambo King couldn’t find a gold-banded Timex watch and about twenty dollars in cash that he had left in the drawer of his bedroom dresser. Missing, too, was a Ronson lighter from another drawer and a silver ring which the Mambo King had received from one of his fans. Eddie was caught trying to peddle the ring in a Harlem pawnshop, and did an afternoon in the juvenile pen. He was never allowed back into the house, but the Mambo King continued giving lessons to his other students, a handful of whom ended up as struggling happy professionals.

  Now he was listening to Eugenio practicing his trumpet and it was raining. Under a blanket of late-afternoon drowsiness, he listened carefully to the kid, whose playing sounded so distant: at times he confused the raindrops on the window ledges with those which used to fall in Cuba, and turned happily in bed, as if he were a kid again, when sleep was beautiful and the world seemed an endless thing. Slowly he came out of this—his dog Poochie had started barking because a fire alarm down the street had gone off—and he sat up and lit a cigarette. He’d been out real late the night before, working some job in the Bronx, and his head was pounding. Something about a woman in a short green dress kissing him in front of a jukebox, and then something else about a horrendous time trying to get a cab in those dead Bronx streets at four in the morning. Then what could he remember? Last thing he knew, he was resting in bed and could feel his tie being slipped off from around his neck, someone unbuttoning his shirt and trying to pull it off his back. Then the pleasure of his shoes slipping off his feet, and those tired soles refreshed by the cool night air. Then: “Good night, Uncle,” and the light clicking off.

  Well, he had to get up, had another job to play up in the Bronx, any other night, dear God, but tonight. He would have preferred to stay in bed and fall asleep again to that nice rush of water out the rain gutters, which always reminded him of tropical storms like those he was ecstatic about in Cuba. (A crack of lightning reminded him that he had once been a little kid dancing on the patio tiles and spinning in circles, euphoric under the downpour.) He didn’t want the rain to stop, didn’t want to get up, but finally left his bed. Eugenio was playing “Bésame Mucho,” and as the Mambo King took care of business in the toilet and later shaved, he reflected on how, after nearly two years, the kid was finally starting to show some real improvement. Not that anyone in the family thought he should settle on a musician’s life, no way, boy! You had better go to school so you don’t have to slave your ass off working with your hands or playing jobs in the middle of nowhere until four in the morning. And understand, there’s nothing wrong with entertaining the people or with the enjoyment of playing itself. No, it’s everything else eating at you, the long trips home so late, the tiredness in your bones, the kind of dishonest people you have to deal with sometimes, the feeling that one night is going be like another, forever and forever.

  Unless you’re very very lucky, he’d tell the kid, you have to work hard. Unless you’re like Frank Sinatra or Desi Arnaz with a beautiful house in California, you know, kid? I advise you to be sensible. Get yourself a nice girl, get married, have kids, the works. And if you try to have a family on a musician’s salary, you better believe that you’re going to have to get a regular job before you know it. So if you want to play, go ahead, but just remember that for you it should be a hobby. I mean to say, boy, you don’t want to end up like your uncle, do you?

  (The kid would always lower his head.)

  Later, when he went upstairs, the kid had already eaten his dinner and was waiting anxiously for his uncle in the living room. In the kitchen, the Mambo King joined pretty Leticia and dour Pedro at the table and ate his meal while listening to Delores carry on about the boy: “You must tell him to calm down. He’s going to get in trouble. Do you understand?”

  They’d been having trouble with him for the last year. He still wasn’t getting along with his stepfather and had started to run in the streets with some bad kids. They’d tried everything: they’d gone after him with a belt, taken him to the priest, to the youth counselor, and on one occasion Delores had called the police. But none of it worked: the kid reacted by running away and hopping a train that took him in the dead of winter to Buffalo, New York, where he holed up in a rail yard for three days and nearly caught pneumonia. And she wasn’t even happy about him going off on those late-night jobs with the Mambo King, but at least that was better than hanging around in the street.

  “Just talk some sense into him,” Delores pleaded with him. “Tell him it’s not good for him to be like that.”

  “I will.”

  On their way to these jobs he’d tell Eugenio to listen to his mother, to forget about the kids on the street. “You know I’d never lay a finger on you, boy, but if you keep going this way, I’ll have to do something about it.”

  “Would you do that to me?”

  “Well, I, I, I wouldn’t want to, because you’re my blood”—and he’d be thinking about the beatings he’d once received—“but you should absolutely respect your mother.”

  “I don’t respect her no more.”

  “No, no, nephew, don’t be that way.”

  But he could see how the kid might be pissed at Pedro. The guy was a stiff.

  “Eugenio, think what you want to think, but just remember that your mother’s a good woman and that she’d never do anything that’s not right. I mean, you shouldn’t be so angry
just because she chose to marry again. She did it for you, do you understand?”

  And the kid would nod.

  “I heard you today,” he said. “You sounded good.”

  Then: “Let’s go.”

  The club was up a steep hill, a narrow stairway, past a NO GUNS PLEASE sign, a little old lady selling admission tickets by the door. By the time they’d arrived, they were chilled to the bone. The warmth of the crowd, comforting.

  Voices:

  “Hey, look who’s here!”

  “Mambero!”

  “Nice to see you. This is my nephew, a giant, huh?”

  Then: “Good, everybody’s here.”

  Sometimes, when he’d rap Eugenio on the back, hitting the frame of a solid man, he would marvel at the passage of time.

  When they reached the little wooden platform that was their stage, he met with his musicians, all of whom he had played with before, but who had never met Eugenio.

  “He’s learning the trumpet,” the Mambo King said to their pianist, Raúl.

  “Then let him sit in.”

  “No, he’s happy just to play the bongos.”

  And just to be with me. When he was younger, a few years back, the kid used to stay in my apartment all day, watching television and doing as he pleased. Once he asked me, “Uncle, can I come and live with you?”

  And I answered him, “But, chico, you almost do.”

  That night the Mambo King sang well. He played his usual sets, mixing fast and slow songs, joking with the audience and sometimes stepping out onto the floor. Spinning around (as he used to in the rain, how he sometimes wished to be under that wind-torn tree), he would catch sight of his nephew sitting on a black drum case, tapping away on a pair of bongo drums set between his knees, and looking nearly like a grown man. Soon enough, that would be the case and the kid would leave their household and things would never be the same again. Was that why he always hung around his uncle? What could that kid be thinking? Maybe he just concentrated on the music or daydreamed—but about what?

  “Do you want to play the trumpet later? We can do ‘Bésame Mucho,’ would you like that?”

  “No, I’m happy just sitting here.”

  He let him have his way, never forcing the kid. Still, he couldn’t understand why his nephew practiced so much, if he didn’t want to play.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, hombre! Come on,” said another of the musicians.

  But he kept to the bongos. And just then the Mambo King thought that Eugenio was even more reserved than his father, his poor father.

  Playing a trumpet solo, during “Santa Isabel de las Lajas,” he realized that he simply did not understand Eugenio. Delores kept telling him that the boy was angry, that he would throw things down from the walls, had scattered Pedro’s bookkeeping ledgers and his stamp collection all over the floor, that he had been caught running through the streets breaking windows. That in the street he was quick-tempered, starting fights over nothing.

  “Don’t you see that, Cesar?”

  If that was so, why was the boy so gentle with me?

  There he was, tapping the drums, how could anyone say that things weren’t right with him?

  You know, boy, I’ll be sorry when you’re out of the house.

  Tilting his head back, he drifted aloft on the flow of notes, drifted into his vision of Eugenio:

  A boy who used to fall asleep on his lap in midafternoon, a boy who would hold him steady on some nights when they walked along the street and he needed someone to help him on the way. A hand touching his face, the quiet boy who preferred television in his uncle’s apartment, rather than in his own. (The boy loving that program on which me and my brother had appeared.) And he was a respectful boy, a boy he’d take to Coney Island and to the Palisades amusement park or to visit friends like Machito or to the market on 125th Street. A boy who knew how to say “Come on” to him, when his spirits were low as they were on that afternoon three years ago when, standing on the stoop and looking around at the world, he shuddered with longing for his mother, whom he would never see again. A boy who took his hand that day and led him over to the market, where the vendors had set up stalls selling everything from Barbie dolls to Hula Hoops, a boy who had pulled him free of his sadness, running happily from booth to booth and finding him, of all things, a secondhand store that had a rare mambo record by one of Cesar’s favorites, Alberto Iznaga!

  That was all he had to know, all that he knew, all that he would ever know about the kid.

  If I could give you anything in the world, I would, boy, but I don’t have that power.

  He leaned back from the microphone, touching Eugenio’s head.

  Later he stood by the window watching the street, with a drink in hand, whiskey that made him ache a little less.

  I would have brought your Papi back in a second if I could.

  “Eugenio, do me a favor and get me another drink?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  I would have snapped my fingers . . .

  And when he got the drink and started to belt it down, he tried to reassure the boy: “Don’t worry, I’m too tired to stay out late tonight.”

  Around one-thirty, they played a final set: “El Bodeguero,” “Tú,” “Siempre en Mi Corazón,” “Frenesí,” and “Qué Mambo!”

  And there they were at three o’clock in the morning at the 149th Street station, waiting for the express into Manhattan.

  The stillness in the station, the boy leaning up against his uncle, and his uncle against a column, black instrument case by his side.

  THE MAMEY TREE RESTAURANT, a huge place on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street in Brooklyn, with two dining rooms and a juice and sandwich bar that wrapped around the corner and opened to the sidewalk.

  Its owner, Don Emilio, would pass his days seated in a wheelchair by the cash register, sternly scanning the dining room. He wore gleamy metal-rim glasses and his guayabera shirt pockets were stuffed with panatelas and red-nibbed, shiny ballpoint pens, always arranged neatly in a row. His legs dangled, hopelessly, in a pair of black pantalones.

  The poor man had arrived in the States, settled in Brooklyn, and like many other Cubans worked like an animal to save money and start a business, the restaurant, which flourished, and then boom, a stroke filled his legs with sawdust and he ended up in the wheelchair, paralyzed below his waist. “Used to be a nice guy,” the waiters told Cesar. “Used to be proud of the whole works and treat us good, only now all he thinks about is that people are robbing him . . . the same way that God robbed him of his legs.”

  Walking into the crowded dining room this Saturday afternoon, the Mambo King sheepishly removed his hat and with head bowed said, “Good afternoon, Don Emilio.”

  “How are you, my friend?”

  “Good, Don Emilio. I’ve come for my guitar. I left it here last night.”

  (Because he had been drunk and did not want to take it on the subway.)

  “My wife told me. I think she put it in the back.”

  “Yes?”

  Through a pair of double doors he made his way into the bustling kitchen, where three cooks were working over huge, many-burner stoves and ovens, baking chicken and pork chops and making pots of rice, broth and fish soup, frying plantains and boiling yuca.

  “The boss sent me back here for my guitar.”

  “Carmen’s taken it upstairs. She said she didn’t think the heat would be good for it.”

  Then the cook, in a long, sauce-stained apron, pointed out to a back door that opened into a yard. “Up those stairs, on the second floor.”

  Across a small back yard where a tree and flowers had managed to grow through the cracked concrete floor, he made his way into another doorway and up the steps to Don Emilio’s apartment on the second floor. When his wife opened the door, the apartment was glowing with sunlight and smelled like roses. Inside, set out on every table, desk, and sill, bouquet after bouquet of flowers, so many that their colors floated through the room.
>
  (And he remembers again how his mother in Cuba used to fill the house with flowers.)

  The Mambo King took off his hat and, flashing a warm smile, said quietly, “Carmencita, I’ve come to get my guitar.”

  A pretty woman in her late thirties, with a vaguely defeated air about her, Don Emilio’s wife, Carmen, was wearing a clean, matronly, pink sleeveless dress. With her coiffure of hair-sprayed curls, long eyelashes, thick lipstick, and mascara, she seemed ready to step out. No children in the apartment, a few photographs set out here and there in the room, including a wedding picture taken down in Holguín, Cuba, in a plaza, before the revolution, when Don Emilio had the use of his legs. (He was this tall, grinning fellow, holding his wife close.) An antique crucifix over the couch (And, Jesus, promise to help me), electric sun-rayed clock, a big color TV set, a plastic-covered couch. It was an old apartment with a brand-new bathroom, where there was a fancy-looking hospital-style commode with handles fitted onto the seat.

  “Please come in, Cesar.”

  “Okay, but I only came to get the guitar.”

  In its black case, the guitar was leaning up against the radiator.

  “I wanted to talk with you,” Carmen said.

  The Mambo King shook his head. “I’ll listen, but if you’re going to talk to me about your husband, I want no part of it. I have nothing against Don Emilio and . . .”