The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  “And I have nothing,” she said desperately. “When I’m not working downstairs, I’m here, alone. He won’t even let me go out on the street unless he’s with me in the wheelchair.”

  Then: “Hombre. . .” and she undid the front buttons of her dress, from her neck to the hem of her skirt, and spread it open. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She had a short and plumpish body, her bottom nice and round, and large stretch-marked breasts. Resting back on the couch, she told him, “Cesar, I’m waiting.”

  When he hesitated, she sat forward, undid his trousers, and fondled him so that his thing unwillingly (he liked Don Emilio) sprang into the world and she wrapped her fingers around him and fed upon him as if she were a small creature of the forest seeking honey from a hive.

  Mother Nature took over, and with his trousers and drawers pulled down below his knees, he made terrified love to her, afraid that Don Emilio or one of his brothers might find out about them. The first time he had been down in the cold-storage room, a year ago, when Don Emilio was sick in bed with the flu, and it was very late and he had been playing his usual night’s work (strolling among the noisy tables playing “Malagueña,” singing “Bésame Mucho” and “Cuando Caliente el Sol”) and was waiting around to get paid, when she told him to come back with her to the office so that the waiters would not see how much she was going to give him; and then she pushed open the door of the cold-storage room, hitched her skirt up over her waist, and that was that, as he was a little drunk and her panties had fallen down nicely over her black-nyloned, red-high-heeled legs. The phone in the office next door kept ringing—Don Emilio calling to see when she would come home—and the melody of Beny More’s “Santa Isabel de las Lajas” came in faintly through the walls, his knees scraping against fifty-pound burlap sacks of lentils, and Doña Carmen’s face crushed against his chest (and biting whatever she could reach), and then everything ended quickly. It hadn’t taken her more than two minutes to get what she had wanted. Afterwards he had felt bad, for in the days when he had first started playing music again and would go from restaurant to restaurant looking for work, to raise money for the family in Cuba, Don Emilio had been one of the first to hire him.

  But he had to admit that once they had started, there wasn’t much chance of stopping . . . Just her hand on him would have been enough, and she had done more than that; thick as a sink J-joint, his thing was slowly entering her. (She kept stopping him every three inches or so and would throw back her head and grind her hips until the tight hot space blossomed with moisture and unfurled like silk and then she would let in more, whipping her head from side to side and grinding her teeth to suppress her moans.) Once he was all the way inside her, it took him only seven strokes, his immense body smothering her, her pelvic bone hitting hard against his, everything squirmy underneath, the tip of his penis licking her cervical flower, and Carmen saying, “Don Emilio was once built like you. I used to call him caballo.”

  Then it was all over; she broke into pieces and kicked over a lamp and he barely had time to get dressed, say “Good day,” and drink down a glass of water. His livid bone tucked back into his trousers, he found himself standing outside her door, anxiously, as if he’d just narrowly avoided being hit by a bus.

  Downstairs, with his guitar case in hand, and into the kitchen, and crossing into the dining room, and thinking about Carmen’s rump and how she had placed his hand over her mouth as she came, flicking her tongue in and out between his index and forefinger, and Cuba and Don Emilio and the crowded room, smell of pork chops and black beans and rice and fried plantains, and wondered if they’d smell Doña Carmen on his hands or his face. Making his way toward the door, he buttoned his London Fog overcoat, and was waving goodbye to his friends until next week, when Don Emilio called him over.

  “Cesar, do me a favor while you’re here,” Don Emilio said to the Mambo King, holding him firmly by the wrist. “Sing that nice little number for those newlyweds over there. He’s the son of a good friend of mine.”

  “Yes, if you want me to, Don Emilio.”

  “It would make me happy.”

  And Don Emilio gave Cesar a friendly rap on the shoulders and the Mambo King got out his guitar, slung its velvet strap over his shoulders, and walked over to the newlyweds’ table. First he sang the Ernesto Lecuona song “Siempre en Mi Corazón,” and then, strumming two chords softly, an A-minor and an E-major (the opening chords to “Beautiful María of My Soul”), he spoke these words:

  “Children, may God bless you on your journey. Now you are entering a special time in your lives, precious but difficult . . . There will be trials and happinesses awaiting you, and there will be times when you, as wife, and you, as husband, will perhaps quarrel with the other and wish that you had never made this bond. And your hearts may wander, and sickness may bring despair. But if these things should ever happen, remember that this life passes quickly and that a life spent without love is lonely, while the love that a man and a woman feel for each other and their children shines like sunlight in the heart. And this sunlight accompanies you forever, protects you all your life, even unto the final days when you are old together and the days are not so long, when you may fear the time when your Maker calls you from the world. But just remember your mutual love will always preserve you and it will be your comfort forever.”

  And when he finished, Cesar bowed and the young couple, aquiver with joy, thanked him.

  “Bueno,” he said to Don Emilio. “I have to get back to Manhattan.”

  “Thank you, my friend”—and he patted Cesar’s back and gave the Mambo King a five-dollar bill. “For your trouble, my friend. We’ll be seeing you next week, yes?”

  “Yes, Don Emilio.”

  Nervous and vaguely elated, he rode home to La Salle Street. Inside his bathroom, he undid his trousers to wash himself over the sink: even though he felt like a traitor, the image of Carmencita’s furious passion was like the lick of a thick female tongue over his member, and just like that he watched, as if from the mouth of a dolphin, spout three clear drops of semen, stretched like a silver wire between the tip of his thing to that point in the air where it snapped free of his dense finger.

  AND THERE WAS THAT MORNING when he had gone upstairs to have a nice Sunday breakfast with Delores and the kids. He was enjoying a chorizo-and-fried-egg sandwich when he heard Frankie the Exterminator honking his horn from the street.

  “Yo!” Frankie called up into the window.

  Down below, Frankie was happy with excitement.

  Cesar went downstairs.

  “You know my friend Georgie from Trinidad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, he wants us to go down there for carnival.”

  He started to think that he hadn’t had a nice vacation lately, trips everywhere to the Bronx and Brooklyn, but nowhere else.

  “Thing is, Georgie’s got a house there, and all we would have to pay is the airfare and whatever we eat, which is cheap there.”

  By the following Thursday night, Cesar, Frankie, and Georgie were dancing in a carnival line. Wearing a sheet and a bull’s head, Cesar danced, blowing his trumpet. Frankie was the devil; Georgie, a naughty harlot. They stormed through the crowded streets, climbed onto the back of flower-covered floats, threw pennies and candies at the children, flirted with the pretty women in their one-piece bathing suits and bikinis, by day enjoying the tropical sun and by night the lantern-lit porches, party houses out of whose windows blared the music of that incomparable Trinidadian, the Mighty Sparrow, whom Cesar had admired since the mid-1950s.

  The crowd was so merry and drunk that the women took off their tops and the men, being swinish louts, lost control, pinching asses, grabbing breasts, and stealing kisses. The masks helped, as they did away with the lines and the sagginess of the men’s once handsome faces. Flirting back, the women shook their hips and, audaciously rolling their tongues around their lips, grabbed their most audacious parts, grabbed the men, too. In every alley there was at least
one drummer, one trumpeter, one blaring speaker, and a half-dozen couples shamelessly fornicating. There was so much lovemaking going on, so much dancing and cavorting, that the streets smelled of sweat, perfume, and sperm. Packs of wild hounds barked and howled their joy. Then they spilled into their friend Georgie’s little house, with its pink and light blue walls, and rolled around on the floor, laughing and kissing their new lady companions.

  The men were having such a good time they hardly slept. The first night, a half hour’s worth of sleep was all that Cesar had. They’d bought two cases of rum and filled the house with women, soft and delicious girls of sixteen and overripe but willing ladies of fifty. Georgie turned up his record player as loud as it would go: everybody danced some more. Hour after hour they listened to the Mighty Sparrow and his celebrated calypso orchestra, and when they weren’t dancing and drinking, they were back on the streets howling like the roaming packs of wild hounds.

  It would have been a dream vacation save for the frailties and limits of endurance of the human body in men approaching their fifties. All the flowing blood, the rum-sludge-filled stomachs, the dizzying heads, the spurting sexual organs, the bubbling digestive systems continuing without respite. These were fellows who had never read health magazines with their articles and medical studies about how many times a man was supposed to get an erection. But these three got it up, breathing the heady air of miasmic, stupefying vapors and living for fun.

  AND WHY SUDDENLY REMEMBER another friend who worked as a caretaker in the cemetery near Edgar Allan Poe’s house up in the Bronx?

  “No easy job working here at this cemetery,” the man told the Mambo King. “Tell you that, coño. A lot of voodoo and santería people come here to hold ceremonies because it’s consecrated ground, and I know this because sometimes in the morning I find blood on the ground, ashes and small-animal bones strewn about the graves: sometimes the tombstones are splattered with blood.”

  “I would be frightened.”

  “No, these people are not so bad, personally they are quite nice. I see them sometimes coming by in the mornings. Tourists too, people from Europe. See”—and he pointed across the way. “Just down that way stands the cottage of the writer Edgar Allan Poe, that’s where he lived for a few years. That’s the house where his wife died of tuberculosis in the wintertime. They were so poor that he didn’t even have a cent for firewood and he had to cover her up with newspapers, and he would put his house cats over her so that she might be warmer. But she died anyway, the poor man by her side. In any case, the santeros say that his house emanates a great supernatural force and that spirits hover around it, and so that’s why they especially like this cemetery: the caretaker of Poe’s house, who also works for the city, told me that he sometimes finds bones and blood and bird feathers scattered over the ground by the entrance.”

  He remembered more:

  There had been the pachanga in 1960.

  The bossa nova in 1962.

  The Mozambique and the bugaloo in 1965.

  After that, he couldn’t figure out what was happening.

  One thing he never got used to in those days was the change in fashion. It certainly wasn’t 1949 anymore. It seemed that elegance had gone down the toilet and the young people of that time were dressing in circus costumes. The men wearing Army fatigues and big thick boots, the women plaid lumberjack shirts and formless, loose-hanging dresses. It was all beyond him. Then it was bell-bottomed trousers, paisley jackets, and impossibly wide-collared shirts. And the hair. Sideburns, muttonchops, walrus mustaches, hair down to the shoulders. (Even Eugenio had been that way, wearing it in a ponytail down his back and looking like a forlorn Indian.) He’d shake his head and in his humble way try to maintain the elegance of his youth, even if Leticia called him “Mr. Old-fashioned.” But, turning around, he saw that even many of his fellow Latin musicians had changed, wearing their hair long and sporting beards and thick Afros. Carajo, they were going with the times!

  That’s why, when he attempted a recording comeback in 1967, he put out a 45 rpm called “Psychedelic Baby” on the Hip Records label out of Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn, a basic Latin bugaloo, with a hybrid Latin-rock improvisation on the flip side (he was using young musicians) built upon a twelve-bar blues progression, a boogie-woogie spiced up by congas and 3/5/7 harmonies on the horns. (For that record he used a young Brooklyn pianist named Jacinto Martínez, Manny his bassist, a sax player named Poppo, Pito on drums, and three unknowns on the horns.) The record sold two hundred copies and was most notable for its black-and-white cover, the only photograph of the Mambo King in a goatee á la Pérez Prado. Dressed in guayabera, wrap-around shades, matching blue linen trousers and white golden-buckled shoes, he had posed for the photograph in front of the old 1964 World’s Fair Unisphere in Flushing Meadows, Queens.

  (There was one more recording comeback that same year, a 33 LP called the “The Fabulous Cesar Castillo Returns!” which included a new bolero “Sadness” and a new version of “Beautiful María of My Soul” done with five instruments accompanying Cesar on the guitar and vocals. A memorable recording that rapidly disappeared into the 39 cents bins of Woolworth’s and John’s Bargain stores everywhere.)

  Soon afterwards Cesar tried to audition for a spot at the Cheetah discotheque and was passed over for an act called Johnny Bugaloo.

  And 1967 was the year that his brothers Eduardo and Miguel and their families finally left Cuba and settled in Miami, leaving one brother, Pedrocito, and their father behind. (The old man, white-haired and cantankerous in his seventies, still worked the farm with his son. The very day that the Mambo King sat in his room in the Hotel Splendour years later, he was still going strong, an old, bent-over man cursing and talking to himself and perhaps daydreaming about his youth in a place called Fan Sagrada in Galicia, Spain.) They were in their late fifties, but their sons were young and ambitious and eventually ventured out into their own businesses—a dry-cleaning service and clothing store. When the Mambo King went down to visit them, they were pure gratitude, as, by then, he had been sending them money for over five years. They told the Mambo King that he could come and stay with them in their crowded and cheerful households any time he wanted to. He did so on four different occasions over the years, but became a little saddened by the sight of his two hickish brothers growing old on chairs in front of the stores in Little Havana, their faces heavy with the jowls of daily monotony and their eyes dreamy, while their sons charged forward, selling the latest Malibu and New York fashions to rich jet-setting South Americans and filling their houses with appliances and putting enough money away so they could send their kids off to law and business school! Visiting them, he always had the feeling that he had stepped into a retirement home as his older brothers moved through the bustle of family life and enterprise like ghosts and drove with their sons to get a little cup of café negro in the evenings in cars with .38 revolvers stashed in paper bags under the front seat—who could be happy with that? (Then, too, there would be their visit to New York, when the cousins met the cousins, the newly arrived young Cubans checking out longhaired Eugenio and quiet, beautiful Leticia, neither party saying a word to the other the whole evening.)

  The following year he dented his trumpet while he and a pickup group were playing a block party in the Bronx. That was a period of “racial unrest,” as the newspapers called it. Martin Luther King was dead, Malcolm X was dead, and young black people were restless. (The day after Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot, the stores all up and down Broadway and Amsterdam closed up and burly Irish policemen stood on every corner waiting for the riots to spread south of 125th Street.) They were performing in the Roosevelt High School playground and found themselves surrounded by a crowd that wanted to hear a song called “Cool Jerk” and were clapping and chanting that name, while the group of seven musicians continued to play their mambos, cha-cha-chas, and old standards like “Bésame Mucho” and “Tú.” But some in the crowd were drinking and soon started throwing bottles to where all t
he Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans were hanging out, what the newspapers would call the “Spanish contingent,” and they threw bottles back and someone had a knife, zip, and people started to shout and rush the bandstand, and zip, the conga player was slashed in the arm and the bass player was kicked in the stomach by someone trying to steal his wallet. When this started, Cesar was in the midst of a mellow solo, sounding nice and feeling good because he and his old pal, Frankie the Exterminator, and his bassist, ex-Mambo King Manny, had killed a case of Rheingold beer before the show. Some kid came toward Cesar to steal his guitar, which he had set down behind him, but he took his trumpet and bopped the kid on the head with it. Then things were calmer. The cops came. The representative from Rheingold, one of the block party’s sponsors, pleaded for order, was booed down, and El Conjunto Castillo packed up and went home. Things like that happened to musicians from time to time, and made them laugh.

  AND NOW THE MEMORY OF THAT woman again struggling down the escalator of Macy’s department store, overloaded with Christmas packages. The Mambo King had bought his niece and nephew their Christmas toys, a slim-banded watch for his sister-in-law, and a Japanese transistor radio for her husband, Pedro. La Nochebuena—Christmas Eve—was one of his favorite times of year: the man would make trips downtown to the docks and over to the big department stores, to Chinatown and Delancey Street, accumulating boxes of scarves, gloves, socks, hot watches, record albums, and bottles of imported perfume and cologne that he would give out to his acquaintances and friends. And he loved receiving gifts: the year before, the “family” had given him a white silk scarf. He loved the way it looked when he wore his overcoat and black-brimmed hat and soft Spanish-leather gloves. He was wearing that scarf and looking very dapper when he saw the woman’s shopping bag split open, her presents tumbling down the stairs. A gentleman, he stooped over, helping her with the packages and, as it turned out, got on the same train with her, an uptown number 2.