The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  And what happened? Came home one day, walking down the street in high jackboots, uniform pressed, and the brim of his military cap a shiny black. Out of his mouth came “Gook this, gook that,” and it was off to Vietnam, where on his first jump he landed on a mine and was shipped home in a metal container the size of a Kleenex box. On top of his closed coffin with swirly brass rails, a small American flag, a Purple Heart, a photograph of his handsome face. Cesar held Frankie by the arm throughout the funeral, looked out for Frankie, kept him drunk for a week.

  He found some comfort in wrapping his arms around his friend’s shoulders and saying, “Now, now this will pass.” He found some comfort in feeling the man’s pain, as if it somehow aggrandized or glorified his own.

  Sometimes there were three or four of them down in his apartment or in his basement workroom, drinking until their faces peeled off and all that was left was shadows.

  Sad expressions, twisted mouths, voices so slurry no one could understand what the other was saying.

  IN THOSE DAYS HE HAD A FRIEND who was a petty gangster with a reputation for sponsoring businesses. His name was Fernando Pérez and for a long time he had been considered a respectable member of the neighborhood. He’d been around for a long time and ran most of the numbers shops on Amsterdam and upper Broadway. He was squat, square-faced, short-limbed, and stubby-fingered. Gentlemanly in gray leisure suits, he liked to wear a white black-brimmed hat and pointy white crocodile-leather shoes with three-inch heels. He used to dine regularly at Violeta’s downtown and at another little place on 127th and Manhattan, where he would sometimes run into Cesar. Although he went around with two rough-looking men, he was the picture of civility. He kept an apartment on La Salle Street, a house in Queens, a house near Mayagüez in Puerto Rico, and a fourth, legendary apartment on 107th between Broadway and Amsterdam. This was known locally as the fortress, and rumor had it that the man kept all his money in a huge safe built into the wall, that to get to that safe you had to break down three heavy doors and fight off numerous bodyguards posted on the stoop, in the hallway, and then in different rooms.

  He had been a big Cesar Castillo fan back when. He had courted his wife, Ismelda, at the dance halls where the Mambo Kings played, and on those nights Pérez had always sent the Mambo King a good bottle of champagne to drink at his table. They’d greet each other by the bar of joints like the Park Palace, send greetings to each other’s families. Their only dispute, now forgotten, had happened years ago when the Mambo Kings, after their appearance on the I Love Lucy show, had been closest to fame. Fernando Pérez had wanted to put them under contract, but Cesar and Nestor wanted nothing to do with him. It had hurt his feelings enough that for about ten years he never said a word to the Mambo King.

  One day in 1972, as Cesar was sitting in Violeta’s restaurant, Pérez walked in with an entourage of friends. He was flashing a wad of bills and dropping twenties on the head of a young and delighted woman, who squealed and sent kisses flying through the air as she gathered up the money. And he announced, with grandiosity: “I’m buying dinner for everybody in here tonight.”

  So the patrons applauded him and he sat down. His party dined on suckling pork and platter after platter of rice and beans, yuca, and tostones. Cesar had noticed him when he walked in, had nodded respectfully. Later, Pérez came over and they embraced as if they were the oldest friends in the world.

  “It’s good to see you, my old friend,” Fernando Pérez told the Mambo King. “We shouldn’t lose more time in our friendship. Life is too short.”

  They talked: Pérez had just gotten over a heart attack, and in the flush of appreciation for finding more time in this world, he had apparently turned into a more magnanimous soul. And there was something else: around Pérez’s neck there was a large, glittery, rhinestone-encrusted crucifix, the kind widows wear. This he touched continuously during his inquiry about Cesar’s life.

  “What am I doing?” the Mambo King said. “I’m working with musicians, nothing that will make me rich, you understand, but I bring in my few dollars here and there. And I’m in the building over there on La Salle Street.”

  He was saying all this with shame, because long ago Pérez had told him: “Unless you act now to insure your future, people will forget about you just like this.” He had snapped his fingers.

  Now that he had some distance on all that and he could tolerate things again, the Mambo King began to feel disturbed by what he did not have in this world. He was getting older. He was fifty-four and had been throwing his money away on women, gambling, and friends for years.

  He had no health insurance, no security, no little house in the Pennsylvania countryside, as a violinist friend did. No little bodega like Manny’s.

  What did he have? A few letters from Cuba, a wall filled with autographed pictures, a headful of memories, sometimes scrambled like eggs.

  (Again, he remembers back to long ago and his Papi in Cuba saying, “You become a musician, and you’ll be a poor man all your life.”)

  Cesar nodded. “Well, you seem in good shape,” he said to Pérez.

  “God bless you, that is what I say to the world now.” And Pérez startled him by kissing him on the neck.

  “I nearly died, did you know that?” he said to Cesar. “And when I was on the brink of death I had a revelation: lights showered down on me from heaven and for one brief moment I saw the face of God. I said to him, ‘Allow me the chance to do good for mankind, allow me to be your humble servant.’ I am here now because of that, sabes? and I can tell you I want to help you. What is it that I can do for you, Cesar? Do you need money? Do you need help with your music? Please tell me, I want to know.”

  “There’s nothing I want, Fernando. Don’t worry about me.”

  “At the very least,” Fernando said before returning to his diners and the pretty young girls whose breasts were spilling out the tight bodices of their red ruffled dresses, “you must come and visit me at my house in Queens. Will you do this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, and may God bless you. Que Dios te bendiga!”

  And he dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter, saying, “Give my friend here a drink.”

  Then he embraced Cesar and made his way to his table: “Now don’t forget.”

  Thereafter, the two men were friendly again. Pérez would drive up in a white El Dorado Cadillac and park in front of the bodega from which he conducted his business of loan-sharking and numbers running. He did so with an air of reverence and saintliness, making the sign of the cross over his customers and sending them off with his blessing. And when he saw Cesar on the street, Pérez would honk the car horn and wave the Mambo King over. It was always: “When are you coming out to Queens for a visit?” And: “Why are you so distant with me, my friend?”

  “No, no, I’m not that way,” he said to Pérez. Then he leaned into the car window, making small talk, and usually walked away with a Havana cigar (Pérez would get them from a friend in Toronto).

  One Thursday night, he went out to Queens, where Pérez lived in a three-story twenty-room house. In every room, pleated French curtains, a color TV set, and a telephone. Tropical-fish tanks and a big abstract painting in his living room, a stereo, bar. And he had three Cadillacs parked in front of the house. But what impressed the Mambo King the most was the swimming pool in Pérez’s back yard.

  They dined in a screen-enclosed sun porch in the back, Pérez and his wife sitting at each end of a long, platter-covered table, and Cesar between them. Ismelda would ring a little bell and in would come the Peruvian maid, to whom they both gave orders: “Take the beans back, they’re much too cold.” “Don’t we have fresher bread?” “Bring another bottle of wine.”

  They sat talking about the old days. Fernando would get up and reach across the table to touch his wife’s beringed hand.

  “Our love started,” Fernando said to him, “one night at that place your orchestra used to play in Brooklyn.”

  “The Imperial Ballroom
,” his wife tenderly said.

  “Man, you were great that night, up there on the stage. What was that song you used to start with? I have it on one of your recordings.”

  “We used to begin our performances with an instrumental bolero called ‘Twilight in Havana.’ ”

  “Your brother, may God rest his soul, used to open it with a long trumpet run, right? Something between Chocolate Armenteros and Harry James. I remember this well because I was at the bar watching the orchestra. I remember that song so clearly”—and he hummed part of the melody. “I remember it because it was during that song that my brother introduced me to my little wife here. That was almost thirty years ago, and look, we’re still together and prospering.”

  He made a toast.

  “You know what our plan is for the coming year? To go to the Vatican this next Easter and turn up at one of those audiences with the Pope. I want to have that honor and satisfaction before I finally enter the sunset years.”

  And he went on about the prosperity of his children: two sons had gone into the business with him and flourished, two others were in college; he had seven grandchildren and enough money for the rest of his life.

  “But my greatest gift is that I have my health.” Pérez rapped on the table. “Money, women, possessions mean nothing in the face of death. It all comes down to shit in the end. That’s what I thought, in any case, before I saw the light.”

  They’d dined on pork chops and fried chicken, rice and beans, fried plantains, a huge mixed salad, tripe soup, toasted Italian bread, and for dessert they had espresso and caramel-glazed lemon-cream and rum-filled pastries. Then came out the bottle of Courvoisier, which was so smooth and so delicious that Cesar could not resist drinking down glass after glass.

  Afterwards, in the living room, they sat listening to the dulcet music of the Ten Thousand Hollywood Strings, Miguel Montoya’s group. Eating from a box of French bonbons, Cesar relaxed and felt an immense nostalgic gratitude for knowing the gangster Fernando Pérez. He was also touched by the huge mahogany crucifix that took up most of the wall opposite the couch.

  “I guess we do go back a long way,” the Mambo King said tearfully. “I guess we are really good friends, aren’t we, Pérez?”

  “Yes, we can thank the Lord Jesus Christ for that.”

  Cesar had spent most of the night feeling that there was something vaguely unjust about the fact that the shady Pérez, who’d once dealt in prostitution and drugs, was so prosperous. The brandy did its work, however, changing the Mambo King’s opinion of the whole enterprise. And he was touched when Pérez, taking the Mambo King by the hand, led him before the crucifix, asking that he kneel down and say a prayer with him.

  “I don’t know, hombre,” Cesar said, laughing. “I haven’t said too many prayers lately.”

  “As you like, my friend.”

  Pérez and his wife knelt down and shut their eyes: almost instantly, their faces turned a deep red and tears flowed from their eyes. Pérez was speaking rapidly. A few words which the drunken Mambo King picked out: “Oh, the passion, the passion of Our Lord who died for us worthless souls.”

  After this, they watched television until eleven, and then Pérez called a private taxi to take the Mambo King home.

  “Don’t you ever forget, my friend,” Pérez told him. “If there’s anything you ever want or need from me, you tell me, okay?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Vaya con Dios.”

  The taxi, whose driver seemed cynical and leering, drove away.

  The next day he ached with a sense of failure. It would hit him from time to time, and had seemed to subside now and then, especially when he was busy with music and women, but his life had been slowing down lately. His body was changing. Now he was getting jowls, his eyes ended in a burst of viny wrinkles, and, worst, his hairline had started to recede. He felt much more cautious about women, set his sights on the pleasures of memory, though from time to time he would get bored and call up an old flame. Miss Vanna Vane had become a Mrs., but he would sometimes meet her downtown, where she worked as a secretary, take her out to lunch, reaching out under the table to touch her thighs. He saw other women, but was slowing down. Though his thing got big as ever, it was more lackadaisical. Just walking down the street to say hello to Eugenio on the corner, to meet up with Manny the bassist seemed to take it out of him. And sometimes when he was resting in bed he felt terrible aches in his heart, aches in his kidneys and liver; headaches between his brows.

  Hard to take that he wasn’t a young king cock anymore. Delores, who read everything, had told him that he was going through a “middle-life crisis.”

  “You feel that way because you don’t think you have much to look forward to, but the truth is, you could live another thirty years.”

  (He laughed in his room in the Hotel Splendour.)

  And it came down to something else: What would he do when he was too old to earn a living? So he played those jobs, and there was always someone to talk about his making a comeback, like that fellow Pérez, but he was so out of what was happening, jazz-rock-fusion, acid salsa, disco boleros, it seemed hopeless. He mostly worked, in those days, when younger bands canceled. The old-timers liked him, but who else remembered him? All this gave him regrets.

  Wished he had hooked up with Xavier Cugat.

  Wished he had stayed married.

  Wished his brother was alive.

  Wished he had some money.

  On the workroom door, the girlie calendar with the big-tit broad in a clingy wet bathing suit, shoving a fluted Coke bottle in her mouth, did nothing to him. He lay his head down on the paper-covered table for half an hour, got up, strummed his guitar. Then he thought he might revive his spirit by dwelling on his virility, pulling from a drawer a pornographic magazine, and then unzipping his trousers and masturbating. In his workroom easy chair, he drank a beer and started to doze again. Hearing the softest music in the walls, made by the water shimmering through the pipes, he realized that it was the I Love Lucy theme. And when he opened his eyes he found himself standing beside Nestor, poor nervous Nestor, as they were preparing to leave the stage wings to make their appearance on the show.

  “Óyeme, hombre,” he said, straightening Nestor’s bow tie. “Be strong. It’ll be great. Don’t be nervous, just do as we did during the rehearsals with Mr. Arnaz.”

  His brother nodded and someone said, “Your cue’s coming up, fellows.”

  And Nestor said, “Brother, you don’t be nervous. Read that book.”

  And then they proceeded, as they had many many times before, to walk into Ricky and Lucy’s life and to sing “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

  When he woke from this “dream,” he remembered his brother’s advice, searched his worktable, finding his brother’s old copy of Forward America! under a pile of building-complaint and hardware-store slips. Flipping through the pages, he reread one of the lines that Nestor long ago had underlined: “In the worst circumstances, never retreat. Keep your eyes on the horizon! Don’t look back and always march forward . . . And remember: It is the general with the advancing army who wins the war!”

  Feeling restless, he was unable to get much work done that Saturday. The Mambo King hung around the workroom, listening to the radio and organizing the papers in his desk, until about three, when he decided to go out to the Shamrock bar.

  It was while drinking a whiskey that he heard the owner, a fellow named Kennedy, tell someone that the bar was for sale.

  “And how much do you want?” someone inquired.

  “Thirty-five thousand.”

  The Mambo King remained there, drinking and occasionally paying attention to the baseball game on the television. Usually he never stayed for very long; but by his second glass of whiskey he was feeling exhilarated, didn’t really want to go back down to the basement.

  Then this Irish man came in, sat beside Cesar. His face was covered with Xs, little cuts from this guy who had slashed him up. A mugger had attacked him an
d cut his face up one night as he staggered home. Thing was, he kept going home by the same route and it kept happening again and again.

  “Now, you must take care of yourself,” the Mambo King said to the man.

  “Nah, nah,” Dickie said. “I know what’s coming to me.”

  He sat in the bar for another hour, watching the owner, Mr. Kennedy, a bony, flush-faced man with shaky hands and a huge age-spot-mottled nose, washing dishes and making drinks. After buying himself and Dickie another drink, he decided to go home. That was the afternoon when, climbing the stairs to his apartment, Cesar found his second-floor neighbor Mrs. Stein standing outside her door.

  “My husband doesn’t want to wake up,” she told him.

  Good thing he had been fortified by drink. When she took him into the bedroom, Mr. Stein was sitting up in bed with a bundle of papers in his hand, his mouth half open, tongue just slightly out between his teeth, as if he were about to say something. A scholar, he was always preoccupied but polite and never impatient with Cesar in his duties. Once, while repairing an electric socket in that room, the Mambo King had wanted to ask Mr. Stein a question. He’d been inspired by all the papers with odd writing on them—“Hebrew and German,” Mr. Stein had said. “And this is Greek.”

  And so he had asked, “Do you believe in God?” And without hesitation Mr. Stein said, “I do.”

  That’s what he remembered about him.

  Now he was covering the man’s head with a sheet. But not without first shutting his eyes, clear and blue and looking at a crack in the flecking walls.

  “Mrs. Stein, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you must call an ambulance. Or do you have a relative I can talk to?”