The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Now, this boy had a sister named Teresa, who was always making eyes at Enrique. They flirted with each other, even kissed, but in the end they both knew that, amorously speaking, he preferred the company of men. He didn’t even have anything going with her brother, but everyone knew. That was the first part of the story. And then he picked it up fifteen years later, with Enrique living in New York and receiving letters from Teresa pleading with him to marry her so that she might get American citizenship: that after they were married they could then arrange for the arrival of her brother. Loving Teresa like a sister, Enrique wrote her that he would take care of everything, that he would be waiting for her at the airport. A month after her arrival they were married at City Hall and lived more or less as husband and wife for a year, though they did not share their bed carnally.

  The Mambo King nodded.

  By that time she had started to make friends, inviting other couples over to the house, and now he really had to behave like a good husband, and that meant that he could not have any of his male companions around. In fact, she began to forbid that his friends come to the house, as she had begun to find them distasteful. And there was another thing: she was tired of going to bed at night and waking up beside Enrique, who tended to sleep, he kept telling the Mambo King, with powerful and virile erections. And even though she knew he was indifferent to women, she would fondle him night after night, until they became lovers, enjoying each other. This idyll lasted for several months and he began to barter with her, the company of his friends in exchange for his virile services, a proposal that made things worse between them, because with that she told him, “Enrique, but you don’t understand, I love you. I’ve always loved you,” and, “If I can’t have you, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” like an actress in a bad Hollywood movie—his words again—but then, when he did not believe her, she stepped things up and went with whatever men she met on the street, and got a reputation as a harlot, so that Enrique, a huge man, had to go out and fight for who knows whose honor, but he did so. And then he tried to keep peace in the house, but she had started to smash plates and scream out the window that she was married to a “queen,” weeping loudly for hours, so that he was ashamed to even leave his apartment.

  Then things calmed down. One day, he told the Mambo King, he came home from his job waiting tables downtown and found that she’d cleared out of his apartment: a few days later he was served with divorce papers, the grounds being that he was incapable of fulfilling his manly functions with her. Not only was justice not served, but she was awarded alimony payments of fifty dollars a week, which was a lot of money in those days.

  “Thank God,” he said, “that she finally remarried, a few years ago.”

  “Sounds crazy to me,” said the Mambo King, shaking his head. Then he stood up and rapped Enrique on the shoulder, saying, “Well, I hope things are better for you now?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Good.” And he left.

  And with the Guatemalan man, who’d had bad luck, he remembered the poor rich Englishman, a dapper fellow who also hung out at the Park Palace, the one who fell in love with a beautiful brunette who drove him to suicide.

  So many years had passed.

  He remembered the short priest from the local parish who resembled Humphrey Bogart and always seemed to be looking down women’s dresses.

  Now there’s a man who had made a big mistake.

  And, speaking of bad luck, what about his friend Giovanni, who managed the boxer Kid Chocolate, a jaunty Cuban welterweight. Another waiter, Giovanni had a ticket to millions, and what happened? His boxer called the champ a fairy and paid for it in the ring, getting pummeled into a coma.

  What happened to his Cuba? His memories?

  Having watched the match on Friday Night Fight of the Week, the Mambo King waited for his friend Giovanni, who lived in the building next door, to come home, saw him walking up the street about one in the morning with his son, carrying a canvas bag. He raced down the stairs just to say, “I saw what happened. How is he?”

  “Not good.”

  “Look, then, come back with me to the apartment and we’ll have a few drinks.”

  “Okay.”

  And as they sat finishing off a bottle, Giovanni said, “Psssssht, just like that. All his training, all those fights. Psssssht, a crying shame, you know?”

  The last bar of that strange line of bad-luck music really pinched his heart, because out of nowhere he started to hear Elva and René, his old dance team, shouting at each other. René accusing his fine-looking wife of cuckolding him, and Elva denying it to tears and then, because he did not believe her, turning it all around and boasting about all her young and handsome virile lovers, so that René lost his self-control and stabbed Elva to death with a kitchen knife. Afterwards he threw himself out the window.

  That was another bad-luck thing that had happened in 1963. Thank God, the Mambo King thought, that the music changed swiftly, moving on again.

  Toward the end, while listening to the wistful “Beautiful María of My Soul”

  IT HAD COME DOWN TO THIS: HE had turned around to find that the temporary job he’d taken to fill his idle days had lasted nearly twenty years.

  Passing through the lobby, he would remember when he was a cocky and arrogant musician, and think to himself, Who would have dreamed that things would turn out this way? (And millions of people watching him on the rerun of the I Love Lucy show could never imagine that he had his own life, never see him as a super.) He’d gotten used to smelling like plumber’s gum, his nails blackened with grease and oil. Tenants tapped the pipes (in claves time) and he answered quickly, some of those jobs being nightmares. (Trapped under a sink in a hot kitchen, the linoleum floor beneath him rotting with roaches, crinkly and gnarled witch’s hair growing out the bottom of the sink, hanging down into his face, the man struggling with a seat wrench to unscrew the J-joint or sink trap for hours in the stinging heat of the day. Or going into an apartment that had been locked up for a month because the tenants had gone on vacation and entering the kitchen to find that they’d turned off the refrigerator but left the door closed so that a blue fungus had proliferated and spread across the floor and everywhere he looked in that room were roaches feasting on that blueness. Or the time he had opened a closet and a million roaches, clinging one to another, had fallen on him like an old coat. These were some of the things he did not like.) But when tenants called him he always answered quickly. Wishing to fill the emptiness of his days, those many years back, he had fixed loosened doors, leaky faucets, cracked windows, saggy walls, faulty electrical sockets. He had installed a fancy bronze-tube lamp, like those found in old post offices and in library cubicles, over the mailboxes, and even found a new mirror for the narrow lobby, taking the old speckled mirror off its mounts and leaving it out for the garbage collectors on the sidewalk. (The children of La Salle Street, loving destruction, gleefully smashed the mirror.)

  Rotund and slowly putting on weight, he began to take on the shape of a cathedral bell. He had his old favorite suits let out and retailored about thirteen times in a few years, so often that his tailor put elastic in the waistbands. Amazed by his own immensity, he sometimes stomped down on the back stairway, enjoying the way the rickety structure shook. Though he was having more difficulty breathing and his walk had slowed, the Mambo King was happy there was more of him to take up room in the world.

  As he sank into the bathtub, the water would rise unexpectedly to the rim.

  That was around the time when the pains got so bad that his old pal Dr. López wanted to put him in the hospital.

  He went on the radio that year, a nostalgia hour. The pianist Charlie Palmieri, a bandleader and arranger, was on the same program. Palmieri talked about starting out with Tito Puente and then branching off on his own in the fifties, traveling cross-country before “racial barriers” had been broken, playing dances up in the mountains, and the way he had been the one to discover Johnny Pacheco, a dis
hwasher who played the flute in the kitchen, jamming along with the featured band, his playing so lively that Palmieri hired him on the spot.

  And then it was “Thank you, Charlie Palmieri,” and over the radio an oceanic rumbling and the melody of “Twilight in Havana.”

  “My next guest today is someone who was very much a part of the scene in the fifties here in New York. It’s my pleasure to introduce the bandleader and singer Cesar Castillo. Welcome.”

  As he sat there telling his and Nestor’s story, what the scene was like then in the dance halls where the Mambo Kings used to play, the Imperial Ballroom, the Friendship Club, the Savoy in the Bronx, and the quirky things that happened, like the all-baldhead contests and the great battles of the bands, stuff like that—the interviewer would occasionally break off and play one of the old Mambo King records, then return for more talk.

  “And how did you feel about Desi Arnaz?”

  Cesar laughed. “A nice man.”

  “I mean, musically?”

  “A tremendous talent, untrained, but really good for his musicians. You know, me and my brother once played his show.”

  “Yes.”

  “But to get back to his talent. I ran into Chico O’Farrill one day and we got into the subject of reading charts. I mean, I had never learned to read, and from what I could tell, neither could Arnaz, and that led me to asking Chico as to what he thought of Desi Arnaz as a talent, and he said the man was very good for an untrained musician.”

  “But no one has ever considered him very authentic or original.”

  “Bueno, I think what he did was difficult. For me, he was very Cuban, and the music he played in those days was good and Cuban enough for me. You know he sang a lot of old Cuban ballads on that show.”

  But mainly he talked about the different dance halls, which bands were playing where, and the crisscross of musicians and the chumminess of the songwriters—“A lost epoch,” they concurred.

  “And who do you like now?”

  “Most of the same. My favorites have remained much the same.”

  “You mean el Conjunto Mambo Kings?”

  “No, I’ve always liked Puente, Rodríguez, Fajardo, Palmieri, Machito, Beny More, Nelo Sosa. I don’t know, I guess you can name them and I’ll like them. And there’s Celia Cruz and the singer Carlos Argentina. I could go on, there are so many great talents still working.”

  “And yourself?”

  Cesar laughed, puffed on his cigarette.

  “I’m still working here and there. Nothing spectacular, you understand, but I’m still out there exercising my vocal cords.”

  “To our benefit.” Then: “Well, now we’re going to sign off, but before we do, I’m going to leave you with this fine little canción.”

  With that, the interviewer cued “Beautiful María of My Soul,” which played out of windows, out of car radios, and at the beach, where fine young women lying out in the sun, bodies shiny with suntan lotion, and hearts and heads filled with thoughts of the future, heard the song.

  Occasionally, he would get a call from an agent or a promoter talking about bringing him back into the public’s eye.

  Usually nothing happened.

  But one day he was hauling garbage out the basement, dragging the heavy incinerator cans out to the curb, when he heard a car horn. A Mercedes-Benz had pulled up and, sitting behind its wheel, looking plush in a white sable coat, plumed hat with leopard-skin band, his old Mambo King pianist, the fabulous Miguel Montoya.

  It took him a second to figure that out. “Miguel, hombre!”

  And soon they were embracing.

  “My God, but you look prosperous.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can’t complain.”

  Later they drove over to one of Cesar’s favorite spots on 129th Street. Miguel must have been in his late seventies, but he seemed still to be going strong and, by his own account, had done well for himself, making Muzak recordings in California—his was the creamy, velvet, dulcet-toned piano playing “Moon River,” “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,” and “Beautiful María of My Soul” that came out over supermarket, airport, bus-terminal loudspeakers everywhere—and writing scores for low-budget Mexican horror films with titles like The Beautiful Vampires of the Hacienda of Terror! (Cesar had seen that film in the Bronx in 1966. He had gone to see it with his nephew Eugenio and a few of his friends—Louie, a lanky Puerto Rican, and Victor, a newly arrived Cuban—and they had sat in the bluish glow of the horrific light in a theater crowded with worldly children who laughed and clapped while watching the big-titted female vampires—their breasts rounded, pointy, and succulent under their black transparent gowns—bounding across verandas, where sombreroed musicians played, and crashing through high-arched windows to claim the amorous favors and blood of their male victims.)

  A nice long afternoon, drinking and getting reacquainted, and Miguel finally bringing up one of the reasons, aside from friendship, for his visit. “A promoter I know, an Englishman who lives in London, has been wanting to mount a revival show at the London Palladium and he asked me to put together an orchestra and a lineup of singers. Of course, I told him about you.”

  “Yes?”

  And the notion of traveling to Europe, to England, where he had never been, made the Mambo King happy.

  “It’s all being planned now, but I have some good people lined up already. And who knows, maybe we can take the show on a tour, to Madrid, Paris, Rome, all those beautiful places.”

  Miguel was enthusiastic enough to keep the Mambo King informed about the whole business, calling him every few months, but then he stopped hearing from him: and when he called Miguel’s number in Phoenix, Arizona, where he had his home, someone who was taking care of Miguel’s affairs informed the Mambo King that his old friend was dead.

  “Coño!”

  Once, he had almost seen his daughter again. He still corresponded with her, but what was she but a few fading lines of ink on paper? Then she wrote to say that her ballet company was going to be appearing in Montreal, Canada, in a production of Giselle with Alicia Alonso. Now in her early thirties, she had something to do with running the corps de ballet, and would he like to see her in that wintry city? Yes, he wrote. They made the arrangements and he bought a ticket, but the morning of the flight to Montreal he allowed his symptoms to blossom, and he could not move from his bed, and settled for a long, static-ridden conversation with his daughter at ten-thirty in the evening. His voice tired and trying to explain the pains in his body and the pains in his heart.

  Then it was: “Well, I’m sorry we did not get the chance to see each other, Papi.”

  “Yes, daughter. It’s the same for me. Another time?”

  “Yes.”

  “You take care of yourself, my daughter.”

  “Yes, you take care of yourself, Papi.”

  And goodbye forever.

  On another night, a singing job, and he came up out of the coolness of the basement, where it always felt like autumn, and undressed before his mirror. Off with his gray utility uniform, off with his belt with its loop of apartment keys, his shorts, his dirty white socks, and down the hallway to the bathroom.

  Then the reverse, getting dressed. First, cologne behind his ears and neck; then talcum powder under his arms and on his hairy chest, with its scar over the right nipple. Clean pair of striped boxer shorts, then high silk socks with garters. On with his flamingo-pink shirt and fading white suit, tight around the middle, the front buttons straining under the threads’ pull. Then on with his sky-blue tie and silver tie clip. He rubbed slick Brylcreem into his hair, put a little Vaseline under his eyes to help disguise the wrinkles, then applied a wax pencil over his wisp of a mustache, like Cesar Romero’s in the old movies. Then he put on his white golden-buckled shoes and spit-polished the soft leather with a chamois cloth. When he finished that, he looked himself over. Satisfied that he had not left a stitch out of place, he was ready to go.

  Later, Cesar and his musicians were on the stage o
f the Club Tropical Paradise in the Bronx, a place run by Puerto Ricans who had been big Mambo King fans, finishing up their second set, a string of classics like “El Bodeguero” and “Cachita,” which had gotten even the old grandmothers and grandfathers to shake their bodies and laugh gaily as if they were young again. He had watched a wisp of a woman, thin and bent over like a branch, in a many-layered black dress from another age, turning into a twelve-year-old girl, her arthritic shoulders pulsing forward as if she’d just joined a conga line. Inspired, the Mambo King had blown his trumpet hard, winked, and shouted, “Vaya!” the notes of his solo sailing the rippling sea of 3/2 time, and the music had sounded so good that even his drowsy bass player Manny, tired from his day’s work, began to awaken.

  And with that they had gone into another song, and the Mambo King, despite a bad urge to urinate, began to dance, moving his big frame on the tiptoes of his white golden-buckled shoes. He sang and blew his trumpet hard as if he were a young man in Havana getting drunk and charging down the street with all the energy in the world, blowing until his face was red, his sides ached, and his head seemed ready to burst. Stepping back, he had turned toward his musicians, signaling the turnaround-and-out.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said—

  . . . in the Hotel Splendour, wishing he didn’t have the bad pains . . .—into the microphone. “Thank you so much. We’re glad you’re enjoying yourselves.”

  And with his bladder full to aching (liver, kidney, hole-torn gut), he clicked off the microphone, stepped down off the wooden platform, and made his way across the crowded dance floor in the darkness, accidentally touching some nice female bottoms. Moving through that room, he felt surrounded, pressed, overwhelmed by youth. In this crowd of mostly young people, he felt ambassadorial, as if he were there to represent the declining older generation, closer to death, as they say, than to the light of youth.