The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  —Running in a field, the ground rushing under him like a river—

  So many pretty young women with big half-moon gold and pagoda-shaped earrings and with lightning-whipped curls and nice asses on slender, long-ankled dancers’ legs. Silky blouses, thick with femininity, quivering and sheeny in the red party lights. Jostled, and lumbering, he pressed close to a woman who smelled like jasmine and sweat.

  Nearly sixty now. And were the young chicks looking at him, the way they used to, up and down, and hoping that he might walk over and strike up a conversation? Now they treated him with a cheerful respect, with looks that said, “My, but he might have been a lady-killer once upon a time.” In the old days he couldn’t walk down the street without some pretty woman looking him sweetly, longingly in the eyes, but now? Dios mío, he had to work a lot harder for his seduction, and if he wanted a younger woman he’d have to pay for her, because now the women who desired him were not young chicks anymore, and that was something he couldn’t accept.

  But then, as he was making his way toward the toilet, he felt someone tugging at his jacket sleeve, and taking hold of his elbow, a pretty woman of thirty, thirty-five. Coño!

  “Señor Castillo? My name is Lydia Santos. This is my cousin Alberto”—across the table from her, a thin-mustached man who resembled the 1930s film actor Leon Errol. “And I just wanted to tell you that I really like your music. You know, I have seen you before, years ago, when I was a young girl. My father would take me to the Teatro Hispano to see all the shows. I saw you there and in Brooklyn. And sometimes up in the Bronx. What was the name of that other place?”

  “The Savoy,” her cousin said.

  “Yes. We played there a few times. With the Tiny Tina Maracas Orchestra. Many years ago. In 1954, it was.”

  (And now, on top of this memory, Tiny Tina Maracas and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra, playing a rumba version of “Moonlight Sonata,” and one night Cesar and Tina huddled at a table drinking daiquiris, and Tina, magnificent in a flame-red dress and mantilla comb in her hair, saying to the Mambo King, “Would you guys like to work with us on second bill at this place in the Catskills?” and this fading out to a moonlit night where at three in the morning the Mambo King and Tiny Tina are tottering along the edge of a lake, enchanted by the reflection of the moon and stars, teary with light in the water, and the pines stone-blue in the distance, and at one moment when the two bandleaders were standing close enough to feel each other’s breath, she turned to him and put two of her fingers inside his shirt, her nails touching his skin and gnarly hair, and she said, in the fashion of that time, “Come on, ya big lug, why don’t you kiss me?”)

  “I was just a kid, but I really liked your orchestra.”

  “Thank you, it’s very much a compliment. Coming from so pretty a woman.” And he bowed.

  But there was suffering in his expression. The Mambo King wanted to stay and talk, but his bladder was aching. “Some more drinks here!” he called to the waiter.

  Then he leaned forward and said to her, “I’ll come back later so that we can talk, yes?”

  Continuing toward the hallway toilets, thinking about that young girl of thirty or thirty-five. Lydia Santos. Most of the younger women he met had never heard of his orchestra, the Mambo Kings, or if they knew the name it was one out of dozens of other antique orchestras whose records their parents played when they were feeling nostalgic.

  “I was just a kid, but I really liked your orchestra,” he heard again as he made his way past the blaring jukebox.

  At the end of a narrow foyer was a bolted-shut fire door, which disturbed him. He had once played a club in Queens where a fire had broken out in the kitchen deep fryer and they had had to smash in the fire door to the alley with an ax. (Wished that had happened at the Club Havana.) Huddled against the door, people were coughing and weeping because of the smoke and fear. That’s why he always checked the fire exits.

  —The fire engines sounding on the night of Nestor’s death—

  Along the hallway wall, a line of young men waiting to use the toilet (for urination, defecation, sprucing up, smoking yerba, the inhalation of cocaine), and among them the groom, el novio, for whom this party was being thrown. The young men were really fucked up and happy. One running joke in the line? About how the groom’s sex organ was going to be sore by the following afternoon. He answered, “It’s already been sore for a long time”—and they all slapped five.

  In the presence of the young men, and buoyed by the attention of Lydia Santos, the Mambo King forgot his age and adopted the posture of a young wolf, with his collar and bow tie loosened. Exposed was his chest of tangled fleecy black-and-gray hair, and, on a chain, the crucifix and money amulet and the small bronze head of Changó nestling against the primeval dampness of his skin. A tallish fellow complimented the Mambo King (even though he had pushed the groom for one of those new disco groups with fancy machines, syn-drums and synthesizer pianos, but the bride’s father had said, “A group is a group, and this Cesar Castillo’s a real pro,” which meant that Cesar charged a lot less than the others, and who cared if his music was a little old-fashioned?) and then offered the Mambo King and his bassist a drag of his marijuana cigarette.

  No, thank you, he preferred rum over smoke, because smoke made him feel crazy, hear voices, and suspect that his dead brother Nestor was just around the corner.

  Another young man made polite conversation and asked the Mambo King his opinion about the upcoming Panamanian, Rubén Blades, whom Cesar had heard and liked. “You must have known a lot of the greats in your time, huh?”

  “Yes, you name ’em . . .” Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, Pérez Prado. I knew a lot of guys going back a long time. Talented guys with style and good musical ideas who vanished into thin air. And they had to work hard. Most of them are where now? A friend of mine, a really good conguero, watches the dinosaur bones over at the Museum of Natural History. I have another friend, works as a steam presser downtown in the fashion district. He’s too old to do anything else, but in his day he was a good trumpet player. You can feel bad for him, but he had his glory, and besides, for whatever reasons, that was his calling. He knew what he was getting into, ¿sabes?

  “Don’t get me wrong, my friend,” he continued. “You can make a living, but it’s not easy, and forget getting rich.” He peeked ahead to see if the line was moving and said to Manny, “How long is that guy going to be in there, huh?”

  When he finally got into the smoky bathroom, he was startled: a green-and-blue parrot feather was floating in the toilet water. Taking out his big thing, he emptied his bladder. As he shut his eyes—curls of smoke from his cigarette rose into them—he thought about the young woman: he imagined her kneeling on the tile floor and undoing his trousers.

  Come on, hombre, give the woman a break, he chided himself, and this brief image of desire dissolved, broken up in a wave of melancholy. He’d always thought his big pinga would take care of things, that he could get what he wanted by staring into a woman’s eyes with his pretty-boy looks, press home his manhood by treating his ladies like shit, with arrogance, as if they were worthless, once his desire ran out. And there he was, an aging musician, with what to show for all his years in the world?

  Wince of pain while remembering how he would carry his young brother on his shoulders across the yard in Cuba: his clinging, loving brother Nestor, his younger brother’s thin hands gripping his neck, the kid laughing whenever Cesar bobbed up and down and neighed like a horse. Rode him to that shady part of the yard where the ladies of the household would gather to sew and wash and gossip. That big tub, filled to the brim with hot water and rose-scented soap, his mother saying to him, “First Nestor, and then you, my son.”

  The ladies of the household: Mamá, Genebria, and her friends, four jolly black women involved with magic who were always laughing at him and joking about his vanity, that one day it would get him into trouble. What were their names—he tried to remember now. Tomasa, Pereza, Nicolena, and
Nisa, swirling around him in their red and yellow and mango-colored skirts, laughing. He hadn’t thought of them for a long time, those cheerful women gathering around him and spoiling him to death with kisses.

  Memory, repeated memory, of looking up into his mother’s eyes and finding pure goodness and affection.

  Pure goodness, his mother, but she could not do shit against the power of his father, who beat her, beat him, and tried to beat his free spirit into the ground. Frightened his younger brother to death so that he would go through life like . . . a little girl. That powerless goodness.

  Why was he thinking about that suddenly, those years later in the Hotel Splendour?

  Looking in the bathroom mirror, he laughed at himself. “Shame on you, viejito, for even thinking about that young woman.”

  How could he think about that young woman when he was wearing a faja, a girdle?

  What had the doctors told him in the hospital?

  No more pleasure in this life for you.

  Now he checked himself out sideways, sucking in his stomach. With his head tilted up in a noble fashion, he bore some resemblance to the Cesar Castillo of Mambo King fame, whose face adorned the cover of that immortal album “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.”

  Leaving the toilet, he moved briskly, chest out, huge belly in, thumped shoulders, patted the children who were running circles around the adults, waved hello and winked at the older ladies. Then he made his way back up to the stage. As he stood before the microphone and turned to click on the standby switch of an amplifier, he felt acid surging in his gut. Earlier that night, he had had two plates of lechón asado, which he’d seasoned with a handful of salt and the juice of a hearty lemon; then tostones, crisply fried and browned, French fries, arroz moro, some yuca.

  The rum, however, was what cut into his gut. It went down his gullet like melting ice but started to burn in the vicinity (kissed by a thousand women) of his vibrating diaphragm. Occasionally, he chewed a Rolaids antacid. Over the years, he had guzzled bottles of milk of magnesia and ordinary milk to relieve his distress. At times, he even tried an invention of his own, which he called a “69,” milk and rum and crème de menthe or Amaretto, as if the candy taste and limpid texture could ward off the pain. And although the attacks in his gut and the throbbing in his kidneys and liver sometimes woke him in the middle of the night, and good friends like Manny the bassist, Bernardito, and Dr. López had advised him to take better care of himself, he continued to ignore them.

  Soon enough, the Mambo King and his musicians launched into another set of pieces like “The Cuban Mambo,” the “Tremendo Cumbancha,” “Cua, Cua, Cua.” Then it was bolero time and “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

  As he had for years and years, the Mambo King sang that bolero, his vocal cords quivering, his face radiant with sincere, love-drenched emotion: arms spread wide before his corpulent body, he sang to the women with all his heart. And looking at the crowd, his eyes found Lydia: she had been staring at him, a bent straw dangling from between her cherry-red lips. He sang the last verse of the song to her, and only her. While navigating the melancholic beauty of that melody, he had thought to himself: There goes that young chick again, looking at me.

  (Oh, Christ, Jesus, my Lord and Saviour, please explain on this sad night why so many people have cried.)

  They played till around three-thirty, and then the musicians gathered around a table, waiting for their pay. There were still a lot of people out on the dance floor, silhouettes of clinging bodies, a room of shadows under the pink and red lights, tight circles in the glare of the computer-controlled jukebox flashing: MOST POPULAR SELECTION! The bride’s father was reminiscing by the bar, and taking his time. It was just as well: the musicians were exhausted, particularly Manny, slumped in his chair and whispering, “When is that man finally going to pay us, huh?”

  “I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry.”

  “Yes, of course, how could I forget my friend!” And the bride’s father handed Cesar Castillo an envelope containing three hundred dollars—that was fifty dollars for each of the five musicians, for seven and a half hours of live music, plus a fifty-dollar tip to split among themselves—a good night.

  While the musicians collected their instruments, cables, and microphones, the Mambo King, tie loosened, shirt open, stopped by Lydia’s table to say goodbye. First he shook her cousin’s hand, a manly handshake, but with Lydia he displayed gentlemanly aplomb, kissing the knuckles of her right hand. As he did so, he felt her hand warming. And she blushed, too.

  Then he said to her, “Could this viejito take the pleasure of calling you sometime?”

  “Yes.”

  On the back of a Budweiser beer coaster she wrote, “Lydia Santos, 989-8996.”

  “Thank you.”

  Was she really interested in him, or was she just being nice to an old man? Still, he couldn’t help kissing her hand again and following this up with a tender smile. Then, like a king cock, he strutted out the door with Frankie.

  He and Frankie got a lift with Manny. Riding west on the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Mambo King was far from tired. He did not yawn, he did not lean back in the car seat lolling, he did not even particularly feel the pains in his gut anymore. Instead, he tapped his feet and felt like partying. Manny dropped the Mambo King and Frankie off on La Salle Street and wearily made his way home, where he would lock up his bass and amplifier in his bodega. But Cesar?

  “Frankie, you want to come upstairs and have a drink with me?”

  “It’s five in the morning.”

  “You can stay with me.”

  “Let me go home. My wife is waiting.”

  “Come on, she knows you’re with me.”

  Up the stairs to Cesar’s apartment they went, beyond the hallway and into the kitchen, where Cesar made them nice drinks. In the living room he put on one of his favorite records, “Dancemania” by Tito Puente, and then they sat on the couch drinking. Coño, that young woman had liked him, and now the world buzzed with well-being. He had the sensation that goodwill was flowing into him, that he was the center of a benevolent and beautiful universe. Exhausted, Frankie soon dozed. But Cesar remained awake, jubilant and happy, as if everything around him were showing him affection: the old couch, the easy chair, the Victorian-looking chairs by the window which he had brought up from the basement, the big blue-tubed Zenith color TV, his conga drums, his maracas saying “Cuba,” his stereo console. The glint of old and new record spines in the cabinet, the half bottle of Bacardi rum, his black instrument case, all communicating love.

  He kept a little Cuban flag on the television and in the corner of the room a little cabinet dedicated to the memory of Nestor. He and Nestor and the other Mambo Kings smiled at him now from atop an art-deco seashell bandstand circa 1950. Then the other framed pictures on the wall smiling at him: Tito, Pérez, and yes, once again, he and Nestor posed alongside Desi Arnaz.

  (For one moment, as he sat by the window in the summer’s heat in that room in the Hotel Splendour, Cesar Castillo had the impression of standing before the door to Desi Arnaz’s apartment, his brother Nestor, alive and well and young, beside him.)

  Then there were more pictures of his family. His niece and nephew as babies, then toddlers, and onward into life: Leticia in her First Communion gown, Leticia pictured with a blue-tasseled mortarboard on her head on the day of her graduation from Sacred Heart of Mary High School, Leticia on the day of her wedding to a nice Jewish fellow named Howard. Eugenio as a soldier of Christ on his confirmation, in the Chapel of Corpus Christi, black missal in hand, the spirit of Christ radiating light behind him. A shot taken of Cesar and his dead brother and Delores in front of a Chinatown restaurant a few hours after his brother and sister-in-law had gotten married. Delores in a polka-dotted dress, holding a flower; Nestor in a smart-looking blue serge suit. Pictures of his daughter, Mariela, taken in Havana when she was little.

  And among these pictures, the Mambo King imagined himself with Lydia, posed
as if he were a young man again, looking forward to a million nights of love and a bright, happy future, as if he would be able to relive and do certain things over again. Even the tick-tocking clock on the kitchen wall seemed to be smiling at him.

  Then abruptly the sun began rising out of the east and the window burned with an orange-and-red light. And like a character in a bolero, the Mambo King happily felt young again: while Frankie the Exterminator snored away by the kitchen table, a name flew, light as a falling flower, through Cesar’s world-weary soul, flew through the layers of macho and doubt, anger and contempt. “Lydia.”

  The next week the Mambo King nervously called Lydia Santos, inviting her out to dine with him.

  “Yes, I would like that,” she told him.

  The first night they went out, the Mambo King found himself pacing up and down on the 96th Street Express platform, waiting for her train from the Bronx. He wore a lavender leisure suit, white wing-tipped shoes, and a black-brimmed lacquered cane hat. Big shades, so that she would not be able to check out the stage droop beneath his eyes. Lowlifes seemed to be everywhere around him. Long gone were the days when you could take a nap under a shady tree in the park without worrying that someone would go through your pockets. He’d come and gone from jobs on the subway, witnessed fleet-footed thieves stationed by the subway doors, reading the Daily News sports page one second and, pssst, the next moment, just before the car doors closed, yanking off a thick gold chain or a purse or a radio and running down the platform. Snap of the fingers, like that. He once saw a man walk into a car and slash open another man’s shirt so he could get at the other guy’s wallet: the victim did not even stir. He had seen jackets pulled off the backs of sleeping men on trains, shoes yanked off feet. And the number of beggars! Never used to be so many of them in the old days. He’d give to the old, not the young men. There was an Indian fellow whose body seemed to have been cut in half. He would wheel himself through the subway cars on a skateboard, holding out a tin cup, which Cesar always filled with change. (How did that poor suffering man take care of his business in the toilet? What love did he have in his life?)