The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  (Dios mío, Dios mío—toasting the busyness in his heart and mind—I really had fallen for that woman and, coño, fallen hard for her, the way my poor brother fell for that Beautiful María piece-of-shit from Havana, the way I fell for my wife. And so he swallowed the rum, and then had a pleasant experience: a slight elation, the sensation that he was breaking the law of gravity and lifting with his chair off the ground, and then the fan, turning from atop the dresser in his room in the Hotel Splendour, hitting his face, and then a whisk of air hitting him dead between the legs and licking at his penis through the slot in his boxer shorts, a lick like the morning licks of youth, and boom, he found his thing stiffening, though not fully, because of the lick of the air, the rum, and his thoughts of Lydia, a beautiful sensation: if he was a younger man, the Mambo King would have masturbated, floated off on clouds of speculation and hope of future seductions, but now, in his current condition, masturbation seemed sad and hopeless, and so, instead, he took another sip of his rum. On the record player spun that great Mambo King tune “Traffic Mambo,” except that it sounded much different from the way he remembered it: sounded as if there were a hundred musicians playing on the version he was hearing now, with all kinds of instruments added: glass bells and harps, church organs and Oriental chimes. Sounded as if there was a river rushing in the distance and the chaos of a hundred automobiles honking their horns all at once. Plus he hadn’t really remembered that the trumpet solo played by his dead brother Nestor had been so long, it seemed to go on forever in the version he was now hearing. The Mambo King’s confusion made him get up. There was a small mirror over a sink: then a closet-sized bathroom, just enough room for the commode and the shower. He was drunk enough by now that, as he looked in the mirror, all the lines of age and sadness had more or less been smoothed out, the gray of his hair seeming more silver, the jowlishness of his face more like the mark of substance rather than excess. He washed his face and then sat down again. He found himself rubbing his legs: the underside of his legs was riddled with thick, distended varicose veins, blue and as twisty as the thick vein that burst like a river with tributaries up the underside of his big thing. These weren’t little varicose veins like those showing through little-old-lady brown nylons, but worm veins, all up and down the backs of his legs. He touched them for a moment and laughed: how he used to pick on his wife in Cuba the day he noticed that a few varicose veins had appeared on her legs, calling her feita—ugly—when she was still so young and, in her way, pretty.)

  From the stage he watched Lydia like that hound who watched the basement entrance of the building down the street. An old German shepherd with matty coat and milk-cornered eyes, barking at every passerby and sniffing between the legs of every canine interloper. Lydia paid attention to the Mambo King, watching him faithfully from the street, but then she went over to get herself a sandwich from one of the tables, and men started to speak to her.

  What were they saying?

  “Why don’t you dance with me?”

  “I can’t.”

  “But why?”

  “I’m with the singer of the group over there.”

  “Cesar Castillo?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re so young! Why are you with that viejito?”

  That’s what he thought they were saying.

  But the men were just being friendly. When the Mambo King saw her dancing with one of them, he was suddenly overcome with vertigo. Why was she dancing the pachanga with that fellow? Twenty years ago he would have smiled, telling himself, “So?” But now the heat of humiliation burned at the back of his neck and he felt like climbing down off the stage and separating them.

  Then he devised a strategy to regain her attention and remind her of her loyalty. “I dedicate this song to a very special woman in my life. This song is for my woman, Lydia Santos.”

  But she continued to dance with the son of a bitch, and he felt depressed.

  Work was work, however, and the Mambo King and his musicians played other numbers: mambos, rumbas, merengues, boleros, and a few cha-cha-chas. He hadn’t suffered through a set like that since the days after Nestor’s death. When the group finally took a break and began to pack up—there was a local rock ’n’ roll group waiting to go on—he made straightaway for Lydia, who pretended that nothing was happening.

  “Cesar! I’ve been waiting for you!” And she kissed him. “This is Richie.”

  The man she had been dancing with was a slender-looking fellow in a nice clean guayabera, handsome even with a pock-scarred face.

  “Mucho gusto,” the young man said, but the Mambo King would not even shake his hand.

  Then he said to Lydia, “Come on, I want to talk to you.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Because I am the man and I don’t want you with anyone else.”

  “We were just dancing. The music sounded good. We were just having a little fun.”

  “I don’t care. I told you how I feel.”

  They were standing just inside the lobby of 500 La Salle, Cesar’s building.

  “I may be an old man to you, but I’m not going to be cuckolded because of that. I was this way when I was young, and I am not going to change now.”

  “Okay, okay”—and she put her hands up and then gave him a kiss on the neck. He patted her nice nalgitas, and as the anger drained from him, said, “I’m sorry if I sound so harsh with you. There are a lot of wolves out there. Come on, let me buy you an ice cream, and then I want you and your children to meet someone.”

  He made a burning sound: “Psssssssh, my, but you look good, Lydia.”

  And: “Look what you do to me.”

  They attended the block party like everyone else, Cesar treating her children as if he were their father—or grandfather. That afternoon he introduced Lydia to his friends. Frankie and Bernardito had met her before. They had all gone out with their women to restaurants together. Still, he took her by the hand and with his king-cock strut introduced her to his other friends on the street. His mood seemed calmer now. And she did not feel so bad. She did not mind that he was nearly thirty years older, though sometimes when they were in bed together she felt this terrible weight of mortality on her. His spectacular sexual nature sometimes made his whole body shake: his face would turn beet-red from his efforts to impress her, and she was afraid that he might have a heart attack or a stroke. She’d never had any man like him and so spoiled him with praise and adoration that he started to become deluded with the feeling that he had become exempt from the ravages of the years. She was overwhelmed by him. She felt, as had scores of other women before her, his bestial nature.

  He would be shoving himself inside her and she would make it a point of saying things like “You’re going to burst me apart.” And: “Tranquilo, hombre. Tranquilo.” And she moaned and shouted. She didn’t want him to get the look of boredom that other men sometimes got with her, after a certain point. She wanted to say and do everything that he wanted her to, for the simple reason that he was good to her and her children.

  So, he was a little jealous. She forgave that; after all, he was an old man, even if he was a pretty old man. That’s what she had taken to calling him, he’d remember. “Dame un besito, mi viejito lindo.” And whatever one could say about his current situation, that he worked as a superintendent and took small-time jobs here and there as a musician, he had been some kind of famous man. Even though she was thirty-five years old, she had still not lost her childhood awe for the crooners of his generation. And the man had even been on television. She knew the very episode of the I Love Lucy show that he and Nestor had appeared on: he’d even brought her a box of photographs to look at, and had given her one of himself with Arnaz and his poor dead brother. Proudly, she had shown it to people in her building.

  He was the kind of man who had done a lot in life. He didn’t just hang out, like so many others. He was wise and would be able to help her. Looking at pictures of him when he was young and a pretty boy m
ade her sigh. Sometimes it killed her when she would think about young men. Of course she wished he was younger, but she also knew that he would never have stayed with her in the days of his glory. So she had him now in his decline. So what, she would say, if he had jowls, a huge stomach, and testicles that reached halfway down to his knees (like his pinga!). What did she care about that, as long as he promised to help her children out?

  (She had to tell herself this, yes?)

  Later, he finally got the chance to introduce her to the family.

  “So this is your young pollita?” Delores said to Cesar.

  He shrugged.

  On Delorita’s television blared the film Godzilla. Pedro was in his traditional spot, the easy chair, reading the newspaper and having a drink. Sitting behind him on the couch, Leticia with her baby. She’d come up from Long Island for a visit. She played with her baby’s toes, spoke baby talk, oblivious to the television and the rest of the commotion in the apartment. Her brother, Eugenio, shared the couch, sitting close to the window. He’d propped it open a bit and put an ashtray there on the sill so he could smoke and brood in peace. Cesar always liked to see him, which was not often, but the kid always seemed pissed off: he’d been that way for a long time. (Eugenio never understood any of this. An innocent at heart, he had a temper that flared when, as with the other Castillo men, melancholia abruptly came over him and he would suffer from his own plague of memories. When he was angry, he would find himself saying things he did not really mean, such as “Everybody in the world can go fuck themselves” and “I don’t need anyone,” which had frightened many people away from him.)

  Now he would turn up at the apartment on La Salle Street, disappointed and bitter.

  When Cesar brought Lydia into the living room, Eugenio was struck by her good looks. He liked pretty women, too, and leapt out of his sullenness for a moment, as if jumping out of an airplane. “Why, hellllllo.” Eugenio was friendly to her, but once the introductions were over, his mood reverted and he sat by the window, thinking. The older he got, the more he picked up on his long-dead father’s temperament. He went through moods of prolonged anguish and discontent: his eyes grew sad over the smallest thing, his face drooped over the fact that life was not perfect. Although he was not consciously aware of it, Eugenio had by now acquired the same expression he forever associated with his father, the same shattered expression of Nestor Castillo in his role as Alfonso Reyes, who would appear again and again at Desi Arnaz’s door. His father’s shattered expression, on entering that room, hat in hand, guitar demurely by his side, his face in some kind of agony.

  (When he was a kid, his father’s expression was “Cuban”: melancholic, longing. Arnaz had it, his Uncle Cesar had it, Frankie, Manny, and most of the Cubans who walked into the household, jitterbugs and all, had it.)

  “Eugenio, I want you to meet Lydia!”

  Eugenio stood up and bowed. He was wearing a black turtleneck—in summer!—bluejeans, sneakers. He was supposed to go downtown and meet some friends who were trying to fix him up with some woman, but he didn’t care. At least at the apartment Aunt Ana María was around to give him a nice big kiss now and then, and he never had to explain his moods to her, the way he had to with his girlfriends.

  “So you’re Lydia?” asked Delores. “The young chick with the old rooster.” And she laughed, setting the tone for the afternoon.

  Later they had dinner, and that was when Cesar noticed how Delores seemed to glare at Lydia. It couldn’t be jealousy about her looks. Delores had held up well over the years. What was it?

  Well, the Mambo King told himself as he reeled dizzily in his room in the Hotel Splendour, no one in the family had ever thought that Delores felt love for Pedro, not even when he was younger and courting her.

  And she could have had me, he told himself.

  Was that it?

  It had more to do with the fact that, now Eugenio and Leticia had moved out, her reasons for staying with Pedro had gone out the window.

  The Mambo King had once heard her say: “If he dies, I’ll be better off.”

  But there was something else: after so many years of waiting, she had finally enrolled in college.

  It hit her one day while sitting in an English literature class that she couldn’t bear it when Pedro’s hands searched under her robe at night: it didn’t take much for her nipples to get hard, just touching them did that, but he fancied that it was the particular motion of the same thumb that he held a pencil in that did it, the ball of his thumb just touching her and her nipple getting hard. And so his thin but long fish-headed penis went inside her. And she went somewhere else, far away from that room.

  (She was on a bed with Nestor, getting it from behind, raising her haunches so high because when he’d turn up he never seemed to have much time, as he was always dressed up in a white silk suit, like the one he’d worn on the night he died and when he appeared on that television show—he’d barely enough time to pull down his trousers, but she was always in bed waiting for him. And because he liked to do it from behind—he used to say he felt that it went in the deepest like that—she always let him. Sometimes she turned to cream where she was sitting, had to pull herself together. Tired of weeping at night and of losing herself in books and in the petty activities of running a household. By that time she had felt like bursting into pieces.)

  And her feelings showed, because later, after Cesar had taken Lydia home, Delores exulted in deriding him: “She’s very nice, Cesar. But don’t you think she’s a little young for you?” (Riding him, the way she used to nearly thirty years ago.)

  “But why fool yourself with her? What have you got to give her, except some money?”

  “Ask yourself, what would she want with an old man like you?”

  (And he had to hold his tongue, because everyone knew what had happened to Delores while taking some night courses up at City College. She had fallen in love with a genteel literature student, a man younger than herself, with whom she went to bed for several months. And because of the way it ended, with the man running away from her, she had become more careless with herself and went walking on a bad street on her way home from college, and two black men pulled her into an alley and tore off the nice necklace Nestor had given her and they took her watch and a bracelet that had been a Christmas present. Then one of the men pulled down his trousers and the other threatened to kill her if she said a word, but she let out with some kind of howl, lit windows for blocks everywhere, and the men left her there, clothing torn up, lying on the ground, her books all around her.)

  “Listen here, Delorita. Say whatever you want to me, but be good to her, huh? She’s the last chance I’ve got.”

  So happiness came back into the Mambo King’s life. Like a character in a happy habanera, he went through his days listening to sonorous violins and moved through rooms thick with the scent of flowers, as if out of a canción by Agustin Lara.

  (Now he remembers riding along the dirt roads from Las Piñas on a borrowed mule, a cane hat pulled low over his brow and a guitar slung over his back, and, coming to a field of wildflowers, dismounting from his mule and walking out to where the flowers were thickest: crouching and looking through the stems and blossoms, sun hot in the sky and a rattling cutting through the trees: now he picked hibiscus and violets and chrysanthemums, irises and hyacinths, tranquil among the bees and burrowing beetles and ants teeming around the sole of his soft leather shoes: deep inhalation of that fragrant air and the world going on forever and ever. Then he was on his mule again and making the approach to the farm. On the porch of their house, his mother and Genebria, always so happy to see him. And the Mambo King, very much a man, strode toward the house, kissed his mother, and presented her with the wildflowers, his mother whiffing them happily, saying, “Ay, niño!”)

  And he seemed happy. Whistled and shaved every day and wore a sweet cologne and a tie and shirt whenever he went out with her. Happiness, that’s all he talked about, standing on the street corners or in
front of the stoop with his friends. She was turning him, he boasted, into a young man. I’m getting young, he would think, and forgetting my troubles.

  He only wished the pains had gone away and that he could do as he pleased, without being bothered.

  And Lydia? She supposed she was falling in love with him, but she had her doubts. Just felt so desperate to get the hell out of that factory. Wanted anything better than what she had. Wished to God that she had finished high school, wished to God she had a better job. She wished to God that she had not slept with the foreman, because everybody in the factory found out, and it made no difference in the end. She did it because he, like all men, had promised something better. But once she went as far as to lie back on his desk and hike up her dress, he got all offended that she wouldn’t do the rest: get on her knees and take care of him like that. “What I told you is off!” he shouted after the fifth or sixth time she’d visited him. “Forget the whole thing”—and he dismissed her as if she were a child.

  Wished she was smart like Delores (though she did not want her unhappiness) or had a job like Ana María in a beauty salon (she seemed to be happy).

  Wished that the Mambo King was thirty years younger.

  Still, she saw the good in him: liked the respect people showed him and the fact that he seemed to work so hard. (Sometimes when they went out or when she watched him onstage it was hard to imagine that the old man would spend hours a day on his back with a wrench trying to fix a clogged sink trap, or that he climbed ladders and plastered walls, that his back had achy muscles.)