The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  He was good to her and this affected Lydia like music, turning her bones into humming pipes and making honey drip out her valves. He was so happy with her he didn’t want to play jobs anymore, because that took time away from her. After a job, and anxious to see her, he would turn up at her apartment at three-thirty in the morning, carrying a wilting bouquet of flowers and a bag of party leftovers. With keys to her apartment, he would quietly open the door and make his way to her pink bedroom. Sometimes she was up waiting for him, sometimes she was fast asleep and the Mambo King, forgetting all his troubles, would strip down to his shorts and his sleeveless T-shirt and climb into bed beside her, falling asleep with his white-haired arms wrapped around her.

  When they’d go to bed, she felt vindicated in her affection for him. She liked violent lovemaking and looked forward to her physical release, these orgasms which made her scream. She liked it when he kissed her all over. The laziness of his bones and the pure volume of his experience had made him more patient about lovemaking. Languidly exploring the alluring bud of her femininity, he discovered a mole just inside her labia majora, and he kissed this mole until he tasted a vegetable sweetness seeping through his teeth. When she came, grinding herself into his face, he felt as if he was being devoured, too.

  Later, he would bite every one of her spinal knobs, and when he reached her nalgitas, she spread her bottom wide for him, and he licked her uplifted rump, with her flowery asshole, and mounted her. Something like floating on a violent sea, his testicles and legs being pummeled by her: he floated off on her, as if on a raft, closed his eyes and faced the sea, which he thought most beautiful, a stretch of murky blue waters which he remembered from the Merchant Marine off the coast of Sardinia and which burst radiantly with golden helmets and silver-and-red dots of light with the sudden appearance of the sun. These joyful moments always made him think about marriage, but he’d restrain himself, knowing that this desire would pass and that he was old.

  They had been together for almost a year when he asked her to move in with her kids, because the trips back and forth from the Bronx and Manhattan were becoming a bit tiresome. That very day he took her down into a basement storeroom and showed her two little beds and a dresser and a small black-and-white television set and a lamp that he’d bought for them. But she had to be honest: “I can’t, hombre. The children have their school and friends and it wouldn’t be right.” Then: “But I can bring them down for the weekends.”

  She’d always wonder about that decision. She could have quit her job, stayed for a time with him, and looked for another. But there was something about him that frightened her, a look that he’d get in his eyes sometimes, a little too dreamy for her taste. She thought it might be the beginning of senility, and where would that leave her? Taking care of him, like a nursemaid. And she would have been deceiving herself to say that she didn’t sometimes look at younger, more slender men, whose faces were smooth and untroubled, or that it didn’t sometimes embarrass her when he took her out dancing and wore that velvet hat with the feather and the orange shirt and white linen suit, a gold chain around his neck, like a chulo. She preferred it when he tried to be elegant, and told him so, but he kept saying, “No, I want to be youthful, too.”

  Still, bringing the kids down to stay with him for the weekends was a good deal for her: it focused his generosity on her family. Cesar provided whatever the children needed, clothing, books, shoes, toys, medicine, pocket money. (And they loved him for it, covering his face with kisses—holding them, he would think about Eugenio and Leticia when they were small.) He’d take them for walks through the markets, buying clothing for her off the racks, and sometimes took her downtown to the big department stores, where he sometimes paid $60, $70 for a single dress! He made room for her in his dresser and she began to keep clothing there: a drawer filled with her lacy panties and brassieres, a rack of her clothing hung in the closet. When she was not doubting the situation, she felt happy with him, liked the spaciousness of his apartment, and considered the neighborhood swanky in comparison to where she lived, 174th Street and the Grand Concourse, in the South Bronx.

  And on Saturday mornings Ana María treated her to a nice shampoo and hairstyling at the beauty salon.

  “It’s so nice that you’re with Cesar. He seems so content,” the good-natured Ana María would say.

  “You don’t think he’s too old for me?”

  “No! Look at Cary Grant with a young chick, or Xavier Cugat with that coochie-coochie girl, Charo. And look at Pablo Picasso, his last wife could have been his granddaughter. No, there’s nothing wrong with a bachelor like him finally finding the woman of his dreams, even at his age.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Almost sixty-two, I think.”

  Working slowly and carefully, Ana María always gave Lydia the looks of a ravishing Hollywood starlet of the forties. Actually, with her dark oval Spanish face, almond eyes, and pouty, thick lips, she bore some resemblance to the Italian actress Sophia Loren. Made up by Ana María and wearing one of those nice new dresses and high heels, she would head back to La Salle Street, her walk deliberate, one foot tiptoeing in a line after the other, as if she were walking a tightrope, so that her hips really swayed, and the men on the street made remarks as she passed. She enjoyed that. What would her husband have said to that? Once stretch marks had appeared on her breasts and they had gotten a little saggy from having the kids, he had started to call her “old.” And she was only twenty-eight! In the end, he’d left her because they were trying to draft him for the war and it was back down to Puerto Rico and then the Dominican Republic for him. So these remarks appealed to her vanity. And there was this one fellow, Pacito, who worked in a florist’s shop, who always handed her a single rose when she’d go by, asked her for dates, or at least to hang around and talk with him, but she always remained faithful to Cesar.

  It didn’t help things when Delores pulled her aside and said, “Cesar’s a very good man, but you have to be careful with him. That’s all I have to say, just be careful.”

  Or that Mrs. Shannon always looked at her disparagingly from her window, where she’d sit with her wild mane of silver-gray hair, her plump arms resting on the sill.

  But she did feel for him. For his suffering. On many of those nights it seemed the Mambo King, who sometimes slept like a lamb, had his bad dreams.

  In the middle of the night, he would feel his father beating him with a switch. He would wince like a hound on the farm, a dog hiding in the corner. He would hear his mother calling to him from a distance, far away, as if beyond the faintest star in the black sky, “Cesar! Cesar!” He would writhe in bed, because when he opened his eyes she was not there.

  Then there was a dream that had started to plague him in those days with Lydia, almost a beautiful dream, he remembered now.

  It involved a river like the river that used to run by the road from his farm toward Las Piñas, its banks thick with trees and prosperous with birds. He was always riding a white horse in this dream. Dismounting, he would make his way through the dense woods to the water, curly and cool, with bubbles of life and thin-legged insects with Chinese eyes and transparent wings floating on the surface. Kneeling (again), he would scoop up the water, wet his face, and then take a drink. How delicious that water always seemed. Then, he’d undress and jump in, floating on the water and watching the sun breaking through the star-shaped leaves and tongue-like fronds and daydreaming about something he’d once heard as a schoolboy (His school? A single large room, near one of the barracks at a nearby sugar mill): that in the days of Columbus, there was a race of Indians who lived in the treetops, and sometimes he would imagine their lives out on the branches, jumping from acacia to mahogany to breadfruit tree. But always the sky grew dark and in the water he’d smell blood, like the blood that sometimes appeared in his urine. And then he would look down the river and see that there were hundreds of naked women, bursting with youth and femininity, bodies damp and beautiful in the sun: and some
would hold their arms out to him imploringly and some would lie back on the ground with their legs spread wide and he’d want them so bad, daydreaming about making love to one hundred women at a time, as if that would make him immortal. But then he’d hear click-clock, click-clock, click-clock in the trees, and when he looked up he saw hanging from the branches skeletons everywhere, like wind chimes, hanging off every branch on every tree, the sounds they’d make frightening him.

  In the middle of the night she would wake to urinate and find him sitting up, short-breathed and gasping, or murmuring painfully in his sleep and flailing about the bed as if he were drowning. She would watch him shake and then couldn’t imagine what he had been dreaming about, never knew what to do when he got out of bed and went into his kitchen, where he would sit at the table drinking rum or whiskey and reading some book.

  They were happy for a long time, despite her doubts about his age and the pains that sometimes racked his body. But then, abruptly, things started to come apart. One night after he had taken Lydia and the children out to eat, he lay doubled over in bed with terrible pains in his gut, as he’d eaten a big pot of Dominican chicken and rice, which had been hotly spiced with sausages. With Herculean effort, he managed to get himself out of bed (everything about him quivery because he had put on so much weight) and struggled down to the bathroom, where he tried to exorcise the burning insect larvae inside his gut, retching out, with the beer and plantains and the rest, tadpole-shaped dollops of blood, tails veiny and fluttering in the toilet water. Then he just barely made it back to his bed, where he collapsed, shaking with obesity and fear. That was the night of the strange dream, when he saw seven spirits, five of whom he recognized immediately: Tomasa, Pereza, Nicolena, Nisa, and Genebria, women he had known from Cuba. Then there were two shoeless men wearing rags and straw hats, whose faces were covered with white paste like carnival corpses. Circling around the Mambo King, they were chanting:

  “Cesar Castillo, we know you’re very tired and soon it will be time for you to die.”

  Again and again and again.

  “Cesar Castillo, we know you’re very tired and soon it will be time for you to die”—like a nursery rhyme.

  They harassed him for an hour and then slipped off into the night (they would return in the darkness of his hospital room three months later) and the Mambo King, a sweaty mess with heaving chest and bloated stomach, sank back into bed and felt his limbs swelling: when he woke in the morning, his skin was covered with blisters and sores, the kind which used to plague his father in Cuba, when things had gotten very bad. And he was ashamed to take off his clothes in front of Lydia and would make love to her wearing a shirt, turning his head away when she would look at his face.

  When the pains got even worse, he looked up an old friend who worked in a pharmacy and sometimes gave him pain pills for toothaches. While his friend recommended that he go to a doctor, he gave him a small jar of painkiller pills anyway. Instead of seeing a doctor, Cesar took the pills and drank some whiskey, feeling so much better that he lumbered down the stairway and stood out in front of the stoop to enjoy the early-spring weather. The sun felt good on his face and a mood of great optimism came over him. And things were very interesting now. Looking across the street that day, he saw himself and Nestor walking up the block. Then a big checkered cab stood idling in front of the building with Desi Arnaz stepping out and removing his hat—Miguel Montoya and Lucille Ball behind him.

  And across the way, he saw lines of people waiting in front of the Club Havana. He blinked and the lines were gone.

  Then he saw an unbearably beautiful woman standing in front of the bodega, stared at her and realized that the woman was Beautiful María, who had taken his brother’s soul. Someone should show her a thing or two. And so he walked over to her, grabbed her roughly by the wrists, and dragged her upstairs to his apartment. By the time they’d gotten into the bedroom, he had removed all of his clothes. “Now I’m going to show you something, woman.”

  And he buggered her with his huge thing, but not in a gentle way where the woman’s insides get all soft; not in the way where he would finger her at the same time so that she would come. He did it violently, showing María a thing or two. Except it wasn’t María, it was Lydia.

  “Chico, why are you trying to hurt me so?”

  “Oh, no, mami. I don’t want to hurt you, I love you.”

  But he kept taking those tablets. And they would put him in a bad mood.

  “You know there’s something I’ve never told you,” he said one day while visiting her in the Bronx. “And that’s my opinion of Puerto Ricans. Everybody knows you Puerto Ricans are jealous of us Cubans; there was a time when it was very rough for a Cuban to walk into a Puerto Rican bar. But that’s not your fault, not at all. The Puerto Ricans hate us Cubans because even the lowest Cuban who came here with nothing has something now.”

  “Children,” Lydia said. “Why don’t you go into the living room and watch the television.” Then: “Why are you telling me this when you know my situation?”

  He shrugged.

  “You know what? You’re crazy. What have I done to you?”

  He shrugged again. “I say what I think.”

  “If you think I take things from you because I have no money, you’re wrong.”

  “I was only talking about some Puerto Ricans, not all.”

  “I just think you’re trying to start something with me. Now, please, mi amor, why don’t you just relax and sit here, I’ll make you something nice—I have some chorizos and potatoes I can fry up with eggs.”

  “Yes, that would be good.”

  He sat for a long time, watching her cooking. He smoked a cigarette and then he stood up and put his arms around her. She was wearing a nice soft pink Woolworth’s slip, without anything else on underneath, and when he put his hand on her bottom the softness of youth made him feel sad.

  “I’m just an old man and I’m probably going to get worse, do you still want me?”

  “Yes, yes, I do. Don’t be foolish, sit down and eat your breakfast and later we’ll take a walk up to the movie house on Fordham Road.”

  Pacing in the halls of his house, he became more and more like that old German shepherd with matty coat and milk-cornered eyes who watched the basement entrance of a building down the street. He’d wait and wait for Lydia to return, stand by the window, wait by the door. And when she finally came home, happy with her rose, they would start to argue.

  “And where were you?”

  “At the florist’s.”

  “Well, I don’t want you going there anymore.”

  She tried hard to understand him and said, “Cesar, I think you are being a little unreasonable. Don’t worry about me, querido. I’m yours. Worry about yourself, hombre. You’re too old not to be going to a doctor if you’re not feeling well.”

  But he pretended not to hear her.

  “Well, I still don’t want you talking to any men.”

  He slipped in and out of these moods. One Friday night, while toweling himself off after a bath, he daydreamed about Lydia. She was going to turn up at eight and they would go to a movie on Broadway, eat a nice dinner, and then go to bed together. He imagined her taut nipple in his mouth, kissing her quivering thigh. When she came, her whole body shuddered in waves, as if the building was shaking. That was something nice to remember, something nice to look forward to. That, and some of the flan Delores said she was going to make for him. Cesar really liked that flan, and so he decided that after having a drink he would go upstairs to visit his brother’s widow.

  He’d had a hard day, his body aching. Even the pills weren’t working very well anymore. And he’d been bothered by mareos, dizzy spells. In reasonable moments he saw that he had been a little unfair to Lydia and he wanted to make things up to her. She would bring her kids down and stay with him through Sunday. Saturday night, he’d play a job, a party at the School of the Ascension.

  He needed to rest, but it was past seven, and so
he made himself another drink. Better to drink than to take those pills. He sat thinking about Lydia. Promised to reform. Yes, it was those pills making him act cruelly toward her. So, calmly, he went into his bathroom, took the pills, and flushed them down the toilet. Better to just drink, he told himself. Feeling tense, he went upstairs to get a piece of the flan. After so many years he still felt an attraction to Delores, and could not help but greet her with a fast little slap to the ass. But times were changing. When he had done that playfully with Leticia, she had chided him, saying, “A polite man doesn’t do that, especially an uncle.”

  And now Delores said, “Cesar, are you going to be drunk when your woman arrives?”

  Was that her reaction to a friendly slap on the butt?

  “Óyeme, Cesar, I’m only telling you this because I care for you.”

  “I came here for flan, not for lectures.”

  She put a small plate of flan before him, which he ate ravenously. Afterwards he went into the living room, where he and Nestor used to write all those songs, greeted Pedro, and killed time sipping coffee and watching television with him. Now and then, when he heard the subway coming into the station, he got up to look out the window to see if Lydia was among the subway crowd. Around eight-thirty he started to get worried and went downstairs again to wait. He had another glass of whiskey at nine, then waited by the stoop for her until ten.

  By then he found himself walking back and forth between the subway kiosk and his building. He felt like growling, and if anyone looked at him in the wrong way, his face would turn red, his ears would burn. Passing his friends in front of the bodega, he tipped his hat but did not speak to them. Merrily, he whistled a melody. His friends had brought out a milk crate and a television. They were sitting, engrossed in a boxing match.

  “Come on, Cesar, what’s wrong with you?” they’d call, but he just kept on his way.