The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  By eleven he decided that something bad had happened to her: that she was robbed on the subway, or worse. Standing on the corner, smoking one cigarette after the other, he imagined Lydia standing naked in a bedroom and climbing into a bed with cool blue sheets alongside a younger man, planting kisses on his chest and then taking him into her mouth. The florist? Or one of those men who stood on the corners giving her the eye and wondering what she was doing with the old man. If he could have ran up to the Bronx like a young hound, he would have. He’d tried calling her: there was no one home. He went through a period of remorse over his suspicions, prayed to God (if there is a God) that nothing had happened to her. Around midnight, he was drunk in his living room listening to mambos and watching television. By then, he’d tried calling her a dozen times without getting a response, and he fantasized that she was cuckolding him. He said to himself, I don’t need anything from a woman.

  Around one o’clock, Lydia called him. “I’m sorry, but Rico came down with a bad fever. I had to wait in emergency all night.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “There was only one phone and I was in and out with the child. Always people waiting to use it.” Then: “Why are you being so stern with me?” And she started to cry. “You’re so stern.”

  “How’s the boy?” he asked more calmly.

  “It was food poisoning.”

  “Well, are you coming here?”

  “Hijo, I want to, but it’s too late. I’m staying with the children.”

  “Then I’ll say good night to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I don’t take this nonsense from anyone. Que te lleve el demonio!”

  In the Hotel Splendour the Mambo King winced as he swallowed more whiskey. Although he was starting to have trouble reading the time on his watch and he felt as if he were being propelled through a dense forest by a powerful wind, and the same mambo record, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” had been playing over and over, he ached happily for another drink, the same way he ached that night to be reunited with Lydia.

  Slamming down the phone, he waited for Lydia to call him, sobbing the way the broads used to when he played around with them. He sat by the phone, and when it didn’t ring, he said to himself, To hell with her. But a few hours later he felt that he had been stupid and cruel and that he was going to burst unless he could do something to get rid of the bad feelings inside him. He began slowly to understand what had plagued his younger brother those years before, this pressing melancholia. He fell asleep without having tasted more than a bit of flan; he felt something like a bloody rag being pulled through his body. It was a funny thing, pain. The pain was sharp enough that he somehow felt more slender, rather than so heavy. The pains multiplied and were so bad that he wanted to get up out of his bed but could not move. He wanted some of the pills he’d gotten on the sly for toothaches, but each time he moved, the pain got worse. Around six in the morning, the sun started to shine through the windows, and the sunlight gave him strength and he managed with a great shove to get up off the bed. Then, in an epic show of will, and clinging to the walls, he made it to the bathroom.

  Things did not improve. He would take the train to the Bronx unannounced and turn up at her door, drunk and convinced that she had some man hidden there. He would walk down to the corner and find that old hound sitting at the foot of the basement stairway, felt happy the day he watched the old hound take on a younger mutt in a street fight, snapping at the younger dog’s legs and sending it whining through the streets. That’s what he would do, he told himself, to all her young men—the ones he saw taking her to bed every night, because now, in the dresses that he had given her, and smelling sweetly of his perfumes, she was the most desirable woman in the world.

  As he thought about those days, some confusion set in. There was something else going on, too, wasn’t there? His health was getting worse each day. Pink urine, swollen fingers, and little bouts of humiliating incontinence, when he would feel his own urine leaking down his leg and he would think, Stop, but nothing would stop. That humiliation made him want to cry, because even though he was an old man, he liked to think that he was clean, but those days, he feared, had gone forever.

  And Lydia? Her face drained of color: she thought how she had almost moved her kids out of their apartment in the Bronx, and how she would do anything for that man; even forgave his age and his foul moods for the sake of love, and she felt that no matter what she did, he was bent on fucking things up. For the first time she started to think about other men. Thought that if a nice man walked up to her, she would go with him. She thought his world-weariness was spreading like a poison into her, and that even her sweetness couldn’t offset it. She found herself crying herself to sleep at three every night. He would come home, strip naked, climb into bed beside her: sometimes he would make love to her though she hadn’t even opened her eyes.

  He would whisper, “No matter what, Lydia, this old man loves you.”

  But then something became unbearable. Whenever she wanted to talk to him, he never heard her voice. He bought her flowers, new dresses, toys for her children. He blew kisses into the kitchen, but he would not talk to her.

  One day, when he asked her to spend the weekend with him, she told him, “Cesar, I’m taking my kids out to visit my sister in New Jersey.”

  And he nodded, hung up the phone, and holed up for the three days and his health slid out of him and into the toilet for good.

  Now the medicines, the tubes, the blinking machines, the pretty nurses, and the doctor again:

  “You have all the signs of systemic failure. Your kidneys, your liver are all going. Keep up your drinking and you’ll end up in the morgue. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the truth.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  IT HAD BEEN OVER FIFTY YEARS ago in Cuba when he was in school, he told himself, that his teacher, Señora Ortiz, would make him fill pages and pages of newsprint scraps with additions and subtractions, because he used to use an odd, contrary logic when it came to numbers—for example, writing 3 + 3 = 8, simply because the numbers were round-bottomed like an 8. She’d send him out to count things and add them up, and so he’d find himself in town counting the houses (one hundred and twenty-eight) and the number of horses on a given street (seven tied up to porch railings on Tacón), and once he even tried to count the number of yellow hibiscus in a field, losing track and falling asleep on the soft ground after two hundred or so—a beautiful day.

  And nearly fifty years since he’d first mounted a stage to sing.

  And nearly forty years since he’d been married.

  Then thirty-one years since leaving Havana.

  How many thousands of cigarettes had he smoked? How many leaks had he taken? Belches? Fucks, ejaculations? How many times had he ground his hips into a bed, with an erection, thinking that the mattress was a woman and waking with the insides of his underwear damp?

  Remembered trying to count the stars one night while lying on his back in a field in Cuba when he was a kid hiding from his father, and feeling as if the Milky Way was going to swallow him. He stared so long and lost count so many times that he began to feel faint-headed.

  In his own way, he wanted to be someone significant.

  How many drinks had he had that night?

  He figured a dozen, full, hearty glasses, as they might say in one of the ads.

  He did more figuring. Bottles of rum and whiskey, enough to fill a warehouse, all turned into piss. He’d consumed enough food and left the world enough shit to fill Fort Knox. (Behind this, the memory of being seized with cramps on the road outside Cleveland, so badly they had to stop the Mambo King bus so he could crouch low in the grass and relieve himself, with trucks and cars whizzing by.)

  Endless numbers of cigarettes.

  A million smiles, pinches on nice female bottoms, tears.

  Women telli
ng him like Vanna Vane used to, “I love you,” and he’d say, “Yes, I feel it,” or “And I love you, baby.”

  And for what?

  And how many times had he knelt in church as a kid praying? Or whispered as he slept, “Oh, God,” or “Jesus Christ”? Or had watched a woman’s face contort with pleasure and heard her crying out, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus”?

  His life was much more beautiful when he believed that a benevolent angel walked behind him.

  Twenty-three years since Nestor had left the world. He still had the funeral card, tucked among the letters and other things that he had brought with him that night.

  SOMETIMES WHEN THE MUSIC got faster, he would feel like a kid running up and down the steep and beautiful stairways of Santiago de Cuba. Sometimes a fast song took him far from the Bronx to Nueva Gerona, to El Valle de Yumurí, and to the mountains of Escambray, took him strolling through the city of Matanzas, threw him into the waters off the Hanabanilla falls in Las Villas, placed him on a sorrel crossing the tranquil valley of Viñales in Pinar del Río, left him perching on the ledge of a mountain cave in Oriente, peering out over the winding Río Cauto. The music set him leaning drowsily under the shade of a bottle-palm tree in Holguín. Late in the night he returned to a street in Santiago he had not thought about for years, with its narrow, two-story houses with slanting tin roofs and high-shuttered windows, palm trees and bushes and wildflowers that went flowing over the walls. He found himself standing atop a stairway, looking down, three flights below, to a small park, flowers and bushes surrounding a fountain, and in the place of honor a heroic bust. On a bench, a pretty girl in a short-sleeved polka-dot dress, reading a newspaper. The Mambo King, sixteen years old, walking toward her, the Mambo King nodding and smiling, the Mambo King sitting beside her.

  “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to go dancing later?”

  “Yes.”

  And the music redrew the blue cloudless sky and the sun rolled like a ball across his room in the Hotel Splendour, red and purple streaks across the room, and he heard the heavy bronze bells of the cathedrals of Santiago and Havana ringing simultaneously, he heard the tttling-tttling of a bicycle and blinked and saw the Havana night, shoots of light in the sky, a thousand trumpets and drums in the distance, cars honking, and the low murmur, like an ocean, of nighttime crowds.

  He was running now past La Casa Potín, the Surtida Bodega, and the good bakery smells of La Gran Vía!

  A drink in the Pepe Antonio Café with some musician pals, circa 1946; a fuck with a woman he met while strolling along, window-shopping on Obispo, what an ass on that dame, my, but how she smelled nicely of sweat and Candado soap, and her nipples were taut, brown, and smooth as glass beads. What good days, catching Beny More up at that club, La Palma, at Jibacoa beach, or heading down the Paseo del Prado with his brother Nestor toward La Punta off the Malecón, the harbor drive, to catch the ferryboat over to Guanabacoa, the two of them leaning on the railing, checking out the pretty girls. In a creaseless guayabera, he lowers his dark glasses so that this one dish, in a sailor’s blouse and a tight white skirt, slit riding high, could get a good look at his killer-green eyes. Inhalation of the sea, sun warming their faces, tour boats in the harbor, clanging buoys. And then they’re climbing the stairway up to a nice little seafood restaurant, El Morito, with its pink walls, tin roof, and shaded balcony overlooking the love-enriching sea, and they devour a pot of yellow rice cooked in chicken broth and beer, thick with shrimp, scallops, oysters, mussels, clams, olives, and red peppers. The day’s so tranquil, where did it go, so tranquil they’re feeling lazy as seagulls.

  Sometimes when he closed his eyes he saw himself as a little kid sitting in the front row of the small movie theater in their town, watching the stony-faced Eusebio Stevenson leading the musicians of his pit orchestra through tangos, rumbas, and foxtrots, which they played as background to the silent films of Tom Mix, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and so many others who galloped, danced, and swashbuckled. The future Mambo King leaning forward to watch the black man’s whorl-knuckled hands, gray in the cinema light, stretching, stretching across the keyboard. Later, he remembers, he’d followed the man out into the street and to a little café on the corner, where he would sit at a table in the back, quietly eating his chuletas and rice and beans, the kid waiting for him and watching Eusebio bolt down one brandy after another, drinking until a certain lightness entered Eusebio’s hard expression and he would make his way out into the street, Cesar Castillo following after him and pulling on his jacket, begging him, “Can you show me how you make those notes?” and keeping up with his zigzag motions (And who does this remind you of, hombre?) as he weaved down the cobblestone streets, muttering, “Leave me alone, kid. You don’t want this life,” and waving the future Mambo King away. But he kept saying, “Please, please, please,” that being one of the few times in his life that the Mambo King, even as a child, began to cry.

  “Please, please,” he kept repeating, and so adamantly that Eusebio took a long look at him, tipping up his black-brimmed hat and saying, “Well then, suppose I do teach you, what are you going to pay me? You have any money? Your family have any money?”

  Then: “Leave me alone, I must be paid.” But Cesar persisted, and when Eusebio sat down exhausted on the church steps, he said, “I’ll bring you food.” Then: “And I can bring you rum.”

  “Rum? Well then. That seems fair enough.”

  So he started taking music lessons, bringing Eusebio a pot of stew or rice and beans, whatever his mother had cooked that day (she gave him the food), and a jar of rum, which he’d fill from a cask that his father kept in the stone house where he would slaughter his pigs at the edge of their field, and all went well, with the kid learning a little piano and trumpet, until the day that his father caught Cesar filling the jar and gave the boy the beating of his life, slapping his face and going at his legs and back with a knobby branch that he pulled down from an acacia tree. And he remembers how that really started all the bad blood between him and his father, because now his son was not only a free spirit but a thief to boot! And he would not stop taking the rum, no matter how well his father hid it, and he kept getting caught and got more beatings so that he learned to hold his arms in an arc over his head and to take his beating like a man, never crying, insolent and disrespectful, and strong because, after a while, he hardly felt the stick, the belt, the fist. He sometimes arrived at Eusebio’s house with black-and-blue marks on his arms, bruises which touched Eusebio’s heart. (Why did these memories keep coming back to him?)

  And Eusebio Stevenson himself waiting on the porch, clapping his hands when he’d see Cesar approaching. “Come along!”

  There was a mattress on the plank floor of his parlor, a few chairs, a table, a coffeepot, and by a back door that opened out to a thick bush, there was a chamber pot. But then, in the center of the room, against the wall, was an upright Móntez & Co. piano, its soundboard facing decorated with mother-of-pearl nightingales, stars, and arabesque moons.

  “Do you have the rum?”

  Cesar had carried it wrapped up in one of his mother’s scarves. He gave him the jar, which Eusebio emptied into a beer bottle.

  “Good,” he said. “Now sit here and we’ll begin.”

  The first lessons involved the demonstration of simple chords, the idea of playing the bass with the left hand, the melody and chords with the right. Eusebio seemed cruel, showing no mercy in spreading Cesar’s small fingers wide across the fingerboard and stiffly pressing them down. He told the boy to memorize the scales; emphasizing this, as he couldn’t teach Cesar how to read music. He impressed the boy, however, with talk about major and minor chords, chords of joy and friendliness and chords of sadness and introspection. Then he demonstrated what could be done with a single chord, playing all kinds of melodies above it. And now he was hearing Eusebio saying something else that he would always remember.

  “Whe
n you play music you have to remember that just about everything composed has to do with love and courtship. Especially when you learn to play your older music, like the habaneras, zarzuelas, and our own Cuban contradanzas. It has all to do with romance, the man holding a woman around her waist, bowing to her, and then having that one moment in which he may whisper something in her ear, the ladies like that. In the case of the contradanzas, there’s a minute’s pause, hence the name, ‘against the dance.’ And during that pause the man would have a chance to talk to the woman.” He then began to play “La Paloma” and then demonstrated all the different styles of piano, including a ragtime piano he’d picked up while living in New Orleans once.

  “And you have to remember, boy, that what people want is to throw up their arms and say, ‘Qué bueno es! How wonderful,’ when they hear the music. Understand?”

  Yes, love was so beautiful, the music told him, pulling him through the fields at night when the owls hooted and the shooting stars passed overhead in the sky, all the planets and stars melting like wax.

  Grief endless, and over the countryside, sad bonfires and his Papi’s voice, his Papi giving him a beating, and he would form an arc over his head with his elbows for protection, never crying, taking his punishment like a man. Even on those nights when he couldn’t believe what his father was doing, when he was just a little kid holding the door that his father pounded on so hard trying to get inside to hurt him.

  Y coño, he would call me over and pull me hard by the arm, and hold my arm by the elbow, squeezing: he had powerful hands from his day’s labors, hands covered with cuts and calluses, and he’d say, “Boy, look at me when I address you. Now tell me, niño, what is it exactly that I am seeing in your eyes? Why is it that you turn away from me when I walk into this house, what is it that you are hiding from me?” And if I told him that I was hiding nothing from him, his hold would get harder and no one could pull him off me, nor would he stop—I refused to cry, the Mambo King has never cried over a man—and he would hold me until my arm turned black-and-blue or until my mother had pleaded long enough with him not to start something with me, un niño. “If you want to start something, why don’t you go back to town and start something with those men who insulted you?” And then he would start to take it out on her. And so, when he would come home in such bad moods and he asked me or one of my brothers why we had mischief or disrespect in our eyes, I stepped forward, I had the disrespectful answers. If he asked me, “Why are you looking at me in this way, boy?” I didn’t keep my mouth shut like before, I answered, “Because you’re drunk, Papi,” and then he would beat me, but it would happen very quickly, and he would hit me until his palms were dark red and hit me until he saw how cruel he was being, and then he would call me over and ask my forgiveness, and because he was my Papi, I was happy to be back in his good graces again, and so you know that’s why I took this from him, because my father is my father.