The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  And he saw his mother again, saw his mother’s loving face, indistinguishable in memory from the stars he’d watch from the porch at night in Cuba.

  “Te quiero, mijo” is what she used to say.

  He was only a little boy then. He used to fall asleep with his head pressed against his mother’s breasts, hearing her heartbeat and those little gasps. That was when the Mambo King had sweeter ideas about women, when his mother was the morning light, the light burning through the treetops. That was the time when he felt that he was part of her very breath, wishing, wishing (and here the Mambo King feels a tightness around his eyes) that he could do something to end her sadness.

  Pressing his head against her belly, he’d wonder, “What’s inside there?”

  Years later, as a man, kissing women’s privates, he’d tremble with the recollection of how he’d imagined the whole world inside his mother’s womb.

  “My mother, the only mother I’ll ever have.”

  She was sewing his shirt and running a thick cord through the soles of a ratty pair of shoes to repair them. “Ay, I used to love dancing when I was a young girl.”

  She had one prized possession, the only thing he would remember from that household as having any value, an old mahogany music box from Spain, a family heirloom. It had a big bronze key, whose head was shaped like a butterfly, and it played a cheerful zarzuela. She would wind the key and say, “Come dance with me, child.”

  He was barely big enough to reach her waist, but she took him by his hands and led him dancing around the room.

  “And when this part of the dance was over, the man bowed and the woman took hold of the hem of her dress like this, and lifted it slightly off the floor—in those days the women wore dresses that dragged on the floors and had long trains behind them. And many layers underneath.”

  “Many layers?”

  “Yes, son, some women wore a hundred layers underneath their skirts.”

  “One hundred layers . . .” In his happiest dreams he would seduce a woman with a hundred-layer dress, but because it was a dream, under each layer he would find a garter, a warm thigh, a silky pair of underdrawers, and underneath that, a womb opening to him. “One hundred layers . . .” He hadn’t thought of that for years and years. “It’s all a fading memory, you see.” She lifted him off the floor and the room went spinning around him. Then he saw Genebria in the kitchen doorway. She was clapping her hands and broke into a strutting waltz, as if performing a slow dance at carnival. Three steps forward and she shook her shoulders, her head also shaking like a horse’s.

  Ay, poor Mamá, dead but calling out to him from the cheery kitchen, “How many plátanos do you want?” And that’s where he stood now, in their kitchen in Cuba, watching his mother peel off the thick skin of plantains, and through the window he could see the plantain trees outside, and the mangoes, papayas, guanábanas, yuca, and avocados growing here and there. Genebria chopping up garlic and onion and tomatoes, and, cooking in another pot, yuca. Beautiful to see that again.

  And he remembered standing in front of the Arab’s shop with his younger brother, el pobre Nestor, and finding among the lard, rice, sugar, coffee, the endless strands of sausages, near the dresses and Communion gowns and coils of rope, wire, spades, and axes, the shelf of silk-skirted dolls, a guitar. And who taught him that? A lanky insect-looking mulatto named Pucho, who lived in a forest of crates and palm fronds. He’d find him in his yard, sitting on the hood of an abandoned car, singing with such a tremor in his voice that he made the hens run in circles under his feet. He lorded over them with his music and made them sing, “Caaaaacccckkkaka.” He’d made his own guitar out of plywood, wire, and nails, and it looked like a Dominican harp. But he knew how to play, knew magic, knew the chants to Changó.

  Adiós, my friend . . . Adiós.

  Yes, love was so beautiful, the music told him, taking him again to his friends. Adiós, Xavier, sitting out in front of his ice house in a steamy mist, with his pot of rice and beans and his accordion.

  Adiós!

  And he saw the orchestra leader Julián García on a stage before him, waving a baton, and he stood up nervously beside Julián and he began to croon, adiós, adiós, and he saw Ernesto Lecuona, “a helluva nice guy, dignified, a little snotty-nosed, but a true gentleman, who taught me the meaning of a good habanera.” And he goes running down into the plaza, where a band is playing during carnival, lingers near the stage, trying to figure out all the fingerings on the instruments, but it’s hard because they’re only lit by lantern light, and it’s then that he sees a hand reaching down to him and pulling him up onto the glory of the stage, performing for the people.

  And suddenly he remembers all these faces, pretty young female faces that he spent endless energies chasing, some of whom he loved, and some of whom he hardly knew.

  And I loved you, Ana, don’t think I ever forgot that time we went walking in Holguín, even if it was a long, long time ago. We walked so far from your parents’ house that you were certain your Papi would come after both of us with a belt, and so we headed for the park, and whenever we passed through the shadows, where no one could see us, your hand tightened around mine and the air around us seemed charged and then we’d kiss. We stole only a few kisses, I never saw you after that, but don’t you ever think that memory has left me, memory of youth and loveliness, how I’ve often wondered the way things might have been between you and me . . . And I loved you, Miriam, so what if I was a coarse kid who would stick his tongue out at you because you were such a snooty-looking rich girl, coming out of that grand house with your mother, who had a huge rump and walked holding a parasol. I know you were interested in me by the way you would steal a glance, I noticed even when I tried to pretend you weren’t there. Remember how I would stand in front of the movie house singing? And you would come by, snooty as ever, until the day when you smiled, and everything changed. You and I were together for a month before they found us out, kissing in the parks and behind bushes, two happy children, and then your Papi, a judge and highly placed in the Gallego Club, found out through gossip, and they sent you away to live with your aunt. How could I have known that I was “lower”? How could I have known that your father would make such a ruckus over a few harmless kisses? . . . And I loved you, Verónica—remember how we just held hands and I nearly burst out of my trousers, and that for all your efforts you could not help looking at me, and remember the time when you couldn’t resist and you touched me quickly with your palm. A spasm flushed through me as your face, blushing, turned away; milk seeped out of me and you stood in the corner with your fingers spread apart, waiting for the color to drain out of your face, and I went home with this gummy mess in my trousers, but we were never to be . . . And I loved you, Vívian—when the adults were too tired to watch us, we would go out to the veranda the better to hear the string bands, and then we would sit on the stone wall and press our foreheads together, and sometimes you would let me kiss you, but not just an ordinary kiss, but with my tongue. You parted your teeth just wide enough to let the tip slip in, but not all of me, I smelled too much of tobacco. “Always trying to be un gran macho,” you would say. Then there was the time when I ran into you after church and we went through the Camposanto to look for your aunt’s grave, but instead found ourselves kissing against a tree, and gasping, you told me, “I hope you’re the man who will be my husband and to whom I will lose my virginity,” but I was stupid and became very angry, thinking “Why wait?” especially because of the state I was in. I was insatiable as a young man, Vivian, insatiable, and that’s why my fingers would crawl through your defenses until you had no choice but to turn red in the face and run home to your family, but I loved you, understand? . . . And I loved you, Mimi—though you never let me fuck you in the normal way, you took me out beyond your father’s shed and lifted your skirt and let me fuck you in your ass, or was it between your buttocks, I don’t remember, just the cream and the smell of your body and the way your rump just kept lifting as if
you really wanted me inside your vagina, but you kept your hand there over the opening instead and kept pushing me back out, do you remember? And how in the end we would go walking through town but without touching or holding hands: I thought you were feeling a little sad, but after we had done it, I somehow felt ashamed, as if everybody knew. We did it that way every week for months, and then you came to my father’s house and I refused to let you inside, and when you cried, I cried, but you never believed me . . . And I loved you, Rosario, because of the way you smiled at me when we’d pass each other on the street, and I loved you, Margarita, though we never got very far in our lovemaking, just giving each other pecks on the cheek, but you’d make love to the palm of my right hand with your fingernails, digging them in deep and then giving me a look as if to say, “See, macho, what you might expect from me?” I was intrigued, enchanted, Rosario, but you know that your brothers didn’t want me near you, a lot of people didn’t want me near anyone. Someone should teach him a lesson, is what most people thought, and you know how many, including your brothers, tried. I was never Tarzan or Hercules, all I ever wanted was a little comfort, a few kisses. Did I ever tell you that on the night of June 11, 1935, when I was supposed to take you to a dance, I went walking along some side streets and a gang jumped me, six, seven boys, and what they wanted was to drag me through the dirt and shit, beating me down because I didn’t fight back, just held my hands up, saying, “Come on, fellows, what are you doing?” They not only beat me down but rolled me in a thick pit of mud and shit, and I woke up an hour after the dance was over, with this strong stench in my nostrils and the feeling that you would never even look at me, that everybody would know that I had been rolled in the shit, and that’s why I never went back to see you—I thought everybody knew, understand? . . . And I loved you, Margarita, for standing across from me in the plaza, under the yellow light of a Chinese lantern, in a white dress, with a red bow around your waist, shyly smiling at me from across the way, shy because you thought I was too handsome to talk to, but if you knew what I felt like deep inside, it would have made a difference; that’s why I never gave you the up-and-down the way I did some of the others, that’s why I turned away when you finally worked up the nerve to walk up to me smiling—you see, because in my household I had been made to feel like shit, so no matter how handsome I might have seemed, I looked in the mirror with disappointment. It was only because of the way some women looked at me that I knew I was worth something more, but if you left it up to me, I would have spent my life hiding like a monster; I loved you because you seemed to finally love me . . .

  And now beautiful snow was falling, Bing Crosby snow, twirling-in-circles-with-your-mouth-open snow. Baltimore 1949 snow, coming down from heaven.

  Then he was walking along with Nestor, going to all the different dance halls: the Palladium, the Park Palace, the Savoy, someone saying, “Benny, Myra, I want you to meet two good friends of mine, compañeros from Cuba, and really great players, too. They surely know their way around a son and a charanga, know what it is. Benny, this is Cesar Castillo, he’s a singer and instrumentalist, and this is his brother Nestor, one of the best trumpeters you’ll ever hear.”

  “Cesar, Nestor, I want you to meet a nice guy and, you know, a helluva musician. Fellows, meet Frank Grillo—Machito.”

  “A pleasure.”

  “Cesar Castillo.”

  “Xavier Cugat.”

  “Cesar Castillo.”

  “Pérez Prado, hombre!”

  “Cesar Castillo.”

  “Vanna Vane.”

  . . . pushing up the skirt of her sundress . . . taking off her panties, and his sex organ inflamed by sunlight and blood. Moans of pleasure in the solitude of the woods. His thick tongue jammed up high between her legs. Swig of wine, kiss of her ankle.

  “Oh, Vanna, aren’t we having a nice picnic today?”

  “You said it.”

  Hearing the music, he remembered feeling the pork fat of his dinners in Cuba dripping down his chin and onto his fingers, which he’d lick with pleasure. Remembered a whore struggling with a thick rubber on his member, how he had tried to pull it down over himself, how her fingers took hold of his fingers, and then how she used both hands to get it all the way down over his thing. He remembered pressing the valves of the trumpet a thousand times, remembered the beauty of a rose, remembered his fingers slipping under a wire-frame 36C brassiere, Vanna’s, his fingers sinking into the warm skin. He remembered hearing alley cats at night, the Red Skelton radio show in the alley. From the sixth floor, the Jack Benny show, and then, years later, in the courtyard, I Love Lucy.

  Clouds of smoke from the incinerator hurting his eyes, clouds of smoke breaking up over the rooftop.

  His mother holding his hands, his mother closing her hands around his.

  His mother’s soft heartbeat . . .

  And he runs up the stairway again and finds Nestor playing that song again—Oh, brother, if you knew how I’ve thought of you all these years—and he sings this new song, this fucking song he had been working on for a long, long time, and when he’s done, he says, “That’s how I feel about María.” And, love-struck,he looked out the window as if it were raining flowers instead of snowing.

  “Even though I hate to admit it, brother, that’s a nice little song you’ve written. But why don’t we do this with the chorus.”

  “Yes, that’s much better.”

  And with a sly smile on his lips, he nodded to the quinto player, who was banging down hard on the drums with his taped-up fingers for the intro, bap, bap, bap, bap! Then the piano came in with its vamp, then the bass, then the horns and all the drums. Then another nod from Cesar, and Nestor began to play his horn solo, the notes flying across the room like firebirds, and so mellow and happy that all the musicians were saying, “Yeah, that’s it. He’s got it.”

  Cesar dancing with his white golden-buckled shoes, darting in and out like agitated compass needles, and he went back running through Las Piñas as if he were a little kid again, blowing horns and banging pots and making noise in the arcades . . .

  Floating on a sea of tender feelings, under a brilliant starlit night, he fell in love again: with Ana and Miriam and Verónica and Vivian and Mimi and Beatriz and Rosario and Margarita and Adriana and Graciela and Josefina and Virginia and Minerva and Marta and Alicia and Regina and Violeta and Pilar and Finas and Matilda and Jacinta and Irene and Jolanda and Carmencita and María de la Luz and Eulalia and Conchita and Esmeralda and Vivian and Adela and Irma and Amalia and Dora and Ramona and Vera and Gilda and Rita and Berta and Consuelo and Eloisa and Hilda and Juana and Perpetua and María Rosita and Delmira and Floriana and Inés and Digna and Angélica and Diana and Ascensión and Teresa and Aleida and Manuela and Celia and Emelina and Victoria and Mercedes and . . .

  And he loved the family: Eugenio, Leticia, Delores, and his brothers, living and dead, loved them very much.

  Now, in his room in the Hotel Splendour, the Mambo King watched the spindle come to the end of the “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” Then he watched it lift up and click back into position for the first song again. The clicking of the mechanism beautiful, like the last swallow of whiskey.

  When you are dying, he thought, you just know it, because you feel a heavy black rag being pulled out of you.

  And he knew that he was going, because he felt his heart burning with light. And he was tired, wanting relief.

  He started to raise the glass to his lips but he could raise his arm no longer. To someone seeing him there, it would look as if he were sitting still. What was he thinking in those moments?

  He was happy. At first, things got very dark, but when he looked again, he saw Vanna Vane in the hotel room, kicking off her white high heels and hitching up her skirt, saying, “Would you do me a favor, honey? Undo my garters for me?”

  And so he happily knelt before her, undoing the snaps of her garters, and then he slid her nylons down and planted a kiss on her thigh and then another on her buttock,
where the softest skin, round and creamy, peeked out from her panties, and he pulled them down to her knees and with his majestic, ravaged visage between her legs he gave her a deep tongue-kiss. And soon they were on the bed, frolicking as they used to, and he had a big erection and no pain in his loins, so big that her pretty mouth had to struggle with the thick and cumbersome proportions of his sexual apparatus. They were entangled for a long time and he made love to her until she broke into pieces and then a certain calm came over him and for the first time that night he felt like going to sleep.

  THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN THEY found him, with a drink in his hand and a tranquil smile on his face, this slip of paper, just a song, lying on the desk by his elbow. Just one of the songs he had written out himself:

  WHEN I CALLED THE NUMBER that had been listed on Desi Arnaz’s letterhead, I expected to speak with a secretary, but it was Mr. Arnaz himself who answered the phone.