Latin Moon in Manhattan: A Novel

by Jaime Manrique

  “I’m so happy you like them. I know you don’t have a nice summer suit. Anyway,” she said, as she continued chopping scallions and tomatoes, “I want you to look nice tonight. You know Paulina and Claudia are such clothes horses.”

  “I really don’t feel like going anywhere tonight, if you don’t mind,” I said, surprised that she still planned to go to the Saigon Rose.

  “I don’t feel so hot myself,” she said. “But Paulina and Claudia will be disappointed if we don’t show up. Paulina had a dress made just for the occasion. Anyway,” she sighed, “I know Bobby would have wanted us to go out and enjoy ourselves. And I hope you do the same when I die, okay?”

  The timing was wrong to confront her about the Claudia plot.

  Chopping vegetables on the cutting board, all of a sudden she looked old, shrunken, defeated. The sorrow and weariness painted on her face deterred me from bringing it up. I thanked her again for the suit, and told her I wanted to nap for a couple of hours. As I climbed the stairs, I thought about how, for years, Mother had wished I had been a successful businessman like Bobby. His successes had made Mother proud of him. It was no wonder she took Bobby’s death so badly. In my bedroom, I hung the suit, cleared the bed, set the alarm clock, and lay down, burying my face under the pillows. Immediately, I fell asleep. I began to dream about painful moments of my adolescence. I felt as if I were walking with a stick, using it to uncover the cobwebs that had accumulated on top of still-living and bleeding wounds. I dreamed I was in Colegio Americano, where Bobby and I had been classmates. I dreamed the principal called me into his office and for the millionth time asked me to bring my birth certificate to school. I promised to bring it soon, knowing deep down that it was impossible because my father had refused to acknowledge me legally and thus there was no legal record of my birth. The scene played and replayed in my mind, and with each new rehearsal the principal would get angrier until he threatened to expel me from school. In the dream, I experienced the acute feeling of inadequacy and rejection I felt at that time. At the first school I attended, the Jewish school, I saw the circumcised boys in the showers after gym class and I thought I was a freak. I saw myself during school recess, sitting at my desk, sobbing hysterically, while the other children were out in the yard playing. In the next sequence of dreams, I was eleven or twelve. I saw myself naked, holding my uncircumcised penis, trying to remove my foreskin with a razor. I made an incision and started bleeding. Afraid to call for help, I bled until I passed out in the bathroom where my mother found me. She wrapped a towel around my private parts and took me to her bed and applied Mercurochrome to my almost severed penis, then kissed me and hugged me, reassuring me that everything was all right, that I was not a freak, that a doctor would see me the next day and circumcise me if that’s what I wanted. That night, I slept on mother’s bed, embracing her, and when I woke up, I was kissing her, and we were both naked, panting and sweating and my penis was erect as if I had just stopped making love to her and I began to cry. I woke up, quaking. Was that what had really happened? Had I made love to my mother? Or was this just an incestuous dream of unfulfilled passion? Perhaps I would never find out and even if I did, what good would it do me to know the truth?

  5 Nostalgias

  It was nearly midnight when mother and I arrived at the Saigon Rose. Red-carpeted steps led to a landing where we were greeted by a woman attired in a glittering scarlet gown and lots of costume jewelry. Upon giving our names, we were admitted, but not before two beetle-browed men, with gold canines, frisked us.

  The interior of the nightclub looked like a set out of Scarface— the remake. Hot yellows and reds predominated; from the ceiling hung baroque chandeliers all ablaze. A conga was in progress. The long line snaked around the dance floor and the tables surrounding it. The shimmering gowns of the women, plus the substantial rocks they flashed, made the line look like a Chinese dragon. We stood by the bar, waiting for the conga to finish. Although the Saigon Rose is owned by Asians, Saturday night is Colombian night. It was a prosperous, plastic-looking clientele; the women, heavily made up and dressed in elaborate gowns; the men dressed mostly Caribbean style—in white and mauve suits.

  When the conga was over and the exhausted but excited couples dispersed, a tuxedoed waiter escorted us to our table. I was impressed by Mother’s numerous acquaintances. She glided around the tables, waving and calling names and blowing kisses, as if she were the queen of the ball. Much to the annoyance of the waiter, she stopped to introduce me to several “businessmen.”

  Near the back of the dance floor, Paulina and Claudia were sitting across from one another, at a round table for eight. Claudia stood up, stretching her arms. “Lucy, Sammy,” she called out, laughing her deep, nervous, raucous laugh. She looked like a Latin Grace Jones: spiked orange hair, boa-constrictor pants and jacket, and diamonds, rubies, and emeralds cascading from various extremities and orifices. We exchanged kisses and embraces. As I sat down, I noticed two grim-looking men at the next table who must have been Claudia’s and Paulina’s bodyguards. Mother and Paulina engaged in a heated and giggly tête-à-tête. Claudia’s French perfume made her smell like a voluptuous Barranquilla flower.

  “Sammy, viejo man. It’s good to see you. I’m so sad tonight,” she said, putting her arm over my shoulder. Her long purple fingernails were pierced by thin gold chains with tiny diamond stars at their tips. If I had to use an adjective to describe her, I would have to say … unique. She seemed a bit sauced already, but her agate eyes shone like movie projectors in the dark. Claudia poured me a glass of Dom Perignon and we toasted Bobby. Since her arrival in America, Claudia and I had seen one another only intermittently. All I know is that her family arrived in Miami penniless immigrants, and a couple of years later they were millionaires. When Paulina purchased a house in Jackson Heights our mothers became fast friends. During her years at Yale, I saw Claudia infrequently. After graduation, she seemed to spend most of her time traveling to distant places and residing at her many homes on three continents. A few years ago, she had had a motorcycle accident, from which she escaped unharmed, but the friend riding with her, her lover, I assumed, had been killed. Since that time, Claudia developed her peculiar laughter which reminded me of Tallulah Bankhead’s. In the late eighties, she had come to visit me on Eighth Avenue, and she had taken me to rock concerts and punk clubs on the Lower East Side. But she must have sensed that they were not my idea of fun because, much to my relief, she stopped asking me out.

  “Sammy, qué vaina. No joda,” she moaned, swilling her champagne. “I always thought of us as the three musketeers, and now is over and I feel old as hell.”

  I thought it was disarming that, in spite of her Ivy League education, Claudia retained the macho Spanish working-class argot of the Caribbean coast of Colombia. We began to reminisce about our adolescence, which seemed to be our favorite topic of conversation.

  “I remember so clearly the first time I met you,” she said. “I was playing with my toy soldiers in the backyard when I heard you over the wall. Even then your voice was so deep and spectral,” she said, laughing and slapping my back. “Although Mother had told me she’d kill my ass if she caught me climbing the wall, I had to find out what was going on. I climbed the wall and I saw you with your eyes closed and your arms stretched to one side, reciting Silva’s Nocturno:

  Y era una sola sombra larga

  and it was a long, lone shadow,

  and it was a long, lone shadow.

  “Oh, man,” she went on. “You sounded like Anna Magnani on valium.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember Bobby called you down and you climbed down the guava tree, and although you were nine or ten all you had on was a pair of shorts. And you had a Mohawk haircut even then; I thought you were a boy,” I said, to get even.

  “It was a mango tree, not a guava tree, man. How can you have forgotten such a crucial detail?”

  “Are you sure? I always thought it was a guava tree. Sour guavas, if I remember correctly.�
��

  “Man, it must be all that LSD you did that fried your brains. I tell you, Sammy, it was a mango de aúcar tree. Don’t you remember how during mango season we’d spend whole afternoons eating ripe mangoes? We’d only stop when Bobby’s grandmother, Doña Guillermina, would come out in the backyard screaming, ‘Boys, if you don’t stop eating mangoes you’re gonna grow hairs on yourtongues.’ “ She was laughing hard, although the anecdote did not seem all that hilarious to me. I could see Claudia was lit.

  We continued reminiscing about Bobby, gossiping about Joel (whom we both liked), and Doña Leticia (whom we both detested). The conversation was interrupted when the set of boleros was over and the dancing couples returned to their seats. The emcee came out and commanded the attention of the audience. “Damasy caballeros, ladies and gentlemen, the moment we’ve been anxiously waiting for: I give you the artist we all came to see, the heiress to Gardel’s immortal throne, the supreme interpreter of the tango in our time, the incomparable international superstar, Lucinda de las Estrellas.”

  I looked at Mother, but she was already in another galaxy—all her concentration was directed at the stage. Five Japanese men in tuxedos appeared, bowed, and took their seats. They tuned their instruments, as all eyes riveted on the golden circle of light the spotlight made on the curtains. Lucinda de las Estrellas, a.k.a. Wilbrajan, flung the curtains aside and strutted onto the stage. All loud conversation ended, although I heard whispers and titters. My sister scanned the audience with an arrogant, defiant nod, as if she were displeased to find an audience in the nightclub. She smiled at our table, though. I hadn’t seen Wilbrajan in several months, and I was struck how every time I saw her, she seemed to have grown more beautiful. She was wearing a simple, tight, white silk dress, cut several inches above the knees. She wore her hair in a tress, which she kept over her breasts. Wilbrajan walked toward the musicians with the grace of a mother swan. While she chatted inaudibly with them, she turned her back to the audience, showing the low cut of her dress, which exposed her back and carnal shoulder blades. In her fleshiness, she reminded me of Ingres’s Odalisque. I realized that years after her metamorphosis, I still kept looking for the “grasshopper” of my childhood.

  Wilbrajan had started her career singing boleros, cuplés, and rancheras, in disreputable dives all over the United States, wherever there was a Latin population that supported her act. Once a year, she traveled to Mexico and South America, where she claimed she was famous. She had cut an album in Colombia. In the early 80s, she became a tanguera. God knows her lifestyle suited her stage persona; she had had many boyfriends and a few ex-husbands, whose only trait in common was their shadiness.

  She approached the mike slowly, fussing with her tress. All in white, she seemed a moon goddess. She wore a gold chain around her neck and a single large pearl dangled from it. The hand that held the mike had a tattoo of a purple dagger.

  “Buenas noches, ladies and gentlemen,” she said in her husky voice. “I’m honored to have in the audience the person to whom I owe everything, my mother.” The spotlight fell on us, and Mother, playing the moment for all it was worth, took a bow and then blew a kiss at Wilbrajan. I was miffed that the entrancing chanteuse had ignored me, while acknowledging our mother, with whom she didn’t get along at all. The spotlight returned to Wilbrajan, who now was hugging the mike with both hands. “I’m happy to be back at the Saigon Rose, in front of this public I adore,” she purred, stretching her exquisitely dramatic arms and opening her expressive hands. The audience applauded, responding to her fakery. “Tonight,” she went on, “is a very sad night for me. A fellow compatriot, and dear friend of the soul, Bobby Castro, died this afternoon. To his memory, I shall sing ‘Volver.’ “ She signaled to her musicians, and the violins began rippling waves of melancholy notes throughout the nightclub. Closing her eyes, the way Gardel did it, she recited the first few lines of the famous tango:

  Volver ….I can guess the city lights

  blinking in the distance,

  are marking my return.

  Opening her eyes, she crooned:

  They are the same one that lit

  with their pale reflections,

  deep hours of pain;

  She sang mournfully, as if delivering a dirge. But as the song progressed, her voice blossomed, taking dark, tragic tones:

  And though I didn’t want to return

  one always returns to one’s first love.

  The old street that once echoed:

  ‘Her life is yours, her love is yours,’

  under the mocking glance of the stars

  today indifferently watches my return.

  Making a fist, Wilbrajan hit her breasts, as if she were stabbing herself. It was a most operatic effect. Then she ran her fingertips across her forehead:

  To return

  with a wilted brow

  my hair silvered by the snows of time.

  To feel

  that life is just a sigh;

  that twenty years are nothing,

  that my feverish eyes

  wandering in the dark

  look for you and call your name.

  Suddenly, the utter bleakness of the lyrics got to me, and watching my sister doing this striptease of her soul became unbearable. As I looked away, I caught Mother’s profile and her beatific expression. Obviously, Wilbrajan had inherited her love of tango from our mother. To me, Mother was now just an old woman, but in her youth her story hadn’t been much different from Wilbrajan’s. The reason there was so much animosity between them was that they were like two different images of the same person: in Mother, Wilbrajan saw herself in old age. In my sister, Mother saw the woman she had been in her youth.

  Vivir

  con el alma aferrada

  in sweet remembrance

  that still makes me cry.

  Wilbrajan paused, and, as if she were a latter-day but more glamorous and haunted Janis Joplin, she screamed at the top of her lungs:

  I’m afraid of the appointed hour

  when my past returns to confront my life

  I’m afraid of the nights

  alive with memories

  that shackle my dreams.

  But the wanderer who flees

  sooner or later stops on his path

  and though oblivion, smashing it all,

  has killed my old dream,

  I hide a flickering hope,

  the only fortune left in my heart.

  Wilbrajan’s voice was barely adequate, but I had never heard anyone blast a tango in quite that way. She shook, and shivered, and shuddered, as she delivered her song in spasms of pain and despair, and I finally understood the old saying that tango was not sung but lived. When she finished, the entire audience leaped to its feet, and, banging tables, clinking glasses, it shouted: “Viva el tango, Viva Gardel!” Everyone clamored: ‘Nostalgias, Nostalgias.” Smiling like a generous goddess, Wilbrajan obliged her fans. A few couples took to the dance floor.

  “Come on, let’s rip up the floor,” Claudia said, standing and taking my hand.

  “I can’t dance the tango,” I protested.

  “Sure you can. Keep your crotch against mine, and push me around,” she ordered me.

  Ignoring the couples pirouetting around us in the lewdest manner, we danced, getting closer to Wilbrajan; the whiteness of her makeup made her look like a Kabuki performer. When we were about twenty feet away from her, we stopped and stood to the side, watching my sister’s performance.

  I hadn’t lived until I heard Wilbrajan sing ‘Nostalgias.” Standing with her feet apart, she raised her arms toward the ceiling, and with her hands open, palms up, as if she were worshiping in front of a pagan altar, begging to be sacrificed, she wailed:

  Bandoneón, howl out your tango blues.

  Perhaps you too have been wounded

  by a sentimental love.

  My clown’s soul cries out

  sad and lonely tonight

  black night without stars.


  If drinking brings consolation

  then here I’m keeping vigil

  to drown my sorrow once and for all.

  I want my heart to get drunk

  so that later I can toast to

  the failures of love.

  “Nostalgias” brought the house down, and Claudia and I returned to our table to listen to Wilbrajan interpret three more tangos. After taking innumerable curtain calls, she joined us, while the Japanese tangueros played their instruments to the total indifference of the audience who had come to drink, dance, and listen to Lucinda.

  Aware of being the center of attention, Wilbrajan embraced and kissed Mother first, then she gave me a polite, cool peck; next she embraced and kissed the Urrutias. Although it was true that over the years my sister and I had grown distant, occasionally I missed the closeness of our early years. Mother proposed a toast to her great success. A bouquet of pink orchids, compliments of the management, arrived at our table. Wilbrajan pinned an orchid on Mother’s dress. Mother purred and purred, calling Wilbrajan “Mi chinita adorada. My little angel.” Several bottles of Dom Perignon, with cards, arrived. When the waiter pointed to the sender, Wilbrajan acknowledged him with a drop-dead stare.

  “Mijita linda,” mother said to Wilbrajan. “I can’t tell you how proud you’ve made me. Now I can die; you’ve become a great singer. I know that, in heaven, Gardel is watching over you and approves.”

  “Thank you, Mommie,” Wilbrajan said, giving Mother a tiny smile.

  “Next you’ll have to sing in Radio Music Hall,” Paulina elaborated. “I wonder if we could rent it for one night. I promise you, cariño, I’ll fly all my family from Barranquilla for the occasion.”

  Mother kissed Paulina profusely on her cheeks to thank her for her generous, if far fetched, offer.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” Paulina said, holding Mother’s face. “More than friends, we’re family. You know, I’ll do anything for your children, mi amiga adorada.”