The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Tired of singing with the Havana Melody Boys, Cesar Castillo wanted to put together an orchestra of his own. Coming from a small town in Oriente, he had been inspired by the stories he’d heard about Cubans who’d left for the States. A woman from Holguín had become an actress and gone to Hollywood, where she had gotten rich making films with George Raft and Cesar Romero. (Raft appeared as an Argentine gaucho in a jingle-bell-rimmed gaucho’s hat, performing the tango with this woman in a film called Passion on the Pampas.) She made enough money to live in a radiant pink mansion in a place called Beverly Hills; and there was another fellow, a rumba dancer named Ernesto Precioso, whom Cesar had known from the dance halls of Santiago de Cuba and who had been discovered by Xavier Cugat, for whom he’d starred as a featured dancer in a Hollywood short with Cugat called The Lady in Red and with the pianist Noro Morales in The Latin from Staten Island.

  Others who’d done well? Alberto Socarrás playing in a nightclub called the Kubanacan in Harlem, Miguelito Valdez (the Magnificent) crooning away for Xavier Cugat at the McAlpin Hotel, Machito with his widespread New York popularity and his European tours. Tito Rodríguez at the Palm Nightclub, and the Pozo Brothers.

  But the most famous success story would be that of a fellow crooner whom the brothers knew from Santiago de Cuba, where they sometimes performed in dance halls and in the placitas, sitting out under the moonlight, strumming guitars. Desi Arnaz. He had turned up in the States in the thirties and established himself in the clubs and dance halls of New York as a nice, decent fellow and had parlayed his conga drum, singing voice, and quaint Cuban accent into fame. And there were others: Cesar Romero and Gilbert Roland, Latin chaps who’d made it in the movies playing nightclub gigolos and gun-toting, sombrero-pated, spur-booted vaqueros. Cesar was impressed by Arnaz’s success and sometimes daydreamed of achieving that fame (he laughs now). That Cesar was white like Arnaz (though to some Americans he would be “a Spic”) and had a good quivering baritone and blunt pretty-boy looks all seemed destined to work to his advantage.

  In any case, the scene might be better in New York. Musician friends from Havana traveled north and found work in the orchestras of people like Cugat, Machito, Morales, and Arnaz. Cesar heard rumors and received letters about money, dance halls, recording contracts, good weekly salaries, women, and friendly Cubans everywhere. He figured that if he went up there he could stay with Cousin Pablito, hook up with an orchestra, get away from trouble, make some money. And who could say what else might happen for them.

  The day the brothers arrived in New York, fresh from Havana, in January of 1949, the city was covered in two feet of snow. Flying out of Havana on a Pan Am Clipper to Miami for $39.18, they then took the Florida Special north. In Baltimore they began to encounter snow, and while passing through a station in northern Maryland, they came across a water tower that had burst and blossomed into an orchid-shaped, many-petaled cascade of ice. Pablo met them at Pennsylvania Station, and, hombre, the brothers in their thin-soled shoes and cheap Sears, Roebuck overcoats were chilled to the bone. On the streets, people and cars seemed to disappear in the snowy winds like shredding phantoms. (They dissolved in a snow that wasn’t anything like the snow they’d seen in the movies in Havana, nothing like Bing Crosby’s angelic “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” snow, or the snow they’d imagined in dreams, lukewarm like the fake frost on a movie house Air-Conditioned sign.) Their thin-soled Cuban shoes soaked through, and when they stomped their feet in Pablo’s lobby, they could smell the fumes of gas and electric heaters in the halls.

  Pablo and his family lived at 500 La Salle, west of 124th Street and Broadway, in uptown Manhattan. It was a six-story tenement, constructed around the turn of the century to house the servant class, and it had a simple stoop with black curlicue railings, a narrow doorway framed in a crenellated brick archway. Above this rose six floors of black wrought-iron fire escapes and lamplit Venetian-blinded windows. It was two minutes from the 125th Street El, an overnight train ride and forty-five-minute flight from Havana, and five minutes from Harlem, the heartland of syncopating rhythm, as they used to say in those days. From its roof you could see the Hudson River and the domed and pillared mausoleum that was Grant’s Tomb toward the northern edge of Riverside Park at 122nd Street and all the way over to the docks, and the lines of commuters and cars waiting to board the ferryboats for New Jersey.

  That same night, Pablo’s wife cooked them a great feast, and because it had been snowing and their feet were cold, she washed their numb toes in a pan of hot water. She was a practical and kindhearted woman from Oriente, for whom marriage and childbearing were the great events in her life. She lived to take care of the men in that house, slaved washing their clothes, cleaning the house, cooking, and attending to the children. Those first cold days, the future Mambo King spent most of his time in the kitchen drinking beer and watching her prepare big pots of stew and rice and beans and fried plátanos. Frying up steaks and pork chops and long strings of sausages that Pablito would bring home from his foreman’s job at the meat plant. The smoke would escape out the windows, and neighbors, like their landlady, Mrs. Shannon, would shake their heads. Pablo’s wife would cook breakfast, fried chorizos and eggs, and then iron their clothes. She sighed a lot, but immediately after sighing, she smiled, a statement of fortitude; her plump, dimpled face highlighted by long, long eyelashes whose shadows were like the hands of a clock. That was what she was like, a clock, marking her day with her chores, her sighs punctuating the hours.

  “A family and love,” he heard again. “That’s what makes a man happy, not just playing the mambo.”

  And in those days Pablo would drive them around in his Oldsmobile to see the sights, or the brothers would ride the subway all over the four boroughs, faces pressed against the windows, as if counting the pillars and flashing lights for fun. Cesar favored amusement parks, circuses, movie houses, burlesques, and baseball games, while Nestor, a more quiet, docile, and tormented man, enjoyed nature and liked going to the places that Pablo’s children loved the most. He liked to take the children to the Museum of Natural History, where he would revel in walking among the remains of so many reptiles, mammals, birds, fish, insects which had once vibrated, shimmered, crawled, flown, swum through the world and which were now preserved in row after row of glass cases. On one of those days, he, Cesar, Pablo, and the kids posed proudly for a photograph before the looming skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Afterwards they walked over to Central Park, the brothers strolling together as they used to down in Havana. Back then it was tranquil and clean. Old ladies sunned themselves everywhere and young men snuggled in the grass with their girls. Picnicking on the green, they ate thick steak heroes and drank Coca-Colas, enjoying the sunshine as they watched boats float across the lake. Best was the Bronx Zoo in springtime, with its lions prowling in their dens, the buffalo with their great horns and downy fur foaming like whitewater beneath their chins, long-necked giraffes whose heads curiously peeked high into the skirts of trees. Beautiful days, beyond all pain, all suffering.

  At this time in New York there was a bit of malevolent prejudice in the air, postwar xenophobia, and budding juvenile delinquency on the streets. (And now? Years later? A few of the Irish old-timers stubbornly hanging on can’t believe what happened on their street, the sidewalks jammed now with dominoes, shell games, card players, and radios and fruit-ice wagons, those old fellows wandering about furtively like ghosts.) Cesar would remember being shushed on the street for speaking to Nestor in Spanish, having eggs thrown at him from a rooftop as he marched up the hill to Pablito’s in a flamingo-pink suit. They learned which streets to avoid, and not to go walking along the docks at night. And while they found this part of life in New York depressing at first, they took solace in the warmth of Pablo’s household: the music of Pablo’s record player, the aroma of cooking plantains, the affection and kisses from Pablo’s wife and his three children made them happier.

  That was the way it happened with most Cubans coming to
the States then, when every Cuban knew every Cuban. Apartments filled with travelers or cousins or friends from Cuba—just the way it always happened on the I Love Lucy show when Cubans came to visit Ricky in New York, de visita, turning up at the door, hat in hand, heads bowed demurely, with expressions of gratitude and friendliness. Cubans who played the castanets, shook the maracas, danced the flamenco, juggled bones, who trained animals and sang, the men of moderate height with wide-open expressions, the women buxom and small, so quiet, so grateful for the hospitality.

  Sleeping on cots in the living room, the brothers were chilled on some nights by the Hudson River wind seeping in through the loose windowpanes, alarmed by the clang, clang of the fire trucks down the street, startled (at first) when the ground shook and the building rattled with the arrivals and departures of the 125th Street El trains. In the winter they shivered, but in the spring they were serenaded by a band of strolling Italian minstrels—mandolin, violin, guitar, and singer. On Sunday afternoons, they searched the radio dials for nice music and listened to Machito’s “Live from the El Flamingo Nightclub” broadcasts on WHN, the brothers happy whenever the percussionist bandleader would say a few words of Spanish between numbers: “And this is a little number for my compadres out there . . . “Leaning out the window, they watched the scissors man in his heavy black coat, bent back and grizzled face, limping up the street with a grindstone slung over his shoulders and ringing a bell. They bought buckets of ice for their drinks from the ice man, who drove a small black truck. They watched the junk man in his horse-drawn wagon. They were warmed by the coal that came rushing down a chute into the basement, barked at by wild herds of street hounds, and blessed by the priest of the red-doored Catholic church.

  When they weren’t out sightseeing or visiting friends, the two brothers wore sleeveless T-shirts and sat in the kitchen studying to improve their English. They read something called A Better English Grammar for Foreign Speakers, Captain Marvel and Tiger Boy comics, the Daily News, the Brooklyn Herald, the racetrack “blue” sheets, and the golden-spined storybooks about enchanted swans and whorl-eyed trees in the Black Forest that Pablo’s kids would bring home from the parochial school. Even though the brothers already knew how to speak a polite if rudimentary English that they’d learned while working as busboys and waiters in the Havana chapter of the Explorers’ Club on old Neptuno Street (“Yes sir, no sir. Please don’t call me Pancho, sir”), the twisted hard consonants and terse vowels of the English language never fell on their ears like music. At dinner, the table piled high with platters of steaks and chops, plátanos and yuca, Cesar would talk about walking on the street and hearing a constant ruido—a noise—the whirling, garbled English language, spoken in Jewish, Irish, German, Polish, Italian, Spanish accents, complicated and unmelodic to his ear. He had a thick accent, rolled his rrrrrrrs, said “jo-jo” instead of “yo-yo” and “tink,” not “think”—just like Ricky Ricardo—but got along well enough to charm the American women he met here and there, and to sit out on the fire escape in the good weather, strumming a guitar, crooning out in English “In the Still of the Night.” And he could walk down the street to the liquor store and say, “One Bacardi’s dark, please . . .” And then, after a time, with bravado, saying to the proprietor, “How the hell are you, my friend?”

  He was proud of himself, as in those days it was a mark of sophistication among the Cubans of New York to speak English. At the parties they attended, given by Cubans all over the city, the better one’s English, the higher his status. Conversing rapidly in Spanish, Cesar would offer proof of his linguistic facility by throwing in a phrase like “hep cats at a jam session.” Now and then he fell in with a Greenwich Village crowd—American girls with bohemian spirits who would turn up at the Palladium or the Palm Nightclub; wild va-va-voom types who did not wear brassieres underneath their zebra-patterned party dresses. Meeting them on the dance floor, the Mambo King impressed them with his moves and Latin-lover mystique, and retired with them to their Village pads (with bathtubs in the kitchen) where they smoked reefers (he would feel a sugarcane field sprouting in his head), listened to bebop, and made out on dog-haired carpets and atop spring-worn couches. He picked up the words “jive” and “crazy!” (as in “Crazy, man, give me some skin!”), and with avuncular sexist tenderness lent them money and took them out to eat. In the period when he briefly went to work at the Tidy Print lithography plant on Chambers Street, to earn some extra money to buy a car, he would spend his lunch hours with this Jewish kid from Brooklyn, Bernardito Mandelbaum, teaching him Spanish. In the course of this he learned a few Yiddishisms. They’d trade words: schlep (dope), schmuck (fool), schnook (ignoramus), schlemiel (wastrel, fool), for bobo (dope), vago (lazy lout), maricón (fairy), and pendejo (ball-busting predatory louse). At some of these parties, where only English was spoken, he was famous for impressing even the driest Cuban professors with the exuberant variety of his speech. And he was a good listener, too, passing entire evenings with his hand on his chin, nodding and repeating, “Ah, yes?” and later, on his way home with Nestor, reciting the new words he had learned like a poem.

  In the cane suitcases they’d brought with them from Cuba were bundles of paper on which they’d written down many of their ideas for songs. These mostly had to do with little bits out of their lives. Finding romance and country-bumpkin living funny, Cesar wrote unrestrained lyrics that tended toward obscenities, the change of a word for a laugh (“Bésame Mucho” to “Bésame Culo"). Hangovers often inspired him: in the days when he and Nestor slept on cots in Pablo’s living room, he would wake up after an epic night out in dance halls and supper clubs, with his skin and hair smelling of tobacco, perfume, and booze, inspiration would strike him, and the Mambo King would drag himself out of bed, take hold of his orangewood Brazilian guitar, strum chords, and with one slippered foot atop the radiator, and head pounding with ironies and pain, write a song.

  He wrote the 1950 ballad “Alcohol” on a morning when he woke on the living-room couch with a balled-up pair of nylons in his jacket pocket and a bitten-up lip, feeling as if he had a large heavy-winged blackbird inside his head. Inspired, he strummed his guitar, whistled a melody, made up some lyrics, putting together a rudimentary version of the song that the Mambo Kings would record in 1952, the lyric asking, “Alcohol, why have you wrested away my soul?”

  Other compositions came to him in the same effortless manner, songs written to take the listeners back to the plazas of small towns in Cuba, to Havana, to past moments of courtship and love, passion, and a way of life that was fading from existence.

  His (and Nestor’s) songs were more or less typical of the songwriting of that day: ballads, boleros, and an infinite variety of fast dance numbers (son montunos, guarachas, merengues, guaracha mambos, son pregones). The compositions capturing moments of youthful cockiness (“A thousand women have I continually satisfied, because I am an amorous man!”). Songs about flirtation, magic, blushing brides, cheating husbands, cuckolds and the cuckolded, flirtatious beauties, humiliation. Happy, sad, fast, and slow.

  And there were songs about torment beyond all sorrow.

  That was Nestor’s specialty. While Cesar knocked his songs out, Nestor worked and reworked the same compositions over and over again. Loving the torture of composition, he would spend hours hunched over a notebook with a guitar or his trumpet, trying to compose a ballad, one beautiful song. Rafael Hernández had done it with “El Lamento,” Moisés Simón with “The Peanut Vendor,” Eliseo Grenet with “La Última Rumba.” And in those days, his heart filled with an unbearable pain, he was writing the song they would perform on television, that mournful tune that would bring them closest to fame, “Bella María de Mi Alma,” “Beautiful María of My Soul,” a song which in its early stages consisted of only a few pitiful utterances: “María . . . my love . . . María . . . my soul”—words contained in a thorny cage built around three chords, A minor, D minor, and E7th, a song that he would strum so often and sing with such a melanch
olic tone in his voice that even the bemused Cesar Castillo would say, incredulously, “What a horror! If I hear about María one more time, I’m going to throw your guitar out the window.”

  Then: “Why don’t you forget about the song and come out with me? Come on, bro’, I’m nearly ten years older than you . . . and I don’t want to stay home . . .”

  “No, leave without me.”

  Slick and godlike, Cesar Castillo would shake his head and go out the door, disappear up the kiosked stairway with the pagoda roof and smoked-glass windows, to catch the subway downtown. Late on those nights, when he had no diversions, Nestor would think about the past from which there was no escape. His insides twisted into shit, the weight of his skull crushing the pillow, sheets entangled around him, a thick blue wormy vein boring across the brow of his melancholic head. Some nights he heard every sound in the alley: the cats skulking around in the dark basement doorways, the wind dashing television antenna wires against the walls, coffee cups, plates, and utensils being washed, low voices murmuring in the kitchen, bed noises, someone belching, the Jack Benny show on the neighbors’ television, and, mocking him, the frantic breathing of a neighbor across the way, the immense, floppy-breasted, freckle-bottomed Irish girl, Fiona, whom he’d often see through her window, making love and screaming at the top of her lungs in ecstasy.