The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  The grand finale of the evening was the conga. The fabulous Cesar Castillo came out, à la Desi Arnaz, with a conga drum slung over his shoulder, banging that drum and leading the Mambo Kings into a 1-2-3/1-2 rhythm that moved everybody across the dance floor in a snaking conga line, hips bumping, tripping, flying forward, separating, kicking out their legs, shaking their chassis, laughing, and having a good time . . .

  They ended up driving uptown in Manny’s 1947 Olds and there hooked up with some of the other Mambo Kings, taking over a few long tables in the back of a little restaurant called Violeta’s, which the owner kept open late so that musicians, starved after their jobs, could have a good meal. On the back wall there was a mural of a tropic sea ablaze in the colors of an eternal Cuban sunset bursting over El Morro Castle in Havana Harbor. The walls over the bar were covered with signed photographs of the Latin musicians who’d eat there regularly. Everyone from the flutist Alberto Socarrás to the Emperor of the Mambo himself, Pérez Prado.

  That night, as the Mambo Kings and their companions were dining, in walked the well-known bandleaders Tito Rodríguez of the Tito Rodríguez Orchestra, and Tito Puente, who headed an outfit called the Piccadilly Boys, and although Cesar frowned and said to Nestor, “Here comes the enemy!” the brothers greeted them as if they were lifelong companions.

  “¡Oiganme, hombres! ¿Qué tal?”

  Watching the two brothers side by side, Delores got a good idea of what they were like. They were like their signatures on the framed photograph of the Mambo Kings on the wall over the bar. That picture of them posed atop a seashell art-deco bandstand in white silk suits, instruments by their side. The photograph was covered with the musicians’ signatures, the most flamboyant being the elder brother Cesar Castillo’s, for whom she did not at first particularly care. His signature was pure vanity. Filled with so many blooms and loops that his letters resembled the wind-filled sails of a ship. (If only she could have seen him seated at his kitchen table up on La Salle Street with a pad of paper and a pencil, and a book on penmanship open before him, practicing his signature for hours and hours.) And he was like that, Delores thought, filled with wind and meaningless gestures. He had a sly curl of experience to his lips that Delores didn’t trust. Bursting with energy after a night of performance, the older Mambo King was in constant motion, joking with his fellow musicians, talking only about himself and the joys of performance, flirting with the waitresses and giving Delores and Ana María these hungry up-and-downs. It was one thing to look at her sister, who was unattached, that way, but at his own brother’s new companion! ¡Qué cochino! she thought. Rude and presumptuous.

  Nestor’s signature was more plainly and carefully written, almost in a nervous child’s hand, as if he had taken a long time just to get his reduced, humble letters down right. He tended to sit quietly, smiling when jokes were made, nodding seriously when ordering or looking over the menu. And he tried hard to get along with everybody. He was polite to the waitress and to his fellow musicians. Courteous, almost frightened of being corrected about his table manners, even when his older brother grabbed across the table at the tostones platter and devoured everything hungrily, talking with his mouth full, and on not just one occasion indelicately belching in the midst of a laugh that enlarged his eyeballs and brought tears to his eyes: a man dedicated to himself, always taking more than his share: five pork chops, two plates of rice and beans, a plate of yuca, all drowned in salt and lemon and garlic. A bandleader’s share, she was sure. No wonder the glamorous pretty-boy singer was getting a big belly and jowls! On top of that, after filling his belly, he decided to ignore everyone else at the table, and spent all his time flirting with and sweet-talking Ana María. Dios mío, how typical was his voracious wolfishness . . .

  Nestor was more reserved, which suited her fine. And he was attentive to her, pulling out her chair from the table for her, holding doors, and making sure that she had everything she wanted. Would you like some plátanos? Some chicken? Pork chops? Treating her as if she was as important as any of the musicians . . . She liked him, found him a refined kind of man, the kind of poetic soul who would write songs of love. She was nervous, but, right then and there, she decided that she would let him do as he pleased with her. There was something she found immensely appealing about his solemn demeanor, his passivity, his pain.

  Later, Cesar dropped Manny off on 135th Street, where he lived, and borrowing his car, drove the two sisters home to the Bronx, a perilous journey during which the girls gripped their seats in terror because he kept veering into the curb, especially while going uptown on the West Side Highway: sparks flew from the hubcaps as he went zooming past all the other vehicles, honking his horn and driving like a drunk even when he wasn’t. But he got them both home in one piece and waited in the car while Nestor escorted Delores and Ana María to their apartment. Delorita would remember wishing he would at least give her a nice deep kiss, with a little bit of tongue, but he seemed so retiring and polite that she went to bed that night wondering, Is there something wrong with me? And wondering if she should have been the one to pull him close to her and slip her tongue inside his mouth.

  They started going out. They would meet on those nights when the Mambo Kings weren’t playing, eat some Chinese food, and then head downtown to catch a film, visit friends, or step out to a ballroom. Delorita would talk about the books she’d read and the rich man for whom she worked—“He’s nice, but he’s so rich he’s unhappy”—and he would listen quietly, never having much of his own to say. He always seemed preoccupied about something, but he never talked about it. A man you were in love with should have a lot to say, she used to think to herself, but there was someone beautiful in there, inside that broad chest. . . Although he never said very much, she was certain that he would slowly open up. Slowly he did, speaking about his upbringing in Cuba and how he sometimes wished he’d never left his farm—he was better suited for a simple farmer’s life, he used to say.

  “I’m not the adventurer, like my older brother. No, sirree, I was happy to sit out on the porch at night watching the stars and living tranquilito, tranquilito, but I wasn’t destined for that life, I was destined to come here to New York.”

  At first she used to believe that his pain was an ordinary homesickness for the rural countryside and that much simpler life. She always thought he smelled of the Cuban countryside, and that he had not one foul bone in his body.

  But the poor man—she figured that some terrible things had happened to him when he was a kid. He had told her that he was sick enough as a child in Cuba to have the priest perform the last rites over him at least twice. “I can remember a priest dressed in a purple cloak, praying over me. Candles and oil rubbed on my forehead. And my mother in a corner, weeping.”

  And once on a sunny day, the day he wrenched open her heart, when they had gone for a walk in Riverside Park, he told her, “Look how beautiful it is today, huh?”

  “Yes, it is, my love.”

  “But do you know something, as beautiful as this is, I feel as if it doesn’t belong to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I sometimes feel like a ghost, tú sabes, as if I’m not really part of this world.”

  “No! Bobo! You’re very much a part of this world.”

  Then they went to sit on a nice grassy hill. They’d brought a little lunch of ham and cheese with mayonnaise on seeded rolls, and cold beers. Children were playing softball in a field, and pretty college girls in Bermuda shorts and white tennis shoes were spread out here and there on blankets, studying their books. The sun up in the sky, a buzz of insects in the air, boats and barges passing on the Hudson River. Two honeybees floating over a cluster of dandelions like a young couple in love looking over a house. Then a tling-tling, a Good Humor ice-cream man in his squat white truck. Nestor walked over and came back with two icicle pops, his strawberry, hers orange, and they ate them, runny with sweet liquid, and then lay back. She was so happy because it was a beautiful day and the
y were in love, but Nestor?

  He had shut his eyes and suddenly trembled. Not a physical trembling, but a shudder in his spirit. It was so strong she felt it entering her like a fume out of a gas stove.

  “Oh, Nestor, why are you that way?” And she kissed him, saying, “Sit up here, beside me, mi corazón.”

  And he started weeping.

  “Delores . . . a man doesn’t weep. Forgive me.”

  And even though his face was all twisted up, he put a stop to it and regained his composure.

  “I just get so tired sometimes,” he told her.

  “Of what?”

  “Just tired.”

  She didn’t know what to do. She took hold of his right hand and kissed it.

  “It’s just that I don’t feel long for this world sometimes.”

  Then he wouldn’t say another word about it, and they went for a walk. The day ended happily with the two of them watching an Abbott and Costello double feature over at the Nemo movie theater on Broadway. Afterwards they ate pizza, and by then she had fallen in love.

  She must have been lovestruck, must have looked at him with such fawning eyes, because after they’d been going out for about two months, and were kissing in the foyer of her hallway, he said to her, “You know, Delorita, I wish you wouldn’t look at me that way. I’m not the saint you think I am.”

  And just like that he pulled her close, embracing her and forcing her to sigh with the inward shove between her legs of the burning mule bone inside his trousers.

  “You see, Delorita,” he was saying, “I’ve wanted to respect you, but now . . . I can’t even sleep at nights, I’m so filled up with thoughts of you . . . And there’s something else, I haven’t said a word or showed my feelings because I’m a cautious man, but, Delorita”—and he shocked her, taking her hand and pulling it down over the front of his trousers—“can’t you see what a state I’m in?”

  They kissed for a long time, until she said, “Let’s go into the apartment. Ana María’s out and won’t be back until late.”

  She wasn’t nervous, stripping down before him and resting back on the very couch where her father used to fall asleep in exhaustion. Nestor had his hands all over her, his thick tongue inside her mouth, his fingers probing under the wire rim of her brassiere, and he whispered, “Querida, undo my trousers.” And she reached down without looking and unfastened his buttons and then separated the lips of his trousers in the way that his fingers were separating the lips of her vagina, and she pulled out his thing; it was powerful and big enough that she gasped and opened her legs wide for him.

  Because her undergarment was now so damp, she told him, “Pull it off, my darling,” and as they covered each other’s faces with kisses, she floated away again, remembering the afternoons of her youth in Havana when the house was filled with shouting, and how she would seek shelter in a room whose shuttered windows leaked sunlight, resting in her bed and touching herself so that she could forget the shouting, forget it all through the pleasant sensations, like those sensations that were overwhelming her now. Her legs opened wider and she felt herself being occupied by a tremendous force, and her insides filled with the melted wax of a large church candle, and as the sound of his frantic breathing amplified, he sounded like the wind that she sometimes heard in her dreams. Her pores opened and oozed the warm and sweet liquid of her dream and she thought, “My Lord, this is a man!” and they played for hours; Delores felt so grateful to him that she did everything he wanted. That night she went from complete ignorance to knowledge about the act of love. When she heard his moans of pleasure and saw an expression of ecstatic release on his face, a new sense of purpose descended upon her: to release this young musician from his pain.

  (And poor Nestor? He thought he was with Delores and he devoured her big-nippled breasts, but when he closed his eyes and no longer saw her face, he was kissing the breast of the Beautiful María of His Soul, licking her skin from navel to toe, but when he winced at his maudlin thought and remembered how much he loved Delores and how good he felt inside her, he was pulled out of the darkness into which he had started slipping, and so he opened his eyes and looked deep into her eyes, and because he was coming and his bones were giving out inside him and his body teemed with a creamy heat that rose from his penis and exploded in his head, he closed his eyes again and felt the worst sadness about María. And yet, when he saw María, he pictured her in a room, and in that room a doorway through which could be seen the sickbed of his youth and himself, unable to move, calling out, “Mamá!” and waiting, waiting. And he’d open his eyes again and begin to pump Delores harder, but he could not help thinking about the other and almost slipped a few times, almost uttered, “María, María.”)

  By that time, Cousin Pablo and his family had moved away to a nice house in Queens and had left the apartment to the brothers. Cesar took over the big bedroom down the hall, and Nestor got one of the smaller rooms near the kitchen. He started to invite Delorita over for dinner, and because she lived so far away, she would often spend the night. Nestor would wait on the corner of 125th Street and Broadway for Delorita to come stepping off the bus from the Bronx. Or she’d head straight to La Salle Street from her cleaning job, carrying a bag with a change of clothing. She wasn’t bothered by the fact that they shared the same bed out of wedlock. She thought it was no one else’s business, though she was only twenty-one. And besides, she had no doubt that they would be married one day.

  At first, with Pablo and the family gone, the apartment, barely furnished and crammed with musical instruments and drums, seemed drab. But Delores would bring in flowers and rolls of brightly colored Con-Tact paper. Shopping, Nestor and Delores would make trips to Chinatown, returning with vases and Chinese screens and jasmine candles. She kept the place clean and started to cook for them. They’d sometimes walk toward Columbia University and the bookstores on Broadway, and while she’d forage through the bins and used-book racks for adventure, spy, romance, and detective novels that cost a nickel apiece, he’d wait patiently. They went out a lot in those days: sometimes Cesar would borrow a car and they would go for another perilous ride in the country, or they’d go out to the Park Palace, fancy as La Conga or the Copacabana, to catch Machito or Israel Fajardo, and afterwards they would go strolling through Central Park at two in the morning. Once, after a Mambo King job in Brooklyn, they went to Coney Island. She and Nestor sat on a bench necking before the ebbing sea, and the incident with the Pepsodent man seemed as remote as the bone-white moon above them.

  When she was not at night school, she would study. She’d learned her English after a long and humiliating struggle in a Catholic school in the Bronx, where the nuns literally beat her head with a dictionary when she misunderstood or could not remember certain words. Chronic mispronunciations made her the butt of many a joke, but she endured, studied and excelled, won spelling bees and got high grades, becoming one of those latinas who, through a course of terrified learning, could speak English as well as anyone (and with a slight Bronxese accent, at that). She would always try to teach Nestor things, encouraged him to read a book. He would shrug and she would later find him sitting on the living-room sofa with a guitar and a pencil and paper, whistling and working out the melodies to different songs.

  She was happy for the first time since she could remember and she adored Nestor for it. Sometimes she would walk into the living room, lower the Venetian blinds, and take off her dress. Or she sat beside him just to keep him company and in a few minutes found her undergarments pulled down to her knees, and her dress hitched up over her waist. She was always happy with him because during the act of love the younger Mambo King would say, “Te quiero, Delorita. Te quiero,” again and again. When he would have his orgasm his face would widen, as if flattening out like one of the Venetian carnival masks she saw on her employer’s wall; and he’d blush during this ecstatic release from pain. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. She’d rub baby oil on her breasts and thighs, then get a jar of petrol
eum jelly and smear it between her legs, find Nestor napping in the bedroom, suckle him, and then impale herself on his member.

  He was a troubled sleeper and suffered from nightmares. Often, as she slept beside him, she would think of his sadness and about helping him, but there seemed to be nothing she could do to lift him out of his melancholy. Lovemaking distracted this melancholia: he’d fall asleep wedged up against her bottom at night, his erection pressed against her. It seemed they must have made love countless times in their sleep. One night when she was dreaming about picking flowers, she felt his penis entering her from behind. But not into her vagina. She was half asleep, so that the sensation of being entered there came over her body slowly: at first it felt as if her bottom were being packed with warm clay, but after a certain time the softness gave way to a widening and lengthening barb, stretching her painfully at first and then warming and softening again. She turned to facilitate his pleasure and ground her hips into him until he came. Then they were both sound asleep again and he began his uneasy dreams again.

  NOW, THE OPENING CHORDS TO “Beautiful María of My Soul” and Nestor in Delores’s arms dreaming about 1948: In the late evenings, after finishing up with his job at the Havana Explorers’ Club, where he worked side by side with his older brother, he would take walks through the neighborhoods of the city; he liked to get lost in the arcades and to wander in the marketplace among the farmers and the hen cages and gray pigs. In the alley behind a Chinese restaurant called Papo-lin’s in La Marina, that neighborhood by the harbor near where they lived, he watched two red roosters, powerful machos, fight with their razor-taloned claws. Standing up in a bar in a row of bars, he would eat his dinner, a plate of rice and beans and a pork chop drowned in salt and lemon, for 25 cents, and watch the street euphorically cluttered with life: men pulling rag carts; Chinese workers in velvet shoes and long cotton smocks making their way to the tobacco factories; the poor from Las Yaguas selling their wares and services out of stalls: fortunes told, shoes fixed, jugo de fruta 10 cents, clocks, guitars, house tools, coils of rope, toys and religious articles, statuary and good-luck charms, flowers, love potions and magic candles, get your picture taken for 25 cents, in color! He’d look over the clothing to see what he might buy for the fifteen dollars a week he earned in those days: a good guayabera with fancy lace trimmings, $2; a plain shirt, $1; a pair of Buster Browns, $4; a pair of linen pantalones, $3.50. Hershey bar? 2 cents. Pepsi or Apur-Cola, 10 cents . . . And there were bananas hanging like lanterns off the racks, and wagon after wagon of fruit, and ice wagons, and a huddle of men throwing dice in a cool doorway. Flowers growing in pots and flowers spilling off the balconies, and lichen on the sea-rotted walls: astragal fences and antique doors, cornices brown and orange-hued, animal head and angelic door knockers. Racks of copper pots and pans, children running in and out of the stalls, sailors in the city whoring, a bicycle hanging off a rope over a row of bicycle tires; caged parrots; a shady-looking gentleman with the eyes of a turtle, sitting quietly at a narrow fold-up table from which he sold his “artistic” photographs; and then racks of dresses and pretty women moving among the racks and music coming out of the doorways. Smell of blood and sawdust, the sound of animals being butchered on the block, smell of blood and tobacco and a walk down a long alley behind the slaughterhouse that faced another slaughterhouse: a man dumping buckets of water over a floor drenched in blood and behind him, in a row, the split-open carcasses of a dozen pigs. Then the leather and carpentry and beach-goods shops . . .