The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Nestor took a deep breath, stared out into the middle of the living room, where sat a dolly and the black case of a bass American kit drum, blinked, sighed, and then said to her, “Are you sure?”

  But when he saw the happiness in her expression wither away, he added, “No, I’m happy, querida. Really happy.”

  Then he put his arms around her, but he lowered his head and seemed to be watching the window, which was open a slit to the fire escape, and in that moment she had the impression that he wanted to walk over to the window, climb out, and never come back.

  The young musician did the right thing: Nestor and Delores were married by a Justice of the Peace in a small wooded town in New Jersey. After the ceremony, Nestor remained by the table on which Cesar Castillo had placed a case of chilled champagne, tossing back one glass after the other. They had no honeymoon but threw a party that started in a Chinatown restaurant and ended up in the Mambo Nine Club, where they knew the bartender and manager and a band of their musician friends from the dance halls provided the music. In the merriment of that day, she kissed and hugged her sister Ana María and wished to God that her father were alive to see her so happy again. She thought about him and felt sad. Following the example of all the merry friends, she drank too much of that champagne. Her inexperience caught up to her and she twirled in circles to a mambo and watched everyone’s face elongating, ears growing long and pointed like those of wolves, in the red and yellow lights of the club. Then things blurred and grew thick black borders. Later she woke up on the living-room couch of the La Salle Street apartment beside Nestor. He was still dressed, and with his head tilted back on the couch he was snoring and muttering to himself. She wiped his forehead with a kerchief, gave him a kiss, and thought, “My husband, my husband.”

  But then she listened, and like pins through her side, she heard, faintly but clearly, “María, María.”

  They had two children: Eugenio, who was born in ’51, and Leticia, in ’54. Nestor didn’t quite know what to make of fatherhood, he felt so underprepared for manly duty in this world. He realized it when Eugenio was born. At first he celebrated happily. He daydreamed about walking off into the future with his wife and son down golden paths, joyful in their love. But something got to him: the utter helplessness of the baby, its crying for attention, its need for care. Holding Eugenio in his arms and examining the fresh veins under the scalp of his soft pink and sweet-smelling head, he was frightened by all the things that might go wrong. He would think about this fellow who worked with him down at the plant, who had left his one-year-old daughter in a room by herself for fifteen minutes and returned to find her dead; and he would think about this drummer he knew, a really nice Cuban guy named Papito, whose nineteen-year-old son went pffft out of the world because one of the veins in his head had been too thin-walled and could not sustain a surge of blood during the playing of a softball game in Van Cortlandt Park. Nestor would cover Eugenio’s face with kisses, play with his toes, tickle his ribs, and sing to him. He loved it when the baby smiled and showed signs of recognizing his father, but when the baby showed any signs of discomfort, a terrible remorsefulness would overwhelm Nestor and he would walk the halls of the house as if some kind of tragedy were unfolding before his eyes. My son is suffering! And that simple fact seemed unbearable to him.

  “Delores, do something with the nene! Make sure the nene is okay! Don’t forget the nene!”

  He would come home from the day job at the meat-packing plant and see how well Delores had taken care of them. Like a supervisor, he would peer down into their beds and nod pensively, examining them for the plumpness of their legs and color in their cheeks. He would feel at a loss, holding them in his arms. He was affectionate with them but never quite knew what to make of fatherhood. He was constantly brooding about them to himself, worried about their physical health. He saw them as being so helpless and so susceptible to harm that on some days he relived a terrible dream of his anxious childhood. In the middle of the day, he would think how Eugenio liked to play by the window. What if he climbed out and slammed to the pavement below? Dios mío! He would start pacing up and down and take five to call the apartment to make sure everything was all right. He would lift the side of white fatted beef off the conveyor belt and hoist it onto the back of a freezer truck, wearing a long smock that was smeared with blood and a pair of rubber boots. The smell of blood in the air, the carcasses and bones that were everywhere, didn’t help matters.

  It didn’t help that Leticia developed asthma and was sickly for a long time. He felt so bad about her troubled breathing that he would come home every day with presents and candies for her. And because he was not unkind, there was always something in his pockets for Eugenio. He was astounded when they did not die, but the whole business with Leticia made him very tense. In some ways he could not stand to be around the house and the potential for disaster; in others, he could not bear to be away. Best was when the house was packed with visitors—jam sessions with other musicians and dinner parties with these musicians and their wives. And his older brother, Cesar, drunk, collar loosened, big bulge in his trousers, with his arms wrapped around a pretty girl’s waist.

  When responsible, mature, good-hearted people who would know what to do in a crisis were around, Nestor breathed easy. But, generally speaking, he never relaxed for a moment. His moments of release? When his penis exploded with sperm and obliterated his personality, throwing him into a blue- and red-lit heaven of floating space, and when he played the trumpet and got lost in melody. Otherwise, he didn’t know what to do with himself. The responsibility weighed on his shoulders too heavily for his own good. His anxiety took on physical symptoms. Some nights, as he tried to sleep and terror lurked in the air, he would begin to sweat, and his heart would beat so rapidly he could swear he was about to have a heart attack. Other times, as it happened with his father, he broke out into terrible rashes. He was only twenty-eight in 1954, and though he didn’t have very good dietary habits, eating what Cubans liked to eat, he was thin and fit. Yet the pounding of his heart would plague him night after night, and he was convinced that there was something wrong with him. But he would never think of going to a doctor.

  He would send his mother in Cuba tender letters written in his simple script, speaking about his love for her and the family; heartsick letters nostalgic for the security of the home he had—or thought he had—in Cuba. He was very emotional, thinking about his childhood, about the tender care he received when he was sick in bed. He’d forget about the terrors of his solitude and dwell upon all the kisses from his mother and their housemaid Genebria, how everyone seemed to look out after him, especially Cesar. He’d open these letters with the salutation “Querida mamá” and finished them off with: “All of us in the household here send you a thousand, no, a million kisses. With all the love of my heart, your hijito, N.”

  He always signed these letters with a single letter, “N.”

  His nights were a disaster. He’d often come home to La Salle Street from a job by himself, strip down and climb into bed beside Delores, remaining awake beside her and inviting her attentions. They would wrap their arms around each other, caressing affectionately until they fell asleep. But he would always awaken in the early hours, thinking that there was something missing from his life—what, he did not know. At three-thirty in the morning, he would get up and sit in the dark living room, softly strumming guitar chords, and stirring Delores from her dreams, so that she would make her way down the hall.

  “Nestor, why don’t you come back to bed?”

  He’d just keep strumming. He’d sit by the window, looking out. The street glowed like dusk with the light of a wrought-iron lamp.

  “It’s just a song.”

  Sometimes he didn’t sleep for three or four days. He didn’t know what was going on. Cubans then (and Cubans now) didn’t know about psychological problems. Cubans who felt bad went to their friends, ate and drank and went out dancing. Most of the time they wouldn’t think abou
t their problems. A psychological problem was part of someone’s character. Cesar was un macho grande; Nestor, un infeliz. People who hurt bad enough and wanted cures expected these cures to come immediately. Cesar was quite friendly with some santeras, really nice ladies who had come from Oriente Province and settled on 110th Street and Manhattan Avenue. And whenever Cesar felt bad about anything, if he felt depressed about the fact that he still had to work in a meat-packing plant to maintain his flamboyant life-style, or when he felt guilty about his daughter down in Cuba, he would go see his friends for a little magical rehauling. These santeras liked to listen to the radio all day, loved to have children and company around them. If he felt bad, he would just go in there and drop a few dollars into a basket, lie on his stomach on a straw mat on the floor, ring a magic bell (which symbolized his goddess, Caridad, or charity) and pay homage to the goddess Mayarí, for whom these women were intermediaries. And pssssst! his problems would lift away. Or they would lay hands on him. Or he would just go over to 113th and Lenox, to a botánica, and get himself a “cleaning”—the saint pouring magic herbs over him—guaranteed to do the trick. Going to confession at the Catholic church did the same job: a heartfelt opening of the heart and an admission of sins; then the cleansing of the soul. (And no deathbed confession either, no admission to heaven because of last rites. These Cubans died as they lived, and a man who would not confess his sins at age twenty-five was not going to do so at seventy.)

  Nestor went with Cesar and was cleansed, paid obeisance, and felt better for a few days. Then the feeling came back to him, and he was unable to move. It was like being trapped in a tight shaft of darkness: sometimes it twisted in a labyrinth, sometimes it went straight. Moving inside it was always difficult. He even tried to go to confession when he had no sins to confess. Inside the church’s big red doors and its smell of honeycomb candle wax and incense, he would march up to the communion railing, remember how he would kneel on the cool stone floors of the church in Las Piñas beside his mother, and pray to Christ and all his saints and to the Holy Mother. He’d shut his eyes, his brow trembling with the effort to make a connection to God.

  And one day when the priest’s face appeared in the darkness behind the confessional screen, he said, “Father . . . I have come for guidance.”

  “What kind of guidance?”

  “My heart is . . . sad.”

  “And what has made you sad?”

  “A woman. A woman I once knew.”

  “And are you in love with her?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Does she love you?”

  Silence.

  “Well, does she love you?”

  “I don’t know, Father.”

  “Do you want her to love you?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Have you told her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you in a situation that allows you this?”

  “No, Father. I have a family.”

  “And is that why you are here?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Have you acted upon this feeling?”

  “In my heart.”

  “Your marriage makes that wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “But this temptation . . . I counsel you to pray. Do you have a rosary?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Then say the rosary and you will be strengthened.”

  And he said the rosary, enjoying the stony companionship of the saints and Jesus; he said the rosary until the prayers were coming out of his eyes, but his guilty feelings remained. He sometimes felt so bad that he told himself, “If I had remained with María, I would have found my happiness.” He would go over his romance again and again in his head, though it had ended years before. He had walked into it happily, naively, innocently . . . and his soul had been ruined.

  Even though he loved Delores, he could not stop himself from thinking about María. A pain would throb in his kneecaps and this pain would spread upwards through his thighs and down through his ankles, a surge of melancholia, and out of this would come María. What was it that she had said to him that day in 1948?

  “I will love you forever.”

  He would walk over to the park and secretly write her letters at least once a month, though he never received an answer. He would watch the boats passing on the Hudson River, dragging barges of piping and refuse, and think about María naked on a bed. He would have painful memories of what it felt like inside her: out of the sky would fall a silk handkerchief, warmed by the sun and dipped in honey, that would wrap tightly around his penis.

  But even though he knew that it was all wrong, he couldn’t get rid of this longing for her. His feelings of hopelessness always led him back to María, and thoughts of María led him back to hopelessness. He loved Delores, loved his children—why, then, were things so wrong? He tore up most of his photographs of her, save for one, and this he kept hidden in a box thick with sheet music, stuck in the living room between a bass drum and a quinto. He wouldn’t look at this picture for months, and then he’d take it out and she always seemed more beautiful and tender than he had remembered. The fact that she had cruelly abandoned him did not temper his desire. He knew that something had to change, but didn’t know how to change it.

  He developed an odd habit. In the warm weather he and the family liked to go up to the rooftop for a picnic. Once when he did so, he went over to the edge and found himself leaning over it, so far that Delores cried out, “Nestor!” and the excitement and his bravery made the children laugh. For a moment, as he hung over La Salle Street watching the kids below playing stickball and the birds circling the water towers, he thought about dropping off the rooftop, as if by letting go he would fly among the buildings, looping like a butterfly until he hit the pavement. Thinking about his family, he had resisted the temptation to let go. Then he started to lean out their fourth-floor window quite a bit, as if to get rid of the feeling, and was thinking about it on the day when he came home with a present for Eugenio, who was then nearly three years old. It was a kite and they spent hours running back and forth on the rooftop, laughing and watching it rise high into the wind, its balsa cross-beams bending and the paper fluttering in the air. He stood by the edge of the roof with Eugenio in his arms. Kisses on his face and pats on the back.

  Sometimes, on long walks through the city, he’d daydreamed about meeting up with someone who would give him sound advice and have all the keys to happiness. He thought that the Italian fruit vendor knew, that those old wizened-looking Jewish men who would go walking up La Salle on their way to the Jewish Theological Seminary knew. That they would tell him what to do about those feelings which made him lower his head and want to step off the sidewalk into the path of an oncoming bus or that made him cling, with fear, to the subway walls because the edge of the platform seemed so inviting.

  Lost in contemplation, he’d sometimes wander downtown amid the endless crowds that passed him on the street; people with the most purposeful and determined expressions hurrying everywhere, as if to a Dance of the Sabers. As he sat on a park bench, bums approached him and he would give them cigarettes, money. Dogs lay stretched out on the pavement, happy and panting, by his feet. And sometimes pretty women in white high-heeled pumps and feathered hats, fascinated by the soulful-looking young Latin-lover type, would sit beside him, wanting to start up a conversation.

  What did he want? He only wanted to find shelter in the bosom of love, not rush anywhere, and to have the heaviness lifted off his shoulders.

  One thing Nestor came to admire was Delores’s habit of reading. She read huge amounts and seemed better off for it. And she had told him, in the midst of her kisses on one of his restless nights, “Nestor, you should get in the habit of reading yourself to sleep.” But aside from the newspapers and the Captain Marvel books he would buy on the newsstands, he hardly read anything at all. He was curious about those books that kept Delores so occupied while sitting on the park bench rocking the children in
their carriages, those cheap paperbacks whose pages she would turn while standing by the stove and boiling water to cook yuca. Reading gave her a vaguely absent air, though she was never lax about her wifely duties, and he had no cause to complain, because she really did look out for him.

  One day, however, Nestor did buy a book. Having crossed Times Square in a gloomy mood, he stopped at a newsstand to look over the magazines and a book caught his eye. It had a simple bright-red cover and was sitting among some tattered cowboy novels and girlie thrillers in a metal rack to the side. It was a book entitled Forward America! by a certain D. D. Vanderbilt.

  It was the jacket copy that captured the younger Mambo King’s attention:

  . . . Not a human being on earth likes to admit that things aren’t always as rosy as they should be. I knew a fellow who spent half his life plagued with self-doubt. This doubt had a severe effect on his outlook and on his enjoyment of life. He couldn’t sleep, found himself feeling “out of the picture” when everyone else around him seemed to be having the time of their lives. He had a decent-paying job, but with a family to support, he could never put enough money away for a rainy day. On top of all this, he never exerted himself around more aggressive kinds of people. He suffered because of this fault and doubted his own manliness. Many a day he daydreamed about a better life, but he seemed completely without resources when it came to realizing it.

  One day, this man took a good long look in the mirror and said, “I’ve had it!” He spent the night awake dreaming about the possibilities for his future and came up with the principles of achieving happiness in today’s busy and troubled world. Practical secrets and principles that will work for you! That very next day he went to his boss and presented certain ideas that he’d had about the business and was so convincing about his new approaches that his boss gave him a big promotion and a bonus. . . . Within a few months he was promoted again, and within a few years he was made a partner in the firm . . .