The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

by Oscar Hijuelos

  That was when the young man, thick pompadour of curly black hair hanging over his brow, looked over and smiled at Cesar. He had been strumming chords on the guitar to kill time while waiting for a friend with an automobile to show up and had watched Julián running Cesar through the repertoire, mostly the plaintive boleros and habaneras of Ernesto Lecuona, who was the Cuban composer of the day. As Julián led Cesar out, Arnaz called out to him, “Hey, that was pretty good, my friend. Name’s Desiderio Arnaz,” and he extended his hand in friendship. And when they’d shaken hands Arnaz, who was tired of waiting in the dance hall, suggested they go down to the foot of the hill, where there was a little bar.

  “When my friend shows up here,” he said to Julián, “you tell him I’m at the bar.”

  They drank a few beers together, talked about Julián and women and the life of a musician, until Arnaz’s friend appeared at the bar door. Then Arnaz made his way off into the future. “Hope you do well with the orchestra! As for me, I’m off to Havana.”)

  “So it was you. I thought there was maybe something familiar about your face. Life is funny, yes? Who would think that we would be sitting here these years later, getting reacquainted?”

  He raised the bubbling champagne glass in another toast.

  “I was nineteen then,” Cesar told Arnaz. “A hick from the farm. Outside of a few excursions here and there in Oriente, and little trips I made by mule over the countryside, it was my first time out into the world. But what days those were! A great time in my life, singing with Julián’s orchestra. It was beautiful, playing for the people.”

  Arnaz nodded. “I know the ’zact-same feeling, I wasn’t much older than you and there I was going to Havana with a few pesos in my pocket, a guitar, and with plans of taking my act to the States. First to Miami and maybe Tampa, Hialeah, and Fort Lauderdale.” He looked off, his face pained with nostalgia for youth.

  “Eventually I ended up in New York, working the clubs here. Just the same way you fellows are. I had some good breaks, someone heard me singing and playing a conga and next thing I know, I’m up in New York on Broadway playing a Don Juan-type fellow in a musical comedy, something called Too Many Girls, it was a nice break for me, and things have gone well ever since.”

  But then for a moment Arnaz looked off, as if at the corner of the stage-ceiling molding, momentary exhaustion and a slight weariness in his eyes. “. . . But this life is always so much work, though.” And he exhaled. “You fellows know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Cesar concurred. “I know what you mean, hombre. One day in the tropics, and the next up to your knees in snow. One day on someone’s porch in a house in the Sierra Mountains, and the next riding a subway. Here one moment and gone the next, just like that, pssssst.”

  At that point the other Mambo Kings, black instrument cases in hand, came over to say goodbye for the night and to thank Mr. Arnaz again for the drinks. They were all crowded around the table, laughing and nodding, as Arnaz joked with them in Spanish and complimented them on their playing. It was then that Cesar leaned over to his younger brother, consulted for a moment, and then, after the others had left, said to Arnaz, “We’re going to have a late-night dinner at our apartment on La Salle Street uptown. May I invite you and your wife to join us? My brother’s wife always cooks up a feast and tonight we’re having arroz con pollo, black beans, and plátanos.”

  “Yes?”

  And Arnaz consulted with his wife. They heard her saying, “But, sweetheart, we have some business in the morning.”

  “I know, I know, but I’m hungry, and who feels like going to a restaurant now?”

  So he turned and told the brothers, “Why not?” and soon they were out in the street in their long coats and brimmed hats, blowing into their cupped hands and stomping their feet on the sidewalk. While they had been inside, it had started snowing, and now it was still coming down, a heaven of snow falling in all directions on every street and building, awning, car, and tree. Cesar was out on the avenue calling a yellow cab, and shortly they were all huddled together in the back. Nestor and Cesar sat on the small metal flip-up seats, facing the rear window and their new friends.

  Or perhaps they’d simply met Arnaz, who liked their music and, approaching them at the bar, said, “Would you fellows like to be on the show?” All business, with the fatigue of responsibility showing on his face. Or perhaps he had an air of weariness and exhaustion about him that reminded Cesar and Nestor of their father, Don Pedro, down in Cuba. Perhaps he had sadly yawned and said, “Me siento cansado y tengo hambre—I am tired and hungry.” Whatever happened, he and his wife accompanied the brothers uptown to the house on La Salle Street.

  Their taxi had made the turn off Broadway and 124th Street toward La Salle. As Arnaz stepped out of the taxi, his wife behind him, a southbound subway train tore out of the 125th Street El. Otherwise, the world was quiet. Up and down the street were rows of buildings with their yellow-lit windows and the silhouettes of people inside. Arnaz carried an Italian briefcase, Cesar a guitar, Nestor his horn. Miguel Montoya, whom they’d invited along, was behind them. With his fur-collared topcoat, delicate white gloves, and ivory crystal-tipped cane, he was something of an effeminate but dignified dandy. He was fifty-five years old and by far the most refined of the Mambo Kings. He bowed and held doors open for people, using an occasional French word—“Merci,” or “Enchante”—impressing and winning the heart of Arnaz’s wife.

  The building on La Salle Street was nothing like what Arnaz and his wife were accustomed to: they had houses in Connecticut and California, and an apartment in Havana. And it was nothing like what the brothers had known in Cuba, a modest house made of pine timbers facing a field ringed by fruit trees and rhapsodic with birdsong in the late-afternoon sun, a sky bursting with bands of red, yellow, pink, and silver light and burning treetops, and orange-tinged black birds. No, it was a six-story building, the kind one would never dream about living in for the rest of one’s life, situated near the top of a hill, with an ordinary stoop, basement stairs, and narrow, dim-lit entrance. Its main architectural ornamentation, a stone ibis over the doorway, was put up in 1920, during the Egyptian craze.

  Opening the front door, Nestor felt a little nervous and self-conscious; he had been that way since the day of their arrival in the States, six years before. His hands shook as he tried to fit the key into the keyhole. The cold could not have helped, probably did something to the metal. They all waited patiently and finally the door opened into the narrow lobby with its solitary light bulb dangling off a thick black wire, bent like a question mark over the mailboxes. There was a dirty mirror and stairwell, and from the second doorway, the residence of Mrs. Shannon the landlady, came a strong smell of dog hair, cabbage, and, faintly, urine.

  Nestor, who liked to pride himself on his personal cleanliness, puffed his cheeks and wanted to apologize for the offense to their eyes and nostrils, but then Arnaz, sensing Nestor’s embarrassment, gave him a good friendly Cuban rap on the back and said, as consolingly as possible, “Ah, what a nice building you have here.” But his wife rolled her eyes and gave her husband something of a double-take, then graciously smiled her famous ruby-lipped smile.

  Then, as they climbed the stairs up to the fourth floor, where Cesar and Nestor and his family lived, Arnaz began to whistle the melody of the song he’d heard earlier that night, “Beautiful María of My Soul,” and as he did so, he wondered about the terrible somberness that seemed to plague Nestor. He thought, “Of course, he’s a gallego, * and gallegos are melancholic at heart.” All the same, Arnaz felt sorry for the younger brother, who rarely smiled, nothing like the gregarious soul who was his older brother.

  When his nostrils hit the good food smells in the hallway of the apartment, Arnaz slapped his hands together and declared, “¡Qué bien! How wonderful!” He found himself moving along a hallway whose walls were covered with framed photographs of musicians and portraits of Jesus Christ and his saints.

  “Make yourself at ho
me, compañero,” Cesar said in his normal friendly manner. “Now this is your home, you understand, Mr. Arnaz?”

  “Sounds good to me. Now, Lucy, isn’t this nice?”

  “Yes, it is, Desi, just swell.”

  “Ah, do I smell some plátanos?”

  “Plátanos verdes,” a female voice called from the kitchen.

  “And yuca with ajo?”

  “Yes,” said Cesar happily. “And we have wine, we have beer!” He raised up his hands. “We have rum!”

  “¡Qué bueno!”

  It was around one in the morning and Delores Castillo was in the kitchen, heating up all the pots of rice and chicken and beans, and the fritters were sizzling in a frying pan. Her hair was in a bun and she had a stained apron around her waist. When they all jammed into the kitchen, Delores recognized the famous Arnaz and his wife.

  “Dios mío!” she cried. “If I had known they were coming, I would have cleaned the house up.”

  Regaining her composure, Delores smiled so beautifully that Arnaz told her, “Mrs. Castillo, you’re a lovely woman.” The coats were left in the bedroom, and soon enough they were all gathered around the kitchen table. While the men devoured the food, Delores hurried down the hall and woke her children up. Eugenio’s eyes were barely open when he felt himself being carried down the hall, his mother saying to him, “I want you to meet someone.” She put him down by the kitchen doorway and when he looked up he saw the usual scene for that household: a crowded kitchen, mouths chewing, beer and rum bottles open on the table. Even the nice fellow his mother was all excited about looked just like so many of the other musicians who passed through the house. And the name Desi Arnaz meant nothing to him then, it was just a name he heard when she introduced him.

  “Mr. Arnaz, this is our boy, Eugenio. And this is Leticia.”

  Desi Arnaz reached over and pinched his cheek, and he patted Leticia’s head. Then they were taken back into their bedrooms, the kids falling asleep to a background of Spanish-speaking voices in the kitchen, the music from the phonograph in the living room, the sound of laughter and clapping, just like what they’d heard on so many other nights.

  Everyone was laughing. Lucille Ball told about going to Cuba for the first time and having to cook her own Cuban meal to impress Desi’s family. “I nearly burned down the house!”

  “Ay, tell me about it,” said Arnaz.

  “But it turned out right in the end. Anyway, señora, I know just what you have to go through. Mashing those plantains up and everything in brown paper and getting it right.”

  Suddenly she remembered their walks together in the field outside the Arnaz family’s ingenio down in Oriente. At first she was afraid of the dark countryside, but then she began to enjoy the beauty of the night sky, streaked with falling light.

  “But I got it right in the end, mashing the plantains in brown paper, adding just the right amount of salt, garlic, and lemon. Just like you did with these!”

  There was music on the Victrola, as Cesar still called the RCA phonograph in the living room: First he put on the fabulous Beny More, a personal favorite, and then one of the Mambo Kings’ recordings, “Twilight in Havana.” Arnaz seemed happy at the kitchen table, devouring the platters of food placed before him, and saying things like, “¡Qué sabroso! You don’t know how nice it is to just relax for a change.”

  They were pleased to hear that Arnaz was enjoying himself. After a few drinks Cesar could care less how famous he was; he was thrilled to have a compañero in the apartment and matter-of-factly started, once the rum worked into his brain, to feel sorry for Arnaz.

  There’s a man so famous and yet he’s so satisfied with the simplest meal, he thought. He’s probably tired of dining out with the Rockefellers all the time!

  Nestor, however, began to feel they had overstepped their privilege: he was standing in the corner of the room, playing with the fob of his watch. He had seen Lucille Ball blush when Cesar opened another bottle of rum.

  “Darling, maybe we should start thinking about getting home,” she said to him. But then Cesar walked in with his orangewood Brazilian guitar and handed it to Arnaz. “Would you sing us a little song, Mr. Arnaz?”

  “Why not”—and he placed the guitar on his lap and strummed a C-minor chord, flailing his hand quickly over the strings so that its soundbox vibrated like the wind hitting a shutter, and began to sing one of his biggest hits, “Babalú.”

  “Oh, great Babbbbbbaaaallllooo, oh, why did you forsake me?”

  Cesar banged on the table, and Nestor, giving in to the rush of fun, started to play the flute . . . Then Arnaz began playing “Cielito Lindo” and by then everyone in the kitchen was a ring of arms and swaying, happy bodies.

  Strummed like a waltz, “Cielito Lindo” was the kind of song that a loving mother would sing at bedtime to her children, and that was why the two Mambo Kings remembered wonderful things about their mother, and why Arnaz shut his eyes in pleasant contemplation of his own loving mother in Cuba.

  (Nestor remembered how, as a frightened child, he used to wake up from a bad dream, covered in sweat, his heart pounding, and with a feeling of helplessness: the moon would ominously cross the window space, and the mosquito netting which hung down off hooks from the ceiling would seem to breathe like a living creature and shadows would bend into animal shapes and he would cry out so that someone would come to save him, a brother, his father, but most sweetly his mother, parting the netting and sitting beside him on the bed, whispering stories into his ear and softly singing. And Cesar remembered hearing her voice as she’d wash his hair in a metal tub in the back yard, the sunlight breaking up the flowing water into pink- and red-tinged sprays, and the wonderful sensation of her hands moving over the back of his neck and through his hair. And for Arnaz? It was the image of his mother filling the empty hours of the afternoon with songs that she’d play at a spinet in the parlor of their grand house in Santiago. Just those little thoughts made the three men feel like crying.)

  But then around three o’clock Lucille Ball tapped her watch again and said to Arnaz, “Now, honey, we have to go.”

  “Yes, of course. Tomorrow it’s work, always work. I’m sorry we have to go, but I want to tell you something before we do. That canción you fellows sang at the club tonight, ‘Beautiful María,’ I really like it and think that you should come on my show and do it for me there.”

  “Nightclub show?”

  “No, I mean my television show.”

  “Yes!” said Cesar. “Of course, you let us know what we have to do. I’ll give you our address.” And he rushed off into the hall, looking for a pen and a piece of paper. Later, Cesar was out on Broadway trying to flag down a taxicab for Arnaz and his wife, who were waiting on the curb. Miguel Montoya had decided to stay over, taking his chances on the Castro Convertible in the living room. They were out there for about twenty minutes before they caught a taxi, its heavy, snow-chained wheels edging their way up the snowy streets.

  Arnaz shook Cesar Castillo’s hand. “I’m glad we had this chance to meet, my friend. You’ll be hearing from me soon enough. Okay? So, cuídate, take care of yourself.”

  Then Arnaz and his wife got into the taxi and disappeared into the night.

  DESI ARNAZ KEPT HIS PROMISE and three months later the brothers were on a plane to Hollywood, California. Cesar really loved the trip, loved flying in those big four-engine airplanes and watching the clouds burn up with sunlight. But Nestor? He couldn’t believe that all that metal stayed up in the air. The long eleven-hour non-stop flight frightened him. He remained in his seat, hands knotted together nervously, fearfully watching the clouds out the window. Cesar sat quietly, writing postcards and a few song lyrics, reading magazines, enjoying things. They were flying first class, which meant that the stewardesses gave the passengers the time of day. Cesar liked this one stewardess who had the nicest little pair of nalgitas—buttocks—the most serious-looking nalgitas he had seen in a long time, and when she would come down the aisle, Ces
ar would elbow his brother so that Nestor would not miss out on her bouncy splendor. But he was too self-occupied, too worried about how things would go, as if something going wrong would kill him. The idea of going on the show frightened him.

  For Cesar, it was clear-cut and simple and he never gave it much thought, other than that it would be a good opportunity to make a few dollars and for people to see them and hear that song, perhaps get them interested in that bolero, “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Turn it into the Mambo Kings’ first big hit. As for the idea of appearing on television? Cesar didn’t have the slightest idea about television. They watched an occasional boxing match at a friend’s apartment, watched programs in appliance-store windows, but neither brother had ever dreamed of appearing on the I Love Lucy show.

  As for the song that had captured Arnaz’s interest that one night in the Mambo Nine Club? Even Cesar had to admit that it was a great song, catchy and haunting. He had gotten sick and tired of hearing about María over the years, but had walked into the living room one day when Nestor, who wrote twenty-two different versions of that canción, was singing it again. And it sounded as good as any of the long-time classics that make people misty-eyed in the middle of the night. Usually, hearing Nestor working on yet another version made Cesar disgruntled, but that day he told his younger brother, “You can stop now. It’s perfect. It’s a great song, brother.” And he slapped him on the back. “Now enjoy your peace.”

  But Nestor didn’t enjoy anything, brooding constantly like a ruined poet or an old man.

  “Nestor, you’re nearly thirty years old, you have a wife who loves you and two children,” Cesar said. “When are you going to be a man and stop worrying yourself to death? When are you going to stop being such a fairy?”

  That made Nestor wince.

  “I’m sorry,” Cesar told him. “Just be happy. And don’t be worried, bro’, you have your brother Cesar around to look out for you.”