The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (52 page)

So she had put on a few extra pounds. What did that matter when he gloried in the expansiveness of her youthful flesh? He could suck her nipple gratefully for an hour, until it turned purple and grew distended between his teeth and lips; he would revel in the kneading of her quivery flesh. And her hips got much bigger and were ready to burst the seams of her dresses. More men looked and spoke to her as she passed by. And while this made the Mambo King proud, as it used to when he’d make an entrance with the likes of Miss Vanna Vane back in the old days, he’d scowl sternly at these oglers, throw his chest out as if he was ready to fight.

After setting up, he had waited on the stage for her. As the priest was giving a speech about how the poor inherited not the earth but God’s “other bounties,” Cesar spotted Lydia in the crowd, and just seeing her made him happy. Up on the stage, he had thoughts like: I love you, baby, I send you my kisses; I can’t wait until we are locked in a lovers’ embrace.

Those were the days when he had started to tell himself that he was in love, truly in love with Lydia. The kind of love he hadn’t felt since his first loves back in Oriente, like the love he had felt for his wife back in the Cuba of the 1940s.

(It was all coming back to him in his old age. Fantasies about what might have happened to him had he remained with her, hadn’t left their small town for Havana and his destiny. He might have gotten himself a good job through her family, maybe work in the sugar mill as foreman. He might have had himself a little orchestra for the weekends and for festivals in Cuba, satisfying at least part of his wish for a musician’s life. And his brother Nestor would have remained in Cuba with him, too. He might have fathered a brood of loving sons, instead of a single daughter, to keep him company in his sunset years. And instead of all that pussy? He might have contented himself with a mistress or two in town, the way his father, Pedro, had. Even this fantasy did not hold water, because eventually he would have had to leave Cuba.)

That day, the musicians opened their set with a jam instrumental called “Traffic Mambo.” The Mambo King wore a light pinstriped summer suit, and his thick head of hair was shiny with hair tonic. His voice echoed against the buildings as he leaned into the microphone, announcing, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for a little
charrrannnnnnga!”

Having spotted Lydia, he put on a good show to impress her. As he turned in circles, he was astounded by his love for her: even the knots in his gut and the swirling juices inside his body seemed to go away when he thought about her. Memory upon memory: Lydia’s naked body, Lydia sitting before a mirror brushing out her hair, her plump buttocks, the plum-shaped darkness between them, and the Mambo King’s aged member lolling on his belly and then growing stiff—just from looking at her. Then he’d fuck her from behind, inserting himself into that plum of space, and it gave him just what it seemed to be promising: heat, and moisture, curvaceous grip.

(Dios mío, Dios mío
—toasting the busyness in his heart and mind—I really had fallen for that woman and,
coño,
fallen hard for her, the way my poor brother fell for that Beautiful María piece-of-shit from Havana, the way I fell for my wife. And so he swallowed the rum, and then had a pleasant experience: a slight elation, the sensation that he was breaking the law of gravity and lifting with his chair off the ground, and then the fan, turning from atop the dresser in his room in the Hotel Splendour, hitting his face, and then a whisk of air hitting him dead between the legs and licking at his penis through the slot in his boxer shorts, a lick like the morning licks of youth, and boom, he found his thing stiffening, though not fully, because of the lick of the air, the rum, and his thoughts of Lydia, a beautiful sensation: if he was a younger man, the Mambo King would have masturbated, floated off on clouds of speculation and hope of future seductions, but now, in his current condition, masturbation seemed sad and hopeless, and so, instead, he took another sip of his rum. On the record player spun that great Mambo King tune “Traffic Mambo,” except that it sounded much different from the way he remembered it: sounded as if there were a hundred musicians playing on the version he was hearing now, with all kinds of instruments added: glass bells and harps, church organs and Oriental chimes. Sounded as if there was a river rushing in the distance and the chaos of a hundred automobiles honking their horns all at once. Plus he hadn’t really remembered that the trumpet solo played by his dead brother Nestor had been so long, it seemed to go on forever in the version he was now hearing. The Mambo King’s confusion made him get up. There was a small mirror over a sink: then a closet-sized bathroom, just enough room for the commode and the shower. He was drunk enough by now that, as he looked in the mirror, all the lines of age and sadness had more or less been smoothed out, the gray of his hair seeming more silver, the jowlishness of his face more like the mark of substance rather than excess. He washed his face and then sat down again. He found himself rubbing his legs: the underside of his legs was riddled with thick, distended varicose veins, blue and as twisty as the thick vein that burst like a river with tributaries up the underside of his big thing. These weren’t little varicose veins like those showing through little-old-lady brown nylons, but worm veins, all up and down the backs of his legs. He touched them for a moment and laughed: how he used to pick on his wife in Cuba the day he noticed that a few varicose veins had appeared on her legs, calling her
feita—
ugly—when she was still so young and, in her way, pretty.)

From the stage he watched Lydia like that hound who watched the basement entrance of the building down the street. An old German shepherd with matty coat and milk-cornered eyes, barking at every passerby and sniffing between the legs of every canine interloper. Lydia paid attention to the Mambo King, watching him faithfully from the street, but then she went over to get herself a sandwich from one of the tables, and men started to speak to her.

What were they saying?

“Why don’t you dance with me?”

“I can’t.”

“But why?”

“I’m with the singer of the group over there.”

“Cesar Castillo?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re so young! Why are you with that
viejito?”

That’s what he thought they were saying.

But the men were just being friendly. When the Mambo King saw her dancing with one of them, he was suddenly overcome with vertigo. Why was she dancing the
pachanga
with that fellow? Twenty years ago he would have smiled, telling himself, “So?” But now the heat of humiliation burned at the back of his neck and he felt like climbing down off the stage and separating them.

Then he devised a strategy to regain her attention and remind her of her loyalty. “I dedicate this song to a very special woman in my life. This song is for my woman, Lydia Santos.”

But she continued to dance with the son of a bitch, and he felt depressed.

Work was work, however, and the Mambo King and his musicians played other numbers: mambos, rumbas,
merengues,
boleros, and a few cha-cha-chas. He hadn’t suffered through a set like that since the days after Nestor’s death. When the group finally took a break and began to pack up—there was a local rock ’n’ roll group waiting to go on—he made straightaway for Lydia, who pretended that nothing was happening.

“Cesar! I’ve been waiting for you!” And she kissed him. “This is Richie.”

The man she had been dancing with was a slender-looking fellow in a nice clean
guayabera,
handsome even with a pock-scarred face.

“Mucho gusto,
” the young man said, but the Mambo King would not even shake his hand.

Then he said to Lydia, “Come on, I want to talk to you.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I am the man and I don’t want you with anyone else.”

“We were just dancing. The music sounded good. We were just having a little fun.”

“I don’t care. I told you how I feel.”

They were standing just inside the lobby of 500 La Salle, Cesar’s building.

“I may be an old man to you, but I’m not going to be cuckolded because of that. I was this way when I was young, and I am not going to change now.”

“Okay, okay”—and she put her hands up and then gave him a kiss on the neck. He patted her nice
nalgitas,
and as the anger drained from him, said, “I’m sorry if I sound so harsh with you. There are a lot of wolves out there. Come on, let me buy you an ice cream, and then I want you and your children to meet someone.”

He made a burning sound: “Psssssssh, my, but you look good, Lydia.”

And: “Look what you do to me.”

They attended the block party like everyone else, Cesar treating her children as if he were their father—or grandfather. That afternoon he introduced Lydia to his friends. Frankie and Bernardito had met her before. They had all gone out with their women to restaurants together. Still, he took her by the hand and with his king-cock strut introduced her to his other friends on the street. His mood seemed calmer now. And she did not feel so bad. She did not mind that he was nearly thirty years older, though sometimes when they were in bed together she felt this terrible weight of mortality on her. His spectacular sexual nature sometimes made his whole body shake: his face would turn beet-red from his efforts to impress her, and she was afraid that he might have a heart attack or a stroke. She’d never had any man like him and so spoiled him with praise and adoration that he started to become deluded with the feeling that he had become exempt from the ravages of the years. She was overwhelmed by him. She felt, as had scores of other women before her, his bestial nature.

He would be shoving himself inside her and she would make it a point of saying things like “You’re going to burst me apart.” And: “
Tranquilo
,
hombre. Tranquilo.
” And she moaned and shouted. She didn’t want him to get the look of boredom that other men sometimes got with her, after a certain point. She wanted to say and do everything that he wanted her to, for the simple reason that he was good to her and her children.

So, he was a little jealous. She forgave that; after all, he was an old man, even if he was a pretty old man. That’s what she had taken to calling him, he’d remember.
“Dame un besito, mi viejito lindo.
” And whatever one could say about his current situation, that he worked as a superintendent and took small-time jobs here and there as a musician, he had been some kind of famous man. Even though she was thirty-five years old, she had still not lost her childhood awe for the crooners of his generation. And the man had even been on television. She knew the very episode of the I
Love Lucy
show that he and Nestor had appeared on: he’d even brought her a box of photographs to look at, and had given her one of himself with Arnaz and his poor dead brother. Proudly, she had shown it to people in her building.

He was the kind of man who had done a lot in life. He didn’t just hang out, like so many others. He was wise and would be able to help her. Looking at pictures of him when he was young and a pretty boy made her sigh. Sometimes it killed her when she would think about young men. Of course she wished he was younger, but she also knew that he would never have stayed with her in the days of his glory. So she had him now in his decline. So what, she would say, if he had jowls, a huge stomach, and testicles that reached halfway down to his knees (like his
pinga!).
What did she care about that, as long as he promised to help her children out?

(She had to tell herself this, yes?)

Later, he finally got the chance to introduce her to the family.

“So this is your young
pollita?”
Delores said to Cesar.

He shrugged.

On Delorita’s television blared the film
Godzilla.
Pedro was in his traditional spot, the easy chair, reading the newspaper and having a drink. Sitting behind him on the couch, Leticia with her baby. She’d come up from Long Island for a visit. She played with her baby’s toes, spoke baby talk, oblivious to the television and the rest of the commotion in the apartment. Her brother, Eugenio, shared the couch, sitting close to the window. He’d propped it open a bit and put an ashtray there on the sill so he could smoke and brood in peace. Cesar always liked to see him, which was not often, but the kid always seemed pissed off: he’d been that way for a long time. (Eugenio never understood any of this. An innocent at heart, he had a temper that flared when, as with the other Castillo men, melancholia abruptly came over him and he would suffer from his own plague of memories. When he was angry, he would find himself saying things he did not really mean, such as “Everybody in the world can go fuck themselves” and “I don’t need anyone,” which had frightened many people away from him.)

Now he would turn up at the apartment on La Salle Street, disappointed and bitter.

When Cesar brought Lydia into the living room, Eugenio was struck by her good looks. He liked pretty women, too, and leapt out of his sullenness for a moment, as if jumping out of an airplane. “Why, hellllllo.” Eugenio was friendly to her, but once the introductions were over, his mood reverted and he sat by the window, thinking. The older he got, the more he picked up on his long-dead father’s temperament. He went through moods of prolonged anguish and discontent: his eyes grew sad over the smallest thing, his face drooped over the fact that life was not perfect. Although he was not consciously aware of it, Eugenio had by now acquired the same expression he forever associated with his father, the same shattered expression of Nestor Castillo in his role as Alfonso Reyes, who would appear again and again at Desi Arnaz’s door. His father’s shattered expression, on entering that room, hat in hand, guitar demurely by his side, his face in some kind of agony.

(When he was a kid, his father’s expression was “Cuban”: melancholic, longing. Arnaz had it, his Uncle Cesar had it, Frankie, Manny, and most of the Cubans who walked into the household, jitterbugs and all, had it.)