The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (53 page)

“Eugenio, I want you to meet Lydia!”

Eugenio stood up and bowed. He was wearing a black turtleneck—in summer!—bluejeans, sneakers. He was supposed to go downtown and meet some friends who were trying to fix him up with some woman, but he didn’t care. At least at the apartment Aunt Ana María was around to give him a nice big kiss now and then, and he never had to explain his moods to her, the way he had to with his girlfriends.

“So you’re Lydia?” asked Delores. “The young chick with the old rooster.” And she laughed, setting the tone for the afternoon.

Later they had dinner, and that was when Cesar noticed how Delores seemed to glare at Lydia. It couldn’t be jealousy about her looks. Delores had held up well over the years. What was it?

Well, the Mambo King told himself as he reeled dizzily in his room in the Hotel Splendour, no one in the family had ever thought that Delores felt love for Pedro, not even when he was younger and courting her.

And she could have had me, he told himself.

Was that it?

It had more to do with the fact that, now Eugenio and Leticia had moved out, her reasons for staying with Pedro had gone out the window.

The Mambo King had once heard her say: “If he dies, I’ll be better off.”

But there was something else: after so many years of waiting, she had finally enrolled in college.

It hit her one day while sitting in an English literature class that she couldn’t bear it when Pedro’s hands searched under her robe at night: it didn’t take much for her nipples to get hard, just touching them did that, but he fancied that it was the particular motion of the same thumb that he held a pencil in that did it, the ball of his thumb just touching her and her nipple getting hard. And so his thin but long fish-headed penis went inside her. And she went somewhere else, far away from that room.

(She was on a bed with Nestor, getting it from behind, raising her haunches so high because when he’d turn up he never seemed to have much time, as he was always dressed up in a white silk suit, like the one he’d worn on the night he died and when he appeared on that television show—he’d barely enough time to pull down his trousers, but she was always in bed waiting for him. And because he liked to do it from behind—he used to say he felt that it went in the deepest like that—she always let him. Sometimes she turned to cream where she was sitting, had to pull herself together. Tired of weeping at night and of losing herself in books and in the petty activities of running a household. By that time she had felt like bursting into pieces.)

And her feelings showed, because later, after Cesar had taken Lydia home, Delores exulted in deriding him: “She’s very nice, Cesar. But don’t you think she’s a little young for you?” (Riding him, the way she used to nearly thirty years ago.)

“But why fool yourself with her? What have you got to give her, except some money?”

“Ask yourself, what would she want with an old man like you?”

(And he had to hold his tongue, because everyone knew what had happened to Delores while taking some night courses up at City College. She had fallen in love with a genteel literature student, a man younger than herself, with whom she went to bed for several months. And because of the way it ended, with the man running away from her, she had become more careless with herself and went walking on a bad street on her way home from college, and two black men pulled her into an alley and tore off the nice necklace Nestor had given her and they took her watch and a bracelet that had been a Christmas present. Then one of the men pulled down his trousers and the other threatened to kill her if she said a word, but she let out with some kind of howl, lit windows for blocks everywhere, and the men left her there, clothing torn up, lying on the ground, her books all around her.)

“Listen here, Delorita. Say whatever you want to me, but be good to her, huh? She’s the last chance I’ve got.”

So happiness came back into the Mambo King’s life. Like a character in a happy habanera, he went through his days listening to sonorous violins and moved through rooms thick with the scent of flowers, as if out of a
canción
by Agustin Lara.

(Now he remembers riding along the dirt roads from Las Piñas on a borrowed mule, a cane hat pulled low over his brow and a guitar slung over his back, and, coming to a field of wildflowers, dismounting from his mule and walking out to where the flowers were thickest: crouching and looking through the stems and blossoms, sun hot in the sky and a rattling cutting through the trees: now he picked hibiscus and violets and chrysanthemums, irises and hyacinths, tranquil among the bees and burrowing beetles and ants teeming around the sole of his soft leather shoes: deep inhalation of that fragrant air and the world going on forever and ever. Then he was on his mule again and making the approach to the farm. On the porch of their house, his mother and Genebria, always so happy to see him. And the Mambo King, very much a man, strode toward the house, kissed his mother, and presented her with the wildflowers, his mother whiffing them happily, saying,
“Ay, niño!
”)

And he seemed happy. Whistled and shaved every day and wore a sweet cologne and a tie and shirt whenever he went out with her. Happiness, that’s all he talked about, standing on the street corners or in front of the stoop with his friends. She was turning him, he boasted, into a young man. I’m getting young, he would think, and forgetting my troubles.

He only wished the pains had gone away and that he could do as he pleased, without being bothered.

And Lydia? She supposed she was falling in love with him, but she had her doubts. Just felt so desperate to get the hell out of that factory. Wanted anything better than what she had. Wished to God that she had finished high school, wished to God she had a better job. She wished to God that she had not slept with the foreman, because everybody in the factory found out, and it made no difference in the end. She did it because he, like all men, had promised something better. But once she went as far as to lie back on his desk and hike up her dress, he got all offended that she wouldn’t do the rest: get on her knees and take care of him like that. “What I told you is off!” he shouted after the fifth or sixth time she’d visited him. “Forget the whole thing”—and he dismissed her as if she were a child.

Wished she was smart like Delores (though she did not want her unhappiness) or had a job like Ana María in a beauty salon (she seemed to be happy).

Wished that the Mambo King was thirty years younger.

Still, she saw the good in him: liked the respect people showed him and the fact that he seemed to work so hard. (Sometimes when they went out or when she watched him onstage it was hard to imagine that the old man would spend hours a day on his back with a wrench trying to fix a clogged sink trap, or that he climbed ladders and plastered walls, that his back had achy muscles.)

He was good to her and this affected Lydia like music, turning her bones into humming pipes and making honey drip out her valves. He was so happy with her he didn’t want to play jobs anymore, because that took time away from her. After a job, and anxious to see her, he would turn up at her apartment at three-thirty in the morning, carrying a wilting bouquet of flowers and a bag of party leftovers. With keys to her apartment, he would quietly open the door and make his way to her pink bedroom. Sometimes she was up waiting for him, sometimes she was fast asleep and the Mambo King, forgetting all his troubles, would strip down to his shorts and his sleeveless T-shirt and climb into bed beside her, falling asleep with his white-haired arms wrapped around her.

When they’d go to bed, she felt vindicated in her affection for him. She liked violent lovemaking and looked forward to her physical release, these orgasms which made her scream. She liked it when he kissed her all over. The laziness of his bones and the pure volume of his experience had made him more patient about lovemaking. Languidly exploring the alluring bud of her femininity, he discovered a mole just inside her labia majora, and he kissed this mole until he tasted a vegetable sweetness seeping through his teeth. When she came, grinding herself into his face, he felt as if he was being devoured, too.

Later, he would bite every one of her spinal knobs, and when he reached her
nalgitas,
she spread her bottom wide for him, and he licked her uplifted rump, with her flowery asshole, and mounted her. Something like floating on a violent sea, his testicles and legs being pummeled by her: he floated off on her, as if on a raft, closed his eyes and faced the sea, which he thought most beautiful, a stretch of murky blue waters which he remembered from the Merchant Marine off the coast of Sardinia and which burst radiantly with golden helmets and silver-and-red dots of light with the sudden appearance of the sun. These joyful moments always made him think about marriage, but he’d restrain himself, knowing that this desire would pass and that he was old.

They had been together for almost a year when he asked her to move in with her kids, because the trips back and forth from the Bronx and Manhattan were becoming a bit tiresome. That very day he took her down into a basement storeroom and showed her two little beds and a dresser and a small black-and-white television set and a lamp that he’d bought for them. But she had to be honest: “I can’t,
hombre.
The children have their school and friends and it wouldn’t be right.” Then: “But I can bring them down for the weekends.”

She’d always wonder about that decision. She could have quit her job, stayed for a time with him, and looked for another. But there was something about him that frightened her, a look that he’d get in his eyes sometimes, a little too dreamy for her taste. She thought it might be the beginning of senility, and where would that leave her? Taking care of him, like a nursemaid. And she would have been deceiving herself to say that she didn’t sometimes look at younger, more slender men, whose faces were smooth and untroubled, or that it didn’t sometimes embarrass her when he took her out dancing and wore that velvet hat with the feather and the orange shirt and white linen suit, a gold chain around his neck, like a
chulo.
She preferred it when he tried to be elegant, and told him so, but he kept saying, “No, I want to be youthful, too.”

Still, bringing the kids down to stay with him for the weekends was a good deal for her: it focused his generosity on her family. Cesar provided whatever the children needed, clothing, books, shoes, toys, medicine, pocket money. (And they loved him for it, covering his face with kisses—holding them, he would think about Eugenio and Leticia when they were small.) He’d take them for walks through the markets, buying clothing for her off the racks, and sometimes took her downtown to the big department stores, where he sometimes paid $60, $70 for a single dress! He made room for her in his dresser and she began to keep clothing there: a drawer filled with her lacy panties and brassieres, a rack of her clothing hung in the closet. When she was not doubting the situation, she felt happy with him, liked the spaciousness of his apartment, and considered the neighborhood swanky in comparison to where she lived, 174th Street and the Grand Concourse, in the South Bronx.

And on Saturday mornings Ana María treated her to a nice shampoo and hairstyling at the beauty salon.

“It’s so nice that you’re with Cesar. He seems so content,” the good-natured Ana María would say.

“You don’t think he’s too old for me?”

“No! Look at Cary Grant with a young chick, or Xavier Cugat with that coochie-coochie girl, Charo. And look at Pablo Picasso, his last wife could have been his granddaughter. No, there’s nothing wrong with a bachelor like him finally finding the woman of his dreams, even at his age.”

“How old is he?”

“Almost sixty-two, I think.”

Working slowly and carefully, Ana María always gave Lydia the looks of a ravishing Hollywood starlet of the forties. Actually, with her dark oval Spanish face, almond eyes, and pouty, thick lips, she bore some resemblance to the Italian actress Sophia Loren. Made up by Ana María and wearing one of those nice new dresses and high heels, she would head back to La Salle Street, her walk deliberate, one foot tiptoeing in a line after the other, as if she were walking a tightrope, so that her hips really swayed, and the men on the street made remarks as she passed. She enjoyed that. What would her husband have said to that? Once stretch marks had appeared on her breasts and they had gotten a little saggy from having the kids, he had started to call her “old.” And she was only twenty-eight! In the end, he’d left her because they were trying to draft him for the war and it was back down to Puerto Rico and then the Dominican Republic for him. So these remarks appealed to her vanity. And there was this one fellow, Pacito, who worked in a florist’s shop, who always handed her a single rose when she’d go by, asked her for dates, or at least to hang around and talk with him, but she always remained faithful to Cesar.

It didn’t help things when Delores pulled her aside and said, “Cesar’s a very good man, but you have to be careful with him. That’s all I have to say, just be careful.”

Or that Mrs. Shannon always looked at her disparagingly from her window, where she’d sit with her wild mane of silver-gray hair, her plump arms resting on the sill.

But she did feel for him. For his suffering. On many of those nights it seemed the Mambo King, who sometimes slept like a lamb, had his bad dreams.

In the middle of the night, he would feel his father beating him with a switch. He would wince like a hound on the farm, a dog hiding in the corner. He would hear his mother calling to him from a distance, far away, as if beyond the faintest star in the black sky, “Cesar! Cesar!” He would writhe in bed, because when he opened his eyes she was not there.

Then there was a dream that had started to plague him in those days with Lydia, almost a beautiful dream, he remembered now.

It involved a river like the river that used to run by the road from his farm toward Las Piñas, its banks thick with trees and prosperous with birds. He was always riding a white horse in this dream. Dismounting, he would make his way through the dense woods to the water, curly and cool, with bubbles of life and thin-legged insects with Chinese eyes and transparent wings floating on the surface. Kneeling (again), he would scoop up the water, wet his face, and then take a drink. How delicious that water always seemed. Then, he’d undress and jump in, floating on the water and watching the sun breaking through the star-shaped leaves and tongue-like fronds and daydreaming about something he’d once heard as a schoolboy (His school? A single large room, near one of the barracks at a nearby sugar mill): that in the days of Columbus, there was a race of Indians who lived in the treetops, and sometimes he would imagine their lives out on the branches, jumping from acacia to mahogany to breadfruit tree. But always the sky grew dark and in the water he’d smell blood, like the blood that sometimes appeared in his urine. And then he would look down the river and see that there were hundreds of naked women, bursting with youth and femininity, bodies damp and beautiful in the sun: and some would hold their arms out to him imploringly and some would lie back on the ground with their legs spread wide and he’d want them so bad, daydreaming about making love to one hundred women at a time, as if that would make him immortal. But then he’d hear click-clock, click-clock, click-clock in the trees, and when he looked up he saw hanging from the branches skeletons everywhere, like wind chimes, hanging off every branch on every tree, the sounds they’d make frightening him.