The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (14 page)

Then he’d pass the prostitutes who stood in the doorways in their tight slips and robes exposing a breast, or a length of thigh, rolling their tongues over their lips, as if they’d just finished eating an ice cream: they’d check out his crotch, smile, and say, “Psssst.
Ven, macho, ¿adónde vas?”
He passed them and always waved hello: they knew him as the quiet musician walking along their street, the fellow who wasn’t audacious like his brother. They would call to him and rub their breasts and once one of these ladies leapt out of the doorway and pinched his bottom:
“Guapito!
Hey, handsome, what’s taking you so long?” But he never wanted to go, because ever since the days when his brother used to take him to see the prostitutes in Oriente, he had found something unbearably sad about the situation, not the touching of breasts and loins, the gushing of his sperm, or the white pan of water under the bed in which the used prophylactics floated, but the idea that he found himself feeling too sorry for these women who were forced to make love with men with whom they were not in love, spreading their legs for fifty cents and sometimes, with a really beautiful woman, a dollar.

But he was not a saint. There was one pretty girl whom he took to bed now and then, a young woman, married, as it turned out, who really needed a man to love her. He went to see her four times and had been falling in love with her when he realized that the only reason she was suckling his member and bending his back was for money, and that left him sulking with disappointment for weeks, so that he went back to his old ways. (Nothing like Cesar, who was having trouble in his marriage and would go roaring with a bottle of rum into one of those whorehouses and take up with three women at a time and come home to their little two-room apartment sated and with a glow of sly satisfaction in his eyes. Nothing like Cesar, who’d turn up in these brothels and spend the night among these women, entertaining them with his trembling, quivering baritone: he’d sing and they would cook for him and sometimes he would slip off into a room and take a woman to bed.)

So the whores of La Marina came to recognize Nestor’s expression of eternal homesickness and longing for love that flourished in his face at night. Even back then, he was an insomniac, who’d only known peaceful sleep in his mother’s arms when he was a baby; all other sleep was deathly, like the sleep he knew as a sick child in the days when he could not breathe and when he felt his heart churning and welts covered his back and stomach. It was the deathly sleep of opening his eyes and finding his mother sitting in a chair near his bed weeping and a priest looming over him and dabbing an oil that smelled vaguely of cinnamon onto his forehead with the back of his thumb and making the sign of the cross, and he himself thinking as a child that he was going to die. The peaceful sleep in his mother’s arms was the sleep he missed, and so he would walk those streets, agonized by the night and wishing that he had never left Las Piñas or the loving grip of his mother. But he was a man,
coño!
Destined to live in the world and to take his place among the other men who were everywhere, running things and giving orders and facing life in every moment. Why should he be any different?

He would walk those streets daydreaming, and because he took no regular route and liked to zigzag in and out of the back alleys and down corridors and to follow stairways, he never knew where he would end up. This wandering sometimes made him feel an affinity with the stars. He’d sit for hours looking at them by the harbor: stars shooting across the sky, stars hanging there with their pink- and blue-tinted light and set against a sky that went on forever and forever. What were they doing up there? Murmuring and sighing and looking down at love’s follies, the way they did in songs? Were they lonely, or sad, longing to break free of the darkness that nurtured them? Or were they destined to remoteness, always to search for happiness—like Nestor?

One night he went out to a park in the Maríanao district where the
rumberos
would gather under the trees by a river with their incredible
batá
drums and their bead-wrapped rattle gourds and trumpets to play music. That night he had joined them, playing the trumpet, and was on his way back home, wandering the streets. In a corner bar he drank a coffee and watched some children dancing to an organ-grinder’s music. Afterwards he thought about going to a cowboy movie but then continued along a route that took him past a doorway from which he heard smashing dishes, shouts, and a struggle on the stairs. Had that argument broken out five minutes sooner or later than his arrival, the situation might have resolved itself without his intervention and the woman in the torn dress with the tears running down her beautiful face would have gone back to her apartment or made up with the man. But he happened to be walking by when he heard shouting, and then he heard quick, pattering footsteps on the stairs, slaps, then through the doorway the fighting couple, the man trying to pin her arms and the beautiful woman in tears pulling at his hair. A lot of pain on their faces, and the man violently angry.

Heroically, Nestor interceded, approaching the man and telling him, “Look, stop it, you shouldn’t hurt her. She’s only a woman.” And then it turned into something else, the man bristling at this fairy’s nerve of fucking with him, and so he said, “And who are you to tell me this?” and gave Nestor a shove, and Nestor shoved back, and then they both started punching each other, the fight ending up on the cobblestone street, with both men bloody and their clothes covered with dirt. Having watched the fight from a distance, while finishing his rice and chicken and sausage and
tostones
dinner in a café down the street, a police officer came over and pulled them apart.

When the man calmed down, he huddled with the woman, exchanged angry words with her, and then stormed off, saying: “You don’t need me? Then good, you’ll never see me again.” She watched him leave. Every few feet he would reel around and shout something else back at her. “Bitch! Whore!” She wept, and Nestor stood on the corner, no longer wanting to continue his walk. He did not want to move away from her, and though they did not have much to say, they stood side by side, silently. He then offered to take her to the café. “It will make you feel better,” he said.

Looking at her, Nestor felt faint-headed: she was more beautiful than the sea, than the morning light, than a wildflower field, and her whole body, agitated and sweaty from her struggles, gave off an aromatic female scent, somewhere between meat and perfume and ocean air, that assailed Nestor’s nostrils, sank down into his body like mercury, and twisted in his gut like Cupid’s naughty arrow. He was so shy that he couldn’t look at her anymore, and she liked this, because men were always looking at her.

“My name is María,” she told him.

“Nestor’s mine,” he told her quietly.

She was twenty-two years old and had left her small
pueblo
by the sea for Havana, where she had been living for the last few years working as a dancer in different little Havana nightclubs. He wasn’t surprised to hear that she was a dancer: she had a nice body and strong-looking, curvaceous legs, with muscles that were round and delicate. She was a
mulata
beauty with the high cheekbones of a starlet of the forties, a pouty, seductive double for Rita Hayworth. And the man with whom she had been fighting?

“Someone who was once good to me.”

He passed the night with her in the café eating
paella
and drinking wine and telling her everything about his short life, his childhood illnesses, his sense of unworthiness, his fears that he could never be a real macho in the kingdom of machos. Her state of pain and her throbbing vulnerability spoke to his own pain. Each of his stories entered María, his new confidante, the only woman in the world to whom he had spoken so, María, to whom, in the end, these confessions would mean nothing.

That night, and many other nights, she was polite, grateful, and affectionate. At her doorway, he bowed and then turned away. She was so good-looking that he never dreamed he’d have a chance with her. But then she pulled him close to her and they kissed. She closed her eyes in some kind of sympathy, their bodies pressed together, her hand holding the back of his head. The warm softness inside her dress. The thickness of her tongue . . .

“Why don’t we go out to the Luna Park tomorrow,” she said to him. “Can you come here in the afternoon?”

It was his day off.

“Yes.”

“Then shout up into that window there.” And she pointed to a shuttered second-floor window by a balcony off which hung a sheet and some dresses.

He walked the streets home that night with his stomach in and chest out and with his
pinga
warm and bloated inside his trousers, ecstatic over the amorous possibilities. He walked around his neighborhood for hours and then finally climbed the stairs to the
solar
which he had been sharing with his older brother, Cesar. He found him cooking some pork chops over a little stove they had there. He was in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, and looked somber. It had been bad times for him since he’d moved out of the apartment he’d had with his wife and daughter. He’d been drinking, too; a bottle of Tres Medallas brandy sat on the windowsill, and Cesar seemed groggy.

“What happened to you?”

“I met someone. A girl named María.”

Cesar nodded, patted his brother on the back, hoping that this woman would help with Nestor’s solemn moods.

And Nestor sat with his older brother at the table, blood pouring through his veins, bursting with life, devouring another pork chop, even though he’d eaten a big meal just a few hours before. Chewing noisily like a little hungry hound. Sounds of life, of digestion, a look of happiness and hope in his eyes. Although he couldn’t sleep that night, his was a joyful insomnia that buoyed his spirits, so that he felt like leaning out the window and shouting out to the world. Instead, he lay awake in bed and quietly strummed his guitar, an A-minor chord, his favorite key for writing songs. He strummed and dreamed up melodies that materialized in his mind like hard, bright pearl necklaces. He watched the window for the first signs of light. He imagined himself turning up at the farm at Las Piñas with this woman, charging across a field with her, and telling his mother: “Look,
Mamá,
this is Nestor, your son who you thought would never be happy!
Pobrecito!
Look at me, I’ve got a beautiful woman who loves me!”

He waited until he heard the first sounds of day and he could make out the shadowy silhouette of the outside balustrade, a wreath of flowers, on the tattered windowshade. Radio in the courtyard: “And now from the House of Socks, radio station CMQ in Havana . . .” Men in T-shirts frying sausages on their balconies. His older brother turning over in bed, sighing. Footsteps in the hallways, a little girl downstairs playing hopscotch, another jumping rope . . .

That morning and into the afternoon he was tortured by expectation. And as happy as he had felt, his self-doubts, another of the family afflictions, crept through the sunniness of his thoughts. Standing outside her window, he shouted her name for about twenty minutes, but she did not come out. By that time Nestor had become convinced that María had lied about going to the Luna Park with him and that he had been cheated of his joy. And so he began to walk away, figuring he would spend the afternoon downtown in the movie houses. He was feeling discouraged, when María came walking around the corner, breathless and hurried.

“I had to take something to my cousin and it took longer than I thought.”

The day was beautiful. His faith restored, they passed the time holding hands and strolling through the crowds in the park. They played games of chance. From time to time he gazed into her eyes, thinking, I know that we’re falling in love, aren’t we? And she would smile, but her head would turn away, as if struck by some quick, flitting pain. She seemed cautious around him. Of course, she was getting through something with this other man. Nestor kept his distance, remained quiet, but whenever he mentioned the “incident of that day,” she would say, “Don’t even think about that man, he was such a
cabrón.
” Why, then, the wistful look in her eyes?

“Come,” and she would take him by the hand. “Let’s have fun!”

By evening they were sitting out on a pier by the sea necking, the head of his penis weeping semen tears. He wasn’t bothered by the ease with which she gave herself, though old ladies and duennas gave them dirty looks. He thought, if she’s kissing me so much, that’s because we’re in love! Why was she closing her eyes so much, as if he wasn’t there? They saw each other every day for two weeks. He would go to her house, where she rented a room from a woman there, and they would head out into the street, a bounce in his jaunty walk. Their love affair came down to secret moments of hurried kissing and groping, mutual masturbation against alley walls and in movie theaters, and this inevitably led to the consummation of this love in a room filled with blue light by the harbor, on a bed white as beach sand, in the apartment of a friend.

That very day he first thought of writing a
canción
about his love for her. Sated and living in paradise, the younger Mambo King, who really had never known women, thought of this lyric: “When desire overwhelms a man’s soul, he is lost to everything in the world but love . . .”

He and María feasted on each other for months. They’d go to a deserted stretch of beach outside Havana or to the apartment of Nestor’s friend by the harbor. He never took her up to the
solar
he shared with his older brother, because he felt that the cheerfulness of his love would be disturbing to Cesar, who had left his wife and child, and suffered for it, too . . . And besides, what if Cesar didn’t like her? His brother, his heart, his blood. In those days Nestor would rush up the stairway of their
solar,
his Cuban-heeled shoes tapping on the floor, passing images of himself and María kissing in the shadows. They’d do it on the bed and sometimes on the floor, or on a pile of dirty clothes. They seemed to love each other so much, their skin gave off a lustful heat and smell so strong that they would attract packs of wild hounds who’d follow them down the streets.