The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (15 page)

Once, when Cesar was away, she went to the brothers’ flat and decided to make Nestor dinner. She was cooking up a pot of chicken and rice on the white enamel stove with animal feet, and then, ladle in hand, she stuck out her rump, pulled up her dress, and said, “Come on, Nestor.”

She liked it every which way: from behind, in her mouth, between her breasts, and in her tight bottom. She would make his penis agonizingly plump and long. He used to think he would split her open, but the more he gave her, the wider she spread herself before him. He took her to the movies, where they sat in the balcony and in the midst of the crucial love scenes, he slipped one and then two and then three and then four fingers inside her. In the foyer of a building landing, he would lift up her skirt and lick her thighs. He would lean up against her like a hound, pressing his tongue against the dead center of her panties. Some days he forgot his name and where he lived and where he worked: by day at the Havana chapter of the Explorers’ Club, by night in a little gambling casino nightclub called the Club Capri. She had large firm breasts. Her nipples were brown and the size of quarters, very small-tipped at first, but when he suckled them they would swell. Tiny flora of sensation blossomed and he could taste the sweetness of her milk. Livid and as thick as her wrist, his penis slid into her mouth and she reached back and opened his buttocks and stuck her hand inside, probing him. He was alive then,
coño!
Alive.

He was so in love with her that he could have died in her arms happily. Loved her so much he licked her rump hole. She came and he came and in the red-tinged silver-and-white that exploded in his brow and that shuddered through his body he felt a thready presence, like a soul entering him. He would lie beside her, feeling that his body had been turned into a field and that he and she floated ecstatically over that field on the wings of love. He thought about her as he scrubbed the hair-tonic stains off the back of the heavy leather chairs at his job at the club. He wore a short white jacket with three brass buttons and a little hat like a bellboy’s, carried trays of food and drink to the club members, and he daydreamed about licking her nipples. Smell of linseed-oil-polished wood, cologne, blue cigar smoke, flatulence. The smell of leather, hair-tonic-stained chairs, thick rugs from Persia and Turkey. Nestor laughing, Nestor happy. Nestor slapping his older brother’s then-troubled back. He’d work in the little kitchen behind the bar, making crustless ham sandwiches, and drinks. He whistled, he smiled, he sang happily. He’d look out across the dining room through open French doors to the patio and garden. He would think about the devastating curvaceousness of her buttocks, the sliver of thick black hair that protruded, but just barely, from behind her spread thighs. Scent of soft violet wisteria, falling over the garden walls, leafy jasmine and Chinese hibiscus. The taste of her wide-open vagina, all red and gleaming from moistness, an open orchid to his tongue.

Waiting to see her again, he suffered through evenings when he went to work playing the trumpet and singing alongside his brother with the Havana Melody Boys. His María worked in the chorus line of the Havana Hilton, as one in a line of ten “beautiful cream-and-coffee-colored dancers,” and that’s where Nestor wanted to be, his eyes looking off not at the audience or the spotlights but into the distance. He could not help thinking about María. When he was not with her he was miserable, and after playing these jobs he would rush out to meet her.

For his part, Cesar was curious about this Beautiful María who had taken his maudlin, quiet brother and made him happy. So finally Nestor arranged that they meet one night. They chose a bar where a lot of musicians liked to go, up by Maríanao beach.
Dios mío!
his brother Cesar was surprised by María’s beauty and he gave Nestor his approval, but then, so did everyone else. He stood there trying like every other man to figure out how on earth Nestor had landed her. Not by know-how; his younger brother had never been a womanizer. In fact, he’d always seemed a little frightened of women. And now there he was, with a beautiful woman and a real look of happiness on his face. He hadn’t won her over with his looks, pleasantly handsome, with a long matador’s face and a sensitive, pained expression, large dark eyes, and large fleshy ears. It must have been his brother’s sincerity and innocence, qualities which femmes fatales seemed to appreciate. Watching her dance before a jukebox blaring Beny More, her ass shaking and body wobbling, her beautiful face the center of attention in that room, Nestor felt triumphant because he knew what the others wished they knew: that yes, her breasts were as round and succulent as they appeared to be under her dress, and that her nipples got big and taut in his lips, and yes, her big rumba ass burned, and yes, the fabulous lips of her vagina parted and sang like the big kiss-me lips of her wide lipsticked mouth, and yes, she had thick black pubic hair, and a mole on the right side of her face and a corresponding mole on the second inner fold of her labia minora; he knew the fine black hair that crept up gradually out the crack of her buttocks, and that when she reached orgasm she would whip her head back and grind her teeth, her body shaking in the aftermath.

Standing by the bar proudly, beside his older brother, Nestor sipped his beer, one bottle after another, until the sea’s blueness outside the club windows rustled like a cape and he could shut his eyes and drift like the thick smoke of that room through the crowd of dancers, wrapping himself around the voluptuousness that was María.

Funny, that was their mother’s name too. María. María.

Remembering those days, Nestor would never think about the long silences in their conversations when they’d go for walks in the park. After all, he was just an introspective country boy with a sixth-grade education who knew more about musicians and breeding animals than anything else. Once he’d told her about himself, he had almost nothing to say. “And how are your cousins?” “How is the club?” “Nice day, isn’t it?”
“Bueno,
what a good day?” “Why don’t we go for a walk and get something good to eat?” What could he say to her? She was beyond human conversation. She liked it when he serenaded her in front of the opera house in the park with his guitar and crowds would gather to listen and applaud him. Some days, she seemed very sad and lost, and that made her even more beautiful. He would walk alongside her, wondering what she was thinking and what he could say to make her laugh.

Gradually, their walks turned into long vigils through the night, until they reached that place where everything would be fine: their bed. But then, somehow, even their spirited romps in bed turned into something else. She would stop and weep in his arms, weep so hard that he didn’t know what to do.

“What is it, María? Can you tell me?”

“You want a good piece of advice, brother?” Cesar would tell Nestor. “If you want a woman, treat her good sometimes, but don’t let her get too used to it. Let her know that you are the man. A little abuse never hurt a romance. Women like to know who’s the boss.”

“But abuse María? My María?”

“Take my word for it . . . Women like to be ordered around and put in their place. Then she will stop her weeping.”

Trying to think what his brother meant, he started to order María around, and during their silent walks in the park he would show her that he was a man, taking her roughly by the wrists and saying to her, “You know, María, you must feel lucky to be with someone like me.”

He’d watch her by the mirror, making herself up, and say, “I never realized that you were so vain. It’s not good, María, you’ll be ugly in old age if you look too long in the mirror.”

He did other things to her which would later make him cringe with unhappiness and the unfairness of it all. Good-looking as she was, he imitated his older brother and took to looking around at all the other women on the street. He had the idea that if he could diminish her, then she would always remain by his side. When things didn’t get better, their silences increased. As things got worse, Nestor became more and more confused.

But during that time when things were bad for them, Nestor sat down and wrote his mother a letter saying,
“Mamá,
I think I’ve found a girl to marry.”

And once he’d told his mother, his romance took on a magical, inevitable quality. Destiny, he called it. At first, he made a formal proposal to her, on his knees, in a garden behind a social club, with ring and flowers. He bowed his head, waiting for an answer: he shut his eyes, thinking about all the light in heaven, and when he looked up to see her pretty face again, she was running out of the garden, his ring and flowers beside him on the ground.

When he would make love to her, he would think about the man he had seen the day they met and how she had wept afterwards. Making love, he left marks on her legs and on her breasts from gripping them roughly to show her that he was a strong man. He would get up from their bed and say to her, “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?” He had a sick feeling in his gut that something inside him was pushing her away. On those nights he wished for a
pinga
so huge that it would burst her open, and let fly, like a broken
piñata,
all her new doubts about him.

Believing that persistence would win out on his behalf, he would say to her, “I’m going to ask you to marry me every day until you tell me yes.”

They’d take walks, go to the movies, her beautiful face pained.

“There’s something I want to tell you . . .” she’d always begin.

“Yes, María, that we are always going to be together?”

“. . . Yes, Nestor.”

“Ah, I knew it. I would die without you.”

One night they were supposed to see a Humphrey Bogart movie and meet at their usual place, in front of a bakery called De Leon’s. When she failed to turn up, he walked the streets looking for her until three in the morning, and when he returned to the
solar
he told his older brother what had happened and Cesar said that there was probably a good reason why she had missed their date. He always found his brother’s advice sound and felt much better. The next day, he went to María’s house and she was not there, and he went there the next day and she was not there, and then he went to the Havana Hilton and she was not there. What if something had happened to her? He kept returning to her
edificio,
but she was never there, and each evening Cesar, who was having a rough time himself, consoled him. But by the fifth day his older brother, whose life philosophy had turned into rum, rumba, and rump, told Nestor: “Either something happened to her or else she’s abandoned you. If something happened to her, then you’ll see her, but if she’s left . . . you have to forget her.”

On another morning, he knocked at the door so long that the owner came out. “María Rivera? She’s moved away.”

He returned again and again to the club, even when he was told that she had quit her job and returned to her
pueblo.

For weeks he couldn’t eat or drink and he lost weight and his insomnia became worse. He would sit on the rooftop of their
solar,
watching the stars over the harbor, stars of lamentation, stars of devotion, stars of infinite love, and ask them, “Why are you mocking me?” He went to his job in a disastrous state of mind, exhausted and solemn. His state of gloom was as ecstatic as his previous state of happiness.

Even the leader of the Havana Melody Boys noticed Nestor’s low spirits. While the other musicians mamboed across the stage, he barely moved. Someone whispered, “He looks like he’s going through a bad affair of the heart.”

“Poor fellow, looks like someone has died.”

“Let him alone. There’s nothing that’s going to cure him. Only time.”

Finally he went to her
pueblo,
which was about four hours by bus from Havana. He walked the streets, inquiring about a certain María Rivera. He’d left without saying a word to his older brother and had gotten a room in a local inn. He had been there for four days and was drinking a
café con leche
in a bar when he looked over and saw the man who had been fighting with María the day they met. Now that he could get a good look at him without the distortion of fear, he was surprised to see a handsome man. He was wearing a blue
guayabera,
white linen
pantalones,
yellow socks, and white shoes, and he had strong and pleasant, manly features: dark, intense eyes, a thick, virile mustache, a wide neck. The man had been drinking calmly and then abruptly he moved out into the street. Keeping a distance, Nestor followed him. He came to a lovely street, a narrow cobblestone street that went uphill. Old orange and light pink walls, overgrown with flowering vines. Palm trees and acacias throwing their shade over the sidewalk. And in the distance, the sea’s radiance.

There was a house there. A beautiful, tin-roofed house overlooking the water. A smell of pineapple and a garden. A house of happiness and voices. María’s voice, laughing happily, happily.

He waited, tormentedly lingering outside like a ghost, just to catch a glimpse of her. And it made things worse. He would look into her window and hear the chatter of voices and utensils and plates and pans frying up plantain fritters, her life being joyfully pursued without him, and he cringed. At first, he didn’t have the guts to bang on the door and confront her, didn’t want to see the truth. But he later found his strength in a bar and returned at dusk and swaggered over to the door, belly in, chest out. A long, mournful trumpet line, rising high and looping around the stars. Scent of mimosa in the air. Laughter. He kept banging on the door downstairs until the man came out.

“What do you want?”

“My woman.”

“You mean,” he said, “my wife.”

“Don’t tell me?”

“Since a week ago.”

“But she hated you.”

The man shrugged. “It was our destiny.”

Oh, María, why were you so cruel, when I saw the stars washing through your hair and the moon’s pensive glow in your eyes?