The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (17 page)

He would send his mother in Cuba tender letters written in his simple script, speaking about his love for her and the family; heartsick letters nostalgic for the security of the home he had—or thought he had—in Cuba. He was very emotional, thinking about his childhood, about the tender care he received when he was sick in bed. He’d forget about the terrors of his solitude and dwell upon all the kisses from his mother and their housemaid Genebria, how everyone seemed to look out after him, especially Cesar. He’d open these letters with the salutation
“Querida mamá
” and finished them off with: “All of us in the household here send you a thousand, no, a million kisses. With all the love of my heart, your
hijito,
N.”

He always signed these letters with a single letter, “N.”

His nights were a disaster. He’d often come home to La Salle Street from a job by himself, strip down and climb into bed beside Delores, remaining awake beside her and inviting her attentions. They would wrap their arms around each other, caressing affectionately until they fell asleep. But he would always awaken in the early hours, thinking that there was something missing from his life—what, he did not know. At three-thirty in the morning, he would get up and sit in the dark living room, softly strumming guitar chords, and stirring Delores from her dreams, so that she would make her way down the hall.

“Nestor, why don’t you come back to bed?”

He’d just keep strumming. He’d sit by the window, looking out. The street glowed like dusk with the light of a wrought-iron lamp.

“It’s just a song.”

Sometimes he didn’t sleep for three or four days. He didn’t know what was going on. Cubans then (and Cubans now) didn’t know about psychological problems. Cubans who felt bad went to their friends, ate and drank and went out dancing. Most of the time they wouldn’t think about their problems. A psychological problem was part of someone’s character. Cesar was
un macho grande;
Nestor,
un infeliz.
People who hurt bad enough and wanted cures expected these cures to come immediately. Cesar was quite friendly with some
santeras,
really nice ladies who had come from Oriente Province and settled on 110th Street and Manhattan Avenue. And whenever Cesar felt bad about anything, if he felt depressed about the fact that he still had to work in a meat-packing plant to maintain his flamboyant life-style, or when he felt guilty about his daughter down in Cuba, he would go see his friends for a little magical rehauling. These
santeras
liked to listen to the radio all day, loved to have children and company around them. If he felt bad, he would just go in there and drop a few dollars into a basket, lie on his stomach on a straw mat on the floor, ring a magic bell (which symbolized his goddess, Caridad, or charity) and pay homage to the goddess Mayarí, for whom these women were intermediaries. And pssssst! his problems would lift away. Or they would lay hands on him. Or he would just go over to 113th and Lenox, to a
botánica,
and get himself a “cleaning”—the saint pouring magic herbs over him—guaranteed to do the trick. Going to confession at the Catholic church did the same job: a heartfelt opening of the heart and an admission of sins; then the cleansing of the soul. (And no deathbed confession either, no admission to heaven because of last rites. These Cubans died as they lived, and a man who would not confess his sins at age twenty-five was not going to do so at seventy.)

Nestor went with Cesar and was cleansed, paid obeisance, and felt better for a few days. Then the feeling came back to him, and he was unable to move. It was like being trapped in a tight shaft of darkness: sometimes it twisted in a labyrinth, sometimes it went straight. Moving inside it was always difficult. He even tried to go to confession when he had no sins to confess. Inside the church’s big red doors and its smell of honeycomb candle wax and incense, he would march up to the communion railing, remember how he would kneel on the cool stone floors of the church in Las Piñas beside his mother, and pray to Christ and all his saints and to the Holy Mother. He’d shut his eyes, his brow trembling with the effort to make a connection to God.

And one day when the priest’s face appeared in the darkness behind the confessional screen, he said, “Father . . . I have come for guidance.”

“What kind of guidance?”

“My heart is . . . sad.”

“And what has made you sad?”

“A woman. A woman I once knew.”

“And are you in love with her?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Does she love you?”

Silence.

“Well, does she love you?”

“I don’t know, Father.”

“Do you want her to love you?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Have you told her?”

“Yes.”

“And are you in a situation that allows you this?”

“No, Father. I have a family.”

“And is that why you are here?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Have you acted upon this feeling?”

“In my heart.”

“Your marriage makes that wrong.”

“I know.”

“But this temptation . . . I counsel you to pray. Do you have a rosary?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Then say the rosary and you will be strengthened.”

And he said the rosary, enjoying the stony companionship of the saints and Jesus; he said the rosary until the prayers were coming out of his eyes, but his guilty feelings remained. He sometimes felt so bad that he told himself, “If I had remained with María, I would have found my happiness.” He would go over his romance again and again in his head, though it had ended years before. He had walked into it happily, naively, innocently . . . and his soul had been ruined.

Even though he loved Delores, he could not stop himself from thinking about María. A pain would throb in his kneecaps and this pain would spread upwards through his thighs and down through his ankles, a surge of melancholia, and out of this would come María. What was it that she had said to him that day in 1948?

“I will love you forever.”

He would walk over to the park and secretly write her letters at least once a month, though he never received an answer. He would watch the boats passing on the Hudson River, dragging barges of piping and refuse, and think about María naked on a bed. He would have painful memories of what it felt like inside her: out of the sky would fall a silk handkerchief, warmed by the sun and dipped in honey, that would wrap tightly around his penis.

But even though he knew that it was all wrong, he couldn’t get rid of this longing for her. His feelings of hopelessness always led him back to María, and thoughts of María led him back to hopelessness. He loved Delores, loved his children—why, then, were things so wrong? He tore up most of his photographs of her, save for one, and this he kept hidden in a box thick with sheet music, stuck in the living room between a bass drum and a
quinto.
He wouldn’t look at this picture for months, and then he’d take it out and she always seemed more beautiful and tender than he had remembered. The fact that she had cruelly abandoned him did not temper his desire. He knew that something had to change, but didn’t know how to change it.

He developed an odd habit. In the warm weather he and the family liked to go up to the rooftop for a picnic. Once when he did so, he went over to the edge and found himself leaning over it, so far that Delores cried out, “Nestor!” and the excitement and his bravery made the children laugh. For a moment, as he hung over La Salle Street watching the kids below playing stickball and the birds circling the water towers, he thought about dropping off the rooftop, as if by letting go he would fly among the buildings, looping like a butterfly until he hit the pavement. Thinking about his family, he had resisted the temptation to let go. Then he started to lean out their fourth-floor window quite a bit, as if to get rid of the feeling, and was thinking about it on the day when he came home with a present for Eugenio, who was then nearly three years old. It was a kite and they spent hours running back and forth on the rooftop, laughing and watching it rise high into the wind, its balsa cross-beams bending and the paper fluttering in the air. He stood by the edge of the roof with Eugenio in his arms. Kisses on his face and pats on the back.

Sometimes, on long walks through the city, he’d daydreamed about meeting up with someone who would give him sound advice and have all the keys to happiness. He thought that the Italian fruit vendor knew, that those old wizened-looking Jewish men who would go walking up La Salle on their way to the Jewish Theological Seminary knew. That they would tell him what to do about those feelings which made him lower his head and want to step off the sidewalk into the path of an oncoming bus or that made him cling, with fear, to the subway walls because the edge of the platform seemed so inviting.

Lost in contemplation, he’d sometimes wander downtown amid the endless crowds that passed him on the street; people with the most purposeful and determined expressions hurrying everywhere, as if to a Dance of the Sabers. As he sat on a park bench, bums approached him and he would give them cigarettes, money. Dogs lay stretched out on the pavement, happy and panting, by his feet. And sometimes pretty women in white high-heeled pumps and feathered hats, fascinated by the soulful-looking young Latin-lover type, would sit beside him, wanting to start up a conversation.

What did he want? He only wanted to find shelter in the bosom of love, not rush anywhere, and to have the heaviness lifted off his shoulders.

One thing Nestor came to admire was Delores’s habit of reading. She read huge amounts and seemed better off for it. And she had told him, in the midst of her kisses on one of his restless nights, “Nestor, you should get in the habit of reading yourself to sleep.” But aside from the newspapers and the Captain Marvel books he would buy on the newsstands, he hardly read anything at all. He was curious about those books that kept Delores so occupied while sitting on the park bench rocking the children in their carriages, those cheap paperbacks whose pages she would turn while standing by the stove and boiling water to cook
yuca.
Reading gave her a vaguely absent air, though she was never lax about her wifely duties, and he had no cause to complain, because she really did look out for him.

One day, however, Nestor did buy a book. Having crossed Times Square in a gloomy mood, he stopped at a newsstand to look over the magazines and a book caught his eye. It had a simple bright-red cover and was sitting among some tattered cowboy novels and girlie thrillers in a metal rack to the side. It was a book entitled
Forward America!
by a certain D. D. Vanderbilt.

It was the jacket copy that captured the younger Mambo King’s attention:

        . . . Not a human being on earth likes to admit that things aren’t always as rosy as they should be. I knew a fellow who spent half his life plagued with self-doubt. This doubt had a severe effect on his outlook and on his enjoyment of life. He couldn’t sleep, found himself feeling “out of the picture” when everyone else around him seemed to be having the time of their lives. He had a decent-paying job, but with a family to support, he could never put enough money away for a rainy day. On top of all this, he never exerted himself around more aggressive kinds of people. He suffered because of this fault and doubted his own manliness. Many a day he daydreamed about a better life, but he seemed completely without resources when it came to realizing it.

        One day, this man took a good long look in the mirror and said, “I’ve had it!” He spent the night awake dreaming about the possibilities for his future and came up with the principles of achieving happiness in today’s busy and troubled world.
Practical secrets and principles that will work for you!
That very next day he went to his boss and presented certain ideas that he’d had about the business and was so convincing about his new approaches that his boss gave him a
big promotion
and a
bonus
. . . . Within a few months he was promoted again, and within a few years he was made a partner in the firm . . .

        These principles worked to solve the other problems of his life. He has since achieved the greatest kind of success with
his friends, his family.
He has won the respect and love of others and found happiness the
American Way!
Read on, dear prospective buyer. It doesn’t matter what walk of life you’re from. Whether you’re rich or poor, Chinaman, Indian, or from the planet Mars, this book can
change your life!

        I know these principles work, because I was that man! The D. D. Vanderbilt secrets of happiness will work for you!

Momentarily uplifted, Nestor paid the 79 cents plus tax (.04) for this book and then took the bus home to La Salle Street, where he hoped to find revelation among its pages.

Life continued much as it had and yet that book became Nestor’s constant companion.
Forward America!
became dogeared in his back pocket. He needed help for the spirit but not the body: his day job in the Kowolski meat-packing plant on 125th Street left him so exhausted that he’d have to rest up a few hours before getting dressed for a night job that would last until four in the morning. But he always had the strength to bed Delores down. Young and firm Delores had skin so smooth and warm to the touch that all she had to do was open her blouse and they would soon be making love. And Cesar? Even though she used to muffle her moans of pleasure in a pillow, her brother-in-law was like a bloodhound or a Sherlock Holmes when it came to knowing their bedroom habits and he would leave the apartment to check out the girls on the street corner or head down to the park to watch the boats going by on the river, killing an hour’s time before returning to the apartment to find Delorita with her face flushed and her voice humming as she happily went about the ladylike business of cooking dinner.

Once Delorita had moved in, Cesar had had to change many of his habits. He had a room on the courtyard and from his window he could see his brother’s window and had the fortune or misfortune one day, while feeding the alleycats pieces of his leftover lunch and cupcakes, to look over and notice, through a narrow opening in that bedroom’s curtains, his sister-in-law standing naked, looking very voluptuous and fuckable before the mirror. He knew that Beautiful María was fine, but when he saw Delores naked, he thought
Dios mío!,
took a deep breath, shook his head, and decided for the sake of his sanity and family peace to keep his distance from Delores. He did this without much trouble, as he had his own girls, but all the same he couldn’t stand to walk down the hall or sit in the living room reading a newspaper or with a guitar and hear their bed shaking, the headboard thumping into the wall, his brother’s loud panting and her efforts to quiet him, Sssssh sssssssssh, because she didn’t want people to hear them or to know what they were doing, a joke considering how her fecund body filled the apartment with a scent of meat, cinnamon, and blood. And so Cesar would go out for his walks, and daydreaming.