The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (24 page)

Did he think about Delores and his children, Leticia and Eugenio? Yes, he could not bear the thought of hurting them. But what could he do? He would sit up, sighing, desperate to get rid of those feelings.

“A
cabrón,
” he would perhaps tell himself, “would have gone back to Cuba by now. A
cabrón
would have been unfaithful.”

Despite his brother’s constant seduction of women, Nestor wore his faithfulness like a badge of sainthood, but he sometimes found it unbearable, wanting to be held, to be comforted, to be told, “Yes, Nestor, I love you, everyone does.” And those feelings would make him angry at the marriage, so that by the time he returned home, he would take it out on Delores.

He’d only begin falling asleep after the sun had started to rise. Then his dreams would take on a golden glow. “There goes the future,” he would say to himself, falling asleep. “There goes the future.” And he found himself stumbling through a cemetery, exulting in the obelisks, Celtic crosses, and monuments with their carved angels and bursting suns. Christ risen (Save this flesh, Lord), Christ judging (Forgive me, Lord), Christ on the Cross (Please place me in Your Heart). Then he’d wander through the cemetery, feeling very much at home, until some sound, Cesar snoring, Cesar saying, “Oh, baby,” Cesar belching, would stir him from his uneasy sleep and he rejoined the world.

(And the next day, driving along the hilly countryside near the Delaware Water Gap, the bus overheated and stopped on the side of the highway for an hour. The brothers found themselves walking down a country road with Manny. They came to a field of sheep, and in the distance another field of haystacks. Nature buzzing, alive with insect sounds and birdcalls. They saw a mill and a small stone wall where they thought they might pose for a picture. Cesar had brought along a little Kodak box camera and he told Nestor to pose beside him in front of that wall. They were doing so, arms around each other’s shoulder, when they heard a cowbell. Not a Latin orchestra cowbell counting 3/2 time, but a cow cowbell. Then they met the cow herself, who had come walking out of the field. Big black spots covered her hide and she moved in a swirl of a hundred flies. The spots inspired the brothers to put on dark glasses. They posed in front of the cow, looking as if they were part of the cow’s family.

A farmer had been watching the brothers and said to them in a German accent, “Let me take your picture. The three of you.”

And so Manny, Nestor, and Cesar, three Mambo Kings, posed for posterity.

That was June 1956.

Then the farmer invited them to his house, which was down the hill. His front garden was filled with sighing flowers, sighing as they tried to reach higher out of the ground. And the roots of the earth seemed to yawn. In the Hotel Splendour the Mambo King felt the sunniness of that day and poured himself another drink. It was a stone house and its interior smelled of dirt and firewood and cherry pipe tobacco. They drank coffee and had corn bread and ham—
“Sabroso
!”—grape jelly, and scrambled eggs. Then they drank a glass of beer each. When they offered to pay him, he refused, and when they left, he followed them back up the road to the bus, where Cesar gave him a signed copy of “Mambo Dance Party.” He laughed and they were touched by his insistence that they come back any time to eat with him.)

Because of the tour, Cesar spent his thirty-eighth birthday in Chicago. They were holed up in an old twelve-story hotel called the Dover House, on the Northeast Side, overlooking Lake Michigan, and he’d had a good day walking along the shore with his brother and a few of the Mambo Kings, clowning around, eating in nice restaurants, and, as always, trying to kill time before the show. He certainly expected something more from the fellows than what he had gotten. He considered himself their father, their Santa Claus, their spiritual advisor, the butt of their jokes, and there he was, on his birthday, after a show, without any sign that his musicians would celebrate his birthday. So it was not as if he was impervious to pain. On a normal night out, he would have suggested a party, but he resisted the idea of initiating his own birthday celebration. After his fellow musicians had gone their separate ways, and Cesar and Nestor headed for their rooms, Cesar was the solemn one for a change.

“Well, happy birthday,
hermano,
” Nestor said, with some embarrassment in his voice. “I guess I should have said something to the band.”

And that little incident tapped into Cesar’s feeling that went back a long way to Cuba: that no one does a thing for you, so you must do it yourself.

Feeling downcast about turning thirty-eight, and about being alone on the night of his birthday, Cesar opened his hotel-room door and clicked on the light; he slept in a bed that was up against a wall of mirrored tiles. Stretched in front of those mirrored tiles was a beautiful, long-legged woman, head of thick black hair propped up on an elbow, body luscious and naked.

Taking in the spectacular curvaceousness of a body that startled the Mambo King and whose shapely bottom, soft and rounded as a swan’s neck, was reflected in the mirror, he said,
“Dios mío!”

And the woman, a brunette with big brown eyes, said,
“Feliz cumpleaños,
” and smiled.

She would be another acquaintance of his, an exotic dancer, Dahlia Múñez, who was professionally known as the Argentine Flame of Passion. He and a few of the Mambo Kings had watched her dancing in a club on the South Side. When his fellow musicians saw how Cesar could not take his eyes off her that night, they hired her as a present to him, and there they were: she opening her arms and her legs to him, and Cesar hurrying to strip off all his clothes, which he left in a pile on the floor. Every woman he’d ever bedded down, he would think years later in the Hotel Splendour, had something to distinguish her lovemaking. And for the Argentine Flame of Passion it was the way she enjoyed the act of fellatio, actually liked the spill of his milk inside her mouth—or so she pretended. (And her technique! She would make his spectacular member even more spectacularly huge. She’d take the root of his penis above his testicles, which resembled jowls and were the size of good California plums, squeezing so tightly that his thing turned purple with the rush of blood and then got even bigger: and then she would just roll her tongue around it, take him inside her mouth, lick him all over, pull, prod, and poke his member until he came.) She had other virtues, which kept them busy until past seven in the morning; they slept happily until around ten-thirty, when the Mambo King and this Dahlia fucked one more time, showered together, got dressed, and showed up in the hotel dining room, where his musicians were gathered to wait for their bus. When he walked in, they broke into applause. (For years he sent Dahlia postcards, inviting her to visit him in New York and saying that he might visit her in Chicago.)

The brothers loved the immensity of the United States and experienced both the pleasures and the monotony of small towns U.S.A. Of the Midwestern states, they found Wisconsin most beautiful, but they also liked the Far West. They played Denver, where Cesar, delighted all his life by cowboy movies, saw his first bowlegged, drawling cowpokes leaning up against a bar, spurred cowboy boots against the foot railing, a rinky-dink player piano jiving through “The Streets of Laredo.” And it was “Howdy, pardner” and “Thank you much” and long-drawled-out English phrases. They bought the family little presents wherever they went. In Denver, cowboy hats and rubber tomahawks and little dolls, and for Delores, a “Genuine Navajo Squaw” dress. They made like tourists and sent home dozens of postcards of everything from Mount Rushmore to the Golden Gate Bridge. Aside from their moments of strangeness and displacement, they had a beautiful trip.

The guys who had it rough were the black musicians, who were treated in some places like lepers. No violence against them, just a bad silence when they’d go walking into a store, a disenchantment when they’d walk into a lodge for the hunters’ special breakfast, plates slapped down on the table, drinks poured quickly, eyes averted. In one place in Indiana they had a big problem with the owner of a dance hall there. He wanted Desi Arnaz, not these ebony-black Cubans like Pito and Willy. The owner would not allow them to walk onto his premises, and the orchestra canceled, Cesar telling the man, “You go fuck yourself, mister!” In some places they had to come in through the back door and were not allowed to use the toilets with everyone else. Black musicians had to take their pisses out the back stage door. Spirits were dampened, especially when the weather was bad, because in their travels through the heartland of America these fellows sometimes felt an Arctic coldness of spirit that made New York seem like Miami Beach.

At one point, they spent two weeks on the road without ever meeting up with a single fellow Cuban, and a month when they saw no other blacks.

San Francisco was different. Cesar liked it immediately because its hilliness reminded him of Santiago de Cuba. He liked to walk up and down its streets, enjoyed looking at its pretty many-colored houses with the curlicue balconies and bay windows. That was the last stop on their tour, where the Mambo Kings were to hook up for a triple bill in Sweet’s Ballroom, with the orchestras of Monto Santamaría and José Fajardo. This was really important for the Mambo Kings, as they were paid two thousand dollars for a single appearance—more than they’d ever gotten before. When Cesar stepped onto the stage that night, to clamorous applause, and the orchestra opened, as they always did, with “Twilight in Havana,” Cesar Castillo was positive that, from then on, things for the band would get better and better and that there would be many more nights in the future when they’d make that kind of money. Why, a fellow could live well making a few hundred dollars a week! Like a rich man. That night would always be a beautiful memory. Every song greeted enthusiastically, the crowds of dancers going wild with appreciation and happiness, and just the honor of sharing the bill with musicians of this caliber! Then, too, there was always that moment when the audience recognized the opening bars of “Beautiful María of My Soul,” their one hit, the song that brought them closest to fame.

With all this money, the brothers bought themselves new suits, toys for the children, clothing. Nestor bought Delores a fur wrap. For the apartment, he bought a brand-new Castro Convertible sofa and the big RCA black-and-white television that would sit in that living room for the next twenty years. And he was always making trips to the bank, putting money away for a rainy day. His security was his blue American Savings Bank passbook, guaranteed to pay four to five percent interest annually. Manny the bassist saw a trustworthy soul in Nestor and wanted him to go into the
bodega
business up on 135th Street, but Nestor, disliking risks of any kind, backed away. He was so unsure about the future and so plagued by anxieties that he continued to work at the meat plant, reporting every so often to Pablo to pick up assignments, so that the family always had money coming into the house. Even Cesar, who always let the money fly out of his pockets, managed to put some of it away, though not much. He spent it at the racetracks and in the nightclubs and on his male and female acquaintances. For about three months, he lived a life of opulence. Even after sending a few hundred dollars to his daughter in Cuba, whom he kept promising to visit, he had enough to make a down payment on his dream automobile, a 1956 DeSoto.

The afternoons would find Cesar out on the street, proudly sponging down his DeSoto with soap and water and then polishing it with wax. Then he’d wipe the chrome with rags, until the whole machine gleamed radiantly. Cesar would go over that automobile as meticulously as he did his fingernails, with not a mark or a nick anywhere on its great windshield or over its smooth, sloping hood. He derived great pleasure from looking at it and would hold court from its front seat, playing its radio and chatting quietly with his friends until he decided to take someone for a ride up to the George Washington Bridge and back. The thing was so big and shiny that he would attract crowds of poor children, who would stand before it in awe.

“Yes, sir,” Cesar would think. “That’s my nice car.”

He was always reluctant to leave it parked in front of the building without someone to watch over it. La Salle was a street where the hoodlum element not only sat on cars; they took flying leaps off cars to catch balls during stickball games and jumped up on top of cars to dance. He’d usually park it over in the garage on 126th Street but sometimes kept it near the building. On those occasions when he was called upstairs, he would often check out that car from the window. He loved his DeSoto. It was big. It was splendid. It was smooth. It had turbo-thrust and was fifteen feet long. It was so fabulous-looking that no woman could resist smiling when she saw it. That DeSoto was so powerful that when he roared down the street and screeched to a halt, his foot on its “touch-sensitive” automatic brake system pedal, driver and machine were one and he would feel as if he were turbo-thrusting through the dense ordinariness of the world.

He would take everybody for rides, elbow out the window, felt dice dangling off the mirror. His best friends at that time were Manny the bassist, Frankie Pérez the ballroom dandy, Bernardito Mandelbaum, artist, mambo aficionado, and Cubanophile, his fat cousin Pablo, and little Eugenio. They all got to ride around with the Mambo King. One day, he took the family and a date on an outing up north to Connecticut and stopped at a place called Little America, a memorabilia-packed log-cabin lodge whose shelves and walls were filled with animal heads, muskets, medallion-brimmed cowboy hats, tin soldiers, Mohawk Indians, rubber tomahawks, stovepipe hats, “Welcome to Connecticut” ashtrays, miniature American flags, American-flag tablecloths, American-flag pens. Cesar, a rich man, bought the children bundles of this junk. Afterwards they went into the Little America diner, where they drank sodas and chocolate malteds and came away with bags of potato chips and Snickers candy bars. Then they drove for another hour and the road opened to long stretches of meadow, streams, and woods. Cows and horses lolling behind fences, dogs barking from the side of the road. Bing Crosby on the radio singing “Moonlight Becomes You.” Cesar drove his automobile, with its beautiful whitewall tires, screeching around the turns. The family gripped their seats, but Cesar laughed and whistled. Sparks sometimes flew from the friction of hubcaps hitting the highway curb. He drove into a state park, where the forest’s noble pine trees towered over them. Serenely the family made their way down a corridor of these trees, carrying picnic baskets and guitars, a cooler of beer and soda. They were following signs that said,
TO THE LAKE.