The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (25 page)

Bees hovered closely around Cesar and his date, Vanna Vane. He was wearing so much hair tonic that the bees swarmed around him as if he were a wildflower field. That day she wore a lot of perfume and was dressed in a red plaid dress, very plain and very matronly in its way. They were a happy couple even if they weren’t a real couple. They held hands and whispered, telling little jokes and laughing. She was hoping that things would pick up with him. She liked the fact that he was generous with her. Frankly, a girl her age had to think about getting married, and even though he had told her a hundred times that they were good for a few laughs and for the Hotel Splendour, she believed there was something more to him. On a few occasions, when Miss Mambo had felt some real tenderness from him, she had started to cry in his arms. And it was as if he could not bear to see her pain, and so he told her, “Come on, Vanna. Stop acting like a little girl.” So she kept her distance and waited patiently for Cesar to come around.

Cesar reminded her of the movie actor Anthony Quinn and she liked the way he would draw all the attention in a room, how other women seemed to envy her when she was out with him. And now he was on top of things, with all kinds of prospects. A Mexican film producer, Anibal Romero, had been talking to the Mambo King about appearing in a cameo part in a film in Mexico, where “Beautiful María of My Soul” was a hit. And he had been on the
I Love Lucy
show and had enough money that he bought a DeSoto and gave her a gold necklace because he was feeling successful. (Neither of them liked to think about the real circumstance of that necklace, with the Mambo King guilty about having to take Vanna Vane uptown to 155th Street, to that Pakistani fellow with the thick black hair and the inkwell eyes, a doctor who sat Vanna down for a quick surgical procedure, scraping her womb until the child of their conception was taken forever from this world. And Cesar sat outside, chain-smoking because Vanna had been crying, and pissed off about the whole thing. Afterwards he took her down to Brooklyn and bought her a banana split in a corner pharmacy and was startled that she was upset. “A lot of guys,” he said, “wouldn’t have even gone with you.” And that made her leave the pharmacy, sadly, so that it was months before she would speak to him or share a bed with him again.) But to the family they were a regular happy couple, not at all like Delores and Nestor, who had taken to walking solemnly side by side, their remarks addressed to the children: “Come here,
nenes!”
“Don’t put your fingers in your mouth after touching that!” “Give your Papi a kiss!”

It was all silence, because since the brothers had come close to fame, Nestor had begun to change. He’d go for long walks by himself, and people were always saying to Delores or Cesar that they had seen Nestor “standing on a street corner without moving.” Or that “he seemed to be there but wasn’t there, you know what I mean?” Then there was something else: the letters she sometimes found folded up in his jacket pockets, letters to María, whose lines Delores could not bear to read. Her eyes would skim the pages and find phrases that cut her heart like a knife: “. . . And despite all my doubts, I still love you . . . It has always been a torment. . . This love will always thrive in my heart . . . If only I had proved my worthiness to you . . .” And other sentences that made her feel like slapping his face and saying, “If your life is not good enough for you, then go back to Cuba!” But how could she? She was trapped by her love for him. The idea of this beautiful dream of their love cracking open because of jealousy would send her into despair. She would take to her books and maintain her silence. For three months this had kept the peace.

At twenty-seven, Delores was still an attractive woman. But in attending selflessly to Nestor and the family, she’d acquired a puzzled harshness around the eyes. A photograph of her with five other Cubans, the brothers and musician friends of the family, shows a woman of intelligence and beauty literally trapped inside a crush of men. (And in this photograph, taken in front of a statue of Abraham Lincoln on 116th Street, they huddled close. In the crush of machos, she seems to be waiting with annoyance to be lifted out of there.) She had never lost sight of that sad but handsome man she had met years back at the bus stop, and she loved him and the children very much. But there were days when she thought of another life outside of cooking and cleaning and taking care of the family. She sometimes went wandering around Columbia University with the children and would peer into classrooms or stand outside a window, listening to the summer-session lecture. She’d sigh, thinking about all the college people in that neighborhood. For reasons that she was unable to understand, she derived a deep satisfaction from all this learning, but would she ever act upon this?

There seemed no way out for her. She had quit her job as a paid domestic and had finished her night classes down at Charles Evans Hughes High School, where a teacher, who was half flirtation and half sincerity, suggested that she might enroll in college at least part-time. She always got high marks in her courses and could have gotten into City College, which was only a ten-minute walk from La Salle Street. She always told her teachers, “No.” But when she daydreamed about her life, her knees ached with envy of those professors who lived surrounded by books and by admiring colleagues and students.

For a time she had thought her interests were unimportant in the scheme of their family life, but whenever the apartment grew thick with Cesar and Nestor’s pals from the dance halls, who expected to be waited upon, she felt like screaming. It hit her that she was intelligent and more so than anyone else she knew. A vague nausea would come over her and she would barely make it through those evenings, so cramped was her stomach.

She became solemn in the performance of her wifely duties on those nights.

“What’s wrong with you? Why are you so sad?” Nestor would ask her.

“I’m sorry,” she’d say. “It’s my stomach.
Tengo ganas de arrojar.
I feel like throwing up.”

It so distressed her that, a few weeks later, she approached Nestor to discuss the matter with him. “
Querido
,” she said to him. “I want to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“How would it be with you if I enrolled in some courses at the college?”

“And why do you want to?”

“To better myself.”

He didn’t say no. But his face flushed and was filled with disappointment. “You can do as you please,” he told her. He let out a sigh. “You go, and that will be the end of normalcy for us!” He was up out of the chair. “Do as you please, see if I care.”

“But what is the big deal, Nestor? What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that I’m the breadwinner here, but if that’s what you want to do, that’s your business.”

She was silent, hopeful that his expression would change, grow more relaxed.

Instead, he went on. “Go ahead and humiliate me before the others.”

“Oh, Nestor, please.”

“Then don’t suggest such things to me.”

“I was only trying to get your permission to go to the school.”

The word “permission” calmed him. “Yes?” And he seemed more pensive about it now. “Well, maybe we should talk about this, someday. But I just want to say that a woman with two children should never spend more time than’s necessary away from home.”

And then he became very kind, putting his arms around her and giving her a gentle kiss. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “It seems I’m getting a bad temper these days.”

But after that, it became harder to accept her everyday life. She would go walking down Broadway with her kids, among the students and professors of Columbia. Some of them looked daffy, some looked like geniuses. Some held doors for her and some let doors slam in her face. Some were homosexuals and some gave her lascivious up-and-downs. Why were they students, and not she? She would sometimes leave her children with her sister, Ana María, who loved them, and then go sneaking into the big libraries of the university and sit thumbing through their books. She pretended that she was enrolled in the college and she would nod and say hello to her fellow students. She would daydream about the nature of the world and the way it was set up. Why was it that her father dropped dead on a stairway, in the midst of an exhausting work day, his heart sad from all his troubles? Why did the severe librarian with the bifocals pushed down low on his pointy nose watch her with suspicion? Why wasn’t her Papi standing in one of those classrooms, lecturing about the rise of the Popes of Avignon, instead of rotting in the ground? Why was it that she would walk home, dreading the fact that her husband, whom she loved very much, was lost in his own world of pain and music? Why was it that she would spend long periods of silence around him, because he never seemed to be interested in what she had to say and in the books she read? Why was it that when mambo time came around, when the house filled with musicians and their wives and the record player was turned up, why did she act willingly like a slave, attending to all the men, and yet feel no satisfaction or closeness to the women, like her sister, Ana María, and Pablo’s wife, Miriam, who went happily about the business of cooking and happily rushed into the living room with trays of food? Why did she end up sitting on the couch, watching the crowd of happy dancers, with her arms folded on her lap and shaking
no, no, no
each time someone like her brother-in-law would take her by the wrist and pull her up to dance? Why did she open the door to her apartment in the Bronx one day and find Giovanni, that nice Italian fellow from the plant, standing there with his face puffy and hat in hand to tell her that her Papi was dead? Why was it that she liked to get lost in books like the one she was reading one night, Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn,
when she felt her husband lying alongside her, his fingers searching between her legs and his mouth suddenly upon her breast? Why was it that she no longer felt the same compulsion to do exactly what he wanted, to lift him out of his pain? She didn’t know why, and she did all the right things for him, opening her robe all the way and planting kisses on his manly chin and chest and down below, where those kisses made him dissolve quickly.

They just walked in silence, Nestor in his blue
guayabera
and checkered
pantalones,
looking at the sunlight playing between the trees of the forest. One hand on Eugenio’s shoulder, the other pulling little frightened Leticia along. No words for Delores except “It’s a beautiful day, huh?” And that was the way they had always been since meeting at the bus stop. The pensive and pained musician who could make simple statements about life and the world, that was all. A good man, still heartbroken over someone else, she would think to herself. And that’s why he wanted me, she would think. Wanted me so that I can help him forget what he hadn’t forgotten. He winced with that awareness. Nothing was ever said about it, but when he would stand close to Delores, he seemed to stop breathing from shame. He was afraid to let her go to school because he thought that she would become wiser, and see through his confusion. He did love her. He would tell her that a million times over and over again if he had to, but something kept tugging at him, and he kept thinking that it was María. Or was it something else?

As they went walking through the woods, Nestor and Delores were tense. The children felt it, though they were too young to know why, and Cesar knew it. He was always walking over and joking with them. He came across some daisies and picked them for Vanna Vane and for Delorita. A flower slipped from his hand and for a split second was suspended between them, floating there. Like a magnet trick in the circus, Nestor stepped back, and the flower dropped to the ground. Later, Nestor thought he had seen a deer in the forest and went to look for it. As the family watched, he walked into a shaft of sunlight and for a moment he seemed invisible. Then he shouted, “It
is
a deer!”

Over a hill was the lake, and in the distance, mountains. There were a few summer vacationers spread out here and there along the shore, and a bathhouse, where the family changed into their bathing suits. The children played in the shallows of the water. Eugenio was five years old, but he’d remember how good the roast chicken tasted that day, the long-legged insects which seemed to float on the surface of the water, and his mother, looking fine as ever, sitting on the side of the blanket, and his father on the other, Nestor repeating, “Why is it that we are being this way? Don’t you understand?
Yo te quiero.
When you understand that, you will be happy again!”

But each time she turned away from Nestor, he would look around for support from the others, as if someone should step forward and say, “Yes, don’t be so hard on him, Delorita, he’s a good man.”

Cesar and Vanna Vane were inseparable. They jumped into the water, which was cold, and charged back to shore, stretching out on towels, drinking Rheingold beer, and enjoying the sunshine. Nestor, the younger Mambo King, watched them attentively, and each time Cesar’s bottle emptied, Nestor would bring him another. Now and then he would say to Delores, “Forgive me?”

Then, Vanna Vane, in a green bathing suit, nipples pointy, limbs chilled, ran into the water. Cesar followed her, but because he couldn’t swim, he mainly splashed around and laughed like a child. Vanna, being a city girl, really didn’t know how to swim either, and they both went bobbing under the water, held each other by the waist, and played touchy-feely. Enchanted, they kissed. Delores remained on the shore, reading. Nestor was playing with the children when he suddenly felt determined to prove himself a man. There was a small island in the middle of the lake, a few hundred yards out, and he decided to swim there. But he’d only get so far and then sink into the water, churning frantically, his face contorting with the effort to stay afloat. When he started to go under, he felt a fierce constriction in his chest and gut, and from his mouth gushed a stream of bubbles. A few times it looked as if he might drown, as no one there swam well enough to save him, but when Delores put down her book and started to cry out, “Nestor! Nestor! Come back!” he kicked swiftly and with Herculean effort made his way toward the shore. Wrapping a towel around him, Delores covered his shivering body with her own. A chill wind had started to blow across the lake surface, and the greenish water, as if filled by shadows, darkened into black. Then heavy black-bottomed clouds started booming like conga drums in the distance, and just like that, the sunny day, with its hot sunlight brilliant against the lake, grew cold, the air charged up with static energy, and it started to rain. Everyone huddled under the bathhouse awning, watching the rain for about a half hour, and then they got dressed and made their way back to the car. Cesar Castillo took the family back to La Salle and then, with Vanna Vane, drove over to the Hotel Splendour.