The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (27 page)

Then the part that for the Mambo King or anyone else was hard to imagine. Seated in the back of the DeSoto, Cesar Castillo was fooling around with Vanna Vane: they were both drunk enough that he kept sliding his hand up into the warm upper reaches of her skirt, to where the nylons hit the garters, and she was pure pleasure, kissing him affectionately and laughing, the two of them sipping their rum while Nestor, in the front seat, kept his eye on the road and tried not to be thrown by the icy curves or by the lovely snow which had continued to fall everywhere. Vanna was sliding her hand along the inside of Cesar’s thigh, and he pressed his face against hers, telling her all the dirty things they would do once they got back to Manhattan. The backseat was thick with perfume and cigarette smoke, noisy with kisses and laughter, and they were so wrapped up in each other that they sometimes forgot Nestor was driving. He became an anonymous driver for them, as they got lost in each other; he was the man in the overcoat, black-brimmed hat, and scarf, with a trumpet case beside him on the front seat and a box of percussion instruments on the floor.

Nestor had been quiet for a long time, paying more attention to the road than to the kissing behind him, when he thought to ask, “Would you like me to turn up the heat?” But then, just like that, the car began swerving and slid over a patch of ice and he panicked, hitting the brakes and jerking the wheels so that the DeSoto flew into a dense wood and crashed into the trunk of a massive oak. There was a boom and then a loud yawning sound, like a ship’s mainmast cracking, and the sturdy V-8 turbo-thrust engine tore loose from its bolts and slammed the steering wheel into Nestor’s chest.

And that was all. He passed out behind the wheel, letting out a deep sigh. He closed his eyes and felt someone pouring hot oil onto him and he had to ask himself why were his insides filled with wetness: wet palm fronds, rotting flowers, stems mashed and bloody; wet sheet music, wet toilet paper, wet condoms, wet pages from a Bible, wet pages of a television script, wet pages of D. D. Vanderbilt’s
Forward America!
The wheel had hit him like a hard punch in the chest, not even a terribly powerful punch, and he had heard the yawning and after the yawning a ringing of faraway bells. Then black-and-white stars floated around on the insides of his eyes, as if he’d just stared into a camera flash, and he opened his eyes and the falling snow had parted like a curtain and he could see the sky as it had looked from the porch of his family’s house in Cuba: there were the constellations of Cygnus the Swan, Hercules, and Capricorn, and countless other stars, more radiant than he had ever remembered, the stars blinking like a child’s happy eyes. And then started to swirl around like dancers in a crowded ballroom. He closed his eyes and felt like crying but could not cry. He tried to speak. “Tell the family they were in my thoughts,” he wanted to say, but then even thinking became more difficult and he started to fall asleep, and though he was trying his best to stay awake, his thoughts became dreamier and darker, and then he daydreamed that someone was stroking his thick, wavy hair, and did not wake.

Thrown off their cloud of romance, Cesar and Vanna passed out for about ten minutes. The others, who had been following behind, came upon the scene. To free Nestor, the men pushed back the seat and carried him into the snow, where they laid him down on a blanket. Steam oozed from his nostrils and lips, steam and smoke and a smell of burning rubber and gasoline. They would say that Nestor opened his eyes and looked up at the sky, smiling sadly. Cesar was revived by a swig of rum and for a moment thought he was waking up on a Sunday morning in the Hotel Splendour with a terrible hangover. But Vanna Vane was weeping, and there were some of the Mambo Kings with flashlights, then policemen and strangers and sirens in the distance. Kneeling down by Nestor, the Mambo King surprised himself by making the sign of the cross over him. He remained there for a long time, touching Nestor’s face and repeating, “Just wait, brother. Just wait.” But nothing else happened—or there was nothing else that the Mambo King cared to remember.

He did remember Nestor rushing up the stairs to the apartment, happy as a small boy, carrying a Santa Claus gift-wrapped guitar as a present for Cesar, something hot he had picked up off the docks. He remembered the man sitting on the edge of the couch and, when he thought no one was looking, burying his face in his hands. He remembered the first time he heard the name María and the first time his brother played the chords to that song when they were living in Cousin Pablo’s house. And somehow he could not separate Nestor’s death from that song. He daydreamed that Nestor had heard him kissing Vanna lasciviously—and the truth was that he’d already started playing this game with her, nudging the opening to her vagina through her panties with his thumb, the man glorified by the moistness gradually accumulating there—and that Nestor couldn’t bear to have so many others living in a world of pleasure while he existed in a world of pain; that, because of that feeling, instead of heading straight on the icy road, he jammed the wheel to the right abruptly, wanting to hit a tree. Then his brother’s words, which he’d never paid much attention to, came back to him, to everybody: “Sometimes I don’t feel long for this world.”

He remembered something else too, the medical man in the hospital where they’d taken Nestor saying, “It wasn’t that bad. Just a little vein near his heart got crushed, just bad luck.”

“Bad luck.”

The worst was breaking the news to Delores. She knew something was going on when Cesar turned up with Manny at nine-thirty the next morning. She had been asleep when she knew: her book,
Double Indemnity,
fell off the night table at three-thirty in the morning and she could feel a slow sucking mercury passing through her bones, as when she had answered the door to her apartment in the Bronx and learned that her father had died. So what could she do but pace the halls and stand vigil by the window, waiting to hear the news? What could she do but stare at herself in the mirror and wish that things had been better between them?

When Cesar conveyed the news, “There’s been an accident involving Nestor. He’s gone,” she said, “Would you repeat what you just said,
cuñado,
brother-in-law?”

He did.

Then, calmly and impressively, she said, “I must call my sister, Ana María, and tell her.”

Cesar said he would tell the children. Eugenio and Leticia shared a little room at the end of the hall, and around the time of the crash they had heard some of the boiler-room pipes below twisting and churning as if about to burst or tear loose from the walls. And this was followed by a metallic yawn that caused Eugenio to sit up in bed. They were sleeping late Sunday, waiting for their mother to fetch them for eleven-o’clock High Mass at the church. But that day Cesar pushed open the door, still in an overcoat that smelled of snow. He touched their faces and said, “Your Papi’s gone far away.”

“To where?”

“Just far away.”

And he pointed toward the west. It seemed to be a good direction.

“And will he come back?”

“I don’t know, children.”

He reached into his pocket and brought up some of the hard red and orange candies his brother had gotten for the children from that party in New Jersey. And he gave them some, saying: “Your Papi asked me to give you these candies.

“Now get dressed, some people are going to be coming here.”

Those people were the priest, Father Vincent, from the church, and Bernardito Mandelbaum and Frankie Pérez and Miguel Montoya and Ana María and Manny, and then there were the other Mambo Kings, turning up with their wives and kids or with their girlfriends, or just standing solitarily in the hall, hat in hand, head bent low. The priest sat in the living room, speaking about “grace,” and the children, without knowing why, had to get dressed up in their Sunday best. Still, it was nice with every visitor to their home treating the children with kindness, patting their heads, and giving them money for comic books and candies.

Why, if the atmosphere had not been so unbreathable from grief, it might have been like a real party for the kids!

They decided against a wake but waited two days for the arrival of one of the three brothers from Cuba, Eduardo, who was as thin as a rail and had never flown on an airplane before. New York looked black and gray to him. He’d walk around the apartment at night in a terry-cloth bathrobe, white socks, and thin-soled shoes. He was quite tentative about everything. He seemed confused walking down the street, his senses bombarded by the noise of traffic, construction sites, subways. He was in his forties but seemed older. His hair was streaked with white and he was so soft-spoken that no one could hear half of what he was saying. His face was sun-beaten and he would pass through the household shaking his head, as if to say, “Poor Nestor,” and, “This doesn’t make sense.”

Nestor’s death and funeral lingered in memory, like clouds of pain. No one wanted to remember.

Even in the Hotel Splendour, the Mambo King had to fight the impulse to replay “Twilight in Havana” or “Beautiful María of My Soul,” and to head back into the past, circling around the most painful event of his life, the loss of his brother. Maybe play “Manhattan Mambo” and bring back the early club days, or get down to things again with the Julián García Orchestra.

A detail that was easy and pleasurable to remember? That on the day before his brother’s funeral, he slipped off to the Hotel Splendour for an hour with Vanna Vane. For an hour they pretended that nothing terrible had happened. She wanted to forget and he wanted to forget. So he threw her onto the bed and lay on top of her. They were too fucked-up to even take off their clothes, but he hitched up her skirt, pulled his weeping thing out of his trousers, and jammed it between her legs. They didn’t even really fuck, he just kept rubbing it against her opening, just wanting to think about being alive.

He couldn’t help thinking about the plump-thighed Vanna Vane. She kept imposing herself upon him, the image of Miss Vane pulling her nylons over her thick, shapely legs, Miss Vane snapping her garters. Clean cool bed sheets against his skin rubbing against her skin. Endless kisses and Miss Vane’s big ass up and down over him.

“You know what I like that you do to me sometimes?”

“What?”

“I like it when you bite my breast hard as I’m coming.”

“Okay. And you know what I like? I like it when we’re doing it the regular way and then I’m about to come and I pull out and then you take me in your mouth and then I’m about to come and I pull out and go back inside of you and we keep doing it until I can’t contain myself anymore.”

Eugenio figured it out from the funeral. So many people just kept patting them on the head and giving them quarters. They hadn’t known what “die” was. Until then, only Christ had died on the Cross, but that only meant that he flew up into paradise and returned to the earth. The Dominican nuns gave them rosaries, and a lot of the kids of that street, Irish and otherwise, turned up at the funeral, even when they hadn’t always spoken or thought kindly of the family. Ana María told them all about guardian angels who would protect them in the event that they were threatened by the devil. They heard that God in heaven was looking over them. But they never dreamed that their Papi was dead. Leticia supposed that he had gone over the hill to Grant’s Tomb and across the river, westward. What is it that they heard their Papi saying one day, “You see over there, children? You keep going in that direction and you end up in California. That’s where me and your uncle went that time.”

(And in California? Desi Arnaz came pulling up to his home near San Diego. He was driving a car like Cesar’s, a DeSoto. And when he got out, he went walking through a garden whose bougainvillea walls reminded him of the flower-covered walls of Cuba. He lived in a large pink-walled ranch-style house with a tin roof, a garden, a patio, and a swimming pool. He entered the house through the patio, where he would sit drinking coffee and reading his mail. There was a letter from a friend of his, a letter that mentioned the untimely passing of that Cuban songwriter Nestor Castillo. Just happened like that! Remembering the younger brother who’d had a rough time on his show, he felt saddened and tried to think what he could do for the family. His face contorted in the way that a Cuban’s face will contort when he’s reading bad news, his lips turning down and his mouth widening, like a mask of pathos. You know what he wished? He wished he could walk across a room and find Cesar and his brother’s family lined up by a bar and buy them dinner and drinks and reach into his pocket, come up with his wallet, and give the family five or six crisp $100 bills. But what he did was this: he sat down and in a simple script wrote the family of Nestor Castillo a condolence note. It was very direct: “I am saddened by the bad news that has reached me here in California. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. Your friend always, Desi Arnaz.”)

The church was jammed with musicians. Machito and Puente and Mongo Santamaría had turned up for the funeral. And there were many lesser-known musicians, ordinary men who came in wearing long coats, heads bowed, hats in hand, fellows who’d visited the apartment at one time or another with their wives and girlfriends. There were a few co-workers from the meat-packing plant. Elva and René stuck in the thick of things, and wishing they could run away and dance. Manny the bassist stood by the red church doors greeting the mourners. Miguel Montoya attended the funeral with an old woman, his aunt.

The organ played the “Te Deum.” The altar was covered with white flowers, as was the coffin, its white ceremonial cloth embroidered with chrismata.

The family and their closest friends took up the first few rows in the church. Cesar stood beside Delores and she beside the children. Cesar’s face was red, as if someone had slapped him hard. His hand rested on little Leticia’s shoulder. She was only three years old and had no idea what had happened. Even when it was explained that Papi was away, she expected him to come back in through the door. Squirming in her seat, she kicked her black patent-leather shoes against the pew rail; sucking on her fingers, her hands dripping red from the hard cherry candies that Cesar had given her before the service. Patting the top of Leticia’s head, her uncle kept pointing to the altar, where the miracles took place. And Delores? She seemed to be controlling her feelings, her cheeks sucked in and her mouth tense, so tense you could imagine her teeth shaking at the effort of containment. In her head, a storm of thoughts: she had lost her father young, and now she had lost her husband.