The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (28 page)

(For a time, other people ceased to exist. Faces were like pale masks floating before her; voices seemed to come out of nowhere. Hands pulled on her hands. Her children seemed like oversized dolls. She would have liked very much to be anyone else in the world, even Nigger Jim in that book she read. She would have the vague memory of being led up and down the steps of the church. Lots of people saying nice things to her, wishing her and the family well. Yes, you fall in love, you give your heart, you long for their kisses, they break your heart and die. They leave you locks of hair and old hats and memories. That’s how men did things. Shower you with affection when they want something from you, and then vanish just like that.
Men! Qué cabrones!
Her father collapsing on a stairway, Nestor disappearing into the night with his black instrument case in hand. It hit her: I was in love, for all our differences. Oh, hold me, hold me, God, hold me.)

Ana María stood beside Delores. Then there was Eduardo, up from Cuba. He kept touching the bridge of his nose and squinting as if he had a terrible headache. Cousin Pablo, nervous behind the family, with his wife and children. Then there were others, Frankie, Pito, and in the back of the church, among all the Irish, Vanna Vane sobbing.

There were wreaths and bouquets of flowers from Maurio Bauza, “Killer” Joe Piro, “Symphony” Sid Torrin, and others.

“To the Castillo family with deepest condolences, Carlos Ricci and the management of the Imperial Ballroom.”

“With sincerest regrets, Tito Rodríguez.”

“We feel in your hour of sadness . . . Vicentico Valdez.”

“May God bless and strengthen you in your time of sorrow . . . The Fajardo family.”

Benny the baby photographer had turned up with his fiancée, with whom he was deeply in love. He was a short, pleasant-looking man, with a close-cut head of smooth black hair, the kind of head babies and children love to rub. He had been happy because he was in love, laughing and writing love poems to his girl. But now his friend was dead and it seemed so tragic, because Nestor was only thirty-one years old.

The sermon was given by Father Vincent, a tall, balding Irishman. During his sermon he spoke about the fate of men: “. . . Those of us who understand the tragedy of human souls who live only for the physical world also know about the splendor that awaits us. Here was a man who gave of himself to all. He was someone who came to us from Cuba and now he has gone on to a more glorious ancient kingdom, the kingdom of everlasting light, brilliant with the love of God who is everywhere in His infinite universe. God who is everywhere because He is the universe.”

“Nestor,” someone cried.

Over the altar there was a triptych which seemed to have a life of its own, “The Story of Man.” Naked Adam in a beautiful garden, head hung low in shame, naked Eve behind him. Birds fluttered all around and the trees that receded into the narrow, olive distances were thick with fruit. Around an apple tree coiled the serpent of temptation, forked tongue oozing from his mouth and happy because he’d gotten them to sin. Adam and Eve were passing through a gate and entering a wood of dark trees. A golden-haired angel after them, brandishing a sword. Sadness and despair, Adam’s expression saying, “We’ll never reenter that happiness.” And, next to this scene, a cave-tomb. A large boulder had been moved away from the entrance, before which two Roman soldiers, swords and spears by their side, lay writhing on the ground in fear, muscular arms and hands covering their faces. In the foreground, the crucified man, Jesus, in a white robe, hands held aloft for the world to see that it was he who had been dead and returned. The wounds in his hands and feet are deep red and shaped like eyes; his face is calm. (And the children can’t help wishing that they could see what was inside that cave or over the rolling hills toward which Jesus walks.) And in the third panel, Christ risen, and sitting on a throne, the glowing dove of the Holy Spirit over his head, and Jesus judging all men: throngs of angels and penitent men and the saints huddled on cypress-tree clouds—was that where Papi went?

“Nestor.”

The pallbearers carried the coffin out. It was the first time that anyone in the family had ridden in a limousine. There was something vaguely thrilling about that trip out to Flushing, Queens. There were more words over the grave, and with the grayness of the city looming in the distance and flowers being tossed into the grave, the children felt like playing games of tag among the tombs.

S
ITTING IN THE HOTEL SPLENDOUR,
the Mambo King winced because he could not get those thoughts of his brother’s death out of his head. Somehow he had wandered from those happy images of quivering female thighs and was now trying to return to them. He sipped whiskey, looked over the funny cover of “Mambo Inferno” with its cartoon depiction of male and female devils on the tiered ledges of hell, everybody dressed in red and with horns and tails. Flames leaping upward! He took the record out of its sleeve and put it on the spindle. He was racked with pain: not an hour had passed in the last twenty-three years when he did not think about “poor Nestor.” That was the end, he supposed, of his “happy, carefree life.”

“Nestor.”

“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.”

He wondered what time it was and then realized, while trying to look at his watch, that he was really drunk, because the numbers floated around the clock face, as if they were children riding on the hand. He had another drink anyway. He made his way to the toilet again to urinate, leaning his weight on one hand against the wall and watching his big thing and the flow of urine, curious as to just when it might turn pink with blood.

He remembered when he used to masturbate five, six times a day, a long long long time ago.

He remembered those parties they used to have back in the happy days, the tug of the past so powerful. In the living room: tables abundant with food, red-bulbed lamps, piles of records, lines of suave, unruly, boisterous, polite, bashful, arrogant, tranquil, and violent young men spilling out of their apartment and down the stairs past the cooked-cabbage smells of the hallway and into the street, where fights sometimes broke out; while beautiful women turned up in packs with their scents of perfume and sweat in that apartment, the loud record player heard for blocks, the lady downstairs terrified that the sagging floors would fall in, the Irish cops requesting with some hesitation that they turn things down and stop stomping on the floor, and in the early morning the last of the partyers leaving, singing and talking loudly as they made their way down the street.

The record started playing, lilting horn lines and frantic drums in his room in the Hotel Splendour.

In the name of the mambo, the rumba, and the cha-cha-cha.

Now he was going through his dead brother’s effects, his nephew Eugenio sitting on a chair watching him. Over the last month they’d given away all Nestor’s size-ten shoes, his hats and clothing, some nice stuff, too, which they’d left out in boxes in the living room of the apartment on La Salle Street. Lots of people turned up and Cesar, taking care of things in those days, was very matter-of-fact about the giving away of those items. He sat back in an easy chair, chain-smoking cigarettes and saying, “All that stuff is first class, we were never cheap about clothing.” He managed to keep a few items for himself: a few of his brother’s jackets, which he took to the shattered-looking Jewish tailor on 109th Street, who let them out around the middle. Bernardito Mandelbaum got Nestor’s white silk suit, the one he wore on television. Frankie kept his cream-colored jacket. Eugenio would regard the piles of clothing and feel a strong desire to throw himself on them, to swim through the heaps on the floor and glory in the lingering smells of cologne and tobacco that he identified with his father. For a time, Eugenio played a game: sitting out on the stoop, and trying to identify his father’s shoes or some other item of clothing worn by the male passersby.

Cesar also kept his brother’s trumpet and the sheets of paper on which he had written down his lyrics and chords, kept the crucifix and chain that their mother had given Nestor for his First Communion.

Then there was that book,
Forward America!
That was something else the Mambo King had found in Nestor’s jacket pocket.

And at that time Eugenio took to napping side by side with his uncle, the two holding each other tight, day in and day out for months. Whenever footsteps sounded in the hallway, like the tap, tap, tap of Cuban heels on the floor, Eugenio almost expected to hear the door opening and then Nestor’s clear whistle, the melody “Beautiful María.”

The sad business of memory came over Cesar in waves like the initial symptoms of a bad winter influenza, and this led to a plague of melancholia that was blood-red and spread quickly through his psyche. It brought on a paralysis of ambition and feelings of self-contempt, so that he took to spending many of his days in the apartment. This fierce melancholia exerted for a time a hallucinogenic influence. Many an afternoon, while standing by the window, he would hear the El shaking with the arrival of a train and then he’d happily watch the people flooding out of the kiosked stairway. Near that corner was the narrow, gloomy doorway of Mulligan’s Bar and Grill and then a stretch of wall against which the kids on the street played “Chinese.” Then kids on the street playing “Three Steps to Germany,” kids playing “Cow in the Meadow.” One day he looked out the window and saw a slick-looking character leaning against that wall. He was wearing a black-brimmed cane hat and a long coat. There was a black instrument case by his side.

“I’m going to get some cigarettes,” he said. Then he put on his coat and headed down the street toward the slick man, who made his way to the stairway. Cesar rushed up the stairs and managed to get on the downtown train just as the doors were closing. Then he moved methodically from car to car looking for the man with the black-brimmed straw hat and black instrument case. He never found him. Once the Mambo King rode the train down to 59th Street, where three different lines, running to the boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, converged, and he saw this same man standing against another wall, beside a magazine stand. He blinked and the man was gone. The same thing happened again, except this time Cesar rode the A train into Brooklyn, got off after half an hour, and found himself drinking and ravenous in a bar. He was so worked up, his heart pounding so loud, that he had to calm himself down. But he got so calm that a gang of leather-jacket thugs followed him across this stretch of street, which passed in front of a deserted construction site, and about five of the gang members, who had sailors’ caps on and Marlboro cigarettes rolled up inside the sleeves of their T-shirts, swooped down on him, knocking him to the pavement and giving him a bad beating. It didn’t help that he was wearing his flamingo-pink suit and a pair of cream-colored Cuban-heeled shoes, and not only did they rob him, one of the fellows tried to kick his temples in. (He was saved because someone in the gang felt compassion and pulled his friends away.)

When he woke up, Nestor, or the man or spirit who looked like him, was standing under a lamppost across the street, smoking a cigarette. Cesar held his arm up and cried for help and then blinked his eyes and the man was gone.

Those were days of confusion for him—and for everybody. Something odd was going on with Delorita, too.

She seemed to be taking Nestor’s death in stride, spending her evenings with the children and with Ana María and her
novio,
this fellow Raulito, who worked for the Merchant Marine union. Ana María was staying in the apartment then. At night, the two sisters slept together, the way they had as children, in flannel nightgowns, with their arms wrapped around each other. And if Delores could not sleep, she read her books. Neighbors who knew about her literary bent of mind rained books down on her, and a pile of them were stacked beside her bed. She was happiest when she’d walk down toward the university bookstore, where she would forage through their bins and used-book racks, coming home with shopping bags of novels. And there were also the books she’d acquire at the church bazaars. She liked to spend two or three hours a day with these books, propelled forward by a dictionary and the simple desire to possess more knowledge. She made her way slowly through the driest landscapes of biological, agricultural, and historical prose. Although she read about everything, she still preferred detective novels. She’d fall asleep with a small reading lamp on by her side, one arm hanging off the bed, a paperback or hardcover book in hand. Reading reminded her of the nights when she waited up late for her father or her trumpet-playing husband to come home.

Cesar knew how much she liked books and in his journeys around town he would walk into bookstores and browse for Delores in a way that he never did for himself. He gave her at least two novels at that time,
Moby Dick
and
Gone with the Wind.
Inscribed by Cesar “To my lovely sister-in-law, with love and affection, Cesar,” they sat in the bookcase. He bought her other gifts: a pretty fake-pearl-buttoned black dress, a Chinese scarf, a blue velvet hat, a new hand mirror, and, because of a persuasive salesgirl at Macy’s, Coco Chanel perfume from Paris. And he got hold of a nice photograph of Nestor and Delores, posed in the park on a fine spring day, and had that put in a good frame so she could keep it in the bedroom. (Not that they needed more pictures. Their walls were covered with photographs of the band and the two brothers with Cugat, Machito, and Desi Arnaz, alongside pictures of the saints and Jesus with a fiery heart.) While he had become wild and moody in his public life, in their household Cesar behaved in a courteous and almost meek fashion, especially when he was around Delores. There was very little he wouldn’t do for her, he would say.

They would go out shopping together, take the kids to the park together, go to the movies.

Neither Cesar nor Delores knew what was happening. She not only began to look forward to her days spent with Cesar, but she would get all dressed and made up for their excursions. Holed up in the apartment together on a rainy afternoon, they would pass each other in the halls and their skin would give off a faint scent of cinnamon and cooked pork. There were times when he would find himself in the kitchen standing behind Delores and he would want to put his arms around her waist, pull her close, move his hands over her body, and touch her breasts. Brooding, he would sit there daydreaming about when his brother was alive. He remembered the time when he looked across the courtyard into his brother’s window and saw Delores standing naked in front of the mirror, her body bursting with youth and loveliness. It didn’t help that she had become careless about the way she dressed and would spend her days in a pink terry-cloth robe, without a stitch of clothing underneath. It didn’t help that he would walk into the bathroom and find her frilly undergarments hanging off the shower hoop, dainty brassieres, panties, and nylons. It didn’t help Cesar that her body quivered when she walked across the room or that he would stare at her, tortured, when she leaned over the table to wipe away a stain and he could glimpse the plumpness of her breasts. Nor that he walked by the bathroom one day when the door was open a crack and saw her standing naked, dripping wet, just after a bath. He dreamed about her. He would be resting in bed, pressed up against the mattress, his body wrapped in the sheets, and the door would open and Delores would be standing there in her robe. She would open her robe and move naked toward the bed: a thick vegetable-and-meat smell would fill the room and he would find himself kissing Delores and then she would lie down beside him and open herself to him. Her legs spread wide, a shaft of sunlight would come flowing out from her. Then they would make love and his thing would burn up, as if he were jamming the sun. But often the dream ended sadly. He would walk through a dense wood of his desires, thinking “Delores” and then “Nestor.” That connection always startled him and he would wake up feeling ashamed.