The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (30 page)

“I was lost,” Cesar thought as he sat in the Hotel Splendour. “I was fucked up and didn’t know what to do with myself.”

His behavior seriously upset Miguel Montoya. They went out one night and dined at Violeta’s and that’s when Miguel Montoya said, “Look, everybody knows you’re upset about Nestor—we all are, you know that—the fellows in the band think it would be good for you to take a break for a while.”

“You mean, leave the band?”

“For a time.”

“Yes, you’re right, I have been a son of a bitch lately.”

But “for a time” turned out to be forever, because the Mambo King Orchestra would never perform again with Cesar Castillo as their singer and leader.

A
FTER LEAVING THE BAND, HE
went back to Cuba to visit his family. He had to get out of New York, he told himself. He wasn’t behaving in a correct manner and his enjoyment of life—booze and women and love—was going out the window.

He retraced the journey he’d made with Nestor back to Cuba: he took the train down to Miami Beach for a few days, visiting with musician friends who worked one of the big hotels there. And then, with his heart in his gut, he made his way back to Havana. The big news down there in 1958 was the revolution against the Batista government. On the afternoon when he went over to Calle 20 to visit his daughter, he stopped to brace himself with a few drinks. It was a beautiful calm street, sunny and quiet—the other Havana of his dreams. The revolution, that’s what the men were talking about in that bar.

“This fellow Castro, they say he and his men are being beaten out in Oriente. Do you believe it?”

“Yes, he’s being beaten. You don’t see Batista leaving the country.”

That’s what the official version was on the radio. And the only change he’d noticed at all was that there were more police and military personnel at the airport. And on the way in from the airport he’d noticed two big military vehicles, a tank and a personnel carrier, on the side of the road. But the soldiers were sitting out on the street beside the vehicles, metal helmets by their side, having lunch. (And here he can’t help imposing a conversation he’d had years later with a woman who had worked as a domestic in Batista’s household: “The problem with Batista was that he wasn’t cruel enough and a little lazy. He could’ve had Fidel executed in ’53 but he let the man go. He was lazy and liked to have a good time with high-society people. He was so out of it that when the revolution came he didn’t have the slightest idea what had really happened,
sabe?”)
Otherwise, things seemed to have been the same all over the city, from what he could see. The men in their
guayaberas
and linen jackets leaning at the counter. Cesar smoking a cigarette and sipping from his
tacita de espreso
and his two Tres Medallas brandies, sunlight bursting against the limestone-and-brick walls across the street, beyond the shade of the awning. And he noticed, as he looked over his
tacita,
a pretty woman in pink slacks.

Cuba was making him feel better already. He’d called up his ex-wife from New York, announcing his intention to visit his daughter, Mariela. Luisa, who had married a schoolteacher, was good about extending him that privilege, and soon he was making his way to the
solar
where they now lived. He’d purchased a big stuffed rag doll for Mariela and a bunch of flowers, hibiscus and chrysanthemums, for Luisa. As he passed into an inner courtyard, entering a winding wrought-iron stairway through a gate, he ached with regret that he’d fucked up things with his wife. So, standing before her door, he looked like a wrecked and exhausted version of himself. But they were both surprised by how happy they were to see each other. That is, Luisa opened the door, let him into a nice, big, airy apartment, and smiled.

“Mariela’s taking a bath, Cesar,” Luisa told him. “She’ll be out to see you soon.”

And they sat talking by a little table in the kitchen. On the wall, a crucifix and a photograph of Julián García. (Looking at Julián and thinking of his kindness made Cesar go “psssssssh” inside.) Things were well with Luisa. She was newly pregnant. Her husband was running a big school in Havana and they had high hopes when it came to this fellow Fidel Castro.

“Y Mariela?”

“She’s a precocious child, Cesar. Artistic.”

“In what way?”

“She wants to be a ballet dancer. Studies it at the Lyceum.”

A few minutes later, intense and pretty, Mariela came out to greet the father she had not seen in so many years. They went out, as they used to, Cesar taking her around to the different stores and for a nice lunch in one of the harbor restaurants. Thirteen years old, she had kissed him, but kept her head bowed as they’d walk along the streets. She was an awkward, thin girl, with wild eyes, and must have been afraid, the Mambo King thought, that he was finding her plain. That’s why he kept telling her, “Mariela, I’m so proud that you turned out so beautifully.” And: “You have your mother’s pretty eyes.” But she also had some of the family’s sadness and did not have much, or know what, to say to her father, who’d abandoned her. He alluded to this abandonment a few times as they walked along Galiano, a street lined with shops.

“You understand that what happened between me and your mother had nothing to do with you, child . . . I have always cared for you, haven’t I, child? Written you letters and sent you things. Yes or no? I just don’t like to think that you see me in a bad light, when I’m not that way. Do you see me that way, child?”

“No, Papi.”

His spirit bolstered, he began to speak to her as if he would be back the next day and the next to see her.

“Perhaps next time we can go to the movies?” And: “If you like, we can make a little trip to Oriente one day. Or you can come to see me in New York.”

Then: “But you know, child, now that you’re growing up, maybe I should come back here to Havana. Would you like that?”

And she nodded that she would.

When he took her home later, she was happy. From the doorway he could see a pleasant-looking man sitting in the parlor, a book open on his lap.

“Can I come back to see her tomorrow?”

“No. Tomorrow we’re going away.”

“Then when I come back from Oriente?”

“Yes, if we’re here. But you know she’s not your child anymore, Cesar. She’s the daughter of my husband now, and her name is Mariela Torres.”

The worst telegram he had ever sent in his life, to Las Piñas shortly after the wreck in which his brother was killed, saying: “Nestor has been in accident from which he will never recover,” a message it took him a long time to word, unable as he was to say the blunt truth. He imagined his mother reading and reading those words over and over again. He could have written: “Nestor was driving and I was fucking around with a girl, but I would have been a fool to pass her up, she was so good-looking: my fingers were playing with the buttons of her blouse, my fingertips were touching her breasts, her nipples were taut between them, her hands were touching me, when things got out of control. He was drunk and the car slid off the road, hitting a tree.”

And he imagined it again: a kiss, laughter, the honking of a car horn, the words
“Dios mío,
” a terrific groan of metal, smell of gasoline, smoke, blood, the mangled heavy chassis of a sporty 1956 DeSoto.

(And behind that? An inkling, since he was close to death himself now, of what his brother felt like. Inside a doorless room and wanting to get out, his brother pounding on the walls, hurtling against them.)

Two of his older brothers, Eduardo, who had come to New York for the funeral, and Miguel, were waiting for him at the Las Piñas station. He embraced them with all the strength in his limbs. They were wearing
guayaberas
and linen
pantalones.
The song
“Cielito Lindo
” was playing out of a radio in the stationmaster’s office. The stationmaster was leaning forward over the ticket counter, reading a newspaper. On the wall, a framed portrait of Batista, President of the Republic of Cuba; an overhead fan.

He’d always planned a triumphant return to Las Piñas. He used to joke with Nestor about how, in emulation of the Hollywood movies, he would drive into Las Piñas in a fancy automobile, laden with nice gifts from the States, pockets filled with money. Regret in his heart that he hadn’t returned to Las Piñas in eleven years, though he had been back to Havana for carnival a few times and to play Mr. High-Life around his friends. And now? He had returned out of guilt: his mother had written him letters saying things like “At night I pray to God that I see you again before I am too old. My arms feel empty without you, my son.”

They made their way to the farm by a dirt road, their carriage taking them along the river. A column of palm trees and houses built out over the water on one side, and dense wood on the other. The trees were thick with black birds and he could not help remembering that day when he was a kid and he and Nestor were away from the farm, walking through the forest, looking for hollow tree trunks that they might make into drums. They were walking in the wood for twenty minutes without hitting light, and then they came to a clearing, where they heard a rustling in the trees. Above them a few birds were flying from the high branches of trees on one side to the high branches of trees on the other. And they were followed by about twenty more birds. Then fifty, then a hundred birds. Then a rustling in the distance, as if a strong wind were blowing through the treetops, but it wasn’t the wind: the treetops were shaking, leaves and fronds shuddering as if they were being whipped, and then the shuddering grew even louder and then clarified: it was a river of black-and blue- and light-brown-winged birds rushing through the forest in migration. As the brothers stood there, the sky over them grew dense with the flight of a million birds fluttering their wings, shooting between the treetops as if storming through the world, so many that they could not see the sunlight anywhere in the forest and the sky turned nearly black for an hour, that’s how long it took those birds to pass.

Remember that, brother?

Then there was the old hut where that lanky black man Pucho, who used to play the guitar and lord over his hens, first gave him music lessons. They passed an abandoned water mill, walls half collapsed, and then the old stone tower from the time of the
conquistadores.
They passed the road to the Díaz farm, the road to the Hernández farm.

Then they came to their farm. He remembered the approach well. As a young man he used to make the three-mile trip from Las Piñas by mule, a guitar slung over his shoulder, a cane hat pulled down low over his brow. When they turned into the farm road, he saw his mother for the first time in many years. She was on the porch of their simple, tin-roofed house, conversing with Genebria, the woman who’d wet-nursed the Mambo King.

They had about ten acres of land, a pen where the gray pigs played gaily in their swill, a few tired horses, and a long, low hen coop. And beyond it, a field of wild grass ringed by fruit trees.

When he saw his mother, he thought she would say, “Why did you let your brother die? You know he was the light of my world?”

But his mother had much love in her heart for him, and she said, “Oh, my son, I’m so happy you’ve come home.”

Her kisses were tender. She was thin, almost weightless in his arms. She held him for a long time, repeating: “
Grandón! Grandón!
You’re so grown!”

He was happy to be home. His mother’s affection was so strong that for one brief moment he had an insight into love: pure unity. That’s all she became in those moments, the will to love, the principle of love, the protectiveness of love, the grandeur of love. Because for a few moments he felt released from this pain, which had withered the coil at the bottom of his spine; felt as if his mother was an open field of wildflowers through which he could run, enjoying the sunlight in his face, or like the night sky cut by the planets and the mists of far away—“That veil over the hidden face of
Dios,
” as she used to say. And as she held him, the only words she had to say: “Oh, son, oh, son of mine.”

(On top of this, the memory of how he felt a few years later, in 1962, when he heard that his mother had died, at the age of sixty-nine. The telegram shot out black threads that flew into his eyes, stinging them like dust motes, so that he, the man who never cried, began to weep. “My mother, the only mother I’ll ever have.”

He kept rereading that telegram as if his concentration would rearrange the meaning of the words. He wept until his body shook and his stomach was in knots, until his desire to repress the sadness drew into his chest and he felt an iron band tightening around his heart.)

“Oh, son, I’m so happy you’ve come home.”

Being around them again brought back a few of his childhood longings, and mostly these had to do with the ladies of the house. In his dreams of youth—and later, when his mother was dead—she would be represented by light. His happiest hours as a boy were spent on the porch or in the back yard, napping with his head on her lap, the sun burning silver-white through the treetops above them. His mother, María, saying, “Pssssssh,
niño,
come here,” and taking him by the hand into the yard to that tin tub set out on the patio under the immense acacia tree, where she would wash his thick, curly hair: that was when the Mambo King had sweeter ideas about women, when his mother was the morning light. Genebria, whose breast had tasted like cinnamon and salt, would bring the boiled water, and this water, tinged pink and yellow and blue by the sunlight, would drip down over his head and onto his privates, what a pleasure that was, looking up into the attentive and loving eyes of his mother. Now, dirty from his long journey, he went to his old room near the back patio, where he stripped down to a pair of boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and called out to his mother in the kitchen:
“Mamá,
do me a favor and wash my hair.”

So the old scene was reenacted, with the Mambo King bent over a tub in the yard, eyes squinting with the pleasure of simple affection: not a thing had seemed to change then: his mother, now older, poured the water on his head, scrubbed him with soap, and massaged his scalp with her tender hands.