The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (31 page)

“Ay, hijo,
” she repeated like a horn line, “I’m so happy that you’re home.”

Genebria was there to wipe the water off his head. After all those years apart, the Mambo King couldn’t pass her in the hallway without giving her bottom a little pinch. He’d always had a special fondness for her, thankful for the complimentary way she’d gasped one afternoon many, many years ago. He was at that age when he would fall asleep and dream about the stretching of his bones, when his body was an expansion of flesh and organs, when pleasure hummed in his spine, wrapped around his hips, and burst out through his sex. He was at the age when he wanted to flaunt his newfound virility before the world like a boy dragging a crocodile through a house. He was in the bathtub going about the rubbing and cleaning of his private parts when his thing, ready to burst with redness and milk, came up, bobbing like a bottle of wine in the water. Genebria was cleaning the house, and when he heard her singing, he called to her, “Genebria, can you come here?” And when she did, the future Mambo King stood up and, pulling his thing, said,
“Mira! Mira!
Look! Look!”

“Stop that, you beast! You little pig!” She gasped and ran back into the house.

Smiling, he held on to it and sank down under the water, his milk oozing out like white octopus ink. Then a silver-edged redness exploded inside his shut eyelids and he had the sensation that the world had abruptly tipped over. He spent many of those days in a dream of pulling, prodding, choking, banging, wetting, and exploding this new instrument. As for Genebria, what was her new nickname for Cesar, that name she’d say with fondness and curiosity?

“
Hombrecito,
” at first, and then, “
El macho.
”

Now, when he saw her and said,
“Mira, mira!”
it was with great sadness.

“Here, Genebria, I’ve brought you some perfume.”

And he gave her a little bottle of Chanel No. 5.

It was perfume and a hat for his mother, and Italian wallets and Ronson lighters for his three brothers. And, yes, a bundle of recordings and some photographs of Nestor and the family.

His mother sat on a rattan rocker on the porch, looking through the bundle of records. The smooth, modern 1950s design of some of the record covers, with flowing musical notes, New York skylines, and sharp cut-out conga drums, made her smile. And the lettering was in English, and on three of the covers Nestor was posed side by side with his older brother.

“Nestor,” she called him. “My son who is in paradise.”

In his room he dressed slowly, knowing that before long he would see his father, Pedro Castillo, again. He heard horses outside, and his father chewing out one of his sons, “I’m not going to pay you for doing nothing,” and in the same indignant tone he’d always used around him.

What was it that the old man used to say? “You want to waste your life in the dance halls? Suit yourself, but when you need money, don’t come back to me. You become a musician and you’ll be a poor man all your life.”

He heard the porch screen door and his father’s boots on the parlor floor. In a moment he would go into the parlor and embrace the man, who wouldn’t give a damn that Cesar, despite their past troubles, was still trying to show him respect and affection.

As he stood before the mirror rubbing a lilac lotion into his thick hair, he heard his father’s voice again. “María, you say he’s back? Well, then, where is he? Has he come back to do some work around here?”

And he shut his eyes, not quite sure just how he would remain calm, because to hear his father’s voice was to invite bodily disaster. Feeling a flutter of restrained violence just below his heart, he dallied by the mirror, telling himself,
“Tranquilo, hombre, tranquilo.
”

He took a swig of rum and made his way to the parlor to see his father again. He was forty years old.

Sitting in the Hotel Splendour, good and drunk, Cesar had the worst trouble thinking about his father; even remembering his appearance was difficult. He had a picture that he’d always liked, one of those thin, cracked photographs, yellow at the edges, with the back stamped “Oliveres Studios, Calle Madrid no. 20, Holguín.” The only one he had of his father. It was a humorous picture taken around 1926 or so, the man in a bow tie and a linen suit, a big cowboy-looking hat, and a thick, droopy
guajiro
’s mustache, sad Castillo eyes, stiffened expression—leaning his weight on a cane. And right behind him, a movie poster of Charlie Chaplin from
The Gold Rush
, Chaplin in the same pose.

“The golden time . . .” he thought.

He had one beautiful memory of his Papi taking him and his brothers into Las Piñas, where they spent the morning in a café among the men, eating sandwiches and drinking
batidas
—fruit malteds . . . Farmers in that café, caged hens by the doorway, and the man chopping up fruit on a counter dripping with juice. That day his father, Don Pedro, had lifted him off the ground and had stood talking with the men in the bar, the future Mambo King in his arms. He was a gaunt man, smelled of tobacco, and when he drank his
tacitas
of coffee, he’d have to wipe his mustache clean of froth. He had huge knuckles and his cheeks and forehead were burned Indian-red from his countless days in the fields.

But that was the only time it was so beautiful. When he would think about his early childhood, he’d remember cringing like a frightened animal when he was near his father. He would see red and black and silver birds streaking across space in swiftly forming arcs, and his face, his ribs, his back, his legs would sting from beatings with fists and a stick. His older brothers, who were better behaved, got beatings, too—in the name of respect and authority and because their Papi did not know what to do with his anger and foul moods. They grew up into more or less respectful and weary sons, with shattered expressions and broken spirits. While Cesar, in his father’s words, “got worse.” But he never understood why the man beat him. He used to cry out, cringing in a corner, “What have I done to you? Why are you doing this?” He felt like a happy little dog that only wanted a little kindness from that man, but he got beat and beat and beat. It used to make him cry for hours, and then after a while he couldn’t cry anymore. He tried to be happy, playing jokes on his brothers and running through the house, a continuous burst of energy, like his dancing, like his music, from too many slaps in the face. He’d gotten so used to the man beating him into the ground that after a while he seemed to enjoy it, taunting the man and challenging him to beat him again and again. He would roll on the floor laughing because his father sometimes hit him so much that the man’s fists ached. His father would beat him until a strange look would come over Pedro’s face, a look of sadness and futility.

“Son,” he would say, “I only want your love and respect.”

“You know your father came to Cuba without so much as a penny. He never had a father to look after him, the way he looks after you. He’s known only work,
hijo,
sweat.”

“Your Papi was cheated by fate. He’s too trusting. People have robbed him because he’s always had a good heart. God was not generous. Tomorrow he’ll change. God will pardon him. He’s a worker and a provider. You must be tolerant of him. Forgive your father. He loves you,
niño.
His heart is made of gold. Never forget that he is your father. Never forget that he is your blood.”

No softness in Pedro’s face, no kindness, no compassion. Pedro was a real man. He worked hard, had his women on the side, showed his strength to his sons. His manliness was such that it permeated the household with a scent of meat, tobacco, and homemade rum. It was thick enough that their mother, María, would fill the house with flowers, which she put in vases everywhere. And eucalyptus in pots to swallow up this scent of manliness that wafted through the rooms in wavy bands like heat off a steaming street.

He didn’t have much money and had never learned how to read or write, signed his name with an X. But he claimed a high standing in the local society of Las Piñas because of his
gallego
blood and his white Spaniard’s skin, which placed him above the mulattoes and Negroes of town.

The Mambo King remembered a hurricane that drowned many of the horses and cows and pigs, who were found floating in the water the next morning, with bloated bellies and distended tongues. He remembered someone knocking on the door of their house one night, and when his father answered the door, a knife was plunged into his shoulder. He remembered the military men with whom his father dealt in Holguín. Over the years he’d been cheated more than once and considered himself, after all his efforts, a “poor man.”

His Papi was so tense that he suffered from a plague of maladies that had to do with his bad moods, debts, and hard work. He sometimes suffered from a hysterical eczema and prurigo that so dried his skin it became as hard and brittle as parchment. The Mambo King could remember days when Pedro’s body looked as if he’d just finished running naked through a forest of thorn-bushes, all scratched up and covered with sores. On hot days he would become so agitated that the only thing he would wear was a pair of
calzoncillos.
His father would come in from a stone house at the field’s edge, where he sometimes holed up, racked with the pain of hot salty sweat on those tormented limbs. Without a good word for anyone, he would head out to the tub in the back yard, where he would soak in a bath to which María had added a rose-scented lotion, with an alcohol base, that only made his condition worse. Soaking for hours in the shade of a pomegranate tree, he’d rest his head on the tub’s rim, sip rum, and in agony watch the sky.

Those were the days when his Papi worked in the fields taking care of his animals. Off in the distance, standing in the shade of breadfruit, papaya, and plantain trees, the stone house where he slaughtered livestock. At midday, one of his boys would carry out a pot of food, which he’d angrily devour. Then he would go back to the business at hand: if he had to slaughter a pig, his white linen
pantalones,
his cotton
guayabera,
his skin, his nails, his thick
campesino
’s mustache smelled of blood. The poor animals kicked and sometimes they ran into the field, galloping for a distance before collapsing to the ground.

(And now he cuts through everything else, remembering the day when his Papi came after him with a machete. He couldn’t remember what had started the trouble. Was it one of his indignant looks, his usual lack of respect, or was he sitting out on the porch, strumming his guitar?

All he knew was that his father was chasing him across a wild sugarcane field, the machete raised over his head, shouting, “You come back here.” He ran for his life, ran as fast as he could, down the corridors of sugarcane, his father’s shadow, one hundred feet long, behind him. He was running toward the forest when he heard a terrible scream: his father lay on the ground, clutching his leg.

“Help me, boy!” his father called to him. “Help me!”

Then: “Over here, boy. I’ve jammed my foot on a stake.”

He wanted to help his father, but what if it was a trick? What if he went to his father and the man struck him with the machete? His father called again and again, and slowly the future Mambo King moved closer. Then he moved closer and closer until he could see that his father was telling the truth, saw the bloody stake protruding out of the instep bones of his right foot.

“Pull it up,” he said to Cesar.

When he did, pulling up on the foot with all his strength, his father let out a scream that sent all the birds flying off the treetops.

And when he’d gotten to his feet again, limping, his arms around his son, Cesar thought that things would be different.

Then they were back in the house and his father was stretched out in a chair. He called to Cesar, saying, “Come here.”

As his son leaned close, he slapped Cesar in the face, hard, with the back of his hand.

His father’s face was red, eyes cruel—that’s how he remembered him now.)

But in 1958 the Mambo King was in such pain that he embraced his father. He did love the man. After so many years away from that house, he hardly felt like a son around his father. The man walked with a limp, from the time he’d impaled his foot on a stake in the field, and he surprised the Mambo King by giving him a strong embrace back. Then they sat in the parlor, in silence, as they used to. His mother waited on him, and the Mambo King sat there drinking. Later that night, he tried to comfort his mother, who’d gotten all weepy about Nestor, holding her in his arms.

It had been the records. She had listened to his trumpet playing and remembered her sons when they were boys, remembered when Nestor had been so sickly as a kid, pale with asthma.

“He worshipped you, Cesar,” she told him. “He was always so happy when you did anything for him. Happy to go places with you and to sing and dance and play for the people . . .”

Then her silence, her tears.

What else could he remember?

Visiting his friends in town and riding horses again. He was the rage in the local bars, talking about New York and inviting everyone he knew to come and visit him. He went to see the first woman he’d ever taken to bed (“This was just to see if you like it. Next time you’ll pay, okay?”). And he walked beyond the cemetery, where his old music teacher, Eusebio Stevenson, a movie-pit house musician, used to live. The man had been dead for a long time. (“Mister! Mister! Can you show me how you do that on the piano?”) He walked among the tombstones and felt exhilarated, talking to the spirits.

Out on the porch those nights in 1958, he sometimes felt that the universe could be peeled away like the skin of an orange, revealing paradise, where his poor brother had gone. The paradise of his mother, his religious mother who believed in all that. Paradise, where the angels and saints and the good souls go, up to the swirling heavens among the luminescent stars and the perfumed clouds . . . Why, then, did she weep? During the day that question would accompany him to town, where he would visit friends, hang around the street corners. He would make the journey back to the farm along dirt roads on a borrowed mule and with a bottle of rum tucked under his arm. This bottle he would drink at night. He drank rum until God hung low in the heavens like a heavy cloak. He drank rum until the rims of his eyes glowed with a pleasant pinkness, like the wing of a nightingale in a flash of light, and until the trees that ringed the farm breathed in, the way that only drunkards can hear. He drank until it was time to get up, and then he would cheerfully make his way into the house, shaving before a mirror in the room of his youth, and afterwards sitting with the women, enjoying the industry of the kitchen.