The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (32 page)

It was on one of those mornings that he heard his mother saying to Genebria, “Take this plate of food to my poor drunkard of a son.”

Then the memory of saying his goodbyes: to Miguel and Eduardo, whom he would not see again for nine years; to Pedrocito, and to his father and his mother, none of whom he would ever see again in this life.

Holding his mother, he maintained his macho composure, but whispered, “One thing I want you to know about me,
no soy borrachón.
I’m not a drunk.”

And his mother nodded, “I know,” but she had a different look in her eye, complacent, stoic, and perhaps convinced that things were destined to go a certain way. But the lingering doubt in her eyes, and his sense that many other things were wrong, too, and that he was at their center, disturbed him.

This disturbance followed him home from Cuba on the Pan Am flight on which he ate American-cheese sandwiches served in wax-paper bags, and on which he flirted with the stewardess, smiling and winking at her each time she came by, followed him off the train in New York and up the steps to the apartment on La Salle Street, followed him when even his beloved nephew, Eugenio, answered the door and wrapped his arms around his leg, followed him even when Leticia, who was pure affection, came charging down the hall, pigtails bobbing, to embrace him and to see the gifts he had bought for her, followed him on his visits to the Hotel Splendour with Vanna Vane, to the side of his brother’s grave, through many things, through many years, and to the very moment when he sipped yet another glass of whiskey that steamy night in the Hotel Splendour, years later, an indelible and thorny line, memory, forever present.

D
ECIDING THAT HE HAD TO DO
something to change his life, Cesar went into the Merchant Marine. His connection was Ana María’s boyfriend, Raúl, who worked for the union.

He worked on a ship for eighteen months and returned in the spring of 1960, looking weather-beaten and sporting a grizzly beard. Around his eyes clustered the swirly deep lines that had formed on those countless nights he spent at the deck railing fighting the queasiness in his stomach and his disappointment over the monotony of his days. He had become nearly bulimic by then. He had a monstrous appetite from his day’s labors as a stoker’s mate, feasting on the ship’s cookery and heaving it over the side by late evening. His illness was enhanced by the huge quantities of Portuguese wine and Spanish brandy that cost the sailors pennies and that the ex-Mambo King guzzled down like water with his meals: it would take a few hours for the acids to wreak havoc with his stomach lining, and then, out on deck to gaze at the stars and to dream, he vomited his suppers into the pretty and phosphorescent Sardinian waters, into the Mediterranean, the Aegean. In Alexandria, Egypt, where he spent three days’ shore leave, he had his picture taken in a Stanley Bay bar, sporting a gleamy-brimmed captain’s hat and sitting on a rattan throne, flanked by a Puerto Rican chum named Ernesto and a cheerful Italian named Ermano, and surrounded by the potted palms that so reminded him of Havana (this, too, in the Hotel Splendour).

His eyes seemed to be filled with a black liquid of sorrow; they were contrite, curious; they said: “I have seen a lot.” The Cesar Castillo who looked wistfully into the camera was gaunt, dark-eyed, and world-weary. Now he seemed to have somehow acquired his dead younger brother’s melancholy. He went to an Egyptian bazaar, where in the midst of a surging crowd he saw the ghost of Nestor looking through a street vendor’s table heaped with onyx bracelets and scarab necklaces.

And in that sweaty brow would also swirl the memory of names of ports-of-call: Marseilles, Cagliari, Lisbon, Barcelona, Genoa, Tangiers, San Juan, Biloxi. (Women, too. He remembered the misty night in Marseilles when he met Antoinette, a delightful woman who loved to suckle his member. Some women didn’t know what to make of it, but she treated his thing like a favorite rag doll. Exhilarated by its elasticity and thickness, she’d rub her big stretchy French lips over its head, as if its seepage were some kind of lotion, until her lips became sheeny with his semen and her nipples, taut as cork, stood out from her breasts and her hot ass left a line of moisture down from his knees to his toes. Viva la France!) He had lost a lot of weight but walked with a bounce in his step. In the duffel bag slung over his shoulder, he’d brought back lots of presents from his journeys: silk scarves, ebony candlesticks, a small Persian rug, a roll of Oriental silk that he had bought for practically nothing from the mate on his tanker, a gift for Ana María, who liked to make dresses. By that time he had been at sea for a year and had not sung a note or touched an instrument.

Music was far behind him, he would tell himself. Walking up the hill, duffel bag over his shoulder, Cesar Castillo was another man. His hands were callused and cut: he had a scar down his right shoulder from a boiler valve that had burst and scalded him, and though he didn’t like to admit it, the strains of the last few years had made him slightly myopic, because now when he read the newspaper or that book by D. D. Vanderbilt he had to squint, the words were so blurry.

The biggest item of news in his absence was that Delorita had married the bookkeeper, Pedro, in a quiet City Hall ceremony; the man was now part of the household. He was not a bad fellow; neither flashy nor particularly friendly, he would install himself on a big easy chair in the living room of the apartment on La Salle Street, feet up on a stool, and occasionally glance up from the newspaper at the television. The only sign of Nestor’s previous life in that household were a few photographs left here and there in the hallway and on the mantel in the living room. Otherwise, the apartment on La Salle Street had adapted to the presence of another man, a non-musician, reliable and steady, whose instruments were not congas, or guitars, or trumpets, but rather, ledger books, rulers, and mechanical pencils. Although he was dull, Pedro was nice to the family. He took Delorita and the kids out every Saturday night to a restaurant or a movie: and sometimes he would rent a car and they would take a Sunday drive. He was a private, snippy man with odd bathroom habits. The john was where he would go in the office for peace and quiet, and it was where he would go in the household when Eugenio, trying to torment him, banged and threw his toys against the wall, shouted, gave him dirty looks, and otherwise tried to disturb his leisurely peace. He was not a bad man, but he was also not Nestor, and this provoked in the children a certain weariness and distrust, which the poor beleaguered man stoically accepted and tried to offset with gentleness and demonstrations of concern.

Cesar came back to all this. No one recognized him on the street. He did not look like the Cesar Castillo who had posed on the cover of “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” nothing like the Alfonso Reyes of the
I Love Lucy
show. The children were happy to tug on his beard. Eugenio was now nine and had more or less adjusted to the new situation. He had developed something of an introspective, pensive demeanor, not too far removed from his father’s. When he came down the hall and saw his uncle, who smelled of tobacco and the sea, Eugenio’s expression, suspicious and serious, gave way to pure exaltation.

“
Nene!
” his uncle called out to him, and Eugenio charged down the hall. When Cesar lifted him up, Eugenio’s feelings of emptiness went away.

That night the family and friends from the neighborhood gathered to greet his return. He went into the bathroom, where, with Leticia clinging to his side, he shaved off the great beard, and emerged with his face a bright sunburnish red and all squiggly with deep lines, and his slick mustache restored.

Of course, the family passed the evening hearing about Cesar’s adventures. At nearly forty-two, the man had seen a little bit of the world. He would think about the way he and his brother used to walk down by the docks around Christmastime to buy boxes of Japanese toys, the most exciting items being battery-operated, cable-controlled green-and-white New York City police cars, which they’d pay a quarter apiece for and give out like Santa Clauses to the children they knew on the street and in the building. They’d look at the great steamship lines with their smoking chimneys and the elegant French porters and daydream about something as fanciful as playing the café society of Gay Paree, as his pianist Miguel Montoya called it.

“Salud!”
and a worldly nod were his greetings to the household in those days, his nephew, Eugenio, clinging to his side. Emptying his duffel bag, he offered Eugenio some nice presents: an African ivory-handled hunting knife, purchased in Marseilles and attributed to the Yorubas of the Belgian Congo, and a light Italian silk scarf, which Eugenio would wear for years. Then his uncle gave him a crisp twenty-dollar bill. (Eugenio, looking through the bag, found something startling, a French magazine called
Le Monde des “Freaks,”
with wavy, out-of-focus photographs of pretty, big-rumped women sucking off and fornicating with sailors, circus performers, and farm boys all over Europe.) This, with a wink and an index finger pressed to his lips, and a rap to his nephew’s shoulder.

Eugenio was proud of his uncle, having kept close tabs on his journeys. Eugenio had borrowed an atlas from his pal Alvin so that he could look up the cities and ports named on the postcards which would arrive from time to time. (Nearly twenty years later, Eugenio would find one of those postcards and remember how the messages rarely varied, saying, more or less, “Just to let you know that you are always in my thoughts, and that your Uncle Cesar loves you.”) Eugenio kept those postcards in a plastic bag under his bed, with a few hundred rubber cowboys and Indians and a page from a
Life
magazine article about the Folies-Bergère of Paris (this showed a row of beautiful French women kicking in a line, their pointy, sparkle-covered breasts provoking a concupiscent interest from him) and his collection of baseball and Christmas cards.

One Christmas card from 1958 was a family portrait of Desi, Lucille, Desi Jr., and Lucie Arnaz, posed in front of a fireplace and a thickly ornamented evergreen tree, prosperity and Christmas cheer glowing all around them. The card for 1959 was more subdued: a wintry scene of a sleigh moving over a countryside—signed, “From the Arnaz family” in bold Roman print. And written under that the words, “With much love and concern, Desi Arnaz.” Cesar always gave the cards to Eugenio, who saved them because Mr. Arnaz was famous: all the kids on the street had made a big deal about his dead father’s appearance with his uncle on that show: this card was further proof of the event. What struck him most and the reason why he showed it around was the word “love.”

That first night back, his uncle drank until four in the morning, and his face was droopy and livid from the rush of blood and thoughts in his head. When his friend Bernardito had asked the ex-Mambo King, “So tell us, Cesar, when are you going to get another orchestra together? Everybody at the Palladium asks for you.” Cesar, red in the face, answered in an angry voice, “I don’t know!”

Then it was “Come on, don’t be that way, Cesar, sing us a little bolero,” to which he answered, “I don’t feel like singing much these days.”

By the time Delores had gone into the kitchen to chase Frankie and Bernardito out because it was already past midnight and Pedro had to go to work the next morning, time had dissolved and the point of existence was to drink down rum and to feel that inward radiance which passed for love.

“Why do you want to chase my pals out of the house?”

“Because it’s getting very late.”

“And who are you, anyway? It was me and Nestor who got this apartment in the first place. It’s my name on the lease!”

“Please, Cesar, be reasonable.”

But then Bernardito and Frankie got up from the kitchen table, where they had been sitting for hours, pouring drinks and patting their old friend on the back, and with their manly talk about women, Cuba, baseball, and friendship. They got up because Delorita was shouting now, “Please go.”

Later that night, Pedro the accountant told Delores, “It’s okay if he stays for a time, but he has to get his own place to live, as soon as he can.”

When his friends left, Cesar slumped at the table as if he had been betrayed. Eugenio, sitting across from his uncle, loyally remained by his side. While Delorita went down the hall, Eugenio listened to his famous, worldly, slumped-over, macho uncle imparting his little observations about life: “Women, boy, will ruin you if you’re not careful. You offer them love, and what do you get in return? Emasculation. Orders. Heartbreak. Now, everyone, I know what they think about me, that I hurt your father in some way. It was the other way, he put me in a bad way with his unhappiness.”

Now and then he would realize to whom he was speaking and stop, but then Eugenio, through the gauze of half-shut eyes, vanished.

“Men should stick together, boy, to avoid suffering. Friendship and a few drinks, that’s good. Friends. You know who was good to me? A good guy? Let me tell you, boy. Machito. Manny. There are others, I can’t remember their names now. Everybody good to me. You know who was a swell guy, a hell of a man, who loved me and your father? Desi Arnaz.”

Then Pedro appeared in the doorway, calmly walked over, and in a quiet voice said to the Mambo King, “Come on,
hombre.
You’ve had enough, and it’s very late.”

Pedro had taken hold of his elbow. “I’ll go to bed,” Cesar told him, “but not because you threaten me, but because you’re a man and I respect the request of another man.”

“Yes,
hombre,
I appreciate that. Now let’s go down the hall.”

“I’ll go, but just remember, don’t push me, because I can have a temper.”

“Yes, yes, sleep, and tomorrow everything will be fine.”

In her bedroom, lips pursed tightly, one hand formed into a fist, and rapping at her knee through the pink flannel nightdress, Delorita was waiting, waiting for the ex-Mambo King to sleep.

Pedro was trying to be a nice guy about the whole thing.