The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (34 page)

A tingle went through her body, because when Cesar said “job” he pronounced it “yob,” just like that Ricky Ricardo fellow.

She smiled and let him into the chaos of her living room, which smelled of mildewy rugs, beer, and cabbage. She was excited, even honored, that there was something she could do for this man. Why, he was practically a celebrity.

“Are you really interested in this?”

“Yes, I am.” He pronounced “jes” instead of “yes,” and “jam” for “am.”

“See, things have been a little slow for me on the music end, and I would like to have a regular income.”

“Do you know anything about superintending, electricity, plumbing—any of that?”

“Oh yes, when I first came to this country I worked,” he lied, “as a super for two years in a building downtown. It’s on 55th Street.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s not the best work, but not the worst,” she said. “If you really want to do it, I can give you a trial, and if it doesn’t work out, you know I don’t want any hard feelings.”

“And if it does work out?”

“You get paid and your rent free. There’s an apartment rented by some college students opening up next month. You would get that and twenty-five dollars a week. If everything’s all right.” Then she added, “It’s not union, you know.” Then: “Would you like a beer?”

“Yes.”

She went into the kitchen and he looked around. He wasn’t one to criticize apartments, but Mrs. Shannon’s living room was dense with newspapers and butt-filled bottles, glasses of beer, and yellow-tinged milk. One pretty picture caught his eye, however: a hand-tinted photo of a clover-covered meadow in Ireland, the country of her ancestors. He liked that.

As she came out of the kitchen with two glasses of beer, she felt enchanted and somehow elated at getting Cesar Castillo to work for her.

She sat in her easy chair, saying, “You know, I still think about how you and your brother were on that
I Love Lucy
show. You wouldn’t believe it, but I once saw Lucille Ball on the street in front of Lord and Taylor’s around Christmastime. She seemed like a nice lady.”

“She was.”

“And Ricky, you were pals with him?”

“Yes.”

She looked him over admiringly; he didn’t know what she might be thinking. He wanted everything to be over with quickly. He didn’t want to go through any long route to find a new life for himself. No way would he go back, despite his longings, into the life of a bandleader. Walking down the hill from the park, and feeling buoyed by the practical advice of Mr. Vanderbilt, he had seen the sign in the window and decided that he would take the first step toward security. Better than dealing with club owners, and petty gangsters, and with the agony of pure memory. Besides, it all seemed to make sense. There wasn’t so much work involved, and he would always have a roof over his head. And if he changed his mind and wanted to play music again, he would have the time to do so. He could not recall that the superintendent of his building had ever worked particularly hard, only that he often saw the man heading underground to the basement. Somehow he found the idea of the basement appealing.

“Yes,” he continued. “Mr. Arnaz is a gentleman.”

He milked it for everything it was worth, delighting her. Then she offered him another beer.

She came back into the living room a few minutes later, holding a beer and an old cheap Stella guitar with a warped neck. “Would you sing something for me?”

He wiped the strings of the guitar clean with a handkerchief; the thick gritty strings left traces like gunpowder on the cloth. Pressing down on the fret board hard, he struck an E-minor chord and, clearing his throat, said, “You know, I don’t sing very much these days. It’s a little rough for me now.”

He started to sing
“Bésame Mucho
” in a voice that, if anything, was more soulful and vulnerable than it had been before: now his baritone really quivered with melancholy and a desire for release from pain in this life, and his singing made Mrs. Shannon, who’d always had her eye on the musician, absolutely happy.

“Oh, delightful,” she said. “You should make more records.”

“Maybe, one day.”

By the time he had finished the beer, she had told him, “Well, we’ll try you out,” and then, with a broad smile and her huge body, that eternal mass under the soup-stained dress, shaking: “But you gotta promise that you’ll sing every now and then for me. Promise?”

“Okay.”

“Now, just let me get my slippers on and find the keys for the basement and I’ll take you down and show you the works.”

Down the stairs and into the basement, and following the hallway past the boiler and washing-machine rooms, he went. Then for the hundredth time—or was it the thousandth?—Cesar Castillo, ex-Mambo King and former star of the
I Love Lucy
show, found himself before the black bolt-studded fire door that was the entrance to his workroom. A solitary bulb, its filament burning like a tongue of fire above him, the lunar-looking walls filled with cracks out of which seemed to sprout long strands of human hair. He was not wearing a white silk suit or a frilly-sleeved mambo shirt, or sporty golden-buckled shoes, ladies and gentlemen: instead, a gray utility suit, plain thick rubber-soled black shoes, a belt off which dangled a loop of keys for twenty-four apartments, various storage rooms, and electrical closets. In his pockets, crumpled-up receipts from the hardware store, building-complaint slips, and a sheet of yellow lined paper on which after two years of musical inactivity he had started to write down the lyrics for a new song.

In the basement, his spirits flourished. He whistled, he happily pushed brooms, he liked the idea that metal things like wrenches and pliers hung off his body, clanking like armor; he found himself walking about the building in the same attitude as his captain at sea, arms folded behind him, eyes inquisitive and proprietary. He liked the happy-looking row of electrical meters and the fact that they ticked off in 3/2 time, claves time, that the multiple rows of pipes with their valves whistled, water whirring through them. He liked the crunching noises when faucets were turned on, the conga-drum pounding of the washroom dryer: the thunder of the coal-bin walls. In fact, he was so elated by the perfect realization of a purgatorial existence that better spirits came to him.

“Me siento contento cuando sufro,
” he sang one day. “I feel happy when I’m suffering.”

In the foyer outside the bolt-studded door to his workroom, his dog Poochie, a wiry, corkscrew-tailed mutt who resembled the famous movie hound Pluto, with his droopy face and long hooked paws, nails like black sea mussels. On the black door itself a calendar, a big-hipped pretty girl with green eyes in a scanty bathing suit, wading in a pool and lifting to her mouth a frosty-tipped, fluted bottle of Coca-Cola.

Inside, his worktable, a chaos of screw-and-nail, washer-and-nut-filled jars, tin cans, spools of wire and string, dollops of wood compound, solder and paint drops; tagged apartment keys on a wire hanging across the wall; then another calendar, from Joe’s Pizzeria, featuring Leonardo’s
Last Supper.
Wooden boxes were everywhere, and one paint-speckled telephone into which he would say, “Speak, this is the super.”

He set down tools everywhere, and these congealed with a resinous-looking paste, so carelessly did he take care of them. A dusty, rusty-bladed fan sat atop a stack of old
National Geographics
, which he sometimes liked to read. There were two large storerooms, a deep and narrow-shelved room in which he was always finding items of interest: among them, a six-stringed lute, which he now added to the instruments in his apartment upstairs, and a spiked German helmet from the First World War, which he kept on a beauty-salon manikin head as a joke. And he had all kinds of magazines: nudist magazines with names like
Sun Beach California
which featured sling-shot-testicled men and strawberry-faced women, pictured with watering cans and little plaid sun hats in the garden of life, a strange race, to be sure. Then a stack of scientific and geographical surveys, refuse from the apartment of Mr. Stein, a scholarly fellow from the sixth floor. And Cesar had a big stuffed chair, a stool, an old radio, and a record player salvaged from one of the workrooms.

A stack of records too, including the fifteen 78s and three long-playing 33s he’d made with Nestor and the Mambo Kings. He never played them, though he heard them from time to time in jukeboxes or over the Spanish-language radio station, the disc jockey introducing a
canción
in this manner: “And now a little number from that Golden Era of the mambo!” He kept some of those records upstairs, too: up in the small apartment he’d gotten with the job, that joint crammed now with instruments and with the odd collection of souvenirs from his travels and his musician’s life and with the pieces of mismatching furniture which he more or less stoically brought up out of the basement.

His apartment reflected the bad habits of a jaded, lifelong bachelor, but he would pay Eugenio and Leticia to come down once a week and sweep his floors, wash his dishes, wash his clothes, and so forth. His sister-in-law, happy that he was no longer in the same apartment and willing to forget many things, made it clear that he could take his meals upstairs at any time. He did so three or four times a week, but mainly to make sure that he was around his dead brother’s children and that their stepfather, Pedro, was good to them.

Settled in, he went about his business happily. He came to know the neighbors, to whom he had rarely said more than a few words. Some people knew that he had been a musician, others did not. Most of his chores involved minor repairs of faucets and electrical sockets, though on occasion he had to bring in outside help, as when Mr. Bernhardt’s living room caved in. He learned his job little by little: he applied himself to an apprenticeship in faucet fixing, boiler maintenance, spackling, plastering, electrical wiring. He would stand before the burning incinerator once every few days, watching the flames consume the cardboard and paper and wax milk containers, hear the bones crackling, singed skin evaporating, all turning to smoke. He tended to remember things, to get a look of lost contemplation as he would stand in front of the open incinerator door, stoking the dying larvae of the embers.

Often Eugenio wondered about his uncle then. The man staring into the fire and not moving. It wasn’t so much that Cesar Castillo stared into the embers or sometimes murmured to himself; it was that he seemed to be somewhere else.

What did he see in these ashes? The harbor of Havana? The fields of Oriente? His dead brother’s face floating amid the burning junk?

It didn’t matter. His uncle would come out of it, tap his nephew’s shoulder, saying: “Come on.” And he would shovel the ashes into the trash cans, dragging them down the cracked concrete floor and up the stairs with mighty heaves and onto the sidewalk to await the garbage truck.

And he had made the acquaintance of other superintendents. Luis Rivera, Mr. Klaus, Whitey. His tenants were Irish, black, and Puerto Rican, with a few scholars and college students thrown in. His plumber was this one-eyed man named Leo, a Sicilian, who used to play jazz violin with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, lost the eye and the will to play during the Second World War. Cesar was never beyond the generosity of offering a man a drink, so that when Leo finished a job, he and Cesar would retire to the workroom to drink beer while Leo would relate his sorrows.

The flamboyant Cesar Castillo became a good listener and got the reputation of a man to whom one might tell one’s troubles. His friends who came to visit him were either beset with woes or looking to get something from the ex-Mambo King. Men wanting to borrow money or to pass the night drinking his booze. People on the street and in the clubs who used to talk about what a womanizing and insensitive man he had been before his brother’s death now talked about how, perhaps, this tragedy had helped to reform him into a more noble character. Actually, most people felt sorry for him and wished the Mambo King well. His phone was always ringing; other musicians, some of them famous too, were always trying to check him out: the great Rafael Hernández inviting him over to his place on 113th to talk music and have some good food; Machito inviting him to festive gatherings in the Bronx; and so many others, wanting to see if the ex-Mambo King would perform again.

SİDE B

Sometime later in the night in the Hotel Splendour

S
OMETIME IN THE MIDDLE OF
the night the noises started in the room next door again, chair legs scuffling against the floor and the man’s voice gravelly with self-satisfied laughing. The Mambo King had nodded off for a few minutes, but a pain in his sides jolted him awake and now he sat up in his chair in the Hotel Splendour, the steamy world slowly coming into focus. Two of his fingers smarted because he’d fallen asleep with a cigarette burning between them, and a blistery welt had risen there. But then he noticed the worse, more edemic welts and blisters up and down his arms and on his legs.
“Carajo!”