The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (35 page)

He got up to urinate, and by the toilet, he could hear the voices from next door. Listening for a moment, he realized they were talking about him.

The woman’s voice: “Come back here, don’t bother nobody.”

“But I’ve been hearing music all night from that room next door. I’ll just inquire.”

Soon there was a knock at the Mambo King’s door. The black man was big-boned and thin, wearing lumpy pinstriped pajamas and a pair of velvet slippers. He had a big pompadour and black-and-blue bite marks on his neck.

“Yes, what is it that you want?”

“It’s me, your neighbor. Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Look, I’ve just run out of booze. You got any you can spare until tomorrow, I’ll pay you for it.”

The Mambo King had pushed open the door just enough to see the man. He considered the request and felt sorry for the couple, stuck in the Hotel Splendour without enough to drink. He could remember a night with Vanna Vane when they’d drunk all their booze. Naked and in bed and too lazy to leave the room, he had leaned out the window of the Hotel Splendour and called down to a little kid passing by: “Go to the corner and tell the liquor-store man that you need a bottle of Seagram’s whiskey for the mambo musician. He’ll know! And get him to give you some ice, too, huh?”

Gave the kid five bucks for his trouble, later paid the liquor-store owner—that’s how he solved his problem.

What the hell, he told himself.

“Just wait a minute.”

“That’s nice of you, sport.”

Then the black man looked in and saw how Cesar had trouble walking across the room. “Say, you all right?”

“No problem.”

“All right!” Then: “How much?”

“Don’t worry about it.
Mañana.
”

“Yeah? Well, shit, you’re a gentleman.”

The Mambo King laughed.

“Looky here,” the black man said in a really friendly manner. “Come over and say hello to my baby. Come on in for a drink!”

While “Beautiful María of my Soul” played once again, he slowly pulled on a pair of trousers. It would only take three, four hours of drinking to tighten his muscles. Screwing the cap onto the half-full bottle of whiskey he had been drinking—he had two others left on the bed waiting for him—he followed the black man to his door.

“Baby, got some!” to his woman, and to the Mambo King: “What’s your name, pal?”

“Cesar.”

“Uh, like Julius?”

“My grandfather’s name.”

Cesar had shuffled into the room, noticing the faint smell of fucking on the sheets. It was funny, he could barely hold his head up. His shoulders felt as if they were being forced to slump forward; his whole posture was that way. He saw himself in the mirror, saw an old man, jowlish and tired. Thank God he dyed his gray hair black.

“Babe, this is our neighbor come to say hello.”

On the bed, in a violet negligee, the man’s female companion. Stretched out like that dancer in Chicago, the Argentine Flame of Passion. Her nipples dark, bud-tipped flowers against the cloth. Long-legged, wide-wombed, her hips smooth and curvy like the polished banisters in the Explorers’ Club in Havana. And her toenails were painted gold! There was something else he liked: she’d brushed out her black hair so that it almost touched her shoulders, and looked as if she were wearing a crown or a headdress.

“You resemble,” said the Mambo King, “a goddess from Arará.”

“Say what?”

“Arará.”

“You all right, man?”

“Arará. It’s a kingdom in Africa where all magic is born.” He said that, remembering how Genebria had told him this, sitting out in the yard in Cuba when he was six years old.

“And when the man dies, he enters that kingdom. Its entrance is a cave.”

“In Africa, he said!”

The black man instructed her, “That’s what all them spiritist shops are called. Arará this, Arará that.”

“You’re very beautiful,” Cesar said, but he could hardly hold up his head to look at her. Then, when he managed to, the Mambo King smiled, because even though he felt sick and knew that he must look pathetic, he’d caught her looking and admiring his pretty eyes.

“Here’s your drink, my friend. You want to sit down?”

“No. If I sit down, I won’t get up.”

If he were a young man, he was thinking, he would get down on his knees and crawl over to the bed, wagging his head like a dog. She seemed the type who would be amused and flattered by that. Then he’d take hold of her slender foot, turn it just enough so her leg was perfectly shaped and then run his tongue up from her Achilles’ heel to the round of her dark buttocks: then he’d push her toward the wall, open her legs, and rest his body on hers.

He imagined an ancient, unchanging taste of meat, salt, and grain, moistened and becoming sweeter, the deeper his tongue would go . . .

He must have drifted off for a moment, looking as if he might fall, or perhaps his arms started shaking, because suddenly the black man was holding him by the elbows, saying, “Yo? Yo? Yo?”

Maybe he reeled around or seemed as if he would fall, because the woman said, “Mel, tell the cat it’s two-thirty in the morning. He should go to sleep.”

“No problem.”

At the door he turned to look at the woman again and noticed how the hem of her negligee had just hitched higher over her hips. And just as he wanted to see more, she shifted and the diaphanous material slid up a few inches more until he could see most of the right side of her hip and thigh.

“Well, good night,” he said.
“Buenas noches.
”

“Yeah, thanks, man.”

“You take care.”

“You take care,” said the woman.

Walking slowly to his room in the Hotel Splendour, the Mambo King remembered how, toward the end of the year in Cuba, during December and into January, the white men used to form lines into the houses of prostitution so that they might sleep with a black woman, the blacker her skin the better the pleasure. They believed that if they slept with a black woman at that time of year, their penises deep inside those magical wombs, they would be purified. In Las Piñas, he used to go to this old house—
bayu
—with an overgrown garden at the edge of a field, and in Havana he would visit, along with hundreds of other men, the houses on certain streets in the sections of La Marina, where he and Nestor had lived, and Pajarito. They came back to him, the cobblestone streets closed off to traffic and dense with men knocking on the doors. In every instance, at this time of the year, a huge bull of a man, usually a homosexual, would let the customers in. Their lights low, the houses had dozens of rooms and smelled of perfume and sweet-scented oils, and they would enter a parlor where the women waited for their customers, naked on old divans and enormous antique chairs, anxious to be chosen. At that time the white prostitutes sulked because business fell off for them, while the
mulatas
and the black queens swam in rivers of saliva and sperm, their legs wide open, taking in one man after the other, each man’s bodily hunger sated, each man’s soul cleansed. And it was always funny how, in those days, he would stick his thing back into his trousers and make his way into the street, feeling strong and renewed.

Now, as he shut the door behind him and made his way toward another bottle of whiskey, the room thick with the trumpets, piano, drums of his old orchestra, the Mambo King, weak of body, daydreamed of making love to the woman next door, and it was then that he could hear their voices again:

“Pssssst, oh, baby.”

“Not so hard, honey.”

“Ohhhh, but I like it!”

“Then wet me with your mouth.”

The Mambo King was hearing the bed again, the mattress thumping against the wall, and the woman moaning, the softest music in the world.

He drank his whiskey and winced with pain, the stuff turning into brittle glass by the time it reached his stomach. Remembered when he could play music and drink all night, come home and devour a steak, a plate of fried potatoes and onions, and finish that off with a bowl of ice cream, and wake up the next morning, four or five hours after the meal, feeling nothing. The thing about one’s body coming apart was that, if anything, you felt more. Leaning back in his chair, he could feel the whiskey burning in the pit of his stomach, and leaking out through the cuts and bruises that he envisioned his ulcers looked like, oozing into his liver and kidneys, which throbbed with pain, as if someone had jammed a fist inside. Then, too, there was the column of heat, long as his penis, shooting back up out of the pit of his stomach and skewering his heart. Sometimes the pain was so bad as he sat drinking in that room in the Hotel Splendour that his hands would shake, but the whiskey helped, and so he could continue on.

He’d had a boyhood friend in Cuba, a certain Dr. Victor López, who had turned up in the States in 1975 and set up an office in Washington Heights. One night, three years later, when the Mambo King was playing a job in a Bronx social club, he found this Dr. López among the crowd. They had not seen each other since 1945 and had a happy reunion, with the two old friends kissing each other and slapping each other’s back, remembering and laughing over their childhood in Las Piñas, Oriente Province.

Afterwards, his old friend noticed that Cesar’s hands trembled and he said, “Why don’t you come along to my office one day and I’ll give you an examination, gratis, my friend. You know we’re not so young anymore.”

“I will do that.”

The doctor and his wife left the crowded, red-lit social club, and the singer made his way over to the bar for another drink and a tasty fried
chorizo
sandwich.

He didn’t go see his old friend, but one day, while walking down La Salle Street, he felt certain pains again, like glass shards cutting inside him. Usually, whenever these pains, which he’d been experiencing on and off for years, came to him, he would drink a glass of rum or whiskey, take some aspirin, and take a nap. Then he’d go upstairs to see his brother’s widow and the family, or he’d head out to the street, where he would hang around with his old pals, Bernardito Mandelbaum and Frankie Pérez,
“El Fumigador
”—the Exterminator. Or if his nephew Eugenio happened to be around, he would take him out for a drink. Best was when he’d hear his doorbell ringing in quick, enthusiastic spurts, because that meant his girlfriend was waiting in the lobby.

But that day the pain was too much, and so the Mambo King went to see Dr. López. Because he had known the doctor from his old
pueblo,
he felt all the trust in the world in the man, and thought his fellow cubano would produce a few pills that would make his pains go away. He expected to get out of there in a few minutes, but the doctor kept him for an hour: took his blood, checked his sputum, his urine, listened to his heart, thumped at his back, took his blood pressure, looked in his ears and up his ass, felt his testicles, peered into the dark green eyes that had made him such a lady killer in his youth, and in the end said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, my friend, but your body is something of a mess. I think you should go into the hospital for a while.”

He turned red, listening to the doctor, felt his pulse quicken. He thought, Victor, how can this be? Just the other day, I screwed the hell out of my young girl . . .

“You understand, your urine is pink with blood, your blood pressure is way too high, dangerously high, my friend, you have the symptoms of kidney stones, your liver is enlarged, your lungs sound blocked, and who knows what your heart looks like.”

You see, she was screaming. I was making her come, me, an old man.

“Look here, Victor, you want to know how I feel about this business? It’s just that I’d rather go out like a man, rather than slowly rotting away like a piece of old fruit, like those
viejitos
I see in the drugstores.”

“Well, you’re not so young anymore.”

He answered the doctor insolently, with the same kind of annoyance as when he was a kid and he’d heard something he didn’t want to hear.

“Then,
coño.
If I’m already at death’s door, I’ll die and then I’ll find out a lot of things, won’t I?”

“My friend, if you don’t do something now, you will rot away slowly like a piece of old fruit. Not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but all these things, unless taken care of, mean the beginning of a lot of physical suffering.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

But he didn’t really believe in his old friend’s advice, and that was why two years later he had said his goodbyes, had written his letters, and had packed up to pass his last days in the Hotel Splendour.

Now the Mambo King had trouble standing. When it was time for him to get up and turn the record over, his sides ached. But he managed to turn the record over and to make his way across the room in the Hotel Splendour to the little toilet: could have been the same little toilet where Vanna would be standing in front of the mirror, stark naked, dabbing lipstick on her mouth and cheerfully saying, “I’m ready!” He wished his sides didn’t ache so much, that it wasn’t so hot outside, that his brother was not dead. Standing over the toilet, he pulled out his big thing, and his urine went gurgling in the water. Then he heard something, like a man’s fist pounding on the wall, and when he finished, he stood by the dresser and listened carefully. It wasn’t anyone pounding on the wall, it was that couple next door going at it! The man was saying, “Das right, baby. Das right, yeah.” The man was going to have an orgasm and Cesar Castillo, Mambo King and former star of the
I Love Lucy
show, had shooting pains through his body. Bad kidneys, bad liver, bad everything, except for his
pinga,
which was working perfectly, though a little more lackadaisically these days. He sat by the bed again and clicked on the record player. Then he took another long, glorious swallow of whiskey, and during that swallow he remembered what they had told him at the hospital some months ago:

“Mr. Castillo, you’re going to be all right this time. We’ve reduced the edema, but it’s the end of drinking for you, and you’ll have to go on a special diet. Do you understand?”