The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (37 page)

S
O WHY HAD THE MAMBO KING
started playing music again, after losing so much of his heart? It had to do with the family in Cuba, his brothers Miguel and Eduardo writing him letters and asking for money, medicine, and clothes. This had become his “cause.” Even if he had never given a shit about politics before, what could he do when someone in the family asked him for help? At first he took on any kind of extra work, plastering and painting apartments to make more money, but then after being urged on by his old bassist Manny, he started accepting pickup jobs here and there around the city. (The first job back? Hilarious, a wedding out in Queens in 1961, a Cuban fellow who got caught by his bride pinching the bridesmaid’s ass. Later, while they were packing up their instruments, out into the parking lot spilled bride and groom, the bride slapping and kicking at him.) The money that survived his generous and spendthrift ways went into buying food and medicine which he’d ship to Cuba. With Delores’s
Webster’s Dictionary
open before him, he would carefully draft letters to the government, inquiries as to the procedure for getting his family out, and then show these to one of the smarter tenants, a certain Mr. Bernhardt, who had once been a college professor. Reading through bifocals, Bernhardt, a portly and distinguished-looking fellow, made the proper corrections and then he’d redo the letters carefully on an antique British typewriter. (And Cesar would look around his living room. Bernhardt had worked as some kind of history teacher and his tables were covered with papers and books in Latin and Greek and clumps of photographs of archaeological sites, as well as a collection of thick, impossibly old books on witchcraft, and file folders containing pornographic photos.) The replies to his letters said that it all came down to getting permission from the Castro government; but those letters to Cuba seemed to go floating from office to office, rotting in bins filled with thousands of others. In the end, it would take them five years to get out.

There was more to it. On some nights, while listening to music, he’d remember his childhood in Cuba and how he’d go out to the sugar mill to hear the famous orchestras that toured the island: orchestras like Ernesto Lecuona’s Melody Boys. In 1932, admission to hear Lecuona cost one dollar and everybody in Las Piñas would go, that being the grandest cultural event of the year. Families would make their way to the sugar mill in carriages, automobiles, and wagons, and the roads would be jammed with travelers from nearby towns. Some made the journey on horseback. Conversations cutting through the night, the chirping of the crickets, and the clop-clop-clop of horses. The stars humming like delicate glass bells. In the sugar-mill concert hall, there was a high-ceilinged ballroom with chandeliers and arched windows with great pleated drapes, Moorish wainscoting, and floors so polished they glimmered as if in sunlight. One night, nearly fifty years ago, Ernesto Lecuona came out onto the stage and Cesar Castillo, then a boy, was there to hear and see him. He was not a tall man and resembled, at first glance, a more thickset Rudolph Valentino. He wore a black tuxedo, a pearl-buttoned shirt, a bright-red bow tie. He had dark, penetrating eyes and long, slender hands. Seated before the piano, his face serene, he played the first ebbing chords of his famous composition “
Malagueña.
”

Later, during the intermission, the revered Lecuona came down off the stage to mingle with his audience. That night, as he saw Lecuona moving through the crowd, Cesar Castillo, fourteen years old, pushed forward to shake that grand gentleman’s hand. That was the evening when Cesar introduced himself, saying, “My name is Cesar Castillo, Mr. Lecuona, and there’s something I’ve written that I’d like you to hear. A ballad.”

And Lecuona sighed, giving off a scent of lemon cologne. Although he seemed a little weary, he politely nodded and told the boy, “Come and see me afterwards in the parlor.”

After the concert, in a large parlor adjoining the ballroom, the young Cesar Castillo sat down before a piano, nervously playing and singing his
canción.

Lecuona’s reaction was honest and gentle: “You have a good singing voice, your verses are monotonous, but you have written a good chorus.”

The name of the song? Nothing that he could remember, just that one of the verses mentioned “wilting flowers.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lecuona, thank you,” Cesar remembered saying, “thank you,” as he followed him back toward the crowd, that image fading almost instantly, but not the desire to slip back inside that music which had sounded so beautiful.

In time, he was working joints like the Sunset Club and the 146th Street Latin Exchange (A cabdriver: “You know who I took up there one night? Pérez Prado!”) on Friday and Saturday nights, dispensing with the hard business of running a band and just taking jobs as they came along. He didn’t charge very much, twenty or twenty-five dollars a night, and this tended to get him work, because (whether he realized it or not) he was still something of a name.

He just never knew it.

Even took work as a strolling guitarist and singer in restaurants like the Mamey Tree and the Morro Castle in Brooklyn.

Of course, it was a pleasure to perform for the people again. Got his mind off things. And it always made him happy when someone would come along and ask him for an autograph
(“Ciertamente!”).
It felt good when he’d go walking along the 125th Street markets on a Sunday afternoon and some guy in a sleeveless T-shirt would call out to him from a window, “Hey! Mambo King, how’s it going?”

Still he felt his sadness. Sometimes when he played those jobs with Manny, he would get a ride back home. But most often he rode the subways, as he didn’t like to drive at night anymore. Having scrapped his DeSoto, he had bought a ’54 Chevrolet, but whenever he took it out, he would feel like jerking the car into a wall. Now he took it for occasional spins up and down Riverside Drive on nice days, washed it on Sundays, playing its radio and using it like a little office, to greet pals. Mainly, it was a pain in the ass; he was always paying parking tickets and lending it out to friends. That’s why he’d sell it in ’63, for $250. In any case, he liked to drink, and taking the subway meant that he didn’t have to worry about wrecking the car or hurting anyone. The only setback was that he sometimes felt nervous waiting on the platforms late at night—New York had started to get bad in the early 1960s; that’s why he would walk all the way to the end and hide behind a pillar and wait there for the train.

Anonymous in a pair of sunglasses and with his hat pulled low over his brow, guitar or trumpet case wedged between his knees, the Mambo King traveled to his jobs around the city. It was easy to get home when he worked restaurants in the Village or Madison Avenue bars, where he would serenade the Fred MacMurray-looking executives and their companions (“Now, girls, sing after me, ‘Babaloooooo!’ ”), as those jobs usually ended around eleven at night. But when he’d play small clubs and dance halls out on the edges of Brooklyn and the Bronx, he’d get home at four-thirty, five in the morning. Spending many a night riding the trains by himself, he’d read
La Prensa
or
El Diario
or the
Daily News.

He made lots of friends on the trains; he knew the flamenco guitarist from Toledo, Spain, a fellow named Eloy García, who played in the Café Madrid; an accordionist with a tango orchestra in Greenwich Village, named Macedonio, a roly-poly fellow who’d go to work in a gaucho hat. (“To play the music of Matos Rodríguez is to bring Matos back,” he’d say.) He knew Estela and Nilda, two
zarzuela
singers who would pass through matronhood with wilting carnations in their hair. He knew a black three-man dance team with conk hairdos, friendly and hopeful fellows, resplendent in white tuxedos and spats, who were always heading out to do auditions. (“These days we’re hoping to get on the Ed Sullivan show.”) Then there were the Mexicans with their oversized guitars, trumpets, and an accordion that resembled an altar, its fingerboard shiny with hammer-flattened religious medals of the Holy Mother, Christ, and the Apostles, bloody with wounds, hobbling on crutches, and pierced through with arrows to the heart. The men wore big sombreros and trousers that jangled with bells, and high, thin-heeled cowboy boots, leather-etched with swirly flowers, and traveled with a woman and a little girl. The woman wore a mantilla and a frilly dress made of Aztec-looking fabric; the little girl wore a red dress and played a tambourine on which an enamel likeness of John the Baptist had been painted. She’d sit restlessly, unhappily during the rides, while Cesar would lean forward and speak quietly to her mother. (“How is it going with you today?” “Slow lately, the best time is during Christmas, and then everybody gives.”) They’d ride to the last stop downtown, to the Staten Island Ferry terminal, where they would play
bambas, corridos, huapangos,
and
rancheras
for the waiting passengers.

“Que Dios te bendiga.
God bless you.”

“The same to you.”

There were others, a lot of Latin musicians like himself on their way to weary late-night jobs in the deepest reaches of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Some were young and didn’t know the name Cesar Castillo, but the old-timers, the musicians who had been kicking around in New York since the forties, they knew him. Trumpet players, guitarists, and drummers would come over and sit with the Mambo King.
*

Still, there were the tunnels, the darkness, the dense solitude of a station at four in the morning, and the Mambo King daydreaming about Cuba.

It made a big difference to him that he just couldn’t get on an airplane and fly down to Havana to see his daughter or to visit the family in Las Piñas.

Who would ever have dreamed that would be so? That Cuba would be chums with Russia?

It was all a new kind of sadness.

Sitting in his room in the Hotel Splendour (reeling in the room), the Mambo King preferred not to think about the revolution in Cuba. What the fuck had he ever cared about Cuban politics in the old days, except for when he might play a political rally in the provinces for some local crooked politician? What the fuck had he cared when the consensus among his musician pals was that it wouldn’t make any difference who came to power, until Fidel. What could he have done about it, anyway? Things must have been pretty bad. The orchestra leader René Touzet had fled to Miami with his sons, playing the big hotels there and concerts for the Cubans. Then came the grand master of Cuban music, Ernesto Lecuona, arriving in Miami distraught and in a state of creative torpor, unable to play a note on his piano and ending up in Puerto Rico, “bitter and disenchanted,” before he died, he’d heard some people say. Bitter because his Cuba no longer existed.

God, all the Cubans were worked up. Even that
compañero
—who never forgot the family—Desi Arnaz had scribbled a little extra message on one of his Christmas cards: “We Cubans should stick together in these troubled times.”

What had a friend called the revolution? “The rose that sprouted a thorn.”

The great Celia Cruz would come to the States, too, in 1967.

(On the other hand, Bola de Nieve—the musician “Snowball”—and the singer Elena Burke chose to remain behind.)

When his mother had died in 1962, the news came in a telegram from Eduardo, and a funny thing, too, because he had been thinking about her a lot that week, almost a soft pulsing in his heart, and his head filled with memories. And when he first read the line “I have bad news,” he instantly thought “No.” After reading the telegram, all he could do for hours was to drink and remember how she would take him into the yard as a child and wash his hair in a tub, again and again and again, her soft hands that smelled of rose water scrubbing his head and touching his face, the sun down through the treetops, her hair swirling with curls of light . . .

The man cried for hours, until his eyelids were swollen, and he fell asleep with his head against the worktable.

Wished he had seen her one more time. Told himself that he would have gone back the previous year, when he’d first heard that she had gotten sick, if it hadn’t been for Castro.

Sometimes he got into big arguments with Ana María’s husband, Raúl, about the situation down there. A long-time union man, Raúl kept himself busy organizing union shops in factories in the West Twenties, where most of the workers were immigrants from Central America and Puerto Rico. They were still friends, despite their differences of opinion. But Raúl kept trying to persuade the Mambo King about Castro. On a Friday night he went so far as to bring him down to a club on 14th Street where old Spanish and Portuguese leftists held meetings. He sat in the back listening as the old Spaniards, their expressions and politics shaped by beatings and jail terms in Franco’s Spain, gave long, heartfelt speeches about “what must be done,” which always came down to
“Viva el socialismo!”
and “Viva Fidel!”

Nothing wrong with doing away with the world’s evils. He had seen a lot of that. In Cuba there had been rotting sheds made of cardboard and crates, skeleton children and dying dogs. A funeral procession in a small town called Minas. On the side of the plain pine coffin, a sign:
“Muerto de hambre.
” On the street corners where the handsome
suavecitos
hung out talking, some guy who’d lost a limb while working at the sugar mill, in the
calderas,
begging. When he pictured suffering, he thought of a dead dog he’d found lying on the cobblestone road near the harbor of Lisbon: a tiny hound, with a sweet face and pleasantly cocked ears, stiff on its back, with its belly torn open, its dark purple stomach bloated to the size of a fifteen-pound melon.

He had no argument with wanting to help others, Raúl. Back in Cuba, the people took care of their own. Families giving clothing, food, money, and, sometimes, a job in the household or in a business.

“My own mother, Raúl, listen to me. My own mother was always giving money to the poor, even when we didn’t have very much. What more could anyone ask?”