The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (39 page)

Now and then, he watched the
I Love Lucy
show, and saw that episode one last time before he made his way to the Hotel Splendour. Saw his brother and wept, thinking how life had become very sad because of his death. Closing his eyes, he heard the rapping at Ricky Ricardo’s door, stood in Lucy and Ricky’s living room one more time, and could swear that if he reached over to his side he could touch his brother’s knee and nod as Lucille Ball came into the room with their coffee and snacks, and it would give him the worst craving for a nice little glass of booze, but he kept thinking about what the doctors had told him and knew that the logical thing would be to improve his health, but he was desolately bored, it seemed that all he had were memories, that where his pleasures resided now was in the past. Everything else was too complicated, even walking across the room, what with arthritis aching in his joints and his fingers still so bloated and stiff that he couldn’t even play the guitar or trumpet anymore.

(There were countless other episodes besides the one in which he had appeared with his brother. At four in the morning, just a few weeks before he had left for the Hotel Splendour, he had sat up watching two old
I Love Lucy
reruns:

The first was an episode about Lucy getting all nervous because Ricky’s sweet mother is coming up from Cuba to visit and Lucy doesn’t know more than a few words of Spanish, which she always botches, and so, when Ricky’s mother turns up, demure and tranquil, to see her loving son, they sit quietly in the living room together, each without knowing what to say and waiting for the other to speak, and they seem to live in this world where everything happens because of the door, and Lucy keeps looking toward the door, waiting for her husband to help her out, and they sit on the couch for a long time, just smiling at one another, Lucy fidgeting and the Cuban mother perfectly content to sit on the couch waiting for her nightclub singer son, of whom she is proud, and you just know that when he walks in she’ll rise and give him a tender kiss, that she will hold him in her arms. Feeling embarrassed because even her four-year-old son, Ricky Jr., speaks better Spanish than she does, Lucy’s really trying to figure out a way around this, because not only has Ricky’s mother come to visit but now some of their cousins from Cuba, other cousins, are coming to join them for dinner. It happens that Ricky has booked a mentalist act for the Tropicana nightclub and this mentalist, a classy fellow with a beautiful Cuban accent, does all his “mind-reading” with a listening device, which Lucy borrows from him, so that the mentalist, hiding in her kitchen, can feed her lines through a microphone. When the family comes over, Lucy’s sudden knowledge of Spanish at first impresses everyone, but then the mentalist has to leave because his wife has just had a baby, and right then and there Lucy begins to fuck everything up, fumbling her Spanish and making a fool of herself. Yet the episode ends happily, with all the Cubans touched by her effort, with everyone embracing, and with Ricky Ricardo lovingly kissing her.

In the second, Ricky and Lucy are living up in the country far away from the troubles of the city, when Lucy gets the idea to raise chickens and buys a huge supply of eggs, but because she doesn’t have an incubator, she brings them into the house and turns up the temperature, without realizing that all the eggs will hatch suddenly, so that when Desi Arnaz, alias Ricky Ricardo, with his wildly expressive eyes, comes home, the living room’s filled with ten thousand chicks, chirping and crawling happily over everything, under the sofa and on top of the tables and chairs, and so Ricky stands astounded in the doorway and does a double take, slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand and his eyes brimming out—his “Lucy!
No me digas que compraste un
mink coat
que costaba $5,000!”
expression. And he starts mock-cursing in a thousand-words-a-minute Spanish, and Lucy’s afraid, until Desi’s good mood returns and everybody’s happy again . . .

Good and funny episodes! he told himself, while drinking in the Hotel Splendour.)

And Lydia, his last love, whom he’d met in a Bronx nightclub in 1978, could not bring herself to make love to him anymore. That hurt the most. She would come over to check in on him every few days, and he was always happy as a young pup to see her, but when he touched her now, she’d pull away.

“You’re still not well,” she’d say to him.

But he’d persist. She’d cook his meals and he would stand behind her, pressing against her back until the heat of her rump aroused him. And without thinking twice, he would undo his trousers and show her his hound-snouted thing, not even fully erect but still able to put many a younger man to shame. “Please,” she’d say, “I’m here to take care of you.”

He persisted. “Just touch me there.”

“Dios mío,
you’re like a child.”

And she took hold of his thing, giving him hope, but put it back into his trousers.

“Now sit down and eat this soup I made for you.”

She’d clean his house, cook his meals, make his bed, tidy up the magazines and newspapers in his living room, but all he wanted was to strip off her clothes and make love to her. Nothing he tried worked with her. No singing, no jokes, no flowery compliments. Finally he resorted to pitiable behavior. “You never loved me. Now I feel so useless, I may as well die.” That became his song for weeks, until, worn down, she took pity on him, stripped off her dress, and in a black brassiere and panties, kneeled before him, pulled off his trousers, and began to suckle his aged member. Holding her thick black hair and brushing it away from her eyes, he appraised the expression on her face and realized that it was one of pure revulsion and he wilted, asking himself, Am I so old and far gone that she doesn’t want me anymore?

She kept at him until her mouth and jaw were tired and then settled into a rough masturbation of him, finally producing the tremor that he had been waiting for. But when she had finished, it was as if she could not bear to look at him, this old, thickset man with white hair, and she turned away, both her fists pressed against her mouth and biting her knuckles in some agonized judgment of what she had just done. And when he touched her gently, she pulled away, like everybody else in his life.

“Are you being like this because I haven’t been able to give you and the children money lately? I have money in the bank I can give you. Or if you can wait until I start working again or if a royalty check comes in, I’ll bring you money, okay? If that’s what you want, then I’ll do whatever you want to make you happy.”

“
Hombre
, I don’t want to touch you anymore because touching you is like touching death.”

And then she just started weeping.

Dressed, she kept saying things like, “I’m sorry I told you this. But you’ve pushed me so much. Please understand.”

“I understand,” he said. “Now please leave this death house, this sick old man, just go.”

She left, promising to return, and he stood up, looking at himself in the mirror. His huge, red-snouted
pinga
hanging down between his legs. Belly gigantic, skin saggy. Why, he almost had breasts like a woman’s.

He thought: It’s one thing to lose a woman when you’re twenty-five, forty, another when you’re sixty-two years old.

He thought about his wife, Luisa, in Cuba. His daughter, Mariela.

The many others.

Oh, Vanna Vane.

Lydia.

“Mamá
”

“. . . like touching death.”

It took him a long time to make his decisions, the first being “Fuck this shit with special diets and no more booze!” Getting nicely dressed in a white silk suit, he went up to that little joint on 127th Street and Manhattan Avenue and had two orders of fried plantains, one sweet, one green, a plate of
yuca
smothered in salt, oil, and garlic, an order of roast pork, and a special dish of shrimp and chicken, bread and butter, all washed down with half a dozen beers, so filling and bloating that making his way back up to La Salle Street was one of the great struggles of his life.

That was when he decided to hell with everything. Took his savings out of the bank and bought everybody presents (among them: a set of false teeth for Frankie, a plumed hat for Pedro, who had been too shy to buy one for himself, an old Don Aziapaú recording entitled “Havana Nights” for Bernardito, and for his nephew, Eugenio, who liked to draw, something he’d learned in college, the thickest art book he could find, one on the works of Francisco Goya), and then spent a month visiting friends here and there. What a bitch to say goodbye to old pals like Manny and Frankie. What a bitch to say goodbye to Delores, to travel out to Flushing, Queens, with a box of pastries and gifts for his cousin Pablo, to eat a nice meal with the family and then give him an
abrazo
for the last time.

N
OW HE LAUGHS, THINKING ABOUT
grinning Bernardito Mandelbaum again and what he had been like when they first met in 1950: skinny, with a thick head of tousled black hair, in baggy hand-me-downs from an older brother, plaid shirts and a pair of scuffed brown Sears, Roebuck shoes and white socks! That’s how he’d dress for his job as a clerk in the office of the Tidy Print plant where Cesar had also worked in the stockroom for a time. In a cavernous room noisy with printing machines they had become friends, Bernardito immediately liking Cesar’s lighthearted and suave demeanor and always doing him favors. In the mornings he’d get the Mambo King coffee, bring him homemade pastries for a snack, and whenever the Mambo King had to leave early for a job, Bernardito would take care of punching out his time card. In exchange for these favors, the Mambo King let Bernardito into his circle of friends at the plant, Cubans and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, who’d sit around at lunch conversing and telling bawdy stories. And Bernardito, an aspiring cartoonist, with his high-school Spanish, would listen attentively, later picking Cesar’s brains about certain words and phrases which he’d collect into a notebook.

He seemed like a nice enough kid, and that’s why the Mambo King approached him one afternoon and said, “Listen, boy, you’re too young to be missing out on all the fun. Why don’t you come with us tomorrow night after work. Me and my brother, we’re playing this dance in Brooklyn—near where you live—I want you to come with us after work, okay? Just get a little better dressed, wear a nice tie and jacket, like a gentleman.”

And that was the beginning of a new life, because the next night Bernardito joined the Mambo King and his brother for the evening, eating a steak and a platter of fried sweet plantains and then driving down with them to the Imperial Ballroom, where he fell under the spell of the music and found himself gyrating wildly before the stage like a living hieroglyphic, confusing the ladies with his cryptic moves and strange mode of dress—brown jacket, yellow shirt, green tie, white pants, and brown shoes.

Taken in by the excitement and glamour of the dance halls, he forgot all about Bensonhurst and started to hang around with the Mambo King on the weekends, rarely coming home before three in the morning. Slowly, under Cesar’s—and Nestor’s—wing, Bernardito became transformed into a high-stepping ballroom
suavecito.
The first thing that changed was his way of dressing. On a Saturday afternoon, Cesar met Bernardito and they made the rounds of the big department stores and clothing shops. Out went the hand-me-downs from his older brother. With his savings, Bernardito bought the latest in fashion: ten pairs of pleated trousers, wide-lapeled puff-shouldered double-breasted jackets, Italian belts, and sporty two-toned shoes. And he had his hair shaped into a pompadour and grew a wisp of a mustache, after the fashion of his newest friends.

Then he started to collect Latin records. His Sundays were spent haunting record shops in Harlem and on Flatbush Avenue, so that in time this kid who hadn’t known Xavier Cugat from Jimmy Durante started to accumulate rare recordings by the likes of Ernesto Lecuona, Marion Sunshine, and Miguelito Valdez. And he would have hundreds of these records, enough to fill up three bookcases, one of the best collections in the city.

He was happy until he started to have fights about his new life with his parents. His parents, he’d told the Mambo King, weren’t too happy about the hours he was keeping and were worried about his new friends. His mother and father, who had emigrated from Russia, must have been quite surprised when, on a Sunday afternoon, they heard their doorbell ring and found the two brothers standing there. They had dressed up in suits, bought flowers and a box of chocolates from the Schrafft’s on 107th Street and Broadway. That afternoon the brothers sat with them, sipping coffee, eating cookies, and behaving so agreeably that Bernardito’s parents changed their minds.

But, soon afterwards, Bernardito went to a Mambo King party and met Fifi, a thirty-year-old hot tomato, who soon won his heart with affection and with the carnal pleasures of her body. He moved into her apartment on 122nd Street and would spend the next twenty-five years trying to make peace with his parents. Settled in with her, Bernardito began to live his life much as he always would, holding a full-time job by day and working as a freelance illustrator at night: he was the artist for
The Adventures of Atomic Mouse
comics and had also drawn three Mambo King covers, among them “Mambo Inferno.”

Then Bernardito’s life fell into the tranquil Cubanophile track of his days. For thirty years he and Cesar Castillo would be friends. And in that time Bernardito not only learned a Latin life-style, speaking a good slangy Cuban Spanish and dancing the mambo and the cha-cha-cha with the best of them, but he also slowly turned his and Fifi’s apartment into a cross between a mambo museum and the parlor of a Havana mansion of the 1920s, with shuttered windows, potted palms, an overhead mahogany fan, animal-footed cabinets and tables, tropical-fish tanks, wicker furniture, a parrot squawking in a cage, candles and candelabra, and, in addition to a big modern RCA television and stereo, a 1920 crank-driven Victrola. Lately he had started to look as if he had stepped out of that age, parting his hair in the middle, wearing wire-rim glasses and a thin mustache, baggy, suspendered
pantalones,
bow ties, and flat, black-brimmed straw hats.