The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (40 page)

And he had signed photographs of some of the greats: Cesar Castillo, Xavier Cugat, Machito, Nelo Sosa, and Desi Arnaz.

The day the Mambo King had gone to Bernardito’s house to say goodbye, he found his friend sitting by the window, hunched over a drawing table with a pencil in hand, working out some advertising drawings. A staff artist for the
La Prensa
syndicate, he also earned extra money as a freelance artist, spicy cartoons for girlie magazines being a quick and easy specialty—a big-assed chick bending over to pick up a rose, her butt out in the world, some man gaping at her, and his matronly wife, beside him, saying, “I didn’t know you liked flowers so much!” That afternoon, he sat beside Bernardito as he worked, the two men talking and drinking. Usually Bernardito listened to music while he worked, and that day had not been different: Nelo Sosa’s orchestra came out of his speakers, sounding beautiful.

For an hour or so they talked, and then, feeling the sadness of that day, the Mambo King presented his old friend with a package of rare old records from Cuba by the Sexteto Habanero, five 78s he had found in a sidewalk shop in Havana during the 1950s.

“These are for you, Bernardito.”

And the Mambo King took a good long look at his friend. The man was in his late forties now but still had this goofy grin of enchantment he’d get when he was nineteen.

“But why are you giving me these?”

“Because you’re my friend,” the Mambo King told him. “Besides, I never listen to them anymore. You may as well have them.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Happily, Bernardito Mandelbaum placed upon his old KLH stereo, which had a 78 rpm gear, the Sexteto Habanero’s famed recording of
“Mamá Inez.
”

And then he played all the others, and as he did he kept asking, “Are you sure you want to give these to me?”

“They’re yours.”

Then they just sat for a time and Cesar asked, “And your
señora?
When is she coming home?”

“She should be here soon.”

Yes, and that was another thing. After waiting twenty-five years for his parents to pass away, he had finally married Fifi.

It was another hour before Fifi came home, offering to cook the Mambo King a nice healthy dinner of fried steak and plantains, and planting a kiss on his cheek that made him blush.

But he refused the dinner, saying that he wasn’t feeling well.

At the door, he said goodbye to Bernardito, giving him a strong embrace and holding it for a long time.

“Come back on Sunday,” Bernardito told him as the Mambo King made his way down the stairs. “Don’t forget. Sunday.”

The worst goodbye had been with Eugenio. He didn’t want to leave the kid “behind,” without seeing him one last time. And so, one day, he called Eugenio at his job as a bookkeeper in an artist-supply store on Canal Street, a joint called Pearl Paints, and invited him out to dinner that night, so they could hang around like they used to. They met on 110th Street and ended up in this Dominican place on Amsterdam Avenue, ate a nice meal. Afterwards they made their way out to this little bar called La Ronda, where beers were five dollars apiece but where the stripper dancing in the cage had a nice compact body. They’d come in when she was down to nothing. (Now and then she would go into the back with customers for a price, lie down on a bed, and open her legs.)

“
Mambero,
” she called to him when she noticed he had come in. “Are you feeling better?”

He shrugged. Then she gave Eugenio an up-and-down, and the Mambo King leaned over to his nephew with a twenty-dollar bill in hand, saying, “Do you want to go with her? Makes no difference to me.”

“You go with her, Uncle.”

The Mambo King looked at her up in the cage with her firm legs and nice smooth thighs. She’d even shaved her vagina, the slit like a sidewise mouth, which she had made gleamy with some Vaseline and who knew what else. It was tempting, but he said, “No, I’m here to spend the time with you.”

By then, everybody in the family knew that Cesar had abandoned his special diets and medicines, putting on weight and getting teary-eyed and sluggish. It hit Eugenio bad. As he sat beside his uncle, certain old desires came over him—to run away, go somewhere else, be someone else.

They listened to music and then there were long periods of silence: the kid seemed so unhappy.

“Do you remember when we always used to go to places and music jobs together?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Those were good times, huh?”

“They were okay.”

“Well, things change. You’re not a
nene
anymore and I’m not a young man.”

Eugenio shrugged.

“Do you remember when I took you to that woman up on 145th Street?”

“Yes!”

“Eugenio, don’t be so cross with me. She was a dish, huh?”

“She was a pretty woman, Uncle.”

Then: “Are we going to be here for a long time, Uncle?”

“No, just for a few drinks, boy.” He sipped. “I just want you to know that . . . you mean a lot here,” and he tapped his chest.

Eugenio scratching his brow, the dancer leaning forward in her cage and shaking her breasts.

“I hope you believe me, boy. I want you to believe me.”

“Uncle . . .”

“I just wanted to tell you one little thing, man to man, heart to heart.” His whole face was red and immense, his breathing heavy.
“Que yo te quiero.
I love you, nephew. You understand?”

“Yes, Uncle, is that why you told me to come here?”

Then: “Look, Uncle, I really thought something was wrong; I mean, it’s one in the morning and I have to get home.”

The Mambo King nodded, wanting to let out a cry of excruciating pain. “Well, I appreciate that you have come to see your old
mambero
uncle,” he said.

And then they sat in the bar awhile, watching the stripper and not saying much. The jukebox loud with the latest Latin hit-makers’ songs—musicians like Oscar de León and perennial favorites like Tito Puente.

Later, they were both standing by the subway on 110th Street and Broadway.

Eugenio had to get down to East 10th Street, where he lived, while the Mambo King would catch the uptown local. The last words he said to his nephew repeated the words he used always to say when he was drunk. “Well, don’t forget about me, huh? And don’t forget that your uncle loves you.” Then he embraced his nephew for the last time.

Waiting for his train, he had watched his nephew across the platform. Eugenio was sitting on a bench reading a fancy paper,
The New York Times.
His nephew, who had gone to college, was as melancholic as his father and becoming more so as he got older. As the Mambo King’s train approached, he whistled across to Eugenio, who barely looked up in time to see his uncle waving. Pressed against the window and squinting through his dark green glasses, the Mambo King watched his nephew out of the rushing car until he was swallowed up in the dark tunnel.

That had been a few nights before, the Mambo King remembered as he sat in the Hotel Splendour.

Remembering something else, too, he went in this little suitcase and took out some envelopes and letters so that he might look at them one more time, and then he fished through the soft cloth pockets of his suitcase and withdrew a fine black-handled straight razor, the gift of a friend many years ago, and placed it before him on the table, in case he found himself lingering too long into the night in his room in the Hotel Splendour.

M
USICIAN, SINGER, AND SUPERINTENDENT,
he had also become a teacher in the early 1960s. Most of his classes, which would gather on Sunday afternoons, consisted of five or six students, and for a few years included Eugenio, who started trumpet lessons at about the age of twelve. In the nice weather he’d sometimes hold the lessons out in the park, but in the cooler seasons they’d gather in his apartment. He gave these lessons for free, because it made him feel a little bit like his old teacher Eusebio Stevenson and the kindly Julián García, who had looked out after him many years ago.

And because he didn’t like to be alone.

Happy to have these kids around, he’d usually spring for sodas and cupcakes, but if he had a few extra dollars in his pocket he would send Eugenio out to the
bodega
across the street with five dollars to buy a few pounds of cold cuts and some loaves of Italian bread and bags of potato chips, so that these boys, some of whom did not always have much to eat, might have a nice lunch afterwards.

Gathered in his living room, the boys would wait for the maestro to come out with an armful of records and his portable record player. Depending on his mood, he would just teach technique or, as he did on this day, play some mambos and old
canciones
and drift off into memoryville, relating to them some of the very same things that his teacher, Eusebio Stevenson, had once told him:

“Now, the rumba is derived from the
guaguancó
, which goes back to long ago, many hundreds of years ago, when the Spaniards first brought the flamenco style of music to Cuba, and this Spanish style, mixed up with the rhythms of the Africans, played on the drums, led to the early forms of the rumba. The word ‘rumba’ means magnificence. The slaves who first danced this were usually chained up at night by the ankle, so they were forced to limit their movements: when they danced their rumbas, it was with much movement of the hips and little movement of the feet. That’s the authentic rumba from the nineteenth century, with drums and voices and melody lines that sound Spanish and African at the same time . . . And what is the African? The African always sounds to me like people chanting in a forest, or shouting across a river. These rumbas were first played with only trumpets and drums. When you hear modern music and there’s a drum jam session, a
descarga,
it’s called the
rumba
section. In any case, these rumbas became popular in the nineteenth century; the small military bands in the towns of Cuba used to spice up their bland waltzes and military marches with rumba rhythms, so that people could let loose and have a good time.

“The mambo, that’s another dance. That came along in the 1940s, before you were all born. As a dance it’s like the rumba, but with much more movement of the feet, as if the chains had been removed. That’s why everybody looks crazy, like a jitterbug on fire, when they dance the mambo.”

And he’d show them a few steps, his lumbering body moving nimbly across the floor, and the kids laughed.

“The mambo’s freedom comes originally from the
guaracha,
an old country-style dance of Cuba, always played cheerfully.

“The stuff we have now like the
pachanga
is really just a variation. Most of what you are going to play, if you should ever play with a
conjunto,
will be in 2/4 time, and on top of that you’ll hear the claves rhythm in 3/2, which goes one-two-three, one-two.

“Now, most orchestras are going to play their arrangements in the following way, the songs being divided into three sections. The first is the ‘head’ or the melody; the second is the
coro,
or chorus, where you get the singers harmonizing; and then finally the mambo or rumba section. Machito often uses that way of arranging.”

Then he would go on about the different instruments and time schemes, this whole erudite discussion covering up the fact that he did not know how to read music himself.

After this, the actual lessons and playing of instruments, with the most attentive pupils being Miguelito, a stringy Puerto Rican, who wanted to learn the saxophone; Ralphie, Leon the one-eyed plumber’s son, and Eugenio, with his decent ear and careful demeanor. Both played the trumpet. Taking turns, each student would get up and play a song and the Mambo King would comment on his technique, and show the student how to correct a flaw. And this method worked, as some of his students excelled and moved on to other teachers who knew how to read music. This was one shortcoming of which the Mambo King was ashamed. While he could sit them down and identify the notes in a written piece, he’d never learned how to read quickly. His face would flush and he would avoid looking into his students’ eyes; and forget about playing through complicated jazz scores like the books that Miguelito would turn up with, thick with Duke Ellington arrangements.

Still, there was no shortage of new students. There was always some poor kid from La Salle or Harlem or the Bronx who had heard about a Mambo King who gave free music lessons, and sandwiches, too! And the Mambo King never regretted taking them in. His only bad experience involved a kid with a pockmarked face and gruff, fast-talking manner á la Phil Silvers in the Sergeant Bilko television series. Cesar knew Eddie from the neighborhood. In the middle of his second lesson, the kid went into the kitchen to get a glass of water: later, while getting dressed to go out, the Mambo King couldn’t find a gold-banded Timex watch and about twenty dollars in cash that he had left in the drawer of his bedroom dresser. Missing, too, was a Ronson lighter from another drawer and a silver ring which the Mambo King had received from one of his fans. Eddie was caught trying to peddle the ring in a Harlem pawnshop, and did an afternoon in the juvenile pen. He was never allowed back into the house, but the Mambo King continued giving lessons to his other students, a handful of whom ended up as struggling happy professionals.

Now he was listening to Eugenio practicing his trumpet and it was raining. Under a blanket of late-afternoon drowsiness, he listened carefully to the kid, whose playing sounded so distant: at times he confused the raindrops on the window ledges with those which used to fall in Cuba, and turned happily in bed, as if he were a kid again, when sleep was beautiful and the world seemed an endless thing. Slowly he came out of this—his dog Poochie had started barking because a fire alarm down the street had gone off—and he sat up and lit a cigarette. He’d been out real late the night before, working some job in the Bronx, and his head was pounding. Something about a woman in a short green dress kissing him in front of a jukebox, and then something else about a horrendous time trying to get a cab in those dead Bronx streets at four in the morning. Then what could he remember? Last thing he knew, he was resting in bed and could feel his tie being slipped off from around his neck, someone unbuttoning his shirt and trying to pull it off his back. Then the pleasure of his shoes slipping off his feet, and those tired soles refreshed by the cool night air. Then: “Good night, Uncle,” and the light clicking off.