The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (47 page)

“Back in the old days before the revolution,” said Rafael, “we used to listen to jazz in Havana on CMQ, sneak around to all the big hotels to hear the big bands and jam sessions with people like Dizzy Gillespie . . .”

“He’s great,” said Rico.

“In this one bar we knew up at La Concha”—he was referring to a beach popular with young people and musicians, about forty minutes’ drive out of Havana—“we’d listen to music and meet other musicians. Nice days. But then we had the revolution and what we hear is this jive Eastern European jazz like pompom waltz music, and sometimes we’d be lucky, and get our hands on a short-wave radio and listen to the real stuff from the States and Mexico. In any case, we were both working in Havana, Rico in a cigar factory and myself driving a bus around the city, and we both just wanted to get out of there. I mean, what was there for us? Fidel closed down so many of the clubs and hotels, and what work we got, playing weddings and dances for the Russians, was not to our liking. To tell the truth, we could see that he was doing some good things with the poor people, but for us? What was there? Nothing. In any case, it was Rico here who pushed that we leave. But it wasn’t easy.”

The brothers’ expressions? World-weary exhaustion, followed by healthy, appreciative smiles.

Then the story of a friend, a bassist, traveling with the Tropicana Review out of Havana in Mexico City, climbing out the second-floor window of a hotel bathroom and running for blocks and blocks and catching a taxi that took him to the American Embassy. Another traveling performer, a male singer, leaving his dressing room in London disguised as a woman.

“. . . But, as not to let this nice little gathering slip into a maudlin state of affairs,” the Mambo King remembered the older brother saying, “I make a toast to our friend Cesar Castillo.”

“And to the lovely ladies who have brought us tender
flan
and warm smiles,” said Cesar. “And to our new friends.”

“And to Dizzy Gillespie and Zoot Sims and John Coltrane,” said the younger brother.

“
Salud!
” all around, even for Leticia, who drank a glass of wine, which made her cheeks turn red.

Enjoying the role of
patrón,
Cesar lifted his glass for a final toast: “To your future!”

Then it was good night to Delores and Leticia, and the Mambo King set the brothers up in one of the rooms in the back and went off, a little drunk, to the club.

The next afternoon, he showed them around the neighborhood, introducing the Sánchez brothers to his friends. And he pointed across the street, saying: “See that place across the way? That’s the Club Havana. That’s mine.” Then: “We’ll see what work I can find for you. Maybe in the kitchen, if you like.”

Within a few weeks, the brothers were working in the Club Havana as dishwashers and waiters. Now and then, when things were slow, they’d jam, Cesar sitting in on the piano, and the brothers beside him on the stage playing their instruments. Cesar had heard a lot of jazz in the fifties, and while he could make his way around a few lilting blues riffs, as he got older he definitely preferred living in boleroland and melodyville. But the brothers played wild and looping music, crows and nightingales in a cage, around which he circled, while cheerfully trying to keep up.

He remembered that.

One night, he had this dream: The brothers were shouting up to his window from the street, and when he looked out, they were down below in
guayaberas
and white linen trousers, their faces tormented with the cold. The city was covered with snow and he called out the window, “Don’t be worried, I’m going to let you in.” He screamed in his sleep so loud that the older brother appeared at his bedroom door, asking, “Are you all right?”

(And another night, a glimpse of an eerier dream: the entire neighborhood trapped inside a glacier, everything frozen in its tracks, but music piping through the ice.)

“Yes, yes. It’s the club. Sometimes I think too much about the club.”

(And sometimes he would shut his eyes and imagine that it was 1949 again.)

Liking them, he went out of his way to make both brothers comfortable and to help them get work. He called bandleaders and club owners to put out the word that the musicians were available. He took them down to Macy’s and Gimbels and bought them nice suits, new shoes, took them over to the beauty salon, where Ana María cut their hair. He felt bad when they had to wash dishes, but paid them even on slow nights when there were hardly any dishes to wash. When he heard that the older brother had a thing for the singer Celia Cruz, he went out and bought an armful of her recordings, and when he heard Rico say that he missed having his own phonograph, he went out to a pawnshop on 116th Street off Manhattan Avenue and bought him one. (Now, at night, he would hear Rico jamming along with the recordings of Machito and Miles Davis.) He took them along with him to meetings of the Cubans of Washington Heights, brought them every Sunday to Delores’s, where they enjoyed the hospitality of the family. (“Anytime you want a meal,” Pedro told them, “you’re welcome.”) And he was concerned for them. He blamed himself whenever he saw Rico, homesick and claustrophobic, yawning before the television, blamed himself on the grayest days when Rico or his older brother would stand before the window, heartbroken. Not one to lecture others, he found himself pointing to the 123rd Street projects and saying, “You don’t want to go in there.” He identified the junkies on the street and the lowlife drug dealers who sometimes popped up on the corner. When he looked into Rico’s or Rafael’s eyes and found sadness, he would say, “Do you want a drink, my friend?” And in an hour they would be halfway through a bottle of rum.

Once he almost told the brothers about his brother Nestor. They’d seen his picture on the curvy-glass-front cabinet in the corner of the living room, and they’d seen the Mambo King pictures in the hall. He didn’t tell them because why should he share his sadness.

On the other hand, he might have told them about Nestor a dozen times, and couldn’t remember.

Sometimes he found himself staring at Rico and thinking about Nestor, wondering where so much time had gone. Then he would sit at the table, lamenting the pleasures, the main ones being affection and comfort, his brother was missing out on, the pleasures his brother would never have.

On a Sunday night, he fell asleep on the living-room couch after visiting with Bernardito and Frankie and their women in the chatty, lively household upstairs. He had another dream, this one beautiful.

He was in a field in Cuba, wading in wildflowers, with his brother at his side, picking them for their mother.

He hadn’t had so beautiful a dream in a long time.

They remained with the Mambo King for three months, helping him out in the club and here and there in the building, while also trying to find work as musicians. They got along with everybody, and only Leticia had her heart broken by one of them: Eighteen years old and agonizingly fine, she had given up the matronly dresses and books that her mother bought her and taken to wearing a silver-lame miniskirt and pink blouses and sunburst-pattern brassieres, all to impress Rico, who hardly noticed her. The Mambo King was so oblivious of Leticia’s life that his discovery of this drama, which had been going on for several months, came to him as a complete surprise. He’d seen her crying from time to time but blamed her tears on the monthly female cycle, overheard Delores lecturing Leticia about the essential unworthiness of men, heard Delores threatening Leticia with convent school if she didn’t straighten out, and, still, he remained dense about the particulars of his niece’s existence. He became aware of the situation only when Leticia came to visit Rico at the Club Havana, wearing so seductive a red dress that Delores came after her with a belt and beat her. Intervening as a peacemaker, the Mambo King sent Delores home and held the weeping Leticia in his arms, wondering, “Who is this woman brimming over with emotion?”

For a half hour he listened to Leticia’s laments: how she felt as if she were a dog on a leash, as her mother never let her do anything by herself, that all she wanted was a little life of her own. And tears and more tears, and the Mambo King not knowing what to say except “These things will pass.”

Later, while standing alone by the bar, he tried to reconcile his memory of Leticia as the skinny, affectionate little girl who would come running into his arms years ago with the love-throttled raven-haired beauty whose ample femininity and dense emotions now confused him. He had tried to stop her crying by offering to buy her infantile presents—an ice-cream cone, a doll, a jump rope—but she kept crying. Something about her tears took him back to lots of other women whom he seemed to identify with tears—his mother crying in bed, his wife weeping on the street, Delores crying in bed—and still he did not know what to do. In the end, he gave her a hug, a ten-dollar bill, and took her home to the apartment, without saying another word.

And the brothers? While Rafael, the older brother, liked to go downtown on his nights off, visiting friends (they would sometimes come up to drink cheaply on evenings when Rafael was waiting tables) and going to jazz clubs in the Village (the Half Note on Spring Street being a favorite), Rico would put on his blue pinstriped Macy’s suit and head off to the subway, smelling all sweet from a rose-honey cologne; a nice story really, a romance involving a girl he had known back in Cuba, with whom he hooked up again. She lived in New Jersey with her family. He’d go out to see her a few nights a week, slicking back his hair and preening himself before the mirror. He’d ride home on the PATH trains at four in the morning, moving quietly through the house, not wanting to disturb anyone. Usually the Mambo King would be awake and sitting at the kitchen table with Frankie or one of his other friends, speaking quietly, the man fighting sleep, or he might be sitting in the living room watching television or, pad in hand, going over some old arrangement that he was trying to remember. Or he’d be trying to write a song.

One night, Rico came home and joined the Mambo King at the table and related that he was going to marry this woman, that he and his older brother were going to be living in her family’s house in Elizabeth.

The Mambo King shrugged. “Let me know what I can get you as a present,” he told Rico. And he patted the younger musician on the back. And, smiling, he said, “I knew I smelled love in the air!”

There was something else: he asked the brothers to perform at the club.

It was arranged. One night Rafael and Rico Sánchez appeared on the stage of the Club Havana, backed by Manny the bassist, a pianist named Eddie Torres, and good old reliable Pito on the drums. They played a lot of jazzy-sounding instrumentals, some old dance standards. Now and then, the older brother would step to the microphone and sing a bolero, and in the tradition of bolero singers, his vocal cords quivered, his eyes closed, and his expression became pained and sincere. Seated at a back table, Delores, Leticia, Eugenio, and Pedro. And at the bar, drinking shots of rum, the Mambo King, listening attentively and feeling pleased by the repetition of certain events.

“Adiós,
my friends,” he recalled telling them when they left.

A
FTER THIS, THINGS STARTED TO
change at the club. Even though Cesar owed Pérez thousands of dollars and seemed to be doing a decent business, he made no payments, claiming that he just didn’t have the money. And why? Because he was still playing the big man, hiring friends, like the brothers from Cuba, keeping two waitresses on salary, a cook named Esmeralda, Frankie behind the bar, and dishwashers, and, on top of that, giving meals and drinks away, and paying his musicians decently, regardless of the take at the door.

Hearing reports of this conspicuous generosity, Pérez one day called a meeting of the partners.

“I don’t know how to relate this to you, my friend,” Pérez told him. “But it’s my opinion that you think you’re running a social club, yes?”

“No, but it’s my club.”

“Yes, run with my money.”

In total, Pérez claimed to have put over forty thousand dollars into the place. Manny, who had put in five thousand, didn’t really care how Cesar ran the club, as long as it made the Mambo King happy, but Pérez stated the case that, as a businessman, he had to look out for his own interests.

“All I want is that you leave the management to me, okay? Otherwise, you can continue as you like, bringing in bands and greeting the patrons. That is what you do best, understand?”

Then he gave Cesar a hearty
abrazo.
“Believe me, as God is my witness, this is the right thing to do.”

Eventually Pérez sent two of his men in. One resembled the boxer Roberto Durán and possessed his piercing black eyes just before the kill. The other seemed more easygoing, low-keyed, until he spoke to you and then he’d smile, lips curled with sarcastic intent. They called the Mambo King Papi and humored him when he gave them orders. They didn’t much like Eugenio or his friends, didn’t like “dead-beat” Frankie, measured out the drinks, gave no buy-backs, and never fed the jukebox with quarters from the register.

They fired one of the waitresses, making Cesar look cheap, which depressed him.

But with this new management came a whole new clientele. Sports from Brooklyn who would double-park their lavender Cadillacs out on the street and who wore thick gold chains around their necks. They’d sit at their tables and pull out thick wads of twenty-dollar bills, and they favored “soul” music whose bottom-heavy bass lines nearly blew out the jukebox speakers. Bands were featured only one night a week now, Saturdays. Slowly the number of old Latin standards began to dwindle, and so did the number of older customers. And they were generous, giving out big tips and always buying the “boss,” Cesar Castillo, drinks. By midnight he would find himself leaving the club with Frankie by his side, so drunk that he sometimes could not see across the street. It was on one of those nights that he had another beautiful dream: the Club Havana was burning down, but it was a silent fire, like embers in the incinerator, without sirens or shattering glass, just the place burning up with all the bad people inside. Sometimes he would just make it to his stoop and sit there wishing that the club would burn.