The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (49 page)

“Bueno,
I think what he did was difficult. For me, he was very Cuban, and the music he played in those days was good and Cuban enough for me. You know he sang a lot of old Cuban ballads on that show.”

But mainly he talked about the different dance halls, which bands were playing where, and the crisscross of musicians and the chumminess of the songwriters—“A lost epoch,” they concurred.

“And who do you like now?”

“Most of the same. My favorites have remained much the same.”

“You mean el Conjunto Mambo Kings?”

“No, I’ve always liked Puente, Rodríguez, Fajardo, Palmieri, Machito, Beny More, Nelo Sosa. I don’t know, I guess you can name them and I’ll like them. And there’s Celia Cruz and the singer Carlos Argentina. I could go on, there are so many great talents still working.”

“And yourself?”

Cesar laughed, puffed on his cigarette.

“I’m still working here and there. Nothing spectacular, you understand, but I’m still out there exercising my vocal cords.”

“To our benefit.” Then: “Well, now we’re going to sign off, but before we do, I’m going to leave you with this fine little
canción.
”

With that, the interviewer cued “Beautiful María of My Soul,” which played out of windows, out of car radios, and at the beach, where fine young women lying out in the sun, bodies shiny with suntan lotion, and hearts and heads filled with thoughts of the future, heard the song.

Occasionally, he would get a call from an agent or a promoter talking about bringing him back into the public’s eye.

Usually nothing happened.

But one day he was hauling garbage out the basement, dragging the heavy incinerator cans out to the curb, when he heard a car horn. A Mercedes-Benz had pulled up and, sitting behind its wheel, looking plush in a white sable coat, plumed hat with leopard-skin band, his old Mambo King pianist, the fabulous Miguel Montoya.

It took him a second to figure that out. “Miguel,
hombre
!”

And soon they were embracing.

“My God, but you look prosperous.”

“Yes,” he said. “I can’t complain.”

Later they drove over to one of Cesar’s favorite spots on 129th Street. Miguel must have been in his late seventies, but he seemed still to be going strong and, by his own account, had done well for himself, making Muzak recordings in California—his was the creamy, velvet, dulcet-toned piano playing “Moon River,” “
Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,
” and “Beautiful María of My Soul” that came out over supermarket, airport, bus-terminal loudspeakers everywhere—and writing scores for low-budget Mexican horror films with titles like
The Beautiful Vampires of the Hacienda of Terror!
(Cesar had seen that film in the Bronx in 1966. He had gone to see it with his nephew Eugenio and a few of his friends—Louie, a lanky Puerto Rican, and Victor, a newly arrived Cuban—and they had sat in the bluish glow of the horrific light in a theater crowded with worldly children who laughed and clapped while watching the big-titted female vampires—their breasts rounded, pointy, and succulent under their black transparent gowns—bounding across verandas, where sombreroed musicians played, and crashing through high-arched windows to claim the amorous favors and blood of their male victims.)

A nice long afternoon, drinking and getting reacquainted, and Miguel finally bringing up one of the reasons, aside from friendship, for his visit. “A promoter I know, an Englishman who lives in London, has been wanting to mount a revival show at the London Palladium and he asked me to put together an orchestra and a lineup of singers. Of course, I told him about you.”

“Yes?”

And the notion of traveling to Europe, to England, where he had never been, made the Mambo King happy.

“It’s all being planned now, but I have some good people lined up already. And who knows, maybe we can take the show on a tour, to Madrid, Paris, Rome, all those beautiful places.”

Miguel was enthusiastic enough to keep the Mambo King informed about the whole business, calling him every few months, but then he stopped hearing from him: and when he called Miguel’s number in Phoenix, Arizona, where he had his home, someone who was taking care of Miguel’s affairs informed the Mambo King that his old friend was dead.

“Coño!”

Once, he had almost seen his daughter again. He still corresponded with her, but what was she but a few fading lines of ink on paper? Then she wrote to say that her ballet company was going to be appearing in Montreal, Canada, in a production of
Giselle
with Alicia Alonso. Now in her early thirties, she had something to do with running the corps de ballet, and would he like to see her in that wintry city? Yes, he wrote. They made the arrangements and he bought a ticket, but the morning of the flight to Montreal he allowed his symptoms to blossom, and he could not move from his bed, and settled for a long, static-ridden conversation with his daughter at ten-thirty in the evening. His voice tired and trying to explain the pains in his body and the pains in his heart.

Then it was: “Well, I’m sorry we did not get the chance to see each other, Papi.”

“Yes, daughter. It’s the same for me. Another time?”

“Yes.”

“You take care of yourself, my daughter.”

“Yes, you take care of yourself, Papi.”

And goodbye forever.

On another night, a singing job, and he came up out of the coolness of the basement, where it always felt like autumn, and undressed before his mirror. Off with his gray utility uniform, off with his belt with its loop of apartment keys, his shorts, his dirty white socks, and down the hallway to the bathroom.

Then the reverse, getting dressed. First, cologne behind his ears and neck; then talcum powder under his arms and on his hairy chest, with its scar over the right nipple. Clean pair of striped boxer shorts, then high silk socks with garters. On with his flamingo-pink shirt and fading white suit, tight around the middle, the front buttons straining under the threads’ pull. Then on with his sky-blue tie and silver tie clip. He rubbed slick Brylcreem into his hair, put a little Vaseline under his eyes to help disguise the wrinkles, then applied a wax pencil over his wisp of a mustache, like Cesar Romero’s in the old movies. Then he put on his white golden-buckled shoes and spit-polished the soft leather with a chamois cloth. When he finished that, he looked himself over. Satisfied that he had not left a stitch out of place, he was ready to go.

Later, Cesar and his musicians were on the stage of the Club Tropical Paradise in the Bronx, a place run by Puerto Ricans who had been big Mambo King fans, finishing up their second set, a string of classics like
“El Bodeguero
” and “
Cachita,
” which had gotten even the old grandmothers and grandfathers to shake their bodies and laugh gaily as if they were young again. He had watched a wisp of a woman, thin and bent over like a branch, in a many-layered black dress from another age, turning into a twelve-year-old girl, her arthritic shoulders pulsing forward as if she’d just joined a conga line. Inspired, the Mambo King had blown his trumpet hard, winked, and shouted, “V
aya!
” the notes of his solo sailing the rippling sea of 3/2 time, and the music had sounded so good that even his drowsy bass player Manny, tired from his day’s work, began to awaken.

And with that they had gone into another song, and the Mambo King, despite a bad urge to urinate, began to dance, moving his big frame on the tiptoes of his white golden-buckled shoes. He sang and blew his trumpet hard as if he were a young man in Havana getting drunk and charging down the street with all the energy in the world, blowing until his face was red, his sides ached, and his head seemed ready to burst. Stepping back, he had turned toward his musicians, signaling the turnaround-and-out.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said—

. . . in the Hotel Splendour, wishing he didn’t have the bad pains . . .—into the microphone. “Thank you so much. We’re glad you’re enjoying yourselves.”

And with his bladder full to aching (liver, kidney, hole-torn gut), he clicked off the microphone, stepped down off the wooden platform, and made his way across the crowded dance floor in the darkness, accidentally touching some nice female bottoms. Moving through that room, he felt surrounded, pressed, overwhelmed by youth. In this crowd of mostly young people, he felt ambassadorial, as if he were there to represent the declining older generation, closer to death, as they say, than to the light of youth.

—Running in a field, the ground rushing under him like a river—

So many pretty young women with big half-moon gold and pagoda-shaped earrings and with lightning-whipped curls and nice asses on slender, long-ankled dancers’ legs. Silky blouses, thick with femininity, quivering and sheeny in the red party lights. Jostled, and lumbering, he pressed close to a woman who smelled like jasmine and sweat.

Nearly sixty now. And were the young chicks looking at him, the way they used to, up and down, and hoping that he might walk over and strike up a conversation? Now they treated him with a cheerful respect, with looks that said, “My, but he might have been a lady-killer once upon a time.” In the old days he couldn’t walk down the street without some pretty woman looking him sweetly, longingly in the eyes, but now?
Dios mío,
he had to work a lot harder for his seduction, and if he wanted a younger woman he’d have to pay for her, because now the women who desired him were not young chicks anymore, and that was something he couldn’t accept.

But then, as he was making his way toward the toilet, he felt someone tugging at his jacket sleeve, and taking hold of his elbow, a pretty woman of thirty, thirty-five.
Coño!

“Señor Castillo? My name is Lydia Santos. This is my cousin Alberto”—across the table from her, a thin-mustached man who resembled the 1930s film actor Leon Errol. “And I just wanted to tell you that I really like your music. You know, I have seen you before, years ago, when I was a young girl. My father would take me to the Teatro Hispano to see all the shows. I saw you there and in Brooklyn. And sometimes up in the Bronx. What was the name of that other place?”

“The Savoy,” her cousin said.

“Yes. We played there a few times. With the Tiny Tina Maracas Orchestra. Many years ago. In 1954, it was.”

(And now, on top of this memory, Tiny Tina Maracas and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra, playing a rumba version of “Moonlight Sonata,” and one night Cesar and Tina huddled at a table drinking daiquiris, and Tina, magnificent in a flame-red dress and mantilla comb in her hair, saying to the Mambo King, “Would you guys like to work with us on second bill at this place in the Catskills?” and this fading out to a moonlit night where at three in the morning the Mambo King and Tiny Tina are tottering along the edge of a lake, enchanted by the reflection of the moon and stars, teary with light in the water, and the pines stone-blue in the distance, and at one moment when the two bandleaders were standing close enough to feel each other’s breath, she turned to him and put two of her fingers inside his shirt, her nails touching his skin and gnarly hair, and she said, in the fashion of that time, “Come on, ya big lug, why don’t you kiss me?”)

“I was just a kid, but I really liked your orchestra.”

“Thank you, it’s very much a compliment. Coming from so pretty a woman.” And he bowed.

But there was suffering in his expression. The Mambo King wanted to stay and talk, but his bladder was aching. “Some more drinks here!” he called to the waiter.

Then he leaned forward and said to her, “I’ll come back later so that we can talk, yes?”

Continuing toward the hallway toilets, thinking about that young girl of thirty or thirty-five. Lydia Santos. Most of the younger women he met had never heard of his orchestra, the Mambo Kings, or if they knew the name it was one out of dozens of other antique orchestras whose records their parents played when they were feeling nostalgic.

“I was just a kid, but I really liked your orchestra,” he heard again as he made his way past the blaring jukebox.

At the end of a narrow foyer was a bolted-shut fire door, which disturbed him. He had once played a club in Queens where a fire had broken out in the kitchen deep fryer and they had had to smash in the fire door to the alley with an ax. (Wished that had happened at the Club Havana.) Huddled against the door, people were coughing and weeping because of the smoke and fear. That’s why he always checked the fire exits.

—The fire engines sounding on the night of Nestor’s death—

Along the hallway wall, a line of young men waiting to use the toilet (for urination, defecation, sprucing up, smoking
yerba,
the inhalation of cocaine), and among them the groom,
el novio,
for whom this party was being thrown. The young men were really fucked up and happy. One running joke in the line? About how the groom’s sex organ was going to be sore by the following afternoon. He answered, “It’s already been sore for a long time”—and they all slapped five.

In the presence of the young men, and buoyed by the attention of Lydia Santos, the Mambo King forgot his age and adopted the posture of a young wolf, with his collar and bow tie loosened. Exposed was his chest of tangled fleecy black-and-gray hair, and, on a chain, the crucifix and money amulet and the small bronze head of Changó nestling against the primeval dampness of his skin. A tallish fellow complimented the Mambo King (even though he had pushed the groom for one of those new disco groups with fancy machines, syn-drums and synthesizer pianos, but the bride’s father had said, “A group is a group, and this Cesar Castillo’s a real pro,” which meant that Cesar charged a lot less than the others, and who cared if his music was a little old-fashioned?) and then offered the Mambo King and his bassist a drag of his marijuana cigarette.

No, thank you, he preferred rum over smoke, because smoke made him feel crazy, hear voices, and suspect that his dead brother Nestor was just around the corner.

Another young man made polite conversation and asked the Mambo King his opinion about the upcoming Panamanian, Rubén Blades, whom Cesar had heard and liked. “You must have known a lot of the greats in your time, huh?”