The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (59 page)

Most recently, the term
gallego
is used in Cuba to describe light-skinned Cubans, or non-Cuban Spaniards, passing through.

*
“If you knew what I have to go through every day with this woman. These American women are enough to drive you nuts! My mother told me a million times: Ricky, never marry an American woman unless you’re looking for one big headache. And she was right, I should’ve married that girl back in Cuba! Now there was a quiet girl who never bothered me, who knew where her bread was buttered. She wasn’t crazy! She always left me alone, you know what I mean,
compañeros?”

*
Always a nice hello and sometimes a reunion, the fellows inviting each other out to jam sessions. In the Hotel Splendour he remembered that one of his favorite jam sessions took place when Benny the conga player invited him over to the Museum of Natural History, where he worked, in his reincarnated life, as a guard. Around nine one night, when it was really dead, Cesar showed up with a few other musicians and they ended up playing in a small office just off the Great Hall of Dinosaurs, Benny playing the drums and a fellow named Rafael strumming a guitar and Cesar singing and blowing the trumpet, this music echoing and humming through the bones of those prehistoric creatures—the Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus and woolly mammoth, breathing heavy in the vastness of that room and click-clacking onto the marble floors melodies caught in their great hooked jaws and in the curve of their gargantuan spinal columns.

Table of Contents

SİDE A: In the Hotel Splendour 1980

SİDE B: Sometime later in the night in the Hotel Splendour

Toward the end, while listening to the wistful “Beautiful María of My Soul”