Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

And now beautiful snow was falling, Bing Crosby snow, twirling-in-circles-with-your-mouth-open snow. Baltimore 1949 snow, coming down from heaven.

Then he was walking along with Nestor, going to all the different dance halls: the Palladium, the Park Palace, the Savoy, someone saying, “Benny, Myra, I want you to meet two good friends of mine, compañeros from Cuba, and really great players, too. They surely know their way around a son and a charanga, know what it is. Benny, this is Cesar Castillo, he’s a singer and instrumentalist, and this is his brother Nestor, one of the best trumpeters you’ll ever hear.”

“Cesar, Nestor, I want you to meet a nice guy and, you know, a helluva musician. Fellows, meet Frank Grillo — Machito.”

“A pleasure.”

“Cesar Castillo.”

“Xavier Cugat.”

“Cesar Castillo.”

“Pérez Prado, hombre !”

“Cesar Castillo.”

“Vanna Vane.”

… pushing up the skirt of her sundress… taking off her panties, and his sex organ inflamed by sunlight and blood. Moans of pleasure in the solitude of the woods. His thick tongue jammed up high between her legs. Swig of wine, kiss of her ankle.

“Oh, Vanna, aren’t we having a nice picnic today?”

“You said it.”

Hearing the music, he remembered feeling the pork fat of his dinners in Cuba dripping down his chin and onto his fingers, which he’d lick with pleasure. Remembered a whore struggling with a thick rubber on his member, how he had tried to pull it down over himself, how her fingers took hold of his fingers, and then how she used both hands to get it all the way down over his thing. He remembered pressing the valves of the trumpet a thousand times, remembered the beauty of a rose, remembered his fingers slipping under a wire-frame 36C brassiere, Vanna’s, his fingers sinking into the warm skin. He remembered hearing alley cats at night, the Red Skelton radio show in the alley. From the sixth floor, the Jack Benny show, and then, years later, in the courtyard, I Love Lucy.

Clouds of smoke from the incinerator hurting his eyes, clouds of smoke breaking up over the rooftop.

His mother holding his hands, his mother closing her hands around his.

His mother’s soft heartbeat…

And he runs up the stairway again and finds Nestor playing that song again — Oh, brother, if you knew how I’ve thought of you all these years — and he sings this new song, this fucking song he had been working on for a long, long time, and when he’s done, he says, “That’s how I feel about María.” And, love-struck,he looked out the window as if it were raining flowers instead of snowing.

“Even though I hate to admit it, brother, that’s a nice little song you’ve written. But why don’t we do this with the chorus.”

“Yes, that’s much better.”

And with a sly smile on his lips, he nodded to the quinto player, who was banging down hard on the drums with his taped-up fingers for the intro, bap, bap, bap, bap! Then the piano came in with its vamp, then the bass, then the horns and all the drums. Then another nod from Cesar, and Nestor began to play his horn solo, the notes flying across the room like firebirds, and so mellow and happy that all the musicians were saying, “Yeah, that’s it. He’s got it.”

Cesar dancing with his white golden-buckled shoes, darting in and out like agitated compass needles, and he went back running through Las Piñas as if he were a little kid again, blowing horns and banging pots and making noise in the arcades…

Floating on a sea of tender feelings, under a brilliant starlit night, he fell in love again: with Ana and Miriam and Verónica and Vivian and Mimi and Beatriz and Rosario and Margarita and Adriana and Graciela and Josefina and Virginia and Minerva and Marta and Alicia and Regina and Violeta and Pilar and Finas and Matilda and Jacinta and Irene and Jolanda and Carmencita and María de la Luz and Eulalia and Conchita and Esmeralda and Vivian and Adela and Irma and Amalia and Dora and Ramona and Vera and Gilda and Rita and Berta and Consuelo and Eloisa and Hilda and Juana and Perpetua and María Rosita and Delmira and Floriana and Inés and Digna and Angélica and Diana and Ascensión and Teresa and Aleida and Manuela and Celia and Emelina and Victoria and Mercedes and…

And he loved the family: Eugenio, Leticia, Delores, and his brothers, living and dead, loved them very much.

Now, in his room in the Hotel Splendour, the Mambo King watched the spindle come to the end of the “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” Then he watched it lift up and click back into position for the first song again. The clicking of the mechanism beautiful, like the last swallow of whiskey.

When you are dying, he thought, you just know it, because you feel a heavy black rag being pulled out of you.

And he knew that he was going, because he felt his heart burning with light. And he was tired, wanting relief.

He started to raise the glass to his lips but he could raise his arm no longer. To someone seeing him there, it would look as if he were sitting still. What was he thinking in those moments?

He was happy. At first, things got very dark, but when he looked again, he saw Vanna Vane in the hotel room, kicking off her white high heels and hitching up her skirt, saying, “Would you do me a favor, honey? Undo my garters for me?”

And so he happily knelt before her, undoing the snaps of her garters, and then he slid her nylons down and planted a kiss on her thigh and then another on her buttock, where the softest skin, round and creamy, peeked out from her panties, and he pulled them down to her knees and with his majestic, ravaged visage between her legs he gave her a deep tongue-kiss. And soon they were on the bed, frolicking as they used to, and he had a big erection and no pain in his loins, so big that her pretty mouth had to struggle with the thick and cumbersome proportions of his sexual apparatus. They were entangled for a long time and he made love to her until she broke into pieces and then a certain calm came over him and for the first time that night he felt like going to sleep.

THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN THEY found him, with a drink in his hand and a tranquil smile on his face, this slip of paper, just a song, lying on the desk by his elbow. Just one of the songs he had written out himself:

WHEN I CALLED THE NUMBER that had been listed on Desi Arnaz’s letterhead, I expected to speak with a secretary, but it was Mr. Arnaz himself who answered the phone.

“Mr. Arnaz?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Eugenio Castillo.”

“Ah, Eugenio Castillo, Nestor’s son?”

“Yes.”

“Nice to hear from you, and where are you calling from?”

“From Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles? What brings you out here?”

“Just a vacation.”

“Well then, if you are so close by, you must come to visit me.”

“Yes?”

“Of course. Can you come out tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Then come. In the late afternoon. I’ll be waiting to see you.”

It had taken me a long time to finally work up the nerve to call Desi Arnaz. About a year ago, when I had written to him about my uncle, he was kind enough to send his condolences and ended that letter with an invitation to his home. When I finally decided to take him up on his offer and flew to Los Angeles, where I stayed in a motel near the airport, I had wanted to call him every day for two weeks. But I was afraid that his kindness would turn into air, like so many other things in this life, or that he would be different from what I had imagined. Or he would be cruel or disinterested, or simply not really concerned about visitors like me. Instead, I drank beer by the motel swimming pool and passed my days watching jet planes crossing the sky. Then I made the acquaintance of one of the blondes by the pool, and she seemed to have a soft spot for guys like me, and we fell desperately in love for a week. Then ended things badly. But one afternoon, a few days later, while I was resting in bed and looking through my father’s old book, Forward America! just the contact of my thumb touching the very pages that he — and my uncle — had once turned (the spaces in all the little letters were looking at me like sad eyes) motivated me to pick up the telephone. Once I’d arranged the visit, my next problem was to get out to Belmont. On the map, it was about thirty miles north of San Diego along the coast, but I didn’t drive. So I ended up on a bus that got me into Belmont around three in the afternoon. Then I took a cab and soon found myself standing before the entranceway to Desi Arnaz’s estate.