Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Though they lived in a cheerful and noisy solar, their cramped two-room apartment was a somber place. He’d gotten work for a time as a pit musician in a big movie house, backing up the singers and comedians who would entertain the audiences between films; loaded crates in the market; and then, through a new acquaintance, got himself — and his brother Nestor, who had come out to join him — jobs as busboy and waiter over at the Havana chapter of the Explorers’ Club. With people on the streets, and friends in the cafés and bars and dance halls, he was a cheerful man, but when it came to his wife he’d spend hours without saying a word to her, and when she crossed a room, he didn’t notice. She had become this invisibility who sometimes shared his bed and who’d carry his daughter in her arms across the room, to sit in a square of sunlight.

In those months he completely gave in to a family affliction: every other woman walking the streets of Havana seemed infinitely, painfully more beautiful and desirable than his own wife. He’d come home at night, get dressed up, and head out to the dance halls, a dandy in a black-brimmed cane hat. He pretended not to hear her calling out, “Please, why don’t you stay home with me?” Pretended not to hear her “Please don’t go.”

He found himself whistling at the girls walking on the promenade of the Prado; he was the slick macho with hat tilted low over his brow, out on the sidewalk in front of the El Dandy clothing shore, giving the up-and-down to women; he was the crooning guitarist, eyebrows cocked high, serenading the pretty tourists on their way into the Hotel Nacional, the T-shirted man in plaid bathing trunks, skulking along the balconies of the hotel and heading clandestinely for a stairway the fuck out of there, the fellow writhing on a sun-baked bed on a Tuesday afternoon in a room facing the sea.

After a while, he simply pretended that he had never been married: he kept his thin wedding band tucked away in a cane suitcase among the sheets of paper on which he’d written down his ideas for songs with names like “Ingratitude,” “Deceitful Heart,” “A Tropical Romance.” Occasionally he grew nostalgic for that time of happiness when he had gotten close to Julián and his family, when he had fallen in love with Luisa, and then he would settle down again and they would be happy for weeks. But things went in cycles with him. The baby made it really difficult. He would storm around saying, “If it wasn’t for the kid, I’d be a free man.” He horrified his wife, who kept trying to make him happy. This went on for six months, then he finally pushed her too far.

He was in a fruit market down the street from where he lived, a market crowded with wagons and stands, ice sellers and coffee vendors, fish and poultry sellers, wandering among the tubers and thick plantains, when he noticed a woman, no prettier than most women, but exuding, in his opinion, a rampant sensuality. She wore a wedding ring. She looked bored. Perhaps her husband no longer made love to her at night, or perhaps he was an effeminate man who could hardly get it up, or perhaps he liked to abuse her at night, squeezing her breasts until they turned black and blue. Circling around the arcade, Cesar followed this woman, who avoided him coyly, as if they were playing a game, disappearing among the columns.

He would turn up at her solar in the afternoons when her husband was working. He couldn’t remember her name, but in the Hotel Splendour the Mambo King remembered how she would get all violent during the act of love and had the bad habit of yanking hard on his quivering testicles at the moment of his climax, so hard he would have pain for days. The sordidness of all this turned his stomach years later, but back then he took this woman for granted, in the same way that he took his wife and all women for granted. One day it caught up with him. When he’d gotten tired of this woman and moved on, she turned up at the solar one afternoon and told Luisa about her affair with Cesar. (And did she describe the tattoo of an angel over the nipple on the right side of his chest, did she describe the burn scar on his right arm, the birthmark in the shape of a horn on his back, or his thing that used to creep up a hand’s width above his belly button?) By the time he came home that night, Luisa had left the apartment.

He found a letter saying that his abuse had driven her away. The family was waiting for her, she would manage better by herself with his child than with a man who did not appreciate the truly good things in his life, who spent his life chasing after tramps.

Hearing the word “cruel, cruel, cruel” in his sleep, he had a dream in which he was walking up that hill and meeting Julián García again for the first time. Then he started all over again with Luisa and for a time his pain and sorrow went away. He wrote her a letter begging her forgiveness, and she wrote back saying that she might forgive him if he returned to Oriente to talk things over with her. He felt relieved that she still cared for him but in the end declared in his macho manner, “No woman runs my life.” He believed that since she had left him, it was her duty to return. He spent a few months waiting, thinking that the door to the solar would open and that she would walk in. It never happened. He couldn’t understand her problems with him. Couldn’t she see that he was handsome and she was plain? Couldn’t she see that he was still a young man and wanted to have his way with other women? And how did she have the right to deprive his baby of her father? Hadn’t she watched him with Mariela? Seen how the baby cooed and fell happily asleep in his arms… Hadn’t he told her about the rough circumstances of his upbringing?

(You didn’t believe me, that for me as a kid it was a slap in the face and a kick in th e fondillo in the name of my father, who did as he pleased and shoved it up my ass.)

At first he spent many a night missing her, a humiliating pain gnawed inside him, a pain that said life was sad. If only she had known what it was to be a handsome caballero with a nice singing voice and a bestial thing between his legs and youth burning in his veins, wouldn’t she have known better?

“If she turns up at my door, then we’ll see.”

But living in Havana without her got him into a really bad way — many a night found him charging madly and drunkenly down the streets of La Marina.

“My little daughter, my precious little daughter, Mariela.”

Sip of whiskey.

“Mariela…”

Then he softened and backed down from his stubborn stance, given the distance of time and nostalgia. He had speeches all prepared. He would go back to Oriente and sweet-talk her. “I have no excuses… I don’t know what it is. I’ve always been alone. You know my father, he was un bruto with my mother, I never learned any other way.”

He decided to return to Oriente to reclaim his daughter, and showed up at the house of Luisa’s parents, where she had been staying, pounding the door with a shoe and demanding that he be shown the proper respect.

“Only if you behave in a civil manner,” he was told.

He expected to find her in bad shape, pale and gaunt. But she seemed happier, and that bothered him, made him angry. “She couldn’t have loved me very much” is what he came to think. They sat facing each other in the parlor of the house, the family skulking in nearby rooms. The formality of the situation startled him. They spoke like old, passing acquaintances rather than a husband and wife of nearly three years. He had searched his mind for the right words that would break her down, force her to accept his actions. He refused to admit to any wrongdoing, refused to concede that he had treated her badly. He said that his letters had already confessed to his sins. Why should he be humiliated again? Despite the fact that he was the budding composer of beautiful romantic boleros that exposed the sweetest sentiments, he felt at a loss for the proper words. It was the one time in his life, he would tell himself years later, when he had truly lost his composure and suffered dearly for it. After demanding that she return to him, he had been told by his wife, Luisa, in a calm and delicately toned voice, “Only if you behave like a decent gentleman, then I’ll accompany you.”