Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

She read so much that Ana María, who liked to go to the dance halls, said to her one night, “You’re going to be an old woman all alone in a house without children or grandchildren, without a husband or love, you’ll have nothing but books coming out your ears unless you get serious about finding yourself a man.”

So, at her sister’s urging, she’d go out on dates. Some of them were Americans and some of them were Romeos just up from Cuba or Puerto Rico, friendly, garrulous fellows who seemed more like children than like men. She liked a few of the American boys, but would have nothing to do with them romantically. She always had the feeling that she was “saving” herself, for what or for whom she did not know. She’d sometimes feel saddened by her increasing indifference to romance but would tell herself, “I’ll know a good man when I see him.”

She went out, petted, necked a little, allowed these men the chance to feel her body. But she didn’t take it too seriously, finding the whole business of love and courtship disorienting. A man would take her to see Pecos Bill Meets the Apaches, and while she would sit absorbed in the excitement of stampeding horses and whooping Indians, the man would whisper, “You’re just so beautiful… Please, querida, a kiss.” And sometimes she’d kiss the man for the sake of being left alone. She’d double-date with Ana María but disliked it when the evenings lasted until three or four in the morning. She went out because she didn’t want to be a wallflower, but she was always happy to get home to the privacy of her room, where she could turn on the radio and read her books. She read books in Spanish and studiously read books in English. Having completed only two years of high school, she went to night classes twice a week.

When she came into the apartment, Ana María was ironing clothes in the kitchen, listening to some happy music on the radio and humming along. As usual, Delores got undressed and ready for a bath. It was always “Should I cook up some dinner tonight?” from Ana María, and “Maybe we should go to a movie? Huh?” But that night, as Delores made her way down the hall to the bathroom, it was Delores who said, “Why don’t we go dancing this weekend?”

“What made you think of that? My God, did someone ask you out?”

“A musician.”

“Oh, musicians are exciting!”

“This one’s like me, a quiet type of person.”

“Well, if you want to go, then I’ll go.”

That evening she took a nice long, leisurely bath. She sometimes took books with her, reading ten or twelve pages at a time, the book held out of the water, her breasts and thick pubic hair floating on the surface. She read a few pages, the scene where the man and woman kill the Greek in the Cain novel, and then she just decided to float and enjoy the water and the flight of her thoughts, speculation about that nice simpático young musician in whom she saw certain similarities to her father.

In the same way that the Mambo King’s mind kept circling certain events as he sat in the summer’s heat in the room in the Hotel Splendour years later, just as others in the family daydreamed about that past, Delores Fuentes heard her own kind of music and closed her eyes.

It was 1942 when Delores Fuentes, thirteen years old, and her father, Daniel, arrived in the Bronx from Havana. Her older sister, Ana María, had stayed behind in Cuba with their mother, who had refused to join him. He had come from the countryside and had found nothing but bad luck in the city, misfortunes that Delores was too young to understand. Why would his luck change in New York, her mother used to argue, where things were more difficult? She had refused to be thrown to the wolves and told him to go alone. Reluctantly, he got a visa and left Havana, taking his daughter with him.

Daniel was forty and did not speak English, and that made finding a job difficult, manpower shortage or not. Each evening she waited for him by the window, listened for his footsteps in the hall. For three months he looked for work without success. No English, no work, until he finally found a delivery job with a seltzer company, carrying heavy wooden boxes of metal-topped seltzer bottles up and down the stairs of one building after the next. His shift began at six-thirty in the morning and lasted until six at night. Their one bit of luck was finding an apartment through a friendly Cuban he’d met on the street. He’d come home to their walk-through apartment on 169th Street and Third Avenue with his back bent and muscles aching so much he’d just barely have the strength to eat his dinner in silence. Then he’d take a bath and retire to his big empty bed, undraping his bath towel and lying in the summer heat naked.

In imitation of her mother in Havana, Delores would cook for her father, making do with what she could find at the market in those days of war rationing. One night she wanted to surprise him. After he had taken to his bed, she made some caramel-glazed flan, cooked up a pot of good coffee, and happily made her way down the narrow hallway with a tray of the quivering flan. Pushing open the door, she found her father asleep, naked, and in a state of extreme sexual arousal. Terrified and unable to move, she pretended that he was a statue, though his chest heaved and his lips stirred, as if conversing in a dream… He with his suffering face, it, his penis, enormous… The funny thing was that, despite her fear, Delores wanted to pick up his thing and pull it like a lever; she wanted to lie down beside him and put her hand down there, releasing him from pain. She wanted him to wake up; she didn’t want him to wake up. In that moment, which she would always remember, she felt her soul blacken as if she had just committed a terrible sin and condemned herself to the darkest room in hell. She expected to turn around and find the devil himself standing beside her, a smile on his sooty face, saying, “Welcome to America.”

Around that time, she started to gush thick black pubic hair, which curled like flames and weaved out from her body; a single strand that she plucked out of curiosity was nearly a foot long, and there were so many she had to trim this shock of hair back with scissors. Her breasts ached with their weight, and she started to wake up bleeding on those sheets which she’d always kept meticulously clean. Then other things started to happen: boys on the street began to invite her to play games of tag and hide-and-seek down in the basement and tried to touch her breasts and get their fingers down under the rim of her brassiere. She would look in the full-length mirror tacked to the door in her room, asking herself, “Do I want this?” Did she want men giving her these looks on the street? She tried to dress like a boy, in trousers, but in the end her feminine vanity brought her back to the few dresses she owned, items that were getting tighter and more alluring each day.

One night, around Christmas, a year after their arrival, her father came home drunk with some of his friends from the seltzer plant: a couple of Italians, a Jewish fellow, a Puerto Rican, men feeling good after a Christmas party and happy to be free for a few days’ holiday. They came to the apartment with big boxes of pizza and cheese calzone. Her father never used to drink, but that night she saw him and the others drinking a lot of whiskey. Faces twisted, they were clapping hands to the dulcet strains of the Guy Lombardo Orchestra on the radio. Delores sat quietly, hands folded on her lap, watching them. Her father kept asking her, “What’s wrong, darling? What is it, tell your papá, huh?”

What could she tell him? That she felt a strange, nearly unbearable desire to release him from his pain by lying naked beside him on his bed? That she would never do it in a million years, but felt that she should? That she felt like an exile in her own apartment?