Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

As the Italian turned up the music, her father said, “Come on, Delorita, have some fun with us, it’s Christmas.”

And the Italian joined in, “Yes, yes, sugar, don’t be a stiff!”

Then her father took her by the hand and swung her around in circles, bouncing on her, then off her, he was so drunk. Then, sweaty, panting, he leaned up against the wall, patting his forehead dry with a kerchief. He stared at her and saw that she looked like her mother; certainly he was surprised that she was so pretty a woman. And he made her nervous, and she shut her eyes.

Perhaps her father had misread her expression, but what he said would buzz through her bones for years afterwards. “Don’t be ashamed of your father or be worried that I embarrass you, niña, because one day you’ll be free of me for good.”

Here her desire to remember faltered. What had he meant by that? Had she somehow added to his woes? Was it something about the way she was treating him? She only knew that, with time, her father’s unhappiness seemed to increase, and she passed these first years in the States trying to take care of him. She went to a Catholic school and, to help pay the bills, managed to find a job in the Woolworth’s on Fordham Road. That was one occasion when her good looks were of help to her. The manager hired her because he liked pretty girls. She was grateful to get the job, worked there part-time and then came home to take care of her father. She cooked his meals, made his bed, washed his clothes, packed his lunches, and in the evenings listened to him talking about the solitude of his days.

“A man is nothing without his family, Delorita. Absolutely nothing. Nothing without family, nothing without love.”

He would come home from the seltzer plant now with bottles of cheap, homemade Italian wine for which he’d paid ten cents apiece. He’d sit in the living room drinking until the pains in his back and in his heart left and his lips started to turn blue.

Usually the evenings found him at home, but one night, when she was sixteen, the wine so heightened his spirits that he got all dressed up and said to Delores, “I’m too young to stay in all the time. I’m going out.”

He had been looking through the newspapers and came up with the addresses of a few dance halls that his friends had told him about.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said, touching her face with his warm hands. She studied an English grammar book until one in the morning, lingering by the living-room windows and watching the street. Hours later, she was asleep and dreaming about playing with her older sister, Ana María, in Havana, the sun shining and the day radiant with hope for the future, when she heard her father in the hallway. She found him there, leaning against the wall, drunk and exhausted. It took him a while to focus on her, but when he finally did, he said, “I’ve just been having myself a good time. And you?”

She helped him to his bed, took off his shoes. When she looked over at the table clock, the time was 4:45 and the poor man would have to get up in exactly forty-five minutes for work. She remained with him, sitting by the bed and watching her papá snore away, his breathing troubled, head turning from side to side. She watched his powerful body, virile and frightening, and felt confused by her tender feelings toward him. Occasionally, he would say a few words, and her memory of those words, “Please, Dios, release me,” would come back to her years later when she would have her own family and her own troubles. “Release me,” when the alarm went off and she watched the man open his eyes. Like a corpse coming back to life, he popped up, yawned, stretched his arms, and then made his way down the hall to the bathroom, where he washed and put on his gray seltzer-plant deliveryman uniform.

The following week, the same thing happened. Then, after a while, it became his habit to go out two or three nights a week, just as he used to down in Havana.

“A man’s got to do as he likes, or else he’s not a man,” he’d tell her. And: “You know it’s not easy for me to be alone all the time.”

And what about me? she used to ask herself. She passed those nights worrying about him and fighting feelings of loneliness. Her main refuge? Listening to the radio and studying her books. Sometimes she would visit with neighbors, with whom she would talk. Between her job at Woolworth’s, her high-school classes, and her friendships in the building, she became quite good at speaking English. But what good was her English when she was so alone? She liked people, but always felt so bashful. She was beautiful and her body used to make men stare hungrily at her. But even so, she thought herself unattractive, that some kind of mistake was constantly being made about her looks. If only she was not so lonely on those nights when her father went out, if she didn’t feel as if some part of her might burst.

And her father, why was he always going out when he looked so exhausted?

“ Papi, ” she asked him one night, “adónde vas?”

“I’m going dancing.”

“By yourself?”

“With a friend.”

Her father was going out in New York in the same way he used to back in Havana. Suddenly Delores found herself feeling what her mother must have felt. All those nights of shouting in the house hadn’t turned into air. She had the shouts inside her, and when she saw her father slicked up to see his woman, Delores found herself saying, “Papá, I don’t think you should go, you’ll be tired.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

And he’d give her a kiss and make his way down the stairs. He was usually drunk by the time he’d leave the apartment. She’d follow him out into the stairwell, watching him fading into the shadows. At first thinking, Don’t fall. Then: Fall and don’t get up.

He’s going to a dance hall with a tramp is what she would think, watching him head down the steep hill of 169th Street toward the El, from their window. She’d imagine the woman: wearing a hat crowned with flowers, a too-tight dress, the top bursting. And she’d have thick lipstick-gummy lips, and thick-thick hips.

Alone in that apartment in the Bronx at night, she’d try to calm herself. She loved her father, who worked to take care of them. Wasn’t it fair that he go out? Yes, poor Papi, and she would sit by the window listening to a neighbor’s radio in the courtyard, or try, as usual, with a dictionary in hand, to read a newspaper or one of the books that her neighbor, a schoolteacher who was touched by her efforts to improve her reading, would leave for her by the door.

Some nights she’d write her mother sympathetic letters, saying things like “Mamá, as I get older I understand more about how Papá must have hurt you.”

Because her mother had refused to accompany him to the States, Delores had judged her harshly. Thought her cruel. There were things you don’t understand about us, she used to tell Delorita — but now she was starting to understand. Hadn’t he spent many nights away from their home, back when?

Weeks would go by in which she would await an answer, never receiving one. She’d think that her mother was right in hating her for siding with her father. On those nights alone, Delores would ask herself, “And now what do I have? Neither my mother nor my father.”

She’d remember how her mother would sit, her arms crossed tight over her lap, the posture of anger that her mother adopted in the days when her papá used to do as he pleased. Delores would also sit with her arms crossed tight over her lap, waiting to hear her father’s footsteps in the hall, and wanting to shout at him.

But she always softened and took care of him instead.