Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

When the contest had been announced, mainly through pamphlets and posters and a few radio spots, there had been a rush to the barbershops of downtown Brooklyn, the Bronx, and central Harlem. A huge crowd had turned out, among them several hundred couples who had shaved off all their hair: purple and green eggheads, baldies in white tuxedos and evening gowns, baldies in giant baby diapers (the woman’s diaper discreetly pinned and joined at the back of her neck), Mr. and Mrs. Moon, baldies as oranges, baldies as people from the planet Mars, baldies as hydrogen bombs, baldies posing as baby chicks, and who knew what else. There were clowns and harlequins and couples draped with ball-bearing-sewn robes, couples with feathers and bells. The costumed entrants to this contest not only had to look weird but also had to demonstrate virtuoso and light-footed dancing, expertise in the arts of the mambo, rumba, tango, and cha-cha-cha.

Standing amid the ring of tipsy onlookers, Delores rooted for a couple who were the prettiest pair of baldheads. The woman looked like Queen Nefertiti and wore glittering necklaces and bracelets, all reflecting light into the world, and a butterfly-sleeved red dress whose skirt curled upwards like the roof of a pagoda. Her partner had peacock feathers for a collar and wore huge loop earrings and oversized purple silk pants and resembled a genie; but the main thing about them was that they seemed so much in love, smiling and kissing with every turn, dip, and slide.

They did not win, though they were good dancers. Another couple won: the man had an alarm clock tied to his bald head and numbers written all over his scalp. He was wearing oversized peg pants and pink spike-tipped shoes and a lavender shirt and jacket. His partner wore a tight black strapless gown in which she wobbled her way into the hearts of the males of the audience, her crowning moment arriving during a twirling spin in which the centrifugal forces tore free the top of her dress, revealing two plump breasts, large, quivering, and as bare as the top of her head.

Afterwards, Delores and Ana María made their way into the ladies’ room, which was jammed with bald and full-headed women seriously going about the business of freshening up their eyeliner, mascara, lipstick. She sat down before a mirror to freshen up, too, and enjoyed the comings and goings of these pretty young women who were out to meet young men and have a good time.*

Loud big-band Latin music slipped into the room when the door opened, ladies in the stall urinating, a scent of Chanel No. 5 thick everywhere, Sen-Sen, chewing gum popping in mouths. Cuban and Puerto Rican and Irish and Italian girls lined up before the makeup mirrors, applying mascara and rouge, and fixing their lipstick. Women pulling up on their skirts and getting their garters straight, thick thighs moon-white and honey-colored in the glare of the lights.

And voices:

“Tell ya, darlin’, some of these men, woooey! This fella fresh as hell, just met the guy and his bone is knocking on my door.”

“You think I look all right, I mean, how do you think he’ll like the way I look if I put my hair up like this?”

“And he wants me to go down to San Juan with him to a hotel there… Pay for it and everything.”

“And the fucking bastard takes me for a walk. I’m a little tipsy and so I sit with him in the car out in the parking lot. All I want to do is sit there and just get some fresh air, and then he’s all over me, like he’s never been with a woman before. I don’t even really know the guy, just that he’s married, and I say unhappily married by the way he’s grabbing at me… We wrestle around for a while, I don’t even really mind that, but no way am I going to go to bed with a man when I don’t have anything going with him, know what I’m saying? And what does he do but pulls his purple thing out of his trousers and says, ‘Oh, please, honey, why don’t you give it a little kiss?’ and ‘Oh, please,’ squinting his eyes and all like he’s in the worst pain in the world. I told him, you go to hell, and left him in the car holding his thing, and so, even though I’m in the right, twenty minutes later he’s back on the dance floor doing the cha-cha-cha with another girl, and from the way she looked, I’ll bet she did put his thing in her mouth. I end up going home to the Bronx, number 2 line all the way uptown to Allerton Avenue by myself…”

“Anyway, this guy’s six foot four, must weigh two hundred and fifteen pounds, works for the city, you know, and… he’s got a thing the size of my pinkie, what a gyp!”

“As beautiful as you are, there’s always some other girl out there beautifuller than you.”

“I’d give it up for a wedding ring.”

“Oh, God! Anyone have an extra pair of nylons?”

“… Qué mono that singer is, huh? I’d go out with him anytime.”

“Well, I’ve been out with him.”

“And?”

“He’d break your heart.”

“His brother isn’t bad, either.”

“You said it.”

She’d remember heading out into the ballroom again, down along the shoeshine stand, that thick row of men smoking their cigarettes like mad and trying to get a little fresh air before an opened window. Couples in phone booths and in corridors kissing and fondling each other, chandeliers that were a rainfall of crystal and light, the music coming from a distance, as if down a long, long tunnel: the string bass, the percussion, with the crash of cymbals, banging of congas and timbales looming like a storm cloud, from which only occasionally rose a horn line or crescendoing piano… Life was funny: she was thinking about Nestor Castillo and moving through the crowd toward the bar when she felt a hand gently taking hold of her elbow. And it was Nestor, as if she had wished him there. He took her over to the bar, drank down a glass of whiskey, and said, “We have to play one more set, and then afterwards we’re going out, around three o’clock or so, to get something to eat. Why don’t you come along with us… You can meet my brother and a few of the other musicians.”

“Can I bring my sister?”

“Cómo no. We’ll meet out in front.”

The grand finale of the evening was the conga. The fabulous Cesar Castillo came out, à la Desi Arnaz, with a conga drum slung over his shoulder, banging that drum and leading the Mambo Kings into a 1-2-3/1-2 rhythm that moved everybody across the dance floor in a snaking conga line, hips bumping, tripping, flying forward, separating, kicking out their legs, shaking their chassis, laughing, and having a good time…

They ended up driving uptown in Manny’s 1947 Olds and there hooked up with some of the other Mambo Kings, taking over a few long tables in the back of a little restaurant called Violeta’s, which the owner kept open late so that musicians, starved after their jobs, could have a good meal. On the back wall there was a mural of a tropic sea ablaze in the colors of an eternal Cuban sunset bursting over El Morro Castle in Havana Harbor. The walls over the bar were covered with signed photographs of the Latin musicians who’d eat there regularly. Everyone from the flutist Alberto Socarrás to the Emperor of the Mambo himself, Pérez Prado.

That night, as the Mambo Kings and their companions were dining, in walked the well-known bandleaders Tito Rodríguez of the Tito Rodríguez Orchestra, and Tito Puente, who headed an outfit called the Piccadilly Boys, and although Cesar frowned and said to Nestor, “Here comes the enemy!” the brothers greeted them as if they were lifelong companions.

“¡Oiganme, hombres! ¿Qué tal?”

Watching the two brothers side by side, Delores got a good idea of what they were like. They were like their signatures on the framed photograph of the Mambo Kings on the wall over the bar. That picture of them posed atop a seashell art-deco bandstand in white silk suits, instruments by their side. The photograph was covered with the musicians’ signatures, the most flamboyant being the elder brother Cesar Castillo’s, for whom she did not at first particularly care. His signature was pure vanity. Filled with so many blooms and loops that his letters resembled the wind-filled sails of a ship. (If only she could have seen him seated at his kitchen table up on La Salle Street with a pad of paper and a pencil, and a book on penmanship open before him, practicing his signature for hours and hours.) And he was like that, Delores thought, filled with wind and meaningless gestures. He had a sly curl of experience to his lips that Delores didn’t trust. Bursting with energy after a night of performance, the older Mambo King was in constant motion, joking with his fellow musicians, talking only about himself and the joys of performance, flirting with the waitresses and giving Delores and Ana María these hungry up-and-downs. It was one thing to look at her sister, who was unattached, that way, but at his own brother’s new companion! ¡Qué cochino! she thought. Rude and presumptuous.