Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

She wasn’t nervous, stripping down before him and resting back on the very couch where her father used to fall asleep in exhaustion. Nestor had his hands all over her, his thick tongue inside her mouth, his fingers probing under the wire rim of her brassiere, and he whispered, “ Querida, undo my trousers.” And she reached down without looking and unfastened his buttons and then separated the lips of his trousers in the way that his fingers were separating the lips of her vagina, and she pulled out his thing; it was powerful and big enough that she gasped and opened her legs wide for him.

Because her undergarment was now so damp, she told him, “Pull it off, my darling,” and as they covered each other’s faces with kisses, she floated away again, remembering the afternoons of her youth in Havana when the house was filled with shouting, and how she would seek shelter in a room whose shuttered windows leaked sunlight, resting in her bed and touching herself so that she could forget the shouting, forget it all through the pleasant sensations, like those sensations that were overwhelming her now. Her legs opened wider and she felt herself being occupied by a tremendous force, and her insides filled with the melted wax of a large church candle, and as the sound of his frantic breathing amplified, he sounded like the wind that she sometimes heard in her dreams. Her pores opened and oozed the warm and sweet liquid of her dream and she thought, “My Lord, this is a man!” and they played for hours; Delores felt so grateful to him that she did everything he wanted. That night she went from complete ignorance to knowledge about the act of love. When she heard his moans of pleasure and saw an expression of ecstatic release on his face, a new sense of purpose descended upon her: to release this young musician from his pain.

(And poor Nestor? He thought he was with Delores and he devoured her big-nippled breasts, but when he closed his eyes and no longer saw her face, he was kissing the breast of the Beautiful María of His Soul, licking her skin from navel to toe, but when he winced at his maudlin thought and remembered how much he loved Delores and how good he felt inside her, he was pulled out of the darkness into which he had started slipping, and so he opened his eyes and looked deep into her eyes, and because he was coming and his bones were giving out inside him and his body teemed with a creamy heat that rose from his penis and exploded in his head, he closed his eyes again and felt the worst sadness about María. And yet, when he saw María, he pictured her in a room, and in that room a doorway through which could be seen the sickbed of his youth and himself, unable to move, calling out, “ Mamá!” and waiting, waiting. And he’d open his eyes again and begin to pump Delores harder, but he could not help thinking about the other and almost slipped a few times, almost uttered, “María, María.”)

By that time, Cousin Pablo and his family had moved away to a nice house in Queens and had left the apartment to the brothers. Cesar took over the big bedroom down the hall, and Nestor got one of the smaller rooms near the kitchen. He started to invite Delorita over for dinner, and because she lived so far away, she would often spend the night. Nestor would wait on the corner of 125th Street and Broadway for Delorita to come stepping off the bus from the Bronx. Or she’d head straight to La Salle Street from her cleaning job, carrying a bag with a change of clothing. She wasn’t bothered by the fact that they shared the same bed out of wedlock. She thought it was no one else’s business, though she was only twenty-one. And besides, she had no doubt that they would be married one day.

At first, with Pablo and the family gone, the apartment, barely furnished and crammed with musical instruments and drums, seemed drab. But Delores would bring in flowers and rolls of brightly colored Con-Tact paper. Shopping, Nestor and Delores would make trips to Chinatown, returning with vases and Chinese screens and jasmine candles. She kept the place clean and started to cook for them. They’d sometimes walk toward Columbia University and the bookstores on Broadway, and while she’d forage through the bins and used-book racks for adventure, spy, romance, and detective novels that cost a nickel apiece, he’d wait patiently. They went out a lot in those days: sometimes Cesar would borrow a car and they would go for another perilous ride in the country, or they’d go out to the Park Palace, fancy as La Conga or the Copacabana, to catch Machito or Israel Fajardo, and afterwards they would go strolling through Central Park at two in the morning. Once, after a Mambo King job in Brooklyn, they went to Coney Island. She and Nestor sat on a bench necking before the ebbing sea, and the incident with the Pepsodent man seemed as remote as the bone-white moon above them.

When she was not at night school, she would study. She’d learned her English after a long and humiliating struggle in a Catholic school in the Bronx, where the nuns literally beat her head with a dictionary when she misunderstood or could not remember certain words. Chronic mispronunciations made her the butt of many a joke, but she endured, studied and excelled, won spelling bees and got high grades, becoming one of those latinas who, through a course of terrified learning, could speak English as well as anyone (and with a slight Bronxese accent, at that). She would always try to teach Nestor things, encouraged him to read a book. He would shrug and she would later find him sitting on the living-room sofa with a guitar and a pencil and paper, whistling and working out the melodies to different songs.

She was happy for the first time since she could remember and she adored Nestor for it. Sometimes she would walk into the living room, lower the Venetian blinds, and take off her dress. Or she sat beside him just to keep him company and in a few minutes found her undergarments pulled down to her knees, and her dress hitched up over her waist. She was always happy with him because during the act of love the younger Mambo King would say, “Te quiero, Delorita. Te quiero, ” again and again. When he would have his orgasm his face would widen, as if flattening out like one of the Venetian carnival masks she saw on her employer’s wall; and he’d blush during this ecstatic release from pain. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. She’d rub baby oil on her breasts and thighs, then get a jar of petroleum jelly and smear it between her legs, find Nestor napping in the bedroom, suckle him, and then impale herself on his member.

He was a troubled sleeper and suffered from nightmares. Often, as she slept beside him, she would think of his sadness and about helping him, but there seemed to be nothing she could do to lift him out of his melancholy. Lovemaking distracted this melancholia: he’d fall asleep wedged up against her bottom at night, his erection pressed against her. It seemed they must have made love countless times in their sleep. One night when she was dreaming about picking flowers, she felt his penis entering her from behind. But not into her vagina. She was half asleep, so that the sensation of being entered there came over her body slowly: at first it felt as if her bottom were being packed with warm clay, but after a certain time the softness gave way to a widening and lengthening barb, stretching her painfully at first and then warming and softening again. She turned to facilitate his pleasure and ground her hips into him until he came. Then they were both sound asleep again and he began his uneasy dreams again.

NOW, THE OPENING CHORDS TO “Beautiful María of My Soul” and Nestor in Delores’s arms dreaming about 1948: In the late evenings, after finishing up with his job at the Havana Explorers’ Club, where he worked side by side with his older brother, he would take walks through the neighborhoods of the city; he liked to get lost in the arcades and to wander in the marketplace among the farmers and the hen cages and gray pigs. In the alley behind a Chinese restaurant called Papo-lin’s in La Marina, that neighborhood by the harbor near where they lived, he watched two red roosters, powerful machos, fight with their razor-taloned claws. Standing up in a bar in a row of bars, he would eat his dinner, a plate of rice and beans and a pork chop drowned in salt and lemon, for 25 cents, and watch the street euphorically cluttered with life: men pulling rag carts; Chinese workers in velvet shoes and long cotton smocks making their way to the tobacco factories; the poor from Las Yaguas selling their wares and services out of stalls: fortunes told, shoes fixed, jugo de fruta 10 cents, clocks, guitars, house tools, coils of rope, toys and religious articles, statuary and good-luck charms, flowers, love potions and magic candles, get your picture taken for 25 cents, in color! He’d look over the clothing to see what he might buy for the fifteen dollars a week he earned in those days: a good guayabera with fancy lace trimmings, $2; a plain shirt, $1; a pair of Buster Browns, $4; a pair of linen pantalones, $3.50. Hershey bar? 2 cents. Pepsi or Apur-Cola, 10 cents… And there were bananas hanging like lanterns off the racks, and wagon after wagon of fruit, and ice wagons, and a huddle of men throwing dice in a cool doorway. Flowers growing in pots and flowers spilling off the balconies, and lichen on the sea-rotted walls: astragal fences and antique doors, cornices brown and orange-hued, animal head and angelic door knockers. Racks of copper pots and pans, children running in and out of the stalls, sailors in the city whoring, a bicycle hanging off a rope over a row of bicycle tires; caged parrots; a shady-looking gentleman with the eyes of a turtle, sitting quietly at a narrow fold-up table from which he sold his “artistic” photographs; and then racks of dresses and pretty women moving among the racks and music coming out of the doorways. Smell of blood and sawdust, the sound of animals being butchered on the block, smell of blood and tobacco and a walk down a long alley behind the slaughterhouse that faced another slaughterhouse: a man dumping buckets of water over a floor drenched in blood and behind him, in a row, the split-open carcasses of a dozen pigs. Then the leather and carpentry and beach-goods shops…