Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

He was so in love with her that he could have died in her arms happily. Loved her so much he licked her rump hole. She came and he came and in the red-tinged silver-and-white that exploded in his brow and that shuddered through his body he felt a thready presence, like a soul entering him. He would lie beside her, feeling that his body had been turned into a field and that he and she floated ecstatically over that field on the wings of love. He thought about her as he scrubbed the hair-tonic stains off the back of the heavy leather chairs at his job at the club. He wore a short white jacket with three brass buttons and a little hat like a bellboy’s, carried trays of food and drink to the club members, and he daydreamed about licking her nipples. Smell of linseed-oil-polished wood, cologne, blue cigar smoke, flatulence. The smell of leather, hair-tonic-stained chairs, thick rugs from Persia and Turkey. Nestor laughing, Nestor happy. Nestor slapping his older brother’s then-troubled back. He’d work in the little kitchen behind the bar, making crustless ham sandwiches, and drinks. He whistled, he smiled, he sang happily. He’d look out across the dining room through open French doors to the patio and garden. He would think about the devastating curvaceousness of her buttocks, the sliver of thick black hair that protruded, but just barely, from behind her spread thighs. Scent of soft violet wisteria, falling over the garden walls, leafy jasmine and Chinese hibiscus. The taste of her wide-open vagina, all red and gleaming from moistness, an open orchid to his tongue.

Waiting to see her again, he suffered through evenings when he went to work playing the trumpet and singing alongside his brother with the Havana Melody Boys. His María worked in the chorus line of the Havana Hilton, as one in a line of ten “beautiful cream-and-coffee-colored dancers,” and that’s where Nestor wanted to be, his eyes looking off not at the audience or the spotlights but into the distance. He could not help thinking about María. When he was not with her he was miserable, and after playing these jobs he would rush out to meet her.

For his part, Cesar was curious about this Beautiful María who had taken his maudlin, quiet brother and made him happy. So finally Nestor arranged that they meet one night. They chose a bar where a lot of musicians liked to go, up by Maríanao beach. Dios mío! his brother Cesar was surprised by María’s beauty and he gave Nestor his approval, but then, so did everyone else. He stood there trying like every other man to figure out how on earth Nestor had landed her. Not by know-how; his younger brother had never been a womanizer. In fact, he’d always seemed a little frightened of women. And now there he was, with a beautiful woman and a real look of happiness on his face. He hadn’t won her over with his looks, pleasantly handsome, with a long matador’s face and a sensitive, pained expression, large dark eyes, and large fleshy ears. It must have been his brother’s sincerity and innocence, qualities which femmes fatales seemed to appreciate. Watching her dance before a jukebox blaring Beny More, her ass shaking and body wobbling, her beautiful face the center of attention in that room, Nestor felt triumphant because he knew what the others wished they knew: that yes, her breasts were as round and succulent as they appeared to be under her dress, and that her nipples got big and taut in his lips, and yes, her big rumba ass burned, and yes, the fabulous lips of her vagina parted and sang like the big kiss-me lips of her wide lipsticked mouth, and yes, she had thick black pubic hair, and a mole on the right side of her face and a corresponding mole on the second inner fold of her labia minora; he knew the fine black hair that crept up gradually out the crack of her buttocks, and that when she reached orgasm she would whip her head back and grind her teeth, her body shaking in the aftermath.

Standing by the bar proudly, beside his older brother, Nestor sipped his beer, one bottle after another, until the sea’s blueness outside the club windows rustled like a cape and he could shut his eyes and drift like the thick smoke of that room through the crowd of dancers, wrapping himself around the voluptuousness that was María.

Funny, that was their mother’s name too. María. María.

Remembering those days, Nestor would never think about the long silences in their conversations when they’d go for walks in the park. After all, he was just an introspective country boy with a sixth-grade education who knew more about musicians and breeding animals than anything else. Once he’d told her about himself, he had almost nothing to say. “And how are your cousins?” “How is the club?” “Nice day, isn’t it?” “Bueno, what a good day?” “Why don’t we go for a walk and get something good to eat?” What could he say to her? She was beyond human conversation. She liked it when he serenaded her in front of the opera house in the park with his guitar and crowds would gather to listen and applaud him. Some days, she seemed very sad and lost, and that made her even more beautiful. He would walk alongside her, wondering what she was thinking and what he could say to make her laugh.

Gradually, their walks turned into long vigils through the night, until they reached that place where everything would be fine: their bed. But then, somehow, even their spirited romps in bed turned into something else. She would stop and weep in his arms, weep so hard that he didn’t know what to do.

“What is it, María? Can you tell me?”

“You want a good piece of advice, brother?” Cesar would tell Nestor. “If you want a woman, treat her good sometimes, but don’t let her get too used to it. Let her know that you are the man. A little abuse never hurt a romance. Women like to know who’s the boss.”

“But abuse María? My María?”

“Take my word for it… Women like to be ordered around and put in their place. Then she will stop her weeping.”

Trying to think what his brother meant, he started to order María around, and during their silent walks in the park he would show her that he was a man, taking her roughly by the wrists and saying to her, “You know, María, you must feel lucky to be with someone like me.”

He’d watch her by the mirror, making herself up, and say, “I never realized that you were so vain. It’s not good, María, you’ll be ugly in old age if you look too long in the mirror.”

He did other things to her which would later make him cringe with unhappiness and the unfairness of it all. Good-looking as she was, he imitated his older brother and took to looking around at all the other women on the street. He had the idea that if he could diminish her, then she would always remain by his side. When things didn’t get better, their silences increased. As things got worse, Nestor became more and more confused.

But during that time when things were bad for them, Nestor sat down and wrote his mother a letter saying, “Mamá, I think I’ve found a girl to marry.”

And once he’d told his mother, his romance took on a magical, inevitable quality. Destiny, he called it. At first, he made a formal proposal to her, on his knees, in a garden behind a social club, with ring and flowers. He bowed his head, waiting for an answer: he shut his eyes, thinking about all the light in heaven, and when he looked up to see her pretty face again, she was running out of the garden, his ring and flowers beside him on the ground.

When he would make love to her, he would think about the man he had seen the day they met and how she had wept afterwards. Making love, he left marks on her legs and on her breasts from gripping them roughly to show her that he was a strong man. He would get up from their bed and say to her, “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?” He had a sick feeling in his gut that something inside him was pushing her away. On those nights he wished for a pinga so huge that it would burst her open, and let fly, like a broken piñata, all her new doubts about him.