Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Then he smothered her with his body: she was nicely plump, with the scars of a cesarian section above her thick black pubic hair, which was not much of a shield, and she had stretch marks all over her breasts, but looked so beautiful, and even though his bones ached and his guts twisted, he went at her for a long time, and when with his enormous stomach he finally burst, he flew headlong through a field of redness, ground his teeth, and felt her interior doubling back on itself like a warm silken glove turned inside out.

From that night on, she took to calling the Mambo King “My pretty old man,” and “My machito. ”

Though he was sixty years old, he suckled her breasts like a baby, thinking to himself, What luck I have. I was born in 1918, and here I am with this young chick.”

When he’d finish in bed with her, he’d fall back like a dead man, his eyes fixed on the wall, daydreaming about youth and strength and speed, his face nestled against her breasts.

Afterwards, he said, “I love you, Lydia.”

But he didn’t know if it was the truth of his heart: he’d lied so often to women over the years, had mistreated and misunderstood so many women, that he had resigned himself to forgetting about love and romance, those very things he used to put in songs.

All through the night, like a young man, he whispered, half singing, “The thought of not possessing you is an agony I cannot bear.”

IT WAS A SUNDAY AFTERNOON and the church had set up a block party on 121st Street. Father Vincent had asked Cesar to provide the music. He had rounded up some of his friends and had asked the Puerto Ricans with the slick black hair to play rock ’n’ roll.

Lydia turned up in a pink summer suit which fit her well when she first wore it, a present, like so many others, from Cesar. But in the intervening months, the Mambo King had gone to her apartment in the Bronx with several pounds of groceries, pastries, and steaks from the plant on 125th Street, and when he learned that she had a weakness for chocolate, he had started to buy her pound bags of bitter Dutch chocolate from a fancy European-style shop near the university. And they were always going to restaurants, and when they weren’t doing that, Lydia was busy proving herself as some kind of cook, taking his money and going crazy at the supermarket — cooking all the Cuban and Puerto Rican dishes, like fried plantains and roast pork and rice and beans, and Italian food, too. Cooking up big pans of lasagna and pots of spaghetti with seafood (alle vongole, as she called it), and served up big salads doused in olive oil. With all this, she had started to get fat.

As his prodigious manly appetites began to wane under the onslaught of the years (his penis had thickened and stretched from years of use and occupied his trousers like a dozing mutt), he became more and more interested in food. She didn’t mind, though her nice butt was more pronounced. As for the kids? They had not eaten so well in all their lives, and they were happy whenever the Mambo King visited them in the Bronx.

So she had put on a few extra pounds. What did that matter when he gloried in the expansiveness of her youthful flesh? He could suck her nipple gratefully for an hour, until it turned purple and grew distended between his teeth and lips; he would revel in the kneading of her quivery flesh. And her hips got much bigger and were ready to burst the seams of her dresses. More men looked and spoke to her as she passed by. And while this made the Mambo King proud, as it used to when he’d make an entrance with the likes of Miss Vanna Vane back in the old days, he’d scowl sternly at these oglers, throw his chest out as if he was ready to fight.

After setting up, he had waited on the stage for her. As the priest was giving a speech about how the poor inherited not the earth but God’s “other bounties,” Cesar spotted Lydia in the crowd, and just seeing her made him happy. Up on the stage, he had thoughts like: I love you, baby, I send you my kisses; I can’t wait until we are locked in a lovers’ embrace.

Those were the days when he had started to tell himself that he was in love, truly in love with Lydia. The kind of love he hadn’t felt since his first loves back in Oriente, like the love he had felt for his wife back in the Cuba of the 1940s.

(It was all coming back to him in his old age. Fantasies about what might have happened to him had he remained with her, hadn’t left their small town for Havana and his destiny. He might have gotten himself a good job through her family, maybe work in the sugar mill as foreman. He might have had himself a little orchestra for the weekends and for festivals in Cuba, satisfying at least part of his wish for a musician’s life. And his brother Nestor would have remained in Cuba with him, too. He might have fathered a brood of loving sons, instead of a single daughter, to keep him company in his sunset years. And instead of all that pussy? He might have contented himself with a mistress or two in town, the way his father, Pedro, had. Even this fantasy did not hold water, because eventually he would have had to leave Cuba.)

That day, the musicians opened their set with a jam instrumental called “Traffic Mambo.” The Mambo King wore a light pinstriped summer suit, and his thick head of hair was shiny with hair tonic. His voice echoed against the buildings as he leaned into the microphone, announcing, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for a little charrrannnnnnga!”

Having spotted Lydia, he put on a good show to impress her. As he turned in circles, he was astounded by his love for her: even the knots in his gut and the swirling juices inside his body seemed to go away when he thought about her. Memory upon memory: Lydia’s naked body, Lydia sitting before a mirror brushing out her hair, her plump buttocks, the plum-shaped darkness between them, and the Mambo King’s aged member lolling on his belly and then growing stiff — just from looking at her. Then he’d fuck her from behind, inserting himself into that plum of space, and it gave him just what it seemed to be promising: heat, and moisture, curvaceous grip.

(Dios mío, Dios mío —toasting the busyness in his heart and mind — I really had fallen for that woman and, coño, fallen hard for her, the way my poor brother fell for that Beautiful María piece-of-shit from Havana, the way I fell for my wife. And so he swallowed the rum, and then had a pleasant experience: a slight elation, the sensation that he was breaking the law of gravity and lifting with his chair off the ground, and then the fan, turning from atop the dresser in his room in the Hotel Splendour, hitting his face, and then a whisk of air hitting him dead between the legs and licking at his penis through the slot in his boxer shorts, a lick like the morning licks of youth, and boom, he found his thing stiffening, though not fully, because of the lick of the air, the rum, and his thoughts of Lydia, a beautiful sensation: if he was a younger man, the Mambo King would have masturbated, floated off on clouds of speculation and hope of future seductions, but now, in his current condition, masturbation seemed sad and hopeless, and so, instead, he took another sip of his rum. On the record player spun that great Mambo King tune “Traffic Mambo,” except that it sounded much different from the way he remembered it: sounded as if there were a hundred musicians playing on the version he was hearing now, with all kinds of instruments added: glass bells and harps, church organs and Oriental chimes. Sounded as if there was a river rushing in the distance and the chaos of a hundred automobiles honking their horns all at once. Plus he hadn’t really remembered that the trumpet solo played by his dead brother Nestor had been so long, it seemed to go on forever in the version he was now hearing. The Mambo King’s confusion made him get up. There was a small mirror over a sink: then a closet-sized bathroom, just enough room for the commode and the shower. He was drunk enough by now that, as he looked in the mirror, all the lines of age and sadness had more or less been smoothed out, the gray of his hair seeming more silver, the jowlishness of his face more like the mark of substance rather than excess. He washed his face and then sat down again. He found himself rubbing his legs: the underside of his legs was riddled with thick, distended varicose veins, blue and as twisty as the thick vein that burst like a river with tributaries up the underside of his big thing. These weren’t little varicose veins like those showing through little-old-lady brown nylons, but worm veins, all up and down the backs of his legs. He touched them for a moment and laughed: how he used to pick on his wife in Cuba the day he noticed that a few varicose veins had appeared on her legs, calling her feita— ugly — when she was still so young and, in her way, pretty.)