Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

From the stage he watched Lydia like that hound who watched the basement entrance of the building down the street. An old German shepherd with matty coat and milk-cornered eyes, barking at every passerby and sniffing between the legs of every canine interloper. Lydia paid attention to the Mambo King, watching him faithfully from the street, but then she went over to get herself a sandwich from one of the tables, and men started to speak to her.

What were they saying?

“Why don’t you dance with me?”

“I can’t.”

“But why?”

“I’m with the singer of the group over there.”

“Cesar Castillo?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re so young! Why are you with that viejito?”

That’s what he thought they were saying.

But the men were just being friendly. When the Mambo King saw her dancing with one of them, he was suddenly overcome with vertigo. Why was she dancing the pachanga with that fellow? Twenty years ago he would have smiled, telling himself, “So?” But now the heat of humiliation burned at the back of his neck and he felt like climbing down off the stage and separating them.

Then he devised a strategy to regain her attention and remind her of her loyalty. “I dedicate this song to a very special woman in my life. This song is for my woman, Lydia Santos.”

But she continued to dance with the son of a bitch, and he felt depressed.

Work was work, however, and the Mambo King and his musicians played other numbers: mambos, rumbas, merengues, boleros, and a few cha-cha-chas. He hadn’t suffered through a set like that since the days after Nestor’s death. When the group finally took a break and began to pack up — there was a local rock ’n’ roll group waiting to go on — he made straightaway for Lydia, who pretended that nothing was happening.

“Cesar! I’ve been waiting for you!” And she kissed him. “This is Richie.”

The man she had been dancing with was a slender-looking fellow in a nice clean guayabera, handsome even with a pock-scarred face.

“Mucho gusto, ” the young man said, but the Mambo King would not even shake his hand.

Then he said to Lydia, “Come on, I want to talk to you.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I am the man and I don’t want you with anyone else.”

“We were just dancing. The music sounded good. We were just having a little fun.”

“I don’t care. I told you how I feel.”

They were standing just inside the lobby of 500 La Salle, Cesar’s building.

“I may be an old man to you, but I’m not going to be cuckolded because of that. I was this way when I was young, and I am not going to change now.”

“Okay, okay”—and she put her hands up and then gave him a kiss on the neck. He patted her nice nalgitas, and as the anger drained from him, said, “I’m sorry if I sound so harsh with you. There are a lot of wolves out there. Come on, let me buy you an ice cream, and then I want you and your children to meet someone.”

He made a burning sound: “Psssssssh, my, but you look good, Lydia.”

And: “Look what you do to me.”

They attended the block party like everyone else, Cesar treating her children as if he were their father — or grandfather. That afternoon he introduced Lydia to his friends. Frankie and Bernardito had met her before. They had all gone out with their women to restaurants together. Still, he took her by the hand and with his king-cock strut introduced her to his other friends on the street. His mood seemed calmer now. And she did not feel so bad. She did not mind that he was nearly thirty years older, though sometimes when they were in bed together she felt this terrible weight of mortality on her. His spectacular sexual nature sometimes made his whole body shake: his face would turn beet-red from his efforts to impress her, and she was afraid that he might have a heart attack or a stroke. She’d never had any man like him and so spoiled him with praise and adoration that he started to become deluded with the feeling that he had become exempt from the ravages of the years. She was overwhelmed by him. She felt, as had scores of other women before her, his bestial nature.

He would be shoving himself inside her and she would make it a point of saying things like “You’re going to burst me apart.” And: “ Tranquilo, hombre. Tranquilo. ” And she moaned and shouted. She didn’t want him to get the look of boredom that other men sometimes got with her, after a certain point. She wanted to say and do everything that he wanted her to, for the simple reason that he was good to her and her children.

So, he was a little jealous. She forgave that; after all, he was an old man, even if he was a pretty old man. That’s what she had taken to calling him, he’d remember. “Dame un besito, mi viejito lindo. ” And whatever one could say about his current situation, that he worked as a superintendent and took small-time jobs here and there as a musician, he had been some kind of famous man. Even though she was thirty-five years old, she had still not lost her childhood awe for the crooners of his generation. And the man had even been on television. She knew the very episode of the I Love Lucy show that he and Nestor had appeared on: he’d even brought her a box of photographs to look at, and had given her one of himself with Arnaz and his poor dead brother. Proudly, she had shown it to people in her building.

He was the kind of man who had done a lot in life. He didn’t just hang out, like so many others. He was wise and would be able to help her. Looking at pictures of him when he was young and a pretty boy made her sigh. Sometimes it killed her when she would think about young men. Of course she wished he was younger, but she also knew that he would never have stayed with her in the days of his glory. So she had him now in his decline. So what, she would say, if he had jowls, a huge stomach, and testicles that reached halfway down to his knees (like his pinga!). What did she care about that, as long as he promised to help her children out?

(She had to tell herself this, yes?)

Later, he finally got the chance to introduce her to the family.

“So this is your young pollita?” Delores said to Cesar.

He shrugged.

On Delorita’s television blared the film Godzilla. Pedro was in his traditional spot, the easy chair, reading the newspaper and having a drink. Sitting behind him on the couch, Leticia with her baby. She’d come up from Long Island for a visit. She played with her baby’s toes, spoke baby talk, oblivious to the television and the rest of the commotion in the apartment. Her brother, Eugenio, shared the couch, sitting close to the window. He’d propped it open a bit and put an ashtray there on the sill so he could smoke and brood in peace. Cesar always liked to see him, which was not often, but the kid always seemed pissed off: he’d been that way for a long time. (Eugenio never understood any of this. An innocent at heart, he had a temper that flared when, as with the other Castillo men, melancholia abruptly came over him and he would suffer from his own plague of memories. When he was angry, he would find himself saying things he did not really mean, such as “Everybody in the world can go fuck themselves” and “I don’t need anyone,” which had frightened many people away from him.)

Now he would turn up at the apartment on La Salle Street, disappointed and bitter.

When Cesar brought Lydia into the living room, Eugenio was struck by her good looks. He liked pretty women, too, and leapt out of his sullenness for a moment, as if jumping out of an airplane. “Why, hellllllo.” Eugenio was friendly to her, but once the introductions were over, his mood reverted and he sat by the window, thinking. The older he got, the more he picked up on his long-dead father’s temperament. He went through moods of prolonged anguish and discontent: his eyes grew sad over the smallest thing, his face drooped over the fact that life was not perfect. Although he was not consciously aware of it, Eugenio had by now acquired the same expression he forever associated with his father, the same shattered expression of Nestor Castillo in his role as Alfonso Reyes, who would appear again and again at Desi Arnaz’s door. His father’s shattered expression, on entering that room, hat in hand, guitar demurely by his side, his face in some kind of agony.