Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

(When he was a kid, his father’s expression was “Cuban”: melancholic, longing. Arnaz had it, his Uncle Cesar had it, Frankie, Manny, and most of the Cubans who walked into the household, jitterbugs and all, had it.)

“Eugenio, I want you to meet Lydia!”

Eugenio stood up and bowed. He was wearing a black turtleneck — in summer! — bluejeans, sneakers. He was supposed to go downtown and meet some friends who were trying to fix him up with some woman, but he didn’t care. At least at the apartment Aunt Ana María was around to give him a nice big kiss now and then, and he never had to explain his moods to her, the way he had to with his girlfriends.

“So you’re Lydia?” asked Delores. “The young chick with the old rooster.” And she laughed, setting the tone for the afternoon.

Later they had dinner, and that was when Cesar noticed how Delores seemed to glare at Lydia. It couldn’t be jealousy about her looks. Delores had held up well over the years. What was it?

Well, the Mambo King told himself as he reeled dizzily in his room in the Hotel Splendour, no one in the family had ever thought that Delores felt love for Pedro, not even when he was younger and courting her.

And she could have had me, he told himself.

Was that it?

It had more to do with the fact that, now Eugenio and Leticia had moved out, her reasons for staying with Pedro had gone out the window.

The Mambo King had once heard her say: “If he dies, I’ll be better off.”

But there was something else: after so many years of waiting, she had finally enrolled in college.

It hit her one day while sitting in an English literature class that she couldn’t bear it when Pedro’s hands searched under her robe at night: it didn’t take much for her nipples to get hard, just touching them did that, but he fancied that it was the particular motion of the same thumb that he held a pencil in that did it, the ball of his thumb just touching her and her nipple getting hard. And so his thin but long fish-headed penis went inside her. And she went somewhere else, far away from that room.

(She was on a bed with Nestor, getting it from behind, raising her haunches so high because when he’d turn up he never seemed to have much time, as he was always dressed up in a white silk suit, like the one he’d worn on the night he died and when he appeared on that television show — he’d barely enough time to pull down his trousers, but she was always in bed waiting for him. And because he liked to do it from behind — he used to say he felt that it went in the deepest like that — she always let him. Sometimes she turned to cream where she was sitting, had to pull herself together. Tired of weeping at night and of losing herself in books and in the petty activities of running a household. By that time she had felt like bursting into pieces.)

And her feelings showed, because later, after Cesar had taken Lydia home, Delores exulted in deriding him: “She’s very nice, Cesar. But don’t you think she’s a little young for you?” (Riding him, the way she used to nearly thirty years ago.)

“But why fool yourself with her? What have you got to give her, except some money?”

“Ask yourself, what would she want with an old man like you?”

(And he had to hold his tongue, because everyone knew what had happened to Delores while taking some night courses up at City College. She had fallen in love with a genteel literature student, a man younger than herself, with whom she went to bed for several months. And because of the way it ended, with the man running away from her, she had become more careless with herself and went walking on a bad street on her way home from college, and two black men pulled her into an alley and tore off the nice necklace Nestor had given her and they took her watch and a bracelet that had been a Christmas present. Then one of the men pulled down his trousers and the other threatened to kill her if she said a word, but she let out with some kind of howl, lit windows for blocks everywhere, and the men left her there, clothing torn up, lying on the ground, her books all around her.)

“Listen here, Delorita. Say whatever you want to me, but be good to her, huh? She’s the last chance I’ve got.”

So happiness came back into the Mambo King’s life. Like a character in a happy habanera, he went through his days listening to sonorous violins and moved through rooms thick with the scent of flowers, as if out of a canción by Agustin Lara.

(Now he remembers riding along the dirt roads from Las Piñas on a borrowed mule, a cane hat pulled low over his brow and a guitar slung over his back, and, coming to a field of wildflowers, dismounting from his mule and walking out to where the flowers were thickest: crouching and looking through the stems and blossoms, sun hot in the sky and a rattling cutting through the trees: now he picked hibiscus and violets and chrysanthemums, irises and hyacinths, tranquil among the bees and burrowing beetles and ants teeming around the sole of his soft leather shoes: deep inhalation of that fragrant air and the world going on forever and ever. Then he was on his mule again and making the approach to the farm. On the porch of their house, his mother and Genebria, always so happy to see him. And the Mambo King, very much a man, strode toward the house, kissed his mother, and presented her with the wildflowers, his mother whiffing them happily, saying, “Ay, niño! ”)

And he seemed happy. Whistled and shaved every day and wore a sweet cologne and a tie and shirt whenever he went out with her. Happiness, that’s all he talked about, standing on the street corners or in front of the stoop with his friends. She was turning him, he boasted, into a young man. I’m getting young, he would think, and forgetting my troubles.

He only wished the pains had gone away and that he could do as he pleased, without being bothered.

And Lydia? She supposed she was falling in love with him, but she had her doubts. Just felt so desperate to get the hell out of that factory. Wanted anything better than what she had. Wished to God that she had finished high school, wished to God she had a better job. She wished to God that she had not slept with the foreman, because everybody in the factory found out, and it made no difference in the end. She did it because he, like all men, had promised something better. But once she went as far as to lie back on his desk and hike up her dress, he got all offended that she wouldn’t do the rest: get on her knees and take care of him like that. “What I told you is off!” he shouted after the fifth or sixth time she’d visited him. “Forget the whole thing”—and he dismissed her as if she were a child.

Wished she was smart like Delores (though she did not want her unhappiness) or had a job like Ana María in a beauty salon (she seemed to be happy).

Wished that the Mambo King was thirty years younger.

Still, she saw the good in him: liked the respect people showed him and the fact that he seemed to work so hard. (Sometimes when they went out or when she watched him onstage it was hard to imagine that the old man would spend hours a day on his back with a wrench trying to fix a clogged sink trap, or that he climbed ladders and plastered walls, that his back had achy muscles.)

He was good to her and this affected Lydia like music, turning her bones into humming pipes and making honey drip out her valves. He was so happy with her he didn’t want to play jobs anymore, because that took time away from her. After a job, and anxious to see her, he would turn up at her apartment at three-thirty in the morning, carrying a wilting bouquet of flowers and a bag of party leftovers. With keys to her apartment, he would quietly open the door and make his way to her pink bedroom. Sometimes she was up waiting for him, sometimes she was fast asleep and the Mambo King, forgetting all his troubles, would strip down to his shorts and his sleeveless T-shirt and climb into bed beside her, falling asleep with his white-haired arms wrapped around her.