Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

In the middle of the night she would wake to urinate and find him sitting up, short-breathed and gasping, or murmuring painfully in his sleep and flailing about the bed as if he were drowning. She would watch him shake and then couldn’t imagine what he had been dreaming about, never knew what to do when he got out of bed and went into his kitchen, where he would sit at the table drinking rum or whiskey and reading some book.

They were happy for a long time, despite her doubts about his age and the pains that sometimes racked his body. But then, abruptly, things started to come apart. One night after he had taken Lydia and the children out to eat, he lay doubled over in bed with terrible pains in his gut, as he’d eaten a big pot of Dominican chicken and rice, which had been hotly spiced with sausages. With Herculean effort, he managed to get himself out of bed (everything about him quivery because he had put on so much weight) and struggled down to the bathroom, where he tried to exorcise the burning insect larvae inside his gut, retching out, with the beer and plantains and the rest, tadpole-shaped dollops of blood, tails veiny and fluttering in the toilet water. Then he just barely made it back to his bed, where he collapsed, shaking with obesity and fear. That was the night of the strange dream, when he saw seven spirits, five of whom he recognized immediately: Tomasa, Pereza, Nicolena, Nisa, and Genebria, women he had known from Cuba. Then there were two shoeless men wearing rags and straw hats, whose faces were covered with white paste like carnival corpses. Circling around the Mambo King, they were chanting:

“Cesar Castillo, we know you’re very tired and soon it will be time for you to die.”

Again and again and again.

“Cesar Castillo, we know you’re very tired and soon it will be time for you to die”—like a nursery rhyme.

They harassed him for an hour and then slipped off into the night (they would return in the darkness of his hospital room three months later) and the Mambo King, a sweaty mess with heaving chest and bloated stomach, sank back into bed and felt his limbs swelling: when he woke in the morning, his skin was covered with blisters and sores, the kind which used to plague his father in Cuba, when things had gotten very bad. And he was ashamed to take off his clothes in front of Lydia and would make love to her wearing a shirt, turning his head away when she would look at his face.

When the pains got even worse, he looked up an old friend who worked in a pharmacy and sometimes gave him pain pills for toothaches. While his friend recommended that he go to a doctor, he gave him a small jar of painkiller pills anyway. Instead of seeing a doctor, Cesar took the pills and drank some whiskey, feeling so much better that he lumbered down the stairway and stood out in front of the stoop to enjoy the early-spring weather. The sun felt good on his face and a mood of great optimism came over him. And things were very interesting now. Looking across the street that day, he saw himself and Nestor walking up the block. Then a big checkered cab stood idling in front of the building with Desi Arnaz stepping out and removing his hat — Miguel Montoya and Lucille Ball behind him.

And across the way, he saw lines of people waiting in front of the Club Havana. He blinked and the lines were gone.

Then he saw an unbearably beautiful woman standing in front of the bodega, stared at her and realized that the woman was Beautiful María, who had taken his brother’s soul. Someone should show her a thing or two. And so he walked over to her, grabbed her roughly by the wrists, and dragged her upstairs to his apartment. By the time they’d gotten into the bedroom, he had removed all of his clothes. “Now I’m going to show you something, woman.”

And he buggered her with his huge thing, but not in a gentle way where the woman’s insides get all soft; not in the way where he would finger her at the same time so that she would come. He did it violently, showing María a thing or two. Except it wasn’t María, it was Lydia.

“ Chico, why are you trying to hurt me so?”

“Oh, no, mami. I don’t want to hurt you, I love you.”

But he kept taking those tablets. And they would put him in a bad mood.

“You know there’s something I’ve never told you,” he said one day while visiting her in the Bronx. “And that’s my opinion of Puerto Ricans. Everybody knows you Puerto Ricans are jealous of us Cubans; there was a time when it was very rough for a Cuban to walk into a Puerto Rican bar. But that’s not your fault, not at all. The Puerto Ricans hate us Cubans because even the lowest Cuban who came here with nothing has something now.”

“Children,” Lydia said. “Why don’t you go into the living room and watch the television.” Then: “Why are you telling me this when you know my situation?”

He shrugged.

“You know what? You’re crazy. What have I done to you?”

He shrugged again. “I say what I think.”

“If you think I take things from you because I have no money, you’re wrong.”

“I was only talking about some Puerto Ricans, not all.”

“I just think you’re trying to start something with me. Now, please, mi amor, why don’t you just relax and sit here, I’ll make you something nice — I have some chorizos and potatoes I can fry up with eggs.”

“Yes, that would be good.”

He sat for a long time, watching her cooking. He smoked a cigarette and then he stood up and put his arms around her. She was wearing a nice soft pink Woolworth’s slip, without anything else on underneath, and when he put his hand on her bottom the softness of youth made him feel sad.

“I’m just an old man and I’m probably going to get worse, do you still want me?”

“Yes, yes, I do. Don’t be foolish, sit down and eat your breakfast and later we’ll take a walk up to the movie house on Fordham Road.”

Pacing in the halls of his house, he became more and more like that old German shepherd with matty coat and milk-cornered eyes who watched the basement entrance of a building down the street. He’d wait and wait for Lydia to return, stand by the window, wait by the door. And when she finally came home, happy with her rose, they would start to argue.

“And where were you?”

“At the florist’s.”

“Well, I don’t want you going there anymore.”

She tried hard to understand him and said, “Cesar, I think you are being a little unreasonable. Don’t worry about me, querido. I’m yours. Worry about yourself, hombre. You’re too old not to be going to a doctor if you’re not feeling well.”

But he pretended not to hear her.

“Well, I still don’t want you talking to any men.”

He slipped in and out of these moods. One Friday night, while toweling himself off after a bath, he daydreamed about Lydia. She was going to turn up at eight and they would go to a movie on Broadway, eat a nice dinner, and then go to bed together. He imagined her taut nipple in his mouth, kissing her quivering thigh. When she came, her whole body shuddered in waves, as if the building was shaking. That was something nice to remember, something nice to look forward to. That, and some of the flan Delores said she was going to make for him. Cesar really liked that flan, and so he decided that after having a drink he would go upstairs to visit his brother’s widow.

He’d had a hard day, his body aching. Even the pills weren’t working very well anymore. And he’d been bothered by mareos, dizzy spells. In reasonable moments he saw that he had been a little unfair to Lydia and he wanted to make things up to her. She would bring her kids down and stay with him through Sunday. Saturday night, he’d play a job, a party at the School of the Ascension.