Oscar Hijuelos - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

He needed to rest, but it was past seven, and so he made himself another drink. Better to drink than to take those pills. He sat thinking about Lydia. Promised to reform. Yes, it was those pills making him act cruelly toward her. So, calmly, he went into his bathroom, took the pills, and flushed them down the toilet. Better to just drink, he told himself. Feeling tense, he went upstairs to get a piece of the flan. After so many years he still felt an attraction to Delores, and could not help but greet her with a fast little slap to the ass. But times were changing. When he had done that playfully with Leticia, she had chided him, saying, “A polite man doesn’t do that, especially an uncle.”

And now Delores said, “Cesar, are you going to be drunk when your woman arrives?”

Was that her reaction to a friendly slap on the butt?

“ Óyeme, Cesar, I’m only telling you this because I care for you.”

“I came here for flan, not for lectures.”

She put a small plate of flan before him, which he ate ravenously. Afterwards he went into the living room, where he and Nestor used to write all those songs, greeted Pedro, and killed time sipping coffee and watching television with him. Now and then, when he heard the subway coming into the station, he got up to look out the window to see if Lydia was among the subway crowd. Around eight-thirty he started to get worried and went downstairs again to wait. He had another glass of whiskey at nine, then waited by the stoop for her until ten.

By then he found himself walking back and forth between the subway kiosk and his building. He felt like growling, and if anyone looked at him in the wrong way, his face would turn red, his ears would burn. Passing his friends in front of the bodega, he tipped his hat but did not speak to them. Merrily, he whistled a melody. His friends had brought out a milk crate and a television. They were sitting, engrossed in a boxing match.

“Come on, Cesar, what’s wrong with you?” they’d call, but he just kept on his way.

By eleven he decided that something bad had happened to her: that she was robbed on the subway, or worse. Standing on the corner, smoking one cigarette after the other, he imagined Lydia standing naked in a bedroom and climbing into a bed with cool blue sheets alongside a younger man, planting kisses on his chest and then taking him into her mouth. The florist? Or one of those men who stood on the corners giving her the eye and wondering what she was doing with the old man. If he could have ran up to the Bronx like a young hound, he would have. He’d tried calling her: there was no one home. He went through a period of remorse over his suspicions, prayed to God (if there is a God) that nothing had happened to her. Around midnight, he was drunk in his living room listening to mambos and watching television. By then, he’d tried calling her a dozen times without getting a response, and he fantasized that she was cuckolding him. He said to himself, I don’t need anything from a woman.

Around one o’clock, Lydia called him. “I’m sorry, but Rico came down with a bad fever. I had to wait in emergency all night.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“There was only one phone and I was in and out with the child. Always people waiting to use it.” Then: “Why are you being so stern with me?” And she started to cry. “You’re so stern.”

“How’s the boy?” he asked more calmly.

“It was food poisoning.”

“Well, are you coming here?”

“Hijo, I want to, but it’s too late. I’m staying with the children.”

“Then I’ll say good night to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I don’t take this nonsense from anyone. Que te lleve el demonio!”

In the Hotel Splendour the Mambo King winced as he swallowed more whiskey. Although he was starting to have trouble reading the time on his watch and he felt as if he were being propelled through a dense forest by a powerful wind, and the same mambo record, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” had been playing over and over, he ached happily for another drink, the same way he ached that night to be reunited with Lydia.

Slamming down the phone, he waited for Lydia to call him, sobbing the way the broads used to when he played around with them. He sat by the phone, and when it didn’t ring, he said to himself, To hell with her. But a few hours later he felt that he had been stupid and cruel and that he was going to burst unless he could do something to get rid of the bad feelings inside him. He began slowly to understand what had plagued his younger brother those years before, this pressing melancholia. He fell asleep without having tasted more than a bit of flan; he felt something like a bloody rag being pulled through his body. It was a funny thing, pain. The pain was sharp enough that he somehow felt more slender, rather than so heavy. The pains multiplied and were so bad that he wanted to get up out of his bed but could not move. He wanted some of the pills he’d gotten on the sly for toothaches, but each time he moved, the pain got worse. Around six in the morning, the sun started to shine through the windows, and the sunlight gave him strength and he managed with a great shove to get up off the bed. Then, in an epic show of will, and clinging to the walls, he made it to the bathroom.

Things did not improve. He would take the train to the Bronx unannounced and turn up at her door, drunk and convinced that she had some man hidden there. He would walk down to the corner and find that old hound sitting at the foot of the basement stairway, felt happy the day he watched the old hound take on a younger mutt in a street fight, snapping at the younger dog’s legs and sending it whining through the streets. That’s what he would do, he told himself, to all her young men — the ones he saw taking her to bed every night, because now, in the dresses that he had given her, and smelling sweetly of his perfumes, she was the most desirable woman in the world.

As he thought about those days, some confusion set in. There was something else going on, too, wasn’t there? His health was getting worse each day. Pink urine, swollen fingers, and little bouts of humiliating incontinence, when he would feel his own urine leaking down his leg and he would think, Stop, but nothing would stop. That humiliation made him want to cry, because even though he was an old man, he liked to think that he was clean, but those days, he feared, had gone forever.

And Lydia? Her face drained of color: she thought how she had almost moved her kids out of their apartment in the Bronx, and how she would do anything for that man; even forgave his age and his foul moods for the sake of love, and she felt that no matter what she did, he was bent on fucking things up. For the first time she started to think about other men. Thought that if a nice man walked up to her, she would go with him. She thought his world-weariness was spreading like a poison into her, and that even her sweetness couldn’t offset it. She found herself crying herself to sleep at three every night. He would come home, strip naked, climb into bed beside her: sometimes he would make love to her though she hadn’t even opened her eyes.

He would whisper, “No matter what, Lydia, this old man loves you.”

But then something became unbearable. Whenever she wanted to talk to him, he never heard her voice. He bought her flowers, new dresses, toys for her children. He blew kisses into the kitchen, but he would not talk to her.

One day, when he asked her to spend the weekend with him, she told him, “Cesar, I’m taking my kids out to visit my sister in New Jersey.”

And he nodded, hung up the phone, and holed up for the three days and his health slid out of him and into the toilet for good.