The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

SİDE A: In the Hotel Splendour 1980

NEARLY TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after he and his brother had appeared on the I Love Lucy show, Cesar Castillo suffered in the terrible heat of a summer’s night and poured himself another drink. He was in a room in the Hotel Splendour on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, not far from the narrow stairway that led up to the recording studios of Orchestra Records, where his group, the Mambo Kings, made their fifteen black brittle 78s. In fact, it could have been the very room in which he had once bedded down a luscious and long-legged party girl by the name of Vanna Vane, Miss Mambo for the month of June 1954. Everything was different then: 125th Street was jumping with clubs, there was less violence, there were fewer beggars, more mutual respect between people; he could take a late-night stroll from the apartment on La Salle Street, head down Broadway, cut east on 110th Street to Central Park, and then walk along its twisting paths and across the little bridges over streams and rocks, enjoying the scent of the woods and nature’s beauty without a worry. He’d make his way to the Park Palace Ballroom on East 110th Street to hear Machito or Tito Puente, find musician friends at the bar, chase women, dance. Back then, you could walk through that park wearing your best clothes and a nice expensive watch without someone coming up behind you and pressing a knife against your neck. Man, those days were gone forever.

He laughed: he would have given anything to have the physical virtuosity now that he did when he was thirty-six and first brought Miss Mambo up those stairs and into the room. He used to live for that moment when he could strip a woman down on a bed: Miss Vanna Vane of Brooklyn, New York, had a mole just below the nipple of her right breast, and, boom, his big thing used to stick out just like that, just by touching a woman’s breast or standing close to her and sensing the heat between her legs. Women wore nicer clothes back then, more elaborate delicate things, and it was more fun to watch them undress. Yes, perhaps that was the room where he’d take Vanna Vane on those glorious unending nights of love so long ago.

He sat in the flickering street-lit window, his languorous heavy-jowled hound’s face glowing like white stone. He’d brought up a little phonograph, used to belong to his nephew Eugenio, and a package of old records made by his group, the Mambo Kings, in the early 1950s. A case of whiskey, a carton of cigarettes — filtered Chesterfields (“Folks, smoke Chesterfields, the preferred tobacco, the Mambo King’s favorite!”) that had wrecked his nice baritone voice over the years; and a few other items: paper, envelopes, a few BiC pens, his tattered address book, stomach pills, a dirty magazine — something called El Mundo Sexual—a few faded photographs, a change of clothes, all packed in a beaten-up cane suitcase. He was planning to stay in the Hotel Splendour for as long as it would take him to drink that whiskey (or until the veins on his legs burst), figuring he’d eat, if he had to, at the Chinese place on the corner with its sign saying, “Takee Out Only.”

As he leaned forward, placing on the buzzing phonograph a record called “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” he could hear footsteps on the stairway, a man’s and a young woman’s voice, the man saying, “Here we are, baby,” and then the sound of the door opening and closing, and the moving about of chairs, as if they were going to sit in front of a fan together to drink and kiss. Black man’s voice, Cesar figured before clicking on the record player.

A sea of scratches and a trumpet line, a habanera bass, a piano playing sentimental, sad minor chords, his brother Nestor Castillo in some faraway place in a world without light, raising the trumpet to his lips, eyes closed, face rippled by dreamy concentration… the melody of Ernesto Lecuona’s “Juventud.”

Sipping whiskey, his memory scrambled like eggs. He was sixty-two. Time was becoming a joke. One day, young man; next day, old man. Now, as the music played, he half expected to open his eyes and find Miss Vanna Vane seated on that chair across the room, slipping her long legs into a pair of nylons, the cheery white light of 125th Street on a Sunday morning burning through the half-open window shade.

On one of those nights when he could not sit still in their apartment on La Salle Street back in 1954, he was in the Palm Nightclub listening to the fabulous Tito Rodríguez and his orchestra and watching the cigarette girl: she was wearing a too tight leopard-skin leotard and her blond hair was long, curled, and swept to one side, so that it fell pouty over half her face, like Veronica Lake’s. Every time this blonde walked by, Cesar Castillo bought a package of cigarettes from her, and when she would set her cigarette box down on the table he’d hold her by the wrist and look deep into her eyes. Then he’d give her a quarter tip and smile. In a sheeny black top, her breasts were splendid and large. He’d once overheard a drunken sailor saying to a pal in a bar, “Look at the torpedoes on that broad, mamma mia!” Loving American expressions, he thought of torpedoes with their pointed tips, and was enchanted by the line of sweat congealing across her diaphragm.

After he’d bought his eighth package of cigarettes from her, he invited her to have a drink. Because it was very late, she decided to sit with them, these two handsome brothers.

“My name is Cesar Castillo, and this is my brother Nestor.”

“Vanna Vane. Nice to meet you.”

A little later he was out on the dance floor with Miss Vane, putting on a hell of a show for the crowd, when the orchestra broke into a furious jam: a conga player, a bongo player, and a drummer with an American kit, pounding out a fast, swirling, circular rhythm. Their playing was so conducive to spinning that the Mambo King unfurled his breast-pocket handkerchief and in a variation of the scarf dance slipped one end of it between his teeth and urged Vanna to do the same with the other. Joined by a pink-and-light-blue handkerchief clenched between their teeth, Cesar and Vanna started to spin quickly like two whirling acrobats in a circus act. As they spun, the crowd applauded, and a number of couples imitated them on the dance floor. Then they dizzily zigzagged back to their table.

“So you’re a Cuban fellow like that guy Desi Arnaz?”

“That’s right, baby.”

Later, at three in the morning, he and Nestor walked her to the subway.

“Vanna, there’s something I want you to do for me. I have this orchestra and we’ve just made a new record. We’re thinking of calling it something like ‘Mambos for the Manhattan Night,’ that’s my idea, and we need someone, a pretty girl like you — how old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“—a pretty girl to pose with us for the cover of this record. I mean to say”—and then he seemed flustered and bashful—“that you would be good for this. It pays fifty dollars.”

“Fifty.”

Decked out in white silk suits on a Saturday afternoon, the brothers met Vanna in Times Square and walked over to the photographer’s studio at 548 West 48th Street, the Olympus Studio, where their photographer had outfitted a back room with fake palm trees. Turning up with their instruments, a trumpet, a guitar, and a drum, they looked quite slick, their thick heads of hair conked high into shining pompadours. Miss Vane wore a ruffle-skirted, pleat-waisted party dress with a tight bodice, gleamy black seamed nylons, and five-inch-high heels that lifted her rump into the air and showed off her nice long legs. (And behind this memory, he didn’t know what they called that muscle up at the high end inside a woman’s thigh, that muscle which intersected the clitoris and got all twisted, quivering ever so slightly when he’d kiss a woman there.) They tried a hundred poses, but the one that made the album cover was this: Cesar Castillo with wolfish grin, a conga drum strapped around his neck, his hand raised and coming down on the drum, his mouth open in a laugh, and his whole body bending toward Miss Vane. Her hands were clasped together by her face, her mouth forming an “Ooooh” of excitement, her legs bent for dancing, part of her garter showing; while to her left, Nestor, eyes closed and head tilted back, was blowing his trumpet. Later the artist who did the mechanicals for Orchestra Records would add a Manhattan skyline and a trail of one- and two-flagged notes spewing out of Nestor’s trumpet around them.

Because Orchestra Records worked on the cheap, most of their recordings were 78s, though they also managed to put out a few party-size 33s, with four songs per side. In those days, most record players still had three speeds. Pressed in the Bronx, these 78s were made of a heavy but brittle plastic, never sold more than a few thousand copies each, and were to be found in botánicas—religious knickknack shops — alongside statues of Jesus Christ and his tormented disciples, and magic candles and curative herbs, and in record stores like the Almacén Hernández on 113th Street and Lexington Avenue in Harlem, and in bins in the street market and on tables manned by friends at dances. The Mambo Kings would put out fifteen of these 78s, selling for 69 cents each, between 1949 and 1956, and three long-playing 33s (in 1954 and 1956).

The A and B sides of these 78s were titled “Solitude of My Heart,” “A Woman’s Tears,” “Twilight in Havana,” “The Havana Mambo,” “Conga Cats and Conga Dolls,” “The Sadness of Love,” “Welcome to Mamboland,” “Jingle Bells Mambo!” (“Who’s that fat jolly guy with the white beard dancing up a storm with that chick?… Santa Claus, Santa Claus dancing the ‘Jingle Bells Mambo!’ ”), “Mambo Nocturne,” “The Subway Mambo,” “My Cuban Mambo,” “The Lovers’ Mambo,” “El Campesino,” “Alcohol,” “Traffic Mambo,” “The Happy Mambo!” “The New York Cha-cha-cha,” “Cuban Cha-cha,” “Too Many Women (and Not Enough Time!),” “Mambo Inferno!” “Noche Caliente,” “Malagueña” (as cha-cha-cha), “Juventud,” “Solitude,” “Lovers’ Cha-cha-cha,” “How Delicious the Mambo!” “Mambo Fiesta!” “The Kissing Mambo!” (And the 33s: “Mambo Dance Party” and “Manhattan Mambo”—1954—and their full-length 33, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, June 1956.) Not only did the Mambo Kings feature winsome and beautiful Miss Mambo pinup girls on each of these records, but sometimes a dance instruction box was included. (By the mid-seventies, most of these records had vanished from the face of the earth. Whenever Cesar would go by a secondhand store or a “classic” record rack, he would search carefully for new copies to replace the ones that had gotten smashed or lent out or given away or just worn out and scratchy from so much use. Sometimes he found them for 15 cents or 25 cents and he would walk happily home, his bundle under his arm.)

Now the narrow entranceway of Orchestra, where those records were made, was blocked off with boards, its windows filled with the remnants of what had become a dress shop; a few manikins were leaning backwards against the glass. But back then he and the Mambo Kings used to carry their instruments up the narrow stairway, their enormous string bass always banging against the walls. Beyond a red door marked STUDIO was a small waiting room with an office desk and a row of black metal chairs. On the wall, a corkboard filled with photographs of the record company’s other musicians: a singer named Bobby Soxer Otero; a pianist, Cole Higgins; and beside him, the majestic Ornette Brothers. Then a photograph of the Mambo Kings all dressed in white silk suits and posed atop a seashell art-deco bandstand, the photograph crisscrossed with looping scrawls.

The studio was about the size of a large bathroom and had thickly carpeted floors with corkboard- and drape-covered walls, and a large window looking out on 125th Street. It was hot and airless on warm days, without air-conditioning or ventilation when they were recording, save for the rusty-bladed fan that sat atop the studio piano, which they’d turn on between numbers.

Three big RCA ball microphones in the center of the room for vocals, another three for the instruments. While making their records, the musicians would remove their shoes and walk quietly about, careful not to stomp their feet during the recording session, as this would get picked up as “thumps” on the microphones. No laughing, no breathing, no whispering. The horn players would stand to the side, the rhythm section — drummers and string bass and pianist — on another.

Cesar and his brother Nestor side by side, the Mambo King playing the claves (the wooden instruments making the 1-2-3/1-2 clicking sound) or shaking maracas, strumming a guitar. Sometimes Cesar played trumpet melodies with Nestor, but usually he stepped back and allowed his brother to take his solos in peace. Even so, Nestor always waited for his older brother’s signal, a nod, to begin. Only then, would Nestor step forward, his mournful solos flying like black angels through the group’s lavish orchestrations. With that, Cesar returned to the microphone or the pianist took his own solo or the chorus sang. Sometimes these sessions lasted until the early morning, with some songs coming easily, and others played again and again until throats grew hoarse and the streets seemed to blur in a phantasm of lights.

Like his music, the Mambo King was very direct in those days. He and Vanna had just been out to dinner at the Club Babalú and Cesar said to her, as she chewed on a piece of plantain fritter, “Vanna, I’m in love with you, and I want the chance to show you what it’s like to be loved by a man like me.” And because they’d been throwing down pitchers of the Club Babalú’s special sangria, and because he had taken her to a nice movie — Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa—and because he had gotten her a fifty-dollar modeling fee and an expensive ballroom dress with pleated skirt so she could appear between himself and his younger brother on the cover of “Manhattan Mambos ’54”; and perhaps because he was a reasonably handsome man who seemed earnest and knew, as wolves know, exactly what he wanted from her — she could see it in his eyes — she was flattered enough that when he said, “Why don’t we go uptown?” she said, “Yes.”

Maybe it was on that chair that she had first set down her fine ass while going about the delicate business of hoisting up her skirt and unsnapping her garters. Coyly smiling as she rolled down her nylons, which she afterwards draped across the chair. He lay down across the bed. He’d taken off his jacket, his silk shirt, his flamingo-pink tie, stripped off his sleeveless T-shirt, so that his top was bare — save for a tarnished crucifix, a First Communion gift from his mother in Cuba, hanging from a thin gold chain around his neck. Off with the lights, off with her wire-reinforced Maidenform 36C brassiere, off with her Lady of Paris underwear with the flowery embroidered crotch. He told her exactly what to do. She undid his trousers and gripped his big thing with her long slender hand, and soon she was unrolling a heavy rubber prophylactic over it. She liked him, liked it, liked his manliness and his arrogance and the way he threw her around on the bed, turning her on her stomach and onto her back, hung her off the side of the bed, pumping her so wildly she felt as if she was being attacked by a beast of the forest. He licked the mole on her breast that she thought ugly with the tip of his tongue and called it beautiful. Then he pumped her so much he tore up the rubber and kept going even when he knew the rubber was torn; he kept going because it felt so good and she screamed, and felt as if she was breaking into pieces, and, boom, he had his orgasm and went floating through a wall-less room filled with flitting black nightingales.

“Tell me that phrase again in Spanish. I like to hear it.”

“Te quiero.”

“Oh, it’s so beautiful, say it again.”

“Te quiero, baby, baby.”

“And I ‘te quiero,’ too.”

Smugly, he showed her his pinga, as it was indelicately called in his youth. He was sitting on the bed in the Hotel Splendour, hidden by the shadows, while she was standing near the bathroom door. And just looking at her fine naked body, damp with sweat and happiness, made his big thing all hard again. That thing burning in the light of the window was thick and dark as a tree branch. In those days, it sprouted like a vine from between his legs, carried aloft by a powerful vein that precisely divided his body, and flourished upwards like the spreading top branches of a tree, or, he once thought while looking at a map of the United States, like the course of the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

“Come over here,” he told her.

On that night, as on many other nights, he pulled up the tangled sheets so that she could join him on the bed again. And soon Vanna Vane was grinding her damp bottom against his chest, belly, and mouth and strands of her dyed blond hair came slipping down between their lips as they kissed. Then she mounted him and rocked back and forth until things got all twisted and hot inside and both their hearts burst (pounding like conga drums) and they fell back exhausted, resting until they were ready for more, their lovemaking going around and around in the Mambo King’s head, like the melody of a song of love.

Thinking about Vanna threw open the door to that time. The Mambo King found himself walking arm in arm with her — or a woman like her — into the Park Palace Ballroom, a huge dance joint on 110th Street and Fifth Avenue. That was his favorite place to hang out on his nights off, when he wanted to have fun. It would feel good to make an entrance with a pretty woman on his arm, a tall blonde with a big heart-shaped ass: Vanna Vane, splendid in a bursting black sequin-disk-covered number that blinked and wobbled clamorously when she’d walk across a room. He’d strut in beside her, wearing a light blue pinstriped suit, white silk shirt, light sky-blue tie, his hair slick and his body scented with Old Spice, the mariner’s cologne.

That was the thing in those days: to be seen with a woman like Vanna was prestigious as a passport, a high-school diploma, a full-time job, a record contract, a 1951 DeSoto. Dark-skinned men like Nat King Cole and Miguelito Valdez would turn up at the dance halls with blond girlfriends. And Cesar liked to do the same, even though he was a white Cuban like Desi Arnaz. (Why, he knew of this fellow, hung around in the clubs, who made his brunette girlfriend dye her pubic hair blond. He knew it because he’d taken her to bed once, when she was still a brunette, and then later, on the sly, he’d talked her into going somewhere with him, maybe the Hotel Splendour, where he planted a kiss on her navel and slid her panties off, slipping his tongue into the sweetness of her new, improved golden Clairol hair.) Moving through the ballroom crowd, he liked to watch the heads turning in admiration as he and his girl would make their way to the jammed bar. There he’d play the sport and buy his friends drinks — in the 1950s, rum and Cokes were the rage — joking and telling stories until the orchestra broke into something like the “Hong Kong Mambo” or the “Mambo de Paree” and he would take his girl back out onto the floor and dance.

Later he might go into the cavernous Park Palace rest rooms to get his fancy two-toned shoes shined, or to place a bet with one of the bookies who worked out of a long stall where magazines and newspapers, condoms, flowers, and reefers were sold. A dollar tip for the shoeshine boys, a piss in the urinal, a comb through his wavy hair, and then out again, his metal-heeled shoes tap, tap, tapping down the tiled halls, like shoes in the arcades of Cuba, toward the beautiful music. Then he’d dance or rejoin his quiet brother at their table, sipping drinks and gratefully observing the juicy babes around him. (Yeah, and even if he’s in the Hotel Splendour, it’s as if he’s back in that dance hall again, checking things out and noticing that there’s a nice brunette looking over at him. And who should come by when his date gets up to use the ladies’ room but that brunette, and even if she’s not a blonde, she looks seriously fly in a tight pink dress and bops toward him with a drink in her hand, and Dios mío, but she looks hot from dancing, with beads of sweat rolling off her chin and onto her breasts, her stomach damp and transparent through the clingy material of her dress. And what does she say but, “Aren’t you Cesar Castillo, the singer?” And he nods and takes hold of her wrist and says, “My, but you smell nice,” and he gets her name, cracks her up with a joke, and then, before his date returns, he says, “Why don’t you come back here tomorrow night and we can talk some more and have a little fun,” and he jumps ahead, feeling her nipple stiffen in his mouth, and then he’s back in the Park Palace, watching her walking off — he can just barely make out the outline of her panties through her dress, and she’s in bed tormenting him with the ball of her thumb, a rolling motion over his opening that makes the head of his penis the size of a Cortland apple, and then his girl’s sitting beside him and they have some more drinks, he remembered that.)*

The Mambo King flourished in that ballroom with its friendly crowds, good food, booze, companionship, and music. And when he wasn’t out to dance or to play jobs with his orchestra, he was visiting the friends he had made in the Park Palace and other dance halls, fellow Cubans or Puerto Ricans who would invite him over to their apartments to eat dinner, play cards, listen to records, and become a swaying ring of arms in the kitchen, singing and always having fun.

It was at the Park Palace that the Mambo King and his brother found many of their musicians. When he and his brother had first turned up in New York in early 1949, the beginning of the mambo boom, they had gotten jobs through their fat cousin Pablo, with whom they had at first lived, working in a meatpacking plant on 125th Street by day so that they could have enough money to party and set things up at night. They met a lot of people then, a lot of musicians like themselves, good players. There was Pito Pérez, who played the timbales; Benny Domingo on the congas; Ray Alcázar on the piano; Manny Domínguez, who played the guitar and the cencerro; Xavier from Puerto Rico, the trombone; Willie Carmen, the flute; Ramón “El Jamón” Ortiz, the bass saxophone; José Otero, violin; Rafael Guillón, the rattle gourd; Benny Chacón, accordion; Johnny Bing, saxophone; Johnny Cruz, horn; Francisco Martínez, vibraphone; Johnny Reyes, the tres and the eight-stringed quatro. And, among them, the brothers themselves: Cesar, who sang, played the trumpet, guitar, accordion, and piano; and Nestor, flute, trumpet, guitar, and vocals.

Like the brothers, many of the musicians were workers by day, and when they played jobs and were on a stage, or went out dancing, they were Stars for a Night. Stars of buying drinks, stars of friendly introductions, stars of female conquest. Some of them were already famous like the Mambo King wanted to be. They met the drummer Mongo Santamaría, who had an act back then called the Black Cuban Diamonds; Pérez Prado,* the emperor of the Mambo; the singer Graciela; Chico O’Farrill; and that black fellow who liked Cubans so much, Dizzy Gillespie. And they met the great Macedonio Rivera, a dignified and dapper-looking mulatto, who would hang out at the bar of the Park Palace, his wife by his side, receiving his fans and their occasional gifts of jewelry, which he would calmly tuck into his jacket pocket. Later the jewelry would end up in a teakwood Chinese box that Rivera kept in his living room. Visiting at his apartment in the West Eighties, the brothers would see this box, thick with engraved watches, bracelets, and rings, its lid decorated with Chinese swirls and inlaid with the image of a mother-of-pearl dragon devouring a flower. And Cesar would say, “Don’t you worry, brother, that’s going to be happening to us one day.”

Cesar had a picture from one of those nights, tucked in the soft cloth pocket of his suitcase in the Hotel Splendour: the two brothers decked out in white suits and seated at a round table, the mirrored walls and columns behind them reflecting the distant lights, dancers, and the brass of an orchestra. Cesar, a little drunk and pleased to death with himself, a champagne glass in one hand and, in the other, the soft, curvaceous shoulder of an unidentified girl — Paulita? Roxanne? Xiomara? — looking a lot like Rita Hayworth, with her nice breasts pushed up into the top of her dress and a funny smile because Cesar had just leaned over and kissed her, licking her ear with his tongue, and Nestor beside them, a little detached and to the side, staring off, his brows raised slightly in bewilderment.

Those were the days when they’d formed the Mambo Kings. It started with jam sessions that used to drive their landlady, Mrs. Shannon, and their other neighbors, mostly Irish and German people, crazy. Musicians they knew from the dance halls would come over to the apartment with their instruments and set up in the living room, which was often noisy with wacky saxophones, violins, drums, and basses that screeched, floated, banged, and bounced out into the courtyard and street, so that the neighbors slammed down their windows and threatened the Cubans with hammers. The casual jam sessions became regular sessions, certain musicians always showed up, and so one day Cesar simply said, “Let’s make a little orchestra, huh?”

His best find, though, was a certain Miguel Montoya, a pianist and good professional who knew the secrets of arranging. He was also Cuban and had been kicking around in different orchestras in New York City since the early 1930s and he was well connected, having played with Antonio Arcana and with Noro Morales. They’d see Montoya over at the Park Palace. Dressed in white from head to toe, he wore large, glittering sapphire rings, and sported an ivory crystal-tipped cane. Rumor had it that although he’d show up in the dance halls with a woman he was effeminate in character. One night they went to Montoya’s apartment on Riverside Drive and 155th Street for dinner. Everything in his home was white and fleecy — from the goatskins and plumes that hung on the walls to the statues of Santa Barbara and the Holy Mother that he’d draped in silk, to the furry love seats, sofas, and chairs. In the corner his white baby grand piano, a Steinway, on which he’d placed a thin-necked vase filled with tulips. They dined on delicate slices of veal which Miguel had cooked with lemon, butter, garlic, salt, and olive oil; scalloped potatoes; and a grand salad, which they washed down with one bottle of wine after the other. Later, as the Hudson gleamed silver in the moonlight and New Jersey blinked in the distance, they laughed, turned on the record player, and passed half the night dancing rumbas, mambos, and tangos. Cultivating Miguel through flirtation, Cesar treated him with real affection like a beloved uncle, constantly patting and hugging him. Later in the evening he asked Montoya if he could spare the time to sit in with their orchestra, and that night Montoya gave in and said he would.

They formed a mambo band; that is, a traditional Latin dance band given balls by saxophones and horns. This orchestra consisted of a flute, violin, piano, sax, two trumpets, two drummers, one playing an American kit and the other a battery of congas. Cesar had thought up the Mambo Kings while looking through the advertising pages of the Brooklyn Herald, where half the orchestras had names like the Mambo Devils, Romero and the Hot Rumba Orchestra, Mambo Pete and His Caribbean Crooners. There was a certain Eddie Reyes King of the Bronx Mambo, Juan Valentino and His Mad Mambo Rompers, Vic Caruso and His Little Italy Mambonairs, and groups like the Havana Casino Orchestra, the Havana Melody Band, the Havana Dance Orchestra. Those same pages advertising DANCING LESSONS NOW! LEARN THE MAMBO, THE FOX-TROT, THE RUMBA. DANCE YOUR WAY INTO A GIRL’S HEART! Why not Cesar Castillo and the Mambo Kings?

Although Cesar considered himself a singer, he was also quite talented as an instrumentalist and adept at percussion. He was blessed with tremendous energy, a surge of power from too many slaps in the face from his foul-tempered father, Pedro Castillo, and a love of melody because of his mother and the affectionate maid who had helped bring him into the world, Genebria. (Here he listens to a distant trumpeting on a Mambo King recording, “Twilight in Havana,” and sighs; it’s as if he’s a kid again running through the center of Las Piñas at carnival and the porches of the houses are lit with huge lanterns and the balconies garlanded with ribbons and tapers and flowers, and past so many musicians, musicians everywhere on the street corners, on the church steps, on the porches of the houses, and continuing on toward the plaza, where the big orchestra’s set up; that’s the trumpet he hears echoing in the arcades of his town as he passes the columns and the shadows of couples hidden behind them and charges down steps beyond a garden, through the crowds and the dancers, to the bandstand, where that trumpet player, obese in a white suit, head tilted back, blows his music into the sky, and this carries and bounces off the walls of another arcade in Havana, and Cesar’s blowing the trumpet now at three in the morning, reeling around in circles and laughing after a night out at the clubs and brothels with friends and his brother, laughing with the notes that whip into the empty dark spaces and bounce back, swirling inside him like youth.)

He and his brother actually preferred the slower ballads and boleros, but they set out with Montoya to build a sound dance band, because that’s what the people wanted. It was Montoya who did all the arrangements of pieces like “Tu Felicidad,” “Cachita,” “No Te Importe Saber,” pieces made popular by the likes of René Touzet, Noro Morales, José Fajardo. He knew how to read music, which the brothers had never really learned — though they could struggle their way through a chart, they presented their songs with simple chords and with the melodies worked out on instruments or in their heads. This sometimes annoyed the other musicians, but Cesar used to tell them, “What I’m interested in is a man who can really feel the music, instead of someone who can only play the charts.” And then he talked about the immortal conguero Chano Pozo, who was shot to death in 1948 over a drug deal* and whose ghost was already turning up in Havana mambos, and of musicians like the great Mongo Santamaría. “Just look at Mongo,” Cesar would say to Nestor. “He doesn’t read. And did Chano? No, hombre, he had the spirit, and that’s what we want, too.”

They’d rehearse in the living room of their cousin Pablo’s apartment, on days when the walls were subject to wild fits of clanking boiler pipes and when the floors rumbled because of the subways, as if in an earthquake. They’d rehearse on days when the boiler had shut down and it was so cold steam oozed out of their cuticles and the musicians would roll their eyes, saying, “Who needs this shit?” But they continued because Cesar Castillo treated them well: they’d show up dead-tired from their day jobs and play their hearts out, knowing that at the end of the rehearsal they would crowd into the little kitchen: Pablo’s wife would cook up big platters of steak and pork chops — smuggled out of the meat-packing plant under shirts and long coats — rice and beans, and whatever else they wanted. Having consumed great quantities of food and beer, they’d laugh and head back into the chilly universe feeling as if Cesar Castillo and his brother had really looked out for them.

Hands moving around in circles (after taking a sip of beer, drag of a Chesterfield), he’d explain his ideas about a song: “For this ballad, we should come in quietly like cats. Miguel, first you on the piano, the minor chords and all that business on the high notes, then, Manny, you come in with the bass, but suavecito, suavecito, and then, Nestor, you come in with the horn, talatalatalata, then the congas and the other brass. We go through one verse and then we come into the turnaround and I’ll sing the verse.”

“We’ll play,” Manny the bassist was saying. “And you sing with that priestly expression on your face.”

When they finally had the songs worked out, lyrics and simple chords, the melody lines memorized, he used to take them to his arranger, the elegant Miguel Montoya. Sitting down beside him, he’d whistle the melody or pick it out directly on the piano, so that it could be written down as music. Many a night, passersby on Broadway and Tiemann Place would hear these melodies being worked out by the Mambo King and his brother. People would look up and see their silhouettes in the window, heads arched back. Or sometimes they went up to the rooftop with a few bottles of beer and steak sandwiches on Italian bread, smothered in onions and salt, and set out a blanket, feasted and drank, passing the night improvising songs as if for the red-yellow-blue-and-white-lit buildings of the city.

Jobs were hard to find at first, with so many good dance bands already out there. On his days off, Cesar did a lot of the footwork, going from club to club on Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Avenues, and to the Bronx and Brooklyn and uptown, Harlem. He was always trying to set up auditions with jaded, tan-suited Puerto Rican gangsters who owned half of the mambo singers in New York. But they did get some jobs: parish dances, grammar-school parties, weddings. Many hours of rehearsal, few dollars of pay. It would help a lot that Cesar Castillo was a white Cuban bolero singer like Desi Arnaz, what they called in those days a Latin-lover type, dark-haired and dark-featured, his skin being what was then called “swarthy.” Swarthy to Americans, but light-skinned when compared to many of his friends. Pito, a wiry Cuban from Cienfuegos, was as dark as the mahogany legs of the easy chair in their living room on La Salle. A lot of the fellows who turned up at the apartment with their squealing, guitar-shaped wives and girlfriends were dark, bony-limbed men.

A flier from May 15, 1950:

The Friendship Club on 79th Street and Broadway presents for your dancing pleasure a double bill of top Mambo Entertainment. Tonight and tomorrow night (Fri. and Sat.) we are proud to present the Glorious Gloria Parker and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra! And, sharing this bill, the Fabulous Cesar Castillo and His Mambo Kings of Cuba! Admission $1.04. Doors open at 9P.M. No zoot suits and no jitterbugs, please.

They started playing jobs all over the city. The Café Society on 58th Street, the Havana Madrid on Broadway and 51st, the Biltmore Ballroom on Church and Flatbush, the Club 78, the Stardust on Boston Road in the Bronx, the Pan-American Club and the Gayheart Ballroom on Nostrand Avenue, the Hotel Manhattan Towers on 76th Street and at the City Center Casino.

He’d get up on the stage, dancing before the microphone while his musicians took the music forward. The glory of being on a stage with his brother Nestor, playing for crowds of café-society people who jumped, bounced, and wriggled across the dance floor. While Nestor soloed, Cesar’s heavy eyelids fluttered like butterfly wings lilting on a rose; for drum solos his hips shook, his arms whipped into the air: he’d take backwards dance steps, gripping his belt with one hand and a crease of trouser with the other, hiking them up, as if to accentuate the valiant masculinity therein: outline of big prick through white silk pantalones. Piano taking a ninth chord voicing behind a solo, he’d stare up into the pink and red spotlights, giving the audience a horse’s grin. Woman in a strapless dress dancing a slow, grinding rumba, staring at Cesar Castillo. Old woman with hair coiffed upward into a heavenly spiral, staring at Cesar. Teenage girl, Miss Roosevelt High School Class of 1950, thin-legged and thinking about the mystery of boys and love, staring at Cesar Castillo. Old ladies’ skin heating up, hips moving like young girls’ hips, eyes wide open with admiration and delight.

Audiences everywhere seemed to like them, but if there was one place they “owned,” it was the Imperial Ballroom on East 18th Street and Utica Avenue, Brooklyn. Here they were the house band — hired at first because of Miguel Montoya, but kept on because of Cesar and Nestor’s popularity. They were constantly playing contests which awarded $25 prizes for the Best Peg Pants, Loudest Shirts, Best-Looking Woman, Best Dancer Holding an Umbrella, Shapeliest Legs, Weirdest Shoes, Most Outrageous Hat, and, on one Saturday night, the Best Baldhead contest, for which a huge crowd turned out. Their greatest moment of glory at the Imperial came on that memorable night when they engaged in a battle in the war between Cuba and Puerto Rico. Under the sterling hip-swinging, pelvis-grinding admiralship of their singer, Cesar Castillo, the orchestra pulled a victory out of, to quote the Herald’s entertainment column, “the ravages of da-feet.”

And, on another night, Cesar met one of his best and lifelong friends, Frankie Pérez. This was in 1950 and the orchestra was playing one of Cesar and Nestor’s original compositions, “Twilight in Havana.” Frankie was a hammy dancer, knew every rumba, mambo, and cu-bop* step on earth. He was a suavecito who had been a natural wizard on his toes since he was a kid in Havana, and could make any partner look good dancing with him. At that time, he’d make the rounds of the major ballrooms of the city three or four nights a week: the Park Palace, the Palladium, the Savoy, the Imperial. That night he was dressed in a green zoot suit with a pink oversized purple-brimmed hat, cream-colored Cuban-heeled shoes, and green argyle socks. Dancing happily near the stage, and oblivious to the troubles of the world, he heard pop, pop coming out of the manager’s office. Then the crashing of glass and screaming. Someone shouted, “Get down!” and people scattered across the dance floor and hid behind the mirrored columns and under the tables. Two more pops and the orchestra stopped playing, the musicians ducking behind their music stands and jumping down off the stage and hitting the floor.

Two men came running out of the manager’s office onto the dance floor and they spun around firing off shots as they made their way out toward the door. One of them was thin and eagle-beaked and carried a satchel of money. The other man was heavier and seemed to have trouble running, as if he had a lame leg or had been hit by the gunshots fired from the office. They looked as if they were going to make it, but once they got outside they ran into a barrage of gunfire; some cops had been driving by when they heard the commotion. One of the robbers was hit in the back of the head, the other surrendered. Later, when everyone was huddling by the bar and throwing down drinks, Cesar and Nestor struck up a conversation with Frankie. When they finished with their drinks, they made their way out into the street, where a crowd had gathered. The dead man was still lying face-down in the gutter. He was broad-shouldered and dressed in a pinstriped jacket. Nestor had no stomach for this, but Cesar and Frankie made their way over to the corpse to get a better look. Leaning up against a brick wall, their solemn faces peering out into the world from the shadows, they sadly and confoundedly contemplated the dead man’s fate. As he watched, Cesar had one foot lifted behind him, the bottom of his sporty cordovan shoe pressed to the wall, and was lighting a cigarette and listening to all the sirens when a white camera flash went off. Foof. Aside from becoming friends that night, he and Frankie ended up on page 3 of the next morning’s Daily News, part of the photograph whose caption read: BALLROOM ROBBER DIES IN POOL OF BLOOD.

A spectacular evening among so many spectacular evenings. How the rum flowed then, Jesus, how the bottles of booze multiplied along with the thick latex prophylactics and quivering female thighs like the miracle of fish and bread.

VISAS IN HAND AND SPONSORED by their cousin Pablo, they had turned up in New York as part of the wave of musicians who had been pouring out of Havana since the 1920s, when the tango and rumba crazes swept the United States and Europe. That boom had started because so many musicians lost their jobs in pit orchestras when talkies came in and silent movies went out. It was stay in Cuba and starve to death or head north to find a place in a rumba band. Even in Havana, with so many hotels, dance halls, and nightclubs, the scene was overcrowded. When Cesar had gone there in 1945, with the naïve idea of making it big, he became just one of a thousand bolero singers struggling to earn a living. Havana was jammed with first-rate underpaid singers and musicians like himself and Nestor, island musicians who played arrangements that sounded quaintly archaic next to the big brass American jazz bands like those of Artie Shaw, Fletcher Henderson, and Benny Goodman, who were much in vogue at the time. A musician’s life in Havana was poor, sociable. Pretty-boy singers, trumpet players, and congueros gathered everywhere — in the arcades, plazas, and bars. With the Paul Whiteman Orchestra playing in the casino, the more authentic Cuban music was relegated to the alleys. Even musicians who were in the popular tropical orchestras of Enric Madriguera and René Touzet used to complain how badly they were being treated by the mobsters who ran the casinos and paid the Cuban musicians shit. Ten dollars a night, with cleaning charges for uniforms, black skins and mulattoes in one door, white musicians in another, no drinks on the house, no overtime, and Christmas bonuses of watered-down resealed bottles of whiskey. This at clubs like the Tropicana and the Sans Souci.

The best — Olga Chorens, Alberto Beltrán, Nelson Piñedo, Manny Jiménez — worked in clubs with names like the Night and Day, the New Capri, Lucky Seven. The fabulous Ernesto Lecuona at the Montmartre, Beny More at the Sierra.

The brothers had mainly worked in Havana as strolling troubadours and in a cheap social band called the Havana Melody Boys. They’d played in the lounge of a gambling casino, entertaining audiences of soaked-with-alcohol gamblers and spinster tourists from the American Midwest; shaking cocktail mixers filled with shot, strumming guitars and blowing horns. They wore frilly-sleeved mambo shirts and orange toreador pants so tight their paterfamilias gnarled up like big tree knots. (Another version of the Havana Melody Boys picture tucked inside the soft cloth pocket in the Mambo King’s cane suitcase that he’d brought with him into the Hotel Splendour, in a clump of old photographs, letters, and song ideas: a row of frilly-sleeved mambo musicians in white-striped blue pantalones, seated on a bamboo stage that is made up to look like a hut. There are nine musicians. A window opens behind them to a fake view of Havana Harbor, the sky thick with stars and a half-moon.) They had even made a record back then featuring the Fabulous Cesar Castillo, something called “El Campesino” (he’d make a later version of this with the Mambo Kings in 1952). Printing about a thousand copies of this 78 as a demonstration record, they sent them around to local radio stations, even got a few into the jukeboxes of Havana Amusement Park and up at La Playa de Maríanao. It was not a hit and got lost in the sea of boleros and ballads coming out of Havana at that time. A thousand crooners and female torch singers, and for each one a black plastic disc, a record for each foam-curled wave in the rippling mambo sea.

Tired of singing with the Havana Melody Boys, Cesar Castillo wanted to put together an orchestra of his own. Coming from a small town in Oriente, he had been inspired by the stories he’d heard about Cubans who’d left for the States. A woman from Holguín had become an actress and gone to Hollywood, where she had gotten rich making films with George Raft and Cesar Romero. (Raft appeared as an Argentine gaucho in a jingle-bell-rimmed gaucho’s hat, performing the tango with this woman in a film called Passion on the Pampas.) She made enough money to live in a radiant pink mansion in a place called Beverly Hills; and there was another fellow, a rumba dancer named Ernesto Precioso, whom Cesar had known from the dance halls of Santiago de Cuba and who had been discovered by Xavier Cugat, for whom he’d starred as a featured dancer in a Hollywood short with Cugat called The Lady in Red and with the pianist Noro Morales in The Latin from Staten Island.

Others who’d done well? Alberto Socarrás playing in a nightclub called the Kubanacan in Harlem, Miguelito Valdez (the Magnificent) crooning away for Xavier Cugat at the McAlpin Hotel, Machito with his widespread New York popularity and his European tours. Tito Rodríguez at the Palm Nightclub, and the Pozo Brothers.

But the most famous success story would be that of a fellow crooner whom the brothers knew from Santiago de Cuba, where they sometimes performed in dance halls and in the placitas, sitting out under the moonlight, strumming guitars. Desi Arnaz. He had turned up in the States in the thirties and established himself in the clubs and dance halls of New York as a nice, decent fellow and had parlayed his conga drum, singing voice, and quaint Cuban accent into fame. And there were others: Cesar Romero and Gilbert Roland, Latin chaps who’d made it in the movies playing nightclub gigolos and gun-toting, sombrero-pated, spur-booted vaqueros. Cesar was impressed by Arnaz’s success and sometimes daydreamed of achieving that fame (he laughs now). That Cesar was white like Arnaz (though to some Americans he would be “a Spic”) and had a good quivering baritone and blunt pretty-boy looks all seemed destined to work to his advantage.

In any case, the scene might be better in New York. Musician friends from Havana traveled north and found work in the orchestras of people like Cugat, Machito, Morales, and Arnaz. Cesar heard rumors and received letters about money, dance halls, recording contracts, good weekly salaries, women, and friendly Cubans everywhere. He figured that if he went up there he could stay with Cousin Pablito, hook up with an orchestra, get away from trouble, make some money. And who could say what else might happen for them.

The day the brothers arrived in New York, fresh from Havana, in January of 1949, the city was covered in two feet of snow. Flying out of Havana on a Pan Am Clipper to Miami for $39.18, they then took the Florida Special north. In Baltimore they began to encounter snow, and while passing through a station in northern Maryland, they came across a water tower that had burst and blossomed into an orchid-shaped, many-petaled cascade of ice. Pablo met them at Pennsylvania Station, and, hombre, the brothers in their thin-soled shoes and cheap Sears, Roebuck overcoats were chilled to the bone. On the streets, people and cars seemed to disappear in the snowy winds like shredding phantoms. (They dissolved in a snow that wasn’t anything like the snow they’d seen in the movies in Havana, nothing like Bing Crosby’s angelic “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” snow, or the snow they’d imagined in dreams, lukewarm like the fake frost on a movie house Air-Conditioned sign.) Their thin-soled Cuban shoes soaked through, and when they stomped their feet in Pablo’s lobby, they could smell the fumes of gas and electric heaters in the halls.

Pablo and his family lived at 500 La Salle, west of 124th Street and Broadway, in uptown Manhattan. It was a six-story tenement, constructed around the turn of the century to house the servant class, and it had a simple stoop with black curlicue railings, a narrow doorway framed in a crenellated brick archway. Above this rose six floors of black wrought-iron fire escapes and lamplit Venetian-blinded windows. It was two minutes from the 125th Street El, an overnight train ride and forty-five-minute flight from Havana, and five minutes from Harlem, the heartland of syncopating rhythm, as they used to say in those days. From its roof you could see the Hudson River and the domed and pillared mausoleum that was Grant’s Tomb toward the northern edge of Riverside Park at 122nd Street and all the way over to the docks, and the lines of commuters and cars waiting to board the ferryboats for New Jersey.

That same night, Pablo’s wife cooked them a great feast, and because it had been snowing and their feet were cold, she washed their numb toes in a pan of hot water. She was a practical and kindhearted woman from Oriente, for whom marriage and childbearing were the great events in her life. She lived to take care of the men in that house, slaved washing their clothes, cleaning the house, cooking, and attending to the children. Those first cold days, the future Mambo King spent most of his time in the kitchen drinking beer and watching her prepare big pots of stew and rice and beans and fried plátanos. Frying up steaks and pork chops and long strings of sausages that Pablito would bring home from his foreman’s job at the meat plant. The smoke would escape out the windows, and neighbors, like their landlady, Mrs. Shannon, would shake their heads. Pablo’s wife would cook breakfast, fried chorizos and eggs, and then iron their clothes. She sighed a lot, but immediately after sighing, she smiled, a statement of fortitude; her plump, dimpled face highlighted by long, long eyelashes whose shadows were like the hands of a clock. That was what she was like, a clock, marking her day with her chores, her sighs punctuating the hours.

“A family and love,” he heard again. “That’s what makes a man happy, not just playing the mambo.”

And in those days Pablo would drive them around in his Oldsmobile to see the sights, or the brothers would ride the subway all over the four boroughs, faces pressed against the windows, as if counting the pillars and flashing lights for fun. Cesar favored amusement parks, circuses, movie houses, burlesques, and baseball games, while Nestor, a more quiet, docile, and tormented man, enjoyed nature and liked going to the places that Pablo’s children loved the most. He liked to take the children to the Museum of Natural History, where he would revel in walking among the remains of so many reptiles, mammals, birds, fish, insects which had once vibrated, shimmered, crawled, flown, swum through the world and which were now preserved in row after row of glass cases. On one of those days, he, Cesar, Pablo, and the kids posed proudly for a photograph before the looming skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Afterwards they walked over to Central Park, the brothers strolling together as they used to down in Havana. Back then it was tranquil and clean. Old ladies sunned themselves everywhere and young men snuggled in the grass with their girls. Picnicking on the green, they ate thick steak heroes and drank Coca-Colas, enjoying the sunshine as they watched boats float across the lake. Best was the Bronx Zoo in springtime, with its lions prowling in their dens, the buffalo with their great horns and downy fur foaming like whitewater beneath their chins, long-necked giraffes whose heads curiously peeked high into the skirts of trees. Beautiful days, beyond all pain, all suffering.

At this time in New York there was a bit of malevolent prejudice in the air, postwar xenophobia, and budding juvenile delinquency on the streets. (And now? Years later? A few of the Irish old-timers stubbornly hanging on can’t believe what happened on their street, the sidewalks jammed now with dominoes, shell games, card players, and radios and fruit-ice wagons, those old fellows wandering about furtively like ghosts.) Cesar would remember being shushed on the street for speaking to Nestor in Spanish, having eggs thrown at him from a rooftop as he marched up the hill to Pablito’s in a flamingo-pink suit. They learned which streets to avoid, and not to go walking along the docks at night. And while they found this part of life in New York depressing at first, they took solace in the warmth of Pablo’s household: the music of Pablo’s record player, the aroma of cooking plantains, the affection and kisses from Pablo’s wife and his three children made them happier.

That was the way it happened with most Cubans coming to the States then, when every Cuban knew every Cuban. Apartments filled with travelers or cousins or friends from Cuba — just the way it always happened on the I Love Lucy show when Cubans came to visit Ricky in New York, de visita, turning up at the door, hat in hand, heads bowed demurely, with expressions of gratitude and friendliness. Cubans who played the castanets, shook the maracas, danced the flamenco, juggled bones, who trained animals and sang, the men of moderate height with wide-open expressions, the women buxom and small, so quiet, so grateful for the hospitality.

Sleeping on cots in the living room, the brothers were chilled on some nights by the Hudson River wind seeping in through the loose windowpanes, alarmed by the clang, clang of the fire trucks down the street, startled (at first) when the ground shook and the building rattled with the arrivals and departures of the 125th Street El trains. In the winter they shivered, but in the spring they were serenaded by a band of strolling Italian minstrels — mandolin, violin, guitar, and singer. On Sunday afternoons, they searched the radio dials for nice music and listened to Machito’s “Live from the El Flamingo Nightclub” broadcasts on WHN, the brothers happy whenever the percussionist bandleader would say a few words of Spanish between numbers: “And this is a little number for my compadres out there… “Leaning out the window, they watched the scissors man in his heavy black coat, bent back and grizzled face, limping up the street with a grindstone slung over his shoulders and ringing a bell. They bought buckets of ice for their drinks from the ice man, who drove a small black truck. They watched the junk man in his horse-drawn wagon. They were warmed by the coal that came rushing down a chute into the basement, barked at by wild herds of street hounds, and blessed by the priest of the red-doored Catholic church.

When they weren’t out sightseeing or visiting friends, the two brothers wore sleeveless T-shirts and sat in the kitchen studying to improve their English. They read something called A Better English Grammar for Foreign Speakers, Captain Marvel and Tiger Boy comics, the Daily News, the Brooklyn Herald, the racetrack “blue” sheets, and the golden-spined storybooks about enchanted swans and whorl-eyed trees in the Black Forest that Pablo’s kids would bring home from the parochial school. Even though the brothers already knew how to speak a polite if rudimentary English that they’d learned while working as busboys and waiters in the Havana chapter of the Explorers’ Club on old Neptuno Street (“Yes sir, no sir. Please don’t call me Pancho, sir”), the twisted hard consonants and terse vowels of the English language never fell on their ears like music. At dinner, the table piled high with platters of steaks and chops, plátanos and yuca, Cesar would talk about walking on the street and hearing a constant ruido—a noise — the whirling, garbled English language, spoken in Jewish, Irish, German, Polish, Italian, Spanish accents, complicated and unmelodic to his ear. He had a thick accent, rolled his rrrrrrrs, said “jo-jo” instead of “yo-yo” and “tink,” not “think”—just like Ricky Ricardo — but got along well enough to charm the American women he met here and there, and to sit out on the fire escape in the good weather, strumming a guitar, crooning out in English “In the Still of the Night.” And he could walk down the street to the liquor store and say, “One Bacardi’s dark, please…” And then, after a time, with bravado, saying to the proprietor, “How the hell are you, my friend?”

He was proud of himself, as in those days it was a mark of sophistication among the Cubans of New York to speak English. At the parties they attended, given by Cubans all over the city, the better one’s English, the higher his status. Conversing rapidly in Spanish, Cesar would offer proof of his linguistic facility by throwing in a phrase like “hep cats at a jam session.” Now and then he fell in with a Greenwich Village crowd — American girls with bohemian spirits who would turn up at the Palladium or the Palm Nightclub; wild va-va-voom types who did not wear brassieres underneath their zebra-patterned party dresses. Meeting them on the dance floor, the Mambo King impressed them with his moves and Latin-lover mystique, and retired with them to their Village pads (with bathtubs in the kitchen) where they smoked reefers (he would feel a sugarcane field sprouting in his head), listened to bebop, and made out on dog-haired carpets and atop spring-worn couches. He picked up the words “jive” and “crazy!” (as in “Crazy, man, give me some skin!”), and with avuncular sexist tenderness lent them money and took them out to eat. In the period when he briefly went to work at the Tidy Print lithography plant on Chambers Street, to earn some extra money to buy a car, he would spend his lunch hours with this Jewish kid from Brooklyn, Bernardito Mandelbaum, teaching him Spanish. In the course of this he learned a few Yiddishisms. They’d trade words: schlep (dope), schmuck (fool), schnook (ignoramus), schlemiel (wastrel, fool), for bobo (dope), vago (lazy lout), maricón (fairy), and pendejo (ball-busting predatory louse). At some of these parties, where only English was spoken, he was famous for impressing even the driest Cuban professors with the exuberant variety of his speech. And he was a good listener, too, passing entire evenings with his hand on his chin, nodding and repeating, “Ah, yes?” and later, on his way home with Nestor, reciting the new words he had learned like a poem.

In the cane suitcases they’d brought with them from Cuba were bundles of paper on which they’d written down many of their ideas for songs. These mostly had to do with little bits out of their lives. Finding romance and country-bumpkin living funny, Cesar wrote unrestrained lyrics that tended toward obscenities, the change of a word for a laugh (“Bésame Mucho” to “Bésame Culo"). Hangovers often inspired him: in the days when he and Nestor slept on cots in Pablo’s living room, he would wake up after an epic night out in dance halls and supper clubs, with his skin and hair smelling of tobacco, perfume, and booze, inspiration would strike him, and the Mambo King would drag himself out of bed, take hold of his orangewood Brazilian guitar, strum chords, and with one slippered foot atop the radiator, and head pounding with ironies and pain, write a song.

He wrote the 1950 ballad “Alcohol” on a morning when he woke on the living-room couch with a balled-up pair of nylons in his jacket pocket and a bitten-up lip, feeling as if he had a large heavy-winged blackbird inside his head. Inspired, he strummed his guitar, whistled a melody, made up some lyrics, putting together a rudimentary version of the song that the Mambo Kings would record in 1952, the lyric asking, “Alcohol, why have you wrested away my soul?”

Other compositions came to him in the same effortless manner, songs written to take the listeners back to the plazas of small towns in Cuba, to Havana, to past moments of courtship and love, passion, and a way of life that was fading from existence.

His (and Nestor’s) songs were more or less typical of the songwriting of that day: ballads, boleros, and an infinite variety of fast dance numbers (son montunos, guarachas, merengues, guaracha mambos, son pregones). The compositions capturing moments of youthful cockiness (“A thousand women have I continually satisfied, because I am an amorous man!”). Songs about flirtation, magic, blushing brides, cheating husbands, cuckolds and the cuckolded, flirtatious beauties, humiliation. Happy, sad, fast, and slow.

And there were songs about torment beyond all sorrow.

That was Nestor’s specialty. While Cesar knocked his songs out, Nestor worked and reworked the same compositions over and over again. Loving the torture of composition, he would spend hours hunched over a notebook with a guitar or his trumpet, trying to compose a ballad, one beautiful song. Rafael Hernández had done it with “El Lamento,” Moisés Simón with “The Peanut Vendor,” Eliseo Grenet with “La Última Rumba.” And in those days, his heart filled with an unbearable pain, he was writing the song they would perform on television, that mournful tune that would bring them closest to fame, “Bella María de Mi Alma,” “Beautiful María of My Soul,” a song which in its early stages consisted of only a few pitiful utterances: “María… my love… María… my soul”—words contained in a thorny cage built around three chords, A minor, D minor, and E7th, a song that he would strum so often and sing with such a melancholic tone in his voice that even the bemused Cesar Castillo would say, incredulously, “What a horror! If I hear about María one more time, I’m going to throw your guitar out the window.”

Then: “Why don’t you forget about the song and come out with me? Come on, bro’, I’m nearly ten years older than you… and I don’t want to stay home…”

“No, leave without me.”

Slick and godlike, Cesar Castillo would shake his head and go out the door, disappear up the kiosked stairway with the pagoda roof and smoked-glass windows, to catch the subway downtown. Late on those nights, when he had no diversions, Nestor would think about the past from which there was no escape. His insides twisted into shit, the weight of his skull crushing the pillow, sheets entangled around him, a thick blue wormy vein boring across the brow of his melancholic head. Some nights he heard every sound in the alley: the cats skulking around in the dark basement doorways, the wind dashing television antenna wires against the walls, coffee cups, plates, and utensils being washed, low voices murmuring in the kitchen, bed noises, someone belching, the Jack Benny show on the neighbors’ television, and, mocking him, the frantic breathing of a neighbor across the way, the immense, floppy-breasted, freckle-bottomed Irish girl, Fiona, whom he’d often see through her window, making love and screaming at the top of her lungs in ecstasy.

On those nights, Nestor went to bed hoping for beautiful dreams about gardens and the early-morning sunlight which he associated with love, but walked instead down a long dark hallway of misfortune into a room of tortures where Beautiful María of His Soul, naked and desirable, placed him on a rack and turned a great wheel whose ropes began to tear out his limbs and debone his member. He would wake with his heart beating as if it would burst and with shadows swirling against the walls. Worked up in this way, he would sit by the side of the bed, his body sweaty, and light a cigarette, wishing he had gone out with his older brother.

And what would happen then?

The phone would ring and he’d answer it, hearing something like this:

“Hey, brother, know we have to go to work tomorrow, but why don’t you get dressed and come down here right away. I’m down at the El Morocco and my friend Eddie here is going to be throwing a little party soon, with lots of nice little girls”—and in the background the delighted squeals of women and the music of a twenty-piece orchestra tearing up the joint.

Nestor, answering in his quiet manner said: “Yes, give me an hour,” and, despite his practical and introspective nature, got dressed and went to the club.

Always the more somber and silent of the brothers, he was the big-eared fellow who would have to throw down five drinks before loosening up and showing the world a toothy grin. A woman pressing against him, in a crowd of happy partyers around a champagne-glass-covered table, her breast soft through the silk of her dress, didn’t have a chance with him. It didn’t matter if she was sweet, affectionate, sexually voracious, and pretty; he always seemed somewhere else. A few drinks would fill his face with shadows; in the men’s-room mirror, those shadows would ebb and flow over his features like caressing female hands. When he had first arrived in the States, every woman he looked at had seemed as lifeless as a doll. He could not look at another woman, and the only way he overcame this unbearable pain was by daydreaming about María: Would she suddenly write him the most adoring letter? Would she turn up on the next airplane, a little bag packed with her frilly underthings? Would she weep unabashedly over the telephone, begging his forgiveness?

Cesar, despite his shortcomings, always thought this: Don’t be an idiot, forget about her! But Nestor couldn’t. He relived their life over again so often that he sometimes had the sensation of being buried by the past, as if the details of this shattered love (and the other sadnesses of his life) had been turned into stone, weeds, and dirt and thrown over him.

He even took his dreams about María to the meat factory where Pablo had gotten him a job, working over a vat in which the bones and viscera of certain animals were crushed and ground up for making hot dogs and sausage fillers. As the blades churned he would pass the time staring at the whipping entrails — intestines, stomachs, backbones, brains — as if at a sunny garden. The crush of bones, the whirring of machines, memories, music, and his dreams of María. The plant was in a long, flat warehouse alongside the river, with huge metal doors that opened for deliveries and pickups by freezer trucks. He’d work there from seven in the morning until four in the afternoon, spending those hours at the vat whistling to himself and trying to improvise a song about María. What did he seek to accomplish? To write a song communicating such pure love and desire that María, far away, would magically reinstate him into the center of her heart. He thought that she would “hear” these melodies in her dreams and that something would possess her: she would sit down and write him a letter begging his forgiveness, a letter admitting to confusion and foolishness, that one day she would leave her husband — if he was her husband — and he would hear a knocking at the door, make his way down the hall, the panting hound behind him, and find María of his soul standing there, this woman who had somehow become the lost key to happiness.

But as many letters as he wrote her, she never answered him. As many gifts as he sent her, he never received as much as a thank-you. For more than two years, not a day went by that he did not think about flying down to Havana to see her. It was hopeless, he felt his heart drawing in, constricting. He didn’t talk about María of Havana, but he passed most of his days thinking about her.

He’d carry around a little photograph of her in a cinch-waisted bathing suit, his María rising out of the foamy tides of a Havana sea, take it out, speak to the picture as if she would hear him. After work he’d go on a solitary walk up to Grant’s Tomb to check out the dead President and his wife, then head down a path into Riverside Park, where he would lean up against a stone wall and watch the sparkling ice floes on the river, imagining himself inside. Constriction in his dreams. Under the ground, in tunnels, in blocks of ice. He went over his feelings about María so often they became as mashed up as the innards in the crushing machines at the plant. The more he thought about her, the more mythic she became. Every ounce of love he’d received in his short life was captured and swallowed up by the image of María. (Mamá, I wanted María the way I wanted you when I was a baby feeling helpless in that bed, with welts covering my chest, and lungs stuffed with thick cotton. I couldn’t breathe, Mamá, remember how I used to call you?)

That was Nestor the young man in the sleeveless T-shirt whose body was like a letter K in the window of the apartment on La Salle Street, one leg bent at the knee on the sill, arm up against the windowframe, smoking a cigarette like a languishing movie star waiting for a call from a studio, and humming a melody line. That was Nestor on the living-room couch, strumming a chord on the guitar, looking up, and writing in a notebook. That was Nestor’s voice heard on the street at night, on La Salle, on Tiemann Place, on 124th Street and Broadway. That was Nestor down on his knees playing with the children, pushing a toy truck into a city of alphabet blocks, the children climbing on his back and riding him like a horse, while in his head there bloomed a thousand images of María: María naked, María in a sun hat, María’s brown nipple filling his mouth, María with a cigarette, María commenting on the beauty of the moon, María dancing long-legged, her body wobbling in perfect rhythm in a chorus of women in feathered turbans, María counting the doves in a plaza, María sucking a pineapple batida through a straw, María writhing, lips damp and face red from kisses, in ecstasy, María growling like a cat, María dabbing her mouth with lipstick, María pulling up a flower…

That was Nestor, eyebrows arched with the scholarly concentration of a physics student, reading science-fiction comic books at the kitchen table. That was Nestor up on the rooftop stretched out on a blanket and sipping whiskey, waking up screaming at night, decked out in a white silk suit, blowing a trumpet on the stage of some dance hall, quietly attending to the drinks, filling a punch bowl during a party in the apartment, dreaming about some of those nights spent with María in Havana, her presence so strong in his memory that around three o’clock in the morning the door to the apartment would open and María would walk like a spirit into the living room and pull off her slip, sliding one knee onto the cot and then the other, lowering herself so that the first thing Nestor felt moving slowly upward over his shinbone and then his knee was María’s vagina. And then she would take hold of his thing and say, “Hombre!”

He was the man plagued with memory, the way his brother Cesar Castillo would be twenty-five years later, the man with the delusion that the composition of a song about María would bring her back. He was the man who wrote twenty-two different versions of “Bella María de Mi Alma,” first as “The Sadness of Love,” then “María of My Life,” before arriving, with the help of his older brother, Cesar, upon the version they would be singing one night in 1955 in the Mambo Nine Club, “Beautiful María of My Soul,” a song of love, that night when they drew the attention and interest of their fellow Cuban Desi Arnaz.

SPENDING LATE NIGHTS OUT, they’d find themselves climbing the stairs to their cousin Pablo’s fourth-floor apartment on La Salle Street at five in the morning. Rooftops burning red, and black birds circling the water towers. Cesar was thirty-one years old then and out to have a good time, preferring to look forward and never back into his past: he’d left a kid, a daughter, behind in Cuba. Sometimes he had pangs for his daughter, sometimes felt bad that things didn’t work out with his former wife, but he remained determined to have a good time, chase women, drink, eat, and make friends. He wasn’t cold-hearted: he had moments of tenderness that surprised him toward the women he went out with, as if he wanted truly to fall in love, and even tender thoughts about his former wife. He had other moments when he didn’t care. Marriage? Never again, he’d tell himself, even though he’d lie through his teeth about wanting to get married to women he was trying to seduce. Marriage? What for?

He heard a lot about “a family and love” from Pablo’s plump little wife. “That’s what makes a man happy, not just playing the mambo,” she’d say.

He had moments when he thought about his wife, a hole of sadness through his heart, but it was nothing that a drink, a woman, a cha-cha-cha wouldn’t fix. He had hooked up with her a long time ago because of Julián García, a well-known bandleader in Oriente Province. He was just a young upstart from Las Piñas then, a singer and trumpet player with a wandering troupe of guajiro musicians who would play in the small-town plazas and dance halls of Camagüey and Oriente Provinces. Sixteen years old, he fled to the dance halls, had a good time meeting and entertaining the people of small towns and bedding down poor country girls where he could find them. He was a handsome and exuberant singer, with an unpolished style and a tendency toward operatic flourishes that would take him off-key.

These musicians never made any money, but one day when they were playing at a dance in a small town called Jiguaní, his youthful exuberance and looks had impressed someone in the crowd who passed his name to Julián García. At the time he was looking for a new crooner and wrote a letter simply addressed “Cesar Castillo, Las Piñas, Oriente.” Cesar was nineteen then, and not yet jaded. He took the invitation to heart and made the journey down to Santiago the week after he’d received it.

He’d always remember the steep hills of Santiago de Cuba, a city reminiscent in its hilliness, he would think years later, of San Francisco, California. Julián lived in an apartment over a dance hall which he owned. The sun radiating against the cobblestone streets and cool doorways from which one could smell the afternoon lunches and hear the comforting sounds of families dining at their tables. Brooms sweeping out a hallway, salamanders skulking along the arabesque tiles. García’s dance hall was a refuge of shady arcades and a long, cool inner hallway. The place was deserted except for García, who sat in the middle of a colonnaded dance floor tinkling at the piano, stout, sweaty, and with a head damp with running hair dye.

“I’m Cesar Castillo, and you told me to come and sing for you one day.”

“Yes, yes.”

For his audition he opened with Ernesto Lecuona’s “María la O.”

Nervous about performing for Julián García, Cesar sang his heart out in a flamboyant style, using extended high notes and long, slow phrasing, arms flailing dramatically. When he’d finished, Julián nodded encouragingly and kept him there, singing, until ten o’clock that night.

“You come back here tomorrow. The other musicians will be here, okay?”

And in a friendly, paternal manner, his hand on Cesar’s shoulder, Julián led him out of the hall.

Cesar had a few dollars in his pocket. He was planning to wander around the harbor and have some fun, fall asleep on one of the piers by the ocean, as he had so many times before, arms thrown over his face, in fields in the countryside, in the plazas, on church steps. He was so used to looking out for himself that it surprised him to hear García ask, “And do you have a place to sleep tonight?”

“No.” And he shrugged.

“Bueno, you can stay with me upstairs. Huh? I should have told you that in the letter.”

Remaining that night, the future Mambo King basked in Julián’s kindness. High on that hill and overlooking the harbor, that apartment was a pleasant change for him. He had his own room, which opened up to a balcony, and all the food he could eat. That was the order of the household: all of García’s family, his wife and four sons, lived for their evening meals. His sons, who performed with him, were immense, overfed, with cheerful, angelic dispositions. That was because Julián was so loving, an affectionate man who even challenged Cesar’s macho resolve to need or want no one.

He began to sing with Julián’s outfit, a twenty-piece orchestra, in 1937. They had a pleasant “tropical” sound, depending heavily on violins and sonorous flutes, and their rhythm section dragged as in the style of fox-trotters of the twenties, and Julián, who conducted and played the piano, had a penchant for dreamlike orchestrations, clouds of music that seemed to float upward on waves of tremolo-choked piano. The Mambo King would have one photograph of that orchestra — and this sat in that envelope in the Hotel Splendour — of himself in a formal black suit, wearing white gloves, sitting in a row with the others. Behind them, a backdrop of Havana Harbor and El Morro Castle, flanked by pedestals on which Julián had placed small statues of antique themes — a wingèd victory and a bust of Julius Caesar, and large ostrich-plume-filled vases. What was that look on Cesar’s face? With his black hair combed back and parted in the middle, he was pleasantly smiling, in commemoration of that happy time in his life.

Julián’s orchestra packed dance halls all over Oriente and Camagüey. He had conservative tastes, never playing original compositions but relying on the songs of the popular Cuban composers of the day: Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, Manuel Luna, Moisés Simón, Miguel Matamoros, Eliseo Grenet, Lecuona. He was the warmest human being Cesar Castillo would ever meet in his life. That portly orchestra leader exuded pure love for his fellowman—“A family and love, that’s what makes a man happy”—and showed this affection to his musicians. That was a time when the Mambo King was close to becoming a different kind of human being.

Cesar never let go of his liking for women. He maintained his king-cock strut and manly arrogance, but around Julián and his family, he felt so peaceful that he calmed down. And it showed in his singing. He gained more control, became more lilting, and developed an affectionate tone in his songs, which people liked and responded to. He had not yet found a way of transforming that into the world-weariness of his records in the mid-fifties. (And if you heard the wrecked voice of Cesar in 1978 and compared it to the golden-toned voice of the 1930s and 1940s, you would have a hard time believing they came from the same singer.) They played all over the provinces in towns with names like Bayamo, Jobabo, Minas, Morón, Miranda, Yara, El Cobre, and in the larger cities of Camagüey, Holguín, and Santiago. They traveled in three trucks and they would make their way down dirt roads, struggling through the brush and forests of the countryside, and into the mountains. They played for campesinos, soldiers, bureaucrats, businessmen. They played for people who lived in houses with palm-thatch roofs, for those who lived in grand-style Spanish villas, and in the plantations and sugar mills, and in beautiful citrus groves, for the Americans who had constructed New England frame clapboard houses, with little back gardens and front porches. They played in towns without modern plumbing or electricity where people hardly knew the name of Hitler, in countryside so dark that the stars were a veil of light and where the thready luminescence of spirits moved through the streets and over walls at night and where the arrival of Julián’s orchestra was greeted like the Second Coming of Christ, with children and dogs and crowds of teenagers following behind it, clapping and whistling wherever they went. They played weddings, baptisms, and confirmation parties, fiestas de quince, and fiestas blancas, where the participants dressed in white from head to toe. They’d perform waltzes and danzones for the old people, and floor-sliding tangos and steamy rumbas for the young.

Julián was a good orchestra leader and a good man. Cesar would have thought of Julián as a “second father” if the word “father” did not make him want to punch a wall. In that time, he learned much about putting together an orchestra and singing from Julián, and enjoyed the glory of performance. He used to throw himself completely into his songs and lived for the moment when the entire ballroom would be on its feet either dancing or applauding.

“Just make them feel that you care for them. You don’t have to overdo it, because they know that, but let them know all the same.”

While singing with Julián’s orchestra the Mambo King became well known. He could walk down the street of many a small town and there would always be someone to come up to him and say, “Aren’t you Cesar Castillo the singer?” He started to acquire a lordly bearing, though one that fell apart when it came to chasing women. Returning to the farm in Las Piñas for his monthly visits, he would feel as if he had come home to a haunted house, the site of many of his fights with his father and the sadness of his mother’s weeping that filled the halls. He would return with presents and advice and with a desire for peace that always erupted, after a day or so, into another fight with his father, Don Pedro, who considered musicians effeminate, doomed men. He’d return and give Nestor music lessons, take Nestor to town. Always impressed with his brother’s musicianship, he had plans to take Nestor into Julián’s orchestra when he was of age and the family would let him leave the house.

Now he remembers and sighs: the long approach to the farm along the riverbank and forest, the dirt road past the houses and over the water, the sun bursting through the treetops. The Mambo King riding on a borrowed mule, a guitar slung over his shoulders…

He had been in the orchestra for four years when he attended a weekend party at Julián’s apartment in Santiago and there made the acquaintance of his niece, Luisa García. He was the handsome young crooner at the end of the table, reveling in the friendship of this older man, guzzling Spanish brandy all night and feeling light-headed enough to easily fall in love. And there she was, Luisa. Sitting across from her during the meal, he smiled and kept staring into her eyes, but she would turn away. Shy and thin, with a plain face, Luisa had a large beaked nose, pretty eyes, and a kindly expression. She liked to wear simple dresses. Although her body was not spectacular, her skin gave off a nice scent of oils and perfume, and when he stood beside her, filling a glass from a punch bowl, he knew she would turn out to be a passionate lover.

She was a schoolteacher and, at twenty-six, three years older than the Mambo King. No one in her family held out much hope that she would get married, but that night the way Cesar kept looking at her became a subject of family gossip. Julián could not have been more delighted. He would call them together and speak to them jointly. “I wanted to show you both the view from this window. Isn’t that something there, the sun’s rays spreading everywhere. ¿Qué bueno, eh?”

Who knew what she felt? She had the downcast look of a woman who was in the habit of taking nervous sidelong glances into mirrors, a woman who was used to taking care of herself. But Cesar? Sitting at that happy table in the company of the first man who had ever really looked out for him, he felt that he wanted to be a part of that family. So he began the most dogged courtship. She’d seen the way he had looked at her cousin Vivian, his eyes looping around the curvaceousness of her rear end, and she had told herself, “No, no, no, no matter what he says to me.” But she gave in to Cesar and started to take walks with him along the streets of Santiago. Always gentlemanly, he held doors open for her, and never cursed in his conversation. Around her, he would make flamboyant gestures with his hands and always dressed neatly, usually in a white linen jacket and clean trousers, and his cane hat, the brim pinched in, pulled low over his brow.

They had their picture taken in front of a movie poster advertising the Betty Grable film Moon Over Miami.

Sometimes he’d get her alone, the two of them sitting in a little deserted park among the flowers. Her iron resistance amused the Mambo King. She’d allow him a few kisses and embraces and one evening he unbuttoned the four left-sided pearly buttons of her blouse and got his hands inside, touching her tender breasts, but she never let him go any further, and he’d laugh out, telling her, “Don’t you know, it’ll happen sooner or later — even if I have to marry you!” There was something funny about this man who’d bedded down many women being foiled by this girl who used to blow air into his mouth and who’d lock her legs tight whenever his long musician’s fingers prowled under her skirt, searching out her most precious “treasure.” How this courtship turned into marriage, no one would be able to explain.

For a time he trusted Luisa in a way he had never trusted anyone. She was an unlikely partner for the Mambo King, especially when put next to the cheap floozies he usually preferred, but Cesar, who had been seeking peace since the days of his childhood, wanted to marry her.

Privately, in her company, shut away from the rest of the world, he was content. But as soon as he stepped out into the street he became a different man. When other women walked by, he would look, his penis would get stiff in his trousers, and Luisa would know it. Quickening her pace, she would march off and leave him behind. His macho temperament never knew how to deal with this, and it would be days before loneliness and his affection for the family brought them back together again.

When he asked her to marry him, Luisa had her doubts, but fearing old-maidhood, and because Julián had sworn by Cesar, she said yes. This was in 1943 and they went to live in a small apartment in Santiago (another beautiful memory: their little home on a cobblestone street, sunny from morning until night and busy with merchants and children). When he brought her home to the family in Las Piñas, his mother, María, liked her very much, and so did Nestor: everyone, including the irascible Pedro, treated her civilly.

What happened? He did as he pleased. It took about a year for the elation of joining García’s family to wear off. The Mambo King found himself sitting at these meals in García’s house, daydreaming about some of the women he had seen on the streets. He even behaved in an annoyed fashion at García’s, because García had placed at his feet a woman who seemed to weep if you offended her! Because she knew well her uncle’s schedule in advance, it became difficult for Cesar to disappear for two or three days at a time, and this bothered him. So he developed the excuse of returning home to Las Piñas, where he would hole up with some country girl, resentful and angry over his situation. He would return from these sojourns maintaining a silence for a week at a time. He would walk through rooms muttering phrases like “Why have I allowed myself to become a captive,” and “What am I doing with my youth,” in clear earshot of Luisa. For a long time she did what she could to make him feel better… She would beg him to come around, and he would leave the house, her question “Why are you so cruel to me?” circling his head like a summer mosquito.

One day in 1944, Luisa happily told Cesar that she was pregnant, as if the birth of a child later that year would shore up their crumbling marriage. They would turn up at Julián’s house for weekly meals, and as a family they seemed content. But then one night Julián, who was not made of sawdust and had heard about and seen the way this crooner was treating his niece, called Cesar out onto his balcony and as he looked into the distance over Santiago Bay said, “I feel very close to you, my boy, but no matter what, I expect you to treat my family with respect. And I’ll tell you now, if you don’t like what I’m saying, señor, you can walk out the door.”

His sternness depressed Cesar. The man had been sick for a time with poor breathing and edema of the limbs and he was no longer playing much piano with the orchestra and preferred to conduct, halfheartedly waving a baton, from a chair. The man could hardly walk across a room (as the Mambo King could not now). It was as if Julián’s huge weight had crushed his lungs, his breathing was labored and he had trouble moving. And so the future Mambo King blamed Julián’s ill health for his temper.

“What you hear isn’t true, Julián. I love Luisa with all my heart, I would never want things to go badly for her.”

Julián rapped him on the shoulder and hugged him in his friendly way and his anger seemed to subside. This brush with him turned the Mambo King into a better husband for a time and he and Luisa passed through a period of happiness that revolved around a picture of future domestic bliss, with Cesar as dutiful bandleader-crooner-husband, and his wife and child(ren) waiting happily and lovingly at home for him. Yet, when he conceived of this tranquil scene, he saw himself pushing open the door of that house with a hard kick, the way his Papi used to; he saw himself shouting and angry and slapping his child’s face as he had been slapped, saw himself pacing in circles and cursing everyone around him, as did his father. He had thought that marrying into Julián’s family would inspire a mundane, normal happiness in him, but now he found himself regretting the whole business again. Not because he didn’t love Luisa, but because he felt that abuse and discontent boiled in his blood and he did not want to hurt her…

And the pregnancy which made the act of love a too-delicate operation also troubled him. (Here he remembers the first time he made love to her. Her skin was white and her hips bony and her triangle of pubic hair wet at its center because of all their kisses. He was not a heavy man then, but he was twice as thick as she and he undid her virginity in one spurting thrust which led, through the succession of days, to many other thrusts: they did it so much her hipbones and buttocks were covered with black-and-blue marks and his thing, which never failed to rise, finally fainted dead away at three o’clock one Sunday afternoon, due to heat and exhaustion. But when he was in love with her, he loved the Luisa who was the key to her Uncle Julián García, the thin, pensive Luisa who was there for his pleasure and who never expected anything from him.) He found himself restless, spending many nights with the whores of those small towns. Luisa knew, she could smell these women on his skin, in his hair, she could tell by the sated sleepiness and the blueness that ringed his eyes.

“Why are you so cruel to me?” she’d ask him again and again.

(And this cruelty, I didn’t want things to be that way, I was just being a man and doing as I saw fit, Luisa, but you didn’t know, didn’t know my restlessness and my disbelief in such simple things as a tranquil married life, you couldn’t see how it all struck me as a final trick, that enslavement and humiliation perhaps awaited me. The situation was already turning your Uncle Julián away from me, he’d used to look at me with pure love. So I was led around by my penis, so what? What did a few laughs, a few fucks with women I’d never see again, have to do with anything, especially our love? Why did you have to take it so badly? Why did you have to weep and then shout at me?)

That was when he really started to drink. One night he drank enough rum at Julián’s to feel as if he were floating down a river. When he stumbled out of the house, two of his fellow musicians were sent out to help him down the stairs. Of course, he pushed them away, repeating, “I don’t need anybody,” and slipped down two flights, conking his head.

He woke to an idea: going to Havana.

Away, away, away from all this was how Cesar saw it. He had many reasons for moving to Havana: that was the place to be in Cuba if you were a musician. But he also believed that he could resolve things with Luisa in Havana, and at the same time, away from her family, he could do as he pleased. Besides, he was twenty-seven years old and wanted to work in an orchestra where he might perform some original songs. He and Nestor had been writing boleros and ballads for a long time and had never performed them with Julián García. In Havana, they might be able to put something together. What else could he do, remain with Julián and play the same dance halls for the rest of his life?

In any case, things with Julián’s orchestra had changed. Julián was so ill that he spent most of his days in bed. One of his sons, Rudolfo, took over as orchestra leader and wanted to teach Cesar a lesson in humility for treating his cousin so badly, relegating him to the trumpet section, alongside his brother Nestor, who had recently joined the band. This lesson just intensified his resolve to leave the orchestra, and in 1945 he took his wife and baby to Havana.

They had been in Havana for two months, living in a solar in the inexpensive section of La Marina, when word came that García had died. With Julián gone, the Mambo King felt like a prince who had abruptly come out from under a spell. By the time they returned with their baby from Oriente after the funeral, he had no stomach left for the matrimonial bond. (Now you must see him at a party in Manhattan circa 1949 with his right hand slung across his heart, the other held up high as if doing the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, sweat pouring off his forehead, hips shaking, a drink in hand, happy, happy.)

Though they lived in a cheerful and noisy solar, their cramped two-room apartment was a somber place. He’d gotten work for a time as a pit musician in a big movie house, backing up the singers and comedians who would entertain the audiences between films; loaded crates in the market; and then, through a new acquaintance, got himself — and his brother Nestor, who had come out to join him — jobs as busboy and waiter over at the Havana chapter of the Explorers’ Club. With people on the streets, and friends in the cafés and bars and dance halls, he was a cheerful man, but when it came to his wife he’d spend hours without saying a word to her, and when she crossed a room, he didn’t notice. She had become this invisibility who sometimes shared his bed and who’d carry his daughter in her arms across the room, to sit in a square of sunlight.

In those months he completely gave in to a family affliction: every other woman walking the streets of Havana seemed infinitely, painfully more beautiful and desirable than his own wife. He’d come home at night, get dressed up, and head out to the dance halls, a dandy in a black-brimmed cane hat. He pretended not to hear her calling out, “Please, why don’t you stay home with me?” Pretended not to hear her “Please don’t go.”

He found himself whistling at the girls walking on the promenade of the Prado; he was the slick macho with hat tilted low over his brow, out on the sidewalk in front of the El Dandy clothing shore, giving the up-and-down to women; he was the crooning guitarist, eyebrows cocked high, serenading the pretty tourists on their way into the Hotel Nacional, the T-shirted man in plaid bathing trunks, skulking along the balconies of the hotel and heading clandestinely for a stairway the fuck out of there, the fellow writhing on a sun-baked bed on a Tuesday afternoon in a room facing the sea.

After a while, he simply pretended that he had never been married: he kept his thin wedding band tucked away in a cane suitcase among the sheets of paper on which he’d written down his ideas for songs with names like “Ingratitude,” “Deceitful Heart,” “A Tropical Romance.” Occasionally he grew nostalgic for that time of happiness when he had gotten close to Julián and his family, when he had fallen in love with Luisa, and then he would settle down again and they would be happy for weeks. But things went in cycles with him. The baby made it really difficult. He would storm around saying, “If it wasn’t for the kid, I’d be a free man.” He horrified his wife, who kept trying to make him happy. This went on for six months, then he finally pushed her too far.

He was in a fruit market down the street from where he lived, a market crowded with wagons and stands, ice sellers and coffee vendors, fish and poultry sellers, wandering among the tubers and thick plantains, when he noticed a woman, no prettier than most women, but exuding, in his opinion, a rampant sensuality. She wore a wedding ring. She looked bored. Perhaps her husband no longer made love to her at night, or perhaps he was an effeminate man who could hardly get it up, or perhaps he liked to abuse her at night, squeezing her breasts until they turned black and blue. Circling around the arcade, Cesar followed this woman, who avoided him coyly, as if they were playing a game, disappearing among the columns.

He would turn up at her solar in the afternoons when her husband was working. He couldn’t remember her name, but in the Hotel Splendour the Mambo King remembered how she would get all violent during the act of love and had the bad habit of yanking hard on his quivering testicles at the moment of his climax, so hard he would have pain for days. The sordidness of all this turned his stomach years later, but back then he took this woman for granted, in the same way that he took his wife and all women for granted. One day it caught up with him. When he’d gotten tired of this woman and moved on, she turned up at the solar one afternoon and told Luisa about her affair with Cesar. (And did she describe the tattoo of an angel over the nipple on the right side of his chest, did she describe the burn scar on his right arm, the birthmark in the shape of a horn on his back, or his thing that used to creep up a hand’s width above his belly button?) By the time he came home that night, Luisa had left the apartment.

He found a letter saying that his abuse had driven her away. The family was waiting for her, she would manage better by herself with his child than with a man who did not appreciate the truly good things in his life, who spent his life chasing after tramps.

Hearing the word “cruel, cruel, cruel” in his sleep, he had a dream in which he was walking up that hill and meeting Julián García again for the first time. Then he started all over again with Luisa and for a time his pain and sorrow went away. He wrote her a letter begging her forgiveness, and she wrote back saying that she might forgive him if he returned to Oriente to talk things over with her. He felt relieved that she still cared for him but in the end declared in his macho manner, “No woman runs my life.” He believed that since she had left him, it was her duty to return. He spent a few months waiting, thinking that the door to the solar would open and that she would walk in. It never happened. He couldn’t understand her problems with him. Couldn’t she see that he was handsome and she was plain? Couldn’t she see that he was still a young man and wanted to have his way with other women? And how did she have the right to deprive his baby of her father? Hadn’t she watched him with Mariela? Seen how the baby cooed and fell happily asleep in his arms… Hadn’t he told her about the rough circumstances of his upbringing?

(You didn’t believe me, that for me as a kid it was a slap in the face and a kick in the fondillo in the name of my father, who did as he pleased and shoved it up my ass.)

At first he spent many a night missing her, a humiliating pain gnawed inside him, a pain that said life was sad. If only she had known what it was to be a handsome caballero with a nice singing voice and a bestial thing between his legs and youth burning in his veins, wouldn’t she have known better?

“If she turns up at my door, then we’ll see.”

But living in Havana without her got him into a really bad way — many a night found him charging madly and drunkenly down the streets of La Marina.

“My little daughter, my precious little daughter, Mariela.”

Sip of whiskey.

“Mariela…”

Then he softened and backed down from his stubborn stance, given the distance of time and nostalgia. He had speeches all prepared. He would go back to Oriente and sweet-talk her. “I have no excuses… I don’t know what it is. I’ve always been alone. You know my father, he was un bruto with my mother, I never learned any other way.”

He decided to return to Oriente to reclaim his daughter, and showed up at the house of Luisa’s parents, where she had been staying, pounding the door with a shoe and demanding that he be shown the proper respect.

“Only if you behave in a civil manner,” he was told.

He expected to find her in bad shape, pale and gaunt. But she seemed happier, and that bothered him, made him angry. “She couldn’t have loved me very much” is what he came to think. They sat facing each other in the parlor of the house, the family skulking in nearby rooms. The formality of the situation startled him. They spoke like old, passing acquaintances rather than a husband and wife of nearly three years. He had searched his mind for the right words that would break her down, force her to accept his actions. He refused to admit to any wrongdoing, refused to concede that he had treated her badly. He said that his letters had already confessed to his sins. Why should he be humiliated again? Despite the fact that he was the budding composer of beautiful romantic boleros that exposed the sweetest sentiments, he felt at a loss for the proper words. It was the one time in his life, he would tell himself years later, when he had truly lost his composure and suffered dearly for it. After demanding that she return to him, he had been told by his wife, Luisa, in a calm and delicately toned voice, “Only if you behave like a decent gentleman, then I’ll accompany you.”

For two months they lived under the same roof in Havana. But, in that city with its exciting night life, he grew restless, and this restlessness took him back to the women he had here and there. He loved his daughter, never went out without bringing her a little gift, a doll, a bag of candies, a little hand mirror, anything he’d happen to see in the marketplace that she might like. He’d cover her face with kisses and rock her on his lap by the window overlooking the street. These moments of real tenderness sometimes inspired reconciliations, but as soon as Cesar spent any time with his wife, their struggles began again. By the end of those two months she was looking worn and exhausted, and he was impatient for solutions.

He moved out of their solar, and stayed with Nestor, who had gotten his own little place, seeing his wife only once a week, when he would faithfully give her half his pay from the Explorers’ Club and the band in which they played. It wasn’t that he didn’t care: when he saw her, he was polite and almost conciliatory. It was she who told him, “Never again.” He would bounce his daughter on his knees, carry her around the room, planting kisses on her face. For a time, he would meet other women and speak sadly of the loss of his little daughter. They divorced, through her family’s connections, and she ended up marrying someone else, from Havana.

Now as he sat in the Hotel Splendour his life with Luisa fluttered like a black moth through his heart. He felt a great sadness, recalling how in his youth he had never believed that love really existed — for him. But back then, while living in Havana and later strumming a guitar in Pablo’s living room in New York, he just told himself, “That’s life,” dismissing his sadness and bringing down a macho wall between himself and his feelings.

Snap of the fingers, just like that.

Toward the end, she had told him, “For someone who sings so many songs of love, you are cruel.”

“My little daughter, my precious loving daughter… Mariela.”

Sip of whiskey.

“Mariela… Luisa…”

At least he got a song out of it, he thought now—“Solitude of My Heart,” a bolero from 1949.

ONE DAY IN 1950, A YOUNG, pretty Latin woman was standing by a bus stop on 62nd Street and Madison Avenue. She was about twenty-one and wearing a raincoat and white tennis shoes. By her side, a shopping bag filled with soap, rags, a work dress, scarf, and duster. She was carefully reading a book, her lips barely moving, but moving just the same. She had been waiting for about fifteen minutes when she looked over and noticed the young, well-dressed man with a black instrument case by his side. He was watching the street for a bus and whistling to himself. He had quite a pensive manner, and even though he looked at her, and nodded politely, he seemed to be concentrating on the whistling of the tune, his brows creasing in creative fervor. She liked that, and even though she knew where the bus went, she said to him in Spanish, “Excuse me, does this bus go up to 125th Street?”

“Yes, this is the stop for that bus. It goes all the way up.”

They stood for a few minutes in silence, and then he asked her, “Are you Cuban? ¿Tú eres cubana?”

“Oh, yes, I am.”

“I knew it.” He looked her over, gave her a nice up-and-down.

“What do you do? Working?”

“Yes, I clean house for a rich man. He’s so rich he’s unhappy. You?”

“I’m a musician.”

“Ahhhh, I can tell just by looking at you that you’re a good musician. Have you had much luck?”

“Well, I have a little conjunto with my brother, my older brother. He’s the real singer in the family, but sometimes I do a few songs myself. We’re trying to get along, but it’s difficult. I mean, I have to work days in a warehouse.”

“I can tell that you’ll succeed at whatever you want.”

“Everybody says that, but who knows. What’s your name?”

“Delores Fuentes. And yours?”

“Nestor Castillo.”

She was so used to being around men who were happy and aggressive, and here was this musician, quiet, polite, and a little gloomy.

They rode up Madison Avenue together, sitting next to each other. He was jotting down the lyrics of a song on a piece of paper, and from time to time he’d whistle part of a melody, look out the window at the gray buildings, whistle again.

“Is that something you’re making up?”

“Yes, a bolero.”

“A love song, yes?”

“Something like that. Been working on it for a long time.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“‘Beautiful María of My Soul.’ Something like that.”

“And this María?”

He was somewhere else, though he looked her straight in the eyes.

“Just a name. Maybe I’ll write it using your name.”

They both got off at 125th Street. He was going to walk west toward Broadway and up the hill to La Salle Street, where, he’d explained, he lived with his brother. And she was going to catch the number 29 bus for the Bronx. Before he left her, he’d said, “Do you like to dance?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Bueno, we’re playing this coming Friday night in Brooklyn. At a place called the Imperial Ballroom, have you heard of it? That’s on East 18th Street, off Utica Avenue, Brooklyn, one of the last stops on the number 4 line. I’ll write it down for you, okay?”

“Okay.”

It took her another hour to get home. When she made the long trips to and from the Bronx, she preferred buses over subways. She didn’t mind the long trip because she always carried a few books to read. That day she was halfway through a James M. Cain novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and she was also reading something called A Simpler English Grammar by a Hubert Orville which she studied diligently for her night-school English classes. She liked to read because it took her mind off her loneliness, gave her feelings of both solitude and companionship. She’d gone to work cleaning houses because she’d gotten tired of her job at the five-and-ten, a Woolworth’s up on Fordham Road, mainly because the manager was giving her a hard time with pinches and casual caresses. But that was her story with just about every man on the street. It seemed they were always trying to pick her up. She had an elegant face with large, pretty, and intelligent eyes, black hair that fell over her shoulders, and a curious and introspective expression which men read as lonely. Men chased her everywhere, tried to get hold of her. GIs, businessmen, young kids, college students, professorial types who would come into that Woolworth’s to buy pencils. Men trying to look down her cleavage whenever she bent over, men looking at her out of the corner of their eye while examining the quality of a fountain pen, looking into the slit of her blouse where the meat of her breasts met with the white cloth of her brassiere. Some men said, “Maybe we can go out tonight,” meaning, “Maybe I can fuck you tonight.”

She lived with her older sister, Ana María, who had come up from Cuba to keep her company after their father, with whom Delores lived, had died. Ana María was a live wire. She liked to go out dancing and on dates and was always trying to get Delores to go with her.

“Come on, let’s go dancing, have some fun!”

But she preferred to stay home and read. One of the nice things about her job cleaning houses for the rich people was that they always gave her books. The rich man who lived on 61st Street and Park always gave her some time off during the day to do as she pleased, saying that she could help herself to any of his books, and he had hundreds in massive shelves that rose up to his Florentine molded ceilings. She would sit happily by a window overlooking Park Avenue, eating rare-roast-beef sandwiches and salad for lunch, with a book open on her lap. She didn’t particularly care what she read, as long as the language was not too difficult, and she prided herself on reading at least two books a week. Not bad for the daughter of a barely literate man. And in English, too! Besides, the books took her mind off the terrors of the world and the sadnesses that ran madly through her heart. It was funny, she felt that same kind of sadness from the musician at the bus stop.

She read so much that Ana María, who liked to go to the dance halls, said to her one night, “You’re going to be an old woman all alone in a house without children or grandchildren, without a husband or love, you’ll have nothing but books coming out your ears unless you get serious about finding yourself a man.”

So, at her sister’s urging, she’d go out on dates. Some of them were Americans and some of them were Romeos just up from Cuba or Puerto Rico, friendly, garrulous fellows who seemed more like children than like men. She liked a few of the American boys, but would have nothing to do with them romantically. She always had the feeling that she was “saving” herself, for what or for whom she did not know. She’d sometimes feel saddened by her increasing indifference to romance but would tell herself, “I’ll know a good man when I see him.”

She went out, petted, necked a little, allowed these men the chance to feel her body. But she didn’t take it too seriously, finding the whole business of love and courtship disorienting. A man would take her to see Pecos Bill Meets the Apaches, and while she would sit absorbed in the excitement of stampeding horses and whooping Indians, the man would whisper, “You’re just so beautiful… Please, querida, a kiss.” And sometimes she’d kiss the man for the sake of being left alone. She’d double-date with Ana María but disliked it when the evenings lasted until three or four in the morning. She went out because she didn’t want to be a wallflower, but she was always happy to get home to the privacy of her room, where she could turn on the radio and read her books. She read books in Spanish and studiously read books in English. Having completed only two years of high school, she went to night classes twice a week.

When she came into the apartment, Ana María was ironing clothes in the kitchen, listening to some happy music on the radio and humming along. As usual, Delores got undressed and ready for a bath. It was always “Should I cook up some dinner tonight?” from Ana María, and “Maybe we should go to a movie? Huh?” But that night, as Delores made her way down the hall to the bathroom, it was Delores who said, “Why don’t we go dancing this weekend?”

“What made you think of that? My God, did someone ask you out?”

“A musician.”

“Oh, musicians are exciting!”

“This one’s like me, a quiet type of person.”

“Well, if you want to go, then I’ll go.”

That evening she took a nice long, leisurely bath. She sometimes took books with her, reading ten or twelve pages at a time, the book held out of the water, her breasts and thick pubic hair floating on the surface. She read a few pages, the scene where the man and woman kill the Greek in the Cain novel, and then she just decided to float and enjoy the water and the flight of her thoughts, speculation about that nice simpático young musician in whom she saw certain similarities to her father.

In the same way that the Mambo King’s mind kept circling certain events as he sat in the summer’s heat in the room in the Hotel Splendour years later, just as others in the family daydreamed about that past, Delores Fuentes heard her own kind of music and closed her eyes.

It was 1942 when Delores Fuentes, thirteen years old, and her father, Daniel, arrived in the Bronx from Havana. Her older sister, Ana María, had stayed behind in Cuba with their mother, who had refused to join him. He had come from the countryside and had found nothing but bad luck in the city, misfortunes that Delores was too young to understand. Why would his luck change in New York, her mother used to argue, where things were more difficult? She had refused to be thrown to the wolves and told him to go alone. Reluctantly, he got a visa and left Havana, taking his daughter with him.

Daniel was forty and did not speak English, and that made finding a job difficult, manpower shortage or not. Each evening she waited for him by the window, listened for his footsteps in the hall. For three months he looked for work without success. No English, no work, until he finally found a delivery job with a seltzer company, carrying heavy wooden boxes of metal-topped seltzer bottles up and down the stairs of one building after the next. His shift began at six-thirty in the morning and lasted until six at night. Their one bit of luck was finding an apartment through a friendly Cuban he’d met on the street. He’d come home to their walk-through apartment on 169th Street and Third Avenue with his back bent and muscles aching so much he’d just barely have the strength to eat his dinner in silence. Then he’d take a bath and retire to his big empty bed, undraping his bath towel and lying in the summer heat naked.

In imitation of her mother in Havana, Delores would cook for her father, making do with what she could find at the market in those days of war rationing. One night she wanted to surprise him. After he had taken to his bed, she made some caramel-glazed flan, cooked up a pot of good coffee, and happily made her way down the narrow hallway with a tray of the quivering flan. Pushing open the door, she found her father asleep, naked, and in a state of extreme sexual arousal. Terrified and unable to move, she pretended that he was a statue, though his chest heaved and his lips stirred, as if conversing in a dream… He with his suffering face, it, his penis, enormous… The funny thing was that, despite her fear, Delores wanted to pick up his thing and pull it like a lever; she wanted to lie down beside him and put her hand down there, releasing him from pain. She wanted him to wake up; she didn’t want him to wake up. In that moment, which she would always remember, she felt her soul blacken as if she had just committed a terrible sin and condemned herself to the darkest room in hell. She expected to turn around and find the devil himself standing beside her, a smile on his sooty face, saying, “Welcome to America.”

Around that time, she started to gush thick black pubic hair, which curled like flames and weaved out from her body; a single strand that she plucked out of curiosity was nearly a foot long, and there were so many she had to trim this shock of hair back with scissors. Her breasts ached with their weight, and she started to wake up bleeding on those sheets which she’d always kept meticulously clean. Then other things started to happen: boys on the street began to invite her to play games of tag and hide-and-seek down in the basement and tried to touch her breasts and get their fingers down under the rim of her brassiere. She would look in the full-length mirror tacked to the door in her room, asking herself, “Do I want this?” Did she want men giving her these looks on the street? She tried to dress like a boy, in trousers, but in the end her feminine vanity brought her back to the few dresses she owned, items that were getting tighter and more alluring each day.

One night, around Christmas, a year after their arrival, her father came home drunk with some of his friends from the seltzer plant: a couple of Italians, a Jewish fellow, a Puerto Rican, men feeling good after a Christmas party and happy to be free for a few days’ holiday. They came to the apartment with big boxes of pizza and cheese calzone. Her father never used to drink, but that night she saw him and the others drinking a lot of whiskey. Faces twisted, they were clapping hands to the dulcet strains of the Guy Lombardo Orchestra on the radio. Delores sat quietly, hands folded on her lap, watching them. Her father kept asking her, “What’s wrong, darling? What is it, tell your papá, huh?”

What could she tell him? That she felt a strange, nearly unbearable desire to release him from his pain by lying naked beside him on his bed? That she would never do it in a million years, but felt that she should? That she felt like an exile in her own apartment?

As the Italian turned up the music, her father said, “Come on, Delorita, have some fun with us, it’s Christmas.”

And the Italian joined in, “Yes, yes, sugar, don’t be a stiff!”

Then her father took her by the hand and swung her around in circles, bouncing on her, then off her, he was so drunk. Then, sweaty, panting, he leaned up against the wall, patting his forehead dry with a kerchief. He stared at her and saw that she looked like her mother; certainly he was surprised that she was so pretty a woman. And he made her nervous, and she shut her eyes.

Perhaps her father had misread her expression, but what he said would buzz through her bones for years afterwards. “Don’t be ashamed of your father or be worried that I embarrass you, niña, because one day you’ll be free of me for good.”

Here her desire to remember faltered. What had he meant by that? Had she somehow added to his woes? Was it something about the way she was treating him? She only knew that, with time, her father’s unhappiness seemed to increase, and she passed these first years in the States trying to take care of him. She went to a Catholic school and, to help pay the bills, managed to find a job in the Woolworth’s on Fordham Road. That was one occasion when her good looks were of help to her. The manager hired her because he liked pretty girls. She was grateful to get the job, worked there part-time and then came home to take care of her father. She cooked his meals, made his bed, washed his clothes, packed his lunches, and in the evenings listened to him talking about the solitude of his days.

“A man is nothing without his family, Delorita. Absolutely nothing. Nothing without family, nothing without love.”

He would come home from the seltzer plant now with bottles of cheap, homemade Italian wine for which he’d paid ten cents apiece. He’d sit in the living room drinking until the pains in his back and in his heart left and his lips started to turn blue.

Usually the evenings found him at home, but one night, when she was sixteen, the wine so heightened his spirits that he got all dressed up and said to Delores, “I’m too young to stay in all the time. I’m going out.”

He had been looking through the newspapers and came up with the addresses of a few dance halls that his friends had told him about.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said, touching her face with his warm hands. She studied an English grammar book until one in the morning, lingering by the living-room windows and watching the street. Hours later, she was asleep and dreaming about playing with her older sister, Ana María, in Havana, the sun shining and the day radiant with hope for the future, when she heard her father in the hallway. She found him there, leaning against the wall, drunk and exhausted. It took him a while to focus on her, but when he finally did, he said, “I’ve just been having myself a good time. And you?”

She helped him to his bed, took off his shoes. When she looked over at the table clock, the time was 4:45 and the poor man would have to get up in exactly forty-five minutes for work. She remained with him, sitting by the bed and watching her papá snore away, his breathing troubled, head turning from side to side. She watched his powerful body, virile and frightening, and felt confused by her tender feelings toward him. Occasionally, he would say a few words, and her memory of those words, “Please, Dios, release me,” would come back to her years later when she would have her own family and her own troubles. “Release me,” when the alarm went off and she watched the man open his eyes. Like a corpse coming back to life, he popped up, yawned, stretched his arms, and then made his way down the hall to the bathroom, where he washed and put on his gray seltzer-plant deliveryman uniform.

The following week, the same thing happened. Then, after a while, it became his habit to go out two or three nights a week, just as he used to down in Havana.

“A man’s got to do as he likes, or else he’s not a man,” he’d tell her. And: “You know it’s not easy for me to be alone all the time.”

And what about me? she used to ask herself. She passed those nights worrying about him and fighting feelings of loneliness. Her main refuge? Listening to the radio and studying her books. Sometimes she would visit with neighbors, with whom she would talk. Between her job at Woolworth’s, her high-school classes, and her friendships in the building, she became quite good at speaking English. But what good was her English when she was so alone? She liked people, but always felt so bashful. She was beautiful and her body used to make men stare hungrily at her. But even so, she thought herself unattractive, that some kind of mistake was constantly being made about her looks. If only she was not so lonely on those nights when her father went out, if she didn’t feel as if some part of her might burst.

And her father, why was he always going out when he looked so exhausted?

“Papi,” she asked him one night, “adónde vas?”

“I’m going dancing.”

“By yourself?”

“With a friend.”

Her father was going out in New York in the same way he used to back in Havana. Suddenly Delores found herself feeling what her mother must have felt. All those nights of shouting in the house hadn’t turned into air. She had the shouts inside her, and when she saw her father slicked up to see his woman, Delores found herself saying, “Papá, I don’t think you should go, you’ll be tired.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

And he’d give her a kiss and make his way down the stairs. He was usually drunk by the time he’d leave the apartment. She’d follow him out into the stairwell, watching him fading into the shadows. At first thinking, Don’t fall. Then: Fall and don’t get up.

He’s going to a dance hall with a tramp is what she would think, watching him head down the steep hill of 169th Street toward the El, from their window. She’d imagine the woman: wearing a hat crowned with flowers, a too-tight dress, the top bursting. And she’d have thick lipstick-gummy lips, and thick-thick hips.

Alone in that apartment in the Bronx at night, she’d try to calm herself. She loved her father, who worked to take care of them. Wasn’t it fair that he go out? Yes, poor Papi, and she would sit by the window listening to a neighbor’s radio in the courtyard, or try, as usual, with a dictionary in hand, to read a newspaper or one of the books that her neighbor, a schoolteacher who was touched by her efforts to improve her reading, would leave for her by the door.

Some nights she’d write her mother sympathetic letters, saying things like “Mamá, as I get older I understand more about how Papá must have hurt you.”

Because her mother had refused to accompany him to the States, Delores had judged her harshly. Thought her cruel. There were things you don’t understand about us, she used to tell Delorita — but now she was starting to understand. Hadn’t he spent many nights away from their home, back when?

Weeks would go by in which she would await an answer, never receiving one. She’d think that her mother was right in hating her for siding with her father. On those nights alone, Delores would ask herself, “And now what do I have? Neither my mother nor my father.”

She’d remember how her mother would sit, her arms crossed tight over her lap, the posture of anger that her mother adopted in the days when her papá used to do as he pleased. Delores would also sit with her arms crossed tight over her lap, waiting to hear her father’s footsteps in the hall, and wanting to shout at him.

But she always softened and took care of him instead.

In her own way, Delores became something of a stoic. Life would have its limited pleasures. There was sunlight, there were boys and men to give her the up-and-down on the street; there were funny letters from her older sister, Ana María, in Cuba; there were the Hollywood films at the big movie house on Fordham Road; there were romantic novels; there were little boxes of bonbons; there were diaper-dragging two-year-olds toddling on the sidewalk outside her building; there were flowers in the park and pretty dresses in store windows. But there was nothing to overcome her feeling that the world was veiled by a melancholia which emanated from her poor father’s sadness. She was stoic enough that few things bothered her, and although she was at an age when young girls fall in love, she never dreamed about it, until one night, when she decided to follow her father to a dance hall.

That night, while her father was out, Delores went searching the apartment for some paper and found a flier for the Dumont Ballroom on East Kingsbridge Road. She felt an overwhelming desire to see him. Dressed up, she walked down that steep hill, caught a Jerome Avenue subway north, and arrived at the ballroom. There she found herself in a zoot-suit haven of slick young men. Many of them were tough, lean veterans of the war who whistled at her and called out to her. Lines like “Enchantment, where are you going?”

“Enchantment” found her father at the bar drinking, his shirt covered in sweat. He was talking to a woman who looked just the way Delores had imagined her. She was in her late thirties, quite plump, a little overripe in a cheap dress. She has the face of a whore, Delores had first thought, but when her father, acting as if nothing was out of the ordinary, introduced Delores to this woman, the woman’s face brightened with friendliness.

“My, but you’re pretty,” the woman said to Delores.

Delores blushed at the compliment. What could she be angry about? Her father had his arm wrapped around the woman’s fleshy hips. He was smiling in a way that she hadn’t often seen before, happily. And exhaustion had left his expression. What could she be angry about, at these two lonely people trying to comfort one another at a bar in a dance hall? Onstage, the orchestra was playing “Frenesí.” Her father leaned close to Delores and asked, “Delorita, what is it that you want?”

“Papi, I want you to come home.”

He didn’t even answer that, just made a looping motion with his cigarette and said to the woman, “Now, can you see that? My own daughter’s giving me orders. Me, the man.”

Then he smiled.

“Come on, don’t be like your mother.”

Then the orchestra started to play a tango and the three of them stepped out into the crowd of shadows. Right then and there she saw that her father was a fabulous and graceful dancer, and that this dancing seemed to offer him release from his pain. He took hold of her by the hand and began showing her the three-strided slides of the tango. With her cheek pressed against his warm face, with the lights swirling about, and the perfume-scented shadows swarming around them, she had a daydream about dancing with him in that same way forever… Then the song ended and the woman came out to join them. Delores moved off to the side and watched as her father went back out onto the dance floor. Delores watched them spinning in circles. He was a good dancer. He did the lindy hop and the rumba and he jitterbugged with the best of them. Up on the bandstand, an outfit called the Art Shanky Orchestra, a troupe of pinstripe-suited musicians, were playing their hearts out. Their golden trumpets seemed magical because of the way they rejuvenated her father. He danced right into a spotlight and threw a silhouette that crept up the curtained walls of the dance hall a hundred feet high. A crooner got up and started to sing “Moonlight Becomes You.” That’s when her father and this woman went back to the bar. Exhausted by the fast dances, her father then said to his daughter, “This place isn’t so bad, now, is it?”

He leaned with his back against the bar, and as the woman wiped off his forehead with a handkerchief and dabbed sweat from his lips, it seemed as if she was wiping years of strain and unhappiness off his face. For one moment, a moment when he seemed spellbound by the spotlight and the music, he lifted out of himself, floating upwards to a place of eternal relief and comfort. He lit a cigarette and said, “Delorita, over there, that American fellow’s looking at you.”

At the end of the bar was a tall man, looked Irish or German, with a head of wavy blond hair. He was dressed in a sports jacket and bow tie and seemed quite clean. He was in his mid-twenties. Delores was now seventeen.

The man smiled. A little later, he came over and respectfully asked Delores to dance. She’d already turned down a number of other requests, and she turned him down, too.

“I just wanted to talk to you anyway. My name’s — And I know this seems a little unlikely, but you have to believe me… See, I work for the Pepsodent toothpaste company and we’re holding a beauty contest down in Coney Island in a couple of weeks, and so, I just thought that you might like to enter. I mean, if you give me your name and all that, I can take care of everything… There’s a first prize of one hundred dollars.” Then, looking away, he added, “And you’re certainly pretty enough to win…”

“What do I have to do?”

“You just put on a bathing suit — do you have a bathing suit? — and you get up in front of the people. It’s on a Saturday morning… Why don’t you give me ya address, huh? It would be a nice thing for you.”

He put up his hands as if to say, “I’m not armed…”

She blushed, looking away. “You can find me at the Woolworth’s on Fordham Road. I work there part-time.” And she wrote down her name, Delores Fuentes.

He looked over the piece of paper and said: “You have really beautiful handwriting.”

“I can write down poems for you. I write my own, and I learn poems in English.”

“Yeah?”

“You want me to write one down?”

“Sure.”

She turned to the bar and meticulously wrote out the poem “Annabel Lee,” by Edgar Allan Poe.

“You’re kidding me?” And he scratched his head, put the poem in his pocket, and said, “You’re really classy, you know that?”

Later, around three o’clock, when the dance was winding down, Delores no longer felt angry or anxious about her father. As a matter of fact, she now seemed happy about the dance hall. And her father didn’t even seem drunk. As they left the dance hall together, he walked with his back straight and his head held high. It made her happy to think about coming back here. People paid you compliments, and said you were pretty enough to enter a beauty contest! She and her father were heading to the bus stop, and as they crossed the street to catch a downtown bus, the American fellow dazzled Delores, pulling up alongside them in a 1946 Oldsmobile. It was a convertible and the canvas-top roof had been pulled down.

“Let me drive you folks home.”

And so they climbed into his car, feeling like wealthy people. Her father plopped down into the plump leather upholstery of the back seat. He put his arm around Delores, eventually falling asleep and snoring, as the car drove away.

The fellow she’d met in the dance hall was a nice man. He would show up at the Woolworth’s to make sure that she’d enter the contest, brought her a box of chocolates, a bouquet of flowers, a little cuddly teddy bear. On the day of the contest he drove over to the Bronx from his apartment on Dyckman Street and then took her down to the boardwalk of Coney Island in his open convertible. He was a sporty-looking fellow. That day he wore a light blue summer suit, with a light pink shirt and a red bandana around his neck. As they drove along, his golden hair whipped like a sea flag in the wind. He was muy guapo—handsome — and seemed prosperous. That day the beach’s sand warmed the bottoms of more than a million people, and while looking at them from the stage, she experienced vertigo. Being seen by so many people in that endless crowd was like flying through the air, especially when she stepped out of her robe and marched her winsome body out to where the people could see her. Greeted with a deafening volley of whistles and hoots, she took third place in the beauty contest and won twenty-five dollars. Then the nice man took her to the amusement park, paid for all the rides and treats she wanted. Then it was getting late and he said, “Now for the surprise.” And they drove beyond Coney Island and off to an Italian seafood restaurant by Avenue X.

He kept saying, “Well, this is our special little meal.”

Toasting her, he said, “I can’t believe that you didn’t win first place, but it was probably rigged, ya know? But there’s always next year.”

Then he ran out of that subject and said, “Pepsodent has this contest every year. Wouldn’t it just be swell if we could come back here next year?”

“Yes, it would.”

“And it’s good to get out of that hot sun. Trouble with New York in August, it just gets too darn hot.”

The waiter brought them a big platter of linguini with clam sauce, and this was followed by a large steamed silver-finned fish. And he said, “Gosh, we’re having a feast, aren’t we?”

He was enthusiastic and happy about just everything, and she couldn’t imagine that she’d stayed home so much, without dating any of the American fellows who looked at her on the street.

“You’re from Cuba-way, huh? My uncle goes down there like clockwork every winter. Down to Havana. Says it’s a nice place.”

“Yes, I haven’t been back for a long time. But I’ll go back one of these days.”

Then she talked about herself and the books she liked to read, romance and detective stories; told him that she wouldn’t mind studying one day to be a schoolteacher. He nodded intently and smiled a lot, and when he sat back she could see that his ears had turned a livid red from the wine. It was a noisy, cheerful restaurant. The Italian waiter was delighted with her, everyone was so nice to her.

“I guess it’s time we got back,” the nice man said, looking at his watch. “It’s almost eleven o’clock.” Then, as they were getting some little mints out of a bowl by the cash register, he stopped and said, “I grew up around here, can I interest you in looking at the house where I lived?”

“Okay.”

In the car she sat demurely beside him, not sure what she should do. She was worried about alienating him. A lady in her building who had lots of experience with men had told her, “If he’s nice to you, give him a kiss and let him fool around a little bit, but don’t let him do anything under your skirt.”

They drove beyond the restaurant, along the boardwalk, where the beaches started to hook out more into the sea, and where there were fewer houses.

“Keep going in this direction and you end up in southern Long Island,” he said. She noticed that there weren’t as many residential streets now, only occasional streetlights in the distance. The sea was gray and churning with a yellow moonlit foam.

“Are we almost there?” she asked.

“Yeah, we are.”

She thought he would turn left, but he turned right. By then they were on a street somewhere far beyond the Rockaways and Coney Island, where the subway line veered inland and disappeared. Abruptly he turned the car to one side and drove it out under a deserted boardwalk and through a forest of sea-rotted piers before finally stopping.

“Know what,” he said, letting out a deep breath in concern. “My car’s overheated, just feel the dashboard.”

She put her hand on the dashboard and it was hot.

“What say we sit here for a bit and enjoy the night air?”

They sat for a time watching the sea and he talked about how his mother would take him there in the afternoons and he would sit out by the shoreline with a toy bucket and shovel, making castles — his house wasn’t far away. And she just sat waiting for the moment when he would turn to her so that she could give him a kiss, and then it happened, just like that: he took a swig of some whiskey from a little flask, took her by the wrists, and said, “Delores, I’ve been wanting to kiss your pretty face all day.”

She felt him pressing close to her, and she said, under her breath, “Me, too.”

Then they started to kiss: he planted kisses on her cheeks and around her nose, and then he gave her real kisses, and his hands were touching her everywhere. She allowed him to fondle her breasts; then he tried to get his hands inside her bathing suit and slid them to between her legs, which she clenched shut like a vise. And, just like that, the fellow got a quite disbelieving look on his face, which was now a little twisted, and he said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Now relax, will ya? I’m not going to eat you.” But all the same he was still trying to hitch up her skirt and get his fingers inside the bottom part of her bathing suit, and then she pushed him away.

And just like that he seemed more disdainful and tore at the top of her bathing suit, shredding the straps and pulling down on the front of the suit so that he could get his mouth on her breasts; she squirmed under him, under his kisses and thick tongue.

“If you knew, Delores, how I feel right now,” he kept repeating. She tried to push him away, but he was a strong man and, at one point, annoyed with her resistance, slapped her face and said, “I’m not fooling with you, come on now, Delores. What the hell’s wrong with you, anyway?”

Then it hit her all at once that she was about to lose her virginity in the worst way imaginable. With this pendejo! Oh, Papi! There was nothing she could do to avoid it. Where could she go? Run off under this boardwalk out into those streets where there wasn’t a soul? It was so desolate she wished she was a mermaid so she could swim out into the beautiful sea. And she went through the possibilities of resistance and of compliance and felt herself in a world of pure gloom. How could she have been so trusting, so stupid? What could she do but sit back in the seat, feeling pity and shame in her heart and almost a fondness for his ardor. All these thoughts turned into a feeling of overwhelming sadness about being a woman. And where was this man’s kindness now? She rested back in the seat and he stood up, pulling off his shoes and then his socks. Then with the same manic devotion with which he had torn at her bathing suit he tugged at the erection inside his trousers, grabbed it proudly…

By the time he had undone his zipper she had gotten to the point where she wanted to get it all over with. He pushed open the door of the car and was standing over her when down to his knees went his trousers and his polka-dotted boxer shorts. And there it was, his member, slightly bent and wavering in the air. She thought, It’s like a child’s.

Something between a look of pity, mirth, and pure contempt crossed her face as she told him, “Go to hell, hombre.”

And as she turned herself around in that seat and drifted away like the wood and foam and debris that floated at the water’s edge, he kept trying to jam his thing into her bottom, he was so angry, and while this was going on, she had the impression of being in that room with her father the day she saw him naked; that she was now on the bed beside him and looking at his member, huge and powerful, an entity beyond the bodily weaknesses that would one day kill him.

Her poor father would die in 1949, collapsing on a stairway while making a seltzer delivery, boom, down two flights of stairs, dumbfounded, his last sight twenty bottles of seltzer bouncing off the steps, spraying everywhere and shattering to bits. Years later, she would say to herself, “Whatever anyone says about you, Papi, you were a worker, a protector, and a man, a sweet and gentle man, Papi, not like that bastard who abused me.”

That night, as she was assaulted on the beach, the word “virile” floated through her thoughts, brushed like a silk scarf against the edge of sexual speculation about her father. She was not on the beach but sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing oil into her father’s aching back, and running her hands up and over his shoulders, hearing him say, “Ay, qué rico! — How good it feels!” and happy at his sighs of pleasure, even if he was a spirit in her thoughts. But in those few moments, while the Pepsodent man tried to enter her womb, now dry as a bone, she heard the man crying out in frustration: “Bring me off!” And then, “Goddammit!” When she opened her eyes, he was masturbating himself to help along the ejaculation that had started against his will, during the moment of his failure… With a certain amusement she watched the temper and passion drain from his face, watched him hitch back his trousers and all the rest, his back to her. He said to her: “I should drown you in the water. Now get out of my sight!”

That night he left her on the beach among the gnats and the fleas and the crabs that moved in clusters across the sand, feeding slowly, and she had to wander the streets searching for someone to help her. By morning she was sitting on a curb some seven blocks inland where there were houses. A milk truck pulled up and the man, dressed in white, leaned out and said, “Rough night, huh, lady?”

Then he drove her to a subway fifteen minutes away.

The night of the dance, Delores was thinking about what her sister Ana María had told her: “Love is the sunlight of the soul, water for the flowers of the heart, and the sweet-scented wind of the morning of life”—sentiments taken from corny boleros on the radio, but maybe they were true, no matter how cruel and stupid men can be. Perhaps there’ll be a man who’ll be different and good to me.

And so Delores put on a red dress with a pleated midsection and slit skirt, dark nylons and black high heels, a fake pearl necklace, got her hair done up like Claudette Colbert’s, dabbed some Chanel No. 5 behind her ear and between her breasts, and poured a few drops over the talcum-powdered crotch of her panties, so that the woman who would walk into the ballroom only remotely resembled the cleaning woman Nestor had met at the bus stop.

What Delores and Ana María saw posted outside the brass doors of the ballroom was:

!!! CONTEST!!!!!CONTEST!!!

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

AT THE IMPERIAL BALLROOM

for the

BEST

and

MOST OUTRAGEOUS

BALDHEADED COUPLES!

★

$50 first prize! & CASE OF CHAMPAGNE &

A SET of YOUR VERY FAVORITE RECORDINGS

!!!!!!!MUCH MUCH MORE!!!!!!!

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

featuring

THE FABULOUS MAMBO KINGS!!

★

Adm. $1.06. Doors open 9 pm

Checking their hats and coats, Delores and Ana María, their asses pinched by naughty hands, made their way through the bald and full-haired crowd gathered at the Imperial Ballroom. She was now in the world of courtship for which Delorita thought she had no use. But, just the night before, she’d dreamed about the musician she’d met at the bus stop. She was lying naked in a bed, pressed against him, and they were kissing, kissing; so tightly were they pressed together that her hair had wrapped around him like a coiling rope and their skin burned and, at the same time, she had the sensation that all the pores in her body had opened and that from each pore dripped a warm sweet liquid like honey. That dream soon blossomed into a funnel of sensations through which her body floated like a cloud: she awakened in the middle of the night, imagining the musician’s long, sensitive finger touching the juiciest valve in her body. As she moved toward the stage to point Nestor out to her sister, she blushed, thinking about that dream.

The Mambo Kings were up on the stage, looking much as they did in photographs of them from that time, in white silk suits and set up in two rows across, the elegant Miguel Montoya seated behind a grand piano, a percussionist standing before a battery of congas, bongos, and timbales, a drummer before an American kit, then Manny with his stand-up bass, and then the trombonist and two of the horn players. And in front of them the saxophonist and flutist, their two violinists, and then the brothers, standing side by side before the microphone. The spotlight was on the handsome Cesar Castillo, and at first Ana María, liking his looks, asked, “Is that him?”

“No, the shy one standing off to the side.”

And there he was, waiting for the turnaround of a habanera, and then, given the nod by Cesar, he stepped before the microphone, tilted his head back, and began to play his solo. Like his older brother, who had slipped back, he was decked out in a white silk suit, flamingo-pink shirt, and sky-blue tie. He was playing the solo to his brother’s composition “Solitude.”

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Delores asked.

And then, when the song had turned around again and Cesar sang the last verse, she stood under the stage where the trumpet player was standing, and smiled at him. He had been lost in a stony-faced concentration, but he was happy to see her. Then they went into a fast number, a mambo. Sly smile on his face, Cesar Castillo gave a nod to the percussionist, whose hands were taped up like a boxer’s, and he started to bop, bop, bop on a quinto drum, and in came the piano with its Latin vamp, then the alternating bass. Another nod from Cesar and the others came in, and Cesar started dancing before the big ball microphone, his white leather, golden-buckled shoes darting in and out like agitated compass needles. And Nestor, standing in with the brass, blew his trumpet so hard in his exhilaration over seeing Delores, whose presence seemed to soothe his inner pain, his face turned red and his pensive head seemed ready to burst. And the crowds on the dance floor wriggled and bounced, and the musicians enjoyed Nestor’s solo and were shaking their heads, and he played happily, just hoping to impress Delores.

Then another slow song, a bolero.

Nestor whispered to Cesar, who said, “This little number is an original composition entitled ‘Twilight in Havana,’ and my brother here wants to dedicate it to a pretty girl named Delores.”

Head back, he stood beside the microphone, a backlight throwing his shadow down over the floor and rising up along the insides of her shapely legs, lingering on the dampness between them and giving her a lick.

That evening, Delorita and her sister Ana María were a couple of killer-dillers and would spend the night dancing with one man after the other. Ana María with pure joy, and Delorita with a sweet wistfulness, her chin on the shoulder of her dance partner, her eyes on the stage and that spotlight on the microphone and the pained, soulful countenance of Nestor Castillo. Though she could have ended up with one of the handsome men there that night, Delores waited for Nestor. When he came down off the stage during the band’s break, when the other orchestra played, he seemed happy and enchanted, his somberness broken, after two years of suffering over Beautiful María, by the prospect of a new love. He attended to Delores as if there was nothing in the world that he wouldn’t do for her. He bought Delores and her sister drinks from the bar, wiped a bead of sweat from her brow with his lilac-scented handkerchief, and when she said, “I like to dance, but my feet get so sore,” he offered to rub her warm, nyloned soles.

When she asked, “Why are you so nice to me?” he told her: “Because, Delores, it feels like my destiny.”

He remained at her side as if he had always known her, and when, for no apparent reason, he dropped his head melancholically, she touched the back of his neck with her hands gently, thinking, “My poor Papi was that way,” and because she seemed to understand his pain and because he did not have to make jokes around her and hatch romantic schemes to trap her, the way his brother did with women, he felt that there was a chance for a strong connection between them. Like a forlorn bird in a bolero, he felt his wings being singed by the flame of tender love.

When the musicians returned to the stage, they were joined by the squat, mustachioed MC for the evening, who wore a black tuxedo and a thick red silk cummerbund around his immense belly, like a foreign diplomat. He stood before the microphone, announcing the event for that evening:

“And now, ladies and gents, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for: our best baldheads dance contest! Our judges for tonight are none other than the famed rumba dancer Palito Pérez, and his wife, Conchita.” And they bowed from the stage. “The ever-fabulous Mr. Dance himself, ‘Killer’ Joe Piro, and last, that crooning marvel with the Mambo Kings orchestra, the ever-fabulous Cesar Castillo! Before beginning, I would like to remind you that this event has been jointly sponsored by the Sons of Italy Organization and the Nostrand Avenue Rheingold brewery. Maestro, you may begin.”

When the contest had been announced, mainly through pamphlets and posters and a few radio spots, there had been a rush to the barbershops of downtown Brooklyn, the Bronx, and central Harlem. A huge crowd had turned out, among them several hundred couples who had shaved off all their hair: purple and green eggheads, baldies in white tuxedos and evening gowns, baldies in giant baby diapers (the woman’s diaper discreetly pinned and joined at the back of her neck), Mr. and Mrs. Moon, baldies as oranges, baldies as people from the planet Mars, baldies as hydrogen bombs, baldies posing as baby chicks, and who knew what else. There were clowns and harlequins and couples draped with ball-bearing-sewn robes, couples with feathers and bells. The costumed entrants to this contest not only had to look weird but also had to demonstrate virtuoso and light-footed dancing, expertise in the arts of the mambo, rumba, tango, and cha-cha-cha.

Standing amid the ring of tipsy onlookers, Delores rooted for a couple who were the prettiest pair of baldheads. The woman looked like Queen Nefertiti and wore glittering necklaces and bracelets, all reflecting light into the world, and a butterfly-sleeved red dress whose skirt curled upwards like the roof of a pagoda. Her partner had peacock feathers for a collar and wore huge loop earrings and oversized purple silk pants and resembled a genie; but the main thing about them was that they seemed so much in love, smiling and kissing with every turn, dip, and slide.

They did not win, though they were good dancers. Another couple won: the man had an alarm clock tied to his bald head and numbers written all over his scalp. He was wearing oversized peg pants and pink spike-tipped shoes and a lavender shirt and jacket. His partner wore a tight black strapless gown in which she wobbled her way into the hearts of the males of the audience, her crowning moment arriving during a twirling spin in which the centrifugal forces tore free the top of her dress, revealing two plump breasts, large, quivering, and as bare as the top of her head.

Afterwards, Delores and Ana María made their way into the ladies’ room, which was jammed with bald and full-headed women seriously going about the business of freshening up their eyeliner, mascara, lipstick. She sat down before a mirror to freshen up, too, and enjoyed the comings and goings of these pretty young women who were out to meet young men and have a good time.*

Loud big-band Latin music slipped into the room when the door opened, ladies in the stall urinating, a scent of Chanel No. 5 thick everywhere, Sen-Sen, chewing gum popping in mouths. Cuban and Puerto Rican and Irish and Italian girls lined up before the makeup mirrors, applying mascara and rouge, and fixing their lipstick. Women pulling up on their skirts and getting their garters straight, thick thighs moon-white and honey-colored in the glare of the lights.

And voices:

“Tell ya, darlin’, some of these men, woooey! This fella fresh as hell, just met the guy and his bone is knocking on my door.”

“You think I look all right, I mean, how do you think he’ll like the way I look if I put my hair up like this?”

“And he wants me to go down to San Juan with him to a hotel there… Pay for it and everything.”

“And the fucking bastard takes me for a walk. I’m a little tipsy and so I sit with him in the car out in the parking lot. All I want to do is sit there and just get some fresh air, and then he’s all over me, like he’s never been with a woman before. I don’t even really know the guy, just that he’s married, and I say unhappily married by the way he’s grabbing at me… We wrestle around for a while, I don’t even really mind that, but no way am I going to go to bed with a man when I don’t have anything going with him, know what I’m saying? And what does he do but pulls his purple thing out of his trousers and says, ‘Oh, please, honey, why don’t you give it a little kiss?’ and ‘Oh, please,’ squinting his eyes and all like he’s in the worst pain in the world. I told him, you go to hell, and left him in the car holding his thing, and so, even though I’m in the right, twenty minutes later he’s back on the dance floor doing the cha-cha-cha with another girl, and from the way she looked, I’ll bet she did put his thing in her mouth. I end up going home to the Bronx, number 2 line all the way uptown to Allerton Avenue by myself…”

“Anyway, this guy’s six foot four, must weigh two hundred and fifteen pounds, works for the city, you know, and… he’s got a thing the size of my pinkie, what a gyp!”

“As beautiful as you are, there’s always some other girl out there beautifuller than you.”

“I’d give it up for a wedding ring.”

“Oh, God! Anyone have an extra pair of nylons?”

“… Qué mono that singer is, huh? I’d go out with him anytime.”

“Well, I’ve been out with him.”

“And?”

“He’d break your heart.”

“His brother isn’t bad, either.”

“You said it.”

She’d remember heading out into the ballroom again, down along the shoeshine stand, that thick row of men smoking their cigarettes like mad and trying to get a little fresh air before an opened window. Couples in phone booths and in corridors kissing and fondling each other, chandeliers that were a rainfall of crystal and light, the music coming from a distance, as if down a long, long tunnel: the string bass, the percussion, with the crash of cymbals, banging of congas and timbales looming like a storm cloud, from which only occasionally rose a horn line or crescendoing piano… Life was funny: she was thinking about Nestor Castillo and moving through the crowd toward the bar when she felt a hand gently taking hold of her elbow. And it was Nestor, as if she had wished him there. He took her over to the bar, drank down a glass of whiskey, and said, “We have to play one more set, and then afterwards we’re going out, around three o’clock or so, to get something to eat. Why don’t you come along with us… You can meet my brother and a few of the other musicians.”

“Can I bring my sister?”

“Cómo no. We’ll meet out in front.”

The grand finale of the evening was the conga. The fabulous Cesar Castillo came out, à la Desi Arnaz, with a conga drum slung over his shoulder, banging that drum and leading the Mambo Kings into a 1-2-3/1-2 rhythm that moved everybody across the dance floor in a snaking conga line, hips bumping, tripping, flying forward, separating, kicking out their legs, shaking their chassis, laughing, and having a good time…

They ended up driving uptown in Manny’s 1947 Olds and there hooked up with some of the other Mambo Kings, taking over a few long tables in the back of a little restaurant called Violeta’s, which the owner kept open late so that musicians, starved after their jobs, could have a good meal. On the back wall there was a mural of a tropic sea ablaze in the colors of an eternal Cuban sunset bursting over El Morro Castle in Havana Harbor. The walls over the bar were covered with signed photographs of the Latin musicians who’d eat there regularly. Everyone from the flutist Alberto Socarrás to the Emperor of the Mambo himself, Pérez Prado.

That night, as the Mambo Kings and their companions were dining, in walked the well-known bandleaders Tito Rodríguez of the Tito Rodríguez Orchestra, and Tito Puente, who headed an outfit called the Piccadilly Boys, and although Cesar frowned and said to Nestor, “Here comes the enemy!” the brothers greeted them as if they were lifelong companions.

“¡Oiganme, hombres! ¿Qué tal?”

Watching the two brothers side by side, Delores got a good idea of what they were like. They were like their signatures on the framed photograph of the Mambo Kings on the wall over the bar. That picture of them posed atop a seashell art-deco bandstand in white silk suits, instruments by their side. The photograph was covered with the musicians’ signatures, the most flamboyant being the elder brother Cesar Castillo’s, for whom she did not at first particularly care. His signature was pure vanity. Filled with so many blooms and loops that his letters resembled the wind-filled sails of a ship. (If only she could have seen him seated at his kitchen table up on La Salle Street with a pad of paper and a pencil, and a book on penmanship open before him, practicing his signature for hours and hours.) And he was like that, Delores thought, filled with wind and meaningless gestures. He had a sly curl of experience to his lips that Delores didn’t trust. Bursting with energy after a night of performance, the older Mambo King was in constant motion, joking with his fellow musicians, talking only about himself and the joys of performance, flirting with the waitresses and giving Delores and Ana María these hungry up-and-downs. It was one thing to look at her sister, who was unattached, that way, but at his own brother’s new companion! ¡Qué cochino! she thought. Rude and presumptuous.

Nestor’s signature was more plainly and carefully written, almost in a nervous child’s hand, as if he had taken a long time just to get his reduced, humble letters down right. He tended to sit quietly, smiling when jokes were made, nodding seriously when ordering or looking over the menu. And he tried hard to get along with everybody. He was polite to the waitress and to his fellow musicians. Courteous, almost frightened of being corrected about his table manners, even when his older brother grabbed across the table at the tostones platter and devoured everything hungrily, talking with his mouth full, and on not just one occasion indelicately belching in the midst of a laugh that enlarged his eyeballs and brought tears to his eyes: a man dedicated to himself, always taking more than his share: five pork chops, two plates of rice and beans, a plate of yuca, all drowned in salt and lemon and garlic. A bandleader’s share, she was sure. No wonder the glamorous pretty-boy singer was getting a big belly and jowls! On top of that, after filling his belly, he decided to ignore everyone else at the table, and spent all his time flirting with and sweet-talking Ana María. Dios mío, how typical was his voracious wolfishness…

Nestor was more reserved, which suited her fine. And he was attentive to her, pulling out her chair from the table for her, holding doors, and making sure that she had everything she wanted. Would you like some plátanos? Some chicken? Pork chops? Treating her as if she was as important as any of the musicians… She liked him, found him a refined kind of man, the kind of poetic soul who would write songs of love. She was nervous, but, right then and there, she decided that she would let him do as he pleased with her. There was something she found immensely appealing about his solemn demeanor, his passivity, his pain.

Later, Cesar dropped Manny off on 135th Street, where he lived, and borrowing his car, drove the two sisters home to the Bronx, a perilous journey during which the girls gripped their seats in terror because he kept veering into the curb, especially while going uptown on the West Side Highway: sparks flew from the hubcaps as he went zooming past all the other vehicles, honking his horn and driving like a drunk even when he wasn’t. But he got them both home in one piece and waited in the car while Nestor escorted Delores and Ana María to their apartment. Delorita would remember wishing he would at least give her a nice deep kiss, with a little bit of tongue, but he seemed so retiring and polite that she went to bed that night wondering, Is there something wrong with me? And wondering if she should have been the one to pull him close to her and slip her tongue inside his mouth.

They started going out. They would meet on those nights when the Mambo Kings weren’t playing, eat some Chinese food, and then head downtown to catch a film, visit friends, or step out to a ballroom. Delorita would talk about the books she’d read and the rich man for whom she worked—“He’s nice, but he’s so rich he’s unhappy”—and he would listen quietly, never having much of his own to say. He always seemed preoccupied about something, but he never talked about it. A man you were in love with should have a lot to say, she used to think to herself, but there was someone beautiful in there, inside that broad chest… Although he never said very much, she was certain that he would slowly open up. Slowly he did, speaking about his upbringing in Cuba and how he sometimes wished he’d never left his farm — he was better suited for a simple farmer’s life, he used to say.

“I’m not the adventurer, like my older brother. No, sirree, I was happy to sit out on the porch at night watching the stars and living tranquilito, tranquilito, but I wasn’t destined for that life, I was destined to come here to New York.”

At first she used to believe that his pain was an ordinary homesickness for the rural countryside and that much simpler life. She always thought he smelled of the Cuban countryside, and that he had not one foul bone in his body.

But the poor man — she figured that some terrible things had happened to him when he was a kid. He had told her that he was sick enough as a child in Cuba to have the priest perform the last rites over him at least twice. “I can remember a priest dressed in a purple cloak, praying over me. Candles and oil rubbed on my forehead. And my mother in a corner, weeping.”

And once on a sunny day, the day he wrenched open her heart, when they had gone for a walk in Riverside Park, he told her, “Look how beautiful it is today, huh?”

“Yes, it is, my love.”

“But do you know something, as beautiful as this is, I feel as if it doesn’t belong to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I sometimes feel like a ghost, tú sabes, as if I’m not really part of this world.”

“No! Bobo! You’re very much a part of this world.”

Then they went to sit on a nice grassy hill. They’d brought a little lunch of ham and cheese with mayonnaise on seeded rolls, and cold beers. Children were playing softball in a field, and pretty college girls in Bermuda shorts and white tennis shoes were spread out here and there on blankets, studying their books. The sun up in the sky, a buzz of insects in the air, boats and barges passing on the Hudson River. Two honeybees floating over a cluster of dandelions like a young couple in love looking over a house. Then a tling-tling, a Good Humor ice-cream man in his squat white truck. Nestor walked over and came back with two icicle pops, his strawberry, hers orange, and they ate them, runny with sweet liquid, and then lay back. She was so happy because it was a beautiful day and they were in love, but Nestor?

He had shut his eyes and suddenly trembled. Not a physical trembling, but a shudder in his spirit. It was so strong she felt it entering her like a fume out of a gas stove.

“Oh, Nestor, why are you that way?” And she kissed him, saying, “Sit up here, beside me, mi corazón.”

And he started weeping.

“Delores… a man doesn’t weep. Forgive me.”

And even though his face was all twisted up, he put a stop to it and regained his composure.

“I just get so tired sometimes,” he told her.

“Of what?”

“Just tired.”

She didn’t know what to do. She took hold of his right hand and kissed it.

“It’s just that I don’t feel long for this world sometimes.”

Then he wouldn’t say another word about it, and they went for a walk. The day ended happily with the two of them watching an Abbott and Costello double feature over at the Nemo movie theater on Broadway. Afterwards they ate pizza, and by then she had fallen in love.

She must have been lovestruck, must have looked at him with such fawning eyes, because after they’d been going out for about two months, and were kissing in the foyer of her hallway, he said to her, “You know, Delorita, I wish you wouldn’t look at me that way. I’m not the saint you think I am.”

And just like that he pulled her close, embracing her and forcing her to sigh with the inward shove between her legs of the burning mule bone inside his trousers.

“You see, Delorita,” he was saying, “I’ve wanted to respect you, but now… I can’t even sleep at nights, I’m so filled up with thoughts of you… And there’s something else, I haven’t said a word or showed my feelings because I’m a cautious man, but, Delorita”—and he shocked her, taking her hand and pulling it down over the front of his trousers—“can’t you see what a state I’m in?”

They kissed for a long time, until she said, “Let’s go into the apartment. Ana María’s out and won’t be back until late.”

She wasn’t nervous, stripping down before him and resting back on the very couch where her father used to fall asleep in exhaustion. Nestor had his hands all over her, his thick tongue inside her mouth, his fingers probing under the wire rim of her brassiere, and he whispered, “Querida, undo my trousers.” And she reached down without looking and unfastened his buttons and then separated the lips of his trousers in the way that his fingers were separating the lips of her vagina, and she pulled out his thing; it was powerful and big enough that she gasped and opened her legs wide for him.

Because her undergarment was now so damp, she told him, “Pull it off, my darling,” and as they covered each other’s faces with kisses, she floated away again, remembering the afternoons of her youth in Havana when the house was filled with shouting, and how she would seek shelter in a room whose shuttered windows leaked sunlight, resting in her bed and touching herself so that she could forget the shouting, forget it all through the pleasant sensations, like those sensations that were overwhelming her now. Her legs opened wider and she felt herself being occupied by a tremendous force, and her insides filled with the melted wax of a large church candle, and as the sound of his frantic breathing amplified, he sounded like the wind that she sometimes heard in her dreams. Her pores opened and oozed the warm and sweet liquid of her dream and she thought, “My Lord, this is a man!” and they played for hours; Delores felt so grateful to him that she did everything he wanted. That night she went from complete ignorance to knowledge about the act of love. When she heard his moans of pleasure and saw an expression of ecstatic release on his face, a new sense of purpose descended upon her: to release this young musician from his pain.

(And poor Nestor? He thought he was with Delores and he devoured her big-nippled breasts, but when he closed his eyes and no longer saw her face, he was kissing the breast of the Beautiful María of His Soul, licking her skin from navel to toe, but when he winced at his maudlin thought and remembered how much he loved Delores and how good he felt inside her, he was pulled out of the darkness into which he had started slipping, and so he opened his eyes and looked deep into her eyes, and because he was coming and his bones were giving out inside him and his body teemed with a creamy heat that rose from his penis and exploded in his head, he closed his eyes again and felt the worst sadness about María. And yet, when he saw María, he pictured her in a room, and in that room a doorway through which could be seen the sickbed of his youth and himself, unable to move, calling out, “Mamá!” and waiting, waiting. And he’d open his eyes again and begin to pump Delores harder, but he could not help thinking about the other and almost slipped a few times, almost uttered, “María, María.”)

By that time, Cousin Pablo and his family had moved away to a nice house in Queens and had left the apartment to the brothers. Cesar took over the big bedroom down the hall, and Nestor got one of the smaller rooms near the kitchen. He started to invite Delorita over for dinner, and because she lived so far away, she would often spend the night. Nestor would wait on the corner of 125th Street and Broadway for Delorita to come stepping off the bus from the Bronx. Or she’d head straight to La Salle Street from her cleaning job, carrying a bag with a change of clothing. She wasn’t bothered by the fact that they shared the same bed out of wedlock. She thought it was no one else’s business, though she was only twenty-one. And besides, she had no doubt that they would be married one day.

At first, with Pablo and the family gone, the apartment, barely furnished and crammed with musical instruments and drums, seemed drab. But Delores would bring in flowers and rolls of brightly colored Con-Tact paper. Shopping, Nestor and Delores would make trips to Chinatown, returning with vases and Chinese screens and jasmine candles. She kept the place clean and started to cook for them. They’d sometimes walk toward Columbia University and the bookstores on Broadway, and while she’d forage through the bins and used-book racks for adventure, spy, romance, and detective novels that cost a nickel apiece, he’d wait patiently. They went out a lot in those days: sometimes Cesar would borrow a car and they would go for another perilous ride in the country, or they’d go out to the Park Palace, fancy as La Conga or the Copacabana, to catch Machito or Israel Fajardo, and afterwards they would go strolling through Central Park at two in the morning. Once, after a Mambo King job in Brooklyn, they went to Coney Island. She and Nestor sat on a bench necking before the ebbing sea, and the incident with the Pepsodent man seemed as remote as the bone-white moon above them.

When she was not at night school, she would study. She’d learned her English after a long and humiliating struggle in a Catholic school in the Bronx, where the nuns literally beat her head with a dictionary when she misunderstood or could not remember certain words. Chronic mispronunciations made her the butt of many a joke, but she endured, studied and excelled, won spelling bees and got high grades, becoming one of those latinas who, through a course of terrified learning, could speak English as well as anyone (and with a slight Bronxese accent, at that). She would always try to teach Nestor things, encouraged him to read a book. He would shrug and she would later find him sitting on the living-room sofa with a guitar and a pencil and paper, whistling and working out the melodies to different songs.

She was happy for the first time since she could remember and she adored Nestor for it. Sometimes she would walk into the living room, lower the Venetian blinds, and take off her dress. Or she sat beside him just to keep him company and in a few minutes found her undergarments pulled down to her knees, and her dress hitched up over her waist. She was always happy with him because during the act of love the younger Mambo King would say, “Te quiero, Delorita. Te quiero,” again and again. When he would have his orgasm his face would widen, as if flattening out like one of the Venetian carnival masks she saw on her employer’s wall; and he’d blush during this ecstatic release from pain. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. She’d rub baby oil on her breasts and thighs, then get a jar of petroleum jelly and smear it between her legs, find Nestor napping in the bedroom, suckle him, and then impale herself on his member.

He was a troubled sleeper and suffered from nightmares. Often, as she slept beside him, she would think of his sadness and about helping him, but there seemed to be nothing she could do to lift him out of his melancholy. Lovemaking distracted this melancholia: he’d fall asleep wedged up against her bottom at night, his erection pressed against her. It seemed they must have made love countless times in their sleep. One night when she was dreaming about picking flowers, she felt his penis entering her from behind. But not into her vagina. She was half asleep, so that the sensation of being entered there came over her body slowly: at first it felt as if her bottom were being packed with warm clay, but after a certain time the softness gave way to a widening and lengthening barb, stretching her painfully at first and then warming and softening again. She turned to facilitate his pleasure and ground her hips into him until he came. Then they were both sound asleep again and he began his uneasy dreams again.

NOW, THE OPENING CHORDS TO “Beautiful María of My Soul” and Nestor in Delores’s arms dreaming about 1948: In the late evenings, after finishing up with his job at the Havana Explorers’ Club, where he worked side by side with his older brother, he would take walks through the neighborhoods of the city; he liked to get lost in the arcades and to wander in the marketplace among the farmers and the hen cages and gray pigs. In the alley behind a Chinese restaurant called Papo-lin’s in La Marina, that neighborhood by the harbor near where they lived, he watched two red roosters, powerful machos, fight with their razor-taloned claws. Standing up in a bar in a row of bars, he would eat his dinner, a plate of rice and beans and a pork chop drowned in salt and lemon, for 25 cents, and watch the street euphorically cluttered with life: men pulling rag carts; Chinese workers in velvet shoes and long cotton smocks making their way to the tobacco factories; the poor from Las Yaguas selling their wares and services out of stalls: fortunes told, shoes fixed, jugo de fruta 10 cents, clocks, guitars, house tools, coils of rope, toys and religious articles, statuary and good-luck charms, flowers, love potions and magic candles, get your picture taken for 25 cents, in color! He’d look over the clothing to see what he might buy for the fifteen dollars a week he earned in those days: a good guayabera with fancy lace trimmings, $2; a plain shirt, $1; a pair of Buster Browns, $4; a pair of linen pantalones, $3.50. Hershey bar? 2 cents. Pepsi or Apur-Cola, 10 cents… And there were bananas hanging like lanterns off the racks, and wagon after wagon of fruit, and ice wagons, and a huddle of men throwing dice in a cool doorway. Flowers growing in pots and flowers spilling off the balconies, and lichen on the sea-rotted walls: astragal fences and antique doors, cornices brown and orange-hued, animal head and angelic door knockers. Racks of copper pots and pans, children running in and out of the stalls, sailors in the city whoring, a bicycle hanging off a rope over a row of bicycle tires; caged parrots; a shady-looking gentleman with the eyes of a turtle, sitting quietly at a narrow fold-up table from which he sold his “artistic” photographs; and then racks of dresses and pretty women moving among the racks and music coming out of the doorways. Smell of blood and sawdust, the sound of animals being butchered on the block, smell of blood and tobacco and a walk down a long alley behind the slaughterhouse that faced another slaughterhouse: a man dumping buckets of water over a floor drenched in blood and behind him, in a row, the split-open carcasses of a dozen pigs. Then the leather and carpentry and beach-goods shops…

Then he’d pass the prostitutes who stood in the doorways in their tight slips and robes exposing a breast, or a length of thigh, rolling their tongues over their lips, as if they’d just finished eating an ice cream: they’d check out his crotch, smile, and say, “Psssst. Ven, macho, ¿adónde vas?” He passed them and always waved hello: they knew him as the quiet musician walking along their street, the fellow who wasn’t audacious like his brother. They would call to him and rub their breasts and once one of these ladies leapt out of the doorway and pinched his bottom: “Guapito! Hey, handsome, what’s taking you so long?” But he never wanted to go, because ever since the days when his brother used to take him to see the prostitutes in Oriente, he had found something unbearably sad about the situation, not the touching of breasts and loins, the gushing of his sperm, or the white pan of water under the bed in which the used prophylactics floated, but the idea that he found himself feeling too sorry for these women who were forced to make love with men with whom they were not in love, spreading their legs for fifty cents and sometimes, with a really beautiful woman, a dollar.

But he was not a saint. There was one pretty girl whom he took to bed now and then, a young woman, married, as it turned out, who really needed a man to love her. He went to see her four times and had been falling in love with her when he realized that the only reason she was suckling his member and bending his back was for money, and that left him sulking with disappointment for weeks, so that he went back to his old ways. (Nothing like Cesar, who was having trouble in his marriage and would go roaring with a bottle of rum into one of those whorehouses and take up with three women at a time and come home to their little two-room apartment sated and with a glow of sly satisfaction in his eyes. Nothing like Cesar, who’d turn up in these brothels and spend the night among these women, entertaining them with his trembling, quivering baritone: he’d sing and they would cook for him and sometimes he would slip off into a room and take a woman to bed.)

So the whores of La Marina came to recognize Nestor’s expression of eternal homesickness and longing for love that flourished in his face at night. Even back then, he was an insomniac, who’d only known peaceful sleep in his mother’s arms when he was a baby; all other sleep was deathly, like the sleep he knew as a sick child in the days when he could not breathe and when he felt his heart churning and welts covered his back and stomach. It was the deathly sleep of opening his eyes and finding his mother sitting in a chair near his bed weeping and a priest looming over him and dabbing an oil that smelled vaguely of cinnamon onto his forehead with the back of his thumb and making the sign of the cross, and he himself thinking as a child that he was going to die. The peaceful sleep in his mother’s arms was the sleep he missed, and so he would walk those streets, agonized by the night and wishing that he had never left Las Piñas or the loving grip of his mother. But he was a man, coño! Destined to live in the world and to take his place among the other men who were everywhere, running things and giving orders and facing life in every moment. Why should he be any different?

He would walk those streets daydreaming, and because he took no regular route and liked to zigzag in and out of the back alleys and down corridors and to follow stairways, he never knew where he would end up. This wandering sometimes made him feel an affinity with the stars. He’d sit for hours looking at them by the harbor: stars shooting across the sky, stars hanging there with their pink- and blue-tinted light and set against a sky that went on forever and forever. What were they doing up there? Murmuring and sighing and looking down at love’s follies, the way they did in songs? Were they lonely, or sad, longing to break free of the darkness that nurtured them? Or were they destined to remoteness, always to search for happiness — like Nestor?

One night he went out to a park in the Maríanao district where the rumberos would gather under the trees by a river with their incredible batá drums and their bead-wrapped rattle gourds and trumpets to play music. That night he had joined them, playing the trumpet, and was on his way back home, wandering the streets. In a corner bar he drank a coffee and watched some children dancing to an organ-grinder’s music. Afterwards he thought about going to a cowboy movie but then continued along a route that took him past a doorway from which he heard smashing dishes, shouts, and a struggle on the stairs. Had that argument broken out five minutes sooner or later than his arrival, the situation might have resolved itself without his intervention and the woman in the torn dress with the tears running down her beautiful face would have gone back to her apartment or made up with the man. But he happened to be walking by when he heard shouting, and then he heard quick, pattering footsteps on the stairs, slaps, then through the doorway the fighting couple, the man trying to pin her arms and the beautiful woman in tears pulling at his hair. A lot of pain on their faces, and the man violently angry.

Heroically, Nestor interceded, approaching the man and telling him, “Look, stop it, you shouldn’t hurt her. She’s only a woman.” And then it turned into something else, the man bristling at this fairy’s nerve of fucking with him, and so he said, “And who are you to tell me this?” and gave Nestor a shove, and Nestor shoved back, and then they both started punching each other, the fight ending up on the cobblestone street, with both men bloody and their clothes covered with dirt. Having watched the fight from a distance, while finishing his rice and chicken and sausage and tostones dinner in a café down the street, a police officer came over and pulled them apart.

When the man calmed down, he huddled with the woman, exchanged angry words with her, and then stormed off, saying: “You don’t need me? Then good, you’ll never see me again.” She watched him leave. Every few feet he would reel around and shout something else back at her. “Bitch! Whore!” She wept, and Nestor stood on the corner, no longer wanting to continue his walk. He did not want to move away from her, and though they did not have much to say, they stood side by side, silently. He then offered to take her to the café. “It will make you feel better,” he said.

Looking at her, Nestor felt faint-headed: she was more beautiful than the sea, than the morning light, than a wildflower field, and her whole body, agitated and sweaty from her struggles, gave off an aromatic female scent, somewhere between meat and perfume and ocean air, that assailed Nestor’s nostrils, sank down into his body like mercury, and twisted in his gut like Cupid’s naughty arrow. He was so shy that he couldn’t look at her anymore, and she liked this, because men were always looking at her.

“My name is María,” she told him.

“Nestor’s mine,” he told her quietly.

She was twenty-two years old and had left her small pueblo by the sea for Havana, where she had been living for the last few years working as a dancer in different little Havana nightclubs. He wasn’t surprised to hear that she was a dancer: she had a nice body and strong-looking, curvaceous legs, with muscles that were round and delicate. She was a mulata beauty with the high cheekbones of a starlet of the forties, a pouty, seductive double for Rita Hayworth. And the man with whom she had been fighting?

“Someone who was once good to me.”

He passed the night with her in the café eating paella and drinking wine and telling her everything about his short life, his childhood illnesses, his sense of unworthiness, his fears that he could never be a real macho in the kingdom of machos. Her state of pain and her throbbing vulnerability spoke to his own pain. Each of his stories entered María, his new confidante, the only woman in the world to whom he had spoken so, María, to whom, in the end, these confessions would mean nothing.

That night, and many other nights, she was polite, grateful, and affectionate. At her doorway, he bowed and then turned away. She was so good-looking that he never dreamed he’d have a chance with her. But then she pulled him close to her and they kissed. She closed her eyes in some kind of sympathy, their bodies pressed together, her hand holding the back of his head. The warm softness inside her dress. The thickness of her tongue…

“Why don’t we go out to the Luna Park tomorrow,” she said to him. “Can you come here in the afternoon?”

It was his day off.

“Yes.”

“Then shout up into that window there.” And she pointed to a shuttered second-floor window by a balcony off which hung a sheet and some dresses.

He walked the streets home that night with his stomach in and chest out and with his pinga warm and bloated inside his trousers, ecstatic over the amorous possibilities. He walked around his neighborhood for hours and then finally climbed the stairs to the solar which he had been sharing with his older brother, Cesar. He found him cooking some pork chops over a little stove they had there. He was in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, and looked somber. It had been bad times for him since he’d moved out of the apartment he’d had with his wife and daughter. He’d been drinking, too; a bottle of Tres Medallas brandy sat on the windowsill, and Cesar seemed groggy.

“What happened to you?”

“I met someone. A girl named María.”

Cesar nodded, patted his brother on the back, hoping that this woman would help with Nestor’s solemn moods.

And Nestor sat with his older brother at the table, blood pouring through his veins, bursting with life, devouring another pork chop, even though he’d eaten a big meal just a few hours before. Chewing noisily like a little hungry hound. Sounds of life, of digestion, a look of happiness and hope in his eyes. Although he couldn’t sleep that night, his was a joyful insomnia that buoyed his spirits, so that he felt like leaning out the window and shouting out to the world. Instead, he lay awake in bed and quietly strummed his guitar, an A-minor chord, his favorite key for writing songs. He strummed and dreamed up melodies that materialized in his mind like hard, bright pearl necklaces. He watched the window for the first signs of light. He imagined himself turning up at the farm at Las Piñas with this woman, charging across a field with her, and telling his mother: “Look, Mamá, this is Nestor, your son who you thought would never be happy! Pobrecito! Look at me, I’ve got a beautiful woman who loves me!”

He waited until he heard the first sounds of day and he could make out the shadowy silhouette of the outside balustrade, a wreath of flowers, on the tattered windowshade. Radio in the courtyard: “And now from the House of Socks, radio station CMQ in Havana…” Men in T-shirts frying sausages on their balconies. His older brother turning over in bed, sighing. Footsteps in the hallways, a little girl downstairs playing hopscotch, another jumping rope…

That morning and into the afternoon he was tortured by expectation. And as happy as he had felt, his self-doubts, another of the family afflictions, crept through the sunniness of his thoughts. Standing outside her window, he shouted her name for about twenty minutes, but she did not come out. By that time Nestor had become convinced that María had lied about going to the Luna Park with him and that he had been cheated of his joy. And so he began to walk away, figuring he would spend the afternoon downtown in the movie houses. He was feeling discouraged, when María came walking around the corner, breathless and hurried.

“I had to take something to my cousin and it took longer than I thought.”

The day was beautiful. His faith restored, they passed the time holding hands and strolling through the crowds in the park. They played games of chance. From time to time he gazed into her eyes, thinking, I know that we’re falling in love, aren’t we? And she would smile, but her head would turn away, as if struck by some quick, flitting pain. She seemed cautious around him. Of course, she was getting through something with this other man. Nestor kept his distance, remained quiet, but whenever he mentioned the “incident of that day,” she would say, “Don’t even think about that man, he was such a cabrón.” Why, then, the wistful look in her eyes?

“Come,” and she would take him by the hand. “Let’s have fun!”

By evening they were sitting out on a pier by the sea necking, the head of his penis weeping semen tears. He wasn’t bothered by the ease with which she gave herself, though old ladies and duennas gave them dirty looks. He thought, if she’s kissing me so much, that’s because we’re in love! Why was she closing her eyes so much, as if he wasn’t there? They saw each other every day for two weeks. He would go to her house, where she rented a room from a woman there, and they would head out into the street, a bounce in his jaunty walk. Their love affair came down to secret moments of hurried kissing and groping, mutual masturbation against alley walls and in movie theaters, and this inevitably led to the consummation of this love in a room filled with blue light by the harbor, on a bed white as beach sand, in the apartment of a friend.

That very day he first thought of writing a canción about his love for her. Sated and living in paradise, the younger Mambo King, who really had never known women, thought of this lyric: “When desire overwhelms a man’s soul, he is lost to everything in the world but love…”

He and María feasted on each other for months. They’d go to a deserted stretch of beach outside Havana or to the apartment of Nestor’s friend by the harbor. He never took her up to the solar he shared with his older brother, because he felt that the cheerfulness of his love would be disturbing to Cesar, who had left his wife and child, and suffered for it, too… And besides, what if Cesar didn’t like her? His brother, his heart, his blood. In those days Nestor would rush up the stairway of their solar, his Cuban-heeled shoes tapping on the floor, passing images of himself and María kissing in the shadows. They’d do it on the bed and sometimes on the floor, or on a pile of dirty clothes. They seemed to love each other so much, their skin gave off a lustful heat and smell so strong that they would attract packs of wild hounds who’d follow them down the streets.

Once, when Cesar was away, she went to the brothers’ flat and decided to make Nestor dinner. She was cooking up a pot of chicken and rice on the white enamel stove with animal feet, and then, ladle in hand, she stuck out her rump, pulled up her dress, and said, “Come on, Nestor.”

She liked it every which way: from behind, in her mouth, between her breasts, and in her tight bottom. She would make his penis agonizingly plump and long. He used to think he would split her open, but the more he gave her, the wider she spread herself before him. He took her to the movies, where they sat in the balcony and in the midst of the crucial love scenes, he slipped one and then two and then three and then four fingers inside her. In the foyer of a building landing, he would lift up her skirt and lick her thighs. He would lean up against her like a hound, pressing his tongue against the dead center of her panties. Some days he forgot his name and where he lived and where he worked: by day at the Havana chapter of the Explorers’ Club, by night in a little gambling casino nightclub called the Club Capri. She had large firm breasts. Her nipples were brown and the size of quarters, very small-tipped at first, but when he suckled them they would swell. Tiny flora of sensation blossomed and he could taste the sweetness of her milk. Livid and as thick as her wrist, his penis slid into her mouth and she reached back and opened his buttocks and stuck her hand inside, probing him. He was alive then, coño! Alive.

He was so in love with her that he could have died in her arms happily. Loved her so much he licked her rump hole. She came and he came and in the red-tinged silver-and-white that exploded in his brow and that shuddered through his body he felt a thready presence, like a soul entering him. He would lie beside her, feeling that his body had been turned into a field and that he and she floated ecstatically over that field on the wings of love. He thought about her as he scrubbed the hair-tonic stains off the back of the heavy leather chairs at his job at the club. He wore a short white jacket with three brass buttons and a little hat like a bellboy’s, carried trays of food and drink to the club members, and he daydreamed about licking her nipples. Smell of linseed-oil-polished wood, cologne, blue cigar smoke, flatulence. The smell of leather, hair-tonic-stained chairs, thick rugs from Persia and Turkey. Nestor laughing, Nestor happy. Nestor slapping his older brother’s then-troubled back. He’d work in the little kitchen behind the bar, making crustless ham sandwiches, and drinks. He whistled, he smiled, he sang happily. He’d look out across the dining room through open French doors to the patio and garden. He would think about the devastating curvaceousness of her buttocks, the sliver of thick black hair that protruded, but just barely, from behind her spread thighs. Scent of soft violet wisteria, falling over the garden walls, leafy jasmine and Chinese hibiscus. The taste of her wide-open vagina, all red and gleaming from moistness, an open orchid to his tongue.

Waiting to see her again, he suffered through evenings when he went to work playing the trumpet and singing alongside his brother with the Havana Melody Boys. His María worked in the chorus line of the Havana Hilton, as one in a line of ten “beautiful cream-and-coffee-colored dancers,” and that’s where Nestor wanted to be, his eyes looking off not at the audience or the spotlights but into the distance. He could not help thinking about María. When he was not with her he was miserable, and after playing these jobs he would rush out to meet her.

For his part, Cesar was curious about this Beautiful María who had taken his maudlin, quiet brother and made him happy. So finally Nestor arranged that they meet one night. They chose a bar where a lot of musicians liked to go, up by Maríanao beach. Dios mío! his brother Cesar was surprised by María’s beauty and he gave Nestor his approval, but then, so did everyone else. He stood there trying like every other man to figure out how on earth Nestor had landed her. Not by know-how; his younger brother had never been a womanizer. In fact, he’d always seemed a little frightened of women. And now there he was, with a beautiful woman and a real look of happiness on his face. He hadn’t won her over with his looks, pleasantly handsome, with a long matador’s face and a sensitive, pained expression, large dark eyes, and large fleshy ears. It must have been his brother’s sincerity and innocence, qualities which femmes fatales seemed to appreciate. Watching her dance before a jukebox blaring Beny More, her ass shaking and body wobbling, her beautiful face the center of attention in that room, Nestor felt triumphant because he knew what the others wished they knew: that yes, her breasts were as round and succulent as they appeared to be under her dress, and that her nipples got big and taut in his lips, and yes, her big rumba ass burned, and yes, the fabulous lips of her vagina parted and sang like the big kiss-me lips of her wide lipsticked mouth, and yes, she had thick black pubic hair, and a mole on the right side of her face and a corresponding mole on the second inner fold of her labia minora; he knew the fine black hair that crept up gradually out the crack of her buttocks, and that when she reached orgasm she would whip her head back and grind her teeth, her body shaking in the aftermath.

Standing by the bar proudly, beside his older brother, Nestor sipped his beer, one bottle after another, until the sea’s blueness outside the club windows rustled like a cape and he could shut his eyes and drift like the thick smoke of that room through the crowd of dancers, wrapping himself around the voluptuousness that was María.

Funny, that was their mother’s name too. María. María.

Remembering those days, Nestor would never think about the long silences in their conversations when they’d go for walks in the park. After all, he was just an introspective country boy with a sixth-grade education who knew more about musicians and breeding animals than anything else. Once he’d told her about himself, he had almost nothing to say. “And how are your cousins?” “How is the club?” “Nice day, isn’t it?” “Bueno, what a good day?” “Why don’t we go for a walk and get something good to eat?” What could he say to her? She was beyond human conversation. She liked it when he serenaded her in front of the opera house in the park with his guitar and crowds would gather to listen and applaud him. Some days, she seemed very sad and lost, and that made her even more beautiful. He would walk alongside her, wondering what she was thinking and what he could say to make her laugh.

Gradually, their walks turned into long vigils through the night, until they reached that place where everything would be fine: their bed. But then, somehow, even their spirited romps in bed turned into something else. She would stop and weep in his arms, weep so hard that he didn’t know what to do.

“What is it, María? Can you tell me?”

“You want a good piece of advice, brother?” Cesar would tell Nestor. “If you want a woman, treat her good sometimes, but don’t let her get too used to it. Let her know that you are the man. A little abuse never hurt a romance. Women like to know who’s the boss.”

“But abuse María? My María?”

“Take my word for it… Women like to be ordered around and put in their place. Then she will stop her weeping.”

Trying to think what his brother meant, he started to order María around, and during their silent walks in the park he would show her that he was a man, taking her roughly by the wrists and saying to her, “You know, María, you must feel lucky to be with someone like me.”

He’d watch her by the mirror, making herself up, and say, “I never realized that you were so vain. It’s not good, María, you’ll be ugly in old age if you look too long in the mirror.”

He did other things to her which would later make him cringe with unhappiness and the unfairness of it all. Good-looking as she was, he imitated his older brother and took to looking around at all the other women on the street. He had the idea that if he could diminish her, then she would always remain by his side. When things didn’t get better, their silences increased. As things got worse, Nestor became more and more confused.

But during that time when things were bad for them, Nestor sat down and wrote his mother a letter saying, “Mamá, I think I’ve found a girl to marry.”

And once he’d told his mother, his romance took on a magical, inevitable quality. Destiny, he called it. At first, he made a formal proposal to her, on his knees, in a garden behind a social club, with ring and flowers. He bowed his head, waiting for an answer: he shut his eyes, thinking about all the light in heaven, and when he looked up to see her pretty face again, she was running out of the garden, his ring and flowers beside him on the ground.

When he would make love to her, he would think about the man he had seen the day they met and how she had wept afterwards. Making love, he left marks on her legs and on her breasts from gripping them roughly to show her that he was a strong man. He would get up from their bed and say to her, “You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?” He had a sick feeling in his gut that something inside him was pushing her away. On those nights he wished for a pinga so huge that it would burst her open, and let fly, like a broken piñata, all her new doubts about him.

Believing that persistence would win out on his behalf, he would say to her, “I’m going to ask you to marry me every day until you tell me yes.”

They’d take walks, go to the movies, her beautiful face pained.

“There’s something I want to tell you…” she’d always begin.

“Yes, María, that we are always going to be together?”

“… Yes, Nestor.”

“Ah, I knew it. I would die without you.”

One night they were supposed to see a Humphrey Bogart movie and meet at their usual place, in front of a bakery called De Leon’s. When she failed to turn up, he walked the streets looking for her until three in the morning, and when he returned to the solar he told his older brother what had happened and Cesar said that there was probably a good reason why she had missed their date. He always found his brother’s advice sound and felt much better. The next day, he went to María’s house and she was not there, and he went there the next day and she was not there, and then he went to the Havana Hilton and she was not there. What if something had happened to her? He kept returning to her edificio, but she was never there, and each evening Cesar, who was having a rough time himself, consoled him. But by the fifth day his older brother, whose life philosophy had turned into rum, rumba, and rump, told Nestor: “Either something happened to her or else she’s abandoned you. If something happened to her, then you’ll see her, but if she’s left… you have to forget her.”

On another morning, he knocked at the door so long that the owner came out. “María Rivera? She’s moved away.”

He returned again and again to the club, even when he was told that she had quit her job and returned to her pueblo.

For weeks he couldn’t eat or drink and he lost weight and his insomnia became worse. He would sit on the rooftop of their solar, watching the stars over the harbor, stars of lamentation, stars of devotion, stars of infinite love, and ask them, “Why are you mocking me?” He went to his job in a disastrous state of mind, exhausted and solemn. His state of gloom was as ecstatic as his previous state of happiness.

Even the leader of the Havana Melody Boys noticed Nestor’s low spirits. While the other musicians mamboed across the stage, he barely moved. Someone whispered, “He looks like he’s going through a bad affair of the heart.”

“Poor fellow, looks like someone has died.”

“Let him alone. There’s nothing that’s going to cure him. Only time.”

Finally he went to her pueblo, which was about four hours by bus from Havana. He walked the streets, inquiring about a certain María Rivera. He’d left without saying a word to his older brother and had gotten a room in a local inn. He had been there for four days and was drinking a café con leche in a bar when he looked over and saw the man who had been fighting with María the day they met. Now that he could get a good look at him without the distortion of fear, he was surprised to see a handsome man. He was wearing a blue guayabera, white linen pantalones, yellow socks, and white shoes, and he had strong and pleasant, manly features: dark, intense eyes, a thick, virile mustache, a wide neck. The man had been drinking calmly and then abruptly he moved out into the street. Keeping a distance, Nestor followed him. He came to a lovely street, a narrow cobblestone street that went uphill. Old orange and light pink walls, overgrown with flowering vines. Palm trees and acacias throwing their shade over the sidewalk. And in the distance, the sea’s radiance.

There was a house there. A beautiful, tin-roofed house overlooking the water. A smell of pineapple and a garden. A house of happiness and voices. María’s voice, laughing happily, happily.

He waited, tormentedly lingering outside like a ghost, just to catch a glimpse of her. And it made things worse. He would look into her window and hear the chatter of voices and utensils and plates and pans frying up plantain fritters, her life being joyfully pursued without him, and he cringed. At first, he didn’t have the guts to bang on the door and confront her, didn’t want to see the truth. But he later found his strength in a bar and returned at dusk and swaggered over to the door, belly in, chest out. A long, mournful trumpet line, rising high and looping around the stars. Scent of mimosa in the air. Laughter. He kept banging on the door downstairs until the man came out.

“What do you want?”

“My woman.”

“You mean,” he said, “my wife.”

“Don’t tell me?”

“Since a week ago.”

“But she hated you.”

The man shrugged. “It was our destiny.”

Oh, María, why were you so cruel, when I saw the stars washing through your hair and the moon’s pensive glow in your eyes?

Nestor made his way down that hill to a seawall and leaned up against a small statue of the Cuban poet José Martí, watching the sea of dusk. There he daydreamed about how happy he could have been with her, if only he had not been so cruel, or if he had been a better conversationalist or had some real ambition. If only she had not seen the weakness in his soul. As if in a dream, María appeared behind him, and she was smiling. When he went to touch her hand, it was as if he were touching air. Nothing was there. But María was there. She spoke so gently to him and so tenderly about the torments of her heart and soul that when she left his side, he felt oddly calmed.

What was it that she had said to him?

“No matter what, I will love you forever.”

Forever and forever unto death.

He spent that night camped outside her doorway, sighing. In the morning he found that she had left a plate of ham and bread outside by the pavement where he had slept, but it had been overrun by an army of ember-red ants.

He returned to Havana and told Cesar what María had told him.

Around his neck was the crucifix which his mother had given him for his First Communion and which had often touched the fullness of Beautiful María’s breasts. And around his chest, a sensation of stones and earth constricting him, the vague, pulsing feeling in the joints of his bones, which turned to wax, as if any second he would collapse.

“She said she still loves me. She said she thinks about me all the time. She said that she never wanted to hurt me. She says that sometimes when she’s lying in bed at night she thinks about me and can still feel me inside her. She said…”

“Nestor, stop it.”

“She said she would have married me except for one thing, this other fellow in her life, an old prometido from her town, where she’s from. That he was just someone she was trying to forget. A country bumpkin who used to ignore her when they were together and who came here to take her back, and”—he cupped his hands over his face—“she felt that she had to go back to him and…”

“Nestor, stop it.”

“She said she’ll always remember our times together as being beautiful, but he came along before me, and, well, now our fate is sealed. She said that she married him because of an inner pain. She says she never meant to deceive me, that she really loved me. She says that her heart was broken that we hadn’t met a long time before, but this man had always been her love…”

“Nestor, she was like a puta!”

“She said that I was her true love but…”

“Nestor, stop it. Where are your balls, man? You’re better off without her.”

“Yes, better off.”

And what happened? After the shattering of this love affair, Nestor just wasn’t the same and took on the fearful expression of his youth when he would cower in the darkness of his room at night, a feeling of doom whirling around him. He would go to his job at the Explorers’ Club on Neptuno like a somnambulist, moving about the wood-paneled rooms with their maps and globes and lions’ and antelopes’ and rams’ heads, carrying his trays of daiquiris and whiskeys for the prosperous British and Americans without ever smiling or saying a friendly word. On one of those days a shot rang out from the fancy toilets there, and the workers in the club rushed to find one of the gentlemen, a certain Mr. Jones, dead, the smoking revolver still in his hand. It would turn out that his real name was Hugo Wuerschner and he’d decided to take his life because of another club member, who had found out that Wuerschner had once acted as an agent in Havana for the Third Reich. Refusing to be blackmailed, Wuerschner, long despondent about the fall of his Führer, preferred to bring his grief to an end. The dead man’s contorted and disillusioned expression was like Nestor’s, so extreme was his suffering.

His older brother took Nestor everywhere, to the movies, the all-night cafés, and the whorehouses, and he told him, “She’s not worth it,” over and over again. “You’re better off being a little hard with these women, because when you’re good, it turns out bad.” And: “Just forget her, she’s worthless… not worth a single tear, you understand?”

Whenever he felt pain in his life, the older Mambo King would find himself a woman, and so he thought smothering Nestor with women was the answer. Memory of a drunken evening in the Havana of 1948 which the two brothers spent down by the harbor in a brothel called the Palace, their backs arching and exuberant sexes rising and falling endlessly through the night. Curling tongues, slapping bellies, moist thighs. They fucked and fucked and then roaring drunk made their way down to the harbor, where Nestor threw bottles at some sailors and wanted to confess his sins to a priest. Reaching the harbor, Nestor decided to steal a yacht so they might sail around the world, but when he found a rowboat and took it out thirty yards he lost the oars and vomited in the water. Standing up and laughing, he pissed into the bay, which the moonlight was chopping up into triangle reflections of the red and yellow and blue party lights of the city. In the distance, he heard the booming horn of a ship, crying out, Castillo, Castillo, and he shouted, “To hell with everything!” Laughing, he kept thinking, The hell with María, I am alive!

Then they went home to their solar, Cesar pulling Nestor through the streets and stumbling toward buildings that seemed to bow and nod like wise old Chinese men. They found the gate and the stairway up into their solar, up ten steps and back down fifteen, Cesar calming his brother, Nestor laughing loudly.

“To hell with everything!”

But even that night did not penetrate the glorious mask of his suffering. What powers María held over him, no one knew. That would remain a mystery to Cesar.

“You’ve always been that way, crying over nothing,” Cesar said to him. “She’s worthless, bad for you like a bottle of poison. Couldn’t you see that from the beginning?”

“But I love her.”

“Hombre, she’s garbage.”

“Without her, I want to die.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“If you knew my pain…”

“Dios mío, you’ve got to stop humiliating yourself this way.”

(Then the voices went on until the last fading trumpet line of “Beautiful María of My Soul,” inhalation of a cigarette, sip of whiskey, and the record-player arm lifts up again.)

ALTHOUGH NESTOR USED THICK World War II-issue prophylactics, he was sometimes very careless and casual about his lovemaking with Delores, doing it without a rubber and withdrawing long after the initial shudder of ejaculation. She would lock herself up in the bathroom and clean out her womb with a douche that resembled a poultry baster, which she’d filled with bicarbonate of soda and seltzer. One afternoon, while waxing the rich man’s parquet floors, she had the sensation that her womb was filling up with light, like stars at dusk rising slowly in the dark sky, and it occurred to her that these intimations of light were those of a soul, a breath, life itself. A hundred-year-old Cuban doctor practicing on Columbus Avenue and 83rd Street diagnosed a pregnancy. She climbed the stairs to the La Salle Street apartment expecting that Nestor would greet the news with ecstatic, lovestruck joy. As she walked in, he was working on the very song he had been whistling when they’d met nearly a year ago. When she heard that melody, it would take her back to that day, and she believed that this bolero was now hers. She approached him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and whispered, “I have something to tell you. I’m pregnant.”

Nestor took a deep breath, stared out into the middle of the living room, where sat a dolly and the black case of a bass American kit drum, blinked, sighed, and then said to her, “Are you sure?”

But when he saw the happiness in her expression wither away, he added, “No, I’m happy, querida. Really happy.”

Then he put his arms around her, but he lowered his head and seemed to be watching the window, which was open a slit to the fire escape, and in that moment she had the impression that he wanted to walk over to the window, climb out, and never come back.

The young musician did the right thing: Nestor and Delores were married by a Justice of the Peace in a small wooded town in New Jersey. After the ceremony, Nestor remained by the table on which Cesar Castillo had placed a case of chilled champagne, tossing back one glass after the other. They had no honeymoon but threw a party that started in a Chinatown restaurant and ended up in the Mambo Nine Club, where they knew the bartender and manager and a band of their musician friends from the dance halls provided the music. In the merriment of that day, she kissed and hugged her sister Ana María and wished to God that her father were alive to see her so happy again. She thought about him and felt sad. Following the example of all the merry friends, she drank too much of that champagne. Her inexperience caught up to her and she twirled in circles to a mambo and watched everyone’s face elongating, ears growing long and pointed like those of wolves, in the red and yellow lights of the club. Then things blurred and grew thick black borders. Later she woke up on the living-room couch of the La Salle Street apartment beside Nestor. He was still dressed, and with his head tilted back on the couch he was snoring and muttering to himself. She wiped his forehead with a kerchief, gave him a kiss, and thought, “My husband, my husband.”

But then she listened, and like pins through her side, she heard, faintly but clearly, “María, María.”

They had two children: Eugenio, who was born in ’51, and Leticia, in ’54. Nestor didn’t quite know what to make of fatherhood, he felt so underprepared for manly duty in this world. He realized it when Eugenio was born. At first he celebrated happily. He daydreamed about walking off into the future with his wife and son down golden paths, joyful in their love. But something got to him: the utter helplessness of the baby, its crying for attention, its need for care. Holding Eugenio in his arms and examining the fresh veins under the scalp of his soft pink and sweet-smelling head, he was frightened by all the things that might go wrong. He would think about this fellow who worked with him down at the plant, who had left his one-year-old daughter in a room by herself for fifteen minutes and returned to find her dead; and he would think about this drummer he knew, a really nice Cuban guy named Papito, whose nineteen-year-old son went pffft out of the world because one of the veins in his head had been too thin-walled and could not sustain a surge of blood during the playing of a softball game in Van Cortlandt Park. Nestor would cover Eugenio’s face with kisses, play with his toes, tickle his ribs, and sing to him. He loved it when the baby smiled and showed signs of recognizing his father, but when the baby showed any signs of discomfort, a terrible remorsefulness would overwhelm Nestor and he would walk the halls of the house as if some kind of tragedy were unfolding before his eyes. My son is suffering! And that simple fact seemed unbearable to him.

“Delores, do something with the nene! Make sure the nene is okay! Don’t forget the nene!”

He would come home from the day job at the meat-packing plant and see how well Delores had taken care of them. Like a supervisor, he would peer down into their beds and nod pensively, examining them for the plumpness of their legs and color in their cheeks. He would feel at a loss, holding them in his arms. He was affectionate with them but never quite knew what to make of fatherhood. He was constantly brooding about them to himself, worried about their physical health. He saw them as being so helpless and so susceptible to harm that on some days he relived a terrible dream of his anxious childhood. In the middle of the day, he would think how Eugenio liked to play by the window. What if he climbed out and slammed to the pavement below? Dios mío! He would start pacing up and down and take five to call the apartment to make sure everything was all right. He would lift the side of white fatted beef off the conveyor belt and hoist it onto the back of a freezer truck, wearing a long smock that was smeared with blood and a pair of rubber boots. The smell of blood in the air, the carcasses and bones that were everywhere, didn’t help matters.

It didn’t help that Leticia developed asthma and was sickly for a long time. He felt so bad about her troubled breathing that he would come home every day with presents and candies for her. And because he was not unkind, there was always something in his pockets for Eugenio. He was astounded when they did not die, but the whole business with Leticia made him very tense. In some ways he could not stand to be around the house and the potential for disaster; in others, he could not bear to be away. Best was when the house was packed with visitors — jam sessions with other musicians and dinner parties with these musicians and their wives. And his older brother, Cesar, drunk, collar loosened, big bulge in his trousers, with his arms wrapped around a pretty girl’s waist.

When responsible, mature, good-hearted people who would know what to do in a crisis were around, Nestor breathed easy. But, generally speaking, he never relaxed for a moment. His moments of release? When his penis exploded with sperm and obliterated his personality, throwing him into a blue- and red-lit heaven of floating space, and when he played the trumpet and got lost in melody. Otherwise, he didn’t know what to do with himself. The responsibility weighed on his shoulders too heavily for his own good. His anxiety took on physical symptoms. Some nights, as he tried to sleep and terror lurked in the air, he would begin to sweat, and his heart would beat so rapidly he could swear he was about to have a heart attack. Other times, as it happened with his father, he broke out into terrible rashes. He was only twenty-eight in 1954, and though he didn’t have very good dietary habits, eating what Cubans liked to eat, he was thin and fit. Yet the pounding of his heart would plague him night after night, and he was convinced that there was something wrong with him. But he would never think of going to a doctor.

He would send his mother in Cuba tender letters written in his simple script, speaking about his love for her and the family; heartsick letters nostalgic for the security of the home he had — or thought he had — in Cuba. He was very emotional, thinking about his childhood, about the tender care he received when he was sick in bed. He’d forget about the terrors of his solitude and dwell upon all the kisses from his mother and their housemaid Genebria, how everyone seemed to look out after him, especially Cesar. He’d open these letters with the salutation “Querida mamá” and finished them off with: “All of us in the household here send you a thousand, no, a million kisses. With all the love of my heart, your hijito, N.”

He always signed these letters with a single letter, “N.”

His nights were a disaster. He’d often come home to La Salle Street from a job by himself, strip down and climb into bed beside Delores, remaining awake beside her and inviting her attentions. They would wrap their arms around each other, caressing affectionately until they fell asleep. But he would always awaken in the early hours, thinking that there was something missing from his life — what, he did not know. At three-thirty in the morning, he would get up and sit in the dark living room, softly strumming guitar chords, and stirring Delores from her dreams, so that she would make her way down the hall.

“Nestor, why don’t you come back to bed?”

He’d just keep strumming. He’d sit by the window, looking out. The street glowed like dusk with the light of a wrought-iron lamp.

“It’s just a song.”

Sometimes he didn’t sleep for three or four days. He didn’t know what was going on. Cubans then (and Cubans now) didn’t know about psychological problems. Cubans who felt bad went to their friends, ate and drank and went out dancing. Most of the time they wouldn’t think about their problems. A psychological problem was part of someone’s character. Cesar was un macho grande; Nestor, un infeliz. People who hurt bad enough and wanted cures expected these cures to come immediately. Cesar was quite friendly with some santeras, really nice ladies who had come from Oriente Province and settled on 110th Street and Manhattan Avenue. And whenever Cesar felt bad about anything, if he felt depressed about the fact that he still had to work in a meat-packing plant to maintain his flamboyant life-style, or when he felt guilty about his daughter down in Cuba, he would go see his friends for a little magical rehauling. These santeras liked to listen to the radio all day, loved to have children and company around them. If he felt bad, he would just go in there and drop a few dollars into a basket, lie on his stomach on a straw mat on the floor, ring a magic bell (which symbolized his goddess, Caridad, or charity) and pay homage to the goddess Mayarí, for whom these women were intermediaries. And pssssst! his problems would lift away. Or they would lay hands on him. Or he would just go over to 113th and Lenox, to a botánica, and get himself a “cleaning”—the saint pouring magic herbs over him — guaranteed to do the trick. Going to confession at the Catholic church did the same job: a heartfelt opening of the heart and an admission of sins; then the cleansing of the soul. (And no deathbed confession either, no admission to heaven because of last rites. These Cubans died as they lived, and a man who would not confess his sins at age twenty-five was not going to do so at seventy.)

Nestor went with Cesar and was cleansed, paid obeisance, and felt better for a few days. Then the feeling came back to him, and he was unable to move. It was like being trapped in a tight shaft of darkness: sometimes it twisted in a labyrinth, sometimes it went straight. Moving inside it was always difficult. He even tried to go to confession when he had no sins to confess. Inside the church’s big red doors and its smell of honeycomb candle wax and incense, he would march up to the communion railing, remember how he would kneel on the cool stone floors of the church in Las Piñas beside his mother, and pray to Christ and all his saints and to the Holy Mother. He’d shut his eyes, his brow trembling with the effort to make a connection to God.

And one day when the priest’s face appeared in the darkness behind the confessional screen, he said, “Father… I have come for guidance.”

“What kind of guidance?”

“My heart is… sad.”

“And what has made you sad?”

“A woman. A woman I once knew.”

“And are you in love with her?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Does she love you?”

Silence.

“Well, does she love you?”

“I don’t know, Father.”

“Do you want her to love you?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Have you told her?”

“Yes.”

“And are you in a situation that allows you this?”

“No, Father. I have a family.”

“And is that why you are here?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Have you acted upon this feeling?”

“In my heart.”

“Your marriage makes that wrong.”

“I know.”

“But this temptation… I counsel you to pray. Do you have a rosary?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Then say the rosary and you will be strengthened.”

And he said the rosary, enjoying the stony companionship of the saints and Jesus; he said the rosary until the prayers were coming out of his eyes, but his guilty feelings remained. He sometimes felt so bad that he told himself, “If I had remained with María, I would have found my happiness.” He would go over his romance again and again in his head, though it had ended years before. He had walked into it happily, naively, innocently… and his soul had been ruined.

Even though he loved Delores, he could not stop himself from thinking about María. A pain would throb in his kneecaps and this pain would spread upwards through his thighs and down through his ankles, a surge of melancholia, and out of this would come María. What was it that she had said to him that day in 1948?

“I will love you forever.”

He would walk over to the park and secretly write her letters at least once a month, though he never received an answer. He would watch the boats passing on the Hudson River, dragging barges of piping and refuse, and think about María naked on a bed. He would have painful memories of what it felt like inside her: out of the sky would fall a silk handkerchief, warmed by the sun and dipped in honey, that would wrap tightly around his penis.

But even though he knew that it was all wrong, he couldn’t get rid of this longing for her. His feelings of hopelessness always led him back to María, and thoughts of María led him back to hopelessness. He loved Delores, loved his children — why, then, were things so wrong? He tore up most of his photographs of her, save for one, and this he kept hidden in a box thick with sheet music, stuck in the living room between a bass drum and a quinto. He wouldn’t look at this picture for months, and then he’d take it out and she always seemed more beautiful and tender than he had remembered. The fact that she had cruelly abandoned him did not temper his desire. He knew that something had to change, but didn’t know how to change it.

He developed an odd habit. In the warm weather he and the family liked to go up to the rooftop for a picnic. Once when he did so, he went over to the edge and found himself leaning over it, so far that Delores cried out, “Nestor!” and the excitement and his bravery made the children laugh. For a moment, as he hung over La Salle Street watching the kids below playing stickball and the birds circling the water towers, he thought about dropping off the rooftop, as if by letting go he would fly among the buildings, looping like a butterfly until he hit the pavement. Thinking about his family, he had resisted the temptation to let go. Then he started to lean out their fourth-floor window quite a bit, as if to get rid of the feeling, and was thinking about it on the day when he came home with a present for Eugenio, who was then nearly three years old. It was a kite and they spent hours running back and forth on the rooftop, laughing and watching it rise high into the wind, its balsa cross-beams bending and the paper fluttering in the air. He stood by the edge of the roof with Eugenio in his arms. Kisses on his face and pats on the back.

Sometimes, on long walks through the city, he’d daydreamed about meeting up with someone who would give him sound advice and have all the keys to happiness. He thought that the Italian fruit vendor knew, that those old wizened-looking Jewish men who would go walking up La Salle on their way to the Jewish Theological Seminary knew. That they would tell him what to do about those feelings which made him lower his head and want to step off the sidewalk into the path of an oncoming bus or that made him cling, with fear, to the subway walls because the edge of the platform seemed so inviting.

Lost in contemplation, he’d sometimes wander downtown amid the endless crowds that passed him on the street; people with the most purposeful and determined expressions hurrying everywhere, as if to a Dance of the Sabers. As he sat on a park bench, bums approached him and he would give them cigarettes, money. Dogs lay stretched out on the pavement, happy and panting, by his feet. And sometimes pretty women in white high-heeled pumps and feathered hats, fascinated by the soulful-looking young Latin-lover type, would sit beside him, wanting to start up a conversation.

What did he want? He only wanted to find shelter in the bosom of love, not rush anywhere, and to have the heaviness lifted off his shoulders.

One thing Nestor came to admire was Delores’s habit of reading. She read huge amounts and seemed better off for it. And she had told him, in the midst of her kisses on one of his restless nights, “Nestor, you should get in the habit of reading yourself to sleep.” But aside from the newspapers and the Captain Marvel books he would buy on the newsstands, he hardly read anything at all. He was curious about those books that kept Delores so occupied while sitting on the park bench rocking the children in their carriages, those cheap paperbacks whose pages she would turn while standing by the stove and boiling water to cook yuca. Reading gave her a vaguely absent air, though she was never lax about her wifely duties, and he had no cause to complain, because she really did look out for him.

One day, however, Nestor did buy a book. Having crossed Times Square in a gloomy mood, he stopped at a newsstand to look over the magazines and a book caught his eye. It had a simple bright-red cover and was sitting among some tattered cowboy novels and girlie thrillers in a metal rack to the side. It was a book entitled Forward America! by a certain D. D. Vanderbilt.

It was the jacket copy that captured the younger Mambo King’s attention:

… Not a human being on earth likes to admit that things aren’t always as rosy as they should be. I knew a fellow who spent half his life plagued with self-doubt. This doubt had a severe effect on his outlook and on his enjoyment of life. He couldn’t sleep, found himself feeling “out of the picture” when everyone else around him seemed to be having the time of their lives. He had a decent-paying job, but with a family to support, he could never put enough money away for a rainy day. On top of all this, he never exerted himself around more aggressive kinds of people. He suffered because of this fault and doubted his own manliness. Many a day he daydreamed about a better life, but he seemed completely without resources when it came to realizing it.

One day, this man took a good long look in the mirror and said, “I’ve had it!” He spent the night awake dreaming about the possibilities for his future and came up with the principles of achieving happiness in today’s busy and troubled world.

Practical secrets and principles that will work for you!

That very next day he went to his boss and presented certain ideas that he’d had about the business and was so convincing about his new approaches that his boss gave him a

big promotion

and a

bonus

…. Within a few months he was promoted again, and within a few years he was made a partner in the firm…

These principles worked to solve the other problems of his life. He has since achieved the greatest kind of success with

his friends, his family.

He has won the respect and love of others and found happiness the

American Way!

Read on, dear prospective buyer. It doesn’t matter what walk of life you’re from. Whether you’re rich or poor, Chinaman, Indian, or from the planet Mars, this book can

change your life!

I know these principles work, because I was that man! The D. D. Vanderbilt secrets of happiness will work for you!

Momentarily uplifted, Nestor paid the 79 cents plus tax (.04) for this book and then took the bus home to La Salle Street, where he hoped to find revelation among its pages.

Life continued much as it had and yet that book became Nestor’s constant companion. Forward America! became dogeared in his back pocket. He needed help for the spirit but not the body: his day job in the Kowolski meat-packing plant on 125th Street left him so exhausted that he’d have to rest up a few hours before getting dressed for a night job that would last until four in the morning. But he always had the strength to bed Delores down. Young and firm Delores had skin so smooth and warm to the touch that all she had to do was open her blouse and they would soon be making love. And Cesar? Even though she used to muffle her moans of pleasure in a pillow, her brother-in-law was like a bloodhound or a Sherlock Holmes when it came to knowing their bedroom habits and he would leave the apartment to check out the girls on the street corner or head down to the park to watch the boats going by on the river, killing an hour’s time before returning to the apartment to find Delorita with her face flushed and her voice humming as she happily went about the ladylike business of cooking dinner.

Once Delorita had moved in, Cesar had had to change many of his habits. He had a room on the courtyard and from his window he could see his brother’s window and had the fortune or misfortune one day, while feeding the alleycats pieces of his leftover lunch and cupcakes, to look over and notice, through a narrow opening in that bedroom’s curtains, his sister-in-law standing naked, looking very voluptuous and fuckable before the mirror. He knew that Beautiful María was fine, but when he saw Delores naked, he thought Dios mío! took a deep breath, shook his head, and decided for the sake of his sanity and family peace to keep his distance from Delores. He did this without much trouble, as he had his own girls, but all the same he couldn’t stand to walk down the hall or sit in the living room reading a newspaper or with a guitar and hear their bed shaking, the headboard thumping into the wall, his brother’s loud panting and her efforts to quiet him, Sssssh sssssssssh, because she didn’t want people to hear them or to know what they were doing, a joke considering how her fecund body filled the apartment with a scent of meat, cinnamon, and blood. And so Cesar would go out for his walks, and daydreaming.

AND NOW THIS TEN-CENT 78 RPM metal disc recorded in a “Record Your Memories” booth in Coney Island, 1954:

(Laughter) (Static) (Laughter) (A man’s and a woman’s voices joking, whispering, the man’s voice saying) Go ahead, go ahead…

Okay. (Static) Ayyyyy! Don’t grab me there! (Laughter) (In the background the roaring roller coaster as it makes a turn and a kid shouting in English) Heeeeeeey, Johnny, ahm over heah, you dumb motherfuckah. (Laughter)

Bueno,

hello out there in radio land! (Laughter) This is Angie Pérez and I (Neck kisses and slurpy sounds) (Laughter) (Static) I… I… ayyyyy! just want to say that I’m here with my new boyfriend, Cesar, that is, the famous Cesar Castillo, at Coney Island, July 10, 1954, and I just want to say that he is the freshest

cochino

in the world

aaaayyyy!

(Laughter) And we’re having a great time. And he told me to say, Heeeellllo, Neessstor, and to everyone at home there! And… (Static) Oh, time’s running out. The, the red light is flashing. We have to say goodbye. Goodbye! Good (Static and click).

Although the Mambo Kings were one of the more popular bands in New York and, one month in 1954, had made it to number 5 in a Brooklyn Herald popularity poll (behind Tito Rodríguez, Machito, José Fajardo, Tito Puente), Cesar never made much money. What could thirteen musicians plus a manager plus the union plus the IRS plus the equipment managers and drivers make if they were paid $500 for a weekend job? One of his biggest problems was that Cesar had never agreed to sign an “exclusive management contract.” He’d heard too many stories about singers and bands who’d signed all their future earnings away just so they could get a good rate in a prestigious club like the El Morocco. These contracts would allow the singer to perform elsewhere but always cut the club owner in for a percentage of the earnings, regardless of whether the performer ever worked in the big-time club again. Those contracts ruined the lives of many musicians, drove a number out of the business and into the Merchant Marine, the Army, inspired name changes and, in a few instances, murders. (A song in Cesar’s head? Mafia, mafia, mafia. Italian, Puerto Rican, Jewish mafia. Black tuxedos, white tuxedos.)

Because of his refusal, he was always getting into shouting matches with club owners who’d pressure him. And this behavior got him into trouble with the wrong people. When they played certain clubs, they would make less money than they deserved. Some of these joints were run by tan-suited Puerto Rican gangsters who didn’t like Cubans. He was always telling them to go fuck themselves and to shove their clubs up the fondillos of their sporty trousers.

But, because Cesar’s bad temper was putting his fellow band-members out of work, Nestor would say, “Be reasonable, hombre,” and the Mambo King would go back to these very same club owners and ask their forgiveness. Later he’d feel like shit.

He was always trying to hustle money so that he could have nice watches, suits, and expensive shoes, take out women like Vanna Vane, and play the sport with his friends in a bar. He liked to buy people presents, gifts for the family and his friends. He never thought twice about paying for dinner or the movies when the family went out. He was the type of fellow to walk thirty blocks to save a fifteen-cent train fare, only to buy a round of drinks at the bar. He had all kinds of expenses, mainly from his social life, but he was always betting the horses on credit, and borrowing off his friends and fellow musicians when he lost. He always needed money. It had flown out of his pockets in Cuba and it flew out of his pockets in New York. He spent generously, his impoverished youth in Cuba be damned.

There was something else, too. As much as he had vowed never to get married again, he still thought about his daughter, Mariela, down in Cuba. Now and then, if something came through for him — if he got paid for singing on a record, or a horse actually won for him — he would buy a money order and send it to his daughter. By now she was nine years old, and from time to time he’d receive a letter from her, thanking him for his gifts. Once, after some difficulty with his wife, he got permission to visit little Mariela in Havana in 1952. By then his ex-wife had remarried and was living off Calle 20 with her schoolteacher husband, an older fellow named Carlos Torres. Bent on impressing Mariela, he took her into all the big department stores — Fin de Siglo, La Época, and El Encanto — buying her dresses and toys. And he bought her everything she wanted to eat, appearing before her as a benevolent being who’d smelled of cologne on whose lap she once used to sit. This Mariela had turned out to be a nice little girl, tender and affectionate. Leaving her at the end of that trip proved much more difficult than he had planned. So he always wanted to keep his memory alive in her mind through the sending of gifts. But week to week, his pockets were empty, no matter what he did to make money.

And he wanted to get a nice new automobile. He had bought Manny the bassist’s used Oldsmobile for a few hundred dollars, and while it ran well, it was quite beat up from being used for all these Mambo King jobs. Parked outside of clubs and in dance-hall parking lots, it always had people sitting on it, jumping on it, making out on its hood. Plus a few accidents hadn’t helped. He wanted a 1955 DeSoto and would walk into DeSoto dealerships every few months to examine the upholstery and the dashboard and the supersonic, space-age V-8 turbo-thrust engine, “whispering” clutch, and 180-degree viewerama window. And he loved its female roundness and sheeny cream-white skin, bumper guards that protruded like breasts and dimpled hood, curvy like a fine female rump. Decked out in a pink suit with lavender shirt and white tie, and black-brimmed cane hat, Cesar Castillo would walk into the showrooms and inquire about the automobile’s price, talk himself behind the wheel, and sit back, daydreaming about the fabulous days that would be waiting for him were he the owner of so fine a car.

ONE TUESDAY NIGHT IN 1955 THE Cuban bandleader and television personality Desi Arnaz walked into the Mambo Nine Club on 58th Street and Eighth Avenue to check out the talent. Someone had told him about two Cuban brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, that they were good singers and songwriters who might have some material for Arnaz to use on his show. The stage of the Mambo Nine was only ten feet wide, more suited for a cabaret act than for a thirteen-piece orchestra, but somehow the brothers’ group, the Mambo Kings, set up with their congas, their horns, trombones, flute, stand-up bass, saxophones, and a grand piano behind a few ball microphones. This club was where the Mambo Kings sometimes tried out new numbers on fellow musicians and composers who’d come by, people like Machito and the great Rafael Hernández, composer of “El Lamento Borincano,” who’d give them advice and encouragement. It was a place where musicians from the best bands in the city came in to drink, talk shop, and see what was going on. Under the glow of red-and-white stage lights the Mambo Kings played fast dance tunes like “El Bodeguero” and dreamy arrangements of slow, romantic boleros like “Bésame Mucho.” Mr. Arnaz was sitting in the back with his pretty wife, the red glow of a candle vaguely illuminating his dark, intense eyes, liking very much what he was seeing and hearing… In white silk suits, and performing side by side before the big ball microphone, the two brothers showed an obvious affection for each other, the audience, and the music. Arnaz, chin resting on a fist, came to certain conclusions about them.

Appearing in the light, arms spreading wide before him, a halo of aureolitic splendor around his head, it was Cesar Castillo who reminded Arnaz of the old-fashioned crooners of society ballrooms and dance halls of Cuba, men with their hair slicked down and parted in the middle, thin mustaches and butterfly-looking lace bow ties. Yes, Cesar’s voice evoked for Arnaz moonlit nights, flowers, and blue-crowned nightingales on the wing, his was the voice of the eternal caballero serenading a woman on her wrought-iron balcony, a man who would die for the alluring bud of love.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this next song is a little canción that me and my brother Nestor here started to write when we first came up to the States some years ago. It’s called ‘Bella María de Mi Alma,’ or ‘Beautiful María of My Soul,’ and it’s about the sadness and torment of love. We hope you like it.”

Cesar nodded to his pianist, the inimitable and ever-elegant Miguel Montoya, dapper in white from head to toe, who struck an A-minor chord, and then the congas and horns came in, Nestor’s opening solo bouncing off the walls and making Arnaz’s glass hum. And then Cesar began to sing the verses Nestor had been writing on a cold, lonely night spent shivering by a radiator, verses inspired by the Havana beauty who had broken his heart. Among those lyrics, these lines:

… How can I hate you

if I love you so?

I can’t explain my torment,

for I don’t know how to live

without your love…

What delicious pain

love has brought to me

in the form of a woman.

My torment and ecstasy,

María, my life,

Beautiful María of my soul…

Arnaz listened attentively. During the chorus, when the two brothers were harmonizing like angels aloft on a cloud and confiding their pain, Arnaz thought about his own past love, his love for his wife and others, like his family down in Cuba and old friends he had not seen in a long time. As he watched the dance floor, where young couples sighed and kissed, Arnaz leaned over to his wife and said, “I must invite these fellows to play on the show.”

Later, when the brothers were drinking by the bar, Arnaz lived up to his reputation as a friendly man and introduced himself, saying, with extended hand, “Desi Arnaz.” He was wearing a sharp blue serge suit, white silk shirt, pink polka-dotted tie, and a frilly fringed handkerchief that bloomed like a tulip from his breast pocket. He shook their hands and ordered a round of drinks for all the musicians, complimented the brothers on their performance, and then invited them and their arranger-pianist Miguel Montoya to sit at his table. Then they met Lucille Ball, who spoke surprisingly good Spanish. She was dressed in a pearl-button blouse with a velvet diamond-broached vest and a long skirt. Her hands and wrists glittered with rings and bracelets and she had curly red hair that had been done up in a bouffant, and beautiful blue eyes. Seated beside her husband, she had been attentively writing in a notebook densely filled with dates and numbers and names, and when the brothers approached, though she had graciously smiled, she had also tapped the face of her wristwatch, showing the time to Arnaz.

They were soon drinking champagne, the bottle kept chilled in a gold ice bucket. Lucille Ball nodded, smiled pleasantly, and every now and then leaned over and whispered into her husband’s ear. But soon enough she slid into the background, allowing the men to smoke their panatelas from Havana, make their toasts and conversation. As this was a time when every Cuban in New York knew every other Cuban, the question was inevitable: “And what part of Cuba are you fellows from?”

“From a town called Las Piñas, surely you must know it, a sugar-mill town in Oriente.”

“Of course, I come from Santiago de Cuba myself. I’m from Oriente, too!”

The knowledge that they were all from the same part of the world made them shake hands and nod at Arnaz in a brotherly way, as if they’d known each other for years and years.

“We grew up on the sugar mill and then we moved over to a farm when our father tried the livestock business,” Cesar told Arnaz. “But I had to get out of there and bring my brother here with me. Cutting off the heads of animals wasn’t for us…Besides, I’d always wanted to be a singer, tú sabes, since my childhood, I always did my best to hang around musicians.”

“It was the exact same thing for me,” Arnaz said.

While talking about the dance-hall scene in Oriente, they discovered they had one more thing in common: they had both worked with the same orchestra leader in Cuba, Julián García and his Orquesta Típica.

The mention of that name had Arnaz slapping his knee. “Julián García was quite a character. Lucy, you should’ve seen him. He used to make us all wear white gloves and outfits in the worst heat, even those musicians to whom it was an impediment. And he carted around palm trees and Greek statues to give the orchestra a little class — was it the same for you?”

“Absolutely!” Cesar exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “You know something, Mr. Arnaz, I swear that I saw you in Santiago. You were there that day in Julián’s place, sitting on the stage… behind a harp or something, I don’t remember exactly when, but I can recall seeing your name on the posters outside the dance hall where Julián rehearsed.”

“On that steep hill from whose top you could see the harbor?”

“That was it. The dance hall on Zayas Street.”

“Yes! What year was that, coño?”

“Nineteen thirty…”

“… Seven! Must have been, because I left for the States that year.”

“And Julián said that I was replacing a singer going to the States! As I think about it, that was you, sitting and strumming a guitar. Yes?”

“… Yes, it comes back to me. I was waiting for a friend. Say, wait a minute, didn’t we speak to one another?”

“We did!”

And then in the way that Cubans get really friendly, Arnaz and Cesar reinvented their pasts so that, in fact, they had probably been good friends.

“Nearly twenty years ago, can you imagine that? Dios mío,” Arnaz said. “Nearly twenty years just like that.”

(And suddenly it was the day again when he had first met Arnaz, back in Cuba, clear as morning light: he was nineteen years old and walking up a steep hill in Santiago de Cuba, and at that time of day the westward sun was throwing toward infinity the shadows of wrought-iron balconies and the rooftops. Along the route there was a woman who always offered passersby, exhausted from the climb, glasses of cool water. On top of the hill, the burning disc of the sun, and then the dance hall itself and its refuge of shady arcades and a coolness inside its heavy oak doors. Cesar could remember looking across the dance-hall stage, through the strings of a Spanish harp, and seeing a young and handsome man sitting beside the piano; had him pinned for a gallego like himself. Beside the young man sat the immense Julián García, head swimming in hair dye and sweat, looking through some sheet music.

“And what will you begin with, my friend?”

“María la O.”

Julián began to play the chords to that canción by Lecuona. Cesar, black-brimmed cane hat in hand, and still nervous at the prospect of performing with Julián García, sang his heart out in a flamboyant style, using extended high notes to end phrases, arms flailing about dramatically. When he finished, Julián grunted, saying, “Good,” and the young singer nodded. Then Julián ran him through some more songs and, satisfied with Cesar’s singing, told him: “Come back here tomorrow and we’ll rehearse with the other musicians, the full orchestra, okay?”

That was when the young man, thick pompadour of curly black hair hanging over his brow, looked over and smiled at Cesar. He had been strumming chords on the guitar to kill time while waiting for a friend with an automobile to show up and had watched Julián running Cesar through the repertoire, mostly the plaintive boleros and habaneras of Ernesto Lecuona, who was the Cuban composer of the day. As Julián led Cesar out, Arnaz called out to him, “Hey, that was pretty good, my friend. Name’s Desiderio Arnaz,” and he extended his hand in friendship. And when they’d shaken hands Arnaz, who was tired of waiting in the dance hall, suggested they go down to the foot of the hill, where there was a little bar.

“When my friend shows up here,” he said to Julián, “you tell him I’m at the bar.”

They drank a few beers together, talked about Julián and women and the life of a musician, until Arnaz’s friend appeared at the bar door. Then Arnaz made his way off into the future. “Hope you do well with the orchestra! As for me, I’m off to Havana.”)

“So it was you. I thought there was maybe something familiar about your face. Life is funny, yes? Who would think that we would be sitting here these years later, getting reacquainted?”

He raised the bubbling champagne glass in another toast.

“I was nineteen then,” Cesar told Arnaz. “A hick from the farm. Outside of a few excursions here and there in Oriente, and little trips I made by mule over the countryside, it was my first time out into the world. But what days those were! A great time in my life, singing with Julián’s orchestra. It was beautiful, playing for the people.”

Arnaz nodded. “I know the ’zact-same feeling, I wasn’t much older than you and there I was going to Havana with a few pesos in my pocket, a guitar, and with plans of taking my act to the States. First to Miami and maybe Tampa, Hialeah, and Fort Lauderdale.” He looked off, his face pained with nostalgia for youth.

“Eventually I ended up in New York, working the clubs here. Just the same way you fellows are. I had some good breaks, someone heard me singing and playing a conga and next thing I know, I’m up in New York on Broadway playing a Don Juan-type fellow in a musical comedy, something called Too Many Girls, it was a nice break for me, and things have gone well ever since.”

But then for a moment Arnaz looked off, as if at the corner of the stage-ceiling molding, momentary exhaustion and a slight weariness in his eyes. “… But this life is always so much work, though.” And he exhaled. “You fellows know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Cesar concurred. “I know what you mean, hombre. One day in the tropics, and the next up to your knees in snow. One day on someone’s porch in a house in the Sierra Mountains, and the next riding a subway. Here one moment and gone the next, just like that, pssssst.”

At that point the other Mambo Kings, black instrument cases in hand, came over to say goodbye for the night and to thank Mr. Arnaz again for the drinks. They were all crowded around the table, laughing and nodding, as Arnaz joked with them in Spanish and complimented them on their playing. It was then that Cesar leaned over to his younger brother, consulted for a moment, and then, after the others had left, said to Arnaz, “We’re going to have a late-night dinner at our apartment on La Salle Street uptown. May I invite you and your wife to join us? My brother’s wife always cooks up a feast and tonight we’re having arroz con pollo, black beans, and plátanos.”

“Yes?”

And Arnaz consulted with his wife. They heard her saying, “But, sweetheart, we have some business in the morning.”

“I know, I know, but I’m hungry, and who feels like going to a restaurant now?”

So he turned and told the brothers, “Why not?” and soon they were out in the street in their long coats and brimmed hats, blowing into their cupped hands and stomping their feet on the sidewalk. While they had been inside, it had started snowing, and now it was still coming down, a heaven of snow falling in all directions on every street and building, awning, car, and tree. Cesar was out on the avenue calling a yellow cab, and shortly they were all huddled together in the back. Nestor and Cesar sat on the small metal flip-up seats, facing the rear window and their new friends.

Or perhaps they’d simply met Arnaz, who liked their music and, approaching them at the bar, said, “Would you fellows like to be on the show?” All business, with the fatigue of responsibility showing on his face. Or perhaps he had an air of weariness and exhaustion about him that reminded Cesar and Nestor of their father, Don Pedro, down in Cuba. Perhaps he had sadly yawned and said, “Me siento cansado y tengo hambre—I am tired and hungry.” Whatever happened, he and his wife accompanied the brothers uptown to the house on La Salle Street.

Their taxi had made the turn off Broadway and 124th Street toward La Salle. As Arnaz stepped out of the taxi, his wife behind him, a southbound subway train tore out of the 125th Street El. Otherwise, the world was quiet. Up and down the street were rows of buildings with their yellow-lit windows and the silhouettes of people inside. Arnaz carried an Italian briefcase, Cesar a guitar, Nestor his horn. Miguel Montoya, whom they’d invited along, was behind them. With his fur-collared topcoat, delicate white gloves, and ivory crystal-tipped cane, he was something of an effeminate but dignified dandy. He was fifty-five years old and by far the most refined of the Mambo Kings. He bowed and held doors open for people, using an occasional French word—“Merci,” or “Enchante”—impressing and winning the heart of Arnaz’s wife.

The building on La Salle Street was nothing like what Arnaz and his wife were accustomed to: they had houses in Connecticut and California, and an apartment in Havana. And it was nothing like what the brothers had known in Cuba, a modest house made of pine timbers facing a field ringed by fruit trees and rhapsodic with birdsong in the late-afternoon sun, a sky bursting with bands of red, yellow, pink, and silver light and burning treetops, and orange-tinged black birds. No, it was a six-story building, the kind one would never dream about living in for the rest of one’s life, situated near the top of a hill, with an ordinary stoop, basement stairs, and narrow, dim-lit entrance. Its main architectural ornamentation, a stone ibis over the doorway, was put up in 1920, during the Egyptian craze.

Opening the front door, Nestor felt a little nervous and self-conscious; he had been that way since the day of their arrival in the States, six years before. His hands shook as he tried to fit the key into the keyhole. The cold could not have helped, probably did something to the metal. They all waited patiently and finally the door opened into the narrow lobby with its solitary light bulb dangling off a thick black wire, bent like a question mark over the mailboxes. There was a dirty mirror and stairwell, and from the second doorway, the residence of Mrs. Shannon the landlady, came a strong smell of dog hair, cabbage, and, faintly, urine.

Nestor, who liked to pride himself on his personal cleanliness, puffed his cheeks and wanted to apologize for the offense to their eyes and nostrils, but then Arnaz, sensing Nestor’s embarrassment, gave him a good friendly Cuban rap on the back and said, as consolingly as possible, “Ah, what a nice building you have here.” But his wife rolled her eyes and gave her husband something of a double-take, then graciously smiled her famous ruby-lipped smile.

Then, as they climbed the stairs up to the fourth floor, where Cesar and Nestor and his family lived, Arnaz began to whistle the melody of the song he’d heard earlier that night, “Beautiful María of My Soul,” and as he did so, he wondered about the terrible somberness that seemed to plague Nestor. He thought, “Of course, he’s a gallego, * and gallegos are melancholic at heart.” All the same, Arnaz felt sorry for the younger brother, who rarely smiled, nothing like the gregarious soul who was his older brother.

When his nostrils hit the good food smells in the hallway of the apartment, Arnaz slapped his hands together and declared, “¡Qué bien! How wonderful!” He found himself moving along a hallway whose walls were covered with framed photographs of musicians and portraits of Jesus Christ and his saints.

“Make yourself at home, compañero,” Cesar said in his normal friendly manner. “Now this is your home, you understand, Mr. Arnaz?”

“Sounds good to me. Now, Lucy, isn’t this nice?”

“Yes, it is, Desi, just swell.”

“Ah, do I smell some plátanos?”

“Plátanos verdes,” a female voice called from the kitchen.

“And yuca with ajo?”

“Yes,” said Cesar happily. “And we have wine, we have beer!” He raised up his hands. “We have rum!”

“¡Qué bueno!”

It was around one in the morning and Delores Castillo was in the kitchen, heating up all the pots of rice and chicken and beans, and the fritters were sizzling in a frying pan. Her hair was in a bun and she had a stained apron around her waist. When they all jammed into the kitchen, Delores recognized the famous Arnaz and his wife.

“Dios mío!” she cried. “If I had known they were coming, I would have cleaned the house up.”

Regaining her composure, Delores smiled so beautifully that Arnaz told her, “Mrs. Castillo, you’re a lovely woman.” The coats were left in the bedroom, and soon enough they were all gathered around the kitchen table. While the men devoured the food, Delores hurried down the hall and woke her children up. Eugenio’s eyes were barely open when he felt himself being carried down the hall, his mother saying to him, “I want you to meet someone.” She put him down by the kitchen doorway and when he looked up he saw the usual scene for that household: a crowded kitchen, mouths chewing, beer and rum bottles open on the table. Even the nice fellow his mother was all excited about looked just like so many of the other musicians who passed through the house. And the name Desi Arnaz meant nothing to him then, it was just a name he heard when she introduced him.

“Mr. Arnaz, this is our boy, Eugenio. And this is Leticia.”

Desi Arnaz reached over and pinched his cheek, and he patted Leticia’s head. Then they were taken back into their bedrooms, the kids falling asleep to a background of Spanish-speaking voices in the kitchen, the music from the phonograph in the living room, the sound of laughter and clapping, just like what they’d heard on so many other nights.

Everyone was laughing. Lucille Ball told about going to Cuba for the first time and having to cook her own Cuban meal to impress Desi’s family. “I nearly burned down the house!”

“Ay, tell me about it,” said Arnaz.

“But it turned out right in the end. Anyway, señora, I know just what you have to go through. Mashing those plantains up and everything in brown paper and getting it right.”

Suddenly she remembered their walks together in the field outside the Arnaz family’s ingenio down in Oriente. At first she was afraid of the dark countryside, but then she began to enjoy the beauty of the night sky, streaked with falling light.

“But I got it right in the end, mashing the plantains in brown paper, adding just the right amount of salt, garlic, and lemon. Just like you did with these!”

There was music on the Victrola, as Cesar still called the RCA phonograph in the living room: First he put on the fabulous Beny More, a personal favorite, and then one of the Mambo Kings’ recordings, “Twilight in Havana.” Arnaz seemed happy at the kitchen table, devouring the platters of food placed before him, and saying things like, “¡Qué sabroso! You don’t know how nice it is to just relax for a change.”

They were pleased to hear that Arnaz was enjoying himself. After a few drinks Cesar could care less how famous he was; he was thrilled to have a compañero in the apartment and matter-of-factly started, once the rum worked into his brain, to feel sorry for Arnaz.

There’s a man so famous and yet he’s so satisfied with the simplest meal, he thought. He’s probably tired of dining out with the Rockefellers all the time!

Nestor, however, began to feel they had overstepped their privilege: he was standing in the corner of the room, playing with the fob of his watch. He had seen Lucille Ball blush when Cesar opened another bottle of rum.

“Darling, maybe we should start thinking about getting home,” she said to him. But then Cesar walked in with his orangewood Brazilian guitar and handed it to Arnaz. “Would you sing us a little song, Mr. Arnaz?”

“Why not”—and he placed the guitar on his lap and strummed a C-minor chord, flailing his hand quickly over the strings so that its soundbox vibrated like the wind hitting a shutter, and began to sing one of his biggest hits, “Babalú.”

“Oh, great Babbbbbbaaaallllooo, oh, why did you forsake me?”

Cesar banged on the table, and Nestor, giving in to the rush of fun, started to play the flute… Then Arnaz began playing “Cielito Lindo” and by then everyone in the kitchen was a ring of arms and swaying, happy bodies.

Strummed like a waltz, “Cielito Lindo” was the kind of song that a loving mother would sing at bedtime to her children, and that was why the two Mambo Kings remembered wonderful things about their mother, and why Arnaz shut his eyes in pleasant contemplation of his own loving mother in Cuba.

(Nestor remembered how, as a frightened child, he used to wake up from a bad dream, covered in sweat, his heart pounding, and with a feeling of helplessness: the moon would ominously cross the window space, and the mosquito netting which hung down off hooks from the ceiling would seem to breathe like a living creature and shadows would bend into animal shapes and he would cry out so that someone would come to save him, a brother, his father, but most sweetly his mother, parting the netting and sitting beside him on the bed, whispering stories into his ear and softly singing. And Cesar remembered hearing her voice as she’d wash his hair in a metal tub in the back yard, the sunlight breaking up the flowing water into pink- and red-tinged sprays, and the wonderful sensation of her hands moving over the back of his neck and through his hair. And for Arnaz? It was the image of his mother filling the empty hours of the afternoon with songs that she’d play at a spinet in the parlor of their grand house in Santiago. Just those little thoughts made the three men feel like crying.)

But then around three o’clock Lucille Ball tapped her watch again and said to Arnaz, “Now, honey, we have to go.”

“Yes, of course. Tomorrow it’s work, always work. I’m sorry we have to go, but I want to tell you something before we do. That canción you fellows sang at the club tonight, ‘Beautiful María,’ I really like it and think that you should come on my show and do it for me there.”

“Nightclub show?”

“No, I mean my television show.”

“Yes!” said Cesar. “Of course, you let us know what we have to do. I’ll give you our address.” And he rushed off into the hall, looking for a pen and a piece of paper. Later, Cesar was out on Broadway trying to flag down a taxicab for Arnaz and his wife, who were waiting on the curb. Miguel Montoya had decided to stay over, taking his chances on the Castro Convertible in the living room. They were out there for about twenty minutes before they caught a taxi, its heavy, snow-chained wheels edging their way up the snowy streets.

Arnaz shook Cesar Castillo’s hand. “I’m glad we had this chance to meet, my friend. You’ll be hearing from me soon enough. Okay? So, cuídate, take care of yourself.”

Then Arnaz and his wife got into the taxi and disappeared into the night.

DESI ARNAZ KEPT HIS PROMISE and three months later the brothers were on a plane to Hollywood, California. Cesar really loved the trip, loved flying in those big four-engine airplanes and watching the clouds burn up with sunlight. But Nestor? He couldn’t believe that all that metal stayed up in the air. The long eleven-hour non-stop flight frightened him. He remained in his seat, hands knotted together nervously, fearfully watching the clouds out the window. Cesar sat quietly, writing postcards and a few song lyrics, reading magazines, enjoying things. They were flying first class, which meant that the stewardesses gave the passengers the time of day. Cesar liked this one stewardess who had the nicest little pair of nalgitas—buttocks — the most serious-looking nalgitas he had seen in a long time, and when she would come down the aisle, Cesar would elbow his brother so that Nestor would not miss out on her bouncy splendor. But he was too self-occupied, too worried about how things would go, as if something going wrong would kill him. The idea of going on the show frightened him.

For Cesar, it was clear-cut and simple and he never gave it much thought, other than that it would be a good opportunity to make a few dollars and for people to see them and hear that song, perhaps get them interested in that bolero, “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Turn it into the Mambo Kings’ first big hit. As for the idea of appearing on television? Cesar didn’t have the slightest idea about television. They watched an occasional boxing match at a friend’s apartment, watched programs in appliance-store windows, but neither brother had ever dreamed of appearing on the I Love Lucy show.

As for the song that had captured Arnaz’s interest that one night in the Mambo Nine Club? Even Cesar had to admit that it was a great song, catchy and haunting. He had gotten sick and tired of hearing about María over the years, but had walked into the living room one day when Nestor, who wrote twenty-two different versions of that canción, was singing it again. And it sounded as good as any of the long-time classics that make people misty-eyed in the middle of the night. Usually, hearing Nestor working on yet another version made Cesar disgruntled, but that day he told his younger brother, “You can stop now. It’s perfect. It’s a great song, brother.” And he slapped him on the back. “Now enjoy your peace.”

But Nestor didn’t enjoy anything, brooding constantly like a ruined poet or an old man.

“Nestor, you’re nearly thirty years old, you have a wife who loves you and two children,” Cesar said. “When are you going to be a man and stop worrying yourself to death? When are you going to stop being such a fairy?”

That made Nestor wince.

“I’m sorry,” Cesar told him. “Just be happy. And don’t be worried, bro’, you have your brother Cesar around to look out for you.”

Just as he was saying that, the plane hit an air pocket, dropped several hundred feet, and started shaking.

And, like the airplane, Nestor kept shaking. Not that he was a complete wreck: playing the trumpet and singing always had a calming effect on him and he had learned to calm himself in front of his children, Leticia and Eugenio.

“Whatever you do,” Cesar said one day, “be a man around your own children. You don’t want them growing up fucked up.”

Desilu Productions put them up in the Garden of Allah Hotel, with a swimming pool, prickly palm trees, and young starlets stretching out in the sun. Each time they would head out from the hotel for rehearsals, Nestor would belt down a glass of whiskey, sometimes two. He had gotten that way, playing in the big dance halls. The television studio was over on Selma Avenue and was so busy that no one noticed when Nestor would show up a little drunk. The actual filming of the program was to take place on a Friday and the players and musicians would have three days to rehearse. Everyone involved with the show was nice to the brothers. Desi Arnaz was especially kind and generous to the Cubans he’d hired. Ask anyone about Arnaz in those days and they’d talk about his friendliness and concern for the people working for him, like a responsible patrón. After all, the man was Cuban and knew how to present the proper image of a man.

They’d arrive for rehearsals at ten and spend most of the day hanging around with the musicians and watching the orchestra set up: many of its members were American musicians who’d been playing around in California big bands, but there were a few Cubans with whom the brothers killed time playing whist.

They didn’t have much to do on the show. A walk-on scene and then the song. As for their acting abilities, Arnaz, who kept an active hand in everything, would tell the brothers just to be themselves — and always with a slap to their backs. But Nestor was always taking out those few pages of script with their few lines of dialogue and reading them over and over again. (A portion of this script, yellowed with age and torn, would be found among the Mambo King’s effects in the room in the Hotel Splendour.) Even when Arnaz had told them, “Don’t worry, even if you flub your dialogue, we’ll take care of it. Pero no te preocupes, okay?”

All the same, Nestor seemed so worried. He was a funny man, at times collected and reasonable about things, at other times lost and distraught.

The evening they actually filmed the show before an audience, Nestor could barely move, he wanted out so badly. He spent the afternoon pacing back and forth in their hotel room, a sweaty nervous mess. And at the studio itself he remained in the wings, leaning up against a Coke machine, watching the bustle of electricians, sound and light technicians, cameramen, and script girls all around him, as if life were passing him by. Something about singing that song, María’s song, before millions, frightened him. His fear frustrated Cesar, who kept saying, “Tranquilo, tranquilo, hombre. And just don’t forget, we’ll have Arnaz out there with us.”

Nestor must have looked really badly off because one of Arnaz’s musicians, a nice plump baldheaded fellow from Cienfuegos who played the congas and bongos for Arnaz, went up to him and asked, “Are you all right, my friend?” Then he pulled Nestor off to the side and gave him a few swigs of rum from a small bottle that he had in his pocket. That did calm him down, and in a short time a makeup lady came over and brushed their foreheads and noses with powder. Another assistant sat tuning Cesar’s guitar to a piano. A third assistant led them over to the spot from which they would enter the stage. Then Arnaz himself stepped out of his dressing room, smiled, and waved to the brothers. Then, as he always did with his younger brother before any performance, Cesar looked him over, brushed the lint off his jacket, pulled down on its hem to make sure his shoulders were straight, and patted Nestor’s back. With that the orchestra started to play the I Love Lucy theme and someone gave them their cue, and together, guitar and trumpet in hand, they went on.

It was 1955 and Lucille Ball was cleaning in her living room when she heard a knock on the door to her Manhattan apartment, someone gently rapping.

“I’m commmmmming,” she answered, touching her hairdo on her way to the door.

Standing there, two men in white silk suits and butterfly-shaped lace bow ties, black instrument cases, guitar and trumpet, by their sides, with black-brimmed cane hats in hand which they’d taken off as she opened the door. The two men nodded and smiled, but there seemed something sad about their expressions, at least in retrospect, as if they knew what would happen to them. The taller and broader of the two, who wore a slick, pimpy-looking mustache, in vogue at the time, cleared his throat and said in a quiet voice, “Mrs. Ricardo? My name is Alfonso and this is my brother Manny…”

“Oh, yes, the fellows from Cuba. Ricky told me all about you. Come on in and make yourselves at home. Ricky’ll be out in a minute.”

With tremendous politeness the brothers bowed and then sat down on the sofa, each leaning forward, not allowing himself to sink completely into its plump cushions. The younger brother, Manny, seemed the more nervous of the two, his foot tapping the floor; his darkened, somewhat tired eyes looking out into the world with innocence and apprehension. Behind them was a spinet piano on which stood a squat bowl of flowers and a porcelain figurine of a picador; then, a lace-draped window before them, a table on which the redheaded Lucille Ball soon placed a tray of cookies and coffee. All this happened in a few seconds, it was as if she had known just when they would be coming to visit. But that didn’t matter — the older brother dropped a few sugar cubes into his coffee, stirred it, and nodded thanks to their hostess.

Suddenly in walked Ricky Ricardo, nightclub singer and musical impresario — the character whom Desi Arnaz played on his television show. He was a pleasant-looking man with large friendly eyes and a thick head of black hair, shiny as sealskin. Dressed in cuffed trousers, wide-lapeled sports jacket, short-collared shirt, and a slick-looking black tie decorated with piano keys and a crocodile-shaped tie clip, he definitely seemed prosperous and self-confident. He walked in with his right hand in his jacket pocket and, when he saw the brothers, rapped each on his back and said, “Manny, Alfonso! Gee, I’m glad to see you! How are things down in Cuba?”

“Fine, Ricky.”

“Well, sit down and tell me, did you fellows decide which song you’re going to do on my show at the Tropicana?”

“Yes,” said the older brother. “We’ve decided to sing ‘Beautiful María of My Soul.’ ”

“That’s swell, fellows. Say, Lucy, wait until you hear the number they’re going to do with me for the finale on the show next week. ‘Beautiful María of My Soul.’ ”

The redhead’s expression changed, fell to pieces, as if someone had died.

“But, Ricky, you promised me the chance to sing on the show!”

“Well, I can’t discuss it with you now, Lucy. I’ve got to take the fellows over to the club.”

“Please, Ricky, if you let me, I’ll never never never ask you again. Please?”

She stood in front of him and looked at him so sweetly and fluttered her eyelashes so endearingly that he began to reconsider. “We’ll see, Lucy.”

And shaking his head, he started speaking rapidly in Spanish to the brothers: “Si ustedes supieran las cosas que tengo que aguantarme todos los días! Dios mío! Me vuelvo loco con estas americanas! Mi mamá me lo dijo, me dijo, ‘Ricky, no te cases con una americana, a no ser que quieras un big headache! Esas americanas te pueden volver loco.’ Mi mamá tenía razón, debía haberme casado con esa chica bonita de Cuba que nunca me puso problemas, que sabía quién le endulzaba el pan. Ella no era crazy, ella me dejaba tranquilo, ¿saben ustedes lo que quiero decir, compañeros?”*

And in English again, “Let’s go.”

The brothers put their hats on, took up their instrument cases, and followed the nightclub singer out. When he opened the door, his neighbors, a stout-looking bald man and his wife, a pretty, somewhat matronly blonde, stood before him, flattop straw hats in hand. The two brothers nodded to them and made their way out into the apartment-building hallway and left for the club.

Later, an immense satin heart dissolved and through a haze appeared the interior of the Tropicana nightclub. Facing a dance floor and stage, about twenty tables set with linen and candles at which sat ordinary but elegantly dressed people — your nightclub clientele of the day. Pleated curtains hanging down from the ceiling, potted palms here and there. A tuxedoed maître d’ with an oversize black wine list in hand, a long-legged cigarette girl, and waiters going from table to table. Then the dance floor itself, and finally the stage, its apron and wings painted to resemble African drums, with birds and squiggly voodoo lines, these patterns repeated on the conga drums and on the music stands, behind which sat the members of the Ricky Ricardo Orchestra, twenty or so musicians seated in four tiered rows, each man decked out in a frilly-sleeved mambo shirt and vest decorated with sequined palms (with the exception of a female harpist in long-skirted dress and wearing rhinestone glasses), the musicians looking very human, very ordinary, wistful, indifferent, happy, poised, and ready with their instruments.

At center stage, a large ball microphone, spotlight, drumroll, and Ricky Ricardo.

“Well, folks, tonight I have a special treat for you. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present to you, direct from Havana, Cuba, Manny and Alfonso Reyes singing a bolero of their own composition, ‘Beautiful María of My Soul.’ ”

The brothers walked out in white suits and with a guitar and trumpet, bowed to the audience, and nodded when Ricky Ricardo faced the orchestra and, holding his conductor’s wand, prepared to begin, asked them, “Are you ready?”

The older brother strummed an A-minor chord, the key of the song; a harp swirled in as if from the clouds of heaven; then the bassist began to play a habanera, and then the piano and horns played a four-chord vamp. Standing side by side before the microphone, brows creased in concentration, expressions sincere, the brothers began to sing that romantic bolero “Beautiful María of My Soul.” A song about love so far away it hurts; a song about lost pleasures, a song about youth, a song about love so elusive a man can never know where he stands; a song about wanting a woman so much death does not frighten you, a song about wanting that woman even when she has abandoned you.

As Cesar sang, his vocal cords trembling, he seemed to be watching something profoundly beautiful and painful happening in the distance, eyes passionate, imploring, his earnest expression asking, “Can you see who I am?” But the younger brother’s eyes were closed and his head was tilted back. He looked like a man on the verge of falling through an eternal abyss of longing and solitude.

For the final verses they were joined by the bandleader, who harmonized with them and was so happy with the song that at the end he whipped his right hand up into the air, a lock of thick black hair falling over his brow. Then he shouted, “Olé!” The brothers were now both smiling and taking bows, and Arnaz, playing Ricky Ricardo, said, “Let’s give them a nice hand, folks!” The brothers bowed again and shook Arnaz’s hand and walked offstage, waving to the audience.

Nestor tried, heaven help him. Every day he read that book on self-improvement by Mr. D. D. Vanderbilt, which he’d study carefully with an English dictionary on hand. That was Nestor in that California hotel at three in the morning, sitting on the edge of the bed in boxer shorts and robe, trying hard to overcome his own skepticism about the victory of a positive attitude and of self-application over despair and defeat. After six years in the United States, he was still living with a growing dread of things. It wasn’t that he feared one thing in particular; he just had the sense that things weren’t going to work out, that the sky would fall in and lightning would strike him as he walked down the street, that the earth might open up and swallow him. He didn’t sit around dwelling on these thoughts, he dreamed them. He had been on the same plateau of dreams for years, the same dreams that had afflicted him in childhood in Cuba, when he used to wake up in the middle of the night covered in sweat in a room swarming with crows or when he found himself entangled in burning coils of rope, when the rope mysteriously crept into his body through his ears and feasted on his insides, when he would wake up in the middle of the night and find the priest standing over him with his funeral cassock and a grim face like melted wax, his vestments and hands smelling oddly of frijoles negros and church incense.

Lately, he’d started dreaming again about crawling on his hands and knees along a narrow tunnel just barely wide enough for him to fit through; the tunnel seemed to go on forever into the distance toward a faint glow of light. And as he crawled through, his shoulders and knees wedged tight, he could hear voices speaking softly, just loud enough to hear but not to understand.

He had been dreaming this and awakened as the California sun burst though an opening in the Venetian blinds, its brilliant light pouring into the room. He felt his stomach muscles flutter, a shock went through his body, and he opened his eyes. It was around noon, and the first thing he heard was his thirty-seven-year-old brother Cesar frolicking in the pool outside with his new acquaintances, three girls barely out of adolescence in scanty one-piece bathing suits, giggly and absolutely delighted that Cesar Castillo, playing the sport, kept buying them high frost-glazed drinks of fruit juice, rum, spoonfuls of sugar, orange, and crushed ice, compliments of Desilu Productions.

This was their last day in California and Cesar was having the time of his life. There he was, wearing a little tarnished crucifix on a chain around his neck, thick curling chest hair damp and streaked with gray, a long Havana cigar in his mouth, head tilted back — not in pain, but in joy — soaking up the sun, sipping his drink, and flirting with the girls. They had rushed over to him because, at first, as he strutted around the pool in his oversized plaid trunks, they had mistaken him for the movie actor Gilbert Roland. The girls were thrilled to meet him anyway, thrilled that the handsome Cesar Castillo had promised them dinner that night at some fancy joint.

“Señoritas,” he had said, “you name it and it’s yours!”

Through the Venetian blinds, Nestor watched Cesar paddling over to the side of the pool with big splashes — he did not know how to swim. Nature was calling, and he came back into their Garden of Allah bungalow, his urine powerful and noisy in the toilet.

“It’s beautiful here, huh? Too bad we have to go back so soon.”

The toilet flushed and he added, “Brother, why don’t you come out and join us?”

“Yes, in a few moments.”

A curvaceous female shadow appeared in the frosted glass of the bungalow door and called in, “Yoo-hoo!” And when Cesar opened the door, she asked, “May I use your little girls’ room?”

“Of course.”

Wearing a red bathing suit with a short pleated skirt and red high heels, the blonde, all of her, rump, breasts, long legs, bounced daintily across the room. As she slipped into the bathroom, Cesar approximated the width of her hips with his hands and sucked in air through his teeth. The blonde must have felt a little self-conscious about urinating in their bathroom, for she turned on a faucet, and Cesar took this as a hint and opened the bungalow door and waited, his slightly drunken frame wedged up against the doorway, stomach in, chest out, watching the pool and the palm trees in the distance, the shrubbery behind them spilling over with flowers — joking with Nestor, he once called them “the pubic hair of nature.” Happy in his thoughts, he whistled.

In a moment, Cesar and the blonde were back by the pool, jumping in and splashing water on the others. She was a good swimmer and gracefully plumed down to the deep end of the pool, gushing to the surface again, her body firm and tanned… Nestor supposed that he should go out, have a few drinks, and relax, but he told himself, “I’m a married man with two children.” But he kept hearing Cesar, relaxed and laughing. When he looked out, Cesar was kneeling by the three girls; they were lying face down on mats in a row: he was rubbing suntan lotion on their backs and the meatiest, sweat-beaded parts of their thighs.

Nestor winced, outraged. Why would this happy sight make him feel as if he would burst apart, as if the pain inside him was a viscous mud flowing through his veins? He was shaken by the old aches: when that happened, he would think “María,” but thoughts about his wife and children sank him into a deeper gloom.

All the same, he changed into a pair of blue bathing trunks and soon was lying out by the pool. The waiter brought him a tall glass of that tropical rum punch, and the initial swallow eased his spirit. Then he started to feel friendlier about the whole business with the girls and the time away from his family, so that when one of the three girls, a brunette, sat down beside him, asking, “Are you going to come out with us tonight? We’re going over to the El Morocco to catch an orchestra and dance…”

And she called over to Cesar, “What’s that orchestra called?”

“The René Touzet Orchestra. Brother, why don’t you come along?”

“I’ll see,” he answered tentatively, though he went everywhere with his older brother and hated to be left alone.

They had remained by the pool drinking until seven-thirty. Around four the waiter had brought them a tray of turkey, ham, and cheese club sandwiches, and they had talked about doing the I Love Lucy show and how everyone had been so kind to them. And they mentioned that they had a mambo orchestra in New York. One of the girls had a bit part in a Ricardo Montalban film called Desperadoes from the Land of the Golden Sun. Ricardo was a “dreamboat,” she said. And Cesar looked at her and said, “Well, you’re a fleet of dreamboats, baby.”

Poor Nestor. He could not help looking at one of the girls, a brunette. Her skin was golden-brown from the sunny California life and seemed to glow with the promise of pleasure. Even though he hadn’t said much to her, she seemed to have paired off with him, paying attention to him and making eyes when he’d look over. While the two others frolicked in the pool with Cesar, she had remained beside Nestor on a sun mat, and this struck him as “classier.” Her name was Tracy Belair, and when they later separated so they could get dressed for the night out, she gave Nestor a sweet tongue-nipped kiss. Taking a shower, Nestor thought about that girl and it gave him an erection. But he vowed to do nothing about her.

Yet, by eight o’clock, another drink had given him a feeling of weightlessness and elation and he suddenly filled with the kind of confidence that Mr. Vanderbilt described in his book. By eight-fifteen he felt immortal.

The phone rang, and it was Nestor who picked it up.

“Hello, this is Desi Arnaz. How are you fellows? Listen, I’m just calling to make sure that everything’s okay with you. You like the hotel and everything? Good.” Thanking the brothers again, he added: “And let’s not forget each other. Okay?”

Next thing he knew, Nestor was sitting at a table in the El Morocco, drinking champagne, the five of them grinning happily for a strolling photographer. This was a real classy joint. Everything on the menu was written in a florid script and had a French name, and many of the items cost as much as what he earned in a week at the meat-packing plant.

“Order whatever you like,” Cesar told everybody.

And why the hell not? Arnaz had told them to send him the bill. Soon their table was piled high with just about every dish on the menu: a silver bowl of poor shriveled-up snails like those which used to swarm over the patio of their house in Cuba after a rain, all black, sad-looking, and cooked with garlic; platters of filet mignon, lobster, shrimps, scalloped potatoes; and bottle after bottle of champagne. This was followed up at some indecent hour by bowls of baked Alaska and Italian baci—chocolate and vanilla ice-cream balls dipped in dark chocolate washed down with French cognac. And there had been intermittent kisses. At one point Nestor’s brunette looked at him for a long time and declared, “You know something, sweetheart, you look just like what’s-his-name, Victor Mature, isn’t he Spanish?” Later he became Gilbert Roland.

The orchestra sounded great, and after a while the five of them were out on the dance floor having a good time. In the midst of all this, however, Nestor decided to call New York, and that would make him wince the next day because he wouldn’t be able to remember what he had said or how he had sounded. Why did he think he’d left Delores crying?

When they left the club, everything dissolved, and then he was stumbling through the Garden of Allah’s door and pinching his companion’s bottom through her silver-lamé gown. More champagne bottles popped. And next thing he knew, he was opening his eyes and looking over at his brother: Cesar was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, one of the women’s brassieres wrapped around his neck like a tie, toasting everybody with champagne: America! Desi Arnaz! René Touzet! And love and romance!

Making zigzags across the floor, the two brothers and their three companions tried to dance the mambo. Then Cesar started to serenade his two women and he went off with them into his separate bedroom, leaving St. Nestor with temptation herself. How had they ended up on the couch, tongue-kissing? The young woman became more and more feline with each kiss. She wore a flame-red brassiere and little red panties, and she had a black mole in the shape of a flower just over her belly button. Her glowing body seemed so perfect, so healthy, so filled with life. He went mad kissing her. Naked and wet with his kisses, she said, “Wait a minute, amigo, you have to take off your clothes.”

And when he had his trousers off he felt a cringe of shame because, after all, he was a married man, a good Cuban, and a diehard Catholic with two children at home in New York, but that didn’t stop Mother Nature, or the woman from taking a long look at him and saying, “Brother, where have you been all my life?”

Then he awoke and in the dark made his way across the room on boneless legs to the bathroom, where he vomited. He went outside to smoke a cigarette: the sky was clear, thick with swirly stars that reflected in the pool. Why was he feeling so bad? Why had he felt so bad all his short life?

About five in the morning, he woke the brunette, who smiled and embraced him, saying, “Hello, lover.”

But he said, “You should go home now, huh?”

And that was that. She dressed and he sat watching her and feeling bad. Maybe it was the way he had said it, without an ounce of affection, after all he’d probably said to her when they were making love.

He tried to go back to sleep — they were to catch an eight o’clock flight home — but already the sun was rising. And so he took out that book of his and began to read an inspiring passage that he’d underlined: “In today’s America one must think about the future. Ally yourself with progress and tomorrow! The confident, self-assured man looks to the future and never backwards to the past. The heart of every success is a plan that takes you forward. In moments of doubt you must remember that every obstacle is only a temporary delay. That every problem can be solved. When there is a will there is a way. You, too, can be a man of tomorrow!”

In the days after the broadcast of the show, they became celebrities on La Salle Street: gaunt, ruddy-cheeked Irishmen would step out of the shadows of the Shamrock Bar on the corner and into the late-afternoon light and say to the brothers, “Can I stand you to a glass of beer?” People would stick their heads out of the window to shout hello, passersby stopped them on the street and wished them well. Gossiping old ladies who sat in front of the stoop on frail, thin-legged chairs whispered about the fame that had abruptly descended upon those two “Spanish fellows” who lived in 500; for weeks after, the two brothers had regular fans among the Irish and Germans on the block, and even those people who hadn’t seen the show knew about it and treated the musicians with a new respect. Their biggest fan was their landlady, Mrs. Shannon, who had heard about the show from Delores and had spread the word all over the neighborhood, proud of the fact that she had them as tenants.

It hadn’t always been that way. After he and Nestor had moved in with Pablo—“Now, there was a good Spanish man for you”—the parties had started, week after week and late into the early mornings, and were so raucous that she would spend half the night banging on the pipes and calling the cops to straighten them out. She had not minded the roly-poly Pablo and his demure, obedient wife — he had always been good to Mrs. Shannon, bringing her free steaks and chops from the plant — but not these two machos with their trail of women and wolfish-looking friends, always drinking and singing and carrying on at night in their apartment upstairs. By the time that Pablo moved out in 1950, the brothers had turned the place into a “house of sin.”

The worst bit of gossip about the goings-on in that “house of sin” upstairs came from one of her neighbors, Mrs. O’Brien, who on hot nights used to go sit on the rooftop by the water tower with her husband, to catch a breeze off the Hudson River, maybe drink a few beers, and eat American cheese, ham, and mayonnaise sandwiches. One evening when they were up there, Mr. O’Brien felt restless and decided to walk around the rooftop to check out the coping. The brothers were having one of their parties downstairs: a row of six windows with the shades pulled halfway down, blaring phonograph, voices, the sight of a room thickly packed with legs and swirling hands, hands holding drinks — that’s all he could really see. He was there looking down at the whole business when he heard noises — like someone panting and groaning up a steep hill. Those sounds were coming from the neighboring roof, and when he took a look, he saw what appeared to be a man and a woman on a blanket, hiding in the shadows, making love. Out of the man’s shadow protruded a large and shiny penis that in the dark resembled a piece of greased pipe. His wife had joined him and they remained for a long time watching the proceedings, aghast and envious, and then decided to call the police. When they reported the incident of beastly fornication, Mrs. Shannon blushed and asked, “What will they do next?”

Despite the many complaints she had about them, she slowly became much taken with the older brother. He would often appear at her door to pay the rent, bring her little presents: food and pastries left over from the wedding and engagement parties that the brothers played; steaks from the plant. And whenever the Mambo Kings made a new record he’d give her one. And he was truly apologetic in the aftermath of their parties, saying in a polite voice: “We’re really sorry if we made a racket last night. It’s just that we have no way of knowing how loud things are”—and that always made her feel better. But there was something else that she liked about him. Fifty years old, stout, ragged-haired, triple-chinned, she believed that the Mambo King somehow found her attractive. Whenever Cesar appeared at her door, he gave her the sense that he found her beautiful: he’d look right into her blue eyes, pure as the morning light, and his brow would arch slightly and a smile would appear at the edge of his lips, as if to say, “My, my.” She had once been an Irish beauty, who, due to a mannish temperament, flew headlong into beer-soaked matronhood. That Cesar seemed even the least bit aware of her former looks made her daydream about a little romance with him, but she kept it to that, a daydream.

Then the brothers appeared on television and she saw them actually speaking to Lucille Ball, her heart fluttered and she felt a dizziness that lingered intensely at the thought of seeing them. A few days after the show was aired, she went out and had her hair shampooed and set, bought herself a new dress, baked the brothers an apple spice cake, and later shocked her brother by announcing, “I’m going upstairs to see those two Cuban fellas.”

It was Cesar who opened the door: standing before him, she felt as if she were leaning over the edge of a steep precipice — breathless and with a sense that she would be carried off forever.

“Yes, Mrs. Shannon?”

“I just had to tell you, you fellas were really, really great. I saw you on the television.”

“Thank you.”

“And I, and I baked you a little something, see? It’s a cake. Haven’t baked a cake in a long time, but I used to.”

Nodding, Cesar said, “Thank you. Why don’t you come in and have a little drink, or some food if you like? Are you going out?” he asked. “You look all dressed up.”

“No, I can come in for a bit.”

She followed Cesar down the hallway and past the kids’ wheel carriage and tricycles and through the kitchen into the dining room: they had a long table still set with platters of bacalao—codfish cooked with garlic — black beans, rice, a huge salad, pork chops and steaks from the plant, and a big bowl of yuca: Nestor, in a bow tie and suspenders, was sitting at the end of the table, sucking on a toothpick. The children were playing on the living-room floor while Delores sat at the opposite end of the table, stone-silent, staring at her husband.

“Everybody, look who’s come to visit us!”

“Would you like something to eat?”

She looked over the food and said, “Just a little chops would be fine. And rice.”

“Delores,” Cesar ordered. “Give Mrs. Shannon a plate of food.”

She got up and obeyed, and piled the black beans and salad and bacalao on all together: Mrs. Shannon took a seat, picking around all the things she refused to try, but began to devour the pork chops and steak.

Cesar watched her and said, “But you should try the yuca. It’s like a potato, but tastier.” And clutching his heart, he added, “In my opinion.”

Mrs. Shannon chewed her meat, enchanted: Cesar complimented her again, and she inquired, “And what were they like, Desi Arnaz and Lucy? Tell me about Lucy?”

“A really nice woman. A lady.”

Then he launched into his story about the star treatment in Hollywood, the pink and light blue houses of Beverly Hills, walking down into a club called Ciro’s and spying the actor William Holden in a booth with his arms around a pretty girl. She ate up every word, and Cesar, being a little bit of a ham and an exaggerater, milked their little trip for everything it was worth: visits to lush mansions, a star on every street corner, money everywhere, and there they were, two ordinary fellows, in the midst of it all. Every now and then, Mrs. Shannon would touch her collarbone, exclaiming, “It must have been something!”

Delores sat confounded over her husband’s growing distance from her: he seemed restless, fidgeting in his chair, smoking cigarette after cigarette, something inside tormenting him: he inhaled deeply, at times almost gasping. Since he’d come back from California, he had been suffering from more intense nightmares, and he seemed to be spending more and more time pacing about the living room. And there was something else: he had a look of doom about him, even if he was always reading that Vanderbilt book with the crumpled pages.

Later Mrs. Shannon unwrapped the aluminum foil off the apple spice cake, which she had set down on the table, revealing a puffy-topped cake filled with citron chunks, cherries, and raisins. The children jumped up for their slices and the adults converged around the cake, admiringly. It was a delicious cake, like kissing a woman for the first time, thought Cesar; like rum-drenched pineapple, thought Nestor; like eating flan with Poppy, thought Delorita; like chocolate, thought Eugenio; like apple spice cake, thought little Leticia. To realize that this was made by the very same woman whose shrill voice shouted up into the courtyard at two in the morning, screaming, “Will youse fucken turn that shit down!” The same woman who came up the stairs one day and stood at the door wielding a hammer, face red and on the verge of attack. When they finished eating, Cesar said to Mrs. Shannon, “I want to give you something,” and he went into the living room. He used to keep a black briefcase on top of the bass drum of an American drum kit, which sat along with other instruments on a dolly in the corner of the living room beside the couch; he snapped it open and pulled out a black-and-white photograph of himself, Nestor, and Desi Arnaz taken during the stirring finale of “Beautiful María of My Soul”—the three harmonizing, with mouths open, teeth showing, and heads bathed in halos of light. The briefcase was filled with about three hundred copies of that photograph. Their friend Benny the Baby and General Purpose Photographer had taken their studio negative and made up the copies; he would put one in his window alongside a First Communion photo and the picture of a GI home from the war. They had one in the hallway — the original — signed by Arnaz: “To my good friends, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, with a strong love y un abrazo siempre. Desi Arnaz 5/17/55.” He came back into the dining room with one of the photographs, addressed it to Mrs. Shannon, and then gave it to his brother to sign. Mrs. Shannon held this signed photograph to her breast and declared, “Oh, thank you.”

She stayed until around ten. In the hallway, just beyond the bookcase of the novels that Delores liked to buy, Cesar and Mrs. Shannon stopped for a moment, and in that moment Cesar gave her a deep and nearly loving look, as if he might really kiss her, but he touched her elbow and squeezed her plump shoulders, patting her on the back, as he often did with friends. Escorting her to the door, he thanked her for the cake, and leaned over the railing, watching the roundness that was Mrs. Shannon disappearing down the stairs. Back in the dining room, he pulled up a chair and said to his brother Nestor, “Do you want some more of this cake, brother?” And then, after another slice: “Imagine that, Mrs. Shannon baking a cake for us, and a good cake. Imagine that.”

THEIR APPEARANCE ON THE show turned out to be a good thing. Desi Arnaz so liked their composition that he paid them a thousand dollars for the rights to perform the song and recorded “Beautiful María of My Soul” in the fall of 1955, when it reached number 8 on the easy-listening charts, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Rosemary Clooney and Eddie Fisher for a week. Among aficionados of the romantic bolero, “Beautiful María of My Soul” became something of a minor classic almost instantly, ranking up there with “Bésame Mucho” and “Siempre en Mi Corazón.” Arnaz himself went on to perform “Beautiful María of My Soul” on the Ed Sullivan show, and soon enough a number of other recording artists did too, notably Nat King Cole (he recorded that song in Havana for his album “Cole Español”; it was perfect for his tender, refined voice, and his accompaniment also featured a horn solo by no less than Chocolate Armenteros). The Ten Thousand Hollywood Strings orchestra did their own cover of it, too. (You can still hear it on the Muzak tapes, stuck between an unbearably cheerful pipe-organ version of “Guantanamera” and “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás!” in supermarkets, shopping malls, airports, and bus-terminal lounges everywhere.) Then one day Cesar received a call from this fellow named Louie Levitt of RCA Victor, saying that Xavier Cugat was interested in doing his own instrumental version of the song. Permission was granted for the sum of one thousand dollars. With the royalties from all these recordings, the brothers suddenly had some money in their pockets. Altogether they’d make about ten thousand dollars in 1956-57 in royalties from the different recordings.

The Mambo Kings recorded “Beautiful María of My Soul” as a 45 rpm, and it was on a 33 LP album, a collection of their romantic love songs, called “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” They sold ten thousand copies of this recording; it was their greatest success. As they’d never had any hits before, even near ones, Cesar was always trying to come up with new catchy dance numbers and experimented with dance steps before the mirror, his hope being to come up with a new craze the way Antonio Arcana did in 1952 with the cha-cha-cha.

They got a lot of air play on stations like WPIX and WOR radio. And they started to get bookings in first-class joints like the McAlpin Ballroom and the Biltmore Hotel, and they were able to get a few hundred dollars more for the band on weekend engagements. Jobs took them all over the city where the crowds were mixed, Italians and blacks, Jews and Latins. Then Grossinger’s, the Jewish resort, hired them for a month of weekends and they had the luxury of bringing in two other bands for the underbill, Johnny Casanova Rumba Boys and an old favorite, Glorious Gloria Parker and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra. But their biggest honor was to play at Grossinger’s on the underbill to Machito’s orchestra. That was the period when teenage girls would nervously approach Cesar Castillo and his brother to ask for their autographs. These girls weren’t sure if Cesar was a star, but he certainly had taken to looking like one, wearing dark Italian sunglasses, a brilliant white ascot, and eight rings on his hands. And he’d sign these autographs as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Soon they got enough jobs out of town that they scraped some money together and bought an old school bus. The first thing they did with the bus was to paint it flamingo-pink, one of Cesar’s favorite colors. In the spirit of color-coordinating the group, the Mambo Kings performed for a time in flamingo-pink, black-lapeled suits. Then Cesar got his friend Bernardito Mandelbaum, the artist, to decorate the bus with palm trees, G clefs, and music notes. They kept the bus parked down in a lot on 126th, off Amsterdam. A new publicity shot was taken of the Mambo Kings: the musicians posed inside the bus with their trombones and saxophones and violins sticking out the windows. They mounted a speaker on the rooftop, through which they played music, and used the bus to get out to Jersey City, Newark, and Danbury, Connecticut. They did not travel long distances: the farthest west they’d ever performed was Philadelphia, for some Cubans there.

That all changed when they made their famous cross-country Mambo U.S.A. tour. Chosen by the Mambo U.S.A. booking company as one of the orchestras which would spread the mambo across the nation, they set out in the spring of 1956 on a two-month stint that took them to the dance halls and theaters of small towns everywhere, and major cities like Chicago and San Francisco. Typical was a dance they played in an old American Legionnaires Hall in a place called Quincyville, Pennsylvania. The town was nestled out beyond the hills, cows, and tranquil fields of the Amish country. Nestor sat in the front of the bus beside the mambo dance team of Elva and René, delighted by the green countryside and lakes and the elongating silos and trees in the sunlight. He made the trip playing cards with Cesar and reading his little book.

Whenever they passed a cemetery, Cesar would joke, saying, “Look, brother, there goes the future.”

As the bus turned down the main street of Quincyville, speakers blaring mambo music, dogs barked, children whistled, kids on bicycles honked their little black horns, and the bells went ching-ching-a-ling. People lined up on the street to get a look at these musicians, and when they climbed off the bus at the Thomas E. Dewey American Legionnaires Hall, they were greeted with friendly nods and smiles. (Though there was that other place in New Jersey, Tanglewood, where they returned to the bus at three in the morning and found the aisles and windows smeared with excrement.)

That night they played for a crowd of redneck farmers and their wives who didn’t know what was going on with their music. Behind the musicians was a banner saying in big letters: MAMBO USA TOURS PRESENTS: THE FABULOUS CESAR CASTILLO AND HIS MAMBO KINGS!

Cesar stood before the microphone, saintly under those lights, with vocal cords trembling, his wrecked-by-cigarettes voice crooning, arms spreading wide to embrace the world. The good people of the good Pennsylvania earth had no idea what to make of their music. Cesar was always a joy to watch during the fast dance numbers, the man sliding and bending, flailing his arms into odd configurations — at one moment lilting forward and stomping his heels, at the next jumping bolt-upright like an exclamation point — his face contorting, his mouth in an “O,” in a Vanna Vane “Ooooo”; his teeth set like a trap, tongue lashing the air; his braceleted and beringed hands jangling; his shoes pirouetting; and he’d shout, “Uhhhhhh!” while conducting the orchestra and clap and shout out the names of his musicians, “Vaya, Pito! Vaya, Nestor!” and “Uhhhhh” again.

Sometimes this was too much for more conservative crowds and then the group would launch into a mixed set of American and Latin American compositions. He crooned “In the Still of the Night,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” then “Bésame Mucho” and “María la O.” For the “Peanut Vendor,” Cesar came out wearing a baseball cap and pushing a cart that had “Peanuts for Sale” written on its side. Taking to the microphone and shaking a martini mixer filled with shot, Cesar sang an English version of the song: “Oh, why don’t you try my peanuts, you’ll never find peanuts as tasty as mine,” which most of the audience did not get anyway, as Cesar still had a thick Cuban accent. But the musicians knew the meaning of those words and always had a good laugh with the songs. Their other big novelty number was a quasi-tango which Cesar had composed, stealing bits of “Malagueña” and the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen. He’d introduce it to the audience: “Now here’s a song about a cat who has to fight the bull all the time, and I mean bull-you-know-what!”

In that number Xavier, their bestial trombonist, came charging like a bull toward Cesar, who played the bullfighter, waving a large red cloth and gesturing with bows and waves of the hand to a beautiful woman offstage. The number was set up for a few laughs and to introduce the dance team of Elva and René. At the end of the song, Elva in a bright red dress would come spinning out into the brave matador’s arms. Vamp and out. The audience always broke into applause.

Whenever Elva came dancing out, Cesar would give her a nice up-and-down, as if to see through the silk of her dress, like Superman. He’d once seen her in a bathing suit when they were playing in the Catskills. She was sunbathing by a lake, and when he saw her, Cesar decided to walk over and ask Elva if she’d like a soda. He took one look at her and blushed; a few strands of pubic hair overrunning her bathing suit broke his heart. He was interested in her, but thought she might be a little crazy. Poor René, word was that he could not satisfy her, that she preferred men with “kingly sticks,” men who were really built… or that’s what the musicians speculated.

He was interested, but wouldn’t touch her. René was his friend and he would never fuck around with a friend’s woman. Still, he spent many a night thinking about her.

The people loved the music, but these Pennsylvania folk who were used to country dancing had their troubles with the mambo, and because of this, part of the evening included free rumba and mambo and cha-cha-cha lessons.

René, the male partner, joined Elva on the stage. He was a tiny, thin man, about five-five or so, in three-inch Cuban heels, with big ears, a pointy, pocked nose, thick mustache, bald head, and soft, aristocratic eyes. He was forty-five and had found Elva some ten years before, when she was sixteen and succulent, dancing rumbas out in Maríanao Park in Havana for pennies. René hired her to join his stage act, which consisted of dancing old-fashioned rumbas at the Tropicana nightclub in Havana. They came to New York in 1947 and made a living teaching dancing at the Fred Astaire dance studios, the Palladium, and the Savoy. And sometimes they performed at the Teatro Hispano in Harlem, where René caught the stage manager feeling Elva up in the wings and attacked him with a hammer. That’s when Cesar hired them to work with the Mambo Kings.

When they’d finished the bullfight song, the Mambo Kings launched into “Mambo Nocturne,” one of their original compositions. The dance couple waltzed around the stage. The next number was “El Bodeguero,” a cha-cha-cha, and Elva and René were out on the dance floor among the crowd, showing them the steps and giving instructions: “And it’s one, two, three, and slide. Stop. One, two, three, slide, and stop… Ah, ladies, you look great, but your husbands are stiffs!”

The men listened to her carefully and were soon bending, spinning, and lurching forward to the music, happy, red-faced, and like shy students at a high-school dance. The men doted on shapely Elva, and their pretty, thick-ankled wives were charmed by the flirtatious splendor that was Cesar Castillo.

Cesar would use the lessons as a chance to mingle with the crowd. He’d come down off the stage and dance with a dozen different women during a single song, his warm-blooded, thick hands taking the woman by the waist and spinning her like a falling flower. The evening would end with a set of Mambo Kings “songs of love”: “Twilight in Havana,” “Solitude of My Heart,” and “The Sadness of Love.” Cesar would sing about the murmuring seas, the mournful moon, scornful, mocking, deceptive, cruel, playful, entrancing love — eyes closed, his face a mask of thoughtful passion.

Everyone had a good time, crowd and musicians. The crowd was generous in its applause, and the musicians would head out thinking about the next day’s journey, gather to pass along little cups of rum and prepare for the night’s sleep before heading to the next day’s job, a Sunday-afternoon mambo dance party at the Plainfield auditorium, Plainfield, New Jersey.

As for women? Even when he was stuck in the middle of nowhere, in a small town where everybody watched him, the Mambo King was always up to his old tricks, dating girls wherever he could, but hardly ever with the kind of success he had back in New York, where the greater difficulties of life promoted a greater pursuit of pleasure. Still, the man never gave up! Sometimes during the dances he would discreetly ask if a certain young lady might show him around town the next morning before he left on the bus. Sometimes he made dates at night and found himself waiting on street corners with names like Maple and Vine at three in the morning, pacing up and down, cigarette in mouth, hands in trousers, waiting for these chancy rendezvous with women named Betty and Mary-Jo and Annette. Meeting these women, he would sit for hours talking sincerely with them and musing on the beauty of the stars, and then he would try to make his move: sometimes he petted, tongue-kissed, wrestled, dry-humped women in the parks of these small towns or in the back seat of a car in the local lovers’ lane, but usually his restlessness and voracious ego were satisfied with the amorous tension of these dates.

(And there were other women that he daydreamed about as he sat drinking his last drinks in the Hotel Splendour. Going down on some girl on Coney Island at ten-thirty at night, the two of them huddled under a blanket. A woman with a broken leg in a cast, standing up in a phone booth during a rainstorm in Atlantic City, the gales whipping against the glass, things so dark around them nobody could see, so that in the ferocity of the winds they started to kiss, his knee pressing between her legs, and this woman saying to hell with it and pulling up her sun skirt and down with her panties, down over her legs and down over the thick plaster cast, so that he lifted her up onto him and she leaned back against the wall, laughing and thinking, This man is insane, laughing and seeing stars while people outside looked like zigzagged pencil doodles running through the deluge. And there was that woman in the crowd watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. She was standing next to him, Leticia, and Eugenio, whose presence certainly made things easier, as this woman seemed to like children very much and smiled each time he hoisted Leticia up over his head so that she would see the bands and floats better. But he really made this woman smile when he said, “And can I lift you up?” Ended up with them walking to the subway together and Cesar making a date with her for a week later. She had a nice body, really a massive woman with pendulous breasts, but, coño, was she motherly and liked to have him suck them and played a game of slapping his face with them, but the woman was too serious, how could he fuck around with a war widow with sadness in her eyes even when she looked fine in one of those lacy Tigress of the Night brassieres, really broke his heart to hurt her so, and she was an office manager in a place downtown, about forty years old but beautiful, she just took everything too seriously, but, man, was she fun, another one who liked her men “built,” as she put it, men with king-sized sticks. And there was that woman in the fancy white coat whom he watched along Fifth Avenue one day, she was the one he followed into Saks Fifth Avenue up to the glove department, where he stood pretending to shop and watched her posing before the mirrors. She had one of those elegant thin model bodies, tall and firm, and he watched her slipping on gloves, nice soft leather gloves, and when he closed his eyes, he imagined the way she would pull on a pair of panties after a shower or play, with dampened fingers, with his thing, slipping a condom on him the same way she put her fingers into that glove. She was impossible, too snotty for him. He followed her all over the store and thought he had a thing going because every now and then she would look deep into his eyes, and he considered that a form of lovemaking, but just as he was about to make his move, to approach her, these two gents stepped out from one of the service departments, store guards, who said to him, “We understand you’re bothering one of our customers, sir,” and that was that, his face blushing with embarrassment, and as he was being led out of the store, he got the last lick in, gave her this look which said, “You don’t know who I am or what you’ve just missed, baby.” And there were others, like the European lady he met on that one-night job moonlighting as a crooner on a harbor tour boat. She was French and not even that good-looking, but she had been staring at him as he sang on the stage. And she was aggressive, joining him by the railing to watch the moonswept sea, because that was when there were many lonely European women, the war had left so many men dead. And she said to him in a thick French accent, “I love the way you use your hands and shake those maracas. You have lovely hands, may I look at them?” And she started to read them and said, “You have a long lifeline, if you want it, and success is here if you want it. But I see trouble ahead, something that you must be prepared for.” She said, “You see that spot here that looks like an exploding star, that means something’s going to explode in your life. I used to see that in Europe all the time, on many, many hands.” She was so thin her Venus mound protruded like a huge fig, and when he made love to her he kept thinking about the city of Paris and the Eiffel Tower and all those newsreels he’d seen of the Free French and Allied troops marching victoriously back into the city. And there were others: Gloria, Ismelda, Juanita, Alice, Conchita, Vivian, Elena, Irene…)

Still, whenever Cesar came back from these dates and he found Nestor, an insomniac, waiting up in the motel-room bed, he would say something: “Oh, man, that chick I picked up, pssssshh, man, you should have seen her body!” And he’d say it to make his brother jealous, because in many ways he was jealous of his brother’s marriage to Delores. Or perhaps he always had to treat Nestor like a poor soul, and therefore tormented him with tales of his amorous exploits.

… When I knew he was in pain…

Poor Nestor, when they were on the road, he would suffer at night with homesickness and ardent longing for María. In those simply furnished motel rooms, he would remain awake half the night, arms tucked behind his pillow, body racked in spiritual pain. Sometimes he would get up and take a walk, lingering against a streetlamp in the motel parking lot, or he’d find some fellows to play cards with for nickels and dimes, but played without caring if he won, outlasting even the most diehard insomniacs. On those nights the thought of looking at the same wistful moon and whispering stars as he used to during his nights of romance with María in Havana destroyed him. He would sit up in bed smoking cigarettes, then clean out his trumpet, jot down a few lyrics, or read from his book, seeking an answer to his woes. He’d feel like crumpling up. Sadness would weaken his knees. He’d pace until his older brother came in with that happy smirk on his face, his older brother whistling, his older brother yawning, his older brother falling quickly to bed. Then, while Cesar snored away on the other side of the room, Nestor passed the time familiarizing himself with the ceiling, faces, roads, stars swirling above him.

Did he think about Delores and his children, Leticia and Eugenio? Yes, he could not bear the thought of hurting them. But what could he do? He would sit up, sighing, desperate to get rid of those feelings.

“A cabrón,” he would perhaps tell himself, “would have gone back to Cuba by now. A cabrón would have been unfaithful.”

Despite his brother’s constant seduction of women, Nestor wore his faithfulness like a badge of sainthood, but he sometimes found it unbearable, wanting to be held, to be comforted, to be told, “Yes, Nestor, I love you, everyone does.” And those feelings would make him angry at the marriage, so that by the time he returned home, he would take it out on Delores.

He’d only begin falling asleep after the sun had started to rise. Then his dreams would take on a golden glow. “There goes the future,” he would say to himself, falling asleep. “There goes the future.” And he found himself stumbling through a cemetery, exulting in the obelisks, Celtic crosses, and monuments with their carved angels and bursting suns. Christ risen (Save this flesh, Lord), Christ judging (Forgive me, Lord), Christ on the Cross (Please place me in Your Heart). Then he’d wander through the cemetery, feeling very much at home, until some sound, Cesar snoring, Cesar saying, “Oh, baby,” Cesar belching, would stir him from his uneasy sleep and he rejoined the world.

(And the next day, driving along the hilly countryside near the Delaware Water Gap, the bus overheated and stopped on the side of the highway for an hour. The brothers found themselves walking down a country road with Manny. They came to a field of sheep, and in the distance another field of haystacks. Nature buzzing, alive with insect sounds and birdcalls. They saw a mill and a small stone wall where they thought they might pose for a picture. Cesar had brought along a little Kodak box camera and he told Nestor to pose beside him in front of that wall. They were doing so, arms around each other’s shoulder, when they heard a cowbell. Not a Latin orchestra cowbell counting 3/2 time, but a cow cowbell. Then they met the cow herself, who had come walking out of the field. Big black spots covered her hide and she moved in a swirl of a hundred flies. The spots inspired the brothers to put on dark glasses. They posed in front of the cow, looking as if they were part of the cow’s family.

A farmer had been watching the brothers and said to them in a German accent, “Let me take your picture. The three of you.”

And so Manny, Nestor, and Cesar, three Mambo Kings, posed for posterity.

That was June 1956.

Then the farmer invited them to his house, which was down the hill. His front garden was filled with sighing flowers, sighing as they tried to reach higher out of the ground. And the roots of the earth seemed to yawn. In the Hotel Splendour the Mambo King felt the sunniness of that day and poured himself another drink. It was a stone house and its interior smelled of dirt and firewood and cherry pipe tobacco. They drank coffee and had corn bread and ham—“Sabroso!”—grape jelly, and scrambled eggs. Then they drank a glass of beer each. When they offered to pay him, he refused, and when they left, he followed them back up the road to the bus, where Cesar gave him a signed copy of “Mambo Dance Party.” He laughed and they were touched by his insistence that they come back any time to eat with him.)

Because of the tour, Cesar spent his thirty-eighth birthday in Chicago. They were holed up in an old twelve-story hotel called the Dover House, on the Northeast Side, overlooking Lake Michigan, and he’d had a good day walking along the shore with his brother and a few of the Mambo Kings, clowning around, eating in nice restaurants, and, as always, trying to kill time before the show. He certainly expected something more from the fellows than what he had gotten. He considered himself their father, their Santa Claus, their spiritual advisor, the butt of their jokes, and there he was, on his birthday, after a show, without any sign that his musicians would celebrate his birthday. So it was not as if he was impervious to pain. On a normal night out, he would have suggested a party, but he resisted the idea of initiating his own birthday celebration. After his fellow musicians had gone their separate ways, and Cesar and Nestor headed for their rooms, Cesar was the solemn one for a change.

“Well, happy birthday, hermano,” Nestor said, with some embarrassment in his voice. “I guess I should have said something to the band.”

And that little incident tapped into Cesar’s feeling that went back a long way to Cuba: that no one does a thing for you, so you must do it yourself.

Feeling downcast about turning thirty-eight, and about being alone on the night of his birthday, Cesar opened his hotel-room door and clicked on the light; he slept in a bed that was up against a wall of mirrored tiles. Stretched in front of those mirrored tiles was a beautiful, long-legged woman, head of thick black hair propped up on an elbow, body luscious and naked.

Taking in the spectacular curvaceousness of a body that startled the Mambo King and whose shapely bottom, soft and rounded as a swan’s neck, was reflected in the mirror, he said, “Dios mío!”

And the woman, a brunette with big brown eyes, said, “Feliz cumpleaños,” and smiled.

She would be another acquaintance of his, an exotic dancer, Dahlia Múñez, who was professionally known as the Argentine Flame of Passion. He and a few of the Mambo Kings had watched her dancing in a club on the South Side. When his fellow musicians saw how Cesar could not take his eyes off her that night, they hired her as a present to him, and there they were: she opening her arms and her legs to him, and Cesar hurrying to strip off all his clothes, which he left in a pile on the floor. Every woman he’d ever bedded down, he would think years later in the Hotel Splendour, had something to distinguish her lovemaking. And for the Argentine Flame of Passion it was the way she enjoyed the act of fellatio, actually liked the spill of his milk inside her mouth — or so she pretended. (And her technique! She would make his spectacular member even more spectacularly huge. She’d take the root of his penis above his testicles, which resembled jowls and were the size of good California plums, squeezing so tightly that his thing turned purple with the rush of blood and then got even bigger: and then she would just roll her tongue around it, take him inside her mouth, lick him all over, pull, prod, and poke his member until he came.) She had other virtues, which kept them busy until past seven in the morning; they slept happily until around ten-thirty, when the Mambo King and this Dahlia fucked one more time, showered together, got dressed, and showed up in the hotel dining room, where his musicians were gathered to wait for their bus. When he walked in, they broke into applause. (For years he sent Dahlia postcards, inviting her to visit him in New York and saying that he might visit her in Chicago.)

The brothers loved the immensity of the United States and experienced both the pleasures and the monotony of small towns U.S.A. Of the Midwestern states, they found Wisconsin most beautiful, but they also liked the Far West. They played Denver, where Cesar, delighted all his life by cowboy movies, saw his first bowlegged, drawling cowpokes leaning up against a bar, spurred cowboy boots against the foot railing, a rinky-dink player piano jiving through “The Streets of Laredo.” And it was “Howdy, pardner” and “Thank you much” and long-drawled-out English phrases. They bought the family little presents wherever they went. In Denver, cowboy hats and rubber tomahawks and little dolls, and for Delores, a “Genuine Navajo Squaw” dress. They made like tourists and sent home dozens of postcards of everything from Mount Rushmore to the Golden Gate Bridge. Aside from their moments of strangeness and displacement, they had a beautiful trip.

The guys who had it rough were the black musicians, who were treated in some places like lepers. No violence against them, just a bad silence when they’d go walking into a store, a disenchantment when they’d walk into a lodge for the hunters’ special breakfast, plates slapped down on the table, drinks poured quickly, eyes averted. In one place in Indiana they had a big problem with the owner of a dance hall there. He wanted Desi Arnaz, not these ebony-black Cubans like Pito and Willy. The owner would not allow them to walk onto his premises, and the orchestra canceled, Cesar telling the man, “You go fuck yourself, mister!” In some places they had to come in through the back door and were not allowed to use the toilets with everyone else. Black musicians had to take their pisses out the back stage door. Spirits were dampened, especially when the weather was bad, because in their travels through the heartland of America these fellows sometimes felt an Arctic coldness of spirit that made New York seem like Miami Beach.

At one point, they spent two weeks on the road without ever meeting up with a single fellow Cuban, and a month when they saw no other blacks.

San Francisco was different. Cesar liked it immediately because its hilliness reminded him of Santiago de Cuba. He liked to walk up and down its streets, enjoyed looking at its pretty many-colored houses with the curlicue balconies and bay windows. That was the last stop on their tour, where the Mambo Kings were to hook up for a triple bill in Sweet’s Ballroom, with the orchestras of Monto Santamaría and José Fajardo. This was really important for the Mambo Kings, as they were paid two thousand dollars for a single appearance — more than they’d ever gotten before. When Cesar stepped onto the stage that night, to clamorous applause, and the orchestra opened, as they always did, with “Twilight in Havana,” Cesar Castillo was positive that, from then on, things for the band would get better and better and that there would be many more nights in the future when they’d make that kind of money. Why, a fellow could live well making a few hundred dollars a week! Like a rich man. That night would always be a beautiful memory. Every song greeted enthusiastically, the crowds of dancers going wild with appreciation and happiness, and just the honor of sharing the bill with musicians of this caliber! Then, too, there was always that moment when the audience recognized the opening bars of “Beautiful María of My Soul,” their one hit, the song that brought them closest to fame.

With all this money, the brothers bought themselves new suits, toys for the children, clothing. Nestor bought Delores a fur wrap. For the apartment, he bought a brand-new Castro Convertible sofa and the big RCA black-and-white television that would sit in that living room for the next twenty years. And he was always making trips to the bank, putting money away for a rainy day. His security was his blue American Savings Bank passbook, guaranteed to pay four to five percent interest annually. Manny the bassist saw a trustworthy soul in Nestor and wanted him to go into the bodega business up on 135th Street, but Nestor, disliking risks of any kind, backed away. He was so unsure about the future and so plagued by anxieties that he continued to work at the meat plant, reporting every so often to Pablo to pick up assignments, so that the family always had money coming into the house. Even Cesar, who always let the money fly out of his pockets, managed to put some of it away, though not much. He spent it at the racetracks and in the nightclubs and on his male and female acquaintances. For about three months, he lived a life of opulence. Even after sending a few hundred dollars to his daughter in Cuba, whom he kept promising to visit, he had enough to make a down payment on his dream automobile, a 1956 DeSoto.

The afternoons would find Cesar out on the street, proudly sponging down his DeSoto with soap and water and then polishing it with wax. Then he’d wipe the chrome with rags, until the whole machine gleamed radiantly. Cesar would go over that automobile as meticulously as he did his fingernails, with not a mark or a nick anywhere on its great windshield or over its smooth, sloping hood. He derived great pleasure from looking at it and would hold court from its front seat, playing its radio and chatting quietly with his friends until he decided to take someone for a ride up to the George Washington Bridge and back. The thing was so big and shiny that he would attract crowds of poor children, who would stand before it in awe.

“Yes, sir,” Cesar would think. “That’s my nice car.”

He was always reluctant to leave it parked in front of the building without someone to watch over it. La Salle was a street where the hoodlum element not only sat on cars; they took flying leaps off cars to catch balls during stickball games and jumped up on top of cars to dance. He’d usually park it over in the garage on 126th Street but sometimes kept it near the building. On those occasions when he was called upstairs, he would often check out that car from the window. He loved his DeSoto. It was big. It was splendid. It was smooth. It had turbo-thrust and was fifteen feet long. It was so fabulous-looking that no woman could resist smiling when she saw it. That DeSoto was so powerful that when he roared down the street and screeched to a halt, his foot on its “touch-sensitive” automatic brake system pedal, driver and machine were one and he would feel as if he were turbo-thrusting through the dense ordinariness of the world.

He would take everybody for rides, elbow out the window, felt dice dangling off the mirror. His best friends at that time were Manny the bassist, Frankie Pérez the ballroom dandy, Bernardito Mandelbaum, artist, mambo aficionado, and Cubanophile, his fat cousin Pablo, and little Eugenio. They all got to ride around with the Mambo King. One day, he took the family and a date on an outing up north to Connecticut and stopped at a place called Little America, a memorabilia-packed log-cabin lodge whose shelves and walls were filled with animal heads, muskets, medallion-brimmed cowboy hats, tin soldiers, Mohawk Indians, rubber tomahawks, stovepipe hats, “Welcome to Connecticut” ashtrays, miniature American flags, American-flag tablecloths, American-flag pens. Cesar, a rich man, bought the children bundles of this junk. Afterwards they went into the Little America diner, where they drank sodas and chocolate malteds and came away with bags of potato chips and Snickers candy bars. Then they drove for another hour and the road opened to long stretches of meadow, streams, and woods. Cows and horses lolling behind fences, dogs barking from the side of the road. Bing Crosby on the radio singing “Moonlight Becomes You.” Cesar drove his automobile, with its beautiful whitewall tires, screeching around the turns. The family gripped their seats, but Cesar laughed and whistled. Sparks sometimes flew from the friction of hubcaps hitting the highway curb. He drove into a state park, where the forest’s noble pine trees towered over them. Serenely the family made their way down a corridor of these trees, carrying picnic baskets and guitars, a cooler of beer and soda. They were following signs that said, TO THE LAKE.

Bees hovered closely around Cesar and his date, Vanna Vane. He was wearing so much hair tonic that the bees swarmed around him as if he were a wildflower field. That day she wore a lot of perfume and was dressed in a red plaid dress, very plain and very matronly in its way. They were a happy couple even if they weren’t a real couple. They held hands and whispered, telling little jokes and laughing. She was hoping that things would pick up with him. She liked the fact that he was generous with her. Frankly, a girl her age had to think about getting married, and even though he had told her a hundred times that they were good for a few laughs and for the Hotel Splendour, she believed there was something more to him. On a few occasions, when Miss Mambo had felt some real tenderness from him, she had started to cry in his arms. And it was as if he could not bear to see her pain, and so he told her, “Come on, Vanna. Stop acting like a little girl.” So she kept her distance and waited patiently for Cesar to come around.

Cesar reminded her of the movie actor Anthony Quinn and she liked the way he would draw all the attention in a room, how other women seemed to envy her when she was out with him. And now he was on top of things, with all kinds of prospects. A Mexican film producer, Anibal Romero, had been talking to the Mambo King about appearing in a cameo part in a film in Mexico, where “Beautiful María of My Soul” was a hit. And he had been on the I Love Lucy show and had enough money that he bought a DeSoto and gave her a gold necklace because he was feeling successful. (Neither of them liked to think about the real circumstance of that necklace, with the Mambo King guilty about having to take Vanna Vane uptown to 155th Street, to that Pakistani fellow with the thick black hair and the inkwell eyes, a doctor who sat Vanna down for a quick surgical procedure, scraping her womb until the child of their conception was taken forever from this world. And Cesar sat outside, chain-smoking because Vanna had been crying, and pissed off about the whole thing. Afterwards he took her down to Brooklyn and bought her a banana split in a corner pharmacy and was startled that she was upset. “A lot of guys,” he said, “wouldn’t have even gone with you.” And that made her leave the pharmacy, sadly, so that it was months before she would speak to him or share a bed with him again.) But to the family they were a regular happy couple, not at all like Delores and Nestor, who had taken to walking solemnly side by side, their remarks addressed to the children: “Come here, nenes!” “Don’t put your fingers in your mouth after touching that!” “Give your Papi a kiss!”

It was all silence, because since the brothers had come close to fame, Nestor had begun to change. He’d go for long walks by himself, and people were always saying to Delores or Cesar that they had seen Nestor “standing on a street corner without moving.” Or that “he seemed to be there but wasn’t there, you know what I mean?” Then there was something else: the letters she sometimes found folded up in his jacket pockets, letters to María, whose lines Delores could not bear to read. Her eyes would skim the pages and find phrases that cut her heart like a knife: “… And despite all my doubts, I still love you… It has always been a torment… This love will always thrive in my heart… If only I had proved my worthiness to you…” And other sentences that made her feel like slapping his face and saying, “If your life is not good enough for you, then go back to Cuba!” But how could she? She was trapped by her love for him. The idea of this beautiful dream of their love cracking open because of jealousy would send her into despair. She would take to her books and maintain her silence. For three months this had kept the peace.

At twenty-seven, Delores was still an attractive woman. But in attending selflessly to Nestor and the family, she’d acquired a puzzled harshness around the eyes. A photograph of her with five other Cubans, the brothers and musician friends of the family, shows a woman of intelligence and beauty literally trapped inside a crush of men. (And in this photograph, taken in front of a statue of Abraham Lincoln on 116th Street, they huddled close. In the crush of machos, she seems to be waiting with annoyance to be lifted out of there.) She had never lost sight of that sad but handsome man she had met years back at the bus stop, and she loved him and the children very much. But there were days when she thought of another life outside of cooking and cleaning and taking care of the family. She sometimes went wandering around Columbia University with the children and would peer into classrooms or stand outside a window, listening to the summer-session lecture. She’d sigh, thinking about all the college people in that neighborhood. For reasons that she was unable to understand, she derived a deep satisfaction from all this learning, but would she ever act upon this?

There seemed no way out for her. She had quit her job as a paid domestic and had finished her night classes down at Charles Evans Hughes High School, where a teacher, who was half flirtation and half sincerity, suggested that she might enroll in college at least part-time. She always got high marks in her courses and could have gotten into City College, which was only a ten-minute walk from La Salle Street. She always told her teachers, “No.” But when she daydreamed about her life, her knees ached with envy of those professors who lived surrounded by books and by admiring colleagues and students.

For a time she had thought her interests were unimportant in the scheme of their family life, but whenever the apartment grew thick with Cesar and Nestor’s pals from the dance halls, who expected to be waited upon, she felt like screaming. It hit her that she was intelligent and more so than anyone else she knew. A vague nausea would come over her and she would barely make it through those evenings, so cramped was her stomach.

She became solemn in the performance of her wifely duties on those nights.

“What’s wrong with you? Why are you so sad?” Nestor would ask her.

“I’m sorry,” she’d say. “It’s my stomach. Tengo ganas de arrojar. I feel like throwing up.”

It so distressed her that, a few weeks later, she approached Nestor to discuss the matter with him. “Querido,” she said to him. “I want to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“How would it be with you if I enrolled in some courses at the college?”

“And why do you want to?”

“To better myself.”

He didn’t say no. But his face flushed and was filled with disappointment. “You can do as you please,” he told her. He let out a sigh. “You go, and that will be the end of normalcy for us!” He was up out of the chair. “Do as you please, see if I care.”

“But what is the big deal, Nestor? What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that I’m the breadwinner here, but if that’s what you want to do, that’s your business.”

She was silent, hopeful that his expression would change, grow more relaxed.

Instead, he went on. “Go ahead and humiliate me before the others.”

“Oh, Nestor, please.”

“Then don’t suggest such things to me.”

“I was only trying to get your permission to go to the school.”

The word “permission” calmed him. “Yes?” And he seemed more pensive about it now. “Well, maybe we should talk about this, someday. But I just want to say that a woman with two children should never spend more time than’s necessary away from home.”

And then he became very kind, putting his arms around her and giving her a gentle kiss. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “It seems I’m getting a bad temper these days.”

But after that, it became harder to accept her everyday life. She would go walking down Broadway with her kids, among the students and professors of Columbia. Some of them looked daffy, some looked like geniuses. Some held doors for her and some let doors slam in her face. Some were homosexuals and some gave her lascivious up-and-downs. Why were they students, and not she? She would sometimes leave her children with her sister, Ana María, who loved them, and then go sneaking into the big libraries of the university and sit thumbing through their books. She pretended that she was enrolled in the college and she would nod and say hello to her fellow students. She would daydream about the nature of the world and the way it was set up. Why was it that her father dropped dead on a stairway, in the midst of an exhausting work day, his heart sad from all his troubles? Why did the severe librarian with the bifocals pushed down low on his pointy nose watch her with suspicion? Why wasn’t her Papi standing in one of those classrooms, lecturing about the rise of the Popes of Avignon, instead of rotting in the ground? Why was it that she would walk home, dreading the fact that her husband, whom she loved very much, was lost in his own world of pain and music? Why was it that she would spend long periods of silence around him, because he never seemed to be interested in what she had to say and in the books she read? Why was it that when mambo time came around, when the house filled with musicians and their wives and the record player was turned up, why did she act willingly like a slave, attending to all the men, and yet feel no satisfaction or closeness to the women, like her sister, Ana María, and Pablo’s wife, Miriam, who went happily about the business of cooking and happily rushed into the living room with trays of food? Why did she end up sitting on the couch, watching the crowd of happy dancers, with her arms folded on her lap and shaking no, no, no each time someone like her brother-in-law would take her by the wrist and pull her up to dance? Why did she open the door to her apartment in the Bronx one day and find Giovanni, that nice Italian fellow from the plant, standing there with his face puffy and hat in hand to tell her that her Papi was dead? Why was it that she liked to get lost in books like the one she was reading one night, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, when she felt her husband lying alongside her, his fingers searching between her legs and his mouth suddenly upon her breast? Why was it that she no longer felt the same compulsion to do exactly what he wanted, to lift him out of his pain? She didn’t know why, and she did all the right things for him, opening her robe all the way and planting kisses on his manly chin and chest and down below, where those kisses made him dissolve quickly.

They just walked in silence, Nestor in his blue guayabera and checkered pantalones, looking at the sunlight playing between the trees of the forest. One hand on Eugenio’s shoulder, the other pulling little frightened Leticia along. No words for Delores except “It’s a beautiful day, huh?” And that was the way they had always been since meeting at the bus stop. The pensive and pained musician who could make simple statements about life and the world, that was all. A good man, still heartbroken over someone else, she would think to herself. And that’s why he wanted me, she would think. Wanted me so that I can help him forget what he hadn’t forgotten. He winced with that awareness. Nothing was ever said about it, but when he would stand close to Delores, he seemed to stop breathing from shame. He was afraid to let her go to school because he thought that she would become wiser, and see through his confusion. He did love her. He would tell her that a million times over and over again if he had to, but something kept tugging at him, and he kept thinking that it was María. Or was it something else?

As they went walking through the woods, Nestor and Delores were tense. The children felt it, though they were too young to know why, and Cesar knew it. He was always walking over and joking with them. He came across some daisies and picked them for Vanna Vane and for Delorita. A flower slipped from his hand and for a split second was suspended between them, floating there. Like a magnet trick in the circus, Nestor stepped back, and the flower dropped to the ground. Later, Nestor thought he had seen a deer in the forest and went to look for it. As the family watched, he walked into a shaft of sunlight and for a moment he seemed invisible. Then he shouted, “It is a deer!”

Over a hill was the lake, and in the distance, mountains. There were a few summer vacationers spread out here and there along the shore, and a bathhouse, where the family changed into their bathing suits. The children played in the shallows of the water. Eugenio was five years old, but he’d remember how good the roast chicken tasted that day, the long-legged insects which seemed to float on the surface of the water, and his mother, looking fine as ever, sitting on the side of the blanket, and his father on the other, Nestor repeating, “Why is it that we are being this way? Don’t you understand? Yo te quiero. When you understand that, you will be happy again!”

But each time she turned away from Nestor, he would look around for support from the others, as if someone should step forward and say, “Yes, don’t be so hard on him, Delorita, he’s a good man.”

Cesar and Vanna Vane were inseparable. They jumped into the water, which was cold, and charged back to shore, stretching out on towels, drinking Rheingold beer, and enjoying the sunshine. Nestor, the younger Mambo King, watched them attentively, and each time Cesar’s bottle emptied, Nestor would bring him another. Now and then he would say to Delores, “Forgive me?”

Then, Vanna Vane, in a green bathing suit, nipples pointy, limbs chilled, ran into the water. Cesar followed her, but because he couldn’t swim, he mainly splashed around and laughed like a child. Vanna, being a city girl, really didn’t know how to swim either, and they both went bobbing under the water, held each other by the waist, and played touchy-feely. Enchanted, they kissed. Delores remained on the shore, reading. Nestor was playing with the children when he suddenly felt determined to prove himself a man. There was a small island in the middle of the lake, a few hundred yards out, and he decided to swim there. But he’d only get so far and then sink into the water, churning frantically, his face contorting with the effort to stay afloat. When he started to go under, he felt a fierce constriction in his chest and gut, and from his mouth gushed a stream of bubbles. A few times it looked as if he might drown, as no one there swam well enough to save him, but when Delores put down her book and started to cry out, “Nestor! Nestor! Come back!” he kicked swiftly and with Herculean effort made his way toward the shore. Wrapping a towel around him, Delores covered his shivering body with her own. A chill wind had started to blow across the lake surface, and the greenish water, as if filled by shadows, darkened into black. Then heavy black-bottomed clouds started booming like conga drums in the distance, and just like that, the sunny day, with its hot sunlight brilliant against the lake, grew cold, the air charged up with static energy, and it started to rain. Everyone huddled under the bathhouse awning, watching the rain for about a half hour, and then they got dressed and made their way back to the car. Cesar Castillo took the family back to La Salle and then, with Vanna Vane, drove over to the Hotel Splendour.

THEY WERE GOING TO PLAY A JOB out in New Jersey. Cesar was standing before the living-room mirror, looping his tie into the shape of a crouching butterfly. As he started to brush back his slick hair, he noticed the window curtains wavering, and from down La Salle Street he heard fire sirens wailing. Then in the cool air he smelled smoke: in a building down the hill, a burning apartment and three little children screaming at the top of their lungs for help (black smoke swirling through the rooms, the floors growing hot from the fire raging underneath). Just out of the bathtub, Nestor went to the window, too. Then the whole family gathered by the windows to watch the brave firemen with their hooked pikes and fire hoses, balancing themselves on their high ladders. Glass melting, windows bursting from the heat, glass shattering on the street — people were everywhere watching this. The fire made the brothers nervous and they went into the kitchen and poured themselves a few drinks. Something about the screams, the billowing clouds of smoke. A night of smoke and crying in the air. A sadness filled the apartment; death was in the air, and they drank up two beers and two Scotches.

Cesar, with his thickset face, shrugged his shoulders and tried to forget about the whole business, and Nestor remembered certain principles of positive thinking, but through their minds echoed those children’s screams. The shadows along the walls were jagged, cutting up the light.

They got dressed and ready to go, black instrument cases by their sides. It was the usual parting, no different from any of the others. Cesar had his black guitar case and a small box filled with percussion instruments out in the hallway by the door. Nestor followed behind with his black trumpet case in hand, hat pulled low over his brow. With his look of intense sadness, he knelt down and called over Eugenio, entranced by the glow of the RCA television, for a goodbye kiss. (You can see that look on his face that time he appeared on the I Love Lucy show, and sometimes you can see that same Cuban melancholy breaking through Ricky Ricardo’s expressions, at once vulnerable and sensitive, the expression of a man who’d been through the mill and wanted no more pain in his life.) Eugenio kissed him goodbye and then hurried back to the television. He was watching Superman. And as Eugenio ran off, Nestor tried to hold on to him for one more kiss.

He had spoken to Delorita in the kitchen. “Bueno,” he said. “We’re going now.”

“When will you be back?”

“Well, you know it’s a coming-out party in New Jersey, una fiesta de quince. We’ll try to be back by five or six.”

She was smoking a cigarette and, exhaling softly through her nostrils, gave Nestor a desultory kiss. Leticia, who was standing beside her, sank back into the folds of her dress and apron. What could Delores do but nod “Yes.”

“Okay, Mamá,” Nestor said to her. “See you later.”

Later she would sit in the living room while the kids watched TV, happy to have the evening more or less to herself so that she could read and do as she liked, maybe take a nice long bath.

By eight o’clock in the morning she would be damning herself for not having shown him more love. She would watch the walls fall away and like a character in a novel move down the hall amid a swirl of shadows.

He was whistling — or that’s the way everybody would remember him — whistling “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Already he was fading away, though, his being compromised by memory, like a ghost. It was cool enough outside that the brothers stomped their feet on the ground and wisps of frosty air blew out their nostrils and mouths, the time of the year when some Christmas lights were still blinking in the windows, some still alive in that building. Survivors huddled in coats and blankets below, a spray of water falling in an arch in the glow of the black wrought-iron streetlamps. The moon over the rooftops, a mambo-singer moon with thin pencil-line mustache, stars shiny like glittering dots of gold lamé. They made their way down the stairs and stood for a time among the crowd watching the fire, waiting for Manny in his wood-paneled Studebaker station wagon. Cesar and Nestor would follow in the DeSoto. Breath from Nestor’s lungs, tail-pipe clouds of steam, black and swirling into the dark night. (Like the sky in Cuba from the porch, the Mambo King would reflect in the Hotel Splendour, the stars going on forever and forever.) An hour and a half later they were still thinking about the fire, how things go up in flames. They had arrived at their destination in New Jersey: a caravan of five cars had pulled up to the club, and from the car driven by Ramón the “Jamón” from Brooklyn, out came Vanna Vane, who had gotten a ride so that she’d have a chance to hang around with that “big lug of a guy,” Cesar.

The Mambo Kings set up inside the club, on a stage under a battery of red lights. Helium balloons everywhere bobbing softly against the ceiling. Half the room was cluttered with long tables and with relatives and friends of the girl of honor. Set against the wall opposite the horseshoe bar, a table of grandmothers in rhinestone brooches and with tiaras in their hair, each throwing back glasses of sangria and maintaining a strict watch on the goings-on of the younger couples in the crowd, slick suavecitos and their young girls, the teenagers at another table looking bored and anxious for the proceedings to begin. Two cooks carried in, as if on a stretcher, two large suckling pigs, their skin brown and crispy, and set them down on a long table that had been covered in a red cloth. Then out came more platters of food, followed by the crowning touch, a three-foot-high chocolate-éclair cake drenched with a honey glaze and topped with the number 15. The guy who was throwing the party was named López, and he handed Cesar a list of songs he wanted the band to play, numbers like “Quiéreme Mucho,” “Andalucía,” and the song of his courtship of his wife, “Siempre en Mi Corazón.”

And he added, “And can you play a little of that rock-’n’-roll for the nenes?”

“Seguro.”

“And one more thing, that song you sang on television?”

“‘Beautiful María of My Soul’?”

“Yes, that one.”

In came Mr. Lopez’s daughter, wearing a five-layer silk dress with an old-fashioned hoop skirt and tottering on high heels, a procession of her girlfriends and aunts behind her. She carried a large bouquet of flowers, wore a crown on her head, and exuded, as she turned to look at the crowd, a blue nobility that was both haughty and grateful.

In green wrap-around sunglasses, Nestor stepped up to the microphone and, with head tilted back, raised his trumpet and began to play — for the last time in his life — the haunting melody of “Beautiful María.” Then, beside him, the fabulous Cesar Castillo pulled from his pocket a frilly perfume-scented handkerchief, and this he passed over his dampened brow. Eyes shut, Cesar waited for his pianist, Miguel Montoya, to finish his tremolo-pedal-choked introduction, and with his arms spread wide before him, face noble and grinning like a horse, he began to sing.

With that, Mr. López took hold of his daughter’s slender, white-gloved hand and led her out to the middle of the dance floor. Elegantly, he swung her in circles, eyes proud, a big smile on his face. The crowd applauded and converged upon father and daughter. Then everyone danced.

During the break, Nestor went off to lean up against a corner to watch the children attacking a piñata, fat with caramelos, toys, and coins; one by one, the children whacked the piñata with a stick, the hitting sounds taking him back to when he was a kid (and he would hear beatings in the other room, his older brother, Cesar, huddled in a corner, his arms held over him, to fend off their Papi). But these blindfolded children were happy, and a strong boy smashed open the piñata, and the children swarmed over the prizes. Eating noises, elderly voices lecturing the young, champagne bottles popping, and on the stage, different acts: a juggler from the local Knights of Columbus, cigarette smoke tearing into his eyes, spinning three torches into a pinwheel of light. Then there were the two little girls in their Shirley Temple hairdos and little red bows, tap-dancing across the stage. Then a comedian in a big red wig and bulbous fake nose presided over a raffle. The prizes were a box of Havana Partagas & Co. cigars, a case of pink champagne, a two-pound box of Schrafft’s chocolates, and many smaller prizes, enough for just about everyone to come away with something: ballpoint pens, compact kits, small purses, cigarette cases each stamped with “Congratulations, Carmencita López, Feb. 17, 1957.”

Miss Vanna Vane won a little seashell compact kit with a pop-up mirror, which she brought back to the table to show her man, Cesar. The Mambo King was drinking that night. Lately he had been that way at some jobs, just belting down a few glasses of booze every so often, when he could get to the bar or would join people at one of the tables. With his arm wrapped around Vanna Vane’s waist, he kissed her behind the ear and then took hold of her chair and pulled it close to him so that he could feel her warm thigh through her slitted skirt against his leg and the slightest pulse there. The pulse in its silent way saying, “Cesar, we’re going to have fun, and I’m going to show you how much I love you.”

She was a nice and affectionate woman, a great dancer who never gave Cesar a hard time except when it came to her looks. She had little complaints about what going out with him was doing to her figure. Cesar was always taking her to restaurants and parties and she’d end up eating all kinds of fattening things. She could tear through a platter of chicken and rice, another of crispy tostones, and follow up with a few bottles of beer, and yet the next day she would spend hours before a mirror sucking in her belly and later squeezed herself into a Maidenform girdle. That she’d get depressed about it astounded Cesar, who enjoyed her maturing plumpness and the way her body quivered. (He winces, remembering how, when she climbed on top of him, she would like him to squeeze her nalgitas really tight, each squeeze timed to when she’d taken all of him inside: and then she’d grind her hips and everything would feel creamy. Wince again: she’d spray atomizer perfume on her neck, cleavage, and in the damp center of her Lily of Paris panties. In the room in the Hotel Splendour, she performed private stripteases for him and wrapped his member up in her nylons and capped it with her panties. Wince again.)

Vanna sat between the brothers and then she jumped because she felt Cesar’s hand settling on her lap. She wriggled, but he left it there. Then, without saying a word or looking at her, he started rubbing her thigh. She wriggled some more, took another sip of her drink, and smiled again. Finally she whispered to Cesar, “Please, there are people here. Your brother’s right here.”

He sipped his drink and shrugged.

Nestor was sitting pensively watching people on the dance floor, the chaos of the tables, daydreaming. He’d been in a bad mood since earlier in the evening; it was as if he knew. While he was onstage and playing the solo to “Beautiful María,” a bad sensation had started in his kneecap and risen slowly, rib by rib, through his chest and neck before settling in his thoughts. It was the simple feeling that his desires somehow contradicted his purpose in his life, to write sad boleros, to lie sick in bed, to mourn long-past loves, to crave what he could never have.

Later in the evening, when their work was done, the musicians attended to the tedious business of packing up their instruments and waiting for their pay. Then they collected bags of leftover food and pastries. And Nestor stuffed his pockets to overflowing with caramelos and chewing gum, marbles and small toys. Cesar took a bottle of rum with him and collected Vanna and made his way out to his car.

“Brother,” he said to Nestor, “you drive.”

Nestor had taken his last piss, eaten his supper, played his last trumpet line. He had scratched his itchy nose, winced at an off-key note, taken his last swallow of rum and, unwrapping one of the cellophane candies, had tasted his last sweet. In the men’s room of the club, he had washed his face with cold water; he had inadvertently looked down Vanna Vane’s cleavage while reaching across the table to get a light from a candle. He had felt like calling Delores but changed his mind. While thinking about the principles of positive thinking, he had noticed a stain on the left lapel of his suit jacket. Before the mirror and looking himself over, he had imagined that his insides were filled with a thick dark fluid like octopus ink. He had felt himself lifting off the ground while leaning back during his trumpet solo, felt himself passing through a wall. While pissing, he had ached, thinking about Beautiful María naked in bed, ached with a lack of understanding about things.

He had almost swatted a fly but decided against it, the poor thing was half dead and clinging to the corner of the bathroom mirror, and had watched some machos arm-wrestling at a back table. He had examined the intricacies of a dime. He had blown his nose. Sweating because it was so hot in that club, and wanting to feel the cool night air on his face, he had opened the back door and looked up into the sky, which seemed to be hanging low to the earth, and identified a constellation, Cygnus. He had watched the snow falling behind the club and had noticed the way the snow collected on the lower branches of the tree and then fell softly off. He had wondered what it would be like to go walking off into an eternal distance. He had thought of the past as going on forever. He had wondered if there were angels, as his mother used to say there were. Remembering how she’d point up to the Milky Way and say, “Look at all the people there,” he daydreamed about a heaven dense with souls. He had been aware of the crucifix hanging around his neck and remembered the day his mother gave it to him. He was twelve years old and kneeling, trembling, at the altar railing to receive the Eucharist. And that night, years later, he had felt a slight pain behind his left ear. He had wished he had bought a spicy girlie magazine off the newsstand on 124th Street a few days before. He had remembered promising to take Eugenio and Leticia to the museum again to look at the dinosaur bones. He had remembered pressing up against Delores in the kitchen as she cooked over the stove. She was reading a book with cowboys on the cover. He had started to get an erection, three-quarters of the way up, and she had started to push herself into him from behind. Then the children came in, and his brother after them. And the steam pipes rattled and it sounded like people were trapped inside the pipes, rapping at them with knives and spoons. He had wondered about Jesus Christ, when He was up on the Cross, had wondered if Jesus, who could see everything in the world, past, present, and future, could see him walking across the club floor. He had remembered how much he loved to think about Jesus fishing in the Sea of Galilee. He had remembered to buy his sister-in-law, Ana María, twenty pounds of center-cut lamb chops from the meat-packing plant at a special bargain price. He had remembered the taste of his wife’s nipple. He had decided to lose a few pounds because his stomach was getting fat. He had thought about a melody he had been fooling around with. He had dreamed about undoing things, not his children, or his wife’s happiness, but of somehow going to Cuba again and into the arms of María. He had remembered thinking, Why do all these pains swirl around inside of me, when will all these pains end?

Then the part that for the Mambo King or anyone else was hard to imagine. Seated in the back of the DeSoto, Cesar Castillo was fooling around with Vanna Vane: they were both drunk enough that he kept sliding his hand up into the warm upper reaches of her skirt, to where the nylons hit the garters, and she was pure pleasure, kissing him affectionately and laughing, the two of them sipping their rum while Nestor, in the front seat, kept his eye on the road and tried not to be thrown by the icy curves or by the lovely snow which had continued to fall everywhere. Vanna was sliding her hand along the inside of Cesar’s thigh, and he pressed his face against hers, telling her all the dirty things they would do once they got back to Manhattan. The backseat was thick with perfume and cigarette smoke, noisy with kisses and laughter, and they were so wrapped up in each other that they sometimes forgot Nestor was driving. He became an anonymous driver for them, as they got lost in each other; he was the man in the overcoat, black-brimmed hat, and scarf, with a trumpet case beside him on the front seat and a box of percussion instruments on the floor.

Nestor had been quiet for a long time, paying more attention to the road than to the kissing behind him, when he thought to ask, “Would you like me to turn up the heat?” But then, just like that, the car began swerving and slid over a patch of ice and he panicked, hitting the brakes and jerking the wheels so that the DeSoto flew into a dense wood and crashed into the trunk of a massive oak. There was a boom and then a loud yawning sound, like a ship’s mainmast cracking, and the sturdy V-8 turbo-thrust engine tore loose from its bolts and slammed the steering wheel into Nestor’s chest.

And that was all. He passed out behind the wheel, letting out a deep sigh. He closed his eyes and felt someone pouring hot oil onto him and he had to ask himself why were his insides filled with wetness: wet palm fronds, rotting flowers, stems mashed and bloody; wet sheet music, wet toilet paper, wet condoms, wet pages from a Bible, wet pages of a television script, wet pages of D. D. Vanderbilt’s Forward America! The wheel had hit him like a hard punch in the chest, not even a terribly powerful punch, and he had heard the yawning and after the yawning a ringing of faraway bells. Then black-and-white stars floated around on the insides of his eyes, as if he’d just stared into a camera flash, and he opened his eyes and the falling snow had parted like a curtain and he could see the sky as it had looked from the porch of his family’s house in Cuba: there were the constellations of Cygnus the Swan, Hercules, and Capricorn, and countless other stars, more radiant than he had ever remembered, the stars blinking like a child’s happy eyes. And then started to swirl around like dancers in a crowded ballroom. He closed his eyes and felt like crying but could not cry. He tried to speak. “Tell the family they were in my thoughts,” he wanted to say, but then even thinking became more difficult and he started to fall asleep, and though he was trying his best to stay awake, his thoughts became dreamier and darker, and then he daydreamed that someone was stroking his thick, wavy hair, and did not wake.

Thrown off their cloud of romance, Cesar and Vanna passed out for about ten minutes. The others, who had been following behind, came upon the scene. To free Nestor, the men pushed back the seat and carried him into the snow, where they laid him down on a blanket. Steam oozed from his nostrils and lips, steam and smoke and a smell of burning rubber and gasoline. They would say that Nestor opened his eyes and looked up at the sky, smiling sadly. Cesar was revived by a swig of rum and for a moment thought he was waking up on a Sunday morning in the Hotel Splendour with a terrible hangover. But Vanna Vane was weeping, and there were some of the Mambo Kings with flashlights, then policemen and strangers and sirens in the distance. Kneeling down by Nestor, the Mambo King surprised himself by making the sign of the cross over him. He remained there for a long time, touching Nestor’s face and repeating, “Just wait, brother. Just wait.” But nothing else happened — or there was nothing else that the Mambo King cared to remember.

He did remember Nestor rushing up the stairs to the apartment, happy as a small boy, carrying a Santa Claus gift-wrapped guitar as a present for Cesar, something hot he had picked up off the docks. He remembered the man sitting on the edge of the couch and, when he thought no one was looking, burying his face in his hands. He remembered the first time he heard the name María and the first time his brother played the chords to that song when they were living in Cousin Pablo’s house. And somehow he could not separate Nestor’s death from that song. He daydreamed that Nestor had heard him kissing Vanna lasciviously — and the truth was that he’d already started playing this game with her, nudging the opening to her vagina through her panties with his thumb, the man glorified by the moistness gradually accumulating there — and that Nestor couldn’t bear to have so many others living in a world of pleasure while he existed in a world of pain; that, because of that feeling, instead of heading straight on the icy road, he jammed the wheel to the right abruptly, wanting to hit a tree. Then his brother’s words, which he’d never paid much attention to, came back to him, to everybody: “Sometimes I don’t feel long for this world.”

He remembered something else too, the medical man in the hospital where they’d taken Nestor saying, “It wasn’t that bad. Just a little vein near his heart got crushed, just bad luck.”

“Bad luck.”

The worst was breaking the news to Delores. She knew something was going on when Cesar turned up with Manny at nine-thirty the next morning. She had been asleep when she knew: her book, Double Indemnity, fell off the night table at three-thirty in the morning and she could feel a slow sucking mercury passing through her bones, as when she had answered the door to her apartment in the Bronx and learned that her father had died. So what could she do but pace the halls and stand vigil by the window, waiting to hear the news? What could she do but stare at herself in the mirror and wish that things had been better between them?

When Cesar conveyed the news, “There’s been an accident involving Nestor. He’s gone,” she said, “Would you repeat what you just said, cuñado, brother-in-law?”

He did.

Then, calmly and impressively, she said, “I must call my sister, Ana María, and tell her.”

Cesar said he would tell the children. Eugenio and Leticia shared a little room at the end of the hall, and around the time of the crash they had heard some of the boiler-room pipes below twisting and churning as if about to burst or tear loose from the walls. And this was followed by a metallic yawn that caused Eugenio to sit up in bed. They were sleeping late Sunday, waiting for their mother to fetch them for eleven-o’clock High Mass at the church. But that day Cesar pushed open the door, still in an overcoat that smelled of snow. He touched their faces and said, “Your Papi’s gone far away.”

“To where?”

“Just far away.”

And he pointed toward the west. It seemed to be a good direction.

“And will he come back?”

“I don’t know, children.”

He reached into his pocket and brought up some of the hard red and orange candies his brother had gotten for the children from that party in New Jersey. And he gave them some, saying: “Your Papi asked me to give you these candies.

“Now get dressed, some people are going to be coming here.”

Those people were the priest, Father Vincent, from the church, and Bernardito Mandelbaum and Frankie Pérez and Miguel Montoya and Ana María and Manny, and then there were the other Mambo Kings, turning up with their wives and kids or with their girlfriends, or just standing solitarily in the hall, hat in hand, head bent low. The priest sat in the living room, speaking about “grace,” and the children, without knowing why, had to get dressed up in their Sunday best. Still, it was nice with every visitor to their home treating the children with kindness, patting their heads, and giving them money for comic books and candies.

Why, if the atmosphere had not been so unbreathable from grief, it might have been like a real party for the kids!

They decided against a wake but waited two days for the arrival of one of the three brothers from Cuba, Eduardo, who was as thin as a rail and had never flown on an airplane before. New York looked black and gray to him. He’d walk around the apartment at night in a terry-cloth bathrobe, white socks, and thin-soled shoes. He was quite tentative about everything. He seemed confused walking down the street, his senses bombarded by the noise of traffic, construction sites, subways. He was in his forties but seemed older. His hair was streaked with white and he was so soft-spoken that no one could hear half of what he was saying. His face was sun-beaten and he would pass through the household shaking his head, as if to say, “Poor Nestor,” and, “This doesn’t make sense.”

Nestor’s death and funeral lingered in memory, like clouds of pain. No one wanted to remember.

Even in the Hotel Splendour, the Mambo King had to fight the impulse to replay “Twilight in Havana” or “Beautiful María of My Soul,” and to head back into the past, circling around the most painful event of his life, the loss of his brother. Maybe play “Manhattan Mambo” and bring back the early club days, or get down to things again with the Julián García Orchestra.

A detail that was easy and pleasurable to remember? That on the day before his brother’s funeral, he slipped off to the Hotel Splendour for an hour with Vanna Vane. For an hour they pretended that nothing terrible had happened. She wanted to forget and he wanted to forget. So he threw her onto the bed and lay on top of her. They were too fucked-up to even take off their clothes, but he hitched up her skirt, pulled his weeping thing out of his trousers, and jammed it between her legs. They didn’t even really fuck, he just kept rubbing it against her opening, just wanting to think about being alive.

He couldn’t help thinking about the plump-thighed Vanna Vane. She kept imposing herself upon him, the image of Miss Vane pulling her nylons over her thick, shapely legs, Miss Vane snapping her garters. Clean cool bed sheets against his skin rubbing against her skin. Endless kisses and Miss Vane’s big ass up and down over him.

“You know what I like that you do to me sometimes?”

“What?”

“I like it when you bite my breast hard as I’m coming.”

“Okay. And you know what I like? I like it when we’re doing it the regular way and then I’m about to come and I pull out and then you take me in your mouth and then I’m about to come and I pull out and go back inside of you and we keep doing it until I can’t contain myself anymore.”

Eugenio figured it out from the funeral. So many people just kept patting them on the head and giving them quarters. They hadn’t known what “die” was. Until then, only Christ had died on the Cross, but that only meant that he flew up into paradise and returned to the earth. The Dominican nuns gave them rosaries, and a lot of the kids of that street, Irish and otherwise, turned up at the funeral, even when they hadn’t always spoken or thought kindly of the family. Ana María told them all about guardian angels who would protect them in the event that they were threatened by the devil. They heard that God in heaven was looking over them. But they never dreamed that their Papi was dead. Leticia supposed that he had gone over the hill to Grant’s Tomb and across the river, westward. What is it that they heard their Papi saying one day, “You see over there, children? You keep going in that direction and you end up in California. That’s where me and your uncle went that time.”

(And in California? Desi Arnaz came pulling up to his home near San Diego. He was driving a car like Cesar’s, a DeSoto. And when he got out, he went walking through a garden whose bougainvillea walls reminded him of the flower-covered walls of Cuba. He lived in a large pink-walled ranch-style house with a tin roof, a garden, a patio, and a swimming pool. He entered the house through the patio, where he would sit drinking coffee and reading his mail. There was a letter from a friend of his, a letter that mentioned the untimely passing of that Cuban songwriter Nestor Castillo. Just happened like that! Remembering the younger brother who’d had a rough time on his show, he felt saddened and tried to think what he could do for the family. His face contorted in the way that a Cuban’s face will contort when he’s reading bad news, his lips turning down and his mouth widening, like a mask of pathos. You know what he wished? He wished he could walk across a room and find Cesar and his brother’s family lined up by a bar and buy them dinner and drinks and reach into his pocket, come up with his wallet, and give the family five or six crisp $100 bills. But what he did was this: he sat down and in a simple script wrote the family of Nestor Castillo a condolence note. It was very direct: “I am saddened by the bad news that has reached me here in California. If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. Your friend always, Desi Arnaz.”)

The church was jammed with musicians. Machito and Puente and Mongo Santamaría had turned up for the funeral. And there were many lesser-known musicians, ordinary men who came in wearing long coats, heads bowed, hats in hand, fellows who’d visited the apartment at one time or another with their wives and girlfriends. There were a few co-workers from the meat-packing plant. Elva and René stuck in the thick of things, and wishing they could run away and dance. Manny the bassist stood by the red church doors greeting the mourners. Miguel Montoya attended the funeral with an old woman, his aunt.

The organ played the “Te Deum.” The altar was covered with white flowers, as was the coffin, its white ceremonial cloth embroidered with chrismata.

The family and their closest friends took up the first few rows in the church. Cesar stood beside Delores and she beside the children. Cesar’s face was red, as if someone had slapped him hard. His hand rested on little Leticia’s shoulder. She was only three years old and had no idea what had happened. Even when it was explained that Papi was away, she expected him to come back in through the door. Squirming in her seat, she kicked her black patent-leather shoes against the pew rail; sucking on her fingers, her hands dripping red from the hard cherry candies that Cesar had given her before the service. Patting the top of Leticia’s head, her uncle kept pointing to the altar, where the miracles took place. And Delores? She seemed to be controlling her feelings, her cheeks sucked in and her mouth tense, so tense you could imagine her teeth shaking at the effort of containment. In her head, a storm of thoughts: she had lost her father young, and now she had lost her husband.

(For a time, other people ceased to exist. Faces were like pale masks floating before her; voices seemed to come out of nowhere. Hands pulled on her hands. Her children seemed like oversized dolls. She would have liked very much to be anyone else in the world, even Nigger Jim in that book she read. She would have the vague memory of being led up and down the steps of the church. Lots of people saying nice things to her, wishing her and the family well. Yes, you fall in love, you give your heart, you long for their kisses, they break your heart and die. They leave you locks of hair and old hats and memories. That’s how men did things. Shower you with affection when they want something from you, and then vanish just like that. Men! Qué cabrones! Her father collapsing on a stairway, Nestor disappearing into the night with his black instrument case in hand. It hit her: I was in love, for all our differences. Oh, hold me, hold me, God, hold me.)

Ana María stood beside Delores. Then there was Eduardo, up from Cuba. He kept touching the bridge of his nose and squinting as if he had a terrible headache. Cousin Pablo, nervous behind the family, with his wife and children. Then there were others, Frankie, Pito, and in the back of the church, among all the Irish, Vanna Vane sobbing.

There were wreaths and bouquets of flowers from Maurio Bauza, “Killer” Joe Piro, “Symphony” Sid Torrin, and others.

“To the Castillo family with deepest condolences, Carlos Ricci and the management of the Imperial Ballroom.”

“With sincerest regrets, Tito Rodríguez.”

“We feel in your hour of sadness… Vicentico Valdez.”

“May God bless and strengthen you in your time of sorrow… The Fajardo family.”

Benny the baby photographer had turned up with his fiancée, with whom he was deeply in love. He was a short, pleasant-looking man, with a close-cut head of smooth black hair, the kind of head babies and children love to rub. He had been happy because he was in love, laughing and writing love poems to his girl. But now his friend was dead and it seemed so tragic, because Nestor was only thirty-one years old.

The sermon was given by Father Vincent, a tall, balding Irishman. During his sermon he spoke about the fate of men: “… Those of us who understand the tragedy of human souls who live only for the physical world also know about the splendor that awaits us. Here was a man who gave of himself to all. He was someone who came to us from Cuba and now he has gone on to a more glorious ancient kingdom, the kingdom of everlasting light, brilliant with the love of God who is everywhere in His infinite universe. God who is everywhere because He is the universe.”

“Nestor,” someone cried.

Over the altar there was a triptych which seemed to have a life of its own, “The Story of Man.” Naked Adam in a beautiful garden, head hung low in shame, naked Eve behind him. Birds fluttered all around and the trees that receded into the narrow, olive distances were thick with fruit. Around an apple tree coiled the serpent of temptation, forked tongue oozing from his mouth and happy because he’d gotten them to sin. Adam and Eve were passing through a gate and entering a wood of dark trees. A golden-haired angel after them, brandishing a sword. Sadness and despair, Adam’s expression saying, “We’ll never reenter that happiness.” And, next to this scene, a cave-tomb. A large boulder had been moved away from the entrance, before which two Roman soldiers, swords and spears by their side, lay writhing on the ground in fear, muscular arms and hands covering their faces. In the foreground, the crucified man, Jesus, in a white robe, hands held aloft for the world to see that it was he who had been dead and returned. The wounds in his hands and feet are deep red and shaped like eyes; his face is calm. (And the children can’t help wishing that they could see what was inside that cave or over the rolling hills toward which Jesus walks.) And in the third panel, Christ risen, and sitting on a throne, the glowing dove of the Holy Spirit over his head, and Jesus judging all men: throngs of angels and penitent men and the saints huddled on cypress-tree clouds — was that where Papi went?

“Nestor.”

The pallbearers carried the coffin out. It was the first time that anyone in the family had ridden in a limousine. There was something vaguely thrilling about that trip out to Flushing, Queens. There were more words over the grave, and with the grayness of the city looming in the distance and flowers being tossed into the grave, the children felt like playing games of tag among the tombs.

SITTING IN THE HOTEL SPLENDOUR, the Mambo King winced because he could not get those thoughts of his brother’s death out of his head. Somehow he had wandered from those happy images of quivering female thighs and was now trying to return to them. He sipped whiskey, looked over the funny cover of “Mambo Inferno” with its cartoon depiction of male and female devils on the tiered ledges of hell, everybody dressed in red and with horns and tails. Flames leaping upward! He took the record out of its sleeve and put it on the spindle. He was racked with pain: not an hour had passed in the last twenty-three years when he did not think about “poor Nestor.” That was the end, he supposed, of his “happy, carefree life.”

“Nestor.”

“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.”

He wondered what time it was and then realized, while trying to look at his watch, that he was really drunk, because the numbers floated around the clock face, as if they were children riding on the hand. He had another drink anyway. He made his way to the toilet again to urinate, leaning his weight on one hand against the wall and watching his big thing and the flow of urine, curious as to just when it might turn pink with blood.

He remembered when he used to masturbate five, six times a day, a long long long time ago.

He remembered those parties they used to have back in the happy days, the tug of the past so powerful. In the living room: tables abundant with food, red-bulbed lamps, piles of records, lines of suave, unruly, boisterous, polite, bashful, arrogant, tranquil, and violent young men spilling out of their apartment and down the stairs past the cooked-cabbage smells of the hallway and into the street, where fights sometimes broke out; while beautiful women turned up in packs with their scents of perfume and sweat in that apartment, the loud record player heard for blocks, the lady downstairs terrified that the sagging floors would fall in, the Irish cops requesting with some hesitation that they turn things down and stop stomping on the floor, and in the early morning the last of the partyers leaving, singing and talking loudly as they made their way down the street.

The record started playing, lilting horn lines and frantic drums in his room in the Hotel Splendour.

In the name of the mambo, the rumba, and the cha-cha-cha.

Now he was going through his dead brother’s effects, his nephew Eugenio sitting on a chair watching him. Over the last month they’d given away all Nestor’s size-ten shoes, his hats and clothing, some nice stuff, too, which they’d left out in boxes in the living room of the apartment on La Salle Street. Lots of people turned up and Cesar, taking care of things in those days, was very matter-of-fact about the giving away of those items. He sat back in an easy chair, chain-smoking cigarettes and saying, “All that stuff is first class, we were never cheap about clothing.” He managed to keep a few items for himself: a few of his brother’s jackets, which he took to the shattered-looking Jewish tailor on 109th Street, who let them out around the middle. Bernardito Mandelbaum got Nestor’s white silk suit, the one he wore on television. Frankie kept his cream-colored jacket. Eugenio would regard the piles of clothing and feel a strong desire to throw himself on them, to swim through the heaps on the floor and glory in the lingering smells of cologne and tobacco that he identified with his father. For a time, Eugenio played a game: sitting out on the stoop, and trying to identify his father’s shoes or some other item of clothing worn by the male passersby.

Cesar also kept his brother’s trumpet and the sheets of paper on which he had written down his lyrics and chords, kept the crucifix and chain that their mother had given Nestor for his First Communion.

Then there was that book, Forward America! That was something else the Mambo King had found in Nestor’s jacket pocket.

And at that time Eugenio took to napping side by side with his uncle, the two holding each other tight, day in and day out for months. Whenever footsteps sounded in the hallway, like the tap, tap, tap of Cuban heels on the floor, Eugenio almost expected to hear the door opening and then Nestor’s clear whistle, the melody “Beautiful María.”

The sad business of memory came over Cesar in waves like the initial symptoms of a bad winter influenza, and this led to a plague of melancholia that was blood-red and spread quickly through his psyche. It brought on a paralysis of ambition and feelings of self-contempt, so that he took to spending many of his days in the apartment. This fierce melancholia exerted for a time a hallucinogenic influence. Many an afternoon, while standing by the window, he would hear the El shaking with the arrival of a train and then he’d happily watch the people flooding out of the kiosked stairway. Near that corner was the narrow, gloomy doorway of Mulligan’s Bar and Grill and then a stretch of wall against which the kids on the street played “Chinese.” Then kids on the street playing “Three Steps to Germany,” kids playing “Cow in the Meadow.” One day he looked out the window and saw a slick-looking character leaning against that wall. He was wearing a black-brimmed cane hat and a long coat. There was a black instrument case by his side.

“I’m going to get some cigarettes,” he said. Then he put on his coat and headed down the street toward the slick man, who made his way to the stairway. Cesar rushed up the stairs and managed to get on the downtown train just as the doors were closing. Then he moved methodically from car to car looking for the man with the black-brimmed straw hat and black instrument case. He never found him. Once the Mambo King rode the train down to 59th Street, where three different lines, running to the boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, converged, and he saw this same man standing against another wall, beside a magazine stand. He blinked and the man was gone. The same thing happened again, except this time Cesar rode the A train into Brooklyn, got off after half an hour, and found himself drinking and ravenous in a bar. He was so worked up, his heart pounding so loud, that he had to calm himself down. But he got so calm that a gang of leather-jacket thugs followed him across this stretch of street, which passed in front of a deserted construction site, and about five of the gang members, who had sailors’ caps on and Marlboro cigarettes rolled up inside the sleeves of their T-shirts, swooped down on him, knocking him to the pavement and giving him a bad beating. It didn’t help that he was wearing his flamingo-pink suit and a pair of cream-colored Cuban-heeled shoes, and not only did they rob him, one of the fellows tried to kick his temples in. (He was saved because someone in the gang felt compassion and pulled his friends away.)

When he woke up, Nestor, or the man or spirit who looked like him, was standing under a lamppost across the street, smoking a cigarette. Cesar held his arm up and cried for help and then blinked his eyes and the man was gone.

Those were days of confusion for him — and for everybody. Something odd was going on with Delorita, too.

She seemed to be taking Nestor’s death in stride, spending her evenings with the children and with Ana María and her novio, this fellow Raulito, who worked for the Merchant Marine union. Ana María was staying in the apartment then. At night, the two sisters slept together, the way they had as children, in flannel nightgowns, with their arms wrapped around each other. And if Delores could not sleep, she read her books. Neighbors who knew about her literary bent of mind rained books down on her, and a pile of them were stacked beside her bed. She was happiest when she’d walk down toward the university bookstore, where she would forage through their bins and used-book racks, coming home with shopping bags of novels. And there were also the books she’d acquire at the church bazaars. She liked to spend two or three hours a day with these books, propelled forward by a dictionary and the simple desire to possess more knowledge. She made her way slowly through the driest landscapes of biological, agricultural, and historical prose. Although she read about everything, she still preferred detective novels. She’d fall asleep with a small reading lamp on by her side, one arm hanging off the bed, a paperback or hardcover book in hand. Reading reminded her of the nights when she waited up late for her father or her trumpet-playing husband to come home.

Cesar knew how much she liked books and in his journeys around town he would walk into bookstores and browse for Delores in a way that he never did for himself. He gave her at least two novels at that time, Moby Dick and Gone with the Wind. Inscribed by Cesar “To my lovely sister-in-law, with love and affection, Cesar,” they sat in the bookcase. He bought her other gifts: a pretty fake-pearl-buttoned black dress, a Chinese scarf, a blue velvet hat, a new hand mirror, and, because of a persuasive salesgirl at Macy’s, Coco Chanel perfume from Paris. And he got hold of a nice photograph of Nestor and Delores, posed in the park on a fine spring day, and had that put in a good frame so she could keep it in the bedroom. (Not that they needed more pictures. Their walls were covered with photographs of the band and the two brothers with Cugat, Machito, and Desi Arnaz, alongside pictures of the saints and Jesus with a fiery heart.) While he had become wild and moody in his public life, in their household Cesar behaved in a courteous and almost meek fashion, especially when he was around Delores. There was very little he wouldn’t do for her, he would say.

They would go out shopping together, take the kids to the park together, go to the movies.

Neither Cesar nor Delores knew what was happening. She not only began to look forward to her days spent with Cesar, but she would get all dressed and made up for their excursions. Holed up in the apartment together on a rainy afternoon, they would pass each other in the halls and their skin would give off a faint scent of cinnamon and cooked pork. There were times when he would find himself in the kitchen standing behind Delores and he would want to put his arms around her waist, pull her close, move his hands over her body, and touch her breasts. Brooding, he would sit there daydreaming about when his brother was alive. He remembered the time when he looked across the courtyard into his brother’s window and saw Delores standing naked in front of the mirror, her body bursting with youth and loveliness. It didn’t help that she had become careless about the way she dressed and would spend her days in a pink terry-cloth robe, without a stitch of clothing underneath. It didn’t help that he would walk into the bathroom and find her frilly undergarments hanging off the shower hoop, dainty brassieres, panties, and nylons. It didn’t help Cesar that her body quivered when she walked across the room or that he would stare at her, tortured, when she leaned over the table to wipe away a stain and he could glimpse the plumpness of her breasts. Nor that he walked by the bathroom one day when the door was open a crack and saw her standing naked, dripping wet, just after a bath. He dreamed about her. He would be resting in bed, pressed up against the mattress, his body wrapped in the sheets, and the door would open and Delores would be standing there in her robe. She would open her robe and move naked toward the bed: a thick vegetable-and-meat smell would fill the room and he would find himself kissing Delores and then she would lie down beside him and open herself to him. Her legs spread wide, a shaft of sunlight would come flowing out from her. Then they would make love and his thing would burn up, as if he were jamming the sun. But often the dream ended sadly. He would walk through a dense wood of his desires, thinking “Delores” and then “Nestor.” That connection always startled him and he would wake up feeling ashamed.

Taking the situation badly, he would sit in the living room, hands folded on his lap, remembering that Nestor was gone, killed while driving his own fancy DeSoto, and the doctor saying, “Just a little vein near his heart.” His legs would go hollow, as if they’d suddenly been drained of their blood and sinew and bone. He’d imagine that his legs were made out of tin piping, and he would feel so weak-kneed he’d have trouble standing up.

He tried to cheer himself by getting the hell out of the house and started to chase women again as never before in his life. Then he fell in with a rougher crowd, a lot of hoods whose violent temperaments struck him as diverting. Night after night he’d make his way around town to the various dance halls and supper clubs in the company of flirtatious dames and stacked floozies, women who might have stepped out of the record cover for “Mambo Inferno”; long-nailed, big-rumped, these women had wicked expressions, immense mouths, teeth streaked with lipstick, hair puffing upwards like flame, and eyes in dark teardrops of mascara. He lived for that life of fleshly distraction. Whereas women used to go for him because he was a good-looking, brash pretty-boy singer, they now found themselves with a more maudlin master of seduction. The agony in his expression, his heavy-lidded eyes, his sad demeanor, and the story of his grief brought out the charitable side in women, so that practically every night Cesar found himself necking in alleyways, in apartment foyers, in the back rows of movie houses. At first, in the name of making Delores jealous, he brought a few of these women to the apartment, but he stopped because he sometimes heard Delores weeping at night and thought she was doing so because his behavior was disrespectful.

So for a time his life was a rainfall of frilly panties, bursting girdles, camisoles, slips, brassieres, gartered nylons, thick condoms, baking soda and Coca-Cola douches, curly blond, red, and black pubic hair. He enjoyed the company of pear-bottomed, sweaty-thighed Negresses with silken interiors, powerful mulatas whose legs lifted him up off the bed. He banged Italian beauties who danced in the chorus at the Mambo Nine Club and spinsters whom he met on the dance floor between sets at the Catskill resort hotels where the Mambo Kings sometimes played on the weekends. He made it with cigarette and hatcheck girls, hostesses and twenty-five-cents-a-dance girls from the ballrooms of 43rd and Eighth. He made it with three of the musicians who played with Tiny Tina Maracas and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra, among them a Lithuanian trombone player named Gertie, whom he made love to against a wall of flour sacks in the storage room of the Pan-American Club in the Bronx.

His lovemaking, which was never a delicate operation, became more blunt and violent. He’d drag Vanna Vane up the stairs of the Hotel Splendour, taking her roughly by the wrists. Usually, by the time he’d opened the door, his thing was already hard. He’d walk behind her, bumping his enraged penis into the dead center of her ass. Then he’d press her up against the wall, sliding his hand into the slit of her silver-sequined skirt, his sensitive musician’s fingers prowling lasciviously over the rough head of her nylons, up onto her thighs, and then under the waistband of her panties and into the tangle of her pubic hair. She was so wiped out by Nestor’s death that she allowed him to do whatever he pleased. They’d get naked: he fucked her in the mouth, between her legs, up her ass. She sometimes wondered if Cesar was crazy, the look he’d get making love to her frightened her, as if not only his penis but also his heart would burst. They must have been crazy, coupled in each other’s arms, it was “I love you, baby,” and “And I love you,” again and again. And he found comfort in it until he’d climb the stairs to the apartment on La Salle Street and realize, once again, that it was Delores and not Vanna Vane he wanted.

(And poor Vanna, she’d put up with the Mambo King for another three years and then marry this nice guy who worked for the post office. In the last days of Cesar Castillo’s life, spent holed up in the Hotel Splendour, she was living with her husband and two sons up in Co-op City in the Bronx. She had put on a few pounds, but she was still pretty. A lot of people used to tell her, “You look like Shelley Winters.” She would be the first to tell you that she was happy now, especially after all those years of being a wild girl, abused by men. But even though she would say that, Miss Vane, now Mrs. Friedman, would remember those chaotic and dense nights with affection, wondering, like so many others, what ever happened to Mambo King Cesar Castillo.)

But when he found no release from his pain through women, Cesar started to drink too much. Inside the Palladium, he was the man reeling by the horseshoe bar, the man unable to clearly recognize the faces of the people who came to greet him. Marlon Brando stood next to him for five minutes at the bar, and the Mambo King did not recognize the famous movie actor. He mistook people. A musician named Johnny Bing, who had a thick head of wavy black hair, came over, and Cesar thought he was Desi Arnaz. “If you knew what the family’s been through, Desi,” and he reeled backwards and then forwards, laughing, so ecstatic was his pain.

Next thing he knew, he would be dragging himself up the stairs to the apartment. When he’d finally reach the landing, the tile floor would be spinning around like a 78 rpm record. Then he’d try to put the key into the lock, but the keyhole kept fading in and out and doubling up like a mirage. When he finally got the key by the hole, it wouldn’t go in, bending all up, like a drunkard’s flaccid penis. Finally he’d have to ring the bell and Delores would come to the door and help him to his bed, a wall-crashing struggle down the hall which always woke and frightened the children.

His continuing grief was a monument to gallego melancholy. He would struggle down the hall, a heavy weight on his shoulders, as if he were carrying on his back the weight of a dead man. He didn’t understand, he longed for the days when he just did as he pleased. These things will pass, he told himself. He fell asleep and found himself waking in the meat-packing plant, among the hanging, white-fatted sides of beef, moving a startled and frightened Nestor out of that cold place and toward the door where there was sun. He dreamed of examining the U.S. Govt, stamp of approval and within the circle read, “You can love a woman so much it sometimes breaks your heart.”

He fell in and out of these drunken sleeps longing for Delores. Laughing at himself. He felt he was paying for his brother’s death. He wanted to suffer, he pushed people away from him. He was confused: how could he have known that he was trying to keep his brother alive by becoming like him?

When they had held something of a memorial dance in Nestor’s honor down at the Imperial Ballroom, which raised fifteen hundred dollars to help with the funeral expenses, Delores turned up looking like a young Hollywood voluptuary. She had borrowed a sexy black dress from Ana María and came in tottering on three-inch stiletto-thin heels. The men parted before her as if she were the Queen of Sheba. (It was a nice benefit, too. Everything fell into place, notice of the event going out in handbills and ads in La Prensa, the Daily News, and the Brooklyn Herald. The dance was emceed by the disc jockey “Symphony” Sid, and the orchestra consisted of some of the best musicians in the city, Maurio Bauza, Mongo Santamaría, and Vicentico Valdez being the most prominent. The ladies, many of them musicians’ wives, brought food — pots of arroz con pollo, black-bean soup, and suckling pig — and they made a vat of sangria, another of the Mambo Kings’ favorites. And there were kegs of beer from the local Rheingold brewery. A big crowd paid $1.04 each to get in the door, and money baskets were passed around.) Followed by her children and Ana María, Delores sat near the stage, surrounded by flowers, her expression pouty and sullen, like a spoiled movie actress.

At her table she met and greeted family friends. She sat fanning herself and taking an occasional bite from the good food that would appear before her on the table. Well-behaved Eugenio and Leticia were fairly stoic about the whole thing. Leticia was pretty in a pink dress and with a bow in her hair. She watched the bandstand happily and waited for her Papi to appear on the stage. Cesar performed that night. As the orchestra plucked, banged, and blew on their instruments and Cesar stepped to the microphone to sing a bolero, his eyes would settle longingly on Delores.

That night there was one man to whom Delores paid special attention. Not the Emperor of the Mambo, Pérez Prado, who bowed before Delores and paid his respects, nor Ray Barretto, who sat Leticia on his lap and gave the kids a dollar to buy candies. No, she paid special attention to a bookkeeper by the name of Pedro Ponce. He was a baldheaded, stern-faced fellow of about forty with a toothbrush-bristle mustache. He wore a checkered jacket, a lace bow tie, and suspenders that hoisted his oversized brown trousers halfway up his chest. His sole item of fashionable attire was a pair of tan-and-cream-colored shoes. Pedro lived over on 122nd Street and used to give the brothers advice about keeping books and paying taxes. They had known Pedro from “just around,” as he sometimes went to have his cup of double espresso in the same little Cuban joint where the brothers went for their coffee. The night of the benefit he approached Delores at the table, hat in hand and heart brimming with respect. The fact that he stuttered when he spoke and that he averted his eyes, staring over her shoulder and up the stage, touched her. She thought, “Now here is a man who would never give me trouble.”

“I share in your pain,” he said to her. “It’s a dreadful thing that has happened to you. My heart and sympathy go out to you.”

And he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope containing two twenty-dollar bills.

“A small amount… to help,” he said.

“Que Dios te bendiga,” Delores replied. “May God bless you.”

That night Cesar had it really bad for Delores. When they returned home and the children were put to bed, he asked her to make a cup of coffee for him, and while she was standing at the stove he surprised himself, stepping up behind her and putting his arms around her waist.

“Delores… Delores.”

Naturally, she turned around and pushed him away, repeating, “Déjame tranquila! Leave me alone.”

“I’m sorry, Delores. I’m drunk, can’t you see?”

“Yes. Now go to sleep.”

She helped him into his room. He sat on the edge of the bed and, rubbing his eyes, said, “That baldy fellow likes you, huh?”

She helped him off with his shoes and pulled off his socks.

“Delorita… I want to ask you something.” It took him a long time to get that sentence out.

“Tell me,” and she tried to lift his legs up off the floor and onto the bed. Right then she wished she had the strength of a man. “Lean back,” and with a great heave she got his legs up.

“Just one question, I only want to ask you one little question, sister. Do you hate me?”

“No, hombre, I don’t.”

“Then what is it that you feel for me, sister?”

“I feel sorry for you sometimes, hombre. I worry about you. Why don’t you go to sleep.”

“But do you see how I feel for you?”

“Yes, I can see it, but it doesn’t make sense. Now go to sleep.”

“A lot of women have liked me, Delorita. I’ve satisfied them all.”

“Go to sleep.”

He had curled up and she put the covers over him and then he put his hand around her waist again and said, “Just stay like this with me for a little longer, just show me a little love.”

Then he started to touch her all over, fondling her breasts, and she told him, “No, hombre, now let me go!” And when he wouldn’t let go, she slapped his face as hard as she could, and was on the verge of getting the broom when his eyes suddenly popped open, in a moment of pure soberness.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he repeated. Shaking his hands in the air as if everything had been a terrible mistake.

“Okay?”

I was so jodido in those days, the Mambo King thought in the Hotel Splendour. I was so fucked up with sadness that I may have crossed the boundary of good manners, but if I did, that was because I wanted so badly to give to her all that God had chosen to take away.

There was something else. He lost his feeling for music and his soul withered. He wrote no songs, picked up neither guitar nor trumpet. And while the Mambo Kings continued to get work, his heart wasn’t in it. The band’s morale was low: it wasn’t a question of finding a replacement trumpet player — there were a hundred trumpet players who could have played the same lines and solos — but his brother’s absence just took Cesar’s spirit out of everything. He tried hard to be a professional about it, but his performances were so withdrawn and tentative, no one would have guessed he was the same aggressive king cock strutting singer of just a few months before. He suddenly had the look of a man who had not slept in a long, long time. On top of that, he really started to drink, just so he could get up onstage. And that started to show: he’d flub his lyrics and screw up his solos. Sometimes, while trying to dance, he’d fly backwards, as if someone had tipped the stage. He sang entire songs with his eyes shut, repeated the same lines, forgot about turnarounds, and stopped giving and taking cues.

He would think about his brother, dead in the ground, and say, “If I could change places with you, bro’, I would.”

Audiences noticed this change and word started to get around that Cesar Castillo was getting a little fucked up.

Despite this, some nights he’d have a big horse grin, sing and play the trumpet, and even loosened up enough to joke around with the audience. Those were his reefer nights. But they didn’t last long. Once, in the middle of performing at the Imperial Ballroom, Cesar forgot where he was and wandered off the stage in the middle of a song, with a startled expression, as if he had seen something in the wings.

The worst was that Cesar started to become foul-mooded around others. The Mambo Kings Orchestra went through two replacement trumpet players, who quit because Cesar would deride their talent, making faces at their solos and stopping songs before they were done, shouting insults at them. Then he started picking fights with strangers. Some poor guy had the misfortune of bumping into Cesar while walking out of the men’s room at the Park Palace, and that was it: Cesar was on the man, pounding the shit out of him on the floor. It took four men to calm him down. That kind of thing happened again and again in clubs around the city where the Mambo Kings were playing.

“I was lost,” Cesar thought as he sat in the Hotel Splendour. “I was fucked up and didn’t know what to do with myself.”

His behavior seriously upset Miguel Montoya. They went out one night and dined at Violeta’s and that’s when Miguel Montoya said, “Look, everybody knows you’re upset about Nestor — we all are, you know that — the fellows in the band think it would be good for you to take a break for a while.”

“You mean, leave the band?”

“For a time.”

“Yes, you’re right, I have been a son of a bitch lately.”

But “for a time” turned out to be forever, because the Mambo King Orchestra would never perform again with Cesar Castillo as their singer and leader.

AFTER LEAVING THE BAND, HE went back to Cuba to visit his family. He had to get out of New York, he told himself. He wasn’t behaving in a correct manner and his enjoyment of life — booze and women and love — was going out the window.

He retraced the journey he’d made with Nestor back to Cuba: he took the train down to Miami Beach for a few days, visiting with musician friends who worked one of the big hotels there. And then, with his heart in his gut, he made his way back to Havana. The big news down there in 1958 was the revolution against the Batista government. On the afternoon when he went over to Calle 20 to visit his daughter, he stopped to brace himself with a few drinks. It was a beautiful calm street, sunny and quiet — the other Havana of his dreams. The revolution, that’s what the men were talking about in that bar.

“This fellow Castro, they say he and his men are being beaten out in Oriente. Do you believe it?”

“Yes, he’s being beaten. You don’t see Batista leaving the country.”

That’s what the official version was on the radio. And the only change he’d noticed at all was that there were more police and military personnel at the airport. And on the way in from the airport he’d noticed two big military vehicles, a tank and a personnel carrier, on the side of the road. But the soldiers were sitting out on the street beside the vehicles, metal helmets by their side, having lunch. (And here he can’t help imposing a conversation he’d had years later with a woman who had worked as a domestic in Batista’s household: “The problem with Batista was that he wasn’t cruel enough and a little lazy. He could’ve had Fidel executed in ’53 but he let the man go. He was lazy and liked to have a good time with high-society people. He was so out of it that when the revolution came he didn’t have the slightest idea what had really happened, sabe?”) Otherwise, things seemed to have been the same all over the city, from what he could see. The men in their guayaberas and linen jackets leaning at the counter. Cesar smoking a cigarette and sipping from his tacita de espreso and his two Tres Medallas brandies, sunlight bursting against the limestone-and-brick walls across the street, beyond the shade of the awning. And he noticed, as he looked over his tacita, a pretty woman in pink slacks.

Cuba was making him feel better already. He’d called up his ex-wife from New York, announcing his intention to visit his daughter, Mariela. Luisa, who had married a schoolteacher, was good about extending him that privilege, and soon he was making his way to the solar where they now lived. He’d purchased a big stuffed rag doll for Mariela and a bunch of flowers, hibiscus and chrysanthemums, for Luisa. As he passed into an inner courtyard, entering a winding wrought-iron stairway through a gate, he ached with regret that he’d fucked up things with his wife. So, standing before her door, he looked like a wrecked and exhausted version of himself. But they were both surprised by how happy they were to see each other. That is, Luisa opened the door, let him into a nice, big, airy apartment, and smiled.

“Mariela’s taking a bath, Cesar,” Luisa told him. “She’ll be out to see you soon.”

And they sat talking by a little table in the kitchen. On the wall, a crucifix and a photograph of Julián García. (Looking at Julián and thinking of his kindness made Cesar go “psssssssh” inside.) Things were well with Luisa. She was newly pregnant. Her husband was running a big school in Havana and they had high hopes when it came to this fellow Fidel Castro.

“Y Mariela?”

“She’s a precocious child, Cesar. Artistic.”

“In what way?”

“She wants to be a ballet dancer. Studies it at the Lyceum.”

A few minutes later, intense and pretty, Mariela came out to greet the father she had not seen in so many years. They went out, as they used to, Cesar taking her around to the different stores and for a nice lunch in one of the harbor restaurants. Thirteen years old, she had kissed him, but kept her head bowed as they’d walk along the streets. She was an awkward, thin girl, with wild eyes, and must have been afraid, the Mambo King thought, that he was finding her plain. That’s why he kept telling her, “Mariela, I’m so proud that you turned out so beautifully.” And: “You have your mother’s pretty eyes.” But she also had some of the family’s sadness and did not have much, or know what, to say to her father, who’d abandoned her. He alluded to this abandonment a few times as they walked along Galiano, a street lined with shops.

“You understand that what happened between me and your mother had nothing to do with you, child… I have always cared for you, haven’t I, child? Written you letters and sent you things. Yes or no? I just don’t like to think that you see me in a bad light, when I’m not that way. Do you see me that way, child?”

“No, Papi.”

His spirit bolstered, he began to speak to her as if he would be back the next day and the next to see her.

“Perhaps next time we can go to the movies?” And: “If you like, we can make a little trip to Oriente one day. Or you can come to see me in New York.”

Then: “But you know, child, now that you’re growing up, maybe I should come back here to Havana. Would you like that?”

And she nodded that she would.

When he took her home later, she was happy. From the doorway he could see a pleasant-looking man sitting in the parlor, a book open on his lap.

“Can I come back to see her tomorrow?”

“No. Tomorrow we’re going away.”

“Then when I come back from Oriente?”

“Yes, if we’re here. But you know she’s not your child anymore, Cesar. She’s the daughter of my husband now, and her name is Mariela Torres.”

The worst telegram he had ever sent in his life, to Las Piñas shortly after the wreck in which his brother was killed, saying: “Nestor has been in accident from which he will never recover,” a message it took him a long time to word, unable as he was to say the blunt truth. He imagined his mother reading and reading those words over and over again. He could have written: “Nestor was driving and I was fucking around with a girl, but I would have been a fool to pass her up, she was so good-looking: my fingers were playing with the buttons of her blouse, my fingertips were touching her breasts, her nipples were taut between them, her hands were touching me, when things got out of control. He was drunk and the car slid off the road, hitting a tree.”

And he imagined it again: a kiss, laughter, the honking of a car horn, the words “Dios mío,” a terrific groan of metal, smell of gasoline, smoke, blood, the mangled heavy chassis of a sporty 1956 DeSoto.

(And behind that? An inkling, since he was close to death himself now, of what his brother felt like. Inside a doorless room and wanting to get out, his brother pounding on the walls, hurtling against them.)

Two of his older brothers, Eduardo, who had come to New York for the funeral, and Miguel, were waiting for him at the Las Piñas station. He embraced them with all the strength in his limbs. They were wearing guayaberas and linen pantalones. The song “Cielito Lindo” was playing out of a radio in the stationmaster’s office. The stationmaster was leaning forward over the ticket counter, reading a newspaper. On the wall, a framed portrait of Batista, President of the Republic of Cuba; an overhead fan.

He’d always planned a triumphant return to Las Piñas. He used to joke with Nestor about how, in emulation of the Hollywood movies, he would drive into Las Piñas in a fancy automobile, laden with nice gifts from the States, pockets filled with money. Regret in his heart that he hadn’t returned to Las Piñas in eleven years, though he had been back to Havana for carnival a few times and to play Mr. High-Life around his friends. And now? He had returned out of guilt: his mother had written him letters saying things like “At night I pray to God that I see you again before I am too old. My arms feel empty without you, my son.”

They made their way to the farm by a dirt road, their carriage taking them along the river. A column of palm trees and houses built out over the water on one side, and dense wood on the other. The trees were thick with black birds and he could not help remembering that day when he was a kid and he and Nestor were away from the farm, walking through the forest, looking for hollow tree trunks that they might make into drums. They were walking in the wood for twenty minutes without hitting light, and then they came to a clearing, where they heard a rustling in the trees. Above them a few birds were flying from the high branches of trees on one side to the high branches of trees on the other. And they were followed by about twenty more birds. Then fifty, then a hundred birds. Then a rustling in the distance, as if a strong wind were blowing through the treetops, but it wasn’t the wind: the treetops were shaking, leaves and fronds shuddering as if they were being whipped, and then the shuddering grew even louder and then clarified: it was a river of black-and blue- and light-brown-winged birds rushing through the forest in migration. As the brothers stood there, the sky over them grew dense with the flight of a million birds fluttering their wings, shooting between the treetops as if storming through the world, so many that they could not see the sunlight anywhere in the forest and the sky turned nearly black for an hour, that’s how long it took those birds to pass.

Remember that, brother?

Then there was the old hut where that lanky black man Pucho, who used to play the guitar and lord over his hens, first gave him music lessons. They passed an abandoned water mill, walls half collapsed, and then the old stone tower from the time of the conquistadores. They passed the road to the Díaz farm, the road to the Hernández farm.

Then they came to their farm. He remembered the approach well. As a young man he used to make the three-mile trip from Las Piñas by mule, a guitar slung over his shoulder, a cane hat pulled down low over his brow. When they turned into the farm road, he saw his mother for the first time in many years. She was on the porch of their simple, tin-roofed house, conversing with Genebria, the woman who’d wet-nursed the Mambo King.

They had about ten acres of land, a pen where the gray pigs played gaily in their swill, a few tired horses, and a long, low hen coop. And beyond it, a field of wild grass ringed by fruit trees.

When he saw his mother, he thought she would say, “Why did you let your brother die? You know he was the light of my world?”

But his mother had much love in her heart for him, and she said, “Oh, my son, I’m so happy you’ve come home.”

Her kisses were tender. She was thin, almost weightless in his arms. She held him for a long time, repeating: “Grandón! Grandón! You’re so grown!”

He was happy to be home. His mother’s affection was so strong that for one brief moment he had an insight into love: pure unity. That’s all she became in those moments, the will to love, the principle of love, the protectiveness of love, the grandeur of love. Because for a few moments he felt released from this pain, which had withered the coil at the bottom of his spine; felt as if his mother was an open field of wildflowers through which he could run, enjoying the sunlight in his face, or like the night sky cut by the planets and the mists of far away—“That veil over the hidden face of Dios,” as she used to say. And as she held him, the only words she had to say: “Oh, son, oh, son of mine.”

(On top of this, the memory of how he felt a few years later, in 1962, when he heard that his mother had died, at the age of sixty-nine. The telegram shot out black threads that flew into his eyes, stinging them like dust motes, so that he, the man who never cried, began to weep. “My mother, the only mother I’ll ever have.”

He kept rereading that telegram as if his concentration would rearrange the meaning of the words. He wept until his body shook and his stomach was in knots, until his desire to repress the sadness drew into his chest and he felt an iron band tightening around his heart.)

“Oh, son, I’m so happy you’ve come home.”

Being around them again brought back a few of his childhood longings, and mostly these had to do with the ladies of the house. In his dreams of youth — and later, when his mother was dead — she would be represented by light. His happiest hours as a boy were spent on the porch or in the back yard, napping with his head on her lap, the sun burning silver-white through the treetops above them. His mother, María, saying, “Pssssssh, niño, come here,” and taking him by the hand into the yard to that tin tub set out on the patio under the immense acacia tree, where she would wash his thick, curly hair: that was when the Mambo King had sweeter ideas about women, when his mother was the morning light. Genebria, whose breast had tasted like cinnamon and salt, would bring the boiled water, and this water, tinged pink and yellow and blue by the sunlight, would drip down over his head and onto his privates, what a pleasure that was, looking up into the attentive and loving eyes of his mother. Now, dirty from his long journey, he went to his old room near the back patio, where he stripped down to a pair of boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and called out to his mother in the kitchen: “Mamá, do me a favor and wash my hair.”

So the old scene was reenacted, with the Mambo King bent over a tub in the yard, eyes squinting with the pleasure of simple affection: not a thing had seemed to change then: his mother, now older, poured the water on his head, scrubbed him with soap, and massaged his scalp with her tender hands.

“Ay, hijo,” she repeated like a horn line, “I’m so happy that you’re home.”

Genebria was there to wipe the water off his head. After all those years apart, the Mambo King couldn’t pass her in the hallway without giving her bottom a little pinch. He’d always had a special fondness for her, thankful for the complimentary way she’d gasped one afternoon many, many years ago. He was at that age when he would fall asleep and dream about the stretching of his bones, when his body was an expansion of flesh and organs, when pleasure hummed in his spine, wrapped around his hips, and burst out through his sex. He was at the age when he wanted to flaunt his newfound virility before the world like a boy dragging a crocodile through a house. He was in the bathtub going about the rubbing and cleaning of his private parts when his thing, ready to burst with redness and milk, came up, bobbing like a bottle of wine in the water. Genebria was cleaning the house, and when he heard her singing, he called to her, “Genebria, can you come here?” And when she did, the future Mambo King stood up and, pulling his thing, said, “Mira! Mira! Look! Look!”

“Stop that, you beast! You little pig!” She gasped and ran back into the house.

Smiling, he held on to it and sank down under the water, his milk oozing out like white octopus ink. Then a silver-edged redness exploded inside his shut eyelids and he had the sensation that the world had abruptly tipped over. He spent many of those days in a dream of pulling, prodding, choking, banging, wetting, and exploding this new instrument. As for Genebria, what was her new nickname for Cesar, that name she’d say with fondness and curiosity?

“Hombrecito,” at first, and then, “El macho.”

Now, when he saw her and said, “Mira, mira!” it was with great sadness.

“Here, Genebria, I’ve brought you some perfume.”

And he gave her a little bottle of Chanel No. 5.

It was perfume and a hat for his mother, and Italian wallets and Ronson lighters for his three brothers. And, yes, a bundle of recordings and some photographs of Nestor and the family.

His mother sat on a rattan rocker on the porch, looking through the bundle of records. The smooth, modern 1950s design of some of the record covers, with flowing musical notes, New York skylines, and sharp cut-out conga drums, made her smile. And the lettering was in English, and on three of the covers Nestor was posed side by side with his older brother.

“Nestor,” she called him. “My son who is in paradise.”

In his room he dressed slowly, knowing that before long he would see his father, Pedro Castillo, again. He heard horses outside, and his father chewing out one of his sons, “I’m not going to pay you for doing nothing,” and in the same indignant tone he’d always used around him.

What was it that the old man used to say? “You want to waste your life in the dance halls? Suit yourself, but when you need money, don’t come back to me. You become a musician and you’ll be a poor man all your life.”

He heard the porch screen door and his father’s boots on the parlor floor. In a moment he would go into the parlor and embrace the man, who wouldn’t give a damn that Cesar, despite their past troubles, was still trying to show him respect and affection.

As he stood before the mirror rubbing a lilac lotion into his thick hair, he heard his father’s voice again. “María, you say he’s back? Well, then, where is he? Has he come back to do some work around here?”

And he shut his eyes, not quite sure just how he would remain calm, because to hear his father’s voice was to invite bodily disaster. Feeling a flutter of restrained violence just below his heart, he dallied by the mirror, telling himself, “Tranquilo, hombre, tranquilo.”

He took a swig of rum and made his way to the parlor to see his father again. He was forty years old.

Sitting in the Hotel Splendour, good and drunk, Cesar had the worst trouble thinking about his father; even remembering his appearance was difficult. He had a picture that he’d always liked, one of those thin, cracked photographs, yellow at the edges, with the back stamped “Oliveres Studios, Calle Madrid no. 20, Holguín.” The only one he had of his father. It was a humorous picture taken around 1926 or so, the man in a bow tie and a linen suit, a big cowboy-looking hat, and a thick, droopy guajiro’s mustache, sad Castillo eyes, stiffened expression — leaning his weight on a cane. And right behind him, a movie poster of Charlie Chaplin from The Gold Rush, Chaplin in the same pose.

“The golden time…” he thought.

He had one beautiful memory of his Papi taking him and his brothers into Las Piñas, where they spent the morning in a café among the men, eating sandwiches and drinking batidas—fruit malteds… Farmers in that café, caged hens by the doorway, and the man chopping up fruit on a counter dripping with juice. That day his father, Don Pedro, had lifted him off the ground and had stood talking with the men in the bar, the future Mambo King in his arms. He was a gaunt man, smelled of tobacco, and when he drank his tacitas of coffee, he’d have to wipe his mustache clean of froth. He had huge knuckles and his cheeks and forehead were burned Indian-red from his countless days in the fields.

But that was the only time it was so beautiful. When he would think about his early childhood, he’d remember cringing like a frightened animal when he was near his father. He would see red and black and silver birds streaking across space in swiftly forming arcs, and his face, his ribs, his back, his legs would sting from beatings with fists and a stick. His older brothers, who were better behaved, got beatings, too — in the name of respect and authority and because their Papi did not know what to do with his anger and foul moods. They grew up into more or less respectful and weary sons, with shattered expressions and broken spirits. While Cesar, in his father’s words, “got worse.” But he never understood why the man beat him. He used to cry out, cringing in a corner, “What have I done to you? Why are you doing this?” He felt like a happy little dog that only wanted a little kindness from that man, but he got beat and beat and beat. It used to make him cry for hours, and then after a while he couldn’t cry anymore. He tried to be happy, playing jokes on his brothers and running through the house, a continuous burst of energy, like his dancing, like his music, from too many slaps in the face. He’d gotten so used to the man beating him into the ground that after a while he seemed to enjoy it, taunting the man and challenging him to beat him again and again. He would roll on the floor laughing because his father sometimes hit him so much that the man’s fists ached. His father would beat him until a strange look would come over Pedro’s face, a look of sadness and futility.

“Son,” he would say, “I only want your love and respect.”

“You know your father came to Cuba without so much as a penny. He never had a father to look after him, the way he looks after you. He’s known only work, hijo, sweat.”

“Your Papi was cheated by fate. He’s too trusting. People have robbed him because he’s always had a good heart. God was not generous. Tomorrow he’ll change. God will pardon him. He’s a worker and a provider. You must be tolerant of him. Forgive your father. He loves you, niño. His heart is made of gold. Never forget that he is your father. Never forget that he is your blood.”

No softness in Pedro’s face, no kindness, no compassion. Pedro was a real man. He worked hard, had his women on the side, showed his strength to his sons. His manliness was such that it permeated the household with a scent of meat, tobacco, and homemade rum. It was thick enough that their mother, María, would fill the house with flowers, which she put in vases everywhere. And eucalyptus in pots to swallow up this scent of manliness that wafted through the rooms in wavy bands like heat off a steaming street.

He didn’t have much money and had never learned how to read or write, signed his name with an X. But he claimed a high standing in the local society of Las Piñas because of his gallego blood and his white Spaniard’s skin, which placed him above the mulattoes and Negroes of town.

The Mambo King remembered a hurricane that drowned many of the horses and cows and pigs, who were found floating in the water the next morning, with bloated bellies and distended tongues. He remembered someone knocking on the door of their house one night, and when his father answered the door, a knife was plunged into his shoulder. He remembered the military men with whom his father dealt in Holguín. Over the years he’d been cheated more than once and considered himself, after all his efforts, a “poor man.”

His Papi was so tense that he suffered from a plague of maladies that had to do with his bad moods, debts, and hard work. He sometimes suffered from a hysterical eczema and prurigo that so dried his skin it became as hard and brittle as parchment. The Mambo King could remember days when Pedro’s body looked as if he’d just finished running naked through a forest of thorn-bushes, all scratched up and covered with sores. On hot days he would become so agitated that the only thing he would wear was a pair of calzoncillos. His father would come in from a stone house at the field’s edge, where he sometimes holed up, racked with the pain of hot salty sweat on those tormented limbs. Without a good word for anyone, he would head out to the tub in the back yard, where he would soak in a bath to which María had added a rose-scented lotion, with an alcohol base, that only made his condition worse. Soaking for hours in the shade of a pomegranate tree, he’d rest his head on the tub’s rim, sip rum, and in agony watch the sky.

Those were the days when his Papi worked in the fields taking care of his animals. Off in the distance, standing in the shade of breadfruit, papaya, and plantain trees, the stone house where he slaughtered livestock. At midday, one of his boys would carry out a pot of food, which he’d angrily devour. Then he would go back to the business at hand: if he had to slaughter a pig, his white linen pantalones, his cotton guayabera, his skin, his nails, his thick campesino’s mustache smelled of blood. The poor animals kicked and sometimes they ran into the field, galloping for a distance before collapsing to the ground.

(And now he cuts through everything else, remembering the day when his Papi came after him with a machete. He couldn’t remember what had started the trouble. Was it one of his indignant looks, his usual lack of respect, or was he sitting out on the porch, strumming his guitar?

All he knew was that his father was chasing him across a wild sugarcane field, the machete raised over his head, shouting, “You come back here.” He ran for his life, ran as fast as he could, down the corridors of sugarcane, his father’s shadow, one hundred feet long, behind him. He was running toward the forest when he heard a terrible scream: his father lay on the ground, clutching his leg.

“Help me, boy!” his father called to him. “Help me!”

Then: “Over here, boy. I’ve jammed my foot on a stake.”

He wanted to help his father, but what if it was a trick? What if he went to his father and the man struck him with the machete? His father called again and again, and slowly the future Mambo King moved closer. Then he moved closer and closer until he could see that his father was telling the truth, saw the bloody stake protruding out of the instep bones of his right foot.

“Pull it up,” he said to Cesar.

When he did, pulling up on the foot with all his strength, his father let out a scream that sent all the birds flying off the treetops.

And when he’d gotten to his feet again, limping, his arms around his son, Cesar thought that things would be different.

Then they were back in the house and his father was stretched out in a chair. He called to Cesar, saying, “Come here.”

As his son leaned close, he slapped Cesar in the face, hard, with the back of his hand.

His father’s face was red, eyes cruel — that’s how he remembered him now.)

But in 1958 the Mambo King was in such pain that he embraced his father. He did love the man. After so many years away from that house, he hardly felt like a son around his father. The man walked with a limp, from the time he’d impaled his foot on a stake in the field, and he surprised the Mambo King by giving him a strong embrace back. Then they sat in the parlor, in silence, as they used to. His mother waited on him, and the Mambo King sat there drinking. Later that night, he tried to comfort his mother, who’d gotten all weepy about Nestor, holding her in his arms.

It had been the records. She had listened to his trumpet playing and remembered her sons when they were boys, remembered when Nestor had been so sickly as a kid, pale with asthma.

“He worshipped you, Cesar,” she told him. “He was always so happy when you did anything for him. Happy to go places with you and to sing and dance and play for the people…”

Then her silence, her tears.

What else could he remember?

Visiting his friends in town and riding horses again. He was the rage in the local bars, talking about New York and inviting everyone he knew to come and visit him. He went to see the first woman he’d ever taken to bed (“This was just to see if you like it. Next time you’ll pay, okay?”). And he walked beyond the cemetery, where his old music teacher, Eusebio Stevenson, a movie-pit house musician, used to live. The man had been dead for a long time. (“Mister! Mister! Can you show me how you do that on the piano?”) He walked among the tombstones and felt exhilarated, talking to the spirits.

Out on the porch those nights in 1958, he sometimes felt that the universe could be peeled away like the skin of an orange, revealing paradise, where his poor brother had gone. The paradise of his mother, his religious mother who believed in all that. Paradise, where the angels and saints and the good souls go, up to the swirling heavens among the luminescent stars and the perfumed clouds… Why, then, did she weep? During the day that question would accompany him to town, where he would visit friends, hang around the street corners. He would make the journey back to the farm along dirt roads on a borrowed mule and with a bottle of rum tucked under his arm. This bottle he would drink at night. He drank rum until God hung low in the heavens like a heavy cloak. He drank rum until the rims of his eyes glowed with a pleasant pinkness, like the wing of a nightingale in a flash of light, and until the trees that ringed the farm breathed in, the way that only drunkards can hear. He drank until it was time to get up, and then he would cheerfully make his way into the house, shaving before a mirror in the room of his youth, and afterwards sitting with the women, enjoying the industry of the kitchen.

It was on one of those mornings that he heard his mother saying to Genebria, “Take this plate of food to my poor drunkard of a son.”

Then the memory of saying his goodbyes: to Miguel and Eduardo, whom he would not see again for nine years; to Pedrocito, and to his father and his mother, none of whom he would ever see again in this life.

Holding his mother, he maintained his macho composure, but whispered, “One thing I want you to know about me, no soy borrachón. I’m not a drunk.”

And his mother nodded, “I know,” but she had a different look in her eye, complacent, stoic, and perhaps convinced that things were destined to go a certain way. But the lingering doubt in her eyes, and his sense that many other things were wrong, too, and that he was at their center, disturbed him.

This disturbance followed him home from Cuba on the Pan Am flight on which he ate American-cheese sandwiches served in wax-paper bags, and on which he flirted with the stewardess, smiling and winking at her each time she came by, followed him off the train in New York and up the steps to the apartment on La Salle Street, followed him when even his beloved nephew, Eugenio, answered the door and wrapped his arms around his leg, followed him even when Leticia, who was pure affection, came charging down the hall, pigtails bobbing, to embrace him and to see the gifts he had bought for her, followed him on his visits to the Hotel Splendour with Vanna Vane, to the side of his brother’s grave, through many things, through many years, and to the very moment when he sipped yet another glass of whiskey that steamy night in the Hotel Splendour, years later, an indelible and thorny line, memory, forever present.

DECIDING THAT HE HAD TO DO something to change his life, Cesar went into the Merchant Marine. His connection was Ana María’s boyfriend, Raúl, who worked for the union.

He worked on a ship for eighteen months and returned in the spring of 1960, looking weather-beaten and sporting a grizzly beard. Around his eyes clustered the swirly deep lines that had formed on those countless nights he spent at the deck railing fighting the queasiness in his stomach and his disappointment over the monotony of his days. He had become nearly bulimic by then. He had a monstrous appetite from his day’s labors as a stoker’s mate, feasting on the ship’s cookery and heaving it over the side by late evening. His illness was enhanced by the huge quantities of Portuguese wine and Spanish brandy that cost the sailors pennies and that the ex-Mambo King guzzled down like water with his meals: it would take a few hours for the acids to wreak havoc with his stomach lining, and then, out on deck to gaze at the stars and to dream, he vomited his suppers into the pretty and phosphorescent Sardinian waters, into the Mediterranean, the Aegean. In Alexandria, Egypt, where he spent three days’ shore leave, he had his picture taken in a Stanley Bay bar, sporting a gleamy-brimmed captain’s hat and sitting on a rattan throne, flanked by a Puerto Rican chum named Ernesto and a cheerful Italian named Ermano, and surrounded by the potted palms that so reminded him of Havana (this, too, in the Hotel Splendour).

His eyes seemed to be filled with a black liquid of sorrow; they were contrite, curious; they said: “I have seen a lot.” The Cesar Castillo who looked wistfully into the camera was gaunt, dark-eyed, and world-weary. Now he seemed to have somehow acquired his dead younger brother’s melancholy. He went to an Egyptian bazaar, where in the midst of a surging crowd he saw the ghost of Nestor looking through a street vendor’s table heaped with onyx bracelets and scarab necklaces.

And in that sweaty brow would also swirl the memory of names of ports-of-call: Marseilles, Cagliari, Lisbon, Barcelona, Genoa, Tangiers, San Juan, Biloxi. (Women, too. He remembered the misty night in Marseilles when he met Antoinette, a delightful woman who loved to suckle his member. Some women didn’t know what to make of it, but she treated his thing like a favorite rag doll. Exhilarated by its elasticity and thickness, she’d rub her big stretchy French lips over its head, as if its seepage were some kind of lotion, until her lips became sheeny with his semen and her nipples, taut as cork, stood out from her breasts and her hot ass left a line of moisture down from his knees to his toes. Viva la France!) He had lost a lot of weight but walked with a bounce in his step. In the duffel bag slung over his shoulder, he’d brought back lots of presents from his journeys: silk scarves, ebony candlesticks, a small Persian rug, a roll of Oriental silk that he had bought for practically nothing from the mate on his tanker, a gift for Ana María, who liked to make dresses. By that time he had been at sea for a year and had not sung a note or touched an instrument.

Music was far behind him, he would tell himself. Walking up the hill, duffel bag over his shoulder, Cesar Castillo was another man. His hands were callused and cut: he had a scar down his right shoulder from a boiler valve that had burst and scalded him, and though he didn’t like to admit it, the strains of the last few years had made him slightly myopic, because now when he read the newspaper or that book by D. D. Vanderbilt he had to squint, the words were so blurry.

The biggest item of news in his absence was that Delorita had married the bookkeeper, Pedro, in a quiet City Hall ceremony; the man was now part of the household. He was not a bad fellow; neither flashy nor particularly friendly, he would install himself on a big easy chair in the living room of the apartment on La Salle Street, feet up on a stool, and occasionally glance up from the newspaper at the television. The only sign of Nestor’s previous life in that household were a few photographs left here and there in the hallway and on the mantel in the living room. Otherwise, the apartment on La Salle Street had adapted to the presence of another man, a non-musician, reliable and steady, whose instruments were not congas, or guitars, or trumpets, but rather, ledger books, rulers, and mechanical pencils. Although he was dull, Pedro was nice to the family. He took Delorita and the kids out every Saturday night to a restaurant or a movie: and sometimes he would rent a car and they would take a Sunday drive. He was a private, snippy man with odd bathroom habits. The john was where he would go in the office for peace and quiet, and it was where he would go in the household when Eugenio, trying to torment him, banged and threw his toys against the wall, shouted, gave him dirty looks, and otherwise tried to disturb his leisurely peace. He was not a bad man, but he was also not Nestor, and this provoked in the children a certain weariness and distrust, which the poor beleaguered man stoically accepted and tried to offset with gentleness and demonstrations of concern.

Cesar came back to all this. No one recognized him on the street. He did not look like the Cesar Castillo who had posed on the cover of “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” nothing like the Alfonso Reyes of the I Love Lucy show. The children were happy to tug on his beard. Eugenio was now nine and had more or less adjusted to the new situation. He had developed something of an introspective, pensive demeanor, not too far removed from his father’s. When he came down the hall and saw his uncle, who smelled of tobacco and the sea, Eugenio’s expression, suspicious and serious, gave way to pure exaltation.

“Nene!” his uncle called out to him, and Eugenio charged down the hall. When Cesar lifted him up, Eugenio’s feelings of emptiness went away.

That night the family and friends from the neighborhood gathered to greet his return. He went into the bathroom, where, with Leticia clinging to his side, he shaved off the great beard, and emerged with his face a bright sunburnish red and all squiggly with deep lines, and his slick mustache restored.

Of course, the family passed the evening hearing about Cesar’s adventures. At nearly forty-two, the man had seen a little bit of the world. He would think about the way he and his brother used to walk down by the docks around Christmastime to buy boxes of Japanese toys, the most exciting items being battery-operated, cable-controlled green-and-white New York City police cars, which they’d pay a quarter apiece for and give out like Santa Clauses to the children they knew on the street and in the building. They’d look at the great steamship lines with their smoking chimneys and the elegant French porters and daydream about something as fanciful as playing the café society of Gay Paree, as his pianist Miguel Montoya called it.

“Salud!” and a worldly nod were his greetings to the household in those days, his nephew, Eugenio, clinging to his side. Emptying his duffel bag, he offered Eugenio some nice presents: an African ivory-handled hunting knife, purchased in Marseilles and attributed to the Yorubas of the Belgian Congo, and a light Italian silk scarf, which Eugenio would wear for years. Then his uncle gave him a crisp twenty-dollar bill. (Eugenio, looking through the bag, found something startling, a French magazine called Le Monde des “Freaks,” with wavy, out-of-focus photographs of pretty, big-rumped women sucking off and fornicating with sailors, circus performers, and farm boys all over Europe.) This, with a wink and an index finger pressed to his lips, and a rap to his nephew’s shoulder.

Eugenio was proud of his uncle, having kept close tabs on his journeys. Eugenio had borrowed an atlas from his pal Alvin so that he could look up the cities and ports named on the postcards which would arrive from time to time. (Nearly twenty years later, Eugenio would find one of those postcards and remember how the messages rarely varied, saying, more or less, “Just to let you know that you are always in my thoughts, and that your Uncle Cesar loves you.”) Eugenio kept those postcards in a plastic bag under his bed, with a few hundred rubber cowboys and Indians and a page from a Life magazine article about the Folies-Bergère of Paris (this showed a row of beautiful French women kicking in a line, their pointy, sparkle-covered breasts provoking a concupiscent interest from him) and his collection of baseball and Christmas cards.

One Christmas card from 1958 was a family portrait of Desi, Lucille, Desi Jr., and Lucie Arnaz, posed in front of a fireplace and a thickly ornamented evergreen tree, prosperity and Christmas cheer glowing all around them. The card for 1959 was more subdued: a wintry scene of a sleigh moving over a countryside — signed, “From the Arnaz family” in bold Roman print. And written under that the words, “With much love and concern, Desi Arnaz.” Cesar always gave the cards to Eugenio, who saved them because Mr. Arnaz was famous: all the kids on the street had made a big deal about his dead father’s appearance with his uncle on that show: this card was further proof of the event. What struck him most and the reason why he showed it around was the word “love.”

That first night back, his uncle drank until four in the morning, and his face was droopy and livid from the rush of blood and thoughts in his head. When his friend Bernardito had asked the ex-Mambo King, “So tell us, Cesar, when are you going to get another orchestra together? Everybody at the Palladium asks for you.” Cesar, red in the face, answered in an angry voice, “I don’t know!”

Then it was “Come on, don’t be that way, Cesar, sing us a little bolero,” to which he answered, “I don’t feel like singing much these days.”

By the time Delores had gone into the kitchen to chase Frankie and Bernardito out because it was already past midnight and Pedro had to go to work the next morning, time had dissolved and the point of existence was to drink down rum and to feel that inward radiance which passed for love.

“Why do you want to chase my pals out of the house?”

“Because it’s getting very late.”

“And who are you, anyway? It was me and Nestor who got this apartment in the first place. It’s my name on the lease!”

“Please, Cesar, be reasonable.”

But then Bernardito and Frankie got up from the kitchen table, where they had been sitting for hours, pouring drinks and patting their old friend on the back, and with their manly talk about women, Cuba, baseball, and friendship. They got up because Delorita was shouting now, “Please go.”

Later that night, Pedro the accountant told Delores, “It’s okay if he stays for a time, but he has to get his own place to live, as soon as he can.”

When his friends left, Cesar slumped at the table as if he had been betrayed. Eugenio, sitting across from his uncle, loyally remained by his side. While Delorita went down the hall, Eugenio listened to his famous, worldly, slumped-over, macho uncle imparting his little observations about life: “Women, boy, will ruin you if you’re not careful. You offer them love, and what do you get in return? Emasculation. Orders. Heartbreak. Now, everyone, I know what they think about me, that I hurt your father in some way. It was the other way, he put me in a bad way with his unhappiness.”

Now and then he would realize to whom he was speaking and stop, but then Eugenio, through the gauze of half-shut eyes, vanished.

“Men should stick together, boy, to avoid suffering. Friendship and a few drinks, that’s good. Friends. You know who was good to me? A good guy? Let me tell you, boy. Machito. Manny. There are others, I can’t remember their names now. Everybody good to me. You know who was a swell guy, a hell of a man, who loved me and your father? Desi Arnaz.”

Then Pedro appeared in the doorway, calmly walked over, and in a quiet voice said to the Mambo King, “Come on, hombre. You’ve had enough, and it’s very late.”

Pedro had taken hold of his elbow. “I’ll go to bed,” Cesar told him, “but not because you threaten me, but because you’re a man and I respect the request of another man.”

“Yes, hombre, I appreciate that. Now let’s go down the hall.”

“I’ll go, but just remember, don’t push me, because I can have a temper.”

“Yes, yes, sleep, and tomorrow everything will be fine.”

In her bedroom, lips pursed tightly, one hand formed into a fist, and rapping at her knee through the pink flannel nightdress, Delorita was waiting, waiting for the ex-Mambo King to sleep.

Pedro was trying to be a nice guy about the whole thing.

And Eugenio? When the bed had been extended out of the sofa, and his uncle was lying down, still dressed, Eugenio went about the business of removing his socks and shoes.

No one wanted Cesar Castillo to suffer, certainly not Eugenio. He looked forward to waking his uncle in the mornings. Would creep down the hall from his room to find the man squirming around in the sheets and speaking to himself in a mangled voice, like a man chewing out the side of his mouth on a great big black puro, or Cuban cigar: “Cuba… Nestor, you wanna meet a really nice broad?… My pinga’s big and hungry, baby… And now, ladies and gentlemen, a little canción that me and my brother here, that pretty boy trumpeter, wrote — take a bow and let the ladies get a good look at your mug, bro’. In the imperious night all the joy in my heart radiates like starlight. Brother, why are you crying out so painfully?… I should’ve married a long time ago and behaved myself, right, bitch? Someone, quick! Put out the fire! Yes, I’m very well acquainted with Mr. Arnaz, you know we’re old pals from Oriente Province,Cuba. You know, if it wasn’t for that fucking revolution down in Cuba now, I would go back.”

Face twisted in his sleep and tormented, as if inside him there was a hell, his uncle filled with caverns and flames and whirls of black smoke. A cool man’s hell, however, just as on the cover of “Mambo Inferno.” Bernardito the artist drew it (and “Welcome to Mamboland,” too). Hell with conga-playing devils and horn-headed women in red leotards, the musicians themselves depicted as black silhouettes perched on ledges in the distance. That hell inside, something painful there so that he moaned, turned in bed, and then abruptly, as if sensing the good intentions of his nephew, eyes popping open…

He fit in with the household but knew that he would soon have to move. He didn’t have much money saved, though from time to time a check could be expected to turn up, royalties mostly from “Beautiful María of My Soul,” which had been published jointly in Nestor and Cesar Castillo’s names. Although musicians came over to the house to see if he wanted to jam or head out to a club, he either agreed and failed to turn up or simply told his friends that he preferred to eat dinner and have a few drinks.

For all his sorrow and confusion, he was fairly social. His little appointment book, in which he used to keep business numbers and club and dance-hall dates, filled with dinner dates. He went out nearly every night for three months. Each afternoon found him restlessly taking a walk through those six blocks from La Salle Street to the shadow of the West Side Highway. He still liked to go out with women, but found the consumption of large meals almost as pleasurable. He was happiest when he would go to someone’s house for dinner and find himself on a blind date. He was always walking down to the plant to get some free steaks from Cousin Pablito. He got big-bellied and had to let out his many suits at the tailor’s. He started to develop his first double chin and his fingers grew thicker, his hands wider. He used to go down for a tacita of coffee in a little joint around the corner from La Salle Street, and the cup would seem like a doll-house coffee cup in his hand.

He did not sing, he did not write or play music and took to standing around on the street corners. At hepcat bongo-player parties he smoked reefers and slipped into a pretty springtime, then into a deep gloom. He still liked to let loose, dancing and trying to put the make on as many women as possible, drinking his heart out, but when he did so, he also tended to get out of control. His memory on some nights? Of being led by three or four men down a stairway. Of standing on a subway platform, unable to read the numbers on the train. Behind all that, there was always Delorita reminding him day in and day out that he would have to find his own place.

“Yes, I know. Today,” he would say.

He would turn up at parties and people would wonder how he could have let himself go. Didn’t he know that people still wanted to hear him sing? Didn’t it mean something that his picture was still up on the wall of Violeta’s restaurant, alongside Tito Puente, Miguelito Valdez, and Noro Morales? And what could he have thought, walking by the window of the Paris Beauty Salon, Benny’s Photography Studio, and the hardware store and seeing himself in that white silk suit, posed with Nestor and Desi Arnaz? He certainly didn’t forget about Mr. Arnaz. Every now and then he would head downstairs and sit on the stoop, writing letters. Letters to Cuba, in a state of political change; letters to his daughter, letters to old girlfriends, and letters to Mr. Arnaz.

But what of it? One day he got tired of his inactivity and hooked up with a friend and got himself a cart, selling coquitos: ice-sludge cones served up with mamey, papaya, and strawberry syrup for fifteen cents each, a business he foolishly got into with two hundred dollars of his savings. He spent the summer out on the corner of 124th Street and Broadway selling and giving away these ices to the kids from the projects, whose affection he relished. He would keep himself cool by drinking down Rheingold beer. Some days, he would stare off into the distance, his forehead warmed by the incredible sunlight, his attention caught by the sound of some young guy in his apartment practicing scales on the trumpet, his mind drifting off to the past, his body shaking from that past’s influence over him. One day he got tired of the coquitos cart and gave it away to a kid named Louie, a lanky Puerto Rican who took his place on the corner, making good money so that he could buy himself some nice clothes. Another day, he sat on the living-room couch without moving for an hour. Leticia, who adored him, climbed all over his shoulders and back, a thin little pigtailed creature who kneaded his thickening flesh as if it were a heavy mass of potter’s clay. Eugenio made it his habit to play wherever Uncle Cesar happened to be. It made him feel good to be around his uncle, a simple feeling of connection like a thread in the air.

Pablito was really concerned for his favorite cousin and, on one afternoon when Cesar came by to buy some more meat, offered him his old job back, on a temporary basis, filling in for men who were away on vacation. He took it and worked like an animal for the month of September 1960, carrying on his shoulders half carcasses of beef weighing one hundred and fifty pounds, that sensation of weight on his back not very different from what he’d feel sometimes in his dreams when he carried the corpse of his brother, whose arm Cesar would tug as if to awaken him. (His brother, who sometimes opened his eyes and said, “Why don’t you leave me in peace.”)

He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with himself. From time to time, with a few drinks in him, he would head uptown to 135th Street to hang around with Manny, his old Mambo King bassist, who would try to talk Cesar into starting up another conjunto. The Mambo Kings only lasted out the year Cesar left. Miguel Montoya went off to California to find his fortune recording piano Muzak albums, and the other musicians, like Manny, their moment of glory gone forever, settled into solving the ordinary problems of life.

Things were working out for Manny. He was one of those practical fellows who kept sober at parties and frugally saved his money. After seven years with the Mambo Kings, he’d saved enough bread to buy himself a bodega, which he ran with a brother. Truth was that the scene was slowing up and jobs were fewer and harder to come by. There were enough low-paying jobs at Saturday-night church dances, graduation parties, and in uptown social clubs and Latin Exchanges, but the resort gigs went to the biggest musicians like Machito, Puente, and Prado, and, in any case, the season was limited. The same thing happened with the big dance halls, joints like the Palladium, the Tropic Palms, the Park Palace. And as for cities like Havana? Castro had kicked the Mafia out and closed down all the big clubs, the Club Capri and the Sans Souci and the Tropicana; and those musicians who were now leaving Cuba for the States were also hustling, the scene getting even tighter. With a wife and three kids to support, he was happy to own that business. In the afternoons, Cesar would walk uptown and sit with Manny behind the counter, helping out with little chores like going into the storeroom to get more chorizo links or another case of shortening. Or if a kid came in to buy a guava pastry or some gum balls out of the round plastic containers on the glass case over the meat display, Cesar would pick these out with tongs, wrap them up in wax paper, and hand them over to the customer. A radio played. Manny had his own copy of that Mambo Kings photograph, hung up behind the counter, the thirteen musicians pictured in white silk suits atop that art-deco seashell bandstand, once again smiling through the squiggles of signatures for all the world to see, but Cesar liked to keep a low profile, getting some salty bacalao or cooking up on a hot plate behind the counter some chorizos and eggs for them to eat for lunch.

When customers recognized him—“Aren’t you Cesar Castillo the singer?”—he would nod yes, and then shrug; he had maintained an elegant manner. In a cotton shirt and pleated linen pantalones from Mexico, he wore golden bracelets on his wrist and three rings on each hand, a black-brimmed panama pulled low over his brow. When people asked him what he was doing, he just shrugged again. His face would turn red. But then he decided to fall back on the explanation that he was putting together another orchestra, and that seemed to satisfy people.

Sometimes Manny came up with some business proposition. He was always pushing for Cesar to use his talents: his looks, his charm, his singing ability.

“You know, Cesar, if you don’t want to go through the grind of an orchestra again, maybe we could do something on the other end, like put together a supper club. A quiet place, not so much for a younger wild crowd but for people our age. Where they could get some dinner, and maybe we’ll have some musicians, too.”

“Maybe sometime,” Cesar would say. “But for now… I don’t know.”

But the truth was that hearing a melody, humming a song, thinking of a lyric reminded him of Nestor. Never happy in life, his brother had died. Period. Punto, end of the canción. The few times he had started to consider Manny’s offers to put another orchestra together, his interest would peak and then his bones would grow hollow, whistling with a grief over the rotting corpse of Nestor.

Wince, swallow of rum. The melody of “The Cuban Cha-cha-cha” playing in the Hotel Splendour, and the Mambo King feeling an ache in his sides, getting up from the chair to stretch; itch between his legs, and those voices from next door again, voices creamy with pleasure.

He was still in the habit of going to the park in the nice weather with Eugenio to throw a ball; sometimes he went by himself, a solitary figure sitting up on the grassy hill watching the river and thinking. He sometimes sat for an hour. The river went by, and on the river, boats passed. The water curled in waves sidewise, foam rippled. Light glistened in triangulated waves, like silver dust being sprinkled by the wind. The wind pushed the clouds. Birds passed overhead; the river flowed. Traffic in two directions on the highway. The wind blew through the trees, the grass wavered, dandelions dissipated, the grass parted under the snouts of hounds. A white butterfly. A leopard-winged butterfly. A multi-knobbed centipede crawling down a tree. The knots in the tree, oozing tiny arrowhead-shaped bugs. People walking, kids throwing a ball, college students playing cricket, folksinger sitting on the stone wall playing a steel-stringed guitar and kicking his feet up, bicyclists in two directions, baby carriages, mamas in curlers and chinos pushing strollers, then the rrrring rrring of the Good Humor truck and children running, the ex-Mambo King giving in to the pleasure of observing life around him and leaning back on the ground and breathing softly and slowly enough that he could begin to discern the circular movement of the earth, the pull of the continents and the surges of the ocean, everything in motion, the earth, the sky, and beyond, he thought one afternoon, the stars.

He’d started to read Nestor’s book, the only book he’d ever seen Nestor reading. While going through Nestor’s effects, Cesar had decided to hold on to it, why he did not know. He’d thumb through the pages, reading the passages that Nestor had underlined and starred: passages about ambition and personal fortitude, about overcoming odds and seizing the future.

“Why, Mr. Vanderbilt,” he asked the book, “did my brother accidentally or not so accidentally take his life?”

The book didn’t reply, though the passages were generally positive about life management.

He thumbed through more of the pages and for a moment he felt a jolt of ambition. For a moment he enjoyed the prospect of having a plan in motion, no matter how vague it seemed then. Something to look forward to in the future. Something to keep him busy. He knew now that he had to do something with himself or he’d turn into one of the bums on the street. He read more of the book and its encouraging passages and soon began to fall asleep. It was a sleep in which all sound from the world fell away, a deep, sturdy sleep.

One afternoon, the landlady’s brother, Ernie, fell down a stairway and broke his back. Within a few weeks, a sign made with black marker on a piece of cardboard appeared in the corner of the window by which Mrs. Shannon perpetually sat, smoking cigarettes and watching television and the street. Now her brother had taken to a bed and the normal duties of the building were proving too much for this lady. The sign said: “Superintendent wanted. See Apt. 2.”

She was watching Queen for a Day when she heard a knock on her door.

Cesar was standing in the doorway, hat in hand, hair slicked back and sweet-scented with cologne and Sen-Sen. She thought he might be there with some complaint about the water, which had been acting up, but instead of complaining he said: “Mrs. Shannon, I saw your sign in the window and wanted to speak to you about that job.”

A tingle went through her body, because when Cesar said “job” he pronounced it “yob,” just like that Ricky Ricardo fellow.

She smiled and let him into the chaos of her living room, which smelled of mildewy rugs, beer, and cabbage. She was excited, even honored, that there was something she could do for this man. Why, he was practically a celebrity.

“Are you really interested in this?”

“Yes, I am.” He pronounced “jes” instead of “yes,” and “jam” for “am.”

“See, things have been a little slow for me on the music end, and I would like to have a regular income.”

“Do you know anything about superintending, electricity, plumbing — any of that?”

“Oh yes, when I first came to this country I worked,” he lied, “as a super for two years in a building downtown. It’s on 55th Street.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s not the best work, but not the worst,” she said. “If you really want to do it, I can give you a trial, and if it doesn’t work out, you know I don’t want any hard feelings.”

“And if it does work out?”

“You get paid and your rent free. There’s an apartment rented by some college students opening up next month. You would get that and twenty-five dollars a week. If everything’s all right.” Then she added, “It’s not union, you know.” Then: “Would you like a beer?”

“Yes.”

She went into the kitchen and he looked around. He wasn’t one to criticize apartments, but Mrs. Shannon’s living room was dense with newspapers and butt-filled bottles, glasses of beer, and yellow-tinged milk. One pretty picture caught his eye, however: a hand-tinted photo of a clover-covered meadow in Ireland, the country of her ancestors. He liked that.

As she came out of the kitchen with two glasses of beer, she felt enchanted and somehow elated at getting Cesar Castillo to work for her.

She sat in her easy chair, saying, “You know, I still think about how you and your brother were on that I Love Lucy show. You wouldn’t believe it, but I once saw Lucille Ball on the street in front of Lord and Taylor’s around Christmastime. She seemed like a nice lady.”

“She was.”

“And Ricky, you were pals with him?”

“Yes.”

She looked him over admiringly; he didn’t know what she might be thinking. He wanted everything to be over with quickly. He didn’t want to go through any long route to find a new life for himself. No way would he go back, despite his longings, into the life of a bandleader. Walking down the hill from the park, and feeling buoyed by the practical advice of Mr. Vanderbilt, he had seen the sign in the window and decided that he would take the first step toward security. Better than dealing with club owners, and petty gangsters, and with the agony of pure memory. Besides, it all seemed to make sense. There wasn’t so much work involved, and he would always have a roof over his head. And if he changed his mind and wanted to play music again, he would have the time to do so. He could not recall that the superintendent of his building had ever worked particularly hard, only that he often saw the man heading underground to the basement. Somehow he found the idea of the basement appealing.

“Yes,” he continued. “Mr. Arnaz is a gentleman.”

He milked it for everything it was worth, delighting her. Then she offered him another beer.

She came back into the living room a few minutes later, holding a beer and an old cheap Stella guitar with a warped neck. “Would you sing something for me?”

He wiped the strings of the guitar clean with a handkerchief; the thick gritty strings left traces like gunpowder on the cloth. Pressing down on the fret board hard, he struck an E-minor chord and, clearing his throat, said, “You know, I don’t sing very much these days. It’s a little rough for me now.”

He started to sing “Bésame Mucho” in a voice that, if anything, was more soulful and vulnerable than it had been before: now his baritone really quivered with melancholy and a desire for release from pain in this life, and his singing made Mrs. Shannon, who’d always had her eye on the musician, absolutely happy.

“Oh, delightful,” she said. “You should make more records.”

“Maybe, one day.”

By the time he had finished the beer, she had told him, “Well, we’ll try you out,” and then, with a broad smile and her huge body, that eternal mass under the soup-stained dress, shaking: “But you gotta promise that you’ll sing every now and then for me. Promise?”

“Okay.”

“Now, just let me get my slippers on and find the keys for the basement and I’ll take you down and show you the works.”

Down the stairs and into the basement, and following the hallway past the boiler and washing-machine rooms, he went. Then for the hundredth time — or was it the thousandth? — Cesar Castillo, ex-Mambo King and former star of the I Love Lucy show, found himself before the black bolt-studded fire door that was the entrance to his workroom. A solitary bulb, its filament burning like a tongue of fire above him, the lunar-looking walls filled with cracks out of which seemed to sprout long strands of human hair. He was not wearing a white silk suit or a frilly-sleeved mambo shirt, or sporty golden-buckled shoes, ladies and gentlemen: instead, a gray utility suit, plain thick rubber-soled black shoes, a belt off which dangled a loop of keys for twenty-four apartments, various storage rooms, and electrical closets. In his pockets, crumpled-up receipts from the hardware store, building-complaint slips, and a sheet of yellow lined paper on which after two years of musical inactivity he had started to write down the lyrics for a new song.

In the basement, his spirits flourished. He whistled, he happily pushed brooms, he liked the idea that metal things like wrenches and pliers hung off his body, clanking like armor; he found himself walking about the building in the same attitude as his captain at sea, arms folded behind him, eyes inquisitive and proprietary. He liked the happy-looking row of electrical meters and the fact that they ticked off in 3/2 time, claves time, that the multiple rows of pipes with their valves whistled, water whirring through them. He liked the crunching noises when faucets were turned on, the conga-drum pounding of the washroom dryer: the thunder of the coal-bin walls. In fact, he was so elated by the perfect realization of a purgatorial existence that better spirits came to him.

“Me siento contento cuando sufro,” he sang one day. “I feel happy when I’m suffering.”

In the foyer outside the bolt-studded door to his workroom, his dog Poochie, a wiry, corkscrew-tailed mutt who resembled the famous movie hound Pluto, with his droopy face and long hooked paws, nails like black sea mussels. On the black door itself a calendar, a big-hipped pretty girl with green eyes in a scanty bathing suit, wading in a pool and lifting to her mouth a frosty-tipped, fluted bottle of Coca-Cola.

Inside, his worktable, a chaos of screw-and-nail, washer-and-nut-filled jars, tin cans, spools of wire and string, dollops of wood compound, solder and paint drops; tagged apartment keys on a wire hanging across the wall; then another calendar, from Joe’s Pizzeria, featuring Leonardo’s Last Supper. Wooden boxes were everywhere, and one paint-speckled telephone into which he would say, “Speak, this is the super.”

He set down tools everywhere, and these congealed with a resinous-looking paste, so carelessly did he take care of them. A dusty, rusty-bladed fan sat atop a stack of old National Geographics, which he sometimes liked to read. There were two large storerooms, a deep and narrow-shelved room in which he was always finding items of interest: among them, a six-stringed lute, which he now added to the instruments in his apartment upstairs, and a spiked German helmet from the First World War, which he kept on a beauty-salon manikin head as a joke. And he had all kinds of magazines: nudist magazines with names like Sun Beach California which featured sling-shot-testicled men and strawberry-faced women, pictured with watering cans and little plaid sun hats in the garden of life, a strange race, to be sure. Then a stack of scientific and geographical surveys, refuse from the apartment of Mr. Stein, a scholarly fellow from the sixth floor. And Cesar had a big stuffed chair, a stool, an old radio, and a record player salvaged from one of the workrooms.

A stack of records too, including the fifteen 78s and three long-playing 33s he’d made with Nestor and the Mambo Kings. He never played them, though he heard them from time to time in jukeboxes or over the Spanish-language radio station, the disc jockey introducing a canción in this manner: “And now a little number from that Golden Era of the mambo!” He kept some of those records upstairs, too: up in the small apartment he’d gotten with the job, that joint crammed now with instruments and with the odd collection of souvenirs from his travels and his musician’s life and with the pieces of mismatching furniture which he more or less stoically brought up out of the basement.

His apartment reflected the bad habits of a jaded, lifelong bachelor, but he would pay Eugenio and Leticia to come down once a week and sweep his floors, wash his dishes, wash his clothes, and so forth. His sister-in-law, happy that he was no longer in the same apartment and willing to forget many things, made it clear that he could take his meals upstairs at any time. He did so three or four times a week, but mainly to make sure that he was around his dead brother’s children and that their stepfather, Pedro, was good to them.

Settled in, he went about his business happily. He came to know the neighbors, to whom he had rarely said more than a few words. Some people knew that he had been a musician, others did not. Most of his chores involved minor repairs of faucets and electrical sockets, though on occasion he had to bring in outside help, as when Mr. Bernhardt’s living room caved in. He learned his job little by little: he applied himself to an apprenticeship in faucet fixing, boiler maintenance, spackling, plastering, electrical wiring. He would stand before the burning incinerator once every few days, watching the flames consume the cardboard and paper and wax milk containers, hear the bones crackling, singed skin evaporating, all turning to smoke. He tended to remember things, to get a look of lost contemplation as he would stand in front of the open incinerator door, stoking the dying larvae of the embers.

Often Eugenio wondered about his uncle then. The man staring into the fire and not moving. It wasn’t so much that Cesar Castillo stared into the embers or sometimes murmured to himself; it was that he seemed to be somewhere else.

What did he see in these ashes? The harbor of Havana? The fields of Oriente? His dead brother’s face floating amid the burning junk?

It didn’t matter. His uncle would come out of it, tap his nephew’s shoulder, saying: “Come on.” And he would shovel the ashes into the trash cans, dragging them down the cracked concrete floor and up the stairs with mighty heaves and onto the sidewalk to await the garbage truck.

And he had made the acquaintance of other superintendents. Luis Rivera, Mr. Klaus, Whitey. His tenants were Irish, black, and Puerto Rican, with a few scholars and college students thrown in. His plumber was this one-eyed man named Leo, a Sicilian, who used to play jazz violin with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, lost the eye and the will to play during the Second World War. Cesar was never beyond the generosity of offering a man a drink, so that when Leo finished a job, he and Cesar would retire to the workroom to drink beer while Leo would relate his sorrows.

The flamboyant Cesar Castillo became a good listener and got the reputation of a man to whom one might tell one’s troubles. His friends who came to visit him were either beset with woes or looking to get something from the ex-Mambo King. Men wanting to borrow money or to pass the night drinking his booze. People on the street and in the clubs who used to talk about what a womanizing and insensitive man he had been before his brother’s death now talked about how, perhaps, this tragedy had helped to reform him into a more noble character. Actually, most people felt sorry for him and wished the Mambo King well. His phone was always ringing; other musicians, some of them famous too, were always trying to check him out: the great Rafael Hernández inviting him over to his place on 113th to talk music and have some good food; Machito inviting him to festive gatherings in the Bronx; and so many others, wanting to see if the ex-Mambo King would perform again.