The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

SİDE B: Sometime later in the night in the Hotel Splendour

SOMETIME IN THE MIDDLE OF the night the noises started in the room next door again, chair legs scuffling against the floor and the man’s voice gravelly with self-satisfied laughing. The Mambo King had nodded off for a few minutes, but a pain in his sides jolted him awake and now he sat up in his chair in the Hotel Splendour, the steamy world slowly coming into focus. Two of his fingers smarted because he’d fallen asleep with a cigarette burning between them, and a blistery welt had risen there. But then he noticed the worse, more edemic welts and blisters up and down his arms and on his legs. “Carajo!”

He got up to urinate, and by the toilet, he could hear the voices from next door. Listening for a moment, he realized they were talking about him.

The woman’s voice: “Come back here, don’t bother nobody.”

“But I’ve been hearing music all night from that room next door. I’ll just inquire.”

Soon there was a knock at the Mambo King’s door. The black man was big-boned and thin, wearing lumpy pinstriped pajamas and a pair of velvet slippers. He had a big pompadour and black-and-blue bite marks on his neck.

“Yes, what is it that you want?”

“It’s me, your neighbor. Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Look, I’ve just run out of booze. You got any you can spare until tomorrow, I’ll pay you for it.”

The Mambo King had pushed open the door just enough to see the man. He considered the request and felt sorry for the couple, stuck in the Hotel Splendour without enough to drink. He could remember a night with Vanna Vane when they’d drunk all their booze. Naked and in bed and too lazy to leave the room, he had leaned out the window of the Hotel Splendour and called down to a little kid passing by: “Go to the corner and tell the liquor-store man that you need a bottle of Seagram’s whiskey for the mambo musician. He’ll know! And get him to give you some ice, too, huh?”

Gave the kid five bucks for his trouble, later paid the liquor-store owner — that’s how he solved his problem.

What the hell, he told himself.

“Just wait a minute.”

“That’s nice of you, sport.”

Then the black man looked in and saw how Cesar had trouble walking across the room. “Say, you all right?”

“No problem.”

“All right!” Then: “How much?”

“Don’t worry about it. Mañana.”

“Yeah? Well, shit, you’re a gentleman.”

The Mambo King laughed.

“Looky here,” the black man said in a really friendly manner. “Come over and say hello to my baby. Come on in for a drink!”

While “Beautiful María of my Soul” played once again, he slowly pulled on a pair of trousers. It would only take three, four hours of drinking to tighten his muscles. Screwing the cap onto the half-full bottle of whiskey he had been drinking — he had two others left on the bed waiting for him — he followed the black man to his door.

“Baby, got some!” to his woman, and to the Mambo King: “What’s your name, pal?”

“Cesar.”

“Uh, like Julius?”

“My grandfather’s name.”

Cesar had shuffled into the room, noticing the faint smell of fucking on the sheets. It was funny, he could barely hold his head up. His shoulders felt as if they were being forced to slump forward; his whole posture was that way. He saw himself in the mirror, saw an old man, jowlish and tired. Thank God he dyed his gray hair black.

“Babe, this is our neighbor come to say hello.”

On the bed, in a violet negligee, the man’s female companion. Stretched out like that dancer in Chicago, the Argentine Flame of Passion. Her nipples dark, bud-tipped flowers against the cloth. Long-legged, wide-wombed, her hips smooth and curvy like the polished banisters in the Explorers’ Club in Havana. And her toenails were painted gold! There was something else he liked: she’d brushed out her black hair so that it almost touched her shoulders, and looked as if she were wearing a crown or a headdress.

“You resemble,” said the Mambo King, “a goddess from Arará.”

“Say what?”

“Arará.”

“You all right, man?”

“Arará. It’s a kingdom in Africa where all magic is born.” He said that, remembering how Genebria had told him this, sitting out in the yard in Cuba when he was six years old.

“And when the man dies, he enters that kingdom. Its entrance is a cave.”

“In Africa, he said!”

The black man instructed her, “That’s what all them spiritist shops are called. Arará this, Arará that.”

“You’re very beautiful,” Cesar said, but he could hardly hold up his head to look at her. Then, when he managed to, the Mambo King smiled, because even though he felt sick and knew that he must look pathetic, he’d caught her looking and admiring his pretty eyes.

“Here’s your drink, my friend. You want to sit down?”

“No. If I sit down, I won’t get up.”

If he were a young man, he was thinking, he would get down on his knees and crawl over to the bed, wagging his head like a dog. She seemed the type who would be amused and flattered by that. Then he’d take hold of her slender foot, turn it just enough so her leg was perfectly shaped and then run his tongue up from her Achilles’ heel to the round of her dark buttocks: then he’d push her toward the wall, open her legs, and rest his body on hers.

He imagined an ancient, unchanging taste of meat, salt, and grain, moistened and becoming sweeter, the deeper his tongue would go…

He must have drifted off for a moment, looking as if he might fall, or perhaps his arms started shaking, because suddenly the black man was holding him by the elbows, saying, “Yo? Yo? Yo?”

Maybe he reeled around or seemed as if he would fall, because the woman said, “Mel, tell the cat it’s two-thirty in the morning. He should go to sleep.”

“No problem.”

At the door he turned to look at the woman again and noticed how the hem of her negligee had just hitched higher over her hips. And just as he wanted to see more, she shifted and the diaphanous material slid up a few inches more until he could see most of the right side of her hip and thigh.

“Well, good night,” he said. “Buenas noches.”

“Yeah, thanks, man.”

“You take care.”

“You take care,” said the woman.

Walking slowly to his room in the Hotel Splendour, the Mambo King remembered how, toward the end of the year in Cuba, during December and into January, the white men used to form lines into the houses of prostitution so that they might sleep with a black woman, the blacker her skin the better the pleasure. They believed that if they slept with a black woman at that time of year, their penises deep inside those magical wombs, they would be purified. In Las Piñas, he used to go to this old house—bayu—with an overgrown garden at the edge of a field, and in Havana he would visit, along with hundreds of other men, the houses on certain streets in the sections of La Marina, where he and Nestor had lived, and Pajarito. They came back to him, the cobblestone streets closed off to traffic and dense with men knocking on the doors. In every instance, at this time of the year, a huge bull of a man, usually a homosexual, would let the customers in. Their lights low, the houses had dozens of rooms and smelled of perfume and sweet-scented oils, and they would enter a parlor where the women waited for their customers, naked on old divans and enormous antique chairs, anxious to be chosen. At that time the white prostitutes sulked because business fell off for them, while the mulatas and the black queens swam in rivers of saliva and sperm, their legs wide open, taking in one man after the other, each man’s bodily hunger sated, each man’s soul cleansed. And it was always funny how, in those days, he would stick his thing back into his trousers and make his way into the street, feeling strong and renewed.

Now, as he shut the door behind him and made his way toward another bottle of whiskey, the room thick with the trumpets, piano, drums of his old orchestra, the Mambo King, weak of body, daydreamed of making love to the woman next door, and it was then that he could hear their voices again:

“Pssssst, oh, baby.”

“Not so hard, honey.”

“Ohhhh, but I like it!”

“Then wet me with your mouth.”

The Mambo King was hearing the bed again, the mattress thumping against the wall, and the woman moaning, the softest music in the world.

He drank his whiskey and winced with pain, the stuff turning into brittle glass by the time it reached his stomach. Remembered when he could play music and drink all night, come home and devour a steak, a plate of fried potatoes and onions, and finish that off with a bowl of ice cream, and wake up the next morning, four or five hours after the meal, feeling nothing. The thing about one’s body coming apart was that, if anything, you felt more. Leaning back in his chair, he could feel the whiskey burning in the pit of his stomach, and leaking out through the cuts and bruises that he envisioned his ulcers looked like, oozing into his liver and kidneys, which throbbed with pain, as if someone had jammed a fist inside. Then, too, there was the column of heat, long as his penis, shooting back up out of the pit of his stomach and skewering his heart. Sometimes the pain was so bad as he sat drinking in that room in the Hotel Splendour that his hands would shake, but the whiskey helped, and so he could continue on.

He’d had a boyhood friend in Cuba, a certain Dr. Victor López, who had turned up in the States in 1975 and set up an office in Washington Heights. One night, three years later, when the Mambo King was playing a job in a Bronx social club, he found this Dr. López among the crowd. They had not seen each other since 1945 and had a happy reunion, with the two old friends kissing each other and slapping each other’s back, remembering and laughing over their childhood in Las Piñas, Oriente Province.

Afterwards, his old friend noticed that Cesar’s hands trembled and he said, “Why don’t you come along to my office one day and I’ll give you an examination, gratis, my friend. You know we’re not so young anymore.”

“I will do that.”

The doctor and his wife left the crowded, red-lit social club, and the singer made his way over to the bar for another drink and a tasty fried chorizo sandwich.

He didn’t go see his old friend, but one day, while walking down La Salle Street, he felt certain pains again, like glass shards cutting inside him. Usually, whenever these pains, which he’d been experiencing on and off for years, came to him, he would drink a glass of rum or whiskey, take some aspirin, and take a nap. Then he’d go upstairs to see his brother’s widow and the family, or he’d head out to the street, where he would hang around with his old pals, Bernardito Mandelbaum and Frankie Pérez, “El Fumigador”—the Exterminator. Or if his nephew Eugenio happened to be around, he would take him out for a drink. Best was when he’d hear his doorbell ringing in quick, enthusiastic spurts, because that meant his girlfriend was waiting in the lobby.

But that day the pain was too much, and so the Mambo King went to see Dr. López. Because he had known the doctor from his old pueblo, he felt all the trust in the world in the man, and thought his fellow cubano would produce a few pills that would make his pains go away. He expected to get out of there in a few minutes, but the doctor kept him for an hour: took his blood, checked his sputum, his urine, listened to his heart, thumped at his back, took his blood pressure, looked in his ears and up his ass, felt his testicles, peered into the dark green eyes that had made him such a lady killer in his youth, and in the end said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, my friend, but your body is something of a mess. I think you should go into the hospital for a while.”

He turned red, listening to the doctor, felt his pulse quicken. He thought, Victor, how can this be? Just the other day, I screwed the hell out of my young girl…

“You understand, your urine is pink with blood, your blood pressure is way too high, dangerously high, my friend, you have the symptoms of kidney stones, your liver is enlarged, your lungs sound blocked, and who knows what your heart looks like.”

You see, she was screaming. I was making her come, me, an old man.

“Look here, Victor, you want to know how I feel about this business? It’s just that I’d rather go out like a man, rather than slowly rotting away like a piece of old fruit, like those viejitos I see in the drugstores.”

“Well, you’re not so young anymore.”

He answered the doctor insolently, with the same kind of annoyance as when he was a kid and he’d heard something he didn’t want to hear.

“Then, coño. If I’m already at death’s door, I’ll die and then I’ll find out a lot of things, won’t I?”

“My friend, if you don’t do something now, you will rot away slowly like a piece of old fruit. Not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but all these things, unless taken care of, mean the beginning of a lot of physical suffering.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

But he didn’t really believe in his old friend’s advice, and that was why two years later he had said his goodbyes, had written his letters, and had packed up to pass his last days in the Hotel Splendour.

Now the Mambo King had trouble standing. When it was time for him to get up and turn the record over, his sides ached. But he managed to turn the record over and to make his way across the room in the Hotel Splendour to the little toilet: could have been the same little toilet where Vanna would be standing in front of the mirror, stark naked, dabbing lipstick on her mouth and cheerfully saying, “I’m ready!” He wished his sides didn’t ache so much, that it wasn’t so hot outside, that his brother was not dead. Standing over the toilet, he pulled out his big thing, and his urine went gurgling in the water. Then he heard something, like a man’s fist pounding on the wall, and when he finished, he stood by the dresser and listened carefully. It wasn’t anyone pounding on the wall, it was that couple next door going at it! The man was saying, “Das right, baby. Das right, yeah.” The man was going to have an orgasm and Cesar Castillo, Mambo King and former star of the I Love Lucy show, had shooting pains through his body. Bad kidneys, bad liver, bad everything, except for his pinga, which was working perfectly, though a little more lackadaisically these days. He sat by the bed again and clicked on the record player. Then he took another long, glorious swallow of whiskey, and during that swallow he remembered what they had told him at the hospital some months ago:

“Mr. Castillo, you’re going to be all right this time. We’ve reduced the edema, but it’s the end of drinking for you, and you’ll have to go on a special diet. Do you understand?”

He felt like a fool, sitting on a hospital bed with only a smock on. The nurse standing beside the doctor was shapely, though, and he tried to play up to her sympathy, and he did not mind letting his thing show through the slit when he got back into bed.

“No more,” the doctor said in English. “No más. ¿Comprende?”

The doctor was a Jewish fellow and was trying hard to relate to the Mambo King, and Cesar nodded, just so he could get the fuck back out. He had been there for a month and been prodded and probed, very much convinced that he was going to die. He’d pulled through, though, and now he had to live with the humiliation that his body was rotting on him. He’d gone through long periods of sleep, then, under the medication. Daydreaming about Cuba, daydreaming about himself and el pobrecito Nestor when they were kids, and about women and booze and good fatty fried foods. He figured that’s what a dead man would think about. That and love. The oddest thing was that he kept hearing music in those deep sleeps. So Dr. Victor López, Jr., was right when he had warned him, as had the doctor in this hospital.

“You have two choices, only two. One is to behave yourself and live. The other is to abuse yourself. Your body is incapable of processing alcohol, you understand?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“It’s like taking poison, you understand?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Do you have any questions?”

“No, Doctor. Thank you, Doctor. And good night, beautiful nurse.”

When he finished emptying the first bottle, he opened a second and filled up his glass. Then he sat back, enjoying the music, a little number called “A Woman’s Tears,” an earnest ballad written out on the fire escape of Pablo’s apartment during the old days. He always enjoyed Nestor’s trumpet playing, and just then, as the bongos were playing like claps in the forest, the man next door had started to groan, his orgasm deep and rich, and she was moaning, too. The Mambo King decided to light another cigarette.

When he had gone into the hospital, forcibly taken there by Raúl and Bernardito, his limbs were bloated and he couldn’t keep food down. Even so, it still surprised him, as if all his years of drinking and eating and doing just as he pleased would never catch up with him. He’d had the symptoms for a long time, going back years (to 1968), but he’d always ignored them.

When he’d think about that hospital stay, he’d remember how much he had slept. For days and days and days, it seemed. He had a lot of dreams at first — dreams about the basement, few about his life as a musician. In one dream the basement walls had started to peel badly and were covered with bubbles that wept a light pink liquid. And he went to work, much as he had for years in his building on La Salle Street, mostly plumbing jobs in the dreams. Pipes burst inside the walls and the softened plaster and ceilings came down or crumbled at his touch. He’d open closets and a wall of insects, prickly and black, would fall onto him. Investigating a clanking noise in the boiler room, he’d find himself crawling down a tunnel which narrowed, so that, while searching for the pipe, he would find himself wedged into a space, so constricted he could barely move. (These were the straps around his wrists and legs.) When he’d finally find the loose joint, dirty water would drip down on his face and often into his mouth. In his dreams, when he’d touch either metal or wood surfaces, he would feel a shock.

At times, things seemed very normal. He would be sitting in his basement workroom looking over all the apartment complaint slips that he would accumulate during the day: “Mr. Stein, fix window.” “Mrs. Rivera, toilet.” And, in a good mood, he’d begin to sing, his voice carrying lovingly into the courtyard, the neighbors hearing him.

And there was always Mrs. Shannon to stick her head out the back window and say, as he’d cross the courtyard, “Ah, you know that you sound just like that Ricky Ricardo fellow.”

Then he’d go about his business.

He would sing, “My life is always taking a funny turn.”

In his dreams (as in life) he’d find junkies working the back windows with screwdrivers and icepicks, he’d shovel snow, fix clogged toilets. Then he’d go to a job and something drastic would go wrong (as in life). A Handi Wipe caught inside a drain beneath a sink, Cesar down on the floor trying to get it out with a bent wire hanger, and then, desperate (as it seems to crawl farther and farther into the pipe), he gets a snake, a whirling cable that will break up anything but which struggles against the cloth: finally, when with a great yank he gets it out, he’s covered with grease and hair and food bits and wants a bath but cannot move.

He remembered another dream when Mrs. Stein’s kitchen pipe burst, flooding her apartment and caving in the ceiling below, just as it had really happened once, but in the dream he stood out in the courtyard laughing as all the water gushed out of her windows like a waterfall.

Then there was always the dream in which he felt like a monster. He was so heavy that his feet as they hit the floor sounded like drums being dropped out of the back of a moving truck, the ground beneath him cracking. He was so cumbersome that when he climbed the stairs to the fourth floor he snapped every step in half and could barely move in sideways through his door.

A more pleasant dream? When all the walls fell away and he could see everything going on inside the building. Beautiful naked college girls (whom he’d sometimes spy from the roof) preparing to take showers, chatting on the telephone, sitting their fine asses down on the toilets and performing the delicate act of defecation. Men urinating, couples fucking, families gathered around their evening meal: life.

Lots of dreams about music, too, but mainly he dreamed about things crumbling: walls coming down, pipes turning brittle, floors rotten and insect-laden, everything soft and mealy to the touch.

Once, on a night when his body felt filthy with medication and with sweat and uncleanliness, his mother came to visit him. Sitting beside him, she held a white palangana filled with soap and water and cleaned him slowly and lovingly with a sponge, and then, luxury of luxuries, she washed his hair, her soft, soft hands touching his face again.

For the first three days he had done nothing but sleep, and when he opened his eyes, his nephew Eugenio was sitting beside his bed.

The kid was in his late twenties by then. Unmarried, he had the same sad expression as his father. Sitting by his uncle, Eugenio passed the time reading a book. Now and then he would lean close and ask in a loud voice: “Uncle, are you there? Are you there?”

And even though he could hear his nephew he could not respond, could do no more than open his eyes and then instantly fall back to sleep.

“Uncle!”

A nurse: “Please, sir, don’t shout.”

While thinking about this, Cesar wished he could have said something to the kid. He almost came to tears, touched by the way his nephew sat near him, even when he was feeling impatient, getting up every few minutes to pace in the ward among all the machines.

“Nurse, can you tell me what’s wrong with my uncle?”

“Speak to the doctor.”

“For one thing, his electrolyte functions are out.”

“Will he wake up?”

“Time will tell…”

Then one day he noticed the pretty Puerto Rican nurse bending over to give some poor man whose skin had turned yellow an injection. That’s when he sat up for the first time and wanted to shave and wash, to get back together and walk out of there like a young man.

“We’re all so happy that you feel better,” Delores told him. “I brought you some books.”

Books on religion, saints, meditation.

“Thank you, Delores.”

And when he saw his nephew sitting nearby, he called the boy over — well, he was a man, wasn’t he? — grabbed him by the shoulder and squeezed. “Well, you glad I’m okay? It was really nothing.”

His nephew was silent.

(Yes, Uncle, nothing. Just three days of being sick to our stomachs that you were going to die, of sitting beside you and feeling the whole world was going to fall away.)

“Come on, smile, boy? Smile for your uncle.” But then he grimaced with pain.

Eugenio’s face passive, unmoved.

“Help me, boy, to sit up.”

And silently Eugenio helped him, but not the way he used to as a little kid, when his eyes were sick with worry. Now his expression was cold.

Eugenio, looking very much like Nestor, left the hospital room without saying a word.

(And what was it that the others brought him? Some girlie magazines from Frankie, a roast-beef sandwich with mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato from Raúl, a little pink transistor radio from the Aztec-looking lady who owned the bakery across the street, a bouquet of flowers from Ana María, a new black-brimmed cane hat from Bernardito. And his girlfriend Lydia and her children brought him some crayon drawings of children running, with a bright yellow-and-orange sun in the sky. Lydia sitting with him and trying to nod happily.)

Then, like sunlight filling the ward, he felt more of his strength returning. A heat thickened around his waist, as if he were wading in tropic water, and he woke up one day with an erection. He was wearing only a smock, because of the bedpan business and all the tubes, but when the blond nurse came by to look after him, she was startled by the old musician’s sexual apparatus. Blushing as she went about the business of straightening up the bed sheets around him, she could not help breaking out into a slight “Oh, you bad boy” smile, and it so pleased him that when she left the room, he called out to her: “Thank you, nurse, thank you! Have a good day!”

That’s when he noticed the other guy. Not the legless man; the bloated man who’d turned up in intensive care, wired up with tubes — liver, kidneys shot, bladder blocked and completely incapable of processing his bodily fluids. For five days he lay next to this man, and despite his own pain, the Mambo King kept thinking, God, I’m glad I’m not him.

The man kept getting worse. His fingers were puffed up with fluid, his limbs so bloated that his fingernails oozed. His face, too, was like a pink balloon on which a makeup artist had composed a pained expression; fluid dripped from his lips, from his nostrils, from his ears, but nothing from anywhere else. With his own edema problems, the Mambo King would open his eyes to the sight of that poor man, and shake his head over the man’s living nightmare.

“See him,” one doctor said. “Keep on, and you’ll be like that.”

Now the pain was very bad, but what the hell, at least he was going out with style. Forget that a few of the veins on his ankles had started to bleed through the skin, forget that he was dizzy and knew, knew for sure, that he was on his way out. Nothing that another belt of whiskey wouldn’t fix up. And to celebrate this drink, he turned up “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.”

At least he had gotten out of the hospital and would never return. That had been in June, and he laughed despite his pain, remembering the nurses. There had been a young Puerto Rican nurse who had seemed like a bitch at first, never smiling at him or even saying hello, but then he softened her up with compliments, and in the days when he seemed to be getting better told Frankie to buy her a bouquet of flowers. (It had nearly killed him when she would lean close to his bed to take his pulse or to check all the tubes and needles they had stuck into his arms and legs, as she wore one of those modern blouses with a zipper down the front that always seemed to open just enough to torture him with her cleavage, slipping all the way open one glorious afternoon as she struggled to shift him over on the bed. The zipper slid down and he could see the front clips of her pink brassiere, its material thin and nearly transparent, and struggling to contain her breasts, squeezed snugly inside and overflowing the soft material, so nice and big and round.) The other nurse, an American girl, and blond like Vanna Vane, had seemed nice from the start, didn’t catch any attitudes when he tried to flirt with her, just smiled and went about her business, perhaps a little shyly in fact, as this nurse was quite tall, nearly six feet in height, with long hands and limbs and broad shoulders, and probably considered herself unfeminine and awkward, but he wouldn’t have thought twice about going to bed with her, all six feet of her shapely nursiness. And she would have felt loved and beautiful and so fucked-out that she would not be able to walk for days. That’s why, when he was awake and his medication had not made him forget how to speak, he’d flirt with her, happy because she would put her hand on her big hips and flirt back, calling him “My favorite and most handsome patient,” and “Sweetheart.” That kept him happy for a while, but the guy next to him, a diabetic fellow who’d lost the use of his legs, kept telling Cesar, “Forget it, hombre. You’re too old, what would a young woman want with you?”

Thank you, my friend.

AND NOW NOTHING BUT DRUMS, a battery of drums, the conga drums jamming out, in a descarga, and the drummers lifting their heads and shaking under some kind of spell. There’s rain drums, like pitter-patter pitter-patter but a hundred times faster, and then slamming-the-door drums and dropping-the-bucket drums, kicking-the-car-fender drums. Then circus drums, then coconuts-falling-out-of-the-trees-and-thumping-against-the-ground drums, then lion-skin drums, then the-whacking-of-a-hand-against-a-wall drums, the-beating-of-a-pillow drums, heavy-stones-against-a-wall drums, then the-thickest-forest-tree-trunks-pounding drums, and then the-mountain-rumble drums, then the-little-birds-learning-to-fly drums and the-big-birds-alighting-on-a-rooftop-and-fanning-their-immense-wings drums, then a-boat-down-the-river-with-its-oars-dropping-heavily-into-the-water drums, then a-man-fucking-a-woman-and-jamming-the-bed-frame-into-the-wall drums and then someone-jumping-up-and-down-on-the-floor drums and then a-fat-man-slapping-his-own-belly drums, and then a-woman-smacking-her-ass-down-on-the-floor drums and then Morse-code drums and then the-sky-breaking-up-and-all-the-heavens-falling-down drums, and then a-bap-bap-bap-like-dialogue drums and children-running-through-an-empty-church drums and a-conquistador-firing-cannons-at-an-Indian-village drums, then slaves-being-thrown-into-the-hold-of-a-ship, the-heavy-weather-worn-oak-doors-crashing-clumsily-shut drums and then the-beating-of-pots-and-pans drums and then lightning drums and then an-elephant-rolling-on-the-ground drums and then heartbeat drums and a-hummingbird-drone drums and then tick-tock-and-stop drums, then a-hurricane-through-the-shutters-of-a-hundred-houses drums, then the-jalousies-flapping-in-the-wind drums and sails-pushed-by-a-sudden-gale and breasts-pumping-against- a-male — stomach, the — sweat — farting — through — belly-buttons drums, rubber-trees-bending drums, forest-winds-blowing, black-birds-flying-through-the-high-branches drums, plates-and-coffee-cups-shattering-in-a-pile drums, wild-native-banging-on-a-row-of-human-skulls, bones-flying-through-the-air drums and beat-on-the-tortoiseshell drums, beat-on-a-fat-wriggly-ass drums, Chinese-chimes drums, and men-hitting-men drums, belts-hitting-faces drums, thick-branches-against-the-back drums, and then rapping-coffin drums, all drums, batá, conga, bongo, quinto, tumbadora drums booming like storm clouds, beautiful-women-shaking-their-Iife-giving-hips drums, a-million-bells-falling-out-of-the-sky drums, a-wave-assaulting-the-earth drum, comparsa- lines-twisting-through-town drums, celebrational-marriage drums, firing-squad drums, a-man-moaning-with-orgasm drums, and shouting, yawning, laughing, crying drums, drums from across a field and deep in the forest, the drums of madmen onstage letting loose, good old Pito on the timbales and Benny on the congas for a little ten-second interlude in the middle of one of those old Mambo King songs.

SO WHY HAD THE MAMBO KING started playing music again, after losing so much of his heart? It had to do with the family in Cuba, his brothers Miguel and Eduardo writing him letters and asking for money, medicine, and clothes. This had become his “cause.” Even if he had never given a shit about politics before, what could he do when someone in the family asked him for help? At first he took on any kind of extra work, plastering and painting apartments to make more money, but then after being urged on by his old bassist Manny, he started accepting pickup jobs here and there around the city. (The first job back? Hilarious, a wedding out in Queens in 1961, a Cuban fellow who got caught by his bride pinching the bridesmaid’s ass. Later, while they were packing up their instruments, out into the parking lot spilled bride and groom, the bride slapping and kicking at him.) The money that survived his generous and spendthrift ways went into buying food and medicine which he’d ship to Cuba. With Delores’s Webster’s Dictionary open before him, he would carefully draft letters to the government, inquiries as to the procedure for getting his family out, and then show these to one of the smarter tenants, a certain Mr. Bernhardt, who had once been a college professor. Reading through bifocals, Bernhardt, a portly and distinguished-looking fellow, made the proper corrections and then he’d redo the letters carefully on an antique British typewriter. (And Cesar would look around his living room. Bernhardt had worked as some kind of history teacher and his tables were covered with papers and books in Latin and Greek and clumps of photographs of archaeological sites, as well as a collection of thick, impossibly old books on witchcraft, and file folders containing pornographic photos.) The replies to his letters said that it all came down to getting permission from the Castro government; but those letters to Cuba seemed to go floating from office to office, rotting in bins filled with thousands of others. In the end, it would take them five years to get out.

There was more to it. On some nights, while listening to music, he’d remember his childhood in Cuba and how he’d go out to the sugar mill to hear the famous orchestras that toured the island: orchestras like Ernesto Lecuona’s Melody Boys. In 1932, admission to hear Lecuona cost one dollar and everybody in Las Piñas would go, that being the grandest cultural event of the year. Families would make their way to the sugar mill in carriages, automobiles, and wagons, and the roads would be jammed with travelers from nearby towns. Some made the journey on horseback. Conversations cutting through the night, the chirping of the crickets, and the clop-clop-clop of horses. The stars humming like delicate glass bells. In the sugar-mill concert hall, there was a high-ceilinged ballroom with chandeliers and arched windows with great pleated drapes, Moorish wainscoting, and floors so polished they glimmered as if in sunlight. One night, nearly fifty years ago, Ernesto Lecuona came out onto the stage and Cesar Castillo, then a boy, was there to hear and see him. He was not a tall man and resembled, at first glance, a more thickset Rudolph Valentino. He wore a black tuxedo, a pearl-buttoned shirt, a bright-red bow tie. He had dark, penetrating eyes and long, slender hands. Seated before the piano, his face serene, he played the first ebbing chords of his famous composition “Malagueña.”

Later, during the intermission, the revered Lecuona came down off the stage to mingle with his audience. That night, as he saw Lecuona moving through the crowd, Cesar Castillo, fourteen years old, pushed forward to shake that grand gentleman’s hand. That was the evening when Cesar introduced himself, saying, “My name is Cesar Castillo, Mr. Lecuona, and there’s something I’ve written that I’d like you to hear. A ballad.”

And Lecuona sighed, giving off a scent of lemon cologne. Although he seemed a little weary, he politely nodded and told the boy, “Come and see me afterwards in the parlor.”

After the concert, in a large parlor adjoining the ballroom, the young Cesar Castillo sat down before a piano, nervously playing and singing his canción.

Lecuona’s reaction was honest and gentle: “You have a good singing voice, your verses are monotonous, but you have written a good chorus.”

The name of the song? Nothing that he could remember, just that one of the verses mentioned “wilting flowers.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lecuona, thank you,” Cesar remembered saying, “thank you,” as he followed him back toward the crowd, that image fading almost instantly, but not the desire to slip back inside that music which had sounded so beautiful.

In time, he was working joints like the Sunset Club and the 146th Street Latin Exchange (A cabdriver: “You know who I took up there one night? Pérez Prado!”) on Friday and Saturday nights, dispensing with the hard business of running a band and just taking jobs as they came along. He didn’t charge very much, twenty or twenty-five dollars a night, and this tended to get him work, because (whether he realized it or not) he was still something of a name.

He just never knew it.

Even took work as a strolling guitarist and singer in restaurants like the Mamey Tree and the Morro Castle in Brooklyn.

Of course, it was a pleasure to perform for the people again. Got his mind off things. And it always made him happy when someone would come along and ask him for an autograph (“Ciertamente!”). It felt good when he’d go walking along the 125th Street markets on a Sunday afternoon and some guy in a sleeveless T-shirt would call out to him from a window, “Hey! Mambo King, how’s it going?”

Still he felt his sadness. Sometimes when he played those jobs with Manny, he would get a ride back home. But most often he rode the subways, as he didn’t like to drive at night anymore. Having scrapped his DeSoto, he had bought a ’54 Chevrolet, but whenever he took it out, he would feel like jerking the car into a wall. Now he took it for occasional spins up and down Riverside Drive on nice days, washed it on Sundays, playing its radio and using it like a little office, to greet pals. Mainly, it was a pain in the ass; he was always paying parking tickets and lending it out to friends. That’s why he’d sell it in ’63, for $250. In any case, he liked to drink, and taking the subway meant that he didn’t have to worry about wrecking the car or hurting anyone. The only setback was that he sometimes felt nervous waiting on the platforms late at night — New York had started to get bad in the early 1960s; that’s why he would walk all the way to the end and hide behind a pillar and wait there for the train.

Anonymous in a pair of sunglasses and with his hat pulled low over his brow, guitar or trumpet case wedged between his knees, the Mambo King traveled to his jobs around the city. It was easy to get home when he worked restaurants in the Village or Madison Avenue bars, where he would serenade the Fred MacMurray-looking executives and their companions (“Now, girls, sing after me, ‘Babaloooooo!’ ”), as those jobs usually ended around eleven at night. But when he’d play small clubs and dance halls out on the edges of Brooklyn and the Bronx, he’d get home at four-thirty, five in the morning. Spending many a night riding the trains by himself, he’d read La Prensa or El Diario or the Daily News.

He made lots of friends on the trains; he knew the flamenco guitarist from Toledo, Spain, a fellow named Eloy García, who played in the Café Madrid; an accordionist with a tango orchestra in Greenwich Village, named Macedonio, a roly-poly fellow who’d go to work in a gaucho hat. (“To play the music of Matos Rodríguez is to bring Matos back,” he’d say.) He knew Estela and Nilda, two zarzuela singers who would pass through matronhood with wilting carnations in their hair. He knew a black three-man dance team with conk hairdos, friendly and hopeful fellows, resplendent in white tuxedos and spats, who were always heading out to do auditions. (“These days we’re hoping to get on the Ed Sullivan show.”) Then there were the Mexicans with their oversized guitars, trumpets, and an accordion that resembled an altar, its fingerboard shiny with hammer-flattened religious medals of the Holy Mother, Christ, and the Apostles, bloody with wounds, hobbling on crutches, and pierced through with arrows to the heart. The men wore big sombreros and trousers that jangled with bells, and high, thin-heeled cowboy boots, leather-etched with swirly flowers, and traveled with a woman and a little girl. The woman wore a mantilla and a frilly dress made of Aztec-looking fabric; the little girl wore a red dress and played a tambourine on which an enamel likeness of John the Baptist had been painted. She’d sit restlessly, unhappily during the rides, while Cesar would lean forward and speak quietly to her mother. (“How is it going with you today?” “Slow lately, the best time is during Christmas, and then everybody gives.”) They’d ride to the last stop downtown, to the Staten Island Ferry terminal, where they would play bambas, corridos, huapangos, and rancheras for the waiting passengers.

“Que Dios te bendiga. God bless you.”

“The same to you.”

There were others, a lot of Latin musicians like himself on their way to weary late-night jobs in the deepest reaches of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Some were young and didn’t know the name Cesar Castillo, but the old-timers, the musicians who had been kicking around in New York since the forties, they knew him. Trumpet players, guitarists, and drummers would come over and sit with the Mambo King.*

Still, there were the tunnels, the darkness, the dense solitude of a station at four in the morning, and the Mambo King daydreaming about Cuba.

It made a big difference to him that he just couldn’t get on an airplane and fly down to Havana to see his daughter or to visit the family in Las Piñas.

Who would ever have dreamed that would be so? That Cuba would be chums with Russia?

It was all a new kind of sadness.

Sitting in his room in the Hotel Splendour (reeling in the room), the Mambo King preferred not to think about the revolution in Cuba. What the fuck had he ever cared about Cuban politics in the old days, except for when he might play a political rally in the provinces for some local crooked politician? What the fuck had he cared when the consensus among his musician pals was that it wouldn’t make any difference who came to power, until Fidel. What could he have done about it, anyway? Things must have been pretty bad. The orchestra leader René Touzet had fled to Miami with his sons, playing the big hotels there and concerts for the Cubans. Then came the grand master of Cuban music, Ernesto Lecuona, arriving in Miami distraught and in a state of creative torpor, unable to play a note on his piano and ending up in Puerto Rico, “bitter and disenchanted,” before he died, he’d heard some people say. Bitter because his Cuba no longer existed.

God, all the Cubans were worked up. Even that compañero—who never forgot the family — Desi Arnaz had scribbled a little extra message on one of his Christmas cards: “We Cubans should stick together in these troubled times.”

What had a friend called the revolution? “The rose that sprouted a thorn.”

The great Celia Cruz would come to the States, too, in 1967.

(On the other hand, Bola de Nieve — the musician “Snowball”—and the singer Elena Burke chose to remain behind.)

When his mother had died in 1962, the news came in a telegram from Eduardo, and a funny thing, too, because he had been thinking about her a lot that week, almost a soft pulsing in his heart, and his head filled with memories. And when he first read the line “I have bad news,” he instantly thought “No.” After reading the telegram, all he could do for hours was to drink and remember how she would take him into the yard as a child and wash his hair in a tub, again and again and again, her soft hands that smelled of rose water scrubbing his head and touching his face, the sun down through the treetops, her hair swirling with curls of light…

The man cried for hours, until his eyelids were swollen, and he fell asleep with his head against the worktable.

Wished he had seen her one more time. Told himself that he would have gone back the previous year, when he’d first heard that she had gotten sick, if it hadn’t been for Castro.

Sometimes he got into big arguments with Ana María’s husband, Raúl, about the situation down there. A long-time union man, Raúl kept himself busy organizing union shops in factories in the West Twenties, where most of the workers were immigrants from Central America and Puerto Rico. They were still friends, despite their differences of opinion. But Raúl kept trying to persuade the Mambo King about Castro. On a Friday night he went so far as to bring him down to a club on 14th Street where old Spanish and Portuguese leftists held meetings. He sat in the back listening as the old Spaniards, their expressions and politics shaped by beatings and jail terms in Franco’s Spain, gave long, heartfelt speeches about “what must be done,” which always came down to “Viva el socialismo!” and “Viva Fidel!”

Nothing wrong with doing away with the world’s evils. He had seen a lot of that. In Cuba there had been rotting sheds made of cardboard and crates, skeleton children and dying dogs. A funeral procession in a small town called Minas. On the side of the plain pine coffin, a sign: “Muerto de hambre.” On the street corners where the handsome suavecitos hung out talking, some guy who’d lost a limb while working at the sugar mill, in the calderas, begging. When he pictured suffering, he thought of a dead dog he’d found lying on the cobblestone road near the harbor of Lisbon: a tiny hound, with a sweet face and pleasantly cocked ears, stiff on its back, with its belly torn open, its dark purple stomach bloated to the size of a fifteen-pound melon.

He had no argument with wanting to help others, Raúl. Back in Cuba, the people took care of their own. Families giving clothing, food, money, and, sometimes, a job in the household or in a business.

“My own mother, Raúl, listen to me. My own mother was always giving money to the poor, even when we didn’t have very much. What more could anyone ask?”

“More.”

“Raúl, you’re my friend. I don’t want to argue with you, but the people are leaving because they can’t bear it.”

“Or because they haven’t the strength.”

“Come on, let’s have a drink.”

A letter, dated June 17, 1962:

To my dear brother,

We may have been apart these years, but you have never lost our hearts. The truth is that the situation down here has become bad. Pedrito is the only one of us who has any sympathy for the Castro government. I feel so depressed just writing those words. Just a year ago I was able to help the others out with the money I was making from the garage, but the government’s taken that away, chained up the doors and informed me that I was welcome to work there if I wanted, but to forget about being the owner. The bastards. That’s Communism. I refused to go back and [crossed out]. I know that you’ve prospered and hope that you can see your way to sending us whatever you can. Bad enough that we’ve had to endure the tragedy of losing Nestor, but now all this seems to just make things worse. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think you had the money. If you could send us fifty or a hundred dollars a month, that would be enough to help us live decently until our applications for exit visas are approved — if ever. But that is a whole other matter. May God bless you. We send you our love.

Eduardo.

So he raised money for his brothers and also sent money and gifts to his daughter, Mariela, even though she didn’t really seem to need them. A headmaster during the days of the revolution, Mariela’s stepfather had edited an underground pro-Castro newspaper and, after the revolution, was rewarded with a good post in the Ministry of Education. Living in an airy apartment on Calle 26 in the Vedado section of Havana, the family thrived, enjoying the privileges of his position, while she studied ballet.

(Among the photographs which the Mambo King had taken with him into the Hotel Splendour, a favorite picture of his daughter in leotards and tutu, beneath an arched window in a room with pilastered walls and ornate tiles. This was at her ballet school in Havana. The picture, taken in 1959, shows a thin, genteel girl with large brown eyes and a teaspoon-shaped face, lively and elegant, in ballet slippers and with a dreamy expression, as if listening to beautiful music. Another picture, taken in 1962, shows her dancing during a rehearsal of Giselle; watching her, Alicia Alonso and her ballet teacher, a pretty Cuban woman named Gloria.)

Sometimes he found himself hanging around the bars and cantinas of Washington Heights and, on occasion, Union City, New Jersey, where in the early sixties many of the feverish Cubans had settled. Sipping his tacita of café negro, he would listen quietly to the political chitchat. The newly arrived Cubans, bitter and forlorn; the old, established Cubans trying to figure out what was going on in Cuba: a man with a shaking right hand whose older brother, a jeweler, had committed suicide in Havana; a man who had lost a good job as a gardener on the Du Pont estate; a man whose cousin had been sent to prison for walking down the street with a pound of sugar hidden in his shirt. A man who lost his farm. A man whose uncle was sentenced to twenty years for shouting “Fuck Castro!” at a town-hall meeting. A man whose precious and beautiful niece was abducted to frigid Moscow, where she married a humorless, barrel-chested Russian. A man who had been shot through the elbow during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Voices:

“And they call us ‘worms.’ ”

“Castro came to the island owning ten thousand acres of land and now he has the whole thing!”

“I smuggled arms for that son of a bitch.”

“Who thinks he would have succeeded had we known he was a Communist?”

“They say the reason Castro was released by Batista in ’54 was because they castrated him.”

“They reduce our discontent to our stomachs. They say we have left because we can’t find a good meal in Havana anymore. That’s the truth, because all the Russians are eating the food. But there’s more. They have taken our right to sit with our families in peace, before tables bountiful with the fruit of our labors.”

“So we left, hombre, and that Castro, mojón guindao, can go to hell!”

“He’s like Rasputin.”

“Let them eat cake is his attitude.”

“He made a deal with the devil.”

“We’ve been betrayed all around.”

“Yes, I know it,” the Mambo King used to say. “I have three brothers and my father still living in Oriente, and they all say the same thing, they want to get out.” Sip of coffee. “Except for my father. He’s very old, in his seventies, and not well.”

And he couldn’t resist: “I have a daughter in Havana. It’s my opinion that her thoughts have been tampered with.”

The Mambo King would walk up the hill of La Salle Street, head bowed, back slightly stooped, belly hanging over his belt, and thoughts clouded with Cuba. In the clutter of his basement workroom, he would read the anti-Castro pamphlets that his friends gave him. Stuck between the pages of his younger brother’s book, Forward America! (“For whatever your problems may be, remember where there is fortitude and determination there is a way!”), this portion of a pamphlet from 1961–62, circled in red ballpoint ink and set on the table in that room in the Hotel Splendour:

… We cannot deny that in the era of republican government we had political leaders who did not always, through honesty and patriotism, implement the just and splendid laws of our Constitution. Yet we could not have known or even imagined the kind of tyranny unleashed by Fidel Castro and his hordes. Former comic-opera dictatorships at least tried to seek democratic solutions to their moral failings. Their methods only became dictatorial when provoked by Communists, who disturbed the public peace and drove innocent, stupid, and fanatical young people out into the streets, using them as cannon fodder. Some people say Cuba is going to flourish anew under Fidel Castro, that malnutrition, prostitution, illiteracy, corruption, and poverty are going to be stamped out forever, that the island will become a paradise of equality, with a truly humanitarian government. Ask those who have been brutally tortured and lie dead in unmarked graves if this is so. The truth is different: Fidel Castro and his gang of robbers and murderous convicts, like the odious Argentine Che Guevara, the Spanish criminals Lister and Bayo, and expert torturers and killers like Raúl Castro and Ramiro Valdés, the head of G-2, have traded off Cuba to Euro-Asiatic powers. Powers that are geographically, spiritually, and historically far removed from everything Caribbean and that have turned Cuba into a tropical colony and military base for Russia. Since January 1, 1959, Cuba has become a miserable pauper state without resources or freedom and the sincere, happy spirit of Cubans has become replaced by tragic gloom. The gaiety of everyday Cuban life and commerce with its rum and good cigars and its bounty of sugar and all that springs from sugar has been reduced by a severe rationing in the name of Soviet-Cuban trade relations. The average Cuban citizen must brace himself stoically for the bleak future while Fidel himself smokes only the best twenty-dollar Havana cigars, drinks rum, and stuffs his gut with Russian caviar. While thousands of Cubans have begun to live in exile, one hundred thousand others rot in prisons for political crimes. The remaining population is divided up between the Cuban traitors who support the tyranny and those who have chosen to remain behind for personal reasons or cannot leave because the government will not allow them to. Let us not forget them! Long live Jesus Christ and long live freedom!

Inspired by the fiery prose of these pamphlets and by news from Cuba, the Mambo King would hole up in his basement workroom, drink beer, and write to Mariela — letters which over the years became more imploring in their tone.

The heart of them said this: “From what I hear about Cuba, I can’t believe that you are happy there. I am not one to tell you what to do, but the day you want to leave and come to the United States, let me know and I will do everything I can, and do it willingly, because you are my flesh and blood.”

He’d sign them, “Your lonely father who loves you.”

Never receiving acknowledgment of these offers, he thought, Of course the letters are intercepted and cut to ribbons before she can read them! Instead, her letters spoke about her dance training—“They say I am one of the more promising students”—and about high-toned cultural events, like a performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird by the Bolshoi Ballet on the stage of the opera house (which left him blinking, because the only ballets he had ever attended were the pornographic ballets at Havana’s notorious Shanghai Theater).

Sometimes (daydreaming, nostalgic) he believed that he would feel some new happiness if Mariela came up from Cuba to live with him, escaping by boat, or miraculously with the permission of the government (“Yes, the poor thing wants to be with her true father. Give her our blessing to leave”). Then she’d look after him, cook his meals, help keep house, and, above all, would receive and give him love, and this love would wrap around his heart like a gentle silk bow, protecting it from all harm.

In a way, thinking about Mariela helped him to understand why Nestor used to sit on the couch and torment himself for hours singing about his “Beautiful María,” even if it was all a pipe dream. Something about love and the eternal spring, time suspended — so that the Mambo King daydreamed about himself sitting in his living room by the sunny window, head set back and eyes closed while his daughter, Mariela, cut his hair, the way his mother used to, Mariela’s lovely voice (he imagined) humming into his huge ears, her face radiant with happy love for him. Now and then he would feel so inspired by all this that he would take the train to Macy’s and, guessing at Mariela’s size, buy her a half-dozen dresses and blouses, lipsticks, mascaras, and rouge, and, on one occasion, a long silk scarf, yellow like the sunlight in old paintings — rushing hurriedly through the store as if the right choice of gift would make things different. With these items he would enclose a note: “Just to let you know that your father loves you.”

And for each November 17, Mariela’s birthday, he’d put together a package of goods generally unavailable to Cubans, things that he thought a teenager would like: chocolate bars, cookies, jam, chewing gum, potato chips, sure evidence of the diversity and abundance of life in America.

She never came running into his arms.

ONCE HE GOT OUT OF THE HOSPITAL in June, his strength on the wane, he didn’t care about anything. Yes, everybody was nice to him. Machito came over to the house to pay his respects, and so did many other musician friends. But he felt so weak, walked so slowly (because of the medications), he didn’t want to get out of bed. Was that a life for the fabulous Cesar Castillo? And forget about his job as superintendent. He had to get Frankie and a few other friends to fill in. When Lydia, his young woman, with whom he had been having his troubles, wasn’t over to take care of him, he would head upstairs to eat with Pedro and Delores, the tensions now gone between them, as he wasn’t a frisky bull anymore but an old hound on his way out. On top of that, he had to maintain a boring, low-fat, low-salt, grainy diet, while deep down he craved plátanos and pork and a heaping plate of rice and beans, with a glass of beer or wine or whiskey on the side.

What pleasures did he have left? Hanging out and going fishing up around Bear Mountain with Frankie, sitting in Bernardito’s house listening to music; hours and hours of watching TV, and reading spicy magazines like Foto Pimienta! with their grainy black-and-white pornographic photographs and their advertisements for the “Revolutionary European System to Lengthen the Size of Your Penis!” (“My old lady never really thought I was ‘stud’ enough for her, pero ahora la penetro muy profundo—but now I go in really deep — and she can hardly wait to go to bed with me!”) and with their ads for lotions and love potions (“Lubricante Jac-Off, Loción Peter-Licker”), and the personal ads in the back, male and female. (“Honest, clean man from Veracruz, Mexico, 38 years old, with a youthful appearance and a penis of nine inches length and two and one half inches thickness seeking lonely female companions between the ages of twenty and sixty for a love affair.” “Bisexual man from Santurce, Puerto Rico, with a six and one half inch penis, seeking out couples for weekend entertainment, am willing to travel.” “Lonely Cuban man, fifty years old but youthful and well endowed—superdotado—living in Coral Gables and homesick for Cuba, seeks a female partner for romance and life.” “I am an abandoned thirty-four-year-old woman with a six-year-old son, very romantic and feel alone and sad. I am an American citizen, white, gordita—chubby — with big breasts, and I am a passionate lover. If you are a healthy male between the ages of 35 and 50, with a good job and decent character, please send information and photograph.” Her photograph, of a naked woman bending over, was below the ad.)

“Dios mío!”

And of course he liked to watch the variety shows on Channel 47 from New Jersey, a Spanish broadcasting station, his favorite being the incredibly voluptuous Iris Chacón, whose jewel-beaded hips and cleavage made the Mambo King a little delirious, and he liked the old musicals from Mexico, like the kind that his former arranger Miguel Montoya used to compose scores for: vampire Westerns and masked wrestler/detective/nightclub singer films and the soap operas about love and family, the women young and beautiful, the men virile and handsome, while he was just an old man now, sixty-two years old but looking seventy-five. Hollywood movies also made him happy, his favorites featuring the likes of Humphrey Bogart, William Powell, and Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, and Marilyn Monroe. (Though he also seemed happy whenever a Laurel and Hardy film turned up. He used to like watching them in the movie house in Las Piñas. But there was one he really liked, The Flying Deuces: Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy escape from the French Foreign Legion in a biplane that crashes, killing Oliver Hardy. At the end of the film Stanley is walking down a road on a beautiful spring day, with a hobo stick and a bundle over his shoulder, sad and wistful that his old pal is dead. Butterflies, trees bending in the breeze, birds chirping, the sun shining, life all around him, and he says, “Gee, Ollie would like a nice day like this,” and just then, as he turns the corner, he comes upon a mule, a mule with a mustache, bangs, and a hat just like Ollie’s, and as Stanley recognizes that Ollie has been reincarnated as a mule, tears come to his eyes, he pats the mule’s back and says, “Gee, Ollie, I’m happy to see you,” and Ollie answers something back like “This is another fine mess you got me into,” but it’s a happy fade-out, and the Mambo King, thinking about resurrection and the way Christ burst through the tomb door, radiant with light, imagines how beautiful it would have been for his younger brother to have returned, and he gets teary-eyed, too.)

Now and then, he watched the I Love Lucy show, and saw that episode one last time before he made his way to the Hotel Splendour. Saw his brother and wept, thinking how life had become very sad because of his death. Closing his eyes, he heard the rapping at Ricky Ricardo’s door, stood in Lucy and Ricky’s living room one more time, and could swear that if he reached over to his side he could touch his brother’s knee and nod as Lucille Ball came into the room with their coffee and snacks, and it would give him the worst craving for a nice little glass of booze, but he kept thinking about what the doctors had told him and knew that the logical thing would be to improve his health, but he was desolately bored, it seemed that all he had were memories, that where his pleasures resided now was in the past. Everything else was too complicated, even walking across the room, what with arthritis aching in his joints and his fingers still so bloated and stiff that he couldn’t even play the guitar or trumpet anymore.

(There were countless other episodes besides the one in which he had appeared with his brother. At four in the morning, just a few weeks before he had left for the Hotel Splendour, he had sat up watching two old I Love Lucy reruns:

The first was an episode about Lucy getting all nervous because Ricky’s sweet mother is coming up from Cuba to visit and Lucy doesn’t know more than a few words of Spanish, which she always botches, and so, when Ricky’s mother turns up, demure and tranquil, to see her loving son, they sit quietly in the living room together, each without knowing what to say and waiting for the other to speak, and they seem to live in this world where everything happens because of the door, and Lucy keeps looking toward the door, waiting for her husband to help her out, and they sit on the couch for a long time, just smiling at one another, Lucy fidgeting and the Cuban mother perfectly content to sit on the couch waiting for her nightclub singer son, of whom she is proud, and you just know that when he walks in she’ll rise and give him a tender kiss, that she will hold him in her arms. Feeling embarrassed because even her four-year-old son, Ricky Jr., speaks better Spanish than she does, Lucy’s really trying to figure out a way around this, because not only has Ricky’s mother come to visit but now some of their cousins from Cuba, other cousins, are coming to join them for dinner. It happens that Ricky has booked a mentalist act for the Tropicana nightclub and this mentalist, a classy fellow with a beautiful Cuban accent, does all his “mind-reading” with a listening device, which Lucy borrows from him, so that the mentalist, hiding in her kitchen, can feed her lines through a microphone. When the family comes over, Lucy’s sudden knowledge of Spanish at first impresses everyone, but then the mentalist has to leave because his wife has just had a baby, and right then and there Lucy begins to fuck everything up, fumbling her Spanish and making a fool of herself. Yet the episode ends happily, with all the Cubans touched by her effort, with everyone embracing, and with Ricky Ricardo lovingly kissing her.

In the second, Ricky and Lucy are living up in the country far away from the troubles of the city, when Lucy gets the idea to raise chickens and buys a huge supply of eggs, but because she doesn’t have an incubator, she brings them into the house and turns up the temperature, without realizing that all the eggs will hatch suddenly, so that when Desi Arnaz, alias Ricky Ricardo, with his wildly expressive eyes, comes home, the living room’s filled with ten thousand chicks, chirping and crawling happily over everything, under the sofa and on top of the tables and chairs, and so Ricky stands astounded in the doorway and does a double take, slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand and his eyes brimming out — his “Lucy! No me digas que compraste un mink coat que costaba $5,000!” expression. And he starts mock-cursing in a thousand-words-a-minute Spanish, and Lucy’s afraid, until Desi’s good mood returns and everybody’s happy again…

Good and funny episodes! he told himself, while drinking in the Hotel Splendour.)

And Lydia, his last love, whom he’d met in a Bronx nightclub in 1978, could not bring herself to make love to him anymore. That hurt the most. She would come over to check in on him every few days, and he was always happy as a young pup to see her, but when he touched her now, she’d pull away.

“You’re still not well,” she’d say to him.

But he’d persist. She’d cook his meals and he would stand behind her, pressing against her back until the heat of her rump aroused him. And without thinking twice, he would undo his trousers and show her his hound-snouted thing, not even fully erect but still able to put many a younger man to shame. “Please,” she’d say, “I’m here to take care of you.”

He persisted. “Just touch me there.”

“Dios mío, you’re like a child.”

And she took hold of his thing, giving him hope, but put it back into his trousers.

“Now sit down and eat this soup I made for you.”

She’d clean his house, cook his meals, make his bed, tidy up the magazines and newspapers in his living room, but all he wanted was to strip off her clothes and make love to her. Nothing he tried worked with her. No singing, no jokes, no flowery compliments. Finally he resorted to pitiable behavior. “You never loved me. Now I feel so useless, I may as well die.” That became his song for weeks, until, worn down, she took pity on him, stripped off her dress, and in a black brassiere and panties, kneeled before him, pulled off his trousers, and began to suckle his aged member. Holding her thick black hair and brushing it away from her eyes, he appraised the expression on her face and realized that it was one of pure revulsion and he wilted, asking himself, Am I so old and far gone that she doesn’t want me anymore?

She kept at him until her mouth and jaw were tired and then settled into a rough masturbation of him, finally producing the tremor that he had been waiting for. But when she had finished, it was as if she could not bear to look at him, this old, thickset man with white hair, and she turned away, both her fists pressed against her mouth and biting her knuckles in some agonized judgment of what she had just done. And when he touched her gently, she pulled away, like everybody else in his life.

“Are you being like this because I haven’t been able to give you and the children money lately? I have money in the bank I can give you. Or if you can wait until I start working again or if a royalty check comes in, I’ll bring you money, okay? If that’s what you want, then I’ll do whatever you want to make you happy.”

“Hombre, I don’t want to touch you anymore because touching you is like touching death.”

And then she just started weeping.

Dressed, she kept saying things like, “I’m sorry I told you this. But you’ve pushed me so much. Please understand.”

“I understand,” he said. “Now please leave this death house, this sick old man, just go.”

She left, promising to return, and he stood up, looking at himself in the mirror. His huge, red-snouted pinga hanging down between his legs. Belly gigantic, skin saggy. Why, he almost had breasts like a woman’s.

He thought: It’s one thing to lose a woman when you’re twenty-five, forty, another when you’re sixty-two years old.

He thought about his wife, Luisa, in Cuba. His daughter, Mariela.

The many others.

Oh, Vanna Vane.

Lydia.

“Mamá”

“… like touching death.”

It took him a long time to make his decisions, the first being “Fuck this shit with special diets and no more booze!” Getting nicely dressed in a white silk suit, he went up to that little joint on 127th Street and Manhattan Avenue and had two orders of fried plantains, one sweet, one green, a plate of yuca smothered in salt, oil, and garlic, an order of roast pork, and a special dish of shrimp and chicken, bread and butter, all washed down with half a dozen beers, so filling and bloating that making his way back up to La Salle Street was one of the great struggles of his life.

That was when he decided to hell with everything. Took his savings out of the bank and bought everybody presents (among them: a set of false teeth for Frankie, a plumed hat for Pedro, who had been too shy to buy one for himself, an old Don Aziapaú recording entitled “Havana Nights” for Bernardito, and for his nephew, Eugenio, who liked to draw, something he’d learned in college, the thickest art book he could find, one on the works of Francisco Goya), and then spent a month visiting friends here and there. What a bitch to say goodbye to old pals like Manny and Frankie. What a bitch to say goodbye to Delores, to travel out to Flushing, Queens, with a box of pastries and gifts for his cousin Pablo, to eat a nice meal with the family and then give him an abrazo for the last time.

NOW HE LAUGHS, THINKING ABOUT grinning Bernardito Mandelbaum again and what he had been like when they first met in 1950: skinny, with a thick head of tousled black hair, in baggy hand-me-downs from an older brother, plaid shirts and a pair of scuffed brown Sears, Roebuck shoes and white socks! That’s how he’d dress for his job as a clerk in the office of the Tidy Print plant where Cesar had also worked in the stockroom for a time. In a cavernous room noisy with printing machines they had become friends, Bernardito immediately liking Cesar’s lighthearted and suave demeanor and always doing him favors. In the mornings he’d get the Mambo King coffee, bring him homemade pastries for a snack, and whenever the Mambo King had to leave early for a job, Bernardito would take care of punching out his time card. In exchange for these favors, the Mambo King let Bernardito into his circle of friends at the plant, Cubans and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, who’d sit around at lunch conversing and telling bawdy stories. And Bernardito, an aspiring cartoonist, with his high-school Spanish, would listen attentively, later picking Cesar’s brains about certain words and phrases which he’d collect into a notebook.

He seemed like a nice enough kid, and that’s why the Mambo King approached him one afternoon and said, “Listen, boy, you’re too young to be missing out on all the fun. Why don’t you come with us tomorrow night after work. Me and my brother, we’re playing this dance in Brooklyn — near where you live — I want you to come with us after work, okay? Just get a little better dressed, wear a nice tie and jacket, like a gentleman.”

And that was the beginning of a new life, because the next night Bernardito joined the Mambo King and his brother for the evening, eating a steak and a platter of fried sweet plantains and then driving down with them to the Imperial Ballroom, where he fell under the spell of the music and found himself gyrating wildly before the stage like a living hieroglyphic, confusing the ladies with his cryptic moves and strange mode of dress — brown jacket, yellow shirt, green tie, white pants, and brown shoes.

Taken in by the excitement and glamour of the dance halls, he forgot all about Bensonhurst and started to hang around with the Mambo King on the weekends, rarely coming home before three in the morning. Slowly, under Cesar’s — and Nestor’s — wing, Bernardito became transformed into a high-stepping ballroom suavecito. The first thing that changed was his way of dressing. On a Saturday afternoon, Cesar met Bernardito and they made the rounds of the big department stores and clothing shops. Out went the hand-me-downs from his older brother. With his savings, Bernardito bought the latest in fashion: ten pairs of pleated trousers, wide-lapeled puff-shouldered double-breasted jackets, Italian belts, and sporty two-toned shoes. And he had his hair shaped into a pompadour and grew a wisp of a mustache, after the fashion of his newest friends.

Then he started to collect Latin records. His Sundays were spent haunting record shops in Harlem and on Flatbush Avenue, so that in time this kid who hadn’t known Xavier Cugat from Jimmy Durante started to accumulate rare recordings by the likes of Ernesto Lecuona, Marion Sunshine, and Miguelito Valdez. And he would have hundreds of these records, enough to fill up three bookcases, one of the best collections in the city.

He was happy until he started to have fights about his new life with his parents. His parents, he’d told the Mambo King, weren’t too happy about the hours he was keeping and were worried about his new friends. His mother and father, who had emigrated from Russia, must have been quite surprised when, on a Sunday afternoon, they heard their doorbell ring and found the two brothers standing there. They had dressed up in suits, bought flowers and a box of chocolates from the Schrafft’s on 107th Street and Broadway. That afternoon the brothers sat with them, sipping coffee, eating cookies, and behaving so agreeably that Bernardito’s parents changed their minds.

But, soon afterwards, Bernardito went to a Mambo King party and met Fifi, a thirty-year-old hot tomato, who soon won his heart with affection and with the carnal pleasures of her body. He moved into her apartment on 122nd Street and would spend the next twenty-five years trying to make peace with his parents. Settled in with her, Bernardito began to live his life much as he always would, holding a full-time job by day and working as a freelance illustrator at night: he was the artist for The Adventures of Atomic Mouse comics and had also drawn three Mambo King covers, among them “Mambo Inferno.”

Then Bernardito’s life fell into the tranquil Cubanophile track of his days. For thirty years he and Cesar Castillo would be friends. And in that time Bernardito not only learned a Latin life-style, speaking a good slangy Cuban Spanish and dancing the mambo and the cha-cha-cha with the best of them, but he also slowly turned his and Fifi’s apartment into a cross between a mambo museum and the parlor of a Havana mansion of the 1920s, with shuttered windows, potted palms, an overhead mahogany fan, animal-footed cabinets and tables, tropical-fish tanks, wicker furniture, a parrot squawking in a cage, candles and candelabra, and, in addition to a big modern RCA television and stereo, a 1920 crank-driven Victrola. Lately he had started to look as if he had stepped out of that age, parting his hair in the middle, wearing wire-rim glasses and a thin mustache, baggy, suspendered pantalones, bow ties, and flat, black-brimmed straw hats.

And he had signed photographs of some of the greats: Cesar Castillo, Xavier Cugat, Machito, Nelo Sosa, and Desi Arnaz.

The day the Mambo King had gone to Bernardito’s house to say goodbye, he found his friend sitting by the window, hunched over a drawing table with a pencil in hand, working out some advertising drawings. A staff artist for the La Prensa syndicate, he also earned extra money as a freelance artist, spicy cartoons for girlie magazines being a quick and easy specialty — a big-assed chick bending over to pick up a rose, her butt out in the world, some man gaping at her, and his matronly wife, beside him, saying, “I didn’t know you liked flowers so much!” That afternoon, he sat beside Bernardito as he worked, the two men talking and drinking. Usually Bernardito listened to music while he worked, and that day had not been different: Nelo Sosa’s orchestra came out of his speakers, sounding beautiful.

For an hour or so they talked, and then, feeling the sadness of that day, the Mambo King presented his old friend with a package of rare old records from Cuba by the Sexteto Habanero, five 78s he had found in a sidewalk shop in Havana during the 1950s.

“These are for you, Bernardito.”

And the Mambo King took a good long look at his friend. The man was in his late forties now but still had this goofy grin of enchantment he’d get when he was nineteen.

“But why are you giving me these?”

“Because you’re my friend,” the Mambo King told him. “Besides, I never listen to them anymore. You may as well have them.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Happily, Bernardito Mandelbaum placed upon his old KLH stereo, which had a 78 rpm gear, the Sexteto Habanero’s famed recording of “Mamá Inez.”

And then he played all the others, and as he did he kept asking, “Are you sure you want to give these to me?”

“They’re yours.”

Then they just sat for a time and Cesar asked, “And your señora? When is she coming home?”

“She should be here soon.”

Yes, and that was another thing. After waiting twenty-five years for his parents to pass away, he had finally married Fifi.

It was another hour before Fifi came home, offering to cook the Mambo King a nice healthy dinner of fried steak and plantains, and planting a kiss on his cheek that made him blush.

But he refused the dinner, saying that he wasn’t feeling well.

At the door, he said goodbye to Bernardito, giving him a strong embrace and holding it for a long time.

“Come back on Sunday,” Bernardito told him as the Mambo King made his way down the stairs. “Don’t forget. Sunday.”

The worst goodbye had been with Eugenio. He didn’t want to leave the kid “behind,” without seeing him one last time. And so, one day, he called Eugenio at his job as a bookkeeper in an artist-supply store on Canal Street, a joint called Pearl Paints, and invited him out to dinner that night, so they could hang around like they used to. They met on 110th Street and ended up in this Dominican place on Amsterdam Avenue, ate a nice meal. Afterwards they made their way out to this little bar called La Ronda, where beers were five dollars apiece but where the stripper dancing in the cage had a nice compact body. They’d come in when she was down to nothing. (Now and then she would go into the back with customers for a price, lie down on a bed, and open her legs.)

“Mambero,” she called to him when she noticed he had come in. “Are you feeling better?”

He shrugged. Then she gave Eugenio an up-and-down, and the Mambo King leaned over to his nephew with a twenty-dollar bill in hand, saying, “Do you want to go with her? Makes no difference to me.”

“You go with her, Uncle.”

The Mambo King looked at her up in the cage with her firm legs and nice smooth thighs. She’d even shaved her vagina, the slit like a sidewise mouth, which she had made gleamy with some Vaseline and who knew what else. It was tempting, but he said, “No, I’m here to spend the time with you.”

By then, everybody in the family knew that Cesar had abandoned his special diets and medicines, putting on weight and getting teary-eyed and sluggish. It hit Eugenio bad. As he sat beside his uncle, certain old desires came over him — to run away, go somewhere else, be someone else.

They listened to music and then there were long periods of silence: the kid seemed so unhappy.

“Do you remember when we always used to go to places and music jobs together?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Those were good times, huh?”

“They were okay.”

“Well, things change. You’re not a nene anymore and I’m not a young man.”

Eugenio shrugged.

“Do you remember when I took you to that woman up on 145th Street?”

“Yes!”

“Eugenio, don’t be so cross with me. She was a dish, huh?”

“She was a pretty woman, Uncle.”

Then: “Are we going to be here for a long time, Uncle?”

“No, just for a few drinks, boy.” He sipped. “I just want you to know that… you mean a lot here,” and he tapped his chest.

Eugenio scratching his brow, the dancer leaning forward in her cage and shaking her breasts.

“I hope you believe me, boy. I want you to believe me.”

“Uncle…”

“I just wanted to tell you one little thing, man to man, heart to heart.” His whole face was red and immense, his breathing heavy. “Que yo te quiero. I love you, nephew. You understand?”

“Yes, Uncle, is that why you told me to come here?”

Then: “Look, Uncle, I really thought something was wrong; I mean, it’s one in the morning and I have to get home.”

The Mambo King nodded, wanting to let out a cry of excruciating pain. “Well, I appreciate that you have come to see your old mambero uncle,” he said.

And then they sat in the bar awhile, watching the stripper and not saying much. The jukebox loud with the latest Latin hit-makers’ songs — musicians like Oscar de León and perennial favorites like Tito Puente.

Later, they were both standing by the subway on 110th Street and Broadway.

Eugenio had to get down to East 10th Street, where he lived, while the Mambo King would catch the uptown local. The last words he said to his nephew repeated the words he used always to say when he was drunk. “Well, don’t forget about me, huh? And don’t forget that your uncle loves you.” Then he embraced his nephew for the last time.

Waiting for his train, he had watched his nephew across the platform. Eugenio was sitting on a bench reading a fancy paper, The New York Times. His nephew, who had gone to college, was as melancholic as his father and becoming more so as he got older. As the Mambo King’s train approached, he whistled across to Eugenio, who barely looked up in time to see his uncle waving. Pressed against the window and squinting through his dark green glasses, the Mambo King watched his nephew out of the rushing car until he was swallowed up in the dark tunnel.

That had been a few nights before, the Mambo King remembered as he sat in the Hotel Splendour.

Remembering something else, too, he went in this little suitcase and took out some envelopes and letters so that he might look at them one more time, and then he fished through the soft cloth pockets of his suitcase and withdrew a fine black-handled straight razor, the gift of a friend many years ago, and placed it before him on the table, in case he found himself lingering too long into the night in his room in the Hotel Splendour.

MUSICIAN, SINGER, AND SUPERINTENDENT, he had also become a teacher in the early 1960s. Most of his classes, which would gather on Sunday afternoons, consisted of five or six students, and for a few years included Eugenio, who started trumpet lessons at about the age of twelve. In the nice weather he’d sometimes hold the lessons out in the park, but in the cooler seasons they’d gather in his apartment. He gave these lessons for free, because it made him feel a little bit like his old teacher Eusebio Stevenson and the kindly Julián García, who had looked out after him many years ago.

And because he didn’t like to be alone.

Happy to have these kids around, he’d usually spring for sodas and cupcakes, but if he had a few extra dollars in his pocket he would send Eugenio out to the bodega across the street with five dollars to buy a few pounds of cold cuts and some loaves of Italian bread and bags of potato chips, so that these boys, some of whom did not always have much to eat, might have a nice lunch afterwards.

Gathered in his living room, the boys would wait for the maestro to come out with an armful of records and his portable record player. Depending on his mood, he would just teach technique or, as he did on this day, play some mambos and old canciones and drift off into memoryville, relating to them some of the very same things that his teacher, Eusebio Stevenson, had once told him:

“Now, the rumba is derived from the guaguancó, which goes back to long ago, many hundreds of years ago, when the Spaniards first brought the flamenco style of music to Cuba, and this Spanish style, mixed up with the rhythms of the Africans, played on the drums, led to the early forms of the rumba. The word ‘rumba’ means magnificence. The slaves who first danced this were usually chained up at night by the ankle, so they were forced to limit their movements: when they danced their rumbas, it was with much movement of the hips and little movement of the feet. That’s the authentic rumba from the nineteenth century, with drums and voices and melody lines that sound Spanish and African at the same time… And what is the African? The African always sounds to me like people chanting in a forest, or shouting across a river. These rumbas were first played with only trumpets and drums. When you hear modern music and there’s a drum jam session, a descarga, it’s called the rumba section. In any case, these rumbas became popular in the nineteenth century; the small military bands in the towns of Cuba used to spice up their bland waltzes and military marches with rumba rhythms, so that people could let loose and have a good time.

“The mambo, that’s another dance. That came along in the 1940s, before you were all born. As a dance it’s like the rumba, but with much more movement of the feet, as if the chains had been removed. That’s why everybody looks crazy, like a jitterbug on fire, when they dance the mambo.”

And he’d show them a few steps, his lumbering body moving nimbly across the floor, and the kids laughed.

“The mambo’s freedom comes originally from the guaracha, an old country-style dance of Cuba, always played cheerfully.

“The stuff we have now like the pachanga is really just a variation. Most of what you are going to play, if you should ever play with a conjunto, will be in 2/4 time, and on top of that you’ll hear the claves rhythm in 3/2, which goes one-two-three, one-two.

“Now, most orchestras are going to play their arrangements in the following way, the songs being divided into three sections. The first is the ‘head’ or the melody; the second is the coro, or chorus, where you get the singers harmonizing; and then finally the mambo or rumba section. Machito often uses that way of arranging.”

Then he would go on about the different instruments and time schemes, this whole erudite discussion covering up the fact that he did not know how to read music himself.

After this, the actual lessons and playing of instruments, with the most attentive pupils being Miguelito, a stringy Puerto Rican, who wanted to learn the saxophone; Ralphie, Leon the one-eyed plumber’s son, and Eugenio, with his decent ear and careful demeanor. Both played the trumpet. Taking turns, each student would get up and play a song and the Mambo King would comment on his technique, and show the student how to correct a flaw. And this method worked, as some of his students excelled and moved on to other teachers who knew how to read music. This was one shortcoming of which the Mambo King was ashamed. While he could sit them down and identify the notes in a written piece, he’d never learned how to read quickly. His face would flush and he would avoid looking into his students’ eyes; and forget about playing through complicated jazz scores like the books that Miguelito would turn up with, thick with Duke Ellington arrangements.

Still, there was no shortage of new students. There was always some poor kid from La Salle or Harlem or the Bronx who had heard about a Mambo King who gave free music lessons, and sandwiches, too! And the Mambo King never regretted taking them in. His only bad experience involved a kid with a pockmarked face and gruff, fast-talking manner á la Phil Silvers in the Sergeant Bilko television series. Cesar knew Eddie from the neighborhood. In the middle of his second lesson, the kid went into the kitchen to get a glass of water: later, while getting dressed to go out, the Mambo King couldn’t find a gold-banded Timex watch and about twenty dollars in cash that he had left in the drawer of his bedroom dresser. Missing, too, was a Ronson lighter from another drawer and a silver ring which the Mambo King had received from one of his fans. Eddie was caught trying to peddle the ring in a Harlem pawnshop, and did an afternoon in the juvenile pen. He was never allowed back into the house, but the Mambo King continued giving lessons to his other students, a handful of whom ended up as struggling happy professionals.

Now he was listening to Eugenio practicing his trumpet and it was raining. Under a blanket of late-afternoon drowsiness, he listened carefully to the kid, whose playing sounded so distant: at times he confused the raindrops on the window ledges with those which used to fall in Cuba, and turned happily in bed, as if he were a kid again, when sleep was beautiful and the world seemed an endless thing. Slowly he came out of this — his dog Poochie had started barking because a fire alarm down the street had gone off — and he sat up and lit a cigarette. He’d been out real late the night before, working some job in the Bronx, and his head was pounding. Something about a woman in a short green dress kissing him in front of a jukebox, and then something else about a horrendous time trying to get a cab in those dead Bronx streets at four in the morning. Then what could he remember? Last thing he knew, he was resting in bed and could feel his tie being slipped off from around his neck, someone unbuttoning his shirt and trying to pull it off his back. Then the pleasure of his shoes slipping off his feet, and those tired soles refreshed by the cool night air. Then: “Good night, Uncle,” and the light clicking off.

Well, he had to get up, had another job to play up in the Bronx, any other night, dear God, but tonight. He would have preferred to stay in bed and fall asleep again to that nice rush of water out the rain gutters, which always reminded him of tropical storms like those he was ecstatic about in Cuba. (A crack of lightning reminded him that he had once been a little kid dancing on the patio tiles and spinning in circles, euphoric under the downpour.) He didn’t want the rain to stop, didn’t want to get up, but finally left his bed. Eugenio was playing “Bésame Mucho,” and as the Mambo King took care of business in the toilet and later shaved, he reflected on how, after nearly two years, the kid was finally starting to show some real improvement. Not that anyone in the family thought he should settle on a musician’s life, no way, boy! You had better go to school so you don’t have to slave your ass off working with your hands or playing jobs in the middle of nowhere until four in the morning. And understand, there’s nothing wrong with entertaining the people or with the enjoyment of playing itself. No, it’s everything else eating at you, the long trips home so late, the tiredness in your bones, the kind of dishonest people you have to deal with sometimes, the feeling that one night is going be like another, forever and forever.

Unless you’re very very lucky, he’d tell the kid, you have to work hard. Unless you’re like Frank Sinatra or Desi Arnaz with a beautiful house in California, you know, kid? I advise you to be sensible. Get yourself a nice girl, get married, have kids, the works. And if you try to have a family on a musician’s salary, you better believe that you’re going to have to get a regular job before you know it. So if you want to play, go ahead, but just remember that for you it should be a hobby. I mean to say, boy, you don’t want to end up like your uncle, do you?

(The kid would always lower his head.)

Later, when he went upstairs, the kid had already eaten his dinner and was waiting anxiously for his uncle in the living room. In the kitchen, the Mambo King joined pretty Leticia and dour Pedro at the table and ate his meal while listening to Delores carry on about the boy: “You must tell him to calm down. He’s going to get in trouble. Do you understand?”

They’d been having trouble with him for the last year. He still wasn’t getting along with his stepfather and had started to run in the streets with some bad kids. They’d tried everything: they’d gone after him with a belt, taken him to the priest, to the youth counselor, and on one occasion Delores had called the police. But none of it worked: the kid reacted by running away and hopping a train that took him in the dead of winter to Buffalo, New York, where he holed up in a rail yard for three days and nearly caught pneumonia. And she wasn’t even happy about him going off on those late-night jobs with the Mambo King, but at least that was better than hanging around in the street.

“Just talk some sense into him,” Delores pleaded with him. “Tell him it’s not good for him to be like that.”

“I will.”

On their way to these jobs he’d tell Eugenio to listen to his mother, to forget about the kids on the street. “You know I’d never lay a finger on you, boy, but if you keep going this way, I’ll have to do something about it.”

“Would you do that to me?”

“Well, I, I, I wouldn’t want to, because you’re my blood”—and he’d be thinking about the beatings he’d once received—“but you should absolutely respect your mother.”

“I don’t respect her no more.”

“No, no, nephew, don’t be that way.”

But he could see how the kid might be pissed at Pedro. The guy was a stiff.

“Eugenio, think what you want to think, but just remember that your mother’s a good woman and that she’d never do anything that’s not right. I mean, you shouldn’t be so angry just because she chose to marry again. She did it for you, do you understand?”

And the kid would nod.

“I heard you today,” he said. “You sounded good.”

Then: “Let’s go.”

The club was up a steep hill, a narrow stairway, past a NO GUNS PLEASE sign, a little old lady selling admission tickets by the door. By the time they’d arrived, they were chilled to the bone. The warmth of the crowd, comforting.

Voices:

“Hey, look who’s here!”

“Mambero!”

“Nice to see you. This is my nephew, a giant, huh?”

Then: “Good, everybody’s here.”

Sometimes, when he’d rap Eugenio on the back, hitting the frame of a solid man, he would marvel at the passage of time.

When they reached the little wooden platform that was their stage, he met with his musicians, all of whom he had played with before, but who had never met Eugenio.

“He’s learning the trumpet,” the Mambo King said to their pianist, Raúl.

“Then let him sit in.”

“No, he’s happy just to play the bongos.”

And just to be with me. When he was younger, a few years back, the kid used to stay in my apartment all day, watching television and doing as he pleased. Once he asked me, “Uncle, can I come and live with you?”

And I answered him, “But, chico, you almost do.”

That night the Mambo King sang well. He played his usual sets, mixing fast and slow songs, joking with the audience and sometimes stepping out onto the floor. Spinning around (as he used to in the rain, how he sometimes wished to be under that wind-torn tree), he would catch sight of his nephew sitting on a black drum case, tapping away on a pair of bongo drums set between his knees, and looking nearly like a grown man. Soon enough, that would be the case and the kid would leave their household and things would never be the same again. Was that why he always hung around his uncle? What could that kid be thinking? Maybe he just concentrated on the music or daydreamed — but about what?

“Do you want to play the trumpet later? We can do ‘Bésame Mucho,’ would you like that?”

“No, I’m happy just sitting here.”

He let him have his way, never forcing the kid. Still, he couldn’t understand why his nephew practiced so much, if he didn’t want to play.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, hombre! Come on,” said another of the musicians.

But he kept to the bongos. And just then the Mambo King thought that Eugenio was even more reserved than his father, his poor father.

Playing a trumpet solo, during “Santa Isabel de las Lajas,” he realized that he simply did not understand Eugenio. Delores kept telling him that the boy was angry, that he would throw things down from the walls, had scattered Pedro’s bookkeeping ledgers and his stamp collection all over the floor, that he had been caught running through the streets breaking windows. That in the street he was quick-tempered, starting fights over nothing.

“Don’t you see that, Cesar?”

If that was so, why was the boy so gentle with me?

There he was, tapping the drums, how could anyone say that things weren’t right with him?

You know, boy, I’ll be sorry when you’re out of the house.

Tilting his head back, he drifted aloft on the flow of notes, drifted into his vision of Eugenio:

A boy who used to fall asleep on his lap in midafternoon, a boy who would hold him steady on some nights when they walked along the street and he needed someone to help him on the way. A hand touching his face, the quiet boy who preferred television in his uncle’s apartment, rather than in his own. (The boy loving that program on which me and my brother had appeared.) And he was a respectful boy, a boy he’d take to Coney Island and to the Palisades amusement park or to visit friends like Machito or to the market on 125th Street. A boy who knew how to say “Come on” to him, when his spirits were low as they were on that afternoon three years ago when, standing on the stoop and looking around at the world, he shuddered with longing for his mother, whom he would never see again. A boy who took his hand that day and led him over to the market, where the vendors had set up stalls selling everything from Barbie dolls to Hula Hoops, a boy who had pulled him free of his sadness, running happily from booth to booth and finding him, of all things, a secondhand store that had a rare mambo record by one of Cesar’s favorites, Alberto Iznaga!

That was all he had to know, all that he knew, all that he would ever know about the kid.

If I could give you anything in the world, I would, boy, but I don’t have that power.

He leaned back from the microphone, touching Eugenio’s head.

Later he stood by the window watching the street, with a drink in hand, whiskey that made him ache a little less.

I would have brought your Papi back in a second if I could.

“Eugenio, do me a favor and get me another drink?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

I would have snapped my fingers…

And when he got the drink and started to belt it down, he tried to reassure the boy: “Don’t worry, I’m too tired to stay out late tonight.”

Around one-thirty, they played a final set: “El Bodeguero,” “Tú,” “Siempre en Mi Corazón,” “Frenesí,” and “Qué Mambo!”

And there they were at three o’clock in the morning at the 149th Street station, waiting for the express into Manhattan.

The stillness in the station, the boy leaning up against his uncle, and his uncle against a column, black instrument case by his side.

THE MAMEY TREE RESTAURANT, a huge place on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street in Brooklyn, with two dining rooms and a juice and sandwich bar that wrapped around the corner and opened to the sidewalk.

Its owner, Don Emilio, would pass his days seated in a wheelchair by the cash register, sternly scanning the dining room. He wore gleamy metal-rim glasses and his guayabera shirt pockets were stuffed with panatelas and red-nibbed, shiny ballpoint pens, always arranged neatly in a row. His legs dangled, hopelessly, in a pair of black pantalones.

The poor man had arrived in the States, settled in Brooklyn, and like many other Cubans worked like an animal to save money and start a business, the restaurant, which flourished, and then boom, a stroke filled his legs with sawdust and he ended up in the wheelchair, paralyzed below his waist. “Used to be a nice guy,” the waiters told Cesar. “Used to be proud of the whole works and treat us good, only now all he thinks about is that people are robbing him… the same way that God robbed him of his legs.”

Walking into the crowded dining room this Saturday afternoon, the Mambo King sheepishly removed his hat and with head bowed said, “Good afternoon, Don Emilio.”

“How are you, my friend?”

“Good, Don Emilio. I’ve come for my guitar. I left it here last night.”

(Because he had been drunk and did not want to take it on the subway.)

“My wife told me. I think she put it in the back.”

“Yes?”

Through a pair of double doors he made his way into the bustling kitchen, where three cooks were working over huge, many-burner stoves and ovens, baking chicken and pork chops and making pots of rice, broth and fish soup, frying plantains and boiling yuca.

“The boss sent me back here for my guitar.”

“Carmen’s taken it upstairs. She said she didn’t think the heat would be good for it.”

Then the cook, in a long, sauce-stained apron, pointed out to a back door that opened into a yard. “Up those stairs, on the second floor.”

Across a small back yard where a tree and flowers had managed to grow through the cracked concrete floor, he made his way into another doorway and up the steps to Don Emilio’s apartment on the second floor. When his wife opened the door, the apartment was glowing with sunlight and smelled like roses. Inside, set out on every table, desk, and sill, bouquet after bouquet of flowers, so many that their colors floated through the room.

(And he remembers again how his mother in Cuba used to fill the house with flowers.)

The Mambo King took off his hat and, flashing a warm smile, said quietly, “Carmencita, I’ve come to get my guitar.”

A pretty woman in her late thirties, with a vaguely defeated air about her, Don Emilio’s wife, Carmen, was wearing a clean, matronly, pink sleeveless dress. With her coiffure of hair-sprayed curls, long eyelashes, thick lipstick, and mascara, she seemed ready to step out. No children in the apartment, a few photographs set out here and there in the room, including a wedding picture taken down in Holguín, Cuba, in a plaza, before the revolution, when Don Emilio had the use of his legs. (He was this tall, grinning fellow, holding his wife close.) An antique crucifix over the couch (And, Jesus, promise to help me), electric sun-rayed clock, a big color TV set, a plastic-covered couch. It was an old apartment with a brand-new bathroom, where there was a fancy-looking hospital-style commode with handles fitted onto the seat.

“Please come in, Cesar.”

“Okay, but I only came to get the guitar.”

In its black case, the guitar was leaning up against the radiator.

“I wanted to talk with you,” Carmen said.

The Mambo King shook his head. “I’ll listen, but if you’re going to talk to me about your husband, I want no part of it. I have nothing against Don Emilio and…”

“And I have nothing,” she said desperately. “When I’m not working downstairs, I’m here, alone. He won’t even let me go out on the street unless he’s with me in the wheelchair.”

Then: “Hombre…” and she undid the front buttons of her dress, from her neck to the hem of her skirt, and spread it open. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She had a short and plumpish body, her bottom nice and round, and large stretch-marked breasts. Resting back on the couch, she told him, “Cesar, I’m waiting.”

When he hesitated, she sat forward, undid his trousers, and fondled him so that his thing unwillingly (he liked Don Emilio) sprang into the world and she wrapped her fingers around him and fed upon him as if she were a small creature of the forest seeking honey from a hive.

Mother Nature took over, and with his trousers and drawers pulled down below his knees, he made terrified love to her, afraid that Don Emilio or one of his brothers might find out about them. The first time he had been down in the cold-storage room, a year ago, when Don Emilio was sick in bed with the flu, and it was very late and he had been playing his usual night’s work (strolling among the noisy tables playing “Malagueña,” singing “Bésame Mucho” and “Cuando Caliente el Sol”) and was waiting around to get paid, when she told him to come back with her to the office so that the waiters would not see how much she was going to give him; and then she pushed open the door of the cold-storage room, hitched her skirt up over her waist, and that was that, as he was a little drunk and her panties had fallen down nicely over her black-nyloned, red-high-heeled legs. The phone in the office next door kept ringing — Don Emilio calling to see when she would come home — and the melody of Beny More’s “Santa Isabel de las Lajas” came in faintly through the walls, his knees scraping against fifty-pound burlap sacks of lentils, and Doña Carmen’s face crushed against his chest (and biting whatever she could reach), and then everything ended quickly. It hadn’t taken her more than two minutes to get what she had wanted. Afterwards he had felt bad, for in the days when he had first started playing music again and would go from restaurant to restaurant looking for work, to raise money for the family in Cuba, Don Emilio had been one of the first to hire him.

But he had to admit that once they had started, there wasn’t much chance of stopping… Just her hand on him would have been enough, and she had done more than that; thick as a sink J-joint, his thing was slowly entering her. (She kept stopping him every three inches or so and would throw back her head and grind her hips until the tight hot space blossomed with moisture and unfurled like silk and then she would let in more, whipping her head from side to side and grinding her teeth to suppress her moans.) Once he was all the way inside her, it took him only seven strokes, his immense body smothering her, her pelvic bone hitting hard against his, everything squirmy underneath, the tip of his penis licking her cervical flower, and Carmen saying, “Don Emilio was once built like you. I used to call him caballo.”

Then it was all over; she broke into pieces and kicked over a lamp and he barely had time to get dressed, say “Good day,” and drink down a glass of water. His livid bone tucked back into his trousers, he found himself standing outside her door, anxiously, as if he’d just narrowly avoided being hit by a bus.

Downstairs, with his guitar case in hand, and into the kitchen, and crossing into the dining room, and thinking about Carmen’s rump and how she had placed his hand over her mouth as she came, flicking her tongue in and out between his index and forefinger, and Cuba and Don Emilio and the crowded room, smell of pork chops and black beans and rice and fried plantains, and wondered if they’d smell Doña Carmen on his hands or his face. Making his way toward the door, he buttoned his London Fog overcoat, and was waving goodbye to his friends until next week, when Don Emilio called him over.

“Cesar, do me a favor while you’re here,” Don Emilio said to the Mambo King, holding him firmly by the wrist. “Sing that nice little number for those newlyweds over there. He’s the son of a good friend of mine.”

“Yes, if you want me to, Don Emilio.”

“It would make me happy.”

And Don Emilio gave Cesar a friendly rap on the shoulders and the Mambo King got out his guitar, slung its velvet strap over his shoulders, and walked over to the newlyweds’ table. First he sang the Ernesto Lecuona song “Siempre en Mi Corazón,” and then, strumming two chords softly, an A-minor and an E-major (the opening chords to “Beautiful María of My Soul”), he spoke these words:

“Children, may God bless you on your journey. Now you are entering a special time in your lives, precious but difficult… There will be trials and happinesses awaiting you, and there will be times when you, as wife, and you, as husband, will perhaps quarrel with the other and wish that you had never made this bond. And your hearts may wander, and sickness may bring despair. But if these things should ever happen, remember that this life passes quickly and that a life spent without love is lonely, while the love that a man and a woman feel for each other and their children shines like sunlight in the heart. And this sunlight accompanies you forever, protects you all your life, even unto the final days when you are old together and the days are not so long, when you may fear the time when your Maker calls you from the world. But just remember your mutual love will always preserve you and it will be your comfort forever.”

And when he finished, Cesar bowed and the young couple, aquiver with joy, thanked him.

“Bueno,” he said to Don Emilio. “I have to get back to Manhattan.”

“Thank you, my friend”—and he patted Cesar’s back and gave the Mambo King a five-dollar bill. “For your trouble, my friend. We’ll be seeing you next week, yes?”

“Yes, Don Emilio.”

Nervous and vaguely elated, he rode home to La Salle Street. Inside his bathroom, he undid his trousers to wash himself over the sink: even though he felt like a traitor, the image of Carmencita’s furious passion was like the lick of a thick female tongue over his member, and just like that he watched, as if from the mouth of a dolphin, spout three clear drops of semen, stretched like a silver wire between the tip of his thing to that point in the air where it snapped free of his dense finger.

AND THERE WAS THAT MORNING when he had gone upstairs to have a nice Sunday breakfast with Delores and the kids. He was enjoying a chorizo-and-fried-egg sandwich when he heard Frankie the Exterminator honking his horn from the street.

“Yo!” Frankie called up into the window.

Down below, Frankie was happy with excitement.

Cesar went downstairs.

“You know my friend Georgie from Trinidad?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he wants us to go down there for carnival.”

He started to think that he hadn’t had a nice vacation lately, trips everywhere to the Bronx and Brooklyn, but nowhere else.

“Thing is, Georgie’s got a house there, and all we would have to pay is the airfare and whatever we eat, which is cheap there.”

By the following Thursday night, Cesar, Frankie, and Georgie were dancing in a carnival line. Wearing a sheet and a bull’s head, Cesar danced, blowing his trumpet. Frankie was the devil; Georgie, a naughty harlot. They stormed through the crowded streets, climbed onto the back of flower-covered floats, threw pennies and candies at the children, flirted with the pretty women in their one-piece bathing suits and bikinis, by day enjoying the tropical sun and by night the lantern-lit porches, party houses out of whose windows blared the music of that incomparable Trinidadian, the Mighty Sparrow, whom Cesar had admired since the mid-1950s.

The crowd was so merry and drunk that the women took off their tops and the men, being swinish louts, lost control, pinching asses, grabbing breasts, and stealing kisses. The masks helped, as they did away with the lines and the sagginess of the men’s once handsome faces. Flirting back, the women shook their hips and, audaciously rolling their tongues around their lips, grabbed their most audacious parts, grabbed the men, too. In every alley there was at least one drummer, one trumpeter, one blaring speaker, and a half-dozen couples shamelessly fornicating. There was so much lovemaking going on, so much dancing and cavorting, that the streets smelled of sweat, perfume, and sperm. Packs of wild hounds barked and howled their joy. Then they spilled into their friend Georgie’s little house, with its pink and light blue walls, and rolled around on the floor, laughing and kissing their new lady companions.

The men were having such a good time they hardly slept. The first night, a half hour’s worth of sleep was all that Cesar had. They’d bought two cases of rum and filled the house with women, soft and delicious girls of sixteen and overripe but willing ladies of fifty. Georgie turned up his record player as loud as it would go: everybody danced some more. Hour after hour they listened to the Mighty Sparrow and his celebrated calypso orchestra, and when they weren’t dancing and drinking, they were back on the streets howling like the roaming packs of wild hounds.

It would have been a dream vacation save for the frailties and limits of endurance of the human body in men approaching their fifties. All the flowing blood, the rum-sludge-filled stomachs, the dizzying heads, the spurting sexual organs, the bubbling digestive systems continuing without respite. These were fellows who had never read health magazines with their articles and medical studies about how many times a man was supposed to get an erection. But these three got it up, breathing the heady air of miasmic, stupefying vapors and living for fun.

AND WHY SUDDENLY REMEMBER another friend who worked as a caretaker in the cemetery near Edgar Allan Poe’s house up in the Bronx?

“No easy job working here at this cemetery,” the man told the Mambo King. “Tell you that, coño. A lot of voodoo and santería people come here to hold ceremonies because it’s consecrated ground, and I know this because sometimes in the morning I find blood on the ground, ashes and small-animal bones strewn about the graves: sometimes the tombstones are splattered with blood.”

“I would be frightened.”

“No, these people are not so bad, personally they are quite nice. I see them sometimes coming by in the mornings. Tourists too, people from Europe. See”—and he pointed across the way. “Just down that way stands the cottage of the writer Edgar Allan Poe, that’s where he lived for a few years. That’s the house where his wife died of tuberculosis in the wintertime. They were so poor that he didn’t even have a cent for firewood and he had to cover her up with newspapers, and he would put his house cats over her so that she might be warmer. But she died anyway, the poor man by her side. In any case, the santeros say that his house emanates a great supernatural force and that spirits hover around it, and so that’s why they especially like this cemetery: the caretaker of Poe’s house, who also works for the city, told me that he sometimes finds bones and blood and bird feathers scattered over the ground by the entrance.”

He remembered more:

There had been the pachanga in 1960.

The bossa nova in 1962.

The Mozambique and the bugaloo in 1965.

After that, he couldn’t figure out what was happening.

One thing he never got used to in those days was the change in fashion. It certainly wasn’t 1949 anymore. It seemed that elegance had gone down the toilet and the young people of that time were dressing in circus costumes. The men wearing Army fatigues and big thick boots, the women plaid lumberjack shirts and formless, loose-hanging dresses. It was all beyond him. Then it was bell-bottomed trousers, paisley jackets, and impossibly wide-collared shirts. And the hair. Sideburns, muttonchops, walrus mustaches, hair down to the shoulders. (Even Eugenio had been that way, wearing it in a ponytail down his back and looking like a forlorn Indian.) He’d shake his head and in his humble way try to maintain the elegance of his youth, even if Leticia called him “Mr. Old-fashioned.” But, turning around, he saw that even many of his fellow Latin musicians had changed, wearing their hair long and sporting beards and thick Afros. Carajo, they were going with the times!

That’s why, when he attempted a recording comeback in 1967, he put out a 45 rpm called “Psychedelic Baby” on the Hip Records label out of Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn, a basic Latin bugaloo, with a hybrid Latin-rock improvisation on the flip side (he was using young musicians) built upon a twelve-bar blues progression, a boogie-woogie spiced up by congas and 3/5/7 harmonies on the horns. (For that record he used a young Brooklyn pianist named Jacinto Martínez, Manny his bassist, a sax player named Poppo, Pito on drums, and three unknowns on the horns.) The record sold two hundred copies and was most notable for its black-and-white cover, the only photograph of the Mambo King in a goatee á la Pérez Prado. Dressed in guayabera, wrap-around shades, matching blue linen trousers and white golden-buckled shoes, he had posed for the photograph in front of the old 1964 World’s Fair Unisphere in Flushing Meadows, Queens.

(There was one more recording comeback that same year, a 33 LP called the “The Fabulous Cesar Castillo Returns!” which included a new bolero “Sadness” and a new version of “Beautiful María of My Soul” done with five instruments accompanying Cesar on the guitar and vocals. A memorable recording that rapidly disappeared into the 39 cents bins of Woolworth’s and John’s Bargain stores everywhere.)

Soon afterwards Cesar tried to audition for a spot at the Cheetah discotheque and was passed over for an act called Johnny Bugaloo.

And 1967 was the year that his brothers Eduardo and Miguel and their families finally left Cuba and settled in Miami, leaving one brother, Pedrocito, and their father behind. (The old man, white-haired and cantankerous in his seventies, still worked the farm with his son. The very day that the Mambo King sat in his room in the Hotel Splendour years later, he was still going strong, an old, bent-over man cursing and talking to himself and perhaps daydreaming about his youth in a place called Fan Sagrada in Galicia, Spain.) They were in their late fifties, but their sons were young and ambitious and eventually ventured out into their own businesses — a dry-cleaning service and clothing store. When the Mambo King went down to visit them, they were pure gratitude, as, by then, he had been sending them money for over five years. They told the Mambo King that he could come and stay with them in their crowded and cheerful households any time he wanted to. He did so on four different occasions over the years, but became a little saddened by the sight of his two hickish brothers growing old on chairs in front of the stores in Little Havana, their faces heavy with the jowls of daily monotony and their eyes dreamy, while their sons charged forward, selling the latest Malibu and New York fashions to rich jet-setting South Americans and filling their houses with appliances and putting enough money away so they could send their kids off to law and business school! Visiting them, he always had the feeling that he had stepped into a retirement home as his older brothers moved through the bustle of family life and enterprise like ghosts and drove with their sons to get a little cup of café negro in the evenings in cars with.38 revolvers stashed in paper bags under the front seat — who could be happy with that? (Then, too, there would be their visit to New York, when the cousins met the cousins, the newly arrived young Cubans checking out longhaired Eugenio and quiet, beautiful Leticia, neither party saying a word to the other the whole evening.)

The following year he dented his trumpet while he and a pickup group were playing a block party in the Bronx. That was a period of “racial unrest,” as the newspapers called it. Martin Luther King was dead, Malcolm X was dead, and young black people were restless. (The day after Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot, the stores all up and down Broadway and Amsterdam closed up and burly Irish policemen stood on every corner waiting for the riots to spread south of 125th Street.) They were performing in the Roosevelt High School playground and found themselves surrounded by a crowd that wanted to hear a song called “Cool Jerk” and were clapping and chanting that name, while the group of seven musicians continued to play their mambos, cha-cha-chas, and old standards like “Bésame Mucho” and “Tú.” But some in the crowd were drinking and soon started throwing bottles to where all the Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans were hanging out, what the newspapers would call the “Spanish contingent,” and they threw bottles back and someone had a knife, zip, and people started to shout and rush the bandstand, and zip, the conga player was slashed in the arm and the bass player was kicked in the stomach by someone trying to steal his wallet. When this started, Cesar was in the midst of a mellow solo, sounding nice and feeling good because he and his old pal, Frankie the Exterminator, and his bassist, ex-Mambo King Manny, had killed a case of Rheingold beer before the show. Some kid came toward Cesar to steal his guitar, which he had set down behind him, but he took his trumpet and bopped the kid on the head with it. Then things were calmer. The cops came. The representative from Rheingold, one of the block party’s sponsors, pleaded for order, was booed down, and El Conjunto Castillo packed up and went home. Things like that happened to musicians from time to time, and made them laugh.

AND NOW THE MEMORY OF THAT woman again struggling down the escalator of Macy’s department store, overloaded with Christmas packages. The Mambo King had bought his niece and nephew their Christmas toys, a slim-banded watch for his sister-in-law, and a Japanese transistor radio for her husband, Pedro. La Nochebuena—Christmas Eve — was one of his favorite times of year: the man would make trips downtown to the docks and over to the big department stores, to Chinatown and Delancey Street, accumulating boxes of scarves, gloves, socks, hot watches, record albums, and bottles of imported perfume and cologne that he would give out to his acquaintances and friends. And he loved receiving gifts: the year before, the “family” had given him a white silk scarf. He loved the way it looked when he wore his overcoat and black-brimmed hat and soft Spanish-leather gloves. He was wearing that scarf and looking very dapper when he saw the woman’s shopping bag split open, her presents tumbling down the stairs. A gentleman, he stooped over, helping her with the packages and, as it turned out, got on the same train with her, an uptown number 2.

He lied to her, saying that he was going that way, and asked her if she’d need help getting those packages home. He charmed her with his politeness, and when he told her that he was a musician, she liked that very much, too. She lived up on Allerton Avenue, an hour out of his way, but he accompanied the woman to the door of her building, anyway. By her doorway she thanked him and they exchanged addresses, wishing each other a Merry Christmas. A week later she called him from her job with the telephone company — she was an operator — and one night they went on a date, ending up in a Sicilian restaurant where everyone knew her. Later he escorted this woman home — her name was Betty, he recalls now in the Hotel Splendour — politely bidding her farewell and bowing. She struck him as an Old World type of woman, with whom he couldn’t be forward. He took her out to the movies, to restaurants, and one night she turned up at a dance he and his pickup musicians were playing, where she spent the evening dancing with strangers. But she would not pass in front of the stage without giving him a big smile.

When he seduced her at three in the morning, in a bedroom decorated in Mediterranean colors — aqua blue, passion pink, Roman orange — she removed her white black-felt-buttoned dress, then her slip, and beneath that a pair of flowery-crotched panties and garters. When he’d taken his clothes off, his erection leapt out into the world and he started to kiss her and his hands went all over her body; each time he was about to mount her, however, she’d push him away. So he turned off the light, thinking that she felt inhibited, but then she flipped it back on. He got to the point where his member was weeping copiously as he pressed against her clamped-shut legs. Finally he sprang back, sitting against the bed frame. His penis, which he’d wedged under her leg, leapt free and smacked his belly.

In his room in the Hotel Splendour, he laughed, shaking his head, despite the pain. The Mambo King had looked at her, saying, “Jesus, I’m only human, woman. Why are you torturing me so?”

“It’s just that I’ve never done it before.”

“And how old are you?”

“Forty.”

“Forty — well, don’t you think it’s about time?”

“No, I’d have to be married first.”

“Then what are we doing here?” And he turned red in the face and was about to get dressed and leave. But then the woman showed him what she liked to do, taking his big thing (“It feels heavy”) into her mouth, and went at him like a pro, and when he started to come, Betty squirmed and twisted, grinding herself into the bed, and then, as her body flushed and her face turned the color of a spring rose, she came, too.

Heartened, the Mambo King thought the woman had to be joking about her virginity, but when he tried to mount her again, she locked her legs and solemnly told him, “Please, anything else but this.” And then she grasped his thing and began sucking him again, and when he came, she did, too, the same way as before. Then they fell asleep, but he woke around five-thirty because she was suckling him again. It was strange, waking up in the dark of the room, to find her moving up and down over his thing. Her mouth and tongue, wet with saliva, felt good on him, but she’d bitten him up so much and stretched and pulled and bent his thing to the point where he was feeling sore. He never thought he’d ever say this to a woman, but he did: “Please give me a rest.”

On Christmas, Cesar held a raucous party in his apartment. First he spent the day with the family upstairs, eating the roast turkey that Ana María and Delores had prepared, and fulfilling his avuncular duties. By the evening, he was back in his apartment playing host to musician and dance-hall friends who turned up with their families, so that by six-thirty in the evening Cesar’s bachelor apartment was overflowing with children and babies, pots of food and pastries, and eating, dancing, singing, drinking adults.

Bongos playing, Bing Crosby, cha-cha-cha out the phonograph, and the living-room floor sagging under the feet of happy dancers.

When the woman called him around eight-thirty to wish him Merry Christmas, he was dizzy with fantasies about making love to her. Drunk and infused with the holiday spirit, he found himself saying, “I love you, baby. I have to see you again, soon.”

“Then come here, tonight.”

“Okay, baby.”

Leaving Frankie and Bernardito in charge of the proceedings—“I’ll be back in two hours”—he made his way to the northeast Bronx. With the determination of an aviator about to circumnavigate the globe, he appeared at her door, vibrant with energy, and holding a bottle of champagne and a carton of food from the party. All the way up he had been thinking, “I’m not going to let her get away this time.”

And within a minute of walking through her door, they were on the bed kissing and fondling one another — she was feeling a little tipsy and amorous after attending a family party that day — and then events were about to unfold again in the usual way when he started to wrestle around with her on the bed, both laughing as if it were a joke, until he decided to part her legs, and this time, when she shut them close as a vise, he really used his strength and forced them apart and so wide that the inevitability of penetration was like heated breath flowing out of her vagina, and even though she had started to plead with him, saying, “Cesar, I mean it when I say stop, so please stop,” he couldn’t. With the smell of her femininity thick in his nostrils and his skin feverishly hot, he didn’t hear her or didn’t want to hear her: lowering himself and bringing the weight of his body to bear, he entered her and she felt as if she were being occupied by a living creature the weight and length of a two-year-old cat. When he had his climax, the Mediterranean colors of that bedroom swirled inside his head, and when he calmed down, he thought that he might have been a little rash in his impetuosity, but hell, he was just being a man. Besides, he’d treat her well, touch her hair, call her pretty, make everything all right with compliments.

But she was crying, and no matter what he tried, kissing her neck and brushing her hair away from her eyes, kissing her breasts, apologizing to her, and offering never never to force himself on her that way—“It was passion, woman. Do you understand? A man like me can’t help himself sometimes, do you understand?”—she kept on crying. Cried for the two hours that he sat beside her by the bed, feeling as if he were the cruelest man in the world, yet unable to understand why she was so upset.

“It was about time for you,” he said, patting her shoulder and making things even worse.

The Mambo King remembered that she continued to cry as he dressed and was crying as he left for the street. He never saw her again. As he sat drinking in the Hotel Splendour, he sort of shook his head, remembering her and still puzzling over how a woman, voracious with her mouth, could be so offended and hurt when all he wanted was that she take care of him in the more normal, natural way.

IN THOSE DAYS HE ALWAYS seemed busy with his superintendent’s duties, busy with music and with women, though not as many as he used to find, but enough that every few months Delores or Ana María would see him walking out of the building in a blue suit and looking dapper, on his way to meet his latest flame. There had been some nice ones like Celia, one of Ana María’s friends, who had overwhelmed the Mambo King with her strength and her powers to control men and who had him figured out—“What you have to do is learn to be content with what you have in this world, hombre”—but he never wanted to hear that. They were together for about six months and the family had hopes that she would calm the Mambo King down, slide him into a life of domestic tranquillity, and help him stop drinking.

But he broke off that love affair, saying, “I wasn’t meant to be tied down.” And he meant it literally, because Celia refused to take shit from him. She was a hard Cuban woman who’d lived in New York for most of her life and had always fended for herself. She smoked cigars if she felt like it, cursed with the best of them, and was always hustling around with different businesses, turning up at Christmas to sell the ladies perfume and with shopping bags of discount Korean and Japanese toys. And she was always out on Broadway in a wool cap and lumberjack’s jacket selling the semi-dry Christmas trees which she would buy in Poughkeepsie and drive back herself in a black pickup truck. Scandalous in bed—“Let’s see if you can satisfy me!”—she carried herself like a man and liked to give Cesar orders, all in the interest of helping him out. She was known locally as something of a clairvoyant and was always sensing presences in the house — his mother, his dead brother — and had wanted to take charge of his life, push him forward, play up his nearly glorious musical past, and encourage him to cultivate people in power like Machito and Desi Arnaz.

“Why don’t you go to California, see if he would give you a job. You say he’s so nice. You have to use your connections to get ahead in this world.”

Why wouldn’t he? Because he never wanted to bother Machito or Desi Arnaz, didn’t want them to think he might use their friendship for personal gain. And while he knew she was well-intentioned, he just couldn’t stand, after so many years of bachelorhood, to be told that he should change his ways. One night, when she had come over to watch television with him, he got drunk and then wanted to go out dancing. And when she told him, “It’s too late, Cesar,” he said, “To hell with this domesticity nonsense, I’ll go out alone!” That’s when she pushed him down into his easy chair and tied him up with a fifty-foot piece of laundry line, and told him, “No, señor, you’re not going anywhere.”

At first he laughed and had a change of heart and said, “Come on, Celia, you know, I promise you I won’t go anywhere.”

“No, this is to teach you a lesson that when you have an engagement with someone, as you do with me, that’s it. No going out, no doing as you please. You may have been able to do what you wanted with these other fulanas, but forget about that with me.

So he remained still and then told her to release him, but quite seriously, with the laugh gone out of his face, and when she refused, he wanted to probe the limits of his Herculean physicality and tried to break the rope by expanding his biceps and chest, but the rope did not break. Then he gave up and, defeated, fell asleep. In the early morning, both Celia and the rope were gone.

That was it, as much as he liked her, as much as everybody thought that she and he could be happy together, as much as he felt like bringing her flowers and liked the way she looked out for him; she had pushed him too far: “You crossed a line with me, Celia. No woman”—and he was pointing his finger around at her face—“can be allowed to do that to a man. You have humiliated and dishonored me. You have tried to reduce me in my stature. This act is something I cannot tolerate or forgive! Ever.”

“Forgive? I was trying to keep you from hurting yourself.”

“I have spoken, woman. Now you must live with the consequences of your act.”

That was that, and he found himself another woman, Estela, who would walk her two miniature poodles in the park and who drove the Mambo King crazy with the pleasant way she’d address those doll-sized canines, whose coats she had dyed pink and on whose heads she had affixed enormous red ribbons and bell collars, the dogs absolutely despising him and scratching at the bedroom door and yipping and jumping up and down whenever he started to carouse with her. It would take a long time to arouse Estela, to turn the leathery firmness between her legs into the soft down of dewy rose petals, and by then the animals would have given up and would stretch out before the bedroom door, morose and defeated. And it always seemed that the moment he had penetrated Estela — she was a trembling, tense woman who worked in the principal’s office of the local Catholic school — the hounds would begin to weep and whine so sadly that their squeals of displeasure always brought out Estela’s maternal nature, and she would disengage herself from him and, naked, attend to the poor little things, while the Mambo King would lie back and daydream about throwing the beasts out the window.

Then there had been the professor of Spanish language from the university, whom Cesar had met one morning while getting a haircut over at the beauty salon. (He loved it when Ana María or Delores pressed close to cut his hair.) She was named Frieda and had once been badly hurt by a love affair in Sevilla, Spain, a few years before he met her, and so she accepted when the Mambo King asked her to go out to a restaurant, loving the opportunity to practice her Spanish and to see a little bit of his world. She was about thirty-five years old and the Mambo King was already in his early fifties, slightly plump around the center, but definitely on the dapper side, holding doors for her and always treating whenever they’d go out. He would take her to nice restaurants and dance halls, teach her how to merengue, and she would haul him off into thickly carpeted and chandeliered rooms at the university, where they would attend readings and lectures by the leading intellectuals of Latin America and Spain. He never knew what was going on, but had very much liked hearing the writer Borges, who had a very pleasant, avuncular manner about him, the kind of fellow, Cesar figured, who would go out and have a few drinks with you. And that’s why he shook Borges’s hand (the poor man was blind). Another thing about the woman was that she was very fastidious in bed. The first time they made love she took a tape measure and figured out the Mambo King’s length from the bottom of his testicles to the tippy-tip of his member and wrote this happy figure down in a book she used as her diary. Then, frantic from the Spanish brandy and flamenco music, they made lascivious love. She was very serious and very nice, he used to think, but he had no use for her friends and always felt like an aborigine at those cultural gatherings. When that one ended, it had really hurt Delores, who sometimes accompanied them to those lectures. (She, too, saw Borges and went out to the library the next day and read one of his books.)

There were others. One of these ladies was just for fun. Every year or so, he would fly down to San Juan, Puerto Rico (wincing as the pilot would announce they were flying over the eastern tip of Cuba), and from there take a rickety shuttle plane to Mayagüez, a beautiful city way out on the west coast of the island. He’d take a public car up into the mountains, where time seemed to dissolve, where farmers led their animals down the roads and men still rode horses, until he reached the town where this woman lived. He’d met her at a dance in the Bronx in 1962 and that was the year he first went to bed with her, first walked the dirt road of her town and saw the powerful river rushing downstream from the Dole pineapple cannery. He always had a nice time. She had two grown children and didn’t want anything from the Mambo King but companionship. He would bring her gifts — dresses, earrings and bracelets, and perfume, and transistor radios. One year, he made her the gift of a television set. Nice times, he’d remember, playing cards, watching television, and conversing with the family, eating, napping, eating, napping. Around three-thirty it would rain for half an hour, a torrential downpour that would get the river really churning, and he would sit on the porch dozing in enjoyment of that sound (the rain, the river) until the sun came back out and he would bathe, wedging himself against some rocks, as there was usually a powerful and swift current, float on his back and daydream. Kids swimming all around him, kids jumping in from the bank and from the sweet-smelling trees. He’d stay there until it got too crowded for his taste. Around five-thirty the workers from the cannery would come down and jump in and that’s when he would gather up his things and go back to the house.

So for two weeks he’d rest. Her name was Carmela and she liked to wear flowery dresses. She was five foot two and must have weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, but she was a pleasure in bed and as sweet-hearted as any woman could be. She owned a record player, which blared out her windows, and whenever he bought her some item of jewelry, she would sit out on the porch waiting for passersby to whom she could show it off. One funny night they went to see the film Ben Hur in the small chaotic tenth-run movie theater that had been overrun by light green insects which had come swarming up out of the floorboards after an especially heavy rain. The insects were everywhere, on the chairs, on the customers, flying across the scenes of Judah Ben Hur racing in the Circus Maximus. These insects forced them to leave early. On the way home she tightened her grasp on his hand, as if she never wanted him to leave, but he always had to. When they’d part there were never any troubles.

Then there was a woman named Cecilia, and María, and Anastasia, and on and on.

As if all the music and women and booze in the world would have made a difference about the way he felt inside: still sick to his heart over Nestor.

This sorrow was so adamant five years, ten years, fifteen years later that he was almost tempted to go into a church and pray, when he wanted a hand to cut down through the sky, to touch his face the way his mother used to, soothing him, forgiving him.

Walking up La Salle Street, his head bowed, back slightly stooped — those years of hauling the incinerator-ash-filled cans were starting to get to him, he had some days when he sought repentance through suffering. Sometimes he was unnecessarily rough with himself, driving a wood chisel into his hand one day, or carelessly grasping a hot steamy pipe while working on the boiler. The pain didn’t bother him, for all his scars, bruises, and cuts. Because he was a diehard macho and because the pain made him feel as if he were paying his way in this world.

Once, when he was coming home from a job, walking along Amsterdam Avenue, three men swooped down on him, pushed him down on the sidewalk, and started kicking him. The Mambo King rolled over and covered up his head the way he used to when his Papi beat him…

A loosened half row of teeth, split lip, aching jaw and sides, somehow all so soothing…

Many of his friends were that way, troubled souls. They would always seem happy — especially when they’d talk about women and music — but when they had finished floating through the euphoric layer of their sufferings, they opened their eyes in a world of pure sadness and pain.

Frankie was one of those men. Frankie with the worst breaks in life. He had a son whom he loved very much, but as the kid got older he spit in his old man’s face. Cesar was always separating them when they’d fight in the street, and he’d accompany Frankie downtown to the juvenile pen to get the kid out. Then the Vietnam War came along. His son had grown up; six foot one, broad-shouldered and handsome, the big-dicked healthy wise-ass son of a Cuban worker.

And what happened? Came home one day, walking down the street in high jackboots, uniform pressed, and the brim of his military cap a shiny black. Out of his mouth came “Gook this, gook that,” and it was off to Vietnam, where on his first jump he landed on a mine and was shipped home in a metal container the size of a Kleenex box. On top of his closed coffin with swirly brass rails, a small American flag, a Purple Heart, a photograph of his handsome face. Cesar held Frankie by the arm throughout the funeral, looked out for Frankie, kept him drunk for a week.

He found some comfort in wrapping his arms around his friend’s shoulders and saying, “Now, now this will pass.” He found some comfort in feeling the man’s pain, as if it somehow aggrandized or glorified his own.

Sometimes there were three or four of them down in his apartment or in his basement workroom, drinking until their faces peeled off and all that was left was shadows.

Sad expressions, twisted mouths, voices so slurry no one could understand what the other was saying.

IN THOSE DAYS HE HAD A FRIEND who was a petty gangster with a reputation for sponsoring businesses. His name was Fernando Pérez and for a long time he had been considered a respectable member of the neighborhood. He’d been around for a long time and ran most of the numbers shops on Amsterdam and upper Broadway. He was squat, square-faced, short-limbed, and stubby-fingered. Gentlemanly in gray leisure suits, he liked to wear a white black-brimmed hat and pointy white crocodile-leather shoes with three-inch heels. He used to dine regularly at Violeta’s downtown and at another little place on 127th and Manhattan, where he would sometimes run into Cesar. Although he went around with two rough-looking men, he was the picture of civility. He kept an apartment on La Salle Street, a house in Queens, a house near Mayagüez in Puerto Rico, and a fourth, legendary apartment on 107th between Broadway and Amsterdam. This was known locally as the fortress, and rumor had it that the man kept all his money in a huge safe built into the wall, that to get to that safe you had to break down three heavy doors and fight off numerous bodyguards posted on the stoop, in the hallway, and then in different rooms.

He had been a big Cesar Castillo fan back when. He had courted his wife, Ismelda, at the dance halls where the Mambo Kings played, and on those nights Pérez had always sent the Mambo King a good bottle of champagne to drink at his table. They’d greet each other by the bar of joints like the Park Palace, send greetings to each other’s families. Their only dispute, now forgotten, had happened years ago when the Mambo Kings, after their appearance on the I Love Lucy show, had been closest to fame. Fernando Pérez had wanted to put them under contract, but Cesar and Nestor wanted nothing to do with him. It had hurt his feelings enough that for about ten years he never said a word to the Mambo King.

One day in 1972, as Cesar was sitting in Violeta’s restaurant, Pérez walked in with an entourage of friends. He was flashing a wad of bills and dropping twenties on the head of a young and delighted woman, who squealed and sent kisses flying through the air as she gathered up the money. And he announced, with grandiosity: “I’m buying dinner for everybody in here tonight.”

So the patrons applauded him and he sat down. His party dined on suckling pork and platter after platter of rice and beans, yuca, and tostones. Cesar had noticed him when he walked in, had nodded respectfully. Later, Pérez came over and they embraced as if they were the oldest friends in the world.

“It’s good to see you, my old friend,” Fernando Pérez told the Mambo King. “We shouldn’t lose more time in our friendship. Life is too short.”

They talked: Pérez had just gotten over a heart attack, and in the flush of appreciation for finding more time in this world, he had apparently turned into a more magnanimous soul. And there was something else: around Pérez’s neck there was a large, glittery, rhinestone-encrusted crucifix, the kind widows wear. This he touched continuously during his inquiry about Cesar’s life.

“What am I doing?” the Mambo King said. “I’m working with musicians, nothing that will make me rich, you understand, but I bring in my few dollars here and there. And I’m in the building over there on La Salle Street.”

He was saying all this with shame, because long ago Pérez had told him: “Unless you act now to insure your future, people will forget about you just like this.” He had snapped his fingers.

Now that he had some distance on all that and he could tolerate things again, the Mambo King began to feel disturbed by what he did not have in this world. He was getting older. He was fifty-four and had been throwing his money away on women, gambling, and friends for years.

He had no health insurance, no security, no little house in the Pennsylvania countryside, as a violinist friend did. No little bodega like Manny’s.

What did he have? A few letters from Cuba, a wall filled with autographed pictures, a headful of memories, sometimes scrambled like eggs.

(Again, he remembers back to long ago and his Papi in Cuba saying, “You become a musician, and you’ll be a poor man all your life.”)

Cesar nodded. “Well, you seem in good shape,” he said to Pérez.

“God bless you, that is what I say to the world now.” And Pérez startled him by kissing him on the neck.

“I nearly died, did you know that?” he said to Cesar. “And when I was on the brink of death I had a revelation: lights showered down on me from heaven and for one brief moment I saw the face of God. I said to him, ‘Allow me the chance to do good for mankind, allow me to be your humble servant.’ I am here now because of that, sabes? and I can tell you I want to help you. What is it that I can do for you, Cesar? Do you need money? Do you need help with your music? Please tell me, I want to know.”

“There’s nothing I want, Fernando. Don’t worry about me.”

“At the very least,” Fernando said before returning to his diners and the pretty young girls whose breasts were spilling out the tight bodices of their red ruffled dresses, “you must come and visit me at my house in Queens. Will you do this?”

“Yes.”

“Good, and may God bless you. Que Dios te bendiga!”

And he dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter, saying, “Give my friend here a drink.”

Then he embraced Cesar and made his way to his table: “Now don’t forget.”

Thereafter, the two men were friendly again. Pérez would drive up in a white El Dorado Cadillac and park in front of the bodega from which he conducted his business of loan-sharking and numbers running. He did so with an air of reverence and saintliness, making the sign of the cross over his customers and sending them off with his blessing. And when he saw Cesar on the street, Pérez would honk the car horn and wave the Mambo King over. It was always: “When are you coming out to Queens for a visit?” And: “Why are you so distant with me, my friend?”

“No, no, I’m not that way,” he said to Pérez. Then he leaned into the car window, making small talk, and usually walked away with a Havana cigar (Pérez would get them from a friend in Toronto).

One Thursday night, he went out to Queens, where Pérez lived in a three-story twenty-room house. In every room, pleated French curtains, a color TV set, and a telephone. Tropical-fish tanks and a big abstract painting in his living room, a stereo, bar. And he had three Cadillacs parked in front of the house. But what impressed the Mambo King the most was the swimming pool in Pérez’s back yard.

They dined in a screen-enclosed sun porch in the back, Pérez and his wife sitting at each end of a long, platter-covered table, and Cesar between them. Ismelda would ring a little bell and in would come the Peruvian maid, to whom they both gave orders: “Take the beans back, they’re much too cold.” “Don’t we have fresher bread?” “Bring another bottle of wine.”

They sat talking about the old days. Fernando would get up and reach across the table to touch his wife’s beringed hand.

“Our love started,” Fernando said to him, “one night at that place your orchestra used to play in Brooklyn.”

“The Imperial Ballroom,” his wife tenderly said.

“Man, you were great that night, up there on the stage. What was that song you used to start with? I have it on one of your recordings.”

“We used to begin our performances with an instrumental bolero called ‘Twilight in Havana.’ ”

“Your brother, may God rest his soul, used to open it with a long trumpet run, right? Something between Chocolate Armenteros and Harry James. I remember this well because I was at the bar watching the orchestra. I remember that song so clearly”—and he hummed part of the melody. “I remember it because it was during that song that my brother introduced me to my little wife here. That was almost thirty years ago, and look, we’re still together and prospering.”

He made a toast.

“You know what our plan is for the coming year? To go to the Vatican this next Easter and turn up at one of those audiences with the Pope. I want to have that honor and satisfaction before I finally enter the sunset years.”

And he went on about the prosperity of his children: two sons had gone into the business with him and flourished, two others were in college; he had seven grandchildren and enough money for the rest of his life.

“But my greatest gift is that I have my health.” Pérez rapped on the table. “Money, women, possessions mean nothing in the face of death. It all comes down to shit in the end. That’s what I thought, in any case, before I saw the light.”

They’d dined on pork chops and fried chicken, rice and beans, fried plantains, a huge mixed salad, tripe soup, toasted Italian bread, and for dessert they had espresso and caramel-glazed lemon-cream and rum-filled pastries. Then came out the bottle of Courvoisier, which was so smooth and so delicious that Cesar could not resist drinking down glass after glass.

Afterwards, in the living room, they sat listening to the dulcet music of the Ten Thousand Hollywood Strings, Miguel Montoya’s group. Eating from a box of French bonbons, Cesar relaxed and felt an immense nostalgic gratitude for knowing the gangster Fernando Pérez. He was also touched by the huge mahogany crucifix that took up most of the wall opposite the couch.

“I guess we do go back a long way,” the Mambo King said tearfully. “I guess we are really good friends, aren’t we, Pérez?”

“Yes, we can thank the Lord Jesus Christ for that.”

Cesar had spent most of the night feeling that there was something vaguely unjust about the fact that the shady Pérez, who’d once dealt in prostitution and drugs, was so prosperous. The brandy did its work, however, changing the Mambo King’s opinion of the whole enterprise. And he was touched when Pérez, taking the Mambo King by the hand, led him before the crucifix, asking that he kneel down and say a prayer with him.

“I don’t know, hombre,” Cesar said, laughing. “I haven’t said too many prayers lately.”

“As you like, my friend.”

Pérez and his wife knelt down and shut their eyes: almost instantly, their faces turned a deep red and tears flowed from their eyes. Pérez was speaking rapidly. A few words which the drunken Mambo King picked out: “Oh, the passion, the passion of Our Lord who died for us worthless souls.”

After this, they watched television until eleven, and then Pérez called a private taxi to take the Mambo King home.

“Don’t you ever forget, my friend,” Pérez told him. “If there’s anything you ever want or need from me, you tell me, okay?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Vaya con Dios.”

The taxi, whose driver seemed cynical and leering, drove away.

The next day he ached with a sense of failure. It would hit him from time to time, and had seemed to subside now and then, especially when he was busy with music and women, but his life had been slowing down lately. His body was changing. Now he was getting jowls, his eyes ended in a burst of viny wrinkles, and, worst, his hairline had started to recede. He felt much more cautious about women, set his sights on the pleasures of memory, though from time to time he would get bored and call up an old flame. Miss Vanna Vane had become a Mrs., but he would sometimes meet her downtown, where she worked as a secretary, take her out to lunch, reaching out under the table to touch her thighs. He saw other women, but was slowing down. Though his thing got big as ever, it was more lackadaisical. Just walking down the street to say hello to Eugenio on the corner, to meet up with Manny the bassist seemed to take it out of him. And sometimes when he was resting in bed he felt terrible aches in his heart, aches in his kidneys and liver; headaches between his brows.

Hard to take that he wasn’t a young king cock anymore. Delores, who read everything, had told him that he was going through a “middle-life crisis.”

“You feel that way because you don’t think you have much to look forward to, but the truth is, you could live another thirty years.”

(He laughed in his room in the Hotel Splendour.)

And it came down to something else: What would he do when he was too old to earn a living? So he played those jobs, and there was always someone to talk about his making a comeback, like that fellow Pérez, but he was so out of what was happening, jazz-rock-fusion, acid salsa, disco boleros, it seemed hopeless. He mostly worked, in those days, when younger bands canceled. The old-timers liked him, but who else remembered him? All this gave him regrets.

Wished he had hooked up with Xavier Cugat.

Wished he had stayed married.

Wished his brother was alive.

Wished he had some money.

On the workroom door, the girlie calendar with the big-tit broad in a clingy wet bathing suit, shoving a fluted Coke bottle in her mouth, did nothing to him. He lay his head down on the paper-covered table for half an hour, got up, strummed his guitar. Then he thought he might revive his spirit by dwelling on his virility, pulling from a drawer a pornographic magazine, and then unzipping his trousers and masturbating. In his workroom easy chair, he drank a beer and started to doze again. Hearing the softest music in the walls, made by the water shimmering through the pipes, he realized that it was the I Love Lucy theme. And when he opened his eyes he found himself standing beside Nestor, poor nervous Nestor, as they were preparing to leave the stage wings to make their appearance on the show.

“Óyeme, hombre,” he said, straightening Nestor’s bow tie. “Be strong. It’ll be great. Don’t be nervous, just do as we did during the rehearsals with Mr. Arnaz.”

His brother nodded and someone said, “Your cue’s coming up, fellows.”

And Nestor said, “Brother, you don’t be nervous. Read that book.”

And then they proceeded, as they had many many times before, to walk into Ricky and Lucy’s life and to sing “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

When he woke from this “dream,” he remembered his brother’s advice, searched his worktable, finding his brother’s old copy of Forward America! under a pile of building-complaint and hardware-store slips. Flipping through the pages, he reread one of the lines that Nestor long ago had underlined: “In the worst circumstances, never retreat. Keep your eyes on the horizon! Don’t look back and always march forward… And remember: It is the general with the advancing army who wins the war!”

Feeling restless, he was unable to get much work done that Saturday. The Mambo King hung around the workroom, listening to the radio and organizing the papers in his desk, until about three, when he decided to go out to the Shamrock bar.

It was while drinking a whiskey that he heard the owner, a fellow named Kennedy, tell someone that the bar was for sale.

“And how much do you want?” someone inquired.

“Thirty-five thousand.”

The Mambo King remained there, drinking and occasionally paying attention to the baseball game on the television. Usually he never stayed for very long; but by his second glass of whiskey he was feeling exhilarated, didn’t really want to go back down to the basement.

Then this Irish man came in, sat beside Cesar. His face was covered with Xs, little cuts from this guy who had slashed him up. A mugger had attacked him and cut his face up one night as he staggered home. Thing was, he kept going home by the same route and it kept happening again and again.

“Now, you must take care of yourself,” the Mambo King said to the man.

“Nah, nah,” Dickie said. “I know what’s coming to me.”

He sat in the bar for another hour, watching the owner, Mr. Kennedy, a bony, flush-faced man with shaky hands and a huge age-spot-mottled nose, washing dishes and making drinks. After buying himself and Dickie another drink, he decided to go home. That was the afternoon when, climbing the stairs to his apartment, Cesar found his second-floor neighbor Mrs. Stein standing outside her door.

“My husband doesn’t want to wake up,” she told him.

Good thing he had been fortified by drink. When she took him into the bedroom, Mr. Stein was sitting up in bed with a bundle of papers in his hand, his mouth half open, tongue just slightly out between his teeth, as if he were about to say something. A scholar, he was always preoccupied but polite and never impatient with Cesar in his duties. Once, while repairing an electric socket in that room, the Mambo King had wanted to ask Mr. Stein a question. He’d been inspired by all the papers with odd writing on them—“Hebrew and German,” Mr. Stein had said. “And this is Greek.”

And so he had asked, “Do you believe in God?” And without hesitation Mr. Stein said, “I do.”

That’s what he remembered about him.

Now he was covering the man’s head with a sheet. But not without first shutting his eyes, clear and blue and looking at a crack in the flecking walls.

“Mrs. Stein, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you must call an ambulance. Or do you have a relative I can talk to?”

Then it hit her: “Now I have been sent to hell,” she said.

“Now, please just sit, I’ll take care of everything.”

That night he had trouble sleeping, spent hours in tortured thought. Why was he, a cocksure and arrogant macho in his youth, now relegated to fearful thoughts of lifelong loneliness? Why were his knees aching? Why did he feel at times that he walked around with a corpse slung over his shoulders, as if the days after his brother died were somehow repeating themselves?

Now and then he thought about the bar. For years (since his return from the Merchant Marine) Manny had been after him to go into a partnership, start something up, like a dance hall or a club. And now he was thinking: Wouldn’t be so bad for a fellow like him who knew the music business to set something up, like a Latin cabaret or dance club. The biggest problem would be money. In his head he went through all the prosperous people he knew, people who’d promised to help him out in a jam. There was Miguel Montoya, now living in Arizona; Bernardito, Manny, his cousin Pablo. They all had a few thousand dollars put away. And Pérez. But thirty-five thousand? And beyond that, how much more would he need? That bar was run down, but he could fix it up, repaint the walls, get some lighting, build a little stage. It could be done inexpensively. Certainly he could get a lot of his musician friends to work cheap. Acting as an MC, he’d get up before a microphone and graciously introduce young and old talent. And what if it caught on, becoming as popular as the Havana San Juan or the Tropicana, then everything would fall in place: money, women, and good moods.

Then he thought about the kind of people who would go to his club. Young, respectable, and fun-loving couples with a few dollars in their pockets, more well-to-do middle-aged people who liked a mix of the old standards and the new… His speculations went on until the early morning, and then finally, thinking that there might be something to his idea, he fell asleep.

Everybody told him he was crazy to get involved with Pérez, even if Pérez walked around, and went to church, wearing a crucifix around his neck. And he knew it, too, but he didn’t care: he put it in the back of his mind. When he daydreamed about the place, he saw it done up as a lush little tropical paradise. Saw himself making like Desi Arnaz as MC and singer (and on the edge of this thought, Nestor) and perhaps becoming more than just a superintendent and pickup musician. But he ignored everyone’s advice. Even after he had a dream about what would happen: that it would open fine and go along nicely for a while, but that Pérez’s people would take it over and turn it into something else. Still, he went for it. Manny and other friends sprang for seven thousand, with Pérez putting up the rest, half as an investment for himself and the rest as a loan to Cesar.

“I said that I would help you, my friend.”

By June he had assumed the ownership of the Shamrock and its ice machines, meat freezer, meat grinder, horseshoe bar, lunch counter, jukebox, tables and chairs, cash register, speckled mirror and bar stools. Out of his basement he dragged the tinny upright piano, had the thing tuned, and set it against a wall: there was a dining area which had seen much better days. The walls had been covered with wood paneling and light green Con-Tact paper. These he tore out in favor of mirrored tiles, which he purchased for next to nothing from a friend in the Bronx. Then he set out to build a small stage. He wanted it to be about the size of the stage of the Mambo Nine Club, as if that might invite success. It measured six by twelve feet, just large enough to accommodate a small band. He covered the plywood construction with a plush red carpeting, painted the doorway an ebony black.

The Irish in the neighborhood knew things were permanently changing when they saw Cesar scraping the shamrocks off the front window. When he finished with that, he got his friend Bernardito the artist to come in as his art director, filled the joint up with rubber palm trees and papier-mâché pineapples. On one of the walls, he stuck a big painting of Havana that he had purchased in New Jersey. Then he put in a flamingo-pink awning that reached the curb, and a fancy neon sign with the words Club Havana flashing in two colors, aquamarine and red, for the window.

Finally he brought over a few of the hundreds of photographs he had in boxes from his heyday in the mambo era, stuck a few in frames over the bar, signed photographs of everybody from Don Aziapaú to Marion Sunshine. And with them went the framed photograph of Arnaz, Nestor, and himself.

He decided to charge two dollars’ cover, a dollar a drink, and to offer a simple menu that would feature such dishes as arroz con pollo, rice and beans, fried plantains, and Cuban sandwiches, for which he’d find some poor woman as a cook. Then he had a thousand promotional fliers made up and hired little kids for a buck an hour to tack them up on lampposts, in building lobbies, and under car windshield wipers. When all this had been done, he got into the habit of turning up there after work. He’d walk around the premises, as if it were some kind of dream come true, smoking a big blue cigar and nodding to himself, tapping the counter, posing in front of the bar mirror, and pouring himself drinks.

Of course it was more complicated than that: he had to apply for licenses, liquor, cabaret, restaurant. He had to have everything inspected by the buildings commission and by the Board of Health, which would not let him open until Pérez took care of the inspectors. There were no problems after that. Pedro advised Cesar about bookkeeping and Pérez provided the “security.”

“May God bless us, but you know, my friend,” Pérez told him, “if you don’t take the right precautions now, all kinds of trouble may follow.”

It was decided that Pérez would keep a man around the club, and he gave Cesar a present that he had wrapped up nicely in shiny blue paper: a.38 Smith & Wesson revolver, which the Mambo King bundled in a towel and left jammed behind the boiler in his basement.

It was a funny thing. Just about a week before they were going to open the club, Cesar had a visitor. He was sitting in the little back room that he used as his office when Frankie, who had been mopping the floors, told Cesar, “Some lady’s here to see you.”

She was a young hippie woman, maybe thirty. She walked in wearing a suede cowboy jacket and rattlesnake boots. She described herself as a filmmaker and said she was working on something around the theme of “alternate life-styles in the melting pot of the city.”

“Yeah?”

“We just want to come in here one night and film. Would that be okay with you?”

“Will you pay for this?”

“No, no, it’s not for pay. I don’t make any money on this. It’s for a film about Latins in New York City. I’m doing it for a friend of mine from Columbia.”

“Not Professor Flores?”

Flores was a Cuban friend who taught Spanish there.

“No.”

She told him that all she wanted was to get a small crew with camera and microphone in one night, film the dancing, and do a few interviews.

He thought about it and then told her, “I have to talk to my partners about this, but I’m going to tell you okay. We’re opening next Saturday night. And if you want, you can come and make your movie then.”

Once word got around that the opening of the Club Havana was going to be filmed, it took on something of the air of a glamorous Hollywood event. The filmmaker turned up that Saturday night with her crew. With free music, food, and drinks, people from all over showed up: old friends from the dance halls, musicians and their wives, friends of the family, patrons of the beauty salon where Ana María worked part-time, friends from the street. Soon the men escorted their beautiful women into the place. That first night, Cesar acted as both MC and singer, using an eight-piece band of pickup musicians to back him. In a white silk suit with a carnation in his lapel and a thick cigar in hand, he sang, he shook his hips, patted backs, laughed, urged his friends to enjoy the free food and the big open bar, and found it hard to believe that he had not thought of all this before. And the people seemed to love the place.

Cesar had asked good dancers he knew to turn up that night. In fact, Bernardito of Brooklyn had become quite expert at dancing the mambo. And Frankie, middle-aged and worn, was still a professional in his writhing, grinding movements. Spotlight and cameras set out on the dance floor, the dancers went crazy, and the orchestra got into long, epic claves-beat jams, the two drummers, the pianist, two trumpet players (including Cesar, a sweaty mess behind his dark green glasses), flute, saxophone, and bassist played their hearts out. And when the camera turned on him, the Mambo King hammed it up, a trumpet in one hand, rump out, feet turning, his mouth pouting “Oh, baby!” and his hands flailing the air as if his fingertips had caught fire, his body, despite his heft, nimble and bending in all directions and shapes. (Then, during a later song, he performed like a robot, moving his limbs and head as if his joints had been stuffed with gears and cotton.)

Everybody clapped and laughed, the music sounded great. Even the jaded neighborhood kids who preferred groups like the Rolling Stones or Smokey Robinson and the Miracles were having a good time. Even Eugenio, who’d long since stopped dancing regularly, came in, and, fortified with a few drinks himself, danced the mambo and the pachanga, though not nearly as well as his uncle or most of the others.

After a while Cesar and his friends got used to the camera, but not to the fact that a woman was giving the orders. She was tall, with a great head of hair and fierce-looking, intelligent eyes. Frankie referred to her as “señorita jefe” and bowed with mock deference when she would pass condescendingly by.

That night, the most touching dance couple on the floor turned out to be fat Cousin Pablito and his wife. Although he was only about five foot four, he cut a dashing figure in a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. He and his wife never used to go out, but now, with their kids grown up, they were free. (Their two daughters had married, and their son, Miguel, had a good mechanic’s job and lived in the Bronx.) Pablito and his wife’s specialty was the pachanga and at one point during the evening the whole nightclub crowd surrounded them as they danced: when the camera fixed on them, Pablito really let loose, showing off every step he knew. In the end, even the hippie camera crew were touched and applauded, whistling and hooting, too.

The opening turned out to be a grand success. Unbridled in their enthusiasm, the crowd danced and drank from nine in the evening until four-thirty in the morning. Even the sidewalk was jammed with people. It was as crowded as the sidewalk outside a funeral parlor during a wake, and as noisy, too. When the band inside wasn’t playing, the jukebox put the music of Beny More right out into the street. With their bellies full, heads woozy from booze, feet danced out, the customers left, happily promising the proud owner that they would return.

And the filmmaker thanked the Mambo King for his help, too, and while the festivities were still going strong, she and her crew packed away their equipment into metal cases and went home.

(And the film? The night’s work resulted in only ten minutes of footage that would be shown at a festival in the Whitney Museum, and included a brief interview with Cesar, who appeared with the caption “manager of the club” floating beneath him. Seated at the bar, with a big cigar in hand, and dapper in his suit, he was saying: “I came here with my younger brother in the late 1940s and we had a little band, the Mambo Kings. I composed with my brother a song, ‘Beautiful María of My Soul,’ and this caught the attention of the singer Desi Arnaz, who asked us to appear with him on his TV show I Love Lucy, do you know it?”

And that ran in the film in a loop, jerking back to a point where he’s first saying, “… Desi Arnaz, who asked us to appear with him on his TV show I Love Lucy.” Jerked back, it showed about ten times in quick succession.

Then it cut to the same kind of loop of Pablito dancing the pachanga with his wife, the same steps being repeated over and over again in a jerky manner. It was shown many times in the viewing room of the Whitney, and then later in France, where it won a prize.)

Then, around five that morning, a Sunday, when most people’s thoughts were turning toward God and the Eucharist, Pérez bid everyone good night. At that point the opening party had dwindled down to Cesar, Pablito, Manny, Bernardito, and Frankie, who had manned the bar for the night. And there was Eugenio, twenty-one years old and attending college, who had worked in the kitchen. As Pérez left, he told them, “I have something for you. Just stick around for a few minutes.” And so they did, and for all their exhaustion and yawning, they were suddenly awake again as three comely young women in glittering silver-sequined miniskirts walked into the club, removed their garments, and started to dance.

The club ended up doing its main business on Saturday nights. For the rest of the week, the Mambo King depended on the local beer drinkers and college students who would come in for his dinner specials. He also rented the club out for private parties, gave the space free to the local church for special cabaret nights, and on several occasions held fund-raisers. But Wednesday nights were reserved for jam sessions. Eating and drinking and paying cheap prices, the musicians who’d turn up at midnight used the Club Havana as a second home, jamming until four in the morning, just like the jam sessions Cesar used to attend at the little beach clubs near Havana. Sitting up on one of the high stools by the bar, cigar burning blue between his thick thumb and index finger, he smiled and nodded at his customers, applauded loudly for the young musicians who would take the stage. Over the years, the bright stage lights had sensitized his eyes, and so he always wore his green sunglasses. Behind the dark lenses, his eyes looked as if they were underwater, and though his jowlish face seemed languorously absorbed in the proceedings, he often drifted off into a reverie of songs that he might write, about love, women, family.

From this club he earned a humble living. The late-night hours left him exhausted for his day’s work as superintendent. This exhaustion, the ache in his bones, the flutters in his stomach, the more lackadaisical rigging of his penis, made the Mambo King realize he was aging. Gray hair appeared in his sideburns (to which he applied Grecian Formula). The sharp pains in his gut, the acidity in his esophagus — hot in the throat of his dreams at night — and the dull, stony pains in his sides — symptoms of liver and kidney maladies — proliferated.

In the name of the mambo, the rumba, and the cha-cha-cha of youth, he ignored all this.

And still during this time he attended to his work in the building, though now he had the luxury of hiring friends to perform certain jobs for him. He paid Eugenio, who had washed out as a musician, to take care of things. For the first year of that club’s existence, it was Eugenio, down from his studies at City College, who’d turn up at tenants’ doors with a wrench and pair of pliers.

DURING THIS TIME CESAR HAD A reputation as one of the Cubans in New York who would put up exile musicians in his apartment and help them find work. Every now and then, trumpeters and congueros, pianists, balladeers, and bolero singers, fresh from Cuba, would come to live in one of the Mambo King’s spare rooms. Before he had opened the club, he would try to find them jobs at anything in the neighborhood and through his connections: Pablo at the meat plant; Bernardito, who knew the printing and magazine business; and club and restaurant owners like Rudy López of the Tropic Sunset, or Violeta, who might need dishwashers or waiters. Finding music jobs was harder. Even if the Cuban population in New Jersey was growing and there were more jobs than before, there still weren’t enough to go around. So he’d let these Cubans stay with him, often lent them money and helped them find instruments in Harlem pawnshops. (Or he’d lend them one of his own.) He did so in the same spirit as he would help his own family. With the average stay being about a month, new faces were always turning up at his apartment.

But one thing about having the club — Cesar could put people more easily to work, taking them on as waiters usually, or sending them into the back to wash dishes. Paid them out of his own pocket even when the club was dead. And he had some good musicians working with him. There had been Pascual Ramírez, a pianist, who was adamantly political and hated the revolution, the man pounding the tables when he’d get worked up about it. And then this other fellow, Ramón, who played the saxophone and spoke sincerely and hopefully about things changing in Cuba. (The poor man hanged himself in Miami in 1978.)

Usually Cesar would just bring these visitors upstairs to meet the family, but between the club and the building, his days were long and full and he had little time to relax, to visit Delores and Pedro and the kids, to watch Delores adoringly whenever she walked across a room. If he worked until four in the afternoon, he was lucky to get an hour’s nap. Then, dressed, he’d make his way over to the Club Havana. Although he was often tired, he’d gotten used to the routine.

One of those afternoons, while getting ready to go to work at the club, he received a long-distance telephone call from Miami, some fellow, a friend of a friend from Cuba, by the name of Rafael Sánchez, who told the Mambo King, “Me and my younger brother, Rico, we’re coming to New York and were wondering if you might be able to help us with a place to stay?”

“Of course,” the Mambo King said.

A week later, he found the two brothers, cane suitcases and black instrument cases, a trumpet’s and a saxophone’s, by their side, standing before his door.

“Señor Castillo?” the older brother said. “I’m Rafael Sánchez and this is my brother, Rico.”

The older brother was a slightly balding man of thirty, thirty-five, with a handsome face and a startled expression. He was wearing blue dungarees, a white shirt, a worn blue blazer, a black overcoat, and a black-brimmed, brown felt hat. Bowing, he shook hands with the Mambo King, as did his younger brother, Rico. He was about twenty-five and thin and gaunt, with a thick head of black hair and clear blue eyes. He wore dungarees and a dark sweater, an overcoat, and a wool cap on his head.

“Come in,” the Mambo King said. “You must be hungry.”

So they went down the hall to the kitchen, where he served the brothers steak sandwiches, French fried potatoes and onions, pasteles, and salad, drowned in oil and salt. They drank beer and beer and beer and played the radio, and Cesar stuck his head out the courtyard window and whistled to Delores, so she might come down and meet them. She came along with Leticia, who was now eighteen years old, quivery and fine like the flan they served the brothers.

“And how was your trip?”

“Tiring, we came up on the train. But we got to see the scenery,” said the older brother. “This is my second time in the States now, but for my younger brother this is the first.”

The younger brother said, in a quiet, quiet voice: “I can see how someone can get lost here.”

The Mambo King nodded. “You mean in spirit or on the streets?”

“In spirit.”

And he poured more beers, as beer made him feel more relaxed and friendly. He patted them on their backs, and then came the stories about how they’d gotten out of Cuba via Spain, spending three months in Madrid and then making their way to a cousin’s house in Miami for another three-month stay. They both had been jazz players in Cuba, the older brother playing the saxophone and guitar, and the younger, the trumpet.

“Back in the old days before the revolution,” said Rafael, “we used to listen to jazz in Havana on CMQ, sneak around to all the big hotels to hear the big bands and jam sessions with people like Dizzy Gillespie…”

“He’s great,” said Rico.

“In this one bar we knew up at La Concha”—he was referring to a beach popular with young people and musicians, about forty minutes’ drive out of Havana—“we’d listen to music and meet other musicians. Nice days. But then we had the revolution and what we hear is this jive Eastern European jazz like pompom waltz music, and sometimes we’d be lucky, and get our hands on a short-wave radio and listen to the real stuff from the States and Mexico. In any case, we were both working in Havana, Rico in a cigar factory and myself driving a bus around the city, and we both just wanted to get out of there. I mean, what was there for us? Fidel closed down so many of the clubs and hotels, and what work we got, playing weddings and dances for the Russians, was not to our liking. To tell the truth, we could see that he was doing some good things with the poor people, but for us? What was there? Nothing. In any case, it was Rico here who pushed that we leave. But it wasn’t easy.”

The brothers’ expressions? World-weary exhaustion, followed by healthy, appreciative smiles.

Then the story of a friend, a bassist, traveling with the Tropicana Review out of Havana in Mexico City, climbing out the second-floor window of a hotel bathroom and running for blocks and blocks and catching a taxi that took him to the American Embassy. Another traveling performer, a male singer, leaving his dressing room in London disguised as a woman.

“… But, as not to let this nice little gathering slip into a maudlin state of affairs,” the Mambo King remembered the older brother saying, “I make a toast to our friend Cesar Castillo.”

“And to the lovely ladies who have brought us tender flan and warm smiles,” said Cesar. “And to our new friends.”

“And to Dizzy Gillespie and Zoot Sims and John Coltrane,” said the younger brother.

“Salud!” all around, even for Leticia, who drank a glass of wine, which made her cheeks turn red.

Enjoying the role of patrón, Cesar lifted his glass for a final toast: “To your future!”

Then it was good night to Delores and Leticia, and the Mambo King set the brothers up in one of the rooms in the back and went off, a little drunk, to the club.

The next afternoon, he showed them around the neighborhood, introducing the Sánchez brothers to his friends. And he pointed across the street, saying: “See that place across the way? That’s the Club Havana. That’s mine.” Then: “We’ll see what work I can find for you. Maybe in the kitchen, if you like.”

Within a few weeks, the brothers were working in the Club Havana as dishwashers and waiters. Now and then, when things were slow, they’d jam, Cesar sitting in on the piano, and the brothers beside him on the stage playing their instruments. Cesar had heard a lot of jazz in the fifties, and while he could make his way around a few lilting blues riffs, as he got older he definitely preferred living in boleroland and melodyville. But the brothers played wild and looping music, crows and nightingales in a cage, around which he circled, while cheerfully trying to keep up.

He remembered that.

One night, he had this dream: The brothers were shouting up to his window from the street, and when he looked out, they were down below in guayaberas and white linen trousers, their faces tormented with the cold. The city was covered with snow and he called out the window, “Don’t be worried, I’m going to let you in.” He screamed in his sleep so loud that the older brother appeared at his bedroom door, asking, “Are you all right?”

(And another night, a glimpse of an eerier dream: the entire neighborhood trapped inside a glacier, everything frozen in its tracks, but music piping through the ice.)

“Yes, yes. It’s the club. Sometimes I think too much about the club.”

(And sometimes he would shut his eyes and imagine that it was 1949 again.)

Liking them, he went out of his way to make both brothers comfortable and to help them get work. He called bandleaders and club owners to put out the word that the musicians were available. He took them down to Macy’s and Gimbels and bought them nice suits, new shoes, took them over to the beauty salon, where Ana María cut their hair. He felt bad when they had to wash dishes, but paid them even on slow nights when there were hardly any dishes to wash. When he heard that the older brother had a thing for the singer Celia Cruz, he went out and bought an armful of her recordings, and when he heard Rico say that he missed having his own phonograph, he went out to a pawnshop on 116th Street off Manhattan Avenue and bought him one. (Now, at night, he would hear Rico jamming along with the recordings of Machito and Miles Davis.) He took them along with him to meetings of the Cubans of Washington Heights, brought them every Sunday to Delores’s, where they enjoyed the hospitality of the family. (“Anytime you want a meal,” Pedro told them, “you’re welcome.”) And he was concerned for them. He blamed himself whenever he saw Rico, homesick and claustrophobic, yawning before the television, blamed himself on the grayest days when Rico or his older brother would stand before the window, heartbroken. Not one to lecture others, he found himself pointing to the 123rd Street projects and saying, “You don’t want to go in there.” He identified the junkies on the street and the lowlife drug dealers who sometimes popped up on the corner. When he looked into Rico’s or Rafael’s eyes and found sadness, he would say, “Do you want a drink, my friend?” And in an hour they would be halfway through a bottle of rum.

Once he almost told the brothers about his brother Nestor. They’d seen his picture on the curvy-glass-front cabinet in the corner of the living room, and they’d seen the Mambo King pictures in the hall. He didn’t tell them because why should he share his sadness.

On the other hand, he might have told them about Nestor a dozen times, and couldn’t remember.

Sometimes he found himself staring at Rico and thinking about Nestor, wondering where so much time had gone. Then he would sit at the table, lamenting the pleasures, the main ones being affection and comfort, his brother was missing out on, the pleasures his brother would never have.

On a Sunday night, he fell asleep on the living-room couch after visiting with Bernardito and Frankie and their women in the chatty, lively household upstairs. He had another dream, this one beautiful.

He was in a field in Cuba, wading in wildflowers, with his brother at his side, picking them for their mother.

He hadn’t had so beautiful a dream in a long time.

They remained with the Mambo King for three months, helping him out in the club and here and there in the building, while also trying to find work as musicians. They got along with everybody, and only Leticia had her heart broken by one of them: Eighteen years old and agonizingly fine, she had given up the matronly dresses and books that her mother bought her and taken to wearing a silver-lame miniskirt and pink blouses and sunburst-pattern brassieres, all to impress Rico, who hardly noticed her. The Mambo King was so oblivious of Leticia’s life that his discovery of this drama, which had been going on for several months, came to him as a complete surprise. He’d seen her crying from time to time but blamed her tears on the monthly female cycle, overheard Delores lecturing Leticia about the essential unworthiness of men, heard Delores threatening Leticia with convent school if she didn’t straighten out, and, still, he remained dense about the particulars of his niece’s existence. He became aware of the situation only when Leticia came to visit Rico at the Club Havana, wearing so seductive a red dress that Delores came after her with a belt and beat her. Intervening as a peacemaker, the Mambo King sent Delores home and held the weeping Leticia in his arms, wondering, “Who is this woman brimming over with emotion?”

For a half hour he listened to Leticia’s laments: how she felt as if she were a dog on a leash, as her mother never let her do anything by herself, that all she wanted was a little life of her own. And tears and more tears, and the Mambo King not knowing what to say except “These things will pass.”

Later, while standing alone by the bar, he tried to reconcile his memory of Leticia as the skinny, affectionate little girl who would come running into his arms years ago with the love-throttled raven-haired beauty whose ample femininity and dense emotions now confused him. He had tried to stop her crying by offering to buy her infantile presents — an ice-cream cone, a doll, a jump rope — but she kept crying. Something about her tears took him back to lots of other women whom he seemed to identify with tears — his mother crying in bed, his wife weeping on the street, Delores crying in bed — and still he did not know what to do. In the end, he gave her a hug, a ten-dollar bill, and took her home to the apartment, without saying another word.

And the brothers? While Rafael, the older brother, liked to go downtown on his nights off, visiting friends (they would sometimes come up to drink cheaply on evenings when Rafael was waiting tables) and going to jazz clubs in the Village (the Half Note on Spring Street being a favorite), Rico would put on his blue pinstriped Macy’s suit and head off to the subway, smelling all sweet from a rose-honey cologne; a nice story really, a romance involving a girl he had known back in Cuba, with whom he hooked up again. She lived in New Jersey with her family. He’d go out to see her a few nights a week, slicking back his hair and preening himself before the mirror. He’d ride home on the PATH trains at four in the morning, moving quietly through the house, not wanting to disturb anyone. Usually the Mambo King would be awake and sitting at the kitchen table with Frankie or one of his other friends, speaking quietly, the man fighting sleep, or he might be sitting in the living room watching television or, pad in hand, going over some old arrangement that he was trying to remember. Or he’d be trying to write a song.

One night, Rico came home and joined the Mambo King at the table and related that he was going to marry this woman, that he and his older brother were going to be living in her family’s house in Elizabeth.

The Mambo King shrugged. “Let me know what I can get you as a present,” he told Rico. And he patted the younger musician on the back. And, smiling, he said, “I knew I smelled love in the air!”

There was something else: he asked the brothers to perform at the club.

It was arranged. One night Rafael and Rico Sánchez appeared on the stage of the Club Havana, backed by Manny the bassist, a pianist named Eddie Torres, and good old reliable Pito on the drums. They played a lot of jazzy-sounding instrumentals, some old dance standards. Now and then, the older brother would step to the microphone and sing a bolero, and in the tradition of bolero singers, his vocal cords quivered, his eyes closed, and his expression became pained and sincere. Seated at a back table, Delores, Leticia, Eugenio, and Pedro. And at the bar, drinking shots of rum, the Mambo King, listening attentively and feeling pleased by the repetition of certain events.

“Adiós, my friends,” he recalled telling them when they left.

AFTER THIS, THINGS STARTED TO change at the club. Even though Cesar owed Pérez thousands of dollars and seemed to be doing a decent business, he made no payments, claiming that he just didn’t have the money. And why? Because he was still playing the big man, hiring friends, like the brothers from Cuba, keeping two waitresses on salary, a cook named Esmeralda, Frankie behind the bar, and dishwashers, and, on top of that, giving meals and drinks away, and paying his musicians decently, regardless of the take at the door.

Hearing reports of this conspicuous generosity, Pérez one day called a meeting of the partners.

“I don’t know how to relate this to you, my friend,” Pérez told him. “But it’s my opinion that you think you’re running a social club, yes?”

“No, but it’s my club.”

“Yes, run with my money.”

In total, Pérez claimed to have put over forty thousand dollars into the place. Manny, who had put in five thousand, didn’t really care how Cesar ran the club, as long as it made the Mambo King happy, but Pérez stated the case that, as a businessman, he had to look out for his own interests.

“All I want is that you leave the management to me, okay? Otherwise, you can continue as you like, bringing in bands and greeting the patrons. That is what you do best, understand?”

Then he gave Cesar a hearty abrazo. “Believe me, as God is my witness, this is the right thing to do.”

Eventually Pérez sent two of his men in. One resembled the boxer Roberto Durán and possessed his piercing black eyes just before the kill. The other seemed more easygoing, low-keyed, until he spoke to you and then he’d smile, lips curled with sarcastic intent. They called the Mambo King Papi and humored him when he gave them orders. They didn’t much like Eugenio or his friends, didn’t like “dead-beat” Frankie, measured out the drinks, gave no buy-backs, and never fed the jukebox with quarters from the register.

They fired one of the waitresses, making Cesar look cheap, which depressed him.

But with this new management came a whole new clientele. Sports from Brooklyn who would double-park their lavender Cadillacs out on the street and who wore thick gold chains around their necks. They’d sit at their tables and pull out thick wads of twenty-dollar bills, and they favored “soul” music whose bottom-heavy bass lines nearly blew out the jukebox speakers. Bands were featured only one night a week now, Saturdays. Slowly the number of old Latin standards began to dwindle, and so did the number of older customers. And they were generous, giving out big tips and always buying the “boss,” Cesar Castillo, drinks. By midnight he would find himself leaving the club with Frankie by his side, so drunk that he sometimes could not see across the street. It was on one of those nights that he had another beautiful dream: the Club Havana was burning down, but it was a silent fire, like embers in the incinerator, without sirens or shattering glass, just the place burning up with all the bad people inside. Sometimes he would just make it to his stoop and sit there wishing that the club would burn.

Sitting in the Hotel Splendour, he did not like to think that those men had used the Club Havana to sell drugs, as the neighborhood gossip said. But even back then, he knew that something was wrong, because of the way people looked at him. The old Irishman with the strawberry-red chin who always tipped his crooked gray hat looked the other way when Cesar passed by. Even gentle Ana María, cutting his hair, did not smile. And there were the stories, or coincidences, that did not sit well with him. Nice black kid, “one of the better ones,” as he used to say, named Alvin, falling off a rooftop. Irish kid named Johnny G., found slumped and fucked-up in some Broadway tavern, dead. Other Irish kid dead in some basement. Italian kid named Bobby wrecked while joyriding, high on drugs; black kid named Owen sucked into a Far Rockaway sewer. Kids yellow with jaundice and who-knows-what, nodding at the Mambo King and saying, “How are you, Mr. Castillo,” a dead look in their eyes. Kid named Tommy, funniest guy on the street, gone with hepatitis. Blind lady newsdealer on 121st slashed straight down the middle of her face for a few dollars; radio-repair man slashed from ear to ear. Then the others he heard about, slipping from memory because he didn’t want to think about them. Just that a lot of the kids used to hang out in front of the Club Havana at night, noisy and exuberant in their black chinos, V-neck sweaters, and double-laced Converse sneakers. He could have made a lot of money if he had stayed in the partnership, but one day he and the other partners approached Pérez, wanting to sell out. Debt paid, Cesar walked away from the club with five thousand dollars to show for it — Pérez had been generous. Then he flew down to Puerto Rico for two weeks and holed up in a mountain town near Mayagüez with some old friends. By the time he returned, he felt somewhat detached from the whole business, though while walking up the street he could hear the jukebox through the doorway and a murmur of voices. He’d taken all his pictures out from behind the bar, and Pérez was kind enough to change the name from Club Havana to the Star Club. A year later it was changed again, to Club Carib, and the year after that, when Pérez died (lifted to heaven by angels), it shut down for good, its front doors and windows whitewashed and covered up with boards.

AND JUST LIKE THAT, ANOTHER line of music brings back a Guatemalan man, a tall, macho-looking fellow named Enrique, whom Cesar had known from his Park Palace dance-hall days. Ran into him one afternoon in the street, years later, and they ducked into a bar, where he related to the Mambo King the story of his “first intercourse,” as he put it. He was a teenager walking home from school along a dirt road, when he heard a voice calling to him from the bushes, a female voice saying, “Come here,” and when he stepped closer and parted the leaves, he saw an Indian woman on the ground, her skirt hoisted up and legs open for him.

“She had a nice body,” he told the Mambo King, who nodded and smiled. “And said to me, ‘Show me what you have,’ ” and she fondled him and his thing got big, “very big,” he said with a macho’s attention to that kind of detail. And then they “coupled”—that was his word — right by the road, and while he had enjoyed himself and had left her satisfied, he said that if the truth be told, he would have preferred the company of a good-looking boy who lived down the road, a good friend.

Now, this boy had a sister named Teresa, who was always making eyes at Enrique. They flirted with each other, even kissed, but in the end they both knew that, amorously speaking, he preferred the company of men. He didn’t even have anything going with her brother, but everyone knew. That was the first part of the story. And then he picked it up fifteen years later, with Enrique living in New York and receiving letters from Teresa pleading with him to marry her so that she might get American citizenship: that after they were married they could then arrange for the arrival of her brother. Loving Teresa like a sister, Enrique wrote her that he would take care of everything, that he would be waiting for her at the airport. A month after her arrival they were married at City Hall and lived more or less as husband and wife for a year, though they did not share their bed carnally.

The Mambo King nodded.

By that time she had started to make friends, inviting other couples over to the house, and now he really had to behave like a good husband, and that meant that he could not have any of his male companions around. In fact, she began to forbid that his friends come to the house, as she had begun to find them distasteful. And there was another thing: she was tired of going to bed at night and waking up beside Enrique, who tended to sleep, he kept telling the Mambo King, with powerful and virile erections. And even though she knew he was indifferent to women, she would fondle him night after night, until they became lovers, enjoying each other. This idyll lasted for several months and he began to barter with her, the company of his friends in exchange for his virile services, a proposal that made things worse between them, because with that she told him, “Enrique, but you don’t understand, I love you. I’ve always loved you,” and, “If I can’t have you, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” like an actress in a bad Hollywood movie — his words again — but then, when he did not believe her, she stepped things up and went with whatever men she met on the street, and got a reputation as a harlot, so that Enrique, a huge man, had to go out and fight for who knows whose honor, but he did so. And then he tried to keep peace in the house, but she had started to smash plates and scream out the window that she was married to a “queen,” weeping loudly for hours, so that he was ashamed to even leave his apartment.

Then things calmed down. One day, he told the Mambo King, he came home from his job waiting tables downtown and found that she’d cleared out of his apartment: a few days later he was served with divorce papers, the grounds being that he was incapable of fulfilling his manly functions with her. Not only was justice not served, but she was awarded alimony payments of fifty dollars a week, which was a lot of money in those days.

“Thank God,” he said, “that she finally remarried, a few years ago.”

“Sounds crazy to me,” said the Mambo King, shaking his head. Then he stood up and rapped Enrique on the shoulder, saying, “Well, I hope things are better for you now?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Good.” And he left.

And with the Guatemalan man, who’d had bad luck, he remembered the poor rich Englishman, a dapper fellow who also hung out at the Park Palace, the one who fell in love with a beautiful brunette who drove him to suicide.

So many years had passed.

He remembered the short priest from the local parish who resembled Humphrey Bogart and always seemed to be looking down women’s dresses.

Now there’s a man who had made a big mistake.

And, speaking of bad luck, what about his friend Giovanni, who managed the boxer Kid Chocolate, a jaunty Cuban welterweight. Another waiter, Giovanni had a ticket to millions, and what happened? His boxer called the champ a fairy and paid for it in the ring, getting pummeled into a coma.

What happened to his Cuba? His memories?

Having watched the match on Friday Night Fight of the Week, the Mambo King waited for his friend Giovanni, who lived in the building next door, to come home, saw him walking up the street about one in the morning with his son, carrying a canvas bag. He raced down the stairs just to say, “I saw what happened. How is he?”

“Not good.”

“Look, then, come back with me to the apartment and we’ll have a few drinks.”

“Okay.”

And as they sat finishing off a bottle, Giovanni said, “Psssssht, just like that. All his training, all those fights. Psssssht, a crying shame, you know?”

The last bar of that strange line of bad-luck music really pinched his heart, because out of nowhere he started to hear Elva and René, his old dance team, shouting at each other. René accusing his fine-looking wife of cuckolding him, and Elva denying it to tears and then, because he did not believe her, turning it all around and boasting about all her young and handsome virile lovers, so that René lost his self-control and stabbed Elva to death with a kitchen knife. Afterwards he threw himself out the window.

That was another bad-luck thing that had happened in 1963. Thank God, the Mambo King thought, that the music changed swiftly, moving on again.