The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Toward the end, while listening to the wistful “Beautiful María of My Soul”

IT HAD COME DOWN TO THIS: HE had turned around to find that the temporary job he’d taken to fill his idle days had lasted nearly twenty years.

Passing through the lobby, he would remember when he was a cocky and arrogant musician, and think to himself, Who would have dreamed that things would turn out this way? (And millions of people watching him on the rerun of the I Love Lucy show could never imagine that he had his own life, never see him as a super.) He’d gotten used to smelling like plumber’s gum, his nails blackened with grease and oil. Tenants tapped the pipes (in claves time) and he answered quickly, some of those jobs being nightmares. (Trapped under a sink in a hot kitchen, the linoleum floor beneath him rotting with roaches, crinkly and gnarled witch’s hair growing out the bottom of the sink, hanging down into his face, the man struggling with a seat wrench to unscrew the J-joint or sink trap for hours in the stinging heat of the day. Or going into an apartment that had been locked up for a month because the tenants had gone on vacation and entering the kitchen to find that they’d turned off the refrigerator but left the door closed so that a blue fungus had proliferated and spread across the floor and everywhere he looked in that room were roaches feasting on that blueness. Or the time he had opened a closet and a million roaches, clinging one to another, had fallen on him like an old coat. These were some of the things he did not like.) But when tenants called him he always answered quickly. Wishing to fill the emptiness of his days, those many years back, he had fixed loosened doors, leaky faucets, cracked windows, saggy walls, faulty electrical sockets. He had installed a fancy bronze-tube lamp, like those found in old post offices and in library cubicles, over the mailboxes, and even found a new mirror for the narrow lobby, taking the old speckled mirror off its mounts and leaving it out for the garbage collectors on the sidewalk. (The children of La Salle Street, loving destruction, gleefully smashed the mirror.)

Rotund and slowly putting on weight, he began to take on the shape of a cathedral bell. He had his old favorite suits let out and retailored about thirteen times in a few years, so often that his tailor put elastic in the waistbands. Amazed by his own immensity, he sometimes stomped down on the back stairway, enjoying the way the rickety structure shook. Though he was having more difficulty breathing and his walk had slowed, the Mambo King was happy there was more of him to take up room in the world.

As he sank into the bathtub, the water would rise unexpectedly to the rim.

That was around the time when the pains got so bad that his old pal Dr. López wanted to put him in the hospital.

He went on the radio that year, a nostalgia hour. The pianist Charlie Palmieri, a bandleader and arranger, was on the same program. Palmieri talked about starting out with Tito Puente and then branching off on his own in the fifties, traveling cross-country before “racial barriers” had been broken, playing dances up in the mountains, and the way he had been the one to discover Johnny Pacheco, a dishwasher who played the flute in the kitchen, jamming along with the featured band, his playing so lively that Palmieri hired him on the spot.

And then it was “Thank you, Charlie Palmieri,” and over the radio an oceanic rumbling and the melody of “Twilight in Havana.”

“My next guest today is someone who was very much a part of the scene in the fifties here in New York. It’s my pleasure to introduce the bandleader and singer Cesar Castillo. Welcome.”

As he sat there telling his and Nestor’s story, what the scene was like then in the dance halls where the Mambo Kings used to play, the Imperial Ballroom, the Friendship Club, the Savoy in the Bronx, and the quirky things that happened, like the all-baldhead contests and the great battles of the bands, stuff like that — the interviewer would occasionally break off and play one of the old Mambo King records, then return for more talk.

“And how did you feel about Desi Arnaz?”

Cesar laughed. “A nice man.”

“I mean, musically?”

“A tremendous talent, untrained, but really good for his musicians. You know, me and my brother once played his show.”

“Yes.”

“But to get back to his talent. I ran into Chico O’Farrill one day and we got into the subject of reading charts. I mean, I had never learned to read, and from what I could tell, neither could Arnaz, and that led me to asking Chico as to what he thought of Desi Arnaz as a talent, and he said the man was very good for an untrained musician.”

“But no one has ever considered him very authentic or original.”

“Bueno, I think what he did was difficult. For me, he was very Cuban, and the music he played in those days was good and Cuban enough for me. You know he sang a lot of old Cuban ballads on that show.”

But mainly he talked about the different dance halls, which bands were playing where, and the crisscross of musicians and the chumminess of the songwriters—“A lost epoch,” they concurred.

“And who do you like now?”

“Most of the same. My favorites have remained much the same.”

“You mean el Conjunto Mambo Kings?”

“No, I’ve always liked Puente, Rodríguez, Fajardo, Palmieri, Machito, Beny More, Nelo Sosa. I don’t know, I guess you can name them and I’ll like them. And there’s Celia Cruz and the singer Carlos Argentina. I could go on, there are so many great talents still working.”

“And yourself?”

Cesar laughed, puffed on his cigarette.

“I’m still working here and there. Nothing spectacular, you understand, but I’m still out there exercising my vocal cords.”

“To our benefit.” Then: “Well, now we’re going to sign off, but before we do, I’m going to leave you with this fine little canción.”

With that, the interviewer cued “Beautiful María of My Soul,” which played out of windows, out of car radios, and at the beach, where fine young women lying out in the sun, bodies shiny with suntan lotion, and hearts and heads filled with thoughts of the future, heard the song.

Occasionally, he would get a call from an agent or a promoter talking about bringing him back into the public’s eye.

Usually nothing happened.

But one day he was hauling garbage out the basement, dragging the heavy incinerator cans out to the curb, when he heard a car horn. A Mercedes-Benz had pulled up and, sitting behind its wheel, looking plush in a white sable coat, plumed hat with leopard-skin band, his old Mambo King pianist, the fabulous Miguel Montoya.

It took him a second to figure that out. “Miguel, hombre!”

And soon they were embracing.

“My God, but you look prosperous.”

“Yes,” he said. “I can’t complain.”

Later they drove over to one of Cesar’s favorite spots on 129th Street. Miguel must have been in his late seventies, but he seemed still to be going strong and, by his own account, had done well for himself, making Muzak recordings in California — his was the creamy, velvet, dulcet-toned piano playing “Moon River,” “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,” and “Beautiful María of My Soul” that came out over supermarket, airport, bus-terminal loudspeakers everywhere — and writing scores for low-budget Mexican horror films with titles like The Beautiful Vampires of the Hacienda of Terror! (Cesar had seen that film in the Bronx in 1966. He had gone to see it with his nephew Eugenio and a few of his friends — Louie, a lanky Puerto Rican, and Victor, a newly arrived Cuban — and they had sat in the bluish glow of the horrific light in a theater crowded with worldly children who laughed and clapped while watching the big-titted female vampires — their breasts rounded, pointy, and succulent under their black transparent gowns — bounding across verandas, where sombreroed musicians played, and crashing through high-arched windows to claim the amorous favors and blood of their male victims.)

A nice long afternoon, drinking and getting reacquainted, and Miguel finally bringing up one of the reasons, aside from friendship, for his visit. “A promoter I know, an Englishman who lives in London, has been wanting to mount a revival show at the London Palladium and he asked me to put together an orchestra and a lineup of singers. Of course, I told him about you.”

“Yes?”

And the notion of traveling to Europe, to England, where he had never been, made the Mambo King happy.

“It’s all being planned now, but I have some good people lined up already. And who knows, maybe we can take the show on a tour, to Madrid, Paris, Rome, all those beautiful places.”

Miguel was enthusiastic enough to keep the Mambo King informed about the whole business, calling him every few months, but then he stopped hearing from him: and when he called Miguel’s number in Phoenix, Arizona, where he had his home, someone who was taking care of Miguel’s affairs informed the Mambo King that his old friend was dead.

“Coño!”

Once, he had almost seen his daughter again. He still corresponded with her, but what was she but a few fading lines of ink on paper? Then she wrote to say that her ballet company was going to be appearing in Montreal, Canada, in a production of Giselle with Alicia Alonso. Now in her early thirties, she had something to do with running the corps de ballet, and would he like to see her in that wintry city? Yes, he wrote. They made the arrangements and he bought a ticket, but the morning of the flight to Montreal he allowed his symptoms to blossom, and he could not move from his bed, and settled for a long, static-ridden conversation with his daughter at ten-thirty in the evening. His voice tired and trying to explain the pains in his body and the pains in his heart.

Then it was: “Well, I’m sorry we did not get the chance to see each other, Papi.”

“Yes, daughter. It’s the same for me. Another time?”

“Yes.”

“You take care of yourself, my daughter.”

“Yes, you take care of yourself, Papi.”

And goodbye forever.

On another night, a singing job, and he came up out of the coolness of the basement, where it always felt like autumn, and undressed before his mirror. Off with his gray utility uniform, off with his belt with its loop of apartment keys, his shorts, his dirty white socks, and down the hallway to the bathroom.

Then the reverse, getting dressed. First, cologne behind his ears and neck; then talcum powder under his arms and on his hairy chest, with its scar over the right nipple. Clean pair of striped boxer shorts, then high silk socks with garters. On with his flamingo-pink shirt and fading white suit, tight around the middle, the front buttons straining under the threads’ pull. Then on with his sky-blue tie and silver tie clip. He rubbed slick Brylcreem into his hair, put a little Vaseline under his eyes to help disguise the wrinkles, then applied a wax pencil over his wisp of a mustache, like Cesar Romero’s in the old movies. Then he put on his white golden-buckled shoes and spit-polished the soft leather with a chamois cloth. When he finished that, he looked himself over. Satisfied that he had not left a stitch out of place, he was ready to go.

Later, Cesar and his musicians were on the stage of the Club Tropical Paradise in the Bronx, a place run by Puerto Ricans who had been big Mambo King fans, finishing up their second set, a string of classics like “El Bodeguero” and “Cachita,” which had gotten even the old grandmothers and grandfathers to shake their bodies and laugh gaily as if they were young again. He had watched a wisp of a woman, thin and bent over like a branch, in a many-layered black dress from another age, turning into a twelve-year-old girl, her arthritic shoulders pulsing forward as if she’d just joined a conga line. Inspired, the Mambo King had blown his trumpet hard, winked, and shouted, “Vaya!” the notes of his solo sailing the rippling sea of 3/2 time, and the music had sounded so good that even his drowsy bass player Manny, tired from his day’s work, began to awaken.

And with that they had gone into another song, and the Mambo King, despite a bad urge to urinate, began to dance, moving his big frame on the tiptoes of his white golden-buckled shoes. He sang and blew his trumpet hard as if he were a young man in Havana getting drunk and charging down the street with all the energy in the world, blowing until his face was red, his sides ached, and his head seemed ready to burst. Stepping back, he had turned toward his musicians, signaling the turnaround-and-out.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said—

… in the Hotel Splendour, wishing he didn’t have the bad pains… — into the microphone. “Thank you so much. We’re glad you’re enjoying yourselves.”

And with his bladder full to aching (liver, kidney, hole-torn gut), he clicked off the microphone, stepped down off the wooden platform, and made his way across the crowded dance floor in the darkness, accidentally touching some nice female bottoms. Moving through that room, he felt surrounded, pressed, overwhelmed by youth. In this crowd of mostly young people, he felt ambassadorial, as if he were there to represent the declining older generation, closer to death, as they say, than to the light of youth.

— Running in a field, the ground rushing under him like a river—

So many pretty young women with big half-moon gold and pagoda-shaped earrings and with lightning-whipped curls and nice asses on slender, long-ankled dancers’ legs. Silky blouses, thick with femininity, quivering and sheeny in the red party lights. Jostled, and lumbering, he pressed close to a woman who smelled like jasmine and sweat.

Nearly sixty now. And were the young chicks looking at him, the way they used to, up and down, and hoping that he might walk over and strike up a conversation? Now they treated him with a cheerful respect, with looks that said, “My, but he might have been a lady-killer once upon a time.” In the old days he couldn’t walk down the street without some pretty woman looking him sweetly, longingly in the eyes, but now? Dios mío, he had to work a lot harder for his seduction, and if he wanted a younger woman he’d have to pay for her, because now the women who desired him were not young chicks anymore, and that was something he couldn’t accept.

But then, as he was making his way toward the toilet, he felt someone tugging at his jacket sleeve, and taking hold of his elbow, a pretty woman of thirty, thirty-five. Coño!

“Señor Castillo? My name is Lydia Santos. This is my cousin Alberto”—across the table from her, a thin-mustached man who resembled the 1930s film actor Leon Errol. “And I just wanted to tell you that I really like your music. You know, I have seen you before, years ago, when I was a young girl. My father would take me to the Teatro Hispano to see all the shows. I saw you there and in Brooklyn. And sometimes up in the Bronx. What was the name of that other place?”

“The Savoy,” her cousin said.

“Yes. We played there a few times. With the Tiny Tina Maracas Orchestra. Many years ago. In 1954, it was.”

(And now, on top of this memory, Tiny Tina Maracas and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra, playing a rumba version of “Moonlight Sonata,” and one night Cesar and Tina huddled at a table drinking daiquiris, and Tina, magnificent in a flame-red dress and mantilla comb in her hair, saying to the Mambo King, “Would you guys like to work with us on second bill at this place in the Catskills?” and this fading out to a moonlit night where at three in the morning the Mambo King and Tiny Tina are tottering along the edge of a lake, enchanted by the reflection of the moon and stars, teary with light in the water, and the pines stone-blue in the distance, and at one moment when the two bandleaders were standing close enough to feel each other’s breath, she turned to him and put two of her fingers inside his shirt, her nails touching his skin and gnarly hair, and she said, in the fashion of that time, “Come on, ya big lug, why don’t you kiss me?”)

“I was just a kid, but I really liked your orchestra.”

“Thank you, it’s very much a compliment. Coming from so pretty a woman.” And he bowed.

But there was suffering in his expression. The Mambo King wanted to stay and talk, but his bladder was aching. “Some more drinks here!” he called to the waiter.

Then he leaned forward and said to her, “I’ll come back later so that we can talk, yes?”

Continuing toward the hallway toilets, thinking about that young girl of thirty or thirty-five. Lydia Santos. Most of the younger women he met had never heard of his orchestra, the Mambo Kings, or if they knew the name it was one out of dozens of other antique orchestras whose records their parents played when they were feeling nostalgic.

“I was just a kid, but I really liked your orchestra,” he heard again as he made his way past the blaring jukebox.

At the end of a narrow foyer was a bolted-shut fire door, which disturbed him. He had once played a club in Queens where a fire had broken out in the kitchen deep fryer and they had had to smash in the fire door to the alley with an ax. (Wished that had happened at the Club Havana.) Huddled against the door, people were coughing and weeping because of the smoke and fear. That’s why he always checked the fire exits.

— The fire engines sounding on the night of Nestor’s death—

Along the hallway wall, a line of young men waiting to use the toilet (for urination, defecation, sprucing up, smoking yerba, the inhalation of cocaine), and among them the groom, el novio, for whom this party was being thrown. The young men were really fucked up and happy. One running joke in the line? About how the groom’s sex organ was going to be sore by the following afternoon. He answered, “It’s already been sore for a long time”—and they all slapped five.

In the presence of the young men, and buoyed by the attention of Lydia Santos, the Mambo King forgot his age and adopted the posture of a young wolf, with his collar and bow tie loosened. Exposed was his chest of tangled fleecy black-and-gray hair, and, on a chain, the crucifix and money amulet and the small bronze head of Changó nestling against the primeval dampness of his skin. A tallish fellow complimented the Mambo King (even though he had pushed the groom for one of those new disco groups with fancy machines, syn-drums and synthesizer pianos, but the bride’s father had said, “A group is a group, and this Cesar Castillo’s a real pro,” which meant that Cesar charged a lot less than the others, and who cared if his music was a little old-fashioned?) and then offered the Mambo King and his bassist a drag of his marijuana cigarette.

No, thank you, he preferred rum over smoke, because smoke made him feel crazy, hear voices, and suspect that his dead brother Nestor was just around the corner.

Another young man made polite conversation and asked the Mambo King his opinion about the upcoming Panamanian, Rubén Blades, whom Cesar had heard and liked. “You must have known a lot of the greats in your time, huh?”

“Yes, you name ’em…” Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, Pérez Prado. I knew a lot of guys going back a long time. Talented guys with style and good musical ideas who vanished into thin air. And they had to work hard. Most of them are where now? A friend of mine, a really good conguero, watches the dinosaur bones over at the Museum of Natural History. I have another friend, works as a steam presser downtown in the fashion district. He’s too old to do anything else, but in his day he was a good trumpet player. You can feel bad for him, but he had his glory, and besides, for whatever reasons, that was his calling. He knew what he was getting into, ¿sabes?

“Don’t get me wrong, my friend,” he continued. “You can make a living, but it’s not easy, and forget getting rich.” He peeked ahead to see if the line was moving and said to Manny, “How long is that guy going to be in there, huh?”

When he finally got into the smoky bathroom, he was startled: a green-and-blue parrot feather was floating in the toilet water. Taking out his big thing, he emptied his bladder. As he shut his eyes — curls of smoke from his cigarette rose into them — he thought about the young woman: he imagined her kneeling on the tile floor and undoing his trousers.

Come on, hombre, give the woman a break, he chided himself, and this brief image of desire dissolved, broken up in a wave of melancholy. He’d always thought his big pinga would take care of things, that he could get what he wanted by staring into a woman’s eyes with his pretty-boy looks, press home his manhood by treating his ladies like shit, with arrogance, as if they were worthless, once his desire ran out. And there he was, an aging musician, with what to show for all his years in the world?

Wince of pain while remembering how he would carry his young brother on his shoulders across the yard in Cuba: his clinging, loving brother Nestor, his younger brother’s thin hands gripping his neck, the kid laughing whenever Cesar bobbed up and down and neighed like a horse. Rode him to that shady part of the yard where the ladies of the household would gather to sew and wash and gossip. That big tub, filled to the brim with hot water and rose-scented soap, his mother saying to him, “First Nestor, and then you, my son.”

The ladies of the household: Mamá, Genebria, and her friends, four jolly black women involved with magic who were always laughing at him and joking about his vanity, that one day it would get him into trouble. What were their names — he tried to remember now. Tomasa, Pereza, Nicolena, and Nisa, swirling around him in their red and yellow and mango-colored skirts, laughing. He hadn’t thought of them for a long time, those cheerful women gathering around him and spoiling him to death with kisses.

Memory, repeated memory, of looking up into his mother’s eyes and finding pure goodness and affection.

Pure goodness, his mother, but she could not do shit against the power of his father, who beat her, beat him, and tried to beat his free spirit into the ground. Frightened his younger brother to death so that he would go through life like… a little girl. That powerless goodness.

Why was he thinking about that suddenly, those years later in the Hotel Splendour?

Looking in the bathroom mirror, he laughed at himself. “Shame on you, viejito, for even thinking about that young woman.”

How could he think about that young woman when he was wearing a faja, a girdle?

What had the doctors told him in the hospital?

No more pleasure in this life for you.

Now he checked himself out sideways, sucking in his stomach. With his head tilted up in a noble fashion, he bore some resemblance to the Cesar Castillo of Mambo King fame, whose face adorned the cover of that immortal album “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.”

Leaving the toilet, he moved briskly, chest out, huge belly in, thumped shoulders, patted the children who were running circles around the adults, waved hello and winked at the older ladies. Then he made his way back up to the stage. As he stood before the microphone and turned to click on the standby switch of an amplifier, he felt acid surging in his gut. Earlier that night, he had had two plates of lechón asado, which he’d seasoned with a handful of salt and the juice of a hearty lemon; then tostones, crisply fried and browned, French fries, arroz moro, some yuca.

The rum, however, was what cut into his gut. It went down his gullet like melting ice but started to burn in the vicinity (kissed by a thousand women) of his vibrating diaphragm. Occasionally, he chewed a Rolaids antacid. Over the years, he had guzzled bottles of milk of magnesia and ordinary milk to relieve his distress. At times, he even tried an invention of his own, which he called a “69,” milk and rum and crème de menthe or Amaretto, as if the candy taste and limpid texture could ward off the pain. And although the attacks in his gut and the throbbing in his kidneys and liver sometimes woke him in the middle of the night, and good friends like Manny the bassist, Bernardito, and Dr. López had advised him to take better care of himself, he continued to ignore them.

Soon enough, the Mambo King and his musicians launched into another set of pieces like “The Cuban Mambo,” the “Tremendo Cumbancha,” “Cua, Cua, Cua.” Then it was bolero time and “Beautiful María of My Soul.”

As he had for years and years, the Mambo King sang that bolero, his vocal cords quivering, his face radiant with sincere, love-drenched emotion: arms spread wide before his corpulent body, he sang to the women with all his heart. And looking at the crowd, his eyes found Lydia: she had been staring at him, a bent straw dangling from between her cherry-red lips. He sang the last verse of the song to her, and only her. While navigating the melancholic beauty of that melody, he had thought to himself: There goes that young chick again, looking at me.

(Oh, Christ, Jesus, my Lord and Saviour, please explain on this sad night why so many people have cried.)

They played till around three-thirty, and then the musicians gathered around a table, waiting for their pay. There were still a lot of people out on the dance floor, silhouettes of clinging bodies, a room of shadows under the pink and red lights, tight circles in the glare of the computer-controlled jukebox flashing: MOST POPULAR SELECTION! The bride’s father was reminiscing by the bar, and taking his time. It was just as well: the musicians were exhausted, particularly Manny, slumped in his chair and whispering, “When is that man finally going to pay us, huh?”

“I’ll take care of it. Don’t you worry.”

“Yes, of course, how could I forget my friend!” And the bride’s father handed Cesar Castillo an envelope containing three hundred dollars — that was fifty dollars for each of the five musicians, for seven and a half hours of live music, plus a fifty-dollar tip to split among themselves — a good night.

While the musicians collected their instruments, cables, and microphones, the Mambo King, tie loosened, shirt open, stopped by Lydia’s table to say goodbye. First he shook her cousin’s hand, a manly handshake, but with Lydia he displayed gentlemanly aplomb, kissing the knuckles of her right hand. As he did so, he felt her hand warming. And she blushed, too.

Then he said to her, “Could this viejito take the pleasure of calling you sometime?”

“Yes.”

On the back of a Budweiser beer coaster she wrote, “Lydia Santos, 989-8996.”

“Thank you.”

Was she really interested in him, or was she just being nice to an old man? Still, he couldn’t help kissing her hand again and following this up with a tender smile. Then, like a king cock, he strutted out the door with Frankie.

He and Frankie got a lift with Manny. Riding west on the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Mambo King was far from tired. He did not yawn, he did not lean back in the car seat lolling, he did not even particularly feel the pains in his gut anymore. Instead, he tapped his feet and felt like partying. Manny dropped the Mambo King and Frankie off on La Salle Street and wearily made his way home, where he would lock up his bass and amplifier in his bodega. But Cesar?

“Frankie, you want to come upstairs and have a drink with me?”

“It’s five in the morning.”

“You can stay with me.”

“Let me go home. My wife is waiting.”

“Come on, she knows you’re with me.”

Up the stairs to Cesar’s apartment they went, beyond the hallway and into the kitchen, where Cesar made them nice drinks. In the living room he put on one of his favorite records, “Dancemania” by Tito Puente, and then they sat on the couch drinking. Coño, that young woman had liked him, and now the world buzzed with well-being. He had the sensation that goodwill was flowing into him, that he was the center of a benevolent and beautiful universe. Exhausted, Frankie soon dozed. But Cesar remained awake, jubilant and happy, as if everything around him were showing him affection: the old couch, the easy chair, the Victorian-looking chairs by the window which he had brought up from the basement, the big blue-tubed Zenith color TV, his conga drums, his maracas saying “Cuba,” his stereo console. The glint of old and new record spines in the cabinet, the half bottle of Bacardi rum, his black instrument case, all communicating love.

He kept a little Cuban flag on the television and in the corner of the room a little cabinet dedicated to the memory of Nestor. He and Nestor and the other Mambo Kings smiled at him now from atop an art-deco seashell bandstand circa 1950. Then the other framed pictures on the wall smiling at him: Tito, Pérez, and yes, once again, he and Nestor posed alongside Desi Arnaz.

(For one moment, as he sat by the window in the summer’s heat in that room in the Hotel Splendour, Cesar Castillo had the impression of standing before the door to Desi Arnaz’s apartment, his brother Nestor, alive and well and young, beside him.)

Then there were more pictures of his family. His niece and nephew as babies, then toddlers, and onward into life: Leticia in her First Communion gown, Leticia pictured with a blue-tasseled mortarboard on her head on the day of her graduation from Sacred Heart of Mary High School, Leticia on the day of her wedding to a nice Jewish fellow named Howard. Eugenio as a soldier of Christ on his confirmation, in the Chapel of Corpus Christi, black missal in hand, the spirit of Christ radiating light behind him. A shot taken of Cesar and his dead brother and Delores in front of a Chinatown restaurant a few hours after his brother and sister-in-law had gotten married. Delores in a polka-dotted dress, holding a flower; Nestor in a smart-looking blue serge suit. Pictures of his daughter, Mariela, taken in Havana when she was little.

And among these pictures, the Mambo King imagined himself with Lydia, posed as if he were a young man again, looking forward to a million nights of love and a bright, happy future, as if he would be able to relive and do certain things over again. Even the tick-tocking clock on the kitchen wall seemed to be smiling at him.

Then abruptly the sun began rising out of the east and the window burned with an orange-and-red light. And like a character in a bolero, the Mambo King happily felt young again: while Frankie the Exterminator snored away by the kitchen table, a name flew, light as a falling flower, through Cesar’s world-weary soul, flew through the layers of macho and doubt, anger and contempt. “Lydia.”

The next week the Mambo King nervously called Lydia Santos, inviting her out to dine with him.

“Yes, I would like that,” she told him.

The first night they went out, the Mambo King found himself pacing up and down on the 96th Street Express platform, waiting for her train from the Bronx. He wore a lavender leisure suit, white wing-tipped shoes, and a black-brimmed lacquered cane hat. Big shades, so that she would not be able to check out the stage droop beneath his eyes. Lowlifes seemed to be everywhere around him. Long gone were the days when you could take a nap under a shady tree in the park without worrying that someone would go through your pockets. He’d come and gone from jobs on the subway, witnessed fleet-footed thieves stationed by the subway doors, reading the Daily News sports page one second and, pssst, the next moment, just before the car doors closed, yanking off a thick gold chain or a purse or a radio and running down the platform. Snap of the fingers, like that. He once saw a man walk into a car and slash open another man’s shirt so he could get at the other guy’s wallet: the victim did not even stir. He had seen jackets pulled off the backs of sleeping men on trains, shoes yanked off feet. And the number of beggars! Never used to be so many of them in the old days. He’d give to the old, not the young men. There was an Indian fellow whose body seemed to have been cut in half. He would wheel himself through the subway cars on a skateboard, holding out a tin cup, which Cesar always filled with change. (How did that poor suffering man take care of his business in the toilet? What love did he have in his life?)

And now things were so filthy: back in the 1950s, the subway platforms were clean. On each column there was either a one-cent gum or a five-cent candy-bar machine; no newsstands, no pizzerias, no hamburger, hot-dog joints. No shit, piss, dirty rags, piles of garbage…

Fare 10 cents, cane seats, and white enamel strap handles. (He now closes his eyes and sees that he is walking down the street with Nestor again.)

He tried to mind his own business, while party-anxious squads of teenagers with loud radios crowded the platform. Coño, the Mambo King thought, sticking close to the edge of the platform. Coño!

“Hey, man, do you have a cigarette?”

“Sure.”

“Chesterfields? Who smokes Chesterfields?”

To that, the Mambo King felt like responding, “That is the preferred brand of the Mambo King, Cesar Castillo.” But he looked away.

“You have a quarter?”

“No.”

“You mean, you have no money?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Whatchew sorry about, you old faggot!”

She was half an hour late.

“My sister who looks out after my kids had trouble getting to my house.”

He was angry about having to wait for her: fifteen years ago, she would not have found him waiting there. He would have waited an extra ten minutes and then he would have gone out without her.

“Come on, let’s go.” And they caught a local down to 23rd Street.

They rode in silence for much of the way, but then he told her, “You look pretty.”

She was wearing a navy-blue dress with black felt buttons and white trim, dark nylons and black high heels. She had brushed her hair back and into a ponytail; a dark, nearly brown rouge and mascara, and a light pink lipstick all intended to throw the heat off her few wrinkles, and off her sadness, too. She was pretty, her skin was good save for a small scar in the shape of a star or bursting flower on her forehead.

“I figured that we would get something to eat,” he told her. “And then go out dancing.”

They went to Violeta’s, where Cesar was always treated well, drank a few pitchers of sangria, and fumbled around for conversation. Aside from flirtatious jiving, Cesar had never really known how to talk to women. To sing romantic boleros, yes, to commence audacious seductions, to tell a woman, “You’re beautiful, baby,” yes. But what would he say to a woman nearly thirty years younger than himself?

When the waiter came by, Cesar Castillo grabbed him by the elbow and said to Lydia, “I want you to hear something, Lydia, a little piece of music.”

And to the waiter: “Do me a favor, Julio, put on one of those tapes for me?”

From a cassette player behind the counter came a snow-blizzard version of “Twilight in Havana.”

“That was my orchestra, the Mambo Kings. Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes!”

“With your parents’ generation, I was a little famous. How old are you, anyway, querida?”

“Older than thirty.”

“Yes?”

They listened to the music for a time, and he talked about Cuba. In those days it was a big subject with him.

“I haven’t been back in twenty years. With Castro there now, I don’t think I’ll ever get back.”

“And you have family there?”

“Some. I have a brother there, who doesn’t seem to mind things; two others in Miami. And my father. He still lives on the farm where I was born. In Oriente.”

And he told her about his daughter, Mariela, a ballet dancer with a Communist dance company headed by Alicia Alonso. His daughter, who existed in his life in the form of a few occasional letters.

Perhaps he also had bastard children, but if he did, he didn’t know their names.

“See, the worst part of it is that things don’t exist anymore.”

“What things?”

“Cuba.”

“It will change perhaps,” she said. “I have friends who say that Fidel is about to fall.”

“Everybody says that. But even if that were to happen, things would not be the same. Too many people want to kill each other down there… And for another thing, I’m not a young man anymore.”

“Don’t say that!”

“I wear these big glasses so that you don’t see this old viejito’s eyes.”

“Take them off! Let me make the judgment.”

And he took off his sunglasses.

“You have young-looking eyes. They’re green, aren’t they?”

“Twilight in Havana” turned into “Los Guajiros,” and the upbeat tempo of this old guaracha piece had Lydia tapping her glass.

What else had she said to him that night — he tried to remember:

“I’ve two children, Rico and Alida. I live up near where you were playing. I work in a factory downtown.”

“And you were married, yes?”

“My husband is in Puerto Rico.”

“Puerto Rico, nice place. You know, I’ve spent time down there. In San Juan, and out by Mayagüez. That’s really beautiful.”

Later (and this was a pleasure for him to remember) the Mambo King took her to the Club 95, where they danced the merengue all night. (That was right next door to the senior citizens’ hall, where he had once seen Machito up on a ladder, putting curtains on a window.) That old-fashioned twirl-your-partner country dance from the Dominican Republic was back in vogue, and Cesar Castillo, an old man, showed her how to do it. And it impressed her that he seemed to know just about everyone in the place. And though he drank and smoked too much, he behaved in a gentlemanly and dignified manner. Everybody who greeted the Mambo King at their table seemed to have a good word for him and showed him respect — that was just what she wanted.

And he was generous. Around two o’clock in the morning, his sides began to ache, and so he yawned and said, “It’s very late, Lydia.”

They left the club together. She thought they would be going to the subway, but on the street he called her a taxi.

“No, no, you get in,” he said, and they got in together.

At La Salle Street, he said to her: “I live over there in that building. Now you tell him where you want to go, okay? And think about me.”

From the street corner in the shadow of the 125th Street El, he watched the cab continue its way north. At first she thought of telling the driver to pull over at 125th Street and Lex, so that she could take the subway and pocket the difference, but it was very late, and she felt that, old man or not, this Cesar Castillo was kindly, the type of fellow who would help her out. Frugal with her money, a woman who nursed drinks until her ice cubes melted and her lemons were sucked dry, she sat in the back of the taxi, holding on to one of the straps, luxuriating in this sudden comfort. And when she stopped, up on 174th Street, she gave the driver a dollar tip.

He took her out at least once a week, on whatever nights they could both manage. In his gray utility uniform, feet up on the cluttered worktable, the Mambo King would call her in the late afternoon, his questions having a wonderful and reassuring effect on Lydia: “How are your children? Is there something I can get for them that you need? Or for you? Do you need extra light bulbs or fuses for your apartment? Tell me, mi vida, anything you want.”

Invigorated by her companionship, the Mambo King became cheerful in those days. Ana María, Delores’s sister, took one look at him during an evening meal and declared, “I don’t believe it, your old brother-in-law is in love! Look at his gooey eyes!”

They’d go to joints like the Tropic Sunset or the New Sans Souci, places where he had sometimes worked. These were nice clubs, he’d tell her, but nothing like what used to be around: nightclubs done up like the insides of Egyptian temples, clubs with thirty-five-girl chorus lines, with glittering chandeliers, long-legged cigarette girls, shoeshine boys, and formal dress codes.

“This generation,” he would say to her, as he’d say to Eugenio, “has lost its sense of elegance.”

He did not tell her about the Club Havana.

Sometimes he’d take her to the Roseland Ballroom, where an older crowd hung out. When they weren’t mamboing on the dance floor, they would sit at a little table in the back, holding hands and drinking rum and Coke. Now and then someone would come over and reminisce about the great ballroom era.

There were times when an angelic cast would pass over his features and she would say, “How young you look now.” He never tried to kiss her and was content just to be seen around town with her. And he was always buying Lydia presents: dresses and boxes of sweets, perfume from the drugstore.

Then, on Puerto Rican Day, he met Lydia and her two kids at the 59th Street station and took them over to Fifth Avenue to watch the big parade. On one of the floats, surrounded by pompom-twirling, pink puff-brassiered and mink-bikinied showgirls with plumed headdresses, stood Mr. Salsa himself, Tito Puente, white-haired and imperial, waving at his fans. Then processions of dancers and Channel 47 television personalities — a float featuring the winsome Iris Chacón, a Goya foods float with conga players in black-bean costumes, then more floats with salsa bands, and a float in the shape of the island of Puerto Rico and on its throne the splendid Miss San Juan; country dancers and guitarists and vocalists singing mountain pregones.

After this great spectacle, they made their way through the park, visiting the beer stands again and again, and buying the children treats: cuchifritos, pasteles, and sausage sandwiches. Garbage cans overflowing with melting ice cream and soda, bees everywhere; ants teeming on the sweet garbage-can rims. They went to the zoo, into the monkey house, the monkeys bounding from rung to rung with their pink asses protruding like pompous lips into the air and their lanky arms grabbing through the cages: they stood for a long time watching the monkeys eating everything thrown at them: pieces of Snickers, popcorn, hamburger buns, peanuts, chewing gum, even shreds of a plastic Puerto Rican flag, families leaning close over the railing—“Mira, mira el mono!”—the Mambo King with his young pollita, one hand around her waist and the other holding the hand of her daughter.

He’d take them all out to eat and they could have whatever they wanted, and when their eyes flared with desire while passing a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor or a toy shop, the Mambo King would lead them inside. He’d take a crumpled five-dollar bill out of his pocket and say, “Go ahead.” And at the end of these days out, he would either put them in a taxi or ride the train with them up to the Bronx, protecting them with his sword-tip cane.

Slowly he got to know her. She worked downtown on 26th Street, off Sixth Avenue, in a factory that manufactured eyeglass frames. Her job consisted of grinding holes into frames with a pen-sized drill (wearing goggles), so that small rhinestones could be glued in. She was hired to take the place of a man who, having had that job for twenty years, went blind. She had no insurance, it was an eight-and-a-half-hour day, and she earned $2.50 an hour. Working there, she made just enough to pay her bills and get to work, so that she could have just enough to pay her bills and get to work. And there had been a few men who liked her, as long as her children weren’t in the picture. But he liked the children and was good to her.

That’s all she wanted, without going any further, she’d tell him: “That you be good to me.”

They had been going together for two months and were watching television in her living room in the Bronx. The Mambo King was massaging her feet: she was tired from standing all week, and when he finished massaging her feet, he began on her ankles, and his hands moved up to her thighs, and he expected her to turn away, because who wanted an old man? But she said, “Sigue. Go on,” and closed her eyes, and soon his hand was kneading her womb through her panties, which soaked through with moisture, and wiry pubic hairs stuck out the sides, and then he did what old men always talk about, knelt between her legs, and while some cowboy movie played on, with vaqueros chasing a herd of cattle, he pulled her panties low and tongue-kissed her and just could not believe it when she pulled him forward. He stood before her with his trousers still on, and it looked as if he had stuck a beer bottle down the front of his pants, because she asked, “And what is that?” and touched him there and gasped when he showed her, the way Genebria had when he was a kid, and for a moment he felt immortal.

Then he smothered her with his body: she was nicely plump, with the scars of a cesarian section above her thick black pubic hair, which was not much of a shield, and she had stretch marks all over her breasts, but looked so beautiful, and even though his bones ached and his guts twisted, he went at her for a long time, and when with his enormous stomach he finally burst, he flew headlong through a field of redness, ground his teeth, and felt her interior doubling back on itself like a warm silken glove turned inside out.

From that night on, she took to calling the Mambo King “My pretty old man,” and “My machito.”

Though he was sixty years old, he suckled her breasts like a baby, thinking to himself, What luck I have. I was born in 1918, and here I am with this young chick.”

When he’d finish in bed with her, he’d fall back like a dead man, his eyes fixed on the wall, daydreaming about youth and strength and speed, his face nestled against her breasts.

Afterwards, he said, “I love you, Lydia.”

But he didn’t know if it was the truth of his heart: he’d lied so often to women over the years, had mistreated and misunderstood so many women, that he had resigned himself to forgetting about love and romance, those very things he used to put in songs.

All through the night, like a young man, he whispered, half singing, “The thought of not possessing you is an agony I cannot bear.”

IT WAS A SUNDAY AFTERNOON and the church had set up a block party on 121st Street. Father Vincent had asked Cesar to provide the music. He had rounded up some of his friends and had asked the Puerto Ricans with the slick black hair to play rock ’n’ roll.

Lydia turned up in a pink summer suit which fit her well when she first wore it, a present, like so many others, from Cesar. But in the intervening months, the Mambo King had gone to her apartment in the Bronx with several pounds of groceries, pastries, and steaks from the plant on 125th Street, and when he learned that she had a weakness for chocolate, he had started to buy her pound bags of bitter Dutch chocolate from a fancy European-style shop near the university. And they were always going to restaurants, and when they weren’t doing that, Lydia was busy proving herself as some kind of cook, taking his money and going crazy at the supermarket — cooking all the Cuban and Puerto Rican dishes, like fried plantains and roast pork and rice and beans, and Italian food, too. Cooking up big pans of lasagna and pots of spaghetti with seafood (alle vongole, as she called it), and served up big salads doused in olive oil. With all this, she had started to get fat.

As his prodigious manly appetites began to wane under the onslaught of the years (his penis had thickened and stretched from years of use and occupied his trousers like a dozing mutt), he became more and more interested in food. She didn’t mind, though her nice butt was more pronounced. As for the kids? They had not eaten so well in all their lives, and they were happy whenever the Mambo King visited them in the Bronx.

So she had put on a few extra pounds. What did that matter when he gloried in the expansiveness of her youthful flesh? He could suck her nipple gratefully for an hour, until it turned purple and grew distended between his teeth and lips; he would revel in the kneading of her quivery flesh. And her hips got much bigger and were ready to burst the seams of her dresses. More men looked and spoke to her as she passed by. And while this made the Mambo King proud, as it used to when he’d make an entrance with the likes of Miss Vanna Vane back in the old days, he’d scowl sternly at these oglers, throw his chest out as if he was ready to fight.

After setting up, he had waited on the stage for her. As the priest was giving a speech about how the poor inherited not the earth but God’s “other bounties,” Cesar spotted Lydia in the crowd, and just seeing her made him happy. Up on the stage, he had thoughts like: I love you, baby, I send you my kisses; I can’t wait until we are locked in a lovers’ embrace.

Those were the days when he had started to tell himself that he was in love, truly in love with Lydia. The kind of love he hadn’t felt since his first loves back in Oriente, like the love he had felt for his wife back in the Cuba of the 1940s.

(It was all coming back to him in his old age. Fantasies about what might have happened to him had he remained with her, hadn’t left their small town for Havana and his destiny. He might have gotten himself a good job through her family, maybe work in the sugar mill as foreman. He might have had himself a little orchestra for the weekends and for festivals in Cuba, satisfying at least part of his wish for a musician’s life. And his brother Nestor would have remained in Cuba with him, too. He might have fathered a brood of loving sons, instead of a single daughter, to keep him company in his sunset years. And instead of all that pussy? He might have contented himself with a mistress or two in town, the way his father, Pedro, had. Even this fantasy did not hold water, because eventually he would have had to leave Cuba.)

That day, the musicians opened their set with a jam instrumental called “Traffic Mambo.” The Mambo King wore a light pinstriped summer suit, and his thick head of hair was shiny with hair tonic. His voice echoed against the buildings as he leaned into the microphone, announcing, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for a little charrrannnnnnga!”

Having spotted Lydia, he put on a good show to impress her. As he turned in circles, he was astounded by his love for her: even the knots in his gut and the swirling juices inside his body seemed to go away when he thought about her. Memory upon memory: Lydia’s naked body, Lydia sitting before a mirror brushing out her hair, her plump buttocks, the plum-shaped darkness between them, and the Mambo King’s aged member lolling on his belly and then growing stiff — just from looking at her. Then he’d fuck her from behind, inserting himself into that plum of space, and it gave him just what it seemed to be promising: heat, and moisture, curvaceous grip.

(Dios mío, Dios mío—toasting the busyness in his heart and mind — I really had fallen for that woman and, coño, fallen hard for her, the way my poor brother fell for that Beautiful María piece-of-shit from Havana, the way I fell for my wife. And so he swallowed the rum, and then had a pleasant experience: a slight elation, the sensation that he was breaking the law of gravity and lifting with his chair off the ground, and then the fan, turning from atop the dresser in his room in the Hotel Splendour, hitting his face, and then a whisk of air hitting him dead between the legs and licking at his penis through the slot in his boxer shorts, a lick like the morning licks of youth, and boom, he found his thing stiffening, though not fully, because of the lick of the air, the rum, and his thoughts of Lydia, a beautiful sensation: if he was a younger man, the Mambo King would have masturbated, floated off on clouds of speculation and hope of future seductions, but now, in his current condition, masturbation seemed sad and hopeless, and so, instead, he took another sip of his rum. On the record player spun that great Mambo King tune “Traffic Mambo,” except that it sounded much different from the way he remembered it: sounded as if there were a hundred musicians playing on the version he was hearing now, with all kinds of instruments added: glass bells and harps, church organs and Oriental chimes. Sounded as if there was a river rushing in the distance and the chaos of a hundred automobiles honking their horns all at once. Plus he hadn’t really remembered that the trumpet solo played by his dead brother Nestor had been so long, it seemed to go on forever in the version he was now hearing. The Mambo King’s confusion made him get up. There was a small mirror over a sink: then a closet-sized bathroom, just enough room for the commode and the shower. He was drunk enough by now that, as he looked in the mirror, all the lines of age and sadness had more or less been smoothed out, the gray of his hair seeming more silver, the jowlishness of his face more like the mark of substance rather than excess. He washed his face and then sat down again. He found himself rubbing his legs: the underside of his legs was riddled with thick, distended varicose veins, blue and as twisty as the thick vein that burst like a river with tributaries up the underside of his big thing. These weren’t little varicose veins like those showing through little-old-lady brown nylons, but worm veins, all up and down the backs of his legs. He touched them for a moment and laughed: how he used to pick on his wife in Cuba the day he noticed that a few varicose veins had appeared on her legs, calling her feita—ugly — when she was still so young and, in her way, pretty.)

From the stage he watched Lydia like that hound who watched the basement entrance of the building down the street. An old German shepherd with matty coat and milk-cornered eyes, barking at every passerby and sniffing between the legs of every canine interloper. Lydia paid attention to the Mambo King, watching him faithfully from the street, but then she went over to get herself a sandwich from one of the tables, and men started to speak to her.

What were they saying?

“Why don’t you dance with me?”

“I can’t.”

“But why?”

“I’m with the singer of the group over there.”

“Cesar Castillo?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re so young! Why are you with that viejito?”

That’s what he thought they were saying.

But the men were just being friendly. When the Mambo King saw her dancing with one of them, he was suddenly overcome with vertigo. Why was she dancing the pachanga with that fellow? Twenty years ago he would have smiled, telling himself, “So?” But now the heat of humiliation burned at the back of his neck and he felt like climbing down off the stage and separating them.

Then he devised a strategy to regain her attention and remind her of her loyalty. “I dedicate this song to a very special woman in my life. This song is for my woman, Lydia Santos.”

But she continued to dance with the son of a bitch, and he felt depressed.

Work was work, however, and the Mambo King and his musicians played other numbers: mambos, rumbas, merengues, boleros, and a few cha-cha-chas. He hadn’t suffered through a set like that since the days after Nestor’s death. When the group finally took a break and began to pack up — there was a local rock ’n’ roll group waiting to go on — he made straightaway for Lydia, who pretended that nothing was happening.

“Cesar! I’ve been waiting for you!” And she kissed him. “This is Richie.”

The man she had been dancing with was a slender-looking fellow in a nice clean guayabera, handsome even with a pock-scarred face.

“Mucho gusto,” the young man said, but the Mambo King would not even shake his hand.

Then he said to Lydia, “Come on, I want to talk to you.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“Because I am the man and I don’t want you with anyone else.”

“We were just dancing. The music sounded good. We were just having a little fun.”

“I don’t care. I told you how I feel.”

They were standing just inside the lobby of 500 La Salle, Cesar’s building.

“I may be an old man to you, but I’m not going to be cuckolded because of that. I was this way when I was young, and I am not going to change now.”

“Okay, okay”—and she put her hands up and then gave him a kiss on the neck. He patted her nice nalgitas, and as the anger drained from him, said, “I’m sorry if I sound so harsh with you. There are a lot of wolves out there. Come on, let me buy you an ice cream, and then I want you and your children to meet someone.”

He made a burning sound: “Psssssssh, my, but you look good, Lydia.”

And: “Look what you do to me.”

They attended the block party like everyone else, Cesar treating her children as if he were their father — or grandfather. That afternoon he introduced Lydia to his friends. Frankie and Bernardito had met her before. They had all gone out with their women to restaurants together. Still, he took her by the hand and with his king-cock strut introduced her to his other friends on the street. His mood seemed calmer now. And she did not feel so bad. She did not mind that he was nearly thirty years older, though sometimes when they were in bed together she felt this terrible weight of mortality on her. His spectacular sexual nature sometimes made his whole body shake: his face would turn beet-red from his efforts to impress her, and she was afraid that he might have a heart attack or a stroke. She’d never had any man like him and so spoiled him with praise and adoration that he started to become deluded with the feeling that he had become exempt from the ravages of the years. She was overwhelmed by him. She felt, as had scores of other women before her, his bestial nature.

He would be shoving himself inside her and she would make it a point of saying things like “You’re going to burst me apart.” And: “Tranquilo, hombre. Tranquilo.” And she moaned and shouted. She didn’t want him to get the look of boredom that other men sometimes got with her, after a certain point. She wanted to say and do everything that he wanted her to, for the simple reason that he was good to her and her children.

So, he was a little jealous. She forgave that; after all, he was an old man, even if he was a pretty old man. That’s what she had taken to calling him, he’d remember. “Dame un besito, mi viejito lindo.” And whatever one could say about his current situation, that he worked as a superintendent and took small-time jobs here and there as a musician, he had been some kind of famous man. Even though she was thirty-five years old, she had still not lost her childhood awe for the crooners of his generation. And the man had even been on television. She knew the very episode of the I Love Lucy show that he and Nestor had appeared on: he’d even brought her a box of photographs to look at, and had given her one of himself with Arnaz and his poor dead brother. Proudly, she had shown it to people in her building.

He was the kind of man who had done a lot in life. He didn’t just hang out, like so many others. He was wise and would be able to help her. Looking at pictures of him when he was young and a pretty boy made her sigh. Sometimes it killed her when she would think about young men. Of course she wished he was younger, but she also knew that he would never have stayed with her in the days of his glory. So she had him now in his decline. So what, she would say, if he had jowls, a huge stomach, and testicles that reached halfway down to his knees (like his pinga!). What did she care about that, as long as he promised to help her children out?

(She had to tell herself this, yes?)

Later, he finally got the chance to introduce her to the family.

“So this is your young pollita?” Delores said to Cesar.

He shrugged.

On Delorita’s television blared the film Godzilla. Pedro was in his traditional spot, the easy chair, reading the newspaper and having a drink. Sitting behind him on the couch, Leticia with her baby. She’d come up from Long Island for a visit. She played with her baby’s toes, spoke baby talk, oblivious to the television and the rest of the commotion in the apartment. Her brother, Eugenio, shared the couch, sitting close to the window. He’d propped it open a bit and put an ashtray there on the sill so he could smoke and brood in peace. Cesar always liked to see him, which was not often, but the kid always seemed pissed off: he’d been that way for a long time. (Eugenio never understood any of this. An innocent at heart, he had a temper that flared when, as with the other Castillo men, melancholia abruptly came over him and he would suffer from his own plague of memories. When he was angry, he would find himself saying things he did not really mean, such as “Everybody in the world can go fuck themselves” and “I don’t need anyone,” which had frightened many people away from him.)

Now he would turn up at the apartment on La Salle Street, disappointed and bitter.

When Cesar brought Lydia into the living room, Eugenio was struck by her good looks. He liked pretty women, too, and leapt out of his sullenness for a moment, as if jumping out of an airplane. “Why, hellllllo.” Eugenio was friendly to her, but once the introductions were over, his mood reverted and he sat by the window, thinking. The older he got, the more he picked up on his long-dead father’s temperament. He went through moods of prolonged anguish and discontent: his eyes grew sad over the smallest thing, his face drooped over the fact that life was not perfect. Although he was not consciously aware of it, Eugenio had by now acquired the same expression he forever associated with his father, the same shattered expression of Nestor Castillo in his role as Alfonso Reyes, who would appear again and again at Desi Arnaz’s door. His father’s shattered expression, on entering that room, hat in hand, guitar demurely by his side, his face in some kind of agony.

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

“Eugenio, I want you to meet Lydia!”

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

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

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

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

And she could have had me, he told himself.

Was that it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wished that the Mambo King was thirty years younger.

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

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

When they’d go to bed, she felt vindicated in her affection for him. She liked violent lovemaking and looked forward to her physical release, these orgasms which made her scream. She liked it when he kissed her all over. The laziness of his bones and the pure volume of his experience had made him more patient about lovemaking. Languidly exploring the alluring bud of her femininity, he discovered a mole just inside her labia majora, and he kissed this mole until he tasted a vegetable sweetness seeping through his teeth. When she came, grinding herself into his face, he felt as if he was being devoured, too.

Later, he would bite every one of her spinal knobs, and when he reached her nalgitas, she spread her bottom wide for him, and he licked her uplifted rump, with her flowery asshole, and mounted her. Something like floating on a violent sea, his testicles and legs being pummeled by her: he floated off on her, as if on a raft, closed his eyes and faced the sea, which he thought most beautiful, a stretch of murky blue waters which he remembered from the Merchant Marine off the coast of Sardinia and which burst radiantly with golden helmets and silver-and-red dots of light with the sudden appearance of the sun. These joyful moments always made him think about marriage, but he’d restrain himself, knowing that this desire would pass and that he was old.

They had been together for almost a year when he asked her to move in with her kids, because the trips back and forth from the Bronx and Manhattan were becoming a bit tiresome. That very day he took her down into a basement storeroom and showed her two little beds and a dresser and a small black-and-white television set and a lamp that he’d bought for them. But she had to be honest: “I can’t, hombre. The children have their school and friends and it wouldn’t be right.” Then: “But I can bring them down for the weekends.”

She’d always wonder about that decision. She could have quit her job, stayed for a time with him, and looked for another. But there was something about him that frightened her, a look that he’d get in his eyes sometimes, a little too dreamy for her taste. She thought it might be the beginning of senility, and where would that leave her? Taking care of him, like a nursemaid. And she would have been deceiving herself to say that she didn’t sometimes look at younger, more slender men, whose faces were smooth and untroubled, or that it didn’t sometimes embarrass her when he took her out dancing and wore that velvet hat with the feather and the orange shirt and white linen suit, a gold chain around his neck, like a chulo. She preferred it when he tried to be elegant, and told him so, but he kept saying, “No, I want to be youthful, too.”

Still, bringing the kids down to stay with him for the weekends was a good deal for her: it focused his generosity on her family. Cesar provided whatever the children needed, clothing, books, shoes, toys, medicine, pocket money. (And they loved him for it, covering his face with kisses — holding them, he would think about Eugenio and Leticia when they were small.) He’d take them for walks through the markets, buying clothing for her off the racks, and sometimes took her downtown to the big department stores, where he sometimes paid $60, $70 for a single dress! He made room for her in his dresser and she began to keep clothing there: a drawer filled with her lacy panties and brassieres, a rack of her clothing hung in the closet. When she was not doubting the situation, she felt happy with him, liked the spaciousness of his apartment, and considered the neighborhood swanky in comparison to where she lived, 174th Street and the Grand Concourse, in the South Bronx.

And on Saturday mornings Ana María treated her to a nice shampoo and hairstyling at the beauty salon.

“It’s so nice that you’re with Cesar. He seems so content,” the good-natured Ana María would say.

“You don’t think he’s too old for me?”

“No! Look at Cary Grant with a young chick, or Xavier Cugat with that coochie-coochie girl, Charo. And look at Pablo Picasso, his last wife could have been his granddaughter. No, there’s nothing wrong with a bachelor like him finally finding the woman of his dreams, even at his age.”

“How old is he?”

“Almost sixty-two, I think.”

Working slowly and carefully, Ana María always gave Lydia the looks of a ravishing Hollywood starlet of the forties. Actually, with her dark oval Spanish face, almond eyes, and pouty, thick lips, she bore some resemblance to the Italian actress Sophia Loren. Made up by Ana María and wearing one of those nice new dresses and high heels, she would head back to La Salle Street, her walk deliberate, one foot tiptoeing in a line after the other, as if she were walking a tightrope, so that her hips really swayed, and the men on the street made remarks as she passed. She enjoyed that. What would her husband have said to that? Once stretch marks had appeared on her breasts and they had gotten a little saggy from having the kids, he had started to call her “old.” And she was only twenty-eight! In the end, he’d left her because they were trying to draft him for the war and it was back down to Puerto Rico and then the Dominican Republic for him. So these remarks appealed to her vanity. And there was this one fellow, Pacito, who worked in a florist’s shop, who always handed her a single rose when she’d go by, asked her for dates, or at least to hang around and talk with him, but she always remained faithful to Cesar.

It didn’t help things when Delores pulled her aside and said, “Cesar’s a very good man, but you have to be careful with him. That’s all I have to say, just be careful.”

Or that Mrs. Shannon always looked at her disparagingly from her window, where she’d sit with her wild mane of silver-gray hair, her plump arms resting on the sill.

But she did feel for him. For his suffering. On many of those nights it seemed the Mambo King, who sometimes slept like a lamb, had his bad dreams.

In the middle of the night, he would feel his father beating him with a switch. He would wince like a hound on the farm, a dog hiding in the corner. He would hear his mother calling to him from a distance, far away, as if beyond the faintest star in the black sky, “Cesar! Cesar!” He would writhe in bed, because when he opened his eyes she was not there.

Then there was a dream that had started to plague him in those days with Lydia, almost a beautiful dream, he remembered now.

It involved a river like the river that used to run by the road from his farm toward Las Piñas, its banks thick with trees and prosperous with birds. He was always riding a white horse in this dream. Dismounting, he would make his way through the dense woods to the water, curly and cool, with bubbles of life and thin-legged insects with Chinese eyes and transparent wings floating on the surface. Kneeling (again), he would scoop up the water, wet his face, and then take a drink. How delicious that water always seemed. Then, he’d undress and jump in, floating on the water and watching the sun breaking through the star-shaped leaves and tongue-like fronds and daydreaming about something he’d once heard as a schoolboy (His school? A single large room, near one of the barracks at a nearby sugar mill): that in the days of Columbus, there was a race of Indians who lived in the treetops, and sometimes he would imagine their lives out on the branches, jumping from acacia to mahogany to breadfruit tree. But always the sky grew dark and in the water he’d smell blood, like the blood that sometimes appeared in his urine. And then he would look down the river and see that there were hundreds of naked women, bursting with youth and femininity, bodies damp and beautiful in the sun: and some would hold their arms out to him imploringly and some would lie back on the ground with their legs spread wide and he’d want them so bad, daydreaming about making love to one hundred women at a time, as if that would make him immortal. But then he’d hear click-clock, click-clock, click-clock in the trees, and when he looked up he saw hanging from the branches skeletons everywhere, like wind chimes, hanging off every branch on every tree, the sounds they’d make frightening him.

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

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

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

Again and again and again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, that would be good.”

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

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

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

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

“And where were you?”

“At the florist’s.”

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

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

But he pretended not to hear her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why didn’t you call me?”

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

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

“It was food poisoning.”

“Well, are you coming here?”

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

“Then I’ll say good night to you.”

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the medicines, the tubes, the blinking machines, the pretty nurses, and the doctor again:

“You have all the signs of systemic failure. Your kidneys, your liver are all going. Keep up your drinking and you’ll end up in the morgue. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the truth.”

“Is it that bad?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

IT HAD BEEN OVER FIFTY YEARS ago in Cuba when he was in school, he told himself, that his teacher, Señora Ortiz, would make him fill pages and pages of newsprint scraps with additions and subtractions, because he used to use an odd, contrary logic when it came to numbers — for example, writing 3 + 3 = 8, simply because the numbers were round-bottomed like an 8. She’d send him out to count things and add them up, and so he’d find himself in town counting the houses (one hundred and twenty-eight) and the number of horses on a given street (seven tied up to porch railings on Tacón), and once he even tried to count the number of yellow hibiscus in a field, losing track and falling asleep on the soft ground after two hundred or so — a beautiful day.

And nearly fifty years since he’d first mounted a stage to sing.

And nearly forty years since he’d been married.

Then thirty-one years since leaving Havana.

How many thousands of cigarettes had he smoked? How many leaks had he taken? Belches? Fucks, ejaculations? How many times had he ground his hips into a bed, with an erection, thinking that the mattress was a woman and waking with the insides of his underwear damp?

Remembered trying to count the stars one night while lying on his back in a field in Cuba when he was a kid hiding from his father, and feeling as if the Milky Way was going to swallow him. He stared so long and lost count so many times that he began to feel faint-headed.

In his own way, he wanted to be someone significant.

How many drinks had he had that night?

He figured a dozen, full, hearty glasses, as they might say in one of the ads.

He did more figuring. Bottles of rum and whiskey, enough to fill a warehouse, all turned into piss. He’d consumed enough food and left the world enough shit to fill Fort Knox. (Behind this, the memory of being seized with cramps on the road outside Cleveland, so badly they had to stop the Mambo King bus so he could crouch low in the grass and relieve himself, with trucks and cars whizzing by.)

Endless numbers of cigarettes.

A million smiles, pinches on nice female bottoms, tears.

Women telling him like Vanna Vane used to, “I love you,” and he’d say, “Yes, I feel it,” or “And I love you, baby.”

And for what?

And how many times had he knelt in church as a kid praying? Or whispered as he slept, “Oh, God,” or “Jesus Christ”? Or had watched a woman’s face contort with pleasure and heard her crying out, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus”?

His life was much more beautiful when he believed that a benevolent angel walked behind him.

Twenty-three years since Nestor had left the world. He still had the funeral card, tucked among the letters and other things that he had brought with him that night.

SOMETIMES WHEN THE MUSIC got faster, he would feel like a kid running up and down the steep and beautiful stairways of Santiago de Cuba. Sometimes a fast song took him far from the Bronx to Nueva Gerona, to El Valle de Yumurí, and to the mountains of Escambray, took him strolling through the city of Matanzas, threw him into the waters off the Hanabanilla falls in Las Villas, placed him on a sorrel crossing the tranquil valley of Viñales in Pinar del Río, left him perching on the ledge of a mountain cave in Oriente, peering out over the winding Río Cauto. The music set him leaning drowsily under the shade of a bottle-palm tree in Holguín. Late in the night he returned to a street in Santiago he had not thought about for years, with its narrow, two-story houses with slanting tin roofs and high-shuttered windows, palm trees and bushes and wildflowers that went flowing over the walls. He found himself standing atop a stairway, looking down, three flights below, to a small park, flowers and bushes surrounding a fountain, and in the place of honor a heroic bust. On a bench, a pretty girl in a short-sleeved polka-dot dress, reading a newspaper. The Mambo King, sixteen years old, walking toward her, the Mambo King nodding and smiling, the Mambo King sitting beside her.

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to go dancing later?”

“Yes.”

And the music redrew the blue cloudless sky and the sun rolled like a ball across his room in the Hotel Splendour, red and purple streaks across the room, and he heard the heavy bronze bells of the cathedrals of Santiago and Havana ringing simultaneously, he heard the tttling-tttling of a bicycle and blinked and saw the Havana night, shoots of light in the sky, a thousand trumpets and drums in the distance, cars honking, and the low murmur, like an ocean, of nighttime crowds.

He was running now past La Casa Potín, the Surtida Bodega, and the good bakery smells of La Gran Vía!

A drink in the Pepe Antonio Café with some musician pals, circa 1946; a fuck with a woman he met while strolling along, window-shopping on Obispo, what an ass on that dame, my, but how she smelled nicely of sweat and Candado soap, and her nipples were taut, brown, and smooth as glass beads. What good days, catching Beny More up at that club, La Palma, at Jibacoa beach, or heading down the Paseo del Prado with his brother Nestor toward La Punta off the Malecón, the harbor drive, to catch the ferryboat over to Guanabacoa, the two of them leaning on the railing, checking out the pretty girls. In a creaseless guayabera, he lowers his dark glasses so that this one dish, in a sailor’s blouse and a tight white skirt, slit riding high, could get a good look at his killer-green eyes. Inhalation of the sea, sun warming their faces, tour boats in the harbor, clanging buoys. And then they’re climbing the stairway up to a nice little seafood restaurant, El Morito, with its pink walls, tin roof, and shaded balcony overlooking the love-enriching sea, and they devour a pot of yellow rice cooked in chicken broth and beer, thick with shrimp, scallops, oysters, mussels, clams, olives, and red peppers. The day’s so tranquil, where did it go, so tranquil they’re feeling lazy as seagulls.

Sometimes when he closed his eyes he saw himself as a little kid sitting in the front row of the small movie theater in their town, watching the stony-faced Eusebio Stevenson leading the musicians of his pit orchestra through tangos, rumbas, and foxtrots, which they played as background to the silent films of Tom Mix, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and so many others who galloped, danced, and swashbuckled. The future Mambo King leaning forward to watch the black man’s whorl-knuckled hands, gray in the cinema light, stretching, stretching across the keyboard. Later, he remembers, he’d followed the man out into the street and to a little café on the corner, where he would sit at a table in the back, quietly eating his chuletas and rice and beans, the kid waiting for him and watching Eusebio bolt down one brandy after another, drinking until a certain lightness entered Eusebio’s hard expression and he would make his way out into the street, Cesar Castillo following after him and pulling on his jacket, begging him, “Can you show me how you make those notes?” and keeping up with his zigzag motions (And who does this remind you of, hombre?) as he weaved down the cobblestone streets, muttering, “Leave me alone, kid. You don’t want this life,” and waving the future Mambo King away. But he kept saying, “Please, please, please,” that being one of the few times in his life that the Mambo King, even as a child, began to cry.

“Please, please,” he kept repeating, and so adamantly that Eusebio took a long look at him, tipping up his black-brimmed hat and saying, “Well then, suppose I do teach you, what are you going to pay me? You have any money? Your family have any money?”

Then: “Leave me alone, I must be paid.” But Cesar persisted, and when Eusebio sat down exhausted on the church steps, he said, “I’ll bring you food.” Then: “And I can bring you rum.”

“Rum? Well then. That seems fair enough.”

So he started taking music lessons, bringing Eusebio a pot of stew or rice and beans, whatever his mother had cooked that day (she gave him the food), and a jar of rum, which he’d fill from a cask that his father kept in the stone house where he would slaughter his pigs at the edge of their field, and all went well, with the kid learning a little piano and trumpet, until the day that his father caught Cesar filling the jar and gave the boy the beating of his life, slapping his face and going at his legs and back with a knobby branch that he pulled down from an acacia tree. And he remembers how that really started all the bad blood between him and his father, because now his son was not only a free spirit but a thief to boot! And he would not stop taking the rum, no matter how well his father hid it, and he kept getting caught and got more beatings so that he learned to hold his arms in an arc over his head and to take his beating like a man, never crying, insolent and disrespectful, and strong because, after a while, he hardly felt the stick, the belt, the fist. He sometimes arrived at Eusebio’s house with black-and-blue marks on his arms, bruises which touched Eusebio’s heart. (Why did these memories keep coming back to him?)

And Eusebio Stevenson himself waiting on the porch, clapping his hands when he’d see Cesar approaching. “Come along!”

There was a mattress on the plank floor of his parlor, a few chairs, a table, a coffeepot, and by a back door that opened out to a thick bush, there was a chamber pot. But then, in the center of the room, against the wall, was an upright Móntez & Co. piano, its soundboard facing decorated with mother-of-pearl nightingales, stars, and arabesque moons.

“Do you have the rum?”

Cesar had carried it wrapped up in one of his mother’s scarves. He gave him the jar, which Eusebio emptied into a beer bottle.

“Good,” he said. “Now sit here and we’ll begin.”

The first lessons involved the demonstration of simple chords, the idea of playing the bass with the left hand, the melody and chords with the right. Eusebio seemed cruel, showing no mercy in spreading Cesar’s small fingers wide across the fingerboard and stiffly pressing them down. He told the boy to memorize the scales; emphasizing this, as he couldn’t teach Cesar how to read music. He impressed the boy, however, with talk about major and minor chords, chords of joy and friendliness and chords of sadness and introspection. Then he demonstrated what could be done with a single chord, playing all kinds of melodies above it. And now he was hearing Eusebio saying something else that he would always remember.

“When you play music you have to remember that just about everything composed has to do with love and courtship. Especially when you learn to play your older music, like the habaneras, zarzuelas, and our own Cuban contradanzas. It has all to do with romance, the man holding a woman around her waist, bowing to her, and then having that one moment in which he may whisper something in her ear, the ladies like that. In the case of the contradanzas, there’s a minute’s pause, hence the name, ‘against the dance.’ And during that pause the man would have a chance to talk to the woman.” He then began to play “La Paloma” and then demonstrated all the different styles of piano, including a ragtime piano he’d picked up while living in New Orleans once.

“And you have to remember, boy, that what people want is to throw up their arms and say, ‘Qué bueno es! How wonderful,’ when they hear the music. Understand?”

Yes, love was so beautiful, the music told him, pulling him through the fields at night when the owls hooted and the shooting stars passed overhead in the sky, all the planets and stars melting like wax.

Grief endless, and over the countryside, sad bonfires and his Papi’s voice, his Papi giving him a beating, and he would form an arc over his head with his elbows for protection, never crying, taking his punishment like a man. Even on those nights when he couldn’t believe what his father was doing, when he was just a little kid holding the door that his father pounded on so hard trying to get inside to hurt him.

Y coño, he would call me over and pull me hard by the arm, and hold my arm by the elbow, squeezing: he had powerful hands from his day’s labors, hands covered with cuts and calluses, and he’d say, “Boy, look at me when I address you. Now tell me, niño, what is it exactly that I am seeing in your eyes? Why is it that you turn away from me when I walk into this house, what is it that you are hiding from me?” And if I told him that I was hiding nothing from him, his hold would get harder and no one could pull him off me, nor would he stop — I refused to cry, the Mambo King has never cried over a man — and he would hold me until my arm turned black-and-blue or until my mother had pleaded long enough with him not to start something with me, un niño. “If you want to start something, why don’t you go back to town and start something with those men who insulted you?” And then he would start to take it out on her. And so, when he would come home in such bad moods and he asked me or one of my brothers why we had mischief or disrespect in our eyes, I stepped forward, I had the disrespectful answers. If he asked me, “Why are you looking at me in this way, boy?” I didn’t keep my mouth shut like before, I answered, “Because you’re drunk, Papi,” and then he would beat me, but it would happen very quickly, and he would hit me until his palms were dark red and hit me until he saw how cruel he was being, and then he would call me over and ask my forgiveness, and because he was my Papi, I was happy to be back in his good graces again, and so you know that’s why I took this from him, because my father is my father.

And he saw his mother again, saw his mother’s loving face, indistinguishable in memory from the stars he’d watch from the porch at night in Cuba.

“Te quiero, mijo” is what she used to say.

He was only a little boy then. He used to fall asleep with his head pressed against his mother’s breasts, hearing her heartbeat and those little gasps. That was when the Mambo King had sweeter ideas about women, when his mother was the morning light, the light burning through the treetops. That was the time when he felt that he was part of her very breath, wishing, wishing (and here the Mambo King feels a tightness around his eyes) that he could do something to end her sadness.

Pressing his head against her belly, he’d wonder, “What’s inside there?”

Years later, as a man, kissing women’s privates, he’d tremble with the recollection of how he’d imagined the whole world inside his mother’s womb.

“My mother, the only mother I’ll ever have.”

She was sewing his shirt and running a thick cord through the soles of a ratty pair of shoes to repair them. “Ay, I used to love dancing when I was a young girl.”

She had one prized possession, the only thing he would remember from that household as having any value, an old mahogany music box from Spain, a family heirloom. It had a big bronze key, whose head was shaped like a butterfly, and it played a cheerful zarzuela. She would wind the key and say, “Come dance with me, child.”

He was barely big enough to reach her waist, but she took him by his hands and led him dancing around the room.

“And when this part of the dance was over, the man bowed and the woman took hold of the hem of her dress like this, and lifted it slightly off the floor — in those days the women wore dresses that dragged on the floors and had long trains behind them. And many layers underneath.”

“Many layers?”

“Yes, son, some women wore a hundred layers underneath their skirts.”

“One hundred layers…” In his happiest dreams he would seduce a woman with a hundred-layer dress, but because it was a dream, under each layer he would find a garter, a warm thigh, a silky pair of underdrawers, and underneath that, a womb opening to him. “One hundred layers…” He hadn’t thought of that for years and years. “It’s all a fading memory, you see.” She lifted him off the floor and the room went spinning around him. Then he saw Genebria in the kitchen doorway. She was clapping her hands and broke into a strutting waltz, as if performing a slow dance at carnival. Three steps forward and she shook her shoulders, her head also shaking like a horse’s.

Ay, poor Mamá, dead but calling out to him from the cheery kitchen, “How many plátanos do you want?” And that’s where he stood now, in their kitchen in Cuba, watching his mother peel off the thick skin of plantains, and through the window he could see the plantain trees outside, and the mangoes, papayas, guanábanas, yuca, and avocados growing here and there. Genebria chopping up garlic and onion and tomatoes, and, cooking in another pot, yuca. Beautiful to see that again.

And he remembered standing in front of the Arab’s shop with his younger brother, el pobre Nestor, and finding among the lard, rice, sugar, coffee, the endless strands of sausages, near the dresses and Communion gowns and coils of rope, wire, spades, and axes, the shelf of silk-skirted dolls, a guitar. And who taught him that? A lanky insect-looking mulatto named Pucho, who lived in a forest of crates and palm fronds. He’d find him in his yard, sitting on the hood of an abandoned car, singing with such a tremor in his voice that he made the hens run in circles under his feet. He lorded over them with his music and made them sing, “Caaaaacccckkkaka.” He’d made his own guitar out of plywood, wire, and nails, and it looked like a Dominican harp. But he knew how to play, knew magic, knew the chants to Changó.

Adiós, my friend… Adiós.

Yes, love was so beautiful, the music told him, taking him again to his friends. Adiós, Xavier, sitting out in front of his ice house in a steamy mist, with his pot of rice and beans and his accordion.

Adiós!

And he saw the orchestra leader Julián García on a stage before him, waving a baton, and he stood up nervously beside Julián and he began to croon, adiós, adiós, and he saw Ernesto Lecuona, “a helluva nice guy, dignified, a little snotty-nosed, but a true gentleman, who taught me the meaning of a good habanera.” And he goes running down into the plaza, where a band is playing during carnival, lingers near the stage, trying to figure out all the fingerings on the instruments, but it’s hard because they’re only lit by lantern light, and it’s then that he sees a hand reaching down to him and pulling him up onto the glory of the stage, performing for the people.

And suddenly he remembers all these faces, pretty young female faces that he spent endless energies chasing, some of whom he loved, and some of whom he hardly knew.

And I loved you, Ana, don’t think I ever forgot that time we went walking in Holguín, even if it was a long, long time ago. We walked so far from your parents’ house that you were certain your Papi would come after both of us with a belt, and so we headed for the park, and whenever we passed through the shadows, where no one could see us, your hand tightened around mine and the air around us seemed charged and then we’d kiss. We stole only a few kisses, I never saw you after that, but don’t you ever think that memory has left me, memory of youth and loveliness, how I’ve often wondered the way things might have been between you and me… And I loved you, Miriam, so what if I was a coarse kid who would stick his tongue out at you because you were such a snooty-looking rich girl, coming out of that grand house with your mother, who had a huge rump and walked holding a parasol. I know you were interested in me by the way you would steal a glance, I noticed even when I tried to pretend you weren’t there. Remember how I would stand in front of the movie house singing? And you would come by, snooty as ever, until the day when you smiled, and everything changed. You and I were together for a month before they found us out, kissing in the parks and behind bushes, two happy children, and then your Papi, a judge and highly placed in the Gallego Club, found out through gossip, and they sent you away to live with your aunt. How could I have known that I was “lower”? How could I have known that your father would make such a ruckus over a few harmless kisses?… And I loved you, Verónica — remember how we just held hands and I nearly burst out of my trousers, and that for all your efforts you could not help looking at me, and remember the time when you couldn’t resist and you touched me quickly with your palm. A spasm flushed through me as your face, blushing, turned away; milk seeped out of me and you stood in the corner with your fingers spread apart, waiting for the color to drain out of your face, and I went home with this gummy mess in my trousers, but we were never to be… And I loved you, Vívian — when the adults were too tired to watch us, we would go out to the veranda the better to hear the string bands, and then we would sit on the stone wall and press our foreheads together, and sometimes you would let me kiss you, but not just an ordinary kiss, but with my tongue. You parted your teeth just wide enough to let the tip slip in, but not all of me, I smelled too much of tobacco. “Always trying to be un gran macho,” you would say. Then there was the time when I ran into you after church and we went through the Camposanto to look for your aunt’s grave, but instead found ourselves kissing against a tree, and gasping, you told me, “I hope you’re the man who will be my husband and to whom I will lose my virginity,” but I was stupid and became very angry, thinking “Why wait?” especially because of the state I was in. I was insatiable as a young man, Vivian, insatiable, and that’s why my fingers would crawl through your defenses until you had no choice but to turn red in the face and run home to your family, but I loved you, understand?… And I loved you, Mimi — though you never let me fuck you in the normal way, you took me out beyond your father’s shed and lifted your skirt and let me fuck you in your ass, or was it between your buttocks, I don’t remember, just the cream and the smell of your body and the way your rump just kept lifting as if you really wanted me inside your vagina, but you kept your hand there over the opening instead and kept pushing me back out, do you remember? And how in the end we would go walking through town but without touching or holding hands: I thought you were feeling a little sad, but after we had done it, I somehow felt ashamed, as if everybody knew. We did it that way every week for months, and then you came to my father’s house and I refused to let you inside, and when you cried, I cried, but you never believed me… And I loved you, Rosario, because of the way you smiled at me when we’d pass each other on the street, and I loved you, Margarita, though we never got very far in our lovemaking, just giving each other pecks on the cheek, but you’d make love to the palm of my right hand with your fingernails, digging them in deep and then giving me a look as if to say, “See, macho, what you might expect from me?” I was intrigued, enchanted, Rosario, but you know that your brothers didn’t want me near you, a lot of people didn’t want me near anyone. Someone should teach him a lesson, is what most people thought, and you know how many, including your brothers, tried. I was never Tarzan or Hercules, all I ever wanted was a little comfort, a few kisses. Did I ever tell you that on the night of June 11, 1935, when I was supposed to take you to a dance, I went walking along some side streets and a gang jumped me, six, seven boys, and what they wanted was to drag me through the dirt and shit, beating me down because I didn’t fight back, just held my hands up, saying, “Come on, fellows, what are you doing?” They not only beat me down but rolled me in a thick pit of mud and shit, and I woke up an hour after the dance was over, with this strong stench in my nostrils and the feeling that you would never even look at me, that everybody would know that I had been rolled in the shit, and that’s why I never went back to see you — I thought everybody knew, understand?… And I loved you, Margarita, for standing across from me in the plaza, under the yellow light of a Chinese lantern, in a white dress, with a red bow around your waist, shyly smiling at me from across the way, shy because you thought I was too handsome to talk to, but if you knew what I felt like deep inside, it would have made a difference; that’s why I never gave you the up-and-down the way I did some of the others, that’s why I turned away when you finally worked up the nerve to walk up to me smiling — you see, because in my household I had been made to feel like shit, so no matter how handsome I might have seemed, I looked in the mirror with disappointment. It was only because of the way some women looked at me that I knew I was worth something more, but if you left it up to me, I would have spent my life hiding like a monster; I loved you because you seemed to finally love me…

And now beautiful snow was falling, Bing Crosby snow, twirling-in-circles-with-your-mouth-open snow. Baltimore 1949 snow, coming down from heaven.

Then he was walking along with Nestor, going to all the different dance halls: the Palladium, the Park Palace, the Savoy, someone saying, “Benny, Myra, I want you to meet two good friends of mine, compañeros from Cuba, and really great players, too. They surely know their way around a son and a charanga, know what it is. Benny, this is Cesar Castillo, he’s a singer and instrumentalist, and this is his brother Nestor, one of the best trumpeters you’ll ever hear.”

“Cesar, Nestor, I want you to meet a nice guy and, you know, a helluva musician. Fellows, meet Frank Grillo — Machito.”

“A pleasure.”

“Cesar Castillo.”

“Xavier Cugat.”

“Cesar Castillo.”

“Pérez Prado, hombre!”

“Cesar Castillo.”

“Vanna Vane.”

… pushing up the skirt of her sundress… taking off her panties, and his sex organ inflamed by sunlight and blood. Moans of pleasure in the solitude of the woods. His thick tongue jammed up high between her legs. Swig of wine, kiss of her ankle.

“Oh, Vanna, aren’t we having a nice picnic today?”

“You said it.”

Hearing the music, he remembered feeling the pork fat of his dinners in Cuba dripping down his chin and onto his fingers, which he’d lick with pleasure. Remembered a whore struggling with a thick rubber on his member, how he had tried to pull it down over himself, how her fingers took hold of his fingers, and then how she used both hands to get it all the way down over his thing. He remembered pressing the valves of the trumpet a thousand times, remembered the beauty of a rose, remembered his fingers slipping under a wire-frame 36C brassiere, Vanna’s, his fingers sinking into the warm skin. He remembered hearing alley cats at night, the Red Skelton radio show in the alley. From the sixth floor, the Jack Benny show, and then, years later, in the courtyard, I Love Lucy.

Clouds of smoke from the incinerator hurting his eyes, clouds of smoke breaking up over the rooftop.

His mother holding his hands, his mother closing her hands around his.

His mother’s soft heartbeat…

And he runs up the stairway again and finds Nestor playing that song again — Oh, brother, if you knew how I’ve thought of you all these years — and he sings this new song, this fucking song he had been working on for a long, long time, and when he’s done, he says, “That’s how I feel about María.” And, love-struck,he looked out the window as if it were raining flowers instead of snowing.

“Even though I hate to admit it, brother, that’s a nice little song you’ve written. But why don’t we do this with the chorus.”

“Yes, that’s much better.”

And with a sly smile on his lips, he nodded to the quinto player, who was banging down hard on the drums with his taped-up fingers for the intro, bap, bap, bap, bap! Then the piano came in with its vamp, then the bass, then the horns and all the drums. Then another nod from Cesar, and Nestor began to play his horn solo, the notes flying across the room like firebirds, and so mellow and happy that all the musicians were saying, “Yeah, that’s it. He’s got it.”

Cesar dancing with his white golden-buckled shoes, darting in and out like agitated compass needles, and he went back running through Las Piñas as if he were a little kid again, blowing horns and banging pots and making noise in the arcades…

Floating on a sea of tender feelings, under a brilliant starlit night, he fell in love again: with Ana and Miriam and Verónica and Vivian and Mimi and Beatriz and Rosario and Margarita and Adriana and Graciela and Josefina and Virginia and Minerva and Marta and Alicia and Regina and Violeta and Pilar and Finas and Matilda and Jacinta and Irene and Jolanda and Carmencita and María de la Luz and Eulalia and Conchita and Esmeralda and Vivian and Adela and Irma and Amalia and Dora and Ramona and Vera and Gilda and Rita and Berta and Consuelo and Eloisa and Hilda and Juana and Perpetua and María Rosita and Delmira and Floriana and Inés and Digna and Angélica and Diana and Ascensión and Teresa and Aleida and Manuela and Celia and Emelina and Victoria and Mercedes and…

And he loved the family: Eugenio, Leticia, Delores, and his brothers, living and dead, loved them very much.

Now, in his room in the Hotel Splendour, the Mambo King watched the spindle come to the end of the “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” Then he watched it lift up and click back into position for the first song again. The clicking of the mechanism beautiful, like the last swallow of whiskey.

When you are dying, he thought, you just know it, because you feel a heavy black rag being pulled out of you.

And he knew that he was going, because he felt his heart burning with light. And he was tired, wanting relief.

He started to raise the glass to his lips but he could raise his arm no longer. To someone seeing him there, it would look as if he were sitting still. What was he thinking in those moments?

He was happy. At first, things got very dark, but when he looked again, he saw Vanna Vane in the hotel room, kicking off her white high heels and hitching up her skirt, saying, “Would you do me a favor, honey? Undo my garters for me?”

And so he happily knelt before her, undoing the snaps of her garters, and then he slid her nylons down and planted a kiss on her thigh and then another on her buttock, where the softest skin, round and creamy, peeked out from her panties, and he pulled them down to her knees and with his majestic, ravaged visage between her legs he gave her a deep tongue-kiss. And soon they were on the bed, frolicking as they used to, and he had a big erection and no pain in his loins, so big that her pretty mouth had to struggle with the thick and cumbersome proportions of his sexual apparatus. They were entangled for a long time and he made love to her until she broke into pieces and then a certain calm came over him and for the first time that night he felt like going to sleep.

THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN THEY found him, with a drink in his hand and a tranquil smile on his face, this slip of paper, just a song, lying on the desk by his elbow. Just one of the songs he had written out himself:

WHEN I CALLED THE NUMBER that had been listed on Desi Arnaz’s letterhead, I expected to speak with a secretary, but it was Mr. Arnaz himself who answered the phone.

“Mr. Arnaz?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Eugenio Castillo.”

“Ah, Eugenio Castillo, Nestor’s son?”

“Yes.”

“Nice to hear from you, and where are you calling from?”

“From Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles? What brings you out here?”

“Just a vacation.”

“Well then, if you are so close by, you must come to visit me.”

“Yes?”

“Of course. Can you come out tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Then come. In the late afternoon. I’ll be waiting to see you.”

It had taken me a long time to finally work up the nerve to call Desi Arnaz. About a year ago, when I had written to him about my uncle, he was kind enough to send his condolences and ended that letter with an invitation to his home. When I finally decided to take him up on his offer and flew to Los Angeles, where I stayed in a motel near the airport, I had wanted to call him every day for two weeks. But I was afraid that his kindness would turn into air, like so many other things in this life, or that he would be different from what I had imagined. Or he would be cruel or disinterested, or simply not really concerned about visitors like me. Instead, I drank beer by the motel swimming pool and passed my days watching jet planes crossing the sky. Then I made the acquaintance of one of the blondes by the pool, and she seemed to have a soft spot for guys like me, and we fell desperately in love for a week. Then ended things badly. But one afternoon, a few days later, while I was resting in bed and looking through my father’s old book, Forward America! just the contact of my thumb touching the very pages that he — and my uncle — had once turned (the spaces in all the little letters were looking at me like sad eyes) motivated me to pick up the telephone. Once I’d arranged the visit, my next problem was to get out to Belmont. On the map, it was about thirty miles north of San Diego along the coast, but I didn’t drive. So I ended up on a bus that got me into Belmont around three in the afternoon. Then I took a cab and soon found myself standing before the entranceway to Desi Arnaz’s estate.

A stone wall covered with bougainvillea, like the flower-covered walls of Cuba, and flowers everywhere. Inside the gate, a walkway to the large pink ranch-style house with a tin roof, a garden, a patio, and a swimming pool. Arched doorways and shuttered windows. Iron balconies on the second floor. And there was a front garden where hibiscus, chrysanthemums, and roses grew. Somehow I had expected to hear the I Love Lucy theme, but that place, outside of birdsong, the rustling of trees, and the sound of water running in a fountain, was utterly tranquil. Birds chirping everywhere, and a gardener in blue coveralls standing in the entranceway of the house, looking over the mail spread out on a table. He was a white-haired, slightly stooped man, thick around the middle, with a jowly face, a bundle of letters in one hand, a cigar in the other.

As I approached him, saying, “Hello?” he turned around, extended his hand, and said, “Desi Arnaz.”

When I shook his hand, I could feel his callused palms. His hands were mottled with age spots, his fingers nicotine-stained, and the face that had charmed millions looked much older, but when he smiled, the young Arnaz’s face revealed itself.

Immediately he said, “Ah, but you must be hungry. Would you like a sandwich? Or a steak?” Then: “Come with me.”

I followed Desi Arnaz down his hallway. On the walls, framed photographs of Arnaz with just about every major movie star and musician, from John Wayne to Xavier Cugat. And then there was a nice hand-colored glamour-girl photograph of Lucille Ball from when she was a model in the 1930s. Above a cabinet filled with old books, a framed map of Cuba, circa 1952, with more photographs. Among them that photograph of Cesar, Desi, and Nestor.

Then this, in a frame: I come here because I do not know when the Master will return. I pray because I do not know when the Master will want me to pray. I look into the light of heaven because I do not know when the Master will take the light away.

“I’m retired these days,” Mr. Arnaz said, leading me through the house. “Sometimes I’ll do a little television show, like Merv Griffin, but I mainly like to spend my time with my children or in my garden.”

When we had passed out of the house through another arched doorway, we reached a patio that looked out over Arnaz’s trees and terraced gardens. There were pear, apricot, and orange trees everywhere, a pond in which floated water lilies. Pinks and yellows and brilliant reds coming out of the ground and clustered in bushes. And beyond all this, the Pacific Ocean.

“… But I can’t complain. I love my flowers and little plants.”

He rang a bell and a Mexican woman came out of the house.

“Make some sandwiches and bring us some beer. Dos Equis, huh?”

Bowing, the maid backed out through a doorway.

“So, what can I do for you, my boy? What is it that you have there?”

“I brought something for you.”

They were just some of my uncle’s and father’s records from back when, Mambo King recordings. There were five of them, just some old 78s and a 33, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” Looking over the first of the records, he sucked in air through his teeth fiercely. On the cover of that record my father and uncle were posed together, playing a drum and blowing a trumpet for a pretty woman in a tight dress. Putting that aside, and nodding, he looked at the others.

“Your father and uncle. They were good fellows.” And: “Good songwriters.”

And he started to sing “Beautiful María of My Soul,” and although he couldn’t remember all the words, he filled in the missing phrases with humming.

“A good song filled with emotion and affection.”

Then he looked over the others. “Are you selling these?”

“No, because I want to give them to you.”

“Why, thank you, my boy.”

The maid brought in our sandwiches, nice thick roast beef, lettuce, and tomato, and mustard, on rye bread, and the beers. We ate quietly. Every now and then, Arnaz would look up at me through heavy-lidded eyes and smile.

“You know, hombre,” Arnaz said, chewing. “I wish there was something I could do for you.” Then: “The saddest thing in life is when someone dies, don’t you think, chico?”

“What did you say?”

“I said, do you like California?”

“Yes.”

“It’s beautiful. I chose this climate here because it reminds me of Cuba. Here grow many of the same plants and flowers. You know, me and your father and uncle came from the same province, Oriente. I haven’t been back there in over twenty years. Could you have imagined what Fidel would have made of Desi Arnaz going back to Cuba? Have you ever been there?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s a shame. It’s a little like this.” He stretched and yawned.

“Tell you what we’ll do, boy. We’ll set you up in the guest room, and then I’ll show you around. Do you ride horses?”

“No.”

“A shame.” He winced, straightening up his back. “Do me a favor, boy, and give me a hand up.”

Arnaz reached out and I pulled him to his feet.

“Come on, I’ll show you my different gardens.”

Beyond the patio, down a few steps, was another stairway, and that led to another patio, bounded by a wall. A thick scent of flowers in the air.

“This garden is modeled after one of my favorite little plazas in Santiago. You came across it on your way to the harbor. I used to take my girls there.” And he winked. “Those days are long gone.

“And from this placita you could see all of Santiago Bay. At sunset the sky burned red, and that’s when, if you were lucky, you might steal a kiss. Or make like Cuban Pete. That’s one of the songs that made me famous.”

Nostalgically, Arnaz sang, “My name is Cuban Pete, I’m the King of the Rumba Beat!”

Then we both stood for a moment looking at how the Pacific seemed to go on forever and forever.

“One day, all this will either be gone or it will last forever. Which do you think?”

“About what?”

“The afterlife. I believe in it. You?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe there’s nothing. But I can remember when life felt like it would last forever. You’re a young man, you wouldn’t understand. You know what was beautiful, boy? When I was little and my mother would hold me in her arms.”

I wanted to fall on my knees and beg him to save me. I wanted to hold him tight and hear him say, “I love you,” just so I could show Arnaz that I really did appreciate love and just didn’t throw it back into people’s faces. Instead, I followed him back into the house.

“Now I have to take care of some telephone calls. But make yourself at home. The bar’s over there.”

Arnaz disappeared, and I walked over to the bar and fixed myself a drink. Through the big window, the brilliant blue California sky and the ocean.

Sitting in Desi Arnaz’s living room, I remembered the episode of the I Love Lucy show in which my father and uncle had once appeared, except it now seemed to be playing itself out right before me. I blinked my eyes and my father and uncle were sitting on the couch opposite me. Then I heard the rattle of coffee cups and utensils and Lucille Ball walked into the living room. She then served the brothers their coffee.

When I thought, Poppy, my father looked up at me and smiled sadly.

“I’m so happy to see you again.”

“And, son, I’m happy to see you.”

My uncle smiled, too.

That’s when Arnaz came in, but he wasn’t the white-haired gentleman with the jowlish face and kind, weary eyes who had led me around the grounds. It was the cocky, handsome Arnaz of youth.

“Gee, fellows,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again. How are things down in Cuba?”

And I couldn’t help myself. I walked over and sat on the couch and wrapped my arms around my father. Expected to find air, but hit on solid flesh. And his neck was warm. His expression pained and timid, like a hick off the boat. He was alive!

“Poppy, but I’m glad to see you.”

“It is the same for me, son. It will always be the same.”

Embracing him, I started to feel myself falling through an endless space, my father’s heart. Not the heart of flesh and blood that had stopped beating, but this other heart filled with light and music, and I felt myself being pulled back into a world of pure affection, before torment, before loss, before awareness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, love’s sadness,

Why did you come to me?

I was happy before you

entered my heart.

How can I hate you

if I love you so?

I can’t explain my torment,

for I don’t know how to live

without your love…

What delicious pain

love has brought to me

in the form of a woman.

My torment and ecstasy,

María, my life….

Beautiful María of my soul,

Why did she finally mistreat me so?

Tell me, why is it that way?

Why is it always so?

María, my life,

Beautiful María of my soul.

And now I’m dreaming, my uncle’s heart swelling to the size of the satin heart on the I Love Lucy show, and floating free from his chest over the rooftops of La Salle, so enormous it can be seen for blocks and blocks. Cardinal Spellman has come to the parish to administer confirmation to the sixth-graders, and my friends and I are hanging out across the street, watching the hoopla, which has been announced in all the newspapers; limousines, reporters, clergy of every rank, from novitiates to bishops, crowded outside the church. And as they file into the church, I notice the enormous satin heart, and it makes me afraid, so I go into the church even when my friends, tough hoods in sleeveless black T-shirts, call me a little girl for doing it, and yet, when I’m inside, there’s no confirmation ceremony going on, it’s a funeral. A beautiful flower-covered coffin with brass curlicue handles is set out in the center aisle, and the Cardinal has just finished saying Mass and is giving his blessing. That’s when the organist starts to play, except, out of each key, instead of pipe-organ music, instead of Bach, what sounds is a mambo trumpet, a piano chord, a conga, and suddenly it’s as if there’s a whole mambo band in the choir stall, and when I look, there is a full-blown mambo orchestra straight out of 1952 playing a languid bolero, and yet I can hear the oceanic scratching, the way you do with old records. Then the place is very sad, as they start carrying out the coffin, and once it’s outside, another satin heart escapes, rising out of the wood, and goes higher and higher, expanding as it reaches toward the sky, floating away, behind the other.

*And, behind that another recollection about the way the ladies dressed for those nights of love: they wore skull-hugging turbans, low-riding cloches, banded berets, and feathered pillbox caps. Heavy drop earrings made with fake rubies, crystals, and pearls; white creamy pearl necklaces hanging down into low-riding necklines, breasts plumped up and sweet underneath; sequined dresses with slit skirts and pleated midriffs, tied up by black sable belts. Frilly slips, step-ins, girdles and garters, brassieres, lacy-fringed and transparent at the nipples. Good for kisses on the belly, roll of the damp tongue on the navel, nose roving over a line of black pubic hairs below. Flower-crotched flame panties, black-seamed white panties, panties with felt-covered buttons, fluffy ball panties, panties whose waistbands snapped tight and left faint pink lines along the ridges of tender female skin; hips warm against his face; black sable panties, fake leopard-skin panties, butterfly-wing panties. (And if these ladies didn’t wear the right kinds of little things underneath, he would head into the lingerie department of stores like Macy’s and Gimbels, flirting with the salesgirls and happily looking over these little things in the display cases. Like a student preparing for an exam, he would squint and arch his handsome brow, checking out the names on the labels: Tropical Rhapsody, Bronze Twilight, Tigress, Nights of Desire.

“Ohh la la,” he would say to the salesgirl, shaking his right hand as if his fingertips were on fire. “Which one would you wear, miss?”)

*Puff of smoke, a swallow of whiskey, the sensation that something was pinching the small of his back, something with razorlike claws, making its way along the mysterious passages of his kidneys and liver… Pérez Prado. When the Mambo King, ensconced in his room in the Hotel Splendour, thought about Pérez, he recalled the first time he saw the man on a stage, off in another world and bending his body in a hundred shapes, as if he was made of rubber: prowling like a hound, on his haunches like a cat, spreading out like a tree, soaring like a biplane, rushing like a train, vibrating like a tumbling washing machine, rolling like dice, bounding like a kangaroo, bouncing like a spring, skipping like a stone… and his face a mask of concentration, conviction, and pure pleasure, a being from another world, his stage another world. Thin Pérez giving the Mambo King some of his jazzier stage moves, the loquacious and cheerful Pérez out by the bar, telling everyone around him, “Fellas, you must come and visit me in Mexico! We’ll have the time of our lives, tell you what, my friends. We’ll go to the races and the bullfights, we’ll eat like princes and drink like the Pope!”

*From Manuel Flanagan, a trumpet player who knew Chano: “I remember when Chano died. I was down on 52nd when I heard the whole thing. Chano was up on 116th Street at the Caribbean Bar and Grill, looking for this man who’d sold him stuff. That was in the morning. He’d injected it, gotten sick, and then later went out on the street looking for him. He found him in that bar, pulled a knife on him, and demanded his money back. Now, the man wasn’t afraid of Chano and Chano wasn’t afraid of the man; Chano had already been shot up and stabbed in Havana and had survived it, you know, so that Chano took his knife out and lunged at the man, even though he’d pulled out a gun: Chano kept coming at him because he thought the spirits were protecting him, but these spirits, Yoruba spirits, couldn’t stop the bullets from tearing him up and that was that.”

*“Cu-bop” being the term used to describe the fusion of Afro-Cuban music and hot be-bop Harlem jazz. Its greatest practitioners were the bandleader Machito Mario Bauzá, Chano Pozo, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who hooked up to create that sound in the late 1940s. The American jazz players picked up the Cuban rhythms, and the Cubans picked up jazzier rhythms and chord progressions. Machito’s orchestra, with O’Farrill’s arrangements, became famous for dazzling solos played over extended vamps called montunos. During these furious breaks, when drummers like Chano Pozo and players like Charlie Parker went nuts, dancers like Frankie Pérez took to the center of the ballroom floor, improvising turns, dips, splits, leaps around the basic mambo steps, in the same way that the musicians improvised during their solos. (Yeah, and there was that other sneaky move he’d picked up from Cesar Castillo. While dancing with a pretty woman he would touch his forehead with his index finger and make a sizzling sound as if he was on fire and then he would fan himself, to cool out from love’s mighty heat, sizzle some more, hop around as if on hot coals, fan himself again, and blow a kiss, all the time feeling cu-bop crazy, man.)

*Women worked hard to enhance their loveliness so that they could find themselves a good man for life, evade loneliness, kiss, hug, sleep, fornicate, so that each could tremble in a man’s arms and find a man to take care of her, protect her, love her, a man to keep her warm against the chill winds of life. (Now a look at these women getting dressed. Quick fluff of powder around the breasts and nice nipples, quick dab down below, a flame-shaped burst of thick black pubic hair snow-powdered and nice, on with the panties, the garters, the nylons, the skirt, the brassiere, the blouse, earrings, lipstick, rouge, mascara, all to be removed later, tugged at, torn, smeared, somewhere in some bedroom or against a wall, in an alley, an apartment, in a parked car, on a rooftop, in the tranquil park. The man dancing and pressing close to her, his bone — and the bigger the better, now tell the truth, ladies — the woman wanting the man inside her but fighting him, legs shut closed, her insides softening, the man kissing her all over and promising her things, until either he proposes to her or leaves her for someone else or she tricks him, weeping crocodile tears, and he marries her and he’s earnest and gentle and courteous and sometimes they age happily together, but there are others… The man always looking for another woman and the woman knowing about it, but what can she do when she’s been losing those precious looks that hooked him up in the first place? With a ring of fat around her gut, so tight the snaps pinch her plump skin and leave screw marks… What can she do, ladies?)

*Who were the gallegos? The most arrogant Cubans, say some; the most hardworking and honest Cubans, opinionated, ambitious, strong-willed, and proud, say others. The term gallego referred to those Cubans whose ancestors had come from Galicia, a province of seaports, morning-mist-ridden farmlands (blue-green and foggish land, like Scotland), and rugged mountains, situated in the northwestern corner of Spain. North of Portugal — Port-of-Gauls — and jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, Galicia had been invaded by the Romans, the Celts, the Gauls, the Suevi, and the Visigoths, who left the Galicians with a taste for fierce battle and a sometimes melancholic outlook. El Cid was a gallego. So were the majority of Spanish soldiers sent to put down revolts in Cuba in the nineteenth century. Another gallego? Franco. Others? Ángel Castro, a Spanish soldier who settled in Oriente Province, Cuba, became a land baron, and whose son, Fidel, ambitious, arrogant, and cocky, would become absolute ruler of the island.

Most recently, the term gallego is used in Cuba to describe light-skinned Cubans, or non-Cuban Spaniards, passing through.

*“If you knew what I have to go through every day with this woman. These American women are enough to drive you nuts! My mother told me a million times: Ricky, never marry an American woman unless you’re looking for one big headache. And she was right, I should’ve married that girl back in Cuba! Now there was a quiet girl who never bothered me, who knew where her bread was buttered. She wasn’t crazy! She always left me alone, you know what I mean, compañeros?”

*Always a nice hello and sometimes a reunion, the fellows inviting each other out to jam sessions. In the Hotel Splendour he remembered that one of his favorite jam sessions took place when Benny the conga player invited him over to the Museum of Natural History, where he worked, in his reincarnated life, as a guard. Around nine one night, when it was really dead, Cesar showed up with a few other musicians and they ended up playing in a small office just off the Great Hall of Dinosaurs, Benny playing the drums and a fellow named Rafael strumming a guitar and Cesar singing and blowing the trumpet, this music echoing and humming through the bones of those prehistoric creatures — the Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus and woolly mammoth, breathing heavy in the vastness of that room and click-clacking onto the marble floors melodies caught in their great hooked jaws and in the curve of their gargantuan spinal columns.