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 di
d 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 tho
ughts 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.