Free The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos Page A

spending many nights with the whores of those small towns. Luisa knew, she could smell these women on his skin, in his hair, she could tell by the sated sleepiness and the blueness that ringed his eyes.
    “Why are you so cruel to me?” she’d ask him again and again.
    (And this cruelty, I didn’t want things to be that way, I was just being a man and doing as I saw fit, Luisa, but you didn’t know, didn’t know my restlessness and my disbelief in such simple things as a tranquil married life, you couldn’t see how it all struck me as a final trick, that enslavement and humiliation perhaps awaited me. The situation was already turning your Uncle Julián away from me, he’d used to look at me with pure love. So I was led around by my penis, so what? What did a few laughs, a few fucks with women I’d never see again, have to do with anything, especially our love? Why did you have to take it so badly? Why did you have to weep and then shout at me?)
    That was when he really started to drink. One night he drank enough rum at Julián’s to feel as if he were floating down a river. When he stumbled out of the house, two of his fellow musicians were sent out to help him down the stairs. Of course, he pushed them away, repeating, “I don’t need anybody,” and slipped down two flights, conking his head.
    He woke to an idea: going to Havana.
    Away, away, away from all this was how Cesar saw it. He had many reasons for moving to Havana: that was the place to be in Cuba if you were a musician. But he also believed that he could resolve things with Luisa in Havana, and at the same time, away from her family, he could do as he pleased. Besides, he was twenty-seven years old and wanted to work in an orchestra where he might perform some original songs. He and Nestor had been writing boleros and ballads for a long time and had never performed them with Julián García. In Havana, they might be able to put something together. What else could he do, remain with Julián and play the same dance halls for the rest of his life?
    In any case, things with Julián’s orchestra had changed. Julián was so ill that he spent most of his days in bed. One of his sons, Rudolfo, took over as orchestra leader and wanted to teach Cesar a lesson in humility for treating his cousin so badly, relegating him to the trumpet section, alongside his brother Nestor, who had recently joined the band. This lesson just intensified his resolve to leave the orchestra, and in 1945 he took his wife and baby to Havana.
    They had been in Havana for two months, living in a solar in the inexpensive section of La Marina, when word came that García had died. With Julián gone, the Mambo King felt like a prince who had abruptly come out from under a spell. By the time they returned with their baby from Oriente after the funeral, he had no stomach left for the matrimonial bond. (Now you must see him at a party in Manhattan circa 1949 with his right hand slung across his heart, the other held up high as if doing the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, sweat pouring off his forehead, hips shaking, a drink in hand, happy, happy.)
    Though they lived in a cheerful and noisy solar, their cramped two-room apartment was a somber place. He’d gotten work for a time as a pit musician in a big movie house, backing up the singers and comedians who would entertain the audiences between films; loaded crates in the market; and then, through a new acquaintance, got himself—and his brother Nestor, who had come out to join him—jobs as busboy and waiter over at the Havana chapter of the Explorers’ Club. With people on the streets, and friends in the cafés and bars and dance halls, he was a cheerful man, but when it came to his wife he’d spend hours without saying a word to her, and when she crossed a room, he didn’t notice. She had become this invisibility who sometimes shared his bed and who’d carry his daughter in her arms across the room, to sit in a square of sunlight.
    In