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

those months he completely gave in to a family affliction: every other woman walking the streets of Havana seemed infinitely, painfully more beautiful and desirable than his own wife. He’d come home at night, get dressed up, and head out to the dance halls, a dandy in a black-brimmed cane hat. He pretended not to hear her calling out, “Please, why don’t you stay home with me?” Pretended not to hear her “Please don’t go.”
    He found himself whistling at the girls walking on the promenade of the Prado; he was the slick macho with hat tilted low over his brow, out on the sidewalk in front of the El Dandy clothing shore, giving the up-and-down to women; he was the crooning guitarist, eyebrows cocked high, serenading the pretty tourists on their way into the Hotel Nacional, the T-shirted man in plaid bathing trunks, skulking along the balconies of the hotel and heading clandestinely for a stairway the fuck out of there, the fellow writhing on a sun-baked bed on a Tuesday afternoon in a room facing the sea.
    After a while, he simply pretended that he had never been married: he kept his thin wedding band tucked away in a cane suitcase among the sheets of paper on which he’d written down his ideas for songs with names like “Ingratitude,” “Deceitful Heart,” “A Tropical Romance.” Occasionally he grew nostalgic for that time of happiness when he had gotten close to Julián and his family, when he had fallen in love with Luisa, and then he would settle down again and they would be happy for weeks. But things went in cycles with him. The baby made it really difficult. He would storm around saying, “If it wasn’t for the kid, I’d be a free man.” He horrified his wife, who kept trying to make him happy. This went on for six months, then he finally pushed her too far.
    He was in a fruit market down the street from where he lived, a market crowded with wagons and stands, ice sellers and coffee vendors, fish and poultry sellers, wandering among the tubers and thick plantains, when he noticed a woman, no prettier than most women, but exuding, in his opinion, a rampant sensuality. She wore a wedding ring. She looked bored. Perhaps her husband no longer made love to her at night, or perhaps he was an effeminate man who could hardly get it up, or perhaps he liked to abuse her at night, squeezing her breasts until they turned black and blue. Circling around the arcade, Cesar followed this woman, who avoided him coyly, as if they were playing a game, disappearing among the columns.
    He would turn up at her solar in the afternoons when her husband was working. He couldn’t remember her name, but in the Hotel Splendour the Mambo King remembered how she would get all violent during the act of love and had the bad habit of yanking hard on his quivering testicles at the moment of his climax, so hard he would have pain for days. The sordidness of all this turned his stomach years later, but back then he took this woman for granted, in the same way that he took his wife and all women for granted. One day it caught up with him. When he’d gotten tired of this woman and moved on, she turned up at the solar one afternoon and told Luisa about her affair with Cesar. (And did she describe the tattoo of an angel over the nipple on the right side of his chest, did she describe the burn scar on his right arm, the birthmark in the shape of a horn on his back, or his thing that used to creep up a hand’s width above his belly button?) By the time he came home that night, Luisa had left the apartment.
    He found a letter saying that his abuse had driven her away. The family was waiting for her, she would manage better by herself with his child than with a man who did not appreciate the truly good things in his life, who spent his life chasing after tramps.
    Hearing the word “cruel, cruel, cruel” in his sleep, he had a dream in which he was walking up that hill and meeting Julián García again for the first time. Then he started