The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Read Free

the trumpet to his lips, eyes closed, face rippled by dreamy concentration . . . the melody of Ernesto Lecuona’s “ Juventud .”
    Sipping whiskey, his memory scrambled like eggs. He was sixty-two. Time was becoming a joke. One day, young man; next day, old man. Now, as the music played, he half expected to open his eyes and find Miss Vanna Vane seated on that chair across the room, slipping her long legs into a pair of nylons, the cheery white light of 125th Street on a Sunday morning burning through the half-open window shade.
     
    On one of those nights when he could not sit still in their apartment on La Salle Street back in 1954, he was in the Palm Nightclub listening to the fabulous Tito Rodríguez and his orchestra and watching the cigarette girl: she was wearing a too tight leopard-skin leotard and her blond hair was long, curled, and swept to one side, so that it fell pouty over half her face, like Veronica Lake’s. Every time this blonde walked by, Cesar Castillo bought a package of cigarettes from her, and when she would set her cigarette box down on the table he’d hold her by the wrist and look deep into her eyes. Then he’d give her a quarter tip and smile. In a sheeny black top, her breasts were splendid and large. He’d once overheard a drunken sailor saying to a pal in a bar, “Look at the torpedoes on that broad, mamma mia!” Loving American expressions, he thought of torpedoes with their pointed tips, and was enchanted by the line of sweat congealing across her diaphragm.
    After he’d bought his eighth package of cigarettes from her, he invited her to have a drink. Because it was very late, she decided to sit with them, these two handsome brothers.
    “My name is Cesar Castillo, and this is my brother Nestor.”
    “Vanna Vane. Nice to meet you.”
    A little later he was out on the dance floor with Miss Vane, putting on a hell of a show for the crowd, when the orchestra broke into a furious jam: a conga player, a bongo player, and a drummer with an American kit, pounding out a fast, swirling, circular rhythm. Their playing was so conducive to spinning that the Mambo King unfurled his breast-pocket handkerchief and in a variation of the scarf dance slipped one end of it between his teeth and urged Vanna to do the same with the other. Joined by a pink-and-light-blue handkerchief clenched between their teeth, Cesar and Vanna started to spin quickly like two whirling acrobats in a circus act. As they spun, the crowd applauded, and a number of couples imitated them on the dance floor. Then they dizzily zigzagged back to their table.
    “So you’re a Cuban fellow like that guy Desi Arnaz?”
    “That’s right, baby.”
    Later, at three in the morning, he and Nestor walked her to the subway.
    “Vanna, there’s something I want you to do for me. I have this orchestra and we’ve just made a new record. We’re thinking of calling it something like ‘Mambos for the Manhattan Night,’ that’s my idea, and we need someone, a pretty girl like you—how old are you?”
    “Twenty-two.”
    “—a pretty girl to pose with us for the cover of this record. I mean to say”—and then he seemed flustered and bashful—“that you would be good for this. It pays fifty dollars.”
    “Fifty.”
    Decked out in white silk suits on a Saturday afternoon, the brothers met Vanna in Times Square and walked over to the photographer’s studio at 548 West 48th Street, the Olympus Studio, where their photographer had outfitted a back room with fake palm trees. Turning up with their instruments, a trumpet, a guitar, and a drum, they looked quite slick, their thick heads of hair conked high into shining pompadours. Miss Vane wore a ruffle-skirted, pleat-waisted party dress with a tight bodice, gleamy black seamed nylons, and five-inch-high heels that lifted her rump into the air and showed off her nice long legs. (And behind this memory, he didn’t know what they called that muscle up at the high end inside a woman’s