Necessary Nestor
Oscar Hijuelos’s novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love offers readers a rich, vibrant concoction of characters and details, as hot and lively as the music at the core of the story. The narrative, in fact, may be a little too rich for its own good: readers come away from it knowing little more about the central character, Cesar Castillo, than they do about such arcana as the types of underwear women wore in the 1950s through the 1980s, or the plumbing in old buildings, or the costs of 78 r.p.m. records, or the books that were popular at the middle of the century. With so much information volleyed at the reader, it takes some concentration to see, at the end of the novel, how little Cesar develops as a character. Readers can turn to any page, in the beginning, middle, or end of the novel, and be assured that Cesar likes being drunk and having sex, and can reasonably guess that the possibility of a lengthy description of either is at hand. Cesar’s true personality has very little below the surface, a fact that is obscured by the constant, attention-drawing parade of exotic minor characters like René stabbing Elva, Bernardito waiting twenty-five years to marry Fifi, gay Enrique marrying Teresa, Mr. Stein owning books in Hebrew and German and Angie Pé, who only shows up to record a message at Coney Island in 1954, and Leticia’s crush on Rico Sánchez. Good novels fill in all of the corners with details, but there is also such a thing as being too detailed, distracting readers from what is really important by making everything seem important.
This book is well in need of a thorough editing job, in order to give some sense of perspective to its hundreds of details. It simply has too much going on. This is, of course, almost impossible to prove, since “too much” is a subjective judgement. Millions of readers have found The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love to be just fine the way it is. To them, there is no reason for the novel to be anything more than a simple story of two brothers, one introverted and one extroverted, one romantic and the other physical: un macho grande and un infeliz, in Hijuelos’s words. The book could be taken at face value and accepted this way, but there really is no reason to not think about its weaknesses.
Although the two Castillo brothers, Cesar and Nestor, are talked about throughout the course of the novel, neither is developed as a complete, convincing character. They just ride through the Cuban-American culture of the 1940s through the 1970s, each holding on to his own solitary personality traits. When Nestor dies he is the same insecure mother’s boy that he has been all along, and Cesar dies listing the women, family and friends who have passed by him without his having formed an attachment to any of them. There is no progress, no result, for all of the minutiae that the narrative heaps on.
In streamlining Cesar’s story, there are thousands of details that could be left out. Many that are less closely related to plot or character can be justified as necessary for establishing the world that Cesar lives in; this makes them, in a roundabout way, important for establishing his character. Many other stories, though, do not establish their importance, and instead focus on things and people that Cesar merely encountered along the way in his sixty-two year life. Having been encountered is not enough to earn them a place in his story;...
(This entire section contains 1916 words.)
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the fact that these events happened, even in a fictitious sense, does not in itself make them worth snaring part of the reader’s attention. After accepting that some of the details presented inThe Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love must go—a fact that many critics take for granted, but one that Hijuelos, his publisher nor many of his readers seem to find essential—it becomes necessary to sort through all of the colorful information and decide which tell Cesar’s story best. For instance, easily half of the sex scenes, and quite a few of the club dates that the Mambo Kings attend, draw their pay, then leave, could have been removed from this book without in any way altering anyone’s sense of who Cesar is. The problem with editing would be deciding which scenes are truly telling of who he is, and which are just routine.
In trying to determine which parts of this story could be done without, one large, surprising element draws attention to itself: there would really be very little loss to the story if the character of Nestor Castillo had just been left out. This might at first seem to require a huge structural overhaul of the novel, which advertisers and critics alike, not to mention the screenwriters who adapted the novel to a movie, have defined as the story of two brothers whose combined life experiences make up the author’s point. Actually, though, the brothers’ significance in the book is in no way equal: Nestor is such a pale shadow that he has little use in the story of Cesar.
Cesar and Nestor are written as distinctly different characters, but their differences are not clear enough to justify more than one character. Nestor has just two or three salient characteristics. For one, he is fixated on his mother, who nursed him back to health when he was young. The second is the most notable character trait, but it might just be a continuation of the first: his infatuation with María. He loses sleep thinking about María, tries unsuccessfully to politely pay some attention to his wife and children, but ends up writing new versions of “Beautiful María of my Soul” in the middle of sleepless nights. He signs letters to his mother “your hijito” (baby boy). At one point, Nestor himself notices that his mother and María are linked by having the same name, but he never does become aware that his fixation on a woman whom he knew for just a few months goes beyond sweeping romance to a routine Oedipal attachment. As Hijuelos notes when talking about Nestor’s insomnia, “Cubans then (and Cubans now) didn’t know about psychological problems.”
Nestor’s third trait is his vague desire to assimilate. He totes around the book Forward America! by a certain D. D. Vanderbuilt, underlining passages about aggression and self-assurance. It never has much effect, though. After being unfaithful to his wife, he turns to the book’s philosophy that “the confident, self-assured man looks to the future and never backward to the past,” but, except for momentary lapses, the book shows no sign of easing his longing for the past.
After Nestor’s death, Cesar inherits Forward America!, as well as his brother’s predilection for turning to it in his spare time for advice. In his hands, it has no more power than it does in Nestor’s. Hijuelos mentions the book occasionally, but not with any consistency. As a symbol of Cesar’s taking on his dead brother’s traits, this is a particularly weak one: since readers do not see the book affecting Nestor’s personality, having Cesar carry it around does not show any hint of his becoming like Nestor, it just shows that he has a sentimental attachment to one of Nestor’s belongings.
If this book is supposed to represent something more sweeping, such as the immigrant’s struggle to suppress his tradition and adapt an American way of looking at things, then it could just as easily have been written as Cesar’s book to begin with. The idea of Nestor looking to the past and not the future is so dwarfed by his melancholy that Forward America!’s significance is hardly noticeable. In Cesar’s hands, the book could at least represent a struggle to find his place in the world.
Cesar is, of course, crudely drawn as a macho figure, one who derives his self-esteem from sex. While Nestor’s memories of childhood involve his mother comforting him, Cesar’s memories focus on beatings from his father. The story draws so many distinctions between the two Castillo brothers that it seems almost eerie that each should remember only one parent. Since these are two different views of two different parents, it would make sense for these memories to exist in just one person, dividing the masculine and feminine aspects of the Castillo farm in Oriente so neatly and simplistically.
Nestor’s main function in the book is to represent the hopeless romantic, who is so in love with a beautiful woman whom he cannot have that he allows himself to waste away. In theory, this is the reverse image of Cesar’s boisterous, life-affirming carnality. In practice, however, Hijuelo does not show enough real difference between the two brothers to make readers feel the differences of their two personality types. When Nestor meets María, he defends her from a bully, a thing that one could easily imagine Cesar doing. When they begin their sexual relationship, though, any distinction between the two brothers becomes seriously blurred: Nestor and María’s scenes together are indistinguishable from the book’s many sex scenes involving Cesar. They are, in fact, indistinguishable from Nestor’s lovemaking with Dolores.
This may well be the book’s point—that Nestor turns sensual like Cesar when he meets the woman he loves and that Cesar turns mournful like Nestor after the death of his brother. The book puts them in situations meant to show they are not that different from one another. The problem is that the book never establishes their differences well enough to make their sameness worth noting. Nestor has their mother’s traits, Cesar their father’s: why are there even two main characters in this novel, when all of their experience could be encompassed by one character? Without Nestor in the book, readers would be focused on Cesar and his experiences, and the threshold for which descriptions and peripheral characters are relevant to his life would be lower. Without the distracting plot line of the two brothers switching personalities, the significance of all of Hijuelos’s fine detail would be easier to grasp.
Of course, this is all speculation. The book is finished, and has proven itself extremely popular with audiences and critics just as it is. It is fine to imagine what the book would be like with a major change like the removal of one of the two main characters, all the while bearing in mind that this is just a hypothetical exercise in literary criticism. There is no reason to pretend that there ever would be a version of the book like the one described here, with the character of Cesar Castillo embodying all of the traits and experiences given to himself and his brother in the novel. Besides, if such a book did exist, some critic somewhere would immediately comment on how much better it would have been if the Mambo King’s passive and aggressive traits had been divided into two different main characters, perhaps brothers.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at several colleges in Illinois.
I Came, I Saw, I Conga’d
In the summer of 1990, the cover story of the June 25 issue of People magazine was devoted to Gloria Estefan, who, as you know, is the most important moving part of the Miami Sound Machine. At the time Estefan was staging what the magazine termed an “amazing recovery” from a serious traffic accident that had left her partially paralyzed; Estefan herself was upbeat about her prospects, and the point of the story was to reassure all of the rhythm nation that little Gloria would conga again.
I begin with this anecdote for two reasons: first, because it gives fair indication of the prominent role that Cuban Americans play in the increasing and inexorable latinization of this country— by now, few Americans will deny that, for better or for worse, the rhythm is going to get them. My other reason for bringing up the People story has to do with the photograph on the cover, which showed Gloria holding two puppies whose names happened to be Lucy and Ricky. Like one of the Miami Sound Machine’s last records, the photograph cuts both ways: it suggests not only the prominence but also the pedigree of Latino popular culture. After all, if Gloria Estefan is one of the most popular Hispanic figures in this country today, Ricky Ricardo is certainly her strong precursor. Surprising as it may seem, Desi Arnaz’s TV character has been the single most visible Hispanic presence in the United States over the last forty years. Indeed, several generations of Americans have acquired many of their notions of how Hispanics behave, talk, treat or mistreat their wives, by watching Ricky love Lucy. And just last semester I had a Cuban-American student who claimed that he had learned how to be a Cuban male by watching I Love Lucy reruns in his home in Hialeah.
But the connection between Estefan and Ricky goes further than this. The Miami Sound Machine’s first crossover hit was “Conga”—the song that contained the memorable refrain, “come on, shake your body, baby, do the conga, / I know you can’t control yourself any longer”; well, the person who led the first conga ever danced on North American soil was none other than Desi Arnaz, who performed this singular feat in a Miami Beach nightclub in 1937. Alluding to this historic (and quite possibly, hysteric) event, Walter Winchell later said, in a wonderful phrase, that a conga line should be called instead “a Desi-chain.” It is well to remember, then, that a few years ago when Gloria Estefan entered the Guinness Book of World Records for having led the longest conga line ever (119,984 people), she was only following in Desi’s footsteps, only adding another kinky link to the Desi-chain.
I can summarize the significance of this photograph by saying that it illustrates in a particularly clear manner the two forces that shape ethnic culture, which I will call traditional and translational. As a work of tradition, the photograph points to the genealogy of Cuban-American culture; it reminds us that Gloria Estefan is only the latest in a fairly long line of Cuban-American artists to have come, seen, and conga’d in the United States. As a work of translation, it reminds us of the sorts of adjustments that have to occur for us to be able to rhyme “conga” and “longer.” In this the photograph is typical, for ethnic culture is constantly trying to negotiate between the contradictory imperatives of tradition and translation.
“Tradition,” a term that derives from the same root as the Spanish traer, to bring, designates convergence and continuity, a gathering together of elements according to underlying affinities or shared concerns. By contrast, translation is not a homing device but a distancing mechanism. In its topographical meaning, translation is displacement, in Spanish, traslación. This notion has been codified in the truism that to translate is to traduce (traduttore, traditore); inherent in the concept of translation is the sense that to move is to transmute, that any linguistic or cultural displacement necessarily entails some mutilation of the original. In fact, in classical rhetoric traductio—which is, of course, the Spanish word for translation—was the term to refer to the repetition of a word with a changed meaning. Translation/traslación, traduction/traducción— the mere translation of these terms is a powerful reminder of the intricacies of the concept.
What I should like to do here is explore these notions a bit further by discussing The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, a recent novel by Oscar Hijuelos that has been termed “the best Hispanic book ever published by a commercial press.” Although only a couple of years old, Mambo Kings is already becoming something of a contemporary classic. Not only is Hijuelos the first Cuban- American writer to receive the Pulitzer prize for fiction; he is the only one of a tiny group of Latino writers to be published successfully by a major North American publisher. Just to mention one contrasting example: within a few months of the publication of Mambo Kings, William Morrow brought out another novel by a Cuban-American writer, Virgil Suárez’s Latin Jazz. Yet Suárez’s novel elicited only moderate interest and quickly sank from sight. One major difference between the two novels is that, unlike Suárez, Hijuelos writes from what may be termed a “translational” perspective. Like Latin Jazz, Mambo Kings divides its attention between Cuba and the United States, as it tells the story of a Cuban family that migrates to this country. Unlike Latin Jazz, however, Mambo Kings does not pledge allegiance to its Cuban roots, for it is very much a novel written away from Spanish and toward English; this drift is already visible in the title, which also moves from Spanish to English, from “mambo” to “songs of love.” One reason for Hijuelos’s success may well be the savvy—and even the sabor—with which he translates tradition. In subject matter, intention, and design, Mambo Kings places itself in the line of descent of some central works in the canon of contemporary Latin American fiction. At the same time, however, the novel’s translational drift distances it from its Hispanic pedigree. Although Mambo Kings invites a general reading as a product of Hispanic culture and specifically as part of its literary tradition, it makes such a reading virtually impossible. In rhetorical terms Mambo Kings may be regarded as a sustained traduction, that is, a transfigured repetition of certain elements in Spanish American literature and culture.
The novel follows the lives of two Cuban brothers, César and Nestor Castillo, who emigrate to New York in the late forties and form an orchestra called the Mambo Kings, achieving ephemeral fame one night in 1955 when they make an appearance on the I Love Lucy show as Ricky’s Cuban cousins. In talent as well as temperament, Nestor and César are worlds apart. César, the leader of the band, is a consummate ladies’ man with slicked-back hair, a mellifluous voice, and an irrepressible libido. He remarks that he had only three interests in life: rum, rump, and rumba. His brother Nestor is moody and melancholy; his main claim to fame is having written the Mambo King’s greatest hit, “Bellísima María de Mi Alma,” “Beautiful María of My Soul,” a sad ballad about the girl who broke his heart in Cuba. For years Nestor works tirelessly on this tune, coming up with twenty-two different versions of the lyric; only his death in a car accident puts an end to his scriptural obsession. The story of the Castillo brothers is told in flashbacks by the agonizing César, who by 1980 has ended up broke and broken in a New York tenement and who spends his last hours replaying records of recuerdos.
The novel’s debt to Hispanic literary tradition is evident in two principal ways. Given the episodic plot and the explicitness with which César’s sexual exploits are recounted, one cannot read Mambo Kings without thinking of the genre of the picaresque, a subgenre that in Cuba includes such texts as Carlos Loveira’s Juan Criollo (1927) and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s La Habana para un infante difunto (1979). Like the protagonist of Loveira’s novel, César is a Don Juan Criollo, a creole translation of the Spanish literary type. In the classical picaresque, the protagonist is driven by hunger and spends a large part of his life in the service of successive masters. In the erotic picaresque, the moving force is a different kind of appetite, and instead of going from master to master the protagonist goes from mistress to mistress—not de amo en amo but rather de amorío en amorío.
This is perhaps the aspect of the novel that has elicited the strongest response from its readers, for the narration’s attention to the nature of things erotic verges on the pornographic. This is not to say, however, that the text unequivocally endorses its protagonist’s phallocentrism, for César’s recollections are filtered through his nephew Eugenio, who puts distance between the reader and César’s view of himself. Eugenio’s mediating presence helps to turn the novel into something other than a celebration of the Castillos’ not-so-private members. As César’s closest relative and the author of the book’s fictional prologue and epilogue, Eugenio occupies a position halfway between the narrating “I” and the narrated “he.” In fact, as I will argue a bit later, Eugenio is best seen as César’s translator, which means that their two voices are formally separate but often hard to tell apart. In this respect Mambo Kings is what one might call a “hetero-autobiography”—a text whose narrator and protagonist are in some ways distinct, in other ways indistinguishable.
Even though César’s recollections are given in the third person, Eugenio’s presence at the beginning and end makes him the medium for the interior story—so much so that some of his sentences are repeated verbatim in the interior text; thus, for example, his description of the Castillos’ cameo on I Love Lucy matches word for word the description that the supposedly impersonal narrator had provided earlier. It’s not entirely clear what one should make of this duplication, which is inexplicable unless one posits that the entire account is Eugenio’s invention—an intriguing possibility that the text insinuates but does not confirm. Without going this far, however, one can at least venture that Eugenio “underwrites” César’s memoirs. I use this verb in both of its meanings: to write beneath something and to guarantee. Even if Eugenio is not responsible for the specific verbal shape of César’s recollections, he is at least generally responsible for the memoirs as a whole. As the novel begins, Eugenio is watching a rerun of I Love Lucy. After the episode is over he remarks, “the miracle had passed, the resurrection of a man.” Since the “resurrection of a man” is precisely the novel’s own miracle, Mambo Kings can be regarded as a type of rerun whose origin is Eugenio. As his name already suggests, Eugenio is the source, the progenitor of the account.
The other token of tradition in the book is music, for Hijuelos’s novel also connects with a spate of recent works of Spanish American fiction that derive inspiration from popular music. I am think- ing generally of books like Sarduy’s De donde son los cantantes (1967), Lisandro Otero’s Bolero (1986), and even Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (1976), with which Hijuelos’s novel shares also the practice of providing explanatory footnotes. More concretely I am thinking of two specific novels: Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La guaracha del Macho Camacho (1980) and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (1965). Like La guaracha del Macho Camacho, which centers on a tune by the same name, Mambo Kings revolves around one song, “Beautiful María of My Soul,” whose lyric is finally transcribed in the last chapter; as in Sánchez’s novel, Hijuelos’s text establishes a counterpoint between music and text, or música y letra. Cabrera Infante’s novel, which also gives high visibility to forms of popular music, includes a section entitled “Ella cantaba boleros” (She sang boleros), a phrase that Hijuelos seems to be transposing in his title, since the “songs of love” in the title is a translation of the Spanish boleros.
With its juxtaposition of mambo and bolero, Hijuelos’s title alerts the reader to the importance of these two musical genres in the novel. The mambo was a mixture of Afro-Cuban rhythms and North American big-band instrumentation popularized by Dámaso Pérez Prado, whose nickname was in fact “el rey del mambo.” Championed also by such orchestras as Tito Rodriguez and the Mambo Devils, Tito Puente and the Picadilly Boys, and Eddie Carbia y los mamboleros, the mambo enjoyed a remarkable popularity during the early and mid-fifties, giving rise to such mamboid compositions as “Papa Loves Mambo,” with which Perry Como had a number-one hit in 1954; Vaughn Monroe’s “They Were Doing the Mambo (But I Just Sat Around)”; Mickey Katz’s “My Yiddishe Mambo” (about a woman who’s “baking her challes for Noro Morales”); Rosemary Clooney’s “Italian Mambo” (sample lyric: “you calbrazi do the mambo like a-crazy”); and Jimmy Boyd’s “I Saw Mommy Doing the Mambo (With You Know Who).” This last song is a yuletide ditty about a little boy who catches his mother mamboing with Santa on Christmas eve (and it wasn’t the only yuletide mambo—there was also a “Santa Claus Mambo,” a “Jingle Bells Mambo,” and a “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Mambo”).
By the latter part of 1954, the whole country had fallen under the Afro-Cuban spell of the mambo. That fall, Tico Records organized “Mambo U.S.A.,” a fifty-six-city tour that took the mambo to America’s heartland and which Hijuelos’s recounts; the troupe of forty mambists included Machito, Joe Loco, Facundo Rivero, and many others (as well as César and Nestor Castillo, of course). In December stores were full of mambo gifts: mambo dolls, mambo nighties, and mambo “kits” (a record, maracas, and a plastic sheet with mambo steps to put on the floor.) And that same month Paramount released Mambo, with Silvana Mangano in the role of a dancer who has to choose between marriage and mambo. As a headline in the December 1954 issue of Life put it, with more than a tinge of racism, “Uncle Sambo, Mad for Mambo.”
Pérez Prado himself was enormously successful. He appeared on American television and was booked in the best nightclubs. When he opened at the ritzy Starlight Roof of the Waldorf Astoria in July of 1954, his was only the second Latin orchestra ever to play that venue (the other was Xavier Cugat’s). A year later his band was picked as the most popular orchestra in this country; that same year one of his songs, “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” stayed on the Billboard charts for twenty-six weeks; surprisingly, only one other song in the history of U.S. popular music has enjoyed a longer run on the charts—Elvis Presley’s “Don’t Be Cruel,” which became a hit the following year. “Cherry Pink” also became the theme for a highly successful RKO movie, Underwater! (1955), in which Jane Russell, accompanied by Pérez Prado, dances a modest mambo—in a bathing suit.
Most of Pérez Prado’s mambos are instrumental compositions characterized by Afro-Cuban percussion and dissonant sax and trumpet riffs. (Pérez Prado’s favorite composer was Stravinsky.) The laconism of Pérez Prado’s mambo was proverbial; typical in this respect is the lyric of the first famous mambo, the urmambo as it were, whose title is “Qué rico el mambo,” and which ran in its entirety: “mambo, qué rico el mambo, mambo, mambo, qué rico é é é é.” Even the apopé of the “es” to “é” betrays Pérez Prado’s penchant for verbal minimalism. It is not accidental, thus, that another of his hits was entitled “Ni hablar.” In Pérez Prado’s hands, the mambo was a medium for sound, not sense. Indeed his signature became the guttural grunts with which he punctuated the breaks in the music and which the jazz historian Marshall Stearns has compared to the cries of an “excited muledriver.” I mention this because the mambo’s lovely inarticulateness makes it an odd choice as a model for literary composition. To the extent that Mambo Kings derives inspiration from the mambo, it tends toward a kind of expressiveness whose medium is not language. Most literary transpositions of popular songs focus on their lyrics—thus it is, for example, with La guaracha del Macho Camacho. But with the mambo, literary transposition is difficult because of the form’s instrumental nature.
It is not surprising, for this reason, that what the mambo kings play are not mambos but “songs of love,” for in the novel the bolero fills the void left by the mambo. Unlike the mambo, most boleros are sad, even whining ballads whose distinctiveness has less to do with the music than with the words. In the bolero, rhythm and melody take a back seat to verbal elaboration, as is suggested by Nestor’s twenty-two versions of the lyrics to “Beautiful Maria of My Soul.” The narrator describes Nestor’s bolero as “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 a woman even after she has abandoned you.” The repetitive intensity of this description, which echoes Nestor’s own obsessive rewriting, gives some idea of the bolero’s involvement with language. In the novel, the bolero modulates the narrator’s voice, providing him with structures of feeling and forms of expression. This identification is evident in the fact that the title of the book is also the title of one of the mambo king’s LPs—the scriptive record merges with the musical recording.
Not only does the bolero’s wordiness contrast with the mambo’s laconism; the two genres also serve as vehicles for discordant emotions. If the central preoccupation of the bolero is loss, the central impulse of the mambo is conquest. Both as music and as dance, the mambo is aggressive, uninhibited, seductive: wham, bam, thank you, mambo. It is no accident that one of the central numbers in the movie Dirty Dancing was a mambo (“Johnny’s Mambo”). By contrast, in a bolero the speaker is typically passive and mournful. Like Nestor’s “Beautiful María of My Soul,” the bolero is a medium for bemoaning unhappiness in love, for questioning the injustice of fate. For this reason, the novel as a whole becomes a musical agon between mambo and bolero, lust and loss, conquest and relinquishment. And the musical question the novels asks is ¡la vida es mambo? ¡o la vida es bolero? Is life a chronicle of conquest—or is life a dirge?
This question is answered, of course, in the lives of the two brothers. César, with his “kingcock strut”, is the mambo king; Nestor is the spirit of the letra of the bolero. As the narrator puts it succinctly, “César was un macho grande; Nestor un infeliz”. The irony is that, in the end, the great macho turns out to be no less of an infeliz than his brother. Indeed, the plot narrates how, after Nestor’s death, César gradually takes on his brother’s temperament; early in the novel Nestor is described as “the man plagued with memory, the way his brother César Castillo would be twentyfive years later.” The gradual merging of the two brothers culminates with César’s last act, which is to transcribe the lyrics of his brother’s composition, “Beautiful María of My Soul.” When he writes down the lyrics as if they were his own, César becomes Nestor, remembrance becomes impersonation. César merges with his brother, becoming another man “plagued by memory.”
César’s final impersonation summarizes the drift of the book. Like the title itself, the novel moves from mambo to bolero, from conquest to loss. César lives in frenetic mambo time only to discover that life actually follows the languid measures of the bolero. The account of his many conquests is modalized by the reader’s awareness that these chronicles of conquest are actually a derelict’s last words. If Nestor composes his bolero in order to get María back, César reminisces in order to recapture his life as a macho grande; and the narration explicitly plays on the punning relationship between “member” and “remember”—at one point César “remembered a whore struggling with a thick rubber on his member.” For César, remembering is a way of re-membering himself, a way of sleeping with the past. And like the bolero composed by Nestor, the novel itself is very much “a song about lost pleasures, a song about youth.” Not one to avoid extremes, the narrator carries the mourning into the most unlikely places. Loss is so ubiquitous that even penises weep: “By evening they were sitting out on a pier by the sea necking, the head of his penis weeping semen tears.”
My discussion thus far is intended to give some idea of the ways in which Mambo Kings incorporates Hispanic literary and musical culture. Having said this much, I should now like to reflect briefly on how the novel distances itself from this same culture. That is to say, I should like to reflect on the text’s translational impulse, which is evident, first of all, in the ambivalence that Hijuelos’s novel demonstrates toward the Spanish language. In one sense, Spanish is everywhere in the text: in the place and character names, in the characters’ hispanicized diction, and in the constant references to Cuban music. In another sense, however, Spanish is nowhere, for Hijuelos has of course rendered in English all of the characters’ thoughts and words. Indeed, since César’s memories make up most of the novel, and since these memories were almost certainly framed in Spanish, the text we read presupposes an invisible act of translation, somewhat in the manner of Don Quixote. The source of this translation must of course be Eugenio, who is both narrator and translator; indeed, Eugenio’s genius, his ingenio, is to filter César’s recollections in such a way that the reader tends to overlook Eugenio’s responsibility for the text’s language.
Significantly, the only sustained Spanish passage in the book is the lyric of “Beautiful María of My Soul,” which appears at the very end. One cannot overlook the overdetermination of its appearance: Nestor’s song of love, the book’s preeminent statement on loss, is transcribed in a language that itself has been lost. The Spanish lyric is a testament to what is lost in translation. And Nestor’s beautiful María may then be the emblem for the maternal language that was left behind in Cuba. Moreover, since César’s last act is to transcribe this lyric, this Spanish interpolation is literally a testament. When readers finally come upon these words, they find themselves at a loss. For Anglophone readers, the loss is more acute—since they cannot understand what they read. The bolero, which is one of the novel’s principal links to Hispanic culture, is also the novel’s figure for the loss of that culture, a loss whose most fundamental manifestation is linguistic.
In a narrow but significant sense, this linguistic loss has been present throughout the novel in the surprisingly large number of misspellings of Spanish words and names. For example, Antonio Arcaño, who is one of the seminal figures in the early history of the mambo, becomes Antonio Arcana; the famous singer Bola de Nieve is strangely transformed into a Pala de Nieve; the equally famous Beny Moré loses his accent and becomes Beny More—a notable example of how “more” can be “less.” These errata and others like them may be evidence of sloppy editing; nonetheless, they also constitute typographical reminders of translation as loss, displacement, as traduction.
But perhaps the best example inside and outside of the novel of traductive translation is Desi Arnaz, who is an important secondary character. In fact, the book ends with Eugenio’s account of his visit to Desi’s house in California, where Desi and Eugenio reminisce about the mambo kings. Think for a moment about the name of the character that Desi played on TV: Ricky Ricardo. The name is a bilingual text that contains both original and translation, since Ricky is a familiar American rendering of the Spanish Ricardo. But it is a translation that distances, a traductive translation: the Germanic Ricardo (which, incidentally, means “king”) is not only anglicized but turned into a diminutive: it does not become Richard, or Dick, or Rick, but Ricky—a child’s name (much as, one may add, Desiderio became Desi). And of the two given names—Ricky, Ricardo—it is the North American one that comes first. Ricardo—which in Spanish is seldom a last name and at that time was the first name of one of Hollywood’s leading Latin lovers, Ricardo Montalbán—becomes the last name. It is as if Ricky has pushed Ricardo into the lastname position, with the consequence that Ricardo’s “real” last name, say, “Rodriguez,” drops out of the picture entirely. In a sense, Ricky Ricardo is an orphan’s name, one that reveals nothing about Ricky’s parentage. Still, what matters about Ricky’s ancestry is that he is Hispanic, and Ricardo functions well enough as a marker of ethnicity. Ricardo signifies that the subject is Hispanic; Ricky signifies that the Hispanic subject—the “I” in I Love Lucy—has been acculturated, domesticated, maybe even emasculated. Ricardo is the Latin lover, Ricky is the American husband.
The contrast between Ricky and Ricardo may well boil down to the different connotations of the final letters in each name, “y” and “o.” In English, the suffix “y” is used in forming diminutives, nicknames, and terms of endearment or familiarity. By attaching a “y” to a proper name we establish an affective relation with the name’s holder, we make the name contingent or dependent on us—an effect that may have to do with the other function of the suffix “y,” which is to turn a noun or a verb into an adjective, as when we turn “touch” into “touchy” or “feel” into “feely.” By contrast, the final “o” is a marker not of familiarity but of foreignness, and not of endearment but of distance. Think, for a minute, of the words in English that end in “o.” Once we get past the names of some instruments— piano, cello—and a few fruits and vegetables— potato, tomato, avocado, mango—we run into such words as psycho, weirdo, tyro, bimbo, Drano, Oreo, buffo. The fact that in Spanish “o” is a masculine ending probably also acts on our sense of the suffix in words such as macho, mambo, Latino, Gustavo. The story of “o” is a tale of estrangement, for the English language treats o-words like foreign bodies. Thus by replacing the “o” in Ricardo with the “y” in Ricky one removes the unfamiliarity, and perhaps the threat, of the foreign body. (One might recall here that the radical spelling of “women” is “womyn, where the “y” feminizes, takes the “men” out of “women.”) Replacing Ricardo with Ricky is, at the very least, an acculturating gesture, a way of turning the resident alien into a naturalized citizen. Ricky is the price that Ricardo pays for sleeping with Lucy—the price he pays for being allowed to enter Lucy’s bedroom and America’s living rooms. Lucy and Ricky—the “y” that ends their names is not the least significant thing they have in common.
Ricky Ricardo’s name alerts us, therefore, to the schisms that bisect what Michael Fisher has called the “ethnic I.” For me a handy emblem of the erosion of Ricky’s subject position is the transition from the initial “I” of the show’s title to the final “y” of his Americanized name (Desi Arnaz once remarked that he wanted to be remembered as the “I” in I Love Lucy). This is a transition from agency to contingency, from activity to passivity, from visibility to invisibility. It would be easy to ridicule the stereotypical elements in the portrayal of Ricky, who like Desi himself used to do, ends each rendition of the Afro-Cuban song “Babalú” with an entirely un-African “olé.” But it may also be possible to see Ricky Ricardo (name and character) as a moving emblem for what is lost—and perhaps what is gained—in translation. Every time Ricky breaks into his nearly unintelligible Spanish or says “wunt” for “won’t” or “splain” for “explain,” his words, beyond whatever comedic value they may have, remind us of the risks—and also of the rewards—of loving Lucy.
I propose something similar happens in Hijuelos’s novel. At one point in the Mambo Kings, during an interview on a radio show, César Castillo praises Desi Arnaz. The emcee replies. “But no one has ever considered him very authentic or original.” To which César counters: “Bueno, but 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.” “Good and Cuban enough”—this statement may apply equally well to Hijuelos’s novel, a dance to the music of time that, like Desi and Ricky, loses and finds itself in translation. As a Hispanic product repackaged for North American consumption, Mambo Kings clearly illustrates the predicament of ethnic culture, which is that it must walk a narrow line between the danger of co-optation on the one hand and of unintelligibility on the other. In this also it resembles the mambo, whose big-band sound was similarly criticized for not being Cuban enough, but whose success was due in some measure to its impurities.
In a fine book, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, Ramón Saldivar has argued that what distinguishes Chicano narrative is the power to demystify relations between hegemonic and minority cultures. I do not think that Mambo Kings is demystifying in this sense; rather than dealing with relations between hegemonic and minority cultures, Mambo Kings focuses on the transactions between two cultures, each of which asserts its own particular kind of hegemony. Even if the novel’s very existence in English seems to tilt the balance in favor of Anglo-American culture, the novel’s content, suffused as it is with Hispanic culture, tends to rectify the scales. Indeed, as we have seen, even the text’s English betrays a Spanish accent. Hijuelos’s own version of the “dialectics of difference” faces off Spanish American culture on one hand and North American culture on the other, but without treating the former as a subaltern or “minority” culture. Their relation is “appositional” rather than “oppositional.” It may be, in fact, that Cuban-American literature differs from Chicano literature in conceiving of culture contact as appositional. Apposition may more accurately reflect the nature and history of Cuban-American participation in the Anglo-American mainstream.
In any event, Hijuelos’s considerable achievement is to stage the negotiation between cultures in such a way that the novel neither forsakes nor is enslaved by its family resemblance to things and texts Hispanic. Spanish American culture figures in the novel as a distant relation—much as César and Nestor appear on I Love Lucy as Ricky’s Cuban cousins. The art of the Mambo Kings resides in knowing how to cultivate distant relations, which means also knowing how to put them in their place. By taking distance from its ancestry, the novel is able to occupy an eccentric space somewhere between Havana and Harlem, a kind of make-believe border ballroom where North meets South, where Ricky loves Lucy, and where mambo kings play songs of love forever.
The preceding sentences may sound like a conclusion, but they are not. I would like to end on a more personal note. Most Latino writers of my acquaintance have thoroughly detested this novel, considering that it sacrifices genuine Hispanic flavor in order to cater to the tastes of a North American readership. For them, Mambo Kings is a sort of literary Taco Bell: inauthentic and even indigestible. For me, however, the issue is whether authenticity, or a certain kind of authenticity, is really worth pursuing. As one who has feasted more than once on a Double Beef Burrito Supreme, I am less quick to dismiss fast food, however hyphenated. Hyphens are curious creatures; they connect, they separate, and above all, they are elastic. Mambo Kings is a study in the elasticity of hyphens; the novel distends the hyphen inside “Cuban-American” to the breaking point, but without letting it snap. To my mind, this is Hijuelos’s most important lesson: he teaches us to stretch the hyphen, to get lost in translation. Sometimes you can even stretch the hyphen so much that it becomes a conga line.
And how about the phrase “lost in translation?” What does this phrase evoke? In what kind of a place does one end up if one gets lost “in translation?” When I try to visualize such a commonplace, I imagine myself, on a given Saturday afternoon, in a shopping center in Miami called the Town and Country Mall. Since I’m thirsty, I go into a store called Love Juices, which specializes in nothing more salacious or salubrious than milk shakes made from tropical fruits; having quenched my thirst, I want to buy some Liz Claiborne jeans, and I head for a boutique called Mr. Trapus, whose name— trapo—is actually the Spanish word for an old rag; undaunted by the consumerist frenzy that has possessed me, I then purchase a hand-painted Italian tie in another store nearby called Cachi Bachi—a name that, in spite of its chichi sound, is a Spanish slang word for junk, cachibache. And then, for dinner, I go to Garcia’s Caribbean Grill, where I have something called a Tropical Soup, the American version of the traditional Cuban stew, ajiaco. In this way, I spend my entire afternoon lost in translation—and loving every minute. Translation takes you to a place where cultures divide to conga. My effort here has been to show you the way to such a place. Now, enter at your own risk. Who knows, you might end up becoming the missing link in the Desi-chain.
Source: Gustavo Perez Firmat, “I Came, I Saw, I Conga’d,” in Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, edited by Celeste Fraser Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz, Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 239–54.