Tomorrow They Will Kiss

by Eduardo Santiago

  “Los Zapaticos de Rosa,” the most famous poem by José Martí, became her specialty. It told the story of a rich girl who owned brand- new rose- colored shoes. One day her mother took her for a walk on the shore and they encountered a woman who had a little girl the same age. The little girl was deathly ill, and they were so poor there was no hope for her. No hope at all. Overtaken by compassion, the rich girl gave her new shoes to the poor girl. But it was too late. The poor girl had died.

  In the beginning, Graciela would just stand on the small stage and recite that long poem from memory. As she got older, she started to embellish her recitations. In the third grade, she entered the stage carrying a tin pail filled with sand. She spread the sand on the floor so that it looked like she was at a beach, and while she recited, she scooped up handfuls of sand and let it all run through her fingers and back into the pail. She did this as if in a dream, perfectly timed so that when the poem ended all the sand was back in the yellow bucket.

  In the fifth grade, she wore pink slippers just like the ones in the poem. Imagínate! By the time we were in the tenth grade, much too old for that sort of thing, she was wearing her hair in a big satin bow, the way girls wore them back in the days of Martí. It was annoyingly creative, but even I will admit that no one performed “Los Zapaticos de Rosa” like Graciela did; she put her heart and soul into it. Year after year she brought the whole school to tears and then cheers. She was featured in all the assemblies from the first grade on, getting better and more dramatic as we grew older. Others tried, but without anything like the same success. In the Palmagria of my childhood, “Los Zapaticos de Rosa” was everyone’s favorite poem. I like to believe it still is.

  Of course, at the time we had no notion what this poem was really about. We innocently believed it was about two little girls, one rich, one poor. We thought it was about how gracious and generous the rich could be to the poor. We were all dying for the chance to give away our new shoes to the less fortunate. Later, when the less fortunate were practically tearing the shoes off my feet as I ran to jump a boat out of the country, it became a different story altogether.

  Imagínate! Through that poem, Graciela became something of a local celebrity, but also something of a curiosity, an eccentric you didn’t want to get too close to. I really got to know her at Imperio’s house. We must have been about thirteen, fourteen years old at the time, just becoming young women. I stopped by Imperio’s house one afternoon shortly before summer vacation and found Graciela teaching her how to cinch her waist with an old nylon stocking. Imperio, in a youthful fit of frustration and despair, had made the silly mistake of turning to Graciela for advice. Poor Imperio was sort of shapeless. She was not developing the wide hips and narrow waist every Cubanita desired. She was skinny, flat- chested, and lacked a single womanly curve. Her stomach bloated out forward and sideways. She had a pretty face and interesting, curly hair, but from the neck down she was a bit of a disaster.

  In those days the style was bright- colored blouses, starched and off the shoulder, narrow skirts with ruffles at the knee, and wide belts with matching purse and shoes. The belt was worn as tight as we could stand it to give us a desirable silhouette, because a girdle could only do so much. The hips were just as important as the breasts. Graciela could cock a hip like opening a drawer, and just by walking down the street she could make men spin like tops.

  I sat on Imperio’s bed and watched as Graciela studied her carefully. Graciela was undoubtedly flattered, and yes, honored, to be invited into our world. Imagínate! We played records and Imperio’s mother brought in pastries and lemonade, which Imperio and I consumed with glee. Graciela hardly ate, which I found rather insulting. That afternoon, in front of my very own eyes, Graciela convinced Imperio to wear the nylon stocking twenty- four hours a day for as long as it took to train her waist.

  The first time Imperio fainted was in the middle of English class. It was a particularly hot afternoon, the kind of afternoon that makes you feel like a lizard, drowsy and changing colors. Well, one moment Imperio’s sitting in front of me, the next she has melted to the floor.

  “It’s the heat,” Graciela said, and rushed to help her up. Imperio looked green, then blue, then white. I walked her outside until she could catch her breath. The same thing happened several times until the teacher discovered the source of the problem and cut the stocking off. Not long after that, Imperio found a boyfriend, a young man named Mario Santocristo, who noticed her because she kept fainting. Until then Imperio had been just another girl among the others at school. But the fainting spells made her quite popular. As it happened, Mario liked her just as she was, short, skinny, and ill- tempered, and she happily gave up trying to be a curvaceous beauty.

  Much to Graciela’s frustration.

  Imagínate! She actually believed that if Imperio kept that thing tied around her waist, it would give her a nicer figure. If it had been up to her, she would have kept poor Imperio in a constant state of suffocation.

  Graciela had no such worries. She wasn’t necessarily prettier than the other girls, but there was an exaggeration about her, partly God- given, partly created by her for her own personal reasons. No reasons I could even begin to imagine. Why would somebody want to stand out like that? I believed in a subtle, elegant beauty. But not Graciela.

  Immediately after her fifteenth birthday, she transformed herself. Her belt was always wider than everyone else’s, and instead of the pleated skirts we all wore, with two or three crinoline half- slips underneath, she wore very tight ones, as tight as she could, to better display her curvaceous figure. Of course, Graciela did have the advantage of height. She was much taller than girls usually grow in Cuba. Not to mention that her heels were higher and narrower than anyone else’s in Palmagria. And her makeup! Well, let me just say she had a tendency to do everything bigger and brighter and leave it at that. She didn’t even wait until she was fifteen, the way decent girls from good families did, to start wearing makeup. Long before her quince años, fifteen years, she was painted up and getting more attention than she deserved. To this day, she can draw on her eyebrows to perfection, even while the van is moving.

  I suppose you think I am being criticona, but I deny that. It’s not my character. If anything, I am very accepting. I simply know her too well. Not that there was ever much of a mystery to Graciela Altamira. Not for me, anyway. She lived in the nicest house in the worst part of town. Right next to her front door there was a narrow alley that led to what we call a solar, which is a cluster of one- room huts where the poorest of the poor live, where they still cook with wood, where everybody sleeps in the same bed, and there are so many skinny, bloated- bellied babies running around that it looks like some kind of refugee camp. Only the people who lived there dared go inside. If I slowed down a little while I walked by, out of the corner of my eye I could see how they lived in there. It was rather disgusting.

  There were always two or three old women sitting outside with the sun cooking their skin, their big, flowered skirts hiked up above their knees, chismeando while they ate a mango or a slice of watermelon. They looked at me in exactly the same way I looked at them, con sospecha, but I always said, “Buenas.”

  A lot of the women from the solar made their living as domestics. They came to our houses to cook, clean, and wash our clothes. They were rough women who never thought twice before getting into hair- pulling fights with each other. But in our houses, they were more civilized. Everything was “Sí señora,” no matter the request.

  Their men were another story. They were fishing or they were drunk. Mostly they drank. And they drank so much they slept on the sidewalks, sometimes even in the middle of the street, or wherever they fell down, or passed out, or whatever it was those people did. So it was up to their women to provide for all those dirty, bloated children.

  Imagínate! Graciela lived among those people all her life. Until she married. Not that she married right away.

  The rest of us had been married about two ye
ars when Graciela and Ernesto de la Cruz got together. Three of us who attended the same schools, Azucena Martínez, Cuca Soto, and me, were already pregnant with our first children. Actually, Cuca Soto was on her second or third. I lose count with her. You could say she was making up for Imperio, who for some mysterious reason refused to conceive. The decent women of Palmagria limited themselves to one or two children. It was only the very poor who insanely had as many babies as God would send them. But even I have to admit that Imperio took it too far, and her husband didn’t seem to care.

  I married the perfect man, Salud Rodríguez. Salud was a chiropodist, which is practically a doctor. Sure, there were times when I looked at his hands and thought, “All day long he touches people’s feet, digs out rotted toenails, cuts out infected calluses.” But then I forced myself to think about all the money he made. In a town like Palmagria, where most everybody walked miles every day, his services were in great demand. There was always somebody limping painfully into his office.

  And Salud, in spite of his limited education, had a talent, an instinct that no amount of schooling could provide. He had no close friends, but people respected him, and he was the only chiropodist around. Everyone called him El Médico.

  *

  ERNESTO DE LA CRUZ WAS THE LAST PERSON I ever expected would get involved with Graciela Altamira, and he would live to regret it. He was our former teacher, a teacher so loved and respected they even made him principal. The youngest principal the school had ever had. He was not one of those dreamy teachers that make girls swoon during class. Handsome he was not, not even a little, but he was attractive in his own way. And solid. People always said that Ernesto de la Cruz was solid.

  “Un verdadero caballero,” they said. A true gentleman.

  He was always punctual, prepared, and ready to teach. He did not have a sparkling personality, but his lectures were always interesting, so students rarely fell asleep during his classes. Unlike other teachers we had, who could just as easily have been driving a bus for a living, Ernesto de la Cruz loved his work, you could tell. It was this passion that made us pay attention. When they promoted him, no one was surprised.

  “Se lo merece,” they said. He deserves it. They honored him with bottles of red Spanish wine and boxes of cigars, which he accepted graciously, humbly. Everything in his life seemed to be going well, perfection. Until the day when tragedy struck. After that, nothing was ever good again.

  His wife, Josefa, may she rest in peace, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. No one could figure out how someone that young could die so suddenly of a heart attack, but that was exactly what happened. They had been married about ten years, and one afternoon when Ernesto went home for lunch, which he did every day, he found her fully dressed and peacefully asleep in their bed. She never woke up.

  Imagine what that must have been like! Imagínate! The news spread quickly, and everyone felt terribly sad—unusual in a town that celebrated the misfortunes of everyone else. But Ernesto de la Cruz was special to us. He had touched all of our lives. I remembered him standing in front of the chalkboard, year after year, his fingertips white with chalk dust. He was a man of letters, a cultured man who read thick, leather- bound books and listened to classical music. Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart could be heard floating from the windows of his house on Sunday mornings. And even though that was not the kind of music we associated with happiness (Palmagria being the sort of place where radios went on at breakfast and stayed on all day long, shaking our houses with the rumba, the samba, and the cha- cha- cha), somehow we knew that, in their own quiet way, Ernesto and Josefa had a happy home.

  I often saw Ernesto and Josefa at the movies. They seemed to enjoy all sorts of films, from adventures to love stories. Whenever the program changed, they were first in line, holding hands like newlyweds. Or sometimes I’d see them sitting side by side on a park bench, watching people walk by. Everyone said hello to the professor, and he always said hello back and included your name.

  “Hola, Caridad,” he always said to me. He remembered the name of each and every student he ever taught. He had an impressive memory. Josefa would just smile slightly and nod a greeting. She was not the kind of woman to make a big show of herself. In fact, I think she would have been embarrassed by the spectacle of her own funeral.

  Imagínate! The funeral was held at Señora Santa church, of course, and attracted such a crowd that people were mobbed around the block. Many of them were Ernesto’s former students come to pay their respects, along with their children, their parents, and even the most distant of relatives.

  “Hurry,” one woman said as she scampered up the steps with three small children in tow. She was wearing white high heels and a tight black dress, much too tight for the occasion.

  Everybody wanted to be inside that church.

  Shouts swarmed around me: “Save me a seat!” “Meet me inside!” “I can only stay for the beginning!”

  It was as if they were going to the first night of the most popular movie in the world.

  But let me tell you, those who weren’t able to get into the church were the lucky ones. Inside it was so hot I could barely catch a breath. Por suerte, I had my cardboard fan, as did many others. Those who had not thought ahead fanned themselves with whatever was available: a hymnal, a folded newspaper, a magazine, or a hat.

  Meanwhile, at the altar, Padre Anselmo struggled to say something of significance about Josefa. Sweat poured out of him as he tried to come up with something other than the usual. I couldn’t really blame him. Who really knew Josefa, and what had she done? Nothing to speak of. She was not a member of a charity, she didn’t leave children or pets behind, had no close friends, kept to herself. All she really did was take care of Ernesto, which we all appreciated. Ernesto had been her life. And so it was that the sermon and eulogy were all about her husband’s achievements, his accomplishments, and his unimaginable pain “at this dark moment,” rather than anything to do with Josefa.

  “Stay close to him,” Padre Anselmo said, pointing at Ernesto’s bowed head. “Today is almost like a feast day for him compared with what’s to come. The funerals, the masses, the burials, all keep us so busy we almost don’t know what has happened. The dearly departed is still aboveground, still with us,” he said, pointing at the coffin in front of him. “His most trying days are yet to come. After she’s buried, after she’s gone.”

  Here Padre Anselmo paused. And I could see, because I had one of the best seats in the church, that a little light had gone on inside his bald and shiny head. It was his job to make us cry, and he was not going to let us out of that sweltering church until he had done so.

  “Tomorrow our beloved friend and teacher will wake up alone,” Padre Anselmo said, pausing to make sure we were all listening. Fans, missals, magazines, and hats all stopped in midair. Only an occasional tickling cough could be heard.

  “He will walk around his lovely home expecting to hear the cheerful voice of his beloved wife, and it will not be there. He will smell her scent, still lingering, but he will not hear her footsteps, nor receive the gentle kiss which always greeted him upon awakening.”

  He stopped to take a well- rehearsed breath. I heard sighs all around.

  “He will walk through his days,” the priest went on, “with a broken heart. He will attend his classes and impart knowledge as he always has, but he will not be the same man. His eyes will be like shattered glass and his heart a field of pain.”

  I watched as Ernesto dropped his face into his hands and his shoulders began convulsing with sobs. I heard all the women start to let go, as they always, inevitably, did. The wailing began. The fanning started up again. Padre Anselmo continued to talk, though he could hardly be heard above all the noise, but that was not his concern. His job was done.

  I felt my own warm tears.

  To make bad matters worse, someone had the well- intentioned but terrible idea of hiring a violin player to accompany the long, slow exit from the church. As soon as the pallbearers
picked up the coffin, the violin music began. The strings cut through our hearts, uniting us in our grief. Most of all, we grieved for our beloved teacher. His pain was our pain. His loss was our loss.

  Outside the church, in the scorching sun, we could barely move. It took what seemed like hours to get everyone out and on their way to the cemetery. I watched patiently as eyes were dabbed, handkerchiefs were passed, noses were blown. Imperio came and stood next to me.

  “It’s like a disgusting competition,” she said, “to see who can suffer the most, who can squeeze the most fluids out of their useless heads. Por Dios, they hardly knew the woman!”

  I knew she was only saying those words to keep from showing her own emotions, so I just nodded, the way I often do with Imperio. She is a good person; she just seems a little coldhearted sometimes.

  “And did you see who slithered over to Ernesto, like butter on bread?” she said as we started walking.

  “No,” I said.

  “Graciela, who else?”

  I looked around, but finding her in the crowd was almost impossible.

  Most everyone who had been at the funeral went to the cemetery. It was an exhausting procession; the hearse creaked slowly, first over cobblestone and then on the bumpy dirt road. It was a rough, hot, dusty walk, but we couldn’t let our professor bury his dear wife all alone.

  Most of us had rushed to his house the moment we heard that Josefa had passed on. Those of us who were most familiar with him went inside, where we drank café, ate white cheese on crackers, and told stories until sunrise.

  Graciela was there that night making trips to and from the kitchen, passing out galletas like she was one of the family.