Tomorrow They Will Kiss

by Eduardo Santiago

  At first, after that ridiculous wedding to that unfortunate man, everything seemed to be going reasonably well. Much better than anyone expected. Certainly much better than I ever thought possible. Ernesto, the poor fool she married, was a popular teacher, but not with me. I always found him to be irritatingly high- minded, with his thick books and classical music, and that wife of his, Josefa, who was boring as dust. As dust! May she rest in peace.

  Caridad suggested that maybe it had done Graciela good to finally get out of her parents’ house, which was more like a battlefield. Her father, Guillermo, was a weak man, so weak that Graciela’s mother, Irma, had been disgraced by countless miscarriages. From what I’ve heard, time and again she got pregnant and then lost the baby. People said that “Guillermo’s glue didn’t stick,” that “his eggs were runny.” So when Graciela was finally born, it had been something of a miracle. Well aware of that, Graciela had tried to rule in that house from the start. But as weak- willed and puny- spermed as her father was, her mother was strong. Por Dios, a woman who would have that many bloody incidents and still try again and again had to be strong. But Graciela was even stronger. Irma’s struggles to make something decent out of her only daughter were legend in Palmagria. Legend! And Graciela had disappointed her to the very end. She married a widower. Even if it was the distinguished Profesor de la Cruz, who could blame her parents for not attending the wedding? Not me. It must have been clear to Irma that Ernesto was just a slightly more successful and respected version of her gutless husband. Guillermo worked his entire life at la papelería, the stationery store, for practically no money simply because he didn’t like to get his hands dirty. Who would want that for their daughter? Not me.

  If you ask me, that wedding never should have happened. But regardless of what I thought, marry they did. The newlyweds moved into Ernesto’s house near the school, definitely a much nicer neighborhood than where Graciela had lived before.

  In her new home, Graciela had to make do with whatever had been left there by Josefa, because at that time, the stores were completely empty. The United States had imposed some sort of an embargo on us, which we didn’t take very seriously at first. Dios mío! Most of us didn’t even know what an embargo was. But we learned fast when we started to feel the lack of everything. People called it El Bloqueo, the blockade, because embargo was just too pretty a word for what was really going on. It made me furious to walk by stores that used to bulge with window displays and see them totally empty, nothing but cobwebs and dust. And on those rare occasions when eggs, bread, or milk came in, lines formed around the block and fistfights broke out. Stupid, desperate people fought each other in the streets just to get a better place in line. They bloodied each other over a can of beans.

  Graciela was like a rock through all this. She developed a quiet determination I had never seen before. She was like another person, this married version of Graciela. Gone were the flirting eyes, the annoying and embarrassing desperation she displayed whenever men were around. I watched her carefully. I had a hard time believing that a woman could change just like that.

  We stopped to chat with her and Ernesto after a late showing of Peyton Place at the Cine Carreta. It was a very warm night, and it had been even warmer inside the theater, where the idiots in the balcony insisted on treating the movie like pornography. They shouted dirty words whenever something even remotely sexy appeared on the screen.

  Caridad and Salud were with us that night, and after the movie the six of us lingered at the corner just for a moment. I had seen Ernesto and Josefa under similar circumstances so many times over the years that it felt a bit odd to see Graciela standing in her place. Ernesto had his arm around her, and they looked like any other couple. Don’t ask me why, but I got the feeling that not all was as it seemed. The movie, which had been seen all over the world but had just reached Palmagria, was all anyone could talk about for weeks.

  “I loved all of Lana Turner’s dresses. So elegant,” Graciela said.

  “Yes,” Ernesto said, “of all the American stars she’s my favorite. Her voice is so unique.” Graciela nodded her head as he spoke, completely agreeing with every syllable.

  “You could hear her voice over all the shouting?” I asked, and Graciela laughed. But she laughed like she was doing me a favor, which was interesting because I didn’t mean for my comment to be funny.

  And then Mario said, “I liked the teenage girl with the big tits.” I could have killed him.

  “Mario,” Graciela said, “you belong up in the balcony with the bad boys.”

  And then she looked at Ernesto and wrinkled her nose at him, and he kissed her right on the tip of her nose.

  “Where do you think I found him?” I said, but no one was listening, they were so impressed by the newlyweds’ affection. I was thinking, This old fool doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into. I mean, just one look said it all. He was short, balding, thick glasses, and bland in every way. And say what you will, at that time Graciela was luscious. That’s the only word for it.

  We said good night and watched for a moment as Ernesto and Graciela walked away, arms around each other.

  Caridad and Salud walked with us in silence for a while.

  “Graciela seems different,” Salud said. “More calm.”

  Mario started to whistle the music from the movie.

  “Marriage changes a girl,” Caridad said.

  “Marriage should,” I said. But I wasn’t convinced.

  The next afternoon I paid Graciela a little visit. She didn’t seem surprised to see me and welcomed me with open arms. And it was then that I saw what a ridiculous effort she was making to be a good wife. But it almost seemed like an impersonation of a good wife. I knew she was making a grave mistake when I noticed that she had taken down all photos of Josefa and put them away. She had taken them right off the wall. All that remained were the nails sticking out. There would be no flowers for the former mistress of the house either, and no visits to the cemetery. Not at Christmas, Easter, or any of the anniversaries. Josefa was dead and buried, and that’s the way Graciela wanted her.

  Graciela had given Josefa’s old pots and pans a good washing and traded bedsheets with her mother. I couldn’t exactly fault her for refusing to conceive her children on a dead woman’s bedding.

  She seemed to have at last settled into a comfortable life. She had finally become one of us, or so I thought. I continued to have my doubts.

  She gave birth to two boys in short order. The first she named Ernestico, after his father, the second, Manolito, after a famous bullfighter. She seemed determined to make her marriage work, which is what baffled and enraged all of us later on, after the truth was revealed, after the scandal started, after doors began to slam in her face. In her face!

  *

  ERNESTO DIDN’T MAKE A LOT OF MONEY, and Graciela wanted things. But things were scarce and the black market was expensive. So she set herself up as a manicurist and was very successful at it, because she rendered the best Cuban half- moons in town. The Cuban half- moon was a pearly- colored crescent painted with precision exactly where the nail met the cuticle. Graciela was masterful at it, an artist. When she did our nails it looked as if all our fingers were smiling. The women who had been doing our nails for years (sloppy, uneven edges, smudges) were left without their best clients. Graciela dealt with their resentment by ignoring them. She opened her door wide for business, and what could we do? We had to support her, and besides she was absolutely the best.

  It soon became very fashionable to have Graciela Altamira de la Cruz do your nails once a week. Word spread and women came from as far as Niquero and Bayamo. And Graciela, who had always wanted to direct fashion and set trends, at last had all the snooty, upper- class girls of Palmagria at her fingertips.

  Every Wednesday afternoon, while our husbands and children slept the siesta, you could find a group of us younger wives reading Graciela’s fashion magazines and blowing on our newly lacquered nails; telling stories,
sharing gossip, and dreaming out loud. This was our time. We sat around Graciela’s dining room table in the cool darkness of her house while outside the sunshine raged or rain poured down. Caridad and I had started smoking mentholated cigarettes, which Caridad made by putting a handful of regular cigarettes into a glass jar with a dab of Vicks VapoRub ointment on the lid and sealing it tight for a week. We smoked without our husbands’ consent, and listened to the latest records. We were crazy for the heartbreakingly romantic boleros by Los Zafiros and Luisa María Güell. It was at that dining room table that new fads were discussed, hemlines were lifted or dropped, colors and patterns adopted or discarded.

  Everything in Graciela’s life seemed ideal from the outside. Por Dios, how was it that none of us took even a moment to notice that Graciela, hunched over finger after finger, quietly trimming cuticles and outlining those perfect half- moons with the precision of a surgeon, for nothing but a few precious coins, was slowly losing her mind?

  Yes, it must have been insanity. Insanity! Complete and absolute madness. What else would drive a woman in her position, in a town like Palmagria, to do what she did?

  People blame the Revolution for every crazy thing that happened back then because people always need to find something to blame. After the Revolution, our town changed. As if everyone had just lost their mind. And who wouldn’t have? Por Dios, who suffered a bigger blow than Palmagria?

  The entire town, except for a few—and we all know who they were—had been against Batista and had blindly, blindly, done everything imaginable to put Castro in power.

  Palmagria, as insignificant a town as it was, had a very lucky geography. Its southern end ran into a natural bay in the Caribbean, and its northern end was located at the foot of the Sierra Maestra, the mountains where Fidel Castro trained his hairy men. Almost everyone in Palmagria was involved with the Revolution in one way or another. Foolishly people smuggled arms, food, and cash to the bearded rebels in the mountains, risking their lives. Idiotic young men went up there with nothing but a desire for freedom, counting only on the protection of the saints and the useless prayers of their mothers. Even Mario got swept up in it and came home one day with his eyes full of fire.

  “Mario,” I told him, “you’re no revolutionary. What are you going to do, sleep in a trench?” As soon as he sobered up, he admitted I was right.

  But most women were not as smart as me, and they willingly sent their husbands up to be killed. When Castro finally took power, they congratulated each other on the streets for a job well done. Never mind that now they were widows with mouths to feed and no way to do it.

  “Ganamos,” they shouted from street corners. We won.

  The people of Palmagria knew they were not completely responsible for Castro’s victory, but they were certain that the town had played an important part. Everyone looked forward to a country free from foreign oppression, the Cuba libre everyone talks about now.

  Everyone but Graciela, I suppose. One breezy July afternoon in Graciela’s dining room, I first noticed that something wasn’t quite right with her. The radio was transmitting one of Fidel’s interminable speeches direct from La Habana.

  Graciela had already finished Caridad’s nails and was now working on mine. Caridad sat on the sofa near the window, her nails still wet, her fingers stiffly extended, a mentholated cigarette held carefully between an index and middle finger. Her eyes were fixed on the radio, as if she expected to see the now familiar bearded face, the waving flags, the reaching hands, or the sea of faces that filled the Plaza de la Revolución.

  I sat across from Graciela, my hand in hers, and watched as the little brush made graceful strokes across my nails. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, Graciela let go of my hand, walked to the radio, and without so much as an “excuse me,” turned it off. She responded to our glaring stares with a shrug. With a shrug!

  “I can’t stand all that noise,” she said, and went back to my nails.

  But it was no use. Fidel’s voice resounded and echoed from all the other houses, so that everything he said seemed to repeat itself.

  “It does great honor to all of us that the Soviet Union,” Fidel said, “has sent the man who has just made the first flight in space to be with us this afternoon.”

  The astronaut must have stood up, because about ten minutes of shouts and applause followed.

  “So it’s true,” I said. “Por Dios, we’re in bed with the Russians.”

  “Imagínate,” Caridad said, her eyes big and wide as she considered what this would mean to us.

  “I’ve had just about enough of this revolución.” Graciela said. “We’ve had governments change many times before without so much commotion and backslapping. Who cares?”

  She had finished my last nail, and I noticed that they were perfect. She calmly collected her tools: the roll of cotton, the bottle of acetone, her emery boards. When she was done packing everything into her pink plastic box, she stood and gave us a look that could only mean good- bye.

  All the way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Russian astronaut. Lately the word communist had been on everyone’s lips. But what did it actually mean?

  It was not a new word. Certainly I was aware that communist countries existed. But that was worlds away, in Russia and China. I could not imagine what it would mean to us. I had seen photographs of uniformed Chinese soldiers standing at attention and looking more like dolls than men. And of Russian soldiers marching the strangest little ceremonial steps in front of buildings that looked like they were topped with onions. But that was always in countries so distant that they didn’t even share our alphabet. To me it always seemed to be taking place in a different time as well, either in the distant past or far into the future.

  There had been mention of communism as far back as I could remember, but not any more than we talked about the Nazis in Germany or the fascists in Italy. There had long been a Communist Party in Cuba, but it was so small and inconsequential that it could be easily ignored. They were no more a threat than Jehovah’s Witnesses were to Catholics. Por Dios, there were no real communists in Palmagria.

  But then, unexpectedly, sympathizers started to emerge. People we had known all of our lives turned suspect. A book by Karl Marx was discovered in the public library, and it had been read so often and so feverishly that its spine was broken. I looked into the eyes of my neighbors and began to wonder if they might be the ones. What if they were the communists?

  There was a Chinese family that had always lived in the center of town. No one but their next- door neighbors really talked to them, and that was at arm’s length. The Chinese family did what Chinese families always do in small Cuban towns. They raised vegetables for market and took in laundry.

  But now everyone wondered, were they the communists in Palmagria who were pushing this new movement on us? Or worse, communist spies?

  “I don’t trust los chinos,” Caridad said, and stopped taking her sheets to them.

  I continued to take my laundry to the Chinese, but kept my visits short. I dropped off and picked up, and made sure no one saw me going in or out. While I was there I took a quick peek behind the counter to see if there was anything subversive lying around: a pamphlet, a leaflet, a flag. It seemed as if, from one day to the next, the people of our town were divided. Suspicions were aroused.

  There were those who were desperate to leave the country, those who hated the people who were leaving the country, and the rest of us, who were caught in the middle.

  People like me were frozen with fear and indecision. We were not the sort of people who dreamed of a life in other parts of the country, let alone the world. We were born in Palmagria and, in spite of its problems and defects, we expected to die there, be buried there, and spend the rest of eternity there. That’s the way it had always been. Occasionally someone ventured out, driven by some strange desire that no one could understand. But for the most part, we stayed.

  It was easier for the wealthy to get out, they had alw
ays kept one foot in Cuba and another abroad. It was not unusual for them to have a big house in Cuba and another in Miami Beach. They sent their children to universities in Spain or the United States. They were used to entertaining foreigners who came to visit in yachts and private airplanes.

  For the very poor, there was no decision to be made at all. Very few had the education or even the mentality to consider going to another country and learning another language. They could barely get along where they were born. Besides, the new administration was all about them. There were slogans on walls now offering them a brighter future. There were organizations dedicated to their care. Politicos of humble backgrounds, who had risen to prominence only after the Revolution, made fervent speeches, telling the poor that it was time to rise up out of their pitiful lives and take their rightful place in society. Every day these new saints of the people served themselves up as examples of the new success.

  You couldn’t leave the house without running into some sort of demonstration. Banners and flags appeared everywhere. Uniformed men and women became so common that after a while we hardly took notice of them. They walked around rigidly, their faces set hard with responsibility. They always saluted us as we walked by. They demanded respect. They were not friendly people, these rebel soldiers. They didn’t smile, they didn’t dance; it was as if, suddenly, they had stopped being Cubans. As if something hard and harsh had invaded their souls.

  “Imagínate,” Caridad said as we crossed the street. “Even a couple of ladies like us simply walking to the store get the military treatment.”

  We didn’t know what to do.

  “Do we salute back?” she asked me.

  “Just wave,” I said. “See what the hell they do.”

  So she just waved. “Qué tal?” And smiled the way she always did. In Palmagria, you greeted your neighbors no matter how you felt about them. It was considered good manners. I didn’t. If I didn’t like you, you knew it. But with these new people, I was always a little concerned that waving or not waving, smiling or not smiling, was somehow wrong or disrespectful. That they might take offense. If forced to, I waved, but I never smiled. Never! And I certainly was not about to salute them.