Tomorrow They Will Kiss

by Eduardo Santiago

  “So whatever became of it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Graciela said. But I could tell she was lying. I was sure of it.

  A silence came over the van—that silence everyone hated because it threatened to reveal our deepest thoughts. I knew no one hated that silence more than Leticia, because it exposed all the sins of that van, the nauseating smell of pork, the rattling motor, the lack of music from the nonexistent radio, the sharp, coiled seat springs that seemed always ready to cause damage.

  “Niiiiñas, do you think Esmeralda’s ever going to find that old man?” Leticia asked, determined to change the subject. “How long is that deathbed going to hold him?”

  “He won’t last the week,” Caridad said.

  She was talking about a show called Solo Vive el Corazón (The Heart Lives Alone). Every once in a while a telenovela played that no one was crazy about—but we watched it anyway. And no matter how awful the story, Leticia was always fanatical about it. Personally I couldn’t care less if Esmeralda ever found her father, even if I did watch it every night. Caridad was of the opinion that the father was going to die before Esmeralda found him, but I knew the opposite was true.

  “Por Dios,” I said. “In these things the girl always finds her father before he dies.”

  “Always,” Caridad said.

  The Heart Lives Alone had another thing that I absolutely hated: Esmeralda was blond. She was as blond and blue- eyed as the dolls we worked on. It was filmed in Argentina, where I hear blondes are quite common. But I wondered if this was a new trend, where the blonde was the heroine. And it eventually proved to be true, the slow but sure Americanization of the telenovelas.

  Graciela and I rode the rest of the way in complete silence; neither of us wanted to talk about Esmeralda. It was certainly not one of our favorite telenovelas. Then I remembered something else about the blouse. The reason I turned back. The reason I didn’t stop Graciela that day in Palmagria. The reason I had trouble recognizing her from behind. It was a different Graciela—not the old Graciela with the high- heeled look- at- me attitude. Her hair was pulled tight into a thick braid, like a country girl’s; her back, usually so straight and tall, was slightly hunched. She held her shoulders close to her body. Even her silhouette seemed different, narrower, defeated. As I watched her walk away, I thought, She did this to herself, she doesn’t deserve my sympathy. I continued watching until she turned the corner and both Graciela and the blouse disappeared from sight. That was the last time I ever saw her in Palmagria.

  chapter seven

  Graciela

  As the van cut through the night and Imperio prattled on and on about Caridad’s blouse, I pretended to look out the window. But I was really looking at my reflection. Am I still attractive? Am I too old? Is my life over? Is Mr. O’Reilly paying special attention to me, or is it my lonely heart creating romance where there isn’t any? Do I seem desperate to him? Sad? Tragic? Can he sense that my heart quickens when he says, “Buenos días,” no matter what time of the day? Can he tell I’m trying to be discreet about my feelings? Can he see Caridad and Imperio eyeing me like hawks?

  Imperio’s voice cut through my thoughts.

  “You gave me that blouse,” I said, just to shut her up.

  Imperio was right. The blouse was beautiful, sublime. One of the most beautiful blouses I had ever seen. It was made out of Chinese crepe, and it wasn’t orange with pink flowers, it was pink with lavender flowers and little sprigs of green. The buttons were real pearls, which I loved, but they were difficult to keep fastened, they tended to fly open at the bosom. Caridad gave it to me because after Celeste was born she put on a quite a few pounds and she couldn’t keep the blouse buttoned, not even with safety pins.

  I only wore it once. I had saved it for a special occasion, and I didn’t have many of those. But I knew that chatter was not about the blouse. It was just one more attempt to shove my past in my face.

  They craved to know what had happened. How did a woman who seemed to have everything risk it all for a man as undeserving and ungrateful as Pepe Medina Ynclán? How did it feel to be thrown out by my husband, a man loved and respected by everyone he’d ever met?

  What was I going to tell them? That I spent the years after my separation from Ernesto practically locked away in my father’s house? That I lived in agony? That I only went out for short little errands, maybe to pick up something we needed for the boys? It was a crazy time. I had married a man I didn’t love just to get out of that house and had been brought back to it like a common whore. Just as my mother had predicted. They took me in because she had triumphed. And I had to change my ways. She had been right and I had been wrong. She warned me and I didn’t listen. Now it wasn’t just me, but also the boys. My parents didn’t say a word, for I had only delivered what they had always expected of me, disgrace. From the moment I returned to that house I was a silent, dutiful slave. Everything that needed to be said between us had been said. And just like any slave, I hated my masters.

  Sure, I’d had other options. I could have gone to Havana, where people could do as they pleased. But I had missed my opportunity. After the Revolution, so many wanted to go to Havana that the city had been closed to outsiders. The capital was just like a little country; you practically needed a visa to go there. I was stuck in Palmagria, and destined to die there a marked woman, a scandal.

  For days after Ernesto dragged me back home, Palmagria simmered with gossip and bile. There was no one to turn to for comfort.

  Pepe kept his distance from then on, and I punished myself for missing him. He had been my one refuge from a strange, incomprehensible loneliness, a feeling that I suspect I had been born with. Or maybe it was the coldness of the home I grew up in. It was a feeling that I had tried to mask with fashion and makeup and even those silly recitations of poetry at school assemblies. And then Pepe, my biggest and most costly extravagance, had turned his back on me. He was determined to climb the political ladder, wasn’t satisfied to deliver exit visas on a bicycle. I heard he had taken leave to go up to the mountains to teach guajiros to read. That had been the breaking point for us. He returned six months later, again a changed man. He returned to the bicycle, but there was something different about him. Something anxious and desperate. The same way that people expected that telegram to arrive telling them they were free to leave the country, Pepe was waiting for orders from above relieving him of what he considered a menial position in the Revolution. And what had happened with me was holding him back. Time and distance would erase the error of his ways. No matter. Now he was gone from my life. Everything was gone. I couldn’t even step outside, because prying eyes followed every move I made.

  I had lived in Palmagria all my life and I knew it was just a matter of waiting for the curiosity to die down, for another scandal to take the place of my own.

  It came a few weeks later when the police unlocked a house a few blocks away, a house that everyone believed had been vacated some weeks earlier, when its inhabitants had escaped to Miami in the middle of the night. What people were calling the one- way midnight boat rides. But the house was not empty. Inside police discovered what was left of their bodies, floating in tubs of lye. A morbidly curious mob congregated around the house, peeking through the grated windows, watching as the men from the morgue assembled the corpses side by side on the living room floor until all of them were accounted for. There was no doubt that it was them, the bones, some with flesh still clinging to them, told the whole story. There was a long figure, which certainly belonged to the father, Basilio, then a slightly shorter one, his wife, Viena, and two smaller ones exactly the same size, twins girls, Maite and Lili. Everyone knew them. We not only knew their names, we knew everything about them. How old they were, what grade they were in, what they liked and didn’t like. The twins hated beans, even puréed and strained, and if forced to eat them, they would throw up. It had been that way since they were babies. Other than that they were perfectly nice little girls. That was what
we’d heard countless times from Viena. Basilio hated anything starched and would never wear a shirt if it had even the slightest smudge or stain on it, which kept Viena busy at the washboard. Viena hated washing and ironing but could not afford to hire someone to do it for her. She didn’t mind cooking and cleaning the house, but she hated laundry. That was the sort of day- to- day information we got from our neighbors. The sort of thing that women talked to each other about when they stood outside on hot days waiting for a cool breeze. We passed the time by telling one another stories about ourselves, about our families. Of course we never really knew each other, no one told everything. Everybody had their secrets, or else we would have known why Basilio, Viena, and the twins had been murdered in such a vicious way. We were horrified.

  The stories traveled from mouth to mouth, from one end of town to the other.

  “How could something like this happen and no one notices or smells it?”

  “Four bodies decomposing and I walked by, day after day . . .”

  “I sat on the steps of the very house of death, night after night . . .”

  “Drank beer, smoked cigars . . .”

  It was upsetting to the core, because up to that day, we lived under the assumption that nothing could go on in Palmagria without everyone knowing about it.

  But right after the Revolution, a lot was going on that no one could explain. The stories drifted into our houses, in spite of the locked doors and sealed windows.

  The milkman, at sunrise, had found the bodies of two men, stripped naked and lying dead in the middle of the street. Places on the outskirts of town that had been boarded up and believed to be vacant were being uncovered as hellholes where tortures and other crimes had been committed.

  On a cross- country train, a trunk leaking a foul- smelling fluid had been forced open and, inside, there were five severed human heads. Nothing but the heads. No one could remember whose trunk it was or how it got on the train. Of course the only reason to transport a trunk full of heads cross- country was for some sort of revenge. Or to send someone a very powerful message. Who was paying for these crimes?

  It wasn’t just the morbid tragedies that shook us up. Everything seemed different.

  The sun was not as bright, the earth didn’t smell as fresh. The sea, which used to look like a restless jewel, had turned pale and complacent. Everything had changed. Now it was dry during the rainy season and torrential at the most inopportune moments.

  People known for their strong constitutions were taking ill. Fishermen were complaining that time after time, their nets were coming up empty. A virus known as cocotillo wiped out entire chicken farms. Everyone said it was a curse.

  I thought it was a long- overdue retaliation from above. I had few illusions about my place of birth. I had seen too much, I knew too much. I knew that Palmagria could be a cruel town. It was a place where people reveled in torturing the weak, the crippled, and the insane. There were two famously crazy old ladies that generations of kids had loved to torment. One of the ladies had the affliction of walking very fast. All day long, she walked maniacally from one end of town to the other and back again. Her nickname was Chanclas, Sandals, and she would chase you if you called her that. Bored teenagers taunted her for sport. So whenever you saw a red- faced boy running up the sidewalk, it was a good bet Chanclas was not too far behind.

  The other crazy lady was Arroz Blanco, which meant White Rice. She got that name because she was invited nowhere but showed up everywhere. Particularly weddings. People started to think it was bad luck if she didn’t show up for your wedding. After the first kiss, the bride always looked toward the door of the church for a glimpse of Arroz Blanco. There she’d be, smiling her toothless smile, eyes bright with tears, happy to be anywhere. But like Chanclas, if you yelled the name Arroz, she would chase you, hollering profanities. Denouncing you to God. My mother had warned that my marriage was destined for disaster, so on the day of my wedding I was so glad to see Arroz that I gave her my beautiful bouquet. I heard she ate it. Maybe that accounted for the disasters that followed.

  I never once called her Arroz Blanco. I knew her real name, it was Nena, but no one had called her that in a long time. In Palmagria they loved to nickname people with deformities. Men liked to stand outside bars and call out names as you walked by. If you limped, they called you El Cojo. If you had a big ass, they called you Baúl. They would do it by cupping their hand over their mouth and changing the pitch of their voice so that if there was a group of men, you couldn’t really be sure which one was insulting you.

  I’d seen them do it to retarded people, Chinese people, fat people, ugly people, people with crooked teeth or a big head or a scar. There was a young girl named Alvita who’d been born with a huge purple mark that covered half her face. People said it was because her mother, while pregnant, had slept on her stomach during an eclipse. Alvita was hounded whenever she left the house alone. They called her Mancha—an unpleasant word for stain. If you looked closely you could see that Alvita’s eyes had shrunk back into her head from fear. She tragically died when she set herself on fire one day, but that was many years later, when she was grown and so lonely she couldn’t take another day. Hard as she tried, Alvita could not develop a sense of humor about herself, and no one loved her enough to save her.

  Everybody was a potential target and, a lot of times, whatever nickname you were given stuck with you for good. So that as time went on, the person actually adopted the nickname and his or her real name was eventually forgotten. There was a handyman who helped out at my father’s house. He was called El Gago because he stuttered, and everybody called him that to his face. It was always El Gago this and El Gago that. But he didn’t seem to mind. His actual name was Policarpo—which took him forever to say. So eventually even he started to refer to himself as El Ga- ga- ga- go. It became his name.

  They all thought they had me labeled when they started circulating that rumor about Pepe Medina Ynclán and me. What they didn’t know was that I had been in love with Pepe long before I married Ernesto.

  But Pepe did not want his relationship with me to interfere with what he wanted. He told me as much. Sure, he could have stayed in Palmagria and continued to rise in status, but he wanted more. He wanted a post in Santiago or, even better, in Havana. His dreams, he hoped, would take him even farther than that, to Madrid or Buenos Aires. He knew a wife meant children and children meant responsibility. He had seen it happen much too often to other men. He needed to stay free, or as he put it, choosing a word that reeked of diplomacy and politics, flexible. Pepe was a small- town boy with very big dreams.

  “Then what is this, Pepe?” I asked him, getting out of bed. “What are we doing?”

  “That’s a question you should ask yourself,” he said, and turned to face the wall.

  I didn’t have an answer.

  Pepe was the first man I laid eyes on after my horrible wedding, holding that poor dead baby. At the time I’d believed with all my heart that there was some significance to that. I had wondered why Pepe had cried that day. Was it over the dead baby or because of my wedding? I never asked him. It was enough to know that a heartless man like him could shed a tear. Funny, the people we choose to love. I know people couldn’t figure out how we found the time to see each other. Imperio and Caridad in particular. Those two never missed a thing. They joked about Arroz Blanco being everywhere, but they were the ones always with their noses in everybody’s business. At least Arroz had the decency to keep her mouth shut. I know that Imperio and Caridad talked garbage about me for weeks on end. I became a favorite topic for them and their friends. It gives me satisfaction that they never figured it out. Pepe and me, we found ways. Manolito was sleeping in his crib, Ernestico was at a neighbor’s. I had cleaned the house, prepared myself for his arrival. I had prepared myself for love.

  Like in the telenovelas, love always finds a way. And for me it had been love. Only love.

  Sometimes Pepe was trapped in my bedroom during one of th
ose afternoon gatherings, when the local ladies came to get their nails done. It was quite a teeth- grinding feat trying to get them out of our house before Ernesto came home and found him.

  One afternoon, Cuca Soto arrived early. I quickly closed the bedroom door and rushed to the living room to greet her. She looked very pretty in a new orange- and- green- striped summer dress that looked like she had pulled it out of the sewing machine just before she arrived. She had started wearing her silky black hair in a shoulder- length pageboy that flattered her curious face. She had Sophia Loren’s mouth and Gina Lollobrigida’s eyes, so depending on the time of day, she could look beautiful or monstrous. Her figure was still as trim as it had been when she was thirteen, even though she had four children who were all under the age of ten.

  “Te gusta?” she asked, and twirled around, a blur of orange and green, hardly taking notice that I was only half dressed.

  “I love it,” I said, handing her my manicure box. “Why don’t you set up while I finish dressing. I’ll be out in a second.”

  She accepted the task without question. I went back into the bedroom and could hear her in the dining room moving things around. Setting out my cotton, my acetone, my colorful little bottles of the most up- to- date nail polish—Rosado Pálido, pale pink—which was their current favorite. They all insisted on the same color. Never red. Not anymore. Red, they said, was the color of the new regime.

  Pepe was still in bed, still undressed. He looked like a long, brown, bright- eyed crocodile.

  I remembered him years before at the little pine- dotted beach. There he was, a young man, just starting to show his beard, the hair under his arms, on his chest. He was dark brown and dusted with white sand. I didn’t mind the flies that swarmed all around my head, or the sand fleas that were picking at my legs. I only cared that the breeze carried the smell of guayabas and seaweed. Pepe had been so playful that day at the beach, delicately handing me tiny seashells the size of a thumbnail, and pale hermit crabs the same color as the sand. He placed the crabs on my arms, shoulders, breasts, and their sharp little legs tickled me endlessly. Pepe’s white teeth showed through an eager smile that said, “Play with me forever.”