Tomorrow They Will Kiss

by Eduardo Santiago

  He sat up in bed and I pushed him back. He looked at me with anger, so I sat next to him and took his hand. I had to make him understand.

  “You have to stay here very quietly until she leaves,” I said. “I’ll try to get rid of her quickly, but it’s going to be a while, so you might as well take a little nap.”

  I reached down to buckle my sandals. Pepe reached over and stroked my back.

  “What if I snore?” he whispered, but even his whisper sounded too loud.

  “Pepe, shhh, cariño, and please don’t snore. Don’t sleep. Here, read this instead,” I said, and handed him one of the books Ernesto kept on his dresser. Pepe looked at the book as if I was handing him excrement.

  “Couldn’t I just jump out the window and run out the back like a real man?” he asked. My throat was dry but my palms were wet. I could hear the others arriving, Caridad, Imperio, and Azucena. They always greeted each other with loud voices and exclamations, as if they hadn’t seen each other in years, when in fact a day had not gone by ever in their lives when they had not seen one another at least in passing. I could hear them clearly through the closed door.

  “Let me take a look at that new dress,” Caridad said.

  “Those are your colors, no question,” said Azucena.

  “Te gusta? It’s what they’re wearing in La Habana,” Cuca said.

  I heard Imperio’s unmistakable voice. “Looks like black market material. Is that how you got it, through bolsa negra?”

  “Imperio, what a thing to say.” Cuca giggled.

  “I should have that idiotic woman arrested and her dress confiscated,” Pepe whispered.

  “Shhh,” I said again.

  I smoothed my dress and checked my hair in the mirror. Before I left the room I took a last look at him. My heart, remembering what had happened on that bed just a few minutes before, gave itself a little squeeze. I loved him.

  On those rare, nerve-racking afternoons when Pepe was hiding in the bedroom like something out of a dirty joke, I did not talk very much, so as not to encourage the girls to stay longer. I just focused on their nails, one finger after another, making sure to provide them with the high- quality half- moons they expected. Then I rushed them out, which wasn’t easy—they had all the time in the world. And they always had one more thing to say, one more inane idea to express. Even as they sauntered down the sidewalk with their newly manicured hands extended in front of them, I could hear them laughing and chattering.

  *

  THE ONE AND ONLY TIME I WORE CARIDAD?248-175?S BLOUSE was the last time I saw Pepe. That day all I wanted was to look special, pretty, young.

  I escaped from my mother’s prying eyes and almost ran to his house. Pepe was not expecting me. I saw him through the open window. He was wearing the pants of his olive- green uniform and no shirt. The olive-green shirt with all the emblems was draped on the back of his chair. He was hunched over his desk, going through some papers. I looked at his broad, brown shoulders and remembered their smell, their warmth. I continued looking into that room, waiting for him to turn around. Surely, I thought, he will sense that I’m here, looking at him, full of love. If he turns around, it’s meant to be; if he doesn’t, I will leave. I waited and waited. I set a time, five minutes, and then extended it another five, then another. Pepe never looked back. It was clear to me I was nowhere in his thoughts. I expected my heart to break, but instead I felt as if I no longer had a heart. I backed away slowly, my eyes on the back of his neck, giving him every opportunity to turn around. He didn’t. I walked back to my parents’ house, in my beautiful blouse that someone I once considered a friend had given me.

  chapter eight

  Caridad

  We left Cuba in the middle of the night. Imagínate!

  All of Palmagria wondered why we left in such a hurry, and in such a dangerous way. We did it for Celeste, of course. There were rumors, strong ones, and behind every rumor there’s more truth than anyone cares to hear. The government was going to take our children, they said. Like brujos. We could only keep our children until they were three years old, they said. After that, they had to be turned over to Círculos Infantiles, state- run child- care centers. From ages three to ten they would live in dormitories and could only come home to visit their parents two days every month, and that was only if they were good. If they were trouble, they would not be allowed to come home at all.

  There were stories going around that truant children were being picked up in the streets and taken to prisons. They were saying that when the parents came to claim them, the parents themselves would be imprisoned for being irresponsible. Imagínate! In a country where children roamed the streets at all hours happy and carefree, suddenly they were being taken away in trucks.

  Like specters, Cuca Soto and Azucena Martínez appeared at my front door with clouded and frightened faces.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  They didn’t even wait to be asked in, but pushed their way past me and into my living room.

  “Cari, you have to sign this,” Cuca said, taking a folded piece of paper out of the big pocket of her housedress. The paper looked as if it had been folded and unfolded a dozen times, pawed and turned over by countless others.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a pact,” Azucena said. Her face twitched, her eyes filled up, and then she couldn’t go on speaking. With trembling hands she motioned to Cuca to tell me.

  “Sit down, Cari,” Cuca said calmly. I did, but only on the edge of the couch. I found the way they were behaving very unsettling. It was as if they were vibrating. I knew Azucena had a tendency toward nerves, and that sometimes she had to be put to bed in a dark room due to pounding headaches, but Cuca suffered from no such condition.

  “This,” she said, trying to remain calm, pronouncing each and every word very carefully, “says that we will kill our children before we let Fidel Castro, or any other Castro, take them away.”

  With that, Azucena burst into sobs.

  “Sign it, Cari, I beg you,” she said through her tears. “It’s our only hope.”

  “Have the two of you lost your minds?”

  I tried to keep my voice soft, almost kind, but I could feel a small hurricane starting to build up inside me, the winds and rains of fear.

  “It’s the only way we can stop them. It’s the only way we can make them see what this means to a mother.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “We’re not just serious,” Cuca said, her voice rising and screeching as if her throat was being pierced with a million needles. “We’re desperate.”

  Azucena stopped crying just long enough to say, “It’s already started in Santa Clara and Cienfuegos. It’s spreading east.”

  I looked at the sheet of paper again. There were more than thirty names on it, written in pencil; some were already smudged from being passed around. They were names I knew very well, the names of respectable women, not just twittery birds like Azucena and impulsive women like Cuca.

  And then I saw her name. Graciela Altamira de la Cruz. I was shocked that she still used Ernesto’s last name! There was her signature, halfway down the page, and just as you would expect: bigger than the others, a dramatic script that took up two lines. No one had seen her for months. So more than a signature, it was a statement. I’m still here, it shouted, and I’m still me.

  What would Imperio say? I wondered. She’d say it was reactionary, alarmist propaganda. She wouldn’t understand. Only a mother could truly understand. And Graciela, for better or worse, was a mother.

  Well, I couldn’t have the whole world saying that Graciela was a better mother than me, so I signed it. I signed it with a shaking, unsure hand that acted as if it had never before held a pencil. Imagínate! It was the hand of a mother signing her own daughter’s death sentence. And what if this document went to the wrong people? Was it evidence of a conspiracy? I could be imprisoned, and then Celeste would be alone and at the mercy of who knew what.

 
All night I was wide awake, with my mind going a mile a minute. What sort of mother would do a thing like that, even under the most horrendous circumstances? But what was I to do? Pack a little bag with her diapers and her bottle and dress her in her best dress and just hand her over? Who do I hand her over to? Who would be at my door to take my girl? Would it be women or men? Whoever it was would certainly be in an olive- green uniform. And then what? Do I just go back to my life as if I never had a baby at all? What would become of my girl in the hands of strangers? Celeste was a child with very special needs.

  I woke up Salud. I shook him until he was alert.

  “We’re leaving,” I said to him. I felt as if my mouth was filling with blood. “Do what you have to do, pay what you have to pay, but I have to get my little girl out of here, and it has to happen now. Today. Before it’s too late and all we have is regrets.”

  Looking back, it was reactionary, alarmist propaganda. But at the time it seemed as real as anything. I could not, just could not, risk it with Celeste. She was starting to show signs that she was unlike other children. A child that fragile I had to keep close to me. What sort of monster would do such a thing? I wondered.

  The waiting list for visas numbered in the hundreds of thousands. So we took the midnight boat. We practically ran out of Cuba. That was how it seemed to me, as if we were running away to hide. Just for a little while, just until things got back to normal. We knew it could not last. A government that crazy would soon come to an end.

  I kept our plan a secret because just the slightest whisper could ruin everything. Not a word about it to Imperio, even though she was the one person I could say anything to. In my mind it was a way of protecting her. The less she knew, the better. All I could think of to do was leave the jar of mentholated cigarettes at her doorstep. I considered a written note, but that could incriminate her, and in those days there was no telling where a little thing like that could lead.

  Talk about things turning out differently than I expected! We were rescued by the coast guard, and at the time I thought for sure we were going to die. I thought for sure they were going to shoot us all down and dump our bodies into the sea. That was the feeling I got when that big white boat pulled up next to ours, with those tall Americans pointing rifles at us, and we had to stand in the sun with our hands above our heads.

  But to my surprise the Americans were friendly. Not hug- and- kiss friendly, but certainly not hostile. They towed our boat all the way to the shores of the United States. They even gave us snacks. I’ve come to know that very little happens in America without snacks.

  Imagínate! It was completely different. Because we were clandestinos and had arrived in a boat, we were treated like heroes.

  That was at first. After that we were just like any other penniless immigrants in a foreign country, but I couldn’t say that to Imperio when she phoned. I couldn’t tell her that every morning I woke up with a towering desire to burst into tears, and that this desire followed me around like a mean black dog. That even on the days when I told myself to go ahead and cry, on the days when I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bathtub, nothing came out. My eyes remained as dry as chalk, and the heaviness of grief stayed with me for the rest of the day and into the night, and was waiting for me when I woke up again. I couldn’t tell her that I had become mean- spirited toward the people I loved the most, that I snapped at my husband for no clear reason. I couldn’t tell her that I no longer seemed to know the difference between fairness and selfishness, that I looked to find someone to blame for my situation, and that because it was Salud who was always there, he was the one I unloaded all my fears and frustrations on. I blamed myself for leaving my country, for allowing rumor and panic to force me to act foolishly. No one had their child taken away. I hated myself. But I couldn’t tell Imperio that.

  I couldn’t tell her that I hardly recognized the person I was becoming—a woman who constantly complained and nagged, even at poor little Celeste, who would just look at me with frightened eyes and go seek the comfort of her father’s lap. I couldn’t tell her that it was impossible for me to find any sort of comfort, not in my husband’s lap or in anybody or anything. I couldn’t tell her that the world had become as flat for me as in the days before Columbus, and that I felt as if at all times I was drifting toward the edge and was sure to fall off.

  I couldn’t tell her that if she came here she would feel lost without the flowers and the green and the language we took for granted. That she would go days and days without hearing someone yell out “Buenos días” from across the street or even “Mal rayo te parta.” That she wouldn’t hear the annoying bicycle bells of the churro vendors or the curses of the garbage man as his wooden wheels ground into the potholes. Or smell the constant stench of the open sewers and the flies, mosquitoes, and gnats that swarmed there and often flew into our mouths when we laughed. All I could think of was that back there we laughed. I would give anything to laugh like that now, even if to do so would mean I had to swallow a million bugs.

  I couldn’t tell her that everything we found irritating back in Palmagria we would miss with a terrible desperation. No, I couldn’t do that. For all I knew, Imperio would have a much better time of it here—she’s much stronger, practical—and selfishly I wanted her here. I thought that perhaps with Imperio nearby the black dog would go away and I would start to greet each morning with my usual resolve and courage without even thinking about it, the way it had been back then, back there, when I knew who I was and where I was going at all times. When I never, for one second, encountered a doubt. Where the horizon was just a beautiful, distant line where the glorious sun went to sleep each night, the sea was the mattress and the sky was the blanket and all was cozy and blue and gold.

  I couldn’t tell her that even if Palmagria had turned into a hopeless little town filled with strangers, it was home.

  “Come,” I said instead. “Mi casa es tu casa.”

  *

  THE GIRLS IN THE VAN, they had it easy, with their apartments and television sets and the jobs at the toy factory and a van that picked them up and dropped them off. When Salud and I arrived we had nothing. Just hunger and poverty and heavy hearts and doubts that maybe we had been too hasty, had left too soon. We were sustained only by the hope that something would happen that would get us back to Cuba right away. We didn’t want to make ourselves too comfortable here. There had been an invasion, Playa Girón, which everyone insisted on calling Bay of Pigs, which gives you an idea of what Americans really thought about us. Playa Girón was a beautiful place, and pigs were not allowed there. Anyway, it had been a disaster. Salud blamed the Americans.

  “Their hearts weren’t really in it,” he said. “This has just been a pantomime.”

  “They will try again,” I said, “and next time they will succeed.” But I could tell Salud had stopped listening to me.

  Poor Salud was lost. In Palmagria he was practically a doctor, and here he was nothing, or less than nothing. Hard as he tried, Salud couldn’t learn English. It was as if his brain had a block against the language. So going back to being a chiropodist was out of the question. Imagine how we felt when we walked around Union City and saw the signs. There were chiropodists everywhere and clearly no need for any more. As dark as it was inside my mind, I never told him, because I suspected it was even darker inside Salud’s. He’d always been able to provide, and now it was as if his hands were tied. So I did what I had to do.

  I put on the best shoes I had and took to the streets to look for a job, leaving Celeste in his care. Every morning I looked through the newspapers and tried to decipher what the job ads said. And then I’d go to this factory or that. I was like a mute in those interviews, signaling to the foreman that I was strong and capable and always smiling. I was the sweetest girl for them. Subservient, even though my heart was breaking.

  I should be your boss, I’d think as I tried to fill out the application with a small, blunt- tipped pencil.

 
That was the year that I became Mrs. Rodríguez. I hated the sound of that. I had my own name, my own last name, the name of my father and mother, but here I was to be known as Caridad Rodríguez. The woman I had been was gone. I would fill out those applications as carefully as possible, answer all the questions, give them all the information. Imagínate!

  Imagine how absurd, to go through all that. It was like a slave showing up at a plantation and begging to be taken in, like offering your wrists to be shackled, only to be turned away, for no reason that I could understand. Of course they didn’t want someone who didn’t speak English—why should they? I tried place after place until finally we saw an ad that had the RCA Victor logo printed on it, the little dog listening to the Victrola. It was as if a light had gone on in my head. I recognized that little dog; he was on all our records at home. And as if that little dog had willed it, that was the first place where I was treated like a human being.

  The factory was big and white. So spotless it even smelled clean. It was hard to imagine that people worked there. I was taken into an office and left there, alone. The professional American woman who I assumed was going to conduct the interview rattled something in English, then rushed out. At first I thought she had gone to get a policeman. In those days I only expected the worst to happen, and I sincerely thought they were going to arrest me and send me back to Cuba and I would never see my husband and daughter again. I sat in the office and tried to calm my nerves by concentrating on the clean and organized desk with its neat towers of papers and folders. There was a telephone with many buttons on it. The telephone rang several times. I watched as the buttons lit playfully like a musical toy while the telephone rang and went off when the ringing stopped. The office smelled strongly of her perfume. I looked for photographs of her family but found none. On the wall hung a calendar with a picture of a long, wide, empty beach.