I was too nervous to dial myself, so I got Imperio to do it. And it just rang forever. Meanwhile, poor Berta was cold and alone in a hospital morgue.
“Let’s try again later,” Imperio said. And so we waited, sitting in that apartment and getting sadder. We didn’t want to go to our own homes to call, because now that Berta was dead, the telephone call would be free.
“Let the phone company try to collect after she’s buried,” Imperio said. Then she went into the kitchen to make some café for us, and soon the smell of dead flowers was replaced by the smells of coffee and the smoke of our Kool cigarettes.
All over the walls hung pictures of the man we needed to reach. There were pictures of him alone, at different stages of growth. There were baby pictures and childhood pictures. Pictures of a teenager with bad skin and wild hair. There were also pictures of him as a serious adult, a wedding picture, and pictures of his wife and his children.
“So we can see him,” Imperio said, “but we can’t reach him.”
There was only one photograph of Berta in the apartment. It had been taken a very long time ago. It was a studio portrait of Berta, when she was very young. She was pretty in a unique way, with a very provocative look on her face—the sort of look that had been getting Cuban women in trouble since the sons of Isabel of Castilla first met the daughters of the Taino Indians. Her shoulders were bare and smooth, with a pronounced beauty mark on the left one. Around her neck hung a lovely necklace made of black stones, probably onyx—el azabache—that we make our children wear to ward off the evil thoughts of others. An azabache is always only one stone, but Berta had a whole string of them around her neck. She must have felt she needed the extra protection. A woman alone in the United States with a little boy, qué lástima.
Imperio moved to the most recent picture of Eladio. He was a middle- aged man now, but the expression on his face had not changed.
“He doesn’t look anything like her,” Imperio said. She was right. The man in the pictures must have resembled the missing father. He was very distinguished, his face serious, even arrogant. He had thick black hair greased away from his wide forehead, a big mustache, and the eyes of a killer.
“He looks like a real son- of- a- bitch,” Imperio said.
“Imperio, his mother is not even cold yet,” I said.
Well, I didn’t know what sort of place this Maracaibo was, but it took us all night to reach him. A complete waste of time. When someone finally answered the telephone I was told to wait while they went to get him. It took a while.
“They must have gone to get him out of the devil’s ass,” Imperio said.
When he finally got on the line, he talked so slowly it was like pouring oil through cheesecloth.
“Look, señora,” he said, very respectfully, as you would imagine, under the circumstances. “I can’t possibly go to New Jersey to bury my mother. Do you know where Maracaibo is?”
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t even know what Maracaibo was, but I simply said, “No.”
“Look, señora, Maracaibo is a ten- hour bus ride away from Caracas in good weather, and it has been raining here like you wouldn’t believe. Bridges between here and Caracas have washed away. And Caracas is where the airport is, así que se la van a tener que arreglar.”
Imperio was next to me, straining to hear the other side of the conversation.
“What’s he saying?” she asked.
I held my hand over the mouthpiece and told her. Imperio, she grabbed the telephone away from me.
“Por Dios,” she said to him, her voice rising. “What sort of son are you? After all the sacrifices your poor mother made for you.”
She was beginning to scream, so I took the telephone away from her. She walked to the other side of the room, and it looked to me as if she was going to start pounding the walls. I knew this had little to do with Berta and her son, and a lot to do with Mario and his mother, so I just looked away and tried to be as gracious as I could with this Eladio on the phone.
“Look, señora,” he said again, getting a little less respectful, as you can imagine, because he thought he was still talking to Imperio, who had been less than respectful to him. He didn’t know that the telephone had been handed back to me, that Imperio was in a corner ready to take one of his photographs and smash it on the floor.
“I feel terrible that my mother has died so far away,” he continued. His voice got tight. There was a long pause, and I knew he was crying. When he spoke again I could detect a vague Venezuelan accent. “I have begged her to come live here with us for years, and she has always refused. She said she didn’t want to live here with the Indians. She said she preferred the Americans. So there you have it. If my mother died alone, it is because that’s the way she wanted it. I don’t know what else to say to you or what I can do for her.”
“Well, your mother is not alone,” I said. “But there is the matter of money. Funerals are expensive in this country.”
Imperio was nodding her head, her curly hair bobbing.
There was a silence on the other end of the line. Somewhere in Venezuela an orphan was weighing his options.
“Look,” he said. “Certainly I can send you a little something, but it’s not like I’m made of money. I work in the oil fields here and I have children to support.”
“Well, we’re not made out of money either,” I said. “We just work with her. So anything you can send will be an alivio.” A relief.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. Then he hung up without so much as an adiós. We never heard from him again, not by telephone, and not by mail, and we didn’t see a nickel from him. I remembered Raquel always saying, “In Cuba, families stay together.” Maybe for poor Berta that was just a fantasy. Never in my life had I met a woman so alone in the world. Not only had her family back in Formento turned its back on her, but now so had her one and only son. I wondered what sort of woman Berta had been in her youth. Probably the type that’s out dancing every night. There are plenty of that type in Cuba. Which would explain a lot. Particularly her aching legs.
chapter fifteen
Imperio
Early the next morning we knocked on Graciela’s door. Caridad wanted to talk to her about Berta, and I wanted to see if we could catch Mr. O’Reilly sneaking out of her apartment. But he wasn’t there. Graciela opened the door immediately. The boys were still sleeping, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. In weeks! Her eyes were red and the skin around them swollen. She was already dressed and I could smell coffee and boiled milk. The place looked decent enough. The lawn furniture had been replaced by a small burgundy sofa, the kind that turns into a bed, and a wooden coffee table. The dingy white walls had been painted light blue and the kitchen bright green. The blue was nice, but a green kitchen? Por Dios! Just looking at it made me nauseous.
“Raquel told me,” Graciela said as soon as we stepped inside. “I’ve been on the telephone with Berta’s family. You know how it is, it takes all night to place a call to Cuba.”
“What family?” Caridad and I asked at the same time.
“Her family in Formento,” Graciela said.
Caridad went into the kitchen and got café for both of us. Graciela chattered on about how at the hospital Berta had given her all sorts of instructions and information.
“She knew she didn’t have much time left,” Graciela said. “She had a vision.”
Dios Santo. A vision. And she tells all this to Graciela but purposely leaves me and Caridad in the dark. It just didn’t seem possible.
“If Berta knew she was dying,” I asked, “why didn’t she tell us? We were the ones at the hospital every damn day.”
If Berta hadn’t been dead already, I would have strangled her, I was so angry. Now I was furious with Graciela, and with good reason. I gulped down the tiny cup of café.
“If Berta told you she knew she was dying,” I said, “why the hell did you disappear for the weekend?”
Graciela took the empty cof
fee cup from my hand and went to the kitchen sink. We followed.
Graciela kept her back to us. She washed that little cup so thoroughly I thought she was going to rub off the paint.
“She told me to go,” Graciela said. “I told her I had planned a camping trip, that I had the feeling Barry was going to propose, and she said to go, that the visions had told her it wouldn’t be for a few days. I knew she was ill, but I’ve also seen her be ill before, and I’ve seen her come back from it like nothing happened. So I don’t understand why you’re so upset, Imperio. It was a simple miscalculation.”
“Did that man propose to you?” Caridad asked. Personally, at that moment, I couldn’t have cared less. I was growing more and more furious with Berta, dead or not.
“I don’t want to talk about that now,” Graciela said, and walked past us and into the living room. Again we followed.
“So he didn’t,” I said. And from the way she held her jaw and her head bent down just a little, I knew I’d hit my target. That man, I was convinced, was never going to marry her. Never!
Graciela couldn’t understand why we were so upset. Of course, Graciela can never understand lo que no le conviene, what she doesn’t want to understand. She was talking about Berta’s visions and marriage proposals just to confuse us. Berta didn’t have any visions. Of that I was convinced. Graciela went camping because Graciela always does lo que le sale—whatever she wants.
“We talked to her son, and it was the hardest thing we’ve ever done,” Caridad said. “He’s washing his hands of the whole thing.”
“In Maracaibo,” Graciela said, as if this was a commonly known fact.
“Yes,” I said. “Por Dios, that son of Berta’s is a cold bastard. Cold! Good thing Caridad grabbed the telephone, or he would have gotten an earful from me.”
“Did he tell you what she wanted?” Graciela asked. “Did Eladio tell you about the arrangement?”
She knew his name! Graciela said “arrangement” slowly, savoring each letter in her mouth. We just looked at her, because from her tone we knew something was coming. And she took her time, took her long sweet time, and we were not about to beg her for an answer.
“Eladio did not mention any arrangements,” I said.
“Well, maybe he doesn’t know,” Graciela said. “He’s been feuding with Berta because she refused to go live with him in the oil fields. I don’t know how often they talked or how often they wrote to each other. Berta wanted him to come here and bring the grandchildren, but Eladio kept saying he didn’t want to arrive in this country without any money, so he stayed there, where he could make a comfortable living, and I guess the years passed and he got used to it. You know how it is. But Berta suffered because of it. She only met one of her seven grandchildren. You know what Raquel always says: ‘In Cuba, families stay together.’ Well, not anymore, as we all know too well. I mean, look at us.”
And when Graciela said “look at us,” her eyes welled up and we could tell she was on the edge of a big scene. It was suddenly going to be all about Graciela, her loss, her grief, how hard she was taking this, and how lonely and far from her loved ones she was. As if we didn’t know she couldn’t wait to get as far away from her family as she could. As if we didn’t know that she never writes to her family, that they haven’t seen a picture of the boys in a very long time, if ever.
I could almost see the curtain going up on the theatrical stage that has always been Graciela’s life.
Caridad had had enough. I could see all that ladylike patience of hers coming to an end.
“What did she want, Graciela?” she said firmly.
“She wanted her body shipped back to Cuba,” Graciela said. “She doesn’t want to be in New Jersey for all eternity.”
I didn’t have to think about it twice.
“Por Dios, it must have been the fever,” I said. “She’s lived here most of her life.”
“Imagínate,” Caridad said, a hand over her mouth.
“Was she out of her mind?” I asked. “Por Dios, Graciela, was she delirious? What exactly did she say?”
“Just what I told you, that she didn’t want to spend eternity here. That she had already been here too long. Those were her exact words, may she rest in peace. I guess she never mentioned it to you. I guess you didn’t know.”
Apparently there was a lot we didn’t know. For one thing, we didn’t know that Berta and Graciela were so incredibly chummy, that they were practically comadres.
“But not so chummy,” Caridad later said, in her slow, measured tone, “that Graciela didn’t strap on a backpack and leave her friend’s deathbed to go frolic in the woods with that man.”
The clear and senseless selfishness of it all came to light when Graciela reached into a drawer and took out the letter. We had no idea that Berta had given Graciela written instructions, which she was only too happy to wave in our faces. The letter was addressed to Graciela, handwritten and signed by la difunta herself.
“Mi Queridísima Amiga Graciela . . .” it started. My dearest friend. Singular. So there was no mistaking that this letter was intended for Graciela and no one else. What about us? We were the ones at her side almost to the moment when she took her last breath. And then it went on about the evenings they had spent together and what an alivio those times had been for her. A comfort!
“What is this, about the evenings she spent with you?”
Graciela took the letter from me and looked at it as if seeing it for the first time, as if she’d missed that part.
“She came here to watch the telenovelas sometimes,” she said, her eyes welling up again.
“What’s sometimes, Graciela?” I asked.
“I don’t know, two, three times a week.”
“Imagínate,” Caridad said. “I had no idea.”
Suddenly it was clear to me.
“Did Berta cook for you?” I asked.
“Sometimes, whenever she felt like it. She said that she hated cooking just for herself. It was mostly on nights when I had school.”
So that’s where all those leftovers came from that Graciela was so generously offering to Raquel. What a little conspiracy the two had going. With Berta cooking for Graciela, and Graciela giving the front seat in the van to Berta, and both of them quiet like little mice about the whole thing.
“You let that old lady come here after dark?” Caridad said.
“Whenever she could get a ride. Or Ernestico would help her—it’s only two blocks,” Graciela said without a note of apology. As if it was the most normal thing in the world to send your son out at night in Union City with an old woman and let him walk the streets alone.
The rest of the letter was about Berta’s money, which apparently she had plenty of, in a savings account.
“She saved whatever Eladio sent her from Maracaibo because she didn’t want to be a burden to him when this happened,” Graciela said.
“He sent her money?” I said. “No wonder he sounded so upset this morning.”
The letter went on, very specifically, about how the money was to be used to buy a coffin and to send her body back to Cuba in the event of her death. She even had the name of a mortuary in Miami that specialized in that morbid business of transporting bodies from one country to another.
I stood up and looked Graciela in the eye, practically backing her into a wall. I saw Caridad’s eyes grow wide, as if expecting me to grab Graciela by the hair and pull her to the ground. Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind.
“You realize this is crazy,” I said, almost spitting in her face. “Don’t you? You know what they do, don’t you? The government steals the coffins and throws the bodies into wooden crates so they can use the fancy American coffins when one of Castro’s cronies dies. You know that, don’t you? She can rest right here in Union City. What difference does it make now? Just because Berta went a little crazy from her illness doesn’t mean we have to carry out this crazy wish of hers.”
“Not us, me,” Graciela said. She s
lapped her chest with her hand, but it felt like a slap in my face. She was trying to squeeze us out, take it all for herself. Graciela the hero, Graciela the saint.
“Look,” she said, a little softer. “I know you loved Berta, we all did. I need your help and your support, but what Berta wanted is what she’s going to get. I don’t care what I have to do to get her back there. I’ve already talked to her family in Formento, and we’re all in agreement. They have a family plot there, and that’s where she should go. Not here all by herself in this cold, foreign ground. She’ll be miserable here. Her spirit won’t get any rest.”
And then she stopped, bit her lips as if to keep them from trembling, and said, “Por favor, don’t fight me on this.”
I looked at Caridad, who only shrugged helplessly. We had no way of knowing if Graciela was telling the truth about a family plot in Formento. And we couldn’t prove that she was lying either. She had to have been, of that we were convinced. But no one could stop Graciela once she set her mind on something. Por Dios, shipping a body back to Cuba! We had seen bodies in the news being shipped back to America from Vietnam. Coffins covered with the American flag and filled with men hardly old enough to shave. Is that where Berta got her crazy idea? Should we cover Berta’s coffin with the Cuban flag? Or would that be just a little too much? One thing was certain, Graciela was determined to send Berta back and there appeared to be nothing we could say or do to stop her.
*
FORTUNATELY, GRACIELA WAS ABLE TO TALK to Mr. O’Reilly and get us excused from work. Dios mío, what Berta put us through that week. She had been very little trouble in life, but in death, she was nothing but. I don’t know where Berta got her information, but there was no such thing as sending bodies to Cuba. The place in Miami did not exist. A child answered the phone and told Graciela that his parents were not home.
“What kind of a funeral home is that,” I asked, “that has children answering the telephone?”
“Are you sure you dialed right?” Caridad asked.
Graciela tried calling again later while we stood around her like idiots, a coffee cup in one hand and a mentholated cigarette in the other, our hearts pounding with anticipation. We wanted Graciela to fail. We wanted her to give up, and put Berta in the ground, in New Jersey, where she belonged. At first there was no answer, the telephone just rang and rang. Graciela avoided our eyes, the receiver to her ear for an eternity. An eternity!
Tomorrow They Will Kiss Page 19