“Send me the right man or take away my desire to find true love,” I had prayed again and again. And they sent me Barry O’Reilly.
Who was I to say no?
I signed the divorce papers without conditions or requests and sent them back to Miami.
I was free to love again.
chapter seventeen
Imperio
Dios mío, Rosalinda was the only topic of conversation for weeks. Las niñas, as Leticia still insisted on calling us (even though there wasn’t one woman in that van who wasn’t on the slippery side of thirty), chattered faster, louder, and longer than ever. To keep from thinking about Berta, if you ask me.
I must admit, the telenovela was definitely heating up. It was the best one yet, and I’m not easy to impress. Rosalinda’s boss, Armando, had left his wife and confessed his love to her, but she refused to let him near her until after the operation. If she regained her sight, she would be his. If not, she made him promise to go away forever. Only a complete moron would believe that Rosalinda would not see again. The question that had everyone worked up was: When will Rosalinda and Armando kiss?
Caridad, who now sat in the front seat once again and for all times (Graciela knew better than to even mention changing the system), insisted there would be a surprise ending.
“Imagínate,” she said. “Rosalinda isn’t just going to regain her sight, but she’s also going to come to her senses. Don’t expect a wedding.”
“Caridad, what makes you think Rosalinda’s not going to marry him?” Leticia asked.
“What would that girl want with such a rich man?” Caridad said. “If Rosalinda marries Armando she will be miserable. People should marry people like themselves. If all your life you’ve been someone’s maid, even if in fact you are the true heiress of the plantation, the man you marry will always look at you as if you were the maid. When the honeymoon is over, and we all know that honeymoons don’t last forever, he’s going to see her for what she really is. The maid.”
Everyone disagreed with her. Even I disagreed with her—which is something I never do, not in front of the others. If I have a problem with Cari, I always discuss it with her in private. But we all wanted the happy ending. Why not? Even Berta, in a strange way, got hers. One of the little boxes made it to Cuba—and even if the authorities there opened it up and flushed her remains down the toilet, at least it was a Cuban toilet.
But Caridad wouldn’t leave it alone. Ever since Berta’s death she’d been nervous and grumpy. Even I saw a big change in her. She was always so kind and gentle. Too kind and too gentle if you asked me.
The other day she said, “Women should not marry men who are unlike them financially, and most importantly, they absolutely should not marry a foreigner.”
We all held our breath, because it was a loud and clear attack on Graciela. But Caridad was not done.
“Because you never know how often they bathe,” she added.
It was a really cruel thing to say, all things considered, coming from Caridad, who always smells like she slept on a bed of roses. I thought it was damn funny, but no one dared to laugh. The words hung in the stuffy air of Leticia’s van.
“Chá,” said Raquel with a sympathetic look to Graciela.
Graciela didn’t say anything at all. The discussion ended right then and there. As the van continued moving toward the factory, a very deep silence descended. Thoughts of Berta were inevitable, no matter how loud we talked, no matter how hard we laughed or quarreled.
Graciela kept her distance from us that week. But Caridad was obsessed.
“Can you imagine his ya tu sabes?” Caridad said to me one day, after we dropped Graciela off. Her hand went to her chest, as if to feel her own heartbeat, but her eyes remained fixed on mine.
I knew exactly what she meant. Santo Dios, it’s no secret to us that American men have their foreskin trimmed off when they are babies, like the Jews. And I couldn’t imagine. None of us could imagine having that big pink head looking at us all the time. At least our men have the decency to cover it up between rounds, like God intended.
Another night, on our way home, we were talking about the balseros, the countless Cubans arriving in Miami on rafts, and how short the distance between Florida and Cuba really was.
And then Graciela crossed a line. And I know these were not her words; it was the Americano talking. I would bet my life on it. It was raining that night, hard, gray, rain that made it so loud inside the van that we almost had to shout to hear each other. And we are not women with soft voices. But on that night we had to make an effort to be heard.
“Have you noticed,” Graciela said, “when you look at a map, that Cuba looks like a vagina, a horizontal slit quivering in the warm blue sea, and that the Florida peninsula looks like a big, hard, throbbing penis just waiting to . . .”
Graciela stopped and looked at Caridad.
“Waiting to ya tu sabes,” she finished, but her voice was mocking Caridad, who’s always had trouble voicing intimate body parts and functions.
Leticia almost drove the van off the road. The rest of us were mortified. We would never be able to look at our little country the same again.
“Graciela, how do you come up with such things?” Raquel said. Raquel was now always dressed in blue. In her desperation she had apparently turned away from Alpha 66 and now was asking La Virgen for help in getting her husband out of prison. But Caridad said it was just a smokescreen to cover up her affiliation with Alpha 66. And it made sense to me, because not once before, in all the time we’d known her, had Raquel even hinted at a spiritual life. But for weeks she’d been wearing that horrible blue dress she made herself, and a medallion. During the coffee breaks she disappeared somewhere, “to pray,” she claimed. But I suspected other motives.
“You can’t see it? A penis and a vagina?” Graciela asked, looking at each one of us. “Who knows, maybe it’s destiny, maybe it’s just a temporary squabble, a lovers’ quarrel. Maybe someday they will kiss and even make love.”
“Well,” Raquel said, “if you want to look at it like that, I will admit that Cuba is no virgin. She’s been penetrated by Americans before.”
“Exactly,” said Graciela, as if she was suddenly a professor of world history and geography. Two subjects I remembered very well that she didn’t quite get in school.
“And by the Spanish,” Raquel added, as if a brilliant thought had just occurred to her. “And the Russians.”
Caridad looked at me and I knew what she meant. Raquel’s blue promise was just a farce. No true disciple of La Virgen would ever entertain such a thought.
“Niiiiñas, can you talk about something else, please? Graciela, you too,” Leticia shouted over the pounding rain. “I won’t have my country insulted in my van. I won’t have her talked about as if she was a bitch in heat. I may be far away, but she’s still my country.”
Silence followed. We drove along with just the rain, and a strange sadness. I knew these were the filthy thoughts that Mr. O’Reilly was putting in Graciela’s head. Perverted pillow talk. For me it just brought a picture of their sex life that, frankly, I would rather not have to think about. It just made us even more uncomfortable with that relationship. I couldn’t stand it much longer.
“Tomorrow they will kiss,” I said.
“Too soon,” Leticia said. “Rosalinda’s still bandaged. It will happen after the bandages are removed, and you know it’s going to be blurry at first, it will take some time for her to see clearly.”
We had all watched enough telenovelas to know that she was right. The next few weeks would be blurry, because we would be looking at the world through the watery eyes of a formerly blind girl. And then the image would get clearer and clearer until the end. Until that kiss.
*
NO MATTER HOW WE FELT about Barry O’Reilly or how big our hints to Graciela, she was determined to go ahead with her plan—her crazy, crazy plan. She was like a little bird chirping. Her happiness was so annoying it was giv
ing me headaches.
But just the same, that Saturday morning we all had to put away our differences and put on our best outfits. We tried to make the best of a very uncomfortable situation.
At first I didn’t want to go. It felt as if I was betraying the entire community. But I’m not one to piss on the parade of others, so I clenched my teeth, took four aspirins, and got dressed.
Of all the days in the year, Graciela had to pick July 15, a day when the blacks of Newark had decided to set the city on fire. Leticia picked us up in the van, except it was her husband, Chano, behind the wheel. And the van was fresh that day because Chano didn’t do deliveries on Saturdays, and I guess he took the trouble to clean it out. The last thing I needed was to arrive smelling like raw pork. Leticia sat in the passenger seat, where Berta used to sit. And once again it was very quiet. It was the first time that we’d had men in there. Mario, uncomfortable in a suit and smelling too strongly of cologne, sat next to me. Caridad came alone. Salud, as usual, stayed home with Celeste.
Leticia wanted to talk about the new telenovela they were advertising, the one that will follow Rosalinda. It was to be called Amor Perdido. Love Lost. It would be the first telenovela shown in color. A todo color! Of course none of us had a color television, so we’d have to settle for watching it in black-and-white. But every time Leticia started to talk, her husband, Chano, interrupted her.
“Shut up about those stupid telenovelas,” is what he actually said!
And Leticia just kept quiet. She just backed down. Leticia, who was always in charge. Por Dios, what kind of a marriage is that? I wondered if he beat her. If Mario ever dared to talk to me like that I’d smack him with a frying pan so hard he’d never say another word again without drooling. Suddenly it was clear to me that Chano had forced Leticia to smuggle the jewelry out of Cuba in her chocha. In her chocha! That definitely explained why she never wanted to talk about it. But I didn’t say anything. We just traveled in silence. I missed our chatter. It would have been nice to be able to talk to the girls about Rosalinda, the way we always did in the van. But having those two men in there made everything different. All they wanted to talk about was what was going on in Newark. I wanted to tell Leticia’s husband that we had a right to talk about anything we wanted, but I chose not to because the last thing I needed was Mario getting all worked up. He’d already had a couple of drinks before we left and had been ranting about the treatment of los negros in this country.
So we had to sit there quietly while the men tried to solve all the problems of the world. At least our husbands were Cubanos, for better or for worse. We didn’t go running off with an American like Graciela. We didn’t sell ourselves to the foreigners. As Caridad said, “We still have a sense of decency.”
*
IT WAS THE STRANGEST WEDDING! Por Dios, who gets married in a city park? On a Saturday? During a riot? Shouldn’t a wedding take place on a Sunday, in a church? But we all showed up with our presents. Caridad and I were shocked that she wanted us to be her matrons of honor, but how could we refuse? For better or worse, we’d known her all our lives, and that first wedding of hers was such a disaster. I looked around, almost expecting to see Arroz Blanco standing there waiting to give her blessings. If only she were here, I thought, for this union certainly could use a good luck charm, even a tarnished, toothless, demented one like Arroz.
“Of course,” Caridad said, smiling through clenched teeth, “she only asked us because her comadre Berta is dead.”
“This is such a mistake,” I replied.
“What’s one more stripe to a tiger?” Caridad said, looking up at the smoky skies.
So we went along. Por Dios, Graciela didn’t even tell us ahead of time. Probably with good reason. If we’d had time to think about it, we probably would have refused, made up some sort of excuse. But Graciela, in spite of all her endless blunders, was not stupid. Just seconds before the ceremony, she ran to us and, in that breathless way she has, said, “I can’t do this alone. I’m so far away from home. I need you two to stand with me.”
We knew exactly what she meant. Por Dios, we all felt like orphans in this country. We pretended it wasn’t a problem, but deep down inside, everyone felt adrift. So we let her take us by the hand and we gladly gave her away.
Gladly.
Graciela was wearing something made of white gauze. A wedding dress, sort of. She designed it herself, and it showed. Mario said she looked like a mummy from a horror movie. The wedding took place at sunset, and there were lots of people from work. Cloretta was there, big and black, in a floral gown and a big, wide hat. She was at a wedding while her entire neighborhood was going up in flames. In flames! She was all smiles and good wishes. I kept an eye on her, though, and I noticed that every time a siren sounded, she stiffened.
Some of Barry’s family members were there. He has two older brothers, and one of them looked a little afeminado, if you know what I mean. A tall, skinny man with long hair just like Barry’s, he was looking at that strange wedding dress of Graciela’s as if he wanted to be the one wearing it. But no one seemed to take notice except Caridad and me.
The only person missing was Raquel, who had taken a bus to Miami the week before to join her husband, who was waiting for her there.
“What did I tell you?” I said to Caridad when Raquel told us she was leaving. That was all she told us, and I was surprised that she didn’t just disappear. She could have, for as much as we ever saw of her except in the van and at work.
Caridad just looked at me with that look I know so well.
“It’s just as we suspected,” she said. “Raquel must be Alpha Sixty- six. How else do you explain a man getting out of jail and making it to Miami? He was rescued or paid for. I have no doubt of that.”
Raquel had packed up her blue dresses, her little girls, and their headless dolls, and off they all went to live in Miami.
Leticia drove her to the bus depot, and we all went to say our tearful good- byes and to wish her luck. It’s what we always do. We show up for our own, no matter how misguided their decisions.
As Raquel climbed the steps to the bus, Caridad put a hand on her shoulder.
“Óyeme,” she said with the best intentions. Listen. “If things turn out different than you expect, come back. Remember, prison changes a man. You haven’t seen him in a long time. You don’t know who he is anymore.”
“Chá,” Raquel said, with a twist of her orange lips. And without a look back, she got on that bus.
“Leave her, Caridad,” Graciela said. “The promise to La Virgen worked for her. She’s going to be all right.”
Graciela, always so naive about the simplest things. This had nothing to do with the Virgin or the saints. It was politics, plain and simple. But there she stood, crying and waving as the bus pulled away with a big fart of black smoke.
I had the feeling Raquel would be back. From the sounds of it, her husband was trouble. Real trouble. I didn’t know him or anything about him, but I had a strong feeling that something was wrong. I mean, for a man to be rescued out of jail, he must be in with someone. And who that someone was I would rather not know. In my heart I wished her my very best.
At least Raquel didn’t have to be at that wedding. She may have been headed for heartache, but at least she dodged that bullet. And Leticia already had two new women lined up to fill her seats. One of them was named Flor and the other Orquídea. They seemed nice enough—Cubans, of course. But they were not assembly line, like us, they were part of the janitorial staff, and they smelled like it, believe me. But as long as they paid on time, I didn’t think Leticia cared. We might need to have a little talk with her.
*
THE SMOKE FROM THE RIOTS in Newark darkened what little sun there was. The brown clouds seemed to struggle with the blue and the effect was that of an enormous bruise. But Graciela didn’t notice. Graciela, nervous and excited, stood between Imperio and me and pledged eternal love to a man she hardly knew—and will probably never know v
ery well.
Although her English had improved.
She didn’t even have a Catholic priest there. No priest would have been caught dead at such a spectacle. The ceremony was performed by a stuttering friend of Mr. O’Reilly’s from the shipping department. He looked sort of Jewish to me. He had long hair, like Mr. O’Reilly’s but brown, and big, round eyes. He read from a wrinkled sheet of paper, but he could hardly be heard because of the patrol car and ambulance sirens blasting on their way to and from Newark.
Graciela’s boys were very well behaved. Ernestico seemed a little dazed, probably wondering what life would be like now that there was another man in his family. I wondered how his father felt about the whole thing. Poor Ernesto, our teacher of so long ago. Just like I’d said ten years before, that marriage never should have taken place. And I didn’t want to be a cynic, but I had serious doubts about this one too.
Manolito read a poem he wrote himself. It was like being back in Palmagria and watching Graciela. He seemed to have all of his father’s best qualities. He read the poem with a clear and serene voice, not in Graciela’s dramatic way. Those words seemed to have come directly from his heart.
And Mr. O’Reilly, well, El Americano wore his long blond hair loose and flowing. I thought he’d have the decency to at least get a haircut. But no, his hair was as long as Graciela’s. Y de contra, a tear rolled down his cheek during the ceremony. Dios Santo, a grown man who cried . . . in public . . . I predicted a problem.
chapter eighteen
Caridad
I would never begrudge anyone their happiness. Just the same, I tried to skip the reception. And all that business with los negros in Newark had me nervous, very nervous. All those sirens and helicopters! Celeste didn’t like loud noises, any commotion could set her off. And even though she was home with her father, I had no idea what I would find when I returned.
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