Tomorrow They Will Kiss

by Eduardo Santiago

  I just wanted to go home and lock the door. But Graciela wouldn’t hear of it. “Por favor, Cari, you have to stay until we cut the cake,” she said.

  Imagínate. She had changed out of her wedding dress and into something even more inappropriate. This dress was made of blue denim with white ruffles around the low- cut neck and more ruffles at the hem. She looked like I don’t know what. But you would think she was wearing silk the way she strutted around in white high heels, as high as you can imagine.

  The party took place in a rented hall off Bergenline Avenue. I asked if this was the same place where Castro used to hold his fund- raisers back in the fifties, but no one knew what I was talking about. Personally I wouldn’t have been at all surprised that Graciela would pick that particular establishment for her wedding reception. Graciela has a tendency not to think things through.

  There was a very loud American band playing the most horrendous music. You should have seen Graciela on that dance floor, shaking in directions I didn’t know the human body could go. She was the life of her own party, that one. I knew it would just be a matter of time before she jumped up onto that stage and grabbed the microphone away from the singer, if you could call him that. The music was too loud, if you want to call it music. I called it noise, and the worst sort of noise. It was all electric guitars and a big drum set. The sounds seemed to be aimed directly at the most sensitive part of my brain.

  I sat at the table as long as I could. Leticia and Imperio kept me company, but we could hardly hear each other. We just sat there, our purses on our laps, while Mario and Chano continued the tiresome conversation they had started in the van. We watched Graciela on the dance floor making all sorts of indecent moves. She swayed her hips like a rocking chair and shook her shoulders so that her breasts went this way and that. It was embarrassing. Leticia, Imperio, and I didn’t know where to look. And Graciela just wouldn’t stop dancing. Typical, when you think of the spectacle she used make at school assemblies back in Palmagria. She hadn’t changed one bit, that one. Not one bit.

  She danced with Barry, of course. That crazy band actually knew a slow song, and I have to admit Barry and Graciela looked good together. Who knows? Maybe they were in love. They were alone in the middle of the dance floor, and it was like they were lost in a dream. “Wake up,” I wanted to shout, but I decided to stay out of it. I knew it would be useless. Graciela was off and running. What else could I do but wish her luck? And then the music picked up again and she danced with both of his brothers. First the normal one and then with the other. With the other, she danced twice.

  I watched Graciela go up to the band and I thought, Here we go, she’s going to sing. But she just whispered something to the singer and he smiled big and nodded, and then he said something to the band and what do you know, they started to play something that sounded a lot like “Guantanamera.” Imagínate! But of course they know that song, I said to myself. The Americans own Guantánamo.

  Then, happy as if she was listening to the Cuban national anthem, Graciela started going from table to table, pulling people to their feet. Cloretta didn’t need much encouragement; no sooner had Graciela asked her than she was shaking her big body like the world was coming to an end. Imagínate, Cloretta was going home to smoke and ashes, but there she was, dancing the night away. I had never seen Graciela laugh so much, she could hardly stand from laughing. Is that what happiness looks like? I wondered. Like insanity?

  The band played “Guantanamera,” the singer machacando José Martí’s legendary lyrics, for what seemed like forever to me. Over and over the same little tune, over and over again the same few lines of the poem, for of course the Americano didn’t know all of them, just Guantanamera, guajira Guantanamera, over and over again. But Graciela didn’t seem to mind, Graciela was delighted.

  More and more people poured into the hall with shouts and kisses for the bride. The Cuban population of Union City was growing. We now had a panadería right there on Bergenline Avenue, not far from the hall, and from the looks of it, they had made the cake for the wedding. It looked just like a Cuban cake, pink and white meringue with a little plastic couple on top. There was a table full of choripan, pastelitos, croquetas, bocaditos. A real Cuban feast. It seemed to me Graciela hadn’t met a Cuban in Union City she didn’t invite to the party. The new girls, Flor and Orquídea, were there, smelling of detergent but laughing and dancing como si nada. Even the panadero and his wife were there. What were these people thinking, opening a business. Did they think we were going to stay in the U.S. forever?

  The cake sat there, and I could tell that Graciela had no intention of interrupting her dancing. I waited as long as I could. I was so nervous. I kept waiting for the FBI to show up because of all that business with Berta and the ashes.

  “This is going to turn ugly,” I said to Imperio. She knew exactly what I meant. Graciela couldn’t possibly have a wedding without a tragedy. I just knew they were going to show up and arrest us all. The longer we sat there, the more nervous I became. I almost wished the FBI would come and get it over with. The longer they waited, the more irritated I became. Had they given up the investigation because Berta was a Cuban? Didn’t we matter? Or had the riots in Newark distracted them? I didn’t know what to think.

  Finally I couldn’t take one more moment of it. I thought it best to just sneak out, to pretend I was going outside for fresh air and then vanish. I would walk home if I had to. I just wanted to get home and wash the whole crazy affair out of my hair. So I grabbed the flower centerpiece and discreetly said good- bye to the others sitting there. Imperio looked at me with a horrified face.

  “You’re going to leave me here?” she said, and started gathering her things. Leticia followed. Of course, with everyone at our table suddenly jumping up, I couldn’t make the clean getaway I had planned. As we reached the door, a sweating, panting Graciela ran up to us and hugged me like I was her sister. Imagínate, after all these years, that’s what she had become.

  “So soon? We’re just about to cut the cake.”

  “Leticia isn’t feeling well,” I said. But what I really wanted to say was “How could you be carrying on like that with Berta dead only a few weeks? Don’t you care about anyone but yourself?”

  Graciela turned to Leticia, and it was obvious that there was nothing wrong with Leticia at all. Leticia did not confirm or deny. She just stood there, paralyzed and probably hating me more than ever for putting her on the spot like that.

  Thank God the men took over. Suddenly they were all hugging and kissing Graciela, congratulating her and wishing her a happy life. Even Mario, who by now was, basically, drunk. Graciela accepted his embrace and good wishes. I could see her face over his shoulder, and I could tell from her expression that she had finally forgiven him.

  “Wait here,” she said to us. It wasn’t a friendly, happy Graciela who said it. Not the Graciela who had been tearing up the dance floor just a few moments before. This was Graciela with a posture like a knife and eyes that could see right through you. Leticia and the men went to the van. Imperio and I waited while Graciela walked to the a table where people had placed their presents and she returned with two little, delicately wrapped packages with bows and everything.

  “For my matrons of honor,” she said. Her voice was low, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into tears. We allowed her to draw us close to her and felt her embrace. She was hot and moist from dancing. I could feel the warmth of her body, smell her perfume, made more potent by her frantic dancing.

  For that one moment, at that instant, I loved Graciela, in all her infuriating imperfection. The feelings surprised me. Graciela clung to me, and finally I had to pull away. She had no choice but to release me from her suffocating embrace.

  Smiling, she handed one little package to me and the other to Imperio. We dropped them in our purses and practically ran to the waiting van.

  *

  I WAITED UNTIL I GOT HOME to open the little present. It’s not polite t
o open a present in front of the giver. What if I didn’t like it? You’d see it in my face. It was wrapped with shiny white paper that had little wedding bells and lovebirds all over it. On top of the box was a little white bow, the kind that Americans glue on because they can’t be bothered to do the simplest things, like use a piece of ribbon and tie a decent bow.

  I immediately telephoned Imperio.

  “Did you open it?” I asked.

  From the silence on the other end, I knew she had. Inside the little box I had found a doll’s head. It was pink and shiny and had that awful frozen smile that looks more like a grimace. Was this Graciela’s idea of a joke? And then, suddenly, I knew exactly what it meant. I grabbed that doll’s head and I threw it hard against the wall. But it didn’t break, it bounced back at me. It all made sense. Graciela had married our boss. I couldn’t believe Graciela was going to be our supervisor.

  chapter nineteen

  Graciela

  Rosalinda is a red rose, with sharp, deadly thorns. The kind of thorns that cut deep to the blood. She’s not like the girls in the previous telenovelas. She isn’t a delicate white rose, or blushing pink. Her love for Armando is hot and furious. She doesn’t tiptoe around waiting to be noticed, she wants him and doesn’t care who knows it. When she sees Armando, she quickly unbuttons the top two buttons of her blouse. Whenever he talks to her, she stands as close to him as she can. There is no doubt she wants him and she’s going to get him. In this telenovela, the blonde isn’t just the fiancée, she’s Armando’s wife. And Rosalinda is determined to break up that miserable marriage. Even after the accident that compromises her sight, she stomps around their mansion like she already owns it, and the wife almost trips over her own fancy shoes to get out of Rosalinda’s way.

  I was well aware of what Imperio and Caridad were up to, and it just made me laugh. I pretended I didn’t know that when they talked about me, they referred to me as Rosalinda. I knew all about it. I considered it an honor. And I enjoyed that they didn’t have the courage to say it to my face. Little cowards.

  “Baby, they fixate on you,” Barry said, “to keep from looking at themselves.”

  He was right. Imperio had her own very serious problems at home. Her husband, Mario, had a tendency to disappear. I knew all about it, because Leticia told me.

  “Imperio showed up at my apartment in tears,” she said, “because Mario hadn’t been home for three days.”

  Leticia had to take Imperio driving around in the van from bar to bar all over downtown Union City, for free. Imperio begged Leticia to stay double- parked outside each and every bar. Leticia had to sit and wait while Imperio ran into bar after bar to see if her husband was inside. Every time she returned alone and more frightened.

  “I had never seen her like that,” Leticia said. “She seemed ready to break into a million pieces. I could have taken her apart and put her together, like the dolls at the factory.”

  It turned out Mario was in jail for being drunk in public, and for fighting. And it wasn’t the first time. Mario Santocristo had always had a huge problem with alcohol, practically since birth. Imperio could pretend the accident didn’t happen, or that she didn’t remember, but there was a young man in Palmagria missing an eye due to Mario’s drinking. The way I heard it, the whole family had gone to a new restaurant on the outskirts of town that was known for making really good blood sausage stew. Mario, as usual, had had too much to drink and, on the way back, his favorite nephew, Felipe, had wanted to sit on his lap and pretend he was driving. Against Imperio’s protests, Mario indulged the boy, who at the time must have been about eight years old. Of all his nephews, Mario loved Felipe the most. He was a smart, good- looking little boy. Then, of course, the inevitable happened. Mario’s car smashed right into a palm tree and the boy went flying through the windshield. I remember the neighborhood was very quiet the week that poor child was in the hospital.

  Imperio insisted that Mario’s problems were due to some curse a neighbor put on him back in Palmagria, and I wondered how a curse could have followed him all the way to Union City. He was a drunk, he always would be. He was drunk the day he ruined that little boy’s life, and he was drunk the night he almost ruined mine. What business did he have telling Ernesto about Pepe? I saw no point in bringing it up, ever. The damage was done, and in this country we had to learn to coexist. But I remembered. How could I not? An accident could happen to anybody, but Mario in Union City was the same Mario as before. He’d been given plenty of opportunities, it seemed to me, and he continued to lose job after job because of his big mouth and his hot temper. Everybody who came to this country had to start at the bottom, but not Mario. Soon after he started a new job at a restaurant, washing dishes or bussing tables, he wanted to tell the owner how to run things.

  “In my restaurant, we did it like this,” he’d say, or, “In my restaurant, we did it like that.”

  Nobody wanted to hear it. It would have been like me going to Barry and telling him how to run the factory. How long would any of us last at a job if we behaved that way? And all that talk about Mario’s big restaurant back in Palmagria. It was a sandwich shop at the train station. I’m sure they did good business, but to hear him talk, he ran a five- star restaurant in the center of town. I remember that place, it was a timbirichi, a greasy spoon, nice for Palmagira, but hardly five stars. It was no stars, and why Mario and Imperio choose to remember it differently, I can’t understand.

  Everyone knows that Imperio’s trying to scrape money together to send for her mother- in- law, Liliana, who last I heard was a fire- breathing communist but suddenly is desperate to get out of Cuba. From what I heard, officials back in Cuba wanted her to go back to work. The law was “Él que no trabaja no come.” He who does not work does not eat.

  That was the new motto of the Revolution.

  “Liliana is too old to cut sugarcane all day,” Imperio said. “I promised her we would send for her, but time is passing and we can’t get the money. Now she sends horrible letters telling us we abandoned her. Por Dios, she could have come with us when we left, but she refused. She was so enamored of Fidel. Now she’s making it seem like we don’t want anything to do with her. We do want her here—at her age she could collect welfare, and we’d have a lot more money, believe me.”

  Caridad also has her share of problems. She refuses to admit that Celeste is seriously ill. No one knows what exactly is wrong with her, no one ever mentions it. Celeste has to be watched constantly because when she entered puberty she became very sexually aggressive. She’s done crazy things. She attacked the superintendent of their building. I heard that Celeste went out of control and practically raped the poor man. Salud had to pull her off of him. If left unattended she masturbates in public or shoves things into her vagina. No cucumber or banana is safe around the girl.

  Caridad says it’s a normal reaction to the hormones they give her. She gets hormone injections because her face tends to get hairy; the poor thing was starting to look like a monkey. Salud and Caridad can’t afford a private hospital. Someday Celeste will have to go into an institution for the rest of her life. Caridad lives in terror of what could happen to her daughter in one of those places. So they keep her at home. Salud quit his job and they have less money than ever. But Caridad continues to smear herself with expensive creams—how she affords them I don’t know, and I don’t much care.

  Salud was always a pompous ass. He thought he was a doctor. A doctor? He was a chiropodist, and not much of one at that. All he did was treat calluses and ingrown toenails. But the way he cocked around Palmagria wearing pressed white shirts and an air of superiority, it was like he almost expected you to call him “doctor.” Now he stays home all day, all night. Caridad says she needs him to watch Celeste, but where was he when Celeste attacked the super? I think he uses this obsession with Celeste to stay home and not do anything at all.

  So Caridad is up to her ears in debt. Her paycheck barely covers her rent and the payments to creditors. She is often
on the wrong side of Leticia because she can’t always come up with her monthly fee. She claims that all her money goes to the special care of their daughter. But everyone knows that Celeste gets a welfare check every month.

  Leticia loves her money. She puts up with anything in the van—bickering, theft, or if one of us has one of those mornings and is running late. She’ll wait patiently as long as every week we hand her the cash. She has absolutely no tolerance for moochers. None. But Caridad wants to live as if she’s still the pampered wife of a successful man, instead of the factory worker she really is.

  One morning, some months ago, when we stopped to pick up Imperio and Caridad, who always wait outside their building together, Leticia pointed her finger at Imperio and said, “You, get in.” And then she looked at Caridad and said, “But not you.”

  I almost died for Caridad. She stood on the sidewalk not knowing what step to take.

  “She doesn’t ride, nobody rides,” Imperio said, and she stood in front of the van.

  Leticia turned off the engine, jumped out of the van, and slammed the door.

  “Get out of the way,” she shouted at Imperio. But Imperio crossed her arms and wouldn’t move.

  “You think this is easy for me?” she then shouted at Caridad.

  “Leave her alone,” Imperio said, moving to the sidewalk and putting her arm around Caridad.

  Caridad started to cry, her hands cupped over her face.

  “No puedo más, no puedo más,” Caridad said between sobs. I can’t go on.

  “See what you’ve done, you greedy pig?” Imperio shouted.

  “She’s taking advantage,” Leticia shouted. “I’ve put up with it, but it’s been months. What am I supposed to do? I still have two years of payments on this piece of shit van. And her with her lotions and her new furniture. Do I have new furniture? Look at my hands, do I have fancy creams?”