Tomorrow They Will Kiss (13 page)

A
s 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.