Tomorrow They Will Kiss (14 page)

Sometimes Pepe was trapped in my bedroom during one of those afternoon gatherings, when the local ladies came to get their
nails done. It was quite a teeth- grinding feat trying to get them out of our house before Ernesto came home and found him.

One afternoon, Cuca Soto arrived early. I quickly closed the bedroom door and rushed to the living room to greet her. She
looked very pretty in a new orange- and- green- striped summer dress that looked like she had pulled it out of the sewing
machine just before she arrived. She had started wearing her silky black hair in a shoulder- length pageboy that flattered
her curious face. She had Sophia Loren’s mouth and Gina Lollobrigida’s eyes, so depending on the time of day, she could look
beautiful or monstrous. Her figure was still as trim as it had been when she was thirteen, even though she had four children
who were all under the age of ten.

“Te gusta?” she asked, and twirled around, a blur of orange and green, hardly taking notice that I was only half dressed.

“I love it,” I said, handing her my manicure box. “Why don’t you set up while I finish dressing. I’ll be out in a second.”

She accepted the task without question. I went back into the bedroom and could hear her in the dining room moving things around.
Setting out my cotton, my acetone, my colorful little bottles of the most up- to- date nail polish—Rosado Pálido, pale pink—which
was their current favorite. They all insisted on the same color. Never red. Not anymore. Red, they said, was the color of
the new regime.

Pepe was still in bed, still undressed. He looked like a long, brown, bright- eyed crocodile.

I remembered him years before at the little pine- dotted beach. There he was, a young man, just starting to show his beard,
the hair under his arms, on his chest. He was dark brown and dusted with white sand. I didn’t mind the flies that swarmed
all around my head, or the sand fleas that were picking at my legs. I only cared that the breeze carried the smell of guayabas
and seaweed. Pepe had been so playful that day at the beach, delicately handing me tiny seashells the size of a thumbnail,
and pale hermit crabs the same color as the sand. He placed the crabs on my arms, shoulders, breasts, and their sharp little
legs tickled me endlessly. Pepe’s white teeth showed through an eager smile that said, “Play with me forever.”

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.

*

T
HE 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.

W
e 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.