Tomorrow They Will Kiss (24 page)

“Poor Graciela,” I said, “has no idea what’s going on in the world.”

“Poor Graciela?” Imperio said. “Poor Graciela is planning her next move. A woman like that is never
just
sitting, she’s never
just
reading the newspaper. She always has
something
going on below the surface.”

Imperio had been asking about Mr. O’Reilly, and rumor had it that he smoked marijuana and probably used other drugs. She found
out he had a five- year- old daughter but was never married to the mother, and had been taken to court for child support violations
more than once. That was the kind of man Graciela was getting herself tangled up with. I thought we should try to talk some
sense into her, but Imperio said it would be a waste of our time.

“Just sit back and watch it unravel,” Imperio said. “It has happened before, and it will happen again.”

I tended to listen to Imperio, she was the practical one. But in spite of everything, I was sick with worry.

*

G
RACIELA WAS AWAY CAMPING
on the day that poor Berta died, so it was left to us to take care of everything. We had to contend with the ugly side of
death.

It happened on a Sunday, the day when we always visited Berta at the hospital. Imperio and Mario picked me up at two o’clock
that afternoon. It was March, and it felt as if summer had started too soon. Union City was empty and quiet. The air was thick
with diesel fumes and the smoke from the refineries. The sun looked big and dark through the haze and cast the sort of ugly,
brown light that made me nauseous. Mario stayed out on the sidewalk to finish a cigarette.

Inside the hospital it was air- conditioner cool, but it still felt humid and sticky. Even before we reached Berta’s room,
I knew her bed would be empty. And it was.

The first thing I felt was that the ground had gotten soft under my feet. It was like standing on cushions. Then the walls
began to stretch and bend and a strange nausea attacked my insides. Then I felt Imperio grip my arm. Her hand dug into my
forearm like a claw.

“Por Dios, Caridad, don’t faint,” she said, and she said it sternly, with a tone she’d never used on me before. She talked
to many people like that, but never to me.

“Look at me,” she said. I raised my eyes to hers and they were on fire.

“Hold on to me,” she said. “We have a lot to do now. We have to get through this together.”

For the rest of my life I would be amazed at her strength. Her character. Call her what you will—cold, heartless—but to me
she was strength. Together we walked to the nurses’ station.

“When did it happen?” Imperio asked the Puerto Rican nurse.

The nurse checked a sheet of paper on her desk.

“Last night, a little after eleven,” she said.

“And no one called?” I asked.

The nurse glanced at the sheet of paper again.

“It says here,” she said, “that the attending nurse placed a call to Graciela Altamira, but there was no answer. Do you know
who she is?”

We both nodded.

“I am Graciela Altamira,” Imperio said. “I was out last night.” I was impressed with how quickly Imperio lied, and more than
a little disturbed to hear her call herself Graciela. No two people were less alike.

“Can we see Berta?” I asked, hoping to divert the nurse’s attention.

“Miss Altamira can,” the nurse said, her eyes on Imperio.

“It’s okay,” Imperio said. “She’s with me.”

“But first I need to see some ID,” the nurse said.

“Qué?”

“Identification.”

“I left in such a hurry,” Imperio said quickly and without hesitation, “that I forgot my purse.”

“Isn’t that your purse right there?” the nurse said, pointing at the brown leather purse clearly hanging from her arm.

“I meant my wallet,” Imperio said. She was like lightning.

Imperio locked eyes with the nurse. Angry tears were now flowing down her cheeks. But the eyes of the nurse remained unmoved.
In all the time I’d known her, which was all my life, I had never seen Imperio even remotely close to tears.

“Vámonos,” I said. Let’s go. I took Imperio by the arm. She let me lead her away, while the nurse looked at us and shook her
head as if we’d tried to do something horrible.

We went to Berta’s apartment. We needed to find her son’s telephone number. The super let us in. And even though Berta was
miles away, the place already smelled like death, like dead flowers. Her apartment was small and very neat, just one room.
She used her bed for a couch, and there were so many little pillows on it that you had to sit on the edge.

“All those pillows are a sure sign of a lonely woman,” Imperio said.

“What ever happened to her husband?” I asked.

Imperio gave me a funny look.

“There never was a husband. Her family sent her to work here when she was a young girl because she got pregnant. They sent
her here to live with relatives, who I guess are dead by now. And they never let her go back to Cuba. Not even for a visit.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody. I just figured it out. I mean, look around, it’s obvious.”

“Imperio,” I said, “that is how rumors get started.”

She gave me a funny look and said, “Only if you repeat it. I know you won’t tell anybody.”

“Poor Berta,” I said to change the subject.

“It’s too late now for laments,” Imperio said. “Berta lived her life the way she wanted to, and she was lucky to have friends
like us. Friends who didn’t ask too many questions, or judge her, no matter how crazy and irresponsible she had been in her
youth.”

“Claro que no,” I said. Of course not.

Imperio smiled and we continued our search. We were good people doing a good deed for a dear friend.

Before we found the address book, neatly tucked in a drawer by the telephone, we found something that squeezed every drop
of blood out of my heart—a cardboard box, filled with doll parts. There were dozens of little mismatched legs, arms and torsos,
all the same shiny pink, all waiting for the head that never came. Imperio immediately grabbed it.

“This has to go straight to the incinerator,” she said and stepped outside. I nodded as I frowned over Berta’s address book.
We never did know her son’s name, and the thought of calling the wrong person terrified me. Berta had never referred to him
by name; it was always “my son” this and “my son” that.

And her address book was not as neat as her apartment would have you believe. There were things listed as just one name, like
Bebo, for example, and then several numbers scribbled under it, or addresses on scraps of paper tucked into the pages with
no logic whatsoever. Some had numbers that we recognized as Cuban because they were only four digits. But there were several
of those—which one was in Formento?

Some were for people here in Union City, or scattered over other parts of the United States. We even saw our own names. Just
our first names and our telephone numbers. No address. When we finally located her son’s number, there was no denying it because
all it said was Venezuela. It was not under the V’s, it was under the E’s.

His name was Eladio, and he didn’t live in Caracas, as we had always imagined, but in a place called Maracaibo.

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.

E
arly 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.