Tomorrow They Will Kiss
Read Tomorrow They Will Kiss Online
Authors: Eduardo Santiago
Copyright © 2006 by Eduardo Santiago
Reading group guide © 2006 by Eduardo Santiago and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company
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Visit our website at
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.
First eBook Edition: June 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-07670-8
Extraordinary advance praise for Eduardo Santiago’s
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
“
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
is a sheer delight, by turns as hilarious and heartbreaking as the telenovelas the novel’s heroines watch. Santiago has created
a compelling chorus of Cuban womanhood. Along the way he meditates on exile, community, and the complexities of loyalty and
love in fresh and poignant ways.”
—Cristina Garcia, author of
Dreaming in Cuban
“A delightful book! Santiago enchants us with these three women and their tangled relationships, from their youth together
in a small town in Cuba to their lives in 1960s New Jersey. He spins their unique voices and attitudes with a humorous eye
and rich understanding of how, among exiles, community will trump personal history, even an acrimonious one. Like mango sprinkled
with chili,
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
is sweet, with a bite.”
—Janet Fitch, author of
White Oleander
and
Paint It Black
“Eduardo Santiago proves with his first novel that he has the true novelist’s gift of completely inhabiting his narrator’s
mind and voice.
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
is a large-hearted, large-spirited novel that takes us straight into a vivid and colorful world, and shows great promise
for this writer’s future.”
—Mark Childress, author of
One Mississippi
and
Crazy in Alabama
“A feast of splendidly drawn characters—of anxious dreamers, lost souls, and gritty survivors—
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
is a work of gentle loveliness, sometimes searing and often hilarious.”
—Ann Louise Bardach, author of
Cuba Confidential
“Eduardo Santiago has captured the voice of Cuban womanhood in all its whimsical, musical beauty. This is a compelling and
compassionate story.”
—Charles Fleming, author of
After Havana
and
The Ivory Coast
“Gift-wrapped in passionate lives with an explosion of magical images for a bow,
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
delivers a community of women whose ordeals unravel in a splendid and fascinating tale that is as Cuban as it is universal.”
—María Amparo Escandón, author of
Esperanza’s Box of Saints
and
González & Daughter Trucking Co.
“
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
is a vibrant and passionate work that lives with you beyond the pages. Eduardo Santiago has created a textured and vivid
novel that reveals a bright and adventurous new talent.” —Tod Goldberg, author of
Living Dead Girl
and
Simplify
“With characters as real as they are exotic,
Tomorrow They Will Kiss
reveals lives lived on the edge, caught between repression and freedom. . . . Santiago’s tale sizzles, smokes, and enlightens,
and then smolders in one’s memory.”
—Carlos Eire, National Book Award-winning author of
Waiting for Snow in Havana
This book is dedicated to the beautiful women who shaped my life: my aunts—Tía Cusin, Tía Benita, Tía Radita, Tía Nelia, Tía
Lourdes, Tía Gloria, Tía Cachita, Tía Flor—and most notably my mother, María, who taught me how to dream, and my sister, Susana,
who never loses faith.
The Cubans can be characterized individually by sympathy and intelligence, in a group by yelling and passion. Every one of
them carries the spark of genius, and geniuses do not mingle well. Consequently, reuniting Cubans is easy—uniting them impossible.
— Luis Aguilar León
Contents
Graciela
T
elenovelas can be cruel
with that first kiss. I sat in front of my television set and waited for the protagonists to finally find true love, the
way farmers waited for the first rains of spring.
“Don’t worry, Graciela. Tomorrow they will kiss,” I sighed to myself with complete certainty as the night’s episode ended.
I always watched as the names of the actors rolled across the screen while the romantic theme song played. This was my time.
This was when, inspired by the music and the drama I had just watched, I allowed my mind and my heart to merge, just for a
blissful moment, just until a screeching commercial message shook me out of my daydream. Used Cars! Used Appliances! Easy
Credit! It was 1966 and everything offered to Latinos on the Spanish- language channel was just as used.
I turned off the set and went into the bedroom to check on my two boys. Ernestico, who was nine years old, slept curled up
in a ball, his long legs tucked under like a cricket. Manolito, one year younger, slept on his back, his chubby self open
to the ceiling, fearless.
I returned to the living room, unfolded the sofa into the uncomfortable bed it became every night, and lay down.
Alone, as usual.
But as always, with a little prayer to every saint and virgin I had ever heard about. Even the ones I didn’t believe in.
“Send me the right man,”
I prayed,
“or take away my desire to find true love.”
*
E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING,
I waited downstairs in the cold, narrow lobby and that strange loneliness came over me again. I thought how warm and comforting
it would be to have a man’s arms around me. My breath made a cloud on the glass door and I drew a heart in it with my finger.
For a second, I imagined the face of Mr. O’Reilly, the foreman at the factory, in the middle of the heart.
Estás loca, I said to myself. You’re crazy. And using the same finger, I quickly drew an arrow through it.
A familiar car horn cut through the frozen darkness. I tightened my overcoat and rushed out into the wintry New Jersey wind,
across the stretch of icy sidewalk to the idling van.
Five of us rode with Leticia to the toy factory every morning. Imperio and Caridad were already there, as usual. They were
always the first to be picked up and the last to be dropped off.
Caridad was sitting in the front passenger seat and Imperio sat in the back, behind Leticia. When I slid open the door, a
gust of cold blew into the overheated van, which always smelled like raw pork. Particularly in winter, when the windows had
to be shut tight against the cold.
“Por Dios, Graciela, close the door,” Imperio said before I had a chance to sit down. It was as if she expected me to get
in without disturbing the temperature.
Imperio had a sharp tongue that she tried to soften by constantly referring to God. “Por Dios,” she’d say, or “Dios mío,”
or “Santa Madre de Dios.” But there was venom behind her benedictions. She was a short and skinny person and had always had,
as long as I could remember, a nasty disposition, a tendency to complain and to order people around. Which was odd coming
from such a tiny person. Even after she reached maturity she was built like a ten- year- old boy. Her dark skin had a reddish
tint to it that became even more noticeable whenever her anger flared, which was frequently. She did not have any children
of her own. Maybe this was because of her impossibly narrow hips and flat chest, or her sour spirit, or because she once saw
a dog take his last breath. Or maybe because sometimes the saints really were paying attention.
“Santa Madre de Dios, I can’t stand this cold wind one more minute,” Imperio said. “I’ll never get used to waking up while
it’s still dark out and spending the rest of the day in dusk until nightfall. It’s inhuman.”
“Imagínate,” Caridad said with a delicate shiver. “They say it’s going to drop below zero again tonight.”
Caridad was thick of build, but not fat. She looked luxuriously stuffed and upholstered, like an expensive sofa. Her skin
was very pale, and she carried herself with an elegance that, as a girl, I had admired from a distance. Her big brown eyes
were always in a state of surprise or discovery. She wasn’t stupid. She just wanted everyone to believe that she was as innocent
and sheltered as a society debutante. That she was the type of person who had never been touched by the cruelties of the real
world. That at the slightest provocation she could swoon.
“Imagínate!” she’d gasp whenever something offended her fragile sensibilities. More often than not during such exclamations,
a pale hand clutched at the invisible pearls around her neck.
Every morning Caridad came to work in a starched blouse, freshly powdered, creamed, and perfumed as if she was sitting on
a breezy veranda. She loved powders and creams, and she did without essentials in order to purchase expensive products from
Spain. They had all but vanished from Cuba, but she could now find them at any Puerto Rican bodega. They were kept behind
the counter, inside a locked glass case, and had to be asked for.
She bought and used them carefully, applying the rose- scented Maja de Myrurgia, the delicate lavender of Lavanda Puig, and
particularly the cream from Heno de Pravia in tiny dabs to her plump, aristocratic hands. She would never offer any to the
rest of us, even in winter, when all our hands were red and chapped. Caridad only had one daughter, the unfortunate Celeste,
who was born with the wizened, crinkly eyes of an old man. Celeste, I’d noticed, wasn’t developing like a normal child; she
was slow to reason, had trouble speaking, and never smelled as sweet as her mother.
A few blocks later, we stopped for Berta, who was in her sixties and came from Formento, a town in central Cuba that none
of us had heard of before. Berta had been in the United States since she was a young girl, long before the Revolution. She
came to Union City to work in the lace factories, and even though the lace business had long since dried up, she never went
back.
“I always meant to return,” Berta said, “and now it’s too late.”
Berta’s legs swelled up like hams from standing at the assembly line all day long. As soon as she got in the van, she took
off her shoes and massaged her legs, which were blue and knotted with varicose veins. All the way to the factory, she moaned
as she squeezed. “Ay, ay, ay.”
The last woman to be picked up, and always the first one we dropped off, was Raquel, who was younger than Berta but often
looked much older. And her legs didn’t swell up.
Raquel could try anyone’s patience, even of those, like me, who liked her. All she ever talked about was what she, in Union
City, had too much of, and what her husband and the others back in Cuba had to do without. Her husband was serving fifteen
years in one of Castro’s jails. She would never say why, which drove Imperio and Caridad wild with curiosity.
“Chá,” Raquel said whenever they brought it up. Not a word, but a sound, hard and final. Her husband was not a character in
a telenovela. He was not up for discussion.
Raquel had arrived in the States with just her three daughters. Most days she wore her dark hair in a dirty ponytail that
sat on top of her head like a little fountain. The only vanity she allowed herself was the orange lipstick that she carelessly
ran over her thick lips.
Some mornings it was painfully obvious to me that Raquel had been up all night crying, and I knew that it wasn’t because the
telenovela had taken a tragic turn. I imagined her in her cold little apartment with her little girls huddled around her,
all staring at a picture of the missing husband, the missing father. Their sad faces lit by a votive candle—their hearts sick
with fear. I imagined her waking up with a pillowcase covered with orange kisses. I knew only too well what it was like to
be that lonely.