Tomorrow They Will Kiss...Maybe

Tomorrow They Will Kiss is a novel I've been circling for about a year. It's interesting but the trade paperback and the artwork reminded me of the Esmeralda Santiago novels, so I skipped it. This week I was pretty desperate for reading materials while doing my chemo escort thing, so I finally picked it up. I should have picked it up sooner.

A while back I posted on the old telenovela, El derecho de nacer, and the gurgling Rafael del Junco. Well, in Eduardo Santiago's Tomorrow They Will Kiss, we have another telenovela with a a temporarily blinded Rosalinda who is almost romantically involved with her boss. It is one of the unifying factors in this story about the lives of five Cuban women carpooling to their jobs in a Union City doll factory.

This is what some now call the "historical" wave of exile. Forced by the growing repressiveness of the Cuban revolution from a tropical world where their concerns centered on the petty scandals of their neighbors and the perfect half moons on their nails into the cold gray world of a Union City production line, the story of each emerges. There is the more entrepreneurial of the lot, Leticia who drives them in her yellow van, sometimes still reeking of fresh pork from her husband's early morning delivery route; the elderly and infirm Berta: the reclusive wife of a political prisoner, Raquel; and Graciela, Caridad, and Imperio, a trio from Palmagria.

The point of view here shifts from Graciela to Caridad to Imperio. These three adversaries cum friends are locked in a tangle of emotion that predates the novel. As each tells her story in the present, their shared history emerges. Caridad and Imperio here represent the small-mindedness, the strictures of small town Cuba, yet they are all too human. And it is the scandalous, reckless, passionate Graciela who rises triumphant from the ashes of the past.

If I have one quibble, it is that her romance with the her rather one dimensional boss, Barry O'Reilly, read hippie, is too like the telenovelas that the women discuss in the van every day. On one level, this is definitely grown woman's chick lit, on the other it has much to say about the human cost of the Castro regime and the redemptive nature of exile for some. Intricately plotted, Santiago has done a marvelous job of weaving together an amazing number of threads. I enjoyed it.