In the Name of Salome (14 page)

Just then, we heard the knock at the front door. Ramona and I looked at each other curiously. It was too early in the day for parlor visitors. Perhaps a student had come to fetch the
Catón cristiano
she forgot in the parlor-classroom? We hurried from our room to the front of the house to see who it might be.

The two young men standing before us were the very same ones who had been at the church door a few days ago: the tall, droll-looking one, who seemed always about to burst into laughter, and the younger, handsome one, whose face was so oddly familiar, whose eyes belonged to my father. He was wearing a red cravat and a gardenia bloom in his boutonniere. He was the one who spoke up.

“Señorita Salomé Ureña,” he began, looking from one to the other as if not sure which one of us was Salomé.

“She is my sister, Salomé, and I am Ramona,” my sister said holding back her giggles, for the young man seemed overly officious and too nervous.

The gallant explained the purpose of the call. He and his socio, Pablo Pumarol, had come to personally invite us to a soirée in honor of poetry to be hosted by the Friends of the Country. Other young ladies would be present, as well as many mothers of the members; in other words, a gathering decently chaperoned.

I barely heard what was being said, for slowly, it was surfacing, who this young man was: the little brother of Federico, who had been off in search of love the day his brother had come calling! I wondered if he was the same Henríquez brother who had recently been apprehended writing my poem, “A la Patria,” on the walls of the fortaleza. Old Don Noël had had to pay a fine, and the whole clan of Henríquez men had turned out one Sunday afternoon with buckets of lime and rags to touch up the old mural, bringing along the Henríquez women, wives and sisters, with baskets of cornmeal candy and cane sugar caramelos to give away to the children. The sisters Bobadilla had come back with the full report
of how these Jewish people had behaved themselves as nicely as Christians.

“We would be profoundly honored if you would accept our invitation.” The young man was now looking directly to me.

I tried looking away, but his eyes were like Papá's eyes and like the madwoman's eyes, probing. I could not resist. I thought, Doesn't this young man know better than to look at a woman directly in that fashion?

I wanted to respond to the look by saying, Come in, young man, come in and see just how awkward and shy Salomé Ureña truly is; how her face has gotten thin and hollow-cheeked with grief, how her ears are as big as ever and her hair still has its unruly kink; how her stack of poems is gathering dust and her heart is haunted by her father's ghost who will not give her a sign that she can go on without him.

But I had been living in a numb silence for two years, and I could not find the words I wanted to say to him. All I could manage is, “You may count on me.”

He waited for more, but there was no more to say. He bowed, Pablo bowed, and before they turned away, the gallant, who had introduced himself as Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal (“Everyone calls me Pancho”), took the gardenia from his buttonhole and offered it to me. Then, they headed down the street, the sweet, young fellow plunging his hands in his pockets, the way men do when they are unsure of themselves and need to hear the consoling jingle of coins. Ramona shut the top door and threw her arms around me in gratitude. “My wonderful, brave, charming, talented sister!” She hurried off to the back of the house to inform our mother how she, Ramona, had finally managed to bring me out of my grief-stricken condition.

As soon as she left the room, I pushed open the small side window and watched as the two men neared the end of the street, pausing to let the water donkey go by with its sweating tinaja of drinking water. That bit of swagger had returned to the young
man's step and his hands were now out of his pockets, and he was swinging them like a boy who had accomplished a hard task and was proud of himself.

And I felt myself slowly rising from where I had lain for so long. I felt life spiraling up my legs, stirring awake the aching dullness in my brain. I smelled bread baking in the nearby ovens of the panadería, the salty smell in the breeze from the sea. The curfew bell rang down at la fortaleza. I stood with my head poking out of that window, like the bodega neighbor's baby at her birth, her head popped out, the rest of her still unborn, just taking a look out there at the world she was about to come into. Then, as if it had been my father's blessing finally reaching me, I heard the neighborhood band beginning its practice in preparation for the Corpus Cristi procession the next day: the roll of the drum, the the trill of the flute, the waking call of the trumpet.

S
HE LOVES RIDING ON
trains. She feels like a heroine, suspended between lives, suspended between destinations. A line from her mother's poems pops in her head and is repeated and repeated—until it is nonsense—by the clacking of the train on its tracks.

Which of my many dreams shall claim my heart
?

Or did she herself write that?

But inevitably, the heroine arrives at a station. People are there to pick her up, important characters who expect too much of her. Perhaps Domingo himself will be there, still furious, demanding further explanations.

Before she knows it, she is on her feet, pacing down the rocking aisle of the New York–Boston Yankee Clipper Express.

T
HERE HE IS
! Her dear brother Pedro!

He looks so elegant, in a tan, belted coat, the collar turned up, no hat on his head even though it is a chilly March day. A band starts up somewhere, trumpets and drums, maybe some dignitary
is on the train. She imagines the music is for her, a band her brother has hired to celebrate her escape.

She
has
escaped. She remembers an old engraving in a picture-book of myths in her father's library: a girl running away to avoid a dark cloud of what looked like gnats pursuing her. But no one is after her: Papancho is dead, Mon is dead, Marion is now teaching in Vermont, “happy as a lark,” and Domingo has left, infuriated to be—as he phrased it—“an experiment.” She is free of that that little graveyard of the past she has been tending, which has been filling up with her personal dead, her failed loves, as well as all the new Cuban casualties of the Batista dictatorship.

“Pibín!” she calls out, rapping the window, but Pedro has not seen her. She struggles to open the train window but it will not budge. Quickly, she puts her notebook away in her purse and collects her things. She hurries down the long aisle with her bag, then hesitates before she shows herself at the top of the stairs.

H
E MIGHT NOT
recognize her. Twenty years have passed. She is forty-six years old. He himself looks so much older and more worldly than the intense young man of her memory, who followed her around the University of Minnesota like a spy. This Pedro has an air of accomplishment, his slicked-back hair liberally sprinkled with gray. He is famous now, she reminds herself, more famous than their mother ever was.

And
she
has changed. Everyone says so. She is thinner, the strong bones of her face more pronounced. She looks, well, famous, too.

Perhaps her face knows what is coming! In the last few months, she has been writing poems feverishly. For weeks she will be in a daze, lines going round and round in her head. Sometimes she thinks of this as utter foolishness—at her age—to become a poet. Her own mother blossomed early. By the time she was thirty, all her significant work had been written. But Camila could
end up being the child who inherited her mother's gift, her own blossoming coming later in life.

Pedro catches sight of her, and his face opens up with pleasure and emotion. She is relieved. Over the years, he has been very concerned about her “personal life,” as he terms it in his letters, as if he already knows that in the future his correspondence will be published (he
is
that famous), and this phrase is the safest way to refer to his sister's perverseness. In fact, when he heard that Marion had followed Camila to Santiago, he wrote their father—Camila found the letter as a bookmark in her father's copy of Lamartine—saying that the American woman should not be allowed in the house. “Una influencia malísima. Camila es demasiado impresionable . . .” A bad influence. Camila is too impressionable . . .

But all that is behind them now. They have gotten close again through letters. In fact, when she wrote telling Pedro about Domingo—holding up her new beau as if he were some sort of trophy, never mind that he was poor, a sculptor, darker-skinned than anyone in the family, with that exasperating stutter, never mind—Pedro wrote back congratulating her as if she had announced that she had finally recovered from a long illness.

He is carrying two small flags—the Dominican flag and the Cuban one of her adopted country. As she comes down the steps, he lifts them and waves a hearty welcome. She can see the soft look of pride and love in his eyes. Pedro is the one who is supposed to most resemble their mother, down to the darker color of his skin, and when he looks at her in that sweet way, she thinks, that is the way Mamá would have looked at me had she been alive today.

They fall into each other's arms. When they pull away, she is surprised to see tears in her brother's eyes. As she reaches up to wipe them away, his own hands mirror hers, wiping the tears running down her face.

T
HEY WALK THROUGH THE
campus to the guest house where Pedro has reserved a room for her. Cambridge is still in the grip of winter. The trees are bare, the drab brick buildings also seem in a dormant state. Across a tree-lined yard, a group of young men in uniform march in formation.

“What is going on?” she asks Pedro in a whisper. She remembers this detail from Minnesota: how breath becomes visible in cold air, betraying she has spoken.

“Americans practicing for war. We have so many we never get out of practice,” he says bitterly. “Thirty-one just in Mamá's lifetime. I added them up for my last lecture.”

She has also counted them up in the past, disbelieving that there really could have been so many. Recently, Max wrote her from the newly named Ciudad Trujillo. He had discovered a deep hole under Mamá's childhood house—she remembers it!—where the terrified women used to hide during wars. They must have spent a lot of time underground.

Just ahead of the soldiers, a group of men brandish placards, PROTECT OUR PEACE, and shout slogans. “Not a peaceful thing to do,” Pedro mutters under his breath as they pass by.

“What have you got there?” One of them has broken from the group and is standing directly in front of them. He has the bright, empty eyes of a cat. He jerks his head down toward the flags poking out of the bag Pedro is carrying. Camila feels her shoulders tensing and her breath coming short. She wonders if she should introduce her brother. This is the Norton Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Harvard for the year. Would that give them safe passage?

Two young men come forward and hook their arms through the protestor's arms, murmuring in his ear. Perhaps they are reminding him that they are peacemakers trying to save the world.

Pedro stands by patiently as if waiting for an impediment to be removed from his path. He has never been a fighter.
My Pedro
is not a soldier, no Caesar or Alexander storms his heart
, Salomé's final poem begins.

Camila quickens her own step, tugging at her brother's arm. “What are they protesting?” she asks when they are safely out of earshot. Her own university in Havana has always been a hotbed of revolution, and Batista keeps closing it down.

“They don't want to go to war,” Pedro explains. “El presidente Roosevelt has promised that not one American boy will die in this European war. But the feeling on this campus is that this country will be at war by the end of the year.”

She glances nervously at Pedro's flags, poking from the side pocket of her bag. Given the rumors of upcoming war, carrying strange flags is probably not a wise move on her brother's part. It does not help, of course, that he looks foreign.

“The whole world is starting to feel like our little countries,” Pedro adds, shaking his head sadly. He slips her bag's strap over one shoulder. His hands disappear in his coat as if he were looking for something consoling in his pockets.

“W
E'RE GOING TO A
special place to meet everyone,” Pedro says, offering her his arm. She has deposited her things upstairs in the guest house and gathered up her hair in a fresh chignon with a silver comb, once her mother's.

The place turns out to be a brisk walk through the university gates and down several twisting, narrow streets. The protestors have dispersed. Camila glances tenderly at her brother, thinking of all he must have endured these last nine months here by himself.

He has gotten old. His face is lined: a parenthesis has formed around the mouth; the brow is furrowed even when he is not scowling. He is fifty-six years old, but it is not just his age that shows. He seems tired, a sad, perplexed look on his face. He would not complain, of course, but in one of his essays that she
found in a recent journal, she was surprised to read about “the terrible moral disinheritance of exile.” She felt a pang to learn so impersonally of her brother's sadness, to know what a terrible toll his wandering life has taken. Unlike their brother Max, Pedro refused to stay on in Trujillo's government and instead transplanted his family to Argentina, where he has been scraping out a living with two or three simultaneous teaching jobs. The Norton lectureship has been a godsend, but it is only a nine-month post. He is saving every penny for the dearth ahead.

They stop before a set of double doors with the dark silhouette of a bull on each half door. The place, known as El Toro Triste, the Sad Bull, is owned by a Republicano who was forced into exile when civil war exploded in Spain five years ago. Pedro's friends and colleagues are gathering here, some from as far as New York and Princeton, for Pedro's final lecture tomorrow evening. Since travel is becoming increasingly difficult, quite a few have taken the precaution of arriving a day early.