In the Name of Salome (15 page)

A lively, dark-haired woman comes forward and gives Pedro a warm embrace, exclaiming over how handsome and distinguished he looks. She is short and plump, with a countrywoman look, but with the expressive eyes of someone who has seen more of the world. “I am Germaine,” she introduces herself, taking both Camila's hands in hers. She is French, which piques Camila's interest. Ever since she learned about her father's other family in Paris, she cannot meet a French woman of a certain age without wondering about the half sister and nieces she has never known. Do they look like Pancho? Do they look like her?

“Come meet my Jorge.” Germaine takes her by the arm. Her husband turns out to be Jorge Guillén, the poet, whose book of poems,
Cántico
, is one of the few books Camila has carried with her from Havana.

Jorge stands, tall, slender, with the distracted air of a scholar in his thick glasses. Actually, she is not sure yet that he is distracted, but she has already assigned him that quality. Now that
she is writing, she is developing the bad habits of writers, creating the world rather than inhabiting it. Perhaps that is why her mother's good friend Hostos banished poets from his clear-eyed, rational republic.

“It is a pleasure,” he is saying, as he gives her a quaint bow. “I hear you have just come from the killing fields of Cuba?”

“Jorge, Jorge,” Germaine scolds. She seems much younger than he, her high voice like a little bell tinkling in the autumn of his years. “Don't ruin the mood of the gathering.”

The chastised Jorge sits down obediently, offering Camila the chair beside him. He seems as shy as she, but somehow the miracle that sometimes happens between the shy does happen: they can be garrulous together. They speak of Cuba, the growing repression, and suddenly she finds herself confessing what she has told no one else, not even her brother. “I've run away.”

His eyes quicken with interest. She has a story to tell him. “And where is our heroine headed?” he asks.

She feels the color rising to her face, as if she were a young girl receiving attention from a man for the first time. But the sad truth injects a sudden sobriety into their banter. “I'm not so much headed somewhere as I am leaving the place I came from.”

“We are the new Israelites.” Jorge nods, his long, sad face adding to the gloom of his observation. “What will become of us? We die if we forget. We die if we remember.” This time Germaine touches his shoulder softly. “But I shall leave the solutions to your brother. Quite a David that brother of yours, taking on such questions in Goliath's own country!”

“Yes,” she says, smiling fondly toward where her brother is seated, at the center of a group of colleagues engaged in some heated discussion. She is so proud of Pedro, not because of his honors, but because of the quality of his mind. Thoughtful and serious, wise beyond his years, even as a child. “I've given birth to an old man,” their mother was supposed to have said about him.

This is precisely why she has brought, bound and ready at the
bottom of her suitcase, the poems she has been writing. She has already sent them to Max, who has written back saying that they are “fabulous.” He wants to publish them in the Dominican papers with a headline, SALOMÉ LIVES AGAIN, but she has begged him not to, for she is not yet sure of them. She has also sent a handful to an old family friend, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and he has been more circumspect. “Fine line,” he has written here and there, but the pages are riddled with tiny, penciled suggestions. She knows from her teaching that this is not a good sign, the use of pencil intended to soften the indignity of the corrections. Still, his overall evaluation is encouraging: “You have your mother's gift. Keep working at it.”

As Pedro's friends stream in, Germaine brings them over to meet “Pedro's little sister, Camila.” Salinas up from Princeton, the del Rios from Columbia, Casalduero over from Smith. Here are the best minds and writers of Spain, now living in exile, gathered to celebrate her brother. Perhaps, she, too, will some day create something of value that allows her a place in this illustrious company, and not just as Pedro's sister or Salomé's daughter either.

“Your brother tells me you work as a teacher,” Jorge says, resuming their conversation.

“I used to,” she corrects him. She explains that her university has again been shut down. She herself is out of a job.

Jorge lifts his eyebrows in sympathy. She has noticed how he uses his brows like a mime, for punctuation. “So, in fact, you are running away from the burning building.”

“Actually, I helped set fire to it.” But saying so feels too much like boasting, so she adds, “Or rather, my students did.” In fact, in her black teaching gown with chalk marks down the front, she came outside and joined them.

He smiles, nodding approval. “But can you also teach the pluperfect as well as work the guillotine?” One eyebrow lifts interrogatively. “I ask because there is an opening at Vassar. I have a friend there, Pilar. I could give her a call.”

Camila hesitates. She is not so sure she wants to return to the rigors of full-time teaching. She has spent the last twenty years in classrooms. It is time to spread her wings: to devote herself to her writing. She has a little money coming in. Pancho died penniless, but—no doubt Max's doing—Camila has been receiving a small pension from the Dominican government as the unmarried daughter of a former president. She does not feel altogether comfortable collecting money from the dictatorship, but it is one of the compromises she is making for her art.

“My sister is here to enjoy herself and, I hope, to enjoy my lecture,” Pedro says, coming to the rescue. “Maybe I'll take her back with me to Argentina,” he adds. She is surprised to hear him say so. A few months ago, she wrote him about that possibility, but Pedro wrote back explaining that life in Buenos Aires has become very expensive and his own situation there quite difficult. The country is flooded with European immigrants, fleeing the war. That is why he has decided to come north for a year to Harvard and is leaving Isabel and the girls behind to save money. “Join me in Boston,” he had invited her. “We can talk of the future then. Perhaps we will even invent the future there.”

The proprietor of the Sad Bull, a crusty old man with a day's growth of beard and a beret, hobbles from table to table filling glasses. He has a pronounced limp, perhaps an injury incurred in the war. Camila has a sudden sense of all of them in the room as survivors of national catastrophes that have sent them scattering across the globe. She imagines a future historian coming upon a photograph of the assembled group.
The great poets of suffering Spain gather in Boston to celebrate Pedro Henríquez Ureña's final Norton lecture
, the caption might read, names listed from left to right. (But who is the woman sitting in the corner next to Guillén? Ah yes! Salomé Camila Henríquez Ureña, the poet.) She feels a guilty thrill, giving herself a title she has not yet earned.

Pedro calls the room to silence. “In honor of our gathering,”
he begins, “I would like to welcome you with some verses.” When Pedro finishes reciting Martí's words of longing for his country, there is a hush in the room, as if the Liberator himself had just pushed open the doors, parting the butting bulls, and sat himself down among them.

Salinas follows, his body swaying to the rhythm of a lilting romancero, his voice breaking with emotion. He finishes with one of his own poems, a eulogy to the fallen poet Lorca, a curse on the Falangists who murdered him and sent all of them into exile! One by one colleagues rise and recite, and the chilly room fills with bright presences.

“It is your turn,” Jorge urges her after giving his recitation. “Your brother has told us you are marvelous reciter.”

Shy as she is, she does love to recite. In the classroom, she often surprises her students, by being able to call up any poem and recite several stanzas, if not the whole poem, off the top of her head. She goes through a mental index of her mother's poems, wondering which one will have the most effect? “Sombras” would be too grim, and “Contestación,” though about exile, a theme present in all their hearts, is not among Salomé's best. Camila glances toward Pedro, hoping for a suggestion, and sees the tension on his face. He does not want her to recite one of their mother's poems. Modernism is upon them. Salomé's neoclassical style is out of favor. And the disapproval or even inattention of these eminences would hurt.

“Somebody from your part of the world,” Jorge insists.

“I shall recite a little-known poet,” she says, taking a deep breath. Among her poems, one particularly has received a positive response from Juan Ramón, an underlined
FINE POEM
scribbled across the bottom of the page, and only one penciled suggestion in the margin. “La raíz,” it is called, a root probing in the dark earth for water, dreaming of flowers. She has practiced saying it out loud many times to herself, but now, she is too nervous, and her voice keeps giving out.

When she is done, she sits down hurriedly, feeling the familiar tightness in her chest. These attacks first started when she was a child: a sense of panic and breathlessness would overtake her. At one point, Pancho had moved the whole family out of Santiago into the nearby hills, for he was convinced that Camila had inherited her mother's weak lungs and would grow consumptive in the hot lowlands of the coastal city.

There is a moment of silence before Jorge calls out, “Bravo, bravo!” Others join in. Who is this poet? they want to know. A young Dominican, she replies vaguely, avoiding Pedro's eyes, fearful of finding judgment there.

Later, as they walk back to the guest house, he says, “Camila, do you have any more of that poet's verses?”

“A whole manuscript,” she admits. They often speak in this way, indirectly, tentatively, trusting the depths of their love for each other. “I would like you to read it and give me your considered opinion,” she adds. It is as close as she can come to an admission.

“Yes, I would very much like to,” he says.

Night has already fallen, and the air has grown chillier. She hooks her arm through his and smells the surprisingly perfumey scent of cologne on his coat. A touch of Isabel, no doubt. Camila finds herself resenting this intrusion of her sister-in-law. But this is silly, she has her brother all to herself for now. When people turn to watch, she pulls close to him as if they are a couple out for a stroll on this crisp winter evening.

She glances up at the stars and is surprised by how easily she can make them out: Orion's belt, the dipper, Cassiopeia in her chair. What an odd world, she is thinking. An ocean away, the sky is lit up with the fire of bombs exploding over London. In their part of the world, Batista's thugs are in the thick of some grim deed that needs the cover of darkness. And here they are, she and Pedro, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, walking happily under these same stars in the month of March, the month that their mother died. Surely such privilege requires something of them.

She leans against her brother, feeling the rough caress of his overcoat on her cheek, and thinks about their mother.

S
HE WAS THINKING
, in fact, of the last poem their mother ever wrote.

They had gone up to the north coast, hoping the fresh sea air might save Salomé's life. Their father was still keeping it a secret that his wife had tuberculosis, so a country retreat was well advised. As for the immediate family, they were all to use every precaution, and the baby, Camila, especially was to be kept at a distance. But of course, any chance she got, she wanted to be with her mother.

One siesta time, she was awakened by the familiar sound of coughing. Camila crawled out of her little cot and went in search of her mother. She found her in her room at the small desk she kept by the window, facing the sea. Her mother was crying. It was a dangerous thing for her to do, for crying always brought on the coughing. Her emaciated frame shook horribly, and she gasped for air.

“Mamá, Mamá, what's wrong?” Camila remembers asking, on the verge of tears herself. Supposedly, she had gone from baby gurgles and smiles to full sentences—no in-between phases of temper tantrums or nonsense syllables. Raised by a sick, dying woman, maybe she knew there was not much time for dillydallying.

“Nada, nada,” Mamá reassured her, bringing her kerchief to her mouth. She patted the bench beside her, and Camila climbed up on her own, for her mother could no longer lift her. From that height, she could see that her mother had been writing. “What is it?” she asked.

“A poem for your big brother, Pibín, my love.”

“I want a poem for me, Mamá.”

“It
is
also for you, but I've already begun it and shown it to your brother, so I'll leave the title as is.”

“Read it to me then.”

Her mother read the poem, pausing here and there to catch her breath, but also as if to reconsider what she had written. No doubt, since the poem was now being addressed to Camila, her mother was having to improvise some quick rhyme changes and feminine endings. But there was also a desperation in her voice, as if she had very little time to get something important said.

When she got to the ending, she broke out in a fit of coughing. Tivisita, whom Pancho had moved in to take care of his wife, came into the room.

“What are you doing here, Camila?” she began. “I really don't think you should be—”

“We're fine, Tivisita, thank you.” Her mother watched as Tivisita closed the door.

Camila leaned into her mother's side. “What does it say, Mamá?” She had heard the big words, but didn't quite know what her mother was telling her with this poem she had just read her.

“It says that I love you very, very much.” She was looking intently at Camila as if she were trying to make out the woman her daughter would become in the young face gazing up at her.