In the Name of Salome (2 page)

The car honks again, another shout of summons.

It will be a long ride to Florida. She has measured the route on the large atlas at the library using her fingers to figure out the distance. Each finger a day on the road. Five fingers, a handful, with Marion singing old campfire songs and driving too fast, especially with Salomé's trunk tied to the roof of the car. On the passenger's side, Camila clutches the arm loop by the door and hopes that that they don't run into a rainstorm, hopes and prays that Marion will not try to talk her out of her decision by reminding her that she is sixty-six, alone, and should be thinking about her pension, should be thinking about her future, should be thinking about moving into a comfy bungalow just down the road from Marion, at least until things settle down at home in those hot-tempered little islands.

“In the name of my mother, Salomé,” she says to herself again. She needs all the help she can get here at the end of her life in the United States.

S
OMEWHERE PAST
T
RENTON
, New Jersey, to keep her restless friend from further distractions (“Light me a cigarette, will you?” “Any more of those chips left?” “I sure could use a soda!”), she offers: “Shall I tell you why I have decided to go back?” Marion has
been pestering Camila ever since she arrived a few days ago to help her friend pack. “But why? Why? That's what I want to know. What do you hope to accomplish with a bunch of ill-mannered, unshaven, unwashed guerrillas running a country?”

Purposely, she believes, Marion mispronounces the word so it sounds like
gorillas
. “Guerrillas,” Camila corrects, rattling the
r
's.

She has been afraid she will sound foolish if she explains how just once before her life is over, she would like to give herself completely to something—yes, like her mother. Friends would worry that she has lost her wits, too much sugar in her blood, her cataracts blurring all levels of her vision. And Marion's disapproval would be the worst of all, for she would not only disagree with Camila's choice, she would try to save her.

Marion has turned to face her. Briefly, the car weaves into the left lane. A honk from an oncoming car startles Marion, and she pulls back over just in time.

Camila takes a deep breath. Perhaps the future will be over sooner than she thinks.

“I'
M ALL EARS
,” Marion says when they have both recovered.

Camila's heart is still beating wildly—one of those bats that sometimes gets trapped in her attic apartment so that she has to call the grounds crew to come get it out. “I have to go back a ways,” she explains. “I have to start with Salomé.”

“Can I confess something?” Marion asks, not a real question, as she does not wait for Camila to answer back. “Please don't get your feelings hurt, but I honestly don't think I would ever have heard of your mother unless I had met you.”

She's not surprised. Americans don't interest themselves in the heroes and heroines of minor countries until someone makes a movie about them.

Up ahead a man on a billboard is smoking a cigarette; behind him a herd of cattle waits until he finishes it.

“So, what's the story?” Marion wants to know.

“As I said, I'll have to start with my mother, which means at the birth of la patria, since they were both born about the same time.” Her voice sounds strangely her own and not her own. All those years in the classroom. Her half brother Rodolfo calls it her teacher's handicap, how she vanishes into whatever she's teaching. She's done it all her life. Long before she stepped into a classroom, she indulged this habit of erasing herself, of turning herself into the third person, a minor character, the best friend (or daughter!) of the dying first-person hero or heroine. Her mission in life—after the curtain falls—to tell the story of the great ones who have passed on.

But Marion is not going to indulge her. Camila has not gotten past the first few years of Salomé's life and the wars of independence when her friend interrupts. “I thought you were finally going to talk about yourself, Camila.”

“I
am
talking about myself,” she says—and waits until they have passed a large moving van, a sailing ship afloat on its aluminum sides—before she begins again.

P
ROFESORA
C
AMILA
H
ENRÍQUEZ
U
REÑA'S FAMILY
B
. 1894

H
ISTORICAL
B
ACKGROUND:
Tons of revolutions and wars, too numerous to list!

T
HE STORY OF MY
life starts with the story of my country, as I was born six years after independence, a sickly child, not expected to live. But by the time I was six, I was in better health than my country, for la patria had already suffered eleven changes of government. I, on the other hand, had only endured one major change: my mother had left my father.

I could hardly remember my parents' separation, and as for my country, I grew up amid so many wars that I had no real understanding of the danger I was in. What I feared was not the revolutions themselves, but the dark hole underneath the house that we had to hide in whenever a war broke out.

We children had no idea what the fighting was about. One side was red and the other side was blue—color being the only way we could tell one side from the other, though both sides said that whatever they were doing, they were doing for la patria. We had fought off an invasion from Haiti, and soon we would fight a war with Spain. Now we were fighting among ourselves. I still remember the song my sister, Ramona, and I used to sing:

I was born Spanish,
by the afternoon I was French,
at night I was African.
What will become of me?

We were living, my mother, my sister, Ramona, my tía Ana—the second mother of the household—and myself, in a small, wooden house with a bright zinc roof, far enough from the central square to escape bombing and looting. “Whoever heard of two women owning a house!” my father was said to have exclaimed when he heard the news that his wife had bought a house with her sister.

We were proud of our house, and most especially we were proud of our zinc roof. If you had a fine, old house from when the Spaniards first settled in the island, you no doubt had a Spanish-tile roof, which was all very fine and pure-blooded of your family to have, except for the fact that if you had that kind of house, you would be living in the old Spanish section of the city along with the government house and the prison house and the cathedral, and in time of war, that would be the area where the opposing side would aim its cannons and blast your fine, old family roof to hell.

And so, a zinc roof from the United States of America, which was a country much closer by than Spain, was a more convenient roof to have in 1856 when I was six years old and bombs were going off up and down the streets of the capital, as the Reds fought to recover la patria from the control of the Blues.

I
T IS AN AFTERNOON
in October 1856, and a bomb has just blown up the candle factory down the street.

“Girls,” my mother says, “get ready.”

We know the procedure: wrap up a platano and a chunk of codfish in a scrap of cloth from Mamá's basket, slip on our oldest
smocks, and then hurry down the back steps to a hole dug underneath the house for just this purpose.

“Can I bring Alexandra?” Ramona asks. My older sister won't go anywhere without the porcelain doll with egg-yolk-color hair that our father has sent her from St. Thomas.

I suppose Ramona likes the doll better than me as it does not cry. There are days when I wake up crying and cannot even say why I am crying, which worries Mamá, as melancholy is an affliction like leprosy or dementia, for which people can be locked away. Sometimes when I cry so hard, my chest tightens up and I can't breathe, which worries Mamá even more, as melancholy is a trifle compared to consumption. But Dr. Valverde says all I have is a touch of asthma, and Mamá must stop worrying or she herself will succumb to hysteria. All in all, we sound quite unhealthy.

But today has not been a weeping day. I have been entertaining myself writing in the back of one of the catechism books that my aunt Ana, a schoolteacher, hands out to her students. I look up from the
Catón cristiano
and ask my mother what is the fighting about today.

“La patria,” Mamá says, sighing.

Today the word catches my attention, the way a word will suddenly stare back at you and refuse to tell you what it means. “Mamá,” I say, “what is la patria?” and my mother does not answer but looks ready to weep herself.

A shell explodes in the street beyond the barred door, so that the walls shake and our crucifix comes tumbling down, Christ first, followed by his cross.

Mamá motions desperately. Tía Ana is already down the back steps and calling for us to come.

Quickly, I gather my things, including the
Catón cristiano
. It is not so much that I am interested in reviewing my catechism, but in the back of the book, I have illegally begun writing a small verse.

Several hours later, after three cannon shots have announced a
change of government, we crawl out and climb up the steps, and then, since I am the smallest, Mamá and Tía Ana hoist me up on top of the zinc roof. A new flag is flying above the government palace.

“Red,” I call down.

“Your father will be back soon,” Mamá observes.

A
WEEK LATER THERE
is a knock on the front door. The front door is always kept closed because of the noise and dust of the streets. It is also kept closed because on a sunny afternoon in October a civil war might erupt and a band of men come galloping down the streets, guns drawn and firing.

But today there is just a knock and no war going on. Tía Ana is teaching the alphabet to fifteen little girls who have carried their own small cane chairs to our house on top of their heads. When these girls are older, they will enroll, most of them, in the school of the sisters Bobadilla a block away, the school that Ramona and I now attend. At Tía Ana's school, the little girls learn how to sit properly in a chair, how to hold their hands when they are sitting down, and how to hold them when they are standing up. They learn how to recite the alphabet and how to pour a glass of water and how to pray the rosary and say the stations of the cross. Then the sisters Bobadilla take over.

At the sisters Bobadilla, the older girls learn manualities, which means they learn how to sew and how to knit and crochet; they learn how to read—the
Catón cristiano
and
Friends of Children
, and
Elements of All of the Sciences
(“The earth is a planet revolving around the sun”), and they memorize lessons in morality and virtue from
Morality, Virtue, and Urbanity
. But they will not learn how to write, so that even if they receive a love letter, they will not be able to write one back.

Of course, I am growing up with my tía Ana and my mother, Gregoria, who has left her husband, and these are not women to
hold back orthography from a little girl whose first question on noticing the crucifix was not “Who is that man?” but “What are those letters written above his head,
I, N, R, I
?” And so, long before Ramona and I go a block away to attend the school of the sisters Bobadilla, my mother and aunt have taught us how to write as well as how to read.

That afternoon when there is knock, I run to the door because I am not in school today. I have caught cold from spending so much time in the damp revolution-hole this past month. I pull the stool over and open the top of the Dutch door because this is what I have been taught to do when there is a knock.

Standing outside is a handsome man with curly, black tresses (he wears his hair long like a pirate!) and a thin mustache and skin the color of fresh milk in a pail. He studies me a moment. Then his face lights up with a smile.

“Good morning, sir. What is your business?”

“Only to see those lovely stars! Only to hear my cooing dove!”

I have never heard anyone talk this way before. I am intrigued.

“¿Quién es?” my mother calls from the back of the house.

“Who are you, señor?” I echo my mother's question.

“I am the bearer of this letter.” The way he says it, the words all rhyme like a song. He holds up a piece of parchment, folded over and sealed with a red wax seal I have seen before among my mother's papers.

I take the letter, turn it over, and read.
Señoritas Salomé and Ramona Ureña
. “This is for me?”

“So you
can
read!” He grins. I don't like this sense that I am providing him with amusement every time I open my mouth.

“I can write, too,” I pipe up, though this is something that Mamá has instructed me not to boast about, especially not to the sisters Bobadilla. But this man is a stranger—no one I have ever seen near the likes of the two elderly sisters, who are pure Spaniards, with a house made of stone and a roof made of tiles.