In the Name of Salome (23 page)

“I've often felt this deplorable gap,” Hostos went on to explain.
“We are forging the new man but not the new woman. In fact, without one we can't possibly accomplish the other.” Hostos studied me with his sad eyes. “It must be difficult for you, Salomé, to feel the lack of true companions among your own sex.” Again, the joy of talking to a man who understood me!

“But, maestro, I don't have any training to be a teacher. I myself only went to one of our little schools.”

“You have a soul deep enough to hold your whole country.” His words betrayed that he knew me deeply in a way which Pancho, intent on the future, was so far incapable of doing. But he is young, I thought. El maestro is twenty years his senior. I had to make some allowances for a husband who was only a few years out of short pants when I began falling in love with him.

“El maestro is right, Salomé. You know more than you think. And wherever you feel a lack, I will fill in, I promise.”

“But you are away half the time, Pancho!”

Hostos had stood up and was pacing our parlor. He stopped before a jar of scattered blossoms; he seemed suddenly to notice their litter on the table. Slowly, he picked them up, one by one, and put them in his pocket. I wondered what on earth he meant to do with them. “I can think of no one better than the first woman of the island to lead us in this regard,” Hostos said, turning and giving me one of the luminous smiles that too seldom lit up his long, somber face.

“We shall see,” I said, worrying my hands in the lap of my skirt.

“Duty is the highest virtue,” Pancho reminded me, quoting the master to the master's face.

U
PON
P
ANCHO'S RETURN FROM
a trip north, I had a new poem to show him, “Vespertina.” It was all about missing him with a desperation that made me afraid for my sanity.

“These personal poems are very tender.” He leaned forward
and kissed my forehead gratefully. “But you must not squander away your talent by singing in a minor key, Salomé. You must think of your future as the bard of our nation. We want the songs of la patria, we need anthems to lead us out of the morass of our past and into our glorious destiny as the Athens of the Americas.”

“Pancho!” I said sharply, snapping the spell he seemed to be casting on himself. “I am a woman as well as a poet.”

“That tone of voice is not becoming, Salomé,” he said, one hand tucked inside his vest in the manner of a statesman making a pronouncement.

“I don't care!” I had started crying. With the last few poems, I had begun writing in a voice that came from deep inside me. It was not a public voice. It was my own voice expressing my secret desires that Pancho was dismissing.

“I did not think that aligning your life to mine would be an incentive to shirk your duties,” Pancho continued.

I wiped my tears with my apron. “I thought I was pleasing you by writing this. But perhaps you should list my duties so that I will not forget them.”

In a small, hurt voice I was unaccustomed to hearing, he said, “You're right, Salomé. I sometimes confuse my muse with my wife.”

“I want to be both,” I said fiercely.

“You are both,” he reassured me.

O
FTEN NOW
, H
OSTOS WOULD
bring up the idea of a school for señoritas. I suppose with the birth of his little girl, María, the abstract had become specific. It was touching how involved Hostos was with the care of his children. Belinda told me how every night our maestro crawled into bed with each one and sang the special lullaby he had composed just for that child.

“Have you thought further of my suggestion, Salomé?”

I was not yet convinced. I suppose I still felt my first duty—after my wifely duties, of course—was to my writing. After all, I
had received a national medal. People had bought up all the copies of my poems that Friends of the Country had published and were already asking for more. Now, too, the new voice was compelling me to listen. How then could I also open a school that would absorb what little time I had left over for my writing?

“But, maestro,” as I spoke, I leaned in toward him as if my whole body were speaking to him, “poetry is also a necessary part of our being.”

Hostos looked down at the bundle in his arms and smiled. María babbled on as if she already had opinions on these weighty matters. “We southern peoples have an overabundance of poetry.”

I knew that Hostos held my work apart from his general condemnation of the arts. After all, my poems had inspired noble sentiments and encouraged progress and freedom. Had he read “Quejas” or “Amor y anhelo” or “Vespertina,” he would have urged me to open a school for the health of my rational soul no less than for the good of the women in my country.

I must say that I had never felt drawn to the profession of teaching. I could not help but think of my aunt's scolding voice, the thwack of her whipping branch, the sniffling of a poor student with a palm-leaf dunce tail hanging down the back of her dress. Early on, I vowed I would never be a teacher. I suppose it was the same aversion some daughters who have had dreadful mothers feel toward having a child.

“We shall see,” I said, reaching for little María to turn the conversation away from this big sacrifice Hostos was asking of me.

I
WAS WITH CHILD
, or so it seemed, since I had missed my monthly. I decided to wait another month before I told Pancho because I wanted to be sure. My husband was like a child himself if you promised him something and then withheld it. He was still waiting for the grand new poem to la patria that he thought I was writing.

When I missed a second monthly and the morning sickness began, I decided to tell him. He had just returned from a short trip west to Baní where some old caudillos were on the verge of revolution.

“Pancho, I have some happy news which will throw a little light on all this gloom.”

Although he was worried and weary from the trip, his face brightened. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I was kneeling beside him, helping him off with this boots and massaging his legs to work the tiredness out of them.

“So where is it, Salomé?” Pancho asked, eyeing my desk.

I lost heart. I did not want my child to be second to anything, even one of my own poems. And so I did not give him the news. Instead I brought up the other matter I had been thinking about now that la patria was on the verge of collapse again. “Perhaps el maestro is right. We need a school of señoritas, especially with the way things are.”

“I knew you would not disappoint me, Salomé,” Pancho said, smiling down at me and dissolving the thought just forming in my head about who was the disappointed one.

P
ANCHO DID FINALLY GET
his wish for a poem to la patria from me. But I think even he would have preferred my silence to the atrocities that occurred that June that stirred me to write “Sombras.”

By then we had moved back with Mamá and Ramona and Tía Ana. With Pancho gone so often, I was too lonely all by myself in our small, dark house.

At first I had feared that Pancho would refuse to live with my family again. Neither Ramona or my Tía Ana were easy on him, but Pancho, I must say, loved a challenge. “They are coming around,” he kept telling me, though I, who had known them all my life, saw no signs of it.

There were good reasons to move—besides the company and care I would receive from my family. We could not continue paying rent on a house. None of the many enterprises in which Pancho was engaged seemed to bring in money. Even his job as a president's secretary paid mostly in honor rather than pesos.

Soon after I moved in, Tía Ana decided to close down the little school she had run for fifty years. The house suddenly grew to twice its size. Mamá offered me the front parlor my aunt had vacated for my own school, and Ramona offered to help me. She was the only one who knew I was pregnant, and she worried about my starting a school by myself at the same time that I would be giving birth to a child as well as taking care of a grown one disguised as a husband.

“Now, Ramona,” I reminded her, for she had promised me that she would try to get along with Pancho.

“I want you to have some time for your writing, Salomé,” she reminded me. Unlike Pancho who was always holding up my glorious future, Ramona wanted to see me writing because she knew it brought me deep pleasure and satisfaction.

“And you know,” she added, lowering her voice. “Though I was the first to scold you when you wrote ‘Quejas,' these new poems are among my favorites.”

“Pancho says—” But the look on her face stopped me.

“When you move in, I will make sure you find time to write. Even if I have to poison all distractions.” She gave me one of those cross smiles that had become habitual whenever she spoke of Pancho.

I laughed uneasily, wondering to what lengths my sister would go to get rid of my husband.

T
HE
A
YUNTAMIENTO VOTED TO
allot me sixty pesos a month for each pupil, which, with a minimum of ten pupils, would be enough to buy all our supplies and pay my teachers besides. Every
time el maestro came over to discuss the school, my aunt would stand at the door to offer her “word of advice after a lifetime of teaching.” Once, when Pancho suggested that we would be following the apostle's positivist model, which was different from my aunt's old-fashioned, religious, rote style, my aunt lit into Hostos.

“You, sir, are starting schools without God, schools without morals!”

“No, not at all, Doña Ana.” Hostos stood up and offered the old woman his chair. “An ethical education is my first concern. Let me explain what we are trying to do here. Please join us.”

And before we knew it, that forbidding old woman was sitting in a rocker, eating right out of Hostos's hand.

At the end of our meeting as we walked el maestro to the door, Pancho apologized for the intrusion. “You were very kind to include her.”

“It's not kindness. She has been exercising this profession most of her life. We will learn a thing or two from her if we listen carefully.”

“But, maestro, how can you listen to someone who says that you don't learn anything without a little bleeding?”

Hostos bowed his head and smiled. “Most new mothers would agree with her, wouldn't they, Salomé?”

I
N
M
AY 1881, THE
rebellion Pancho had tried to stave off finally erupted in the southwest. Meriño abolished all civil rights and issued a decree that anyone caught bearing arms would be shot on the spot. The army prepared for war.

“It's just to calm things down,” Pancho explained. “Meriño will never enforce it. I promise you.”

“Meriño might not,” Hostos agreed, “but he's got a bloodthirsty general of the army who will. Lilís would love the excuse to get rid of all his enemies under the banner of ‘calming things down' and ‘protecting la patria.'”

A patrol came door to door to collect any firearms. By the time they got to our neighborhood, the weary soldiers were asking only at the first house on each block to vouch for the disarmament of all the neighbors. When they knocked at our corner house, Tía Ana opened the top of the Dutch door and told them we had all the weapons we needed: Salomé's poems and Christ, our Lord. Of course, the lieutenant in charge immediately discharged two soldiers to each house on the block, and he and two subalterns scoured every inch of ours, Coco behind them, barking wildly. Suddenly, several shots rang out. One of our neighbors, caught with a small revolver he had hidden in his boot, had been taken out on the street and shot. I think that is when we all realized that Meriño and his general, Lilís, were deadly serious. From that day on, Tía Ana seldom said a word. I believe she felt responsible for a martyrdom she might have prevented.

That we were heading back to our old warring state made me feel sicker than I already was. All our hard work the last two years had come to nothing: the new schools that Hostos had started, the hopeful sacrifices of so many young people, many like Pancho, willing to work for nothing. For the first time, I began to wonder if we were capable of freedom.

“We must not lose faith,” Hostos urged me when he stopped by one day to review my instituto plans. Now that Pancho and José had moved their school to a building beside the Normal for older boys, I did not see the maestro daily as I had when the school was in our house. I wondered if my growing eagerness to start my own instituto was because it meant I would see Hostos more often. Our conversations were a balm for my weary spirit.

We were pacing the front parlor to see how many small chairs we might fit in there. A globe already stood at one end of the room, a donation from Don Eliseo. Stacks of books sat on a long bench, gifts from friends who had heard we were starting a school. There were hopeful souls out there who believed in our peaceful revolution.

Hostos was scribbling down numbers on a scrap of paper as he paced the room again. I sat down, tired out with the effort. I had not been feeling well for several days, and I had begun to suspect that something had gone wrong with my pregnancy.

Hostos stopped pacing and looked directly at me. The windows were shuttered to keep out the dust of the street, and so the air was dusky, which gave our meeting a secretive feeling. “When are you going to tell Pancho?” he asked me.

“About what?”

“How many other things are you keeping from him?”

“Pancho is preoccupied these days,” I defended him.

“Your husband is putting every other duty before you.”

Hush, I told myself, for I was tempted to confess my loneliness and disappointment. It was an enormous comfort just to know Hostos understood these things.

“You are a natural teacher on many fronts, Salomé. Pancho will learn from you how to make a fine husband. But as your aunt suggested, you might have to draw blood.”