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Authors: Julia Alvarez

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BOOK: In the Name of Salome
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“What's going on?”

“I'm leaving,” Marion announces, and then, as if the shocked
look on Camila's face were concern about her visit, Marion adds, “Don't worry. I'm coming to your talk first.”

O
N THE WALK UP
to Munroe Hall, Marion explains—if the giggling confession she is making can be termed an explanation. With each year, as Camila has become more respectable—full professor and chair of her department at Vassar, president of the Modern Language Association's Northeast Division—her friend Marion has gotten more eccentric. Her wardrobe looks as if she has broken into the costume shop at the college. Her hair is cut in a short bob with bangs and encircled by bright scarves that flow behind her dramatically. It's as if Marion wants attention, and rather than perform responsibly, she is—like an adolescent—showing off to get it.

“I'm moving to Florida.”

“Why on earth?”

“Lesley,” Marion says, watching her carefully.

Camila feels a pang of jealousy. She averts her face, not wanting Marion to guess at her feelings. For the last twenty-five years, she has been keeping Marion at bay in one way or another. Why should it distress her that Marion has finally found what she always wanted, a woman to love and live with?

“Who is she?” Camila asks quietly.

“Lesley is a he,” Marion says with a smirk.

Camila cannot help but think that Marion has laid this little trap, a male lover with a feminine name in order to get a rise out of her. She must not get riled up. Her class visit begins in a few minutes. She will have to face a group of undergraduates and talk to them about her mother's poetry. Afterward, she has agreed to meet with a talented Dominican student who is going through a difficult adjustment period.

“It's an old Scottish name,” Marion concedes. “You know, like Leslie Howard.” (Who is Leslie Howard? Camila wonders.) “His
whole name's Lesley Frederick Richards the third. Actually, he goes by Fred, but I prefer Lesley.” (Of course!) “He's got a summer home on Lake Champlain, and this year he stayed on. But the winter is too much for him, so he's heading back to his place in Florida, and he wants me to join him.”

“Are you to be married then?”

“Married?!” Marion says horrified. “Who mentioned marriage?”

Camila feels exasperated, as if she were talking to one of her uncooperative students, the ones she encourages to take French or German. “Please talk sense, Marion!” All around them, the snow is falling. She feels suddenly very bridal herself, as if she were being pelted by handfuls of rice at a wedding. “What about your job?”

“Ah, Cam, come on. This place doesn't take dance seriously. They have me posing the girls in tableaus like they're so many cabbages for sale!” For a moment, Marion's own bitterness seems to have swallowed up her earlier playfulness. But she rallies, Marion always rallies. “Anyhow, they're glad to be rid of me, believe me. Especially after fall recital.” Camila has heard all about it—dancers presenting the ages of a woman's life, including a writhing birth scene.

We're both too old for all this, Camila is feeling. Too old to still be knocking around the hemisphere, motherless, daughterless, fatherless souls. “Ay, Marion, Marion.”

“You don't have to feel sorry for me. Lesley is quite well-off.” Marion is gloating!

She shakes her head and strides ahead. There is nothing to say to Marion when she is in one of her moods.

“Well, don't walk off mad,” Marion says, catching up with her. “You've got your own little thing going with Guillén.”

“Marion, don't start that, please.” Camila hears that tone of know-it-all in her voice. She tones it down. “I'm trying to simplify, not complicate, what is left of the rest of my life.”

“You've been trying to do that since you were born!” Marion says smartly. Oh dear, Camila thinks, why did she accept this invitation? When Chairman Graziano of the Spanish Department invited her on campus to talk about her mother, she accepted in large part because it was a chance to see Marion.

“Come on, Cam,” Marion says winningly, hooking her arm in Camila's. “Think of how pleased Daddy would be. Remember how he always worried that I didn't cotton to young fellows?” Marion does a perfect imitation of the Mr. Reed Camila remembers. “Anyhow, why not congratulate your old friend on her new adventure. Remember you and I are in our prime. Didn't you read that article in
Life
about women in their fifties? Kick your heels up, honey, the fun's about to start!”

On the campus walk, with students coming toward them, Marion executes one of her dance leaps and then collapses laughing against her best friend's shoulder. The students smile, pleased to catch a teacher being flamboyant. They turn into Munroe Hall—no doubt these are members of the class Camila will be visiting. One of them, a tense young man, with her own tawny skin color, eyes her dolefully, as if trying to make up his mind about her.

S
HE SHOULD BE USED
to this. Periodically, throughout their friendship, Marion will rip up her roots and do something unexpected. Years ago she dropped out of the university and followed Camila to Cuba. Camila remembers opening the front door to find her handsome, dark-haired friend with a suitcase in either hand. “Howdy!” Marion said, in a voice Camila could tell was straining for bravado. The paleness was more than Marion's naturally pale color, it was the color of full-blown terror. “Remember how you said, mi casa su casa?” she had said, her voice breaking.

Camila had felt a rush of warm emotion that made her want to weep with gratitude. She had missed Marion horribly, more
than she cared to admit. She had assumed when she headed south that she would never see her beloved friend again. And here she was, Marion! as faithful and devoted as any lover in a storybook.

Marion announced that she had come to teach modern dance in Cuba. “¡Excelente! We need a modern dance school in Cuba,” Pancho had said, without the least irony in his voice. Probably, if Marion had said that she had come to open a baton-twirling school, Pancho would have said, “How nice! We need to learn to twirl batons in Cuba.” Poor Pancho, always too caught up in his own preoccupations to pay much attention to anyone else's craziness.

But Marion soon grew impatient with Camila's family and Cuban society in general. Somebody had to tell these women that they were now living in the twentieth century! And that somebody was Marion. She would hem her dresses above the calf and cut her hair in a short bob, if she felt like it. She would go out without a chaperone and smoke and swear like a sailor. (Damn it! Hell's bells! Stick it where the sun never shines, so there!) Nobody blinked an eye. Nobody was surprised. Miss Marion was American, after all; they did not expect her to behave herself.

But as for Señorita Camila . . .

It was a constant tug of war for Camila, caught as she was between her wild friend and her family, trying to keep the peace in a household in which she seemed the only neutral being. There were two stepaunts, the cranky Mon, three half brothers going off like firecrackers, Regina (who spoke only Spanish) and the cook from Martinique (who only spoke French), and a menagerie of animals, who at Pancho's insistence received all their commands in English—and then, as if she could balance them all with her splashy, incomparable presence, Marion, or, la Miss Marion. Camila might have been in love, but what she remembers is being in a state of constant exhaustion. No wonder her voice gave out, and her teacher, Doña Gertrudis, told her she must give up her dream of singing opera.

When Camila and her father left for a month's stay in Washington, Marion decided to accompany them as far as New York and then go to visit her family in North Dakota. Camila hoped that that once there, Marion would not come back. She had her own plans. She was almost thirty. She still had a chance of happiness if she finally made the correct choices.

But at the end of the summer, Marion was back at Camila's door. “I'll never let go!” Marion had sworn, even the final time, when she climbed aboard the train that would take her to Havana, and thence, by ferry, to Key West and a job teaching dance up north. Over the years, on and off, the two friends have stayed close, finding each other again and again, especially when their lives are beginning to fall apart.

Most recently, as they are both crossing the half-century mark, Marion has been hinting that the two friends might “end up together after all.” Especially now that their parents are all gone and they don't have to worry about awkward explanations. But they are not gone for me, Camila thinks. No doubt her ambivalence is driving Marion away again. But in fact, Marion's recent lapses in writing and calling have been much more depressing than Camila would have thought.

Especially given this whole centennial business, bringing back, as she knew it would, that hollowed-out feeling of original loss. And then, the newer losses! Pedro, dear Pedro is gone. And fast upon this grief, another: her cousin Gugú shot down on a beach this past summer.

Winter upon winter.
Stripping the land of its glorious young
. . .

Camila is not above improvising on her mother's poems.

“B
UENAS TARDES
,”
SHE SMILES
at the room of entirely strange young faces. (
Their faces fresh with what they do not know
. . .) In honor of the season, she takes the class through a close textual reading of her mother's poem, “The Arrival of Winter.”

“¡Excelente!” Chairman Graziano congratulates her after class. Tall and effusive with the broad shoulders of a football player, he seems out of a place in the scholarly confines of the classroom. Beside him stands a young man, brooding and thin, a dusting of cinnamon in his skin. No doubt this is the Dominican student, who has been having some sort of trouble—she can't quite remember what. He cradles a small parcel in his arms possessively. Her mother's poems, she thinks. He wants her to sign his copy.

The chairman introduces him as Manuelito Calderón, a name that sounds vaguely familiar. “Why don't you two visit right here?” The chairman rearranges two classroom chairs so they face each other, then nods at Marion. “We'll be back in about twenty minutes.” There is a slight lift of his eyebrows as if to ask, or sooner? Camila understands: the guest speaker must be protected against the eager student or colleague. “Twenty minutes is fine,” she agrees, smiling at the student. “Don't you think, Manuelito?”

“As you wish,” he says, quietly in Spanish. In the too-large winter coat he has not taken off, he seems ill at ease. Camila wonders if this is the way her colleagues and students at Vassar view her. Perhaps that is why her neighbors are constantly trying to dress her warmly and acclimate her to a place they can see she does not
cotton to
, as Daddy Reed might have said.

“D
ON'T YOU RECOGNIZE MY
name?” the young man confronts her as soon as the chairman and Marion have left the room. He is scanning her face for some hint of recognition he seems to feel he deserves.
Difficult time adjusting
, Camila remembers the chairman's phrase. She should think so with this rude attitude.

It turns out he is, in fact, the son of Manuel Calderón, who was killed last summer in the Luperón invasion. He knows of Gugú. Before she can express her sympathy, Manuelito continues, testing her. “I understand your brother works for the government.”

“Max is in foreign relations,” she says, trying to minimize her brother's participation. In fact, Trujillo offered posts to the whole family—the Henríquez Ureña name would lend prestige to his regime. Even Pedro had served briefly as secretary of education, only to resign before a year was up. But Max has stayed on.

“So you can go back when you want?” Manuelito asks. His look is fierce, but his eyes, she notices, are a boy's eyes, full of tears.

She sighs, her glance falling on her hands. They have aged, grown spotted and rough. Recently, her body is full of these kinds of surprises. She looks in the mirror, and an aging woman blinks back at her. Meanwhile, a girl waits in the wings of her heart for all the important things she was promised that have not yet happened: a great love, a settled home, a free country. “I have not been back since the massacre,” she explains. The slaughter of Haitians had disturbed her profoundly. What was it Trujillo finally paid for the twenty thousand dead, twenty pesos a head?

“But you mentioned in class that you will be going back in October for your mother's centennial?”

She hesitates. She had said so. (“There will be a procession of six hundred students, wearing black armbands. We will make one stop so we can each lay a gardenia, my mother's favorite flower, in front of the house where she was born. The fragrance will be apparent for miles.”) It was as if she were creating that future day, a touch of this, a touch of that, filling in the gaps left behind by her mother.

The young man sets down his parcel on the small desk that projects from her armrest. The wood is full of carvings, sets of initials connected with plus signs, declarations of love, and indictments of teachers:
Peguero is a pill
, then a quote ascribed to Martí but which sounds rather biblical,
Whoever gives himself to others lives among the doves
.

“What is it?” she asks, nodding at the package.

“My submission to the contest,” he says. He is watching her
with a look she used to call a thermometer look, when she saw it on her stepmother's face, eyes probing, gauging her reaction. “I am Dominican. I can submit?”

“Of course, you can. But you must submit it to the instituto directly. Why not send it by mail?”

“It would not pass the censors.”

Her hands burrow in her lap as if away from his scrutiny. “Manuelito, there is a good chance I will not be going down at all. I still have not decided. But remember, if I do, my luggage will be checked, too.”

BOOK: In the Name of Salome
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