In the Name of Salome (11 page)

“I see,” he says, giving her little nods as if confirming a suspicion he has about her. “You come here, you get ahead, you forget your country.” He is speaking to someone he has created in his head.

She could defend herself. She could say that she came here just as he did, because there was no place left to go.
La patria still in chains . . . The tears I've shed for her have never dried
. . . Or she could try to calm him by agreeing to do whatever he asks. Pancho always used to say that the best prescription for dealing with the mad was not to contradict them. But this boy is not crazy. He is the voice of her own heart if she were prepared to obey it.

Instead, she stands, weary. A long evening awaits her: the lecture she does not feel confident about, a reception with colleagues she has not seen since last summer, a talk with Marion. She gathers together her scarf, her leather gloves, the briefcase with her initials imprinted in gold letters (S.C.H.U.), feeling suddenly ashamed of owning fine things.

“If I can be of some other useful help to you, let me know.” The words sound empty. What can she possibly offer him? A recommendation for graduate school? A letter of introduction to a colleague? He wants more of her.
Whoever gives himself to others lives among the doves
. It is the same old story everywhere she turns.

He says nothing, watching her, his eyes narrowed. As she is stepping out the door, he calls after her, “Long live Salomé Ureña!”

M
ARION IS BESIDE HERSELF
. They are sitting in her kitchen, drinking hot chocolate before getting dressed for the evening. “The nerve! You should tell Graziano. Who does he think he is?” It is a great solace to feel such unquestioning loyalty. One can leave one's defense to friends and instead try to understand the point of view of the enemy.

“Remember, he is heartbroken. He has lost his father. He has lost his country.”

“And you lost your mother; you lost your country. But are you taking it out on somebody?” Marion challenges.

Only myself, she thinks.

“Anyhow, if I see him tonight, I'm going to box his ears,” Marion declares. Then, having performed her righteous anger, she lets her curiosity get the better of her. “So what were his poems like?”

“A lot like Mamá's,” Camila admits. She feels suddenly anxious. Marion, especially, will not like the dry dutifulness of her speech. “My precaution got the best of me.”

“Well, your mother's poems were subversive,” Marion reminds her. Dear Marion, still bent on defending her.

They should be getting ready for the evening. But neither wants to end this moment of intimacy. Soon enough, their lives will draw them worlds apart. They sit in the warm kitchen, sipping their hot drink, exchanging the little news of the last few months. Periodically, one or the other goes to the window to check on the progress of the snow. It is still coming down hard.

“You suppose they really have a hundred words for it?” Marion asks. Then, in her usual non sequitur way, she takes both Camila's hands in hers. “I know I sprung this on you. I'm sorry . . .”

“I just want to know that you're happy,” Camila cuts her off. She knows if she gives her friend any indication of the sadness she is feeling, Marion will begin to feel ambivalent. Let one of them finally be at peace with the future she has chosen.

“I just don't want to grow old alone. I don't have your resources, Camila.”

Resources? she wonders. “Now, Marion, I thought this was our prime. Weren't you advising me this afternoon to kick up my heels and have a good time?”

Her friend suddenly looks old, the dyed hair depressing in its too black glossiness, the skin around her eyes puffy with lack of sleep. “Maybe
you're
having a good time,” she accuses. She looks like she might cry.

“Maybe,” Camila says vaguely. In his last letter, Guillén confessed his loneliness. “Perhaps when you come in May, we may dine together?” She had felt a queasy feeling reading those words, a sudden repulsion, just as when Domingo used to touch her. Poor Domingo. She has written him, asking his pardon, but he has never answered her.

“But do you love him, Marion?”

A look of sadness washes over her friend's face. “This is an alliance, Camila, an alliance, not a romance. You always say, there's more to life than black or white.”

Does she really say that? Her pronouncements in the mouths of others always sound so facile. “I only ask because you have always . . .”

“Preferred women?” Marion finishes the awkward phrase Camila finds difficult to say. It is not squeamishness, as Marion thinks. She hates labels that pin the self down to only one set of choices.

“Who says that's changed?” Marion challenges. She reaches across the table and takes hold of Camila's hands. “You know all you have to do—”

“Marion, por favor,” she says quickly before the thought fans into a hope.

“But we could try.” Marion has begun to cry.

“No, we couldn't.” She speaks soothingly. What can she say? That she knows the life waiting for her in the wings is not one she can live out with Marion. That Marion already played the best part, the glorious first love forever preserved in her memory. But Marion has outlived her role and become an endearing, bossy, and slightly tedious friend. A woman who no longer commands Camila's imagination, but who takes over everything else. “You're going to be all right, Marion,” she consoles her. “He sounds like a good companion.”

“Cammie, Cammie,” Marion sobs, “how come I feel like I'm deserting you? Where will you end up?”

Dear Marion, wanting to know the ending before the story is done! “I have a good job, a nice pension building up. I have dozens of nieces and nephews.” The thought of Gugú comes to mind. May he rest in peace, she thinks, E.P.D.,
En Paz Descanse
. You have to make a special request of the stonecutter at home if you do not want those initials inscribed on the stone you order. The way you must ask the midwife not to pierce your baby's ears if she is a girl. (Even her modest, unadorned mother in her one photograph is wearing two large, disquieting Chiquita Banana hoops.)

Beyond them in the living room, Camila can see the portrait of Mr. Reed. Marion has finally brought him down off the wall, and he leans against the sofa, looking down the hall at Camila. Every once in a while, Daddy would take Camila aside to talk about
his
Marion, as if she were one of his thorny actuarial tables whose predictions were not panning out for the company. He had encouraged the friendship, believing that such an elegant young lady, the daughter of a president, was bound to be a fine influence on his recalcitrant daughter. Every summer while she was at the
university, she had stayed with the Reed family. She remembers the first summer when some locals left a burning cross on the lawn. Mr. Reed had gone out with a shotgun and fired it in the air to disperse the cars gathered in his driveway. From then on, nobody bothered Camila on her summer visits to LaMoure, North Dakota.

Our Marion
, she thinks, looking back fondly at the portrait.

“Promise me something,” Marion is saying. “Promise me nothing is going to change between us.”

To avoid having to lie again, she leans across the table and kisses her friend chastely on the lips, a mother's kiss. By the time she says, “I promise,” she is not quite sure what vow she has sworn to keep.

W
HAT
WILL
BECOME OF HER
?

As she dresses for the evening, Marion's question keeps popping out at her, like a cuckoo bird that will not stay lodged in its tiny house even after the pendulum of the Swiss clock he lives in has been stopped. Where did she hear some odd anecdote about someone cutting off the pendulum of a clock, thinking it was unnecessary?

What will become of her?

She has lived long enough to realize that unlike her dear friend, great escapes have never worked for her. Tomorrow she will return to Poughkeepsie. The snows will have abated, the arborvitae bushes in front of the college house will be covered in fresh white caps, as if Dot has kept busy in the days Camila has been gone. She will teach her classes, explaining the pluperfect for the umpteenth time, assigning favorite poems (
Youth, divine treasure, you are leaving, never to return
), and perhaps she will change one small point of view after another and be changed by them: her leap accomplished step by small step. What could be wrong with that?

I
N THE NAME OF
the Father, and of the Son, and of my mother
. She says the old charm, taking deep breaths to calm herself as she sits in the wings at Middlebury's McCullough Auditorium, waiting to go on, listening to the chairman intone his rococo introduction. He is making up a character she does not know, an eminent Hispanicist, a woman with two doctorates, a tenured professor at Vassar. She hears the polite clapping that signals she is to come on stage. In the front row Marion sits in her earth-colored tunic, which does nothing for her looks. She reminds Camila, in fact, of her old aunt Mon in her acres of shapeless fabric. But the choice of a tunic is not totally misguided. It does confer on Marion the authority of a robed seer in a Greek play. If she were to give a standing ovation, everyone behind her would follow suit.

Sitting beside her is the young man. He seems subdued, as if Marion has actually boxed his ears. But he must have had second thoughts himself about his outburst. Why else would he be here?

The houselights dim. The chairman turns on the podium light for her to read by and exits the stage. She stares down at the speech she has written. It is a dull combination of duty and fact that no one will feel inspired by. She cannot do this to her mother. She cannot do this to Marion or to the young man. She cannot do this to herself! She closes the folder.

“I have accepted this invitation in error,” she begins, her voice breaking with tension. “I cannot celebrate my mother's work when her country is in shambles.” She brings up the recent disappearances, the murders, the massacre of the Haitians she has never mentioned publicly before. All her life she has had to think first of her words' effect on the important roles her father and brothers and uncles and cousins were playing in the world. Her own opinions were reserved for texts, for roundtables on women's contributions to the colonies, for curriculum committees implementing one theory of language learning over another.

“But if I remain quiet, then I lose my mother completely, for the only way I really know her is through the things she stood for.”

To keep her dreams from dying
Was all the monument she dreamed of having.

She finishes with a quote she improvises from her mother, then looks around for a way off the stage. In the wings, a young girl managing the houselights gives a signal and the room explodes with light and loud clapping. From the front row, she hears the young man shouting, “¡Salomé! ¡Salomé!” And beside him, Marion has sprung to her feet and is cheering her on as always, “Camila!”

S
UDDENLY EVERYONE WAS LOOKING
at me.

I studied my face in the mirror: the same eyes, mouth, big ears (oh, how I hated them!), the nose I wished were a little less broad, the springy hair I couldn't tamp down—in short, I was the very same Salomé Ureña, but now everyone seemed to point, to make a low bow at the waist, or dip down in a schoolgirl curtsy, and say, “Buenos días, poetisa.”

I
T'S AS IF
I had on a disguise, a famous face, behind which I watched people who just a few months ago would not have said good day to me on the street suddenly smile with deference and ask, “And what do you think of the weather we're having, Señorita Poetisa?”

“Hot,” I would say in my terse way. But then, because I could see they were waiting for me to say more, I would add, “To be expected in the summer.”

“Salomé says we should expect more heat this summer,” I heard myself misquoted.

“Did you hear the wonderful tone of irony when she said, ‘To be expected in the summer'?”

This is the way beauties must feel, I thought to myself.

N
IGHTS WHEN
I
LAY
in bed, I ached for the kind of love I had read about in other people's poems. I was twenty-four years old, and only once had a young man squeezed my hand and whispered poetry in my ear.

“That's one more time than me,” Ramona noted sullenly when I voiced my heart's yearning to her. “And you certainly stopped any chances of the same thing happening to me.” My older sister was turning more and more into a younger version of our cranky tía Ana.

Miguel and Alejandro, our former tutors, were back with their pretty Puerto Rican brides in tow. “They go out as exiles and come back as grooms,” Ramona complained. She was right. Gruff, manly patriots whom we remembered in torn, bloody shirts with firearms over their shoulders, their hair matted with blood, returned in long frock coats with silk cravats tied in complicated French knots and haircuts that made their ears pop out and their faces look sweeter and plumper.

“Your day will come, girls, if it is meant to come,” Mamá would say from time to time. “Meanwhile you are lucky to have each other.”

But if I was to remain by my sister's side for the rest of my life, I wanted at least one brief excursion into love. Long enough to feel a man's arms around my waist, to see the look of worship falling away from his face, the look of fame falling away from mine, that hushed and holy moment that all poems aspire to when the word becomes flesh.

Was that too much to ask?

E
VERY EVENING, IT SEEMED
, the house filled with visitors.

There was our regular Don Eliseo Grullón, and Papá with his heart full of pride and his rum-flushed face, and the poet José Joaquín Pérez, just back from exile, and the sainted Father Billini, who had founded a school for boys as well as an insane asylum (“Some mornings, I find myself at one and I think I'm at the other,” he joked fondly), and Archbishop Meriño, also back from exile, an imposing, broad-shouldered man with a thunderous voice and a shock of white hair. “I thought you'd be older,” he said when he met me.