In the Name of Salome (18 page)

I could not tell if Pancho was jealous—but how could he be? The poem was so obviously about my regard for the venerable poet, not about my feelings for the respectable, married man.

“May I read that poem at our next gathering?” Pancho asked.

“You may, of course. But I am finishing a new one that might be more suitable. I will bring it along.”

It was as if I mentioned water to a man dying of thirst. Pancho could not thank me enough for my generosity, my intelligence, my talent.

I saw that if I wanted this man, all I had to do was keep writing.

O
N THE FIRST DAY
of the new year, I received a letter from Pancho.

I opened it with trembling fingers for it had the heft and feel of a love letter—fine linen paper and black looping letters tossed out to capture the beloved in ropes of words.

Reading it through a first, and then a second time, I admit that I felt disappointed. The letter was three pages long, and not once was love or anything approximating love mentioned. He was writing, Pancho explained, because after our talk about positivism, he had come to realize how little foundation I had in the sciences. I was the one poet of our nation who stood a chance of
becoming a great poet for all times. But I had never received the light of scientific truth. And since he, Pancho, had devoted himself to the sciences (arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, mineralogy, astronomy, philosophy—just to mention a few), he would like to offer, with all due respect, to transfer all the scientific knowledge in his mind to mine.

“What arrogance!” Ramona had come up behind me and had been reading the letter over my shoulder. I disagreed with her. In fact, what I had concluded was that Pancho had great faith in my abilities.

One thing we both agreed on: this study plan could last a lifetime.

So, was this a proposal of sorts? I was not about to ask Ramona, and so I decided to approach Mamá. I would have to ask her permission anyway to allow me to enter into a course of study again with a man.

Mamá smiled fondly as she read the letter, shaking her head every now and then, as she had at the little puppy in Baní. For the moment, she seemed to have shed two of her three score years, the white in her hair glinting like highlights of the sun rather than the mark of the years. When she had finished, she folded the letter carefully along its folds and handed it back to me. “I think you should accept his proposal.”

“Ramona says it is inappropriate,” I explained.

Mamá walked across her bedoom and shut the door. Then, she turned to me and in a low voice said, “I want to tell you something that I don't want repeated outside this room. Do you hear me?” I nodded.

“Once long ago, another sister interfered with the matters of her younger sister's life. And that younger sister is still living out the pain of allowing that interference. Salomé, mi'ja,” she took me by the shoulders, “you are beloved by the whole country. Your poetry is memorized by your countrymen, young and old. But there is nothing, nothing, I don't care what it is, that compares with the
love of a man. Don't give up your chance to have that. I'll stand by you when the storms start to blow, for there will be criticism.”

“Because he's so much younger?” I asked.

“That, and he is white and we are mixed. His family has money and we have none.” She had been counting these reasons, and now she made a fist, as if to crush such silly opposition. “Then, of course, there is his Jewish religion . . .”

I could tell even Mamá was concerned about this. “But the family has converted,” I protested. Pancho had told me how his Sephardic grandfather had married a Dominican woman and agreed to raise the children as Catholics.

“We'll never convince your aunt,” Mamá trailed off. Then, nodding at the letter in my hand, she added, “Be that as it may, you must accept.”

“But Mamá,” I said, dropping all pretense that I was talking about the lessons. “What if he finds out he doesn't love me?”

I was a grown woman, but the way I looked up at her, Mamá must have thought I was her little girl again. She brushed the hair away and planted a kiss on my forehead. “That is always the risk we take. But love is worth that risk. And should you fall, you have a great net to catch you.”

I thought she would say, “My arms,” when I asked, “What net is that?” But my mother said, “The poems you have written and the ones you will write.”

T
OWARD THE END OF
that year, the papers reported that a Mr. Bell from the United States had invented a way to talk to someone who wasn't there. This news brought on one of Tía Ana's endless tirades. “That's fooling with God's creation!”

“Don't worry, Ana,” Mamá tried to soothe her. “It will be many years before that telephone finds its way down here. God's creation might not even be here by then.”

That eighteen-hundredth-and-seventy-eighth year—“of our
Lord, and don't you forget it,” Tía Ana scolded—we had eight governments and as many battles. Each toppled government headed for exile in Haiti. “Soon there will be more Dominican politicians in Haiti than here,” Don Eliseo noted. “All the better for us,” Mamá said under her breath.

In the midst of all this turbulence, Semper Vigilans managed to collect the requisite sum of two hundred pesos. The announcement appeared in the papers: the decoration would take place on Saturday night, December 22, at seven o'clock at the National Library established by Friends of the Country.

I didn't know if Pancho was, in fact, Semper Vigilans, but I did know that he and the Friends of the Country were behind this campaign on behalf of my getting this medal. And so, I protested directly to Pancho. Our country was in no condition to be spending money on a gold medal when we were just beginning to recover from a year of fighting.

We had been poring over the structure of flowers. Pancho sliced open the long white lilies with a small knife on a board on his knees. He had asked my permission to remove his jacket for our dissection lesson. Watching him working in his shirtsleeves, I was reminded of those long-ago afternoon lessons in my father's garden. Back then, I had thought my father the most handsome man in all the world. But in fact, Papá was not handsome as much as he was engaging, with his broad face and infectious smile and eyes full of naughtiness. Pancho, on the other hand, was out-and-out lovely to behold. Even Ramona called him Absalom, after the handsome lad of the Old Testament. She was full of nicknames for him. But Pancho never cracked a smile. He was the opposite of Papá in that regard: he had no sense of humor at all. But this gravity appealed to me, for it made him seem older than his nineteen years.

“Salomé, don't you see? This is precisely what la patria needs, to focus on excellence and nobility and progress.” Pancho gestured with his small knife. Recently, he had begun to talk like all
positivists, as if he were delivering speeches even in private conversation.

“They can focus on those things without spending on such vanity.”

Pancho laid down his knife on the board. In the last few months of daily lessons, we had raced through mathematics (“You have a remarkably quick mind,” Pancho kept observing) and were presently studying the inorganics. Next week, Pancho had promised, we would start in on astronomy. “Your modesty becomes you, Salomé,” Pancho said.

There was a softness to his voice, as if it were coming from inside the silky center of the flower he had just cut open.

I stared down at the paper on which I had been taking notes. I could not help but glance over at Pancho's arm, strong and bare, with a tangle of blue veins at the wrist. How I yearned to touch him! But I had been raised in a country where national heroines tied their skirts down as they were about to be executed. I did not know that it was possible for a woman to reach over and touch a man's arm of her own accord.

“Salomé, I have a confession to make.” Pancho had lowered his voice. “I gave my solemn promise to scale the heights of knowledge with you, did I not?”

“Yes,” I said, reminding myself to breathe calmly.

“I must break that promise,” he said, pausing dramatically. Sometimes I wondered if Pancho had read one too many romances. “Hostos has asked me to accompany him around the country for several months, studying schools, seeing what can be done.”

These, of course, were goals that all of us patriots had been working toward, but it was upsetting to hear that I would have to make a personal sacrifice.

“I know you can find any number of admirers, much more qualified, who would consider it an honor to take my place. What I ask,” he hesitated, taking up the dissecting board on his knees as
if to occupy his restless hands, “is if you would do me the honor of waiting until I return to resume your studies.”

I looked at those dark eyes, that handsome, ardent face, and I could not believe the man did not see I was in love with him. “I will happily wait until you return, Pancho.”

He had cut open another flower and was poking at it nervously with his knife. He had explained how the whole mechanism of its propagation worked. The pistil at the center, with its sticky opening, waiting for the pollen from the stamen. As he toyed with the flower, I felt my breath coming short with wonder and desperation.

T
HE NIGHT OF THE
decoration went by in a blur. Mamá, who never went anywhere anymore, made a concession to the occasion. (“One of your own to be named a national poet! You must go,” our old friend Don Eliseo Grullón urged her.) Ramona had surprised me with a posy of gardenias she had gathered from the bush outside Papá's old house. I touched her hand in gratitude, for I could not trust myself not to start crying.

The library at the center of the capital was lit up as if for an inauguration. Rumors spread that several ex-presidents were present, but given the many governments we had had, I did not consider this fact so flattering. Pancho had set up a receiving line, and as each new guest arrived, he made the introduction to me. All I could think to say was,
You are too kind, You are too kind, You are too kind
. Beside me, Pancho was full of extravagant praise for everyone. By the end of the line, I felt as if I had shaken the hand of every great man and every lovely woman on the island.

Except one. Trini was absent. When I had a free moment with Mamá just before the program got started, I asked if she had seen the Villeta family. “Why of course not, Salomé. The father died yesterday.” I felt a pang of shame at my gladness that my rival was not there to take Pancho's attention away from me.

It was when the crowd stood to applaud me as the medal on its satin ribbon was slipped over my head that I finally realized that my life was changed forever. I read my short speech of thank you, everyone leaning forward, straining to hear me, for my voice kept giving out. But when Pancho read my new poem in his full, expressive voice, the crowd came to its feet again.
¡Salomé! ¡Salomé! ¡Salomé
! Lines from the poem were recited back to me. I bowed my head, acknowledging the applause, and after it had died down, and rose again, and died down, like a series of waves coming to shore, a man's voice cried out, “What a man that woman is!” It was meant to be a compliment, I suppose.

T
HE NEXT DAY, MAMÁ
, Ramona, and I went to pay our respects to the Villetas.

“I am so sorry I missed your coronation,” Trini said, after we had sat for a while, talking about her father's loss.

I had to wonder if Trini intended to hurt me with her mistaken word choices and mistimed comments or if she really was not in command of her language. Perhaps she was just not very smart—though I did not want to think so and add one more example to the theory that women were not very intelligent and education should not be wasted on us.

“It was a decoration,” I corrected her. Ramona reached in her reticule and gave Trini the medal to hold. We had brought it along to show the Villetas, whose contribution of two pesos had been listed in the papers.

“I would have liked to have been there,” Trini said wistfully. “Pancho was here this morning and told me how well the evening went. You know, he leaves right after Noche Buena with that odd man Hostos.”

Of course, I knew all about Pancho's trip, but the fact that he had come first thing in the morning to tell Trini about our special evening together was painful to hear. Ramona saw my disappointment,
and as Trini chatted on, she reached over and squeezed my hand, as I had wanted to squeeze Pancho's, had I known I was allowed.

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE HE
left, Pancho stopped by to say goodbye.

“I will miss our lessons terribly,” he declared, trying to catch my eye.

Remembering his visit to Trini, I did not betray any feeling about his departure. I spoke only of my work. “I am almost finished with my poem for Emiliano Tejera.”

It was as if I had mentioned positivism to a priest. Pancho's jaw tightened. “Emiliano? You're writing him a poem now?”

Over a year ago, Columbus's bones had been found by a caretaker as he cleaned a vault in la catedral. The eminent historian Don Emiliano had asked me for a poem to commemorate the occasion. “I can be tardy with assignments, as you well know.”

“You write poems for everybody,” Pancho said, pouting. “You even wrote one for my brother.”

“That's because Federico wrote me one.”

Pancho reached in his waistcoast and pulled out a folded-up sheaf of papers. “There you go,” he said with a proud look. “I've written you one, too.”

“‘Epistle to Salomé Ureña,'” I read out the title. Epistle! I thought. Why not a sonnet, a love ballad, a lover's acrostic using the letters of my name?

“Shall I read it to you?” Pancho offered, taking the pages back. I think Pancho loved the sound of his voice as much as the poems he was always reciting.

“What do you think?” he asked when he was done. He himself seemed quite pleased with it.