In the Name of Salome (22 page)

His mouth closes on hers, large and wet and frighteningly alive. She stiffens and pushes him away.

“W-w-what?” He is looking straight at her. He has always been able to read the state of her soul from the muscles on her face, a necessary skill for a sculptor he has told her. But she does not want him to see the cloud of doubt that is descending upon her. She buries her face in his shoulder and lets him stand her up, touching the whole length of her body. She is revolted by his big hands, his hardness pressing against her thigh. The word become flesh is not always an appealing creature.

“Are you sure you w-w-want this?” he is whispering in her ear. It could be Max asking her about her march tomorrow.

“Yes,” she says as he begins unbuttoning the back buttons of her blouse, slipping his hands underneath, “but not here.” Over his shoulder she can see the car from this afternoon parked again at the curb, the brief flicker of a cigarette being tossed by the driver on the lawn. Cuba is closing down. Batista's boys have taken over. It is madness to think that her Lyceum ladies can march down to the docks and change anything, madness to be here with this man when every time he touches her she cringes. But she has already broken free from the old life and there is no going back to it. In the studio they walk through on their way to the back room, she catches a glimpse of the bust he has left uncovered. Her own face stares back at her, fierce and almost finished.

I
N THE SPACE OF
a few years, my life got so full, I couldn't put my arms around it!

If I were to write down all the things that made it full, the list would be as long as the index in the back of my poetry book. Yes, that was one of the things I finished that year I got married: a poetry book. In fact, I didn't really finish it. Up to the last moment, I was still working on my long poem, “Anacaona.”

But Pancho insisted my book had to come out. The country was enjoying peace again, and my patriotic poems would inspire my readers. Besides, Friends of the Country had already made the announcement of its publication in May.

“But we need to get settled first, Pancho,” I argued. I was sitting at my small desk, among bundles of our things ready for our move in a few days. Given Ramona's sullenness and Tía Ana's continuing disapproval, we didn't feel at ease at Mamá's, and so we had rented a small house a few streets away.

“Poetry comes first!” Pancho pronounced. He was working on our bed, which was the bed I had shared with Ramona, who
was now sharing a room with Tía Ana. Needless to say, this rearrangement did not help matters.

While I sat at the desk, working on the long poem, Pancho was busy editing the packet of my poems for the Friends of the Country edition. “Salomé, are you really sure you want to say
brilliant
palms? How about
fecund
palms? It goes better with the meter, don't you think: ‘And martyrdom beneath the fecund palms'?”

My young husband, who had once worshiped at the feet of my muse, was now polishing her rough edges. “No,” I said firmly. “It does not sound better.”

Pancho looked up, disapproving of my tone. Since our marriage, my young husband had grown more self-assured. “That's because you've heard it so many times that you can't hear it anymore. Trust me, Salomé, I have your future in mind.”

“My future” was that magical phrase marched out whenever he wanted his way. Pancho had vision, and he could see where I was going. Didn't I see that? And if I didn't see that, then I was proving his point, that I wasn't seeing well at all, and I should trust him to show me where I was going.

When he spoke like this, I would get so tangled up in what he was saying, I couldn't think straight. Finally, I just wanted to free myself of his web of words and I'd let go my end. “Go ahead, then,” I'd say.

But this is the mystery of love, the more you empty your cup, the more it fills up. Besides, he was right. I wasn't seeing where I was going, for my gaze had fallen on the future right before my eyes. Here I am speaking of the man I met shortly after my marriage.

I
HAD HEARD
P
ANCHO
and the Friends of the Country talk about Hostos until I was weary with the man even before I met him. “The apostle says this, the apostle says that.”

“Apostle?” Tía Ana asked crossly. She had been going through her stack of tablets, correcting the sums of her young charges. Pancho had been explaining to us how the apostle wanted students to think for themselves instead of relying on memorization. “The Bible mentions twelve apostles. I wasn't aware that there was a thirteenth one.” Tía Ana was so religious that at three o'clock every day, the hour at which Christ was supposed to have expired, she made the sign of the cross in order to grieve his loss. “Besides,” Tía Ana added. “I'm sure if God had a thirteenth apostle, he would
not
be Puerto Rican.”

“Hostos is our intellectual apostle, Doña Ana,” Pancho explained. “We don't mean the title religiously—”

“Precisely, you Jews don't mean anything religiously.”

“We're not Jews,” Pancho said. The patience in his voice was so obvious, like a too-bright sash on a mourning dress. Tía Ana would not be convinced that the Henríquez were now as Christian as she was. “We are positivists. We believe God created us with reason, and education is our way to develop it.”

“Religion is the way to develop it. I've been teaching for fifty years, young man. I was teaching long before you were even born. I taught Salomé there everything she knows.”

This wasn't exactly true, but I let it go.

“With all due respect,” Pancho began, “religion has its place in our lives, but so does reason.” Pancho could argue until the next day in order to win his point. Tía Ana was the same way. Many times, I'd excuse myself, thinking Pancho would follow suit, and I'd lie in bed or, more likely, sit at my desk where I'd push myself to finish up a few more lines of the long epic I was writing on our tragic Indian princess. And I'd hear them out in the parlor, their voices rising.

And so the first time I myself spoke with Hostos after a meeting of the Friends of the Country I said to him, “You have been the cause of many an argument in my house.”

He bowed his handsome head and smiled sadly. “I seem to
cause trouble wherever I go.” I had heard he had been run out of Puerto Rico, Peru, Spain, Venezuela—for promulgating his radical ideas. But, of course, that had been before he turned from political revolution to educational reform. I knew the whole story, backward and forward, as if it were my own.

“You, on the other hand, have stirred many of us to higher goals with your poems,” Hostos went on.

Oh no, I thought, here we go. I was weary of the moral throne everyone wanted me to sit on. After I had scandalized half the city with my poem “Quejas,” I had come to understand the danger of being crowned queen of people's hearts. I wanted to be queen in only one heart, Pancho's, but I'm afraid he was not satisfied with operating in such a small domain. “I have merely written down what we all know to be true,” I finally said.

“Exactly,” Hostos agreed. He had a long, bony face with a broad forehead topped by a head of boyish black curls threaded with silver. He seemed both ancient and young. Pancho had told me that Hostos had just celebrated two score and one. “That is precisely our struggle. To make rational the only living being who is gifted with reason.”

I had heard people say amusing things, clever things, romantic things, but never before had anyone spoken so simply and with such moral authority that inside myself I felt the rightness and goodness of what he was saying. I must have looked stunned.

“You seem surprised that I should say so?” His eyes were light gray, deep set, and half-lidded. They were the saddest eyes in the world, contemplative and melancholy.

“Not at all, Apostle,” I said before I could think that my aunt would boil me in her sancocho if she heard me so address a living being, no less a Puerto Rican.

A
ND SO
I,
TOO
, began to listen closely to what Hostos had to say. I was in moral love—does that make sense? A moral love
that took over my senses and lightly touched my whole body with an exquisite excitement whenever the apostle was in the room!

Soon after we moved to our home, he came by daily. Pancho had opened a small school in our parlor with his friend José Pantaleón. They were preparing young boys to enter the Normal School that Hostos had set up for older boys. The new president, none other than our old friend Archbishop Meriño, was especially committed to education.

And so mornings, from eight to twelve, or afternoons, from two to five, Hostos would drop in to give the boys lessons on some subject Pancho and José didn't know enough about. El maestro, as he was also called, would ask questions, and using everyday objects—the handle of a grinder, the spring on a top, the gyrating fall of a blossom from my jar of jacarandas—he would slowly lead them (though they looked as if they were leading themselves) forward to some moment of understanding that would make their little mouths drop and their eyes blink with the light of reason, as I suppose Hostos would have described it. Pancho and José looked on. Passing by the doorway in the middle of peeling plantains for the midday meal, I would stop to watch, filled with wonder at the kind genius of the man.

And each time, I'd be struck by a thought, which I tried to arrest mid-motion so it would not spin out of control: Here was a true companion for my soul!

But another thought soon followed. I had met Hostos's lovely, young bride Belinda. Even if we had not pledged ourselves to others, I was not beautiful enough to attract a man like Hostos. I was like the branch of purple jacarandas that Hostos shook from his hand while the boys sketched the path of the downward spiraling blossoms.

I served as an example. I stirred my readers to noble actions.

I would sigh, wipe my hands on my apron, and go back to peeling my plantains.

N
OT THAT
I
GAVE
any of this positivist consideration. In fact, if anything, what I felt was a deepening passion for Pancho. I marveled at his youthful body: his strong, pale arms; his thick hair full of cowlicks. He was tender and eager, which put me at my ease in our marriage bed. But it was his soul I missed in our encounters. He was so preoccupied with all his projects.

I said my life was full, but Pancho's life was bursting at the seams. He was involved in half a dozen things: studying law at night at the Instituto Profesional that Hostos had opened, running his own newspaper
El Maestro
, presiding over the Friends of the Country, directing the school in our living room, editing my book of poems. On top of all this, when Meriño was inaugurated, he asked Pancho to be his personal secretary. This meant a lot of travel, for as President Meriño explained, Pancho was to serve as his eyes around the country.

I cried when Pancho told me about this great honor conferred on him. Honor! I was beginning to hate the word. I remembered those three long months before our engagement when he had been on the road, how terribly I had missed him. Back then, I was living with Mamá and Ramona and Tía Ana, and now I was all alone in a dark house with a parlor full of boys knocking over my jars of flowers with the excuse that they wanted to watch the blossoms spiral.

“But aren't you proud, Salomé?”

“Of course, I am, Pancho,” I said, burying my face on his shoulder so he would not see my tears. He was holding me in that absent way of his. Already he was far away, sitting on a veranda in a small village talking to local leaders about the glorious future of la patria. “It's just that we are hardly together anymore.”

He pulled back and lifted my chin to make me face him. My eyes felt puffy and my nose was running. For the hundredth time I wished for one of those pretty faces that soften men's hearts. “Salomé, our patria is just barely standing again on its shaky legs. We
have to roll up our sleeves, as el maestro says, and work hard, side by side, to bring about that future we both dream about.”

“Ay, Pancho,” I wailed. “I know that.”

“We have to create a new man for a new nation,” he went on lecturing me. Sometimes, I felt like taking a big heavy olla to all of el maestro's preachings. “I know how you feel,” he said, softening. “But Salomé,” he added, his eyes tender in a way that made my own heart swell with love and self-abnegation, “who will do this work if we don't? I know I am asking you to take on so much, so very much. But I thought these were goals we shared?”

“They are goals we share, Pancho,” I said, recalled to my better self. It was something Pancho was good at doing, recalling me to my better self.

B
ECAUSE HE WAS AWAY
, Pancho asked me to fill in for him in the classroom. This was unusual: a woman teaching boys. But I was la musa de la patria. An exception could be made. Sometimes, during my lessons, Hostos would drop by.

“El maestro has arrived,” I'd say to my students.

Hostos would sit down on the back bench to observe me. “Please continue.”

He might as well have said, “Hush now,” for with his eyes on me, I would fall silent. A few times, he slipped in so quietly that he caught me by surprise. I suppose it was from those observations that he decided I was a natural teacher, and I should open the first secondary school for girls that would also train them as teachers.

Pancho loved the idea. “We'll hold classes for the boys in the mornings and for the young girls in the afternoons. Salomé has a wonderful background in the sciences as well as literature. Don't you, dear?”

“Thanks to you,” I said, knowing what he wanted to hear.