In the Name of Salome (24 page)

“What on earth do you mean?” I said, standing. Visions of Ramona poisoning Pancho's water glass were racing through my mind. But immediately I sat down overcome with dizziness.

“I mean that it will take some effort,” Hostos added. Suddenly, he seemed to notice my distress. “Are you all right, Salomé?”

I could feel the blood coursing down my legs, confirming my fears. “I think you better call Ramona,” I said, holding back tears.

T
HEY BROUGHT BACK BODIES
in heaps on carts and laid them out in the square. They said it was so relatives could identify their dead, but we all knew it was as a warning to us. The stench in the center of the city was so bad that Hostos closed the nearby Normal School for the rest of the month. It was just as well. Meriño had declared himself dictator and had turned against the positivists.
They were free thinkers, who cared more about the hypotenuse of a triangle than about the number of angels on the head of a pin.

The world seemed to be falling apart. That summer the American president Garfield was shot by a man who had been caught stealing stationery inside the White House. Mr. Garfield had been trying to reform his government, and this petty thief had been refused a job earlier. Good men were being killed off. Meanwhile the rich and greedy were in control. Our papers reported that the richest man in the world, a Mr. Vanderbilt, had said, “Everybody but me and mine be damned.” When he died, he was buried in a three-hundred-thousand-dollar mausoleum where a watchman looked into his crypt every fifteen minutes to make sure his corpse was not kidnapped. Tía Ana rolled that edition up and put it in out in the latrine, where it belonged.

Dark thoughts shadowed me day and night. I felt as if we had failed, not just as a nation, but as God's creation. Whenever Pancho took off to the presidential palace, I grew frantic with fears of what might happen to him. I offered up every word in every one of my poems, every accolade I would ever receive and every mention of my work to posterity—everything—for the sight of my beloved returning unharmed at the end of the day. The problem was that the more I became a positivist, the less faith I had in God or in poetry.

Meanwhile, the Ayuntamiento informed me that it had reduced our allotment to half. At this rate we would be able to buy lumber, but would have to wait to build the desks. Hire teachers, but delay purchasing books. We were forced to put off the day of our opening.

Not that I was in any condition to open a school, anyway. I was in and out of the fever that attacked me soon after I lost the child. I had begged Ramona not to tell Pancho about the miscarriage, as what could be gained by hurting him with information he need not know? “Maybe he will grow up,” Ramona said angrily.
But I think she kept her promise, for Pancho never said a word about it.

Even in my dazed, feverish state, I realized Pancho was debating what to do about his post in the Meriño government. El maestro would stop by, and I would hear them talking in the now abandoned schoolroom. “You must resign,” Hostos urged Pancho. “I know you think you can do more good if you have Meriño's ear, but your reputation will be tarnished from being near him.”

“Someone needs to balance the evil influence of Lilís,” Pancho argued back. He knew the general from having served with him these last two years. In fact, Lilís had made Pancho the godfather to his firstborn, and Pancho, in his trusting way, had not seen through the general's wiliness. A compadre was not supposed to lift a hand against his godchild's family, so now Pancho's hands were tied. “Meriño is letting himself be duped by this fellow.”

“Meriño is a grown man,” I heard Hostos replying. “He stood up to Santana, he stood up to the Spaniards, he stood up to Baez. He can stand up to Lilís if he wants to.”

Did I really hear this conversation or was I imagining it along with other conversations in my head? Did I really wake one afternoon in that shuttered room to hear the rain pounding on the zinc roof and find, sitting beside me, el maestro reading a book, keeping vigil at my sickbed?

“What are you doing here?” I wanted to ask, but my breath could not fill the sails of so many words.

The book was put aside. A cloth soaked in a bowl of water was squeezed ever so gently into my mouth. And then it was soaked again and placed upon my hot forehead.

“You must not be in here, maestro,” I managed, refreshed. “Your children, Belinda. What if it is the typhoid?”

“You and I know it is not the typhoid.” Again I heard the sound of water and felt the blessing of the wet cloth on my burning lips.

“What did Pancho decide?” I asked after a while of silence.

“He has resigned,” Hostos explained. “But we thought it best that he go into hiding for the next few days. Nothing to worry about,” Hostos added when he saw the worry on my face. “It is merely a precaution. As a matter of fact, I am hiding out as well.”

“Here?”

“In your old revolutionary hole under the house. I just came up here for a visit.”

A little while later, I heard him slip out of my room. Then, I heard the sound of Belinda's voice. She had come over to see Hostos under the guise of visiting a sick friend. And here I had thought Hostos had come upstairs only to see me!

Later that night, when I felt stronger, I reached over to soak my cloth in water. On the bedside table, I saw the book Hostos must have forgotten. My book of poems! Inside its pages, I found some dried blossoms and remembered the jacaranda blossoms I had seen Hostos putting in his pocket.

P
ANCHO WAS LEANING OVER
the bed, his face tight with tension, his eyes wet and worried. Another dream? I thought. But my fever was lifting. I was feeling better. I closed my eyes and opened them again.

“I was afraid, Salomé,” he whispered. “Life without you would be meaningless.”

I reached up and touched his dark, unruly hair.

Later in the long hours of lying in that bed, waiting for the fevers to pass, I recalled Pancho's words over and over, as if they were that cloth soaked in water, soothing my feverish heart. Perhaps el maestro was right, and Pancho would learn to be a husband to the woman he had married.

I
WROTE
“S
OMBRAS” IN
that sickbed.

Now that it was clear that I did not have the typhoid fever,
visitors were stopping at the house to ask after me. I heard them talking in the parlor. Hushed voices alarmed at the state of things. The casualties. The repression of newspapers and individuals. Many wished that Salomé would get better and write one of her poems that would stir patriots to rise up against this renewed wave of bloodshed.

But I had lost heart in the ability of words to transform us into a patria of brothers and sisters. Hadn't I heard that Lilís himself liked to recite passages of my patriotic poems to his troops before battle? I found myself converted to Hostos's way of thinking. He was right. The last thing our country needed was more poems. We needed schools. We needed to bring up a generation of young people who would think in new ways and stop the cycle of suffering on our island. It was time to put away my childish toys and roll up my sleeves. Money or no money, as soon as I felt stronger I was opening up my school, even if we had to sit on our haunches and write our sums with sticks on the dirt floor.

But first, I needed to say farewell to poetry. No more anthems, no more hymns to the republic. I had other important work to do.

Hush now, my song,
the storm has taken over,
with its din of waves and its crash of thunder.

When I read the new poem to Pancho, he shook his head sadly. “Ay, but the thought of your not writing breaks my heart. What will fill its place in our lives, Salomé?'

“The children,” I said, thinking of the school.

Pancho misunderstood my remark and came forward in his chair. “Are you with child?” he asked. I felt a pang, thinking of the child I had lost, whom I would always mourn by myself.

“Soon,” I promised Pancho, as if I had control over nature as well as over the words I wrote down on paper.

S
OON, MY LIFE FILLED
up so full I could not hold all of it in my single pair of arms. Thank goodness I had Ramona and Mamá and Tía Ana to burp one of my sons when the other cried for his food and the third one wanted me to button his shoe or when a young student approached with an insurmountable problem in geometry she wanted me to help her solve. Pancho, of course, still had a knack for filling every free moment with some project. “It's not just nature that abhors a vacuum,” I always teased him. But he did make good on his promise, and besides his own school, which he was running with José, and the medical school he started attending at night after he had finished law school, he helped me run my instituto those first few years of no money and increasing enrollments.

Every once in a while, when I had a minute to myself, I would sit down and close my eyes and hear an old call from deep inside. It was not one of my babies, or one of my charges, or Coco barking, or my mother or aunt or sister, or my husband asking for his supper.

Hush now, I would whisper.

S
HE DECIDES TO TRY
out a new life by writing to Marion about it. If nothing else, perhaps the story of what is happening will begin to make sense to her.

Dear Marion,

Here we are finally settled in! We are staying in a townhouse in Georgetown, an elegant address that Pancho can give out at the White House and the State Department.

Her father's calling card reads
Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal, President, Dominican Republic
, though of course there is some debate about whether he can still claim that title. The house is a loan, which Camila has begged from her father's former friend and protégé, Peynado.

Pancho knows nothing of this transaction. He believes the house is a lease left over from the years when Peynado was his ambassador to the United States. But now Peynado has gone over to the other side and is negotiating with the Americans on his own. Pancho has come to Washington to let the State Department
know that the Dominicans already have a president, and that neither Peynado nor any of the other turncoats have a right to negotiate without his approval.

“They won't listen,” Camila kept telling her father when he proposed the trip back in Cuba. She tried to convince him to give it up, to stay quietly in exile, seeing the occasional patient. They have been through so much already!

Ay, Marion, what a saga this has been . . . I still remember that July, 1916 (was it already seven years ago?), when the Dominican delegation arrived at our door in Cuba. I know I've told you how surprised we all were to hear that Papancho had been elected president in absentia! And the greater surprise, after living in exile for so many years, he accepted! I remember telling you that I stayed behind with the little boys in Cuba since Tivisita had not been dead a year, and I wanted to be sure this presidency would “take” before I put the whole family through the ordeal of a move. Two months later, we joined Papancho in Santo Domingo. I remember the boys were still wearing black armbands for their mother. But this is the part I've never told you, as I know how proud you are of my father's being president. Marion, Papancho was president for only four months. The family hadn't been reunited a month—twenty-seven days!—when Papancho came to our living quarters in the presidential palace one afternoon with the news that the Americans had invaded the island. “I refuse to be their puppet!” he pronounced for the reporters who had followed him upstairs. We went back to Cuba, cabinet in tow—yes, even Peynado came along—to establish a government in exile. So began our saga.

Seven years later, the cabinet has disbanded, but Pancho still persists in his claim to the presidency. Camila has tried to talk
sense into him. He cannot save a country that does not want to be saved in the way he wants to save it. But if she has not fully known him in this incarnation before, she is now encountering her father as a Force of History, and when that kind of idea gets in the heads of the Henríquez men, there is no way—short of the paralysis that did temporarily strike Pancho down last year—no way on earth to stop them.

“But where are we to stay in Washington?” Camila finally turned from protest to practicalities.

Max came up with a solution, and at his urging, Camila wrote to Peynado, who replied that, of course, he would be “more than honored to have the former president of our island stay in my house.” He will not be using it during the month of May, and in any case, if he does happen to be in town a night or two, there is plenty of space: four bedrooms on the second floor as well as an attic room with a daybed, where Camila sometimes sits now, in one of her moods, daydreaming about Scott Andrews.

She has been mulling over the proposal of marriage he made in his last letter. Since she allowed the question to go unanswered, and Scott Andrews is a shy man, he is not likely to bring it up again. In fact, one of the reasons she finally agreed to accompany her father this May on what she considers a humiliating mission and a risky one for his health, is to find out if the proposal is still in the offing, as Scott Andrews himself might put it. Then, of course, she will have to decide if she loves him.

S
HE MET
M
AJOR
A
NDREWS
at a reception in the White House over two years ago. It was during one of their numerous trips north in quest of Pancho's post. Camila had wandered off in the direction of the powder room but took a wrong turn, and ended up in a stately, lamplit sitting room presided over by a portrait that made her stop in her tracks. The face was, of course, a man's face, but Lincoln's eyes were the same sad, heavy-lidded ones as her mother's!

Behind her, Camila heard footsteps, turned, and was surprised to find a guard, as she believed him to be, coming to apprehend her. Scott Andrews was on detail at the White House that night, and his job was to keep guests within the reception area. Ever since Mrs. Harding had opened the White House to the public, small knickknacks had been disappearing: ashtrays in which Teddy Roosevelt had tapped the ashes of his cigar, tassels from Martha Washington's time torn off lampshades. Scott Andrews told her this later, one of those bits of information that he liked to offer her, knowing she delighted in the harmless gossip that made her feel in the know. And although he had not meant for her to draw this conclusion, Camila understood that his first impression of her—a tall, serene woman from a Spanish-speaking country—was that she was engaged in petty thievery.