In the Name of Salome (32 page)

At the corner, she waits for him to catch up with her. She looks up at the night sky: so many stars in odd places. It has taken a while to get used to finding the familiar where she did not expect it. Like this passion she has been feeling, a passion she always yearned for, but did not expect to feel toward a woman.

She waits a few minutes, but tonight Pedro does not appear. She feels a pang of that old loneliness she felt as a young girl when she would sink into depression and want to disappear. In fact, she had written at that time to Pedro, who was away in Mexico, explaining that a friend's friend was contemplating suicide.
What should she do? He had written back promptly, suggesting that Camila come live with him. Of course, their father had not allowed it.

Pedro has been the dearest, closest person to her in this world. What if by getting free of her family, she were to lose him as well? She hurries down the street, pursued by her worries, like the girl in her book of Greek myths beset by the trunkful of sorrows and plagues she has let loose on the world.

W
HEN
M
ARION OPENS THE
door, Camila falls into her arms. “Is everything okay?” Marion asks, holding her, as if Camila were a child in need of comfort. “You're out of breath. Come sit down before you get an attack of asthma.”

Camila cannot bear to be still and let her dark thoughts catch up with her. She paces as she recounts what she has told her brother.

“You told him!” Marion hoots. “Good for you!”

Camila hushes her. “Remember there are people around.” “People” are other young women students and Miss Tucker, who lives downstairs, but is going deaf, and so leaves the front door unlocked until at the stroke of nine, when she “brings up the drawbridge and floods the moat.” Before her present incarnation as boarding-house mother, Miss Tucker taught history at a private school for girls near Boston.

“Salomé . . . Camila . . . Henríquez . . . Ureña . . .” Marion murmurs each name as if it were an endearment. Each one merits a kiss, each kiss lingers a minute longer.

When the door opens on them, Camila is not surprised to see her brother standing in the hallway, a baffled look in his eyes. “How dare you!” Marion descends on him, a mother bird defending her chicks against a predator. He backs away, embarrassed.

There is something in his face that takes Camila back to that
first memory of her mother, looking up from the poem she has just finished to say, “Stay close to your brother.”

He has turned on his heel and is running down the upstairs hall.

“Pibín,” she calls after him, hoping the name will recall him to the vow he made their mother.

T
HE DAY FINALLY CAME
when Pancho came home. Four years had gone by.

I was utterly changed. Everyone told me so. I was so thin that even Max could put his little hands around my wrists. I could barely catch my breath. My hair had turned gray. The lines on my face were deep, almost as if all the writing I had not done on paper, I had done on my skin.

The last thing I wanted to do was go down to the dock and watch his boat come in.

I
T WAS SUNDOWN
, I remember, and Federico had come for the two boys. A welcome party of Pancho's family and friends had gone ahead. I had said I wasn't going—the first dew of the evening was always the worst for my coughing.

But at the last minute, I changed my mind. I dressed up in my black silk gown, as buenamoza as a woman can look in a dress that had fit her when she was ten kilos heavier. I put the little cross
Pancho had given me around my neck, and I marched down to the dock with one boy in each hand.

“Con calma, Salomé,” Federico pleaded.

How could I remain calm after waiting four years to be deceived?

“Remember that he is a youngster,” Federico went on, mistaking my silence for compliance.

Little Pibín looked up at me with his wise eyes. “Who are you talking about, Mamá?”

“No one we know,” I replied.

When the passengers were helped from the rowboat onto the dock, and I saw them, Pancho! Fran! I could not believe my eyes. Pancho had grown even more good-looking in France. As for Fran, I had sent my son off a boy, and he had come back a little man.

I gave out a cry. I knew I was in public, but I didn't care. I spread my arms and I ran down toward them, my lungs so tight, I thought I would collapse before I reached them. Behind me, my two little ones were trying to keep up.

I saw the shock on Pancho's face as he took in the sad reality of how ill I was, the wasted face and figure. He must have assumed I was running toward him, my anger and formality forgotten in my happiness to have him back. He turned, handed his hat to the porter who was carrying his portmanteau, and spread his arms for me. I swooped down past him and took my boy in my arms.

Fran cringed, and for a horrid moment, I could see the disgust on my son's face. He didn't know who this old, hollow-eyed, twig-thin woman was. And then, slowly, recognition spread across his face.

“Mamá?” he asked, before we both burst out crying.

T
HAT NIGHT EVERYONE GATHERED
at our house: all of Pancho's brothers except Manuel, of course, who was still in exile; Dubeau and Zafra had come down from Puerto Plata expressly to
see their beloved compatriot, and Don Eugenio Marchena, who had carried so many letters back and forth to Paris while he had been minister, dropped in for a while. Sick as I was, I stayed up, greedy for the sight of my three sons reunited again.

Long after the last bell at nine, when the two youngest couldn't stand up any longer, Ramona helped me put them to bed. A while later, Fran kissed me good night. “Bon nuit, chérie.” He could barely speak Spanish anymore. I wondered if he had said the very same words to that other woman those nights she put him to bed before she bedded down with Pancho.

Scorpions in the mind—that's what my jealousy felt like. And in my chest. Every time I thought of that woman, I'd break down in a fit of coughing.

Finally, the last guest left. Ramona shut up the house, and Pancho walked her home to Mamá's house, a block away. I waited, standing in the entryway, trying to compose my thoughts.

He jumped when he saw me, shocked to find me there on the other side of the front door. His head was bowed; he had obviously been preparing for this scene. I could see he was uneasy, for this was really our first moment alone together.

In January I had moved to a house closer to Mamá and Ramona. Large and airy with an inner courtyard full of fruit trees and birds, the house itself was shaped like a horseshoe, with a central parlor I used for the school and two wings with several large rooms for our living quarters.

We stood looking at each other a long moment in the entry-way. His hair was cut stylishly short; his mustache was trim and elegant. He had come back from France, the figure of a man, thirty-two years old, his life ahead of him. I, on the other hand, had been consumed by the separation. I was forty and looked ten years older.

When he moved toward me, I handed him the lamp I had taken down from its hook. “I suspect you must be tired, Pancho. Your room is down that hallway.”

“Aren't we in the same room?” he questioned. There was an odd French intonation to his Spanish. “I vow to you, Salomé—”

“Your trunks should be there,” I interrupted in a tired voice. “From now on, you go your way, and I go mine.”

“Ay, Salomé, por Dios, this is my first night home . . .”

I don't know what else he said. I left him standing with the lamp at the front of the house, as I made my way in the dark to bed.

I
BURNED AZUFRE IN
my room every night, hoping to clear my lungs. On the small table beside my bed, I placed the jar of jarabe Scott Emulsion and a glass of milk covered with a saucer. When I woke up, weak with coughing in the middle of the night, the milk soothed my throat. I closed the jalousies, latched the windows together, and hung a sheet over them to block out the noxious night vapors. By my bed I kept a ponchera ready for the expectoration that came with every attack.

You can see this was no place I wanted to share with a man.

But as I secured my room for the night and latched the bedroom door from inside, I could not keep my feelings from flooding my heart. I could not bar the thought of Pancho and his mademoiselle from my mind. It was like taking a swallow of vinegar into a mouth full of sores.

Deceiver, egotist, philanderer, liar, sin vergüenza, good for nothing, I thought to myself, as if each word were a door I was shutting against him.

One night, I heard steps, followed by quiet knocking, which I ignored.

“Are you all right, Mamá?” It was Pibín, checking on me after a bout of coughing.

“Yes, my love,” I called back, touched by my dear boy's concern. But I was also disappointed. I did not want to admit it, even to myself: I had wanted it to be Pancho.

Deceiver, egotist, philanderer, liar, sin vergüenza, good for nothing, but I was still in love with him!

I broke out into another fit of coughing.

T
O THE WORLD AROUND
us, our reunion was the happy ending to a touching love story. Or the beginning of a happy ending. First there was Doña Salomé's health to set to rights. What better agent of her delivery than her own husband, trained in the latest medical procedures in France?

Pancho had come back with a big head, made even bigger by an ostentatious top hat, just what all the doctors were wearing in Paris. He also wore his Prince Albert frock coat everywhere he went in the capital, even when he was not calling on a patient.

Late afternoons, he liked to drop in at el Instituto Profesional during classes. The illustrious doctor recently arrived from Paris would, of course, be invited to say a few words. Pancho would oblige with long discourses on the latest medical findings.

His favorite disquisition was on Pasteur's germ theory, and how the spread of the disease could best be controlled by better hygiene. In our own house, he had set up sinks in every room and insisted we wash our hands constantly to avoid the spread of germs my students might have carried in. Pancho and his enthusiasms! I couldn't help but recall the young man I had fallen in love with, eager to wipe out ignorance and injustice. Now his attention was directed toward the obliteration of germs with water and soap. You can imagine the rumors that got started, that Don Pancho had gone to Paris to learn how to wash his hands!

Pancho loved to take my little Pibín along and show him off. The truth is my middle one was an astonishing child. He had taught himself to read when he was four, and then easily learned all his numbers. Recently, as a surprise to his father, he had memorized the names of all the bones and knew where they all were. “Scapula, fibula, clavicle, ulna and radius, humerus, femur,
metacarpal,” he would recite in his little voice, pointing to the spot on his body where each bone was located.

Pibín would come home with stories about what Dr. Alfonseca had said, and then how Papancho had corrected him. “It sounds as if your father was as brilliant as usual,” I noted.

The boy cocked his head thoughtfully. “But he embarrassed Dr. Alfonseca. Maybe it would have been better if he talked to Dr. Alfonseca afterward?” Alfonseca was the elderly doctor who had saved Pedro's life when he'd had the croup several years back. And it was also Alfonseca, who had kept me breathing through months of severe pulmonary attacks.

“I'm sure your father didn't mean to embarrass the kind doctor, Pibín.”

He thought about that a moment, and then he said, “I don't think Papancho meant to hurt him. I just think Papancho wanted to be right.”

I looked at my Pedro. It was not just the fund of information in his head I admired. My son had a moral gravity which, in one so young, was astonishing. You'd teach him something, and he would puzzle at it, asking serious questions:
What is justice? What is patria? Is kindness better than truth?
And the one I could no longer answer for him,
Is love really stronger than anything else in the world?

I
HAD ONCE ASKED
Hostos the same question.

Before he finally left the country, Hostos had come over to examine the oldest girls on their knowledge of botany, and he had lingered afterward. I knew this was my only chance to say goodbye privately. I had already promised myself I would not cry. I was afraid that once I got started, I would not be able to stop.

He was restless, as usual, on his feet, going from object to object in the room—almost as if like a lost man he needed to find his way with clues. At the whirligig I had constructed to teach
wind power, he turned to face me. I had been coughing quite a bit in the last few days of rainy winter weather.

“Are you all right, Salomé?”

“It's just a touch of catarrh. Everyone has it.” I waved away the cough as an insignificance.

“Yes, Belinda and María have caught it as well.” And then he paused, waiting, as if I had not yet answered his question.

Perhaps I would have confessed the strength of my feelings had he not just mentioned Belinda. Instead, I asked him the question that Pibín was always asking me. “Is love stronger than anything else in the world?”

“Why do you ask, Salomé?” Hostos was never one to leave a stone unturned.

“Because I console myself in Pancho's absence by telling myself that love is stronger than his absence, stronger than my fears—”

I would have said more. I would have told him that I was now consoling myself with the same philosophy about his impending departure, and that it was not working. But suddenly, Hostos put a finger to his lips, his head cocked as if he had heard an intruder.

He motioned for me to continue talking as he walked quietly to the door and pulled it open. There stood Federico peering in through the crack in the double door.