In the Name of Salome (39 page)

Pancho had sinks installed in every room of the palm-wood cottage Dubeau had rented for us. He coached Tivisita on washing the boys' and her own hands after being in the room with me. A special set of utensils tied with bright red ribbons was kept in a small cupboard in my room, along with my own linens.

“Mamá has the red ribbons,” was how Max got to calling my illness. Only to Pibín, who even at his young age could be discreet, had I mentioned the word
consumption
.

The morning of his departure, Pancho reviewed the regimen for the household: the children could visit with me, but no kisses, no hugs, no sleeping with Mamá. Saying so, he eyed my Pibín, who looked away, biting his lip so as not to cry. Pancho could be so tactless.

He had insisted Tivisita be with us in the room as he gave me his last-minute instructions, so that later, I would not be trying to prescribe for myself. “I will write every week to keep up with your progress,” Pancho promised.

“And I will write you every single day, Mamá!” Max piped up. He was dressed in his sailor outfit, cocky with the experience of having been on board a boat once before.

I smiled fondly at my baby, knowing what a handful Pancho was taking with him. “I would like that very much,” I told him. It was almost a physical pain not to be able to hold him and say goodbye before he left.

“Perhaps he can improve his penmanship, so you will be able to read his letters,” Pancho noted pointedly. Max colored, shamed in the midst of his avowals.

“Check the cabinet, Tivisita. There should be enough quinine, but remember, only for high fevers. Salomé drinks it like water.” Pancho always accused me of being a difficult patient, of thinking I had gone to medical school right along with him. “I do want her on 25 centigrams a day of ioduro for the cough and then her creosote capsules with two fingers of cod liver oil. Every meal, you hear. Salomé is fond of forgetting breakfast is a meal, not just a time to get up and read her books.”

As Tivisita was checking all the supplies in the closet, Max showed me the top she had given him as a bon voyage gift. She was also sending along gifts for her three older sisters, whom she missed terribly, she admitted. I had tried to convince her to go along to El Cabo with Pancho and Max so she could see them. Regina could look after me until Ramona arrived, but Tivisita would not leave me. “Not till you are cured and the baby is born,” she promised.

It was when I turned from listening to Max boast about his new top, that I saw something in an eyeblink that I wished I had not seen. Tivisita's back was turned, and Pancho was gazing at her with a look of longing mingled with renunciation. It was this renunciation that pained me the most, for it meant Tivisita had entered the realm of his imagination, where lust turns to love, and souls marry.

I felt that old scorpion, jealousy, stirring in my heart, but immediately, I chased it out. I had heard Mamá and the old people talk of how expecting mothers could poison their babies with dark thoughts. I did not want my Camila to be small-minded and petty, her world cut down to the size of what she did not fear.

And so again, I did what I had always done with pain. I swallowed my disappointment. One thing I was glad for. Tivisita was staying with me. To see her, Pancho would have to come home to me.

P
ANCHO KEPT HIS PROMISE
and wrote regularly. Every week we had a letter or two from him; as for Max, there were several the first few weeks, then a trickle, one or two, and then none at all. My Max, just like his father, his enthusiasms bigger than his character!

Zafra usually brought over the packet of letters, since we seldom went out. Daily now, he stopped at the house to check on my condition. He was worried at my labored breathing. As the weeks went by, and my belly grew, the pressure on my diaphragm was making it even more difficult for me to catch my breath. The fevers continued, the bloody expectorations and relentless coughing sapping the last of my strength. It was not a hopeful prognosis. Finally, Zafra suggested I summon Pancho home. But I kept resisting. Patients were now coming to his small office at the hospice, and we desperately needed the nest Pancho had begun building.

Ramona did appear, sooner than we had planned, saying that our cousin Valentina from Baní had moved in with Mamá and our aunt Ana in the interim. Mon was a sight in her netted hat and gloves with a cape over her shoulders and a parasol over her head, every surface shielded in some manner. And there was a considerable amount of surface—for my sister had grown stout with age. It was no secret in our family that Ramona hated to travel, believing every boat would sink, every train be held up by bandits, every bit of unpeopled countryside full of vermin and wild animals. She had read too much Plutarch, I think, and Marco Polo. But she would do anything in the world for me, and so here she was, dressed in the armor of a lady ready to battle the wilderness for her little sister.

But the real battle took place from the very first day indoors. Ramona was not one to take direction from anyone, “Especially not from some little girl who looks like my old doll.” Not that Tivisita was one to contradict anyone, but Pancho had given her strict instructions, which often Ramona would oppose just to be at odds with her philandering brother-in-law. I had told her the Paris story.

One day, Tivisita came in to help me with my letter to Pancho. I had requested but had not yet received some eyeglasses from him. It was a strain to read, so Tivisita was now writing my correspondence for me. What a lucky seed I had planted for the future by teaching that young girl her letters!

I knew her well enough by now that I could tell she was feigning her usual cheerfulness. “What is it, Tivisita?” I asked, looking directly at her.

A look came into her eyes: something she wanted to say but could not bring herself to say. I knew, of course, what it was. “Just let her have her way, Tivisita, she means well.” I dared not mention any names in case Ramona was snooping.

“But Pancho says that I must not let her overturn the regimen he set up. He said it could make the difference between whether . . .” She faltered, not wanting to name the thing we all feared.

So, Pancho was corresponding with Tivisita! Of course, he wrote to me, too. His tone was cherishing, but the letters were brief. Obviously, he had a lot on his mind. Now I wondered if what was on his mind was living right here under my own roof.

The next time Zafra delivered our packet, I sent Tivisita out of the room for a fresh drink from the cistern as my thirst was great. She hesitated, her glance falling on the packet by my bedside. Usually, it was she who sorted the packet of letters and bills Pancho sent home every week, sending some on to the capital, distributing others.

As soon as Tivisita was out of the room, I reached for that packet and held each envelope up to the light. In addition to
mine, there was one addressed in Pancho's hand to a name I couldn't read, what looked like a remittance to the merchant, who had sold us the sinks, a letter with an article for Federico in the capital, a note to
My Beloved Sons
, and one in that familiar hand addressed to
Señorita Natividad Lauranzón, sus manos
. A private missive to be put in her hands only.

I held that note in my hands wondering what to do with it. The last time I had read a letter Pancho had intended for someone else, I had come to such grief. My health had already been sacrificed and my heart broken with disappointment, what more was there to destroy—except my peace of mind? I could live, and die, without knowing.

I shuffled that letter back with the others and returned the packet to the bedside table. When Tivisita hurried in, my ribboned cup brimming with fresh water, she glanced at me uneasily. Already I could see her innocence passing, her secret like the pearl the oyster fashions from irritable circumstance, a fact that Pancho had taught me years ago, when he so gallantly offered to catch me up on my sciences.

W
HEN I CAUGHT PNEUMONIA
, my condition turned grave. My fever was so high that my poor Camila steadily kicked at my sides. “Am I going to die?” I asked Zafra, who gave me the sorriest look. He had only been practicing a few years and had not yet learned to banish all such unprofessional expressions from his face.

“I think Pancho should come,” was all he said.

I had lost weight, the skin on my belly taut as a drum, so that I could feel the exact shape of the baby with my hand. “Hold on, my Camila,” I urged her. She kicked back as if to say, I am doing the best I can, Mamá.

L
ABOR BEGAN SOON AFTER
Pancho's arrival. At midnight a great swell of pain rose from the small of my back and made me break out in a spasm of coughing. Of course, I did not immediately think it was labor, for I was eight weeks early. The contractions were squeezing my lungs tight, and I could not catch my breath. Surely I was dying, for I did not remember asphyxiation as part of giving birth.

Ramona was the first one in the room, a lamp swinging in her hand, her long braid like a thick rope hanging over one shoulder and down the front of her night dress. I tried to answer her questions, but I could no longer give air to words, only move my lips. This must be the beginning of death, I thought, the tendrils of language unable to reach beyond the self and catch the attention of others.

On her heels came Pancho, Tivisita right behind him, carrying his black doctor's bag. Pancho put his scope to my belly, here and there, and then I heard him washing his hands before lifting my bedding and examining me. It was then that I smelled the pungent wetness I was lying in.

Ramona had returned with Zafra, who was rolling up his sleeves and issuing orders to everyone. On the other side of the door, Pibín was trying to calm both his brothers. “Mamá!” Max kept bawling. I wanted to call out and reassure him, but I was saving up what little strength I had.

Zafra and Pancho had propped me up on pillows to relieve my breathing and allow me to bear down. Blood was draining from me, and I could feel the child struggling to be born. Finally, with a pain that felt as if I were being split in half, Zafra entered the metal contraption inside me and drew her out, first her head, followed by one shoulder and the other, and then there she was, upside down, ghastly looking and blue and covered with a thin membrane as if she had been born in her own shroud, ready for burial.

I could see the dark outcome from the look that passed from
Zafra to Pancho. As the cord was cut and the tiny creature carried away, I called out, “Tivisita,” but of course, my voice was faint. “I baptized her,” Ramona whispered, as if what concerned me was that the child die a Christian.

“I want her to live,” I sobbed, struggling to get up. But hands were holding me down; voices were calming me; then, the sting of a needle in my arm.

All grew calm. I watched them working over me as if they were working on a body that did and did not belong to me. Far off I could hear the voices of my children, Pibín reading to Max, no doubt from his beloved Jules Verne, Max asking his endless questions, Fran banging his ball again and again on the living room wall, their lives continuing without me. The light dimmed, the mind stilled, my lungs struggled for air, and I could feel my life slowly draining from me. In the light that was beginning to come from the window behind him, I saw Pancho, his eyes welling with tears, bend down toward me. He had forgotten his own precautions.

Whatever he was saying, I could not stay to hear him. I was falling, falling down a long flight of stairs into the dark center of myself.

And then I heard a cry, a lusty wail I recognized.

“Salomé Camila,” I whispered.

As if summoned by the force of my desire, Tivisita had returned to my side, carrying the bundle she had rescued from the doomed judgment of the others. She laid my newborn daughter on my belly for me to admire.

I struggled back up out of the darkness to meet her.

S
HE IS ON THE
boat and the breeze is blowing her dress and the ribbons on her cap and they are going to El Cabo to see her father. The waves are slippy-slapping slippy-slapping on the side of the boat like Mon pretending to spank Max because he is so bad but she does not really spank him but Max really cries because Mamá is gone to heaven and that is who Max really wants.

She stands on the trunk Pibín has hauled over next to the rail so she can wave at everybody on the dock. Mon, Minina, Luisa, Eva—that's enough! Her hand hurts. Besides, they are all crying so much no one waves back.

She loves it on this boat. She hopes they will never get off but keep on sailing to El Cabo for the rest of their lives with her dress blowing up like when Max is being naughty, wanting to peek at her petticoat (and getting spanked for doing so, slippy-slap slippy-slap), and the ribbons on her cap snapping against the side of her head and every time she tries to look, the wind blows them out of sight.

Quick! she turns her head and catches a glimpse of them: red ribbons!

“ARE WE ALMOST THERE?” she asks Pibín. He is the brother who answers the nicest when she asks him things.

“We haven't left yet,” he explains to her. He looks so sad, almost as sad as the day Mamá died but not as bad.

Maybe he is sad because of what happened in Mon's house before they left for the dock, everyone talking in angry voices. Mon stood at the door, holding Camila's hand. “Your Mamá said you were to stay with your aunt Mon, remember?” Mon squeezed Camila's hand to help her remember.

But Camila couldn't remember what her mother had said that last time. She remembered Puerto Plata and the curly seashells and Dr. Zafra, who made faces to make her laugh, and her mother coughing and the funny eyeglasses her father sent Mamá from El Cabo and many many bottles of medicines ranged on the bureau and the light striking through them like the stained glass windows of the cathedral.