In the Name of Salome (40 page)

“Their father says they must
all
come to El Cabo.” It was Pimpa, Tivisita's sister, gruff and fat just like Mon, who is Mamá's sister, as if everyone needs one sister, gruff and fat, to fight off mean people. But Camila has no sister. If she goes to El Cabo to live with her father maybe she will get another sister like Regina says she might. “Don't you see, Ramona, that you are just making matters worse for all the children?” Pimpa shook her head sadly and reached down to pick up Camila.

But Mon was holding on tight to her hand and would not let go, and Pibín and Fran looked like they didn't know what to do. Max was sobbing for Mamá, who was too far away in heaven to answer him back, and then their grandmother Minina said, “This is a crying shame, a crying shame,” and everyone stopped arguing because she had a flutter in her heart like when a wasp gets under your mosquito net and you have to get out or it might sting you and cause your heart to swell.

And then the mules came to carry them away to the dock but no one could find her, ¡SALOMÉ CAMILA! ¡SALOMÉ CAMILA!
because she had run off and hidden in the hole underneath the house where she sometimes hid from Max but now she was hiding from everybody fighting, and suddenly it was so quiet and peaceful like the wasp going free and you can go back under your net and go to sleep.

A
ND SHE DID FALL
asleep, just a little nap on the straw mats rolled up in a corner, and the next thing she knew there was Mon at the opening and Tivisita behind her and everybody so happy to see her at first and then everybody scolding that she must get over this bad habit of hiding or she was going to be the death of everybody.

“I didn't make Mamá die,” she protested. She is a big girl who can clean her plate and not go peepee in her drawers.

A look went from face to face and ended up lodged in Tivisita's eyes as she said, “Of course not, dear heart. Nobody is saying so. You are a good girl. Your mother in heaven is so proud of you.”

Then Mon crouched down beside Camila so her eyes—which are just like Mamá's eyes, Camila never noticed that before!—were looking straight at Camila's eyes. “Would you like to stay here with Mon? Is that why you were hiding? Tell your aunt Mon.” Her face had sad lines down each side of her mouth and little hairs under her nose like a man's mustache. “Tell your aunt Mon you would like to stay with her and your grandmother Minina.” This time it was not a question but a statement.

“Mon, por Dios, her father has written that she is to come.” Tivisita had come down to eye level as well. She was brushing away the dirt from Camila's pretty new dress and straightening her bonnet.

“The mules are leaving,” Pimpa called down from the back door.

Tivisita stood back up and took Camila by the hand. “Your father is waiting for us at El Cabo.”

“Stay!” Mon called. She was still kneeling in the dirt with her dress getting dirty, looking up at the sky and sobbing.

Halfway up the back steps, Camila stopped and peered down at the distressing sight of her aunt, crumpling in a heap on the ground. What was she to do? she wondered, and this moment of standing, looking through the bars of the rail, not knowing what to do because her mother was not here to tell her, this moment was the very first time she ever felt a funny tightening in her chest that made her struggle for air and her heart flutter like Minina's flutter when a wasp gets in her chest that nobody can get out, and she began coughing, standing there on the steps, and suddenly it was quiet, and then Tivisita said, “See, it's as Pancho says, she has a touch of contagion. She needs a dryer climate. Do it for that reason, Ramona.”

And then, Mon did stop crying and came slowly up the steps as if someone else were holding her back by the hem of her dress, and she took Camila's other hand and led her outside to where the mules and their drivers were waiting to take them away to El Cabo to see her father.

T
HEY ARE GOING TO
El Cabo to see her father, who lives there. El Cabo is in Haiti like Santo Domingo is in the Dominican Republic and the stars are in the sky and Mamá in heaven.

Her father went to El Cabo after the parade when Mamá was taken to the church in a box piled with flowers on her way to heaven, and he has been gone for as long as Mamá has been gone, the fingers of one hand. Now he has written Mon and said he has changed his mind and all the children are to be sent to him with Tivisita who will help take care of them.

Tivisita had been living with Camila and Pibín, Fran, and Max, and Regina, and their mother. Then when Mamá went to
heaven, Camila, Pibín, Fran, Regina, and Max moved in with Mon and Minina, and her father went to El Cabo, and Tivisita had nowhere to go because Mon didn't have any room in her house for a girl who looked like a doll from St. Thomas.

So Tivisita stayed in their old house and took care of the pony Patriota and Tom, the puppy dog, and the new monkey, Monkey Two, with her sister Pimpa.

Every day Camila went with Pibín to visit Mamá at the Church of Las Mercedes, but Mamá was never there. Instead, Tivisita was there with a bunch of white flowers (“Remember how your mother loved these?” She didn't remember . . .), crying and saying if it hadn't been for Mamá she wouldn't be able to read the name written on the stone that Camila couldn't read at all.

M
ON WAS ALWAYS ASKING
her what she remembered of her mother.

“I remember coughing.” She coughed into her hand to demonstrate.

Mon was teaching her how to recite some more of her mother's poems. She already knew “El ave y el nido” and a little bit of “Mi Pedro,” but the poem her mother wrote about how she almost died when Camila was born was too grown up for her to learn now. (“We thought you weren't going to live. We put you in a cigar box with cotton, but then you lived so we used it as your first cradle.” Mon knew she loved to hear this story!) Mon was copying all the poems in a book she was going to give to Camila some day when she was grown up enough to take care of them.

“You are going to forget your mother unless we keep reminding you,” Mon explained.

And then Mon taught her to make the sign of the cross, and to recite, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the holy spirit of Salomé, my mother.”

The next day at church, Camila corrected Tivisita on how to
say the sign of the cross prayer, and when Tivisita heard it was Mon who had taught Camila that prayer, she said she would have to report Mon to Pancho in a letter, and that was when her father asked that all the children be sent to him on the boat to El Cabo to start a new life.

S
HE IS ON THE
boat, holding on to Tivisita's hand, so that she doesn't fall into the Atlantic Ocean and ruin the new dress Tivisita made her.

Black, with a white collar and sash, just like the one Tivisita is wearing for going to El Cabo. A bonnet trimmed with red ribbons and a black parasol to match the one Tivisita is carrying.

“Throw a kiss to Minina,” Tivisita says.

And she throws a kiss to her grandmother way off on the dock, hoping that will settle the flutter in her heart.

“Why are they crying?” she asks but nobody hears her. For just then the steamboat honks and a puff comes out of its chimney and they are moving away from the land! Everything is getting smaller and smaller: the houses, and the cathedral with the two bells, and the big house with five balconies where they used to live (Pibín says), and the fortaleza where Lilís puts his enemies, and the park where the wooden horses, about the size of Patriota, go round and round while a tune plays, and Mon is getting smaller, though she is very fat, and Minina and Luisa and Eva, until Camila can't tell if if she is waving at them or other people she doesn't know, but now they are waving back.

“I don't want to leave Mamá!” Max starts sobbing, and Tivisita has to let go of Camila's hand and go over to Max and crouch down beside him and have a little talk.

“Where is Mamá, Pibín?” she asks, looking up at her brother and seeing that sad look that tastes like the dark air in her room at night. He does not say what the others say, in bright voices like turning on lights, “Your mother is in heaven.”

He takes her hand and he presses it against her heart. “There,” he says.

“Not in heaven?”

He shakes his head and looks away.

“Why not in heaven?”

“Heaven is for the dead,” he says. “We're going to keep Mamá alive, you and I.”

She doesn't understand a word he has said, but she keeps her hand at her heart just so Mamá doesn't have to die.

R
EGINA IS COMING ALONG
, too, but she is down below the deck because she will have a fit if she looks at the sea.

Regina's skin is so black that whatever she says has to be believed.

Her family came long ago on a slave ship, in chains, and when she sees the long watery distances, she says those old people in her blood start moaning and she is liable to do anything, including throw up.

So it is better if Regina stays down below deck holding on to her sides and smelling the smelly bottle she brought with her. When Camila puts her nose right against the opening, she smells her mother's room, an odd smell that makes her nostrils tingle and spread like Patriota's right before he whinnies when he sees her coming with a sugar lump in her hand.

Max has stopped crying and Tivisita is back. “Let's go sit on the deck chairs,” she says. “I'll tell you a story.”

“The story of the cigar box and cotton?”

Tivisita looks doubtful. “Well, the true story of the day you were born.”

“Mamá almost died.”

Tivisita hesitates, a blinking look in her eyes like she doesn't know what to say. “But she lived for three whole years—”

“And then she died.”

“Your mother is in heaven now, God rest her soul.”

Camila shakes her head, red ribbons tossing, but then she catches a glimpse of Pibín from the corner of her eye. He is giving her his secret look that means, Don't tell.

She presses her hand against her heart. Her mother is as close as that—but Tivisita is not supposed to know because Pibín says Tivisita has not proven herself to be Mamá's true friend. But why not? Tivisita is her friend and her father's friend, and they are going to meet him in El Cabo where maybe there will be a big surprise, like Mamá coming back from heaven where she went to get rid of her cough and get a baby sister for Camila to take care of.

T
HEY SIT ON THE
deck chairs, Tivisita and Max and Camila and Pibín. Fran is older, so he is up in the cabin with the captain learning how a steamboat moves over the sea.

She is older, too, three going on four! But at Mon's house this morning when she could not remember what Mamá had said, Mon told Tivisita and Pimpa, “The child is too young to remember.”

“I am going on four,” she spoke up. But nobody was listening to her, because they were arguing and Minina was feeling faint and that was why Camila slipped away to the dark hole to get away from everyone. She has been doing this a lot lately, hiding under the table or in the mahogany armoire or in the dark hole, because then she is like Mamá who has gone away to heaven to get rid of her cough.

“On the day Camila was born,” Tivisita begins, and Camila feels a surge of happiness hearing those words like the sun is coming up in the morning and shining right on her face. When Tivisita tells the story of the day Camila was born, the story is different from when Mon tells it. Tivisita says she never put Camila in the cigar box with cotton. She put her in a pretty blanket. She put her mouth to Camila's mouth and put air in her lungs and
Camila cried and her mother woke up for three more years before she died.

But in that sunrise of warm feeling, there is a patch of dark worry. “Why was Mon angry?” she asks Tivisita now.

But Tivisita does not want to talk about why Mon was angry. “On the day Camila was born,” Tivisita repeats, looking at Max and Pibín to help her tell this important story.

“What don't I remember?” Camila wants to know. Mon said, “The child is too young to remember.”

“You don't remember this story,” Tivisita explains, “because no one remembers the day they were born.”

“I do!” Max claims.

“So do I,” Pibín says, lifting his chin.

Her brothers do that a lot now. Everything Tivisita says can't be, they say it can be. As soon as that happens, all stories are over, and everyone is very quiet, like now, listening to the waves splash on the deck as they move across the ocean toward El Cabo, where her father is waiting with Mamá and a baby sister to start a new life together.

“W
HAT DON'T
I REMEMBER?” she asks Regina that night.

“Child, go to sleep or this ocean is going to swallow us both up. You got to peepee or anything?”

“I remember the day I was born,” she whispers to her nanny. She would not want Tivisita or Pimpa to hear her or they would say, “Camila, don't tell untruths. Your mother is watching in heaven.”

“And I remember the day the world was made,” Regina says. Camila cannot tell if her nanny is teasing because it is dark and so she cannot see Regina's face.

When she closes her eyes she hears the slippy-slapping of the waves like she used to in the creaky house in Puerto Plata before the sound of her mother's coughing exploded like guns going off and a war starting, and Camila would wake up, crying.

MOST OF ALL SHE remembers her mother's cough—in the morning with the roosters crowing and all through the day and most especially at night when there is no other noise except the hush of the waves and the breeze blowing through the palms.

“Mamá, are you all right?” she calls through the door.

She is not supposed to go into the room unless Tivisita or one of her brothers takes her in, and then she is not supposed to touch her mother so she does not catch the coughing germs.