In the Name of Salome (41 page)

She goes in anyway. It is a secret. There is a bench and there are books piled up on it, and Camila climbs up on one end of the bench and walks to the other end near her mother and sits on her books. Her mother puts a handkerchief over her mouth to trap the coughing germs and tells stories about where the name Camila comes from.

A beautiful lady who walks on the sea and never ever wets her feet.

One day her mother is writing when Camila walks in. A poem for Pibín.

“Are you going to write one for me?”

Her mother is a thin, sad face with funny glasses that make her eyes look big like fish eyes and long, bony hands that move oh so quickly over the blank piece of paper. “Yes, when the cough stops.”

But the coughing never stops. Her mother gets skinnier and skinnier so that she looks different from other people. No one comes to the house except Dr. Zafra with his funny monkey faces and his thumb he can make disappear. They are staying up in Puerto Plata because it is good for Mamá's cough but the cough doesn't get better, and so Mamá says she wants to go back to die with her mother in the capital.

Their father is still in El Cabo and says Mamá must stay in Puerto Plata for surely the trip will kill her. “These are Pancho's orders,” Tivisita says, but Mamá says she is leaving for the capital and Tivisita can stay and tell on her if she wants to, which makes
Tivisita cry. Then Tivisita packs up the whole house and writes a quick letter to Pancho (that she gives to Regina to take to the mail boat with a silver coin not to tell anybody) and they all get on the people boat, Fran and Max and Pibín and Regina and Tivisita—and by the time they get to the capital, Mamá is so sick, they have to put her on a cot and carry her home from the dock.

Mon is angry and says Mamá is going to die on account of Tivisita allowing her to have her way and travel when she is in such bad condition.

Tivisita cries and says it is not her fault and shows Mon the letter from Pancho that says Salomé must not travel. But now, Mon is even more angry and wants to know what on earth is Pancho doing writing to a young lady about Beatrice and Dante when his own wife is on her deathbed dying of consumption.

And then Tivisita really starts to cry and Max is crying and Minina has one of those wasps in her heart that won't come out.

That is the first time Camila remembers hiding in the dark hole underneath the house.

A
ND THEN THE DYING
starts, in that dark bedroom, with lots and lots of visitors keeping Regina busy bringing chairs and serving cafecitos no one wants to touch because they worry that the cough can spread on the rims of the china cups.

Her father arrives from El Cabo, though at first she does not know it is her father. Everyone is in the back parlor or going into the bedroom in little groups, and so that afternoon it is Camila who hears the knock at the door up front which has been shut because as Mon says this is not a party and where on earth are they to put any more visitors with her sister dying. So Camila unlatches the door and it is a man in a frock coat and top hat and when she says, “Who are you?” he swoops down and picks her up and he says, “I am your father, Salomé Camila.”

How much he already knows about her!

“How is your mother?” he wants to know.

“She is dying from the cough,” Camila reports.

He looks smacked when she says so, and then he buries his face in her dress, sobbing like Max. “My poor child,” he is saying, “my poor wife, my poor family.”

Then Tivisita comes in the room, and he puts Camila down, and dries his tears, and takes Tivisita's hand and says how much he and his family are indebted to her kindness.

“Not at all,” Tivisita says, and then she is crying because what of Mon said and how it is all her fault for allowing Salomé to travel in her condition.

“That is unjust,” her father is saying. “It was already too late back when—” His eye falls on her, Camila, and his voice goes on its tippy toes. “She never recovered after that.”

From the room in back they hear the spasm of coughing like a summons. “Mamá is calling us,” she reminds them in case they have forgotten.

T
HE SUN IS RISING
through the round window right on her face, making the water sparkle with fallen-down stars. Camila braces herself to hear her mother coughing.

But there is no cough. Regina is gone from her side of the bed, and Pimpa is still snoring on the other bed, and Tivisita is lying on her back looking up at the ceiling.

Up on the deck someone is hollering and Camila hears the rushing around footsteps of grown-up people busy with something important. From the bottom of the boat comes the whoosh whoosh whoosh of the steam rushing up the chimney like Fran explained to Pibín last night at dinner.

Tivisita sits up and sees her awake, and smiles. “We better get dressed. Soon we will be in El Cabo.”

“And see my father,” she says, adding to the story to make it move forward.

“Yes!” Tivisita says, smiling again.

“And Mamá and my little sister?”

The smile fades. “What little sister? Camila, your mother is in heaven now.”

“She went to heaven to get me a little sister.”

Tivisita turns to Pimpa who has sat up and is listening to the conversation. “Let her be,” Pimpa says, making a secret gesture with her hand. “It takes time.”

Regina is back with a lemon tea for the ladies and Camila's milk in a bottle. “I can see land,” Regina says relieved, making the sign of the cross.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Salomé, my mother
, Camila says in her head, but she will not say it aloud as that is what started all the trouble.

T
HEY ARE ON DECK
and up ahead loom dark green mountains with a little town at their feet and pretty houses coming right up to the sea with zinc roofs flashing in the sun and fishing boats bobbing up and down, just like when they lived in Puerto Plata, which she remembers as the sound of her mother coughing.

“The bay is too shallow to come in today,” she hears Fran explain to Pibín.

“The bay is too shallow to come in today,” she chants, a song about their arrival.

S
UDDENLY, THE SHOUT
! “There's Pancho!”

Camila cocks her head, this way, that way, and tries to fit the shape waving in the small boat with the tall man in a frock coat who came to say goodbye to her mother several months ago.

“Papancho!” she calls out because she has been told that is his name.

“Papancho! Papancho!” her brothers are shouting and Tivisita is waving her handkerchief and smiling.

He shouts back, but the rowboat is still too far away for anybody to hear him. Besides, the steamboat is making horrible, squealing sounds that mean, Fran explains to Pibín, that they are stopping.

As the boat draws closer, she can see her father standing and waving. Another man is rowing. But where is Mamá? Where is the baby sister from heaven?

“Pibín,” she asks him, “Where is Mamá and the baby sister from heaven?”

Pibín looks down at her, frowning. As if he thought she were older, as if he thought she knew better. “We're not going to have a baby sister, Camila.”

“You're the baby sister,” Max taunts. “Baby! Baby!”

Camila ignores him. “Why can't we have a baby sister, Pibín?”

Max's face gets red like just before he bursts out crying. “Because Mamá is DEAD, stupid!” he says, like slamming a door in her face.

She sees the meanness in her brother's face, and that more than anything is what makes her want to cry. Maybe someone will scold Max for calling her a baby, naughty boy! But everyone is too excited with the boat approaching, and Tivisita and Pibín and Fran are hurrying to greet her father as he comes up the rope ladder and throws his arms around them.

Camila is not going to cry in front of everybody and be called a baby again. She runs from the deck, down the first stairs, past their cabin where Regina is tying up their bedding, and on down the narrow passageway of the boat rocking, and down the steep stairs to the dark hole with the boiler making gurgling sounds and men without shirts cranking open valves and a great whoosh like steam escaping out of a kettle's spout.

“Stoke her down!” one of them shouts.

She crouches behind the coal pile in the heat of the nearby
furnace, listening to the men put out the fires and stop the boat that she thought was taking her to her mother.

I
T GETS SO HOT
and steamy, she cannot breathe, but she must not cough or they will find her and take her away to El Cabo, where she now knows she will not be seeing her mother.

But where is Mamá?

In heaven? But where is heaven?

In her heart? But then why doesn't her mother come out so she can see her?

The last day, her mother tried to tell her where she would be. But the handkerchief was over her mouth and so Camila could not make out the words she was whispering.

Tivisita had dressed her up in her white dress with the embroidered leaves on the collar like her head is a flower. “Dear heart,” Tivisita said, kissing her forehead, “you must be very brave.”

“What am I to do?”

“Your Mamá wants to hear you recite ‘El ave y el nido.' And she wants to say goodbye to you.”

“Where is she going?” Camila asked, suddenly afraid.

For days now, so many people have been dropping by that straw has been put down on the street in front of their house so the noise of carriages won't disturb her mother. People are coming in and out of the dark room, crying and shaking their heads sadly when they look at Camila. But Mon will not let Camila go in there because she says it won't be good for Camila to see her mother in this condition.

That last day, when Tivisita is done dressing her, Mon comes and carries her into the dark room. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust, but slowly she recognizes the figures, ranged around the bed, handkerchiefs dabbing at their eyes: fat Archbishop Meriño with his big red sash, and Dr. Alfonseca with yellow streaks on his
white mustache where he blows out smoke from his nostrils, and her mother's students, Luisa and Eva, her grandmother Minina, her three big brothers, her uncle Federico, her pretty aunt Trini, and Tía Valentina with her cousins from Baní—it seems everyone they know is here.

She looks from one to the other, searching for her mother, her eyes finally falling on the pale face lost in the big bed, surrounded with sweet-smelling white flowers and green sprigs from the laurel tree.

“Mamá!” she calls out and the eyes open and the lips spread in a faint smile.

Mon places a handkerchief over her mother's mouth, the center sinking down as her mother takes a breath to speak. Immediately, she breaks out in a spasm of coughing.

“Recite for your mother!” her father commands.

How can she remember the words of “El ave y el nido,” when her mother looks so bad? “Go ahead,” Mon encourages. “Your mother wants you to recite for her.”

She looks at the frail figure lying on the bed. She wants to do anything to please her and keep her here. And so she begins reciting the poem her mother wrote years ago about a bird flying away because her nest has been disturbed.

When she is done, many of the ladies begin to weep.

Her mother motions for her to come closer, but her father holds her back. Mon whispers something to her father, and he finally lets Camila go stand next to the bed.

She is looking right into her mother's eyes, and she can see her mother moving farther and farther away, but struggling also to get loose from whatever is pulling her away to say something to her.

The handkerchief flutters—the words are trapped beneath it. She leans in closer, turning her head toward the sound the way she has seen Minina do with her good ear to listen better. But then her father bends down beside her, pushing her head away.

“She is saying something.” He holds up his hand for everyone
to keep quiet. “‘I see more light,'” he repeats. Then, he lifts her hand as if he is going to kiss it, but very soon he lays it back down on her tummy next to the other one. “Salomé is gone,” he sobs, bowing his head.

Everyone makes the sign of the cross. Archbishop Meriño starts a prayer. Some of the ladies burst out crying.

But her mother is not gone. Camila sees the eyes flick open, the handkerchief stirs, the hand reaches out to touch hers.

Or did this really happen? How can she be certain that what she heard is what her mother actually said when her mother's mouth was covered up and her voice so faint?

So, she plays the scene back. She exits the room, Tivisita dresses her, she goes back to the last trip on the boat, to Puerto Plata and the sand and the waving palm trees, to the room with the sunlight, where her mother sits writing a poem, and coughing, and then she starts over.

Backward and forward she goes, as her mother's face begins to fade and the sound of the coughing to recede until it is the faint hooting of steamboats when the tide is up and they can come in the bay, and she can see them bobbing on the waters from their two-story pink house in the center of El Cabo, while downstairs the baby Salomé is crying, and her stepmother Tivisita is calling for Camila to come out from wherever she is hiding and say hello to her father home from the hospital, and she will go down, for she must go down, but for this moment she stands on the balcony with the sun so hot it will burn her skin darker, which she is supposed to avoid doing, trying to remember that first steamboat ride down to the capital with a sick lady coughing in the downstairs cabin and people crying over a bed of flowers and the silent parade of schoolgirls with black armbands stopping at the seven houses where their teacher lived before they arrive at the church of Las Mercedes and the bells begin to ring scattering the doves in the tower.

This is how people can really die, she thinks, remembering her mother.