In the Name of Salome (44 page)

Soon after I arrived, Rodolfo applied to leave, taking my nieces with him. “How can you stand this, Camila?” Rodolfo whispered to me as we walked to his final hearing with the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. “What kind of a revolution is this?” He glared at yet another poster of Fidel going up on Lenin Boulevard.

“Con calma, Rodolfo,” I reminded him.

I was disappointed with his reaction. For I had never thought of the real revolution as the one Fidel was commanding. The real revolution could only be won by the imagination. When one of my newly literate students picked up a book and read with hungry pleasure, I knew we were one step closer to the patria we all wanted.

One summer, I was assigned to a literacy brigade in a cafetal up in the Sierra Maestra. Day after day, I read to a large, stuffy hall of women sorting coffee beans. One morning, I put aside my suggested list (
Granma
, Karl Marx, José Martí) and read them a poem of Mamá's that had never been published. She must have written it right after Fran was born.

There sleeps my little one, all mine!
There sleeps the angel who enchants my world!
I look up from my book a dozen times,
absorbed with him, I haven't read a word.

I looked up after I was finished; the women had stopped sorting and were looking at me with interest. “What is it?” I asked, glancing over their shoulders at our compañera-in-charge at the back of the hall. She could be rather brusque when the sorters fell behind on their quotas.

“That was written by a mother?” one of the women asked.

I nodded. “It was written by my mother, in fact.” And then, I told them her story, and when I was done, one by one, the women began to clack with their wooden scoopers on the side of their tables, until the din in the room drowned out the compañera, shouting for order, in the name of Fidel, in the name of the revolution.

T
HE RAIN IS COMING
down hard. Elsa sits down beside me, our chairs pulled back from the edge of the galería. Rodolfo has caught a cold and is napping. We sit in silence, listening to the downpour, a mist of the raindrops on our faces.

“See, Tía Camila, Lupe was right. It did rain.”

“I don't mind a little rain,” I say.

“Are you upset at us for not taking you out there today?”

“You are the ones in charge now,” I say, with an edge in my voice.

“Maybe Sunday,” she says. “The operation isn't until Tuesday, remember.”

“Maybe,” I agree. But Sunday the sun will be too strong. The strike of garbage workers will have made the streets impassable. Rodolfo's cough will be so bad that everyone will have to be on call in case he decides to die.

“Tía Camila, I often wonder, are you glad you went back to Cuba?”

I sigh as this is a question I am asked a lot by people who find out I had another life in the States. I might have retired with a nice pension and lived out my days in a cottage on a lake in New Hampshire or Vermont or maybe even in Sarasota, close to Marion and her husband whose name I never could get right. How could I throw that life away at sixty-five?

“How could I not?” I always answer back.

“You gave up so much,” Elsa notes.

“Less than you think, dear,” I tell her. The pension I later discovered I had lost by moving to Cuba was nothing compared to what I had found. Teaching literature everywhere, in the campos, classrooms, barracks, factorías—literature for all. (
Liberature
, Nora likes to call it.) My mother's instituto had grown to the size of a whole country!

“It
was
a lot, Tía. You always want to make your self sound less great than you are.”

I have to laugh. “We are all the same size, don't you know? Just some of us stretch ourselves a little more.”

My niece squeezes my hand. I am reminded suddenly of Domingo, how he always had to be in physical touch when he spoke to me. I feel again that old regret at how I might have misled him. But then, I misled myself, thinking I had fallen in love with the man, when in fact, I had fallen in love with the artist, his intensity, Africa in his skin—the things that connected me to my mother, not to him.

“It was time to come home,” I tell my sweet Elsa. “Or as close as I could get to home. I wanted that more than anything.” Who can explain it? That dark love and shame that binds us to the arbitrary place where we happened to be born.

We listen to the drops beating down from the galería roof to the hedge below. The scent of ginger is very strong.

“I miss Cuba,” Elsa confesses at last. She was older than her
sisters when they left, and so she feels a greater pull back. “But I don't think Castro is the answer.”

“It was wrong to think that there was an answer in the first place, dear. There are no answers.” I hesitate. I don't even know how to explain this to her. If I could see her face clearly, perhaps the words would rise up from the mute knowing of my heart. “It's continuing to struggle to create the country we dream of that makes a patria out of the land under our feet. That much I learned from my mother.”

“So you think I should go back?” Elsa is a dentist, she has studied long and hard to set up her little practice in the front rooms of her father's house.

Such a mistake to want clarity above all else! I feel like telling her. A mistake I myself made over and over all my life.

“Again you want an answer, my dear.” I smile because I understand just how she feels.

E
ARLY IN THE MORNING
, I dress quietly and make my way to the front of the house. Usually my roamings take place in the middle of the night, in and out of rooms, as if I had lost something during the day which I need to recover after dark.

“Ignacio,” I call out when I get to the front gate.

I had caught the young driver by the front steps the day before and arranged for this drive to the cemetery. I offered him my change purse of pesos, but he refused. “It would be an honor,” he insisted.

An honor! A young man working for honor! I was impressed. In spite of our disappointing history, my people keep surprising me with their generosity of spirit. What is it that Martí used to say, Every time has its own evil but a human being can always be good? Or was it Hostos who said that, or was it Mamá, after all? The beautiful, the brave, the good—they are all running together in my head, into that great river of time that is now hurrying me along.

The morning is cool, rain on the trade winds coming off the sea. Soon we will edge toward our tropic winter, the waves going wild, the dark closing in earlier each day. I shiver thinking of those long, cold winters in Poughkeepsie and Minnesota and of the long eternity ahead of me. So much left to be done! And no children of my own to send into the future to do it.

Not true! My Nancy in Poughkeepsie, my coffee sorters in Sierra Maestra, my Belkys, my Lupe, my Elsa in Santo Domingo—my own and not my own—the way it is for all us childless mothers who help raise the young.

The gates are already open by the time we arrive. I can smell the carnations, brought from the outskirts, being put out in their cans, a welcome scent after the stench of uncollected garbage on the city streets.

“Would the señora like some flowers,” a marchanta calls out after us, without much enthusiasm in her voice—a tic of selling, to offer wares to anyone passing by. The real buyers come later in their black Mercedes with shaded windows that do not expose their privileged grief to the curious passerby.

Ignacio knows the way, as he brings Don Rodolfo here often to visit Don Max and Doña Guarina. “I have to go take care of the car,” he reminds me after he has settled me on the stone bench that faces the family plot. We left the car by the entry turnabout—the sereno let us—so that Ignacio could help the old woman find her dead people before coming back to park it.

Just before he leaves, we hear something drop with a bang like a firecracker. “What was that?” I say, startled.

“The anacahuita tree,” Ignacio explains. “There's a great big one right next to the grave.”

The pods of the anacahuita are known for exploding when they hit the ground. Oh dear, I think, there goes my peaceful eternity!

When he has gone, the silence is so profound, I wonder if perhaps I have already died. But soon enough, the sound of traffic
starts up as the city wakes to work. Horns blare, annoyed cars navigating the piles of garbage on the streets. An occasional siren wails. A woman calls out for Juan to remember the mangoes on his way home. Early Friday morning in the land where I was born.

I lean forward, my hands out, to find my stone and check the name. But the bench is placed too far from the graves, and I almost fall over on my face. Just as I regain my balance, I sit up, tense and listen. There is a stirring nearby. Someone is approaching furtively, and suddenly I wonder if it was foolish after all to let Ignacio leave me alone in a deserted cemetery in a capital city increasingly known for its crime.

“Who is there, please?”

“It's just me, doña,” a boy's voice calls out. He introduces himself: José Duarte Gómez Romero.

“They call me Duarte.” Duarte is from Los Millones, a nearby barrio, named not for the millionaires who do not live there but for the million poor who do. He comes here by foot every morning, weeding grave sites for small change. “Would you like me to do your plot?”

“Are there weeds here?”

The boy is silent. No doubt, he thinks I am tricking him with my silly question. He has not registered that I cannot see very well. He comes closer. “Can't you see, doña?”

“Not as well as I use to,” I explain to him. In some respects, I might add, much better than I used to. “I would like your help, Duarte. The stone on the left there at the bottom. What does it say?”

Again he is silent. “The one at the very bottom on this side,” I say, waving my left hand. Not a word from him. Finally, it dawns on me. In Cuba, he would know how to read. He would not be picking weeds on a schoolday. “Put my hand on that stone,” I tell him, rising and coming to kneel by him. How I will get back up is anyone's guess. “The one at the bottom there.”

His smaller hand closes over mine and he leads my fingers over the cut letters. I feel the satisfying curves of my full name. My nieces kept their promise!

The boy has guided my hand, and now I put my hand over his. “Your turn,” I say to him. (My José Duarte in Los Millones!) Together we trace the grooves in the stone, he repeating the name of each letter after me. “Very good,” I tell him when we have done this several times. “Now you do it by yourself.

He tries again and again, until he gets it right.

Salomé Camila Henríquez Ureña
9 April 1894–
12 September 1973
E.P.D
.

I
T IS IMPOSSIBLE TO
acknowledge the many people who made this book possible. Helpers and colleagues in Middlebury College, Vassar College, New York, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic offered their books, knowledge, comments, insights, memories. To all of you, mis gracias and heartfelt thanks. Never has it been truer that without your help, I could not have written this book.

But every book has godparents, and these I will mention by name:

Gracias to the padrinos: José Israel Cuello, who one day invited me over to his house for una sorpresa and handed me the original diary that Pedro Henríquez Ureña kept after his mother's death with the full history of the family, and told me, with that incomparable Dominican generosity, that I could borrow this treasure until I needed it no longer. And gracias, too, to Arístides Incháustegui, opera singer turned historian, who gave generously of his time, his research, his insights into the figures of the past. And to Ricardo Repilado, now in his nineties, living in Santiago de Cuba, who brought the young tutor, Miss Camila, to my imagination, including her slightly “nasal” voice that always quavered with strain, and who before my departure gave me another treasure, the 1920 edition of Salomé's poems, because, he said, “I am an old man, soltero, sin hijos, and when I die, no one will end up with this book that will get as much pleasure from it as you.” Finally to Roberto Véguez, colleague at Middlebury College, whose help ranged from details of Spanish punctuation to the names of streets in his hometown of Santiago de Cuba. Mil gracias.

And to the madrinas: Chiqui Vicioso, who five years ago, just
after I finished
In the Time of the Butterflies
(the ink was not yet dry!), sat me down in her apartamento in Santo Domingo and loaned me her copy of the just-published
Epistolario
of the Henríquez Ureña family, and a copy of the poems of Salomé, and like some bossy musa said, “Your next book, Julia!” (Chiqui went on to write her own prize-winning play about Salomé,
Cartas a una ausencia
.) And to the other madrina, Shannon Ravenel, who encouraged me every step of the way. Gracias for the faith and the excellent “invisible” help throughout.