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Authors: Julia Alvarez

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BOOK: In the Name of Salome
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Down below, Vivian Lafleur is returning from a faculty tea. The wind has begun to whip the snowflakes into whirls. From street-light to streetlight she watches her neighbor's unsteady progress: Vivian is almost bent double, holding down her Kelly-green hat with a Kelly-green mitten. Camila's own most recent set is in a shade that Dot especially chose because it had a Spanish-sounding name,
verde green
. In her lighter moments this last fall, Camila has written under her PRO LEAVING VASSAR COLLEGE column:
No more of Dot's hat-and-mitten sets
.

When they next cross paths, Vivian will hint that the faculty missed her at afternoon tea, no doubt hoping that her upstairs neighbor will explain her recent reclusiveness. “We missed our eminent Hispanicist.” For years, Camila used to think that Vivian was making fun of her. But no, this is the way Vivian actually talks.

College Street is deserted at this hour. In a few days the girls will be returning to campus from their Christmas break. It has been a long holiday, waiting for her last semester to start. Not that she is looking forward to it. She has never been good at endings.

Below, Vivian has looked up and caught sight of Camila at the window. She lets the curtain fall and sits back down at her desk as if she has been caught doing something undignified.

S
HE OPENS THE FOLDER
she has labeled THE FUTURE. Her lists, should anyone else read them, are as embarrassing as a diary. The reasons for and against a decision seem so petty. She remembers Rodolfo, deciding to move to a neighborhood because it was closer to the one ice cream parlor in Havana that sold pistachio ice cream. She herself accepted the Vassar job years ago because when she came for the interview, her future colleague Pilar gave her a box of scented soaps shaped like butterflies.

She takes out a clean page and writes, BUYING THE COTTAGE IN SARASOTA CLOSE TO MARION, then draws a line down the center. PRO and CON. Is
close to Marion
pro or con? she wonders.

But before she has even begun listing her reasons, she puts the page aside. None of her reasons are convincing anymore. She turns to her mother's poems again—closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. This time, she opens on one of her favorites, “Luz,” which begins, “Where shall the uncertain heart attempt its flight? Rumors of another life awaken it.”

She listens closely, but all she hears are Vivian's steps at the front door and Dot calling from her bedroom, “Come quickly, Viv.” In the background, the television drones, punctuated by screams and raucous applause. A game show has come on.

D
EAR
M
ARION
,
SHE WRITES
,
you must understand . . . this is not easy for me. When I put my reasons into words they do not sound like the truth. But we parted lives long ago, and I know it will never do for me to join you and your husband in my retirement
.

Something has always been missing between them. She used to blame herself: she was not committed enough to Marion. Now she suspects she was not committed enough to living in this country.

And yet she has stayed on, almost twenty years, long after Marion departed for Florida, long after her brothers stopped trying to convince her to come home.

It is a mystery how the heart gets free.

And perhaps there is a kind of quiet courage to waiting until it does. But she does not want to make too much of this. She has never trusted the trumpet or the drums. She prefers the background piano, bearing the burden, plunking along with its serviceable tune.

I think it is time now to go back and be a part of what my mother started
.

She knows precisely what Marion will write back.

“Nonsense, Camila! Look how your mother ended up.”

H
ER
C
HRISTMAS PLANS
had been to go to Cuba for the holidays as usual. But given the chaos on the island, the bombings and imminent embargo, the airline had canceled all flights. When she phoned her nieces in Havana with the news, they were terribly disappointed. For years, their aunt Camila was known as the Santa Claus from Poughkeepsie, a name that always made the young girls laugh as they mispronounced it.

“It's just as well you stay quiet up there,” Rodolfo advised when he got on the line. The baby of the family had grown up to become a know-it-all at fifty-five. Now that Camila's older brothers were gone—Max was still alive but sadly ailing—Rodolfo had stepped in to boss her around. Families, it seems, like nature, abhor a vacuum.

“Things are happening, lots of things are happening. Your ambassador has been recalled,” Rodolfo continued.

She felt a flash of annoyance that made her want to put the phone back in its cradle. “Bonsal is not
my
ambassador, Rodolfo. I am as Cuban as you are.” Dominican, really, by birth. The family had fled to Cuba years ago, only to find a dictatorship there as well. But they stayed on. Someone else's dictator was never as difficult as their own.

“Santa Claus has been outlawed,” Rodolfo noted casually, the way he might mention that he had decided to grow out his mustache or paint the house yellow. Perhaps he feared that his phone calls were being monitored. Had things gotten that bad?

“Give it time, Rodolfo.” Camila had to raise her voice to be heard. Connections from Poughkeepsie to Havana were never very good. Downstairs, she could hear the stillness of her neighbors listening in.

“Will you be coming in June?” he wanted to know.

I am waiting for a sign, she thought of saying, but he would assume he had misheard and start shouting again into the receiver. “I'll write, Rodolfo,” she promised. “This connection is terrible.”

As if her saying so made it even worse, the crackling of static increased, and then the line went dead. And her brother and the brilliant light of the tropics and hundreds of confiscated Santa Clauses, their fake white beards dyed black and used for Fidel floats in celebration parades, and the smell of cafecitos and her three pretty nieces telling their girlfriends that this year their old-maid aunt would not be coming from the United States with her suitcase full of nail polish and board games—all vanished—and she was alone again in this attic apartment in which she had lived and worked anonymously for close to twenty years. All alone with her indecision and fears.

T
WO TRUNKS ARRIVE FROM
Max. The return address wasn't as funny as he meant it to be.
From your brother Max, one foot on the other side of the grave
. The tags are stamped with the official seal from the Cancillería of the Dominican Republic. Every time she sees him, Max tries to talk her into leaving Poughkeepsie and coming down to work with him in the foreign office. “You could travel. You could use all your languages.” He does not go as far as to say, though she knows he is thinking it, You might meet somebody.

“I'll never go back while Trujillo is alive,” she has told him.

“You don't abandon your country because of one bad mango,” Max replies, glancing away as if to avoid her eyes. He himself has accepted numerous posts from Trujillo. “Look at Mamá.”

The thought of Max, comparing himself to their mother! Ten years ago, at the centennial of their mother's birth, Camila stopped using her first name, Salomé, considering it an honor she had not earned. “I'm just plain Camila,” she corrects those who read her name from some official record.

“I know we have disagreed on many things over the years,” Max writes in the letter that accompanies the trunks, “but despite that, it is you and only you whom I know I can trust with the family papers.” She is to sort out what to give the archives and what to destroy. The irony of his request is not lost on her—she, the nobody among them, will be the one editing the story of her famous family.

Meanwhile, the present is being reported in dozens of recaps of the year's small and big news on television. Alaska and Hawaii have become states. The Barbie doll has been invented in imitation of dolls handed out to patrons of a West Berlin brothel. Panty hose will now liberate women from girdles. In Cuba the peasants are singing, “With Fidel, with Fidel, always with Fidel,” to the tune of “Jingle Bells.”

Camila sings along.

S
HE IS GLAD WHEN
the new semester starts. She has missed her girls. On the first day of class, she greets them in a too bright voice, “¡Buenos días, señoritas!” as if Spanish were the language of a heightened emotional state. The girls sit back, wary of her enthusiasm.

She has fifteen students in each class, all with names like Joan or Susan or Nancy, so it is difficult to keep them straight. Her procedure has always been to spend the first month reviewing grammar, and then move on to the literature, though she has always shied away from teaching the poetry of her mother. Perhaps because this is her last semester, she assigns five of Salomé's most famous poems to the more advanced section.

She does not trust her voice to read them out loud as she usually does. Instead she chooses a volunteer. “Wake from your sleep, my Patria, throw off your shroud,” one of three Susans in the class begins. After a poor rendition of “A la Patria,” Camila asks the blond, pale girl what she thinks of the poem.

“It's too . . . too . . .” Susan wrinkles her nose, as if the word she is looking for might be found by its smell. Camila stands by, quietly, letting the young woman flounder. Usually, she tries to help students out with a ready supply of vocabulary words. But why should she help someone find a negative word to describe her mother's work?

Another student steps in. “They're too bewailing, oh woe is me and my poor suffering country. ‘And martyrdom beneath the fecund palms'! Is this poet supposed to be any good? I never heard of her.”

“As good as your Emily Dickinson, as good as your Walt Whitman.” She feels surprised at her outburst. The students look up, alert and wide-eyed. She is a quiet woman in quaint suits from the forties and funny, colorful winter accessories that they suppose are meant to liven up her black coat. She is one of their favorite professors, soft-voiced and calm. She can see this in their eyes, and as usual when she adopts another's point of view, her anger subsides.

Still, as she walks home, she cannot forget the indifference in their voices, the casualness of their dismissal. Everything of ours—from lives to literature—has always been so disposable, she thinks. It is as if a little stopper that has contained years of bitterness inside her has been pulled out. She smells her anger—it has a metallic smell mixed in with earth, a rusting plow driven into the ground.

That evening, she takes her glass of wine into the back room and opens the trunks.

S
HE HAS BEEN LISTENING
intently for the last half hour, and then has forgotten to listen, so that the crunch of snow on the pathway surprises her. A brief pause as the visitor reads the names on the mailboxes, the squeak of the knob being turned, the rush of cold air as the downstairs door is opened, the seventeen steps to the attic apartment.

“Sorry,” the young woman says at the door. “I was told 204 College Street, and it jumps from 202 to 210.”

The face is open and eager. (What was it her mother wrote in her poem to schoolchildren?
Their faces fresh with what they do not know
. . .) Atop the pale face there is a burst of red hair.

“You're right on time,” she lies. “They're in the back room.”

“Dr. Henríquez,” the girl starts over. “I'm Nancy, Nancy Palmer.”

She leads the young Nancy to the back of the apartment. “I suppose Pilar, or rather, Profesora Madariaga explained what I'd like you to help me with.”

“I'm only a Spanish minor, you know?” the young woman says rather quickly. Perhaps she has spotted some loose pages on top of one of the trunks.

“But you read Spanish well enough to read to me?”

“I got an A in Miss Madariaga's Spanish 220.”

“Muy bien, muy muy bien. Shall we start?”

Camila explains the task at hand. She had thought she could do it all on her own, but this last year has been a strain on her poor eyes. The eye doctor has told her that indeed she has cataracts, which will have to be operated on.

“I think it is better if I introduce everyone first,” she explains to the young woman. That way she will know in what box to place the different letters and documents. “I'll start with Salomé Ureña, my mother—some of the letters might say ‘la poetisa nacional.' She married Francisco Henríquez, whom everyone calls Pancho or Papancho, so she became Salomé Ureña de Henríquez. We always keep our own last names.”

Nancy looks up as if sensing a criticism.

“It is the custom in our poor countries.” She intends the phrase ironically, but the girl nods earnestly with that abstract compassion for the downtrodden of the world.

“Pancho became President Pancho in 1916—”

Nancy's mouth drops open.

“It was actually a very brief presidency,” Camila notes, “not unlike those small towns. What is it you say? Don't blink as you drive by or you will miss them.”

“How long was he president?”

She counts the months out on her fingers to be sure. “Four months, I think it was. We were living in Cuba when he heard. By the time the family joined him in Santo Domingo, we barely had time to unpack before we were back in exile in Cuba again.” She does not add that it was the American occupation that forced Pancho out.

“Gosh,” Nancy says, shaking her her head. “You should write a memoir. Alice Roosevelt has. I hear one of the Eisenhower kids is writing one about his dad.”

Camila waves the suggestion away. She has been approached before, by journalists and historians south of the border. They query her on the details of her life as First Daughter. What details? she asks. There was no time for details, no time to plan an inauguration ball, to have calling cards printed up.

BOOK: In the Name of Salome
4.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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