In the Name of Salome (6 page)

“Well, I think it's pretty neat to have a daddy who was president, even if it was only for four months.”

“I wish it had only been four months.” Camila sighs, and when she notes the baffled look on Nancy's face, she adds, “The effects went on for a long time is what I mean.” Nine years spent trying to reclaim his country. A president without a country. Someone (not her!)
should
write a book about it.

“How are we doing?” Camila asks the young woman. She has started drawing a family chart for herself on a blank sheet of paper.

“So far, so good,” Nancy says, nodding.

“Well then, Pancho and Salomé had three sons, Fran, the oldest—I don't suspect there will be much mail or papers from him. Early on, he faded into the background, you might say.”

“Oh?” Nancy asks, cocking her head, curious.

“A violent temper, an incident . . .” She waves that past away. “Then there was dear Pedro—he often signs ‘Pibín.'” The smile
on her face no doubt betrays he is her favorite. “And Maximiliano, who is always Max, still alive, still causing trouble.” She laughs. Nancy laughs, too, amiably. She will be easy to work with, Camila thinks. She had not wanted to employ one of her own students, someone whose judgments she would have to live with.

“And then, of course, there is me. But I won't have much in those trunks either.” She smiles at the sunshine pouring in through the window. It is the main reason she has never wanted to give up the small apartment. On a sunny day, it floods with light.

“That's pretty simple,” Nancy says, finishing her tree with a flourish. “I thought it would be like one of those complicated Latin American families with oodles of kids.”

“You spoke too soon,” Camila laughs. “My mother died, and my father remarried.” She mentions her stepmother, two half sisters, both of whom died, her three half brothers. Rodolfo, the baby, now has three daughters of his own! She spells out each name. “There's also the Parisian family—”

“I guess I did speak too soon,” Nancy sighs. Her sheet is now dark with names and arrows and lines.

“And we mustn't forget Columbus, the bear; and the monkeys, One through Eight; and Paco, the parrot.” She decides against mentioning Teddy Roosevelt, the pig. The young woman might get insulted.

“Paco and Columbus . . .” She is writing down the names of the pets! Oh dear. Humor does not always translate well.

“Why don't we stop there,” Camila suggests. “I'll explain other people as they come up.”

Just introducing these ghosts by name has recalled them so vividly, they rise up before her, then shimmer and fade in the shaft of sunlight in which she is sitting. Maybe it is a good thing to finally face each one squarely. Maybe that is the only way to exorcise ghosts. To become them.

I
N THE FIRST TRUNK
, the packets of letters are all tied with red ribbons.

“Whoever put these away did a neat job,” Nancy notes.

“I think it was my aunt Mon—oh yes, you better put Mon down, short for ‘Ramona,' Salomé's only sister. She became something of the guardian of Mamá's memory.”

“Guardian of a memory?” The young woman seems surprised by Camila's choice of words.

Perhaps
guardian
does not mean the same in English as it does in Spanish? “I mean that my aunt took charge of keeping my mother's memory alive in me. My mother died when I was quite young. I hardly remember her.”

She rises and walks to the window. How often has she awakened in the middle of the night, wandering the houses where she lived, looking for something, anything, to fill up the emptiness inside her. And here she is sixty-six years old, the need still raw, the strategies breaking down. Maybe she should take that mild sedative? It is still too early in the afternoon for a glass of wine.

The phone rings. She would ignore it if the girl were not here. “Will you take that, Nancy, please? I'm at work,” she adds.

“It's someone called Marion,” Nancy mouths, holding her hand over the receiver. “She says she has to talk to you.”

Camila shakes her head. At this moment, she cannot bear to be asked about the future. The past is too much with her.

N
ANCY HAS UNTIED THE
first packet. “There's a picture in this one. What a pretty lady!” She holds up the photograph. “Was this your mother?”

Camila is tempted to say yes, as she would have said in the past when asked. In fact, as a young woman she used to give away this picture of her mother to her girlfriends. But the photo is of a painting, done after her mother's death on her father's instructions.
“Actually that pretty lady is my father's creation. I have the actual photograph somewhere.”

The young woman looks at her, waiting for further explanation, as if she does not understand.

“He wanted my mother to look like the legend
he
was creating,” Camila adds. “He wanted her to be prettier, whiter . . .”

Something shifts in the young woman's eyes. She looks at Camila closely. “You mean, your mother was a . . . a negro?”

“We call it mulatto. She was a mixture,” Camila explains.

“That's amazing,” the girl says finally, as if that is the safest thing to say.

Camila does not know if the young woman is amazed by her mother's color or by her father's touch-up. But it was not just Pancho. Everyone in the family—yes, including Mon!—touched up the legend of her mother.

Nancy has unfolded several letters. “I don't have the best accent,” she protests before she begins reading.

“You will do fine,” Camila reassures the young woman. “I just need to get some idea of the content of each one. We'll use those two boxes to sort them.”

“You mean, they aren't all going to the archives?”

“They should all go to the archives, shouldn't they?” In spite of Max, in spite of the others, let the true story be told!

But for now, she wants her mother just to herself.

“Shall I label them something?”

“What was that, Nancy?”

“Shall I label the two boxes so we don't confuse them?”

“Label one ‘Archives.'” She thinks a moment what the other box should be called. “And just put my name on the other one.”

S
HE STARTS TO GIVE
away her own things as if something inside her already knows where she is going, what she will need. She presents Flo on the first floor with a copy of Pedro's
Literary Currents
,
which includes his Norton Lectures from Harvard. To Vivian, she gives her records of Italian operas, Spanish zarzuelas.

“So, have you made up your mind where you are going?” Vivian asks.

“Not yet,” she says, and she repeats the same thing to Marion, who calls again to say she has received Camila's last letter.

“Well, I want you to know that no matter what you decide, I'll come in June to help you pack up.” Marion takes a deep, resigned breath, which she is meant to hear. “By the way, who is that young thing who always answers when I call?”

“You mean Nancy?” Camila revels in the pause that follows. “She's my student helper.”

“Tell her to get on the ball. I keep leaving her my number and you never call.”

Thank goodness for student helpers one can blame things on! “We've been so busy, sorting through years and years of papers.”

“Be careful with your asthma,” Marion reminds her. She sends a motherly kiss over the wires, then calls back up a minute later because she forgot one for the other cheek.

Nancy comes twice a week and on weekends. Soon they finish one trunk and start on the other. Every night she pores over her mother's box: notes to her children; a sachet with dried purplish flowers; a catechism book,
Catón cristiano
, with a little girl's handwriting on the back cover; silly poems from someone named Nísidas; a lock of hair; a baby tooth tied up in handkerchief; a small Dominican flag her mother must have sewn herself, its stick snapped off, no doubt from the weight of the other packets upon it. What these things mean, only the dead can tell. But they are details of Salomé's story that increasingly connect her mother's life to her own.

As for the future, who knows what that will be. All she knows is that she wants to become Salomé Camila, living it.

A
MBASSADOR
B
ONSAL IS BEING
interviewed by David Brinkley. What is happening over in Cubar? Mr. Brinkley wants to know. Cuba
r
. Camila has noticed how President Eisenhower, too, mispronounces the name, adding an
r
at the end, a little growl of warning. Mr. Fidel Castro has another think coming if he thinks he can do what he wants so close to the United States, Ambassador Bonsal growls straight at the cameras. Next, there is a clip of Fidel standing in the plaza, hundreds of doves circling and landing around him as he speaks. He seems familiar with his large, pale face and a beard like a black bib under his mouth.

Whom does he resemble? Camila wonders. More and more, there are so many ghosts. People now gone for years reappear in these brief resurrections! A few days ago when Pilar had her over to celebrate her last semester with one of her paellas, Camila could not take her eyes off Pilar's collie, Kalua. The sad face, the soulful eyes, the quietude of his pose as he stood guard by their chairs—all of it reminded her of someone. And then, she saw him, fourteen years gone, her brother Pedro, slowly surfacing in the face of an old dog.

Fidel tilts his head, the doves fly off. He looks like Pancho! The same pouty mouth, the same intent face, something fierce about the eyes. The voice-over in English makes it hard to understand what he is saying. But it seems there has been an exodus of professionals. He is putting out a call for teachers and doctors, dentists and nurses. “Come join us,” he says, looking straight at Camila.

“I
HEAR YOU ARE
retiring?”

She meets the young Nancy on her way home from teaching her classes. It is a brilliant winter day, sun spangling the icicles from the roofs of the buildings. A few weeks ago, they finished sorting through the trunks. The archival material has been sent off to Harvard and Minnesota, the Dominican Republic, Cuba. Her one trunk sits like a rock in the rooms she has been dismantling.
Someday, it will join the others. For now, she wants it with her, part keepsake chest, part talisman.

“Not retiring exactly,” she explains.

“Oh?” The young woman cocks her head. “Where do you go from here?” Weeks of working together have made her bolder than she would normally be with a professor.

Instead of the ambivalence she has felt in the past when confronted by this question, she feels a sense of release—
fields wear their flowers, light floods the sky
. She knows exactly where she wants to go. She wants to try saying it aloud, to see the ghostly breath the words leave in the air. “I'm going to join a revolution.”

“Are you feeling okay, Dr. Henríquez?” The young woman peers at her closely. Her red hair is delightful—as if someone has lit a flame on top of her head.

She is feeling more hopeful than she has in a long time. Just when she thought her life was over—when the rest of her days would be a succession of short trips from one safe place to another, pills in compartmentalized containers labeled with the days of the week, saving stamps pasted into booklets and redeemed for small appliances that are always falling apart, and parts of her body giving out, beginning with her bad eyes—just when, in short, she thought her story was over, epilogue, coda, diminuendo, she has happened upon a caravel with sails filling with wind (no Noah's ark, please, no salvation for me at the expense of others), she has happened upon a way home, a song in her head from childhood,
I'm going to El Cabo to meet my mother . . . The bay is too shallow to float in today
. . . Just when she thought . . .

All the heart wants is to be called again.

“Why do you ask?”

The young woman seems baffled as if she doesn't know how to explain what she has sensed in the older woman's tone. “You just seem . . .” She makes the motion of setting something down. “Happier,” she finally says, though that is not the word that goes with the gesture.

Camila throws her head back and laughs. The young woman gives her an uncertain smile, as if she is not quite sure why her remark is humorous. Reassuringly, Camila adds, “I'm going home, or as close as I can get. I guess I've been homesick for a while now.”

“I bet,” the young woman nods. She has a talent for being agreeable. Camila should send this young Nancy south to work with Max in diplomacy. “Warm weather'll be nice,” Nancy adds, rolling her eyes, as if the piles of snow around them had conspired to ruin their lives. “But will it be safe?”

“All my people live there,” Camila says tartly, a not totally accurate statement, as most of her people are actually one island over.

“Vaya con Dios,” Nancy says with obvious pride to have nailed down the correct colloquialism.

Camila feels a surge of tenderness toward the young woman, her hair springing up irrepressibly around her pale face. This has always been a handicap in her line of work. Every semester she falls in love with her babies, as she calls them, and spoils them to death, so Pilar claims. “It's a wonder they know anything about the subjunctive!”

Camila says her goodbyes and heads down the path toward her apartment. At Joss Gate, she turns—the young woman is still watching her—and lifts a purple mitten and calls out, “Hasta luego.”

Upstairs, the sunny rooms make her feel a giddy certainty about what she is doing. She finds her folder of lists, pros and cons to this or that plan, and rolls the sheaf into a cylinder that looks amusingly official—a scroll, a diploma. Turning on her stove, she sets fire to one end and drops the burning pages in the sink. The future goes up in flames. Although it is only midafternoon, she pours herself a glass of wine and lifts it in celebration.