In the Name of Salome Page 8

  But as for Señorita Camila . . .

  It was a constant tug of war for Camila, caught as she was between her wild friend and her family, trying to keep the peace in a household in which she seemed the only neutral being. There were two stepaunts, the cranky Mon, three half brothers going off like firecrackers, Regina (who spoke only Spanish) and the cook from Martinique (who only spoke French), and a menagerie of animals, who at Pancho’s insistence received all their commands in English—and then, as if she could balance them all with her splashy, incomparable presence, Marion, or, la Miss Marion. Camila might have been in love, but what she remembers is being in a state of constant exhaustion. No wonder her voice gave out, and her teacher, Doña Gertrudis, told her she must give up her dream of singing opera.

  When Camila and her father left for a month’s stay in Washington, Marion decided to accompany them as far as New York and then go to visit her family in North Dakota. Camila hoped that that once there, Marion would not come back. She had her own plans. She was almost thirty. She still had a chance of happiness if she finally made the correct choices.

  But at the end of the summer, Marion was back at Camila’s door. “I’ll never let go!” Marion had sworn, even the final time, when she climbed aboard the train that would take her to Havana, and thence, by ferry, to Key West and a job teaching dance up north. Over the years, on and off, the two friends have stayed close, finding each other again and again, especially when their lives are beginning to fall apart.

  Most recently, as they are both crossing the half-century mark, Marion has been hinting that the two friends might “end up together after all.” Especially now that their parents are all gone and they don’t have to worry about awkward explanations. But they are not gone for me, Camila thinks. No doubt her ambivalence is driving Marion away again. But in fact, Marion’s recent lapses in writing and calling have been much more depressing than Camila would have thought.

  Especially given this whole centennial business, bringing back, as she knew it would, that hollowed-out feeling of original loss. And then, the newer losses! Pedro, dear Pedro is gone. And fast upon this grief, another: her cousin Gugú shot down on a beach this past summer.

  Winter upon winter. Stripping the land of its glorious young . . .

  Camila is not above improvising on her mother’s poems.

  “BUENAS TARDES,” SHE SMILES at the room of entirely strange young faces. (Their faces fresh with what they do not know . . .) In honor of the season, she takes the class through a close textual reading of her mother’s poem, “The Arrival of Winter.”

  “¡Excelente!” Chairman Graziano congratulates her after class. Tall and effusive with the broad shoulders of a football player, he seems out of a place in the scholarly confines of the classroom. Beside him stands a young man, brooding and thin, a dusting of cinnamon in his skin. No doubt this is the Dominican student, who has been having some sort of trouble—she can’t quite remember what. He cradles a small parcel in his arms possessively. Her mother’s poems, she thinks. He wants her to sign his copy.

  The chairman introduces him as Manuelito Calderón, a name that sounds vaguely familiar. “Why don’t you two visit right here?” The chairman rearranges two classroom chairs so they face each other, then nods at Marion. “We’ll be back in about twenty minutes.” There is a slight lift of his eyebrows as if to ask, or sooner? Camila understands: the guest speaker must be protected against the eager student or colleague. “Twenty minutes is fine,” she agrees, smiling at the student. “Don’t you think, Manuelito?”

  “As you wish,” he says, quietly in Spanish. In the too-large winter coat he has not taken off, he seems ill at ease. Camila wonders if this is the way her colleagues and students at Vassar view her. Perhaps that is why her neighbors are constantly trying to dress her warmly and acclimate her to a place they can see she does not cotton to, as Daddy Reed might have said.

  “DON’T YOU RECOGNIZE MY name?” the young man confronts her as soon as the chairman and Marion have left the room. He is scanning her face for some hint of recognition he seems to feel he deserves. Difficult time adjusting, Camila remembers the chairman’s phrase. She should think so with this rude attitude.

  It turns out he is, in fact, the son of Manuel Calderón, who was killed last summer in the Luperón invasion. He knows of Gugú. Before she can express her sympathy, Manuelito continues, testing her. “I understand your brother works for the government.”

  “Max is in foreign relations,” she says, trying to minimize her brother’s participation. In fact, Trujillo offered posts to the whole family—the Henríquez Ureña name would lend prestige to his regime. Even Pedro had served briefly as secretary of education, only to resign before a year was up. But Max has stayed on.

  “So you can go back when you want?” Manuelito asks. His look is fierce, but his eyes, she notices, are a boy’s eyes, full of tears.

  She sighs, her glance falling on her hands. They have aged, grown spotted and rough. Recently, her body is full of these kinds of surprises. She looks in the mirror, and an aging woman blinks back at her. Meanwhile, a girl waits in the wings of her heart for all the important things she was promised that have not yet happened: a great love, a settled home, a free country. “I have not been back since the massacre,” she explains. The slaughter of Haitians had disturbed her profoundly. What was it Trujillo finally paid for the twenty thousand dead, twenty pesos a head?

  “But you mentioned in class that you will be going back in October for your mother’s centennial?”

  She hesitates. She had said so. (“There will be a procession of six hundred students, wearing black armbands. We will make one stop so we can each lay a gardenia, my mother’s favorite flower, in front of the house where she was born. The fragrance will be apparent for miles.”) It was as if she were creating that future day, a touch of this, a touch of that, filling in the gaps left behind by her mother.

  The young man sets down his parcel on the small desk that projects from her armrest. The wood is full of carvings, sets of initials connected with plus signs, declarations of love, and indictments of teachers: Peguero is a pill, then a quote ascribed to Martí but which sounds rather biblical, Whoever gives himself to others lives among the doves.

  “What is it?” she asks, nodding at the package.

  “My submission to the contest,” he says. He is watching her with a look she used to call a thermometer look, when she saw it on her stepmother’s face, eyes probing, gauging her reaction. “I am Dominican. I can submit?”

  “Of course, you can. But you must submit it to the instituto directly. Why not send it by mail?”

  “It would not pass the censors.”

  Her hands burrow in her lap as if away from his scrutiny. “Manuelito, there is a good chance I will not be going down at all. I still have not decided. But remember, if I do, my luggage will be checked, too.”

  “I see,” he says, giving her little nods as if confirming a suspicion he has about her. “You come here, you get ahead, you forget your country.” He is speaking to someone he has created in his head.

  She could defend herself. She could say that she came here just as he did, because there was no place left to go. La patria still in chains . . . The tears I’ve shed for her have never dried . . . Or she could try to calm him by agreeing to do whatever he asks. Pancho always used to say that the best prescription for dealing with the mad was not to contradict them. But this boy is not crazy. He is the voice of her own heart if she were prepared to obey it.

  Instead, she stands, weary. A long evening awaits her: the lecture she does not feel confident about, a reception with colleagues she has not seen since last summer, a talk with Marion. She gathers together her scarf, her leather gloves, the briefcase with her initials imprinted in gold letters (S.C.H.U.), feeling suddenly ashamed of owning fine things.

  “If I can be of some other useful help to you, let me know.” The words sound empty. What can she possibly offer him? A recommendation for
graduate school? A letter of introduction to a colleague? He wants more of her. Whoever gives himself to others lives among the doves. It is the same old story everywhere she turns.

  He says nothing, watching her, his eyes narrowed. As she is stepping out the door, he calls after her, “Long live Salomé Ureña!”

  MARION IS BESIDE HERSELF. They are sitting in her kitchen, drinking hot chocolate before getting dressed for the evening. “The nerve! You should tell Graziano. Who does he think he is?” It is a great solace to feel such unquestioning loyalty. One can leave one’s defense to friends and instead try to understand the point of view of the enemy.

  “Remember, he is heartbroken. He has lost his father. He has lost his country.”

  “And you lost your mother; you lost your country. But are you taking it out on somebody?” Marion challenges.

  Only myself, she thinks.

  “Anyhow, if I see him tonight, I’m going to box his ears,” Marion declares. Then, having performed her righteous anger, she lets her curiosity get the better of her. “So what were his poems like?”

  “A lot like Mamá’s,” Camila admits. She feels suddenly anxious. Marion, especially, will not like the dry dutifulness of her speech. “My precaution got the best of me.”

  “Well, your mother’s poems were subversive,” Marion reminds her. Dear Marion, still bent on defending her.

  They should be getting ready for the evening. But neither wants to end this moment of intimacy. Soon enough, their lives will draw them worlds apart. They sit in the warm kitchen, sipping their hot drink, exchanging the little news of the last few months. Periodically, one or the other goes to the window to check on the progress of the snow. It is still coming down hard.

  “You suppose they really have a hundred words for it?” Marion asks. Then, in her usual non sequitur way, she takes both Camila’s hands in hers. “I know I sprung this on you. I’m sorry . . .”

  “I just want to know that you’re happy,” Camila cuts her off. She knows if she gives her friend any indication of the sadness she is feeling, Marion will begin to feel ambivalent. Let one of them finally be at peace with the future she has chosen.

  “I just don’t want to grow old alone. I don’t have your resources, Camila.”

  Resources? she wonders. “Now, Marion, I thought this was our prime. Weren’t you advising me this afternoon to kick up my heels and have a good time?”

  Her friend suddenly looks old, the dyed hair depressing in its too black glossiness, the skin around her eyes puffy with lack of sleep. “Maybe you’re having a good time,” she accuses. She looks like she might cry.

  “Maybe,” Camila says vaguely. In his last letter, Guillén confessed his loneliness. “Perhaps when you come in May, we may dine together?” She had felt a queasy feeling reading those words, a sudden repulsion, just as when Domingo used to touch her. Poor Domingo. She has written him, asking his pardon, but he has never answered her.

  “But do you love him, Marion?”

  A look of sadness washes over her friend’s face. “This is an alliance, Camila, an alliance, not a romance. You always say, there’s more to life than black or white.”

  Does she really say that? Her pronouncements in the mouths of others always sound so facile. “I only ask because you have always . . .”

  “Preferred women?” Marion finishes the awkward phrase Camila finds difficult to say. It is not squeamishness, as Marion thinks. She hates labels that pin the self down to only one set of choices.

  “Who says that’s changed?” Marion challenges. She reaches across the table and takes hold of Camila’s hands. “You know all you have to do—”

  “Marion, por favor,” she says quickly before the thought fans into a hope.

  “But we could try.” Marion has begun to cry.

  “No, we couldn’t.” She speaks soothingly. What can she say? That she knows the life waiting for her in the wings is not one she can live out with Marion. That Marion already played the best part, the glorious first love forever preserved in her memory. But Marion has outlived her role and become an endearing, bossy, and slightly tedious friend. A woman who no longer commands Camila’s imagination, but who takes over everything else. “You’re going to be all right, Marion,” she consoles her. “He sounds like a good companion.”

  “Cammie, Cammie,” Marion sobs, “how come I feel like I’m deserting you? Where will you end up?”

  Dear Marion, wanting to know the ending before the story is done! “I have a good job, a nice pension building up. I have dozens of nieces and nephews.” The thought of Gugú comes to mind. May he rest in peace, she thinks, E.P.D., En Paz Descanse. You have to make a special request of the stonecutter at home if you do not want those initials inscribed on the stone you order. The way you must ask the midwife not to pierce your baby’s ears if she is a girl. (Even her modest, unadorned mother in her one photograph is wearing two large, disquieting Chiquita Banana hoops.)

  Beyond them in the living room, Camila can see the portrait of Mr. Reed. Marion has finally brought him down off the wall, and he leans against the sofa, looking down the hall at Camila. Every once in a while, Daddy would take Camila aside to talk about his Marion, as if she were one of his thorny actuarial tables whose predictions were not panning out for the company. He had encouraged the friendship, believing that such an elegant young lady, the daughter of a president, was bound to be a fine influence on his recalcitrant daughter. Every summer while she was at the university, she had stayed with the Reed family. She remembers the first summer when some locals left a burning cross on the lawn. Mr. Reed had gone out with a shotgun and fired it in the air to disperse the cars gathered in his driveway. From then on, nobody bothered Camila on her summer visits to LaMoure, North Dakota.

  Our Marion, she thinks, looking back fondly at the portrait.

  “Promise me something,” Marion is saying. “Promise me nothing is going to change between us.”

  To avoid having to lie again, she leans across the table and kisses her friend chastely on the lips, a mother’s kiss. By the time she says, “I promise,” she is not quite sure what vow she has sworn to keep.

  WHAT WILL BECOME OF HER?

  As she dresses for the evening, Marion’s question keeps popping out at her, like a cuckoo bird that will not stay lodged in its tiny house even after the pendulum of the Swiss clock he lives in has been stopped. Where did she hear some odd anecdote about someone cutting off the pendulum of a clock, thinking it was unnecessary?

  What will become of her?

  She has lived long enough to realize that unlike her dear friend, great escapes have never worked for her. Tomorrow she will return to Poughkeepsie. The snows will have abated, the arborvitae bushes in front of the college house will be covered in fresh white caps, as if Dot has kept busy in the days Camila has been gone. She will teach her classes, explaining the pluperfect for the umpteenth time, assigning favorite poems (Youth, divine treasure, you are leaving, never to return), and perhaps she will change one small point of view after another and be changed by them: her leap accomplished step by small step. What could be wrong with that?

  IN THE NAME OF the Father, and of the Son, and of my mother. She says the old charm, taking deep breaths to calm herself as she sits in the wings at Middlebury’s McCullough Auditorium, waiting to go on, listening to the chairman intone his rococo introduction. He is making up a character she does not know, an eminent Hispanicist, a woman with two doctorates, a tenured professor at Vassar. She hears the polite clapping that signals she is to come on stage. In the front row Marion sits in her earth-colored tunic, which does nothing for her looks. She reminds Camila, in fact, of her old aunt Mon in her acres of shapeless fabric. But the choice of a tunic is not totally misguided. It does confer on Marion the authority of a robed seer in a Greek play. If she were to give a standing ovation, everyone behind her would follow suit.

  Sitting beside her is the young man. He seems subdued, as if Marion has actually boxed his ears. But he
must have had second thoughts himself about his outburst. Why else would he be here?

  The houselights dim. The chairman turns on the podium light for her to read by and exits the stage. She stares down at the speech she has written. It is a dull combination of duty and fact that no one will feel inspired by. She cannot do this to her mother. She cannot do this to Marion or to the young man. She cannot do this to herself! She closes the folder.

  “I have accepted this invitation in error,” she begins, her voice breaking with tension. “I cannot celebrate my mother’s work when her country is in shambles.” She brings up the recent disappearances, the murders, the massacre of the Haitians she has never mentioned publicly before. All her life she has had to think first of her words’ effect on the important roles her father and brothers and uncles and cousins were playing in the world. Her own opinions were reserved for texts, for roundtables on women’s contributions to the colonies, for curriculum committees implementing one theory of language learning over another.

  “But if I remain quiet, then I lose my mother completely, for the only way I really know her is through the things she stood for.”

  To keep her dreams from dying

  Was all the monument she dreamed of having.

  She finishes with a quote she improvises from her mother, then looks around for a way off the stage. In the wings, a young girl managing the houselights gives a signal and the room explodes with light and loud clapping. From the front row, she hears the young man shouting, “¡Salomé! ¡Salomé!” And beside him, Marion has sprung to her feet and is cheering her on as always, “Camila!”

  TRES

  La fe en el porvenir