In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  Perhaps because she was unencumbered by petticoat or buttoned bodice or long overskirt tied back at the sides or buckle shoes with light cotton stockings, in short because she was not dressed as I was, even in my unpreparedness for the street, she was at my side in a few jerky moves before I was even five steps closer to the door. She grabbed me at the shoulders, and though I tried pulling away, she was strong—my height, but stouter—and I could not get loose. She reeked of urine and sweat.

  But she was looking at me in a way no one had looked at me in a while. She was seeing me, with a wild, probing desire to know who I was. I tried looking away but her eyes held me.

  We stared at each other, and I only tore myself away when she opened her rotted mouth to scream.

  I COULD NOT REMAIN angry at my father, for he was not well. Constantly, he complained about a shot of pain, which he said was like an arrow piercing his chest. The broad, dimpled face became thin and haggard. He lost his flamboyant, swashbuckling manner. Often we found him in bed, unable to get up. Finally, we overcame Papá’s reluctance and fear of doctors, and Dr. Alfonseca came to see him.

  The young doctor sat by the bed timing Papá’s pulse. His black frock coat made him look like a black bird perched on my father’s bedside, something I did not want to think about, for black birds were supposed to be omens of bad luck.

  “So what’s your verdict, doctor?” Papá asked when the young man had finished his examination. “Am I going to die?” He was trying to be jovial, but I could see the fear in his eyes.

  “Die!” the doctor said, as if it were out of the question. “You have to live long enough to see these girls married, Don Nicolás.” He waited to elaborate upon my father’s condition until we were downstairs in the parlor.

  “Prepare yourselves for the end,” he said quietly to Ramona and me and Papá’s sister, Altagracia, the only sister left. “Don Nicolás has a cancer. It has already invaded the lungs and intestines.”

  I felt as if that arrow that Papá often said went through his heart had pierced right through mine as well.

  “I know this is a shock,” the doctor continued. “But we must give him hope. Don Nicolás is very impressionable. He is a poet after all.” The doctor gave me an acknowledging nod. “I will be by daily with his dose of laudanum. We will keep him comfortable.”

  I don’t know how we got through that day, for after weeping with Altagracia in the parlor, then going upstairs with bright faces and lying to Papá, saying that Dr. Alfonseca had said he would be dancing a waltz by summer, we went home to tell Mamá.

  It was then that I realized that my mother was a woman still deeply in love with the man who had broken her heart. But the years had softened that blow of disillusionment, and his love for his daughters had rounded the sharp edges of her anger, and his recent decline had glued the pieces of her heart back together. She spent many days and nights, spelling Ramona and me, helping out Altagracia with my father’s meal preparations and needs. She had become his faithful bride again.

  “He’s going to suspect something with you coming all the time now,” Ramona noted one day as all three of us walked toward Papá’s house.

  My mother held her head high—her black bonnet shielding her face except when she turned to address us. “I have ways of convincing your father. Besides, God is going to work one of his miracles, I know he will.” It was not just Papá who needed hope to keep from falling apart.

  But this was not to be one of God’s miracles. Papá worsened and toward the end of March he was too feeble to walk to his garden or turn the pages of a book. I read to him for long hours, often looking up to find his eyes closed, his head to one side on his pillow. With a sinking heart, I would rush to his side and hold my hand close to his mouth to make sure he was still breathing.

  One day I had been reading to him from José Castellanos’s anthology that had been published late the last year. He had included four of Papá’s poems and six of mine.

  “Whatever happened to that friend of yours, Federico?” my father asked. I had to shudder, thinking of how the dying are said to be sentient, for just that moment I had turned to Federico’s poems in the book. When I received a copy of the book, I had been surprised to find included the poem he had sent me. It’s as if he wanted to broadcast our great friendship, which, in fact, had not come to much. Federico had been quite preoccupied elsewhere.

  “He is to be married soon, to Carmita García,” I answered my father. When I had heard the news a few weeks before, I had not been surprised. Right beside Federico’s friendship poem to me in Castellanos’s anthology was a poem dedicated to Carmita with all the languishing sighs and vows of adoration that had been missing from mine. Obviously, I had correctly judged that first look I had seen on Federico’s face.

  “That poem you wrote him, the one I destroyed, pardon me, mi’ja. I was trying to protect you.” He allowed himself a moment to catch his breath, closing his eyes, as if stopping one sense could increase the capacity of the others.

  “I remember the day, you ran off,” he continued. “When you came back, you looked like . . . you had seen . . . the devil himself. Then I understood you had feelings for this young man.”

  I bowed my head. The ache of disappointment was again upon me.

  “Years ago, I left you my trumpet . . . now I leave you my flute,” he added.

  This was too much like a parting to suit me. “Ay, Papá, come now, you’re a young man. The Bible says Methusalah lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine. You can do better than fifty-three.”

  We were quiet for a while, and then, he opened his eyes and looked at me. “Tell me,” he said, and I already guessed what he was going to ask me, for I always had a way of knowing what was on my father’s mind. “No one will tell me . . . Am I dying?”

  “Come, come, Papá,” I said in my best imitation of Dr. Alfonseca. I tried to keep the knowledge from my eyes, but I know he saw it there. “The doctor says you are having a very bad bout with an intestinal catarrh,” I lied, looking away quickly from his probing eyes. “If you take care of yourself and listen to what your daughters tell you, you should be dancing a waltz by the summer.”

  He let his head fall back on the pillow, his hands on his chest, as if mocking the pose of the dead. And then, as I came to his side, afraid, ready to check his breath, he spoke, very softly, as if from the dead. “I will be gone by summer.”

  “Papá, please,” I sobbed, unable to hold back any longer, “please don’t leave me.”

  “I leave you my flute as well as my trumpet,” he reminded me.

  PAPÁ DIED ON THE third of April.

  If I were to try and describe the pain, I would have to compare it to those moments after a great blow or a bad fall. You lie on the ground, dazed and in pain, not knowing what harm you have done to yourself.

  I watched as Mamá and Altagracia prepared Papá’s body, dressing him in his black gown and Chinaman hat from his days on the Supreme Court, Tía Ana scenting the pockets with petals from the gardenia bush by the door, packing his mouth with anise seeds to sweeten the escaping noxious fumes. I remember the wake in the old house on Mercy Street, the dark dresses, the sobs stifled in handkerchiefs, and then what might have been a shock if I had not already been too stunned to feel anything: the other woman, Felipa Muñoz, and her two daughters, who looked about the same age as Ramona and I.

  The summer came and went with only the interruption of a single outing in the country near Baní where we had distant cousins on my mother’s side. And then the rains came, and the government we were all so hopeful about fell apart, and we had wars again, the Greens against the Reds and the Reds against the Blues, until it was all a muddle of politics, the only dominant color being the red of spilled blood. Up north, the United States celebrated its one hundredth birthday. Their president Grant threw a big party for everyone, but our new president Espaillat had too many revolutions on his hands to go. By the end of that year the public clock made by a Swiss watchmaker who had
gone blind making it was delivered to the cathedral, but the pendulums were too long and the sacristan in a fit of impatience cut them off, thinking they were only decorative, so time stopped and it was quarter to seven for months on end. And this was somehow mixed in with the seven governments we had before the next year was out, and Mister McCurtney’s Zoo Circus coming to town and the lion tamer Herr Langer being eaten up by his own lion while hundreds of people watched in horror. And all that time, even as I heard or observed all these happenings, and wrote a few vague lines now and then, all that time, I was lying back, waiting for the pain to pass.

  A period of national calm ensued, and visitors once again came to our door. But Mamá turned them away. She did write down their names in a book, which she said she would keep for posterity, which Ramona pointed out would not come via her daughters, unless Mamá let us get out of our black dresses and accept the many invitations we were now receiving to attend evenings of readings or lectures or music. A half dozen literary and art societies had sprouted up throughout the city.

  But the truth is, I didn’t care to go. I didn’t care to get out of my black dress, or be a famous poet, or look into the faces of young men, wondering if this might be the one who would see past the lauds and laurels and the broad nose and unadorned character to the grieving daughter who had once brought delight to the doting heart of her father.

  I lay there, numb, as if my body had already died, but hearing myself breathe the way I had listened for my father’s breathing by his bedside. In truth, I cannot account for how two years went by, cannot say how it was I even wrote the few poems I did write, cannot say how I tied my bonnet or buttoned my shoes or how early one morning in my twenty-seventh year I was walking to mass with my sister Ramona and looked up toward the heavy, wooden doors of the church where two young men were standing.

  My first thought was how stylishly they were dressed—in silvery-gray morning coats with shiny silk cravats—to be coming to six o’clock mass. One was long and thin like a stringbean with round eyes and a droopy mustache like a small fish hanging from a cat’s mouth, and the other was instantly striking, both in his manly beauty and in the familiarity of his features: the fresh, open face; the intense, dark eyes; the coarse black hair like an Indian cacique’s. I was left puzzling who this young man might be as Ramona and I walked inside past them, concluding it must not be anyone I knew for I heard him distinctly ask his friend, “So, which one is Salomé?”

  I glanced over at Ramona, and thank goodness she had not heard the question, or she would have flashed me one of her see-what-I-mean looks. All the time we knelt at our pew, then stood and genuflected, I was wondering where I had seen this young man before. Recently, in the oddness I had inhabited for over two years, Papá had been coming back into my life, once in the shape beneath my iron as I pressed out the wrinkles from my dimity shift; once in the pained cries of our bodega neighbor giving birth to her first child; once in the satisfied smile of that same baby fallen asleep while nursing at her mother’s breast; and now in the probing eyes of this young man whom I had encountered before and who had been sent back into my life as my father’s ghost.

  The mass was over. We walked back home, the rising sun flashing on the zinc roofs as if delivering greetings from the dead. But my ghost was nowhere in sight. Soon, I forgot, caught up in my day-to-day tasks with an ache still in my heart and silence in my head in places of the phrases, rhyming lines I used to hear all the time.

  “You’ve got to try, Salomé,” Ramona urged me from time to time. She had recovered more quickly and was making every attempt to shake me out of my stupor. “For all of us, especially for Mamá.”

  “I am trying,” I said. My voice sounded small and distant as if it were coming from the bottom of the old revolutionary hole in the crawl space under the house.

  “I know you are, I know, Herminia,” Ramona said, coming and sitting down beside me. I winced in pain, for I could no longer bear hearing myself called by the pet name my father once gave me. She untied the bundle on her lap, full of the invitations that had been streaming in. “Look at this,” she said. “All these people are waiting. All of them inviting you here and there. And now Mamá has said we can accept.”

  Just then, we heard the knock at the front door. Ramona and I looked at each other curiously. It was too early in the day for parlor visitors. Perhaps a student had come to fetch the Catón cristiano she forgot in the parlor-classroom? We hurried from our room to the front of the house to see who it might be.

  The two young men standing before us were the very same ones who had been at the church door a few days ago: the tall, droll-looking one, who seemed always about to burst into laughter, and the younger, handsome one, whose face was so oddly familiar, whose eyes belonged to my father. He was wearing a red cravat and a gardenia bloom in his boutonniere. He was the one who spoke up.

  “Señorita Salomé Ureña,” he began, looking from one to the other as if not sure which one of us was Salomé.

  “She is my sister, Salomé, and I am Ramona,” my sister said holding back her giggles, for the young man seemed overly officious and too nervous.

  The gallant explained the purpose of the call. He and his socio, Pablo Pumarol, had come to personally invite us to a soirée in honor of poetry to be hosted by the Friends of the Country. Other young ladies would be present, as well as many mothers of the members; in other words, a gathering decently chaperoned.

  I barely heard what was being said, for slowly, it was surfacing, who this young man was: the little brother of Federico, who had been off in search of love the day his brother had come calling! I wondered if he was the same Henríquez brother who had recently been apprehended writing my poem, “A la Patria,” on the walls of the fortaleza. Old Don Noël had had to pay a fine, and the whole clan of Henríquez men had turned out one Sunday afternoon with buckets of lime and rags to touch up the old mural, bringing along the Henríquez women, wives and sisters, with baskets of cornmeal candy and cane sugar caramelos to give away to the children. The sisters Bobadilla had come back with the full report of how these Jewish people had behaved themselves as nicely as Christians.

  “We would be profoundly honored if you would accept our invitation.” The young man was now looking directly to me.

  I tried looking away, but his eyes were like Papá’s eyes and like the madwoman’s eyes, probing. I could not resist. I thought, Doesn’t this young man know better than to look at a woman directly in that fashion?

  I wanted to respond to the look by saying, Come in, young man, come in and see just how awkward and shy Salomé Ureña truly is; how her face has gotten thin and hollow-cheeked with grief, how her ears are as big as ever and her hair still has its unruly kink; how her stack of poems is gathering dust and her heart is haunted by her father’s ghost who will not give her a sign that she can go on without him.

  But I had been living in a numb silence for two years, and I could not find the words I wanted to say to him. All I could manage is, “You may count on me.”

  He waited for more, but there was no more to say. He bowed, Pablo bowed, and before they turned away, the gallant, who had introduced himself as Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal (“Everyone calls me Pancho”), took the gardenia from his buttonhole and offered it to me. Then, they headed down the street, the sweet, young fellow plunging his hands in his pockets, the way men do when they are unsure of themselves and need to hear the consoling jingle of coins. Ramona shut the top door and threw her arms around me in gratitude. “My wonderful, brave, charming, talented sister!” She hurried off to the back of the house to inform our mother how she, Ramona, had finally managed to bring me out of my grief-stricken condition.

  As soon as she left the room, I pushed open the small side window and watched as the two men neared the end of the street, pausing to let the water donkey go by with its sweating tinaja of drinking water. That bit of swagger had returned to the young man’s step and his hands were now out of his pockets, and he was swingin
g them like a boy who had accomplished a hard task and was proud of himself.

  And I felt myself slowly rising from where I had lain for so long. I felt life spiraling up my legs, stirring awake the aching dullness in my brain. I smelled bread baking in the nearby ovens of the panadería, the salty smell in the breeze from the sea. The curfew bell rang down at la fortaleza. I stood with my head poking out of that window, like the bodega neighbor’s baby at her birth, her head popped out, the rest of her still unborn, just taking a look out there at the world she was about to come into. Then, as if it had been my father’s blessing finally reaching me, I heard the neighborhood band beginning its practice in preparation for the Corpus Cristi procession the next day: the roll of the drum, the the trill of the flute, the waking call of the trumpet.

  THREE

  Ruins

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1941

  SHE LOVES RIDING ON trains. She feels like a heroine, suspended between lives, suspended between destinations. A line from her mother’s poems pops in her head and is repeated and repeated—until it is nonsense—by the clacking of the train on its tracks.

  Which of my many dreams shall claim my heart?

  Or did she herself write that?

  But inevitably, the heroine arrives at a station. People are there to pick her up, important characters who expect too much of her. Perhaps Domingo himself will be there, still furious, demanding further explanations.

  Before she knows it, she is on her feet, pacing down the rocking aisle of the New York–Boston Yankee Clipper Express.

  THERE HE IS! Her dear brother Pedro!

  He looks so elegant, in a tan, belted coat, the collar turned up, no hat on his head even though it is a chilly March day. A band starts up somewhere, trumpets and drums, maybe some dignitary is on the train. She imagines the music is for her, a band her brother has hired to celebrate her escape.