Night has already fallen, and the air has grown chillier. She hooks her arm through his and smells the surprisingly perfumey scent of cologne on his coat. A touch of Isabel, no doubt. Camila finds herself resenting this intrusion of her sister-in-law. But this is silly, she has her brother all to herself for now. When people turn to watch, she pulls close to him as if they are a couple out for a stroll on this crisp winter evening.
She glances up at the stars and is surprised by how easily she can make them out: Orion’s belt, the dipper, Cassiopeia in her chair. What an odd world, she is thinking. An ocean away, the sky is lit up with the fire of bombs exploding over London. In their part of the world, Batista’s thugs are in the thick of some grim deed that needs the cover of darkness. And here they are, she and Pedro, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, walking happily under these same stars in the month of March, the month that their mother died. Surely such privilege requires something of them.
She leans against her brother, feeling the rough caress of his overcoat on her cheek, and thinks about their mother.
SHE WAS THINKING, in fact, of the last poem their mother ever wrote.
They had gone up to the north coast, hoping the fresh sea air might save Salomé’s life. Their father was still keeping it a secret that his wife had tuberculosis, so a country retreat was well advised. As for the immediate family, they were all to use every precaution, and the baby, Camila, especially was to be kept at a distance. But of course, any chance she got, she wanted to be with her mother.
One siesta time, she was awakened by the familiar sound of coughing. Camila crawled out of her little cot and went in search of her mother. She found her in her room at the small desk she kept by the window, facing the sea. Her mother was crying. It was a dangerous thing for her to do, for crying always brought on the coughing. Her emaciated frame shook horribly, and she gasped for air.
“Mamá, Mamá, what’s wrong?” Camila remembers asking, on the verge of tears herself. Supposedly, she had gone from baby gurgles and smiles to full sentences—no in-between phases of temper tantrums or nonsense syllables. Raised by a sick, dying woman, maybe she knew there was not much time for dillydallying.
“Nada, nada,” Mamá reassured her, bringing her kerchief to her mouth. She patted the bench beside her, and Camila climbed up on her own, for her mother could no longer lift her. From that height, she could see that her mother had been writing. “What is it?” she asked.
“A poem for your big brother, Pibín, my love.”
“I want a poem for me, Mamá.”
“It is also for you, but I’ve already begun it and shown it to your brother, so I’ll leave the title as is.”
“Read it to me then.”
Her mother read the poem, pausing here and there to catch her breath, but also as if to reconsider what she had written. No doubt, since the poem was now being addressed to Camila, her mother was having to improvise some quick rhyme changes and feminine endings. But there was also a desperation in her voice, as if she had very little time to get something important said.
When she got to the ending, she broke out in a fit of coughing. Tivisita, whom Pancho had moved in to take care of his wife, came into the room.
“What are you doing here, Camila?” she began. “I really don’t think you should be—”
“We’re fine, Tivisita, thank you.” Her mother watched as Tivisita closed the door.
Camila leaned into her mother’s side. “What does it say, Mamá?” She had heard the big words, but didn’t quite know what her mother was telling her with this poem she had just read her.
“It says that I love you very, very much.” She was looking intently at Camila as if she were trying to make out the woman her daughter would become in the young face gazing up at her.
Of course, Camila has questioned herself, as to whether she could possibly have remembered all this. The truth is: she remembers spots. And the rest is the story she has made up to connect those few dim memories so she does not lose her mother completely. But the next thing her mother said, she is very sure she has not made up. Her mother took her hands and tightened her grip. “Stay close to Pibín. Trust what he tells you.”
“Not Papancho?”
Her mother looked doubtful a moment. “Of course, Papancho.”
“And Fran?”
“Yes, Fran.” They went through the whole list of family members, but again, her mother returned to Pedro. “Most of all stay close to Pibín.”
“Why?” she insisted.
But that is as far as the memory goes. Try as she might Camila cannot reconstruct what her mother might have replied. Probably the conversation did not go on much longer. Her mother tired easily those last days, and she could not keep up with the pace of her young daughter’s questions.
Years later, when she was ten, Camila had found the poem again in a collection of her mother’s work in her father’s library. With a pencil, line by line, she had changed all the pronouns and masculine endings—her first poetic endeavor!—so the poem was addressed to her, not Pedro.
Desecrating books was a serious crime in their household of book lovers, and she had been punished in what her father considered a harsh way. She was made to copy over her mother’s whole book of poems by hand. That, in fact, was how she began to commit all of Salomé’s poems to memory.
She had tried explaining to her father why she had done this, but Pancho dismissed her memory as a “fabrication.” It was Pedro who had rescued this memory for her years later, when they were living together in Minnesota (before Marion, before things had fallen apart between them). Late one night, Pedro related a memory of their mother, not unlike Camila’s.
“She called me into her bedroom,” Pedro explained. “She had started a poem for me three years before but she was so sick she abandoned it. Or so I thought. But a few months before she died, she said she had a surprise. She read me the finished poem, and when she was done, she said the most curious thing.”
Even before Pedro said it, Camila knew exactly what their mother had said.
“I’ve asked the future to take care of you. Now you take care of your little sister.”
THE FOLLOWING EVENING AT the Fogg, Camila joins the crowd filing into the auditorium. Many of Harvard’s eminences are here: endowed chairs, dons, dignitaries—Jorge points them out to her. There is a rumor that the president of the college has arrived, but in fact, Pedro has told her that President Conant has sent his excuses. He is just this moment on a mission from President Roosevelt, winging his way to England for talks with Mr. Churchill.
“This really is quite special,” Jorge explains. “One of our own invited by Harvard! Not since Santayana at the beginning of the century.” His eyebrows lift to impress upon her the significance of the evening.
She is sitting beside him and Germaine in the front row, which Pedro has reserved for his friends and colleagues. When she turns to speak to them, she catches sight of a sea of dark tweeds and somber wools behind her. It looks like nothing so much as a gathering of undertakers.
She is herself wearing black, a dress that belonged to her mother and that she has never worn before—or rather she had tried wearing it once, very long ago, and her father, or maybe it was her stepmother, did not allow it. As she was packing and deciding what to take, she tried it on again, and the dress fit perfectly. It is odd to think that her body conforms exactly to her mother’s body, as if she were somehow resurrecting her mother in her own flesh.
As she sits in the audience, listening to her brother, she feels the same sense of excitement that she felt earlier at the Sad Bull hearing the poets recite their sad poems. “We must pledge ourselves to our America,” Pedro is saying, “the America our poor, little countries are struggling to create.”
She, too, wants to be part of that national self-creation. Her mother’s poems inspired a generation. Her own, she knows, are not clarion calls, but subdued oboes, background piano music, a groundswell of cellos bearing the burden of a melody. Every
revolution surely needs a chorus.
“We cannot be mere bookworm redeemers,“ Pedro stumbles over the words. She knows the effort it is for him to speak in English—as all Norton Lecturers are required to do. “Whoever gives himself to others lives among the doves.” (Where has she heard that phrase before?)
“Let us not forget the most important factor, especially important for us to remember on the eve of war, what our apostle Martí once remarked before he was cut down in the mountains of eastern Cuba, ‘Only love creates!’” Pedro’s quote from Martí brings the house to its feet. As he comes out from behind the podium to the front of the stage and acknowledges his audience’s tribute, Camila can see his face, glistening with sweat and tired from the strain. How high a price he has paid for being the one who received their mother’s legacy.
But now, she is here to help him carry it.
From her front row seat, just like a little sister, she blows him a kiss.
LATER THAT NIGHT, after everyone has left the Sad Bull, singing Republicano songs, Camila finally gets a chance to tell her brother how very proud she is of him.
“It’s not just the speech,” she tells him, averting her eyes, for it is not their habit to speak so openly with each other. “I’m proud of how you did not stay with that job. How you would not go along with Trujillo’s schemes. If only you could convince Max.” This is probably not the best time to bring up their brother, but Pedro’s words this evening have fired her up.
“Our Max is extremely cabeza dura,” Pedro admits, “not unlike the rest of us.” Pedro raps his head with his knuckles to show how hardheaded they all are.
“It’s more than hardheadedness. That Haitian business was a disgrace. Twenty pesos for each dead soul . . .” She shakes her head. “History will never forgive him.” Not to mention his little sister, Camila thinks.
Pedro shifts in his chair uneasily. “Let’s put Max aside right now.” He lowers his head and looks up at her as if over the rim of an invisible pair of glasses. Camila believes he can see all the way back to the mess she has left behind her in Cuba. An irate lover, a house hurriedly packed up, boxes and trunks of valuable family papers left behind with friends.
“You need to be more careful, Camila.”
“I am careful,” she protests. “You need not worry about me.” No doubt Max has filled him in on her escapade in a Cuban jail. Max had to come from the Dominican Republic and use his diplomatic immunity to get her released.
“How is your friend?” he asks, gazing steadily at her. “The sculptor,” he adds, though they both know he was also thinking of Marion.
She wishes now she had never mentioned Domingo in her letters to him. “Things did not quite work out.” She looks down at her hands, knowing Pedro is waiting to hear why. What can she say? She could no longer bear to deceive Domingo as well as herself. The night she returned from her two weeks in jail, she had ended with him, using as her pretext the fact that he had deserted the welcome committee at the dock when the guardia arrived with their dogs. “You left us,” she blamed him.
“You l-l-left me long before th-th-that,” Domingo had correctly noted.
“Did Jorge speak to you?” Pedro asks suddenly. She nods. As they waited for Pedro’s lecture, Jorge had delivered his good news. He had called his colleague Pilar Madariaga at Vassar that afternoon. The glowing report he had given “Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s sister”—she could just imagine—had so impressed Pilar, she had virtually guaranteed Camila a job on the spot.
“Vassar is a very prestigious university, you know,” Pedro continues when she says nothing.
Of course she knows that, but there are more important things than prestige, she wants to remind him. The room feels suddenly cold. Perhaps the owner has turned the heat down to let them know he wants to close up for the night. They should go.
“Have you grown to dislike pedagogy? Is it that?” Pedro asks. His voice is intimate, coaxing. He might have been asking one of his little daughters why she would not give her papá a kiss.
“It’s not that,” she says, wondering if now is the moment to ask him about her poems.
“You wanted time, I heard you talking to Jorge.” Pedro lifts his coat from the back of his chair and drapes it over her shoulders. In a quiet, careful voice, he says, “I had a chance to read those poems this morning.”
She hugs the coat tighter around her. She cannot say anything. Her voice would betray her.
“They are skilled, well written. Some, in fact, remind me of Mamá’s poems.” He stops as if to let that sink in. She can feel his gaze on her. “My favorite, in fact, was the one you recited for us yesterday afternoon, ‘La raíz.’ I thought the theme fully achieved, but the rhymes in the last stanza were a little forced.”
Dear Pibín, she thinks. The rhymes can be fixed. There are more important conclusions to be drawn. “Would you have any advice to give the author?” she asks as evenly as she can. She has begun lining up the salt and pepper shakers on the long table, wondering why the owner has bothered to put out these condiments. Both times the group has been there, no food has been served, except olives and oily peanuts—with too much salt, in fact.
“Yes, I do have some advice,” Pedro says. Every word is measured out. “I think the poet should keep writing for her own pleasure. But I think she should take the job at Vassar, if it is offered.” His voice is almost a whisper, as if he has discovered a secret she needs to keep and which he does not want to take away from her.
“I see,” she says, clearing her throat of the sadness lodged there. She does not dare look up, or the tears that are welling up will fall out of her eyes. “What about what you said about helping build our America. What about your words tonight?” It’s as if she is deliberately turning the argument into something else—a job in the United States in contrast to service at home—in order to avoid facing Pedro’s judgment on her poems. Or perhaps the two issues are not so unrelated after all.
“Pibín, answer me. What of your advice to all of us tonight to keep fighting?”
“You can fight from Poughkeepsie,” Pedro says, stumbling over the name of the town. Those consonant clusters are impossible on their Spanish tongues.
“What fight would that be?”
“It’s all the same fight, Camila, don’t you see? Martí fought Cuba from New York, Máximo Gómez fought Lilís from Cuba, Hostos came to us from Puerto Rico. Right now the safest place for you is Vassar.”
“And you and Isabel are fighting from Argentina, and Max from within regime, I suppose?” She hears the disappointment in her voice. She has always looked upon Pedro’s marriage as a surrender of his highest goals. The struggle to provide Isabel and his girls with nice clothes, summer homes, private schools have consumed his energies in petty, low-paying hack jobs.
He has bowed his head as if accepting her judgment. My Pedro is not a soldier, no Caesar or Alexander storms his heart. After a moment of thought, he adds, “I am continuing the fight. I am defending the last outpost.”
“And what would that be?” she challenges him.
“Poetry,” he says. He has taken up her activity of lining up the condiments on the table, as if they are playing an odd game, akin to chess, but with fewer pieces, a game for the bold, easily lost, quickly won. “I am defending it with my pen. It is a small thing, I know, but those are the arms I was given. Defending it because it encodes our purest soul, the blueprint for the new man, the new woman. Defending it against the bought pens, the dictators, the impersonators, the well-meaning but lacking in talent.”
Her eloquent brother. How beautifully he can seal her doom.
“I’m sorry,” he says in a voice so nakedly sad that she feels momentarily sorry for him. She reminds herself that he himself gave up writing poems because he did not feel he was good enough. “Mamá would not forgive me if I didn’t tell you what I think. Others may disagree.”
Yes, she feels like telling him. Max disagrees. Juan Ramón Jiménez disagrees. But it is his opi
nion that counts, she knows that. And she suspects he is right, for what she is feeling is not sadness, but immense relief. Vassar is not so far from Vermont, where Marion has started teaching. Perhaps now without the pressures of family or the hopes raised by Domingo, she and Marion will work out their differences.
“I appreciate your honesty,” she says at last, gathering her things. She has begun feeling the stirrings of her self-respect. She does not want his pity. That would be awful. There are other women she can be besides the heroine of a story.
“Will you at least go look?”
The way his voice rises in a plea is like a hand lifting her chin. She looks up at him. What she sees is an old man’s face—weary and spent, the eyes full of longing, the terrible moral disinheritance of exile, which he is now urging her to partake of. What a way to take care of me, she feels like saying, but they have said too much to each other already.
“I’ll have to think about it,” she says, standing up to go.
CUATRO
Amor y anhelo
Santo Domingo, 1878 – 1879
A NOTICE APPEARED IN all the papers.
We are now collecting sums for the national medal for poetry to be awarded to Salomé Ureña. Once we reach our goal of two hundred pesos, the time and place of the decoration will be announced.
Signed, “Semper Vigilans.”
“WHO IS THIS SEMPER Vigilans?” my mother wanted to know.
“Always Watchful,” Tía Ana translated. “I believe that’s José Joaquín’s pseudonym.”
Ramona and I knew better. She looked at me, her eyes narrowed, before she swept out of the room. She could not understand how I, a grown woman of twenty-eight, had taken leave of my senses. How could I allow a nineteen-year-old boy, hiding behind that silly pen name, to carry on with this public auction of my talent?
She was right. Normally, I would have been embarrassed with so much attention. But instead I was bemused and charmed by this young man’s antics. All I can compare it to is the puppy my Baní cousins gave me to distract me from my grief when I stayed with them soon after Papá’s death. I would watch Coco chew on my shoe or stuff his mouth with the satin ribbon on my bonnet or drool all over my Amazing Travels of Marco Polo, and I would chase him with a whipping branch, but then he would stop, look up at me, wagging his tail, his pink tongue lolling from his mouth, his little black eyes rolling up at me in adoring eagerness, and I would drop the branch and instead scoop Coco in my arms and bury my face in his side.
In the Name of Salome Page 12
