In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  That is exactly the way I felt about Pancho, at first. I stood by, watching this young gallant outdo himself with articles, letters, subscriptions, events in my honor. I was indulging him, of course, thinking he will soon get over this.

  THE FIRST POETRY SOIRÉE Pancho invited us to attend was hosted by Friends of the Country. Many of these clubs had sprung up in the capital: they organized courses and concerts and political campaigns—in fact, they kept the spirit of liberty alive at a time when our leaders were mostly looking out for themselves. Among the most prestigious, because it was one of the oldest, was Friends of the Country.

  I had dressed in half-mourning, a gray dress trimmed with black crepe, and a black bombazine cap and cape that Ramona thought made me look grim and too thin. The event was held at Don Noël Henríquez’s house on Hope Street, the subject for discussion having been announced in the papers that Wednesday: In what consists the greatness of poetry? Meanwhile, Society of Youth would be discussing, What is the future of fatalism? La Republicana, Is Haiti our true enemy? And Ramona’s favorite, to be addressed at the Dawn of the People Society, Is love the crowning glory of the human species?

  Of course, women guests were not allowed to participate in the discussions. “I’ve been told we keep our mouths shut,” Ramona told me, “unless the master of memories should turn to us and say, ‘And what does the fair sex have to say about the future of fatalism?’”

  Don Noël lived in a handsome, two-story house with a Spanish-tile roof and a balcony of iron grillwork that matched the lampposts on each side of the front door. Ramona and I were greeted first by Federico with such warmth I could see why I had mistaken his earlier attentions and then by numerous other Henríquez brothers, all with the same dark-eyed good looks as Pancho’s. The white-haired father, Don Noël, looking every inch the paterfamilias, offered us each an arm, but at just that moment, the minister of culture and his wife arrived, and he was forced to excuse himself to welcome them properly.

  So, Ramona and I entered the crowded, noisy room, clutching each other’s hands, without anyone noticing us. We were shy to begin with and unpracticed in the art of circulating from one polite conversation to another. In our plain, dark gowns, the two of us, in our late twenties with some color to our skin, must have looked like somebody’s chaperones. We found our way to the spot where some of the older ladies seemed to be congregating, and sat down wordlessly.

  From my post in the corner, I was able to observe Pancho as he moved here and there around the room, greeting members and newcomers. He had a strong voice that carried. I heard him introduce a half dozen of his friends as his very closest friend like no other; every writer had written the best essay on Cuba’s independence or the best drama on the massacre of the Indians.

  When he took the podium at one end of the large drawing room, it was clear he was in command. He had just turned nineteen—there had been several congratulatory birthday odes in the papers, but young as he was, the Friends of the Country had elected him as their president. After a few words of welcome, he introduced some of his honored guests. It turned out the room was full of luminaries. He asked the great general Máximo Gómez to rise and take a bow. Ulises Espaillat, frail and spent from his nine months trying to rule us, was applauded incessantly. Then, José Joaquín Pérez, our celebrated poet, stood and put his hand to his heart to show how much it meant for him to be here.

  “Now, I will introduce our guest of honor this evening.” And then, leaving the podium, he walked across the room toward me.

  Ramona said later I was like one of those hermit crabs that pulls in every appendage and refuses to move. In fact, I could not move. It was as if someone had tied me up inside my own body using my own muscles for ropes.

  But if I was a hermit crab, this young man was a barnacle stuck to my side.

  “Por favor, Señorita Salomé, do me the honor.”

  I made the mistake of glancing up at that pleading face, and it was as if the neighbor’s child were reaching toward the caramelito I had been about to put in my mouth. How could I refuse? I felt myself rising up out of that chair, taking his arm, and walking toward the front of the room.

  As we passed by, people stood up to applaud me. I wished my mourning veil were still fastened to my cap, so I could hide my face.

  At the podium, Pancho leaned over and asked if I would recite something. I gave him a look of terror. “I shall do it for you,” he offered.

  I must say, Pancho recited “The Glory of Progress” beautifully, without consulting the text, his voice as full of passion as if he had written the poem himself. In fact, when I next sat down to work on a new poem, it was his voice I imagined intoning the lines.

  After reciting the poem, Pancho and several other members read speeches in which the greatness of poetry consisted of nobility of spirit and passionate commitment to la patria, as exemplified in the poetry of Salomé Ureña.

  “Do any of our guests, including those of the fair sex, have anything to add to these remarks?” Pancho asked after the speeches were over.

  Trinidad Villeta stood, creating that stir that always accompanies the pronouncements of a pretty girl. “I agree with all our illustrious speakers. And I am an exhaustive lover of Salomé’s poetry.” (I could see Ramona beside her wince.) “But I would like to acknowledge two other poets in the room tonight whose work also exemplifies the greatness of poetry, José Joaquín Pérez and our very own Josefa Perdomo.”

  I felt like a fool to have let myself be shown off as a prize at the expense of others.

  “She was just jealous,” Ramona noted as we were getting ready for bed that night. “The truth is, Herminia, Papá would have been so proud of you!” She threw her arms around me. It was the first time since his death that I had heard my father mentioned without feeling heartsick.

  SOON AFTERWARD, RAMONA AND I were inducted as honorary members of Friends of the Country. Despite the new round of revolutions, we continued to meet regularly.

  I admit I really went to these meetings so I could see Pancho. Whenever I entered the room, he hurried to my side. On one occasion, however, he did not see me arrive, and I spotted him, talking to Trini Villeta. Have I described Trinidad Villeta? She might have been Pancho’s sister, with the same rosy skin and dark eyes and black hair, which she wore in silky ringlets at her ears. Every time I saw her, I had to remind myself that God had given me other, special talents. The angle of Pancho’s body, his hand on the wall beside where Trini was standing, his other hand at his hip, gave a clear signal that this was a tête-à-tête one should not intrude upon.

  I sat down beside José Joaquín Pérez, who had stood and nodded to the vacant chair by his side. Later he said that it was that night he urged me to begin my long poem, “Anacaona,” and so take up the indigenous theme that all our young poets were writing about. But in truth, I cannot remember a word José said, except, when he looked over my shoulder and announced, “And here comes our president, Pancho!”

  RAMONA, OF COURSE, NOTICED my distraction.

  “Just remember,” she warned me the day after we had both seen Pancho flirting with Trini, “this won’t be the first Henríquez man to mislead you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked crossly.

  “You know what I mean, Salomé. Don’t play the crazy goat with me. Pancho’s in love with your poetry, not with you. Even if he mistakes the two, you should not.”

  I had so little confidence in my charms that I was convinced she was right. Pancho was too handsome and young a man to be interested in me. The next invitation we received from Friends of the Country to a gathering to welcome the great educator Hostos, I declined.

  One missed meeting was not unusual. But the next event hosted by Friends of the Country in which Hostos was going to discourse on the future of mankind, I also did not attend. Several missed meetings went by, and not a word from Pancho. I began to think my sister had been right about him.

  Then, one day a package arrived. I tore open the wrapper
to find José Joaquín Pérez’s new book of poems with a touching dedication, To Salomé Ureña, whose lyre makes me want to silence mine.

  Something about reading those words was like a wake-up call. I thought of how I had been squandering my time and talent by letting my heart distract me from my true calling of writing. Sadly, I remembered what Doña Bernardita had written in her Manual: “Pequeñuelas,” she advised young girls, “fill yourselves with the beauty of the world before you are met by love. For after that, you will see nothing but love in the world.” Back then, I had thought this would be a wonderful thing, but now I saw what a waste it was, to turn the world into a book of signs, to pluck a flower and only think, He loves me, he loves me not, instead of noticing the radiant sun and white petals of the margarita.

  And so I resolved to do my work, which was to write poems that would keep the love of liberty alive in the hearts of my countrymen and women during these hard times. I wrote José a poem of sincere thanks for reminding us with his Indian poems of our tragic past. He must have submitted my poem to El Estudio, for a couple of days later, it appeared in that paper.

  As if I had set out a bowl of cream for a puppy, Pancho came calling.

  RAMONA WOULD NOT LET him in. “Salomé is busy,” she declared, holding the top half of the door ajar. “She is working on a new poem.”

  “Do not disturb her,” he said quickly. “I will wait out here until she is done.”

  “How could you, Ramona?” I scolded her the minute the top door was closed.

  “Where has he been for the last month that you’ve been crying into your pillow. Don’t tell me I don’t hear you!”

  But I was already unlatching the door, and poking my head out. He was crouched by the sidewalk with his back against the wall of the house. When he stood, there was a chalky streak down the back of his jacket.

  “Pancho, come in, please.” I had to raise my voice. Our little dog Coco was barking wildly. “You’ll scare our guest away!” I scolded him.

  “Not at all, not at all,” Pancho protested, crouching at the door to give Coco a treat. Pancho carried bits of jerky in a pouch at his belt. “I love animals,” he explained. I had heard a rumor that Pancho had tried to buy Herr Langer’s lion, but the Ayuntamiento ordered the lion killed after it had devoured its owner.

  Ramona was not about to let Pancho make a second conquest in the household. She scooped Coco up in her arms and strode out of the room.

  Pancho took the first seat I offered him. “Salomé,” he confessed, “I haven’t dared come . . . I thought I might have offended you.”

  “Why on earth did you think that?” I asked. This possibility had never occurred to me those nights I tossed in bed with my heart in pieces.

  “You haven’t come to any of our meetings since Hostos joined us. I thought perhaps you, too, were of the group that thought all positivists were atheists.”

  Sancho Pancho, I thought, Ramona’s nickname for him, after Sancho Panza, the bumpkin attendant of Don Quijote de la Mancha. Where did he ever get the idea that I would have nothing to do with him? “Pancho, what on earth is a positivist?”

  “Salomé Ureña,” he said, dropping every other concern, “you don’t know what a positivist is?”

  He settled in his chair and gladly began to inform me. Hostos, the great Puerto Rican educator, believed in something called positivism, which held that mankind was evolving toward a higher, perfect state. Positivists all over the world were fighting a peaceful evolutionary battle to replace the dark cloud of unreason and violence and religion with reason and progress and science. “The one revolution we have not tried is the peaceful one of education,” Pancho proclaimed, his voice as ardent as when he recited my poems to the members of his club.

  Seeing that bright look in his eye, I began to understand that Pancho was a man easily possessed by grand and noble ideas. A few months ago it had been Salomé Ureña, la musa de la patria; now it was Hostos and the education of the positivist man.

  “So will you start coming to our meetings again?” Pancho wanted to know. “Hostos so much wants to make your acquaintance. He’s a great admirer of your poems. He says you’re a natural positivist.”

  I was not surprised to hear this, as quite a few of the people who read my work told me things I had not known about myself. “You may count on me,” I teased, repeating the first words I had ever said to him. But Pancho did not smile. He seemed preoccupied, shifting in his chair. Finally, he blurted out what was on his mind. “I read the poem you wrote to José.”

  I could not tell if Pancho was jealous—but how could he be? The poem was so obviously about my regard for the venerable poet, not about my feelings for the respectable, married man.

  “May I read that poem at our next gathering?” Pancho asked.

  “You may, of course. But I am finishing a new one that might be more suitable. I will bring it along.”

  It was as if I mentioned water to a man dying of thirst. Pancho could not thank me enough for my generosity, my intelligence, my talent.

  I saw that if I wanted this man, all I had to do was keep writing.

  ON THE FIRST DAY of the new year, I received a letter from Pancho.

  I opened it with trembling fingers for it had the heft and feel of a love letter—fine linen paper and black looping letters tossed out to capture the beloved in ropes of words.

  Reading it through a first, and then a second time, I admit that I felt disappointed. The letter was three pages long, and not once was love or anything approximating love mentioned. He was writing, Pancho explained, because after our talk about positivism, he had come to realize how little foundation I had in the sciences. I was the one poet of our nation who stood a chance of becoming a great poet for all times. But I had never received the light of scientific truth. And since he, Pancho, had devoted himself to the sciences (arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, mineralogy, astronomy, philosophy—just to mention a few), he would like to offer, with all due respect, to transfer all the scientific knowledge in his mind to mine.

  “What arrogance!” Ramona had come up behind me and had been reading the letter over my shoulder. I disagreed with her. In fact, what I had concluded was that Pancho had great faith in my abilities.

  One thing we both agreed on: this study plan could last a lifetime.

  So, was this a proposal of sorts? I was not about to ask Ramona, and so I decided to approach Mamá. I would have to ask her permission anyway to allow me to enter into a course of study again with a man.

  Mamá smiled fondly as she read the letter, shaking her head every now and then, as she had at the little puppy in Baní. For the moment, she seemed to have shed two of her three score years, the white in her hair glinting like highlights of the sun rather than the mark of the years. When she had finished, she folded the letter carefully along its folds and handed it back to me. “I think you should accept his proposal.”

  “Ramona says it is inappropriate,” I explained.

  Mamá walked across her bedoom and shut the door. Then, she turned to me and in a low voice said, “I want to tell you something that I don’t want repeated outside this room. Do you hear me?” I nodded.

  “Once long ago, another sister interfered with the matters of her younger sister’s life. And that younger sister is still living out the pain of allowing that interference. Salomé, mi’ja,” she took me by the shoulders, “you are beloved by the whole country. Your poetry is memorized by your countrymen, young and old. But there is nothing, nothing, I don’t care what it is, that compares with the love of a man. Don’t give up your chance to have that. I’ll stand by you when the storms start to blow, for there will be criticism.”

  “Because he’s so much younger?” I asked.

  “That, and he is white and we are mixed. His family has money and we have none.” She had been counting these reasons, and now she made a fist, as if to crush such silly opposition. “Then, of course, there is his Jewish religion . . .”

  I
could tell even Mamá was concerned about this. “But the family has converted,” I protested. Pancho had told me how his Sephardic grandfather had married a Dominican woman and agreed to raise the children as Catholics.

  “We’ll never convince your aunt,” Mamá trailed off. Then, nodding at the letter in my hand, she added, “Be that as it may, you must accept.”

  “But Mamá,” I said, dropping all pretense that I was talking about the lessons. “What if he finds out he doesn’t love me?”

  I was a grown woman, but the way I looked up at her, Mamá must have thought I was her little girl again. She brushed the hair away and planted a kiss on my forehead. “That is always the risk we take. But love is worth that risk. And should you fall, you have a great net to catch you.”

  I thought she would say, “My arms,” when I asked, “What net is that?” But my mother said, “The poems you have written and the ones you will write.”

  TOWARD THE END OF that year, the papers reported that a Mr. Bell from the United States had invented a way to talk to someone who wasn’t there. This news brought on one of Tía Ana’s endless tirades. “That’s fooling with God’s creation!”

  “Don’t worry, Ana,” Mamá tried to soothe her. “It will be many years before that telephone finds its way down here. God’s creation might not even be here by then.”

  That eighteen-hundredth-and-seventy-eighth year—“of our Lord, and don’t you forget it,” Tía Ana scolded—we had eight governments and as many battles. Each toppled government headed for exile in Haiti. “Soon there will be more Dominican politicians in Haiti than here,” Don Eliseo noted. “All the better for us,” Mamá said under her breath.