“Just a f-f-few more sittings, please! I w-w-would be eternally grateful,” Domingo pleads. The flowery phrase coming from the usually plainspoken man makes her laugh. He joins in, his head thrown back, his mouth opened, the dark, moist muscle of his tongue showing. He is straddling a stool, sketching her, now from this angle, now from another, his hand moving over the white paper as if it had a life of its own.
She can’t help noticing his glances straying from her face. Her own fantasies have not abated with increased contact. Sometimes after a session she is not sure if he has touched her or if she has just imagined it. Often she feels a light-headed, nauseated feeling she attributes to the stuffy air in the hot studio.
She has told him about her Lyceum work: the campaign for the vote, the literacy classes, the visits to politicians. He watches her closely, his hand recording minute changes in her expression, as if he is not really listening. It is annoying.
“And now, the American writers are coming,” she adds. The Lyceum ladies are joining other civil liberties groups that will meet the ship at the dock in a show of solidarity.
“Let me know how I c-c-can help,” he offers. He can easily make any number of placards in his studio. “I w-w-would like to join you.”
It takes her a moment to understand that he is actually offering to take part in the demonstration itself, not just the preparation sessions. “It will be dangerous,” she explains. “Batista has already announced he’ll round up anyone who shows up. You could lose your commission.”
He waves away the threat as if it were an insignificance. Just over his shoulder, on its high stool, she can see the bulge of her father’s bust under its dust cloth. He has told her that he works on it at night after she is gone. He will not show it to her until he is done.
“And you could l-l-lose the university p-p-post you applied for,” he points out.
“There is no job. There is no university.” It has been closed down again. Besides, her Lyceum work is her work right now. He, on the other hand, seems devoted only to his art. Why risk a good commission for a cause he has only now heard about?
He looks at her so pointedly that she is the one to break the glance. “There is more to m-m-my life th-th-than art, Camila.”
She has asked him to call her Camila. If she is to call him plain Domingo, certainly he can’t be addressing her as Señorita Henríquez Ureña. She has noticed with a little thrill that he never stumbles over her name. Camila, he says it clearly each time, like cracking open a shell without ever bruising the enclosed almond.
She tries to appear calm, to not show her agitation on her face. But she feels as if she were running through a garden, tearing off leaves in her excitement.
SHE HAS BEEN COMING every day now for two weeks. Sometimes on very hot days, they sit in the front room with the windows open, just talking. Other times, they stray into the studio, exchanging stories, as they cut and hammer placards onto boards or print slogans in the English she learned in Minnesota years ago.
Mostly, she talks about her mother. She has told him Salomé’s story, and he joins in, as if he knew the national poet, who at thirty married a young white man from a prominent family. Back and forth they go, conversing and weaving the imagined fabric of Salomé’s life from what Camila already knows and what she is discovering by talking openly with him about her mother.
“I can see more of her in your f-f-face now,” he tells her. She has shown him the only photo of Salomé, the sad eyes, the dark oval of the face, the full-lipped mouth, and broad nose that the London artist filed down to aquiline, the discernible kink at the hairline in her tightly gathered hair.
It is so good to be able to talk about these things! Even her outspoken friend Marion has always avoided the subject of Camila’s race. As if to mention it were to bring up the unmentionable. “I don’t care what you are,” Marion has often said to her. But she wants Marion to care about who she is. She wants to be apprehended fully, rather than be seen only through the narrow lens of a few adjectives the other person finds acceptable. And having been fully apprehended, she wants to be loved. Perhaps it is too much to ask of anyone? Mon once told her only God and mothers (and, she added, “some aunts”) were capable of doing this.
Marion! Since Pancho’s death, her old friend has been writing regularly, sweet, anecdotal letters of sympathy and news from the Dakotas. But lately, condolence has been turning to counsel. “You must come and stay here with me,” she has written. “Nothing is holding you back now.”
Camila feels annoyed at Marion’s easy disposal of her life. What do I do with my aunts? What do I do with my Lyceum work? What do I do with my teaching? All these challenges push forward and then the one she finds the hardest to voice: What do I do about Domingo? Isn’t he proof that her feelings for Marion were an anomaly? She feels a sense of release thinking that this might be so. Life will be so much easier. There will be the chance of children, a family, all the things that come to the happy heroines of love stories.
“There is always a r-r-ich conversation g-g-going on in there,” Domingo notes, touching the top of her head with the tip of his large fingers. He is a big man so that he seems taller than she, but in fact they are of a height. When she looks at him, there is no escaping his dark, penetrating eyes.
“Can’t I hear a l-l-little of what is b-b-being said?”
“Only if you let me see what you have so far.”
He shakes his head. “I c-c-can’t. Your h-h-harsh judgment would k-k-kill it.”
“I wouldn’t be looking at it as a judge,” she argues. But in fact, she understands how he feels. Several times in the last few weeks, upon leaving these sessions, she has felt the urge to write verses. She would be mortifed if her aunts or anyone else should read these confessions. Roots plunging in the earth that turn into Domingo reaching for her. Oh dear! How could her mother ever allow her private poems to be published, she wonders. In fact, in the posthumous edition of her mother’s work, Pedro omitted many of these “intimate verses.” But these are precisely the poems Camila has been poring over lately, relieved to know that her mother once felt what she is now feeling. Put out my ardent fire with your kisses! Answer the wild longing in my heart!
Outside, the taxi has returned to pick her up at the end of the afternoon. As she comes out the front door with Domingo, a man in a dark fedora and big-shouldered suit who has been talking to the driver returns to a car in which two other men wait. Was the driver merely asking for directions, or are they being watched? But she hasn’t done anything yet, she feels like telling them, either with her ladies at the dock or with Domingo in the large bed where he sleeps under a mosquito net like a sultan under his silken tent. (He has given her a tour of the house, lingering in the back bedroom, having her try out the springs of the bed he made himself.)
As they drive off, she has a sudden impulse to turn and look behind her. The idling car is pulling away from the curb. But this is not the danger that catches her eye. On the sidewalk, Domingo stands, waving before he turns back to the house. She feels a little breathless to think that she is leaving behind a part of herself in that most precarious of all places, somebody else’s heart.
THE DAY BEFORE THE dockside demonstration, she comes home from a session with Domingo to find an embassy car parked in front of their new rental house. In the parlor, in Pancho’s old chair, his feet up on the coffee table, sits her brother Max. He is on his way from the Dominican Republic to London, having just been named ambassador to Britain by Trujillo. She has not seen him since before their father’s death—Max had been on assignment in Argentina when it happened—and the memory of this sad event, which they have not yet shared, makes them both linger in an embrace.
“Let me look at you,” Max says, holding her at arm’s length. “You’re going to break every heart in Havana, isn’t she, Mon?” The old woman scowls, not sure she is pleased to hear that her niece is capable of such things. Max has grown extravagant in his compliments, no doubt a valuable skill
in a regime staffed by sycophants. “The truth is, Camilita, you are looking lovely. Maybe a little too thin.”
“Too, too thin,” the aunts take up the litany. Camila flashes him a look which means, Don’t get them started, please.
“Let’s have a talk out on the patio,” he suggests after they visit for a while with Mon and Pimpa. The two old women are thrown into a flurry of activity. The patio must be swept off and two chairs dusted. Poor Regina is breathless from trying to follow the sometimes contradictory orders to do this or that immediately.
“What brings you here?” Camila asks when they are finally alone. Max is too busy a man to be dropping by for a casual visit on his way to London. He looks tired. Camila has heard from Pibín, who saw a lot of Max in Argentina, that Max is thinking of quitting the regime. There are too many things over which he cannot see eye to eye with Trujillo: the lack of civil liberties, the trouble brewing with Haiti, the return of rote learning to the public schools. “Is something worrying you, Max?”
“You have met with Domingo?” he asks. “The sculptor doing the bust,” he adds, as if she needs to be reminded. She wonders if this might be it—her brother has heard reports that she is seeing too much of this bohemian fellow. “It’s really quite an honor for the Cuban people to donate a bust of Father to our hall of presidents. I hope you have been helpful.”
“I think he would not complain,” she says in her wry manner. Her brother looks at her a moment as if to make sure she is not making fun of him. She and Pedro are said to have inherited their mother’s dry humor, which often baffles their garrulous, expansive brother, who prefers overstatement. He is going to have a hard time in England.
“And so, Camilita, you can see that it would not do for you to be impolite to hosts who have been so kind to our family.”
“Some things are more important than politeness.” She is annoyed at how Max is trying to control her with diminutives that reduce her to the status of a child. “Besides I was never given the opportunity to accept or decline this honor.” She says the word honor as if it has a bad taste. In fact, she is sick of the honors one regime or another keeps piling on the family. “I believe in what I am doing.”
“Don’t think I don’t know who is in back of all this,” Max says, the color rising on his face. “If Rodolfo and Eduardo want to get themselves killed—”
“It’s not them,” Camila defends her brothers. “I’m a grown woman, Max.” But of course, he is not convinced. How else to explain why his shy, withdrawn sister who has always stayed out of everyone’s way would suddenly become so brazen, so political.
“I’m taking you with me,” he announces. “I’ve already been talking to Mon and Pimpa about moving. They’re all for it.”
She stands up, indignant that he should be arranging her life with her old aunts behind her back. The quick movement sends the blood spiraling to her head, and for a moment she feels she might faint on the spot. “You can take them if they want to go, but I am not going with you. I have my own life here.” Her voice has begun to quaver. She is not in the habit of making firm statements to her family.
“This isn’t even your country, Camila.”
She has applied for her Cuban citizenship—something she has not told Max, for fear he would oppose it. If she is to struggle for freedom here, she might as well join her fate to this country. And as Martí once said to their uncle Federico, why speak of Cuba and Santo Domingo, when even the underwater cordillera that runs from island to island knows they belong together.
“I can have you extradited.”
She looks at him. The eyes are full of that crazed conviction she remembers in her father’s eyes those years she trailed him to Washington. She wonders how far Max would go in his loyalty to Trujillo. He seems a stranger, capable of anything. “You can do any number of things to me, I know.”
The pained look on his face surprises her: he is her brother again, the big talker in the family, the young musician who once played piano in a bar in New York City, the gallant who married her best girlfriend, Guarina, the boy who once put a lizard in her underclothes drawer.
“I don’t want you to go on this march tomorrow,” he says simply. “I’m asking you as a favor to me if nothing else—”
“No,” she interrupts him. This appeal has almost always had its desired effect on her: Do this for me. “No, Max,” she tells him. She does not say what is also in her thoughts: I’ve given all of you all of me for too long.
And then, because she cannot bear to see his perplexed, unhappy look, she goes to her room and gathers up her things. She will spend the night at Rodolfo’s. She does not put it beyond Max to devise some way to stop her—perhaps even having Mon stage a sudden attack of nerves that would require Camila’s assistance. How little faith she has left in him! This is the way brothers and sisters get divorced, she suddenly thinks.
As she goes out the front door, she feels a pang of guilt to be deserting her aunts, and quickly she scribbles a note explaining where she is going. But once outside, she finds herself walking in the opposite direction of where she would catch a taxi to Rodolfo’s apartment. Tonight, she needs the comfort a brother can’t give. When a taxi picks her up, it is Domingo’s address that she gives.
SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT to say when he opens the door, surprise followed by pleasure dawning in his eyes. She forgets that these moments between a man and a woman have their own encoded meanings, and he will assume he knows what she wants, showing up at his doorstep at eight o’clock in the evening.
But she does not know what she wants, not as he takes off her suit jacket for the second time today, or fixes her a mojito such as she has never had before. He is right. She rarely drinks—afraid, in fact, that she might like such numbing escapes too much. She is watching herself as she tells him about her meeting with her brother Max, as he brushes back the hair fallen from her chignon, and then without warning, pulls the hairpin that releases the dark, curly mass down her back.
His mouth closes on hers, large and wet and frighteningly alive. She stiffens and pushes him away.
“W-w-what?” He is looking straight at her. He has always been able to read the state of her soul from the muscles on her face, a necessary skill for a sculptor he has told her. But she does not want him to see the cloud of doubt that is descending upon her. She buries her face in his shoulder and lets him stand her up, touching the whole length of her body. She is revolted by his big hands, his hardness pressing against her thigh. The word become flesh is not always an appealing creature.
“Are you sure you w-w-want this?” he is whispering in her ear. It could be Max asking her about her march tomorrow.
“Yes,” she says as he begins unbuttoning the back buttons of her blouse, slipping his hands underneath, “but not here.” Over his shoulder she can see the car from this afternoon parked again at the curb, the brief flicker of a cigarette being tossed by the driver on the lawn. Cuba is closing down. Batista’s boys have taken over. It is madness to think that her Lyceum ladies can march down to the docks and change anything, madness to be here with this man when every time he touches her she cringes. But she has already broken free from the old life and there is no going back to it. In the studio they walk through on their way to the back room, she catches a glimpse of the bust he has left uncovered. Her own face stares back at her, fierce and almost finished.
II
CINCO
Sombras
Santo Domingo, 1880 – 1886
IN THE SPACE OF a few years, my life got so full, I couldn’t put my arms around it!
If I were to write down all the things that made it full, the list would be as long as the index in the back of my poetry book. Yes, that was one of the things I finished that year I got married: a poetry book. In fact, I didn’t really finish it. Up to the last moment, I was still working on my long poem, “Anacaona.”
But Pancho insisted my book had to come out. The country was enjoying peace again, and my patriotic poems would i
nspire my readers. Besides, Friends of the Country had already made the announcement of its publication in May.
“But we need to get settled first, Pancho,” I argued. I was sitting at my small desk, among bundles of our things ready for our move in a few days. Given Ramona’s sullenness and Tía Ana’s continuing disapproval, we didn’t feel at ease at Mamá’s, and so we had rented a small house a few streets away.
“Poetry comes first!” Pancho pronounced. He was working on our bed, which was the bed I had shared with Ramona, who was now sharing a room with Tía Ana. Needless to say, this rearrangement did not help matters.
While I sat at the desk, working on the long poem, Pancho was busy editing the packet of my poems for the Friends of the Country edition. “Salomé, are you really sure you want to say brilliant palms? How about fecund palms? It goes better with the meter, don’t you think: ‘And martyrdom beneath the fecund palms’?”
My young husband, who had once worshiped at the feet of my muse, was now polishing her rough edges. “No,” I said firmly. “It does not sound better.”
Pancho looked up, disapproving of my tone. Since our marriage, my young husband had grown more self-assured. “That’s because you’ve heard it so many times that you can’t hear it anymore. Trust me, Salomé, I have your future in mind.”
“My future” was that magical phrase marched out whenever he wanted his way. Pancho had vision, and he could see where I was going. Didn’t I see that? And if I didn’t see that, then I was proving his point, that I wasn’t seeing well at all, and I should trust him to show me where I was going.
When he spoke like this, I would get so tangled up in what he was saying, I couldn’t think straight. Finally, I just wanted to free myself of his web of words and I’d let go my end. “Go ahead, then,” I’d say.
In the Name of Salome Page 16
