In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  But this is the mystery of love, the more you empty your cup, the more it fills up. Besides, he was right. I wasn’t seeing where I was going, for my gaze had fallen on the future right before my eyes. Here I am speaking of the man I met shortly after my marriage.

  I HAD HEARD PANCHO and the Friends of the Country talk about Hostos until I was weary with the man even before I met him. “The apostle says this, the apostle says that.”

  “Apostle?” Tía Ana asked crossly. She had been going through her stack of tablets, correcting the sums of her young charges. Pancho had been explaining to us how the apostle wanted students to think for themselves instead of relying on memorization. “The Bible mentions twelve apostles. I wasn’t aware that there was a thirteenth one.” Tía Ana was so religious that at three o’clock every day, the hour at which Christ was supposed to have expired, she made the sign of the cross in order to grieve his loss. “Besides,” Tía Ana added. “I’m sure if God had a thirteenth apostle, he would not be Puerto Rican.”

  “Hostos is our intellectual apostle, Doña Ana,” Pancho explained. “We don’t mean the title religiously—”

  “Precisely, you Jews don’t mean anything religiously.”

  “We’re not Jews,” Pancho said. The patience in his voice was so obvious, like a too-bright sash on a mourning dress. Tía Ana would not be convinced that the Henríquez were now as Christian as she was. “We are positivists. We believe God created us with reason, and education is our way to develop it.”

  “Religion is the way to develop it. I’ve been teaching for fifty years, young man. I was teaching long before you were even born. I taught Salomé there everything she knows.”

  This wasn’t exactly true, but I let it go.

  “With all due respect,” Pancho began, “religion has its place in our lives, but so does reason.” Pancho could argue until the next day in order to win his point. Tía Ana was the same way. Many times, I’d excuse myself, thinking Pancho would follow suit, and I’d lie in bed or, more likely, sit at my desk where I’d push myself to finish up a few more lines of the long epic I was writing on our tragic Indian princess. And I’d hear them out in the parlor, their voices rising.

  And so the first time I myself spoke with Hostos after a meeting of the Friends of the Country I said to him, “You have been the cause of many an argument in my house.”

  He bowed his handsome head and smiled sadly. “I seem to cause trouble wherever I go.” I had heard he had been run out of Puerto Rico, Peru, Spain, Venezuela—for promulgating his radical ideas. But, of course, that had been before he turned from political revolution to educational reform. I knew the whole story, backward and forward, as if it were my own.

  “You, on the other hand, have stirred many of us to higher goals with your poems,” Hostos went on.

  Oh no, I thought, here we go. I was weary of the moral throne everyone wanted me to sit on. After I had scandalized half the city with my poem “Quejas,” I had come to understand the danger of being crowned queen of people’s hearts. I wanted to be queen in only one heart, Pancho’s, but I’m afraid he was not satisfied with operating in such a small domain. “I have merely written down what we all know to be true,” I finally said.

  “Exactly,” Hostos agreed. He had a long, bony face with a broad forehead topped by a head of boyish black curls threaded with silver. He seemed both ancient and young. Pancho had told me that Hostos had just celebrated two score and one. “That is precisely our struggle. To make rational the only living being who is gifted with reason.”

  I had heard people say amusing things, clever things, romantic things, but never before had anyone spoken so simply and with such moral authority that inside myself I felt the rightness and goodness of what he was saying. I must have looked stunned.

  “You seem surprised that I should say so?” His eyes were light gray, deep set, and half-lidded. They were the saddest eyes in the world, contemplative and melancholy.

  “Not at all, Apostle,” I said before I could think that my aunt would boil me in her sancocho if she heard me so address a living being, no less a Puerto Rican.

  AND SO I, TOO, began to listen closely to what Hostos had to say. I was in moral love—does that make sense? A moral love that took over my senses and lightly touched my whole body with an exquisite excitement whenever the apostle was in the room!

  Soon after we moved to our home, he came by daily. Pancho had opened a small school in our parlor with his friend José Pantaleón. They were preparing young boys to enter the Normal School that Hostos had set up for older boys. The new president, none other than our old friend Archbishop Meriño, was especially committed to education.

  And so mornings, from eight to twelve, or afternoons, from two to five, Hostos would drop in to give the boys lessons on some subject Pancho and José didn’t know enough about. El maestro, as he was also called, would ask questions, and using everyday objects—the handle of a grinder, the spring on a top, the gyrating fall of a blossom from my jar of jacarandas—he would slowly lead them (though they looked as if they were leading themselves) forward to some moment of understanding that would make their little mouths drop and their eyes blink with the light of reason, as I suppose Hostos would have described it. Pancho and José looked on. Passing by the doorway in the middle of peeling plantains for the midday meal, I would stop to watch, filled with wonder at the kind genius of the man.

  And each time, I’d be struck by a thought, which I tried to arrest mid-motion so it would not spin out of control: Here was a true companion for my soul!

  But another thought soon followed. I had met Hostos’s lovely, young bride Belinda. Even if we had not pledged ourselves to others, I was not beautiful enough to attract a man like Hostos. I was like the branch of purple jacarandas that Hostos shook from his hand while the boys sketched the path of the downward spiraling blossoms.

  I served as an example. I stirred my readers to noble actions.

  I would sigh, wipe my hands on my apron, and go back to peeling my plantains.

  NOT THAT I GAVE any of this positivist consideration. In fact, if anything, what I felt was a deepening passion for Pancho. I marveled at his youthful body: his strong, pale arms; his thick hair full of cowlicks. He was tender and eager, which put me at my ease in our marriage bed. But it was his soul I missed in our encounters. He was so preoccupied with all his projects.

  I said my life was full, but Pancho’s life was bursting at the seams. He was involved in half a dozen things: studying law at night at the Instituto Profesional that Hostos had opened, running his own newspaper El Maestro, presiding over the Friends of the Country, directing the school in our living room, editing my book of poems. On top of all this, when Meriño was inaugurated, he asked Pancho to be his personal secretary. This meant a lot of travel, for as President Meriño explained, Pancho was to serve as his eyes around the country.

  I cried when Pancho told me about this great honor conferred on him. Honor! I was beginning to hate the word. I remembered those three long months before our engagement when he had been on the road, how terribly I had missed him. Back then, I was living with Mamá and Ramona and Tía Ana, and now I was all alone in a dark house with a parlor full of boys knocking over my jars of flowers with the excuse that they wanted to watch the blossoms spiral.

  “But aren’t you proud, Salomé?”

  “Of course, I am, Pancho,” I said, burying my face on his shoulder so he would not see my tears. He was holding me in that absent way of his. Already he was far away, sitting on a veranda in a small village talking to local leaders about the glorious future of la patria. “It’s just that we are hardly together anymore.”

  He pulled back and lifted my chin to make me face him. My eyes felt puffy and my nose was running. For the hundredth time I wished for one of those pretty faces that soften men’s hearts. “Salomé, our patria is just barely standing again on its shaky legs. We have to roll up our sleeves, as el maestro says, and work hard, side by side, to bring about
that future we both dream about.”

  “Ay, Pancho,” I wailed. “I know that.”

  “We have to create a new man for a new nation,” he went on lecturing me. Sometimes, I felt like taking a big heavy olla to all of el maestro’s preachings. “I know how you feel,” he said, softening. “But Salomé,” he added, his eyes tender in a way that made my own heart swell with love and self-abnegation, “who will do this work if we don’t? I know I am asking you to take on so much, so very much. But I thought these were goals we shared?”

  “They are goals we share, Pancho,” I said, recalled to my better self. It was something Pancho was good at doing, recalling me to my better self.

  BECAUSE HE WAS AWAY, Pancho asked me to fill in for him in the classroom. This was unusual: a woman teaching boys. But I was la musa de la patria. An exception could be made. Sometimes, during my lessons, Hostos would drop by.

  “El maestro has arrived,” I’d say to my students.

  Hostos would sit down on the back bench to observe me. “Please continue.”

  He might as well have said, “Hush now,” for with his eyes on me, I would fall silent. A few times, he slipped in so quietly that he caught me by surprise. I suppose it was from those observations that he decided I was a natural teacher, and I should open the first secondary school for girls that would also train them as teachers.

  Pancho loved the idea. “We’ll hold classes for the boys in the mornings and for the young girls in the afternoons. Salomé has a wonderful background in the sciences as well as literature. Don’t you, dear?”

  “Thanks to you,” I said, knowing what he wanted to hear.

  “I’ve often felt this deplorable gap,” Hostos went on to explain. “We are forging the new man but not the new woman. In fact, without one we can’t possibly accomplish the other.” Hostos studied me with his sad eyes. “It must be difficult for you, Salomé, to feel the lack of true companions among your own sex.” Again, the joy of talking to a man who understood me!

  “But, maestro, I don’t have any training to be a teacher. I myself only went to one of our little schools.”

  “You have a soul deep enough to hold your whole country.” His words betrayed that he knew me deeply in a way which Pancho, intent on the future, was so far incapable of doing. But he is young, I thought. El maestro is twenty years his senior. I had to make some allowances for a husband who was only a few years out of short pants when I began falling in love with him.

  “El maestro is right, Salomé. You know more than you think. And wherever you feel a lack, I will fill in, I promise.”

  “But you are away half the time, Pancho!”

  Hostos had stood up and was pacing our parlor. He stopped before a jar of scattered blossoms; he seemed suddenly to notice their litter on the table. Slowly, he picked them up, one by one, and put them in his pocket. I wondered what on earth he meant to do with them. “I can think of no one better than the first woman of the island to lead us in this regard,” Hostos said, turning and giving me one of the luminous smiles that too seldom lit up his long, somber face.

  “We shall see,” I said, worrying my hands in the lap of my skirt.

  “Duty is the highest virtue,” Pancho reminded me, quoting the master to the master’s face.

  UPON PANCHO’S RETURN FROM a trip north, I had a new poem to show him, “Vespertina.” It was all about missing him with a desperation that made me afraid for my sanity.

  “These personal poems are very tender.” He leaned forward and kissed my forehead gratefully. “But you must not squander away your talent by singing in a minor key, Salomé. You must think of your future as the bard of our nation. We want the songs of la patria, we need anthems to lead us out of the morass of our past and into our glorious destiny as the Athens of the Americas.”

  “Pancho!” I said sharply, snapping the spell he seemed to be casting on himself. “I am a woman as well as a poet.”

  “That tone of voice is not becoming, Salomé,” he said, one hand tucked inside his vest in the manner of a statesman making a pronouncement.

  “I don’t care!” I had started crying. With the last few poems, I had begun writing in a voice that came from deep inside me. It was not a public voice. It was my own voice expressing my secret desires that Pancho was dismissing.

  “I did not think that aligning your life to mine would be an incentive to shirk your duties,” Pancho continued.

  I wiped my tears with my apron. “I thought I was pleasing you by writing this. But perhaps you should list my duties so that I will not forget them.”

  In a small, hurt voice I was unaccustomed to hearing, he said, “You’re right, Salomé. I sometimes confuse my muse with my wife.”

  “I want to be both,” I said fiercely.

  “You are both,” he reassured me.

  OFTEN NOW, HOSTOS WOULD bring up the idea of a school for señoritas. I suppose with the birth of his little girl, María, the abstract had become specific. It was touching how involved Hostos was with the care of his children. Belinda told me how every night our maestro crawled into bed with each one and sang the special lullaby he had composed just for that child.

  “Have you thought further of my suggestion, Salomé?”

  I was not yet convinced. I suppose I still felt my first duty—after my wifely duties, of course—was to my writing. After all, I had received a national medal. People had bought up all the copies of my poems that Friends of the Country had published and were already asking for more. Now, too, the new voice was compelling me to listen. How then could I also open a school that would absorb what little time I had left over for my writing?

  “But, maestro,” as I spoke, I leaned in toward him as if my whole body were speaking to him, “poetry is also a necessary part of our being.”

  Hostos looked down at the bundle in his arms and smiled. María babbled on as if she already had opinions on these weighty matters. “We southern peoples have an overabundance of poetry.”

  I knew that Hostos held my work apart from his general condemnation of the arts. After all, my poems had inspired noble sentiments and encouraged progress and freedom. Had he read “Quejas” or “Amor y anhelo” or “Vespertina,” he would have urged me to open a school for the health of my rational soul no less than for the good of the women in my country.

  I must say that I had never felt drawn to the profession of teaching. I could not help but think of my aunt’s scolding voice, the thwack of her whipping branch, the sniffling of a poor student with a palm-leaf dunce tail hanging down the back of her dress. Early on, I vowed I would never be a teacher. I suppose it was the same aversion some daughters who have had dreadful mothers feel toward having a child.

  “We shall see,” I said, reaching for little María to turn the conversation away from this big sacrifice Hostos was asking of me.

  I WAS WITH CHILD, or so it seemed, since I had missed my monthly. I decided to wait another month before I told Pancho because I wanted to be sure. My husband was like a child himself if you promised him something and then withheld it. He was still waiting for the grand new poem to la patria that he thought I was writing.

  When I missed a second monthly and the morning sickness began, I decided to tell him. He had just returned from a short trip west to Baní where some old caudillos were on the verge of revolution.

  “Pancho, I have some happy news which will throw a little light on all this gloom.”

  Although he was worried and weary from the trip, his face brightened. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I was kneeling beside him, helping him off with this boots and massaging his legs to work the tiredness out of them.

  “So where is it, Salomé?” Pancho asked, eyeing my desk.

  I lost heart. I did not want my child to be second to anything, even one of my own poems. And so I did not give him the news. Instead I brought up the other matter I had been thinking about now that la patria was on the verge of collapse again. “Perhaps el maestro is right. We need a school of s
eñoritas, especially with the way things are.”

  “I knew you would not disappoint me, Salomé,” Pancho said, smiling down at me and dissolving the thought just forming in my head about who was the disappointed one.

  PANCHO DID FINALLY GET his wish for a poem to la patria from me. But I think even he would have preferred my silence to the atrocities that occurred that June that stirred me to write “Sombras.”

  By then we had moved back with Mamá and Ramona and Tía Ana. With Pancho gone so often, I was too lonely all by myself in our small, dark house.

  At first I had feared that Pancho would refuse to live with my family again. Neither Ramona or my Tía Ana were easy on him, but Pancho, I must say, loved a challenge. “They are coming around,” he kept telling me, though I, who had known them all my life, saw no signs of it.

  There were good reasons to move—besides the company and care I would receive from my family. We could not continue paying rent on a house. None of the many enterprises in which Pancho was engaged seemed to bring in money. Even his job as a president’s secretary paid mostly in honor rather than pesos.

  Soon after I moved in, Tía Ana decided to close down the little school she had run for fifty years. The house suddenly grew to twice its size. Mamá offered me the front parlor my aunt had vacated for my own school, and Ramona offered to help me. She was the only one who knew I was pregnant, and she worried about my starting a school by myself at the same time that I would be giving birth to a child as well as taking care of a grown one disguised as a husband.

  “Now, Ramona,” I reminded her, for she had promised me that she would try to get along with Pancho.

  “I want you to have some time for your writing, Salomé,” she reminded me. Unlike Pancho who was always holding up my glorious future, Ramona wanted to see me writing because she knew it brought me deep pleasure and satisfaction.

  “And you know,” she added, lowering her voice. “Though I was the first to scold you when you wrote ‘Quejas,’ these new poems are among my favorites.”