In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  According to Marion, these voices are nothing but figures from her childhood taking over her adult life and telling her unconscious what to do. “You have to free yourself from their control!” Marion urges. Freud is all the rage now, and Marion and her dance friends are, of course, swept up in all the latest theories. Marion sees an analyst four times a week, and then imparts all her knowledge to her friend, “for free.”

  The hatted figure in the dark, bulky coat is keeping a respectful distance. It crosses Camila’s mind that her pursuer might well be a reporter from the Journal. To test her hunch, she slips behind the outdoor stairwell of Folwell Hall, where she can watch the entrance and not be seen.

  It cannot be! Pedro? Her brother is home lying on the couch, convalescing from his operation. But in this campus of mostly pale Finns, Swedes, Germans (though they must not be called Germans anymore), her brother’s dark skin and black hair stand out.

  If it were not that she has to go meet his classes right now, she would rush home to check that he is where he is supposed to be.

  SHE PUTS HER EAR to the door before opening it. The click of typewriter keys. Of course, he is typing his doctoral thesis. Between his sessions, she has been using the rented machine to type her own master’s thesis. Shepherds in the Pastorals of Lope de Vega, Olmsted’s suggestion. She had wanted to write about Hostos, her mother’s dear friend and mentor. But Professor Olmsted, tall, tow-headed, with his thick mustache and his sad walrus expression, had suggested someone a bit more classical.

  Pedro glances up when the door opens. Her poor brother looks as if he has been in a fist fight: his nose is swollen from the doctor’s having had to break the bone and realign it. Every time Pedro explains the operation to a well-wisher, Camila cringes. “Poor Camila,” Pedro has said. “She has had all the suffering and none of the pain.” She laughs when he says this, even though he has said it a half dozen times.

  Camila sets the heavy book bag down on the kitchen table. The place is only one large room with a curtain strung across an alcove behind which Camila sleeps and dresses. The rental was advertised as an efficiency and never had truer words been written. But the landlord, an old German who had no doubt been feeling the bite of discrimination himself, was willing to rent to foreigners who were members of the university community.

  “How is my hardworking sister?” Pedro grins. He looks even worse when he grins. “How is the Mecca of Minnesota?” The Mecca of Minnesota is how Pedro refers to their department, when he is being kindly.

  “Your classes all sent their get-well wishes.” Camila is stacking his students’ workbooks on the table. From the bottom of the bag, the headline stares up at her.

  “Anything interesting happen?” he asks, eager for news.

  “Why do you ask?”

  He seems surprised at her sharp rejoinder. Usually, when they come home, they sit chatting about the events of the day over a simple supper. “Did something happen? You seem upset.”

  “Actually something interesting did happen,” she begins, watching him closely to see how he will react. “I think I saw you.”

  “What are you talking about, Camila?” He is sitting in his dressing gown, his face puffy and swollen, working on his thesis on irregular versification in Spanish poetry, and from time to time, taking a break to pour himself a glass of bottled tea she makes for him and take two more aspirin for pain. He has actually gotten a lot done in the last week of convalescing: his thesis is almost typed and he has made headway in his compilation of their mother’s “best work,” which he means to publish in a new edition that his best friend Alfonso Reyes has arranged with a publisher friend in Madrid. Since Friends of the Country published that first book, there has not been another collection of Salomé’s poems. “This is how poets really die,” Pedro had observed.

  “So you didn’t go out at all?”

  “Por favor, Camila.” He lifts his hands as if to say, Look at me, I am a sick man.

  “Maybe I was so upset I was seeing double.” She pulls out the paper from her bag and stands by him as he reads aloud: CHILDREN OF FORMER PRESIDENT OF SAN DOMINGO PREFER THE USA.

  “Hijos de la gran puta,” Pedro mutters.

  Camila has never heard her brother swear in this ugly way. But instead of shock, she feels relieved to have him express the feelings she has kept locked inside her all day.

  Her brother rips the page he has been typing out of the machine and inserts a clean sheet. His fingers hit the keys, one by one, fast and hard.

  “Be careful what you say,” she cautions. She does not need to remind Pedro of the stories they have both been reading in the paper: the young man hanged for mentioning the Kaiser’s name in Wyoming, the speaking of German forbidden on streetcars by the governor of Iowa, menu entries for hamburgers all over town pasted over with the correction, liberty sandwich. Olmsted now refers to his dachshund as a “liberty pup.”

  “We have to defend ourselves against these lies,” Pedro says, striking furiously at the keys. But he is so angry, he keeps making mistakes.

  “Let me do it, Pibín,” Camila says, touching his shoulder to calm him. “You dictate.”

  He holds his head in his hands—obviously the pain is returning—and lets her have his seat. He lies down on the couch, which doubles as his bed, and composes the letter out loud as she types it. “Our father was ousted by the Americans because he would not agree to their demands . . . We are here because the occupation of our country does not permit us to return . . . ”

  That last afternoon of Pancho’s presidency, after he had informed the family that they would be going back into exile, Camila remembers wandering from room to room of the elegant colonial palace. In a stripped-down bedroom in the second floor, she had opened a casement window. It was November. The tropical winter was coming on. Waves hurled themselves against the sea wall with an abandon that frightened her. She had imagined her homecoming, in triumph, Salomé’s grown-up daughter, returning with her father to help her struggling country . . . Now, two months later, she saw the vanity of the fantasy she had carried around in her head as a measure of how she must act. But unlike her mother, she would not let this disappointment consume her. She would not throw herself away on a country that could not keep faith with the dreams in her heart.

  Pedro pauses, and then in a tired voice she knows is not meant for the letter, he says, “I am so glad we are leaving this crazy place in a few weeks.”

  She feels the heavy weight of this conclusion. There is no way that she can stay with Marion over the summer or accept Olmsted’s offer without seeming to betray her country and her beloved brother.

  That night she goes on her customary walk—“to get fresh air,” as she explains to Pedro. But when she comes to Marion’s rooming house, she does not go in as she usually does. Instead, she turns just in time to see the familiar, dark figure hurrying back in the direction of their apartment house. It is Pedro, she is sure of it. With a pang of embarrassment, she wonders just how much he knows about her and Marion.

  MARION REED WAS ONE of the easier names to pronounce on the roster the first day of her Spanish conversation class. The consonants and vowels of her students’ names (Hough, Steichner, Thompson) kept snagging Camila’s tongue, and the girls—there was a preponderance of them with so many young men off to war—giggled mercilessly.

  But the young woman with short, black hair in the first row seemed absorbed by whatever Camila had to say. She looked older than the other students, perhaps the same age as Camila. She was wearing a sports coat, and when she crossed her long legs, it became clear she was wearing trousers! Camila had never seen a woman dressed in this way except in magazines or on the musical stage back home.

  She was going around the room, asking each student in English why he or she had chosen to study Spanish.

  When she got to the young woman, she replied in Spanish. “Amo la lengua.”

  I love the language.

  Camila felt the thrill of the foreigner hearing her n
ative tongue praised.

  That afternoon, she was informed by Olmsted that she must sign up for a physical education class in order to fulfill the requirements for graduate study.

  “Physical education?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair. These first few weeks in English, she never knew if she was hearing correctly or if one language could be so different from another.

  “Field hockey, preliminary hygiene, personal hygiene, elementary, intermediate or advanced physical training.” He was reading from the catalog. “Rhythmic expression.”

  “Rhythmic expression?”

  “I think that means dance,” Olmsted guessed.

  For her first class Camila dressed appropriately in her party dress and short-heeled slippers that would make it easier to master the waltz, the two-step, the fox-trot. She had always loved to dance.

  There in the class was her student, Miss Reed. But rather than street clothes, she and the other students wore loose-fitting tunics. They leapt across the room, throwing their arms and legs about in an embarrassing way, like girls gone goofy at an overnight party. Camila turned to leave.

  “Hey there!” Marion swept across the room toward her. “Don’t I know you?” The dark eyes searched her face boldly, without trying to disguise the rudeness of staring. Camila looked down at the floor and was surprised by the sight of the young woman’s toes. She was dancing barefoot.

  “I know! You’re my Spanish teacher. Are you taking R.E.?” She was staring at Camila’s cream-colored, lace dress as if trying to decide whether it was edible. Years ago, the front of the dress had been stained at a birthday party. Her stepmother had scoured it clean, but even so, every time Camila put it on and and people looked at her, she thought, oh no, the stain is showing after all.

  “It’s a great class,” the young woman was saying. Her long, slender body was visible through the deep armholes of her tunic. “We’re starting off with Delsarte exercises and then moving on to Fuller and St. Denis, freeing the body from the solar plexus out.” She began to breathe deeply and spread her arms as if she meant to embrace Camila. Instinctively, Camila stepped back.

  The gesture snapped the young woman out of her trance. She looked at Camila quizzically. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong,” Camila answered, trying not to sound annoyed. American students were known to be casual with their teachers, but she had yet to get used to this new style.

  Marion held her eyes her a moment. And then, she carried through with the gesture she had started and spread her arms as wide as she could get them.

  Camila watched, wondering what was required of her.

  “What did you mean by that gesture?” she asked Marion months later when they had become friends. “Spreading your arms like that.”

  “I was actually doing the Delsarte movement for welcome. I wanted you to know you could trust me,” Marion explained. “Seriously. From the beginning, I was drawn to you. It was like putting a face on love.”

  In her notebook that night, Camila wrote down the phrase that had caught her fancy, putting a face on love. She had always imagined a man’s face or her mother’s face pinned on that big heart, but ever since her encounters with her first beau, Primitivo, had left her curiously cold, she has wondered if she is capable of that kind of love at all. Since then there have been plenty of admirers, but no one whom she has admired. “You are looking for a hero in a novel,” Pedro has accused her. But no, she has often thought. It is my mother I am looking for.

  “I see you with the eyes of love,” Marion has said, turning on her stomach to look into Camila’s eyes. The Song of the Lark, the new Cather novel they have been reading, is forgotten, tossed at the foot of the bed. “And I see you seeing me,” Camila smiles back.

  Sometimes Camila wonders if her American friend truly sees her. When Marion first suggested spending the summer together, Camila worried about her reception in LaMoure, North Dakota. After all, if she and Pedro have been heckled in the big cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, will she be safe visiting a small village?

  Marion laughed. “Camila, hon, we don’t have villages in North America. And come on, you’re about as much of a negro as I am a German.” Several generations ago, Marion’s great-grandfather had emigrated from Germany. The family name has since been changed from Reidenbach to Reed. This is one of the many secrets they have shared, which cannot be repeated. Daddy Reed has an important position in his company and needs to be careful. “That doesn’t make me German. That was way back. That’d be like saying we’re monkeys because we’re descended from apes.”

  “I don’t care what you are,” Marion added, kissing first the palm of one hand, then the other, pronouncing Camila’s full name slowly as if it were a tongue twister she was trying to master.

  It has occurred to Camila how silly love talk would sound to someone who is not a participant. But who would be listening? No doubt, that old ghost that her aunt Mon once showed her how to summon when she was a child: “In the name of the father, and of the son, and of Salomé, my mother.” But it is not just her mother, but her own father and brothers and aunts have gotten inside her head. Even at twenty-four, it is difficult to break this old habit of seeing herself through their eyes.

  And now, those eyes are real: the eyes of her favorite brother, following her, trying to catch her at something—but what? She feels angry at this invasion of her privacy. Angry enough to find the first opportunity to retaliate by invading his.

  HE IS AT THE doctor’s for his final postoperative appointment. Then he intends to stop by the head offices of the Journal and deliver their letter. Normally, she would accompany him, but she begs off. She needs to finish typing her thesis and to write final exams for her classes.

  She watches him from the front window and as soon as he is out of sight, she kneels beside the old trunk in which Pedro stores his manuscripts and packets of correspondence. Her brother is an inveterate writer: everything he thinks, knows, questions, Pedro writes down, mostly in long letters to Alfonso Reyes, who suffers from the same affliction. Whatever Pedro suspects, he will have written to Alfonso about it, and no doubt, Alfonso will mention the matter in his own replies.

  The trunk also doubles as their coffee and typing table. Lifting the stacks of paper she notes the table of contents Pedro has typed out for the new edition of their mother’s poems. Many of Camila’s favorites are missing. “Personal poems,” Pedro calls them as if that diminishes their value. At the center of her brother’s personality there is a deep conservatism that astonishes her in a man who thinks of himself as rational and modern.

  Inside the trunk, she is overwhelmed by what she finds: not just Pedro’s correspondence but letters addressed from her mother to her father, a diary Pedro kept as a young boy with a biography of their mother’s life, copies of a little newspaper that Pedro and Max used to publish as children with their mother listed as director, even a clipping from the Dominican papers she has seen before, reporting Fran’s acquittal in the murder of a young man. It was judged to be self-defense, though, knowing her brother’s violent temper, Camila is not sure she would have acquitted him.

  She could spend hours reading these and no doubt uncovering many secrets in her family’s past, but she must work quickly. The packet of letters from Alfonso is close to the top. Near the end of the third letter, she spots her name.

  About this worrisome matter of Camila. It is best, Pedro, if you have ocular proof and then there will be no doubt in your mind and no arguments on her part to sway you from what you must do. You and I both know how Americans are much more free in their ways. And these young Yanks (believe me, I have seen them over here) feel much more license with a foreign woman of indeterminate race. Once you have the evidence, you must confront her and insist she break off the relation and immediately upon graduation send her back to the safety of your family.

  What she feels, at first, is relief: her brother suspects her of a secret love affair with a man! As grievous as that would be, it
is nothing compared to a liason with a woman. But the relief soon passes. In its wake she feels the sadness of the trust they have betrayed in each other. Why couldn’t Pedro just ask her straight out if she is interested in anyone? She recalls how he has been dropping hints, mentioning the name of this or that instructor. But so little is her interest in any of these young men that Camila has assumed Pedro’s comments are merely part of the daily news they share when they both come home and talk long hours into the night with each other.

  Several nights ago, in fact, Camila asked Pedro about a dim memory she had of their mother, which Pancho always claimed Camila had made up to avoid a childhood punishment.

  “You didn’t make it up,” Pedro assured her. “I’ll always remember when Mamá gave me that poem, she made me vow to take good care of you. Mamá would never forgive me if any harm should come your way.” Pedro was looking pointedly at her.

  She glanced away uneasily.

  “Is there something wrong, Camila? You’ve seemed preoccupied.”

  She had thought then of telling him then of her plans for the summer and fall, and even more pointedly, of her feelings for Marion. But without the face of love, as Marion might put it, any passion would seem creaturely and preposterous. Even her own beloved Pibín, if she did not love him, even he would seem slightly repugnant, with his animal sounds and smells, his grievances, the dark soft hair curling on the back of his hands.

  She shook her head, no. She had nothing to confess to him yet.

  THEY SIT ACROSS FROM Olmsted, who is cracking his big pink knuckles like a nervous schoolboy. Periodically, he scoops up his dachshund, an odd little animal with a body of pulled taffy and the unlikely name of Doña Lola. Doña Lola accompanies him everywhere—a droll pair: a large, diffident-looking man and the shortest dog in the world. Brother and sister have been asked to the chairman’s office to discuss their rebuttal letter printed in the Journal that has caused a ripple of unpleasant reaction from the administration.

  “I am behind you both, I hope you know that,” Olmsted is saying. He scratches at his fine, colorless hair. The friction makes it stand on end, a prickly halo.