In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  “We have nothing to apologize for.” Pedro has drawn himself up in his chair. It pains Camila to see him in such a state of readiness, as if any minute now he will dash out the door and make a run for the border. What border, she wonders? They are surrounded by the United States. “Lies were put in our mouths,” Pedro adds.

  “The apology should come from the paper,” the chairman agrees. He stands and walks to the window, Doña Lola at his heels. The click of the dog’s nails on the wood floor is unnerving. “But let’s face it. There’s a war going on. Patriotism is the law of the land, and any breath of a criticism . . .” His voice trails off. Perhaps he has seen something out the window on the campus green that keeps him from continuing.

  Though the fact has not been mentioned, Camila knows what is on the line, the degrees they are both scheduled to receive in a week. She herself would only be sacrificing a year of work, but Pedro, in fact, has been here two years, and he is due to receive his doctorate in Spanish.

  “What do you advise?” Camila asks.

  “You both might write a letter, explaining that you intended no disrespect to this great nation, et cetera, et cetera.” Olmsted sighs and lifts his arms, then lets them drop. Now more than ever, he looks like a walrus, stranded, landlocked, waving his flippers desperately.

  Camila has pulled out her notebook and is jotting down the chairman’s phrases.

  “We will write no such letter,” Pedro stands and crosses his arms, ready for martyrdom. Doña Lola growls at the sudden movement, but Olmsted reaches down and calms her with a stroke of his big hand against the sleek, sausagelike body. “If the school decides not to award us our degrees, we will protest that action,” Pedro declares.

  Looking up at him, Camila notices how much her brother resembles their father. The same stubbornness that has made Papancho unbearable at times. She says nothing. It is useless to try to reason with an Henríquez man who has dug his heels in moral ground.

  “I am not worried about your degrees,” Olmsted says. He stops a moment and surveys them both, as if he is about to hatch a plot and wants to be sure of their loyalty. “But as you know, Miss Henríquez, I’ve offered you a job this fall.” He nods toward Camila, who can feel her brother’s eyes fixed on her face as if to say, You knew this all along and did not tell me!

  “And as for you, Pedro,” Olmsted continues, “with so many of our colleagues going off to the front, I am prepared to offer you a two-year contract with a considerable raise in salary. But, of course, both offers must be approved by the administration—”

  “I have already made plans,” Pedro cuts him off. This is an outright lie, as Camila knows. Pedro has made a decision about leaving, but he has no plans. Spain is out of the question. Mexico is still reeling from civil war and American intervention. Their own country is occupied, and so is their neighbor Haiti. Puerto Rico is now owned by the United States, and Cuba is headed for the same compromised situation. Where can they go that isn’t enemy territory anymore?

  An audible sigh escapes from the chairman’s mouth, accompanied by a slumping of the shoulders—the performed emotion of a veteran professor who needs to project his disappointment to the class. Doña Lola ears have perked up, on the alert for trouble. The chairman turns to Camila. “I suppose then, Miss Henríquez, that you won’t be back either.”

  She takes a deep breath, but her voice still comes out as a whisper. “I have decided to accept your offer,” she tells the sad, walrus face.

  She picks up her book and rises to meet her brother’s furious gaze.

  Doña Lola rises, too, barking excitedly.

  PEDRO IS PACING. Given the size of the efficiency, he does not have far to go before he has turned around to face her. “Papancho entrusted you to my care.”

  She says nothing, holding her hands to keep them from shaking. She could say any number of things. That she is twenty-four years old. She has her own life to live. That she now has a job, a way to take care of herself.

  Their degrees have been approved. They heard earlier this morning from Olmsted. The chairman also handed Camila her new contract. “To sign at your convenience.” Camila slipped the envelope in her bag to avoid a confrontation with her brother in public. They have already had several scenes since she accepted the offer in Olmsted’s office. Every time he starts up with his arguments, Camila merely responds, “I will certainly take your feelings into consideration, Pedro.” She cannot call him Pibín when she is so angry at him.

  As for a letter of explanation to the papers, it has proved to be unnecessary. Olmsted got around the whole matter by inviting a friendly reporter from the competing paper, the Minneapolis Tribune, over to his house to meet Camila and Pedro. The reporter asked them a few questions and wrote up a heartwarming article about these two bright emissaries from south of the border. Pedro was quoted correctly as saying, “I don’t like to compare countries, which one is better, which one is more right. I am interested in people, in individuals.” Camila’s appearance in print was brief and uncontroversial as always. “His lovely sister nodded in agreement.”

  If that reporter could see us now, Camila is thinking, as her brother halts directly in front of her, frowning. “I am not going to leave you here by yourself.”

  “But I am not staying here by myself. I’m spending the summer with Marion and her family.”

  Pedro’s mouth drops in surprise. His nose has healed and only a slight puffiness around the eyes recalls the pain and trouble of a few weeks ago. “You don’t know who these people are,” Pedro begins.

  “Her parents have sent a kind invitation. Mr. Reed is a manager of the North American Life Insurance Company.” She offers this detail as proof of the respectability of Marion’s family, but of course, that is not the point.

  She heads for her alcove to retrieve the letter of invitation. With her back turned, she feels brave enough to add, “In the fall, I will be moving with Marion and some friends into our own apartment. So you see, I will not be alone.” She finds the letter where she has kept it, hidden out of sight for weeks, under her mattress, where her aunt Ramona told her Salomé used to store her packet of poems.

  When she next turns around, Pedro is sitting in the chair she has vacated, as if brought down by the shock of all this news. But in actual fact, he does not seem shocked anymore or even angry, just weary. It is a lot to take in, she thinks, a little sister growing up, finally.

  THAT NIGHT, SHE IS late going out for her customary walk. Pedro and she sit in the living room, sipping tea, and talking. They have turned a corner in their standoff, and now Pedro is considering accepting Olmsted’s offer and staying two more years.

  “Pibín,” she says, touching his hand, “it will be fine if you decide to go, really.” Her anger has receded, and she feels only tenderness toward him. She has never been able to hold a grudge for long. Inevitably, she ends up seeing the other person’s point of view. It is a habit she has developed from reading too many books, perhaps, or from always having those voices in her head telling her what to do. She remembers how Pedro described her in one of his letters to Alfonso. “My sister has a perfect character.” (She felt a pang of guilt reading this in the midst of her snooping.) “She lives by continual little realignments that look to all the world like indecisiveness. But they are, I believe, the quivering of her moral compass toward its true north—which I think she believes is our mother, but is really her own soul. She is strong but without violence.”

  She did not recognize herself in the description but loved her brother’s effort to see her with such respect. Often, she has wondered if destiny has not played a trick and given her a perfect companion as a brother instead of a lover.

  “Maybe it is I who will miss you too much if we are apart,” Pedro notes. She is not sure she believes this. Pedro has always been the solitary wanderer.

  As they talk, he rests his feet on the trunk she can no longer look at without feeling ashamed. Once or twice during their conversation, she has been on the
point of confessing to him. But let him have his ocular evidence, as Alfonso has advised. Spare herself the mortification of trying to explain what she herself does not understand.

  At the corner, she waits for him to catch up with her. She looks up at the night sky: so many stars in odd places. It has taken a while to get used to finding the familiar where she did not expect it. Like this passion she has been feeling, a passion she always yearned for, but did not expect to feel toward a woman.

  She waits a few minutes, but tonight Pedro does not appear. She feels a pang of that old loneliness she felt as a young girl when she would sink into depression and want to disappear. In fact, she had written at that time to Pedro, who was away in Mexico, explaining that a friend’s friend was contemplating suicide. What should she do? He had written back promptly, suggesting that Camila come live with him. Of course, their father had not allowed it.

  Pedro has been the dearest, closest person to her in this world. What if by getting free of her family, she were to lose him as well? She hurries down the street, pursued by her worries, like the girl in her book of Greek myths beset by the trunkful of sorrows and plagues she has let loose on the world.

  WHEN MARION OPENS THE door, Camila falls into her arms. “Is everything okay?” Marion asks, holding her, as if Camila were a child in need of comfort. “You’re out of breath. Come sit down before you get an attack of asthma.”

  Camila cannot bear to be still and let her dark thoughts catch up with her. She paces as she recounts what she has told her brother.

  “You told him!” Marion hoots. “Good for you!”

  Camila hushes her. “Remember there are people around.” “People” are other young women students and Miss Tucker, who lives downstairs, but is going deaf, and so leaves the front door unlocked until at the stroke of nine, when she “brings up the drawbridge and floods the moat.” Before her present incarnation as boarding-house mother, Miss Tucker taught history at a private school for girls near Boston.

  “Salomé . . . Camila . . . Henríquez . . . Ureña . . .” Marion murmurs each name as if it were an endearment. Each one merits a kiss, each kiss lingers a minute longer.

  When the door opens on them, Camila is not surprised to see her brother standing in the hallway, a baffled look in his eyes. “How dare you!” Marion descends on him, a mother bird defending her chicks against a predator. He backs away, embarrassed.

  There is something in his face that takes Camila back to that first memory of her mother, looking up from the poem she has just finished to say, “Stay close to your brother.”

  He has turned on his heel and is running down the upstairs hall.

  “Pibín,” she calls after him, hoping the name will recall him to the vow he made their mother.

  SIETE

  La llegada del invierno

  Santo Domingo, 1891 – 1892

  THE DAY FINALLY CAME when Pancho came home. Four years had gone by.

  I was utterly changed. Everyone told me so. I was so thin that even Max could put his little hands around my wrists. I could barely catch my breath. My hair had turned gray. The lines on my face were deep, almost as if all the writing I had not done on paper, I had done on my skin.

  The last thing I wanted to do was go down to the dock and watch his boat come in.

  IT WAS SUNDOWN, I remember, and Federico had come for the two boys. A welcome party of Pancho’s family and friends had gone ahead. I had said I wasn’t going—the first dew of the evening was always the worst for my coughing.

  But at the last minute, I changed my mind. I dressed up in my black silk gown, as buenamoza as a woman can look in a dress that had fit her when she was ten kilos heavier. I put the little cross Pancho had given me around my neck, and I marched down to the dock with one boy in each hand.

  “Con calma, Salomé,” Federico pleaded.

  How could I remain calm after waiting four years to be deceived?

  “Remember that he is a youngster,” Federico went on, mistaking my silence for compliance.

  Little Pibín looked up at me with his wise eyes. “Who are you talking about, Mamá?”

  “No one we know,” I replied.

  When the passengers were helped from the rowboat onto the dock, and I saw them, Pancho! Fran! I could not believe my eyes. Pancho had grown even more good-looking in France. As for Fran, I had sent my son off a boy, and he had come back a little man.

  I gave out a cry. I knew I was in public, but I didn’t care. I spread my arms and I ran down toward them, my lungs so tight, I thought I would collapse before I reached them. Behind me, my two little ones were trying to keep up.

  I saw the shock on Pancho’s face as he took in the sad reality of how ill I was, the wasted face and figure. He must have assumed I was running toward him, my anger and formality forgotten in my happiness to have him back. He turned, handed his hat to the porter who was carrying his portmanteau, and spread his arms for me. I swooped down past him and took my boy in my arms.

  Fran cringed, and for a horrid moment, I could see the disgust on my son’s face. He didn’t know who this old, hollow-eyed, twig-thin woman was. And then, slowly, recognition spread across his face.

  “Mamá?” he asked, before we both burst out crying.

  THAT NIGHT EVERYONE GATHERED at our house: all of Pancho’s brothers except Manuel, of course, who was still in exile; Dubeau and Zafra had come down from Puerto Plata expressly to see their beloved compatriot, and Don Eugenio Marchena, who had carried so many letters back and forth to Paris while he had been minister, dropped in for a while. Sick as I was, I stayed up, greedy for the sight of my three sons reunited again.

  Long after the last bell at nine, when the two youngest couldn’t stand up any longer, Ramona helped me put them to bed. A while later, Fran kissed me good night. “Bon nuit, chérie.” He could barely speak Spanish anymore. I wondered if he had said the very same words to that other woman those nights she put him to bed before she bedded down with Pancho.

  Scorpions in the mind—that’s what my jealousy felt like. And in my chest. Every time I thought of that woman, I’d break down in a fit of coughing.

  Finally, the last guest left. Ramona shut up the house, and Pancho walked her home to Mamá’s house, a block away. I waited, standing in the entryway, trying to compose my thoughts.

  He jumped when he saw me, shocked to find me there on the other side of the front door. His head was bowed; he had obviously been preparing for this scene. I could see he was uneasy, for this was really our first moment alone together.

  In January I had moved to a house closer to Mamá and Ramona. Large and airy with an inner courtyard full of fruit trees and birds, the house itself was shaped like a horseshoe, with a central parlor I used for the school and two wings with several large rooms for our living quarters.

  We stood looking at each other a long moment in the entry-way. His hair was cut stylishly short; his mustache was trim and elegant. He had come back from France, the figure of a man, thirty-two years old, his life ahead of him. I, on the other hand, had been consumed by the separation. I was forty and looked ten years older.

  When he moved toward me, I handed him the lamp I had taken down from its hook. “I suspect you must be tired, Pancho. Your room is down that hallway.”

  “Aren’t we in the same room?” he questioned. There was an odd French intonation to his Spanish. “I vow to you, Salomé—”

  “Your trunks should be there,” I interrupted in a tired voice. “From now on, you go your way, and I go mine.”

  “Ay, Salomé, por Dios, this is my first night home . . .”

  I don’t know what else he said. I left him standing with the lamp at the front of the house, as I made my way in the dark to bed.

  I BURNED AZUFRE IN my room every night, hoping to clear my lungs. On the small table beside my bed, I placed the jar of jarabe Scott Emulsion and a glass of milk covered with a saucer. When I woke up, weak with coughing in the middle of the night, the milk soothed my throat. I clos
ed the jalousies, latched the windows together, and hung a sheet over them to block out the noxious night vapors. By my bed I kept a ponchera ready for the expectoration that came with every attack.

  You can see this was no place I wanted to share with a man.

  But as I secured my room for the night and latched the bedroom door from inside, I could not keep my feelings from flooding my heart. I could not bar the thought of Pancho and his mademoiselle from my mind. It was like taking a swallow of vinegar into a mouth full of sores.

  Deceiver, egotist, philanderer, liar, sin vergüenza, good for nothing, I thought to myself, as if each word were a door I was shutting against him.

  One night, I heard steps, followed by quiet knocking, which I ignored.

  “Are you all right, Mamá?” It was Pibín, checking on me after a bout of coughing.

  “Yes, my love,” I called back, touched by my dear boy’s concern. But I was also disappointed. I did not want to admit it, even to myself: I had wanted it to be Pancho.

  Deceiver, egotist, philanderer, liar, sin vergüenza, good for nothing, but I was still in love with him!

  I broke out into another fit of coughing.

  TO THE WORLD AROUND us, our reunion was the happy ending to a touching love story. Or the beginning of a happy ending. First there was Doña Salomé’s health to set to rights. What better agent of her delivery than her own husband, trained in the latest medical procedures in France?

  Pancho had come back with a big head, made even bigger by an ostentatious top hat, just what all the doctors were wearing in Paris. He also wore his Prince Albert frock coat everywhere he went in the capital, even when he was not calling on a patient.

  Late afternoons, he liked to drop in at el Instituto Profesional during classes. The illustrious doctor recently arrived from Paris would, of course, be invited to say a few words. Pancho would oblige with long discourses on the latest medical findings.