Saving the World

by Julia Alvarez

  Alma nods, feeling suddenly saddened by his noble reply. This is Richard’s only life, too. Why should he be a minor character in hers? “Let’s go upstairs,” she suggests, wishing it were sex she wanted, not just a legitimate way to disappear.

  “Wow,” Richard says for the second time tonight, a word from his Indiana boyhood, one he reverts to whenever slightly embarrassed by an indulgence he doesn’t feel he has earned. He looks unsure. He has come home to a different wife than he is used to. Alma, too, is perplexed. A self is splintering off, not the smart-cookie, magazine wife, playing her cards right, but a woman from some other story than the one Richard and she are living in together.

  “You don’t want to talk over our plans first?” Richard is asking. Alma shakes her head, watching as he downs his drink. “I’ve already made up my mind.”

  His head jerks up, surprised. “Oh?” He hesitates. “What … did you decide?”

  “I think you should go. I think I should stay—”

  “No way. I’m not going without you!” Richard shakes his head adamantly. But something in his tone, in the way his face shone after Alma said he should go, tells her he can be convinced. It makes her sad knowing how easily she can talk him into leaving her.

  Alma gives him her reasons. She will be able to totally focus and finish her novel. He will be able to concentrate on his project without worrying about her. This will be a test of their love. After ten years, they should be able to survive the deep and separate dive into their individual passions. “Remember that quote I used to have on our fridge?” she reminds him. “What Rilke said: ‘Love is two solitudes that protect, something something, and salute each other.’” She can never remember the middle verb.

  He winces. “I never liked that quote. It sounds painful. Besides, I know I can survive a separation, just that it won’t be much fun. So why do it?”

  She does not want to sound like the Puritan in the family, though for a long time, Alma has suspected that she, from the culture of flamboyance and excess, is much more willing than Richard to don sackcloth and talcum-powder herself with ashes. “Sometimes we have to do stuff that isn’t easy.”

  He sighs, as if he knows what’s coming: how writing is hard work, the fascination of what’s difficult, and so on. But it’s not that, even if it’s the reason she gave him for staying. She wants to find out who she is anymore without him, to follow the vague, shadowy woman she has been avoiding and see where she might be going. Of course, if Alma breathes a word of this to Richard, he will think that she is falling apart, that he has to stay and take care of her.

  “Well,” Richard wavers. “I guess it could work. We could see each other a couple of times at least. I’m going to have to come up and check in with the main office and my other projects. You can come down like in the middle or something? Also, we can meet in Miami for Christmas with your parents.”

  Alma feels just as she did when Tera outlined their post-Richard life together, amazed and depressed by how doable it sounds, surviving any loss, becoming someone else.

  “I’ll miss you so much,” Richard adds, but his face is flushed with excitement, his eyes already dreaming of the deforested mountainsides of the Dominican Republic he will green up. Alma is the one who’s bracing herself, as if she is getting ready for major surgery, the removal of Richard from her heart, a delicate excision she is not sure she will survive.

  “Here we are talking first,” he reminds her, grinning. “I like your original plan about going upstairs.”

  She lets him lead her by the hand, as if he were wheeling her down the corridor to the OR. As if he were leaving tomorrow, forever. The woman’s call had been a sign of a big change after all. Her curse is already hard at work.

  As they go by it, Alma glances over at the answering machine. A signal is flashing on the narrow panel. Only Richard knows how to clear and reset the recording. Another set of instructions she will have to write down in her spiral notebook.

  “Shall we clear it?” she asks. Richard shakes his head. “Later.” He is a man intent on his goal now. Alma follows, slowly climbing the stairs, as if having sex will be that conclusive handshake finalizing their new plan. The odd thing is that until the last minute, she thought she would accompany him. But then she appeared, beckoning from the edges. A woman yearning for the larger version of herself is how Alma would describe her, if this woman were one of her characters.

  The phone rings again while they are making love. “Damn! I should’ve taken it off the hook,” Richard sighs, when the rings go on and on. They wait it out, as they did the first time, but the interruption breaks the mood. “Don’t worry about it,” Richard says. “It’s fun just being in bed with you.” Alma doesn’t for a moment believe him, but she has come to appreciate these small courtesies, which in her younger, woman-warrior years, she would have dismissed as BS. Now she sees that they, not passion, are what keep a marriage oiled and running smoothly.

  Later, before they sit down to supper, Alma resets the machine as Richard talks her through the steps. For the first time since they got it, it’s her voice on the recording. “Hi, this is the number for Alma Rodríguez and Richard Huebner. Sorry we can’t come to the phone right now …” On and on, the message unfolds chattily, as opposed to Richard’s curt “You’ve reached 388-4343. Leave us a message.” “It’s friendlier,” Alma protests when Richard rolls his eyes.

  They’ve just begun eating when the phone starts ringing again. They wait, sighing with relief when Alma’s voice comes on. “I wonder who it’s going to be?” Richard lowers his voice, as if the person were in the next room, ready to make an entrance. “I bet—”

  “Hey!” the voice begins after a brief hesitation. “I expected Richard. Did you kick him out or what? Just joking!” It’s Tera, static crackles and all, calling from her antique phone. “Anyhow, I was just listening to the local news. And you will not believe it: there was a report about this woman who’s been calling people all over the county. Hannah … Something. What was her name? Paul, what was that Hannah woman’s last name? Hannah McSomething. Anyhow, this woman always asks for the wives and pretends she has AIDS and has slept with their husbands. She claims she’s part of some weird ethical terrorist group trying to save the world. Well, it turns out this poor woman is mentally ill and had been getting treatment, but with the cuts on spending the counseling center terminated her care. I tell you, we can bomb other countries, we can let people go homeless—” Tera is abruptly cut off. There is a three-minute maximum on messages.

  Alma can feel Richard’s eyes on her. She can guess the look on his face: a mixture of I told you so and something else, a new look he has been giving her these days when she has been so sad. A look of helplessness, as if he is no longer sure he can save her from that part of herself he hoped would disappear with love.

  “See,” Richard says softly. There is no righteousness in his voice. “You have nothing to worry about.”

  “I know,” Alma says, giving him a small, chastened smile. Of course, he is right. What was that quote she used to quote to him? We are saved not because we are worthy; we are saved because we are loved. She is lucky to have his love. This crazy woman is a warning of what can happen when you wander off from the safe, gated neighborhoods of the human heart, out where the winds of mortality blow hard.

  “I wonder why she flipped?” Alma wonders out loud.

  Richard shrugs. “Life. Some people can’t take it.”

  All through supper and as Alma does the dishes, she ponders Richard’s words as he sits at the table, making notes on the margins of the project report he has brought home. Why can’t she just settle down to being his lucky, beloved wife, author of a couple of decent novels, a nice person to the people in her life? Why this periodic need to reinvent the world and herself along with it? Sure, it fuels the writing, but taking it literally is madness. She recalls a woman who wrote to her years back, inspired by a revolutionary character in one of Alma’s novels. The woman had decided to
go to Sandinista Nicaragua and be a human sandbag for peace on the northern border. Oh my God, what have I done? Alma had been alarmed. She wrote back, It’s fiction! She never heard back from the woman, but for months Alma worried over every word she wrote. She had never before considered that a novel could have casualties.

  Perhaps she will become a casualty of the novel that she has yet to write. When she is done, Richard will find the manuscript in a neat stack on the desk and below, on the floor, a pile of pencil shavings—a cartoon on a New Yorker back page, next to the ads for bow ties and expensive diamond animal pins.

  But Alma could still decide to go with Richard on his mission to help her part of the world. Like Isabel, willing to follow Balmis around the world. What pluck it must have taken for this rectoress of an orphanage to cut her ties and risk her life and those of twenty-some little boys in the bargain! She must’ve felt a pang as each of her little charges climbed aboard that ship.

  Some stronger pull than Alma feels kept Isabel from changing her mind that gusty November day. A steadfastness that evades Alma’s pro/con mind, back and forth, endlessly for the weeks before Richard finally boards his flight to Newark and on to the Dominican Republic. Yes, no; yes, no—like a heartbeat, this time her very own.

  II

  OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1803

  MY HEART WAS POUNDING as my boys boarded the ship on that windy November day. What had I done? Each one of these innocents was on my conscience! Each one seemed all the more fragile and precious: Juan Antonio was coughing, his little nose running; Pascual wailed that he was hungry—who knew when the next meal was coming; even my little bully Francisco looked pale and frightened.

  The herald read out each name as if it were a title, a trumpet blew, the bishop lifted his hand in blessing.

  I dared not look up at the skies for consolation, for then I would have to see the ship before me, the men up in the rigging gawking at me, the gray open sea beyond the bay, preparing to batter us with its waves.

  And so I fixed my eyes on her, the figurehead on the prow after whom the ship was named, María Pita. Centuries ago, she had defended La Coruña from the British invaders after her husband was slain. In old stories, people seemed braver than I could ever be. Yet it occurred to me that to all those looking on from the crowd on the dock, I seemed a courageous woman, standing with my little boys, letting them go, one by one, up the gangway—sheep to the slaughter or souls up Jacob’s ladder toward a great reward.

  They say that before one passes on to the Lord’s judgment, one’s whole life appears before one’s view. I thought back over all my hard work in the last few months, and I admit I cared more what Don Francisco might think of me than how history or God might judge me. Perhaps all our noble deeds begin as the mustard seed of the parable, which bears a mighty tree.

  Mine indeed was a tiny seed: subterfuge and selfishness; my little boys, God spare them, buying my freedom. How could any good come of such lowly beginnings?

  MY PART IN THIS grand moment had begun two months ago, the day after Don Francisco’s visit. As the fly might fall in the spider’s web, Doña Teresa had come calling.

  It was a rainy Saturday morning, so I had not been expecting her. But our benefactress had been visiting a sick friend and, passing by on her way home, had dropped in to see her boys and deliver some grapes she had bought for them.

  Before she was in the door, the boys had given her the report. A visitor had come from the king! All the cleverness I had spent devising a way to tell our benefactress about the expedition without alluding to its royal origin was for naught. I should have known better than to think a matter the children knew about could be kept secret.

  Doña Teresa was scowling by the time I greeted her. “What’s this I hear about the king sending a visitor here, Isabel?” she asked in place of a greeting back.

  “Let me help you with your cape,” I offered, delaying in order to figure out how best to respond.

  She was stamping her muddy shoes on the carpet she had bestowed on us and so could soil at her pleasure without my correcting her as I would have my boys. “That cuckold king has done nothing for destitute children during his whole reign!” (“What is a cuckold?” the boys had asked the first time Doña Teresa had gone into one of her royal rants in their presence.) “Thank you, Isabel,” she said, allowing me at last to remove her cape. “Now tell me what this is all about.”

  “We had an important visitor yesterday, yes,” I said as I hung her cape on the post by the door. “He came with a special request for a mission approved by His Holiness.”

  “Oh?” Doña Teresa’s face suddenly softened. She was a pious woman. In the Roman Church she had found her substitute to the court in Madrid. The many battles she fought on its behalf—the church should not be forced to sell its properties in order to bail out the Royal Treasury; Rome, not Spain, should decide marriage cases; monasteries and convents should not pay additional taxes—distracted her from persisting in questions that could not be answered, questions that had haunted her after the death of her son. “What does the Holy Father require of us?”

  I felt a surge of confidence. Perhaps this would not be a battle after all. “An expedition will be setting out from La Coruña in a few weeks,” I began. I mentioned the director’s name. “It was Don Francisco, who was here yesterday—”

  “So, is it money he wants?” Doña Teresa was scowling again. She had an open, expressive face, and though it was unlikely one would not already know from looking at it, she also reported exactly what she was feeling. There always seemed to be this redundancy about her, why Nati found her trying. “Now, Isabel, you know very well I don’t like to give money to individuals.”

  “No, Doña Teresa, I assure you Don Francisco was not asking for money.” I took a deep breath. “He came here … asking for members to join an expedition to cure the world of smallpox.” At the mention of this plague, Doña Teresa’s face drained of color. She sat herself heavily down in one of her husband’s uncomfortable chairs. She did not seem to notice her selection nor did she question the oddness of searching for expedition members in a home for orphan boys. Her mouth had dropped open. “Rid the world of smallpox? Is this possible?”

  Clearly, she had not heard the hospital rumors about the English doctor. This was odd as Doña Teresa kept abreast of most gossip. La gaceta, especially, had proliferated her sources of scandals, strange tales, and memorable stories. “Are you quite sure, Isabel, this isn’t another one of his cures?” she scowled again. King Carlos was known to dabble in the sciences and was often offering purgatives and palliatives to his nobles and foreign visitors. So La gaceta had reported.

  “No, no, Doña Teresa. This cure is already established in Rome, France, Russia.” I recounted what Don Francisco had told me, assuring her at crucial points where my own faith had faltered that science was handmaiden to religion. I outlined Dr. Jenner’s experiment, omitting that he was English, explaining about the milkmaids, the cowpox, the epidemics raging in the colonies. But in order to get the vaccine across the ocean, live carriers were required, which is why Don Francisco had come to the foundling house. He was requesting twenty-two of our boys to carry the cowpox fluid across the sea.

  “I see,” Doña Teresa said with a deep nod. She was quiet a moment, gazing fondly at the boys who had been listening intently to the story. This was the first they knew of our visitor’s request, for the fact that he had come from the king had eclipsed any further questions about the reason for his visit. “So, my little sailors,” Doña Teresa inquired of them, “which of you wants to go on a big ship across the ocean?”

  “Me!” they shouted and lunged toward Doña Teresa, almost toppling her over in her chair. She might have been the big ship herself they were ready to board.

  “Boys!” I scolded. But I could tell our benefactress was enjoying herself. She came precisely to feel the sticky, needy warmth of their affection.

  “You mean to say that you would leave your Doña Teresa all alo
ne here in La Coruña?” She made a pouty face.

  “I’ll stay,” Clemente offered, inciting a complete reversal. So much for the enlightened rule of the multitude, I thought, remembering how it was the rabble next door in France that had cut off their king’s head. Or so I had read in one of the discarded Gacetas Doña Teresa had brought me.

  Only Francisco held his course. From the beginning, that boy was determined to go. “Por favor, Doña Teresa, let me go.” Por favor? I registered the change. The boy might still mend.

  “That’s enough now, boys,” I quieted them. I should never have started this explanation with the boys afoot. But Doña Teresa’s questions had met me at the door, forcing me into the conversation I had cleverly (and uselessly!) prepared for.

  She was shaking her head at them now. “You must remember, my boys, that if His Holiness asks anything of us, we must obey. That way, we can all finally be together in heaven. We will all meet there, will we not?” The boys nodded solemnly.

  Only your conniving rectoress might not be there, I thought.

  Doña Teresa turned to me. She spoke in a lowered voice, as if the boys were incapable of hearing anything said in confidence in their presence.

  “I worry only about these poor innocents. They have never been further than the Tower of Hercules. How can we be sure they will survive such a voyage? And when will they be sent back? What if they catch some other horrid disease? La gaceta reports that the Americans are full of illness.” All the questions and qualms I had swept aside in my excitement swarmed round me. I had scooped out honey from the hive, tasted its sweetness, but now the worrisome bees were after me. My mind was full of unease.

  Perhaps my face was as easy to read as hers, for Doña Teresa stopped abruptly. “Oh dear, Isabel, now I’ve got you doubting. Always, the Evil One tries to tarnish a noble deed with ignoble quandaries. I have known you these dozen years, and I know you would not endanger the welfare of boys you love so well.”