There is nothing anyone can do to make me stop, not my aunt Ana with her tea of guanabana leaves to calm the nerves; or my mother rocking me, singing me lullabies; or my sister, Ramona, offering to let me play with Alexandra if I stop crying. There is only one way to make it stop, a way which Papá has been trying to teach me, and that is to sit down and think of the words for it all, then write them up in the verses my mother copies neatly into her letters to my father.
THE NEXT TIME I see my father, he is standing in the central square on the morning of March 18, 1861.
The exact date is not hard to remember. Every time I think of it, which is often, I bring my hand to my heart as if the date were carved there and I could feel the numbers and letters with my fingers. I think of Cuba and Puerto Rico about to fight for their independence, and of the United States just beginning to fight for the independence of its black people, and then I think of my own patria willingly giving up its independence to become a colony again, and I ask myself again, “What is la patria?” What is this notion of a country that will make so many people die for its freedom only to have a whole other set of its people put it back in a ball and chain again?
Of course, back then when I am living it, I have no idea what is going on. All I know is that the government is going to be changing and that means that my father is coming back, for the defeat of the Blue government always means that my father will be back with the Red party.
On the eve of March 18th, a proclamation is read out at all the major cross streets in the capital. We are to gather at the main plaza at sunrise tomorrow for the president has important news. “We’re not going,” Tía Ana argues with Mamá that night. “They’re liable to get us all dressed in our best clothes and then shoot us down.”
“By presidential order,” my mother reminds her. “That was the proclamation.”
“What does this or any president we’ve had since 1844 know of order?”
Listening to their disagreement, I know I am going to start crying unless I do something to distract myself. I cannot write my father a poem except in my head, because we are saving up our lamp oil in preparation for another invasion from Haiti that never comes. We sit in the yard under the stars, discussing the plans for tomorrow morning.
Later that night, lying next to Ramona, I let go of the tears I’ve held back all evening. My sister stirs, coming awake. “What is it this time?” she whispers, her voice full of impatience.
“Ramona,” I ask her between sobs, “does it hurt you, too?”
Ramona sits up on one elbow. I know what she is thinking. Recently, she has gotten her menses, which means she bleeds between her legs, which is a good thing, she boasts, as it means there will be room in her organs for babies in the future. “What about me?” I have kept asking. “When do I get to bleed?” Ramona must be thinking that I have gotten my menses. “What hurts?” she asks me.
I tell her. It hurts to be alive.
“What kind of a hurt is that, Salomé? Honestly. It’s late. We’ve got to get up early to be at the square for the proclamation.”
Our mother has laid out our dresses, our petticoats, our good shoes, our stockings, our hair ribbons, and our little national flags to wave at the president. Tía Ana has told me the story of our flag: how during the war of independence from Haiti one of the patriots tore up the Haitian flag and asked his aunt to sew up the scraps in a whole different pattern as he had no money to buy more fabric. This seamstress, a brave patriot herself, was later shot down for disagreeing with the new president over what it means to be a patria, and just before she was executed, she asked the firing squad if they would kindly tie down her skirts as she did not want her underwear to show when she fell down dead in front of them.
I am thinking of the story of this brave woman and asking myself again, What is patria in whose name people can do such things, murder the woman who sewed up your national flag? Make your father disappear? Take away one man’s leg and another man’s arm? And so, I cry and cannot stop, and soon I am having a hard time breathing. My sister takes me in her arms the way she does her doll, Alexandra, and sings a song about a baby boy who becomes an angel, which really is enough to make anyone cry as it is one of the saddest lullabies in all creation.
The next morning, Mamá shakes us awake. How can it be morning and be so dark? We dress quickly, Mamá letting us sip from her cup of sweetened coffee as she braids our hair. We can hear our aunt Ana, grumbling in the back of the house about having to get up to make coffee for a sister who is determined to go get herself and her two young daughters killed. Ramona, who is never the one to cry, begins to cry.
“What now, mi’ja?” Our mother sighs.
“I don’t want to go,” Ramona wails.
“You’re a young señorita, for heaven’s sake,” Mamá scolds. “Don’t you understand, this is a presidential order!”
It is not that our mother is inordinately obedient to orders. But she has heard a rumor that Nicolás has come back. If Papá is in the country, he will be at the square, and though Mamá will not return to live with him, will not let him slip his hand down the front of her dress when Tía Ana’s back is turned, nevertheless, she is willing to risk everything for the sight of the man she loves.
So, in the early morning, Mamá and I set out, leaving behind a howling Ramona with our cranky aunt, who complains that not only is her sister going to get herself shot down, but she is taking a lamb to the slaughter and leaving her, Ana, with a señorita who acts like a baby girl instead of being grown up in consideration of her old aunt’s nerves.
The streets are full of people of all ages hurrying toward the center of the city. Many of the children are bearing flags, and some are still nibbling on a plantain fritter or piece of water bread. We gather in the central square. I believe all five thousand inhabitants must be here, even if we subtract Tía Ana and Ramona. A large dais has been erected to one side of the government building right beside the flagpole from which a large version of the little flag I am carrying is tossing in the wind.
A blast of trumpets makes both me and Mamá jump. Two lines of soldiers in blue drill uniforms march into the square, their scabbards empty, their firearms gone. They stop and face each other, and then, down that alleyway comes the president himself, a short man with a mean face like a dog who bites, and gold braid all up and down his uniform. This is not the same president who was president when my father was a justice in the supreme court, whose hand I once shook, who asked me if it was true that I could recite all twenty-five verses of “On the Invention of the Printing Press,” but then stopped me when I got to number ten, and so I give the flag I am holding only a quick, obligatory wave.
This president climbs up on the dais and begins to speak in a voice full of curlicues. He talks of the Haitian threat and the protection we will get from being a part of Spain again. Then he hands over the keys to the city to a man with a plume in his hat and a sword on his belt, and some voices in the crowd shout, “Long live Queen Isabela! Long live Spain!” And then, one hundred canon shots are fired. I count them all.
Silence follows the last cannon blast. The flag is lowered—the big version of the little flag in my hand—and another flag, yellow with red bands, flies up in its place.
“Whose is that, Mamá?” I ask, pointing. I know a red flag means Papá will be back, and a blue flag means that he will have to go into exile, but what a yellow-and-red flag means, I cannot guess.
“The Spanish flag,” Mamá answers blankly.
“Will Papá be back then?”
Mamá nods. I wave my flag in celebration, but Mamá snatches it away. “No more!” she snaps, and then my mother cracks the rod in her two hands and throws the pieces on the ground.
I am so astonished at my mother’s anger that I cannot even cry. I pick up the pieces of the flag from the street, blinking away tears, and stuff them in the pocket of my pinafore. I will never let my mother read my poems to my father again! I will never thread my mother’s needles agai
n! I will never drink Scott Emulsion for my asthma again! But this is too many nevers. They press against the inside of my eyes, and finally I burst into tears.
Because I am crying, the rest of the ceremony is a blur. The watery dignitaries climb down from the blurry dais, and with solemn step proceed to the cathedral for a Te Deum in honor of Spain and Queen Isabela. The crowd thins. I look back toward the empty dais and see my father swimming inside my tears.
“¡Papá!” I shout. And it is my father, leaning against the dais, talking to a soldier. He turns around and spreads his arms, and I run to him with all the fury of wanting to get away from my mother as well as all the desire of wanting to be near him again.
Walking home, my mother’s hand in mine, squeezing gently, asking forgiveness, my father’s large hand enveloping my other hand, I feel a surge of happiness. It is the first time I can remember us walking together as a family. Perhaps yellow and red means that now all Dominicans will be friends again, and husbands and wives will live together, and children will have their fathers around all the time, and girls will be allowed to write letters and own houses without having to explain themselves.
I want to ask my father if this is so, since he always knows everything, but I can tell by the tone of my parents’ voices that now is not a good time to interrupt. My father is explaining something to my mother, but she is not convinced, for all she says when he finishes is, “But why come back at this most disgraceful moment?”
“I’d rather be a colony than a cemetery,” Papá replies. “I’d rather be Spanish than Haitian. We are not ready to be a patria yet.”
“Papá,” I ask him when it is safe to interrupt, “what is a patria?”
He looks down, all the answers draining from his face. He does not know what to say!
And I can tell a whole new time is beginning: not Before Nísidas and After Nísidas, but a grown-up time, like Ramona bleeding between her legs. I will have to figure out my own answers so that someday if I have a daughter I will know how to answer any question she might put to me.
ONE
Light
Poughkeepsie, New York, 1960
SHE WOULD LIKE TO ask her mother, “What should I do now?” But she has never had that luxury: a mother to turn to at difficult moments in her life, a hand on her brow, a soothing voice in her ear.
Marion claims these are clichés of motherhood that Camila believes in because she has never had the opportunity to test them. “Trust me,” her friend has told her. “I had a mother to turn to, and guess what her advice always was: Ask Jesus. How helpful was that?”
These days she is feeling so unsettled that she has started consulting her mother’s poems. But the game is getting out of hand.
WHEN SHE TELLS THE school doctor what she is doing, the kindly old man takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “You’re engaged in magical thinking,” he explains, though Camila is not sure she has heard correctly. Even after all these years, she has to strain to understand and to make herself understood in English. Just last week, she found herself walking home several blocks because the taxi driver had delivered her to the wrong address. She had been too embarrassed to inform him.
“Magical thinking?” she repeats the phrase. That can’t possibly be something bad. She has come about her eyes. Her vision is blurring. Sometimes she feels as if there were a light snow falling between herself and the world out there.
“Cataracts,” he guesses. “You’re at that magical age.” He winks. How nice of him to use that word again, magical, a word she likes. He is a kind man, retired from the navy, he has said. His letter opener is in the shape of a sword. His pen stand, a submarine. Engravings of ships sail upon his walls. Everyone has their little thing.
He is probing. What are her plans? Does she have any family? Is she upset with this nonsense about mandatory retirement? Is she worried about the future?
“Not exactly worried,” she says as evenly as she can. After all, she does not want to be locked away somewhere. Who knows what rules apply to a foreign woman who goes mad in this country. “But this is my last chance, and I don’t want to spoil it.”
“Your last chance at what, Miss Henry?” he asks softly. She has told him to please call her Miss Henry. He was having such a hard time with her name, the r to rattle, the Spanish i to negotiate.
“To start over,” she says simply.
He waits a few minutes for her to elaborate but when she says nothing, he offers her a hand off the examining table.
“That a girl,” he says as she climbs heavily down.
SHE TOUCHES THE FADED cover, closes her eyes, and parts the pages, then glances down. The letters blur. No matter. She knows them all by heart. Her mother’s poem about winter:
In our poor countries, rivers keep singing,
fields wear their flowers, light floods the sky . . .
No answers in that. But she does feel a surge of silly, chauvinistic pride in the tropics’ claim to better winters.
It is after six. She goes to the kitchen and pours herself her glass of wine. Every evening about this time, she uncorks the bottle she buys one town over. A deep-throated burgundy. One glass only. She felt ashamed to tell the doctor when he said he was prescribing a mild sedative and asked if she drank. The last thing she needs is a mild sedative. How about a strong clarion call? she should have asked him. One of those resurrection angels who wake up the dead when they blow their horns. How about one of those?
She takes her glass to the window. At each streetlight, there is a roiling cloud of white. The snowfall, predicted for days, has arrived. Odd how just now she opened on her mother’s poem about winter.
Maybe the game is working. The answers are coming at last.
She lifts her glass but can think of nothing she wants to toast just now.
ON THE TELEVISION SHE has turned on for company, there is a special report on Cuba, approaching the anniversary of its revolution. Castro’s nationalization of land continues. The King ranch has been converted into a cooperative for schoolchildren. What kind of a revolution is this? President Eisenhower wants to know.
Ours, she thinks. The kind we have in our poor countries.
She has just gotten off the phone with Marion in sunny Sarasota. (“Ha! Ha! We don’t have a bit of snow!”) She is calling hurriedly: the little cottage at the end of their block is up for sale. “It would be perfect for you. But you’re going to have to make up your mind right away, Cam, this place will sell in a day.”
Is this a sign, she wonders, this sudden phone call just when she is beginning to feel at her wits’ end? Her life has come to a standstill. This year she has not sent out her Christmas cards. Everyone would want to know her plans for the future—and the idea of increasing her uncertainty by sharing it is appalling.
Down below, Vivian Lafleur is returning from a faculty tea. The wind has begun to whip the snowflakes into whirls. From street-light to streetlight she watches her neighbor’s unsteady progress: Vivian is almost bent double, holding down her Kelly-green hat with a Kelly-green mitten. Camila’s own most recent set is in a shade that Dot especially chose because it had a Spanish-sounding name, verde green. In her lighter moments this last fall, Camila has written under her PRO LEAVING VASSAR COLLEGE column: No more of Dot’s hat-and-mitten sets.
When they next cross paths, Vivian will hint that the faculty missed her at afternoon tea, no doubt hoping that her upstairs neighbor will explain her recent reclusiveness. “We missed our eminent Hispanicist.” For years, Camila used to think that Vivian was making fun of her. But no, this is the way Vivian actually talks.
College Street is deserted at this hour. In a few days the girls will be returning to campus from their Christmas break. It has been a long holiday, waiting for her last semester to start. Not that she is looking forward to it. She has never been good at endings.
Below, Vivian has looked up and caught sight of Camila at the window. She lets the curtain fall and sits back down at her desk as if she has be
en caught doing something undignified.
SHE OPENS THE FOLDER she has labeled THE FUTURE. Her lists, should anyone else read them, are as embarrassing as a diary. The reasons for and against a decision seem so petty. She remembers Rodolfo, deciding to move to a neighborhood because it was closer to the one ice cream parlor in Havana that sold pistachio ice cream. She herself accepted the Vassar job years ago because when she came for the interview, her future colleague Pilar gave her a box of scented soaps shaped like butterflies.
She takes out a clean page and writes, BUYING THE COTTAGE IN SARASOTA CLOSE TO MARION, then draws a line down the center. PRO and CON. Is close to Marion pro or con? she wonders.
But before she has even begun listing her reasons, she puts the page aside. None of her reasons are convincing anymore. She turns to her mother’s poems again—closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. This time, she opens on one of her favorites, “Luz,” which begins, “Where shall the uncertain heart attempt its flight? Rumors of another life awaken it.”
She listens closely, but all she hears are Vivian’s steps at the front door and Dot calling from her bedroom, “Come quickly, Viv.” In the background, the television drones, punctuated by screams and raucous applause. A game show has come on.
DEAR MARION, SHE WRITES, you must understand . . . this is not easy for me. When I put my reasons into words they do not sound like the truth. But we parted lives long ago, and I know it will never do for me to join you and your husband in my retirement.
Something has always been missing between them. She used to blame herself: she was not committed enough to Marion. Now she suspects she was not committed enough to living in this country.
And yet she has stayed on, almost twenty years, long after Marion departed for Florida, long after her brothers stopped trying to convince her to come home.
In the Name of Salome Page 3