In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  “Where’s that?” I asked. But Papá was in the middle of his own poem. “Come here,” he called me. He read me one of the lines. “Something doesn’t sound right.” He read it a few times. I offered him some suggestions that loosened up the way the words all flowed together. “Herminia, Herminia,” he winked, “soon I will give you my trumpet and play only the flute.”

  Sometimes, Ramona and I would catch Josefa Perdomo walking down the street, and say in awed voices to each other, “She writes verses!” When the third Spanish governor arrived, Josefa welcomed him with some verses in El Eco del Ozama.

  Everyone exclaimed how lovely the verses were, but I was not so sure. I mean, the verses were lovely verses, but they were doing an unlovely thing. They were binding us to a country that had turned us into a colony. It was like the verses I had written for Don Eloy, funny and clever, but shaking mangoes off the wrong tree. Don Eloy should have been courting his old wife and making her feel like the young girl he was dreaming about in his head. That’s what I should have said to him. I’ll write a verse you can give to Caridad that will wake up every inch of her half-dead body.

  “Salomé, for heaven’s sakes. They’re just verses.” Ramona could be fierce in her defense of the plump, pretty poetess. It was as if Josefa were a human version of her old doll Alexandra, on whose porcelain prettiness Ramona had doted. “It’s not her fault we’re back to being a colony. She’s just being polite.”

  But I wasn’t convinced. It was one thing to be polite and another thing altogether to welcome intruders and say, “Please make yourself right at home.” And some people were doing just that. The sisters Bobadilla had gone overboard with their hospitality: holding teas for the Spanish soldiers and dignitaries, flying a Spanish flag from their roof—their fine, Spanish-tile roof. Their lisps had gotten so pronounced that you didn’t want to meet them on the street, for they would sprinkle you with saliva before you ever got past talk of the weather.

  Right then and there, I promised myself that I would never write verses out of politeness. Rather than write something pretty and useless, I would not write at all.

  It was a high standard to set for myself just as I was starting out. But I suppose it was like me, as Mamá would have pointed out, to give with all my heart or not at all.

  It was an attitude that would not serve me well in love.

  OUR TUTOR ALEJANDRO ROMÁN brought his younger brother, Miguel, to class one day. By now I was eighteen and had learned everything Alejandro had to teach me, so I was glad for a new face. Miguel was an aspiring poet, and he had heard from his brother that the Ureña girls were none other than the daughters of Nicolás Ureña, and they were smart as clockwork. Miguel was hoping not only to meet us but to make the acquaintance of the poet himself at Mamá’s house.

  “What kind of poetry do you write, Miguel?” Ramona asked him the first time he came to our house. How I hated that question—like pinning down a butterfly.

  “The Noah’s ark kind, a little of everything,” he answered, a smile in his eyes as he glanced my way.

  I tried not to smile. Recently, Mamá had begun reading to us out of Doña Bernardita’s Manual of Instruction for Young Ladies, and among the things that Doña Bernardita warned against was smiling at a man.

  “Smiling is a gift of intimacy,” Mamá explained. Nice young ladies gave such tender responses only to their husbands along with—Mamá hesitated—along with everything else. About the everything else Mamá was not very specific. Indeed, Doña Bernardita counseled that too much of that kind of knowledge might lead a young lady to solitary indulgence.

  Ramona and I looked at each other with just the faintest lift of the brows. Then Ramona, who as the oldest usually went ahead into unknown territory, asked, “What’s that, Mamá?”

  Mamá colored prettily, the pink in her cheeks making her look younger. “It’s a term that is used to describe . . . individual transgression.”

  “That explains a lot, Mamá,” Ramona said.

  Mamá closed Doña Bernardita’s Manual and looked straight at my sister. “Are you being fresh with me, young lady?”

  “Non, non, Maman, pardonnez-moi,” Ramona said fondly, and she folded her arms around our mother. We would slip into French and English from time to time to show off to Mamá how much we had learned from our tutor, Alejandro.

  That first day, Miguel had come, as I said, tagging along with his older brother. Soon, he became a regular, and Mamá allowed him to join our class. I think she felt sorry for us, for we hardly went out or entertained visitors. We became fast friends, all four us, meeting for years. Mamá later said that ours were the longest lessons she had ever heard of, but she saw nothing wrong at the time with such innocent scholarship.

  What happened started innocently enough. One day, Miguel and I got into an impassioned discussion over a poem by Lamartine. At our next meeting, we discussed Lamartine again, almost as if the poem were now a door we had to go through to get somewhere else. The next time, Miguel said, speaking of Lamartine, here’s a poem by Espronceda which I think you might like, and that was another door we opened, and Espronceda led to Quintana, and Quintana to our own Nicolás Ureña (“I understand he is your father!”)—and Ureña led to our poetess Josefa Perdomo (“A pity she sells her poetry for a smile”), which led to some poems by an unknown poet Herminia that I showed Miguel (“Excellent! May I have copies?”), and then one day, we had opened all the doors and gone down all the corridors, and we found ourselves sitting side by side, like Dante’s lovers, in a room with nobody else in it.

  That day Mamá had gone down to the docks with Ramona as a ship had come in from St. Thomas that might be selling notions we needed. Miguel had stayed on to discuss Herminia’s latest production, a poem on the glory of progress. My aunt was just finishing with her little girls, but as her charges were leaving, one girl fell down the steps and commenced crying. In the commotion of tears and a bloody knee, my aunt must have forgotten that she would be leaving two young people alone (an absolute DO NOT EVER DO! in Doña Bernardita’s Manual), for she decided to walk the sniffling child down the street to the grandmother’s house.

  It was only a matter of minutes. But in those minutes, there was time for a young man to say a verse or two; time for a young girl to let the color in her face die down; time for her to murmur, “Me, too”; time for him to say he had not heard her, could she speak up; time for her to stammer again; and then the timeless moment of his hand reaching over Lamartine, over Espronceda and Quintana, to give her hand a fervent squeeze, before time ran out, and there was Tía Ana out of breath in the doorway, her long shadow like old Father Time himself come to put an end to lessons from that day on.

  “I should never have consented to this,” Mamá blamed herself when she heard from her sister about the scene that had ensued. My aunt had swooped down on the flabbergasted Miguel and literally picked him up by his collar (which had snapped open) and deposited him on the street outside. His torn cravat had followed.

  For days, Ramona would not talk to me. I suspect she was not only angry about my ruining her lessons, but jealous that I, her younger sister, had gone ahead of her in experience. I had been touched by a man.

  As for Papá, he was furious. You’d think I had done some truly awful thing like gone over to the old Blue party or supported the new Red party, which Papá no longer supported, for its leader Báez had become a dictator. “They all break your heart,” he said, looking at me with that After-the-Ten-Commandments look of Moses coming down the mountain only to find the Israelites dancing in loose garments around a calf of melted-down jewelry and candelabras.

  The worst outcome, of course, was that I was no longer to have any communication with either of the Román brothers. Soon enough, our dictator Báez removed all temptation from my side—for the brothers were exiled to Haiti for writing poems against the new regime. We had left off being a colony to become a dictatorship with a censor who understood the power of poetry.

  It was as i
f I were back in my childhood again, for just as I had given all my heart to a charming man in a frock coat who rhymed his conversation, I now had given my heart to a charming young man in a short jacket and cap who had declared his feelings for me. My asthma reappeared. I wept for days on end.

  Before Miguel left the country, I had a gift to give him. Night after night, I had been copying over Herminia’s poems, which Miguel had requested. It was my small act of rebellion against the foolish dictates of my elders. I had no idea how I would get them to him.

  It was Ramona who came up with the solution: Ramona, who could never endure my weeping and would do anything to stop my tears. At Sunday mass, as Miguel walked past our pew to communion, Ramona slipped in behind him. They knelt side by side at the communion rail. As they waited for Padre Billini to come down the row with his chalice, Ramona slipped Miguel a sheaf of poems. Accompanying them was my letter, disclosing that I was Herminia. It seemed a much more intimate thing to do than smiling, to take off my disguise and let him know my secret soul as I had put it down on paper.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, Papá was at our door with a copy of El Nacional rolled up under one arm and a scared look on his face. When he unrolled the paper, and thrust it before me, my mouth fell open. There, on the front page, was my poem, “Recuerdos a un proscrito,” which I had included in the poems to Miguel. It was signed “Herminia.”

  “¿Qué pasa?” Mamá asked, scouring the paper up and down. President Grant to our north was sending a commission of American senators to study the idea of buying off part of the island and shipping some of their own negro people to live here. A group calling itself the Ku Klux Klan was burning crosses in front of these negro people’s houses, so maybe they wouldn’t mind coming. The Clyde steamship was due in from Havana. Señorita Trinidad Villeta had been crowned Queen of May in Teatro Republicano.

  Papá looked at her impatiently, and then glancing over his shoulder and seeing that the top of the Dutch door was still open, he motioned for me to close it. After he had read the poem out loud, my father said, “This is seditious!”

  My mother’s face shone with fierce pride. “Good for Herminia! She is saying what we all feel and don’t have the courage to speak.”

  Papá looked at her for a long moment, and you could see that he was just now realizing that I had never shared my pen name with my mother. It was our special secret.

  Later that night in bed, Ramona and I figured out what must have happened. Miguel had given my poem to his friends at El Nacional to publish. All we could hope for was that he had not betrayed my true identity.

  The next afternoon at his house, Papá warned me. “You must be careful, Herminia. Báez is not the old Báez. He would not protect his old friend if he were to find out my daughter was sowing seeds of sedition. No more publishing without my permission!”

  Of course, I promised not to do what I had never done in the first place. The following week another poem by Herminia was published in the paper. “Una lagrima” was not out-and-out seditious, but no dictator could have read those lines addressed to an exile without feeling challenged. Your patria still in chains . . . The tears you shed for her have never dried . . . Rumors in the capital were that El Nacional would be shut down within the week. But the paper continued publishing. It seemed Báez was showing off to the American senators how freedom-loving he was.

  For several weeks, poems appeared by Herminia in the paper. “Contestación,” “A un poeta,” “Una esperanza,” “Ruego,” “Un gemido,” and finally, “La gloria del progreso,” a poem that caused an uproar. Our old friend Don Eliseo Grullón, a statesman himself, declared that whoever this Herminia was, she was going to bring down the regime with pen and paper.

  Papá was beside himself. Why was I bent on defying him? Exile would be the least of it. I was going to get us all killed. Finally, I had to confess that it was not my doing. I had allowed some acquaintances to have copies. “I’m sorry, Papá.”

  But secretly, I was glad. Poetry, my poetry, was waking up the body politic! Instead of letting my father’s fears hold me back, I kept writing bolder poems.

  Sometimes my hand would shake as I wrote. Herminia, Herminia, Herminia, I would whisper to myself. She was the brave one. She was not in thrall to her fears. She did not quail at a harsh word. Or to cry over every little thing, wasting her tears.

  Secretly, in the dark cover of the night, Herminia worked at setting la patria free.

  And with every link she cracked open for la patria, she was also setting me free.

  EACH TIME THERE WAS a new poem by Herminia in the paper, Mamá would close the front shutters of the house and read it in a whisper to the rest of us. She was delighted with the brave Herminia. I felt guilty keeping this secret from her, but I knew if I told her, all her joy would turn to worry. Her theory was that Herminia was really Josefa Perdomo, but my aunt Ana disagreed. Josefa had a more sentimental, ingratiating style. “This Herminia is a warrior,” my aunt said proudly. “In fact, my theory is that Herminia is really a man, hiding behind a woman’s skirt.”

  “How interesting, tía,” Ramona said, looking directly at me. “Herminia, a man. Somehow I don’t quite see it.” My sister was enjoying herself immensely. She claimed it was all her doing that Herminia had come to the notice of the public. I knew the minute Mamá discovered our travesty, Ramona would be the innocent accomplice, put up to this by her naughty little sister, who had once let a man touch her.

  In fact, we had both lit a fire that was raging out of control. “La patria has discovered her muse,” read one letter by an anonymous writer reprinted in El Nacional. Rebellions began erupting everywhere. The American senators left the country. Governor González of the north province of Puerto Plata announced that he was starting his very own party, the Green Party, and he called for all Dominicans to join with him in a public meeting to protest the tyranny of Báez. His proclamation inspired a new poem I began writing that very night, Wake from your sleep, my Patria, throw off your shroud . . .

  It was because of this poem that Mamá made her discovery. Our housekeeping habit was to air our mattresses in the open courtyard in back of the house. On airing days I was always very careful to transfer the stack of poems I kept under my side of the mattress to the bottom of the clothes chest.

  That day, I had made the transfer, but it must have been that the ink on my latest revision of “A la Patria” was still wet when I had put the poem away on top of the stack the night before. That one page had stuck to the bottom of the mattress, and as we up-ended it, my mother was staring straight at my poem, or rather Herminia’s poem.

  “Y esto, ¿qué es?” My mother peeled the poem away and read enough of it to recognize the style. She looked straight at me. “How could you, Salomé?”

  “You said you were proud of Herminia,” I reminded her. “You said she had the courage to say what we all thought but wouldn’t speak.” My knees were shaking. I could feel that tightness in my chest that preceded my asthma attacks.

  My mother did not say a word. I expected her to scold me as she sometimes did Ramona for being impudent. But she could see how upset I was. She made a sign of the cross and kept shaking her head. “Dios santo, let this cup pass from me.”

  “What are you talking about? What are you talking about?” Tía Ana had caught the hysteria in the air, but she could not divine the cause of it.

  My mother handed the paper to her sister, who read it over quickly. When she got to the signature at the bottom of the page, a smile spread on her lips. “Now who—” she said, with mock ingenuousness—“who on earth could this Herminia be? And what are her poems doing under my dear niece’s mattress?”

  With that, she set the approach we were all to take. We didn’t know who Herminia was. We didn’t know how her poem had appeared in our house. And as the revolution was erupting up north, and the capital was being bathed in blood, Mamá sewed all Herminia’s poems inside the hem of an old cape.

  “What do you think?” the sist
ers Bobadilla would ask my aunt or my mother when they dropped in for a visit. “Who could this Herminia be?”

  “¿Quién sabe?” Mamá would reply. “Ana says Herminia is probably a man.” And I could see as she spoke, her hands making a small sign of the cross at her heart, in penance for the lie she had just told.

  I WOULD HAVE KEPT our secret. I did not sign my own name to my poems, not during our glorious revolution or the bloody siege of the capital or the uncertain days of one government toppling another. But then one day in early February of my twenty-third year, we opened El Centinela, one of the papers that had been allowed to stay in print on account of its innocuous content, and there was a flowery little piece in prose about winter and white snowflakes, signed Herminia.

  “Herminia has certainly come down a notch or two,” our old friend Don Eliseo Grullón said when he came by that evening with a copy of the paper Papá had already brought us. “Why do our writers have to write about winter as if we were North Americans?” It had become a fad to ape all things from up north, even to the extent of pretending we had snows in December and had to warm our hands at fireplaces. Don Eliseo shook his head. “Our Herminia, like our Josefa, has let us down. Maybe these glorious notes are just too much for a woman to maintain.” It made me feel sick not to be able to defend myself.

  “On the contrary, I think our Herminia is heading towards new horizons,” the sisters Bobadilla defended the piece. They had begun dropping by, now that the respected statesman Eliseo Grullón was a regular visitor. According to Don Eliseo, ours was the only household in the capital where he could talk to women about politics and poetry instead of hair ribbons and fabrics. “I think Herminia’s piece is darling,” the sisters Bobadilla continued. It seemed they spoke in chorus, though I’m sure it was just that they always agreed with each other, so their opinions were interchangeable. “‘White snowflakes dancing in the frosty air, as Mistress Winter dusts the village square,’” they quoted. I felt even sicker. If ever I wrote a poem about winter, I would make it accurate. “Truly, Herminia has grown more feminine. But what do you think, Don Nicolás?” My father was also visiting.