“Domingo,” he says again, smiling, as if he has caught her at a petty error, as if they are playing a silly board game and he has just rolled the dice with the winning number.
Let him have his little triumph, since the next thing he tries to say will defeat him with a tricky diphthong or consonant. She has not yet figured out what specific combination of sounds causes him trouble.
“I have photographs your b-br-brother sent th-th-th—” He has stumbled upon a word he cannot possibly say. A helpless look comes on his face. She provides several suggestions, but none of them is right.
He waves off the word and continues. As far as she can make out, Max has sent some of Pancho’s photographs to whatever foreign government office has commissioned this bust as a gift from Cuba to the Dominican Republic. But Domingo needs more to accomplish the job. “I would like for you to pose . . . if p-p-possible.”
This is certainly peculiar. “The bust is not of me,” she reminds him curtly.
“Your b-br-brother wrote that you r-r-resemble your father. The minute I s-s-saw you, I could s-s-see Don Pancho.”
Years ago, of course, she did not like to be told that she looked like Pancho. She wanted to look like her mother, the beautiful fantasy mother made up by a London painter. This sculptor is at least trying to be accurate. Still, why does he need her to sit for this bust—he’s got pictures, many pictures. Pancho was a public man, and he liked being photographed.
“I need to capture the living f-f-force inside the s-s-stone.”
She is taken aback by this simple description. It’s as if one of her less-talented students had surprised her with a highly original answer. She rebukes herself for taking this man so lightly.
“It would only be a s-s-session or two. My studio is . . . close. Would you consent?” His stutter is becoming less pronounced. Maybe it gets worse when he is nervous, and he has begun to relax with her. Even so, each time he opens his mouth, she tenses up, holding her breath, as if that might help him. He is a lucky man, she thinks. I’ll do anything he asks just to spare him having to convince me.
“You may count on me,” she says, turning to go. The words have popped out, unbidden! Her mother’s first words to her father. How very strange.
As she joins her ladies, she realizes her hands are perspiring. The back of her neck is wet. Perhaps the effort of helping the sculptor talk has worn her out. Her mind wanders while she works. She finds herself picturing the man she has just met, his powerful presence, itself like a form carved roughly out of stone. The fantasy is so vivid that when she looks down at her placard, she realizes she has written his name DOMINGO in large, black capital letters.
IT IS A NUISANCE to be adding yet another compromiso to her tight schedule. They have just received notice that a delegation of American journalists will be arriving at the end of the month. A committee must be organized to welcome them and apprise them of the situation. Batista is in full control of the army and clamping down on civil liberties. This must be brought to President Roosevelt’s attention. In his fireside chats, the calm, confident president has promised to help the downtrodden and poor in his own country. Perhaps he will extend the same consideration to his neighbors to the south.
There are also visits to schedule with different party leaders to put in that last push so that the women’s vote comes through. The students want their university reopened, and a group of Lyceum ladies will be hosting an afternoon garden party for Mendieta and Batista, hoping that the puppet president and his puppeteer can be swayed over meringues and Mary Pickfords.
And in the midst of all this, she has agreed to go sit for two hours at a time so this sculptor can capture the likeness of her father. Even in death, her father makes so many demands on her!
Marion used to accuse her of purposely piling on responsibilities like a child adding one more card to her castle of cards to see if it will hold. “How strong do you have to be?” she’d asked. At least as strong as Mamá, Camila would think. But unlike her mother’s broad shoulders, which carried the future of her nation, Camila’s are mostly used to give piggyback rides. It is she who has been tending to the old people, soothing ruffled tempers, paying the bills. It is she who is making sure her half brothers get some kind of education. There has never been much time for work that interests her.
Even before her father’s death, when the family was still living in Santiago, it was her teacher’s salary that provided the backbone of the family finances. Marion had left Cuba “for good,” frustrated with Camila’s devotion to her family and homesick for her own country. It had been a painful separation, but slowly, Camila had come to understand that Marion’s own demanding personality had occupied whatever was left over of her time and energy.
With Marion’s departure, Camila began her trips to Havana. A week at a time, whenever there were vacations, recesses, or the increasing school shutdowns, she would take off. She told Pancho and the old tías that she wanted to see her half brothers and to catch up on some theater and on her beloved opera. But mostly she just wanted to get away and be a part of a larger world.
She always stayed at the university barrio with her “baby” brother Rodolfo, who was still as devoted to his older sister as he had been as a child. She was not surprised to discover that he was a popular student leader, charming as he was and dashingly handsome. (Un martillo, the girls called him—a hammer, because he could knock them out “with the blow of one smile.”)
It was Rodolfo who had gotten her involved in his rallies and gatherings, where she met other women, many of them professionals and unmarried like her. Sometimes she had to smile at herself. Here she was—enslaved to her family’s smallest demands and fighting for these larger freedoms. But it sort of made sense. Hadn’t it always been easier for her to live abstractly rather than in the flesh?
Camila and her new friends decided to found their own group. To avoid harassment, they came up with the idea of giving themselves a name that would make them sound like one of the prestigious social clubs of Havana. Lyceum Lawn and Tennis Club read the gold-lettered sign above the door of the stucco house they rented as their center. In the backyard, a single seedy tennis court gave some truth to the lie that theirs was really a ladies’ sporting club.
Soon, Camila had a secret life going on in the capital. She lived in fear of her picture getting in the papers, LYCEUM LADIES STORM THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE DEMANDING VOTE FOR WOMEN. (She could imagine the headlines and had often composed whole articles in her head as she marched: “Don Pancho Henríquez, the peace-loving former president of the Dominican Republic, who presently resides as our guest in Santiago de Cuba, expresses deepest regrets at the behavior of his rebel daughter.”)
Pancho was always threatening to die if his children disobeyed his wishes. It was to keep her secret from her ailing father that she began to wear her trademark hat at protests, a black cloche with a veil she could let down to muffle her face in photos. Of course, all the Lyceum ladies wore hats and gloves in keeping with their Lyceum policy that they look the part of señoras and señoritas even as they stormed the palacio or the policía.
And so, for her first session with Domingo, she appears at his door dressed up in her protest hat and gloves and wearing the black suit she has been alternating with her other dark clothes this last month. She is surprised at her own boldness. She knows nothing about him. Plain Domingo, he had said, smiling—not triumphantly, no, she had got that wrong—smiling irreverently, as if he were refusing to cover some private part of himself by not availing himself of the polite title of señor when she addressed him.
The truth is, it makes no sense that Domingo should ask her to pose, and even less sense for her to agree. Handsome Rodolfo is the spitting image of their young father. All one has to do is look at the photograph Pancho had taken of himself his first year in Paris. Of course, Max might not have told the bust committee about Rodolfo, favoring as he always does his own “first family,” as he calls them.
But Camila c
ould have told Domingo from the start, the one you want is my half brother. Instead she has accepted this invitation because, plain and simple, she wants to. She has not felt this intrigued by a man since Scott Andrews over a decade ago, and that attraction was so tangled up with the politics of her father’s situation that she cannot say what she actually felt for the man himself. But these feelings are as clear and shocking as sunlight at high noon, all shadowy ambiguities banished. In fact, recently, when her thoughts stray at meetings and marches, she is thinking about Domingo, but not just the innocent replay she entertained after their first meeting, but vividly sensual thoughts that make the color rise in her face and her hands sweat inside her gloves.
“You have come dressed for a funeral,” he notes as he lets her in the door. The sentence slips out in such an easy, flowing way she doubts he has a stammer after all.
“I am still in mourning clothes,” she reminds him, trying not to sound annoyed. Not that she believes in the morbid practice, but she has complied to assuage her aunts. “Anyhow, it is my face you are after for a bust, is it not?”
She has put him on the spot, and the stammer starts up. “Y-y-yes, of c-c-course. Please c-c-come and s-s-sit down.” He helps her off with her suit jacket, and then, as if she were no more than one of his piles of clay, he positions her in a chair, taking her face in his large hands and tilting it here and there as if to make a resemblance come to the surface.
Finally, he gives up. Something is not working. He sits down on a stool and folds his arms across his broad chest, studying her. “Your f-f-father will not appear.”
She is about to lose patience with him. “Of course not, my father is dead.”
“No, he is not,” Domingo says, shaking his big head.
THE AFTERNOON HER FATHER died, she was teaching a geography class across the street. With the frequent school closings, she was having to give private lessons to make ends meet. She had just taken out the globe to show little Ricardo Repilado where her brothers and half brothers were all now living—Pedro in Buenos Aires; Rodolfo and Eduardo in Havana (“I know where that is!”); Cotú studying in France (where Pancho’s other family lives—three petites filles pen notes to grand-père Papancho with baisers for their tante Camille); Fran and Max in Santo Domingo (where her family is from).
“Then why do you live here?” the bright boy was asking her.
She was wondering how to explain (briefly) that they had originally come to Santiago in exile; that now and then, her father had returned to serve in one new government or another, leaving his family safely here, once even serving as president; that during the U.S. occupation the whole family had more or less settled in Cuba; that they had stayed on because a dictatorship had sprung up back home—although a dictatorship soon sprung up here as well! Camila had finally just said, “That is a good question, Ricardo, which we will take up at another time,” when she saw her old nanny Regina at the door.
“Your father has a pain.” Regina was breathless, clutching her side as if she had her own pain. Regina was too old and fat to be put into such a state of alarm. Camila felt a flash of annoyance at Pancho’s histrionics. Pedro once told her that he could not open a letter from their father without experiencing tremors in his hands. No doubt, this was just another one of Pancho’s episodes. Perhaps an argument with Mon had brought it on. “Tell Pancho, I’ll be over when I’m done,” she said, dismissing the old woman.
But something about the docile Regina’s refusal to leave, her stance by the door, casting a long shadow across the nursery floor, made Camila go out to the hall to listen to the full report. “Your father was standing on his chair to get down one of his books, and he fell . . . We found him on the floor, Doña Ramona and I . . .”
Camila was out of the house and at the front gate before she realized she was carrying the globe in her hands. Marion used to say that nothing could make Camila hurry. But she knew if Pancho had fallen off a chair at seventy-six years old, she had better rush to the rescue.
In fact, she had a scolding already prepared once he recovered. How many times had she begged him to please not climb on chairs to get books down? He could ask Regina or ask her for whatever he wanted. But Pancho complained that she was always in Havana or giving classes or lectures, and Regina had gotten too old herself to be getting up on a ladder. Besides, Regina’s eyes were so bad that she always brought down the wrong book. One day recently, he found himself reading Dante when what he had wanted was some lighthearted Cervantes.
Their Santiago house was a rental, a pale yellow adobe with four white columns that today reminded her of nothing else but a mausoleum. She shuddered as she entered the front parlor that served as her father’s consultorio and saw one of the pet monkeys sulking in a corner. The room did not give the impression of a doctor’s office. Instead of diagrams of bones or muscles in the human body, the walls were lined with books. Atop the bust of Cervantes rested Columbus’s ruffled collar. A few weeks ago, the old pet bear had died. Pancho had been inconsolable. He had always loved animals.
She found him sitting in his soft chair, Mon and Pimpa beside him, each reporting to the other what might be the matter with their brother-in-law. Soon, Camila thought, they will be arguing about it.
Pancho was deathly pale. “Camila,” he said gratefully when he saw her enter the room, shifting his hand on the armrest. He did not seem to have the strength to lift it in greeting.
She knew the instant she saw him that this was no attack of imaginary illness on his part. Some large, incontrovertible thing had entered his body, and it was not going to leave without him. She knelt down in front of his chair and looked up at him. “This is my last illness,” he said, uncertainly, as if he wanted her to talk him out of it.
“Nonsense, Pancho,” Ramona scolded. “I’m eleven years older than you, and look at me.” Ramona was hefty, her legs so large that, Rodolfo once joked, seeing her standing at the entrance, it looked like the house had two extra columns.
“Have you called the doctor?” Camila asked her aunts. Dr. Latorre lived two blocks away.
Ramona nodded. “He is on his way.” And as if the words had the power to summon him, Dr. Latorre entered the room. One look at his patient, and the younger man’s cheerful look vanished. He seemed to see what Camila had seen in her father’s face.
“What happened, Don Pancho?” Dr. Latorre asked, hurriedly unbuttoning the old man’s collar. Before Pancho could answer, Dr. Latorre silenced him with a dip of his head, so he could listen closely to the stethoscope’s report.
It turned out that Pancho had indeed climbed a chair in search of a book, but the fall had come when he was walking back to his chair to read it. He was about to sit down when he felt as if someone had struck him in the chest. “With every intention of knocking me over,” her father said peevishly as if reporting some bully’s misbehavior.
Dr. Latorre had filled a syringe from a small vial. After the injection of morphine, Pancho seemed to relax and some color returned to his face. Pimpa and Mon left the room to make the phone calls Pancho insisted they make to his sons in Havana with the news. For a few minutes, the doctor and patient discussed his symptoms. Suddenly, Pancho put his hand to his heart with a look of surprise on his face, as if that bully had belted him again!
Dr. Latorre rushed forward, listening again for a heartbeat. He leaned closer and closer as if he were hearing a sound withdrawing further and further from him. Finally, he took his stethescope away from his ears and looked down at Camila. “I’m sorry,” he said simply, as if he could not bring himself to tell her that her father was dead.
She did not react at all. She felt numb, as if she herself had been dealt a great blow and was unsure whether she would be able to get up. She was still kneeling when Dr. Latorre left the room. She heard her aunts sobbing as they redialed the numbers they had just dialed to reinform their nephews in Havana. She looked up at Pancho, thinking how odd it was that she had lost her father and felt nothing. He seemed alive, the e
yes half opened, the lips still moist with saliva, the white hair on his head blowing a little from a breeze coming through the window. “Papancho?” she whispered, shaking his arm to wake him.
She looked around the room as if for help, and that was when she saw the book that her father had retrieved from the shelf before feeling ill. It was a copy of her mother’s poems, fallen face down, so that several pages were folded over, making it impossible to tell which of her mother’s poems her father had sought on his last afternoon in this world.
She picked up the book and straightened the pages. Before putting it back up on the shelf, she turned to the last poem. She could still make out the erased pencil marks where she had once adjusted her mother’s words. Then she turned to the poem her mother had written when her own father died, “¡Padre mío!” and her numbness broke, and her eyes filled with tears.
BY THEIR THIRD SESSION, Domingo reports that he has begun work on the bust. He has explained how he sculpts from sketches, not from the live model. “If someone is in the room, I cannot g-g-give myself to the s-s-stone.” He makes sculpting sound like some private act of lovemaking.
“But I will n-n-need s-s-some more sessions with you,” he explains. It has taken a while for her father’s face to come through.
“I am very busy with my own work right now,” she hesitates. Work is how she describes her Lyceum activities to her old aunts when they ask where she is going as she leaves the house. After the funeral, she gave up the rental in Santiago and moved the whole household with her to Havana, leaving the animals behind. Two monkeys, a parrot, a pony, and a dozen ducks were gifts to the local park. Little Ricardo Repilado talked his mother into letting him keep Coco’s great-great-great-granddaughter.
The move has not been easy on the old aunts. They are still dazed by the change. They cling to her at the door. They have been listening to the radio. There are raids and roundups and all kinds of horrible things going on out there. Can’t she stay? Camila thinks of them as family sirens, luring her back to the greater danger, a closed-down life at home. “I’ll be fine,” she promises.
In the Name of Salome Page 15