In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  His favorite disquisition was on Pasteur’s germ theory, and how the spread of the disease could best be controlled by better hygiene. In our own house, he had set up sinks in every room and insisted we wash our hands constantly to avoid the spread of germs my students might have carried in. Pancho and his enthusiasms! I couldn’t help but recall the young man I had fallen in love with, eager to wipe out ignorance and injustice. Now his attention was directed toward the obliteration of germs with water and soap. You can imagine the rumors that got started, that Don Pancho had gone to Paris to learn how to wash his hands!

  Pancho loved to take my little Pibín along and show him off. The truth is my middle one was an astonishing child. He had taught himself to read when he was four, and then easily learned all his numbers. Recently, as a surprise to his father, he had memorized the names of all the bones and knew where they all were. “Scapula, fibula, clavicle, ulna and radius, humerus, femur, metacarpal,” he would recite in his little voice, pointing to the spot on his body where each bone was located.

  Pibín would come home with stories about what Dr. Alfonseca had said, and then how Papancho had corrected him. “It sounds as if your father was as brilliant as usual,” I noted.

  The boy cocked his head thoughtfully. “But he embarrassed Dr. Alfonseca. Maybe it would have been better if he talked to Dr. Alfonseca afterward?” Alfonseca was the elderly doctor who had saved Pedro’s life when he’d had the croup several years back. And it was also Alfonseca, who had kept me breathing through months of severe pulmonary attacks.

  “I’m sure your father didn’t mean to embarrass the kind doctor, Pibín.”

  He thought about that a moment, and then he said, “I don’t think Papancho meant to hurt him. I just think Papancho wanted to be right.”

  I looked at my Pedro. It was not just the fund of information in his head I admired. My son had a moral gravity which, in one so young, was astonishing. You’d teach him something, and he would puzzle at it, asking serious questions: What is justice? What is patria? Is kindness better than truth? And the one I could no longer answer for him, Is love really stronger than anything else in the world?

  I HAD ONCE ASKED Hostos the same question.

  Before he finally left the country, Hostos had come over to examine the oldest girls on their knowledge of botany, and he had lingered afterward. I knew this was my only chance to say goodbye privately. I had already promised myself I would not cry. I was afraid that once I got started, I would not be able to stop.

  He was restless, as usual, on his feet, going from object to object in the room—almost as if like a lost man he needed to find his way with clues. At the whirligig I had constructed to teach wind power, he turned to face me. I had been coughing quite a bit in the last few days of rainy winter weather.

  “Are you all right, Salomé?”

  “It’s just a touch of catarrh. Everyone has it.” I waved away the cough as an insignificance.

  “Yes, Belinda and María have caught it as well.” And then he paused, waiting, as if I had not yet answered his question.

  Perhaps I would have confessed the strength of my feelings had he not just mentioned Belinda. Instead, I asked him the question that Pibín was always asking me. “Is love stronger than anything else in the world?”

  “Why do you ask, Salomé?” Hostos was never one to leave a stone unturned.

  “Because I console myself in Pancho’s absence by telling myself that love is stronger than his absence, stronger than my fears—”

  I would have said more. I would have told him that I was now consoling myself with the same philosophy about his impending departure, and that it was not working. But suddenly, Hostos put a finger to his lips, his head cocked as if he had heard an intruder.

  He motioned for me to continue talking as he walked quietly to the door and pulled it open. There stood Federico peering in through the crack in the double door.

  “Perhaps we had better ask Federico what he thinks?” Hostos said. I could hear the anger in his voice, held in check by his positivist reason. I’m afraid I had no such self-control. “Is love stronger than anything else in the world, Federico, or shall suspicion and betrayal rule the day?”

  That night in bed, I cried as I had not cried since childhood. I could not stop myself. “Tears are the ink of the poet,” Papá had once said. But I was no longer writing. I could waste them now on my own sadness.

  ONE DAY, SHORTLY AFTER Pancho’s return, Dr. Alfonseca dropped by and asked to speak to Pancho and me privately. Ramona shooed the children from the room. Pibín walked out behind the others, his sad eyes clinging to me.

  “I don’t have to tell you, Pancho, that Salomé’s condition is serious. Her consumption—”

  “I beg your pardon, José, but I have examined Salomé’s sputum—”

  “You examined it?” I was mortified. How had he gotten close to my sputum when I didn’t even allow him inside my bedroom?

  “Your ponchera is left by the water closet every morning for emptying. And I retrieved a sample and examined it under my microscope.”

  I could see from Dr. Alfonseca’s expression that he believed this black apparatus was a boy’s toy, nothing to use in the effort to save the lives of human beings.

  “Koch has shown that consumption is caused by tubercle bacilli and I have not observed any such bacilli in Salomé’s expectoration,” Pancho went on. “Hers is an acute incidence of asthma aggravated by overwork, pulmonary inflammation, and . . .” His eyes wandered over toward me. Would he dare say it, I wondered—and by heartbreak?

  Alfonseca didn’t seem to know what to make of this Parisian parrot. Finally, he waved away their disagreement. “It does not matter what we call it, Pancho, but I do want to touch upon a rather sensitive matter. I believe that as a couple you should exercise caution, if not out-and-out abstinence—” (here Alfonseca went into his own fit of embarrassed coughing) “because a pregnancy at this point would be mortal for the mother.”

  Mortal for the mother? It sounded as if he were talking about someone else. You need not worry, I might have told him. There is no chance of that happening to me.

  “There are cases in which pregnancy has actually helped,” Pancho disagreed. As he went on to enumerate them, I broke out in a fit of coughing. Pancho’s lectures had this effect on me.

  “Surely your French colleagues would disagree with you, Don Pancho, fond as they are of applying Peter’s formula to these cases.” Now it was Alfonseca’s turn to show off. The two doctors were engaged in a medical cockfight of sorts. Both had forgotten about me. “If a maiden, no marriage; if a wife, no pregnancy—”

  “If a mother, no breast-feeding,” Pancho concluded the formula, nodding deeply in agreement. “This I know—but these strictures apply only if the patient is tubercular, and you are totally in error with your preliminary diagnosis, Dr. Alfonseca.”

  Alfonseca stood. By his heightened color I knew he was angry. “I will be taking my leave,” he said, bowing toward Pancho. “Perhaps you are right, and I shall be proved wrong in my diagnosis, Dr. Henríquez, but I am right about one thing. You are Salomé’s husband and I am her doctor. We should not both try to treat her illness. But then, Doña Salomé,” he added, bowing toward me, “you are the one to decide.”

  I stood, too, holding on to the back of the chair. I could see Pancho was waiting for me to say that he was my husband and as such he was the ultimate guide in all matters, including my health. But I did not address—indeed I did not know how to address—what Pancho was to me now.

  “You are my doctor,” I assured Alfonseca. I could feel Pancho’s angry eyes on me, which only helped bring on a new fit of coughing.

  EVEN WITH ALL HIS sophisticated theories, Pancho did not fare very well that year of his return. To put it plainly, his patients kept dying on him. In part, I do believe that he was experimenting with the latest surgical procedures in our poor little country but without medications or trained personnel to back him up. When he p
erformed the first ovariectomy on the island on Doña Mónica, who was rumored to be a mistress of Lilís, and she died, what were once whispered suggestions became out and out heckling.

  Lechuza! voices called out when he entered a patient’s house. Owl, the bird of ill omen.

  Matasano! Health killer!

  This persecution became aggravated when Pancho sided with Lilís’s rival. I’m referring, of course, to Don Eugenio Marchena, who had been Lilís’s minister in France but had now broken with the dictator. Don Eugenio and Pancho had become close friends in Paris, and the friendship continued on native soil. Certainly, the man had done us many favors, carrying mail back and forth, and accompanying our Fran on the ocean crossing. But I’m afraid anyone associated with Pancho’s Paris days now aroused only my suspicion. Whenever I saw Don Eugenio, all I could think was, How much does he know about Pancho’s other life that he is keeping from me?

  Don Eugenio’s right-hand man was Don Rodolfo Lauranzón, who had moved his family to the capital from Azua to help with his campaign. When Lilís announced he would not be running in the next election, Don Eugenio got it in his head, or maybe his friends Pancho and Rodolfo put it in his head, that he should be the next president.

  Many nights, those three gathered in Pancho’s wing, talking until late hours in loud voices that kept me awake.

  “Pancho, por Dios,” I pleaded with him one night. “Give up this foolishness!”

  “I cannot forget my dreams for my country,” he protested, slipping his hand in his frock coat like the statesman he now dreamed of becoming.

  “Neither can I,” I said quietly. “But I have been living in this nightmare for the last four years, and I can tell you that these elections are a trick by Lilís to flush out the competition. Woe to the man who takes him at this word.”

  Pancho was shaking his head as if he knew better. “Don Eugenio is going to change things—”

  “Don Eugenio!” I scoffed. “Without Don Eugenio, Lilís would not even be where he is today.” This was a fact that Pancho could not refute. It was Don Eugenio who had engineered all of Lilís’s loans that had steeped the country in debts for decades to come.

  Pancho let his shoulders slump; his hand slipped from his frock coat. “Salomé, must you always choose the contrary opinion in order to be at odds with me?”

  I had to think whether or not this was true. “I am too sick to fight with you, Pancho. But I am concerned for your safety.” Every day more and more testimonies against el Doctor de Paris were appearing in the papers. “You are the father of my children. I do not want them to lose you as I have lost you.”

  “You have not lost me, Salomé,” he said, looking me sadly in the eyes.

  Any woman who has known heartache from a man she loves knows how soothing such words can be. I felt myself wavering, the door giving way to the push of his shoulders.

  “Stand with me on this one, Salomé, I beg you. If you give your support to Don Eugenio, you know how much that would help him.”

  I did try. Whenever the man came over to our house, I listened carefully to what he had to say. He spoke about the Westendorf loans versus the loans from the Americans, long-term and short-term interest rates in silver or gold, private creditors as opposed to national creditors, et cetera et cetera et cetera, but I never heard the words Liberty Justice Equality come from the man’s lips, except in little crescendos, as if these words were a napkin with which to wipe his mouth at the end of a greasy meal.

  The truth is that I could not see that much difference between this man and our present dictator Lilís.

  But I kept my peace. By now, I was too ill to fight with anybody.

  FINALLY, PANCHO RECOGNIZED MY condition. He swallowed his self-importance and pride, and conferred with Alfonseca. It was decided that I would go by boat to the north coast where perhaps the drier air might cure me.

  Mamá and Ramona were present when the prognosis was delivered. Mamá had to sit down when she heard Alfonseca pronounce that I might not last out the year unless I took care of myself. For once, Pancho said nothing.

  “What about the instituto?” I protested. “I can’t abandon my girls.”

  “Your health is the most important thing right now,” Ramona declared. She had been helping me run the school, which was growing daily. At that point we had seventy-two students. Mothers kept coming to the house, their daughters in hand, pleading with me to let them in, even though they could see there was not an inch of space in which to put another chair in that parlor. Indeed, we had just leased a larger house in the center of the city right next to the cathedral to accommodate our growing enrollment.

  “I will move us while you are gone. That way you will not be inconvenienced,” Pancho proposed. He had to stay behind anyhow to keep his medical practice going. He also could not abandon Don Eugenio with elections coming.

  “What about the children?” Just the thought of leaving my little grackles for several months was enough to start the coughing. Everyone looked worriedly from one to the other, waiting until the attack was over.

  “Why not take them with you?” Pancho offered. “That way you can send them to Dubeau’s school so they can catch up with their lessons.” The implication was that in my devotion to the instituto, I had been neglecting my own children’s education.

  “But who is to go with her?” Mamá spoke up. “Ana is in such a bad condition, I should not really leave her.”

  “I can go,” Ramona offered, but I protested. She had just promised to help run my school!

  “What about one of the Lauranzón girls?” Pancho suggested. “There are four of them, surely they can spare one girl.”

  I was always surprised at how easily Pancho could dispose of other people’s lives. But the truth was that Don Rodolfo’s girls would probably welcome any distraction, cooped up as they were. Their father did not believe in education for his girls, who might learn how to read and write love letters. He had good reason to be watchful in the kind of city Santo Domingo was fast becoming, full of rascals and sin vergüenzas. Each Lauranzón lass was prettier than the last, the greatest beauty being the youngest, Tivisita, with a mass of auburn curls and the dainty face of a porcelain doll.

  Tivisita often came over from next door “to help Doña Salomé.” At least, this was the excuse she gave her father for spending her days at my house. And though I’m sure Don Rodolfo worried that she was visiting a home that housed a school for girls, he could not refuse his compatriot Don Pancho, who was, like himself, a staunch Marchena supporter, and whose wife, Doña Salomé, was a national icon.

  That good girl welcomed any task I gave her. I would leave her in back, mending the boys’ clothes or serving Pancho his breakfast of café au lait with a waterbread he insisted on calling a baguette. After his late-night meetings, Pancho woke with the clamor of my students arriving. And though I had Regina helping me out, she had too much to do to interrupt her cleaning to prepare yet another breakfast after serving mine and the boys, two hours earlier.

  About midmorning, I would glance up and find Tivisita leaning against the door to my classroom. At the end of the day, when she helped to clean up the parlor, I would catch her, running her hands over the charts of letters as if she could make sense from just touching them.

  I began giving her tasks that brought her to the front of the house during the beginners’ lessons. And each day, I would ask her to please copy this or that page for me, as if I assumed she could write. One day, when I happened into the parlor to pick up a schoolbook I had forgotten and needed in order to prepare tomorrow’s lessons, I discovered her sitting at the long table, with the book opened before her, reading haltingly, her finger touching each word.

  She looked up, startled, when she heard me, and closed the book quickly.

  “Please continue,” I said, smiling at her worried face. “You are doing just fine!”

  “Ay, Doña Salomé, if my father finds out . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “It’s o
ur secret,” I promised her. “Now you must stop pointing with your finger and learn each word with your eye—like this,” I read the passage out for her, and then she tried reading it back to me, keeping her finger still.

  So naturally, when Pancho mentioned taking one of the Lauranzón girls, it was Tivisita I thought of. She could make great progress learning her letters, up in Puerto Plata, away from her father.

  “Who will make my breakfast?” Pancho asked, before thinking.

  “Ramona can serve you breakfast,” I said, biting the smile from my lips. My sister and my husband glared at me in disbelief.

  Ramona had said she would do anything to save me, but she did have her limits. “Only if he can start getting up at a decent hour.”

  “A decent hour,” Pancho pronounced slowly, as if he had to examine the words carefully before delivering a diagnosis on them. His odd intonation had become something of an affectation. “A decent hour. A provincial concept of time, to be sure. That is very Dominican.”

  “Bueno, Pancho, where do you think you are?” Ramona folded her arms. “Paris?”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE I left the capital, Pancho was behind me every step I took, like our lively little Coco, who had recently passed away. Was I taking my Scott Emulsion along? Did I have enough azufre to burn, ipecacuana in case I got a fever? Had I packed enough socks for the boys, pairs of shoes, little sailor caps?

  “Pancho,” I finally said, “You are disordering my chaos!”

  I knew it was nerves. I myself had been having a terrible day, as any commotion always brought on the coughing.

  “I want to ask you a special favor,” Pancho finally said, sitting himself down right in front of me and taking both my hands. I don’t know if it was because I was departing, but I did not feel my usual repulsion.

  “I will take good care of our sons,” I vowed, thinking of course that was the promise he wanted to extract from me.

  “I know you will do that without my asking,” he said, looking at me with an odd tenderness in his eyes. “But that is not the favor I want.”

  He went on to explain. In October, the country would be celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival on our shores. Friends of the Country was planning an extravaganza at the national theater, with music by Reyes and lyrics by Prud’homme and speeches by everybody. He himself was planning to brush off the presentation he had made in Paris regarding the resting place of Columbus’s bones. Martí was probably coming. A poem by Salomé would crown the evening.