In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  “Why not in heaven?”

  “Heaven is for the dead,” he says. “We’re going to keep Mamá alive, you and I.”

  She doesn’t understand a word he has said, but she keeps her hand at her heart just so Mamá doesn’t have to die.

  REGINA IS COMING ALONG, too, but she is down below the deck because she will have a fit if she looks at the sea.

  Regina’s skin is so black that whatever she says has to be believed.

  Her family came long ago on a slave ship, in chains, and when she sees the long watery distances, she says those old people in her blood start moaning and she is liable to do anything, including throw up.

  So it is better if Regina stays down below deck holding on to her sides and smelling the smelly bottle she brought with her. When Camila puts her nose right against the opening, she smells her mother’s room, an odd smell that makes her nostrils tingle and spread like Patriota’s right before he whinnies when he sees her coming with a sugar lump in her hand.

  Max has stopped crying and Tivisita is back. “Let’s go sit on the deck chairs,” she says. “I’ll tell you a story.”

  “The story of the cigar box and cotton?”

  Tivisita looks doubtful. “Well, the true story of the day you were born.”

  “Mamá almost died.”

  Tivisita hesitates, a blinking look in her eyes like she doesn’t know what to say. “But she lived for three whole years—”

  “And then she died.”

  “Your mother is in heaven now, God rest her soul.”

  Camila shakes her head, red ribbons tossing, but then she catches a glimpse of Pibín from the corner of her eye. He is giving her his secret look that means, Don’t tell.

  She presses her hand against her heart. Her mother is as close as that—but Tivisita is not supposed to know because Pibín says Tivisita has not proven herself to be Mamá’s true friend. But why not? Tivisita is her friend and her father’s friend, and they are going to meet him in El Cabo where maybe there will be a big surprise, like Mamá coming back from heaven where she went to get rid of her cough and get a baby sister for Camila to take care of.

  THEY SIT ON THE deck chairs, Tivisita and Max and Camila and Pibín. Fran is older, so he is up in the cabin with the captain learning how a steamboat moves over the sea.

  She is older, too, three going on four! But at Mon’s house this morning when she could not remember what Mamá had said, Mon told Tivisita and Pimpa, “The child is too young to remember.”

  “I am going on four,” she spoke up. But nobody was listening to her, because they were arguing and Minina was feeling faint and that was why Camila slipped away to the dark hole to get away from everyone. She has been doing this a lot lately, hiding under the table or in the mahogany armoire or in the dark hole, because then she is like Mamá who has gone away to heaven to get rid of her cough.

  “On the day Camila was born,” Tivisita begins, and Camila feels a surge of happiness hearing those words like the sun is coming up in the morning and shining right on her face. When Tivisita tells the story of the day Camila was born, the story is different from when Mon tells it. Tivisita says she never put Camila in the cigar box with cotton. She put her in a pretty blanket. She put her mouth to Camila’s mouth and put air in her lungs and Camila cried and her mother woke up for three more years before she died.

  But in that sunrise of warm feeling, there is a patch of dark worry. “Why was Mon angry?” she asks Tivisita now.

  But Tivisita does not want to talk about why Mon was angry. “On the day Camila was born,” Tivisita repeats, looking at Max and Pibín to help her tell this important story.

  “What don’t I remember?” Camila wants to know. Mon said, “The child is too young to remember.”

  “You don’t remember this story,” Tivisita explains, “because no one remembers the day they were born.”

  “I do!” Max claims.

  “So do I,” Pibín says, lifting his chin.

  Her brothers do that a lot now. Everything Tivisita says can’t be, they say it can be. As soon as that happens, all stories are over, and everyone is very quiet, like now, listening to the waves splash on the deck as they move across the ocean toward El Cabo, where her father is waiting with Mamá and a baby sister to start a new life together.

  “WHAT DON’T I REMEMBER?” she asks Regina that night.

  “Child, go to sleep or this ocean is going to swallow us both up. You got to peepee or anything?”

  “I remember the day I was born,” she whispers to her nanny. She would not want Tivisita or Pimpa to hear her or they would say, “Camila, don’t tell untruths. Your mother is watching in heaven.”

  “And I remember the day the world was made,” Regina says. Camila cannot tell if her nanny is teasing because it is dark and so she cannot see Regina’s face.

  When she closes her eyes she hears the slippy-slapping of the waves like she used to in the creaky house in Puerto Plata before the sound of her mother’s coughing exploded like guns going off and a war starting, and Camila would wake up, crying.

  MOST OF ALL SHE remembers her mother’s cough—in the morning with the roosters crowing and all through the day and most especially at night when there is no other noise except the hush of the waves and the breeze blowing through the palms.

  “Mamá, are you all right?” she calls through the door.

  She is not supposed to go into the room unless Tivisita or one of her brothers takes her in, and then she is not supposed to touch her mother so she does not catch the coughing germs.

  She goes in anyway. It is a secret. There is a bench and there are books piled up on it, and Camila climbs up on one end of the bench and walks to the other end near her mother and sits on her books. Her mother puts a handkerchief over her mouth to trap the coughing germs and tells stories about where the name Camila comes from.

  A beautiful lady who walks on the sea and never ever wets her feet.

  One day her mother is writing when Camila walks in. A poem for Pibín.

  “Are you going to write one for me?”

  Her mother is a thin, sad face with funny glasses that make her eyes look big like fish eyes and long, bony hands that move oh so quickly over the blank piece of paper. “Yes, when the cough stops.”

  But the coughing never stops. Her mother gets skinnier and skinnier so that she looks different from other people. No one comes to the house except Dr. Zafra with his funny monkey faces and his thumb he can make disappear. They are staying up in Puerto Plata because it is good for Mamá’s cough but the cough doesn’t get better, and so Mamá says she wants to go back to die with her mother in the capital.

  Their father is still in El Cabo and says Mamá must stay in Puerto Plata for surely the trip will kill her. “These are Pancho’s orders,” Tivisita says, but Mamá says she is leaving for the capital and Tivisita can stay and tell on her if she wants to, which makes Tivisita cry. Then Tivisita packs up the whole house and writes a quick letter to Pancho (that she gives to Regina to take to the mail boat with a silver coin not to tell anybody) and they all get on the people boat, Fran and Max and Pibín and Regina and Tivisita—and by the time they get to the capital, Mamá is so sick, they have to put her on a cot and carry her home from the dock.

  Mon is angry and says Mamá is going to die on account of Tivisita allowing her to have her way and travel when she is in such bad condition.

  Tivisita cries and says it is not her fault and shows Mon the letter from Pancho that says Salomé must not travel. But now, Mon is even more angry and wants to know what on earth is Pancho doing writing to a young lady about Beatrice and Dante when his own wife is on her deathbed dying of consumption.

  And then Tivisita really starts to cry and Max is crying and Minina has one of those wasps in her heart that won’t come out.

  That is the first time Camila remembers hiding in the dark hole underneath the house.

  AND THEN THE DYING starts, in that dark bedroom, with lots and lots
of visitors keeping Regina busy bringing chairs and serving cafecitos no one wants to touch because they worry that the cough can spread on the rims of the china cups.

  Her father arrives from El Cabo, though at first she does not know it is her father. Everyone is in the back parlor or going into the bedroom in little groups, and so that afternoon it is Camila who hears the knock at the door up front which has been shut because as Mon says this is not a party and where on earth are they to put any more visitors with her sister dying. So Camila unlatches the door and it is a man in a frock coat and top hat and when she says, “Who are you?” he swoops down and picks her up and he says, “I am your father, Salomé Camila.”

  How much he already knows about her!

  “How is your mother?” he wants to know.

  “She is dying from the cough,” Camila reports.

  He looks smacked when she says so, and then he buries his face in her dress, sobbing like Max. “My poor child,” he is saying, “my poor wife, my poor family.”

  Then Tivisita comes in the room, and he puts Camila down, and dries his tears, and takes Tivisita’s hand and says how much he and his family are indebted to her kindness.

  “Not at all,” Tivisita says, and then she is crying because what of Mon said and how it is all her fault for allowing Salomé to travel in her condition.

  “That is unjust,” her father is saying. “It was already too late back when—” His eye falls on her, Camila, and his voice goes on its tippy toes. “She never recovered after that.”

  From the room in back they hear the spasm of coughing like a summons. “Mamá is calling us,” she reminds them in case they have forgotten.

  THE SUN IS RISING through the round window right on her face, making the water sparkle with fallen-down stars. Camila braces herself to hear her mother coughing.

  But there is no cough. Regina is gone from her side of the bed, and Pimpa is still snoring on the other bed, and Tivisita is lying on her back looking up at the ceiling.

  Up on the deck someone is hollering and Camila hears the rushing around footsteps of grown-up people busy with something important. From the bottom of the boat comes the whoosh whoosh whoosh of the steam rushing up the chimney like Fran explained to Pibín last night at dinner.

  Tivisita sits up and sees her awake, and smiles. “We better get dressed. Soon we will be in El Cabo.”

  “And see my father,” she says, adding to the story to make it move forward.

  “Yes!” Tivisita says, smiling again.

  “And Mamá and my little sister?”

  The smile fades. “What little sister? Camila, your mother is in heaven now.”

  “She went to heaven to get me a little sister.”

  Tivisita turns to Pimpa who has sat up and is listening to the conversation. “Let her be,” Pimpa says, making a secret gesture with her hand. “It takes time.”

  Regina is back with a lemon tea for the ladies and Camila’s milk in a bottle. “I can see land,” Regina says relieved, making the sign of the cross.

  In the name of the Father, Son, and Salomé, my mother, Camila says in her head, but she will not say it aloud as that is what started all the trouble.

  THEY ARE ON DECK and up ahead loom dark green mountains with a little town at their feet and pretty houses coming right up to the sea with zinc roofs flashing in the sun and fishing boats bobbing up and down, just like when they lived in Puerto Plata, which she remembers as the sound of her mother coughing.

  “The bay is too shallow to come in today,” she hears Fran explain to Pibín.

  “The bay is too shallow to come in today,” she chants, a song about their arrival.

  SUDDENLY, THE SHOUT! “There’s Pancho!”

  Camila cocks her head, this way, that way, and tries to fit the shape waving in the small boat with the tall man in a frock coat who came to say goodbye to her mother several months ago.

  “Papancho!” she calls out because she has been told that is his name.

  “Papancho! Papancho!” her brothers are shouting and Tivisita is waving her handkerchief and smiling.

  He shouts back, but the rowboat is still too far away for anybody to hear him. Besides, the steamboat is making horrible, squealing sounds that mean, Fran explains to Pibín, that they are stopping.

  As the boat draws closer, she can see her father standing and waving. Another man is rowing. But where is Mamá? Where is the baby sister from heaven?

  “Pibín,” she asks him, “Where is Mamá and the baby sister from heaven?”

  Pibín looks down at her, frowning. As if he thought she were older, as if he thought she knew better. “We’re not going to have a baby sister, Camila.”

  “You’re the baby sister,” Max taunts. “Baby! Baby!”

  Camila ignores him. “Why can’t we have a baby sister, Pibín?”

  Max’s face gets red like just before he bursts out crying. “Because Mamá is DEAD, stupid!” he says, like slamming a door in her face.

  She sees the meanness in her brother’s face, and that more than anything is what makes her want to cry. Maybe someone will scold Max for calling her a baby, naughty boy! But everyone is too excited with the boat approaching, and Tivisita and Pibín and Fran are hurrying to greet her father as he comes up the rope ladder and throws his arms around them.

  Camila is not going to cry in front of everybody and be called a baby again. She runs from the deck, down the first stairs, past their cabin where Regina is tying up their bedding, and on down the narrow passageway of the boat rocking, and down the steep stairs to the dark hole with the boiler making gurgling sounds and men without shirts cranking open valves and a great whoosh like steam escaping out of a kettle’s spout.

  “Stoke her down!” one of them shouts.

  She crouches behind the coal pile in the heat of the nearby furnace, listening to the men put out the fires and stop the boat that she thought was taking her to her mother.

  IT GETS SO HOT and steamy, she cannot breathe, but she must not cough or they will find her and take her away to El Cabo, where she now knows she will not be seeing her mother.

  But where is Mamá?

  In heaven? But where is heaven?

  In her heart? But then why doesn’t her mother come out so she can see her?

  The last day, her mother tried to tell her where she would be. But the handkerchief was over her mouth and so Camila could not make out the words she was whispering.

  Tivisita had dressed her up in her white dress with the embroidered leaves on the collar like her head is a flower. “Dear heart,” Tivisita said, kissing her forehead, “you must be very brave.”

  “What am I to do?”

  “Your Mamá wants to hear you recite ‘El ave y el nido.’ And she wants to say goodbye to you.”

  “Where is she going?” Camila asked, suddenly afraid.

  For days now, so many people have been dropping by that straw has been put down on the street in front of their house so the noise of carriages won’t disturb her mother. People are coming in and out of the dark room, crying and shaking their heads sadly when they look at Camila. But Mon will not let Camila go in there because she says it won’t be good for Camila to see her mother in this condition.

  That last day, when Tivisita is done dressing her, Mon comes and carries her into the dark room. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust, but slowly she recognizes the figures, ranged around the bed, handkerchiefs dabbing at their eyes: fat Archbishop Meriño with his big red sash, and Dr. Alfonseca with yellow streaks on his white mustache where he blows out smoke from his nostrils, and her mother’s students, Luisa and Eva, her grandmother Minina, her three big brothers, her uncle Federico, her pretty aunt Trini, and Tía Valentina with her cousins from Baní—it seems everyone they know is here.

  She looks from one to the other, searching for her mother, her eyes finally falling on the pale face lost in the big bed, surrounded with sweet-smelling white flowers and green sprigs from the laurel tree.

  �
�Mamá!” she calls out and the eyes open and the lips spread in a faint smile.

  Mon places a handkerchief over her mother’s mouth, the center sinking down as her mother takes a breath to speak. Immediately, she breaks out in a spasm of coughing.

  “Recite for your mother!” her father commands.

  How can she remember the words of “El ave y el nido,” when her mother looks so bad? “Go ahead,” Mon encourages. “Your mother wants you to recite for her.”

  She looks at the frail figure lying on the bed. She wants to do anything to please her and keep her here. And so she begins reciting the poem her mother wrote years ago about a bird flying away because her nest has been disturbed.

  When she is done, many of the ladies begin to weep.

  Her mother motions for her to come closer, but her father holds her back. Mon whispers something to her father, and he finally lets Camila go stand next to the bed.

  She is looking right into her mother’s eyes, and she can see her mother moving farther and farther away, but struggling also to get loose from whatever is pulling her away to say something to her.

  The handkerchief flutters—the words are trapped beneath it. She leans in closer, turning her head toward the sound the way she has seen Minina do with her good ear to listen better. But then her father bends down beside her, pushing her head away.

  “She is saying something.” He holds up his hand for everyone to keep quiet. “‘I see more light,’” he repeats. Then, he lifts her hand as if he is going to kiss it, but very soon he lays it back down on her tummy next to the other one. “Salomé is gone,” he sobs, bowing his head.

  Everyone makes the sign of the cross. Archbishop Meriño starts a prayer. Some of the ladies burst out crying.

  But her mother is not gone. Camila sees the eyes flick open, the handkerchief stirs, the hand reaches out to touch hers.

  Or did this really happen? How can she be certain that what she heard is what her mother actually said when her mother’s mouth was covered up and her voice so faint?

  So, she plays the scene back. She exits the room, Tivisita dresses her, she goes back to the last trip on the boat, to Puerto Plata and the sand and the waving palm trees, to the room with the sunlight, where her mother sits writing a poem, and coughing, and then she starts over.