In the Name of Salome

by Julia Alvarez

  Backward and forward she goes, as her mother’s face begins to fade and the sound of the coughing to recede until it is the faint hooting of steamboats when the tide is up and they can come in the bay, and she can see them bobbing on the waters from their two-story pink house in the center of El Cabo, while downstairs the baby Salomé is crying, and her stepmother Tivisita is calling for Camila to come out from wherever she is hiding and say hello to her father home from the hospital, and she will go down, for she must go down, but for this moment she stands on the balcony with the sun so hot it will burn her skin darker, which she is supposed to avoid doing, trying to remember that first steamboat ride down to the capital with a sick lady coughing in the downstairs cabin and people crying over a bed of flowers and the silent parade of schoolgirls with black armbands stopping at the seven houses where their teacher lived before they arrive at the church of Las Mercedes and the bells begin to ring scattering the doves in the tower.

  This is how people can really die, she thinks, remembering her mother.

  BUT ALL OF THIS is the future which she has yet to live. Right now, she is crouched behind a pile of coal in the dark hole of a steamboat filling up with smoke. She cannot catch her breath. She is faint with the lack of air, her head is beginning to spin.

  She hears steps rushing down the corridors, thundering down the iron stairs, and the steam hissing in the air, and someone is shouting at the men by the boiler and they shout back, “NO!”

  There are more steps, more shouts, and just when she feels she is going to plunge down into the dark center of herself where her mother waits to take her by the hand and lead her to heaven where they will start a new life together, she swallows a big breath of air and her lungs explode in a fit of coughing.

  “¡SALOMÉ CAMILA!” It is her father’s voice shouting with such desperation she can feel his need drawing her up out of her hiding place. “¡SALOMÉ CAMILA!”

  Salomé Camila, her mother’s name and her name, always together! Just as on that last day in the dark bedroom she remembers everybody crying and the pained coughing and her mother raising her head from her pillow to say their special name.

  “Here we are,” she calls out.

  EPILOGUE

  Arriving Santo Domingo

  September, 1973

  “SHE WON’T KNOW THE difference,” one of the nieces is saying. As if along with my bad cataracts, I am also losing my hearing.

  “I can hear you, girls,” I call out. They are in their twenties now, but I think of them still as Rodolfo’s pretty girls. In Cuba, when they still lived there, they were the toast of the town, even after the revolution, when we weren’t suppose to be paying attention to such things.

  There is a moment of silence, and then giggles, little hiccups of laughter in the hall where they have been planning how to delay our excursion to the cemetery. Their father Rodolfo bought a plot for “for those of us in the family who aren’t famous,” and he kindly invited me, his half sister, their aunt Camila, to join them. A few weeks ago, I chose a spot, and made arrangements for my stone.

  Then, the trouble started up.

  “Now Tía Camila,” Elsa, the oldest of the girls, is saying, “how do you know we were talking about you?”

  “Because I’m the one being difficult, that’s why.” I respond to the touch of her hand by squeezing back. The softness of the skin and the shapeliness of the fingers recall another hand from the past. This is no longer unusual. At my age, everything is haunted by an antecedent. More and more, my loved ones surface in their young replacements, no doubt signaling my departure.

  For that reason, I am making a fuss now.

  WHEN THE GIRLS FIRST took me to the plot several weeks ago, I chose the lowest level in the three-tiered, outdoor vault, lower left, close to the ground.

  “But your marker is likely be covered over with weeds,” the cemetery attendant argued. He had a point. Down here, weeds grow quicker than we can keep up with them. “Wouldn’t you prefer the top, so everyone sees you?”

  “Heavens no,” I said, shaking my head. Who was this fresh, young man, discussing burial spots as if they were boxes in an opera house? “I want to be close to the ground. You see, I moved around all my life. Every decade a new address. This will be my first permanent home.”

  “You’re being so morbid, aunt!” My nieces groaned. Rodolfo was along that day, and for once he supported my view. “Your aunt Camila is right. We’re at the age when we must think about these things.” Daily, he and I compete for who feels worse in our mortal bodies: his arthritis to my touch of asthma; his painful left hip (“I can hardly walk!”) to my heart murmur and bad cataracts. It’s as if we are playing one of those old board games I used to bring back from the States for my nieces: Risk and Scrabble and—oh dear, if my revolutionary friends should ever hear of it—Monopoly.

  “Come, come, Rodolfo, you’re the baby,” I reminded him. At sixty-seven, he is the youngest of all of Papancho’s children, twelve years younger than I.

  As for the stone, itself, I told them, no angels, no bearded Christ—like a skinny Fidel—bearing his chest to show his heart. I had given them precise instructions, and so when we came back last week and Elsa read me what was on the stone, of course I made a fuss.

  “The name is wrong,” I told her.

  “You always liked going by Camila,” Rodolfo reminded me. “In fact, Papancho said you used to get annoyed with him when he called you Salomé Camila. You’d go hide.”

  Of course, Rodolfo was right, or partly right. After I realized that she would not be coming back, I hated to be reminded of my mother. But still, I longed for her—a longing that would well up in me in the middle of the night and send me wandering through houses, apartments, wherever it was I was living at the time. I tried all kinds of strategies. I learned her story. I put it side by side with my own. I wove our two lives together as strong as a rope and with it I pulled myself out of the pit of depression and self-doubt. But no matter what I tried, she was still gone. Until, at last I found her the only place we ever find the dead: among the living. Mamá was alive and well in Cuba, where I struggled with others to build the kind of country she had dreamed of. But how can I explain this to my autocratic baby brother, who every day seems more and more like a reincarnation of our crazed old father? Just a mention of Cuba makes him so angry that I worry he will precede me to the grave.

  “I want you to have the stone redone,” I told them, right then and there.

  “But Tía Camila, what’s the difference?” Lupe reasoned. It was on the tip of her tongue that here I had come from Cuba, where I had been going through any number of deprivations. What was an omission of a name from a tombstone I wouldn’t even live to enjoy?

  And then, I “heard” the elbowings and the hushings with the eyes. Humor her, their looks were saying. We’ll tell her it’s been changed, and she won’t know the difference.

  I HAD FLOWN OVER from Cuba to see Rodolfo and my nieces. Quinceañeras, graduations, birthdays had gone by, and their tía Camila had been too busy to come. Or so went my excuse. But in fact, once my pension was frozen in the States, my meager salary at the Cuban Ministry of Education would not stretch as far as a plane ticket. Then, Rodolfo sent me the money along with a note, “No excuses,” followed by the heart tug, “I have to see you before I die, Mamila.”

  At the airport, Rodolfo had been upset at my failing eyesight, my shabby clothes. “Is that all you brought?” he asked, staring at my small bag. I had debated bringing the trunk of Mamá’s papers, which I had kept with me for years. But right before my trip, I decided it was time and called up the archives in Havana to come pick it up. Poor Max (dead five years already!) must be kicking in his grave.

  That first afternoon as Rodolfo and I sat in rocking chairs on his galería, he brought up the question of my future.

  “My future? At my age?” I tried not to laugh.

  “Things are going to get worse and worse over there, you know that,” Rodolfo began,
slowing his rocking for emphasis. My brother, always so diligent with his scales as a boy, has learned to play his rocking chair like a musical instrument in old age. “Tell me something, Camila,” he added as if to prove his point, “when was the last time you had a dish of pistachio ice cream?”

  “I don’t like pistachio ice cream, Rodolfo. I don’t miss it in the least.”

  “I want you here with me so I can take care for you.” His voice had become peevish, phlegm from his last bad cold caught in his throat. (Residual bronchitis to my persistent asthma; kidney stone to the hernia that should have been operated on years ago.) It was a voice not so different from the little boy’s bawling for his Mamila to come out of her bedroom so they could go tickle the pig, Teddy Roosevelt, with guava sticks.

  “But how can you take care of me, Rodolfo?” I teased him. “You’re in worse shape than I am, remember?”

  “Camila, Camila,” he was rocking prestissimo—I had to swing myself back and forth to keep up with him. “Just the thought of you alone at Riomar—”

  “Sierra Maestra,” I corrected him. Perhaps that was why the many letters he claimed he wrote me never reached me. Along with most things, my apartment building had been renamed after the revolution. But Rodolfo insisted on addressing the envelope with the old name.

  “Just the thought of you all alone there—it would kill me, Camila, it really would.” He put his hand on his chest, that old gesture of Papancho’s, threatening to punish filial disobedience with a paterfamilias heart attack.

  “Rodolfo, dear,” I said, reaching for his hand. “Let’s talk about the real future. I think I should make arrangements.”

  That was when my brother offered me a spot in the cemetery plot he and Max had bought before Max passed on. “And something else,” he added, “I want you to get those eyes fixed.”

  “Why waste money?” I argued. In the three months it would take after the operation to be fitted with the glasses that would allow me to see, I would be dead. I was sure of it. Which is why I had come home, not just to visit my half brother and nieces.

  But Rodolfo insisted. “Think of it, Camila, to be able to see our faces clearly again. To be able to read poetry again.”

  “All right, Rodolfo,” I told him, “Do what you will with me.” I did not want to worry him with my premonitions. But I could feel it, the weariness of the old dog turning in circles around the spot where he has chosen to lie down.

  “YOU COULD BE BURIED with Salomé,” Rodolfo was saying as we drove to the pantheon to see my mother’s monument. I had already accepted his offer at the cemetery, but I think Rodolfo felt that I was cheating myself of the choice spot I could demand because of my connections. “We could make a case for your wanting to be with your mother and father in your final resting place.”

  “Oh please, Rodolfo,” I shook my head at him. “An eternity of visitors! What could be worse than that? As for being with Mamá, I learned how to be with her as an absence all my life. Why change things on me now?”

  We entered the echoing hall, and Rodolfo announced the names on the tombs as we passed them. We stopped at the tomb of María Trinidad Sánchez. It was she who had had sewn our flag and later requested that her skirt be tied down before she went before the execution squad ordered by General Santana (now lamentably buried directly across from her). Depending on the president, the pantheon of heroes changes, one regime’s villain is the next one’s hero, until the word hero, like the word patria, begins to mean nothing. That is another reason why I do not want to be buried here among the great dead. All I have to do is put my life next to my mother’s life, and I see the difference.

  At the final tomb in the corner, Rodolfo read out the names. Mamá and Pedro lay in the center vault—eternally together!—Pibín’s dying wish. On the right lay Papá, recently arrived from the cemetery in Santiago de Cuba.

  “Did you get a chance to visit Tivisita’s grave when you went to get Papancho?” Rodolfo asked me.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell my half brother what had become of his mother’s gravesite. When the Dominican government requested the return of the body of one of its former presidents, I traveled to Santiago de Cuba from Havana to sign papers and supervise the transfer. In order to exhume the body so that the former president could lie in state in the Dominican pantheon with his first wife, the poet Salomé Ureña, the shared grave with his second wife, Tivisita, had to be opened. In doing so, the large headstone was cracked and then discarded, so that Tivisita was left behind in an unmarked grave.

  My silence obviously puzzled my half brother. “I’ve always wondered, Camila. Did you get on well with Mother?”

  “Tivisita was always kind to me,” I told him. “We were friends.” One good thing about this new handicap of near blindness: my eyes no longer betray me.

  Perhaps I should have told the truth, that I had struggled to love her as I had struggled with countless others. I thought, of course, of Domingo and the handsome Scott Andrews, and my old friend Marion, still alive in Sarasota, both her eyes sharp, repaired by an exiled Cuban doctor using the latest techniques. “Come and visit,” she had written. “I will pay for you to see.”

  The struggle to see and the struggle to love the flawed thing we see—what other struggle is there? Even the struggle to create a country comes out of that same seed.

  In the name of Hostos, Salomé, José Martí . . .

  “I am indeed surprised,” Rodolfo was saying playfully. He had caught his agnostic sister making the sign of the cross. Of course, he had not heard my sacrilegious prayer.

  THAT AFTERNOON, RODOLFO LOANED me his car and the young driver he hires as he no longer drives. (His macular degeneration to my cataracts; his high blood pressure to my high blood pressure.) I wanted to go for a long paseo through the old part of the city, Mamá’s city. Rodolfo was tired out by our morning outing, Elsa was working and so was Lupe, so the baby Belkys—now in her twenties!—came along. Dear Belkys is pure Lauranzón. She doesn’t interest herself in the everlastingly boring history of the Henríquez clan—all those professorish half uncles with their dull books of criticism and patriotic poetry.

  “Where is my tangerine nail polish!” she cries at the top of her lungs. She cannot go out in the city with unpainted fingernails. Thank God I do not have to see those nails. Hearing about them is enough.

  We set out in the car and asked the driver to take us to Salomé Ureña’s house. “Where would that be?” he wanted to know.

  “Where would it be, Tía Camila?” Belkys asked, as if I couldn’t hear the man just because I couldn’t see him. “Would it be on Salomé Ureña Street?”

  “Of course, dear.”

  But once we got there, no one on the street could tell us which house it was exactly. With my poor eyesight, I couldn’t pick it out from the others, but I knew I could find it by feel. A plaque had been embedded in the wall soon after Salomé’s death. What a sight we must have been in that hot afternoon sun: an old, blind woman stroking the faces of the buildings on the south side of the street and a girl with orange nails and high heels trailing with a parasol so her already dark aunt would not get any darker. “Here it is!” I called out.

  “Here lived and flowered Salomé Ureña,” Belkys read the plaque for me. Our young driver had accompanied us, bringing up the rear, no doubt catching the gratifying sight of Belkys in her minidress. Elsa tells me that Belkys’s hemlines cause a stir wherever she goes. “Who is this Salomé Ureña?” he wanted to know. “I read her name everywhere.”

  I had to bite my tongue, I most certainly did.

  “She was one of the best poets of the Spanish-speaking world,” Belkys bragged—as if she would know! “She started the first school for higher education for women in the country. What else, Tía Camila?” she asked turning to me.

  I couldn’t think what else to say. I felt the old sadness welling up in me. And so I said simply, “She was my mother.”

  “May she rest in peace,” the young man said, hi
s hand flashing before me as he made the sign of the cross to seal his wish.

  WE VISITED THE SCHOOL. Mamá had opened the Instituto de Señoritas in 1881 in her front parlor, and except for the hiatus of some years when she was ill, the school had survived dozens of revolutions and civil wars and changes in government. In that respect, we had not changed as a people since Mamá’s time. Now the building occupied most of a block. “Describe it to me,” I asked my young escorts.

  “It’s olive green with a darker olive green trim.”

  It sounded very martial—like a building in Cuba after Soviet taste took over. “What else?”

  “It’s got bars at the windows,” Belkys said. “How creepy.”

  “Of course, with all the crime and vandalism these days,” the young driver lamented. He sounded as if he had been around for ages and had seen the awful direction the human race was taking.

  Once inside, we entered a din of scolding teachers and girls reciting their lessons.

  What had happened to the positivist method? I wondered. To young minds asking unsettling questions?

  “Do you have a pass?” It was one of the teachers, I suppose, patrolling in the hall.

  My dear Belkys, princess of brag, spoke up rather rudely, “We don’t need one. This is Salomé Ureña’s daughter.”

  “Right! And I’m the pope,” the huffy teacher snapped back. A challenge to her authority was something she would not tolerate, especially in the halls within earshot of her charges. No doubt it did not help our cause that a young man had accompanied us inside this den of females.

  “But I’m telling you the truth,” Belkys argued, her voice trembling. “Come on, Tía Camila, let’s go.”

  “Tell me exactly what it was like inside,” I asked her as we rode back to the house.

  And that is when she described the weedy, littered inner yard; the torn-up wooden floors; the cluster of cleaning women with sullen, tired faces, sitting in cane-back chairs; the many rules and mandamientos tacked up on the bulletin boards; the young girls walking down the halls with Dixie cups of something they had all learned how to cook that day.