She has escaped. She remembers an old engraving in a picture-book of myths in her father’s library: a girl running away to avoid a dark cloud of what looked like gnats pursuing her. But no one is after her: Papancho is dead, Mon is dead, Marion is now teaching in Vermont, “happy as a lark,” and Domingo has left, infuriated to be—as he phrased it—“an experiment.” She is free of that that little graveyard of the past she has been tending, which has been filling up with her personal dead, her failed loves, as well as all the new Cuban casualties of the Batista dictatorship.
“Pibín!” she calls out, rapping the window, but Pedro has not seen her. She struggles to open the train window but it will not budge. Quickly, she puts her notebook away in her purse and collects her things. She hurries down the long aisle with her bag, then hesitates before she shows herself at the top of the stairs.
HE MIGHT NOT recognize her. Twenty years have passed. She is forty-six years old. He himself looks so much older and more worldly than the intense young man of her memory, who followed her around the University of Minnesota like a spy. This Pedro has an air of accomplishment, his slicked-back hair liberally sprinkled with gray. He is famous now, she reminds herself, more famous than their mother ever was.
And she has changed. Everyone says so. She is thinner, the strong bones of her face more pronounced. She looks, well, famous, too.
Perhaps her face knows what is coming! In the last few months, she has been writing poems feverishly. For weeks she will be in a daze, lines going round and round in her head. Sometimes she thinks of this as utter foolishness—at her age—to become a poet. Her own mother blossomed early. By the time she was thirty, all her significant work had been written. But Camila could end up being the child who inherited her mother’s gift, her own blossoming coming later in life.
Pedro catches sight of her, and his face opens up with pleasure and emotion. She is relieved. Over the years, he has been very concerned about her “personal life,” as he terms it in his letters, as if he already knows that in the future his correspondence will be published (he is that famous), and this phrase is the safest way to refer to his sister’s perverseness. In fact, when he heard that Marion had followed Camila to Santiago, he wrote their father—Camila found the letter as a bookmark in her father’s copy of Lamartine—saying that the American woman should not be allowed in the house. “Una influencia malísima. Camila es demasiado impresionable . . .” A bad influence. Camila is too impressionable . . .
But all that is behind them now. They have gotten close again through letters. In fact, when she wrote telling Pedro about Domingo—holding up her new beau as if he were some sort of trophy, never mind that he was poor, a sculptor, darker-skinned than anyone in the family, with that exasperating stutter, never mind—Pedro wrote back congratulating her as if she had announced that she had finally recovered from a long illness.
He is carrying two small flags—the Dominican flag and the Cuban one of her adopted country. As she comes down the steps, he lifts them and waves a hearty welcome. She can see the soft look of pride and love in his eyes. Pedro is the one who is supposed to most resemble their mother, down to the darker color of his skin, and when he looks at her in that sweet way, she thinks, that is the way Mamá would have looked at me had she been alive today.
They fall into each other’s arms. When they pull away, she is surprised to see tears in her brother’s eyes. As she reaches up to wipe them away, his own hands mirror hers, wiping the tears running down her face.
THEY WALK THROUGH THE campus to the guest house where Pedro has reserved a room for her. Cambridge is still in the grip of winter. The trees are bare, the drab brick buildings also seem in a dormant state. Across a tree-lined yard, a group of young men in uniform march in formation.
“What is going on?” she asks Pedro in a whisper. She remembers this detail from Minnesota: how breath becomes visible in cold air, betraying she has spoken.
“Americans practicing for war. We have so many we never get out of practice,” he says bitterly. “Thirty-one just in Mamá’s lifetime. I added them up for my last lecture.”
She has also counted them up in the past, disbelieving that there really could have been so many. Recently, Max wrote her from the newly named Ciudad Trujillo. He had discovered a deep hole under Mamá’s childhood house—she remembers it!—where the terrified women used to hide during wars. They must have spent a lot of time underground.
Just ahead of the soldiers, a group of men brandish placards, PROTECT OUR PEACE, and shout slogans. “Not a peaceful thing to do,” Pedro mutters under his breath as they pass by.
“What have you got there?” One of them has broken from the group and is standing directly in front of them. He has the bright, empty eyes of a cat. He jerks his head down toward the flags poking out of the bag Pedro is carrying. Camila feels her shoulders tensing and her breath coming short. She wonders if she should introduce her brother. This is the Norton Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Harvard for the year. Would that give them safe passage?
Two young men come forward and hook their arms through the protestor’s arms, murmuring in his ear. Perhaps they are reminding him that they are peacemakers trying to save the world.
Pedro stands by patiently as if waiting for an impediment to be removed from his path. He has never been a fighter. My Pedro is not a soldier, no Caesar or Alexander storms his heart, Salomé’s final poem begins.
Camila quickens her own step, tugging at her brother’s arm. “What are they protesting?” she asks when they are safely out of earshot. Her own university in Havana has always been a hotbed of revolution, and Batista keeps closing it down.
“They don’t want to go to war,” Pedro explains. “El presidente Roosevelt has promised that not one American boy will die in this European war. But the feeling on this campus is that this country will be at war by the end of the year.”
She glances nervously at Pedro’s flags, poking from the side pocket of her bag. Given the rumors of upcoming war, carrying strange flags is probably not a wise move on her brother’s part. It does not help, of course, that he looks foreign.
“The whole world is starting to feel like our little countries,” Pedro adds, shaking his head sadly. He slips her bag’s strap over one shoulder. His hands disappear in his coat as if he were looking for something consoling in his pockets.
“WE’RE GOING TO A special place to meet everyone,” Pedro says, offering her his arm. She has deposited her things upstairs in the guest house and gathered up her hair in a fresh chignon with a silver comb, once her mother’s.
The place turns out to be a brisk walk through the university gates and down several twisting, narrow streets. The protestors have dispersed. Camila glances tenderly at her brother, thinking of all he must have endured these last nine months here by himself.
He has gotten old. His face is lined: a parenthesis has formed around the mouth; the brow is furrowed even when he is not scowling. He is fifty-six years old, but it is not just his age that shows. He seems tired, a sad, perplexed look on his face. He would not complain, of course, but in one of his essays that she found in a recent journal, she was surprised to read about “the terrible moral disinheritance of exile.” She felt a pang to learn so impersonally of her brother’s sadness, to know what a terrible toll his wandering life has taken. Unlike their brother Max, Pedro refused to stay on in Trujillo’s government and instead transplanted his family to Argentina, where he has been scraping out a living with two or three simultaneous teaching jobs. The Norton lectureship has been a godsend, but it is only a nine-month post. He is saving every penny for the dearth ahead.
They stop before a set of double doors with the dark silhouette of a bull on each half door. The place, known as El Toro Triste, the Sad Bull, is owned by a Republicano who was forced into exile when civil war exploded in Spain five years ago. Pedro’s friends and colleagues are gathering here, some from as far as New York and Princeton, for Pedro’s final lecture tomorrow even
ing. Since travel is becoming increasingly difficult, quite a few have taken the precaution of arriving a day early.
A lively, dark-haired woman comes forward and gives Pedro a warm embrace, exclaiming over how handsome and distinguished he looks. She is short and plump, with a countrywoman look, but with the expressive eyes of someone who has seen more of the world. “I am Germaine,” she introduces herself, taking both Camila’s hands in hers. She is French, which piques Camila’s interest. Ever since she learned about her father’s other family in Paris, she cannot meet a French woman of a certain age without wondering about the half sister and nieces she has never known. Do they look like Pancho? Do they look like her?
“Come meet my Jorge.” Germaine takes her by the arm. Her husband turns out to be Jorge Guillén, the poet, whose book of poems, Cántico, is one of the few books Camila has carried with her from Havana.
Jorge stands, tall, slender, with the distracted air of a scholar in his thick glasses. Actually, she is not sure yet that he is distracted, but she has already assigned him that quality. Now that she is writing, she is developing the bad habits of writers, creating the world rather than inhabiting it. Perhaps that is why her mother’s good friend Hostos banished poets from his clear-eyed, rational republic.
“It is a pleasure,” he is saying, as he gives her a quaint bow. “I hear you have just come from the killing fields of Cuba?”
“Jorge, Jorge,” Germaine scolds. She seems much younger than he, her high voice like a little bell tinkling in the autumn of his years. “Don’t ruin the mood of the gathering.”
The chastised Jorge sits down obediently, offering Camila the chair beside him. He seems as shy as she, but somehow the miracle that sometimes happens between the shy does happen: they can be garrulous together. They speak of Cuba, the growing repression, and suddenly she finds herself confessing what she has told no one else, not even her brother. “I’ve run away.”
His eyes quicken with interest. She has a story to tell him. “And where is our heroine headed?” he asks.
She feels the color rising to her face, as if she were a young girl receiving attention from a man for the first time. But the sad truth injects a sudden sobriety into their banter. “I’m not so much headed somewhere as I am leaving the place I came from.”
“We are the new Israelites.” Jorge nods, his long, sad face adding to the gloom of his observation. “What will become of us? We die if we forget. We die if we remember.” This time Germaine touches his shoulder softly. “But I shall leave the solutions to your brother. Quite a David that brother of yours, taking on such questions in Goliath’s own country!”
“Yes,” she says, smiling fondly toward where her brother is seated, at the center of a group of colleagues engaged in some heated discussion. She is so proud of Pedro, not because of his honors, but because of the quality of his mind. Thoughtful and serious, wise beyond his years, even as a child. “I’ve given birth to an old man,” their mother was supposed to have said about him.
This is precisely why she has brought, bound and ready at the bottom of her suitcase, the poems she has been writing. She has already sent them to Max, who has written back saying that they are “fabulous.” He wants to publish them in the Dominican papers with a headline, SALOMÉ LIVES AGAIN, but she has begged him not to, for she is not yet sure of them. She has also sent a handful to an old family friend, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and he has been more circumspect. “Fine line,” he has written here and there, but the pages are riddled with tiny, penciled suggestions. She knows from her teaching that this is not a good sign, the use of pencil intended to soften the indignity of the corrections. Still, his overall evaluation is encouraging: “You have your mother’s gift. Keep working at it.”
As Pedro’s friends stream in, Germaine brings them over to meet “Pedro’s little sister, Camila.” Salinas up from Princeton, the del Rios from Columbia, Casalduero over from Smith. Here are the best minds and writers of Spain, now living in exile, gathered to celebrate her brother. Perhaps, she, too, will some day create something of value that allows her a place in this illustrious company, and not just as Pedro’s sister or Salomé’s daughter either.
“Your brother tells me you work as a teacher,” Jorge says, resuming their conversation.
“I used to,” she corrects him. She explains that her university has again been shut down. She herself is out of a job.
Jorge lifts his eyebrows in sympathy. She has noticed how he uses his brows like a mime, for punctuation. “So, in fact, you are running away from the burning building.”
“Actually, I helped set fire to it.” But saying so feels too much like boasting, so she adds, “Or rather, my students did.” In fact, in her black teaching gown with chalk marks down the front, she came outside and joined them.
He smiles, nodding approval. “But can you also teach the pluperfect as well as work the guillotine?” One eyebrow lifts interrogatively. “I ask because there is an opening at Vassar. I have a friend there, Pilar. I could give her a call.”
Camila hesitates. She is not so sure she wants to return to the rigors of full-time teaching. She has spent the last twenty years in classrooms. It is time to spread her wings: to devote herself to her writing. She has a little money coming in. Pancho died penniless, but—no doubt Max’s doing—Camila has been receiving a small pension from the Dominican government as the unmarried daughter of a former president. She does not feel altogether comfortable collecting money from the dictatorship, but it is one of the compromises she is making for her art.
“My sister is here to enjoy herself and, I hope, to enjoy my lecture,” Pedro says, coming to the rescue. “Maybe I’ll take her back with me to Argentina,” he adds. She is surprised to hear him say so. A few months ago, she wrote him about that possibility, but Pedro wrote back explaining that life in Buenos Aires has become very expensive and his own situation there quite difficult. The country is flooded with European immigrants, fleeing the war. That is why he has decided to come north for a year to Harvard and is leaving Isabel and the girls behind to save money. “Join me in Boston,” he had invited her. “We can talk of the future then. Perhaps we will even invent the future there.”
The proprietor of the Sad Bull, a crusty old man with a day’s growth of beard and a beret, hobbles from table to table filling glasses. He has a pronounced limp, perhaps an injury incurred in the war. Camila has a sudden sense of all of them in the room as survivors of national catastrophes that have sent them scattering across the globe. She imagines a future historian coming upon a photograph of the assembled group. The great poets of suffering Spain gather in Boston to celebrate Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s final Norton lecture, the caption might read, names listed from left to right. (But who is the woman sitting in the corner next to Guillén? Ah yes! Salomé Camila Henríquez Ureña, the poet.) She feels a guilty thrill, giving herself a title she has not yet earned.
Pedro calls the room to silence. “In honor of our gathering,” he begins, “I would like to welcome you with some verses.” When Pedro finishes reciting Martí’s words of longing for his country, there is a hush in the room, as if the Liberator himself had just pushed open the doors, parting the butting bulls, and sat himself down among them.
Salinas follows, his body swaying to the rhythm of a lilting romancero, his voice breaking with emotion. He finishes with one of his own poems, a eulogy to the fallen poet Lorca, a curse on the Falangists who murdered him and sent all of them into exile! One by one colleagues rise and recite, and the chilly room fills with bright presences.
“It is your turn,” Jorge urges her after giving his recitation. “Your brother has told us you are marvelous reciter.”
Shy as she is, she does love to recite. In the classroom, she often surprises her students, by being able to call up any poem and recite several stanzas, if not the whole poem, off the top of her head. She goes through a mental index of her mother’s poems, wondering which one will have the most effect? “Sombras” would
be too grim, and “Contestación,” though about exile, a theme present in all their hearts, is not among Salomé’s best. Camila glances toward Pedro, hoping for a suggestion, and sees the tension on his face. He does not want her to recite one of their mother’s poems. Modernism is upon them. Salomé’s neoclassical style is out of favor. And the disapproval or even inattention of these eminences would hurt.
“Somebody from your part of the world,” Jorge insists.
“I shall recite a little-known poet,” she says, taking a deep breath. Among her poems, one particularly has received a positive response from Juan Ramón, an underlined FINE POEM scribbled across the bottom of the page, and only one penciled suggestion in the margin. “La raíz,” it is called, a root probing in the dark earth for water, dreaming of flowers. She has practiced saying it out loud many times to herself, but now, she is too nervous, and her voice keeps giving out.
When she is done, she sits down hurriedly, feeling the familiar tightness in her chest. These attacks first started when she was a child: a sense of panic and breathlessness would overtake her. At one point, Pancho had moved the whole family out of Santiago into the nearby hills, for he was convinced that Camila had inherited her mother’s weak lungs and would grow consumptive in the hot lowlands of the coastal city.
There is a moment of silence before Jorge calls out, “Bravo, bravo!” Others join in. Who is this poet? they want to know. A young Dominican, she replies vaguely, avoiding Pedro’s eyes, fearful of finding judgment there.
Later, as they walk back to the guest house, he says, “Camila, do you have any more of that poet’s verses?”
“A whole manuscript,” she admits. They often speak in this way, indirectly, tentatively, trusting the depths of their love for each other. “I would like you to read it and give me your considered opinion,” she adds. It is as close as she can come to an admission.
“Yes, I would very much like to,” he says.