“Girls,” my mother says, “get ready.”
We know the procedure: wrap up a platano and a chunk of codfish in a scrap of cloth from Mamá’s basket, slip on our oldest smocks, and then hurry down the back steps to a hole dug underneath the house for just this purpose.
“Can I bring Alexandra?” Ramona asks. My older sister won’t go anywhere without the porcelain doll with egg-yolk-color hair that our father has sent her from St. Thomas.
I suppose Ramona likes the doll better than me as it does not cry. There are days when I wake up crying and cannot even say why I am crying, which worries Mamá, as melancholy is an affliction like leprosy or dementia, for which people can be locked away. Sometimes when I cry so hard, my chest tightens up and I can’t breathe, which worries Mamá even more, as melancholy is a trifle compared to consumption. But Dr. Valverde says all I have is a touch of asthma, and Mamá must stop worrying or she herself will succumb to hysteria. All in all, we sound quite unhealthy.
But today has not been a weeping day. I have been entertaining myself writing in the back of one of the catechism books that my aunt Ana, a schoolteacher, hands out to her students. I look up from the Catón cristiano and ask my mother what is the fighting about today.
“La patria,” Mamá says, sighing.
Today the word catches my attention, the way a word will suddenly stare back at you and refuse to tell you what it means. “Mamá,” I say, “what is la patria?” and my mother does not answer but looks ready to weep herself.
A shell explodes in the street beyond the barred door, so that the walls shake and our crucifix comes tumbling down, Christ first, followed by his cross.
Mamá motions desperately. Tía Ana is already down the back steps and calling for us to come.
Quickly, I gather my things, including the Catón cristiano. It is not so much that I am interested in reviewing my catechism, but in the back of the book, I have illegally begun writing a small verse.
Several hours later, after three cannon shots have announced a change of government, we crawl out and climb up the steps, and then, since I am the smallest, Mamá and Tía Ana hoist me up on top of the zinc roof. A new flag is flying above the government palace.
“Red,” I call down.
“Your father will be back soon,” Mamá observes.
A WEEK LATER THERE is a knock on the front door. The front door is always kept closed because of the noise and dust of the streets. It is also kept closed because on a sunny afternoon in October a civil war might erupt and a band of men come galloping down the streets, guns drawn and firing.
But today there is just a knock and no war going on. Tía Ana is teaching the alphabet to fifteen little girls who have carried their own small cane chairs to our house on top of their heads. When these girls are older, they will enroll, most of them, in the school of the sisters Bobadilla a block away, the school that Ramona and I now attend. At Tía Ana’s school, the little girls learn how to sit properly in a chair, how to hold their hands when they are sitting down, and how to hold them when they are standing up. They learn how to recite the alphabet and how to pour a glass of water and how to pray the rosary and say the stations of the cross. Then the sisters Bobadilla take over.
At the sisters Bobadilla, the older girls learn manualities, which means they learn how to sew and how to knit and crochet; they learn how to read—the Catón cristiano and Friends of Children, and Elements of All of the Sciences (“The earth is a planet revolving around the sun”), and they memorize lessons in morality and virtue from Morality, Virtue, and Urbanity. But they will not learn how to write, so that even if they receive a love letter, they will not be able to write one back.
Of course, I am growing up with my tía Ana and my mother, Gregoria, who has left her husband, and these are not women to hold back orthography from a little girl whose first question on noticing the crucifix was not “Who is that man?” but “What are those letters written above his head, I, N, R, I?” And so, long before Ramona and I go a block away to attend the school of the sisters Bobadilla, my mother and aunt have taught us how to write as well as how to read.
That afternoon when there is knock, I run to the door because I am not in school today. I have caught cold from spending so much time in the damp revolution-hole this past month. I pull the stool over and open the top of the Dutch door because this is what I have been taught to do when there is a knock.
Standing outside is a handsome man with curly, black tresses (he wears his hair long like a pirate!) and a thin mustache and skin the color of fresh milk in a pail. He studies me a moment. Then his face lights up with a smile.
“Good morning, sir. What is your business?”
“Only to see those lovely stars! Only to hear my cooing dove!”
I have never heard anyone talk this way before. I am intrigued.
“¿Quién es?” my mother calls from the back of the house.
“Who are you, señor?” I echo my mother’s question.
“I am the bearer of this letter.” The way he says it, the words all rhyme like a song. He holds up a piece of parchment, folded over and sealed with a red wax seal I have seen before among my mother’s papers.
I take the letter, turn it over, and read. Señoritas Salomé and Ramona Ureña. “This is for me?”
“So you can read!” He grins. I don’t like this sense that I am providing him with amusement every time I open my mouth.
“I can write, too,” I pipe up, though this is something that Mamá has instructed me not to boast about, especially not to the sisters Bobadilla. But this man is a stranger—no one I have ever seen near the likes of the two elderly sisters, who are pure Spaniards, with a house made of stone and a roof made of tiles.
“Perhaps you will write a reply to my letter? You had better write that letter, or I die without reply!”
I nod. I will do anything he asks me, this man who speaks in rhymes.
The face softens with a look that I have seen before on my mother’s face. “Write me, little dove. Give it to any mule driver to deliver to the house on Mercy Street with the gardenia bush by the door and the laurel tree in the backyard.” He hands me a mexicano, which is a heavy, silver coin that I don’t often get to hold in my hand.
The man catches sight of something over my shoulder. All playfulness vanishes from his face. “Remember, it’s our secret,” he mouths. “Now put it away.” And before I can remember that I have never kept anything hidden from anyone in my family, I slip the letter and coin into the pocket of my pinafore.
A moment later, Tía Ana is at my back. I feel an antipathy I have never felt inside my own house before. It’s as if the hatred that has been causing all the fighting on the streets has been put in a small bottle, and stoppered—so that for days now there have been parades and sunshine and happiness—and now someone has come and opened that little bottle right here between my aunt and this strange man.
But my aunt Ana is a schoolteacher. She has to set a good example. Right this moment, her fifteen charges sit behind her, peering at the stranger and wondering what is about to happen. She reaches out a hand through the top opening of the Dutch door in a half abrazo. “¿Qué hay, Nicolás?” she says, and then over her shoulder she calls, “Gregoria, you are wanted.”
The fifteen little girls bow their heads to their tablets as Tía Ana turns back to them. Mamá hurries in from the backyard. There is an excitement in her face that I don’t often see there, and then also its opposite, a rein to the excitement as if Mamá were trying to make her face stop showing it.
“What is it?” Mamá asks Tía Ana, who glances toward the door, and then looks surprised herself. “Why Nicolás was just standing there.”
I look in the direction my aunt is pointing, and sure enough the man has disappeared.
“What did you say to him, Ana?” my mother asks in her quiet voice that is like something coming to a slow boil on a low fire.
Before my aunt can answer, I’ve lifted the bottom latch an
d run out the door to the corner. The stranger is already halfway down the next street. I call out the one word I know will make him stop. “¡Papá!”
Sure enough, my father turns around and waves back.
I DON’T THINK ANYONE ever told us why my parents separated in 1852, two years after I was born. In fact, until the day Ramona and I buried our father and met our counterparts in my father’s other family at the gravesite, we did not know why our mother had left our father. Of course, once people knew that we knew, they filled us in on all the particulars.
Supposedly, for several years, my mother did not suspect that her husband was finding pleasure outside their marriage bed. She was very much in love with her fun-loving Nicolás, who wrote poetry and studied law and came from a fine, old family in the capital.
The marriage between my mother and my father had been acceptable enough to his family, particularly because, if you count back from the birth of my older sister Ramona, there was very little room for argument as to what should be done. But had there been time to discuss the matter, the Ureñas might have had a long talk with their son Nicolás in which they might have pointed out that though Gregoria herself was pale enough, and though she spoke of her grandpapá from the Canary Islands, all you had to do was look over her shoulder at her grandmother and draw your own conclusions.
The way my mother finally found out about her husband’s transgressions was through her sharp-eyed, straight-talking older sister, Ana. Every time Nicolás did a little stepping out, Ana somehow found out. The capital was then a small city of some five thousand inhabitants, enough to keep your business secret if you kept your voice down and your clothes on in public. But Nicolás was a flamboyant man, a poet as well as a lawyer, and one time he found himself obliged to leave a woman’s house quickly, wearing only what he had grabbed on his way out of the window. It was early in the morning when respectable people were getting up, and not only was he seen by certain people on that street, but my father himself talked about the incident with great charm and frequency.
In those days, the Red party had come to power, and so my father had a post in the government. Early evenings, he would return from the palace to find a tearful wife who addressed him formally as usted and refused to let him put his hand down the front of her dress when his mother turned to stir the sancocho. That night he would find himself kneeling by her bedside, trying to convince her in that silver-tongue voice which could convince fellow ministers that fulano should be fined for watering down his milk or fulanito should be allowed to graze his cattle on public land, that what her sister, Ana, had heard was not to be trusted but was part of a political intrigue to discredit the new government.
And this worked, of course—why shouldn’t it work? If you love your charming husband, why should you believe your sister, who is three years your senior and still not married and known for her difficult temper and gruff manner? But then, one day this sister will tell you something worse than your husband was seen on San Francisco Street in the dawn hours with a woman’s mantilla wrapped around his bottom; she will tell you that he has started a whole other family and set up a whole other woman in her own house, while you are having to live with your in-laws and carry on all your fights at night in whispers after everyone else has fallen asleep.
And the next morning, after he has left for work, you dress your two little girls in their matching calico dresses, tell them to sit quietly on the bed, while you gather their other clothing and their second set of shoes, and your own clothing and second set of shoes, on top of a sheet whose ends you fold over and tie in a knot, and then you send this bundle ahead with a man on a mule you have hired to be delivered to Señorita Ana who has the little school on Commerce Street. Then, shortly afterward, without a word of goodbye to the sisters or the mother or father of your husband, you take your two girls down Mercy Street and up Commerce Street, and for the next four years you do not talk to this man you were married to and you do not let him see his daughters, even when you hear he has been thrown in prison by the newly victorious Blue party, even when you hear he has been exiled to St. Thomas. You say good riddance, though your heart has broken in so many little pieces that looking at those pieces no one would be able to tell what it was they composed when they were all part of something together.
IN THE BEDROOM, by the light of an oil lamp, Ramona and I write our first letter to our father on a sheet of paper torn from the back of my aunt’s Catón cristiano:
Dearest Papá,
could it be true,
you have returned,
just to be near,
two little doves,
who always thought,
you had run off
because we were
not good enough?
He writes back:
Darling damsels,
Do not dare
Darken dreams
With despair,
Father’s love
Always cares.
Little notes begin to go back and forth from Mercy to Cross Street. We all assume pen names. “Just in case the letters should fall in the wrong hands,” Papá writes, imbuing the correspondence with intrigue and danger. He signs his name Nísidas, which is a name he also uses when he publishes something disturbing in the paper; he renames me Herminia because I am more patient and persistent than my sister Ramona, who is given the pen name Marfisa, which our father never explains except to say, “Read the Italians!”
The letters are often in verse. Sometimes they involve little requests or reminders:
Herminia and Marfisa,
Tell your missus
Many thanks and many kisses
For the robe she made Nísidas.
Slowly, our father is regaining a foothold in our mother’s affections. She begins to take in his laundry, then she sews him his black robe and little Chinaman cap (he is a justice in the supreme court), measuring him with a piece of string, from shoulder to wrist, from waist to heel, then lingering as she measures from neck to small of the back where his buttocks stretch the seat of his trousers. She cuts his long hair so he does not look like a lunatic and saves his curls in her box of valuables along with her wedding earrings and my and Ramona’s first milk teeth. They will never live together again as man and wife, but his devoted love for Ramona and me, and the fact that he has stopped seeing the other woman, a fact that finds its way back to my mother because people will tell you about what they know you want to know about, qualifies her disappointment and allows her to perform some, if not all, of her wifely duties toward him.
Our mother now allows us to visit our father every day in the late afternoon when he has returned from the government palace or from the Colegio Central where he teaches or from the printing office of the small newspaper, La República, in which he publishes his articles and poems, sometimes under his pen name, Nísidas. We enter the two-story house on Mercy Street with its laurel tree in the inner yard, whose top you can see from the street. We are greeted by our nervous aunts and our watchful grandparents, who remark on how tall we are, how much we look like our other grandmother, and then we are sent along with a nod, “You know where to find him.”
Up in his room surrounded by stacks of books, old newspapers, a box of goose quill pens, an uncapped ink bottle, a trunk not yet fully unpacked, Papá sits in a rocker by the balcony overlooking the street. He is rocking to the rhythm of something he is writing, a bottle beside him from which he takes a swig from time to time, in celebration of a clever rhyme or felicitious phrase he has just thought of, and sometimes, though he tries to hide it, sometimes he is just drinking and crying.
We pick a book. “Any book you want!” Papá tells us, and then all three of us go downstairs to the lovely garden that he has cultivated and sit under the laurel tree and read, Tasso and Simon de Nantua and Florian’s Numa Pompilius, which I so dearly love I tell myself that one day, when I have my own little girl, I will name her Camila. (“She runs through a field of grain and does not bend a single stal
k, walks across the sea without wetting her feet . . .”) Our father also reads us poems, which we commit to memory: “The Ruins of Italica,” “On the Invention of the Printing Press,” as well as his own poems, “To My Patria,” “Night of the Dead Spent in Exile,” “The Beloved Bumpkin,” and “On Gregoria’s Birthday.”
SOMETIMES WHEN I THINK back on this period of my life, I remember it as intensely as a love affair. In fact, it is then that I begin dividing my life into B.N. and A.N.: Before Nísidas and After Nísidas. And if Before Nísidas is a dark and dreary feeling of being confined to a well with a cranky aunt and a sighing mother and a sister whose idea of fun is combing the yellow hair of a porcelain doll, then After Nísidas is a sunny, flowery feeling of sitting in the lap of a charming man, rocking to the music of a language that can sometimes sound like the low cooing of doves and sometimes like the piping shrillness of the Danish whistles our Papá once sent us from St. Thomas.
IN 1859, THE BLUES are in power again and my father is back in exile. This time, he is gone for over two years. Occasionally, he comes back secretly in the middle of the night to conduct quick, revolutionary business. I wake up knowing there is more light in the room than there should be, and I struggle to the surface of sleep, open my eyes, and there is my father kneeling by my side, a lamp in one hand, hushing my joyful cry. He promises me that he will be back as soon as our country is a free patria again.
“How long will that be?” I always want to know. And just when my chest starts tightening and I am about to burst out crying, Papá reminds me, “Remember, don’t waste them. Tears are the ink of a poet.”
And I try very hard to remember that tears are the ink of a poet. Especially at night, when I am sitting by my mother, making cross stitches on a baptismal gown, or stirring the sancocho so the víveres won’t stick to the bottom (if we have víveres—food is such a scarcity during this latest, yearlong siege of the capital that many nights supper is a tea of boiled leaves sweetened with molasses). Suddenly, I cannot help myself. I think of my father far away on an island all by himself, or I hear the latest victim from the latest skirmish for la patria screaming from his sickbed where his infected leg is being sawed away by Dr. Valverde, and I burst into tears.