Ramona did appear, sooner than we had planned, saying that our cousin Valentina from Baní had moved in with Mamá and our aunt Ana in the interim. Mon was a sight in her netted hat and gloves with a cape over her shoulders and a parasol over her head, every surface shielded in some manner. And there was a considerable amount of surface—for my sister had grown stout with age. It was no secret in our family that Ramona hated to travel, believing every boat would sink, every train be held up by bandits, every bit of unpeopled countryside full of vermin and wild animals. She had read too much Plutarch, I think, and Marco Polo. But she would do anything in the world for me, and so here she was, dressed in the armor of a lady ready to battle the wilderness for her little sister.
But the real battle took place from the very first day indoors. Ramona was not one to take direction from anyone, “Especially not from some little girl who looks like my old doll.” Not that Tivisita was one to contradict anyone, but Pancho had given her strict instructions, which often Ramona would oppose just to be at odds with her philandering brother-in-law. I had told her the Paris story.
One day, Tivisita came in to help me with my letter to Pancho. I had requested but had not yet received some eyeglasses from him. It was a strain to read, so Tivisita was now writing my correspondence for me. What a lucky seed I had planted for the future by teaching that young girl her letters!
I knew her well enough by now that I could tell she was feigning her usual cheerfulness. “What is it, Tivisita?” I asked, looking directly at her.
A look came into her eyes: something she wanted to say but could not bring herself to say. I knew, of course, what it was. “Just let her have her way, Tivisita, she means well.” I dared not mention any names in case Ramona was snooping.
“But Pancho says that I must not let her overturn the regimen he set up. He said it could make the difference between whether . . .” She faltered, not wanting to name the thing we all feared.
So, Pancho was corresponding with Tivisita! Of course, he wrote to me, too. His tone was cherishing, but the letters were brief. Obviously, he had a lot on his mind. Now I wondered if what was on his mind was living right here under my own roof.
The next time Zafra delivered our packet, I sent Tivisita out of the room for a fresh drink from the cistern as my thirst was great. She hesitated, her glance falling on the packet by my bedside. Usually, it was she who sorted the packet of letters and bills Pancho sent home every week, sending some on to the capital, distributing others.
As soon as Tivisita was out of the room, I reached for that packet and held each envelope up to the light. In addition to mine, there was one addressed in Pancho’s hand to a name I couldn’t read, what looked like a remittance to the merchant, who had sold us the sinks, a letter with an article for Federico in the capital, a note to My Beloved Sons, and one in that familiar hand addressed to Señorita Natividad Lauranzón, sus manos. A private missive to be put in her hands only.
I held that note in my hands wondering what to do with it. The last time I had read a letter Pancho had intended for someone else, I had come to such grief. My health had already been sacrificed and my heart broken with disappointment, what more was there to destroy—except my peace of mind? I could live, and die, without knowing.
I shuffled that letter back with the others and returned the packet to the bedside table. When Tivisita hurried in, my ribboned cup brimming with fresh water, she glanced at me uneasily. Already I could see her innocence passing, her secret like the pearl the oyster fashions from irritable circumstance, a fact that Pancho had taught me years ago, when he so gallantly offered to catch me up on my sciences.
WHEN I CAUGHT PNEUMONIA, my condition turned grave. My fever was so high that my poor Camila steadily kicked at my sides. “Am I going to die?” I asked Zafra, who gave me the sorriest look. He had only been practicing a few years and had not yet learned to banish all such unprofessional expressions from his face.
“I think Pancho should come,” was all he said.
I had lost weight, the skin on my belly taut as a drum, so that I could feel the exact shape of the baby with my hand. “Hold on, my Camila,” I urged her. She kicked back as if to say, I am doing the best I can, Mamá.
LABOR BEGAN SOON AFTER Pancho’s arrival. At midnight a great swell of pain rose from the small of my back and made me break out in a spasm of coughing. Of course, I did not immediately think it was labor, for I was eight weeks early. The contractions were squeezing my lungs tight, and I could not catch my breath. Surely I was dying, for I did not remember asphyxiation as part of giving birth.
Ramona was the first one in the room, a lamp swinging in her hand, her long braid like a thick rope hanging over one shoulder and down the front of her night dress. I tried to answer her questions, but I could no longer give air to words, only move my lips. This must be the beginning of death, I thought, the tendrils of language unable to reach beyond the self and catch the attention of others.
On her heels came Pancho, Tivisita right behind him, carrying his black doctor’s bag. Pancho put his scope to my belly, here and there, and then I heard him washing his hands before lifting my bedding and examining me. It was then that I smelled the pungent wetness I was lying in.
Ramona had returned with Zafra, who was rolling up his sleeves and issuing orders to everyone. On the other side of the door, Pibín was trying to calm both his brothers. “Mamá!” Max kept bawling. I wanted to call out and reassure him, but I was saving up what little strength I had.
Zafra and Pancho had propped me up on pillows to relieve my breathing and allow me to bear down. Blood was draining from me, and I could feel the child struggling to be born. Finally, with a pain that felt as if I were being split in half, Zafra entered the metal contraption inside me and drew her out, first her head, followed by one shoulder and the other, and then there she was, upside down, ghastly looking and blue and covered with a thin membrane as if she had been born in her own shroud, ready for burial.
I could see the dark outcome from the look that passed from Zafra to Pancho. As the cord was cut and the tiny creature carried away, I called out, “Tivisita,” but of course, my voice was faint. “I baptized her,” Ramona whispered, as if what concerned me was that the child die a Christian.
“I want her to live,” I sobbed, struggling to get up. But hands were holding me down; voices were calming me; then, the sting of a needle in my arm.
All grew calm. I watched them working over me as if they were working on a body that did and did not belong to me. Far off I could hear the voices of my children, Pibín reading to Max, no doubt from his beloved Jules Verne, Max asking his endless questions, Fran banging his ball again and again on the living room wall, their lives continuing without me. The light dimmed, the mind stilled, my lungs struggled for air, and I could feel my life slowly draining from me. In the light that was beginning to come from the window behind him, I saw Pancho, his eyes welling with tears, bend down toward me. He had forgotten his own precautions.
Whatever he was saying, I could not stay to hear him. I was falling, falling down a long flight of stairs into the dark center of myself.
And then I heard a cry, a lusty wail I recognized.
“Salomé Camila,” I whispered.
As if summoned by the force of my desire, Tivisita had returned to my side, carrying the bundle she had rescued from the doomed judgment of the others. She laid my newborn daughter on my belly for me to admire.
I struggled back up out of the darkness to meet her.
EIGHT
Bird and Nest
Departing Santo Domingo, 1897
SHE IS ON THE boat and the breeze is blowing her dress and the ribbons on her cap and they are going to El Cabo to see her father. The waves are slippy-slapping slippy-slapping on the side of the boat like Mon pretending to spank Max because he is so bad but she does not really spank him but Max really cries because Mamá is gone to heaven and that is who Max really wants.
She stands on the t
runk Pibín has hauled over next to the rail so she can wave at everybody on the dock. Mon, Minina, Luisa, Eva—that’s enough! Her hand hurts. Besides, they are all crying so much no one waves back.
She loves it on this boat. She hopes they will never get off but keep on sailing to El Cabo for the rest of their lives with her dress blowing up like when Max is being naughty, wanting to peek at her petticoat (and getting spanked for doing so, slippy-slap slippy-slap), and the ribbons on her cap snapping against the side of her head and every time she tries to look, the wind blows them out of sight.
Quick! she turns her head and catches a glimpse of them: red ribbons!
“ARE WE ALMOST THERE?” she asks Pibín. He is the brother who answers the nicest when she asks him things.
“We haven’t left yet,” he explains to her. He looks so sad, almost as sad as the day Mamá died but not as bad.
Maybe he is sad because of what happened in Mon’s house before they left for the dock, everyone talking in angry voices. Mon stood at the door, holding Camila’s hand. “Your Mamá said you were to stay with your aunt Mon, remember?” Mon squeezed Camila’s hand to help her remember.
But Camila couldn’t remember what her mother had said that last time. She remembered Puerto Plata and the curly seashells and Dr. Zafra, who made faces to make her laugh, and her mother coughing and the funny eyeglasses her father sent Mamá from El Cabo and many many bottles of medicines ranged on the bureau and the light striking through them like the stained glass windows of the cathedral.
“Their father says they must all come to El Cabo.” It was Pimpa, Tivisita’s sister, gruff and fat just like Mon, who is Mamá’s sister, as if everyone needs one sister, gruff and fat, to fight off mean people. But Camila has no sister. If she goes to El Cabo to live with her father maybe she will get another sister like Regina says she might. “Don’t you see, Ramona, that you are just making matters worse for all the children?” Pimpa shook her head sadly and reached down to pick up Camila.
But Mon was holding on tight to her hand and would not let go, and Pibín and Fran looked like they didn’t know what to do. Max was sobbing for Mamá, who was too far away in heaven to answer him back, and then their grandmother Minina said, “This is a crying shame, a crying shame,” and everyone stopped arguing because she had a flutter in her heart like when a wasp gets under your mosquito net and you have to get out or it might sting you and cause your heart to swell.
And then the mules came to carry them away to the dock but no one could find her, ¡SALOMÉ CAMILA! ¡SALOMÉ CAMILA! because she had run off and hidden in the hole underneath the house where she sometimes hid from Max but now she was hiding from everybody fighting, and suddenly it was so quiet and peaceful like the wasp going free and you can go back under your net and go to sleep.
AND SHE DID FALL asleep, just a little nap on the straw mats rolled up in a corner, and the next thing she knew there was Mon at the opening and Tivisita behind her and everybody so happy to see her at first and then everybody scolding that she must get over this bad habit of hiding or she was going to be the death of everybody.
“I didn’t make Mamá die,” she protested. She is a big girl who can clean her plate and not go peepee in her drawers.
A look went from face to face and ended up lodged in Tivisita’s eyes as she said, “Of course not, dear heart. Nobody is saying so. You are a good girl. Your mother in heaven is so proud of you.”
Then Mon crouched down beside Camila so her eyes—which are just like Mamá’s eyes, Camila never noticed that before!—were looking straight at Camila’s eyes. “Would you like to stay here with Mon? Is that why you were hiding? Tell your aunt Mon.” Her face had sad lines down each side of her mouth and little hairs under her nose like a man’s mustache. “Tell your aunt Mon you would like to stay with her and your grandmother Minina.” This time it was not a question but a statement.
“Mon, por Dios, her father has written that she is to come.” Tivisita had come down to eye level as well. She was brushing away the dirt from Camila’s pretty new dress and straightening her bonnet.
“The mules are leaving,” Pimpa called down from the back door.
Tivisita stood back up and took Camila by the hand. “Your father is waiting for us at El Cabo.”
“Stay!” Mon called. She was still kneeling in the dirt with her dress getting dirty, looking up at the sky and sobbing.
Halfway up the back steps, Camila stopped and peered down at the distressing sight of her aunt, crumpling in a heap on the ground. What was she to do? she wondered, and this moment of standing, looking through the bars of the rail, not knowing what to do because her mother was not here to tell her, this moment was the very first time she ever felt a funny tightening in her chest that made her struggle for air and her heart flutter like Minina’s flutter when a wasp gets in her chest that nobody can get out, and she began coughing, standing there on the steps, and suddenly it was quiet, and then Tivisita said, “See, it’s as Pancho says, she has a touch of contagion. She needs a dryer climate. Do it for that reason, Ramona.”
And then, Mon did stop crying and came slowly up the steps as if someone else were holding her back by the hem of her dress, and she took Camila’s other hand and led her outside to where the mules and their drivers were waiting to take them away to El Cabo to see her father.
THEY ARE GOING TO El Cabo to see her father, who lives there. El Cabo is in Haiti like Santo Domingo is in the Dominican Republic and the stars are in the sky and Mamá in heaven.
Her father went to El Cabo after the parade when Mamá was taken to the church in a box piled with flowers on her way to heaven, and he has been gone for as long as Mamá has been gone, the fingers of one hand. Now he has written Mon and said he has changed his mind and all the children are to be sent to him with Tivisita who will help take care of them.
Tivisita had been living with Camila and Pibín, Fran, and Max, and Regina, and their mother. Then when Mamá went to heaven, Camila, Pibín, Fran, Regina, and Max moved in with Mon and Minina, and her father went to El Cabo, and Tivisita had nowhere to go because Mon didn’t have any room in her house for a girl who looked like a doll from St. Thomas.
So Tivisita stayed in their old house and took care of the pony Patriota and Tom, the puppy dog, and the new monkey, Monkey Two, with her sister Pimpa.
Every day Camila went with Pibín to visit Mamá at the Church of Las Mercedes, but Mamá was never there. Instead, Tivisita was there with a bunch of white flowers (“Remember how your mother loved these?” She didn’t remember . . .), crying and saying if it hadn’t been for Mamá she wouldn’t be able to read the name written on the stone that Camila couldn’t read at all.
MON WAS ALWAYS ASKING her what she remembered of her mother.
“I remember coughing.” She coughed into her hand to demonstrate.
Mon was teaching her how to recite some more of her mother’s poems. She already knew “El ave y el nido” and a little bit of “Mi Pedro,” but the poem her mother wrote about how she almost died when Camila was born was too grown up for her to learn now. (“We thought you weren’t going to live. We put you in a cigar box with cotton, but then you lived so we used it as your first cradle.” Mon knew she loved to hear this story!) Mon was copying all the poems in a book she was going to give to Camila some day when she was grown up enough to take care of them.
“You are going to forget your mother unless we keep reminding you,” Mon explained.
And then Mon taught her to make the sign of the cross, and to recite, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the holy spirit of Salomé, my mother.”
The next day at church, Camila corrected Tivisita on how to say the sign of the cross prayer, and when Tivisita heard it was Mon who had taught Camila that prayer, she said she would have to report Mon to Pancho in a letter, and that was when her father asked that all the children be sent to him on the boat to El Cabo to start a new life.
SHE IS ON THE boat, holding on to Tivisita’s hand,
so that she doesn’t fall into the Atlantic Ocean and ruin the new dress Tivisita made her.
Black, with a white collar and sash, just like the one Tivisita is wearing for going to El Cabo. A bonnet trimmed with red ribbons and a black parasol to match the one Tivisita is carrying.
“Throw a kiss to Minina,” Tivisita says.
And she throws a kiss to her grandmother way off on the dock, hoping that will settle the flutter in her heart.
“Why are they crying?” she asks but nobody hears her. For just then the steamboat honks and a puff comes out of its chimney and they are moving away from the land! Everything is getting smaller and smaller: the houses, and the cathedral with the two bells, and the big house with five balconies where they used to live (Pibín says), and the fortaleza where Lilís puts his enemies, and the park where the wooden horses, about the size of Patriota, go round and round while a tune plays, and Mon is getting smaller, though she is very fat, and Minina and Luisa and Eva, until Camila can’t tell if if she is waving at them or other people she doesn’t know, but now they are waving back.
“I don’t want to leave Mamá!” Max starts sobbing, and Tivisita has to let go of Camila’s hand and go over to Max and crouch down beside him and have a little talk.
“Where is Mamá, Pibín?” she asks, looking up at her brother and seeing that sad look that tastes like the dark air in her room at night. He does not say what the others say, in bright voices like turning on lights, “Your mother is in heaven.”
He takes her hand and he presses it against her heart. “There,” he says.
“Not in heaven?”
He shakes his head and looks away.