It is a mystery how the heart gets free.
And perhaps there is a kind of quiet courage to waiting until it does. But she does not want to make too much of this. She has never trusted the trumpet or the drums. She prefers the background piano, bearing the burden, plunking along with its serviceable tune.
I think it is time now to go back and be a part of what my mother started.
She knows precisely what Marion will write back.
“Nonsense, Camila! Look how your mother ended up.”
HER CHRISTMAS PLANS had been to go to Cuba for the holidays as usual. But given the chaos on the island, the bombings and imminent embargo, the airline had canceled all flights. When she phoned her nieces in Havana with the news, they were terribly disappointed. For years, their aunt Camila was known as the Santa Claus from Poughkeepsie, a name that always made the young girls laugh as they mispronounced it.
“It’s just as well you stay quiet up there,” Rodolfo advised when he got on the line. The baby of the family had grown up to become a know-it-all at fifty-five. Now that Camila’s older brothers were gone—Max was still alive but sadly ailing—Rodolfo had stepped in to boss her around. Families, it seems, like nature, abhor a vacuum.
“Things are happening, lots of things are happening. Your ambassador has been recalled,” Rodolfo continued.
She felt a flash of annoyance that made her want to put the phone back in its cradle. “Bonsal is not my ambassador, Rodolfo. I am as Cuban as you are.” Dominican, really, by birth. The family had fled to Cuba years ago, only to find a dictatorship there as well. But they stayed on. Someone else’s dictator was never as difficult as their own.
“Santa Claus has been outlawed,” Rodolfo noted casually, the way he might mention that he had decided to grow out his mustache or paint the house yellow. Perhaps he feared that his phone calls were being monitored. Had things gotten that bad?
“Give it time, Rodolfo.” Camila had to raise her voice to be heard. Connections from Poughkeepsie to Havana were never very good. Downstairs, she could hear the stillness of her neighbors listening in.
“Will you be coming in June?” he wanted to know.
I am waiting for a sign, she thought of saying, but he would assume he had misheard and start shouting again into the receiver. “I’ll write, Rodolfo,” she promised. “This connection is terrible.”
As if her saying so made it even worse, the crackling of static increased, and then the line went dead. And her brother and the brilliant light of the tropics and hundreds of confiscated Santa Clauses, their fake white beards dyed black and used for Fidel floats in celebration parades, and the smell of cafecitos and her three pretty nieces telling their girlfriends that this year their old-maid aunt would not be coming from the United States with her suitcase full of nail polish and board games—all vanished—and she was alone again in this attic apartment in which she had lived and worked anonymously for close to twenty years. All alone with her indecision and fears.
TWO TRUNKS ARRIVE FROM Max. The return address wasn’t as funny as he meant it to be. From your brother Max, one foot on the other side of the grave. The tags are stamped with the official seal from the Cancillería of the Dominican Republic. Every time she sees him, Max tries to talk her into leaving Poughkeepsie and coming down to work with him in the foreign office. “You could travel. You could use all your languages.” He does not go as far as to say, though she knows he is thinking it, You might meet somebody.
“I’ll never go back while Trujillo is alive,” she has told him.
“You don’t abandon your country because of one bad mango,” Max replies, glancing away as if to avoid her eyes. He himself has accepted numerous posts from Trujillo. “Look at Mamá.”
The thought of Max, comparing himself to their mother! Ten years ago, at the centennial of their mother’s birth, Camila stopped using her first name, Salomé, considering it an honor she had not earned. “I’m just plain Camila,” she corrects those who read her name from some official record.
“I know we have disagreed on many things over the years,” Max writes in the letter that accompanies the trunks, “but despite that, it is you and only you whom I know I can trust with the family papers.” She is to sort out what to give the archives and what to destroy. The irony of his request is not lost on her—she, the nobody among them, will be the one editing the story of her famous family.
Meanwhile, the present is being reported in dozens of recaps of the year’s small and big news on television. Alaska and Hawaii have become states. The Barbie doll has been invented in imitation of dolls handed out to patrons of a West Berlin brothel. Panty hose will now liberate women from girdles. In Cuba the peasants are singing, “With Fidel, with Fidel, always with Fidel,” to the tune of “Jingle Bells.”
Camila sings along.
SHE IS GLAD WHEN the new semester starts. She has missed her girls. On the first day of class, she greets them in a too bright voice, “¡Buenos días, señoritas!” as if Spanish were the language of a heightened emotional state. The girls sit back, wary of her enthusiasm.
She has fifteen students in each class, all with names like Joan or Susan or Nancy, so it is difficult to keep them straight. Her procedure has always been to spend the first month reviewing grammar, and then move on to the literature, though she has always shied away from teaching the poetry of her mother. Perhaps because this is her last semester, she assigns five of Salomé’s most famous poems to the more advanced section.
She does not trust her voice to read them out loud as she usually does. Instead she chooses a volunteer. “Wake from your sleep, my Patria, throw off your shroud,” one of three Susans in the class begins. After a poor rendition of “A la Patria,” Camila asks the blond, pale girl what she thinks of the poem.
“It’s too . . . too . . .” Susan wrinkles her nose, as if the word she is looking for might be found by its smell. Camila stands by, quietly, letting the young woman flounder. Usually, she tries to help students out with a ready supply of vocabulary words. But why should she help someone find a negative word to describe her mother’s work?
Another student steps in. “They’re too bewailing, oh woe is me and my poor suffering country. ‘And martyrdom beneath the fecund palms’! Is this poet supposed to be any good? I never heard of her.”
“As good as your Emily Dickinson, as good as your Walt Whitman.” She feels surprised at her outburst. The students look up, alert and wide-eyed. She is a quiet woman in quaint suits from the forties and funny, colorful winter accessories that they suppose are meant to liven up her black coat. She is one of their favorite professors, soft-voiced and calm. She can see this in their eyes, and as usual when she adopts another’s point of view, her anger subsides.
Still, as she walks home, she cannot forget the indifference in their voices, the casualness of their dismissal. Everything of ours—from lives to literature—has always been so disposable, she thinks. It is as if a little stopper that has contained years of bitterness inside her has been pulled out. She smells her anger—it has a metallic smell mixed in with earth, a rusting plow driven into the ground.
That evening, she takes her glass of wine into the back room and opens the trunks.
SHE HAS BEEN LISTENING intently for the last half hour, and then has forgotten to listen, so that the crunch of snow on the pathway surprises her. A brief pause as the visitor reads the names on the mailboxes, the squeak of the knob being turned, the rush of cold air as the downstairs door is opened, the seventeen steps to the attic apartment.
“Sorry,” the young woman says at the door. “I was told 204 College Street, and it jumps from 202 to 210.”
The face is open and eager. (What was it her mother wrote in her poem to schoolchildren? Their faces fresh with what they do not know . . .) Atop the pale face there is a burst of red hair.
“You’re right on time,” she lies. “They’re in the back room.”
“Dr. Henríquez,” the girl starts over. “I’m Nancy,
Nancy Palmer.”
She leads the young Nancy to the back of the apartment. “I suppose Pilar, or rather, Profesora Madariaga explained what I’d like you to help me with.”
“I’m only a Spanish minor, you know?” the young woman says rather quickly. Perhaps she has spotted some loose pages on top of one of the trunks.
“But you read Spanish well enough to read to me?”
“I got an A in Miss Madariaga’s Spanish 220.”
“Muy bien, muy muy bien. Shall we start?”
Camila explains the task at hand. She had thought she could do it all on her own, but this last year has been a strain on her poor eyes. The eye doctor has told her that indeed she has cataracts, which will have to be operated on.
“I think it is better if I introduce everyone first,” she explains to the young woman. That way she will know in what box to place the different letters and documents. “I’ll start with Salomé Ureña, my mother—some of the letters might say ‘la poetisa nacional.’ She married Francisco Henríquez, whom everyone calls Pancho or Papancho, so she became Salomé Ureña de Henríquez. We always keep our own last names.”
Nancy looks up as if sensing a criticism.
“It is the custom in our poor countries.” She intends the phrase ironically, but the girl nods earnestly with that abstract compassion for the downtrodden of the world.
“Pancho became President Pancho in 1916—”
Nancy’s mouth drops open.
“It was actually a very brief presidency,” Camila notes, “not unlike those small towns. What is it you say? Don’t blink as you drive by or you will miss them.”
“How long was he president?”
She counts the months out on her fingers to be sure. “Four months, I think it was. We were living in Cuba when he heard. By the time the family joined him in Santo Domingo, we barely had time to unpack before we were back in exile in Cuba again.” She does not add that it was the American occupation that forced Pancho out.
“Gosh,” Nancy says, shaking her her head. “You should write a memoir. Alice Roosevelt has. I hear one of the Eisenhower kids is writing one about his dad.”
Camila waves the suggestion away. She has been approached before, by journalists and historians south of the border. They query her on the details of her life as First Daughter. What details? she asks. There was no time for details, no time to plan an inauguration ball, to have calling cards printed up.
“Well, I think it’s pretty neat to have a daddy who was president, even if it was only for four months.”
“I wish it had only been four months.” Camila sighs, and when she notes the baffled look on Nancy’s face, she adds, “The effects went on for a long time is what I mean.” Nine years spent trying to reclaim his country. A president without a country. Someone (not her!) should write a book about it.
“How are we doing?” Camila asks the young woman. She has started drawing a family chart for herself on a blank sheet of paper.
“So far, so good,” Nancy says, nodding.
“Well then, Pancho and Salomé had three sons, Fran, the oldest—I don’t suspect there will be much mail or papers from him. Early on, he faded into the background, you might say.”
“Oh?” Nancy asks, cocking her head, curious.
“A violent temper, an incident . . .” She waves that past away. “Then there was dear Pedro—he often signs ‘Pibín.’” The smile on her face no doubt betrays he is her favorite. “And Maximiliano, who is always Max, still alive, still causing trouble.” She laughs. Nancy laughs, too, amiably. She will be easy to work with, Camila thinks. She had not wanted to employ one of her own students, someone whose judgments she would have to live with.
“And then, of course, there is me. But I won’t have much in those trunks either.” She smiles at the sunshine pouring in through the window. It is the main reason she has never wanted to give up the small apartment. On a sunny day, it floods with light.
“That’s pretty simple,” Nancy says, finishing her tree with a flourish. “I thought it would be like one of those complicated Latin American families with oodles of kids.”
“You spoke too soon,” Camila laughs. “My mother died, and my father remarried.” She mentions her stepmother, two half sisters, both of whom died, her three half brothers. Rodolfo, the baby, now has three daughters of his own! She spells out each name. “There’s also the Parisian family—”
“I guess I did speak too soon,” Nancy sighs. Her sheet is now dark with names and arrows and lines.
“And we mustn’t forget Columbus, the bear; and the monkeys, One through Eight; and Paco, the parrot.” She decides against mentioning Teddy Roosevelt, the pig. The young woman might get insulted.
“Paco and Columbus . . .” She is writing down the names of the pets! Oh dear. Humor does not always translate well.
“Why don’t we stop there,” Camila suggests. “I’ll explain other people as they come up.”
Just introducing these ghosts by name has recalled them so vividly, they rise up before her, then shimmer and fade in the shaft of sunlight in which she is sitting. Maybe it is a good thing to finally face each one squarely. Maybe that is the only way to exorcise ghosts. To become them.
IN THE FIRST TRUNK, the packets of letters are all tied with red ribbons.
“Whoever put these away did a neat job,” Nancy notes.
“I think it was my aunt Mon—oh yes, you better put Mon down, short for ‘Ramona,’ Salomé’s only sister. She became something of the guardian of Mamá’s memory.”
“Guardian of a memory?” The young woman seems surprised by Camila’s choice of words.
Perhaps guardian does not mean the same in English as it does in Spanish? “I mean that my aunt took charge of keeping my mother’s memory alive in me. My mother died when I was quite young. I hardly remember her.”
She rises and walks to the window. How often has she awakened in the middle of the night, wandering the houses where she lived, looking for something, anything, to fill up the emptiness inside her. And here she is sixty-six years old, the need still raw, the strategies breaking down. Maybe she should take that mild sedative? It is still too early in the afternoon for a glass of wine.
The phone rings. She would ignore it if the girl were not here. “Will you take that, Nancy, please? I’m at work,” she adds.
“It’s someone called Marion,” Nancy mouths, holding her hand over the receiver. “She says she has to talk to you.”
Camila shakes her head. At this moment, she cannot bear to be asked about the future. The past is too much with her.
NANCY HAS UNTIED THE first packet. “There’s a picture in this one. What a pretty lady!” She holds up the photograph. “Was this your mother?”
Camila is tempted to say yes, as she would have said in the past when asked. In fact, as a young woman she used to give away this picture of her mother to her girlfriends. But the photo is of a painting, done after her mother’s death on her father’s instructions. “Actually that pretty lady is my father’s creation. I have the actual photograph somewhere.”
The young woman looks at her, waiting for further explanation, as if she does not understand.
“He wanted my mother to look like the legend he was creating,” Camila adds. “He wanted her to be prettier, whiter . . .”
Something shifts in the young woman’s eyes. She looks at Camila closely. “You mean, your mother was a . . . a negro?”
“We call it mulatto. She was a mixture,” Camila explains.
“That’s amazing,” the girl says finally, as if that is the safest thing to say.
Camila does not know if the young woman is amazed by her mother’s color or by her father’s touch-up. But it was not just Pancho. Everyone in the family—yes, including Mon!—touched up the legend of her mother.
Nancy has unfolded several letters. “I don’t have the best accent,” she protests before she begins reading.
“You will do fine,” Camila reassures the y
oung woman. “I just need to get some idea of the content of each one. We’ll use those two boxes to sort them.”
“You mean, they aren’t all going to the archives?”
“They should all go to the archives, shouldn’t they?” In spite of Max, in spite of the others, let the true story be told!
But for now, she wants her mother just to herself.
“Shall I label them something?”
“What was that, Nancy?”
“Shall I label the two boxes so we don’t confuse them?”
“Label one ‘Archives.’” She thinks a moment what the other box should be called. “And just put my name on the other one.”
SHE STARTS TO GIVE away her own things as if something inside her already knows where she is going, what she will need. She presents Flo on the first floor with a copy of Pedro’s Literary Currents, which includes his Norton Lectures from Harvard. To Vivian, she gives her records of Italian operas, Spanish zarzuelas.
“So, have you made up your mind where you are going?” Vivian asks.
“Not yet,” she says, and she repeats the same thing to Marion, who calls again to say she has received Camila’s last letter.
“Well, I want you to know that no matter what you decide, I’ll come in June to help you pack up.” Marion takes a deep, resigned breath, which she is meant to hear. “By the way, who is that young thing who always answers when I call?”
“You mean Nancy?” Camila revels in the pause that follows. “She’s my student helper.”
“Tell her to get on the ball. I keep leaving her my number and you never call.”
Thank goodness for student helpers one can blame things on! “We’ve been so busy, sorting through years and years of papers.”
“Be careful with your asthma,” Marion reminds her. She sends a motherly kiss over the wires, then calls back up a minute later because she forgot one for the other cheek.
Nancy comes twice a week and on weekends. Soon they finish one trunk and start on the other. Every night she pores over her mother’s box: notes to her children; a sachet with dried purplish flowers; a catechism book, Catón cristiano, with a little girl’s handwriting on the back cover; silly poems from someone named Nísidas; a lock of hair; a baby tooth tied up in handkerchief; a small Dominican flag her mother must have sewn herself, its stick snapped off, no doubt from the weight of the other packets upon it. What these things mean, only the dead can tell. But they are details of Salomé’s story that increasingly connect her mother’s life to her own.