As for the future, who knows what that will be. All she knows is that she wants to become Salomé Camila, living it.
AMBASSADOR BONSAL IS BEING interviewed by David Brinkley. What is happening over in Cubar? Mr. Brinkley wants to know. Cubar. Camila has noticed how President Eisenhower, too, mispronounces the name, adding an r at the end, a little growl of warning. Mr. Fidel Castro has another think coming if he thinks he can do what he wants so close to the United States, Ambassador Bonsal growls straight at the cameras. Next, there is a clip of Fidel standing in the plaza, hundreds of doves circling and landing around him as he speaks. He seems familiar with his large, pale face and a beard like a black bib under his mouth.
Whom does he resemble? Camila wonders. More and more, there are so many ghosts. People now gone for years reappear in these brief resurrections! A few days ago when Pilar had her over to celebrate her last semester with one of her paellas, Camila could not take her eyes off Pilar’s collie, Kalua. The sad face, the soulful eyes, the quietude of his pose as he stood guard by their chairs—all of it reminded her of someone. And then, she saw him, fourteen years gone, her brother Pedro, slowly surfacing in the face of an old dog.
Fidel tilts his head, the doves fly off. He looks like Pancho! The same pouty mouth, the same intent face, something fierce about the eyes. The voice-over in English makes it hard to understand what he is saying. But it seems there has been an exodus of professionals. He is putting out a call for teachers and doctors, dentists and nurses. “Come join us,” he says, looking straight at Camila.
“I HEAR YOU ARE retiring?”
She meets the young Nancy on her way home from teaching her classes. It is a brilliant winter day, sun spangling the icicles from the roofs of the buildings. A few weeks ago, they finished sorting through the trunks. The archival material has been sent off to Harvard and Minnesota, the Dominican Republic, Cuba. Her one trunk sits like a rock in the rooms she has been dismantling. Someday, it will join the others. For now, she wants it with her, part keepsake chest, part talisman.
“Not retiring exactly,” she explains.
“Oh?” The young woman cocks her head. “Where do you go from here?” Weeks of working together have made her bolder than she would normally be with a professor.
Instead of the ambivalence she has felt in the past when confronted by this question, she feels a sense of release—fields wear their flowers, light floods the sky. She knows exactly where she wants to go. She wants to try saying it aloud, to see the ghostly breath the words leave in the air. “I’m going to join a revolution.”
“Are you feeling okay, Dr. Henríquez?” The young woman peers at her closely. Her red hair is delightful—as if someone has lit a flame on top of her head.
She is feeling more hopeful than she has in a long time. Just when she thought her life was over—when the rest of her days would be a succession of short trips from one safe place to another, pills in compartmentalized containers labeled with the days of the week, saving stamps pasted into booklets and redeemed for small appliances that are always falling apart, and parts of her body giving out, beginning with her bad eyes—just when, in short, she thought her story was over, epilogue, coda, diminuendo, she has happened upon a caravel with sails filling with wind (no Noah’s ark, please, no salvation for me at the expense of others), she has happened upon a way home, a song in her head from childhood, I’m going to El Cabo to meet my mother . . . The bay is too shallow to float in today . . . Just when she thought . . .
All the heart wants is to be called again.
“Why do you ask?”
The young woman seems baffled as if she doesn’t know how to explain what she has sensed in the older woman’s tone. “You just seem . . .” She makes the motion of setting something down. “Happier,” she finally says, though that is not the word that goes with the gesture.
Camila throws her head back and laughs. The young woman gives her an uncertain smile, as if she is not quite sure why her remark is humorous. Reassuringly, Camila adds, “I’m going home, or as close as I can get. I guess I’ve been homesick for a while now.”
“I bet,” the young woman nods. She has a talent for being agreeable. Camila should send this young Nancy south to work with Max in diplomacy. “Warm weather’ll be nice,” Nancy adds, rolling her eyes, as if the piles of snow around them had conspired to ruin their lives. “But will it be safe?”
“All my people live there,” Camila says tartly, a not totally accurate statement, as most of her people are actually one island over.
“Vaya con Dios,” Nancy says with obvious pride to have nailed down the correct colloquialism.
Camila feels a surge of tenderness toward the young woman, her hair springing up irrepressibly around her pale face. This has always been a handicap in her line of work. Every semester she falls in love with her babies, as she calls them, and spoils them to death, so Pilar claims. “It’s a wonder they know anything about the subjunctive!”
Camila says her goodbyes and heads down the path toward her apartment. At Joss Gate, she turns—the young woman is still watching her—and lifts a purple mitten and calls out, “Hasta luego.”
Upstairs, the sunny rooms make her feel a giddy certainty about what she is doing. She finds her folder of lists, pros and cons to this or that plan, and rolls the sheaf into a cylinder that looks amusingly official—a scroll, a diploma. Turning on her stove, she sets fire to one end and drops the burning pages in the sink. The future goes up in flames. Although it is only midafternoon, she pours herself a glass of wine and lifts it in celebration.
“To us,” she toasts the radiant, smoky air.
DOS
Contestación
Santo Domingo, 1865 – 1874
THE YEAR I TURNED fifteen, I became a woman, so Mamá said. We didn’t have enough money for a quinceañera party, but I got to choose the fabric for a new dress, a pale violet muslin with a black lace trim. I remember we were putting the finishing touches on the hem when Papá rushed in, out of breath. “Mr. Lincoln has been shot!”
We liked the bearded president of our neighbor to the north. He had struggled for the freedom of people our color. “With so many other worthier targets!” was all Mamá said, quickly making the sign of the cross. Mamá could be wicked, but she always followed her lapses with contrition, as if God might not notice.
On my birthday, Ramona and I walked down to the center of town with Papá, one on each arm. I wore my new gown and mantilla with a silver comb, a gift from Papá. We meant to stroll around the central square, but when we got there and looked up at la fortaleza with its Spanish flag tossing proudly, we turned back. Under the laurel tree in his yard, Papá toasted me, saying I was now a grown-up young lady.
It was my country that had gone back to being a baby, having to obey a mother country.
THAT DAY—MARCH 18, 1861—on the main plaza, we had been given back to Spain and became a colony once again.
I dreamed of setting us free. My shield was my paper, and my swords were the words my father was teaching me to wield.
I practiced on paper and I practiced in my head: rhymes, refrains, anthems, hymns. At night, I would lie in bed, and instead of sleeping I would think of what I would say if, like María Trinidad, I was bound and blindfolded before I was shot dead. I thought of what I would whisper into the ears of the Spanish governor if I had the chance. If I got scared, I’d chant my brave name over and over to myself, ¡Herminia! ¡Herminia! ¡Herminia!
I would free la patria with my sharp quill and bottle of ink.
But I had to be very careful not to get my father in trouble.
THE CONDITION UNDER WHICH Papá had been allowed to return to the country was that he not involve himself in politics. This must have been especially hard for him after the war of restoration broke out in the northern part of the country. By then, I think Papá was convinced it was better to be our own patria than somebody else’s colony. But he had given his word. He said nothing, wrote nothing. Inste
ad he drank and he kept a sharp eye over Ramona and me.
We had left off going to the sisters Bobadilla after my father quizzed us on a variety of subjects and found that we didn’t know who Lope de Vega was or Dante or the pistil and stamen in one of the flowers he plucked for us, but we knew all about fine fanning (snapping closed: do not approach; opening slowly while peeking over the top: you may speak to me) and what variety of flowers went into a Queen Isabela bouquet and what to wear to a formal dinner if there has been a recent death in the family. Now that the Spaniards were back, the sisters Bobadilla were in their glory.
Mamá finally agreed with Papá that we were wasting our time and withdrew us from school with the excuse that she needed our help at home with the sewing—which was true enough. Afternoons, Mamá hired a tutor, and then in the cool part of the evening, we headed over to Papá’s house where we’d find him, in his garden or his room, brooding over the disappointments in his life, and yes, drinking.
“Was your father drinking?” Mamá would ask when we returned.
Ramona and I would look at each other, and my mother would say, “Never mind, you need not betray him.”
“It helps preserve his vital organs,” Ramona offered.
“Opens his appetite and increases the flow of the blood to the nervous centers of the brain,” Tía Ana recited.
Mamá gave her sister that fierce look that could make your blood stop flowing. Papá always said that the rebels should forget all their elaborate plots and instead let Mamá loose in the governor’s palace. She could stare the Spanish Empire to ruins and sizzle the sycophants who were now all talking with lisps to show how purebred they were. Papá even started a poem called, “To Gregoria’s Eyes,” but he never finished it.
IT WAS PAPÁ WHO was all eyes. It seemed he had transferred all his worry and attention from la patria to Ramona and me.
We began to see, at least I did, how crucial it was that he have a nation with which to occupy himself or we would not have a moment’s peace. When I mentioned this to Mamá, it must have been one of the funniest things I had ever said, for she repeated it often, even to Papá, who gave me a scowl and said, “So you want to be free of me, eh?”
The drinking had done that. You made an innocent remark, and Papá would take offense, and then, the only thing to do was write him a verse to soothe whatever was hurting inside him.
That was how I got him writing again. One day, after I was done reading one of my verses to him, he began saying very clever, pretty things, for my father had a silver tongue, as my mother often observed. I scribbled down what he said, and that night, I set everything in lines so they rhymed. Next day, I read him his poem out loud, not telling him it was his, and he looked at me when I was done, and said, Not bad, Herminia, and I said, Not bad, Nísidas, and he said, Herminia, did I really write that? and I said, Nísidas you did not write that, and he said, I knew it, and I said, you did not write it but you recited it, and suddenly, which was not unusual when he had been drinking, my father began to sob, and I had to remind him of what he had often reminded me, tears are the ink of a poet. Do not waste them on crying.
“I know, Herminia, I know,” Papá said. “And now, I won’t be wasting them anymore.” He held his flask upside down as if to water the garden, but it must have been empty, for only a few dark drops fell out. “I was born poeta. The other things were chance. But if you don’t do what you’re born to do, it destroys you. Come here, let me show you something.”
He took me by the hand and led me through the house, past his two somber sisters in their dark dresses, rocking sadly in their rocking chairs, the black-veiled pictures on the wall, a votary candle burning by the portrait of his parents and his brother Lucas. So many of the people Papá loved had died that I could see why he would be feeling poorly about being alive.
In the front parlor, Papá threw open the street shutters and pushed one of the rockers to one side. Spiders scurried away, and I saw the long, greasy tail of a rat as it dashed under the keepsake chest in a plume of dust. In their grief, the sisters had let the house go. There, scribbled on the wall in a child’s hand in black charcoal were faint words that were hard to make out. “What is it, Papá?” I asked.
“Your father’s first poem—written when he was five years old!”
Papá’s family had lived in this house from when we were still part of Spain the first time around. Even my great-grandfather’s birth cord was buried in the backyard. As for my father’s first poem, he told me the story. His grandmother, who was in fine health, had fallen sick suddenly one night after eating a guava pastel. The family sent for the famous Dr. Martínez, whose fame mostly derived from his having gone to school in Paris, a fact advertised on his shingle, Dr. Alfonso Martínez, Paris Degree, and in his numerous references to what the famous Bernard or the renowned Craveilhier had said about le corps humain.
Dr. Martínez examined the patient and recommended a vomitivo, which the family prepared, and said he would be back tomorrow in the morning after the second bell at ten. That night Papá’s grandmother died. The next morning when Dr. Martínez arrived at the door, Papá’s family was in the bedroom, laying out the body. Dr. Martínez was led into the front parlor, where he found himself facing the young grandson, charcoal in hand, just putting the finishing touches on his first poem:
Doctor Martínez
used his Paris degree
to kill my grandmother
with his expertise.
“Did you get in trouble for writing on the wall?” I asked. I would have. Tía Ana would have smacked my hands the way she did her students’ hands when she caught them doing something naughty.
Papá said he had not gotten punished, not at all. He had merely put into words what everyone else in the whole capital had been thinking. “Which is what a poet is supposed to do,” Papá said, eyeing me in that Ten Commandments way he had when giving advice which I was meant to store away in the category of things my-father-once-said-which-I-will-never-forget. “A poet puts into words what everyone else is thinking and hasn’t the gumption or talent to say.” Then added unnecessarily, “Remember that.”
I did remember it, but it was Papá who forgot. For as I learned to work my words better and better, I became more fearless, and Papá more fearful for me. Of course, no one knew. That was part of the fun: everyone talking about Herminia, and nobody but Papá and Ramona knowing it was me.
NOT THAT ALL MY productions were lofty.
One day, I received a commission from our farmer to write a poem for him. I call him “our” farmer only because he stopped by our house every few days with víveres from his farm out in the country. Don Eloy had heard me versifying, as he called it, and so he was wondering if I would write him a verse or two for a young girl whom he was courting.
“But you already have your mujer,” I reminded him. Maybe Don Eloy had gotten so old that he had forgotten he had a wife?
“You mean Caridad? Ay Dios, pero si Caridad es una vieja.”
“Caridad’s not an old biddy, Don Eloy. Caridad’s your age. You said so yourself. You said you were born within days of each other.”
“Don’t you know anything?” Don Eloy said, leaning closer. His breath smelled like Papá’s breath when Papá had been drinking. “Women age from the bottom up, and men from the top down.”
Now there was a fact I had never heard at the sisters Bobadilla.
“How’s that?” I asked, putting my hand on my hip like Mamá always did when we told fibs.
“You’ve heard it said men are fools. That’s because our brains get old sooner. But the rest of us is still intact until a very old age. Meanwhile women, well—just look at that old one, that Ana of yours, smart as clockwork, right? Brain all there, but the rest of her—” he motioned from the neck down, “dead as a doorstop.”
How odd of science to do that, I thought. But then, science could be very odd. Look at this whole business of a flower carrying around both stamen and pistil like it had no fai
th in finding a partner out there among the millions of flowers. (There were more flowers than human beings: Papá had confirmed that for me.) Finally, I agreed to write Don Eloy his courting poem in exchange for a basket of guavas from his farm. A few weeks later he reported that the young woman was coming around. “You have to write me another one. That one just shook the tree, but now I want the mangoes to fall.”
But in those few weeks I had had a chance to make some inquiries, and Don Eloy’s science of aging had been wholly discredited by Papá. As for the guavas he had brought me, they were full of worms, and recalling Papá’s grandmother’s experience, I threw them out.
IN THOSE DAYS OF being a colony again, the newspapers were full of poetry. The Spanish censor let anything in rhymed lines pass, and so every patriot turned into poet. Daily, our friend Don Eliseo Grullón or Papá would appear after supper with one paper or other for us to read. There were dozens of poems about liberty.
It was the time for poetry, even if it was not the time for liberty. Sometimes I wondered if this didn’t make sense after all. The spirit needed to soar when the body was in chains. I even wrote an ode about it, which I showed nobody, but added to the growing stack of poems under my mattress.
It was not just me who was writing. Ramona also wrote, lots of sweet poems which she liked to keep small and to the point. I tended to get carried away.
“That’s good,” Papá kept saying. “You want to go farther. You want to fly all the way to Parnassus.”