Santo Domingo, 1874 – 1877
SUDDENLY EVERYONE WAS LOOKING at me.
I studied my face in the mirror: the same eyes, mouth, big ears (oh, how I hated them!), the nose I wished were a little less broad, the springy hair I couldn’t tamp down—in short, I was the very same Salomé Ureña, but now everyone seemed to point, to make a low bow at the waist, or dip down in a schoolgirl curtsy, and say, “Buenos días, poetisa.”
IT’S AS IF I had on a disguise, a famous face, behind which I watched people who just a few months ago would not have said good day to me on the street suddenly smile with deference and ask, “And what do you think of the weather we’re having, Señorita Poetisa?”
“Hot,” I would say in my terse way. But then, because I could see they were waiting for me to say more, I would add, “To be expected in the summer.”
“Salomé says we should expect more heat this summer,” I heard myself misquoted.
“Did you hear the wonderful tone of irony when she said, ‘To be expected in the summer’?”
This is the way beauties must feel, I thought to myself.
NIGHTS WHEN I LAY in bed, I ached for the kind of love I had read about in other people’s poems. I was twenty-four years old, and only once had a young man squeezed my hand and whispered poetry in my ear.
“That’s one more time than me,” Ramona noted sullenly when I voiced my heart’s yearning to her. “And you certainly stopped any chances of the same thing happening to me.” My older sister was turning more and more into a younger version of our cranky tía Ana.
Miguel and Alejandro, our former tutors, were back with their pretty Puerto Rican brides in tow. “They go out as exiles and come back as grooms,” Ramona complained. She was right. Gruff, manly patriots whom we remembered in torn, bloody shirts with firearms over their shoulders, their hair matted with blood, returned in long frock coats with silk cravats tied in complicated French knots and haircuts that made their ears pop out and their faces look sweeter and plumper.
“Your day will come, girls, if it is meant to come,” Mamá would say from time to time. “Meanwhile you are lucky to have each other.”
But if I was to remain by my sister’s side for the rest of my life, I wanted at least one brief excursion into love. Long enough to feel a man’s arms around my waist, to see the look of worship falling away from his face, the look of fame falling away from mine, that hushed and holy moment that all poems aspire to when the word becomes flesh.
Was that too much to ask?
EVERY EVENING, IT SEEMED, the house filled with visitors.
There was our regular Don Eliseo Grullón, and Papá with his heart full of pride and his rum-flushed face, and the poet José Joaquín Pérez, just back from exile, and the sainted Father Billini, who had founded a school for boys as well as an insane asylum (“Some mornings, I find myself at one and I think I’m at the other,” he joked fondly), and Archbishop Meriño, also back from exile, an imposing, broad-shouldered man with a thunderous voice and a shock of white hair. “I thought you’d be older,” he said when he met me.
I think I disappointed them. In fact, what Archbishop Meriño had probably meant to say was that he thought I would be bolder. But the more wonder I saw in their eyes, the more expectation in their voices, the more obsequies in honor of my honor, the more I withdrew.
So I would sit there as Archbishop Meriño expounded on last Sunday’s gospel, or the good wines of Extremadura, or the fine women of St. Thomas, or as José Joaquín extemporized about the new trend of indigenous literature, or as Papá responded to questions about his own poetry by saying how he was leaving me the trumpet and he was going to play the flute from now on, and if I had something to say and there was enough silence for me to say it, I would speak up. But not enough, I suppose, to impress anyone.
And so the rumor spread, or so I heard from Ramona, that Salomé Ureña was a woman who hardly talks.
Meanwhile, poor Mamá was beside herself trying to make polite conversation and keep everyone in refreshments. Now she worried that the house was too dark, the zinc roof too rusty, the rockers too creaky, the portrait of her father at the gates of the city accepting surrender from the Haitian invaders hanging in the wrong place.
“What can I offer you?” Mamá asked visitors. We had as little money as ever, but now we had important guests to entertain. Of course, the polite thing would have been for our important guests to take note of the worn-out rockers, the dark house moldy from lack of paint, the portrait of the liberators at the gate framed in cheap palm-wood and say, “We are fine. Please do not disturb yourself, Doña Gregoria. There is ample refreshment in fine conversation.”
Instead they would ask for a sherry or a shot of rum, or whatever there was to drink in the house, and I would watch poor Mamá grow flustered, as she hurried to the back of the house, and soon I would see Ramona letting herself out the side door to race across the street to the bodega to purchase by the glass what we could not afford to stock in our pantry.
“Don’t these ministers and ambassadors and that husband of yours realize that rum costs money?” Tía Ana complained when everyone had left. She was a step away from putting a small basket at the door with a mexicano or two inside it and a little hand-printed card beside it saying, AGRADECIMIENTOS, but my mother said that she would die if Ana did any such thing, as if we were a church with an alms box. I think our bodega neighbor must have heard this oft-repeated argument between the two sisters, for when Ramona was next there purchasing a glass of Spanish sherry that Archbishop Meriño said he had been hankering for since his days in Sevilla, our neighbor handed her a full bottle, saying, “With gratitude to the musa of our country.”
A FRESH, HOPEFUL ENERGY was at work in la patria. Everyone was writing poems and essays, offering their help to González, our handsome young president, with his dashing mustache and beard and his aquiline nose and green waistcoat in honor of his party. The Green Party he had started was supposed to unite all parties under the color of growth and resurrection. At last, we were becoming a nation of citizens in service to one another.
He even signed a treaty of peace and friendship with Haiti instead of using the threat of an invasion by our neighbor as a bogeyman to make us behave. “As Salomé says,” I heard our president said, “‘Give to the past your blindness. Look ahead!’” Once or twice, the president came in person to gather inspiration from la musa de la patria. “Don’t rest in your labors, Salomé,” he urged me. “The fight continues!”
I didn’t. That year, 1874, was probably one of my best. I wrote seven poems I was proud enough to publish. I wrote countless more we used to light the fogón fires or put under the side table so it wouldn’t wobble when Archbishop Meriño leaned his considerable bulk against it.
Everyone was curious as to how I wrote and where my ideas came from. There were rumors that I heard voices or that the angel Gabriel came to me in dreams. Other stories had it that it was really my father writing the poems for me.
“Let’s tell everyone that it is the angel Gabriel that comes to you at night,” Ramona suggested. “I’ll say I see him, too, but he will only squeeze your hand.” It was wonderful when instead of turning her remarks into weapons to hurt me or herself, Ramona used them to make us both laugh.
One time, Ramona grew serious. “How do you do it, Herminia?”
“Come on, Marfí. You write, too. I do it the same as you.”
But in actual fact, Ramona was not writing anymore. One day, soon after Mother’s Day, when we had each written Mamá and Tía Ana, second mother of the household, as she insisted we call her, their poems, Ramona had turned to me and said, “That’s my last poem. I pass you my trumpet, as Papá would say. You’re the poet from now on.”
“Still,” Ramona insisted, “I want to know how you do it.”
So I explained how random phrases would sometimes pop into my head, and I would go over them and over them in my mind so that if Mamá or Tía Ana or she, Ramona, called me, s
ometimes I really wouldn’t even hear them. All day, for days, I would work those lines over in my head, and then one night, after we had swept the parlor and put the chairs back in their places and cleared off the glasses and cups, and everyone had fallen asleep, I would get up and write down the entire poem, and when I was done, I would dream that now he would come, the great love that would fill the vacant space left inside me by this creation I had made of love.
Ramona had begun to cry.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, feeling guilty for getting carried away with my description.
“That’s just how I feel, but I can’t make something that makes people love me.”
“They don’t love me, Ramona. They love la poetisa, if you can even call it love.”
Ramona looked at me a moment, then shook her head. “At least it’s something, Salomé. At least you’re not the one getting passed over so that they can come sit beside your sister and ask her what she thinks of this hot weather we’re having.”
“I suppose,” I agreed, squeezing her hand, for I could see that she didn’t understand how lonely I was in the midst of all this attention. How much I, too, longed for a love that would go beyond the poems into the wild silence of my heart.
ONE AFTERNOON JOSÉ CASTELLANOS came by. He was putting together the first anthology ever of Dominican poets, and he wanted to include some of my poems. He brought along his friend, Federico Henríquez y Carvajal, son of one of the Sephardic families that had settled in the capital back when we were still occupied by the Haitians.
Federico had a favor to ask. Would I read his new drama, The Hebrew Girl, and tell him what I thought of it?
“I would very much like to,” I said, and I meant it. I was always eager for something to read. We were not a country rich in books; the few collections of this or that author circulated among a group of readers who all knew of each other. Eliseo Grullón owned Victor Hugo; Meriño had a collection of Shakespeare and La historia de la literatura española; Billini had loaned me his Quintana and Gallego; and several people had Lamartine; only José Joaquín Pérez had Espronceda and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Federico was patting his jacket as if the manuscript had disappeared inside it. “¡Ay, Dios mío! Pancho took the satchel. Un momentico,” he said, walking quickly to the door. Down the street, I saw a boy, no more than fifteen, a recent arrival into long pants, with a satchel slung over his shoulder. At the sound of his brother’s whistle, he turned and waved. He had a sweet, young face (one of those random phrases popped in my head: his young face fresh with what he does not know); his eyes were dark and intense; his black hair coarse like an Indian cacique’s. He did not see me, for I had ducked behind the door.
Federico was back at the door, packet in hand. “That little brother of mine is so absent-minded.” Federico shook his head, indulgently. “He’s off to see a new girlfriend, always in love.”
The truth is that boy had seemed too young to have a novia. But boys could start out seeking love at a young age and continue through old age—I recalled Don Eloy and his secret—and their brio was applauded. Meanwhile we girls had to conduct our frantic search, while seeming not to do so, in that narrow corridor between old enough and old maid.
“That Pancho is going to break hearts,” José observed.
“Yes, indeed,” Federico agreed.
“What can I offer you, young jóvenes,” my mother had come into the parlor.
José looked as if he were considering the food that might fill the particular hunger inside him. But Federico spoke up, “Not a thing, Doña Gregoria. This conversation is refreshment enough.”
That afternoon I had no trouble speaking.
IT WAS EVENING WHEN the two men got up to leave. Tía Ana had already come into the room several times to see if these guests had departed yet. The front parlor had always been her special province, as she used it for her little school. Now, every evening, it turned into Salomé’s salon, as Ramona called it, and it was never in order for its transformation back to a classroom the following morning.
As he was finally leaving, Federico remarked, “I don’t know where this rumor comes from that Salomé Ureña is a woman who doesn’t talk. I can’t recall when I’ve had a more interesting evening.” He bowed gallantly. I could smell the perfumed ointment in his hair as his head dipped down before me.
I felt my face burning, and looked away. Had I talked too much? I wondered. Or was he hinting that he felt attraction toward my person and conversation? I glanced up, catching his eye again. But the look I saw there was the glazed one of an admirer. He was seeing the famous poetisa who had agreed to read The Hebrew Girl and whom he hoped would write a poem in the paper in praise of it. He was not seeing me, Salomé, of the funny nose and big ears with hunger in her eyes and Africa in her skin and hair.
BUT PERHAPS I HAD been too hasty in judging Federico’s look? A few days later, a poem was slipped under the door, “Garland,” dedicated “to my distinguished friend, the inspired poetisa Señorita Salomé Ureña.” It was signed “Federico Henríquez y Carvajal.”
I ran to the front window, opened it just a crack, expecting to see the tall, slender Federico, but instead it was his errand boy, the little brother, swinging his arms and whistling a tune from a popular zarzuela, as he walked away.
Ramona came to the window. “There goes the young gallant,” she quipped, imitating his swagger. We giggled, and the boy turned around, just as we quickly pulled the window shut.
Ramona saw the envelope in my hand and snatched it away. “Give that back,” I ordered, but I was still giggling about the cocky, younger brother, and so Ramona did not take my order in earnest.
She read the first stanza with all the embellishments her voice could give it. Federico was weaving a garland of friendship flowers from his heart for me. Or so he said. I came to Ramona’s side and kept reading where her voice had fallen silent. When I finished, I looked at my sister to see her reaction.
She was scowling as if she’d just had a taste of something sour. “Usually at the end they say they’re going to die if you don’t return their love. This forever-friendship garland is puzzling.”
“Maybe he’s being original,” I said, taking the letter gruffly from her hand. I had had the same uneasy feeling, but I did not want to hear it voiced.
“Original? Weren’t you telling me just last night that his Hebrew Girl drama was very derivative and a little tedious?”
I had said that, but now it seemed that I had spoken too quickly. In fact, I went back and reread the drama that very night. The Hebrew girl still exhaled sighs of sweet sorrow and dreary despair, but the prose did seem less facile and the conception a little more inspired now that it was written by someone who might be interested in me.
I wrote Federico a poem, in answer. As I did with all my productions, I showed it to Ramona, who simply handed it back and said, “Salomé, that’s the worst poem you ever wrote.”
My sister was known for her bluntness, but this was downright harsh. Perhaps I had gotten out of the habit of taking criticism after months of hearing myself praised so much. “What do you mean?” I challenged her back.
“Salomé, you’ve never before in your life used this kind of silly language, for heaven’s sake. ‘I languish under the cruelty of my implacable fate.’ It sounds as bad as . . . as Josefa on a bad day.” My older sister had been an avid follower of the beloved poetisa Josefa Perdomo, but in the last years her admiration had cooled. Now that she was older, Ramona said she wanted poems with peso—substance—not just prettiness.
I took the poem back and felt close to tears. What if I were losing my talent? Lately, I had been writing so many occasional poems for graduations and birthdays and burials that people were requesting of me that I had no time to consult my heart to know what I must write. I remembered the promise I had made years back after scribbling that foolish poem for Don Eloy: I would write poems with all my heart, or not at all.
“But what do I know?” Ra
mona added, seeing that I was upset. “I’m not the poet. Here comes the other poet in the family, ask him.”
Papá was at our door before I could put the poem away. Even so, I should not have shown it to him. I should have realized that Papá would not appreciate any poem, no matter how good, if it concerned a young man. But I wanted approval so much that I handed the paper over.
Ramona and I sat down, one on either side of him. Papá started by reading out loud, but as he progressed, he fell silent. The furrow deepened on his brow. Finally, when he was done, he crunched the paper up until it was a small ball in his fist.
“This is the kind of thing Herminia of the white snowflakes would write,” he said in a low, disappointed voice. “You, Salomé Ureña, can do better than that.”
I stood up, my breath coming short as it always did when I was upset, and ran down the hall, backing around the corner where Mamá and Tía Ana were scooping cakes of lye soap out of a wooden mold and out the side door. I had no bonnet, no shawl, or cape. My face was wet with tears. I was a sight all right, but I did not care if the sisters Bobadilla or the president himself saw me in this condition.
Where does a distraught woman go in a small city inhabited by people who know her or know of her? I headed north on Street of Studies with no idea where I was going. I was almost to the gates of San Antonio, when I saw the ruins of the old monastery of San Francisco looming before me. Billini had recently rebuilt one wing as an asylum for the mad. It seemed I was headed in the right direction, after all.
I slipped through the side door on the stone wall and found myself in an inner yard of rock ruins and a few shade trees. The place was deserted. It was late afternoon, and no doubt the nuns were in the chapel, saying the six o’clock angelus. Under a shade tree in the distance, I caught sight of a pile of rags, which suddenly shifted, rose up like the snake charmer’s snake I had read about in The Amazing Travels of Marco Polo, and became a human creature. Her hair was a mass of tangles; her shift soiled and torn in great rips here and there so I could see her body’s alarming nakedness beneath it. Slowly, I began backing myself toward the door, afraid to startle her with too abrupt a movement.