It surprises Alma—being drawn to these historical figures. She never did very well in history when she was in school. Particularly as a child, reading about a watershed episode or a battle or an important discovery made her anxious: as if she were watching a scene of impending disaster she could do nothing to change. That Portuguese captain was going to buy that first cargo of slaves and start a shameful commerce that would lead to revolts, divided families, tragic lives, civil war, the Watts riots, the murder of Malcom X, Martin Luther King, on and on—a whole juggernaut of results to be dealt with in later chapters. Alma wanted to go back and yell, Stop! You don’t know the half of what you’re getting us all into, a hemisphere soaked in the blood of innocent people!
Maybe what intrigues her about the historical Balmis is that she doesn’t know if she would have tried to stop him. Sure, poor orphans were used as visionary fodder, but the world was saved, sort of; massive epidemics prevented; the boys were given an opportunity to go somewhere where they could reinvent themselves and not always be bastard kids from La Casa de Expósitos. And so instead of feeling anxious or dreaming of intervening, Alma wants to go along with Isabel on the Balmis expedition.
Alma stumbled on this story as she was writing the sequel to her second novel: a multigenerational saga of a Latino family, something weighty to make up for the six-going-on-seven years since she published her last novel. Midway through part 1 (the eighteenth century), Alma realized she didn’t care for these people; she was tired of their self-conscious ethnicity, their predictable conflicts. But what to do? The novel was bought! The signing advance spent. Her original editor, sweet Dorie, has been retired to an imprint focusing on memoirs by people who have worked for or are related to the famous: Lady Di’s maid, Elvis’s manager, William Faulkner’s second cousin. A young, very hot editor has replaced her, Vanessa Von Leyden, Veevee as she is known in the book world. Alma has not met Veevee, but they have spoken twice: once, when Veevee called to introduce herself, and then when Veevee called again to introduce herself, no doubt having for gotten to check Alma’s name off her master list. Often, in glossy magazines she peruses on grocery lines or in waiting rooms, Alma sees photos of Veevee, attending literary dos, handing over prizes, looking more like a model than someone who reads, much less edits, books. Maybe publishers have to do a certain amount of schmoozing these days of dwindling readership, midlist titles spiraling down toward the bottom line, corporate owners for whom books are commodities to be marketed as if they’re so many barrels of crude oil or cases of wine. Pressure is on poor Veevee, on Lavinia.
“Veevee called,” Lavinia sometimes mentions. “She wants a guesstimate.”
Guesstimate? What is happening to the English language down in New York City? How to trust an editor who talks like this. “I can’t talk about it,” Alma tells Lavinia, as if it’s some Latina superstition she has to observe, a mystical circle of silencio around the writing. Finally, Lavinia has backed off. Periodically, she forwards a gushing e-mail from a young fan or a note from an editor praising Alma’s work, adding: See, you have lots of loving, devoted readers eager for the next one, as if she, too, suspects the truth: Alma has lost faith, caving in to that old self-doubt that’s gonna get her in the end unless she taps into those oil wells of faith.
Alma’s disenchantment with the book-biz world has been growing over the years: the marketing strategies; the glamour shots; the prepub creation of buzz, as the publicity departments call it; the clubiness of the blurbing; and, then, the panels in which one of every flavor minority is asked to respond to some questionable theme: Coloring the Canon; The Future of the American Novel; Politics and the Postcolonial Writer. And although Alma feels that it’s a far piece from what she set out to do as a writer, she has participated in it, convinced that—as Lavinia constantly reminds her—she’s damn lucky to be asked.
What finally sealed her silence was that mean-spirited article in a small alternative journal, an article that would have been otherwise ignored but was picked up by the mainstream media eager to report on mudslinging among the minorities. It had come about because of her name, that ridiculous name Alma adopted years back out of frustration and hurt at her family’s censorship. Mario González-Echavarriga, the patrón of Latino critics, deconstructed Alma, as Tera liked to put it. Fulana de Tal is nothing but a Machiavellian user of identity. Her ridiculous pen name is an irresponsible attempt to undermine the serious political writing by voices long kept silent. Does this writer consider her ethnicity a joke?
It went on and on like this for three pages, two columns a page, quoting, or rather misquoting her remarks in feature articles that always—it’s the lay of the land in journalism—got some detail wrong: her father had led a revolution (Papote fled the dictatorship); her grandmother was Haitian (Alma’s great-great-grandmother had been a Frenchwoman back when the whole island belonged to France). The critic made the biggest deal out of the fact that Fulana de Tal would not let herself be openly photographed, that her picture on her book jacket showed a chiaroscuro face in the shadows, which, of course, made her look brown—which, he went on to suggest, was her point: to pass herself off as a woman of color.
How could someone get her so convincingly wrong? True, a jacket photo for an author attempting to preserve a measure of anonymity was tricky. Alma tried to beg off, but her editor insisted. In this tough publishing world, it was just too hard to sell a first novel by a writer who required total anonymity. You had to have a story to go with your stories.
Then, too, what was the harm? “Who has to know?” Lavinia argued. Alma could publish and tour as Fulana de Tal. “It’s not like in this huge country anyone’s going to recognize you.” Spanish speakers would understand that Fulana de Tal wasn’t a real name. So? In a population, which included a sizable number of illegal aliens, using a false name was, if anything, emblematic of the Latino condition in the USA, a solidarity gesture. And so it was received, until Mario González-Echavarriga came along.
Alma caved in to these arguments, too afraid to lose the big break she had so wanted and the livelihood she needed. At first, it was some thing of a game, and it had worked to her advantage. The secrecy surrounding who she really was created that buzz around her novels, which did indeed help them sell. After the season of publication, the buzz died down, her second novel went out of print, her first survived through course adoptions, a popular multicultural chaser to the classics Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby, Great Expectations, her literary importance never big enough to warrant a newspaper sending out an investigative reporter to hunt down the true identity of some flash-in-the-pan autora.
During Q&A sessions after readings, the question, of course, always came up. Why couldn’t Alma use her real name? And she was frank, explaining how her family had requested that she not use “their” name; how, yes, she resented their petty reasons—their fear of social embarrassment (Latina girls enjoying sex before marriage; enjoying sex period; having breakdowns, divorcing—just like spoiled gringa girls)—but she also understood their terror, the deep scars after years in a dictatorship, the possibility they cited of political repercussions to the extended familia who had stayed back home. Alma considered an Americanized name, but her publisher vetoed that idea. A Latino name was just too attractive a draw these days. Besides if an Anglo author wrote about a Latino family in today’s charged multicultural climate, she would be raked over the hottest of PC coals, accused of co-opting and colonizing nuestra historia.
“Why write?” a disheartened reader sometimes asked after hearing Alma’s story.
“It’s not a choice,” Alma would counter. Though with the years, she began to wonder. So much staked on one passion. Monocultures always got in trouble; that much she has learned from Richard.
“Well, I think it’s great we finally have Latino authors out there in the mainstream!” some defender would exclaim, inciting a round of applause.
Of course, Alma knew better. “Part of setting down roots in the field of literature is
finding there are worms in the soil,” she reminded the audience. She had stolen that remark from Helen, who had been speaking about life in general and who, of course, found the good in this: worms enrich the soil; problems build character. When Alma was younger, she believed that people who were optimistic were just not as smart as pessimists. Now she sees the blessing and intelligence of Helen’s resiliently cheerful point of view.
“That was awesome! Do you do that everywhere?” the events manager in a small bookstore in Chicago asked Alma during her last book tour. And it was then that Alma realized that although she’d been flooded with sincerity each time, any repetition of such moments condemned them to staginess and inauthenticity. She began to dislike her whole persona, to believe that writing under her pseudonym was actually bad luck. FULANA DE TAL IS DEAD, she titled the e-mail she sent Lavinia, cc’ing Vanessa and getting an instant Out of the office; please contact my assistant reply. (Was Veevee ever in her office? Did she actually edit manuscripts or did her assistant do all the in-office work for her?) Now that Papote’s memory was foggy and Mamasita was unable to read with her bad eyes and perpetual agitation, Alma could safely write under her own name. What was the story she would tell openly as herself? What freedom would be gained with the loss of Fulana de Tal? Before Alma could even begin to answer these questions and re kindle some new spark of faith in herself, Mario González-Echavarriga’s article appeared, pounding the last nails into the coffin in which Fulana de Tal lay.
“But that’s what you wanted, right?” Lavinia argued. “And this negative publicity can only help! You’ll sell more books than ever with the next one, believe me! We’ll put the old, veiled picture on the cover and then a new full-face close-up in back. Maybe we can get Annie Leibovitz to do a new photo.”
It was the first time ever that Alma hung up on someone. Even today with the disturbing caller, her manners had too strong a hold on her temper. But Lavinia’s turning this attack into a marketing opportunity made Alma suddenly feel that in fact she deserved to be taken to task for letting herself become an ethnic performing monkey. She resented the assumption that her writing was nothing but a game of hide-and-seek with her readers. So that’s what Lavinia thought of her work!
Maybe that is why Alma is fleeing to the nineteenth century. Why Balmis’s project intrigues her. The man wanted to do something truly good—save the world from a deadly disease, a spreading epidemic. But his means were questionable, using orphans as carriers of his vaccine! Did Balmis feel the least bit troubled? How had he talked the rectoress, whose job it was to protect those kids, into going along with him? She had been intrigued by him, no doubt about it. Alma studies the only image she has been able to find of the man, a photo of a bust on his Web site: the face a little too stern (there is something about busts—severed heads, after all—that make faces grimmer), the jaw too set, the carved, pupil-less eyes blank as if they are blind or gazing far away. But there is a redeeming softness around the mouth, humanizing the man, making him someone Alma, too, is tempted to find out more about.
I
SEPTEMBER 1803
IT WAS THE FEAST DAY of the twin brothers Cosme and Damián, patron saints of doctors, and our day to deworm the boys.
Once a year, by recommendation of the doctors at the charity hospital next door, we made our brew of rhubarb and calomel, mixed with plenty of molasses, and dosed all our boys upon waking. By midday, most of them had spent time on the chamber pots we had placed in the yard so as to keep the stench out of doors.
There they were squatting on their pots against the back wall. They had stepped out of their soiled tunics, and a big cauldron of soaking clothes was already setting on a low fire by the kitchen door. Nati was stirring, the white kerchief tied around her head making her look like a bandaged patient who had wandered over from next door. Every once in a while she caught my eye, and I guessed the thought going through her head. Where were our fine lady volunteers who came to earn indulgences and show off their good deeds when we needed them?
Little Pascual was holding on to my skirts, nagging that he was hungry. “No, you cannot have something to eat until supper!” I snapped at him. Where had my patience gone? Why had God spawned so many creatures into the world and left them for me to take care of?
Across the yard, several boys were calling for me to come see an enormous worm.
I turned away into the house, leaving Nati to tend to them.
IN MY ROOM, I lay down on my cot and closed my eyes. Imagine, I told myself, another place, another time …
But today, as with many days recently, my old stratagem would not work. I could not envision any other life for myself than the present one. Twelve years I had been cloistered in this orphanage or working at the hospital next door; before that, six years tending to the sick in their own homes. A lifetime inured among the sick and suffering.
Each of the sixty-two boys presently under our roof was like a stone closing up the doorway out. Why had we admitted so many? We hardly had room for fifty! But with the bad harvests of the last few years, fewer and fewer families wanted to take in another mouth to feed. And yet the same bad harvests only seemed to increase the number of bastard children abandoned at the hospital or at our very door.
Our benefactress had noticed the change in me.
“You are worn out, Isabel,” Doña Teresa noted. “You need to take a fortnight away from your labors. Even our Lord …” Rested on the seventh day. I knew all her homilies by now.
As I lay there, my hand wandered as it often did to my face, exploring the rough skin, the misshapen nostrils. It was a perverse desire to pick at the wound, and each time, as if for the first time, I felt shock at not finding the face I had had before the smallpox. I had been spared, one of the lucky ones—so I was told by those who had not lost everything: mother and father and sister to the smallpox. And not just past but future loves! Was I to go down to my grave, having spent my allotment of time, without ever having known a man’s love, ever given birth to a child from my own loins?
“A man would not bring the solace you dream of, believe me,” Nati had told me. We were the same age, though Nati had two strapping sons to show for her ripe years. Her husband, “the father of the boys,” as she preferred to call him so as to distance herself as much as she could from him, had disappeared when the boys were young, which was just as well. Whenever I lamented my single state, Nati would console me with discouraging tales of her marriage.
I felt the tears seep out from under my closed eyes. What, then, did one live for?
Imagine! I told myself now more desperately, another time, another place. My black dress and veil shed, my skin scarred or not scarred, no matter. It was the future, the world without me. Someone would come upon my story, all that was left of me, a story. Isabel, a good woman, the rectoress of an orphanage. Who would guess my desperation, my desire to break out of the life I was living?
In the yard, I could hear the boys shouting. Some rowdy game was afoot I was glad not to be there to put a stop to, but I had left poor Nati in the lurch. She was my right hand, the only one besides myself who knew how to read and write.
“That’s enough, boys!” Nati was shouting. I could tell from her voice that she, too, was at her wit’s end. I lifted myself from the bed to remedy what I could, stop a fight, stroke a sick boy’s forehead, make a promise I could keep.
THAT EVENING, I WAS in the chapel, setting up for evensong. The day was finally done. The boys were cleaned up, and after prayers their only meal today awaited them. The halls and dormitories had been cleansed; we had borrowed Father Ignacio’s censer from the chapel and waved aromatic smoke in every room. The place smelled of High Mass and just the faintest scent of what it was masking, the stench of human waste.
“Doña Isabel! Doña Isabel!” the boys were calling for me.
I heard the sound of running down the corridor. I sighed, gathering patience for the scolding I anticipated having to deliver.
Given the hour, I wa
gered the boys had probably spotted Doña Teresa’s carriage through the windows and were racing to give me the news. Our benefactress often stopped by in the evening on her way home from some outing or other. “I hate going home to that empty house,” she often declared. Doña Teresa had her own heavy losses to bear: her husband, Don Manuel, had been gored by a bull when, drunk and boasting, he had wandered into the ring at a bullfight. “How many times didn’t I tell him it was a savage sport,” she told me many times. Soon thereafter, her sole child fell ill with the smallpox, perishing in this very house—a boy not yet nine. “Why I am drawn to our dear boys,” Doña Teresa had explained.
Her tragedy had indeed been the salvation of orphan boys, over a thousand harbored in La Casa de Expósitos, since it opened almost a dozen years ago. Our earliest residents, who had since grown to manhood, sometimes returned, bringing a young wife or newborn child for us to see. More often we heard of them conscripted into the navy, being buried at sea. The poor and helpless were all too often the fodder for the wars of our kings. But that was Doña Teresa’s homily.
I sat myself down heavily in a pew and waited for the boys to run in with the news that Doña Teresa had arrived.
Almost as if this were a signal, the flock of darkness I had fought off all day descended, their wings beating in my ears, their black-feathered softness snuffing out the spark of my will. This would not do. This would not do. I reached in my pocket, absently, and felt for the rosary I had taken to carrying with me for solace. Hail Mary, full of grace. What grace would come to such as me? I fingered the beads as if they were magic, then pulled hard at the string until it snapped and the black beads spilled upon my lap.
The boys were now just down the hall, calling out for me.