In the Name of Salome (35 page)

Mon is coming to Santiago de Cuba just to see her, Camila, and no one else. Mon is her special aunt, her godmother, her mother's only sister—as close to a mother as a person who is not your mother can be. Camila wrote to Mon early in the year, begging her to come for her fifteenth birthday party in April, but her aunt wrote back that travel was difficult for “a fat, old lady like me.” Instead she invited Camila to come spend the summer with her. That caused quite a disagreement in the household. Papancho would not let Camila go away. He said that the climate there would be very bad for her asthma. But Camila could tell this was just an excuse. Her father has never allowed her to go back home for a visit, even though the two islands are only a day away by steamboat. As often as Camila has been allowed to go back, Santo Domingo might as well be Mexico, where her brother Pedro lives now. She has not seen her aunt or her grandmother since Papancho moved the family to Cuba five years ago. This is
so
unfair.

She knows from comments between her father and stepmother, comments that are always shushed when she comes into the room, that Ramona does not get along with Papancho. She has no idea why. It is one of those mysteries from the past that no one ever talks about, for fear of upsetting her stepmother. At least that is the way Camila explains it to herself. Why else not tell her the truth of why Tía Ramona so dislikes Papancho? She has a right to know. After all, it is her life that is affected by their bad
blood! Of course, she does not say so. In fact, it is only recently that Camila has been admitting any of these dark thoughts to herself, much less anyone else.

“I really don't think you should stand by the window. All that dust from the street.” Tivisita's voice is full of concern, which Camila knows to be false. If Tivisita cared so much about her, she would have allowed Camila to accompany the coach down to the dock to pick up her father and aunt. Hasn't Papancho always extolled the salutary properties of the seaside air? But no, Tivisita said a ride down to the hot, low-lying city and harbor would be the worst thing for Camila's lungs. Ever since they moved up to Vista Alegre, Camila has not heard the end of how these breezy hills are going to cure her asthma. God forbid there should be another lung tragedy in the family!

Well, there is another tragedy in the family even if they cannot see it. She is so unhappy, she can't stand it. She has written about this only to her brother Pedro, and only in a veiled way, saying she has a friend who has a friend who is melancholy and would like to take his life, and her brother has written back, “Tell him to wait a while. Youth is never easy.” But Pedro has also written to their father asking that Camila be sent to live with him in Mexico City. She knows this because her father has developed the habit of using his letters as bookmarks, and Camila has often found herself reading
La divina commedia
or
El Cid
or Victor Hugo only to come upon a letter from one of her brothers marking the place where Papancho stopped reading.

That is how she found out her oldest brother Fran, who seems to have dropped out of the family, killed a man. The letter, written from prison by Fran to their father, explained how the Bordas boy had threatened him first, how the victim got the doctor, and he got the ball and chain. Perusing her father's copy of
La vida es sueño
, Camila discovered a letter from Mon, pleading with Papancho for custody of Camila. Even her brother Max seems to have picked up their father's habit. Recently, Camila discovered
that Max fancies her best friend Guarina. Her brother left a half-finished sonnet inside Salomé's book of poems, perhaps frustrated by his attempts to match their mother's talent. Reading it, Camila felt a pang of jealousy. Max has no right to worm his way into her special friendship with Guarina.

Her half brothers burst into the room, calling out, “Camila! Camila!” They are forbidden to enter their father's study unless an adult is present, and of course, the minute they see their older sister headed for the front of the house, they are in fast pursuit. She has tried scolding and shooing them away, but they throw themselves at the door, begging her not to be so mean.

Sometimes she wishes she could tuck the whole lot of them back inside their mother, like the Russian dolls that fit inside each other that her father brought back from Paris for her when he was foreign minister. Then she would toss that mamá doll as far away as she can!

What an awful person she is to have these thoughts. Her mother must be looking down from heaven with a frown. Quickly, Camila makes the sign of the cross.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of my mother, Salomé
. . .

It is all the more painful that her half brothers adore her and follow her around all the time. Little Rodolfo, in fact, calls her Mamila, and when he is in a temper, no one can calm him, not his mother nor his aunt Pimpa nor his big brothers Cotú and Eduardo nor her old nursemaid Regina, who is now his nursemaid. Only Mamila. He opens and closes his little hands, and Camila's anger falls away before such raw, undisguised need.

“Boys, boys!” Tivisita calls out now. There is such indulgence in her voice that the boys know they need not heed her scolds. In this house, it is Tivisita's older sister, Pimpa, who rules. “Leave your sister alone. Her aunt Mon is coming to visit her especially, and I want you to behave yourselves.”

They ignore her. Everyone but Papancho ignores the petite, pretty woman, or so Camila has always thought. But recently she
has begun to notice how attentive men are to her stepmother. Camila's own young gentlemen friends tell her that she has the most beautiful stepmother—as if this is a compliment to her! Whenever Camila goes with Tivisita to the shops, she notices how men on the street stop and gaze after them. Tall and awkward as she is, Camila knows the appreciation is not directed at her. Until recently, she has been glad for her invisibility, but now that she is a young señorita herself, she feels a pang in her heart. Especially when her friend Primitivo Herrera or Papancho seem to forget she exists the minute Tivisita steps into a room.

A puff of dust in the distance announces the arrival of the carriage. “They're here!” her brothers call out. Papancho has been in the Dominican Republic for several weeks, summoned by the new government to be considered for a possible post, and now he is returning with his former sister-in-law. The boys, eager for travel gifts, break into howls of excitement and race out of the room.

It is now as Camila turns that she sees the expression on her young stepmother's face: pain and worry not yet hidden behind cheerful calm. Something unspoken lurks in her hazel eyes that makes Camila uncomfortable. She doesn't know what it is and doesn't want to ask.

“Camila,” Tivisita begins, her voice hushed in confidence. “I hope—” She stops herself. Perhaps she has seen the look of impatience on her stepdaughter's face.

Right this moment, Camila could ask, “What, Tivisita?” and encourage an intimacy that she knows her stepmother wants. But she cannot bring herself to open that door, even a crack.

She hurries from the room, afraid to be alone with this person she does not want to love.

H
ER AUNT
R
AMONA IS
uglier than she remembered, fat and wonderfully cranky with everyone except Camila. She looks at her
new nephews as if they were related to the pet monkey roaming the house. She shoos the pig away with her parasol. When they are finally alone in Camila's room, she leans toward her niece and asks, point blank, “How can you stand it?”

Camila would like to say, “I can't, Mon; I'm desperate; take me back when you go home.” But, she has developed the habit of accommodating, and her recent revolt has been mostly internal, except of course, when it leaks out in the presence of her stepmother. Unless Camila catches herself, she will say something rude that will bring that look into her stepmother's face.

“You are looking more and more like your mother,” Mon says, cocking her head this way and that as if to see her niece from different angles.

Camila loves to hear this compliment. She glances up at Salomé's portrait, an oil portrait her father recently commissioned by an artist in London. The painting used to hang in Papancho's office, but when he moved his practice to his home, he asked Camila if she would like to have the picture in her room. Camila guesses that Tivisita might have complained that her predecessor's portrait should not hang in the new family's parlor.

Her aunt is looking at the portrait and shaking her head. “That's not what your mother looked like.”

Camila loves this portrait. She always brings Guarina back here so that her friend can see what a beautiful mother she had, as beautiful as Tivisita, though darker-featured, with sparkling black eyes and a pretty, aquiline nose and rosebud mouth. She does not want to hear that her mother did not look like this. But in fact, when her father brought the portrait home from his office, Tivisita also observed that the picture was not really a true semblance of the Salomé she knew. That time her father shared in Camila's annoyance. “Of course it is, Tivisita. It's just that by the time you knew Salomé, she was already quite ill.”

“Papancho says it is a true likeness,” Camila insists. “Before
Mamá got sick,” Camila adds, to soften the defiance in her voice.

Her aunt is studying the portrait, shaking her head. “Your mother was much darker, for one thing.”

“As dark as me?” Camila wants to know. Even though she herself is quite light-skinned, next to the pale Tivisita and the new brood, Camila looks like one of the servant girls.

Her aunt hesitates, “Darker. Pedro's color, with the same features.”

Camila can barely remember her brother's color, much less his features. He left Cuba three years ago, mailing the farewell letter Camila recently found in her father's copy of Rodó's
Ariel
just before boarding the ship.

By the time you receive this, Papancho, I will be bound for the land of the Aztecs. I fear that if I stay, I will succumb, like my mother, to moral asphyxiation.

Moral asphyxiation? Everyone knows her mother died of consumption! What is she to make of her brother's diagnosis? She tries to picture his handsome, swarthy face but Pedro's image has become so faded that Camila would probably not recognize him were she to pass him walking down a crowded street in downtown Santiago de Cuba. Would he turn and gaze after her only if her stepmother were along? she wonders with a pang.

“They say Mamá was quite tall. Very attractive,” Camila continues, hoping her aunt will supply more details, filling in the many blanks in her head.

Mon looks at Camila a moment as if trying to decide something, before waving her questions away. “Get to know your mother from her poems. That is the truest Salomé. That is Salomé before . . .” She trails off. Camila is so sure she can complete the sentence that she does not need to ask if her aunt is referring to Papancho.

“I know all Mamá's poems by heart,” Camila boasts. In fact, she loves to rehearse the poems with Guarina, reciting while her friend follows along in the book.

Her aunt smiles proudly and pulls her rocker toward one of the trunks she has been unpacking. A third and fourth trunk with books the family left behind when they emigrated to Cuba have been stored in the front parlor. Two men unpacked the wagon of baggage that followed the coach up the hill. “You came with a whole household!” Pimpa observed, initiating the war that would soon rage between the two outspoken sisters-in-law.

“I brought some of your mother's things that I think you should have,” Ramona explains. She unpacks a silver comb that she says Salomé's father gave her on her fifteenth birthday and a black silk dress which she spreads on the bed. Camila smooths out the fabric with the palm of her hand, a dark silhouette of her mother's body. From a velvet reticule, Mon withdraws a gold medallion and a small book whose binding looks hand-sewn. She lays these articles on the lap of the dress. “She wore that dress the night she got the national medal. Those are the original poems—”

“Her book?”

Her aunt shakes her head. “No, your father tinkered with those. These are the ones I copied down from the originals. Some day I hope you or Pedro—since you're the ones inclined in that direction—I hope you will publish them.”

Camila picks up the book and opens it. The pages are roughcut, and each time she turns one, the binding strains, so that she is afraid the whole will come apart in her hands. She begins to read “Sombras” and since she knows the published poem by heart, she can make out the small differences. “Why did Papancho do that?”

“He thought he knew better,” Mon says, twisting her mouth as if to knot it shut.

Just then, there is a soft knock on the door. “May I come in?” Tivisita calls out. Camila feels her shoulders tensing.

“Of course, you may come in, Tivisita,” Mon says in a voice loaded with patience.

The door opens, and Tivisita peeks in. Her eyes fall on the bed, where the dress and medal are laid out.

“I'm intruding,” she states, the edge of a question in her voice. She wants so much to be asked into this moment of privacy. Camila feels herself weakening and glances at Mon to see if her aunt might want to collude in indulging the nervous woman.

“I haven't seen my Camila for five years,” Mon says firmly. “We're just catching up with each other. Aren't we?”

Tivisita looks as if she has just been slapped. Why can't she be a horrible stepmother so I can hate her? Camila wonders. Instead, she feels a stirring of affection that she does not want to feel. It would amount to betraying her mother.

“Of course you want some time together,” Tivisita says, pulling the door quietly closed.

“We'll be out soon,” Camila calls after the retreating footsteps. Then, just to be sure her aunt knows that she, Camila, does not like Tivisita either, she rolls her eyes skyward.