In the Name of Salome (43 page)

“Of course, dear.”

But once we got there, no one on the street could tell us
which house it was exactly. With my poor eyesight, I couldn't pick it out from the others, but I knew I could find it by feel. A plaque had been embedded in the wall soon after Salomé's death. What a sight we must have been in that hot afternoon sun: an old, blind woman stroking the faces of the buildings on the south side of the street and a girl with orange nails and high heels trailing with a parasol so her already dark aunt would not get any darker. “Here it is!” I called out.

“Here lived and flowered Salomé Ureña,” Belkys read the plaque for me. Our young driver had accompanied us, bringing up the rear, no doubt catching the gratifying sight of Belkys in her minidress. Elsa tells me that Belkys's hemlines cause a stir wherever she goes. “Who is this Salomé Ureña?” he wanted to know. “I read her name everywhere.”

I had to bite my tongue, I most certainly did.

“She was one of the best poets of the Spanish-speaking world,” Belkys bragged—as if she would know! “She started the first school for higher education for women in the country. What else, Tía Camila?” she asked turning to me.

I couldn't think what else to say. I felt the old sadness welling up in me. And so I said simply, “She was my mother.”

“May she rest in peace,” the young man said, his hand flashing before me as he made the sign of the cross to seal his wish.

W
E VISITED THE SCHOOL
. Mamá had opened the Instituto de Señoritas in 1881 in her front parlor, and except for the hiatus of some years when she was ill, the school had survived dozens of revolutions and civil wars and changes in government. In that respect, we had not changed as a people since Mamá's time. Now the building occupied most of a block. “Describe it to me,” I asked my young escorts.

“It's olive green with a darker olive green trim.”

It sounded very martial—like a building in Cuba after Soviet taste took over. “What else?”

“It's got bars at the windows,” Belkys said. “How creepy.”

“Of course, with all the crime and vandalism these days,” the young driver lamented. He sounded as if he had been around for ages and had seen the awful direction the human race was taking.

Once inside, we entered a din of scolding teachers and girls reciting their lessons.

What had happened to the positivist method? I wondered. To young minds asking unsettling questions?

“Do you have a pass?” It was one of the teachers, I suppose, patrolling in the hall.

My dear Belkys, princess of brag, spoke up rather rudely, “We don't need one. This is Salomé Ureña's daughter.”

“Right! And I'm the pope,” the huffy teacher snapped back. A challenge to her authority was something she would not tolerate, especially in the halls within earshot of her charges. No doubt it did not help our cause that a young man had accompanied us inside this den of females.

“But I'm telling you the truth,” Belkys argued, her voice trembling. “Come on, Tía Camila, let's go.”

“Tell me exactly what it was like inside,” I asked her as we rode back to the house.

And that is when she described the weedy, littered inner yard; the torn-up wooden floors; the cluster of cleaning women with sullen, tired faces, sitting in cane-back chairs; the many rules and mandamientos tacked up on the bulletin boards; the young girls walking down the halls with Dixie cups of something they had all learned how to cook that day.

“That's enough,” I said, pressing her hand.

“Ay, Tía Camila,” Belkys was sobbing now. All tangerine nail polish gone from her voice. “What would Salomé say if she could see the place now.”

What would she have said, except what she must have said to herself, time after time, when her dreams came tumbling down? Start over, start over, start over.

L
ATE AFTERNOONS
, R
ODOLFO AND
I sit on the galería, rocking in rhythm. The rocking chair duet, Elsa calls it. The smell of rain and ginger is in the air—there is a hedge, the girls tell me, circling the house, a moat of ginger!

Sometimes
the
subject comes up, not death as one would think for these two white heads and ailing bodies—that is easy to talk about—but Cuba. “The experiment that has failed,” Rodolfo calls it bitterly. Since he managed to get out five years ago with his girls, Rodolfo, like most exiles, feels driven to soil the nest for those of us who stayed. It's a nest that is already well soiled, as I tell him.

“But that is not the point,” I add. “We have to keep trying to create a patria out of the land where we were born. Even when the experiment fails, especially when the experiment fails.”

“You weren't even born there!” Rodolfo counters.

“It's the place where I was raised. And as Martí once said—”

“Camila, Camila,” he sighs, “your handicap is showing.” This is what Rodolfo calls a certain know-it-all tendency in his older sister, the schoolteacher, to dispense her little nuggets of wisdom wherever she finds ignorance—a state of mind that, of course, does not exist in my brother's head.

“The truth is,” he begins, his favorite opening phrase these days, as if his advanced years have turned him into a Moses coming down the mountain with his tablet of numbered truths, “la pura verdad is that we have been a wandering family.”

That is a truth we can both agree on. The seeds of the Henríquezes are scattered across the Américas: Pedro's two girls in Argentina; childless Fran wherever his wife's family took their ashes when they fled the revolution; Max's sons shuttling here and there
in South America, so that the times I have called their homes, their wives sigh deeply and say, “Let's see. It's Thursday . . . he is in Panamá.” Then there are Papancho's French grandchildren, scattering his seed in France and Norway and New Jersey, so I hear. And every one of these children driven by the little motor of life and need in a world that increasingly resembles our neighbor to the north, a world without sufficient soul or spirit, as Martí put it, as if the great sacrifice and vision of the old people have washed out over time.

“You're rocking strangely today,” Rodolfo notes, stopping his rocking as if to listen more closely to mine. Indeed, I have been beating a rhythm with my hands on the armrest even as I clack, back and forth. “You are playing jazz, not singing harmony.”

“I do that sometimes,” I tell him.

“Y
OU SHOULD REST
, Tía Camila,” Belkys suggests. We are back on the subject of the contested tombstone. My nieces want to cancel today's outing to the cemetery.

“Don't you trust us if we tell you we've changed it?” Lupe asks me, just the slightest bit of impatience in her voice.

“I'd like to go and see for myself.”

“If you're going to
see
it for yourself, you better wait until after your operation to go check up on us!” Belkys pipes up, fresh as ever.

They do not want me to go out at all today. There's a strike of garbage collectors. In some places, the strikers have set up roadblocks of garbage.

“Besides, it really does look like rain. It won't do for you to catch a cold before your operation.” Lupe, ever the logician. She does not believe in arguing, but in reasoning things out, she likes to say. When I used to bring them workbooks from the States, her favorite exercises were always those analogies: house is to home as country is to blank.

But their excuses make me suspicious. My operation is scheduled for next Tuesday, si Dios quiere, as the Dominicans are fond of saying, if God wills it and the garbage collectors allow it. In case anything happens, I want to be sure this last wish has been carried out. “The rain will let up soon. Then we can go.”

“Tía Camila, if we were trying to fool you, all we would have to do is take you to the cemetery and read you what you want to hear,” Lupe continues in her reasoning.

I have ways to check up on you, I think, my hands now quietly folded in my lap. The more blurred my vision has become the more sensitive my fingertips. I would feel the stone and know the difference.

“So you might as well take our word for it, dear Tía!” Lupe concludes, straightening the bow on my collar as if I were a petulant child.

Elsa, the soulful one of the three, worries that my preoccupation with this little detail is a sign of my bigger anxiety about the upcoming eye operation.

“I'm not worried about that,” I reassure her. “All I'm leaving is that stone. The least I can do is get the details right.” Indeed, my old friend Marion used to tease me that I wrote only with pencils because I didn't like my mistakes to show.

“If there is one thing I hate about the revolution,” I add, and of course, they perk up hearing me say this, as they so much want their old aunt to agree with their point of view, “it is the sloppy use of the language.” I have any number of examples, but I don't use them.

“Is that all?” Lupe asks—as if I had complained about a bunion when the problem is the gangrenous foot.

I think a minute about it before I respond—Elsa calls it the time lag of Tía Camila's thinking. “Yes,” I say. “That is all.” Though I could very well have said, That is everything. The words that create who we are.

I R
EMEMBER MY FIRST
job in Cuba after I returned in 1960.

The jefe of the personnel department at the Ministry of Education had heard that a Dominican woman had resigned her job as a professor at Vassar to come join the revolution. (The inaccuracies were already creeping in.) Would la compañera Camila like to serve as technical assessor in the national literacy compaign? His own letter was full of errors and messy efforts at correction. No doubt his secretary had been liberated to a cane harvest, and he had been left alone to type his own correspondence.

It was not the letter itself that made me feel uneasy. It was the close at the end.
Revolutionarily yours, ¡Patria o Muerte! ¡Venceremos
! Surely one of these phrases would have been enough.

It was happening all over Cuba, this awful, overwrought language. Every time I ventured out I would have to fight an urge to take my red pencil. One shopkeeper posted, “The customer is always right except when he attacks the revolution.” Both false statements: one of capitalism, the second of Marxism. Oh dear, I thought, what have I come back to?

The first few years, before I learned the new names, it was impossible for me to travel anywhere by taxi unless I happened upon an older driver. A young driver would not know Calle de la Reina because it had been liberated and renamed Simón Bolívar before he had learned to read. Carlos III Boulevard was gone, but Boulevard Salvador Allende could still take you where you were going. We were at the foot of our very own Tower of Babel, ideological as well as linguistic, and the exodus began, mostly of the rich who had the means to start over in the United States of America.

“What they don't want to admit is that now their servants' children are getting schooled, and everyone can eat, and everyone can get medical care,” my friend Nora Lavedán observed. “When there
is
food and medicine,” she added wryly.

One spot I did want to visit before all of the names were changed was Domingo's grave. But by the time I made it to the
cemetery, the place was a mess. Graves had been plundered, statues toppled, the busts and bones of rich ancestors carted to Miami on Pan Am.

The young compañera in charge of records kept mumbling to herself as she checked through a pile of file folders she had been renumbering. “I would have to know his date of death and date of burial.”

“I'm not sure,” I told her. “You see, I was gone for so many years, that he died and I never knew of it.”

The sharp-featured woman in her beret and combat boots eyed me curiously. “Was he a relation of yours?” She needed that affirmation before she could go on with her task.

“No, not a relation exactly,” I explained—always the stickler for accuracy. The priggishness of the schoolteacher in my voice was itself like a red pencil mark across the permission she might have granted me.

“Compañera, I will need a pass filled out by the comandante of cemeteries before I can release any information.”

Comandante of cemeteries! I thought. Everyone was now in charge of something. That was the bad news. But the good news was very good: we were all in charge of taking care of each other. I could live, and die, for that, too.

“If you would be so kind, compañera, to write the comandante's address down.” I complied, even when the rules seemed foolish, even when the means were flawed. We had never been allowed to govern ourselves. We were bound to get it wrong the first few times around.

One evening, with Domingo on my mind, I followed the smell of the sea and found myself at the docks, where we had once protested together, for what cause I can no longer remember. I walked among the fishermen and stevedores, unloading cargo from Soviet vessels, hauling bins of sugar and barrels of rum and crates full of fragrant cigars with cranes into the holds of those ships. I had this sudden desire to hide myself in one of
those vessels and wake up in a whole new land where the revolution had already succeeded and the people were free and my work was done.

M
Y LIFE IN CUBA
—it was a whole life, wasn't it? Thirteen years flew by. I was busy all the time. For one thing, with our fuel shortages, I had to get everywhere on foot, so each task took twice as long.

The exodus that began as a trickle became a flood. With so many gone, those of us who stayed were needed even more. I taught at the university at night and in factorías during the day. Weekends, I joined my young compañeros, writing manuals and preparing materials for the teachers who came in from the rural schools. Sometimes I was sent out into the countryside.