CAMILA CANNOT BE SURE who it is, but someone is following her around the campus of the University of Minnesota.
It is not so much an actual sighting as it is a feeling, a feeling she tries to dismiss as part of the tension in a country at war. Vigilante groups are sprouting everywhere. Mostly they are after the Germans, but all foreigners are suspect. Pedro, who is particularly dark, and Camila, with her heavy accent, have been questioned twice already by the local branch of the Boy Spies of America.
In her purse is a copy of the letter certifying that Camila is earning a master’s degree and teaching introductory Spanish courses; that Pedro is a doctoral candidate with a full teaching load; that the two aforementioned have pledged to defend the Constitution of the United States, if need be. (“And who will defend ours?” Pedro muttered in front of the dean, Camila coughing to drown out his mutterings.) These documents have reduced the number of incidents, but even so, they are obvious foreigners, and that is reason enough to be stopped and asked to explain themselves.
Of course, she has other reasons to feel spied upon. It all began quite innocently, lying back together on the bed—where else in Marion’s small boarding-house room were they to sit?—reading out loud, first Marion reading a paragraph, and then Camila the next. “So you can practice your English.” Her student had become her teacher. That is how it started.
It is early June, the walks are crowded with students hurrying to and from classes or sitting back in benches enjoying the warm weather after the long and bitter winter. For a moment the examinations starting in two weeks are forgotten, the war going on in Europe, the doughboys off in the trenches of France. The young students bask in the sun like creatures regaining consciousness after a long hibernation.
She herself cannot help but feel hopeful about what lies ahead. There is the invitation from Marion to spend the summer with her family in LaMoure and the offer from her chairman, Olmsted, for next year. All of this, of course, hinges on her standing her ground with her family. It is one of the worrisome things on her mind right now: how to inform Papancho that she will not be coming back to Santiago de Cuba at the end of the school year as planned.
Of course, the person to start with is her brother Pedro, who is at home now in their small apartment, recuperating from an operation on his sinuses. Pedro himself is leaving Minnesota. Maybe Mexico, or if the war is over, Spain, where his best friend Alfonso Reyes is now living. He cannot bear another winter, he says to his colleagues. But privately, he has admitted to Camila that the difficulties he has encountered because of his color and accent have soured him toward the place. And every day the patriotism grows fiercer, tinged with cruelty. “We better get out of here while we can,” he has joked bitterly. Of course, he assumes, Camila will come along.
She has not yet found an opportune time to tell him of her new plans. Between his bouts of pain and her own hectic schedule trying to finish her thesis, prepare for her qualifying exams, teach her own and cover her brother’s classes, she has let several weeks go by. Yesterday, Olmsted reminded her that he will be needing her decision about the fall job by the end of exams.
Now, as she heads toward Pedro’s classes—to collect workbooks—she knows that today will not be a good day to talk either. At the bottom of her bag is a copy of the Minneapolis Journal that he has not seen. She should probably keep it from him, weak as he still is, but they must respond to the accusation or their silence will be taken as agreement. They are, after all, not just two anonymous foreign instructors from an insignificant country working toward advanced degrees, but also, as Marion likes to brag, the son and daughter of the president of a country a stone’s throw away from Florida.
“He actually doesn’t have a country right now,” Camila has reminded Marion. President Pancho has been ousted by the Marines and is waiting in exile in Santiago de Cuba for the war to be over. Then he plans to go to Washington and point out to President Wilson the injustice of the occupation. How he is going to do this, Camila does not know, but by then she will be far away, and Pancho’s campaigns and enthusiasms won’t be her responsibility. Still, she worries—about his health: he has already had one stroke; about her querulous old aunts; and most especially, she worries about her three half brothers, running wild without any supervision.
Just thinking about their deplorable state can start up those old voices in her head. She should go back. She cannot abandon them as well. In fact, when Pedro had written home with the news that he had obtained a teaching assistantship for her to earn a master’s degree at the university where he was earning his doctorate, she first decided that she could not go. Strangely enough, it was Pancho who encouraged her. She would have a fancy American degree and be able to return in less than a year and help the family in its straitened circumstances. Her improved English would also be of immense help later when negotiating with President Wilson.
Up until the last moment at the dock at Santiago de Cuba, Camila had kept changing her mind. Even now, on certain lonesome afternoons, especially when Marion is not around, she will hear those voices in her head, calling her back with phrases that come straight out of her mother’s poems: Duty is the highest virtue. The best lives involve surrender. Whoever gives himself to others lives among the doves.
According to Marion, these voices are nothing but figures from her childhood taking over her adult life and telling her unconscious what to do. “You have to free yourself from their control!” Marion urges. Freud is all the rage now, and Marion and her dance friends are, of course, swept up in all the latest theories. Marion sees an analyst four times a week, and then imparts all her knowledge to her friend, “for free.”
The hatted figure in the dark, bulky coat is keeping a respectful distance. It crosses Camila’s mind that her pursuer might well be a reporter from the Journal. To test her hunch, she slips behind the outdoor stairwell of Folwell Hall, where she can watch the entrance and not be seen.
It cannot be! Pedro? Her brother is home lying on the couch, convalescing from his operation. But in this campus of mostly pale Finns, Swedes, Germans (though they must not be called Germans anymore), her brother’s dark skin and black hair stand out.
If it were not that she has to go meet his classes right now, she would rush home to check that he is where he is supposed to be.
SHE PUTS HER EAR to the door before opening it. The click of typewriter keys. Of course, he is typing his doctoral thesis. Between his sessions, she has been using the rented machine to type her own master’s thesis. Shepherds in the Pastorals of Lope de Vega, Olmsted’s suggestion. She had wanted to write about Hostos, her mother’s dear friend and mentor. But Professor Olmsted, tall, tow-headed, with his thick mustache and his sad walrus expression, had suggested someone a bit more classical.
Pedro glances up when the door opens. Her poor brother looks as if he has been in a fist fight: his nose is swollen from the doctor’s having had to break the bone and realign it. Every time Pedro explains the operation to a well-wisher, Camila cringes. “Poor Camila,” Pedro has said. “She has had all the suffering and none of the pain.” She laughs when he says this, even though he has said it a half dozen times.
Camila sets the heavy book bag down on the kitchen table. The place is only one large room with a curtain strung across an alcove behind which Camila sleeps and dresses. The rental was advertised as an efficiency and never had truer words been written. But the landlord, an old German who had no doubt been feeling the bite of discrimination himself, was willing to rent to foreigners who were members of the university community.
“How is my hardworking sister?” Pedro grins. He looks even worse when he grins. “How is the Mecca of Minnesota?” The Mecca of Minnesota is how Pedro refers to their department, when he is being kindly.
“Your classes all sent their get-well wishes.” Camila is stacking his students’ workbooks on the table. From the bottom of the bag, the headline stares up at her.
“Anything interesting happen?” he asks, eager for news.
“Why do you ask?”
He seems surprised at her sharp rejoinder. Usually, when they come home, they sit chatting about the events of the day over a simple supper. “Did something happen? You seem upset.”
“Actually something interesting did happen,” she begins, watching him closely to see how he will react. “I think I saw you.”
“What are you talking about, Camila?” He is sitting in his dressing gown, his face puffy and swollen, working on his thesis on irregular versification in Spanish poetry, and from time to time, taking a break to pour himself a glass of bottled tea she makes for him and take two more aspirin for pain. He has actually gotten a lot done in the last week of convalescing: his thesis is almost typed and he has made headway in his compilation of their mother’s “best work,” which he means to publish in a new edition that his best friend Alfonso Reyes has arranged with a publisher friend in Madrid. Since Friends of the Country published that first book, there has not been another collection of Salomé’s poems. “This is how poets really die,” Pedro had observed.
“So you didn’t go out at all?”
“Por favor, Camila.” He lifts his hands as if to say, Look at me, I am a sick man.
“Maybe I was so upset I was seeing double.” She pulls out the paper from her bag and stands by him as he reads aloud: CHILDREN OF FORMER PRESIDENT OF SAN DOMINGO PREFER THE USA.
“Hijos de la gran puta,” Pedro mutters.
Camila has never heard her brother swear in this ugly way. But instead of shock, she feels relieved to have him express the feelings she has kept locked inside her all day.
Her brother rips the page he has been typing out of the machine and inserts a clean sheet. His fingers hit the keys, one by one, fast and hard.
“Be careful what you say,” she cautions. She does not need to remind Pedro of the stories they have both been reading in the paper: the young man hanged for mentioning the Kaiser’s name in Wyoming, the speaking of German forbidden on streetcars by the governor of Iowa, menu entries for hamburgers all over town pasted over with the correction, liberty sandwich. Olmsted now refers to his dachshund as a “liberty pup.”
“We have to defend ourselves against these lies,” Pedro says, striking furiously at the keys. But he is so angry, he keeps making mistakes.
“Let me do it, Pibín,” Camila says, touching his shoulder to calm him. “You dictate.”
He holds his head in his hands—obviously the pain is returning—and lets her have his seat. He lies down on the couch, which doubles as his bed, and composes the letter out loud as she types it. “Our father was ousted by the Americans because he would not agree to their demands . . . We are here because the occupation of our country does not permit us to return . . . ”
That last afternoon of Pancho’s presidency, after he had informed the family that they would be going back into exile, Camila remembers wandering from room to room of the elegant colonial palace. In a stripped-down bedroom in the second floor, she had opened a casement window. It was November. The tropical winter was coming on. Waves hurled themselves against the sea wall with an abandon that frightened her. She had imagined her homecoming, in triumph, Salomé’s grown-up daughter, returning with her father to help her struggling country . . . Now, two months later, she saw the vanity of the fantasy she had carried around in her head as a measure of how she must act. But unlike her mother, she would not let this disappointment consume her. She would not throw herself away on a country that could not keep faith with the dreams in her heart.
Pedro pauses, and then in a tired voice she knows is not meant for the letter, he says, “I am so glad we are leaving this crazy place in a few weeks.”
She feels the heavy weight of this conclusion. There is no way that she can stay with Marion over the summer or accept Olmsted’s offer without seeming to betray her country and her beloved brother.
That night she goes on her customary walk—“to get fresh air,” as she explains to Pedro. But when she comes to Marion’s rooming house, she does not go in as she usually does. Instead, she turns just in time to see the familiar, dark figure hurrying back in the direction of their apartment house. It is Pedro, she is sure of it. With a pang of embarrassment, she wonders just how much he knows about her and Marion.
MARION REED WAS ONE of the easier names to pronounce on the roster the first day of her Spanish conversation class. The consonants and vowels of her students’ names (Hough, Steichner, Thompson) kept snagging Camila’s tongue, and the girls—there was a preponderance of them with so many young men off to war—giggled mercilessly.
But the young woman with short, black hair in the first row seemed absorbed by whatever Camila had to say. She looked older than the other students, perhaps the same age as Camila. She was wearing a sports coat, and when she crossed her long legs, it became clear she was wearing trousers! Camila had never seen a woman dressed in this way except in magazines or on the musical stage back home.
She was going around the room, asking each student in English why he or she had chosen to study Spanish.
When she got to the young woman, she replied in Spanish. “Amo la lengua.”
I love the language.
Camila felt the thrill of the foreigner hearing her native tongue praised.
That afternoon, she was informed by Olmsted that she must sign up for a physical education class in order to fulfill the requirements for graduate study.
“Physical education?” she asked, leaning forward in her chair. These first few weeks in English, she never knew if she was hearing correctly or if one language could be so different from another.
“Field hockey, preliminary hygiene, personal hygiene, elementary, intermediate or advanced physical training.” He was reading from the catalog. “Rhythmic expression.”
“Rhythmic expression?”
“I think that means dance,” Olmsted guessed.
For her first class Camila dressed appropriately in her party dress and short-heeled slippers that would make it easier to master the waltz, the two-step, the fox-trot. She had always loved to dance.
There in the class was her student, Miss Reed. But rather than street clothes, she and the other students wore loose-fitting tunics. They leapt across the room, throwing their arms and legs about in an embarrassing way, like girls gone goofy at an overnight party. Camila turned to leave.
“Hey there!” Marion swept across the room toward her. “Don’t I know you?” The dark eyes searched her face boldly, without trying to disguise the rudeness of staring. Camila looked down at the floor and was surprised by the sight of the young woman’s toes. She was dancing barefoot.
“I know! You’re my Spanish teacher. Are you taking R.E.?” She was staring at Camila’s cream-colored, lace dress as if trying to decide whether it was edible. Years ago, the front of the dress had been stained at a birthday party. Her stepmother had scoured it clean, but even so, every time Camila put it on and and people looked at her, she thought, oh no, the stain is showing after all.
“It’s a great class,” the young woman was saying. Her long, slender body was visible through the deep armholes of her tunic. “We’re starting off with Delsarte exercises and then moving on to Fuller and St. Denis, freeing the body from the solar plexus out.” She began to breathe deeply and spread her arms as if she meant to embrace Camila. Instinctively, Camila stepped back.
The gesture snapped the young woman out of her trance. She looked at Camila quizzically. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” Camila answered, trying not to sound annoyed. American students were known to be casual with their teachers, but she had yet to get used to this new style.
Marion held her eyes her a moment. And then, she carried through with the gesture she had started and spread her arms as wide as she could get them.
Camila watched, wondering what was required of her.
“What did you mean by that gesture?” she asked Marion months later when they had become friends. “Spreading your arms like that.”
“I was actually doing the Delsarte movement for welcome. I wanted you to know you could trust me,” Marion explained. “Seriously. From the beginning, I was drawn to you. It was like putting a face on love.”
In her notebook that night, Camila wrote down the phrase that had caught her fancy, putting a face on love. She had always imagined a man’s face or her mother’s face pinned on that big heart, but ever since her encounters with her first beau, Primitivo, had left her curiously cold, she has wondered if she is capable of that kind of love at all. Since then there have been plenty of admirers, but no one whom she has admired. “You are looking for a hero in a novel,” Pedro has accused her. But no, she has often thought. It is my mother I am looking for.
“I see you with the eyes of love,” Marion has said, turning on her stomach to look into Camila’s eyes. The Song of the Lark, the new Cather novel they have been reading, is forgotten, tossed at the foot of the bed. “And I see you seeing me,” Camila smiles back.
Sometimes Camila wonders if her American friend truly sees her. When Marion first suggested spending the summer together, Camila worried about her reception in LaMoure, North Dakota. After all, if she and Pedro have been heckled in the big cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, will she be safe visiting a small village?
Marion laughed. “Camila, hon, we don’t have villages in North America. And come on, you’re about as much of a negro as I am a German.” Several generations ago, Marion’s great-grandfather had emigrated from Germany. The family name has since been changed from Reidenbach to Reed. This is one of the many secrets they have shared, which cannot be repeated. Daddy Reed has an important position in his company and needs to be careful. “That doesn’t make me German. That was way back. That’d be like saying we’re monkeys because we’re descended from apes.”
“I don’t care what you are,” Marion added, kissing first the palm of one hand, then the other, pronouncing Camila’s full name slowly as if it were a tongue twister she was trying to master.
It has occurred to Camila how silly love talk would sound to someone who is not a participant. But who would be listening? No doubt, that old ghost that her aunt Mon once showed her how to summon when she was a child: “In the name of the father, and of the son, and of Salomé, my mother.” But it is not just her mother, but her own father and brothers and aunts have gotten inside her head. Even at twenty-four, it is difficult to break this old habit of seeing herself through their eyes.
And now, those eyes are real: the eyes of her favorite brother, following her, trying to catch her at something—but what? She feels angry at this invasion of her privacy. Angry enough to find the first opportunity to retaliate by invading his.
HE IS AT THE doctor’s for his final postoperative appointment. Then he intends to stop by the head offices of the Journal and deliver their letter. Normally, she would accompany him, but she begs off. She needs to finish typing her thesis and to write final exams for her classes.
She watches him from the front window and as soon as he is out of sight, she kneels beside the old trunk in which Pedro stores his manuscripts and packets of correspondence. Her brother is an inveterate writer: everything he thinks, knows, questions, Pedro writes down, mostly in long letters to Alfonso Reyes, who suffers from the same affliction. Whatever Pedro suspects, he will have written to Alfonso about it, and no doubt, Alfonso will mention the matter in his own replies.
The trunk also doubles as their coffee and typing table. Lifting the stacks of paper she notes the table of contents Pedro has typed out for the new edition of their mother’s poems. Many of Camila’s favorites are missing. “Personal poems,” Pedro calls them as if that diminishes their value. At the center of her brother’s personality there is a deep conservatism that astonishes her in a man who thinks of himself as rational and modern.
Inside the trunk, she is overwhelmed by what she finds: not just Pedro’s correspondence but letters addressed from her mother to her father, a diary Pedro kept as a young boy with a biography of their mother’s life, copies of a little newspaper that Pedro and Max used to publish as children with their mother listed as director, even a clipping from the Dominican papers she has seen before, reporting Fran’s acquittal in the murder of a young man. It was judged to be self-defense, though, knowing her brother’s violent temper, Camila is not sure she would have acquitted him.
She could spend hours reading these and no doubt uncovering many secrets in her family’s past, but she must work quickly. The packet of letters from Alfonso is close to the top. Near the end of the third letter, she spots her name.
About this worrisome matter of Camila. It is best, Pedro, if you have ocular proof and then there will be no doubt in your mind and no arguments on her part to sway you from what you must do. You and I both know how Americans are much more free in their ways. And these young Yanks (believe me, I have seen them over here) feel much more license with a foreign woman of indeterminate race. Once you have the evidence, you must confront her and insist she break off the relation and immediately upon graduation send her back to the safety of your family.
What she feels, at first, is relief: her brother suspects her of a secret love affair with a man! As grievous as that would be, it is nothing compared to a liason with a woman. But the relief soon passes. In its wake she feels the sadness of the trust they have betrayed in each other. Why couldn’t Pedro just ask her straight out if she is interested in anyone? She recalls how he has been dropping hints, mentioning the name of this or that instructor. But so little is her interest in any of these young men that Camila has assumed Pedro’s comments are merely part of the daily news they share when they both come home and talk long hours into the night with each other.
Several nights ago, in fact, Camila asked Pedro about a dim memory she had of their mother, which Pancho always claimed Camila had made up to avoid a childhood punishment.
“You didn’t make it up,” Pedro assured her. “I’ll always remember when Mamá gave me that poem, she made me vow to take good care of you. Mamá would never forgive me if any harm should come your way.” Pedro was looking pointedly at her.
She glanced away uneasily.
“Is there something wrong, Camila? You’ve seemed preoccupied.”
She had thought then of telling him then of her plans for the summer and fall, and even more pointedly, of her feelings for Marion. But without the face of love, as Marion might put it, any passion would seem creaturely and preposterous. Even her own beloved Pibín, if she did not love him, even he would seem slightly repugnant, with his animal sounds and smells, his grievances, the dark soft hair curling on the back of his hands.
She shook her head, no. She had nothing to confess to him yet.
THEY SIT ACROSS FROM Olmsted, who is cracking his big pink knuckles like a nervous schoolboy. Periodically, he scoops up his dachshund, an odd little animal with a body of pulled taffy and the unlikely name of Doña Lola. Doña Lola accompanies him everywhere—a droll pair: a large, diffident-looking man and the shortest dog in the world. Brother and sister have been asked to the chairman’s office to discuss their rebuttal letter printed in the Journal that has caused a ripple of unpleasant reaction from the administration.
“I am behind you both, I hope you know that,” Olmsted is saying. He scratches at his fine, colorless hair. The friction makes it stand on end, a prickly halo.
“We have nothing to apologize for.” Pedro has drawn himself up in his chair. It pains Camila to see him in such a state of readiness, as if any minute now he will dash out the door and make a run for the border. What border, she wonders? They are surrounded by the United States. “Lies were put in our mouths,” Pedro adds.
“The apology should come from the paper,” the chairman agrees. He stands and walks to the window, Doña Lola at his heels. The click of the dog’s nails on the wood floor is unnerving. “But let’s face it. There’s a war going on. Patriotism is the law of the land, and any breath of a criticism . . .” His voice trails off. Perhaps he has seen something out the window on the campus green that keeps him from continuing.
Though the fact has not been mentioned, Camila knows what is on the line, the degrees they are both scheduled to receive in a week. She herself would only be sacrificing a year of work, but Pedro, in fact, has been here two years, and he is due to receive his doctorate in Spanish.
“What do you advise?” Camila asks.
“You both might write a letter, explaining that you intended no disrespect to this great nation, et cetera, et cetera.” Olmsted sighs and lifts his arms, then lets them drop. Now more than ever, he looks like a walrus, stranded, landlocked, waving his flippers desperately.
Camila has pulled out her notebook and is jotting down the chairman’s phrases.
“We will write no such letter,” Pedro stands and crosses his arms, ready for martyrdom. Doña Lola growls at the sudden movement, but Olmsted reaches down and calms her with a stroke of his big hand against the sleek, sausagelike body. “If the school decides not to award us our degrees, we will protest that action,” Pedro declares.
Looking up at him, Camila notices how much her brother resembles their father. The same stubbornness that has made Papancho unbearable at times. She says nothing. It is useless to try to reason with an Henríquez man who has dug his heels in moral ground.
“I am not worried about your degrees,” Olmsted says. He stops a moment and surveys them both, as if he is about to hatch a plot and wants to be sure of their loyalty. “But as you know, Miss Henríquez, I’ve offered you a job this fall.” He nods toward Camila, who can feel her brother’s eyes fixed on her face as if to say, You knew this all along and did not tell me!
“And as for you, Pedro,” Olmsted continues, “with so many of our colleagues going off to the front, I am prepared to offer you a two-year contract with a considerable raise in salary. But, of course, both offers must be approved by the administration—”
“I have already made plans,” Pedro cuts him off. This is an outright lie, as Camila knows. Pedro has made a decision about leaving, but he has no plans. Spain is out of the question. Mexico is still reeling from civil war and American intervention. Their own country is occupied, and so is their neighbor Haiti. Puerto Rico is now owned by the United States, and Cuba is headed for the same compromised situation. Where can they go that isn’t enemy territory anymore?
An audible sigh escapes from the chairman’s mouth, accompanied by a slumping of the shoulders—the performed emotion of a veteran professor who needs to project his disappointment to the class. Doña Lola ears have perked up, on the alert for trouble. The chairman turns to Camila. “I suppose then, Miss Henríquez, that you won’t be back either.”
She takes a deep breath, but her voice still comes out as a whisper. “I have decided to accept your offer,” she tells the sad, walrus face.
She picks up her book and rises to meet her brother’s furious gaze.
Doña Lola rises, too, barking excitedly.
PEDRO IS PACING. Given the size of the efficiency, he does not have far to go before he has turned around to face her. “Papancho entrusted you to my care.”
She says nothing, holding her hands to keep them from shaking. She could say any number of things. That she is twenty-four years old. She has her own life to live. That she now has a job, a way to take care of herself.
Their degrees have been approved. They heard earlier this morning from Olmsted. The chairman also handed Camila her new contract. “To sign at your convenience.” Camila slipped the envelope in her bag to avoid a confrontation with her brother in public. They have already had several scenes since she accepted the offer in Olmsted’s office. Every time he starts up with his arguments, Camila merely responds, “I will certainly take your feelings into consideration, Pedro.” She cannot call him Pibín when she is so angry at him.
As for a letter of explanation to the papers, it has proved to be unnecessary. Olmsted got around the whole matter by inviting a friendly reporter from the competing paper, the Minneapolis Tribune, over to his house to meet Camila and Pedro. The reporter asked them a few questions and wrote up a heartwarming article about these two bright emissaries from south of the border. Pedro was quoted correctly as saying, “I don’t like to compare countries, which one is better, which one is more right. I am interested in people, in individuals.” Camila’s appearance in print was brief and uncontroversial as always. “His lovely sister nodded in agreement.”
If that reporter could see us now, Camila is thinking, as her brother halts directly in front of her, frowning. “I am not going to leave you here by yourself.”
“But I am not staying here by myself. I’m spending the summer with Marion and her family.”
Pedro’s mouth drops in surprise. His nose has healed and only a slight puffiness around the eyes recalls the pain and trouble of a few weeks ago. “You don’t know who these people are,” Pedro begins.
“Her parents have sent a kind invitation. Mr. Reed is a manager of the North American Life Insurance Company.” She offers this detail as proof of the respectability of Marion’s family, but of course, that is not the point.
She heads for her alcove to retrieve the letter of invitation. With her back turned, she feels brave enough to add, “In the fall, I will be moving with Marion and some friends into our own apartment. So you see, I will not be alone.” She finds the letter where she has kept it, hidden out of sight for weeks, under her mattress, where her aunt Ramona told her Salomé used to store her packet of poems.
When she next turns around, Pedro is sitting in the chair she has vacated, as if brought down by the shock of all this news. But in actual fact, he does not seem shocked anymore or even angry, just weary. It is a lot to take in, she thinks, a little sister growing up, finally.
THAT NIGHT, SHE IS late going out for her customary walk. Pedro and she sit in the living room, sipping tea, and talking. They have turned a corner in their standoff, and now Pedro is considering accepting Olmsted’s offer and staying two more years.
“Pibín,” she says, touching his hand, “it will be fine if you decide to go, really.” Her anger has receded, and she feels only tenderness toward him. She has never been able to hold a grudge for long. Inevitably, she ends up seeing the other person’s point of view. It is a habit she has developed from reading too many books, perhaps, or from always having those voices in her head telling her what to do. She remembers how Pedro described her in one of his letters to Alfonso. “My sister has a perfect character.” (She felt a pang of guilt reading this in the midst of her snooping.) “She lives by continual little realignments that look to all the world like indecisiveness. But they are, I believe, the quivering of her moral compass toward its true north—which I think she believes is our mother, but is really her own soul. She is strong but without violence.”
She did not recognize herself in the description but loved her brother’s effort to see her with such respect. Often, she has wondered if destiny has not played a trick and given her a perfect companion as a brother instead of a lover.
“Maybe it is I who will miss you too much if we are apart,” Pedro notes. She is not sure she believes this. Pedro has always been the solitary wanderer.
As they talk, he rests his feet on the trunk she can no longer look at without feeling ashamed. Once or twice during their conversation, she has been on the point of confessing to him. But let him have his ocular evidence, as Alfonso has advised. Spare herself the mortification of trying to explain what she herself does not understand.
At the corner, she waits for him to catch up with her. She looks up at the night sky: so many stars in odd places. It has taken a while to get used to finding the familiar where she did not expect it. Like this passion she has been feeling, a passion she always yearned for, but did not expect to feel toward a woman.
She waits a few minutes, but tonight Pedro does not appear. She feels a pang of that old loneliness she felt as a young girl when she would sink into depression and want to disappear. In fact, she had written at that time to Pedro, who was away in Mexico, explaining that a friend’s friend was contemplating suicide. What should she do? He had written back promptly, suggesting that Camila come live with him. Of course, their father had not allowed it.
Pedro has been the dearest, closest person to her in this world. What if by getting free of her family, she were to lose him as well? She hurries down the street, pursued by her worries, like the girl in her book of Greek myths beset by the trunkful of sorrows and plagues she has let loose on the world.
WHEN MARION OPENS THE door, Camila falls into her arms. “Is everything okay?” Marion asks, holding her, as if Camila were a child in need of comfort. “You’re out of breath. Come sit down before you get an attack of asthma.”
Camila cannot bear to be still and let her dark thoughts catch up with her. She paces as she recounts what she has told her brother.
“You told him!” Marion hoots. “Good for you!”
Camila hushes her. “Remember there are people around.” “People” are other young women students and Miss Tucker, who lives downstairs, but is going deaf, and so leaves the front door unlocked until at the stroke of nine, when she “brings up the drawbridge and floods the moat.” Before her present incarnation as boarding-house mother, Miss Tucker taught history at a private school for girls near Boston.
“Salomé . . . Camila . . . Henríquez . . . Ureña . . .” Marion murmurs each name as if it were an endearment. Each one merits a kiss, each kiss lingers a minute longer.
When the door opens on them, Camila is not surprised to see her brother standing in the hallway, a baffled look in his eyes. “How dare you!” Marion descends on him, a mother bird defending her chicks against a predator. He backs away, embarrassed.
There is something in his face that takes Camila back to that first memory of her mother, looking up from the poem she has just finished to say, “Stay close to your brother.”
He has turned on his heel and is running down the upstairs hall.
“Pibín,” she calls after him, hoping the name will recall him to the vow he made their mother.