THE DAY FINALLY CAME when Pancho came home. Four years had gone by.
I was utterly changed. Everyone told me so. I was so thin that even Max could put his little hands around my wrists. I could barely catch my breath. My hair had turned gray. The lines on my face were deep, almost as if all the writing I had not done on paper, I had done on my skin.
The last thing I wanted to do was go down to the dock and watch his boat come in.
IT WAS SUNDOWN, I remember, and Federico had come for the two boys. A welcome party of Pancho’s family and friends had gone ahead. I had said I wasn’t going—the first dew of the evening was always the worst for my coughing.
But at the last minute, I changed my mind. I dressed up in my black silk gown, as buenamoza as a woman can look in a dress that had fit her when she was ten kilos heavier. I put the little cross Pancho had given me around my neck, and I marched down to the dock with one boy in each hand.
“Con calma, Salomé,” Federico pleaded.
How could I remain calm after waiting four years to be deceived?
“Remember that he is a youngster,” Federico went on, mistaking my silence for compliance.
Little Pibín looked up at me with his wise eyes. “Who are you talking about, Mamá?”
“No one we know,” I replied.
When the passengers were helped from the rowboat onto the dock, and I saw them, Pancho! Fran! I could not believe my eyes. Pancho had grown even more good-looking in France. As for Fran, I had sent my son off a boy, and he had come back a little man.
I gave out a cry. I knew I was in public, but I didn’t care. I spread my arms and I ran down toward them, my lungs so tight, I thought I would collapse before I reached them. Behind me, my two little ones were trying to keep up.
I saw the shock on Pancho’s face as he took in the sad reality of how ill I was, the wasted face and figure. He must have assumed I was running toward him, my anger and formality forgotten in my happiness to have him back. He turned, handed his hat to the porter who was carrying his portmanteau, and spread his arms for me. I swooped down past him and took my boy in my arms.
Fran cringed, and for a horrid moment, I could see the disgust on my son’s face. He didn’t know who this old, hollow-eyed, twig-thin woman was. And then, slowly, recognition spread across his face.
“Mamá?” he asked, before we both burst out crying.
THAT NIGHT EVERYONE GATHERED at our house: all of Pancho’s brothers except Manuel, of course, who was still in exile; Dubeau and Zafra had come down from Puerto Plata expressly to see their beloved compatriot, and Don Eugenio Marchena, who had carried so many letters back and forth to Paris while he had been minister, dropped in for a while. Sick as I was, I stayed up, greedy for the sight of my three sons reunited again.
Long after the last bell at nine, when the two youngest couldn’t stand up any longer, Ramona helped me put them to bed. A while later, Fran kissed me good night. “Bon nuit, chérie.” He could barely speak Spanish anymore. I wondered if he had said the very same words to that other woman those nights she put him to bed before she bedded down with Pancho.
Scorpions in the mind—that’s what my jealousy felt like. And in my chest. Every time I thought of that woman, I’d break down in a fit of coughing.
Finally, the last guest left. Ramona shut up the house, and Pancho walked her home to Mamá’s house, a block away. I waited, standing in the entryway, trying to compose my thoughts.
He jumped when he saw me, shocked to find me there on the other side of the front door. His head was bowed; he had obviously been preparing for this scene. I could see he was uneasy, for this was really our first moment alone together.
In January I had moved to a house closer to Mamá and Ramona. Large and airy with an inner courtyard full of fruit trees and birds, the house itself was shaped like a horseshoe, with a central parlor I used for the school and two wings with several large rooms for our living quarters.
We stood looking at each other a long moment in the entry-way. His hair was cut stylishly short; his mustache was trim and elegant. He had come back from France, the figure of a man, thirty-two years old, his life ahead of him. I, on the other hand, had been consumed by the separation. I was forty and looked ten years older.
When he moved toward me, I handed him the lamp I had taken down from its hook. “I suspect you must be tired, Pancho. Your room is down that hallway.”
“Aren’t we in the same room?” he questioned. There was an odd French intonation to his Spanish. “I vow to you, Salomé—”
“Your trunks should be there,” I interrupted in a tired voice. “From now on, you go your way, and I go mine.”
“Ay, Salomé, por Dios, this is my first night home . . .”
I don’t know what else he said. I left him standing with the lamp at the front of the house, as I made my way in the dark to bed.
I BURNED AZUFRE IN my room every night, hoping to clear my lungs. On the small table beside my bed, I placed the jar of jarabe Scott Emulsion and a glass of milk covered with a saucer. When I woke up, weak with coughing in the middle of the night, the milk soothed my throat. I closed the jalousies, latched the windows together, and hung a sheet over them to block out the noxious night vapors. By my bed I kept a ponchera ready for the expectoration that came with every attack.
You can see this was no place I wanted to share with a man.
But as I secured my room for the night and latched the bedroom door from inside, I could not keep my feelings from flooding my heart. I could not bar the thought of Pancho and his mademoiselle from my mind. It was like taking a swallow of vinegar into a mouth full of sores.
Deceiver, egotist, philanderer, liar, sin vergüenza, good for nothing, I thought to myself, as if each word were a door I was shutting against him.
One night, I heard steps, followed by quiet knocking, which I ignored.
“Are you all right, Mamá?” It was Pibín, checking on me after a bout of coughing.
“Yes, my love,” I called back, touched by my dear boy’s concern. But I was also disappointed. I did not want to admit it, even to myself: I had wanted it to be Pancho.
Deceiver, egotist, philanderer, liar, sin vergüenza, good for nothing, but I was still in love with him!
I broke out into another fit of coughing.
TO THE WORLD AROUND us, our reunion was the happy ending to a touching love story. Or the beginning of a happy ending. First there was Doña Salomé’s health to set to rights. What better agent of her delivery than her own husband, trained in the latest medical procedures in France?
Pancho had come back with a big head, made even bigger by an ostentatious top hat, just what all the doctors were wearing in Paris. He also wore his Prince Albert frock coat everywhere he went in the capital, even when he was not calling on a patient.
Late afternoons, he liked to drop in at el Instituto Profesional during classes. The illustrious doctor recently arrived from Paris would, of course, be invited to say a few words. Pancho would oblige with long discourses on the latest medical findings.
His favorite disquisition was on Pasteur’s germ theory, and how the spread of the disease could best be controlled by better hygiene. In our own house, he had set up sinks in every room and insisted we wash our hands constantly to avoid the spread of germs my students might have carried in. Pancho and his enthusiasms! I couldn’t help but recall the young man I had fallen in love with, eager to wipe out ignorance and injustice. Now his attention was directed toward the obliteration of germs with water and soap. You can imagine the rumors that got started, that Don Pancho had gone to Paris to learn how to wash his hands!
Pancho loved to take my little Pibín along and show him off. The truth is my middle one was an astonishing child. He had taught himself to read when he was four, and then easily learned all his numbers. Recently, as a surprise to his father, he had memorized the names of all the bones and knew where they all were. “Scapula, fibula, clavicle, ulna and radius, humerus, femur, metacarpal,” he would recite in his little voice, pointing to the spot on his body where each bone was located.
Pibín would come home with stories about what Dr. Alfonseca had said, and then how Papancho had corrected him. “It sounds as if your father was as brilliant as usual,” I noted.
The boy cocked his head thoughtfully. “But he embarrassed Dr. Alfonseca. Maybe it would have been better if he talked to Dr. Alfonseca afterward?” Alfonseca was the elderly doctor who had saved Pedro’s life when he’d had the croup several years back. And it was also Alfonseca, who had kept me breathing through months of severe pulmonary attacks.
“I’m sure your father didn’t mean to embarrass the kind doctor, Pibín.”
He thought about that a moment, and then he said, “I don’t think Papancho meant to hurt him. I just think Papancho wanted to be right.”
I looked at my Pedro. It was not just the fund of information in his head I admired. My son had a moral gravity which, in one so young, was astonishing. You’d teach him something, and he would puzzle at it, asking serious questions: What is justice? What is patria? Is kindness better than truth? And the one I could no longer answer for him, Is love really stronger than anything else in the world?
I HAD ONCE ASKED Hostos the same question.
Before he finally left the country, Hostos had come over to examine the oldest girls on their knowledge of botany, and he had lingered afterward. I knew this was my only chance to say goodbye privately. I had already promised myself I would not cry. I was afraid that once I got started, I would not be able to stop.
He was restless, as usual, on his feet, going from object to object in the room—almost as if like a lost man he needed to find his way with clues. At the whirligig I had constructed to teach wind power, he turned to face me. I had been coughing quite a bit in the last few days of rainy winter weather.
“Are you all right, Salomé?”
“It’s just a touch of catarrh. Everyone has it.” I waved away the cough as an insignificance.
“Yes, Belinda and María have caught it as well.” And then he paused, waiting, as if I had not yet answered his question.
Perhaps I would have confessed the strength of my feelings had he not just mentioned Belinda. Instead, I asked him the question that Pibín was always asking me. “Is love stronger than anything else in the world?”
“Why do you ask, Salomé?” Hostos was never one to leave a stone unturned.
“Because I console myself in Pancho’s absence by telling myself that love is stronger than his absence, stronger than my fears—”
I would have said more. I would have told him that I was now consoling myself with the same philosophy about his impending departure, and that it was not working. But suddenly, Hostos put a finger to his lips, his head cocked as if he had heard an intruder.
He motioned for me to continue talking as he walked quietly to the door and pulled it open. There stood Federico peering in through the crack in the double door.
“Perhaps we had better ask Federico what he thinks?” Hostos said. I could hear the anger in his voice, held in check by his positivist reason. I’m afraid I had no such self-control. “Is love stronger than anything else in the world, Federico, or shall suspicion and betrayal rule the day?”
That night in bed, I cried as I had not cried since childhood. I could not stop myself. “Tears are the ink of the poet,” Papá had once said. But I was no longer writing. I could waste them now on my own sadness.
ONE DAY, SHORTLY AFTER Pancho’s return, Dr. Alfonseca dropped by and asked to speak to Pancho and me privately. Ramona shooed the children from the room. Pibín walked out behind the others, his sad eyes clinging to me.
“I don’t have to tell you, Pancho, that Salomé’s condition is serious. Her consumption—”
“I beg your pardon, José, but I have examined Salomé’s sputum—”
“You examined it?” I was mortified. How had he gotten close to my sputum when I didn’t even allow him inside my bedroom?
“Your ponchera is left by the water closet every morning for emptying. And I retrieved a sample and examined it under my microscope.”
I could see from Dr. Alfonseca’s expression that he believed this black apparatus was a boy’s toy, nothing to use in the effort to save the lives of human beings.
“Koch has shown that consumption is caused by tubercle bacilli and I have not observed any such bacilli in Salomé’s expectoration,” Pancho went on. “Hers is an acute incidence of asthma aggravated by overwork, pulmonary inflammation, and . . .” His eyes wandered over toward me. Would he dare say it, I wondered—and by heartbreak?
Alfonseca didn’t seem to know what to make of this Parisian parrot. Finally, he waved away their disagreement. “It does not matter what we call it, Pancho, but I do want to touch upon a rather sensitive matter. I believe that as a couple you should exercise caution, if not out-and-out abstinence—” (here Alfonseca went into his own fit of embarrassed coughing) “because a pregnancy at this point would be mortal for the mother.”
Mortal for the mother? It sounded as if he were talking about someone else. You need not worry, I might have told him. There is no chance of that happening to me.
“There are cases in which pregnancy has actually helped,” Pancho disagreed. As he went on to enumerate them, I broke out in a fit of coughing. Pancho’s lectures had this effect on me.
“Surely your French colleagues would disagree with you, Don Pancho, fond as they are of applying Peter’s formula to these cases.” Now it was Alfonseca’s turn to show off. The two doctors were engaged in a medical cockfight of sorts. Both had forgotten about me. “If a maiden, no marriage; if a wife, no pregnancy—”
“If a mother, no breast-feeding,” Pancho concluded the formula, nodding deeply in agreement. “This I know—but these strictures apply only if the patient is tubercular, and you are totally in error with your preliminary diagnosis, Dr. Alfonseca.”
Alfonseca stood. By his heightened color I knew he was angry. “I will be taking my leave,” he said, bowing toward Pancho. “Perhaps you are right, and I shall be proved wrong in my diagnosis, Dr. Henríquez, but I am right about one thing. You are Salomé’s husband and I am her doctor. We should not both try to treat her illness. But then, Doña Salomé,” he added, bowing toward me, “you are the one to decide.”
I stood, too, holding on to the back of the chair. I could see Pancho was waiting for me to say that he was my husband and as such he was the ultimate guide in all matters, including my health. But I did not address—indeed I did not know how to address—what Pancho was to me now.
“You are my doctor,” I assured Alfonseca. I could feel Pancho’s angry eyes on me, which only helped bring on a new fit of coughing.
EVEN WITH ALL HIS sophisticated theories, Pancho did not fare very well that year of his return. To put it plainly, his patients kept dying on him. In part, I do believe that he was experimenting with the latest surgical procedures in our poor little country but without medications or trained personnel to back him up. When he performed the first ovariectomy on the island on Doña Mónica, who was rumored to be a mistress of Lilís, and she died, what were once whispered suggestions became out and out heckling.
Lechuza! voices called out when he entered a patient’s house. Owl, the bird of ill omen.
Matasano! Health killer!
This persecution became aggravated when Pancho sided with Lilís’s rival. I’m referring, of course, to Don Eugenio Marchena, who had been Lilís’s minister in France but had now broken with the dictator. Don Eugenio and Pancho had become close friends in Paris, and the friendship continued on native soil. Certainly, the man had done us many favors, carrying mail back and forth, and accompanying our Fran on the ocean crossing. But I’m afraid anyone associated with Pancho’s Paris days now aroused only my suspicion. Whenever I saw Don Eugenio, all I could think was, How much does he know about Pancho’s other life that he is keeping from me?
Don Eugenio’s right-hand man was Don Rodolfo Lauranzón, who had moved his family to the capital from Azua to help with his campaign. When Lilís announced he would not be running in the next election, Don Eugenio got it in his head, or maybe his friends Pancho and Rodolfo put it in his head, that he should be the next president.
Many nights, those three gathered in Pancho’s wing, talking until late hours in loud voices that kept me awake.
“Pancho, por Dios,” I pleaded with him one night. “Give up this foolishness!”
“I cannot forget my dreams for my country,” he protested, slipping his hand in his frock coat like the statesman he now dreamed of becoming.
“Neither can I,” I said quietly. “But I have been living in this nightmare for the last four years, and I can tell you that these elections are a trick by Lilís to flush out the competition. Woe to the man who takes him at this word.”
Pancho was shaking his head as if he knew better. “Don Eugenio is going to change things—”
“Don Eugenio!” I scoffed. “Without Don Eugenio, Lilís would not even be where he is today.” This was a fact that Pancho could not refute. It was Don Eugenio who had engineered all of Lilís’s loans that had steeped the country in debts for decades to come.
Pancho let his shoulders slump; his hand slipped from his frock coat. “Salomé, must you always choose the contrary opinion in order to be at odds with me?”
I had to think whether or not this was true. “I am too sick to fight with you, Pancho. But I am concerned for your safety.” Every day more and more testimonies against el Doctor de Paris were appearing in the papers. “You are the father of my children. I do not want them to lose you as I have lost you.”
“You have not lost me, Salomé,” he said, looking me sadly in the eyes.
Any woman who has known heartache from a man she loves knows how soothing such words can be. I felt myself wavering, the door giving way to the push of his shoulders.
“Stand with me on this one, Salomé, I beg you. If you give your support to Don Eugenio, you know how much that would help him.”
I did try. Whenever the man came over to our house, I listened carefully to what he had to say. He spoke about the Westendorf loans versus the loans from the Americans, long-term and short-term interest rates in silver or gold, private creditors as opposed to national creditors, et cetera et cetera et cetera, but I never heard the words Liberty Justice Equality come from the man’s lips, except in little crescendos, as if these words were a napkin with which to wipe his mouth at the end of a greasy meal.
The truth is that I could not see that much difference between this man and our present dictator Lilís.
But I kept my peace. By now, I was too ill to fight with anybody.
FINALLY, PANCHO RECOGNIZED MY condition. He swallowed his self-importance and pride, and conferred with Alfonseca. It was decided that I would go by boat to the north coast where perhaps the drier air might cure me.
Mamá and Ramona were present when the prognosis was delivered. Mamá had to sit down when she heard Alfonseca pronounce that I might not last out the year unless I took care of myself. For once, Pancho said nothing.
“What about the instituto?” I protested. “I can’t abandon my girls.”
“Your health is the most important thing right now,” Ramona declared. She had been helping me run the school, which was growing daily. At that point we had seventy-two students. Mothers kept coming to the house, their daughters in hand, pleading with me to let them in, even though they could see there was not an inch of space in which to put another chair in that parlor. Indeed, we had just leased a larger house in the center of the city right next to the cathedral to accommodate our growing enrollment.
“I will move us while you are gone. That way you will not be inconvenienced,” Pancho proposed. He had to stay behind anyhow to keep his medical practice going. He also could not abandon Don Eugenio with elections coming.
“What about the children?” Just the thought of leaving my little grackles for several months was enough to start the coughing. Everyone looked worriedly from one to the other, waiting until the attack was over.
“Why not take them with you?” Pancho offered. “That way you can send them to Dubeau’s school so they can catch up with their lessons.” The implication was that in my devotion to the instituto, I had been neglecting my own children’s education.
“But who is to go with her?” Mamá spoke up. “Ana is in such a bad condition, I should not really leave her.”
“I can go,” Ramona offered, but I protested. She had just promised to help run my school!
“What about one of the Lauranzón girls?” Pancho suggested. “There are four of them, surely they can spare one girl.”
I was always surprised at how easily Pancho could dispose of other people’s lives. But the truth was that Don Rodolfo’s girls would probably welcome any distraction, cooped up as they were. Their father did not believe in education for his girls, who might learn how to read and write love letters. He had good reason to be watchful in the kind of city Santo Domingo was fast becoming, full of rascals and sin vergüenzas. Each Lauranzón lass was prettier than the last, the greatest beauty being the youngest, Tivisita, with a mass of auburn curls and the dainty face of a porcelain doll.
Tivisita often came over from next door “to help Doña Salomé.” At least, this was the excuse she gave her father for spending her days at my house. And though I’m sure Don Rodolfo worried that she was visiting a home that housed a school for girls, he could not refuse his compatriot Don Pancho, who was, like himself, a staunch Marchena supporter, and whose wife, Doña Salomé, was a national icon.
That good girl welcomed any task I gave her. I would leave her in back, mending the boys’ clothes or serving Pancho his breakfast of café au lait with a waterbread he insisted on calling a baguette. After his late-night meetings, Pancho woke with the clamor of my students arriving. And though I had Regina helping me out, she had too much to do to interrupt her cleaning to prepare yet another breakfast after serving mine and the boys, two hours earlier.
About midmorning, I would glance up and find Tivisita leaning against the door to my classroom. At the end of the day, when she helped to clean up the parlor, I would catch her, running her hands over the charts of letters as if she could make sense from just touching them.
I began giving her tasks that brought her to the front of the house during the beginners’ lessons. And each day, I would ask her to please copy this or that page for me, as if I assumed she could write. One day, when I happened into the parlor to pick up a schoolbook I had forgotten and needed in order to prepare tomorrow’s lessons, I discovered her sitting at the long table, with the book opened before her, reading haltingly, her finger touching each word.
She looked up, startled, when she heard me, and closed the book quickly.
“Please continue,” I said, smiling at her worried face. “You are doing just fine!”
“Ay, Doña Salomé, if my father finds out . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“It’s our secret,” I promised her. “Now you must stop pointing with your finger and learn each word with your eye—like this,” I read the passage out for her, and then she tried reading it back to me, keeping her finger still.
So naturally, when Pancho mentioned taking one of the Lauranzón girls, it was Tivisita I thought of. She could make great progress learning her letters, up in Puerto Plata, away from her father.
“Who will make my breakfast?” Pancho asked, before thinking.
“Ramona can serve you breakfast,” I said, biting the smile from my lips. My sister and my husband glared at me in disbelief.
Ramona had said she would do anything to save me, but she did have her limits. “Only if he can start getting up at a decent hour.”
“A decent hour,” Pancho pronounced slowly, as if he had to examine the words carefully before delivering a diagnosis on them. His odd intonation had become something of an affectation. “A decent hour. A provincial concept of time, to be sure. That is very Dominican.”
“Bueno, Pancho, where do you think you are?” Ramona folded her arms. “Paris?”
THE NIGHT BEFORE I left the capital, Pancho was behind me every step I took, like our lively little Coco, who had recently passed away. Was I taking my Scott Emulsion along? Did I have enough azufre to burn, ipecacuana in case I got a fever? Had I packed enough socks for the boys, pairs of shoes, little sailor caps?
“Pancho,” I finally said, “You are disordering my chaos!”
I knew it was nerves. I myself had been having a terrible day, as any commotion always brought on the coughing.
“I want to ask you a special favor,” Pancho finally said, sitting himself down right in front of me and taking both my hands. I don’t know if it was because I was departing, but I did not feel my usual repulsion.
“I will take good care of our sons,” I vowed, thinking of course that was the promise he wanted to extract from me.
“I know you will do that without my asking,” he said, looking at me with an odd tenderness in his eyes. “But that is not the favor I want.”
He went on to explain. In October, the country would be celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival on our shores. Friends of the Country was planning an extravaganza at the national theater, with music by Reyes and lyrics by Prud’homme and speeches by everybody. He himself was planning to brush off the presentation he had made in Paris regarding the resting place of Columbus’s bones. Martí was probably coming. A poem by Salomé would crown the evening.
I couldn’t believe that Pancho was asking for poetry at a time like this. “Pancho,” I said, looking straight at his eyes, “Do you understand how ill I am?”
He nodded slowly, but I could see that the reality of what I was saying was not sinking in.
“I often think of that incident you spoke of in one of your letters,” Pancho went on, his voice thick with emotion. It was the first time he had referred to any of our correspondence. “The one where you told how your students apologized for your sacrifice of poetry for them. I feel I owe you an apology as well, Salomé. Had it not been for me and your children, you would have continued on that immortal path.”
“Ay Pancho,” I said, shaking my head. “My children are the only immortality I want.”
Pancho was looking intently at me, as if he were cutting away layer after layer of pretense to get to the truth of what I really felt. “But you might have been Quintana. You might have been Gallego,” he appealed.
“Instead I am Salomé, whom no one else could be.”
He kissed me sweetly on my forehead, the tip of my nose, my chin. “I, for one, am so very glad of that.”
Later, I heard him, washing his hands at one of his many sinks.
THOSE THREE MONTHS AWAY were a glorious, sunny blur. We—the children and Tivisita and I—stayed in a small house rented for us by my old friend Dubeau, who had taught at la Normal and at my own instituto. When Lilís began persecuting Hostos’s disciples, Dubeau and his wife Zenona moved north to the seaside town of Puerto Plata and opened a little school. They didn’t even name it, so as not to bring official attention on their endeavor. Positivism had become an underground activity.
We heard rumors of all the preparations going on in the capital for the Columbus celebrations. Dubeau guessed the fanfare was Lilís’s way of distracting attention from the coming elections and the many opponents who had to be got out of the way before voting day. And so, as the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María replicas sent by Spain entered our harbor, they floated on the sea along with the bodies of Lilís’s enemies. Their canon blasts drowned out the gunshots of the execution squads in Azua, where Don Eugenio’s supporters were being massacred left and right.
In our sleepy, seaside town, all that seemed unreal. We woke early, walked barefoot on the sand, picking up shells, each one more perfect than the next. By the time we got back to our small palm-wood house, my skirt was full of treasures. Soon, every one of my dresses had a faded lap and a stained hem. The sea breezes blew away the infection in my chest. The lapping of the waves soothed my spirit. My lungs began to heal and my heart to mend.
From the capital, Pancho sent loving and frequent missives as if he were making up for all his long silences and his cool communications from France. He had moved us to the new house, a “palace,” he called it. He wanted to know if the children would like a monkey, as he had been made a very good offer by one of his patients, an organ grinder. Most definitely not, I wrote back. With a full household and a school below, I had enough to manage. “If you are going to get a monkey, why not a bear and a goat as well?” I added to lighten my refusal.
Looking out at that ocean, I felt inspired, and for the first time in two years, I picked up my pen and wrote, not one, but two poems. The first was in my old style, the cry of the mariner sighting land, “¡Tierra!” Hope and expectation at last fulfilled. The other poem, “Fe,” was much quieter, the mariners mid-ocean, tossed by storms, needing the faith to continue with no sign of land ahead.
I sent both poems to Pancho, and of course, he chose “¡Tierra!” to read at the concluding celebration. If I am to believe Pancho’s account of that evening, my poem was well received. At the end of the ceremonies at the Teatro Republicano, Pancho stood and recited it, hand tucked in his frock coat no doubt, and using that slight French accent he refused to lose. The great apostle Martí, and the great general Máximo Gómez, and the incomparable Meriño, and the next president Marchena (Pancho’s superlatives!) had all been visibly moved. Even Martí took out his handkerchief. Pancho swore it was the power of my poetry, but I imagine the apostle was thinking of his own dear Cuba from which he had been exiled now for so many years.
“¡Mi musa, mi esposa, mi amor, mi tierra!” Pancho closed.
Across the island on the north coast, we gathered that very night in the small parlor of our seaside cottage. Dubeau read some poems; my boys read their little compositions; then I surprised everyone by reciting my new poem, “Faith.” The lamplight shone on the faces of my children and my dear friends. In the distance I could hear the waves coming in and out, in and out—all the applause I wanted. When I had finished, I felt elated: not once during my reading had I broken down coughing.
The rest cure had worked. I had come through the storm. Faith!
BACK AT THE CAPITAL, everything seemed changed. Electricity had arrived, and at night the city was lit up as if it were day. The Carousel Americano set itself up in the central square, and for one mota you could go round and round and round for five minutes until you could hardly stand you were so dizzy. It was probably an appropriate state to be in with elections coming.
The large, two-story house we had leased stood at the center of the city. The day we arrived, I looked out from an upstairs window at the sea and then down at the courtyard below. A small creature with a collar and rope tied to a guava tree gazed up at me. “Pancho!” I called out to him.
He shrugged helplessly. “The organ grinder died. The monkey didn’t want to leave.”
“I’ll make him want to leave,” I declared, but I had already lost the battle. The boys, spying this magnificent pet, cried out, “A monkey! A monkey!” and dashed downstairs to welcome it.
I was too pleased with our new quarters to let anything spoil my homecoming. The house was quite grand, with a Spanish-tile roof and iron grillwork at each one of its five balconies. We used the first floor for the instituto and the second for our living quarters. The sisters Bobadilla would have been proud of the appearance of my instituto, if not of what was going on inside—little girls learning to read and write.
The school had doubled in size, which was a good thing. With Pancho’s few patients, we depended on what income the instituto provided to pay our debts. And there were many of them. Although Pancho had received a government scholarship, he had borrowed considerably from Cosme Batlle in order to help finance his Parisian studies and purchase his equipment. As it turned out, he had also incurred added personal expenses, of which I will not speak.
Even with the instituto flourishing and enrollments increasing every day, we gave out so many scholarships that we could never quite make ends meet. Then, too, the Ayuntamiento was always in arrears in paying us our monthly stipend, a sum considerably reduced from what they had originally promised. When we found out that they were paying double the amount per student to San Luis Gonzaga and Escuela Central, it became quite clear what was happening. The regime wanted to shut us down, quietly, by bankruptcy.
But Salomé had come back from Puerto Plata strong and plucky. I felt up to the hard work of rebuilding my patria, girl by girl. Everyone noticed my nice color, the weight I had put on. Pancho’s eyes no longer wandered to the pretty Lauranzón girls, at least not in my presence. Needless to say, with my health regained, his importuning recommenced.
It came down to a simple detail: there were not two wings to the new house in which we could keep our separate quarters. In fact, upon my return to the capital, I found that Pancho had moved us both into the same bedroom. Even so, I insisted that the porters deposit my things in a small sitting room beside the boys’ bedroom. They helped me unfold my narrow pallet next to a casement window that looked out at the sea.
“Salomé, you’ll be warmer in the back bedroom with me,” he noted, too ashamed to plead his own needs. Winter was coming, he reminded me, and the nights would be cooler, especially now that we lived closer to the sea.
“Cool weather is better for my health,” I argued.
“But you are cured,” Pancho pleaded.
“My lungs are cured,” I agreed.
I was angry at myself, for in truth, I wanted to forgive him. But much as I promised myself to let go my stubbornness, my rage would rise up like a wall between us. Suddenly, I would think of how Pancho had lied to me, of his numerous excuses for not returning home, of his explanations of why he needed more money. Or I would imagine Mlle. Chrittia with her curly reddish hair and grayish sort of eyes—I had coaxed that much information from Fran. I remembered how I had sent her gifts we could ill afford in gratitude for taking care of “my boys.” Indeed! I was furious at Pancho, furious at Mlle. Chrittia, furious at myself.
Perhaps if Pancho had persisted, I would have ceded sooner. But he was preoccupied, as I soon was, with the bloodbath taking place before our very eyes.
Lilís had announced that he would, in fact, run for president. Immediately, all the candidates wisely dropped out. All, that is, except Don Eugenio. Pancho confided that he and Rodolfo had urged Don Eugenio, not only to resign his candidacy, but to take the first ship out of the country. But Don Eugenio believed himself invulnerable. “Not a good sign in a future leader,” Pancho admitted. His waning enthusiasm for Don Eugenio saved Pancho in the end. When Marchena’s inner circle began to be rounded up, Lilís’s spies knew that Pancho was no longer one of them.
The eve of election night, Pancho and Federico went out to size up the mood in the city. I waited in my narrow bed, unable to sleep until I heard the welcome sounds of Pancho coming home. For days, I had been feeling a slight feverishness that made me dread the return of my illness. But I had not had a recurrence of the horrid cough. I was still holding on to faith—faith that this was nothing but a touch of my old asthma.
I don’t know which I heard first—the shots or the steps in the entryway. I sat up, and throwing my shawl over my shoulders, I rushed to the front of the house. I found Pancho at the top of the stairs, trying to catch his breath. The city was coming undone.
“I want you and the children to go to your mother’s first thing in the morning,” he said firmly.
“It’s you who must go away, Pancho. You must take the first ship out, I don’t care where. Haiti, Cuba, Curaçao, Puerto Rico, France.” Rather than risk a hair on his head coming to harm, I would rather send him back to the other woman. Love was stronger than anything else in the world. I had not known until this moment that I was capable of it.
When Pancho reached for me, I did not turn away. He led me down the hall, past the boys’ bedroom, past the room with its narrow pallet I had been using as my own, and into his room and the large four-poster with the marriage coverlet I smoothed out every morning when I made his bed.
He slept soundly in my arms that night, but I lay awake, unable to sleep. The room was cold. I could hear the winter sea crashing against the malecón. Downstairs, the monkey whimpered to be let in. Some time close to dawn, fighting erupted. Gunshots drowned out my bouts of coughing. I lay there, knowing that my hopes for my patria—and for myself—were lost. No matter how much Pancho denied it, I had the signs of consumption, the remissions, the relapses, the fevers, the shortness of breath. The only symptom I had been spared so far was coughing up blood.
Hour after hour, as the dark room slowly became light, I could see all that was coming: Marchena dead, the Lauranzóns forced into exile, Pancho himself forced to flee, the instituto’s doors closed, my children without a settled home. And I could not catch my breath. No, I could not catch my breath. I could not for the life of me catch my breath.