SHE WOULD LIKE TO ask her mother, “What should I do now?” But she has never had that luxury: a mother to turn to at difficult moments in her life, a hand on her brow, a soothing voice in her ear.
Marion claims these are clichés of motherhood that Camila believes in because she has never had the opportunity to test them. “Trust me,” her friend has told her. “I had a mother to turn to, and guess what her advice always was: Ask Jesus. How helpful was that?”
These days she is feeling so unsettled that she has started consulting her mother’s poems. But the game is getting out of hand.
WHEN SHE TELLS THE school doctor what she is doing, the kindly old man takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. “You’re engaged in magical thinking,” he explains, though Camila is not sure she has heard correctly. Even after all these years, she has to strain to understand and to make herself understood in English. Just last week, she found herself walking home several blocks because the taxi driver had delivered her to the wrong address. She had been too embarrassed to inform him.
“Magical thinking?” she repeats the phrase. That can’t possibly be something bad. She has come about her eyes. Her vision is blurring. Sometimes she feels as if there were a light snow falling between herself and the world out there.
“Cataracts,” he guesses. “You’re at that magical age.” He winks. How nice of him to use that word again, magical, a word she likes. He is a kind man, retired from the navy, he has said. His letter opener is in the shape of a sword. His pen stand, a submarine. Engravings of ships sail upon his walls. Everyone has their little thing.
He is probing. What are her plans? Does she have any family? Is she upset with this nonsense about mandatory retirement? Is she worried about the future?
“Not exactly worried,” she says as evenly as she can. After all, she does not want to be locked away somewhere. Who knows what rules apply to a foreign woman who goes mad in this country. “But this is my last chance, and I don’t want to spoil it.”
“Your last chance at what, Miss Henry?” he asks softly. She has told him to please call her Miss Henry. He was having such a hard time with her name, the r to rattle, the Spanish i to negotiate.
“To start over,” she says simply.
He waits a few minutes for her to elaborate but when she says nothing, he offers her a hand off the examining table.
“That a girl,” he says as she climbs heavily down.
SHE TOUCHES THE FADED cover, closes her eyes, and parts the pages, then glances down. The letters blur. No matter. She knows them all by heart. Her mother’s poem about winter:
In our poor countries, rivers keep singing,
fields wear their flowers, light floods the sky . . .
No answers in that. But she does feel a surge of silly, chauvinistic pride in the tropics’ claim to better winters.
It is after six. She goes to the kitchen and pours herself her glass of wine. Every evening about this time, she uncorks the bottle she buys one town over. A deep-throated burgundy. One glass only. She felt ashamed to tell the doctor when he said he was prescribing a mild sedative and asked if she drank. The last thing she needs is a mild sedative. How about a strong clarion call? she should have asked him. One of those resurrection angels who wake up the dead when they blow their horns. How about one of those?
She takes her glass to the window. At each streetlight, there is a roiling cloud of white. The snowfall, predicted for days, has arrived. Odd how just now she opened on her mother’s poem about winter.
Maybe the game is working. The answers are coming at last.
She lifts her glass but can think of nothing she wants to toast just now.
ON THE TELEVISION SHE has turned on for company, there is a special report on Cuba, approaching the anniversary of its revolution. Castro’s nationalization of land continues. The King ranch has been converted into a cooperative for schoolchildren. What kind of a revolution is this? President Eisenhower wants to know.
Ours, she thinks. The kind we have in our poor countries.
She has just gotten off the phone with Marion in sunny Sarasota. (“Ha! Ha! We don’t have a bit of snow!”) She is calling hurriedly: the little cottage at the end of their block is up for sale. “It would be perfect for you. But you’re going to have to make up your mind right away, Cam, this place will sell in a day.”
Is this a sign, she wonders, this sudden phone call just when she is beginning to feel at her wits’ end? Her life has come to a standstill. This year she has not sent out her Christmas cards. Everyone would want to know her plans for the future—and the idea of increasing her uncertainty by sharing it is appalling.
Down below, Vivian Lafleur is returning from a faculty tea. The wind has begun to whip the snowflakes into whirls. From street-light to streetlight she watches her neighbor’s unsteady progress: Vivian is almost bent double, holding down her Kelly-green hat with a Kelly-green mitten. Camila’s own most recent set is in a shade that Dot especially chose because it had a Spanish-sounding name, verde green. In her lighter moments this last fall, Camila has written under her PRO LEAVING VASSAR COLLEGE column: No more of Dot’s hat-and-mitten sets.
When they next cross paths, Vivian will hint that the faculty missed her at afternoon tea, no doubt hoping that her upstairs neighbor will explain her recent reclusiveness. “We missed our eminent Hispanicist.” For years, Camila used to think that Vivian was making fun of her. But no, this is the way Vivian actually talks.
College Street is deserted at this hour. In a few days the girls will be returning to campus from their Christmas break. It has been a long holiday, waiting for her last semester to start. Not that she is looking forward to it. She has never been good at endings.
Below, Vivian has looked up and caught sight of Camila at the window. She lets the curtain fall and sits back down at her desk as if she has been caught doing something undignified.
SHE OPENS THE FOLDER she has labeled THE FUTURE. Her lists, should anyone else read them, are as embarrassing as a diary. The reasons for and against a decision seem so petty. She remembers Rodolfo, deciding to move to a neighborhood because it was closer to the one ice cream parlor in Havana that sold pistachio ice cream. She herself accepted the Vassar job years ago because when she came for the interview, her future colleague Pilar gave her a box of scented soaps shaped like butterflies.
She takes out a clean page and writes, BUYING THE COTTAGE IN SARASOTA CLOSE TO MARION, then draws a line down the center. PRO and CON. Is close to Marion pro or con? she wonders.
But before she has even begun listing her reasons, she puts the page aside. None of her reasons are convincing anymore. She turns to her mother’s poems again—closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. This time, she opens on one of her favorites, “Luz,” which begins, “Where shall the uncertain heart attempt its flight? Rumors of another life awaken it.”
She listens closely, but all she hears are Vivian’s steps at the front door and Dot calling from her bedroom, “Come quickly, Viv.” In the background, the television drones, punctuated by screams and raucous applause. A game show has come on.
DEAR MARION, SHE WRITES, you must understand . . . this is not easy for me. When I put my reasons into words they do not sound like the truth. But we parted lives long ago, and I know it will never do for me to join you and your husband in my retirement.
Something has always been missing between them. She used to blame herself: she was not committed enough to Marion. Now she suspects she was not committed enough to living in this country.
And yet she has stayed on, almost twenty years, long after Marion departed for Florida, long after her brothers stopped trying to convince her to come home.
It is a mystery how the heart gets free.
And perhaps there is a kind of quiet courage to waiting until it does. But she does not want to make too much of this. She has never trusted the trumpet or the drums. She prefers the background piano, bearing the burden, plunking along with its serviceable tune.
I think it is time now to go back and be a part of what my mother started.
She knows precisely what Marion will write back.
“Nonsense, Camila! Look how your mother ended up.”
HER CHRISTMAS PLANS had been to go to Cuba for the holidays as usual. But given the chaos on the island, the bombings and imminent embargo, the airline had canceled all flights. When she phoned her nieces in Havana with the news, they were terribly disappointed. For years, their aunt Camila was known as the Santa Claus from Poughkeepsie, a name that always made the young girls laugh as they mispronounced it.
“It’s just as well you stay quiet up there,” Rodolfo advised when he got on the line. The baby of the family had grown up to become a know-it-all at fifty-five. Now that Camila’s older brothers were gone—Max was still alive but sadly ailing—Rodolfo had stepped in to boss her around. Families, it seems, like nature, abhor a vacuum.
“Things are happening, lots of things are happening. Your ambassador has been recalled,” Rodolfo continued.
She felt a flash of annoyance that made her want to put the phone back in its cradle. “Bonsal is not my ambassador, Rodolfo. I am as Cuban as you are.” Dominican, really, by birth. The family had fled to Cuba years ago, only to find a dictatorship there as well. But they stayed on. Someone else’s dictator was never as difficult as their own.
“Santa Claus has been outlawed,” Rodolfo noted casually, the way he might mention that he had decided to grow out his mustache or paint the house yellow. Perhaps he feared that his phone calls were being monitored. Had things gotten that bad?
“Give it time, Rodolfo.” Camila had to raise her voice to be heard. Connections from Poughkeepsie to Havana were never very good. Downstairs, she could hear the stillness of her neighbors listening in.
“Will you be coming in June?” he wanted to know.
I am waiting for a sign, she thought of saying, but he would assume he had misheard and start shouting again into the receiver. “I’ll write, Rodolfo,” she promised. “This connection is terrible.”
As if her saying so made it even worse, the crackling of static increased, and then the line went dead. And her brother and the brilliant light of the tropics and hundreds of confiscated Santa Clauses, their fake white beards dyed black and used for Fidel floats in celebration parades, and the smell of cafecitos and her three pretty nieces telling their girlfriends that this year their old-maid aunt would not be coming from the United States with her suitcase full of nail polish and board games—all vanished—and she was alone again in this attic apartment in which she had lived and worked anonymously for close to twenty years. All alone with her indecision and fears.
TWO TRUNKS ARRIVE FROM Max. The return address wasn’t as funny as he meant it to be. From your brother Max, one foot on the other side of the grave. The tags are stamped with the official seal from the Cancillería of the Dominican Republic. Every time she sees him, Max tries to talk her into leaving Poughkeepsie and coming down to work with him in the foreign office. “You could travel. You could use all your languages.” He does not go as far as to say, though she knows he is thinking it, You might meet somebody.
“I’ll never go back while Trujillo is alive,” she has told him.
“You don’t abandon your country because of one bad mango,” Max replies, glancing away as if to avoid her eyes. He himself has accepted numerous posts from Trujillo. “Look at Mamá.”
The thought of Max, comparing himself to their mother! Ten years ago, at the centennial of their mother’s birth, Camila stopped using her first name, Salomé, considering it an honor she had not earned. “I’m just plain Camila,” she corrects those who read her name from some official record.
“I know we have disagreed on many things over the years,” Max writes in the letter that accompanies the trunks, “but despite that, it is you and only you whom I know I can trust with the family papers.” She is to sort out what to give the archives and what to destroy. The irony of his request is not lost on her—she, the nobody among them, will be the one editing the story of her famous family.
Meanwhile, the present is being reported in dozens of recaps of the year’s small and big news on television. Alaska and Hawaii have become states. The Barbie doll has been invented in imitation of dolls handed out to patrons of a West Berlin brothel. Panty hose will now liberate women from girdles. In Cuba the peasants are singing, “With Fidel, with Fidel, always with Fidel,” to the tune of “Jingle Bells.”
Camila sings along.
SHE IS GLAD WHEN the new semester starts. She has missed her girls. On the first day of class, she greets them in a too bright voice, “¡Buenos días, señoritas!” as if Spanish were the language of a heightened emotional state. The girls sit back, wary of her enthusiasm.
She has fifteen students in each class, all with names like Joan or Susan or Nancy, so it is difficult to keep them straight. Her procedure has always been to spend the first month reviewing grammar, and then move on to the literature, though she has always shied away from teaching the poetry of her mother. Perhaps because this is her last semester, she assigns five of Salomé’s most famous poems to the more advanced section.
She does not trust her voice to read them out loud as she usually does. Instead she chooses a volunteer. “Wake from your sleep, my Patria, throw off your shroud,” one of three Susans in the class begins. After a poor rendition of “A la Patria,” Camila asks the blond, pale girl what she thinks of the poem.
“It’s too . . . too . . .” Susan wrinkles her nose, as if the word she is looking for might be found by its smell. Camila stands by, quietly, letting the young woman flounder. Usually, she tries to help students out with a ready supply of vocabulary words. But why should she help someone find a negative word to describe her mother’s work?
Another student steps in. “They’re too bewailing, oh woe is me and my poor suffering country. ‘And martyrdom beneath the fecund palms’! Is this poet supposed to be any good? I never heard of her.”
“As good as your Emily Dickinson, as good as your Walt Whitman.” She feels surprised at her outburst. The students look up, alert and wide-eyed. She is a quiet woman in quaint suits from the forties and funny, colorful winter accessories that they suppose are meant to liven up her black coat. She is one of their favorite professors, soft-voiced and calm. She can see this in their eyes, and as usual when she adopts another’s point of view, her anger subsides.
Still, as she walks home, she cannot forget the indifference in their voices, the casualness of their dismissal. Everything of ours—from lives to literature—has always been so disposable, she thinks. It is as if a little stopper that has contained years of bitterness inside her has been pulled out. She smells her anger—it has a metallic smell mixed in with earth, a rusting plow driven into the ground.
That evening, she takes her glass of wine into the back room and opens the trunks.
SHE HAS BEEN LISTENING intently for the last half hour, and then has forgotten to listen, so that the crunch of snow on the pathway surprises her. A brief pause as the visitor reads the names on the mailboxes, the squeak of the knob being turned, the rush of cold air as the downstairs door is opened, the seventeen steps to the attic apartment.
“Sorry,” the young woman says at the door. “I was told 204 College Street, and it jumps from 202 to 210.”
The face is open and eager. (What was it her mother wrote in her poem to schoolchildren? Their faces fresh with what they do not know . . .) Atop the pale face there is a burst of red hair.
“You’re right on time,” she lies. “They’re in the back room.”
“Dr. Henríquez,” the girl starts over. “I’m Nancy, Nancy Palmer.”
She leads the young Nancy to the back of the apartment. “I suppose Pilar, or rather, Profesora Madariaga explained what I’d like you to help me with.”
“I’m only a Spanish minor, you know?” the young woman says rather quickly. Perhaps she has spotted some loose pages on top of one of the trunks.
“But you read Spanish well enough to read to me?”
“I got an A in Miss Madariaga’s Spanish 220.”
“Muy bien, muy muy bien. Shall we start?”
Camila explains the task at hand. She had thought she could do it all on her own, but this last year has been a strain on her poor eyes. The eye doctor has told her that indeed she has cataracts, which will have to be operated on.
“I think it is better if I introduce everyone first,” she explains to the young woman. That way she will know in what box to place the different letters and documents. “I’ll start with Salomé Ureña, my mother—some of the letters might say ‘la poetisa nacional.’ She married Francisco Henríquez, whom everyone calls Pancho or Papancho, so she became Salomé Ureña de Henríquez. We always keep our own last names.”
Nancy looks up as if sensing a criticism.
“It is the custom in our poor countries.” She intends the phrase ironically, but the girl nods earnestly with that abstract compassion for the downtrodden of the world.
“Pancho became President Pancho in 1916—”
Nancy’s mouth drops open.
“It was actually a very brief presidency,” Camila notes, “not unlike those small towns. What is it you say? Don’t blink as you drive by or you will miss them.”
“How long was he president?”
She counts the months out on her fingers to be sure. “Four months, I think it was. We were living in Cuba when he heard. By the time the family joined him in Santo Domingo, we barely had time to unpack before we were back in exile in Cuba again.” She does not add that it was the American occupation that forced Pancho out.
“Gosh,” Nancy says, shaking her her head. “You should write a memoir. Alice Roosevelt has. I hear one of the Eisenhower kids is writing one about his dad.”
Camila waves the suggestion away. She has been approached before, by journalists and historians south of the border. They query her on the details of her life as First Daughter. What details? she asks. There was no time for details, no time to plan an inauguration ball, to have calling cards printed up.
“Well, I think it’s pretty neat to have a daddy who was president, even if it was only for four months.”
“I wish it had only been four months.” Camila sighs, and when she notes the baffled look on Nancy’s face, she adds, “The effects went on for a long time is what I mean.” Nine years spent trying to reclaim his country. A president without a country. Someone (not her!) should write a book about it.
“How are we doing?” Camila asks the young woman. She has started drawing a family chart for herself on a blank sheet of paper.
“So far, so good,” Nancy says, nodding.
“Well then, Pancho and Salomé had three sons, Fran, the oldest—I don’t suspect there will be much mail or papers from him. Early on, he faded into the background, you might say.”
“Oh?” Nancy asks, cocking her head, curious.
“A violent temper, an incident . . .” She waves that past away. “Then there was dear Pedro—he often signs ‘Pibín.’” The smile on her face no doubt betrays he is her favorite. “And Maximiliano, who is always Max, still alive, still causing trouble.” She laughs. Nancy laughs, too, amiably. She will be easy to work with, Camila thinks. She had not wanted to employ one of her own students, someone whose judgments she would have to live with.
“And then, of course, there is me. But I won’t have much in those trunks either.” She smiles at the sunshine pouring in through the window. It is the main reason she has never wanted to give up the small apartment. On a sunny day, it floods with light.
“That’s pretty simple,” Nancy says, finishing her tree with a flourish. “I thought it would be like one of those complicated Latin American families with oodles of kids.”
“You spoke too soon,” Camila laughs. “My mother died, and my father remarried.” She mentions her stepmother, two half sisters, both of whom died, her three half brothers. Rodolfo, the baby, now has three daughters of his own! She spells out each name. “There’s also the Parisian family—”
“I guess I did speak too soon,” Nancy sighs. Her sheet is now dark with names and arrows and lines.
“And we mustn’t forget Columbus, the bear; and the monkeys, One through Eight; and Paco, the parrot.” She decides against mentioning Teddy Roosevelt, the pig. The young woman might get insulted.
“Paco and Columbus . . .” She is writing down the names of the pets! Oh dear. Humor does not always translate well.
“Why don’t we stop there,” Camila suggests. “I’ll explain other people as they come up.”
Just introducing these ghosts by name has recalled them so vividly, they rise up before her, then shimmer and fade in the shaft of sunlight in which she is sitting. Maybe it is a good thing to finally face each one squarely. Maybe that is the only way to exorcise ghosts. To become them.
IN THE FIRST TRUNK, the packets of letters are all tied with red ribbons.
“Whoever put these away did a neat job,” Nancy notes.
“I think it was my aunt Mon—oh yes, you better put Mon down, short for ‘Ramona,’ Salomé’s only sister. She became something of the guardian of Mamá’s memory.”
“Guardian of a memory?” The young woman seems surprised by Camila’s choice of words.
Perhaps guardian does not mean the same in English as it does in Spanish? “I mean that my aunt took charge of keeping my mother’s memory alive in me. My mother died when I was quite young. I hardly remember her.”
She rises and walks to the window. How often has she awakened in the middle of the night, wandering the houses where she lived, looking for something, anything, to fill up the emptiness inside her. And here she is sixty-six years old, the need still raw, the strategies breaking down. Maybe she should take that mild sedative? It is still too early in the afternoon for a glass of wine.
The phone rings. She would ignore it if the girl were not here. “Will you take that, Nancy, please? I’m at work,” she adds.
“It’s someone called Marion,” Nancy mouths, holding her hand over the receiver. “She says she has to talk to you.”
Camila shakes her head. At this moment, she cannot bear to be asked about the future. The past is too much with her.
NANCY HAS UNTIED THE first packet. “There’s a picture in this one. What a pretty lady!” She holds up the photograph. “Was this your mother?”
Camila is tempted to say yes, as she would have said in the past when asked. In fact, as a young woman she used to give away this picture of her mother to her girlfriends. But the photo is of a painting, done after her mother’s death on her father’s instructions. “Actually that pretty lady is my father’s creation. I have the actual photograph somewhere.”
The young woman looks at her, waiting for further explanation, as if she does not understand.
“He wanted my mother to look like the legend he was creating,” Camila adds. “He wanted her to be prettier, whiter . . .”
Something shifts in the young woman’s eyes. She looks at Camila closely. “You mean, your mother was a . . . a negro?”
“We call it mulatto. She was a mixture,” Camila explains.
“That’s amazing,” the girl says finally, as if that is the safest thing to say.
Camila does not know if the young woman is amazed by her mother’s color or by her father’s touch-up. But it was not just Pancho. Everyone in the family—yes, including Mon!—touched up the legend of her mother.
Nancy has unfolded several letters. “I don’t have the best accent,” she protests before she begins reading.
“You will do fine,” Camila reassures the young woman. “I just need to get some idea of the content of each one. We’ll use those two boxes to sort them.”
“You mean, they aren’t all going to the archives?”
“They should all go to the archives, shouldn’t they?” In spite of Max, in spite of the others, let the true story be told!
But for now, she wants her mother just to herself.
“Shall I label them something?”
“What was that, Nancy?”
“Shall I label the two boxes so we don’t confuse them?”
“Label one ‘Archives.’” She thinks a moment what the other box should be called. “And just put my name on the other one.”
SHE STARTS TO GIVE away her own things as if something inside her already knows where she is going, what she will need. She presents Flo on the first floor with a copy of Pedro’s Literary Currents, which includes his Norton Lectures from Harvard. To Vivian, she gives her records of Italian operas, Spanish zarzuelas.
“So, have you made up your mind where you are going?” Vivian asks.
“Not yet,” she says, and she repeats the same thing to Marion, who calls again to say she has received Camila’s last letter.
“Well, I want you to know that no matter what you decide, I’ll come in June to help you pack up.” Marion takes a deep, resigned breath, which she is meant to hear. “By the way, who is that young thing who always answers when I call?”
“You mean Nancy?” Camila revels in the pause that follows. “She’s my student helper.”
“Tell her to get on the ball. I keep leaving her my number and you never call.”
Thank goodness for student helpers one can blame things on! “We’ve been so busy, sorting through years and years of papers.”
“Be careful with your asthma,” Marion reminds her. She sends a motherly kiss over the wires, then calls back up a minute later because she forgot one for the other cheek.
Nancy comes twice a week and on weekends. Soon they finish one trunk and start on the other. Every night she pores over her mother’s box: notes to her children; a sachet with dried purplish flowers; a catechism book, Catón cristiano, with a little girl’s handwriting on the back cover; silly poems from someone named Nísidas; a lock of hair; a baby tooth tied up in handkerchief; a small Dominican flag her mother must have sewn herself, its stick snapped off, no doubt from the weight of the other packets upon it. What these things mean, only the dead can tell. But they are details of Salomé’s story that increasingly connect her mother’s life to her own.
As for the future, who knows what that will be. All she knows is that she wants to become Salomé Camila, living it.
AMBASSADOR BONSAL IS BEING interviewed by David Brinkley. What is happening over in Cubar? Mr. Brinkley wants to know. Cubar. Camila has noticed how President Eisenhower, too, mispronounces the name, adding an r at the end, a little growl of warning. Mr. Fidel Castro has another think coming if he thinks he can do what he wants so close to the United States, Ambassador Bonsal growls straight at the cameras. Next, there is a clip of Fidel standing in the plaza, hundreds of doves circling and landing around him as he speaks. He seems familiar with his large, pale face and a beard like a black bib under his mouth.
Whom does he resemble? Camila wonders. More and more, there are so many ghosts. People now gone for years reappear in these brief resurrections! A few days ago when Pilar had her over to celebrate her last semester with one of her paellas, Camila could not take her eyes off Pilar’s collie, Kalua. The sad face, the soulful eyes, the quietude of his pose as he stood guard by their chairs—all of it reminded her of someone. And then, she saw him, fourteen years gone, her brother Pedro, slowly surfacing in the face of an old dog.
Fidel tilts his head, the doves fly off. He looks like Pancho! The same pouty mouth, the same intent face, something fierce about the eyes. The voice-over in English makes it hard to understand what he is saying. But it seems there has been an exodus of professionals. He is putting out a call for teachers and doctors, dentists and nurses. “Come join us,” he says, looking straight at Camila.
“I HEAR YOU ARE retiring?”
She meets the young Nancy on her way home from teaching her classes. It is a brilliant winter day, sun spangling the icicles from the roofs of the buildings. A few weeks ago, they finished sorting through the trunks. The archival material has been sent off to Harvard and Minnesota, the Dominican Republic, Cuba. Her one trunk sits like a rock in the rooms she has been dismantling. Someday, it will join the others. For now, she wants it with her, part keepsake chest, part talisman.
“Not retiring exactly,” she explains.
“Oh?” The young woman cocks her head. “Where do you go from here?” Weeks of working together have made her bolder than she would normally be with a professor.
Instead of the ambivalence she has felt in the past when confronted by this question, she feels a sense of release—fields wear their flowers, light floods the sky. She knows exactly where she wants to go. She wants to try saying it aloud, to see the ghostly breath the words leave in the air. “I’m going to join a revolution.”
“Are you feeling okay, Dr. Henríquez?” The young woman peers at her closely. Her red hair is delightful—as if someone has lit a flame on top of her head.
She is feeling more hopeful than she has in a long time. Just when she thought her life was over—when the rest of her days would be a succession of short trips from one safe place to another, pills in compartmentalized containers labeled with the days of the week, saving stamps pasted into booklets and redeemed for small appliances that are always falling apart, and parts of her body giving out, beginning with her bad eyes—just when, in short, she thought her story was over, epilogue, coda, diminuendo, she has happened upon a caravel with sails filling with wind (no Noah’s ark, please, no salvation for me at the expense of others), she has happened upon a way home, a song in her head from childhood, I’m going to El Cabo to meet my mother . . . The bay is too shallow to float in today . . . Just when she thought . . .
All the heart wants is to be called again.
“Why do you ask?”
The young woman seems baffled as if she doesn’t know how to explain what she has sensed in the older woman’s tone. “You just seem . . .” She makes the motion of setting something down. “Happier,” she finally says, though that is not the word that goes with the gesture.
Camila throws her head back and laughs. The young woman gives her an uncertain smile, as if she is not quite sure why her remark is humorous. Reassuringly, Camila adds, “I’m going home, or as close as I can get. I guess I’ve been homesick for a while now.”
“I bet,” the young woman nods. She has a talent for being agreeable. Camila should send this young Nancy south to work with Max in diplomacy. “Warm weather’ll be nice,” Nancy adds, rolling her eyes, as if the piles of snow around them had conspired to ruin their lives. “But will it be safe?”
“All my people live there,” Camila says tartly, a not totally accurate statement, as most of her people are actually one island over.
“Vaya con Dios,” Nancy says with obvious pride to have nailed down the correct colloquialism.
Camila feels a surge of tenderness toward the young woman, her hair springing up irrepressibly around her pale face. This has always been a handicap in her line of work. Every semester she falls in love with her babies, as she calls them, and spoils them to death, so Pilar claims. “It’s a wonder they know anything about the subjunctive!”
Camila says her goodbyes and heads down the path toward her apartment. At Joss Gate, she turns—the young woman is still watching her—and lifts a purple mitten and calls out, “Hasta luego.”
Upstairs, the sunny rooms make her feel a giddy certainty about what she is doing. She finds her folder of lists, pros and cons to this or that plan, and rolls the sheaf into a cylinder that looks amusingly official—a scroll, a diploma. Turning on her stove, she sets fire to one end and drops the burning pages in the sink. The future goes up in flames. Although it is only midafternoon, she pours herself a glass of wine and lifts it in celebration.
“To us,” she toasts the radiant, smoky air.