THE YEAR I TURNED fifteen, I became a woman, so Mamá said. We didn’t have enough money for a quinceañera party, but I got to choose the fabric for a new dress, a pale violet muslin with a black lace trim. I remember we were putting the finishing touches on the hem when Papá rushed in, out of breath. “Mr. Lincoln has been shot!”
We liked the bearded president of our neighbor to the north. He had struggled for the freedom of people our color. “With so many other worthier targets!” was all Mamá said, quickly making the sign of the cross. Mamá could be wicked, but she always followed her lapses with contrition, as if God might not notice.
On my birthday, Ramona and I walked down to the center of town with Papá, one on each arm. I wore my new gown and mantilla with a silver comb, a gift from Papá. We meant to stroll around the central square, but when we got there and looked up at la fortaleza with its Spanish flag tossing proudly, we turned back. Under the laurel tree in his yard, Papá toasted me, saying I was now a grown-up young lady.
It was my country that had gone back to being a baby, having to obey a mother country.
THAT DAY—MARCH 18, 1861—on the main plaza, we had been given back to Spain and became a colony once again.
I dreamed of setting us free. My shield was my paper, and my swords were the words my father was teaching me to wield.
I practiced on paper and I practiced in my head: rhymes, refrains, anthems, hymns. At night, I would lie in bed, and instead of sleeping I would think of what I would say if, like María Trinidad, I was bound and blindfolded before I was shot dead. I thought of what I would whisper into the ears of the Spanish governor if I had the chance. If I got scared, I’d chant my brave name over and over to myself, ¡Herminia! ¡Herminia! ¡Herminia!
I would free la patria with my sharp quill and bottle of ink.
But I had to be very careful not to get my father in trouble.
THE CONDITION UNDER WHICH Papá had been allowed to return to the country was that he not involve himself in politics. This must have been especially hard for him after the war of restoration broke out in the northern part of the country. By then, I think Papá was convinced it was better to be our own patria than somebody else’s colony. But he had given his word. He said nothing, wrote nothing. Instead he drank and he kept a sharp eye over Ramona and me.
We had left off going to the sisters Bobadilla after my father quizzed us on a variety of subjects and found that we didn’t know who Lope de Vega was or Dante or the pistil and stamen in one of the flowers he plucked for us, but we knew all about fine fanning (snapping closed: do not approach; opening slowly while peeking over the top: you may speak to me) and what variety of flowers went into a Queen Isabela bouquet and what to wear to a formal dinner if there has been a recent death in the family. Now that the Spaniards were back, the sisters Bobadilla were in their glory.
Mamá finally agreed with Papá that we were wasting our time and withdrew us from school with the excuse that she needed our help at home with the sewing—which was true enough. Afternoons, Mamá hired a tutor, and then in the cool part of the evening, we headed over to Papá’s house where we’d find him, in his garden or his room, brooding over the disappointments in his life, and yes, drinking.
“Was your father drinking?” Mamá would ask when we returned.
Ramona and I would look at each other, and my mother would say, “Never mind, you need not betray him.”
“It helps preserve his vital organs,” Ramona offered.
“Opens his appetite and increases the flow of the blood to the nervous centers of the brain,” Tía Ana recited.
Mamá gave her sister that fierce look that could make your blood stop flowing. Papá always said that the rebels should forget all their elaborate plots and instead let Mamá loose in the governor’s palace. She could stare the Spanish Empire to ruins and sizzle the sycophants who were now all talking with lisps to show how purebred they were. Papá even started a poem called, “To Gregoria’s Eyes,” but he never finished it.
IT WAS PAPÁ WHO was all eyes. It seemed he had transferred all his worry and attention from la patria to Ramona and me.
We began to see, at least I did, how crucial it was that he have a nation with which to occupy himself or we would not have a moment’s peace. When I mentioned this to Mamá, it must have been one of the funniest things I had ever said, for she repeated it often, even to Papá, who gave me a scowl and said, “So you want to be free of me, eh?”
The drinking had done that. You made an innocent remark, and Papá would take offense, and then, the only thing to do was write him a verse to soothe whatever was hurting inside him.
That was how I got him writing again. One day, after I was done reading one of my verses to him, he began saying very clever, pretty things, for my father had a silver tongue, as my mother often observed. I scribbled down what he said, and that night, I set everything in lines so they rhymed. Next day, I read him his poem out loud, not telling him it was his, and he looked at me when I was done, and said, Not bad, Herminia, and I said, Not bad, Nísidas, and he said, Herminia, did I really write that? and I said, Nísidas you did not write that, and he said, I knew it, and I said, you did not write it but you recited it, and suddenly, which was not unusual when he had been drinking, my father began to sob, and I had to remind him of what he had often reminded me, tears are the ink of a poet. Do not waste them on crying.
“I know, Herminia, I know,” Papá said. “And now, I won’t be wasting them anymore.” He held his flask upside down as if to water the garden, but it must have been empty, for only a few dark drops fell out. “I was born poeta. The other things were chance. But if you don’t do what you’re born to do, it destroys you. Come here, let me show you something.”
He took me by the hand and led me through the house, past his two somber sisters in their dark dresses, rocking sadly in their rocking chairs, the black-veiled pictures on the wall, a votary candle burning by the portrait of his parents and his brother Lucas. So many of the people Papá loved had died that I could see why he would be feeling poorly about being alive.
In the front parlor, Papá threw open the street shutters and pushed one of the rockers to one side. Spiders scurried away, and I saw the long, greasy tail of a rat as it dashed under the keepsake chest in a plume of dust. In their grief, the sisters had let the house go. There, scribbled on the wall in a child’s hand in black charcoal were faint words that were hard to make out. “What is it, Papá?” I asked.
“Your father’s first poem—written when he was five years old!”
Papá’s family had lived in this house from when we were still part of Spain the first time around. Even my great-grandfather’s birth cord was buried in the backyard. As for my father’s first poem, he told me the story. His grandmother, who was in fine health, had fallen sick suddenly one night after eating a guava pastel. The family sent for the famous Dr. Martínez, whose fame mostly derived from his having gone to school in Paris, a fact advertised on his shingle, Dr. Alfonso Martínez, Paris Degree, and in his numerous references to what the famous Bernard or the renowned Craveilhier had said about le corps humain.
Dr. Martínez examined the patient and recommended a vomitivo, which the family prepared, and said he would be back tomorrow in the morning after the second bell at ten. That night Papá’s grandmother died. The next morning when Dr. Martínez arrived at the door, Papá’s family was in the bedroom, laying out the body. Dr. Martínez was led into the front parlor, where he found himself facing the young grandson, charcoal in hand, just putting the finishing touches on his first poem:
Doctor Martínez
used his Paris degree
to kill my grandmother
with his expertise.
“Did you get in trouble for writing on the wall?” I asked. I would have. Tía Ana would have smacked my hands the way she did her students’ hands when she caught them doing something naughty.
Papá said he had not gotten punished, not at all. He had merely put into words what everyone else in the whole capital had been thinking. “Which is what a poet is supposed to do,” Papá said, eyeing me in that Ten Commandments way he had when giving advice which I was meant to store away in the category of things my-father-once-said-which-I-will-never-forget. “A poet puts into words what everyone else is thinking and hasn’t the gumption or talent to say.” Then added unnecessarily, “Remember that.”
I did remember it, but it was Papá who forgot. For as I learned to work my words better and better, I became more fearless, and Papá more fearful for me. Of course, no one knew. That was part of the fun: everyone talking about Herminia, and nobody but Papá and Ramona knowing it was me.
NOT THAT ALL MY productions were lofty.
One day, I received a commission from our farmer to write a poem for him. I call him “our” farmer only because he stopped by our house every few days with víveres from his farm out in the country. Don Eloy had heard me versifying, as he called it, and so he was wondering if I would write him a verse or two for a young girl whom he was courting.
“But you already have your mujer,” I reminded him. Maybe Don Eloy had gotten so old that he had forgotten he had a wife?
“You mean Caridad? Ay Dios, pero si Caridad es una vieja.”
“Caridad’s not an old biddy, Don Eloy. Caridad’s your age. You said so yourself. You said you were born within days of each other.”
“Don’t you know anything?” Don Eloy said, leaning closer. His breath smelled like Papá’s breath when Papá had been drinking. “Women age from the bottom up, and men from the top down.”
Now there was a fact I had never heard at the sisters Bobadilla.
“How’s that?” I asked, putting my hand on my hip like Mamá always did when we told fibs.
“You’ve heard it said men are fools. That’s because our brains get old sooner. But the rest of us is still intact until a very old age. Meanwhile women, well—just look at that old one, that Ana of yours, smart as clockwork, right? Brain all there, but the rest of her—” he motioned from the neck down, “dead as a doorstop.”
How odd of science to do that, I thought. But then, science could be very odd. Look at this whole business of a flower carrying around both stamen and pistil like it had no faith in finding a partner out there among the millions of flowers. (There were more flowers than human beings: Papá had confirmed that for me.) Finally, I agreed to write Don Eloy his courting poem in exchange for a basket of guavas from his farm. A few weeks later he reported that the young woman was coming around. “You have to write me another one. That one just shook the tree, but now I want the mangoes to fall.”
But in those few weeks I had had a chance to make some inquiries, and Don Eloy’s science of aging had been wholly discredited by Papá. As for the guavas he had brought me, they were full of worms, and recalling Papá’s grandmother’s experience, I threw them out.
IN THOSE DAYS OF being a colony again, the newspapers were full of poetry. The Spanish censor let anything in rhymed lines pass, and so every patriot turned into poet. Daily, our friend Don Eliseo Grullón or Papá would appear after supper with one paper or other for us to read. There were dozens of poems about liberty.
It was the time for poetry, even if it was not the time for liberty. Sometimes I wondered if this didn’t make sense after all. The spirit needed to soar when the body was in chains. I even wrote an ode about it, which I showed nobody, but added to the growing stack of poems under my mattress.
It was not just me who was writing. Ramona also wrote, lots of sweet poems which she liked to keep small and to the point. I tended to get carried away.
“That’s good,” Papá kept saying. “You want to go farther. You want to fly all the way to Parnassus.”
“Where’s that?” I asked. But Papá was in the middle of his own poem. “Come here,” he called me. He read me one of the lines. “Something doesn’t sound right.” He read it a few times. I offered him some suggestions that loosened up the way the words all flowed together. “Herminia, Herminia,” he winked, “soon I will give you my trumpet and play only the flute.”
Sometimes, Ramona and I would catch Josefa Perdomo walking down the street, and say in awed voices to each other, “She writes verses!” When the third Spanish governor arrived, Josefa welcomed him with some verses in El Eco del Ozama.
Everyone exclaimed how lovely the verses were, but I was not so sure. I mean, the verses were lovely verses, but they were doing an unlovely thing. They were binding us to a country that had turned us into a colony. It was like the verses I had written for Don Eloy, funny and clever, but shaking mangoes off the wrong tree. Don Eloy should have been courting his old wife and making her feel like the young girl he was dreaming about in his head. That’s what I should have said to him. I’ll write a verse you can give to Caridad that will wake up every inch of her half-dead body.
“Salomé, for heaven’s sakes. They’re just verses.” Ramona could be fierce in her defense of the plump, pretty poetess. It was as if Josefa were a human version of her old doll Alexandra, on whose porcelain prettiness Ramona had doted. “It’s not her fault we’re back to being a colony. She’s just being polite.”
But I wasn’t convinced. It was one thing to be polite and another thing altogether to welcome intruders and say, “Please make yourself right at home.” And some people were doing just that. The sisters Bobadilla had gone overboard with their hospitality: holding teas for the Spanish soldiers and dignitaries, flying a Spanish flag from their roof—their fine, Spanish-tile roof. Their lisps had gotten so pronounced that you didn’t want to meet them on the street, for they would sprinkle you with saliva before you ever got past talk of the weather.
Right then and there, I promised myself that I would never write verses out of politeness. Rather than write something pretty and useless, I would not write at all.
It was a high standard to set for myself just as I was starting out. But I suppose it was like me, as Mamá would have pointed out, to give with all my heart or not at all.
It was an attitude that would not serve me well in love.
OUR TUTOR ALEJANDRO ROMÁN brought his younger brother, Miguel, to class one day. By now I was eighteen and had learned everything Alejandro had to teach me, so I was glad for a new face. Miguel was an aspiring poet, and he had heard from his brother that the Ureña girls were none other than the daughters of Nicolás Ureña, and they were smart as clockwork. Miguel was hoping not only to meet us but to make the acquaintance of the poet himself at Mamá’s house.
“What kind of poetry do you write, Miguel?” Ramona asked him the first time he came to our house. How I hated that question—like pinning down a butterfly.
“The Noah’s ark kind, a little of everything,” he answered, a smile in his eyes as he glanced my way.
I tried not to smile. Recently, Mamá had begun reading to us out of Doña Bernardita’s Manual of Instruction for Young Ladies, and among the things that Doña Bernardita warned against was smiling at a man.
“Smiling is a gift of intimacy,” Mamá explained. Nice young ladies gave such tender responses only to their husbands along with—Mamá hesitated—along with everything else. About the everything else Mamá was not very specific. Indeed, Doña Bernardita counseled that too much of that kind of knowledge might lead a young lady to solitary indulgence.
Ramona and I looked at each other with just the faintest lift of the brows. Then Ramona, who as the oldest usually went ahead into unknown territory, asked, “What’s that, Mamá?”
Mamá colored prettily, the pink in her cheeks making her look younger. “It’s a term that is used to describe . . . individual transgression.”
“That explains a lot, Mamá,” Ramona said.
Mamá closed Doña Bernardita’s Manual and looked straight at my sister. “Are you being fresh with me, young lady?”
“Non, non, Maman, pardonnez-moi,” Ramona said fondly, and she folded her arms around our mother. We would slip into French and English from time to time to show off to Mamá how much we had learned from our tutor, Alejandro.
That first day, Miguel had come, as I said, tagging along with his older brother. Soon, he became a regular, and Mamá allowed him to join our class. I think she felt sorry for us, for we hardly went out or entertained visitors. We became fast friends, all four us, meeting for years. Mamá later said that ours were the longest lessons she had ever heard of, but she saw nothing wrong at the time with such innocent scholarship.
What happened started innocently enough. One day, Miguel and I got into an impassioned discussion over a poem by Lamartine. At our next meeting, we discussed Lamartine again, almost as if the poem were now a door we had to go through to get somewhere else. The next time, Miguel said, speaking of Lamartine, here’s a poem by Espronceda which I think you might like, and that was another door we opened, and Espronceda led to Quintana, and Quintana to our own Nicolás Ureña (“I understand he is your father!”)—and Ureña led to our poetess Josefa Perdomo (“A pity she sells her poetry for a smile”), which led to some poems by an unknown poet Herminia that I showed Miguel (“Excellent! May I have copies?”), and then one day, we had opened all the doors and gone down all the corridors, and we found ourselves sitting side by side, like Dante’s lovers, in a room with nobody else in it.
That day Mamá had gone down to the docks with Ramona as a ship had come in from St. Thomas that might be selling notions we needed. Miguel had stayed on to discuss Herminia’s latest production, a poem on the glory of progress. My aunt was just finishing with her little girls, but as her charges were leaving, one girl fell down the steps and commenced crying. In the commotion of tears and a bloody knee, my aunt must have forgotten that she would be leaving two young people alone (an absolute DO NOT EVER DO! in Doña Bernardita’s Manual), for she decided to walk the sniffling child down the street to the grandmother’s house.
It was only a matter of minutes. But in those minutes, there was time for a young man to say a verse or two; time for a young girl to let the color in her face die down; time for her to murmur, “Me, too”; time for him to say he had not heard her, could she speak up; time for her to stammer again; and then the timeless moment of his hand reaching over Lamartine, over Espronceda and Quintana, to give her hand a fervent squeeze, before time ran out, and there was Tía Ana out of breath in the doorway, her long shadow like old Father Time himself come to put an end to lessons from that day on.
“I should never have consented to this,” Mamá blamed herself when she heard from her sister about the scene that had ensued. My aunt had swooped down on the flabbergasted Miguel and literally picked him up by his collar (which had snapped open) and deposited him on the street outside. His torn cravat had followed.
For days, Ramona would not talk to me. I suspect she was not only angry about my ruining her lessons, but jealous that I, her younger sister, had gone ahead of her in experience. I had been touched by a man.
As for Papá, he was furious. You’d think I had done some truly awful thing like gone over to the old Blue party or supported the new Red party, which Papá no longer supported, for its leader Báez had become a dictator. “They all break your heart,” he said, looking at me with that After-the-Ten-Commandments look of Moses coming down the mountain only to find the Israelites dancing in loose garments around a calf of melted-down jewelry and candelabras.
The worst outcome, of course, was that I was no longer to have any communication with either of the Román brothers. Soon enough, our dictator Báez removed all temptation from my side—for the brothers were exiled to Haiti for writing poems against the new regime. We had left off being a colony to become a dictatorship with a censor who understood the power of poetry.
It was as if I were back in my childhood again, for just as I had given all my heart to a charming man in a frock coat who rhymed his conversation, I now had given my heart to a charming young man in a short jacket and cap who had declared his feelings for me. My asthma reappeared. I wept for days on end.
Before Miguel left the country, I had a gift to give him. Night after night, I had been copying over Herminia’s poems, which Miguel had requested. It was my small act of rebellion against the foolish dictates of my elders. I had no idea how I would get them to him.
It was Ramona who came up with the solution: Ramona, who could never endure my weeping and would do anything to stop my tears. At Sunday mass, as Miguel walked past our pew to communion, Ramona slipped in behind him. They knelt side by side at the communion rail. As they waited for Padre Billini to come down the row with his chalice, Ramona slipped Miguel a sheaf of poems. Accompanying them was my letter, disclosing that I was Herminia. It seemed a much more intimate thing to do than smiling, to take off my disguise and let him know my secret soul as I had put it down on paper.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, Papá was at our door with a copy of El Nacional rolled up under one arm and a scared look on his face. When he unrolled the paper, and thrust it before me, my mouth fell open. There, on the front page, was my poem, “Recuerdos a un proscrito,” which I had included in the poems to Miguel. It was signed “Herminia.”
“¿Qué pasa?” Mamá asked, scouring the paper up and down. President Grant to our north was sending a commission of American senators to study the idea of buying off part of the island and shipping some of their own negro people to live here. A group calling itself the Ku Klux Klan was burning crosses in front of these negro people’s houses, so maybe they wouldn’t mind coming. The Clyde steamship was due in from Havana. Señorita Trinidad Villeta had been crowned Queen of May in Teatro Republicano.
Papá looked at her impatiently, and then glancing over his shoulder and seeing that the top of the Dutch door was still open, he motioned for me to close it. After he had read the poem out loud, my father said, “This is seditious!”
My mother’s face shone with fierce pride. “Good for Herminia! She is saying what we all feel and don’t have the courage to speak.”
Papá looked at her for a long moment, and you could see that he was just now realizing that I had never shared my pen name with my mother. It was our special secret.
Later that night in bed, Ramona and I figured out what must have happened. Miguel had given my poem to his friends at El Nacional to publish. All we could hope for was that he had not betrayed my true identity.
The next afternoon at his house, Papá warned me. “You must be careful, Herminia. Báez is not the old Báez. He would not protect his old friend if he were to find out my daughter was sowing seeds of sedition. No more publishing without my permission!”
Of course, I promised not to do what I had never done in the first place. The following week another poem by Herminia was published in the paper. “Una lagrima” was not out-and-out seditious, but no dictator could have read those lines addressed to an exile without feeling challenged. Your patria still in chains . . . The tears you shed for her have never dried . . . Rumors in the capital were that El Nacional would be shut down within the week. But the paper continued publishing. It seemed Báez was showing off to the American senators how freedom-loving he was.
For several weeks, poems appeared by Herminia in the paper. “Contestación,” “A un poeta,” “Una esperanza,” “Ruego,” “Un gemido,” and finally, “La gloria del progreso,” a poem that caused an uproar. Our old friend Don Eliseo Grullón, a statesman himself, declared that whoever this Herminia was, she was going to bring down the regime with pen and paper.
Papá was beside himself. Why was I bent on defying him? Exile would be the least of it. I was going to get us all killed. Finally, I had to confess that it was not my doing. I had allowed some acquaintances to have copies. “I’m sorry, Papá.”
But secretly, I was glad. Poetry, my poetry, was waking up the body politic! Instead of letting my father’s fears hold me back, I kept writing bolder poems.
Sometimes my hand would shake as I wrote. Herminia, Herminia, Herminia, I would whisper to myself. She was the brave one. She was not in thrall to her fears. She did not quail at a harsh word. Or to cry over every little thing, wasting her tears.
Secretly, in the dark cover of the night, Herminia worked at setting la patria free.
And with every link she cracked open for la patria, she was also setting me free.
EACH TIME THERE WAS a new poem by Herminia in the paper, Mamá would close the front shutters of the house and read it in a whisper to the rest of us. She was delighted with the brave Herminia. I felt guilty keeping this secret from her, but I knew if I told her, all her joy would turn to worry. Her theory was that Herminia was really Josefa Perdomo, but my aunt Ana disagreed. Josefa had a more sentimental, ingratiating style. “This Herminia is a warrior,” my aunt said proudly. “In fact, my theory is that Herminia is really a man, hiding behind a woman’s skirt.”
“How interesting, tía,” Ramona said, looking directly at me. “Herminia, a man. Somehow I don’t quite see it.” My sister was enjoying herself immensely. She claimed it was all her doing that Herminia had come to the notice of the public. I knew the minute Mamá discovered our travesty, Ramona would be the innocent accomplice, put up to this by her naughty little sister, who had once let a man touch her.
In fact, we had both lit a fire that was raging out of control. “La patria has discovered her muse,” read one letter by an anonymous writer reprinted in El Nacional. Rebellions began erupting everywhere. The American senators left the country. Governor González of the north province of Puerto Plata announced that he was starting his very own party, the Green Party, and he called for all Dominicans to join with him in a public meeting to protest the tyranny of Báez. His proclamation inspired a new poem I began writing that very night, Wake from your sleep, my Patria, throw off your shroud . . .
It was because of this poem that Mamá made her discovery. Our housekeeping habit was to air our mattresses in the open courtyard in back of the house. On airing days I was always very careful to transfer the stack of poems I kept under my side of the mattress to the bottom of the clothes chest.
That day, I had made the transfer, but it must have been that the ink on my latest revision of “A la Patria” was still wet when I had put the poem away on top of the stack the night before. That one page had stuck to the bottom of the mattress, and as we up-ended it, my mother was staring straight at my poem, or rather Herminia’s poem.
“Y esto, ¿qué es?” My mother peeled the poem away and read enough of it to recognize the style. She looked straight at me. “How could you, Salomé?”
“You said you were proud of Herminia,” I reminded her. “You said she had the courage to say what we all thought but wouldn’t speak.” My knees were shaking. I could feel that tightness in my chest that preceded my asthma attacks.
My mother did not say a word. I expected her to scold me as she sometimes did Ramona for being impudent. But she could see how upset I was. She made a sign of the cross and kept shaking her head. “Dios santo, let this cup pass from me.”
“What are you talking about? What are you talking about?” Tía Ana had caught the hysteria in the air, but she could not divine the cause of it.
My mother handed the paper to her sister, who read it over quickly. When she got to the signature at the bottom of the page, a smile spread on her lips. “Now who—” she said, with mock ingenuousness—“who on earth could this Herminia be? And what are her poems doing under my dear niece’s mattress?”
With that, she set the approach we were all to take. We didn’t know who Herminia was. We didn’t know how her poem had appeared in our house. And as the revolution was erupting up north, and the capital was being bathed in blood, Mamá sewed all Herminia’s poems inside the hem of an old cape.
“What do you think?” the sisters Bobadilla would ask my aunt or my mother when they dropped in for a visit. “Who could this Herminia be?”
“¿Quién sabe?” Mamá would reply. “Ana says Herminia is probably a man.” And I could see as she spoke, her hands making a small sign of the cross at her heart, in penance for the lie she had just told.
I WOULD HAVE KEPT our secret. I did not sign my own name to my poems, not during our glorious revolution or the bloody siege of the capital or the uncertain days of one government toppling another. But then one day in early February of my twenty-third year, we opened El Centinela, one of the papers that had been allowed to stay in print on account of its innocuous content, and there was a flowery little piece in prose about winter and white snowflakes, signed Herminia.
“Herminia has certainly come down a notch or two,” our old friend Don Eliseo Grullón said when he came by that evening with a copy of the paper Papá had already brought us. “Why do our writers have to write about winter as if we were North Americans?” It had become a fad to ape all things from up north, even to the extent of pretending we had snows in December and had to warm our hands at fireplaces. Don Eliseo shook his head. “Our Herminia, like our Josefa, has let us down. Maybe these glorious notes are just too much for a woman to maintain.” It made me feel sick not to be able to defend myself.
“On the contrary, I think our Herminia is heading towards new horizons,” the sisters Bobadilla defended the piece. They had begun dropping by, now that the respected statesman Eliseo Grullón was a regular visitor. According to Don Eliseo, ours was the only household in the capital where he could talk to women about politics and poetry instead of hair ribbons and fabrics. “I think Herminia’s piece is darling,” the sisters Bobadilla continued. It seemed they spoke in chorus, though I’m sure it was just that they always agreed with each other, so their opinions were interchangeable. “‘White snowflakes dancing in the frosty air, as Mistress Winter dusts the village square,’” they quoted. I felt even sicker. If ever I wrote a poem about winter, I would make it accurate. “Truly, Herminia has grown more feminine. But what do you think, Don Nicolás?” My father was also visiting.
“I think it’s not the same Herminia,” Papá stated.
“You sound very sure of this,” Don Eliseo observed. “But remember, even Shakespeare had his lapses. Calderón wrote some clunkers. Espronceda has his insipid moments. And Sor Juana can be insufferable.” He gave a little bow of apology for criticizing a favorite of the ladies. “But Ramona and Salomé haven’t said a word,” he noted, at which point Ramona stammered something about it being possible that there were many Herminias just as there were many Anas, Estelas, Filomenas, and Salomés.
“Hmm,” Don Eliseo considered. He let a moment lapse so as not to seem to have dismissed Ramona’s comment too readily. Then, he turned to me. “And you, Salomé?”
I could feel that shortness of breath I would always experience when I was forced to speak up. Mamá claimed that with each year, both my asthma and my timidity were getting worse. Often, she would have to step in and answer for me.
“Herminia hasn’t been feeling well—” My mother stopped, her face scarlet. Quickly, she corrected herself. “What am I saying?” she asked the assembled gathering, smiling lamely. “I mean Salomé. Forgive me. All this talk of Herminia.” She went on to tell in detail about my latest attacks of asthma. It was embarrassing how my mother would talk of my maladies as if I were still a babe in her arms whose body functions could be broadcast to the world.
The sisters Bobadilla chatted on, but Don Eliseo kept eyeing me closely. “Poets must be brave,” was all he said as he bid me goodbye later that night.
I DON’T KNOW IF it was the thought that Miguel would soon be returning, and I wanted to do something to make him proud of me. Or if it was simply that I had finished my new poem, “A la Patria,” the one Mamá had found stuck to the bottom of the mattress, and I wanted to redeem the name of Herminia. But one morning, not long afterward, I woke up early, dressed in my lavender muslin and buttoned boots, put on my bonnet and tied the ribbons tight. Then, as Mamá and Tía Ana were out back fussing over the coffee water and the mashed plantains, and as my sister Ramona slept on, I let myself out of the house, pulling the door to so that it appeared shut, and I walked down the 19th of March until I got to the Street of Martyrs, and I turned right and then left down Separation Street to the center of the city. Under the door of the owners of El Centinela, I slipped my new submission.
The very next issue, Don Eliseo arrived early with a rolled-up paper and a bouquet of gardenias, my favorites. “I got one of the first copies,” he said holding up the paper. And then, handing me the flowers, he added, “Let me be the first to say, It is your best so far, Herminia!” he winked. And then, he added, “There is a crowd headed in this direction.”
“Ay, Dios mio, ay, Dios mio,” Mamá wailed. Even after Don Eliseo had explained that he meant a crowd of admirers, she was not convinced that we would be safe. My aunt Ana took the paper from her, and when she had finished, very solemnly she handed it to Ramona, who read it and then passed it on to me.
But I had no need to read what I had written. I had been working on that poem for months. Finally, after toiling over every single word, line by line, I concluded with the two hardest words of all.
“Salomé Ureña,” I signed.