SUDDENLY EVERYONE WAS LOOKING at me.
I studied my face in the mirror: the same eyes, mouth, big ears (oh, how I hated them!), the nose I wished were a little less broad, the springy hair I couldn’t tamp down—in short, I was the very same Salomé Ureña, but now everyone seemed to point, to make a low bow at the waist, or dip down in a schoolgirl curtsy, and say, “Buenos días, poetisa.”
IT’S AS IF I had on a disguise, a famous face, behind which I watched people who just a few months ago would not have said good day to me on the street suddenly smile with deference and ask, “And what do you think of the weather we’re having, Señorita Poetisa?”
“Hot,” I would say in my terse way. But then, because I could see they were waiting for me to say more, I would add, “To be expected in the summer.”
“Salomé says we should expect more heat this summer,” I heard myself misquoted.
“Did you hear the wonderful tone of irony when she said, ‘To be expected in the summer’?”
This is the way beauties must feel, I thought to myself.
NIGHTS WHEN I LAY in bed, I ached for the kind of love I had read about in other people’s poems. I was twenty-four years old, and only once had a young man squeezed my hand and whispered poetry in my ear.
“That’s one more time than me,” Ramona noted sullenly when I voiced my heart’s yearning to her. “And you certainly stopped any chances of the same thing happening to me.” My older sister was turning more and more into a younger version of our cranky tía Ana.
Miguel and Alejandro, our former tutors, were back with their pretty Puerto Rican brides in tow. “They go out as exiles and come back as grooms,” Ramona complained. She was right. Gruff, manly patriots whom we remembered in torn, bloody shirts with firearms over their shoulders, their hair matted with blood, returned in long frock coats with silk cravats tied in complicated French knots and haircuts that made their ears pop out and their faces look sweeter and plumper.
“Your day will come, girls, if it is meant to come,” Mamá would say from time to time. “Meanwhile you are lucky to have each other.”
But if I was to remain by my sister’s side for the rest of my life, I wanted at least one brief excursion into love. Long enough to feel a man’s arms around my waist, to see the look of worship falling away from his face, the look of fame falling away from mine, that hushed and holy moment that all poems aspire to when the word becomes flesh.
Was that too much to ask?
EVERY EVENING, IT SEEMED, the house filled with visitors.
There was our regular Don Eliseo Grullón, and Papá with his heart full of pride and his rum-flushed face, and the poet José Joaquín Pérez, just back from exile, and the sainted Father Billini, who had founded a school for boys as well as an insane asylum (“Some mornings, I find myself at one and I think I’m at the other,” he joked fondly), and Archbishop Meriño, also back from exile, an imposing, broad-shouldered man with a thunderous voice and a shock of white hair. “I thought you’d be older,” he said when he met me.
I think I disappointed them. In fact, what Archbishop Meriño had probably meant to say was that he thought I would be bolder. But the more wonder I saw in their eyes, the more expectation in their voices, the more obsequies in honor of my honor, the more I withdrew.
So I would sit there as Archbishop Meriño expounded on last Sunday’s gospel, or the good wines of Extremadura, or the fine women of St. Thomas, or as José Joaquín extemporized about the new trend of indigenous literature, or as Papá responded to questions about his own poetry by saying how he was leaving me the trumpet and he was going to play the flute from now on, and if I had something to say and there was enough silence for me to say it, I would speak up. But not enough, I suppose, to impress anyone.
And so the rumor spread, or so I heard from Ramona, that Salomé Ureña was a woman who hardly talks.
Meanwhile, poor Mamá was beside herself trying to make polite conversation and keep everyone in refreshments. Now she worried that the house was too dark, the zinc roof too rusty, the rockers too creaky, the portrait of her father at the gates of the city accepting surrender from the Haitian invaders hanging in the wrong place.
“What can I offer you?” Mamá asked visitors. We had as little money as ever, but now we had important guests to entertain. Of course, the polite thing would have been for our important guests to take note of the worn-out rockers, the dark house moldy from lack of paint, the portrait of the liberators at the gate framed in cheap palm-wood and say, “We are fine. Please do not disturb yourself, Doña Gregoria. There is ample refreshment in fine conversation.”
Instead they would ask for a sherry or a shot of rum, or whatever there was to drink in the house, and I would watch poor Mamá grow flustered, as she hurried to the back of the house, and soon I would see Ramona letting herself out the side door to race across the street to the bodega to purchase by the glass what we could not afford to stock in our pantry.
“Don’t these ministers and ambassadors and that husband of yours realize that rum costs money?” Tía Ana complained when everyone had left. She was a step away from putting a small basket at the door with a mexicano or two inside it and a little hand-printed card beside it saying, AGRADECIMIENTOS, but my mother said that she would die if Ana did any such thing, as if we were a church with an alms box. I think our bodega neighbor must have heard this oft-repeated argument between the two sisters, for when Ramona was next there purchasing a glass of Spanish sherry that Archbishop Meriño said he had been hankering for since his days in Sevilla, our neighbor handed her a full bottle, saying, “With gratitude to the musa of our country.”
A FRESH, HOPEFUL ENERGY was at work in la patria. Everyone was writing poems and essays, offering their help to González, our handsome young president, with his dashing mustache and beard and his aquiline nose and green waistcoat in honor of his party. The Green Party he had started was supposed to unite all parties under the color of growth and resurrection. At last, we were becoming a nation of citizens in service to one another.
He even signed a treaty of peace and friendship with Haiti instead of using the threat of an invasion by our neighbor as a bogeyman to make us behave. “As Salomé says,” I heard our president said, “‘Give to the past your blindness. Look ahead!’” Once or twice, the president came in person to gather inspiration from la musa de la patria. “Don’t rest in your labors, Salomé,” he urged me. “The fight continues!”
I didn’t. That year, 1874, was probably one of my best. I wrote seven poems I was proud enough to publish. I wrote countless more we used to light the fogón fires or put under the side table so it wouldn’t wobble when Archbishop Meriño leaned his considerable bulk against it.
Everyone was curious as to how I wrote and where my ideas came from. There were rumors that I heard voices or that the angel Gabriel came to me in dreams. Other stories had it that it was really my father writing the poems for me.
“Let’s tell everyone that it is the angel Gabriel that comes to you at night,” Ramona suggested. “I’ll say I see him, too, but he will only squeeze your hand.” It was wonderful when instead of turning her remarks into weapons to hurt me or herself, Ramona used them to make us both laugh.
One time, Ramona grew serious. “How do you do it, Herminia?”
“Come on, Marfí. You write, too. I do it the same as you.”
But in actual fact, Ramona was not writing anymore. One day, soon after Mother’s Day, when we had each written Mamá and Tía Ana, second mother of the household, as she insisted we call her, their poems, Ramona had turned to me and said, “That’s my last poem. I pass you my trumpet, as Papá would say. You’re the poet from now on.”
“Still,” Ramona insisted, “I want to know how you do it.”
So I explained how random phrases would sometimes pop into my head, and I would go over them and over them in my mind so that if Mamá or Tía Ana or she, Ramona, called me, sometimes I really wouldn’t even hear them. All day, for days, I would work those lines over in my head, and then one night, after we had swept the parlor and put the chairs back in their places and cleared off the glasses and cups, and everyone had fallen asleep, I would get up and write down the entire poem, and when I was done, I would dream that now he would come, the great love that would fill the vacant space left inside me by this creation I had made of love.
Ramona had begun to cry.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, feeling guilty for getting carried away with my description.
“That’s just how I feel, but I can’t make something that makes people love me.”
“They don’t love me, Ramona. They love la poetisa, if you can even call it love.”
Ramona looked at me a moment, then shook her head. “At least it’s something, Salomé. At least you’re not the one getting passed over so that they can come sit beside your sister and ask her what she thinks of this hot weather we’re having.”
“I suppose,” I agreed, squeezing her hand, for I could see that she didn’t understand how lonely I was in the midst of all this attention. How much I, too, longed for a love that would go beyond the poems into the wild silence of my heart.
ONE AFTERNOON JOSÉ CASTELLANOS came by. He was putting together the first anthology ever of Dominican poets, and he wanted to include some of my poems. He brought along his friend, Federico Henríquez y Carvajal, son of one of the Sephardic families that had settled in the capital back when we were still occupied by the Haitians.
Federico had a favor to ask. Would I read his new drama, The Hebrew Girl, and tell him what I thought of it?
“I would very much like to,” I said, and I meant it. I was always eager for something to read. We were not a country rich in books; the few collections of this or that author circulated among a group of readers who all knew of each other. Eliseo Grullón owned Victor Hugo; Meriño had a collection of Shakespeare and La historia de la literatura española; Billini had loaned me his Quintana and Gallego; and several people had Lamartine; only José Joaquín Pérez had Espronceda and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Federico was patting his jacket as if the manuscript had disappeared inside it. “¡Ay, Dios mío! Pancho took the satchel. Un momentico,” he said, walking quickly to the door. Down the street, I saw a boy, no more than fifteen, a recent arrival into long pants, with a satchel slung over his shoulder. At the sound of his brother’s whistle, he turned and waved. He had a sweet, young face (one of those random phrases popped in my head: his young face fresh with what he does not know); his eyes were dark and intense; his black hair coarse like an Indian cacique’s. He did not see me, for I had ducked behind the door.
Federico was back at the door, packet in hand. “That little brother of mine is so absent-minded.” Federico shook his head, indulgently. “He’s off to see a new girlfriend, always in love.”
The truth is that boy had seemed too young to have a novia. But boys could start out seeking love at a young age and continue through old age—I recalled Don Eloy and his secret—and their brio was applauded. Meanwhile we girls had to conduct our frantic search, while seeming not to do so, in that narrow corridor between old enough and old maid.
“That Pancho is going to break hearts,” José observed.
“Yes, indeed,” Federico agreed.
“What can I offer you, young jóvenes,” my mother had come into the parlor.
José looked as if he were considering the food that might fill the particular hunger inside him. But Federico spoke up, “Not a thing, Doña Gregoria. This conversation is refreshment enough.”
That afternoon I had no trouble speaking.
IT WAS EVENING WHEN the two men got up to leave. Tía Ana had already come into the room several times to see if these guests had departed yet. The front parlor had always been her special province, as she used it for her little school. Now, every evening, it turned into Salomé’s salon, as Ramona called it, and it was never in order for its transformation back to a classroom the following morning.
As he was finally leaving, Federico remarked, “I don’t know where this rumor comes from that Salomé Ureña is a woman who doesn’t talk. I can’t recall when I’ve had a more interesting evening.” He bowed gallantly. I could smell the perfumed ointment in his hair as his head dipped down before me.
I felt my face burning, and looked away. Had I talked too much? I wondered. Or was he hinting that he felt attraction toward my person and conversation? I glanced up, catching his eye again. But the look I saw there was the glazed one of an admirer. He was seeing the famous poetisa who had agreed to read The Hebrew Girl and whom he hoped would write a poem in the paper in praise of it. He was not seeing me, Salomé, of the funny nose and big ears with hunger in her eyes and Africa in her skin and hair.
BUT PERHAPS I HAD been too hasty in judging Federico’s look? A few days later, a poem was slipped under the door, “Garland,” dedicated “to my distinguished friend, the inspired poetisa Señorita Salomé Ureña.” It was signed “Federico Henríquez y Carvajal.”
I ran to the front window, opened it just a crack, expecting to see the tall, slender Federico, but instead it was his errand boy, the little brother, swinging his arms and whistling a tune from a popular zarzuela, as he walked away.
Ramona came to the window. “There goes the young gallant,” she quipped, imitating his swagger. We giggled, and the boy turned around, just as we quickly pulled the window shut.
Ramona saw the envelope in my hand and snatched it away. “Give that back,” I ordered, but I was still giggling about the cocky, younger brother, and so Ramona did not take my order in earnest.
She read the first stanza with all the embellishments her voice could give it. Federico was weaving a garland of friendship flowers from his heart for me. Or so he said. I came to Ramona’s side and kept reading where her voice had fallen silent. When I finished, I looked at my sister to see her reaction.
She was scowling as if she’d just had a taste of something sour. “Usually at the end they say they’re going to die if you don’t return their love. This forever-friendship garland is puzzling.”
“Maybe he’s being original,” I said, taking the letter gruffly from her hand. I had had the same uneasy feeling, but I did not want to hear it voiced.
“Original? Weren’t you telling me just last night that his Hebrew Girl drama was very derivative and a little tedious?”
I had said that, but now it seemed that I had spoken too quickly. In fact, I went back and reread the drama that very night. The Hebrew girl still exhaled sighs of sweet sorrow and dreary despair, but the prose did seem less facile and the conception a little more inspired now that it was written by someone who might be interested in me.
I wrote Federico a poem, in answer. As I did with all my productions, I showed it to Ramona, who simply handed it back and said, “Salomé, that’s the worst poem you ever wrote.”
My sister was known for her bluntness, but this was downright harsh. Perhaps I had gotten out of the habit of taking criticism after months of hearing myself praised so much. “What do you mean?” I challenged her back.
“Salomé, you’ve never before in your life used this kind of silly language, for heaven’s sake. ‘I languish under the cruelty of my implacable fate.’ It sounds as bad as . . . as Josefa on a bad day.” My older sister had been an avid follower of the beloved poetisa Josefa Perdomo, but in the last years her admiration had cooled. Now that she was older, Ramona said she wanted poems with peso—substance—not just prettiness.
I took the poem back and felt close to tears. What if I were losing my talent? Lately, I had been writing so many occasional poems for graduations and birthdays and burials that people were requesting of me that I had no time to consult my heart to know what I must write. I remembered the promise I had made years back after scribbling that foolish poem for Don Eloy: I would write poems with all my heart, or not at all.
“But what do I know?” Ramona added, seeing that I was upset. “I’m not the poet. Here comes the other poet in the family, ask him.”
Papá was at our door before I could put the poem away. Even so, I should not have shown it to him. I should have realized that Papá would not appreciate any poem, no matter how good, if it concerned a young man. But I wanted approval so much that I handed the paper over.
Ramona and I sat down, one on either side of him. Papá started by reading out loud, but as he progressed, he fell silent. The furrow deepened on his brow. Finally, when he was done, he crunched the paper up until it was a small ball in his fist.
“This is the kind of thing Herminia of the white snowflakes would write,” he said in a low, disappointed voice. “You, Salomé Ureña, can do better than that.”
I stood up, my breath coming short as it always did when I was upset, and ran down the hall, backing around the corner where Mamá and Tía Ana were scooping cakes of lye soap out of a wooden mold and out the side door. I had no bonnet, no shawl, or cape. My face was wet with tears. I was a sight all right, but I did not care if the sisters Bobadilla or the president himself saw me in this condition.
Where does a distraught woman go in a small city inhabited by people who know her or know of her? I headed north on Street of Studies with no idea where I was going. I was almost to the gates of San Antonio, when I saw the ruins of the old monastery of San Francisco looming before me. Billini had recently rebuilt one wing as an asylum for the mad. It seemed I was headed in the right direction, after all.
I slipped through the side door on the stone wall and found myself in an inner yard of rock ruins and a few shade trees. The place was deserted. It was late afternoon, and no doubt the nuns were in the chapel, saying the six o’clock angelus. Under a shade tree in the distance, I caught sight of a pile of rags, which suddenly shifted, rose up like the snake charmer’s snake I had read about in The Amazing Travels of Marco Polo, and became a human creature. Her hair was a mass of tangles; her shift soiled and torn in great rips here and there so I could see her body’s alarming nakedness beneath it. Slowly, I began backing myself toward the door, afraid to startle her with too abrupt a movement.
Perhaps because she was unencumbered by petticoat or buttoned bodice or long overskirt tied back at the sides or buckle shoes with light cotton stockings, in short because she was not dressed as I was, even in my unpreparedness for the street, she was at my side in a few jerky moves before I was even five steps closer to the door. She grabbed me at the shoulders, and though I tried pulling away, she was strong—my height, but stouter—and I could not get loose. She reeked of urine and sweat.
But she was looking at me in a way no one had looked at me in a while. She was seeing me, with a wild, probing desire to know who I was. I tried looking away but her eyes held me.
We stared at each other, and I only tore myself away when she opened her rotted mouth to scream.
I COULD NOT REMAIN angry at my father, for he was not well. Constantly, he complained about a shot of pain, which he said was like an arrow piercing his chest. The broad, dimpled face became thin and haggard. He lost his flamboyant, swashbuckling manner. Often we found him in bed, unable to get up. Finally, we overcame Papá’s reluctance and fear of doctors, and Dr. Alfonseca came to see him.
The young doctor sat by the bed timing Papá’s pulse. His black frock coat made him look like a black bird perched on my father’s bedside, something I did not want to think about, for black birds were supposed to be omens of bad luck.
“So what’s your verdict, doctor?” Papá asked when the young man had finished his examination. “Am I going to die?” He was trying to be jovial, but I could see the fear in his eyes.
“Die!” the doctor said, as if it were out of the question. “You have to live long enough to see these girls married, Don Nicolás.” He waited to elaborate upon my father’s condition until we were downstairs in the parlor.
“Prepare yourselves for the end,” he said quietly to Ramona and me and Papá’s sister, Altagracia, the only sister left. “Don Nicolás has a cancer. It has already invaded the lungs and intestines.”
I felt as if that arrow that Papá often said went through his heart had pierced right through mine as well.
“I know this is a shock,” the doctor continued. “But we must give him hope. Don Nicolás is very impressionable. He is a poet after all.” The doctor gave me an acknowledging nod. “I will be by daily with his dose of laudanum. We will keep him comfortable.”
I don’t know how we got through that day, for after weeping with Altagracia in the parlor, then going upstairs with bright faces and lying to Papá, saying that Dr. Alfonseca had said he would be dancing a waltz by summer, we went home to tell Mamá.
It was then that I realized that my mother was a woman still deeply in love with the man who had broken her heart. But the years had softened that blow of disillusionment, and his love for his daughters had rounded the sharp edges of her anger, and his recent decline had glued the pieces of her heart back together. She spent many days and nights, spelling Ramona and me, helping out Altagracia with my father’s meal preparations and needs. She had become his faithful bride again.
“He’s going to suspect something with you coming all the time now,” Ramona noted one day as all three of us walked toward Papá’s house.
My mother held her head high—her black bonnet shielding her face except when she turned to address us. “I have ways of convincing your father. Besides, God is going to work one of his miracles, I know he will.” It was not just Papá who needed hope to keep from falling apart.
But this was not to be one of God’s miracles. Papá worsened and toward the end of March he was too feeble to walk to his garden or turn the pages of a book. I read to him for long hours, often looking up to find his eyes closed, his head to one side on his pillow. With a sinking heart, I would rush to his side and hold my hand close to his mouth to make sure he was still breathing.
One day I had been reading to him from José Castellanos’s anthology that had been published late the last year. He had included four of Papá’s poems and six of mine.
“Whatever happened to that friend of yours, Federico?” my father asked. I had to shudder, thinking of how the dying are said to be sentient, for just that moment I had turned to Federico’s poems in the book. When I received a copy of the book, I had been surprised to find included the poem he had sent me. It’s as if he wanted to broadcast our great friendship, which, in fact, had not come to much. Federico had been quite preoccupied elsewhere.
“He is to be married soon, to Carmita García,” I answered my father. When I had heard the news a few weeks before, I had not been surprised. Right beside Federico’s friendship poem to me in Castellanos’s anthology was a poem dedicated to Carmita with all the languishing sighs and vows of adoration that had been missing from mine. Obviously, I had correctly judged that first look I had seen on Federico’s face.
“That poem you wrote him, the one I destroyed, pardon me, mi’ja. I was trying to protect you.” He allowed himself a moment to catch his breath, closing his eyes, as if stopping one sense could increase the capacity of the others.
“I remember the day, you ran off,” he continued. “When you came back, you looked like . . . you had seen . . . the devil himself. Then I understood you had feelings for this young man.”
I bowed my head. The ache of disappointment was again upon me.
“Years ago, I left you my trumpet . . . now I leave you my flute,” he added.
This was too much like a parting to suit me. “Ay, Papá, come now, you’re a young man. The Bible says Methusalah lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine. You can do better than fifty-three.”
We were quiet for a while, and then, he opened his eyes and looked at me. “Tell me,” he said, and I already guessed what he was going to ask me, for I always had a way of knowing what was on my father’s mind. “No one will tell me . . . Am I dying?”
“Come, come, Papá,” I said in my best imitation of Dr. Alfonseca. I tried to keep the knowledge from my eyes, but I know he saw it there. “The doctor says you are having a very bad bout with an intestinal catarrh,” I lied, looking away quickly from his probing eyes. “If you take care of yourself and listen to what your daughters tell you, you should be dancing a waltz by the summer.”
He let his head fall back on the pillow, his hands on his chest, as if mocking the pose of the dead. And then, as I came to his side, afraid, ready to check his breath, he spoke, very softly, as if from the dead. “I will be gone by summer.”
“Papá, please,” I sobbed, unable to hold back any longer, “please don’t leave me.”
“I leave you my flute as well as my trumpet,” he reminded me.
PAPÁ DIED ON THE third of April.
If I were to try and describe the pain, I would have to compare it to those moments after a great blow or a bad fall. You lie on the ground, dazed and in pain, not knowing what harm you have done to yourself.
I watched as Mamá and Altagracia prepared Papá’s body, dressing him in his black gown and Chinaman hat from his days on the Supreme Court, Tía Ana scenting the pockets with petals from the gardenia bush by the door, packing his mouth with anise seeds to sweeten the escaping noxious fumes. I remember the wake in the old house on Mercy Street, the dark dresses, the sobs stifled in handkerchiefs, and then what might have been a shock if I had not already been too stunned to feel anything: the other woman, Felipa Muñoz, and her two daughters, who looked about the same age as Ramona and I.
The summer came and went with only the interruption of a single outing in the country near Baní where we had distant cousins on my mother’s side. And then the rains came, and the government we were all so hopeful about fell apart, and we had wars again, the Greens against the Reds and the Reds against the Blues, until it was all a muddle of politics, the only dominant color being the red of spilled blood. Up north, the United States celebrated its one hundredth birthday. Their president Grant threw a big party for everyone, but our new president Espaillat had too many revolutions on his hands to go. By the end of that year the public clock made by a Swiss watchmaker who had gone blind making it was delivered to the cathedral, but the pendulums were too long and the sacristan in a fit of impatience cut them off, thinking they were only decorative, so time stopped and it was quarter to seven for months on end. And this was somehow mixed in with the seven governments we had before the next year was out, and Mister McCurtney’s Zoo Circus coming to town and the lion tamer Herr Langer being eaten up by his own lion while hundreds of people watched in horror. And all that time, even as I heard or observed all these happenings, and wrote a few vague lines now and then, all that time, I was lying back, waiting for the pain to pass.
A period of national calm ensued, and visitors once again came to our door. But Mamá turned them away. She did write down their names in a book, which she said she would keep for posterity, which Ramona pointed out would not come via her daughters, unless Mamá let us get out of our black dresses and accept the many invitations we were now receiving to attend evenings of readings or lectures or music. A half dozen literary and art societies had sprouted up throughout the city.
But the truth is, I didn’t care to go. I didn’t care to get out of my black dress, or be a famous poet, or look into the faces of young men, wondering if this might be the one who would see past the lauds and laurels and the broad nose and unadorned character to the grieving daughter who had once brought delight to the doting heart of her father.
I lay there, numb, as if my body had already died, but hearing myself breathe the way I had listened for my father’s breathing by his bedside. In truth, I cannot account for how two years went by, cannot say how it was I even wrote the few poems I did write, cannot say how I tied my bonnet or buttoned my shoes or how early one morning in my twenty-seventh year I was walking to mass with my sister Ramona and looked up toward the heavy, wooden doors of the church where two young men were standing.
My first thought was how stylishly they were dressed—in silvery-gray morning coats with shiny silk cravats—to be coming to six o’clock mass. One was long and thin like a stringbean with round eyes and a droopy mustache like a small fish hanging from a cat’s mouth, and the other was instantly striking, both in his manly beauty and in the familiarity of his features: the fresh, open face; the intense, dark eyes; the coarse black hair like an Indian cacique’s. I was left puzzling who this young man might be as Ramona and I walked inside past them, concluding it must not be anyone I knew for I heard him distinctly ask his friend, “So, which one is Salomé?”
I glanced over at Ramona, and thank goodness she had not heard the question, or she would have flashed me one of her see-what-I-mean looks. All the time we knelt at our pew, then stood and genuflected, I was wondering where I had seen this young man before. Recently, in the oddness I had inhabited for over two years, Papá had been coming back into my life, once in the shape beneath my iron as I pressed out the wrinkles from my dimity shift; once in the pained cries of our bodega neighbor giving birth to her first child; once in the satisfied smile of that same baby fallen asleep while nursing at her mother’s breast; and now in the probing eyes of this young man whom I had encountered before and who had been sent back into my life as my father’s ghost.
The mass was over. We walked back home, the rising sun flashing on the zinc roofs as if delivering greetings from the dead. But my ghost was nowhere in sight. Soon, I forgot, caught up in my day-to-day tasks with an ache still in my heart and silence in my head in places of the phrases, rhyming lines I used to hear all the time.
“You’ve got to try, Salomé,” Ramona urged me from time to time. She had recovered more quickly and was making every attempt to shake me out of my stupor. “For all of us, especially for Mamá.”
“I am trying,” I said. My voice sounded small and distant as if it were coming from the bottom of the old revolutionary hole in the crawl space under the house.
“I know you are, I know, Herminia,” Ramona said, coming and sitting down beside me. I winced in pain, for I could no longer bear hearing myself called by the pet name my father once gave me. She untied the bundle on her lap, full of the invitations that had been streaming in. “Look at this,” she said. “All these people are waiting. All of them inviting you here and there. And now Mamá has said we can accept.”
Just then, we heard the knock at the front door. Ramona and I looked at each other curiously. It was too early in the day for parlor visitors. Perhaps a student had come to fetch the Catón cristiano she forgot in the parlor-classroom? We hurried from our room to the front of the house to see who it might be.
The two young men standing before us were the very same ones who had been at the church door a few days ago: the tall, droll-looking one, who seemed always about to burst into laughter, and the younger, handsome one, whose face was so oddly familiar, whose eyes belonged to my father. He was wearing a red cravat and a gardenia bloom in his boutonniere. He was the one who spoke up.
“Señorita Salomé Ureña,” he began, looking from one to the other as if not sure which one of us was Salomé.
“She is my sister, Salomé, and I am Ramona,” my sister said holding back her giggles, for the young man seemed overly officious and too nervous.
The gallant explained the purpose of the call. He and his socio, Pablo Pumarol, had come to personally invite us to a soirée in honor of poetry to be hosted by the Friends of the Country. Other young ladies would be present, as well as many mothers of the members; in other words, a gathering decently chaperoned.
I barely heard what was being said, for slowly, it was surfacing, who this young man was: the little brother of Federico, who had been off in search of love the day his brother had come calling! I wondered if he was the same Henríquez brother who had recently been apprehended writing my poem, “A la Patria,” on the walls of the fortaleza. Old Don Noël had had to pay a fine, and the whole clan of Henríquez men had turned out one Sunday afternoon with buckets of lime and rags to touch up the old mural, bringing along the Henríquez women, wives and sisters, with baskets of cornmeal candy and cane sugar caramelos to give away to the children. The sisters Bobadilla had come back with the full report of how these Jewish people had behaved themselves as nicely as Christians.
“We would be profoundly honored if you would accept our invitation.” The young man was now looking directly to me.
I tried looking away, but his eyes were like Papá’s eyes and like the madwoman’s eyes, probing. I could not resist. I thought, Doesn’t this young man know better than to look at a woman directly in that fashion?
I wanted to respond to the look by saying, Come in, young man, come in and see just how awkward and shy Salomé Ureña truly is; how her face has gotten thin and hollow-cheeked with grief, how her ears are as big as ever and her hair still has its unruly kink; how her stack of poems is gathering dust and her heart is haunted by her father’s ghost who will not give her a sign that she can go on without him.
But I had been living in a numb silence for two years, and I could not find the words I wanted to say to him. All I could manage is, “You may count on me.”
He waited for more, but there was no more to say. He bowed, Pablo bowed, and before they turned away, the gallant, who had introduced himself as Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal (“Everyone calls me Pancho”), took the gardenia from his buttonhole and offered it to me. Then, they headed down the street, the sweet, young fellow plunging his hands in his pockets, the way men do when they are unsure of themselves and need to hear the consoling jingle of coins. Ramona shut the top door and threw her arms around me in gratitude. “My wonderful, brave, charming, talented sister!” She hurried off to the back of the house to inform our mother how she, Ramona, had finally managed to bring me out of my grief-stricken condition.
As soon as she left the room, I pushed open the small side window and watched as the two men neared the end of the street, pausing to let the water donkey go by with its sweating tinaja of drinking water. That bit of swagger had returned to the young man’s step and his hands were now out of his pockets, and he was swinging them like a boy who had accomplished a hard task and was proud of himself.
And I felt myself slowly rising from where I had lain for so long. I felt life spiraling up my legs, stirring awake the aching dullness in my brain. I smelled bread baking in the nearby ovens of the panadería, the salty smell in the breeze from the sea. The curfew bell rang down at la fortaleza. I stood with my head poking out of that window, like the bodega neighbor’s baby at her birth, her head popped out, the rest of her still unborn, just taking a look out there at the world she was about to come into. Then, as if it had been my father’s blessing finally reaching me, I heard the neighborhood band beginning its practice in preparation for the Corpus Cristi procession the next day: the roll of the drum, the the trill of the flute, the waking call of the trumpet.