Salomé Camila Henríquez Ureña
9 April 1894–
12 September 1973
E.P.D.
“SHE WON’T KNOW THE difference,” one of the nieces is saying. As if along with my bad cataracts, I am also losing my hearing.
“I can hear you, girls,” I call out. They are in their twenties now, but I think of them still as Rodolfo’s pretty girls. In Cuba, when they still lived there, they were the toast of the town, even after the revolution, when we weren’t suppose to be paying attention to such things.
There is a moment of silence, and then giggles, little hiccups of laughter in the hall where they have been planning how to delay our excursion to the cemetery. Their father Rodolfo bought a plot for “for those of us in the family who aren’t famous,” and he kindly invited me, his half sister, their aunt Camila, to join them. A few weeks ago, I chose a spot, and made arrangements for my stone.
Then, the trouble started up.
“Now Tía Camila,” Elsa, the oldest of the girls, is saying, “how do you know we were talking about you?”
“Because I’m the one being difficult, that’s why.” I respond to the touch of her hand by squeezing back. The softness of the skin and the shapeliness of the fingers recall another hand from the past. This is no longer unusual. At my age, everything is haunted by an antecedent. More and more, my loved ones surface in their young replacements, no doubt signaling my departure.
For that reason, I am making a fuss now.
WHEN THE GIRLS FIRST took me to the plot several weeks ago, I chose the lowest level in the three-tiered, outdoor vault, lower left, close to the ground.
“But your marker is likely be covered over with weeds,” the cemetery attendant argued. He had a point. Down here, weeds grow quicker than we can keep up with them. “Wouldn’t you prefer the top, so everyone sees you?”
“Heavens no,” I said, shaking my head. Who was this fresh, young man, discussing burial spots as if they were boxes in an opera house? “I want to be close to the ground. You see, I moved around all my life. Every decade a new address. This will be my first permanent home.”
“You’re being so morbid, aunt!” My nieces groaned. Rodolfo was along that day, and for once he supported my view. “Your aunt Camila is right. We’re at the age when we must think about these things.” Daily, he and I compete for who feels worse in our mortal bodies: his arthritis to my touch of asthma; his painful left hip (“I can hardly walk!”) to my heart murmur and bad cataracts. It’s as if we are playing one of those old board games I used to bring back from the States for my nieces: Risk and Scrabble and—oh dear, if my revolutionary friends should ever hear of it—Monopoly.
“Come, come, Rodolfo, you’re the baby,” I reminded him. At sixty-seven, he is the youngest of all of Papancho’s children, twelve years younger than I.
As for the stone, itself, I told them, no angels, no bearded Christ—like a skinny Fidel—bearing his chest to show his heart. I had given them precise instructions, and so when we came back last week and Elsa read me what was on the stone, of course I made a fuss.
“The name is wrong,” I told her.
“You always liked going by Camila,” Rodolfo reminded me. “In fact, Papancho said you used to get annoyed with him when he called you Salomé Camila. You’d go hide.”
Of course, Rodolfo was right, or partly right. After I realized that she would not be coming back, I hated to be reminded of my mother. But still, I longed for her—a longing that would well up in me in the middle of the night and send me wandering through houses, apartments, wherever it was I was living at the time. I tried all kinds of strategies. I learned her story. I put it side by side with my own. I wove our two lives together as strong as a rope and with it I pulled myself out of the pit of depression and self-doubt. But no matter what I tried, she was still gone. Until, at last I found her the only place we ever find the dead: among the living. Mamá was alive and well in Cuba, where I struggled with others to build the kind of country she had dreamed of. But how can I explain this to my autocratic baby brother, who every day seems more and more like a reincarnation of our crazed old father? Just a mention of Cuba makes him so angry that I worry he will precede me to the grave.
“I want you to have the stone redone,” I told them, right then and there.
“But Tía Camila, what’s the difference?” Lupe reasoned. It was on the tip of her tongue that here I had come from Cuba, where I had been going through any number of deprivations. What was an omission of a name from a tombstone I wouldn’t even live to enjoy?
And then, I “heard” the elbowings and the hushings with the eyes. Humor her, their looks were saying. We’ll tell her it’s been changed, and she won’t know the difference.
I HAD FLOWN OVER from Cuba to see Rodolfo and my nieces. Quinceañeras, graduations, birthdays had gone by, and their tía Camila had been too busy to come. Or so went my excuse. But in fact, once my pension was frozen in the States, my meager salary at the Cuban Ministry of Education would not stretch as far as a plane ticket. Then, Rodolfo sent me the money along with a note, “No excuses,” followed by the heart tug, “I have to see you before I die, Mamila.”
At the airport, Rodolfo had been upset at my failing eyesight, my shabby clothes. “Is that all you brought?” he asked, staring at my small bag. I had debated bringing the trunk of Mamá’s papers, which I had kept with me for years. But right before my trip, I decided it was time and called up the archives in Havana to come pick it up. Poor Max (dead five years already!) must be kicking in his grave.
That first afternoon as Rodolfo and I sat in rocking chairs on his galería, he brought up the question of my future.
“My future? At my age?” I tried not to laugh.
“Things are going to get worse and worse over there, you know that,” Rodolfo began, slowing his rocking for emphasis. My brother, always so diligent with his scales as a boy, has learned to play his rocking chair like a musical instrument in old age. “Tell me something, Camila,” he added as if to prove his point, “when was the last time you had a dish of pistachio ice cream?”
“I don’t like pistachio ice cream, Rodolfo. I don’t miss it in the least.”
“I want you here with me so I can take care for you.” His voice had become peevish, phlegm from his last bad cold caught in his throat. (Residual bronchitis to my persistent asthma; kidney stone to the hernia that should have been operated on years ago.) It was a voice not so different from the little boy’s bawling for his Mamila to come out of her bedroom so they could go tickle the pig, Teddy Roosevelt, with guava sticks.
“But how can you take care of me, Rodolfo?” I teased him. “You’re in worse shape than I am, remember?”
“Camila, Camila,” he was rocking prestissimo—I had to swing myself back and forth to keep up with him. “Just the thought of you alone at Riomar—”
“Sierra Maestra,” I corrected him. Perhaps that was why the many letters he claimed he wrote me never reached me. Along with most things, my apartment building had been renamed after the revolution. But Rodolfo insisted on addressing the envelope with the old name.
“Just the thought of you all alone there—it would kill me, Camila, it really would.” He put his hand on his chest, that old gesture of Papancho’s, threatening to punish filial disobedience with a paterfamilias heart attack.
“Rodolfo, dear,” I said, reaching for his hand. “Let’s talk about the real future. I think I should make arrangements.”
That was when my brother offered me a spot in the cemetery plot he and Max had bought before Max passed on. “And something else,” he added, “I want you to get those eyes fixed.”
“Why waste money?” I argued. In the three months it would take after the operation to be fitted with the glasses that would allow me to see, I would be dead. I was sure of it. Which is why I had come home, not just to visit my half brother and nieces.
But Rodolfo insisted. “Think of it, Camila, to be able to see our faces clearly again. To be able to read poetry again.”
“All right, Rodolfo,” I told him, “Do what you will with me.” I did not want to worry him with my premonitions. But I could feel it, the weariness of the old dog turning in circles around the spot where he has chosen to lie down.
“YOU COULD BE BURIED with Salomé,” Rodolfo was saying as we drove to the pantheon to see my mother’s monument. I had already accepted his offer at the cemetery, but I think Rodolfo felt that I was cheating myself of the choice spot I could demand because of my connections. “We could make a case for your wanting to be with your mother and father in your final resting place.”
“Oh please, Rodolfo,” I shook my head at him. “An eternity of visitors! What could be worse than that? As for being with Mamá, I learned how to be with her as an absence all my life. Why change things on me now?”
We entered the echoing hall, and Rodolfo announced the names on the tombs as we passed them. We stopped at the tomb of María Trinidad Sánchez. It was she who had had sewn our flag and later requested that her skirt be tied down before she went before the execution squad ordered by General Santana (now lamentably buried directly across from her). Depending on the president, the pantheon of heroes changes, one regime’s villain is the next one’s hero, until the word hero, like the word patria, begins to mean nothing. That is another reason why I do not want to be buried here among the great dead. All I have to do is put my life next to my mother’s life, and I see the difference.
At the final tomb in the corner, Rodolfo read out the names. Mamá and Pedro lay in the center vault—eternally together!—Pibín’s dying wish. On the right lay Papá, recently arrived from the cemetery in Santiago de Cuba.
“Did you get a chance to visit Tivisita’s grave when you went to get Papancho?” Rodolfo asked me.
I didn’t have the heart to tell my half brother what had become of his mother’s gravesite. When the Dominican government requested the return of the body of one of its former presidents, I traveled to Santiago de Cuba from Havana to sign papers and supervise the transfer. In order to exhume the body so that the former president could lie in state in the Dominican pantheon with his first wife, the poet Salomé Ureña, the shared grave with his second wife, Tivisita, had to be opened. In doing so, the large headstone was cracked and then discarded, so that Tivisita was left behind in an unmarked grave.
My silence obviously puzzled my half brother. “I’ve always wondered, Camila. Did you get on well with Mother?”
“Tivisita was always kind to me,” I told him. “We were friends.” One good thing about this new handicap of near blindness: my eyes no longer betray me.
Perhaps I should have told the truth, that I had struggled to love her as I had struggled with countless others. I thought, of course, of Domingo and the handsome Scott Andrews, and my old friend Marion, still alive in Sarasota, both her eyes sharp, repaired by an exiled Cuban doctor using the latest techniques. “Come and visit,” she had written. “I will pay for you to see.”
The struggle to see and the struggle to love the flawed thing we see—what other struggle is there? Even the struggle to create a country comes out of that same seed.
In the name of Hostos, Salomé, José Martí . . .
“I am indeed surprised,” Rodolfo was saying playfully. He had caught his agnostic sister making the sign of the cross. Of course, he had not heard my sacrilegious prayer.
THAT AFTERNOON, RODOLFO LOANED me his car and the young driver he hires as he no longer drives. (His macular degeneration to my cataracts; his high blood pressure to my high blood pressure.) I wanted to go for a long paseo through the old part of the city, Mamá’s city. Rodolfo was tired out by our morning outing, Elsa was working and so was Lupe, so the baby Belkys—now in her twenties!—came along. Dear Belkys is pure Lauranzón. She doesn’t interest herself in the everlastingly boring history of the Henríquez clan—all those professorish half uncles with their dull books of criticism and patriotic poetry.
“Where is my tangerine nail polish!” she cries at the top of her lungs. She cannot go out in the city with unpainted fingernails. Thank God I do not have to see those nails. Hearing about them is enough.
We set out in the car and asked the driver to take us to Salomé Ureña’s house. “Where would that be?” he wanted to know.
“Where would it be, Tía Camila?” Belkys asked, as if I couldn’t hear the man just because I couldn’t see him. “Would it be on Salomé Ureña Street?”
“Of course, dear.”
But once we got there, no one on the street could tell us which house it was exactly. With my poor eyesight, I couldn’t pick it out from the others, but I knew I could find it by feel. A plaque had been embedded in the wall soon after Salomé’s death. What a sight we must have been in that hot afternoon sun: an old, blind woman stroking the faces of the buildings on the south side of the street and a girl with orange nails and high heels trailing with a parasol so her already dark aunt would not get any darker. “Here it is!” I called out.
“Here lived and flowered Salomé Ureña,” Belkys read the plaque for me. Our young driver had accompanied us, bringing up the rear, no doubt catching the gratifying sight of Belkys in her minidress. Elsa tells me that Belkys’s hemlines cause a stir wherever she goes. “Who is this Salomé Ureña?” he wanted to know. “I read her name everywhere.”
I had to bite my tongue, I most certainly did.
“She was one of the best poets of the Spanish-speaking world,” Belkys bragged—as if she would know! “She started the first school for higher education for women in the country. What else, Tía Camila?” she asked turning to me.
I couldn’t think what else to say. I felt the old sadness welling up in me. And so I said simply, “She was my mother.”
“May she rest in peace,” the young man said, his hand flashing before me as he made the sign of the cross to seal his wish.
WE VISITED THE SCHOOL. Mamá had opened the Instituto de Señoritas in 1881 in her front parlor, and except for the hiatus of some years when she was ill, the school had survived dozens of revolutions and civil wars and changes in government. In that respect, we had not changed as a people since Mamá’s time. Now the building occupied most of a block. “Describe it to me,” I asked my young escorts.
“It’s olive green with a darker olive green trim.”
It sounded very martial—like a building in Cuba after Soviet taste took over. “What else?”
“It’s got bars at the windows,” Belkys said. “How creepy.”
“Of course, with all the crime and vandalism these days,” the young driver lamented. He sounded as if he had been around for ages and had seen the awful direction the human race was taking.
Once inside, we entered a din of scolding teachers and girls reciting their lessons.
What had happened to the positivist method? I wondered. To young minds asking unsettling questions?
“Do you have a pass?” It was one of the teachers, I suppose, patrolling in the hall.
My dear Belkys, princess of brag, spoke up rather rudely, “We don’t need one. This is Salomé Ureña’s daughter.”
“Right! And I’m the pope,” the huffy teacher snapped back. A challenge to her authority was something she would not tolerate, especially in the halls within earshot of her charges. No doubt it did not help our cause that a young man had accompanied us inside this den of females.
“But I’m telling you the truth,” Belkys argued, her voice trembling. “Come on, Tía Camila, let’s go.”
“Tell me exactly what it was like inside,” I asked her as we rode back to the house.
And that is when she described the weedy, littered inner yard; the torn-up wooden floors; the cluster of cleaning women with sullen, tired faces, sitting in cane-back chairs; the many rules and mandamientos tacked up on the bulletin boards; the young girls walking down the halls with Dixie cups of something they had all learned how to cook that day.
“That’s enough,” I said, pressing her hand.
“Ay, Tía Camila,” Belkys was sobbing now. All tangerine nail polish gone from her voice. “What would Salomé say if she could see the place now.”
What would she have said, except what she must have said to herself, time after time, when her dreams came tumbling down? Start over, start over, start over.
LATE AFTERNOONS, RODOLFO AND I sit on the galería, rocking in rhythm. The rocking chair duet, Elsa calls it. The smell of rain and ginger is in the air—there is a hedge, the girls tell me, circling the house, a moat of ginger!
Sometimes the subject comes up, not death as one would think for these two white heads and ailing bodies—that is easy to talk about—but Cuba. “The experiment that has failed,” Rodolfo calls it bitterly. Since he managed to get out five years ago with his girls, Rodolfo, like most exiles, feels driven to soil the nest for those of us who stayed. It’s a nest that is already well soiled, as I tell him.
“But that is not the point,” I add. “We have to keep trying to create a patria out of the land where we were born. Even when the experiment fails, especially when the experiment fails.”
“You weren’t even born there!” Rodolfo counters.
“It’s the place where I was raised. And as Martí once said—”
“Camila, Camila,” he sighs, “your handicap is showing.” This is what Rodolfo calls a certain know-it-all tendency in his older sister, the schoolteacher, to dispense her little nuggets of wisdom wherever she finds ignorance—a state of mind that, of course, does not exist in my brother’s head.
“The truth is,” he begins, his favorite opening phrase these days, as if his advanced years have turned him into a Moses coming down the mountain with his tablet of numbered truths, “la pura verdad is that we have been a wandering family.”
That is a truth we can both agree on. The seeds of the Henríquezes are scattered across the Américas: Pedro’s two girls in Argentina; childless Fran wherever his wife’s family took their ashes when they fled the revolution; Max’s sons shuttling here and there in South America, so that the times I have called their homes, their wives sigh deeply and say, “Let’s see. It’s Thursday . . . he is in Panamá.” Then there are Papancho’s French grandchildren, scattering his seed in France and Norway and New Jersey, so I hear. And every one of these children driven by the little motor of life and need in a world that increasingly resembles our neighbor to the north, a world without sufficient soul or spirit, as Martí put it, as if the great sacrifice and vision of the old people have washed out over time.
“You’re rocking strangely today,” Rodolfo notes, stopping his rocking as if to listen more closely to mine. Indeed, I have been beating a rhythm with my hands on the armrest even as I clack, back and forth. “You are playing jazz, not singing harmony.”
“I do that sometimes,” I tell him.
“YOU SHOULD REST, Tía Camila,” Belkys suggests. We are back on the subject of the contested tombstone. My nieces want to cancel today’s outing to the cemetery.
“Don’t you trust us if we tell you we’ve changed it?” Lupe asks me, just the slightest bit of impatience in her voice.
“I’d like to go and see for myself.”
“If you’re going to see it for yourself, you better wait until after your operation to go check up on us!” Belkys pipes up, fresh as ever.
They do not want me to go out at all today. There’s a strike of garbage collectors. In some places, the strikers have set up roadblocks of garbage.
“Besides, it really does look like rain. It won’t do for you to catch a cold before your operation.” Lupe, ever the logician. She does not believe in arguing, but in reasoning things out, she likes to say. When I used to bring them workbooks from the States, her favorite exercises were always those analogies: house is to home as country is to blank.
But their excuses make me suspicious. My operation is scheduled for next Tuesday, si Dios quiere, as the Dominicans are fond of saying, if God wills it and the garbage collectors allow it. In case anything happens, I want to be sure this last wish has been carried out. “The rain will let up soon. Then we can go.”
“Tía Camila, if we were trying to fool you, all we would have to do is take you to the cemetery and read you what you want to hear,” Lupe continues in her reasoning.
I have ways to check up on you, I think, my hands now quietly folded in my lap. The more blurred my vision has become the more sensitive my fingertips. I would feel the stone and know the difference.
“So you might as well take our word for it, dear Tía!” Lupe concludes, straightening the bow on my collar as if I were a petulant child.
Elsa, the soulful one of the three, worries that my preoccupation with this little detail is a sign of my bigger anxiety about the upcoming eye operation.
“I’m not worried about that,” I reassure her. “All I’m leaving is that stone. The least I can do is get the details right.” Indeed, my old friend Marion used to tease me that I wrote only with pencils because I didn’t like my mistakes to show.
“If there is one thing I hate about the revolution,” I add, and of course, they perk up hearing me say this, as they so much want their old aunt to agree with their point of view, “it is the sloppy use of the language.” I have any number of examples, but I don’t use them.
“Is that all?” Lupe asks—as if I had complained about a bunion when the problem is the gangrenous foot.
I think a minute about it before I respond—Elsa calls it the time lag of Tía Camila’s thinking. “Yes,” I say. “That is all.” Though I could very well have said, That is everything. The words that create who we are.
I REMEMBER MY FIRST job in Cuba after I returned in 1960.
The jefe of the personnel department at the Ministry of Education had heard that a Dominican woman had resigned her job as a professor at Vassar to come join the revolution. (The inaccuracies were already creeping in.) Would la compañera Camila like to serve as technical assessor in the national literacy compaign? His own letter was full of errors and messy efforts at correction. No doubt his secretary had been liberated to a cane harvest, and he had been left alone to type his own correspondence.
It was not the letter itself that made me feel uneasy. It was the close at the end. Revolutionarily yours, ¡Patria o Muerte! ¡Venceremos! Surely one of these phrases would have been enough.
It was happening all over Cuba, this awful, overwrought language. Every time I ventured out I would have to fight an urge to take my red pencil. One shopkeeper posted, “The customer is always right except when he attacks the revolution.” Both false statements: one of capitalism, the second of Marxism. Oh dear, I thought, what have I come back to?
The first few years, before I learned the new names, it was impossible for me to travel anywhere by taxi unless I happened upon an older driver. A young driver would not know Calle de la Reina because it had been liberated and renamed Simón Bolívar before he had learned to read. Carlos III Boulevard was gone, but Boulevard Salvador Allende could still take you where you were going. We were at the foot of our very own Tower of Babel, ideological as well as linguistic, and the exodus began, mostly of the rich who had the means to start over in the United States of America.
“What they don’t want to admit is that now their servants’ children are getting schooled, and everyone can eat, and everyone can get medical care,” my friend Nora Lavedán observed. “When there is food and medicine,” she added wryly.
One spot I did want to visit before all of the names were changed was Domingo’s grave. But by the time I made it to the cemetery, the place was a mess. Graves had been plundered, statues toppled, the busts and bones of rich ancestors carted to Miami on Pan Am.
The young compañera in charge of records kept mumbling to herself as she checked through a pile of file folders she had been renumbering. “I would have to know his date of death and date of burial.”
“I’m not sure,” I told her. “You see, I was gone for so many years, that he died and I never knew of it.”
The sharp-featured woman in her beret and combat boots eyed me curiously. “Was he a relation of yours?” She needed that affirmation before she could go on with her task.
“No, not a relation exactly,” I explained—always the stickler for accuracy. The priggishness of the schoolteacher in my voice was itself like a red pencil mark across the permission she might have granted me.
“Compañera, I will need a pass filled out by the comandante of cemeteries before I can release any information.”
Comandante of cemeteries! I thought. Everyone was now in charge of something. That was the bad news. But the good news was very good: we were all in charge of taking care of each other. I could live, and die, for that, too.
“If you would be so kind, compañera, to write the comandante’s address down.” I complied, even when the rules seemed foolish, even when the means were flawed. We had never been allowed to govern ourselves. We were bound to get it wrong the first few times around.
One evening, with Domingo on my mind, I followed the smell of the sea and found myself at the docks, where we had once protested together, for what cause I can no longer remember. I walked among the fishermen and stevedores, unloading cargo from Soviet vessels, hauling bins of sugar and barrels of rum and crates full of fragrant cigars with cranes into the holds of those ships. I had this sudden desire to hide myself in one of those vessels and wake up in a whole new land where the revolution had already succeeded and the people were free and my work was done.
MY LIFE IN CUBA—it was a whole life, wasn’t it? Thirteen years flew by. I was busy all the time. For one thing, with our fuel shortages, I had to get everywhere on foot, so each task took twice as long.
The exodus that began as a trickle became a flood. With so many gone, those of us who stayed were needed even more. I taught at the university at night and in factorías during the day. Weekends, I joined my young compañeros, writing manuals and preparing materials for the teachers who came in from the rural schools. Sometimes I was sent out into the countryside.
Soon after I arrived, Rodolfo applied to leave, taking my nieces with him. “How can you stand this, Camila?” Rodolfo whispered to me as we walked to his final hearing with the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. “What kind of a revolution is this?” He glared at yet another poster of Fidel going up on Lenin Boulevard.
“Con calma, Rodolfo,” I reminded him.
I was disappointed with his reaction. For I had never thought of the real revolution as the one Fidel was commanding. The real revolution could only be won by the imagination. When one of my newly literate students picked up a book and read with hungry pleasure, I knew we were one step closer to the patria we all wanted.
One summer, I was assigned to a literacy brigade in a cafetal up in the Sierra Maestra. Day after day, I read to a large, stuffy hall of women sorting coffee beans. One morning, I put aside my suggested list (Granma, Karl Marx, José Martí) and read them a poem of Mamá’s that had never been published. She must have written it right after Fran was born.
There sleeps my little one, all mine!
There sleeps the angel who enchants my world!
I look up from my book a dozen times,
absorbed with him, I haven’t read a word.
I looked up after I was finished; the women had stopped sorting and were looking at me with interest. “What is it?” I asked, glancing over their shoulders at our compañera-in-charge at the back of the hall. She could be rather brusque when the sorters fell behind on their quotas.
“That was written by a mother?” one of the women asked.
I nodded. “It was written by my mother, in fact.” And then, I told them her story, and when I was done, one by one, the women began to clack with their wooden scoopers on the side of their tables, until the din in the room drowned out the compañera, shouting for order, in the name of Fidel, in the name of the revolution.
THE RAIN IS COMING down hard. Elsa sits down beside me, our chairs pulled back from the edge of the galería. Rodolfo has caught a cold and is napping. We sit in silence, listening to the downpour, a mist of the raindrops on our faces.
“See, Tía Camila, Lupe was right. It did rain.”
“I don’t mind a little rain,” I say.
“Are you upset at us for not taking you out there today?”
“You are the ones in charge now,” I say, with an edge in my voice.
“Maybe Sunday,” she says. “The operation isn’t until Tuesday, remember.”
“Maybe,” I agree. But Sunday the sun will be too strong. The strike of garbage workers will have made the streets impassable. Rodolfo’s cough will be so bad that everyone will have to be on call in case he decides to die.
“Tía Camila, I often wonder, are you glad you went back to Cuba?”
I sigh as this is a question I am asked a lot by people who find out I had another life in the States. I might have retired with a nice pension and lived out my days in a cottage on a lake in New Hampshire or Vermont or maybe even in Sarasota, close to Marion and her husband whose name I never could get right. How could I throw that life away at sixty-five?
“How could I not?” I always answer back.
“You gave up so much,” Elsa notes.
“Less than you think, dear,” I tell her. The pension I later discovered I had lost by moving to Cuba was nothing compared to what I had found. Teaching literature everywhere, in the campos, classrooms, barracks, factorías—literature for all. (Liberature, Nora likes to call it.) My mother’s instituto had grown to the size of a whole country!
“It was a lot, Tía. You always want to make your self sound less great than you are.”
I have to laugh. “We are all the same size, don’t you know? Just some of us stretch ourselves a little more.”
My niece squeezes my hand. I am reminded suddenly of Domingo, how he always had to be in physical touch when he spoke to me. I feel again that old regret at how I might have misled him. But then, I misled myself, thinking I had fallen in love with the man, when in fact, I had fallen in love with the artist, his intensity, Africa in his skin—the things that connected me to my mother, not to him.
“It was time to come home,” I tell my sweet Elsa. “Or as close as I could get to home. I wanted that more than anything.” Who can explain it? That dark love and shame that binds us to the arbitrary place where we happened to be born.
We listen to the drops beating down from the galería roof to the hedge below. The scent of ginger is very strong.
“I miss Cuba,” Elsa confesses at last. She was older than her sisters when they left, and so she feels a greater pull back. “But I don’t think Castro is the answer.”
“It was wrong to think that there was an answer in the first place, dear. There are no answers.” I hesitate. I don’t even know how to explain this to her. If I could see her face clearly, perhaps the words would rise up from the mute knowing of my heart. “It’s continuing to struggle to create the country we dream of that makes a patria out of the land under our feet. That much I learned from my mother.”
“So you think I should go back?” Elsa is a dentist, she has studied long and hard to set up her little practice in the front rooms of her father’s house.
Such a mistake to want clarity above all else! I feel like telling her. A mistake I myself made over and over all my life.
“Again you want an answer, my dear.” I smile because I understand just how she feels.
EARLY IN THE MORNING, I dress quietly and make my way to the front of the house. Usually my roamings take place in the middle of the night, in and out of rooms, as if I had lost something during the day which I need to recover after dark.
“Ignacio,” I call out when I get to the front gate.
I had caught the young driver by the front steps the day before and arranged for this drive to the cemetery. I offered him my change purse of pesos, but he refused. “It would be an honor,” he insisted.
An honor! A young man working for honor! I was impressed. In spite of our disappointing history, my people keep surprising me with their generosity of spirit. What is it that Martí used to say, Every time has its own evil but a human being can always be good? Or was it Hostos who said that, or was it Mamá, after all? The beautiful, the brave, the good—they are all running together in my head, into that great river of time that is now hurrying me along.
The morning is cool, rain on the trade winds coming off the sea. Soon we will edge toward our tropic winter, the waves going wild, the dark closing in earlier each day. I shiver thinking of those long, cold winters in Poughkeepsie and Minnesota and of the long eternity ahead of me. So much left to be done! And no children of my own to send into the future to do it.
Not true! My Nancy in Poughkeepsie, my coffee sorters in Sierra Maestra, my Belkys, my Lupe, my Elsa in Santo Domingo—my own and not my own—the way it is for all us childless mothers who help raise the young.
The gates are already open by the time we arrive. I can smell the carnations, brought from the outskirts, being put out in their cans, a welcome scent after the stench of uncollected garbage on the city streets.
“Would the señora like some flowers,” a marchanta calls out after us, without much enthusiasm in her voice—a tic of selling, to offer wares to anyone passing by. The real buyers come later in their black Mercedes with shaded windows that do not expose their privileged grief to the curious passerby.
Ignacio knows the way, as he brings Don Rodolfo here often to visit Don Max and Doña Guarina. “I have to go take care of the car,” he reminds me after he has settled me on the stone bench that faces the family plot. We left the car by the entry turnabout—the sereno let us—so that Ignacio could help the old woman find her dead people before coming back to park it.
Just before he leaves, we hear something drop with a bang like a firecracker. “What was that?” I say, startled.
“The anacahuita tree,” Ignacio explains. “There’s a great big one right next to the grave.”
The pods of the anacahuita are known for exploding when they hit the ground. Oh dear, I think, there goes my peaceful eternity!
When he has gone, the silence is so profound, I wonder if perhaps I have already died. But soon enough, the sound of traffic starts up as the city wakes to work. Horns blare, annoyed cars navigating the piles of garbage on the streets. An occasional siren wails. A woman calls out for Juan to remember the mangoes on his way home. Early Friday morning in the land where I was born.
I lean forward, my hands out, to find my stone and check the name. But the bench is placed too far from the graves, and I almost fall over on my face. Just as I regain my balance, I sit up, tense and listen. There is a stirring nearby. Someone is approaching furtively, and suddenly I wonder if it was foolish after all to let Ignacio leave me alone in a deserted cemetery in a capital city increasingly known for its crime.
“Who is there, please?”
“It’s just me, doña,” a boy’s voice calls out. He introduces himself: José Duarte Gómez Romero.
“They call me Duarte.” Duarte is from Los Millones, a nearby barrio, named not for the millionaires who do not live there but for the million poor who do. He comes here by foot every morning, weeding grave sites for small change. “Would you like me to do your plot?”
“Are there weeds here?”
The boy is silent. No doubt, he thinks I am tricking him with my silly question. He has not registered that I cannot see very well. He comes closer. “Can’t you see, doña?”
“Not as well as I use to,” I explain to him. In some respects, I might add, much better than I used to. “I would like your help, Duarte. The stone on the left there at the bottom. What does it say?”
Again he is silent. “The one at the very bottom on this side,” I say, waving my left hand. Not a word from him. Finally, it dawns on me. In Cuba, he would know how to read. He would not be picking weeds on a schoolday. “Put my hand on that stone,” I tell him, rising and coming to kneel by him. How I will get back up is anyone’s guess. “The one at the bottom there.”
His smaller hand closes over mine and he leads my fingers over the cut letters. I feel the satisfying curves of my full name. My nieces kept their promise!
The boy has guided my hand, and now I put my hand over his. “Your turn,” I say to him. (My José Duarte in Los Millones!) Together we trace the grooves in the stone, he repeating the name of each letter after me. “Very good,” I tell him when we have done this several times. “Now you do it by yourself.
He tries again and again, until he gets it right.
Salomé Camila Henríquez Ureña
9 April 1894–
12 September 1973
E.P.D.