In the Name of Salome

By 1893, Salomé and Pancho have resumed normal marital relations. She feels her health declining again just as she realizes with a shock that she is pregnant. Salomé thinks, “I sat there, trying to catch my breath, slowly putting it all together: I was with child. I was dying of consumption” (296). Salomé intuitively knows her child is a girl, and she is determined to live long enough to give birth to her. Knowing that her doctor and her husband would advise ending the pregnancy to protect her health, she conceals her situation until four months have passed, and an abortion could no longer be safely performed.

At this same time, Salomé’s cough worsens, and Pancho confirms a diagnosis of tuberculosis. Steps are immediately taken to relocate the family to Haiti, out of the way of political turmoil. Salomé’s school will have to be shut down, though some of her former students vow to set up a new institution in its place. Word spreads that the national poet is gravely ill. As the family migrates to the north side of the island, people turn out to offer their support. Because Pancho must spend most of his time in El Cabo dealing with affairs of state, he leaves detailed instructions for Tivisita to look after his wife and three boys.

Salomé notices Pancho’s growing interest in her young caregiver, Tivisita. She observes: “Pancho was gazing at her with a look of longing mingled with renunciation. It was this renunciation that pained me the most, for it meant Tivisita had entered the realm of his imagination, where lust turns to love, and souls marry” (308). After a painful delivery, Salomé gives birth to Camila. No one expects the baby to live, but Tivisita gives her mouth to mouth resuscitation. Salomé says:

Tivisita had returned to my side, carrying the bundle she had rescued from the doomed judgment of the others. She laid my newborn daughter on my belly for me to admire. I struggled back up out of the darkness to meet her (313).

Camila has now returned to her earliest memories as a three-year-old in 1897. She recalls the day of the steamship ride that is taking her family to live with their father in El Cabo. Before they leave the family home in Santo Domingo for the dock, an argument breaks out. Mon wants to keep Camila with her, but Pancho has ordered all Salomé’s children to come and live with his new family. Camila flees to the hole under the house that has become her favorite refuge. The narrator says, “She had run off and hidden in the hole underneath the house where she sometimes hid from Max but now she was hiding from everybody fighting” (316).

When Camila begins to cough, everyone takes it as a sign that her health could be endangered if she doesn’t leave Santo Domingo. This causes Mon to relent and let her go. Onboard the steamer, Camila sits with Tivisita and talks about the years when her mother was still alive. Mostly, she remembers her mother coughing. She also remembers sneaking into the sick room to sit beside Salomé and asking her mother to write a poem especially for her. As the coughing grows worse, everyone knows Salomé has little time left. Pancho arrives from El Cabo just in time. After it appears that Salomé has passed away, Camila can see her struggling to speak to her daughter. The narrator describes the scene:

Salomé Camila, her mother’s name and her name, always together! Just as on that last day in the dark bedroom she remembers everybody crying and the pained coughing and her mother raising her head from her pillow to say their special name. ‘Here we are,’ she calls out” (332).

The Epilogue is the only chapter in the novel in which Camila is living in the present moment. She is now 79 in 1973 and has traveled from Cuba to Santo Domingo to visit her half-brother Rodolfo and her nieces. She has spent the past 13 years since her retirement helping the revolution in Cuba. Her family in Santo Domingo doesn’t understand why she didn’t come back to her homeland. Camila realizes this is because she found her mother’s spirit in the Cuban revolution. In this segment, she has taken over as the first-person narrator and says:

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 (335).

The privations in Cuba have left Camila impoverished but satisfied. She senses the end of her life approaching and wants to visit her grave plot with its newly carved tombstone. Her cataracts have become so bad that she’s nearly blind. Camila’s stepbrother, Rodolfo, has scheduled cataract surgery for her the following week, but she is impatient to see the tombstone now. She has a premonition that she may pass away soon and says, “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” (337).

Rather than choosing a plot in the cemetery beside her mother, Camila selects a secluded, shaded spot. As she always did earlier in life, Camila wants to find a place to hide and not draw attention to herself. Her nieces want Camila to wait until after the surgery to visit the gravestone. Instead, the old woman calls a cab on Sunday morning and goes to the spot herself. Sitting on a bench near the grave, she hears someone approach. It’s a boy from a nearby slum who earns extra money weeding around gravesites. Because he cannot read, Camila has him lead her to the stone so she can feel the impression of the letters she has chosen to acknowledge at last. The name on her headstone reads, “Salomé Camila Henríquez Ureña” (354).