Read Online In the Name of Salome by Julia Álvarez - Free Book Online Page A

was part of the fun: everyone talking about Herminia, and nobody but Papá and Ramona knowing it was me.
    N OT 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.
    â€œBut you already have your mujer,” I reminded him. Maybe Don Eloy had gotten so old that he had forgotten he had a wife?
    â€œYou mean Caridad? Ay Dios, pero si Caridad es una vieja.”
    â€œCaridad’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.”
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œHow’s that?” I asked, putting my hand on my hip like Mamá always did when we told fibs.
    â€œYou’ve heard it said men are fools. That’s because our brainsget 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.
    I N 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.
    â€œThat’s good,” Papá kept saying. “You want to go farther. You want to fly all the way to Parnassus.”
    â€œWhere’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!”