“What a nice surprise your daughter gave you, Uncle Agustín. You didn’t expect your little girl to come back to life and pay you a visit. It’s a happy time, isn’t it, Uncle Agustín?”
She kisses him again on the forehead and just as abruptly forgets about him. She sits next to Urania on the edge of the bed. She takes her by the arm, looks at her, examines her, overwhelms her again with exclamations and questions:
“You look so good, girl. We’re the same age, right? And you look ten years younger. It’s not fair! It must be because you never married and had children. Nothing like a husband and kids to ruin your looks. What a figure, what skin! You look like a kid, Urania!”
She begins to recognize in her cousin’s voice the nuances, the accents, the music of the little girl she played with so often in the courtyards of Santo Domingo Academy, and to whom she so often had to explain geometry and trigonometry.
“A whole lifetime of not seeing each other, Lucindita, of not knowing anything about each other,” she exclaims at last.
“It’s your fault, you ungrateful thing.” Her cousin lectures her with affection, but now her eyes blaze with the question, the questions, that uncles, aunts, and cousins must have asked one another so often in the early years, after the sudden departure of Uranita Cabral, at the end of May 1961, for the distant town of Adrian, Michigan, where Siena Heights Preparatory School and College had been established by the same order of Dominican nuns that administered Santo Domingo Academy in Ciudad Trujillo. “I never understood it, Uranita. You and I were such good friends besides being cousins, we were so close. What happened to make you suddenly turn away from us? From your papa, your aunts and uncles, your cousins. Even from me. I wrote twenty or thirty letters and not a word from you. For years I sent you postcards, birthday cards, and so did Manolita and my mama. What did we ever do to you? What made you so angry that for thirty-five years you never wrote, never even set foot in your own country?”
“The foolishness of youth, Lucindita.” Urania laughs and takes her hand. “But now, as you can see, I’m over it, and here I am.”
“Are you sure you’re not a ghost?” Her cousin pulls back to look at her, and shakes her head in disbelief. “Why come like this, not letting anybody know? We would have met you at the airport.”
“I wanted to surprise you,” Urania lies. “It was a last-minute decision. An impulse. I threw a couple of things in a suitcase and caught a plane.”
“In the family, we were sure you’d never come back again.” Lucinda becomes serious. “Uncle Agustín too. I have to tell you, he suffered a lot. Because you didn’t want to talk to him, wouldn’t answer him on the phone. He was desperate, he used to cry about it to my mama. He never got over your treating him like that. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I don’t want to interfere in your life, Urania. It’s because we were always so close. Tell me about yourself. You live in New York, right? I know things are going well for you. We’ve followed your career, you’re a legend in the family. You work in a very important office, don’t you?”
“Well, there are bigger law firms than ours.”
“It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve been so successful in the United States,” Lucinda exclaims, and Urania detects an acid note in her cousin’s voice. “Everybody saw it coming from the time you were a little girl, you were so intelligent and studious. Mother Superior said so, and Sister Helen Claire, Sister Francis, Sister Susana, and especially Sister Mary, you were always her pet: Uranita Cabral, an Einstein in skirts.”
Urania bursts out laughing. Not so much because of what her cousin says as for the way she says it: with eloquence and humor, talking with her mouth, eyes, hands, her whole body, all at the same time and with the effusive high spirits typical of Dominican speech. Something she learned about, by way of contrast, thirty-five years earlier, when she came to Adrian, Michigan, and suddenly found herself surrounded by people who spoke only English.
“When you left and didn’t even say goodbye to me, I was so sad I almost died,” her cousin says, sorrowful about those long-ago times. “Nobody in the family understood anything. But what does this mean? Uranita goes to the United States and doesn’t even say goodbye! We pestered Uncle Agustín with questions, but he seemed to be in the dark too. ‘The nuns offered her a scholarship, it was too good an opportunity to miss.’ Nobody believed him.”
“That’s how it was, Lucindita.” Urania looks at her father, who once again is motionless and attentive, listening to them. “There was a chance to study in Michigan, and not being a fool, I took it.”
“That part I understand,” her cousin reiterates, “and I know you deserved a scholarship. But why leave as if you were running away? Why break with your family, your father, your country?”
“I was always a little crazy, Lucindita. And really, even though I didn’t write, I thought about all of you a lot. Especially you.”
A lie. You didn’t miss anyone, not even Lucinda, your cousin and classmate, your confidante and accomplice in mischief. You wanted to forget her too, and Manolita, Aunt Adelina, and your father, this city and this country, during those early months in faraway Adrian, on that beautiful campus of neat gardens with their begonias, tulips, magnolia trees, borders of rosebushes, and tall pines whose resinous scent drifted into the room you shared during your first year with four roommates, among them Alina, the black girl from Georgia, your first friend in that new world so different from the one where you had spent your first fourteen years. Did the Dominican nuns at Adrian know why you had left as if you were “running away”? Did they find out from Sister Mary, the director of studies at Santo Domingo? They had to know. If Sister Mary hadn’t given them some background, they wouldn’t have given you the scholarship so quickly. The sisters were models of discretion, because in the two years Urania spent at Siena Heights Prep and the four years following at Siena Heights College, none of them ever made the slightest allusion to the story that tore at your memory. As for the rest, they never repented of having been so generous: you were the first graduate of that school to be accepted at Harvard and earn a degree with honors from the most prestigious university in the world. Adrian, Michigan! You haven’t been back in so many years. It must have changed from the provincial town of farmers who went into their houses at sunset and left the streets empty, families whose horizons ended at neighboring towns that seemed like twins—Clinton and Chelsea—and whose greatest diversion was attending the famous barbecued chicken festival in Manchester. A clean city, Adrian, and pretty, especially in winter when the snow hid the straight, narrow streets where people could ice-skate and ski, under white puffs of cotton that children made into snowmen and that you, entranced, watched falling from the sky, and where you would have died of bitterness, and perhaps of boredom, if you hadn’t devoted yourself so furiously to studying.
Her cousin has not stopped talking.
“And a little while after that they killed Trujillo, and the calamities began. Do you know the caliés went into the academy? They beat the sisters, Sister Helen Claire’s face was covered with cuts and bruises, and they killed Badulaque, the German shepherd. They almost burned down our house because we were related to your papa. They said that Uncle Agustín sent you to the United States because he guessed what was going to happen.”
“Well, he wanted to get me away from here,” Urania interrupts. “Even though he had fallen into disgrace, he knew the anti-Trujillistas would settle accounts with him.”
“I understand that too,” Lucinda murmurs. “But not your refusing to have anything more to do with us.”
“And since you always had a good heart, I’ll bet you’re not still angry with me,” Urania says with a laugh. “Right, Lucindita?”
“Of course not,” her cousin agrees. “If you knew how much I begged my papa to send me to the United States. To be with you, at Siena Heights. I had persuaded him, I think, when the disaster came. Everybody began attacking us, telling horrible lies about the family just
because my mother was the sister of a Trujillista. Nobody remembered that at the end Trujillo treated your papa like a dog. You were lucky not to be here during those months, Uranita. We were scared to death. I don’t know how Uncle Agustín stopped them from burning his house. But sometimes they threw stones at him.”
She is interrupted by a timid knock at the door.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” the nurse says, pointing at the invalid. “But it’s time.”
Urania looks at her, not understanding.
“To do his business,” Lucinda explains, glancing at the chamber pot. “He’s as regular as a clock. He’s so lucky: I have problems with my stomach and live on prunes. Nerves, they say. Well, let’s go to the living room.”
As they walk down the stairs, the memory returns to Urania of her months and years in Adrian, the austere library with stained-glass windows, beside the chapel and adjacent to the refectory, where she spent most of her time when she wasn’t in classes and seminars. Studying, reading, scrawling in notebooks, writing essays, summarizing books, in the methodical, intense, absorbed way that her teachers valued so highly and that filled some classmates with admiration and infuriated others. It wasn’t a desire to learn and succeed that kept you in the library but the yearning to become distracted, intoxicated, lost in those subjects—sciences or literature, it was all the same—so you wouldn’t think, so you could drive away your Dominican memories.
“But you’re wearing gym clothes,” Lucinda observes when they’re in the living room, near the window that faces the garden. “Don’t tell me you’ve done aerobics this morning.”
“I went for a run on the Malecón. And on my way back to the hotel, my feet brought me here, dressed in these clothes. I arrived a couple of days ago, and wasn’t sure if I’d come to see him or not. If it would be too much of a shock for him. But he hasn’t even recognized me.”
“Of course he recognized you.” Her cousin crosses her legs and takes a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of her purse. “He can’t talk, but he knows who comes in, and he understands everything. Manolita and I see him almost every day. My mama can’t, not since she broke her hip. If we miss one day, he puts on a long face the next time.”
She sits looking at Urania in a way that makes her predict: “Another string of reproaches.” Doesn’t it make you sad that your father is spending his final years alone, in the hands of a nurse, visited only by two nieces? Isn’t it your job to be with him and give him affection? Do you think that giving him a pension means you’ve done your duty? It’s all in Lucinda’s bulging eyes. But she doesn’t dare say it. She offers Urania a cigarette, and when her cousin refuses, she exclaims:
“You don’t smoke, of course. I thought you wouldn’t, living in the United States. They’re psychotic about tobacco up there.”
“Yes, really psychotic,” Urania admits. “They’ve banned smoking in the office. It doesn’t matter to me, I never smoked.”
“The perfect girl,” Lucindita says with a laugh. “Listen, darling, you can tell me, did you ever have any vices? Did you ever do any of those crazy things everybody else does?”
“Some.” Urania laughs. “But I can’t tell you about them.”
As she talks to her cousin, she examines the living room. The furniture is the same, its shabbiness shows that; the armchair has a broken leg and a wedge of wood props it up; the frayed upholstery is torn and has lost its color, which, Urania recalls, was a pale brownish red. Worse than the furniture are the walls: damp spots everywhere, and in many places parts of the outside wall are visible. The curtains have disappeared, though the wooden rods and rings where they hung are still there.
“You’re upset by how bad your house looks.” Her cousin exhales a mouthful of smoke. “Ours is the same, Urania. The family was ruined when Trujillo died, that’s the truth. They threw my papa out of the Tobacco Company and he never found another job. Because he was your father’s brother-in-law, just because of that. Well, Uncle Agustín had it even worse. They investigated him, made all kinds of accusations, brought lawsuits against him. Even though he had fallen into disgrace with Trujillo. They couldn’t prove anything, but his life was ruined too. It’s lucky you’re doing well and can help him. Nobody in the family could. We were all flat broke, on our uppers. Poor Uncle Agustín! He wasn’t like so many others who made accommodations. He was a decent, honest man, and that’s why he was ruined.”
Urania listens gravely, her eyes encourage Lucinda to go on but her mind is in Michigan, at Siena Heights, reliving those years of obsessive, redemptive study. The only letters she read and answered were from Sister Mary. Affectionate, discreet letters that never mentioned what had happened, though if Sister Mary had—she was the only person in whom Urania had confided, the one who came up with the brilliant solution of getting her out of there and sending her to Adrian, the one who threatened Senator Cabral until he agreed—she would not have been angry. Would it have been a relief to unburden herself occasionally in a letter to Sister Mary, to mention the phantom that gave her no peace?
Sister Mary wrote to her about the school, she told her about the great events and turbulent months that followed the assassination of Trujillo, the departure of Ramfis and the rest of the family, the changes in government, the violence and disorder in the streets, she expressed interest in her studies and congratulated her on her academic achievements.
“How is it you never got married?” Lucindita undresses her with a look. “It couldn’t be for lack of opportunity. You still look good. I’m sorry, but you know, Dominican women are very nosy.”
“I really don’t know why,” Urania says with a shrug. “Maybe I didn’t have the time, Lucinda. I’ve always been too busy; first studying, then working. I’m used to living alone and couldn’t share my life with a man.”
She hears herself talking and can’t believe what she’s saying. Lucinda, on the other hand, doesn’t doubt what she hears.
“Girl, you did the right thing.” She grows sad. “You tell me what good it did me to get married. Pedro, that bum, left me with two little girls. One day he moved out and never sent a penny. I’ve had to raise two girls doing the most boring things: renting houses, selling flowers, giving classes to drivers, and they’re really fresh, you have no idea. I never studied for anything, it was the only work I could find. I wish I were like you, Uranita. You have a profession and earn a living in the capital of the world, you have an interesting job. You’re better off not being married. But you must have had your share of affairs, right?”
Urania feels her cheeks burning, and her blush makes Lucinda laugh:
“Aha, aha, look at you. You have a lover! Tell me about him. Is he rich? Good-looking? Gringo or Latino?”
“A gentleman with graying temples, very elegant,” Urania improvises. “Married, with children. We see each other on weekends, if I’m not traveling. A nice relationship, with no commitments.”
“Girl, I’m so jealous!” Lucinda claps her hands. “It’s my dream. An old man who’s rich and distinguished. I’ll have to go to New York to find one, here all the old men are disasters: fat as pigs and dead broke.”
In Adrian she couldn’t avoid attending some parties, going out with boys and girls, pretending to flirt with some freckled farmer’s son who talked about horses or dangerous climbs up snow-covered mountains in winter, but she would return to the dormitory so exhausted by all the pretending she had to do that she looked for reasons to avoid diversion. She developed a repertory of excuses: exams, projects, visits, ailments, pressing deadlines for turning in papers. During her years at Harvard, she didn’t recall ever going to a party, or a bar, or dancing, not even once.
“Manolita had terrible luck in her marriage too. Not because her husband was a womanizer, like mine. Esteban wouldn’t harm a fly. But he’s useless, he loses every job he gets. Now he’s working at one of the tourist hotels they built in Punta Canas. He earns a miserable salary, and my sister sees him maybe once or twice a month. Is that what
you call a marriage?”
“Do you remember Rosalía Perdomo?” Urania interrupts.
“Rosalía Perdomo?” Lucinda searches her memory, half closing her eyes. “The truth is, I don’t…Oh, sure! The Rosalía who had that trouble with Ramfis Trujillo? Nobody ever saw her again. They must have sent her overseas.”
Urania’s admission to Harvard Law School was celebrated at Siena Heights as a great event. Until she had been accepted, she hadn’t realized how much prestige the university had in the United States, how reverently everyone referred to those who had graduated, studied, or taught there. It happened in the most natural way; if she had planned it, it couldn’t have been easier. She was in her last year. The guidance counselor, after congratulating her on her academic work; asked what professional plans she had, and Urania replied, “I like the law.” “A career where you can earn a lot of money,” Dr. Dorothy Sallison responded. But Urania had said “law” because it was the first thing that came to mind, she could have just as easily said medicine, economics, or biology. You had never thought about your future, Urania; you were so paralyzed by the past it never occurred to you to think about what lay ahead. Dr. Sallison reviewed various options with her and they chose four prestigious universities: Yale, Notre Dame, Chicago, and Stanford. One or two days after completing the applications, Dr. Sallison called her: “Why not Harvard too? You have nothing to lose.” Urania remembers traveling to interviews, the nights in religious hostels, arranged for by the Dominican sisters. And the joy of Dr. Sallison, the nuns, and her classmates as she received acceptances from all the universities, including Harvard. They gave her a party, where she was obliged to dance.
Her six years in Adrian allowed her to survive, something she thought she would never be able to do. Which is why she was still profoundly grateful to the Dominican sisters. And yet Adrian, in her memory, was a somnambulistic, uncertain time, the only concrete thing the infinite hours in the library, when she worked to keep from thinking.