In the Name of Salome by Julia Alvarez

Author:Julia Alvarez
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781616201036
Publisher: Plume
Published: 2000-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Love and Yearning

Washington, D.C., 1923

SHE DECIDES TO TRY out a new life by writing to Marion about it. If nothing else, perhaps the story of what is happening will begin to make sense to her.

Dear Marion,

Here we are finally settled in! We are staying in a townhouse in Georgetown, an elegant address that Pancho can give out at the White House and the State Department.

Her father’s calling card reads Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal, President, Dominican Republic, though of course there is some debate about whether he can still claim that title. The house is a loan, which Camila has begged from her father’s former friend and protégé, Peynado.

Pancho knows nothing of this transaction. He believes the house is a lease left over from the years when Peynado was his ambassador to the United States. But now Peynado has gone over to the other side and is negotiating with the Americans on his own. Pancho has come to Washington to let the State Department know that the Dominicans already have a president, and that neither Peynado nor any of the other turncoats have a right to negotiate without his approval.

“They won’t listen,” Camila kept telling her father when he proposed the trip back in Cuba. She tried to convince him to give it up, to stay quietly in exile, seeing the occasional patient. They have been through so much already!

Ay, Marion, what a saga this has been . . . I still remember that July, 1916 (was it already seven years ago?), when the Dominican delegation arrived at our door in Cuba. I know I’ve told you how surprised we all were to hear that Papancho had been elected president in absentia! And the greater surprise, after living in exile for so many years, he accepted! I remember telling you that I stayed behind with the little boys in Cuba since Tivisita had not been dead a year, and I wanted to be sure this presidency would “take” before I put the whole family through the ordeal of a move. Two months later, we joined Papancho in Santo Domingo. I remember the boys were still wearing black armbands for their mother. But this is the part I’ve never told you, as I know how proud you are of my father’s being president. Marion, Papancho was president for only four months. The family hadn’t been reunited a month—twenty-seven days!—when Papancho came to our living quarters in the presidential palace one afternoon with the news that the Americans had invaded the island. “I refuse to be their puppet!” he pronounced for the reporters who had followed him upstairs. We went back to Cuba, cabinet in tow—yes, even Peynado came along—to establish a government in exile. So began our saga.

Seven years later, the cabinet has disbanded, but Pancho still persists in his claim to the presidency. Camila has tried to talk sense into him. He cannot save a country that does not want to be saved in the way he wants to save it.

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