In the Name of Salome Read Free Page A

since I am the smallest, Mamá and Tía Ana hoist me up on top of the zinc roof. A new flag is flying above the government palace.
    â€œRed,” I call down.
    â€œYour father will be back soon,” Mamá observes.
    A WEEK LATER THERE is a knock on the front door. The front door is always kept closed because of the noise and dust of the streets. It is also kept closed because on a sunny afternoon in October a civil war might erupt and a band of men come galloping down the streets, guns drawn and firing.
    But today there is just a knock and no war going on. Tía Ana is teaching the alphabet to fifteen little girls who have carried their own small cane chairs to our house on top of their heads. When these girls are older, they will enroll, most of them, in the school of the sisters Bobadilla a block away, the school that Ramona and I now attend. At Tía Ana’s school, the little girls learn how to sit properly in a chair, how to hold their hands when they are sitting down, and how to hold them when they are standing up. They learn how to recite the alphabet and how to pour a glass of water and how to pray the rosary and say the stations of the cross. Then the sisters Bobadilla take over.
    At the sisters Bobadilla, the older girls learn manualities, which means they learn how to sew and how to knit and crochet; they learn how to read—the
Catón cristiano
and
Friends of Children
, and
Elements of All of the Sciences
(“The earth is a planet revolving around the sun”), and they memorize lessons in morality and virtue from
Morality, Virtue, and Urbanity
. But they will not learn how to write, so that even if they receive a love letter, they will not be able to write one back.
    Of course, I am growing up with my tía Ana and my mother, Gregoria, who has left her husband, and these are not women tohold back orthography from a little girl whose first question on noticing the crucifix was not “Who is that man?” but “What are those letters written above his head,
I, N, R, I
?” And so, long before Ramona and I go a block away to attend the school of the sisters Bobadilla, my mother and aunt have taught us how to write as well as how to read.
    That afternoon when there is knock, I run to the door because I am not in school today. I have caught cold from spending so much time in the damp revolution-hole this past month. I pull the stool over and open the top of the Dutch door because this is what I have been taught to do when there is a knock.
    Standing outside is a handsome man with curly, black tresses (he wears his hair long like a pirate!) and a thin mustache and skin the color of fresh milk in a pail. He studies me a moment. Then his face lights up with a smile.
    â€œGood morning, sir. What is your business?”
    â€œOnly to see those lovely stars! Only to hear my cooing dove!”
    I have never heard anyone talk this way before. I am intrigued.
    â€œÂ¿Quién es?” my mother calls from the back of the house.
    â€œWho are you, señor?” I echo my mother’s question.
    â€œI am the bearer of this letter.” The way he says it, the words all rhyme like a song. He holds up a piece of parchment, folded over and sealed with a red wax seal I have seen before among my mother’s papers.
    I take the letter, turn it over, and read.
Señoritas Salomé and Ramona Ureña
. “This is for me?”
    â€œSo you
can
read!” He grins. I don’t like this sense that I am providing him with amusement every time I open my mouth.
    â€œI can write, too,” I pipe up, though this is something that Mamá has instructed me not to boast about, especially not to the sisters Bobadilla. But this man is a stranger—no one I have ever seen near the likes of the two elderly sisters, who are pure Spaniards, with a house made of stone and a roof made of tiles.
    â€œPerhaps you will write a reply to my letter? You had better write that letter, or