![]() ![]() ![]() The darkness fades in a few seconds and the brilliant blue of the horizon quickly intensifies, beginning the spectacle she has been anticipating since she woke at four in spite of the pill she had taken, breaking her rule against sedatives. She waits for the sea to become visible through the window of her room on the ninth floor of the Hotel Jaragua, and at last she sees it. Could that have been her father's idea too? Urania! As absurd as insulting old Santo Domingo de Guzmán by calling it Ciudad Trujillo. Was it his idea or hers? Too late to find out, my girl your mother was in heaven and your father condemned to a living death. As far as she could remember, after she left Santo Domingo (or Ciudad Trujillo-when she left they had not yet restored the old name to the capital city), no one in Adrian, or Boston, or Washington, D.C., or New York had called her Urania as they did at home and at the Santo Domingo Academy, where the sisters and her classmates pronounced with absolute correctness the ridiculous name inflicted on her at birth. Fortunately nobody called her that anymore now it was Uri, Miss Cabral, Ms. Her parents had done her no favor her name suggested a planet, a mineral, anything but the slender, fine-featured woman with burnished skin and large, dark, rather sad eyes who looked back at her from the mirror. ![]()
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