The War on Terrorism

2011-07-18T17:06:00.005-04:30

Such facile rhetoric, but so ubiquitous, so common that one never stops to question it. Keep it simple and keep it coming. Isnt that just what Hitler recommended in Mein Kampf? And it has worked. Perhaps too well.

The government, along with a host of ideologues, would have you believe that we are winning this war. We subdued Iraq, we have suppressed the Taliban, chased them to the margins of Afghanistan, and we have hunted down and killed Public Enemy Number One, Osama bin Laden. It's a peculiar kind of war, an executive action, not ratified by Congress, fought against a shadowy enemy whose only identifiable characteristic in most people's minds is the turban, in a territory that resists clear definition. Who conceived this war? A bunch of foreign policy wonks, international affairs experts, defense experts, cabinet advisors, and a deluded president. Just who is it we are fighting? Iraqis? Afghans? Chimerical weapons of mass destruction? Chimerical members of Al Qaeda? And where do we fight this war, Iraq -- or Iran, which we accuse of channeling dissent across its border? Afghanistan -- or Pakistan, in those "wild" frontier regions that no one can control? Yemen?

The truth is that the enemy as well as the territory is a vague ideological construct which allows for a rather too broad scope or field of action, targeting Guantanamo detainees, neighborhood mosques, muslims, "ragheads," "sand niggers," dissenters, civilians as well as anyone toting an AK 47 -- that most unAmerican of weapons.

The war on terror is theater, pure and simple. It dramatizes different value systems. Its director and producers intend it as a rousing confirmation of American values, a vindication of our power and our resolution. A resounding answer to the attack on 9/11. A national katharsis. To those of us who refuse to step to the martial drumming, it is theater of the absurd. Nonetheless, it is certainly tragic, because the actors really die -- idealistic young volunteer soldiers and hapless civilians.

The script is heavily clichéd. Predictably the bad guy dies. But the play refuses to end. The war on terrorism has its own momentum, a perverse will of its own. The rhetoric is so broad, so adaptable, that new threats, real or imagined, keep popping up, new battlefields beckon. One has to ask, who is the real winner in this interminable war?

We killed the bad guy, but the damage he did to the country outlives him. I was recuperating in a nursing home when the staff excitedly brought me the news that Osama bin Laden had been shot. I was known for having been a victim of 9/11 and they thought I would be pleased by the news. They kept asking my reaction. But I couldnt give them a satisfactory answer. I'm not sure it meant much of anything.

The planes that struck the towers struck through them to the core of our society. They turned us into a nation of paranoids and jingoists quick to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security. They amplified police powers at the expense of human rights. They provided an excuse to subvert our own most basic legal principles such as due process. They caused us to expand big government by adding on another useless bureaucracy, the interestingly named Department of Homeland Security. They drained our economy through two bootless wars with uncertain results, which in turn have brought us to the point where we are -- incredibly -- debating the need for social welfare programs that protect and nurture the weakest among us (not just the poor but also the infirm, and senior citizens and children) -- programs like social security that each of us earns, because we pay for it and rightly expect to benefit from it when the time comes. They exposed the weaknesses of our news media, which subsequently provided a classic example of what Chomsky calls the manufacture of consent. And they have diverted our attention from the primary business of perfecting our own democracy while we waste dollars and human lives on propping up shaky parodies of democratic government in places we dont understand and cannot control.

Who wins? Not the American people. Not the military either, at least not in the conventional sense, except insofar as they have been able to use the war to test their new toys, defend their budgets, and amplify their role in American foreign policy. If anyone on "our side" wins it must be the capitalists who profit from the war, the weapons manufacturers, technology companies, security companies (what we used to call, more honestly, "mercenaries") and engineers.

We chose war instead of peace. We chose to define our lives in the terms set by the rhetoric of war and terrorism. And in the end, we imprisoned ourselves just as surely as we encarcerated suspects in Guantanamo. In the words of the immortal Pogo, "we have met the enemy, and he is us."

Magic and Reason

2011-07-16T19:52:00.000-04:30

After more than a decade living overseas, I have been forced to settle back in the States. I had left because I wished to escape a way of life that was so ordered, so rationalized, that I felt a kind of claustrophobia. Ironically, I returned because I needed to take advantage of the benefits of that same order, and had I not done so I most surely would have died.

Presently I am recuperating in a Florida town that in some ways is as foreign to me as the places I visited abroad, Southern manners and the Southern social order being rather different than what I experienced as a native New Yorker. As such it provides me with some interest as I explore its differences and learn new things. Nonetheless, it is a deeply American place, where God and country march in step to rousing martial themes of personal salvation and world conquest. There are pockets of unruliness, of dissonant nonconformity -- the pine scrubs where cracker families live off the land in shacks or trailers, the segregated black neighborhoods whose residents practice an ambivalent and wary allegiance to the American way of life. But overall, there is the same insistent and oppressive imposition of rational order that compelled me to seek out different cultures in chaotic places. The rational order is even more oppressive in my residential development, a colony of retirees where every little detail is supervised and controlled. It is beautifully designed: the houses are well built, the broad avenues are shaded by majestic live oaks, the landscaping is tasteful and meticulously maintained. There are social clubs of every stripe, activities, a pool, a gym, a golf course, a miniature golf course, -- it is the perfect realization of middle class affluence and its rewards at the end of life. There is nothing offensive, nothing obstreperous, nothing disruptive or unsettling or stirring, except perhaps those occasions when the ambulance arrives to carry off one of the residents whose tenure is at an end. It is comfortable and it is bland.

When I reflect on my current surroundings, I am seized by a profound nostalgia for the unpredictability and suspense of my way of life in a so called developing nation. Such places are like the frontier towns on the fringes of the global capitalist order: while they succumb eventually to Reason and Progress, they still experience disruptive outbreaks of an atavistic culture, revealing forms of magic that existed before the rationalization and disenchantment of the world.

In such places the metaphysical and the physical are parallel, their relation is osmotic. In America, these planes of existence are strictly hierarchical and rigidly separated by time and space. My life prior to my return was a mix of Nature, Spirit, and Society. In the city or the country my day mingled the cock's crow, the street vendor's pregones, and the beat of palos bringing the misterios among us. My neighbor, pictured above, is a bruja, a witch, who holds the keys to the doors of perception. Communication with the saints is transformative, radical, even perilous to the self. One doesnt politely address god from a pew; one submits, like the Maenads, to a peremptory and capricious force.

But Reason has its magic too, more prosaic perhaps for being explicable. My survival is an example of this kind of magic. The surgeons cut me open and reconfigured my entrails, creating a new kind of organism from the ruins of the old. I live, however hobbled. Quisqueya could not have afforded me such magic.

And so it goes. I vault between these poles of being, like Rilke's acrobats, "worn by their continual leaping," and never find the means to reconcile them.

Nursing Home Sketches: Eugene

2011-07-13T15:25:00.000-04:30

Despite the heat, I customarily sat outside everyday in the courtyard to get away from the arctic air conditioning and dreary ambience of institutional housing. There were two courtyards, one that was beautifully landscaped with trees that afforded some shade against the fierce sun, and the other that was treeless but had a little babbling pond where a couple frogs lived briefly. I would sit in one or the other for as long as I could withstand the heat, reading some Latin American literature or studying Spanish grammar. There almost never came any other resident, I suspect because most of them were immobile.

However, I could always count on seeing Eugene at some point in the day, since he liked to sit and even dine outside. Eugene suffered from gout and his swollen legs prevented him from walking, so he sat in a wheelchair which he couldn’t drive since he also had broken his arm. His stay was temporary and he went home a week before I did. The CNAs would pilot him to the courtyard and leave him there, often forgetting to retrieve him. Once I came upon him late one afternoon and discovered that he had been sitting in the hot sun for hours and was thirsty and sweaty, worn out with the heat. I got out of my wheelchair and pushed his back into the cool hallways where the nurses could take care of him.

I liked Eugene instantly. He was simple and straightforward, and I knew I could talk to him honestly about sensitive subjects without fear of offending. Since I was down South for the first time, I was keenly interested in its race relations, which I have come to feel are a unique product of the history and circumstances of this region. It feels different to me from what I experience in the North.

So one day Eugene and I were talking about whites and blacks in Florida and how segregation still prevails in subtle and not so subtle ways – the blacks live there, the whites here and so on. Relations are genial, but there is always a deep sense of unalterable and insurmountable difference between the two communities. One of my neighbors in Ocala, a lovely person with a big heart, once told me point blank that she would never enter the black neighborhood, implying that she feared its lawlessness and animosity. Having been raised in a very mixed New York nabe and educated in its public schools, I could never understand this mentality. It is natural for me to be among people very different from myself.

Eugene and I spoke quite candidly about these attitudes and at one point he floored me when he divulged that his father had been shot down in the street, right in front of the boy Eugene, by some crazed racists. I couldn’t imagine the pain and fear that this must have caused him, and yet he was not scarred by the event. He bore no hatred, his soul was free of its distortions.

I admired him. But I was impressed also by the nearness of history, by its power to reach out and shake our complacency. I lived through the Civil Rights Era, I remember vividly King’s I Have a Dream speech and his assassination. And yet I think of this almost as ancient history, a period whose struggles have no visceral connection to the concerns of the present. But here was Eugene, a living bearer of that history, who magically brought it all back to life. That day he taught me the meaning of that history, as experienced by lone individuals, and the magnificent courage of such persons who suffered its shocks without losing their humanity.

Unsurprisingly, Eugene viewed his current physical distress with equal equanimity. Severely tested, he wasted no time on idle complaint or bitter reproach. The day the CNA abandoned him to the sun’s lashing, he uttered not one word against such negligence.

The Contradictions of Life in a Developing Nation:

2008-12-03T10:51:00.000-04:30

Where the state cannot guarantee the safety of its citizenry, so everyone goes about armed, a people at war with itself.

Where education is in such low esteem that the poor who attend school learn just enough to stay poor, and the rich who attend private school, learn what they already know, that god and government exist to serve their interests.

Where telecommunications are among the best in Latin America, but there is no electricity to run it all.

Where a peon rides into town on a mule, and a baseball player rides out in a hummer.

Where the public realm is an arena in which private interests clash in a drama regulated by the conventions of a telenovela.

Where a president exercises the prerogatives of strong man politics in order to preserve and amplify a democratic state.

Where a pliant god colludes in the failings of mankind, since, after all, whatever happens, it is his will: Si Dios quiere.

Where progress is a gravy train for the elite and an opiate for the masses, stoned by the light of its televised spectacle.

Where ideas are censored not by the Church or State, but by the free market and the exorbitant price of books.

Where the simple virtues of country life are praised above all others, and everyone frantically tries to escape them.

Where white is the color of money, and no one is black.

Where the eternal rhythms of life are still manifest, and may be ended abruptly by the thief who kills for a cell phone.

Where a peasant will regale a guest with a meal worth three times the pocket change he would deny that same guest.

Where a mulatto people obsessively pursue a regimen of self-improvement: they straighten what is curled, they bleach what is blackened, they trade chacabanas for jeans, sombreros for baseball caps. . . . Pero no se puede corregir lo que nace doblao.

Where the beat of palos echoes through the culture, but no one is African.

Where language expresses ideology instead of ideas: like the dealings of government, it is opaque, the better to obscure the relation between intentions and actions. Appearances count for everything and conspicuous consumption is next to godliness. Xmas begins two months early to make more room in the temple for the usurers.

If it is true, as Galeano once wrote, that we are what we do to change ourselves, that our identity consists in the synthesis of our daily contradictions, then life in a developing nation may be said to be the suspension of this process, its paralysis. Thesis and antithesis forever staring at one another across the breach in which we all dangle.

El Bajapanty, or The Total Girlfriend Experience al Tropico

2007-05-09T09:47:00.000-04:00

(in a Casa de Chicas, St. Domingo ©jon anderson)

A bajapanty (a typically terse Dominicanism which translates roughly as a panty remover, that is, something which causes the girls to lower their panties for you) usually refers to fancy items, say a sporty car—but just as effective is a fat wallet, which is carried by most gringo tourists, or so believe the majority of girls plying the Conde, the Malecon and other thoroughfares of the capital where an odd assortment of retired fat gringos can found trawling for sex. Many, though not all, of these guys are European types who come to the tropics during the cold weather months in their home towns, and take advantage of the fact that their retirement packages allow them to lead a life of luxury here in a developing nation. They run the gamut from genuinely interesting and adventurous characters to charlatans, pornographers, whoremongers and pedophiles. Though they end up spending many years here, they rarely bother to learn the lingo, nor do they ever travel further than the Colonial Zone, except perhaps to visit a beach occasionally, or one of the resort towns such as Sosúa, where the bars teem with women. They pride themselves on their knowledge of the island and its people; however, except for the few genuine adventurers, they are mostly a bunch of ignoramuses. One exemplary character was a Swiss national whom I met at my favorite watering hole, where you can find a good mix of ex pats and more or less bohemian Dominicans. This particular guy never had much to say and was famously cheap, rarely if ever buying any more than one ginger ale for the few hours he would spend quietly absorbing the atmosphere. But he was friendly enough, and I would talk to him from time to time when we crossed paths. I knew something was up with him, but I couldn’t figure him out until one day when I saw him in the Conde looking rather downcast (the Conde is the main street in the Colonial Zone, converted into a pedestrian mall). I asked him the matter, and he blurted out that he had been arrested by the police and had just been released that moment from jail. This is no small matter, of course, in a country whose legal system is somewhat tenuous, despite well written and sometimes quite progressive laws, and whose prisons are nothing short of hell holes on the order of the Midnight Express. So I was naturally concerned and curious too. While he didn’t want to admit to any shameful crime, he was compelled to talk about his experience, if only because he was clearly rattled and scared. He told me that he had been arrested on trumped up charges of pornography—someone had denounced him to the police, who raided his house and took him away along with his magazine collection—an odd detail, because there really isn´t much pornography to be seen in DR, other than the odd inky broadsheet and a few tattered magazines sold in the street. Well, news always travels quickly there, gossip, or chisme, being the favorite pastime of the citizens. (They even have an apt term for this form of communication, radio bemba or lip radio.) It soon came out that he was in fact a pornographer, and his “magazine collection” was actually photographs of the local girls that he had taken himself and then was presumably selling overseas. He got caught because of his famous stinginess: It seems that he never paid the girls fair compensation for their services, so one of them got pissed and turned him in. He was deported and never seen again. Now the worst failing of any gringo buscando chicas is to be tacaño or cheap. After all, a very good time can be had for nothing more than the price of a good dinner, and all you need to do to meet any girl is to look right into her eyes—chances are they are already staring right into yours. Everytime I walk the Conde, I get propositioned in this way, and with Emily my daughter at my side they seem to be even more interested, since I guess they like the idea of a guy who actually enjoys being out with his offspring instead of merely boasting about it.

Of all the tourist groups I see down there, the French are the ones who really know how to have a good time: they spend freely, they linger over long lunches with good wine and good smokes, and they are rewarded for their bon vivant attitude with the most beautiful morenas that the island has to offer (they infallibly go for the darkest skinned girls). The French women too seem to have a lot of fun, and I have known several to have lost their heads over the abundance of caballeros ready to squire them about (this type is called a “sanky” as in “sanky panky,” what goes on between a foreigner and a Dominican “escort”). One of these went quite nuts one night, again in my favorite watering hole, and was vociferously orgasming as she was passed from the embrace of one Dominican to the next—behavior that elicited nothing more than delighted laughter from the crowd, and which was considered perfectly consistent with local mores, states of ecstasy, whether sexual or demonic, being a part of the normal range of experience down here. Cheapness, however, will condemn the inconsiderate gringo or gringa to a lonely vacation, and in a country where a meaningful glance and an aptly phrased come on will get you a date for the night, your loneliness is truly pathetic. The look, by the way, is just one half of the customary approach: the other part is called the piropo, meant to be an artfully developed conceit expressing one´s admiration for the girl´s attributes and displaying one´s wit, but more often a rather crude compliment along the lines of hey mami, I like your tits. At the 1994 Dominican Parade here in New York, which happened to have been heavily rained upon, one of the dancing cheerleaders received just such a compliment from a crazed teenager: bursting from police barricades against the sidewalk, he ran up to the poor girl, whose nipples had blossomed under the cold and wet air, and yelled at her, ¡ay que me gusta tu pecho! One of the best known piropos is from Cuba, and is even the theme of a salsa song by Henry Fiol: “Mami, si tu cocinas como caminas, me como hasta la raspa” (or “hasta el pegao” as the Puerto Ricans put it. More or less: “baby, if you cook like you walk, I will scrape the pan.” Raspa is rind and pegao is the food that clings to the bottom of the pan). They can be rather elaborate affairs, and in a culture with high illiteracy, oral communication thus predominating, you sometimes hear some wonderfully developed bits of poetry. On the other hand, more often you hear the kind of thing I once caught up in Washington Heights, as a guy lewdly eyed a chesty girl walk by: “si fuera un catarro, me caeria en el medio de tu pecho” (if I were a gurb, I´d roll down the middle of your chest). Now the gringas among you might find this kind of attention undesirable, but among Latinas it is not entirely unwelcome. Once on a bus from Newark Airport, I was talking to a Panamanian stewardess who was lamenting the fact that she had to move out of Washington Heights, having found a nicer apartment elsewhere, because she would miss the daily piropos thrown at her by “her boys.”

I was myself accused of cheapness once, though in my own defense it wasn’t cheapness but lack of desire that prevented me from pulling my wallet out and my pants down. I think I had just begun to date my future wife, if memory serves, so I was not exactly in need of stimulation, but I was very curious about the whorehouses in Santo Domingo, which have become famous enough as to turn our little island into one of the major stops on the World Sex Tour. So when two recently acquired friends suggested that we visit the local casas de chicas I readily agreed. We caught a cab, many of whose drivers serve as middle men for the pimps running the whore houses, and had him give us a tour. The first place we went to was quite famous at the time, an upscale joint in a good neighborhood, called Casa de las Modelos. This was no mere boast. The women were numerous and beautiful. I am inclined to agree with Graham Greene, a notorious philanderer, who opined that the women of Haiti were the most beautiful in the world, so long as we can extend that definition to include the women on my side of the same island. There is something about the genetic mix of these people that tends toward a stunning corporal beauty. The mix of African, European and Indigenous characteristics results in a magnificent physique and a range of skin tones that English is not equipped to categorize. Blanca, india, trigueña, and morena, they range from a sandy white (not pink like myself) to gold and olive and brown and black. For many foreigners the most beautiful are considered the dusky blonds with green eyes.

We were ushered into the living room of a house that could easily have been lifted out of Levitown, right down to the plastic covered sofas and kitschy lamps. The women, who lolled about in different rooms, some draped artfully over the banister, some just sitting, were dressed mostly in form fitting nightgowns or short skirts with bold colors, and they quickly surrounded us. We sat around a small table and were offered beers at an inflated price. While we tried to make small talk, it was rather difficult to feel at ease with so many women standing around us and staring—not because of their extreme desirability, but because their manner was so blunt as to be rather aggressive and even threatening. You pay up, I put out. They wanted what was then about a hundred dollars, a high price for Santo Domingo in those days. You had the option of taking the girl out or having her there in one of the upstairs bedrooms. She was yours for the night. Of course, they were waiting for us to invite them to sit and fool around, but we were still trying to figure out if we wanted to, if the price was right, if in this land of plenty, there might not be a better watering hole with just the right mix of wine, women and song. Myself, I had already been to the Dominican “cabarets” and was used to their casual atmosphere, soaked in rum and tears and sad bachata music, and this more tourist oriented spot, with an almost gringo preoccupation with money, didn’t appeal to me, particularly as I was just along for the ride and wanted a good time without the pressure to buy. I admit I was enamored of the tall slim dyed blond on my left, who stared at me imperiously waiting for me to take her aside, and after I left that night the image of her haughty authority haunted me for some time. She was, within that tight space hedged round with God knows what cares and troubles, completely in command of herself and possessed of a certain power to assuage her embattled ego. Seduction is a mysterious thing: there is something in humankind that desires mastery over things and something else that seeks submission when it perceives real mastery, and the charge that either act gives you is powerfully erotic. It´s no accident that Dionysius´s fervent devotees were maenads. And no doubt that is why the teacher-student relation has erotic potential (and erotic pitfalls, as any professor accused of harassment will tell you). And in the market for sex, who can tell where power begins and ends? The fattest, dullest, loudest gringo controls the girl insofar as he controls the money, and we are taught to despise him for his commodification of the girl and his crass immorality, but in reality he is nothing more than a chicken ready for plucking, he is, as Dominicans say, pan comido, eaten bread, a piece of cake. He is a sucker, whose presence is of no more account than the passing minutes in which more like him are born. This is not to say that the almighty dollar that passes from his limp and sweaty hand does no harm. It fills the stomach and empties the heart. The government has acted on this understanding, and set out to close down the sex shops, varying from nude dance clubs, massage parlors to whore houses:

In a press conference on Tuesday, Attorney General Francisco Dominguez Brito said that prostitution centers in the Dominican Republic will be shut down. He said that centers where nude women dance or exhibit themselves will also be closed. Boca Chica sex parlors were shut down at the start of the year. Gazcue's "massage parlors" were next, with 12 shut down last Thursday in a raid in Gazcue and the Zona Universitaria. Some 102 women and 28 men were arrested in the raid.

As reported in El Nacional, Dominguez Brito said that there are many people that take advantage of poverty here to exploit women, and as a consequence the DR is known as a sex destination. He said the practice is against the dignity of the country and that of Dominican women, and thus the reason why he entrusted the prosecutors with taking drastic measures. . . He is against the DR being promoted abroad as a sex destination, and said this is why all the sex parlors will be closed.

District attorney prosecutors said that in the raid in Gazcue, drugs, synthetic penises, erotic chairs and handcuffs for sadomasochistic acts were found. Other centers shut down were La Reyna Cubana, Cisnes Club, Relax, Elegante Center, Estefany Club located on Santiago, Leonor de Ovando, Danae, Cervantes, Hermanos Deligne, Socorro Sanchez, Independencia and Dr. Delgado streets in Gazcue.

I would like to know what an “erotic chair” is. . . . I should clarify here that the raids were undertaken not to stamp out prostitution, but to put a stop to other illegal activities such as drugs. As Jorge Subero Isa, president of the Supreme Court of Justice, noted, “In our country, prostitution is still not an illegal act, but an act that is tolerated by society.” Tolerated, or rather, indulged with glee. This administration raided Boca Chica and Sosúa the last time they were in office, and the activity returned once they left office, so it will probably be up and running again soon. Pimps scour the countryside for naive girls, minors, desperate to change their lives: a certain Cristina Mendoza Coronado was among those arrested. She would bring minors from Cotui to the capital, promising them a better life, and then put them to work. It is a deeply rooted tradition, which has had a huge impetus from the burgeoning tourist industry, and the penalties for this crime are not severe: pimping earns you a sentence of six months to three years in prison and a fine of 150,000 pesos (about 5000 dollars). And there is police connivance. The Boca Chica Association, for example, argues that the prosecutors are going about this all wrong and need to tackle the combined power of the National and Tourist police in addition to the pimps. The police are smack in the middle of all this and look on it with a wink and a smile. One night coming back from the Colonial Zone with my wife, a bunch of cops passing in a car yelled out, “¡sanky panky!" I didn’t take kindly to their implication, but so it goes. I was surprised to learn, however, that my own neighborhood, Gazcue, was a center of this activity—I knew there were clubs, but I didn’t realize the extent of the operations. Gazcue is the garden neighborhood created by Trujillo and his henchmen, a bastion of the old middle class, and despite its decline, still a charming and attractive area to live. Quite expensive too. The homes were built to show off one´s wealth and evidence of Trujillo´s favor under the old regime, and the best of them had spacious yards filled with flowering trees and abundant shade. Ironically Gazcue proved to be the old tyrant´s final resting place for a short while after his assassination, since the tyrannicides fled there after killing him, taking his body with them in the trunk of an old chevy. The chevy was parked overnight just a few blocks from where I now reside. The streets named in this news flash define the borders of the best part of the neighborhood, called La Primavera. I never guessed as I strolled with my daughter down the leafy boulevards that the stately houses I daily admired and lusted after were fronts for prostitution. So much for bourgeois respectability. But nothing down here is as it seems.

The first time I had ever been to a cabaret, I was dragged along on what I initially thought was just a pub crawl with the local photojournalists. I had gone down to cover the historic ´96 elections, and a group of incredibly generous photogs took me under their wing, gave me food, shelter, and my own jeep and driver so that I could get everything without a hassle. I was impressed. Anyway, on the first day they felt like testing me, so off we went to some bar in a sleazy part of town. We entered a smallish place with a dance floor in the middle, bar in the back, walls with mirrors all round and a disco globe and lights on the ceiling. We sat in a corner, and I noticed across from us (already at about 4 or 5 o´clock in the evening) there were a few bored girls sitting on chairs. I was naïve enough not to recognize where I was until they started to get up, once we had ordered big bottles of beer, and come over to sit with us. One of them made a beeline for me, the only gringo ($) in the joint, and we had fun that night dancing and drinking. Bachata in those days, not so long ago, was slower and more mournful, made for sad thoughts and close dances (bien pegao, as they say). As it had gotten quite late, I realized that I had to make a decision. I had a girlfriend back home, and I didn’t really want to do this even though it was easy enough and without strings. My new friend Ignacio, who also had a girlfriend at the time, and unusual for a Dominican, decided not to partake, told me that if I were going any further with this there were rooms above the dance hall, but sternly admonished, “usa un condón”; and then he explained that I could merely pay the woman for the dancing, sort of like taxi dancers in the past. All in all, a better deal for the women, if you ask me, since they do not have to exchange any body fluids more potent than a few drunken tears elicited by the amargo of the bachata.

Though the women at the Casa de las Modelos were alluring, the ambience was cold and uninviting, so we pushed off in search of something more Dominican in flavor, which we found only about ten minutes away by taxi. This place, in a worse neighborhood, close by the National Cemetery over on the Maximo Gomez, had a kitschy pink heart over the doorway, a small bar at the entrance, and a small sala where the women sat on dilapidated sofas. This place had more louche charm than the upscale Casa de las Modelos: it was run down, the women were dressed down and worn out, and the house was cramped and claustrophobic. There was a small child in a bedroom just off the sala where we all sat in a tight circle, and you could tell that this group operated as a kind of dysfunctional family, the bartender-pimp being the cock of the walk in this particular barnyard. Despite his effusive friendliness, you could sense a steely hardness underneath, you knew that this man took no shit from anybody. He was bantamweight, but sinewy and hard. And he was sure to have a gun under the bar.

There wasn’t much for us to do except sit and drink, since there wasn’t room for a dance floor. The women surrounded us, the space being so small our knees knocked together. They waited for us to make a move while we were served beer, and one of my companions decided that he would have a go at one of them. Thus ensued a serious conversation about the relative merits of the various women, and the consensus fell upon a younger member, india and rather pretty. Negotiations were quick and pointed. He settled and paid the price, took her to a small room in the back, in an area separated from us by a curtain, and proceeded to business. It seemed a rather soulless affair, but the point is simply for one to get off and the other to get paid. The room is small, unadorned, with faded paint, and lit by ugly fluorescent bulbs. The girl sits on the bed, beckons you over, washes your penis, fellates you, and then fucks you. The whole thing doesn’t take long, and there is little conversation, if you don’t speak Spanish. Meanwhile the rest of us waited outside, while the girls alternately flirted and insulted us, waiting to see if someone would buy some of their time, or at least buy them a beer. It was at this point that I was called cheap, but I just laughed and we all drank more beer. If I had had better command of Spanish at the time, the whole thing would have been more fun, because regardless of the situation a Dominican always appreciates someone who can animate them with jokes and pleasantries. This social talent, the gift of gab, is highly prized and earns you the title of buena gente, or better yet muy buena gente, if you are really good at entertaining the people.

When our friend reappeared we paid our bar bill, collected our driver, and took off for one more spot. This time the driver took us to a cabaret, with a fair sized dance floor and mirrors on all the walls. But it was late and the place was empty. There were a few women sprawled on some tables, but the lights were on, and they were in the process of closing up. We sat down and were joined by a few unattractive but friendly stragglers, who looked all the more garish in the nasty flourescent lighting. With the lights full on, I danced with one of them under a tiny disco ball, the mirrors filling the forlorn room with our off kilter reflections. It was a fast merengue, strictly regulating the swaying of the hips with its tightly repeated pattern, one two, one two, one two. But the insistent rhythm failed to animate anyone, the conversation, the dance, the mechanical lifting of bottles to lips were all perfunctory by now. At some point it was decided that we had had enough, and we sauntered out, leaving the women simultaneously disappointed and relieved, since they didn’t really make any money off us, but they could finally get some shuteye.

If you are having trouble finding women (and you would have to be pretty clueless), there are plenty of tourist guides who will be happy to take you under their wing. You can find them hanging around the Parque Colon, where they will pounce on you: “ que busca, chicas? Cambio de dinero? Regalos?” The more enterprising among them have learned some English, which they pronounce in that stereotyped Hollywood bad guy Mex style: “hey my frein´ wha jew wan? Jew wan girrrls? Jew wan cheeeks?” I especially love the money changers, who approach you as though offering the most hellish of sinful delights. They hiss furtive promises of inflated exchange rates, “pssssssst, dólares, dólares, trentaicinco por uno!” while passing fat rolls of pesos alluringly in front of your face. These down at heels Virgils will conduct you through the capital´s various levels of hell for a price, the advantage being that since you are their meal ticket, they will be sure to protect you should you get into trouble. I fell in with one guy I still see from time to time in the area, a little guy with a deep bass voice, and was steered to a place up on the hill near the Duarte, which overlooks the colonial zone. This is a notorious area known for its tigueres, whores, and thieves. It is the refuge of illegal Haitians, a makeshift Chinatown, and a bargain basement shopping district. At its head is the old Mercado Modelo, the “model” art deco style market constructed by Trujillo, where I go daily to buy my chickens and vegetables, and my wife goes to purchase the various articles required by the misterios (votive candles and such). This was the area outside the colonial city walls, where the indians and slaves and white trash of the colony lived and worked. A department store called La Sirena (mermaid) sits right over the original mines where many Tainos toiled and died. In certain aisles you find yourself treading on transparent plastic flooring, through the scuffed surface of which can be seen the remains of these mines. It is also home to what was once one of the most beautiful plazas, the Parque Enriquillo, named for the great mestizo rebel slave, who fought the colonialists to a draw and was allowed to live in peace in his desert stronghold in the southwest. Each town in the Dominican Republic has a central park with a gazebo at its center. These are nice examples of public architecture, and Enriquillo is, or rather was, quite attractive, but the park is in very sad shape these days. The municipal government had closed it up in order to renovate it, but when they finally took down the barriers, surprise, surprise, absolutely nothing had been done. But the money had certainly been spent! Anyway, we entered a typical cinder block house, with a bar and fairly commodious dance floor and seating area up front and an even larger room in back, a kind of hall with pokey dark rooms along the sides where you would take the girl of your choice to do the deed. It reminded me of the brothel I had seen at Herculaneum, but much much bigger. This place was also devoid of the charming little pornographic murals placed above the lintel of each doorway in the Roman brothel, but it did have plenty of graffiti, which I could more easily read than the Latin ones in Herculaneum. This being the early afternoon, there was no music and no crowd. Two women and the bartender/bouncer, a heavily built and rather menacing character despite his gruff camaraderie, made up the entire company. We sat down at a table, ordered some beers and tried to make conversation, which was strained because of my poor Spanish at the time and my apprehension that they might just decide to jump me, being a quicker means of achieving their ends, as it became increasingly apparent that I was only there to snap some pix and had no interest in emptying my wallet, thin as it was. But in fact they were pretty accommodating, since my presence alleviated their boredom, and we spent the afternoon getting to know one another. I left a couple hours later, and the only drawback of the time spent there was when my guide put the bite on me, and though I don’t remember what I gave him, I am sure that I overpaid him outrageously. Admittedly, my first couple years travelling to the island I was pan comido: I once had to get from one end of the city to the other, a city which sprawls disconcertingly, and without knowledge of the public transit system, I stood there on the street, my finger sticking out, but without any clue as to the system of gestures needed to get me to my destination, so the conchos passed me by. But one tiguere who was just driving by in his car and had no connection whatsoever to the transit industry, decided to pluck this little chick´s feathers clean, and took me where I was going. I think I paid him 500 pesos for a trip which should have cost only about 6! Course, I was still thinking in terms of a New York cab fare, which was ludicrous but my only meaningful reference at the time, so I figured I didn’t do too badly. My hostess at the other end however was so dismayed to hear how badly I had been cheated that she made sure I caught the right concho on the return journey, walking me directly to the avenue and speaking with the chofer to make sure he would take me safely home.

Of course, many sex tourists opt for the more informal relation that can be had simply by walking down one of the main thoroughfares close to the Colonial Zone, the Malecon, or the Conde. A variety of women can be found there, keeping an eye out for the opportune foreigner. They go by various names: cueros (“skins,” I guess because they work in the nude), putas (whores), patas calientes (“hot legs” which basically refers to any women who chase after men), buscavidas (sort of like gold digger, someone who seeks a living), the orotund mujer de la vida mala, and the relatively benign chicas (“chicks”). I imagine that the younger ones do so in a spirit of longing and hope: they want something different, something exciting and novel, a bit of the world beyond their geographic and conceptual borders. They are not exactly vicious; rather, they live by a utilitarian morality that sensibly abjures starvation and heaps abuse on the pendeja (cowardly fool) who fails to take advantage of the opportunities that fate deposits in one´s path. After all, you would be a fool not to capitalize on your physical assets, the only commodity you have any ostensible control over, and which fetches a nice price in the market. They practice a kind of serial monogamy, because while the affair lasts they give it their all, they play the girlfriend with consummate attention to details. They are warm and friendly, they look after you, they clean your house, dress you, see to your needs. In return, they are treated to nice restaurants; gifts of cash, clothes, trinkets; attention from men presumably more worldly than the run of Dominicans these women are likely to know. They live for a brief period outside the daily grind of worry about money, lack of opportunity, and sheer boredom. The mere possibility of change is inconceivable for these girls, except in the form of a fairytale rescue by a foreign prince, who more often than not turns out to be an idiot Emperor parading about in a ludicrous suit of new clothes. I know of several Europeans (the Americans never stick around very long) who have fathered children, and occasionally they pay for clothing or food, but they meet their obligations in a desultory fashion. Sometimes you find a tourist who does marry the girl, but he is generally young and blind and doesn’t know what he is getting into. I met an Iowan once who had come to Puerto Plata for a vacation and found a woman at a bar. The encounter blew his mind as well as his wad. He married her, returned to the States in order to start the process of repatriating her, only to discover that such marriages, however legal they may be, are not esteemed by the INS. An illegal immigrant stateside has a better chance of getting a green card, however phony the marriage, then a would be immigrant legally married to a solvent American who genuinely wishes to preserve the union. Of course, they find all kinds of ways to emigrate—they acquire false papers, they get stateside relations to vouch for them, they get hold of a tourist visa and then overstay the allotted time, while the more desperate flee to Puerto Rico in flimsy boats called yolas that often capsize, thus delivering a tempting snack to the sharks that patrol the Mona Canal. Being a rather naïve sort, however, this Iowan worked within the system and thus was stalled by the INS. When I met him, a year had already passed, and he still had not managed to get the girl out of St. Domingo. It made me wonder about the wisdom of his course: she was an out and out tiguera, holding tight onto this walking exit visa. He spoke no Spanish, and she no English, so they couldn’t communicate and hence didn’t really know each other. And I asked myself, what would this woman do once she got to rural Iowa, with no one to talk to, nothing of her culture present in her new surroundings, and no concept of the vast country in which she would eventually reside. I imagine that once across the sea, she would leave him and light out for New York. But I never found out.

At times one hears of a story with a happy ending, and this is the case with a friend of ours, who was in fact the means whereby I met my wife. Judith comes from a very poor Haitian-Dominican family in Haina, a seaport close by the capital and one of the original sites of sugar production on the island (hence the reason, I suspect, for the arrival of Judith´s forebears to the area). The family is quite colorful, all its members typically exuberant and warm Caribbeans. Her mother is a mambo (Haitian voodoo priestess) and from time to time throws a big party in honor of the various saints—the last I attended was a party in honor of San Rafael, where there was no less than three witches in attendance. I will save that narrative for another time. When I met Judith she was about twenty nine and had two boys, both of whom quite intelligent and sweet, though undersized and skinny for lack of a proper diet and medical care. I became their unofficial papi, as their own fathers had pretty much given up on providing any real support. Haina is a dreadful place, its muddy streets clogged with traffic, its air choked with exhaust fumes and dust, its streets converted into a huge sewer when the tropical rains flood the area. There is no respite for your lungs, and none for your ears either with the swarm of pasolas and motós buzzing up and down the streets. As there is little work to be found here, Judith, like many young women, looked toward the capital to provide some means of support, and she took a succession of poorly paying jobs as a cashier or waitress. This last post paid off, at least initially, because she came into contact with foreigners and thus could hope to find someone to help her with her kids. She latched onto a fellow traveler I had met in a hotel and who had decided to buy a house in the colonial zone (right on the same street where the "Good Shepherd" goes in search of his prodigal son adrift in "Africa," and where Michael Corleone witnesses the assassination of a “Cuban” police officer, a street that also provided the scenery for one of Celiz Cruz´s last videos). He would dine at the restaurant where Judith worked, located right on the Plaza de España across from El Alcázar de Colon, the home of Diego Colon, one-time governor of Hispaniola and Columbus´s son. A deal was struck between them, the terms of which are disputed, and she moved in as his housekeeper and lover. The children were not part of the deal, though they benefitted indirectly from the money that passed from his wallet to her pocket. But relations were strained because of their very different ideas of the benefits to be gotten from the liaison. Eventually things got so bad that she was banned from the house, after she tried to impregnate herself with a disposed condom and then steal money. She didn’t give up without a fight: at one point she showed up at the house with a policeman in tow, claiming that she was pregnant and the putative father had abandoned her. Some time around then I became steward of the house in the owner´s absence, and I remember that she hit me up for 5000 pesos, a considerable sum, ostensibly for a doctor´s examination, but I really don’t know where the money went. Things calmed down afterward, and we continued to see her as a friend. She scraped by with odd jobs. I remember visiting her at her place in the back of a callejon leading off the main drag in Haina. She lived with one of her sons, Brian, in a one-room unpainted, unfinished concrete block house, the living space divided by sheets into dining room, kitchen and bedroom. We brought her a standing fan as a present, but as there was often no electricity, there would still be many hot sleepless nights and hot sleepy days. Poor homes have no ventilation. The day we visited, Brian´s blood father (papa de sangre) joined us for lunch. He displayed considerable pride about his son, whom he treated affectionately but with a tendency to forget him when the child was outside his field of vision, as though dad were suffering from attention deficit disorder. I have encountered this attitude many times: the father proud of his offspring, insofar as they are evidence of dad´s fecundity, powers of seduction, and manifest paternity—this last an important detail, for if the simulacra they engender do not in fact present a little image of the sire, then he will be derided as a pendejo who was gulled into caring for someone else´s offspring. Not that they do much of the actual caring, for they are mostly absentee dads, as with the case before me. This particular tiguere was happy to see me there too, because he knew that Judith would play me for a pendejo and get help when the need arose, though to her credit she never abused this privilege. He was a motoconchista—a motó is a little motorbike with a geared transmission, one step up from a pasola (moped) which has no gears. In most Dominican towns, if you want to get around without walking, you are forced to make use of the motóres, gangs of which hang around the hotels, the main entrance to the town, the market, in short all the important points of transit. You pay them six pesos (now ten), hop on the tiny back seat (barely enough for the ample North American backside, but often used to carry whole Dominican families), and they speed off, careening crazily through the traffic. A law was passed requiring the motoconchistas to wear a helmet, but they often don’t, and there is no helmet for the passenger unless you happen to have one yourself, so God help you if you crash or fall off, which does happen from time to time. With all the potholes and sandtraps in your way, you are lucky if you make it to your destination unharmed, but the drivers are usually very adept at providing a smooth ride, and the ability to weave through the stalled traffic is undoubtedly an advantage. Despite their ability to zip through town, most motoconchistas spend a good part of the day shooting the shit parked under a bit of shade somewhere, since there aren´t enough passengers for the thousands of motóres trawling the streets. It is easy and cheap to set yourself up in business, cheaper than acquiring a colmado or other such business. But as a result, there are far too many of them, and the competition for paying customers is stiff. Brian´s father drove just one of the many squealing bikes whose fumes choked and blinded the residents of Haina. The limits of his earning power, combined with his youth and fecklessness, discounted him as a serious partner for Judith, and she continued to look for a suitable foreigner. After all, two of her sisters had fished the tourist zones successfully and come up with good husband material. Her persistence eventually paid off: this year she married an Italian she met at her last job and moved to Italy. Her two sons are still in Haina, but she plans to retrieve them soon.

The happy endings are few and far between, so it is no surprise that the older women plying the tourist zones are cynical, they know there is almost no chance of altering their fate by dating foreigners, so they take the short view: live for today, don´t worry be happy. But it´s a pretty pathetic version of the timeworn carpe diem theme. They don’t exactly seize the day; they lazily grab hold of whatever passes close and offers little resistance. Actually, one of them seized hold of my balls once down on the Malecon. I walked there from my hotel one night to photograph the election crowds who traditionally gather along the famous avenue. At that time the man who had inherited power from Trujillo, Joaquin Balaguer, was still campaigning, and his acolytes traditionally took charge of the Malecon every week just before the actual elections—a perfect example of Balaguer´s usual political acumen, for by putting on a raucous display of popular support in such a conspicuous spot, he made it seem as though he was a shoe-in. He survived for half a century basically through surreptitious strategems (including assassination) and by coopting his opponents. (More on this interesting character in a subsequent chapter.) The parade was out in full force, cars and trucks full of people, women shaking their booties, guys honking their horns in appreciation, couples dancing. As I arrived at the corner, a woman came out of the shadows and without missing a beat grabbed hold of my crotch, looked me in the eye, and mouthed some crude compliment intended to excite my interest. I was put off by her approach, which lacked a certain coy seductiveness let´s say, as she was all business, and I was apprehensive about my nuts, which she continued to hold onto with no apparent desire to let me go, so I politely deflected her proposition, she released me, and I continued on to the parade.

I should insert a little history lesson here in order to contextualize my observations and to give you a sense of the kind of island I live on. Most people do not realize it, but when Dominicans celebrate their independence, they celebrate on two distinctive dates, the more important holiday being independence from Haiti, not from Spain, as they had already achieved a kind of de facto independence through the utter neglect of the imperial fatherland, who had long ago shifted its interest to Cuba, Mexico and South America. After Haiti´s legendary slave uprising, a truly heroic endeavor that rightly earns everyone´s respect despite the lamentable lack of leadership worthy of that tradition in the country today—after their liberation, the slave army decided to spread the revolution to the Spanish side of the island, with the usual regrettable results: just as with France and with Russia, the revolution turned into an imperialist enterprise, and the Haitians kept Saint Domingue (as they dubbed it) under their thumb for forty years. When the Dominicans finally liberated the country, their strong men (caudillos) in turn fought amongst themselves for control of it: agriculturalists in the Cibao and cattlemen of the East battled each other, but the cattlemen had a military genius named Santana to lead them, and whenever the Haitians invaded in subsequent attempts to reconquer the island, Santana was inevitably called upon to rout them. But he too was afraid of the Haitians, so he decided to sell back the island to Spain, figuring that Spain could protect the underpopulated colony (Haiti at the time had over 400,000 people while the Dominicans numbered something like 60,000. The only reason Santana fought off the numerically superior Haitians is that he could use the various cordilleras, or mountain ranges, as defensive walls from which he could swoop down guerilla style and harry the invaders). So Spain accepted and immediately started again to impose its rigid strictures on the people, who began to chafe under the disapproving eye of these martinets. The straw that broke the burro´s back in this case was, as you can well believe after reading this far, the Church´s denunciation of the loose sexual mores of the Dominicans, most of whom were not legally married and whose flouting of the Church´s most sacred institution of marriage (one of the sacraments, for those of you who are not Catholic), was causing much consternation among the authorities, who acted quickly and unthinkingly to curb the unruly mulattoes. The Dominicans, God bless them, have always had a somewhat casual attitude toward such rules, and their forthright, natural and easygoing sexuality was in jeopardy. So they revolted. They swept the Spaniards from their shores, and poor Santana was forced to shoot himself in his beautiful colonial house on the corner of Hostos and Salomé Ureña.

These peculiar informal relationships exist to this day among Dominicans as well as between Dominicans and foreigners, and a good example of this can be seen in the history of my brother-in-law´s relation with his novia. Nicknamed Morené, for her dark skin, she recently “went through the window”—or eloped informally, so to speak. It came about in this manner: Morené lived in a wooden shack on a conuco, or small farm, at the back of our little village, and because it is a bit off the beaten path, along a dirt road that skirts farm fields and grazing land, it is called “Nueva Yol” (New York). Whenever you go to visit there, you tell people, I am going to New York. Her mother is known to be a bit crazy, but maybe she is crazy like a fox—she certainly is not as crazy as our next door neighbors, one of whom I think suffers from Tourette´s syndrome and periodically shouts obscenities and blasphemes God, while the other is a reputed witch (bruja) gone over to the dark side and has a toddler she named San Elias. (San Elias is sort of the Dominican Baron of the Cemetery, so it is a bit like naming your child after Damien in The Omen.) Anyway, Morené´s mother may be more cunning than crazy because it turns out that through her strategem she was able to secure a place for her daughter in our household in Bonao. José, my brother in law, a fairly serious character for a Dominican, with leanings toward Pentacostalism, had been seeing her for some time, but has nursed a long hidden passion for a neighbor whose family is rather well off. Since the girl is wealthier than José, his pride won´t let him go out with her, because he doesn´t want people gossiping about how he is being “maintained” by his girlfriend. So he has been seeing Morené, who understandably got tired of waiting around for José to make a definitive move, and made it for him. One day she arrived at our house and told José and his mother that she was pregnant and had been kicked out by her mom. Fait accompli: she moved in, and they took over the bedroom reserved for me and my wife (which irritated Ada no end, since the house in Bonao is by right her own). About a week later, however, we learned the truth. Morené´s mom came to visit her daughter, and Estela (my mother-in-law) politely absented herself ostensibly to allow them some privacy to resolve their differences, but in fact she snuck out back and listened through the window. Far from fighting, Morené and her mom were congratulating each other on how well their plan had worked: she wasn´t pregnant and she hadn´t fought with her mom, but by claiming she had done so, Morené had secured a new home, a husband, and new status in the village. Though no formal ceremony took place, she and José were now in fact “married.” Estela was fit to be tied, and I am told that she went about for the rest of the week muttering and cursing under her breath, but she couldn’t confront the couple with what she had learned, because that would mean admitting that she had eavesdropped, that she had been outfoxed by her daughter in law, and thus that she was a pendeja, which one can never admit to. Estela has a very high reputation in the village, and one´s reputation has to be closely guarded. Moreover, Estela was loath to interfere in her son´s affairs, nor did she wish to deliver bad news, for all the obvious consequences that would ensue. So she bore it in silence, and she and Morené somehow have been living under a rather testy truce. That truce was shattered when José discovered that Morené was “pegandole los cuernos”—clapping the horns on him, cuckolding him. Some guy who has a farm nearby Nueva Yol was meeting her secretly. He apparently had a intermediary who was carrying messages back and forth between them. The neighbors, as always, already knew all about the affair and several of them had told José, who fobbed it off, loose talk being common and often mistaken; but he took the precaution one day of following Morené about, and sure enough he caught them meeting clandestinely. Apparently he did nothing about it, but some time later at the bar the messenger was there drinking and flirting with Morené, so José decided that enough was enough, and popped him upside the head a few times. That led to a huge confrontation between José and Morené, a fight that ended up lasting for a fortnight, with daily skirmishes providing the delighted neighbors with more entertainment than they have had since the last blood feud which claimed a few lives and ended with the banishing of a whole family. The would-be lover swore revenge for the insult done to his go-between, and threatened to shoot José. So Neno, my other brother-in-law, told everyone that he would start packing his pistol, because family was family, and he wasn’t going to allow anyone to shoot one of his own. Luckily, things calmed down, and there was no more talk of guns—which all sounds comical enough, but the truth is that such threats have to be taken seriously. However, with José and Morené at war, there was no peace at home. José decamped and was staying with Neno and his family, while Morené refused to leave Ada´s house, where she continued to live under the baleful eye of Estela. Morené said she wouldn´t budge because José had yet to buy her a house and a car. At this point I am sure that you are all staring at the page with raised eyebrows. Let me try to explain: in Santo Domingo the custom is to provide your wife with a house and whatever material comforts you can afford. A wife who doesn’t receive such tribute will be considered by the community a worthless creature, good for nothing, because if the husband does not fulfill his obligations they will surmise that she has done something to have earned his disapproval. So I imagine that Morené, who stoutly denies the existence of a tryst, was anxious to procure these tokens of José´s esteem in order to salvage her reputation and come out of this with some material compensation, because the relationship was beyond repair. Also, just as clearly, she is nuts! As all the neighborhood commentators agree. Anyway, the camps were at a stalemate, the transistors on the communal radio bemba overheated with so much chisme, and poor José was holed up at Neno´s without any clue as to how to resolve the matter. Morené showed up daily and shouted at him, he shouted back or tried to hide, and she would then storm off to our house in a funk. In the end she packed her bag, and my wife and Neno´s brother Luis drove her back to her casucho. I strongly suspect that we haven´t seen the last of her.

I will leave you with one final example of the relations that prevail in my adopted home. Across the hall from our apartment lived a heavy set morena and her infant white daughter. She was a good neighbor and is still a friend of ours, though she moved to another apartment in the same condominium. To this day, though, we call her la vecina (the neighbor). Her origins are humble, and she betrays all the somewhat comical pretensions of the arriviste: after having espied the contents of my apartment when we first were getting to know one another, she went right ahead and copied the layout. My living room is a kind of museum, filled with various things I have collected over the course of my half century on this earth, including pattachitra paintings from India, Taino artefacts, oriental rugs and what not—even a trapiche cut from pure mahogany, which was used in past centuries for grinding sugar cane. The purpose is not so much decorative as archival, the objects being touchstones of my various interests. Our neighbor, however, decided that the arrangement was classy, and copied it right down to the rugs, which are rarely seen in tropical households. The effect, however, was entirely off the mark, since she filled the space with ugly machine made carpets and dreadful objets d´arts, the sort of thing that is very common down there: Caribbean sunsets, flower girls, and beaches. Instead of a collection of objects rendering homage to the idea of an artisanal, pre-industrial culture, she had assembled a bunch of mass-produced kitsch—but the arrangement was practically a mirror image of my own! Thankfully, when she moved she decorated her new apartment with a different motif, and in fact it is quite a handsome place now. But her bourgeois pretensions remain a strong influence on her comportment. So much so that she has turned her daughter, who is only about four years old, into a basket case. Apparently she kept after the girl to behave in a decorous and ladylike fashion, in particular emphasizing the need to keep one´s legs crossed or closed and never to let anyone touch her “popola.” (I hope I don’t have to translate that one!) But she was rather too insistent, as it so happens, and one day she received a call from the girl´s pre-school, telling her that they were having trouble with the poor girl, who refused to dress or bathe at the school, fearing, I suppose, that someone should take unfair advantage of her popola. (The children who attend pre-school arrive wearing a uniform, but after lunch they all bathe and change because after all it is very hot and humid there.) The headmistress recommended that the neighbor take the mixed up kid to a psychologist and have her straightened out. She did so, but judging by her persistent warnings to protect the popola at all cost, which continue to this day, I fear that the little girl will never make it out of adolescence intact.

At any rate, this woman posed something of a mystery to us, which my wife immediately solved even before knowing all the facts. We would always see her, the nanny, and the daughter, with whom Emily would play from time to time, but we almost never saw the husband, a white guy who dressed expensively. From time to time we would catch him coming and going late at night or at dawn, but he was not to be seen during the day. The neighbor would explain that he was a travelling salesman, and thus was rarely at home. Though not an unlikely situation, as I myself am often forced to be away from home, my wife saw right through it and surmised that in fact the neighbor was a kept woman. And so she is. It slipped out when she once asked Ada if in truth she really was married to me, obviously wondering and with complete justification whether we had the same arrangement as the neighbor did, since most liaisons between foreigners and Dominicans are makeshift affairs of convenience. When Ada answered that in fact we were really and legally married, the neighbor was chagrined to learn this, and Ada quickly surmised that the neighbor´s “marriage” was bogus. The “husband” in fact has a legal wife, probably india, possibly blanca, but certainly not black, and he shuttles back and forth between the two families when he is not at work. Depending on your point of view, he is either an adulterer or a bigamist (possibly a polygamist, though where he gets the energy I can´t imagine), but he certainly makes the best of a good thing. He owns a very lucrative and well known retail business in gold jewelry, the bajapanty to end all bajapantys, so he can afford his double life. I will say this for him, he has certainly fulfilled all his obligations toward our neighbor, having bought her an apartment in our condominium, clothing, food, schooling for the little girl, and a huge SUV, which she wrecked, never having bothered to learn to drive or get a valid license. And la vecina, to give her her due, assiduously plays the part of the good wife. Morality is nothing if not adaptable, at least insofar as its appearance, and in a society which is regulated much along the lines of what anthropologists used to call “shame culture” (as opposed to the hypothetical “guilt culture” found in developed Protestant nations), appearances do count for a lot. There is a very funny merengue from the early 90s about a guy who wants to buy his friend´s girlfriend because of the ideal wifely qualities she possesses. It provides an interesting list of things that the average Dominican male looks for:

Te compro tu novia,
Pues tu me has dicho como es ella
Y me gustó la información
Te la compro
No voy a regatear el precio, dime pronto el valor
Te la compro
No creo que sangrie cara, aunque cueste un millon

Pues tu me has dicho
Que es linda, y apasionada
Que es buena, [y ???]
No cela nunca por nada
Y sabe hacerlo todo en la casa
No sale ni a la esquina
No habla con la vecina
No gasta, y economiza
Y todo lo resuelve tranquila
Vendela, Vendela
O dile a su madre que me fabrique otra igualita
Vendela, Vendela
Si quiere´ una mia, por ella te las cambio toditas

[I´ll buy your girlfriend, since you´ve told me what she´s like and I liked what I heard, I´ll buy her, I wont haggle over the price, tell me her value now, I´ll buy her, I don’t think you´ll be bleeding me much though she cost a million. You´ve told me that she´s pretty, passionate, good [???], never gets jealous, and knows how to do all the housework, she never goes out not even to the corner, doesn’t gossip with the neighbor, doesn´t spend but saves, and doesn’t fight. So sell her, sell her, or tell her mother to make me one just like her. Sell her, sell her, If you want one of mine I will trade you them all for her.]

Like most merengues, it is all meant in fun, and like most jokes there is a hard kernel of truth at the center. La vecina certainly conforms to the spirit and most of the letter of this ditty, so I guess in effect she is a good wife. She is certainly a good neighbor.

The New Background on this Blog

2007-01-22T09:16:00.000-04:00

I have been hacking away at this thing as you can see. The basic template for this blog is called scribe. I like the paper image but the background was a bit too staid for my taste, and a number of people are using this template (T.O.P. among others), so I decided it was time to customize it some more. You may balk at the bold design, but it is in keeping with the desktop theme of the template. The design comes from an antique Tekke Hatchlu or Engsi rug, used by the Turk tribes inside their Yurts to divide up spaces. When the Russians finally conquered these nomads, their rugs became prized possessions of the bourgeoisie back in Europe. Some of them were used to cover writing desks, just as I have it here. This particular Engsi, which hangs in my office, was made by some Tekke tribeswoman in the 1880s on a simple horizontal loom, with consummate skill. The knots are barely visible to the eye, the work is so fine. These anonymous weavers were not only skilled craftswomen, they were great artists.

A Note on El Camino de los Negros

2007-01-19T23:06:00.000-04:00

The log entry below is my first experiment of its kind in hacking this template and rearranging matters so that i can play with combining text and imagery in more interesting ways. What I am aiming for is to get two (or more) narratives running alongside one another while maintaining their independence. For this I had to come up with a new layout so that different bits of text could acquire separate status, and the different shapes could all cooperate while they maintained distinct trajectories. These are photo-essays, photo/grams, ideas written in light and shadow and letters. In the future I hope to add more photos to the essays that have none as yet, as well as to push these formal matters to whatever limits I can devise.

While I may be taxing the patience of the average blog reader who thus far is accustomed to briefer and less demanding reads, I see no reason not to prod them a little bit in the hopes that their habits have not calcified and that they would naturally seek the same intellectual quality that they demand of the material they find between the covers of a book. Time will tell. It always does.

El Camino de los Negros

2007-01-19T22:27:00.000-04:00

"an old brujo was asked about the nature of his practice, and he said, "Well, the white people have their way, but this is the way of black people."

A one room shack in a barrio of San Juan where a woman mourns the loss of her only son, her only solace in a life of almost total deprivation. Death here is a common fact, no more remarkable than the open door through which you pass to escape the close walls of the hovel.

Children in the
barrios sing,

"se murió pa' tí
se murió pa' mí,
Jesús Cristo
se murió así"

The people arrive early to consult with the bruja. Eroánia prepares her altar for vengeance, or forbearance . . .

Los Olvidados

2007-01-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

El modelo de desarrollo de cada civilización emana de los recursos de su tierra. Si no fuera por el humilde bacalao, la industria pescadora del noreste de los Estados Unidos no se habría desarrollado y el famoso "yanqui" no habría nacido, al menos, no de la misma manera. Su cultura y sus valores salieron de esa industria. Eran pescadores, callados y constantes como el Océano.

Nosotros, los caribeños también tenemos nuestra propia historia económica que forjó una cultura fuerte y que por desgracia o por fortuna, apoyó la economía de los imperios europeos. El cultivo de la caña no solo enriqueció a los países europeos, sino que además transformó sus gustos, su dieta, aun la forma de ser de la gente, y en el proceso trituró los pueblos desarraigados que labraban la tierra - en su primera etapa: Tainos, Congoleños y otros Africanos. Ramón Marrero Aristy, autor dominicano, escribió: "La historia de tu pueblo, la de tu región, es la de la caña."

En su posterior etapa, el azúcar caribeño era mayormente una industria norteamericana, aunque empezó en los años 1870s con una mezcla de cubanos, alemanes y norteamericanos. En los bateyes que hicieron los "misters" habitaba una multitud de babel: Cocolos de St. Kitts, Barbados, Jamaica y otras islas anglo parlantes; gallegos de España; dominicanos; cubanos y haitianos. Sin embargo, el ingenio los molió a todos. Más algo quedó dentro de ellos que no fue triturado por el engranaje. De este sabroso melao humano surgió una cultura que consta de las ideas y las figuras más perdurables del caribe. Esta cultura mestiza arrebató la alegría de su sufrimiento y la fuerza nervuda de su opresión, convirtiendo las cadenas de los bateyes en adornos, sus gritos en canto meloso y su labor cotidiana en música suave y baile cadencioso. "Escuchad la canción deliciosa de los ingenios de azúcar y de alcohol" (Pedro Mir).

Ahora el azúcar no manda, los braceros no cortan, los bateyes no cuentan. Ahora las chimeneas de los ingenios no arrojan el humo de los furgones en que se hierve el guarapo, y el olor del aire melcochado no endulza el suspiro de los que comen la tierra amarga. Ahora el caribe fabrica otra forma de dulzura - playas bonitas, complejos turísticos, ocio lujoso. Y los bateyes están olvidados . . .

La migración de los Haitianos a través de la frontera no empezó con la zafra, pero no pasó mucho tiempo para que la zafra se convirtiera en "la invitación abierta" que aumentaría su flujo, hasta que finalmente fueron los haitianos quienes componían la mayoría de los braceros. Este arreglo creado por los "misters" del norte y confirmado en la Hispaniola por Trujillo y Duvalier dejó mucho tiempo atrás de tener sentido en nuestra economía. El corte de la caña ha sido sustituido por largas jornadas en los campos, sembrando semillas en las fincas o golpeando el fuerte martillo de las construcciones. Y es que, la puerta no está del todo cerrada. Un torrente de refugiados haitianos huye diariamente del caos económico y político, buscando su mejoría y dejando a República Dominicana sin medios para solucionarlo. Los bateyes perduran como un triste recuerdo mudo de la historia caribeña en que todos nosotros compartimos cuando consumimos los cristales dorados de nuestra querida azúcar crema.

Las nuevas encuestas nos dicen que el setenta porciento de los que viven en los bateyes son dominicanos. No les llamen "los negritos del batey", ni "los haitianos", mejor llámenles "Los Olvidados" por existir en el limbo de la memoria. En esos bateyes se encuentran nuestros hermanos y hermanas. Estas fotografías reflejan los rostros de los que comparten nuestra cultura, nuestra historia, nuestros valores--caribeños todos. Como dijo un bracero, "Todos tenemos la misma sangre; somos iguales."

Ozymandias

2007-01-11T16:43:00.000-04:00

"hoy nos cuenta tus glorias olvidadas
la brisa que solloza en tus escombros."
-- Salomé Ureña

La ciudad colonial de Santo Domingo de Guzmán era el urbanismo ejemplar del Nuevo Mundo. Su traza cuadricular y sus calles rectas incorporaron el nuevo concepto de la modernidad y del mercantilismo que impelía la Época de Exploración. Pero mientras los conquistadores planteaban su reino de ganancias y pérdidas, los frailes se pusieron a construir un nuevo Vaticano, o sea la sede religiosa de donde salía la influencia papal para administrar el Nuevo Mundo y reclamarlo en el nombre de dios. Entonces habían dos motivos contrarios que gobernaron a la gente. El imperio español tenía la cara de Janus, con un ojo clavado en el porvenir, y otro en el pasado y a la sabiduría del Antiguo Mundo. Aquí el nuevo humanismo y la escolástica se oponían en lucha por las almas del pueblo. Entonces, la arquitectura bélica de la ciudad también tenía su aspecto espiritual. Rodeada de un muro defensivo, la ciudad tenía a la vez una cadena de iglesias que protegían a los forasteros en tierra ajena. Nunca se había visto tal ciudad. Se ubicó en la orilla del hemisferio, entre lo que ya era conocido y lo que quedó por descubrirse. Era la octava maravilla del mundo.

Despues del siglo XVI, la ciudad se volvió un lugar atrasado y empobrecido con pocos habitantes. El imperio había echado su mirada sobre el tesoro de México y de Perú, y condenó a la isla a una temporada del olvido. Cuando el imperio se fue, también se trasladó la sede eclesiástica, y en México se construyó una catedral aún más grande que la de Santo Domingo.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Este lugar no es un desolado desierto, sino una comunidad viva y vivaz que perdura sobre los restos de una civilización quijotesca. Los conquistadores destrozaron la sociedad taina, pero también construyeron aquí el primer hospital, expresión de un humanismo que hizo que el hombre sea la medida de todas las cosas. Vivimos hoy en día entre las ruinas de su ambición imperialista las cuales ahora forman un paisaje pintoresco para el turismo – una manera de viajar muy frívola a diferencia de las aventuras de Cristóbal Colón. Tal vez los turistas carecen de imaginación o de atrevimiento, pero es por viajar en busca de momentos de ocio. Llegan aquí para conquistar a una chica y apenas piensan en conquistar un mundo. Pero entre ellos, hay algunos que contemplan estos mudos restos y paran, siquiera sea por un momento, para interpretar el secreto que las ruinas ocultan: todo evanesce, todas las obras de la humanidad se desmoronan y todos sus sueños esfuman. Pero en las ruinas se halla el nido del fénix.

Amores Perros: Love's a Bitch

2007-01-11T15:03:00.000-04:00

This is the new gossip from my little country town. It seems that the famous Chaguito is out screwing dogs again. He was found on the farm belonging to a guy from the next town over. it seems that Chaguito is so in love with cows and dogs that the longing he experiences obliges him to travel far from home in search of his tabooed love. He has already acquainted himself with all the local beasts and the neighbors no longer let him near them. It is said he had a wife, a pretty woman, whom he lost because of this bad habit of his. He gave her a disease, a disgusting vaginal infection, so she left him.

One night the need to fornicate seized him so forcefully that he couldnt deny it, perhaps because of the time that had passed since he last caressed a nice pelt, or out of loneliness, or just because of some inexplicable cosmic screwup—because you know that destiny is a mischievous devil. So he went secretly in search of that bitch who awaited him like some siren whose bewitching song (or rather bark) traps sailors lost in dark seas. He approached the farm, his heart beating, breathing rapidly. The bitch didnt bark. None of the creatures barked, whinnied, whistled or cockadoodledoed. Perhaps they knew him already and anticipated his nocturnal visits with pleasure because they preferred his affectionate caresses to the blows and curses of their owner.

Unfortunately, though the beasts did not signal his presence, something must have alerted the owner, who surged from his house to find Chaguito screwing his favorite dog. He didnt shoot him with the shotgun however because he recognized Chaguito, despite his distorted face, flushed with his ardent exertions. Even so he gave Chaguito such a start that he jumped up and ran off in a panic. While he left his clothes behind, he had to return through the dark hillside barefoot and nude. How he ever arrived home without being seen is a miracle that implies that perhaps even sinners do not lack for a bit of grace . . . .

The next day the owner of the farm showed everyone the straw-strewn clothing and gave everyone a piece of his mind about this shameless wretch, this beast, this pervert, this brute who cannot control his urges. Nonetheless, no matter how odd this behavior might seem, it has a long history and is often the means whereby country boys achieve their sexual initiation. Lots of peons fall in love with their cattle. And the distinguished cuban author Reinaldo Arenas recounts his youthful days when he and his boys used to screw cattle. The greeks classified the various forms of love: Filos, Agape, Eros and the rest. While they considered erotic love the lowest form, they did not deny that it was the major force behind the cosmic harmony because it was what unites everything. It is said that a dog is man’s best friend, so it could be that this bestiality is also a form of friendship, and friendship according to Aristotle is the highest form of love.

According to the farmer, this love is unpardonable, and he feels mighty disappointed in his dog. He is thinking of getting rid of the bitch.

He aquí el nuevo chisme de mi pueblo: el famoso Chaguito ya está cogiendo perras otra vez. Se encontró en la finca de un señor que vive en un pueblo cercano. Parece que Chaguito se enamora tanto de las vacas y de las perras que el anhelo lo obliga a andar fuera de su pueblo en busca de ese amor tabú. Ya ha conocido las bestias de su vecindario y los vecinos no le permiten acercarselas más. Se dice que tuvo una esposa, una mujer muy linda, pero la perdió por su mala maña. Le enfermó a ella dandole una asquerosa infección, y ella lo dejó despues.

Una noche la gana de fornicar le agarró con tanta fuerza que no la podía negar, quizás por el tiempo que había transcurrido sin cariciar el pelaje, o por su soledad, o por el joder inexplicable del cosmos – ya sabes que el destino es travieso. Así que anduvo a escondidas buscando a esa perra que le esperaba como una sirena del mar que atrapa a los marineros perdidos en tenebrosas aguas, una encantadora que fascina con su cantar (o sea su ladrar). Chaguito se acercó a la finca, latía su corazón, respiraba rapidamente. La perra no ladró. Parece que ningun criatura ladró, gemió, cacareó o pitó. Tal vez lo conocieron ya y anticipaban sus visitas nocturnas porque preferían sus tiernas caricias a los golpes y las palabrotas del dueño.

Lamentablemente, aunque las bestias no señalaron su presencia, algo debe haberlo avisado al dueño, que salió de su casa en esta noche fatídica para encontrar a Chaguito cogiendo a su perra favorita. No le disparó con su escopeta porque lo reconoció a pesar de que la cara del hombre, en el calor del momento, se veía muy torcida y colorada por su esfuerzo ardiente. Aun así le asustó tanto que Chaguito se levantó de un salto y salió huyendo en pánico. Dejó las ropas llenas de paja mientras el desgraciado tuvo que volver a casa andando desnuda por la loma. Como llegó a su pueblo sin que nadie le observara es un milagro que implica que aun a los pecadores no les falta un toque de gracia . . . .

Al dia siguiente, el dueño de la finca mostraba a toda la gente las ropas de este maldito, contandoles lo que sucedió y como pensó del sinvergüenza que anda así cogiendo las perras – un bestia, un pervertido, un bruto que no sabe controlarse. No obstante, por raro que parezca, este comportamiento tiene larga historia y constituye la iniciación sexual por muchos jovenes del campo. Son muchos los peones que se han enamorado de su ganado. El distinguido autor cubano, Reinaldo Arenas, habla en su autobiografía de los días que pasó con sus amiguitos cogiendo las vacas. Los griegos clasificaron las formas del amor: filos, agape, eros y lo demás. Pensaron que el amor erótico era de una clase inferior, pero no negaron que también era la mayor fuerza de harmonía cósmica porque es lo que se une todo. Se dice que el perro es el mejor amigo del hombre, así que puede ser que el amor bestial es a la vez un cariño amigable, y segun Aristóteles la amistad es el amor mas valioso.

Segun el agricultor, este amor es imperdonable y su perra le ha decepcionado. Piensa en botar la perra.

La Calle de "El Tapao"

2007-01-11T14:52:00.000-04:00

Dar un paseo por la ciudad colonial es viajar a través del tiempo igual que el espacio. Uno pisa el pavimento que pisaron los conquistadores, el pavimento que cubre las pistas hechas por los pies de los taínos. Cada paso adelante es un paso atrás. Ando admirando la casa donde Diego Colón soñaba con crecer su dominio, o la casa donde Nicolas Ovando soñaba con aniquilar a los taínos, la casa donde Cortez soñaba con conquistar Mexico y Pizarro con conquistar Peru. Estas casas sólidas y sus fachadas lúgubres se hacen la ilusión de permanencia, mientras ellos que erigieron sus muros y se paseaban ahí de un lado para otro ya han desaparecido hace muchos años; y también yo me pierdo en la niebla de los años que pasan: cada paso me envejece, hago rumbo a mi fallecer.

Se dice de un burgués que vivía durante los años 1500 que le aconteció una desgracia y por la asquerosa mutilación de su cara fue obligado andar con máscara. Las leyendas abundan: se quemó la cara por casualidad, fue acuchillado peleando sobre una mujer, padecía una enfermedad que le desfiguró, era veterano de batallas contra los piratas, o un condenado procedente de Mexico. Este “tapao” enmascarado de hierro nunca se veía de dia, y de noche solía salir a las calles deshabitadas en busca de algo que habia perdido, algo que le perturbía la mente y no le dejaba acostarse de noche en su casa (esta misma que ves ahí en la foto). Repetía su ritual de vagar las tenebrosas calles noche tras noche. Desde entonces, la calle se llamó la calle del tapao. ¡Qué ha debido de padecer! este hombre forastero que vivía en la tierra ajena de una sociedad bien gregaria y chismosa, el lugar mas importante del nuevo mundo, la sede del imperio español. He aquí un hombre que intentaba escapar de si mismo, pero estaba encarcelado de su máscara, de los pesados muros de esa casa, y de las palabras lastimeras de los vecinos. No se sabe qué fue de él, pero los relatos multiplican.

Emigramos por la vida y por los sitios ajenos que otros hacen. Por numerosas que sean, las raices que echamos no detienen nuestro paisaje. Al nacer se nos lleva el turbellino. Estamos envueltos en una inquietud perpetua. Cada paso adelante se nos aleja de lo que buscamos, y el recuerdo de esa pérdida se fija en las cicatrices que atrofian el corazón. Pero adelantar es también descubrir y consolarse de la filosofía. Cuando Cortéz quemó sus naves en la orilla de un nuevo continente, ha debido de morirse un poco en volverse de espaldas al mar caribe donde se distinguió en conquistar Cuba. Con el incendio de esos mástiles de caoba, se agotaron los restos de su vida anterior junto con las materiales que la encerraron. Condenó a su banda de conquistadores, o sea merodeadores, a luchar desesperadamente en la selva desconocida: seis cientos hombres en contra del imperio de Moctezuma. Era un gesto atrevido y típico de ese hombre que sabía que uno no puede estar quieto – hay que seguir adelante, seguir probando, arriesgándose. Nacido en la tierra seca de Extremadura, este hidalgo se puso a atravesar su extensión vacia y no paró, ni siquiera cuando llegó al lluvioso paraiso tropical. La Española no lo detuvo, y el no dejó de viajar. Cortéz reclamó un imperio para España, ¿pero para sí mismo qué reclamó? El privilegio de comprometerse a hacer mas viajes. Aún después de morirse, seguía estar de viaje. Su cadáver fue desenterrado casi diez veces, y viajaba por los siglos entre el Antiguo y el Nuevo Mundo hasta que llegó a su descanso en el año 1947.

Strolling through the first colonial city of the New World is a flaneur's dream. One treads the same pavement and paths that the conquistadors trod, which before they came were dirt lanes created by the passing of many taino feet. One steps out in space and in time, and each step forward is a step backward, a step into the past and into the future with each present moment. With each step I grow older, I stroll toward my demise, as I pass by the houses where Diego expanded the Columbus family fortune; where Ovando plotted the genocide of the Tainos and Las Casas their salvation; where Cortez dreamed of Mexico and Pizarro of Peru.

In the calle del Tapao, it is said that a wealthy burgher of the city during the 1500s had been horribly mutilated in some unknown accident. Different versions abound, he was burned, he was cut up in a fight (possibly over a woman), he was a veteran of battles against pirates or marauders, he was a prisoner returned from Mexico. He was never seen during the day, but at night he would emerge from his house, this very building, wearing a cape and heavy iron mask that covered his grotesque scars, and he would walk the desolate dark streets. The street had its official name, but from then on it became known as the calle del Tapao. What must this man have suffered, living in such an estranged fashion among a very social people in a small backwater of what was once a great empire, haunting the nocturnal streets with his unrequited desire for something he lost, a search ritually repeated night after night. Here was a man who tried to flee from himself and yet remained trapped inside that heavy iron mask, those ponderous stone walls, and the suffocating glances of the prying citizens. No one knows what became of him but the stories multiply.

We migrate through life and through the spaces that others have carved out before us. Whatever roots we put down, they do not arrest our passage. We are caught up in an incessant motion. Each new step is a step away from something whose loss is irrevocable, painful, and whose memory is fixed forever in innumerable scars that atrophy the flesh. But it is also a step toward discovery, and the consolations of philosophy. When Cortez burned his ships on arrival at the shores of Mexico, he must certainly have felt a little death as he turned his back once and for all on the Caribbean where he had made his first mark on the world. With the burning of those mahogany timbers, he dispelled the remnants of a past life and the materials used to enclose it. He condemned his tiny army to a desperate venture in the interior of an unknown jungle and no one at that moment knew the outcome. It was a bold gamble; but it was characteristic of the man, because I suspect he knew there was no standing still, that one had to keep moving, keep venturing, keep testing, keep playing at the edge of one's abilities. Born on a dirt farm in barren Extremadura, he knew in his blood there was no resting on the earth, and even when he arrived at the lush tropical promise of Española, he didnt tarry, he kept moving. He claimed an Empire for Spain; what did he claim for himself? the power and privilege to undertake more expeditions. Even in his death he never stopped travelling. He was exhumed something like ten times and managed to travel between the Old and New World throughout the subsequent centuries up until 1947.

The Death of a Patriarch

2007-01-11T14:23:00.000-04:00

Some time around the New Year, Simon Lopez, my wife's grandfather, started to complain that he was having trouble swallowing. Pastor, or Pito as his family and friends call him, was considerably weakened after a couple coronary incidents which he miraculously survived by dint of tea prepared from foxglove and his own sinewy toughness. Though he spent most of his days resting in a chair on the porch, watching life go by, and occasionally cracking a wry joke, his appetite was hearty enough, and he would eat a sizeable lunch, as is the Dominican custom. Since he continued to eat according to his wont, no one paid much attention to his complaint.

Pastor was 94 years old. That is the family consensus, though I am not sure that anyone can find any legal paperwork to verify that figure. He had been a farmer, and after selling his land, he became a "zapatero" or shoe repairman in one of the marginal barrios of the capital. By the time he reached his late seventies, he retired to live with one of his daughters, my mother in law, in her little house in a town called Sonador. Estela herself had had a tough life. When she was barely adolescent, she went to live with a family in the capital to work for them. She was, essentially, a Dominican version of what Haitians call a "restavek." Families with a surplus of mouths to feed sometimes lend out or even sell a child to a family in order that the child no longer siphon off limited resources. Our neighbor in Sonador recently offered to give me one of her daughters, the idea being that she would cook and clean for us in exchange for room and board. I declined. While this arrangement can be quite cruel, with the lonely child separated from its family and forced to work as an indentured servant, the case of my mother in law was apparently quite different and she enjoyed a good relationship with her new family, learned a lot of things, and was given much support in her subsequent efforts to make a life for herself. She worked at a variety of jobs, both in the informal and formal economy, and eventually ended up working at a savings and loan association where she was greatly esteemed. Later on she became a leading member of an informal loan association in the community. After moving from one humble shack to another, and farming her children out to various members of the extended family while she tried hard to get a leg up, she saved enough money to buy a small plot and built a somewhat modest house of cinderblock at the end of a street where the poorer residents mostly lived in small wooden shacks. We are slowly remodeling the house and presently, though still rather small, the front rooms and the porch have been entirely redone, the space amplified, and a lively color scheme of dark and light blue, ochre and yellow applied.

Sonador is relatively prosperous: on one side of the highway, at the edge of extensive grazing land owned by the Induveca meat company, there is a nice residential area with modest middle class homes, a "play" (baseball field), a police precinct, a town hall, and a stage where the fiesta patronal is held annually. On our side of the highway, the town continues to sprawl, and there are some nice homes mingled among smaller, often unpainted cinderblock houses and wooden shacks which in turn are painted. Along the edges of the town the roads peter out and stony paths lead to farm fields, rivers, and orchards. Where there are paved roads, there are also sidewalks, albeit narrow ones, and there are good sewage lines, plenty of water, but barely any electricity -- wires yes, but not much electricity conducted along them. Everyone has some kind of homemade relay coil to regulate the faulty current.

Pastor passed his final years here, and occasionally spiced up his life with a visit to the city where he would stay with one of his daughters and see girlfriends from time to time. I cannot imagine he was able to do much, but one aspect of the Dominican male is his constant preoccupation with the Dominican female. More energy goes into talking about them (chisme, or gossip), or talking to them (tirando piropos, dandoles muela) than into any other form of social intercourse.

So it is perfectly apt that Pastor's final days would be spent surrounded by women. When the difficulty swallowing progressed to serious respiratory problems, he was interned in a clinic for a spell, and when he returned home he was confined to his bed. All day long a constant stream of visitors appeared at the door. The visitors are men,women, and children, family members, neighbors, friends, and people from the area, but the women are the most important and most honored. Everyone comes to sit a spell, look in on the wasted figure lying beneath the mosquito netting, talk to the family and share some folk wisdom. Each visitor has his or her nugget of advice: "give him plenty of caldo (chicken broth); you all make sure to eat enough and keep your strength; well he's certainly old enough, but he may pull through si dios quiere," and so on. While everyone is concerned, and everyone lends a hand, Estela nonetheless took the precaution of emptying the house of valuables that might otherwise be carried off by one of the compassionate visitors. Though their grief and concern are genuine, their covetousness is no less compelling.

The majority of the visitors, the constant ones anyway, are older women. They are the ones in the community responsible for affirming the connection between this world and the next, they prepare the pilgrim for his progress to the other side, and they affirm the most basic teachings of the bible and the people's traditions. They watch over the afflicted: they wash them and feed them and medicate them and succor them. They show up daily to pray. They sit or stand in the crowded little room at the side of the bed, each holding rosaries, and they finger the beads as they intone sonorously

Por su dolorosa pasión
Ten misericordia de nosotros y del mundo entero;
Por su dolorosa pasión
Ten misericordia de nosotros y del mundo entero;
Por su dolorosa pasión . . .

One woman leads off with the first phrase and the rest chime in afterward with the chorus; this classic call and response is what structures the traditional music of merengue and "palos" as well as all the ritual chants. Its somnolent rhythm is both soothing and thrilling; it recalls the ancient mystery of the sacraments, and the cunning imagination of slaves who turned their masters' beliefs into a simulacrum of their own cosmology.

Outside the house the children provide a different chorus of shrieks and laughter as they run around in the street playing their games.

Debajo de la cama
Hay un perro muerto
A él que diga ocho
Se le come el muerto
(underneath the bed there's a dog that's dead;
whoever says the number eight, has to eat the dog that's dead.)

Though the adults at times shew them away or chide them for making noise, I fancy that Pastor might not mind their cacophony. I imagine he feels pulled in two directions at once, with contrapuntal melodies signalling each drive. When he hears the chanting of the crones, he surely realizes that he is not long for this world; and when he hears the clamor of the children, perhaps he drifts back over his own past and dwells on the many delights of the incarnation. But as his body slowly collapses, as it becomes harder and harder to breath, impossible to eat or even swallow water, his mind undoubtedly becomes unanchored, he drifts, and the myriad ties that bind him to the world in the form of memories and smells and voices and familiar objects are slowly, inexorably loosened.

Toward the end his mind goes. He hears voices and asks who is speaking; he mistakes one person for another; at times he is confused and at others he is quite lucid, states his needs clearly, stares you right in the eye as if to signal that he knows you, he is still here, he lives. But he teeters at the edge of two competing realities, and is gradually losing his balance.

The dying may lose their mind, but the dying also achieve clarity. The meaning of things appears with an awful brute simplicity. Pastor was no bourgeois, but I imagine that his final thoughts were not unlike those of Ivan Ilyich, who, faced with the finality of death, was compelled to confront the utter fecklessness of our hollow social conventions. And I imagine that he wondered, like Ilyich before him, "Agony, death, . . . what for?" He veered between fear and acceptance. When the xrays were produced, and the mass of perverse flesh that was closing off his esophagus made its dramatic appearance on film, he couldn't bear any talk of cancer and refused further tests. He didn't want to know. Perhaps by not knowing, by not certifying the existence of this malignant growth, he might yet escape its consequences. After all, he knew nothing of its existence before and all he had felt was discomfort. The rest was medical mumbo-jumbo, a world filled with incomprehensible terms, unpleasant ministrations, and vague worries. If he ignored it, it might leave him be.

But unlike Tolstoy's famous character, Pastor did not scream for three weeks on end, nor express any disgust, nor lose his patience. He kept his dignity. When the moment came, it wasn't Pastor that was finished, it was death itself.

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On the morning of July 18 th , when I returned to the capital to attend a meeting, Pito began his final agony. His breathing grew shallow and labored, he became restless. Gradually everyone realized that his hour had come. The neighbors gathered at the house as word went round that Pastor was dying. Everyone did their best to comfort him. My daughter, who is three and a half years old, was uncertain about what was happening but knew quite clearly that this was a momentous event. She held Pito's hand and stroked it soothingly, asking him if he felt better. Despite his agony, Pito nodded assent.

At one o'clock in the morning, Pito stopped breathing. Brunilda (his granddaughter and my sister in law), broke into tears and so did Vitalia, one of his three daughters. Estela however held back her own, turned to my wife and said, "no tears, don't cry." And Ada silently nodded. The women washed the corpse and dressed it. The coffin arrived shortly and they lifted Pito into the simple grey box. Then they removed all the furniture and cleared a space for all the people who would soon start arriving. Death in the campo is not in any way an abstraction, it is a present fact of life, an intimate reality. Institutions have no hand in it. No doctor is present, no one signs a death certificate, no mortician whisks the troublesome corpse away for cosmetic remodeling. Death raps sharply at the door and takes over the sala with all the pomp of a fat burgher. Despite his abruptness and his imperiousness, he is not considered a rude guest and is not unwelcome. The people patiently render their hospitality and their respect.

When I arrived around noon on that Saturday, a sizeable crowd was sitting under the tarp that had been stretched across the street as well as in the sala. Various people were busy circulating food and tiny plastic cups of strong sweet coffee. After greeting everyone I made my way inside to greet each of the principal mourners, hug them and listen to their wailing. This is the custom. As you embrace each woman, she inevitably lets loose a fresh litany of grief. My mother in law held me tight and through her tears she lamented, "¡ay, jonny, tu te fuiste cuando Pito empezó agonizar, su agonía comenzó cuando ya te fuiste, tu no estabas, Pito se me fue, Pito se me fue, no queda igual, ay jonny jonny, ay!" And there is not much one can do but murmur some consoling words, hold on to her and wait until she releases you. Then you go on to the next devastated mourner and the litany begins again. They keep this up all day.

My daughter took me aside and said to me with barely restrained excitement, "Papi, Pito is sick. He's in that box. You want to see him?" So I lifted my daughter up and we looked at the face of Pito through the little window on the top of the coffin. In the tropics only the very poorest people will have an open coffin, since the tropical heat begins to corrupt the corpse immediately and the sweet smell of dead flesh would otherwise nauseate the onlookers. Pito looked relaxed and peaceful. His flesh had a slight yellow tinge, but otherwise he looked purged of his burden; he looked as though he had achieved some wisdom.

Some time around three o'clock, the evangelicals began to sing and preach. An earnest young man with a bible in his hand preached to the audience and assured them that while original sin had forfeited mankind its original immortality, God in his wise providence had arranged things so that we could be redeemed, so we should not lament Pito's death. He was not dead, he had merely passed on, he lived on in the heavens. After the evangelicals had their chance to work the crowd, the men assigned to carry the coffin assembled, lifted the coffin up, and the march toward the cemetery began.

At the head of the mass was the coffin and the evangelicals and women singing. Behind them came another larger group made up of weeping mourners. Pito's daughters and granddaughters had to be supported by men on either side of them.

Behind that group came a smaller one, led by Estela, my wife and daughter and a few stragglers. The marchers made a tight circle around the center of the town and then passed through the cemetery gates. A sizeable crowd remained outside to watch the proceedings. We gathered in front of a wall composed of little cubicles in which the coffins are placed, a sort of condominium of dead renters. The cubicle costs two thousand pesos annually (about 62 US dollars).

The coffin was laid on the ground while the masons prepared the cement and cinder block that would seal Pito in his tomb.

The women broke out in tears and laments again, while the men comforted them and choked back their emotion.

Various children climbed on top of the tombs for a better look. When the coffin was lifted up and slid into place the wailing grew more frantic, the act of sealing the tomb as each block was set in place and cemented being such a desolate act, so mundane yet so final, as it cut Pito off forever from the rest of us.

Afterwards the wilted crowd straggled out.

That night the inevitable commentary struck up as everyone assessed the event. Bruni, my sister in law, who had had a rough time of it and cried so much that she became hoarse, was particularly angry at various family members for not having done their part. Death is a financial as well as an emotional event, and while the ritual we observed certainly had a cathartic effect, it did not ease the worries over money. Pito was head of a large family, with many brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, but for the past ten years Estela had shouldered the burden of caring for him, housing him, and feeding him. She also footed the bill for the velorio. Bruni went straight through the list of family members and spared not a single one. She too had helped to pay for everything and was at that moment sheltering a variety of children and not receiving anything in return. When she calmed down, Neno, her husband, changed the topic and commented on the fact that many people had turned out to honor Pastor. " pero llegó mucha gente, y no el tigueraje, pero gente de respeto, gente que vale. " And he was right, there had been a big crowd, and it wasn't composed of the usual worthless layabouts, but all the respectable people in town. Pastor's passing had been noted.

My daughter Emily stuck close to me. She wanted me to bathe her, dress her, and feed her, even though she normally insists on doing everything herself. As we settled into bed exhaustedly, she struck up a litany of questions, repeated endlessly like the prayers we heard earlier.

"Papi, why was everyone crying for Pito?
Papi, why did they bury Pito?
Papi, why did Pito die?
Papi, where is Pito? . . ."

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