by Tim Butcher
Do not think of Jesus as your friend, and please never believe that having a baby when you are still a child yourself can ever redeem a girl such as you. Do not think that a life of struggle in order to feed the many mouths you might be inclined to bring into this world is a virtue that will sanctify you. It is not and it will not. And please, never ever think of yourself as some sort of insurance policy for either of your parents.
Be strong and proud, and go and live your life on your own terms.
Yours always,
Papi
This letter inspired me, but it caused me much sadness, as I took its existence to mean that Papi had been intending to go far away, perhaps back to the USA. It also presented me with a big problem as I had to keep it hidden from Mami. Had Christina known of it, she would almost certainly have destroyed it out of rage and jealousy. She had received nothing from Jose or his family, and her plans for a dream house were gone for ever. We were condemned to live in the horrible shack.
I buried the letter in a spot by the river, close to what I called Papi’s bridge, enclosing it in a red plastic bag to protect it from the rains. Although every line of it was stored in my head, I needed it as a keepsake. Sometimes my mind would play tricks on me and I’d ask myself, did he really say that? and I’d be compelled to go and dig it up to re-examine its contents for affirmation, before re-consigning it to the earth. I guarded my trips to the riverbank jealously – there was no such thing as privacy in Cocoseco.
While I sobbed most nights, Mami had never shown any real sorrow about Papi’s terrible fate. But one day, when I was coming home from school, I saw her standing on the bridge he had built, looking down at the river he had rerouted. I swear there were tears in her eyes. I went to her and hugged her, but she pushed me away, and it was never mentioned again. I suppose she had other things to occupy her with Renata and myself. My sister meanwhile had scant recollection of her father, and had little to remember him by. Unlike me, she thrived in the campo.
Although I now looked forward to my goal of university, my existence grew more torturous with every passing day. I seemed to sprout breasts overnight, and every time I ventured outside the boys wouldn’t leave me alone. I grew fearful and depressed by their gestures and remarks: I knew that only fraudulent intent lay behind their idiot grins and trickster words. I didn’t want to sleep with any of them and I certainly didn’t want a baby, unlike so many other girls. But then I learned to be clever: I pretended to be religious. I walked around with a distracted saintly air, and slept with a plastic figure of Jesus by my bed. This made me a favourite of Mama Aida, who pronounced me a girl of great virtue and grace. I loved my grandmother, but there was something slightly deranged about her. Sometimes when I went into the house, I would find her sitting alone in the dark, muttering like a lunatic in a thick country dialect I could barely understand.
3
Renata was Mami’s favourite. She was always full of fun, an exuberant and playful young girl who was continually berating me for only being interested in my studies. Though we were close, we were very different in our outlook and sometimes fought. The one thing we did have in common was that we had both inherited Mami’s temper and her obstinate nature. I was often supposed to be responsible for Renata when we were outside, but sometimes my younger sister would run away out of devilment. This always got me into trouble with Mami. ‘You must take care of your sister!’
When she got to ten or eleven years old, our paths started to divert. The extreme flattery Renata received from older boys was much more than I ever had to endure. She was different; though at first she was as embarrassed as me, Renata soon started to look back and cock her head, enjoying her power over the boys, loving to illicit more nonsense from their mouths. She was cut from the same cloth as my mother.
Christina was constantly being wooed by the well-dressed papichulo of our village who went by the name of Benjamin. He always wore new shirts and expensive sunglasses, and drove the coolest, finest blue motorconco that anyone had seen. He also had the first cell phone in the campo. Once he volunteered to drive me into San Juan, so that I could visit the library there. I refused this offer; I was scared of Benjamin and avoided him. His hungry eyes seemed to follow you everywhere. Christina disdained him, while casually and light-heartedly spurning his attentions. ‘He is so ugly. That one is wasting his time around here.’
I was growing more self-conscious; painfully aware of my difference from the other girls my age in Cocoseco, most of whom now had children. I carried myself badly, and was always getting told off or slapped around the head by Mami or Mama Aida for slouching when I walked, or for not looking at people. Mami had the harshest tongue but my grandmother was worse; from the shadows those heavy, bony knuckles would shoot out and rap your skull with the warning, ‘Lift your head and keep your eyes off the ground!’
I did not eat well and food became a comfort to me. I guzzled as many sugar-laden fruit drinks as I could, and started to bloat. Renata, meantime, had entered an early puberty and had the figure of a slim but curvy film star. I would cross myself in public when there were groups of boys passing. Soon they started to ignore me, or more accurately the compliments stopped and became jokes.
Not quite all the boys acted that way. There was one, Rudy, who was my friend at school. He was a shy but studious boy, with a stammer that became pronounced when he grew nervous. The other boys mercilessly tormented him. They mocked his condition, and called him a paricon or a palomo. At school Rudy and I put on a play about a girl who slept with a boy who was pestering her to prove her love for him. The boy gave her AIDS. Her mother found out and killed the boy by stabbing him in the heat of the moment. That play was our revenge on Cocoseco. My friendship with Rudy served another handy purpose; everyone assumed that we were having sex, and left us both alone. This, when all we would do is just talk about theatre! He became my closest ally, and I even showed him Papi’s letter.
I wanted to study drama properly, and dreamed of becoming an actress. The cinema in San Juan was only very occasionally operational, but films could be shown in Cocoseco on black market DVDs. Our neighbours, the Sosa family, had a DVD player provided by Maria’s absent husband, and the movies were my other main source of joy besides books. I would watch them with Mami, Renata and the Sosa girls, enthralled by the way they took me into all those different worlds.
*
Graduating from school was the best day of my life. I had my picture taken with my certificate, but Mami put it in the old trunk she kept by her bed. I took a bus to Santo Domingo to meet my grandmother Monica Santos, to discuss my future education. By now my dream was to study drama in New York City. Unfortunately, Mama Santos, who controlled the money and therefore the conditions of my trust fund, had decided that I would study Hotel and Catering Management at a university in North Carolina, USA, in the town of Chapel Hill. This way, she explained, I would be able to return to the Dominican Republic and work in the tourist industry. My father’s people were patriots; his own father (and Mama Santos’s husband) had been murdered for opposing the dictatorship of Trujilla. Mama Santos fervently believed that educated Dominicans had a duty to stay in the country and help to make it better. I sensed that was a viewpoint she had enforced upon my father.
But this was not what I wanted. It was my passionate desire to get away from the Dominican Republic and never return. I’d always had dreams of a different life, and only took proper interest in my family or neighbours when someone in the campo talked of a relative or a friend who had gone to live in New York or Spain. But while the course of study was not what I desired, North Carolina was the first step to a new life and I was excited to go.
4
I took little with me to the USA; in my haste to get away even my father’s treasured note was left buried in its safe place. There would be time to retrieve it later, and I fantasised about briefly returning to Cocoseco as a success, and digging up the letter and reading it to Mami, before heading back to America for good.<
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In the event, it took longer that I thought to settle into Chapel Hill’s student life. The campus at North Carolina was a different world; I came across few Dominicans and Latins in general seemed thin on the ground. But I loved the freedom, and as my English grew better, I made several friendships. Best of all was the study bedroom I had in the student apartment block on campus; everything was so fresh, with cleaners coming in to service it, and no chores, all we had to do was study! And of course, there was the amazing library. Without discussing it with Grandmother Santos, I changed my classes from Hotel and Catering Management to the more generic Business Studies, specialising in Marketing. In the interests of employment, I was prepared to forget about my dreams of becoming an actress. There was a drama society at the university which I joined, though self-conscious of my ever-increasing size (American food and its generous portions were irresistible after the DR), I kept behind the scenes, working in stage management.
I received regular news from Cocoseco, usually emails from Renata, who got ferried regularly to the Internet Café at San Juan by some boy on the back of his motoconcho. Her emails comprised mainly of gossip about the neighbours and boys, and the goings-on in the campo. This was much easier for me to engage with from my laptop in the luxury of my study bedroom on the North Campus Community at Chapel Hill. Then, suddenly, the correspondence stopped. As weeks and then months went by, I was forced to call Benjamin; Renata had sent his cell phone number in case of an emergency, and he informed me that my sister had been gone for almost six months. He then put me on to my mother who explained that Renata, just thirteen, had married, as she put it, a boy from a neighbouring campo and was having his child. The boy in question was ‘no good’ and Christina called Renata foolish, but still did not advise against her moving in with his mother and sisters. ‘I have enough on my hands,’ she said, informing me that she was soon to be a mother again.
I greeted the news with silence.
‘Did you hear me?’ she growled through the static.
‘Who is to be the father?’ I asked, and was not in the least surprised when she told me it was Benjamin.
‘He has changed,’ she contended. ‘He now plans to go to university to study law and business.’
I wanted to tell her that she was delusional, that Benjamin studied nothing but the spots on dominoes and the curves of passing women, and never would, but this was unnecessary as it was evident that my silence had spoken in my stead.
It was sufficient to precipitate an attack on me. ‘You think you can judge us all, with your education and your travelling! You’ll be a cranky, virgin spinster like your po-faced grandmother Santos!’
I forget my reply, but it was something along the lines that, whatever else could be said about her, my father’s mother could scarcely be described as a virgin. Logic was never Christina’s strong point, however, and I learned that my religious charade had been convincing enough for her to be completely taken in by it, as she began to disparage my supposed service to God and Jesus.
I felt it was time to put her straight on that issue. ‘I never cared about religion,’ I cut in when she stopped for breath, ‘I only pretended to do so to be left alone by the idiots in our shit-hole of a town, as I planned my escape from the festering squalor of your home. The figure of Christ I only used to pleasure myself with,’ I hissed.
This was a lie, but it stopped Christina in her tracks. I heard her gasp; it was as if that figurine had just breached her in the very way that I had described. ‘Cuero!’ She shouted through the static, as prayers spilled from her mouth into my ear for the first time ever, asking God and his son to forgive me. How much was in response to Mami’s genuine shock and how much in her customary habit of guilt-tripping was impossible to ascertain.
5
I was deeply concerned about Renata’s fate, and checked my email regularly, but still no contact was forthcoming. Each time I called Christina we ended up arguing, but I sensed that she was growing tired. My mother now had a son, and she told me that there was another baby on the way. Benjamin was in hospital, he had got into a fight with a man at the gallera – inevitably over money or women – and his lung was punctured by a knife. It seemed to me appropriate that he was injured at the pelea de gallos, and I felt no remorse at all. Christina herself seemed to care little; she sent him back to his mother’s to be nursed (or Benjamin had simply gone there, I never got the real story) while she bore and raised their second son.
It was after the arrival of this child that Mami started exhorting me to abandon my studies and return to the DR. ‘I need you to come back and help me!’ she wailed. ‘I have two sons, your baby brothers! And your nephew, little Luis, your only sister’s child; you have never even seen them! Come back and help me!’
In spite of everything, and as much as I loved my studies and my life in Chapel Hill, I was prepared to give them up and go back to Cocoseco and do my duty. But then I thought about how hard I had worked and remembered my father’s words in that letter buried in the soft, rich soil by the banks of the Rio Negra.
… never ever think of yourself as some sort of insurance policy for either of your parents.
When I think back to this time, it scares me how close I was to throwing it all away, and going back to a place that I hated, subsidising a lifestyle I deplored, and for someone I had grown to have such contempt for. So I stayed on. But still the calls came, no matter how expensive they must have been from Benjamin’s cell phone, of which Christina now seemed to have permanent possession. Never was Renata’s name volunteered, and when I asked Mami about my sister’s life in her new home, she was evasive or spoke in generalities. Yet she continued to plead with me for help. There was always something. One of the boys had a fever: a charity was helping with medicines, but she needed her daughter here. A storm had damaged our home and ruined our meagre possessions: in such trying circumstances, the help of her daughter was essential. Two members of a family in the campo had drowned, trying to get to Puerto Rico. I had to come back.
Why, I thought, why? What can I do? ‘Go and get Renata to help! She is your favourite!’ I shouted.
It was then Mami confessed to me that Renata had vanished from her mother-in-law’s home in San Marco, the neighbouring town to Cocoseco. At fifteen years of age she had simply walked out one day, leaving her new family, apparently bound for New York with a friend. Renata had left her infant son at her sister-in-law’s, but they had promptly dispatched him back to Christina and Grandmother Aida. Now Christina had three small boys to look after, her own pair (one and two years old) and their two-year old nephew!
At that point, rather than buckle, I became strangely fortified. Through the lens of my student life in the United States, I resolved that I was never going back to that place of madness, there was no way a modern woman could live such an existence. To my mind, the women that did live back in Cocoseco were now practically indistinguishable from the multi-teated black puercos, goats and bitch-dogs that were tethered miserably in the compacted yards by the tin-roofed shacks, left to rake through piles of festering garbage for old morsels.
Mami did not take this well, particularly when I was moved to verbalise my reservations, and she deployed some of the curses previous used on Freda Sanchez. ‘Asarosa! Puta!’
Her scorn meant little, however, and her concerns were at best peripheral to the life I was leading on the college campus. I had finally found a boyfriend, Eric, a sincere Colombian engineering student. We were thrown together by the prejudices of race and size which decreed that as the two overweight Latins on campus (to say nothing of being desperate virgins) we were meant to be together. So we became a couple; two fat and studious nerds who explored each other’s flabby bodies with fevered lust, excited and repelled in almost equal measure by what we discovered.
I learned that there is nothing like getting fucked to change one’s perspective on life. Things that seem crucial and lead to prudishness or obsession tend to pale into insignificance in the fac
e of the power of sexual gratification. I looked at the people whom I had scorned back home in a somewhat different light. I realised that the problem with places like Cocoseco was not their culture of promiscuity, just the fact that this went in tandem with a lack of individual responsibility and the absence of women’s rights. It thus helped to keep women oppressed and men in a permanent state of infantilism. Again, it was my books, and in this case feminist writings, which provided me with the tools to understand who I was and where I had come from.
Eric and myself made a pact to get in shape, changing our diets and visiting the campus gym regularly. I found it easier to stay on course (poor Eric never managed to kick his addiction to American food: candy, Coca-Cola, hot dogs, burgers and fries), and the pounds started flying off, to the point that other men were soon noticing me. To Eric’s sadness, one was Alexi; a Ukrainian, who was a passionate, powerhouse lover. I suppose that it was this gringo who further helped me find the Dominican woman within me, the one I had forcibly repressed for so long.
6
A fuller life did not curtail my focus on my studies and I graduated second-from-top in my year, with an excellent degree. Crucially, this enabled me to obtain a bursary to go on to New York City and take a master’s qualification, and I now no longer had financial dependence on Mama Santos. New York suited me even better than Chapel Hill, as there were many Dominicans in the city and I moved into the community at Washington Heights, sharing an apartment close to Juan Pablo Duarte Boulevard. I loved the Spanish-speaking life on the asphalt of 163rd Street, and on the sidewalks of bustling St Nicholas Boulevard. At times it felt as if all of Santo Domingo was here, with the Dominican flag flying proudly from balconies, apartment windows, storefronts and patelito stands. Following his graduation, Alexi went back to Kiev, and our relationship fizzled out in cyberspace over a string of emails.
I met my next boyfriend, Victor, at a local theatre group’s comedy improv production. He was a second-generation Dominican but had only been to the old country once. Nonetheless, he had a rose-tinted fascination for it, and hated me deriding the place. ‘You’ll be estranged from yourself as long as you’re alienated from where you grew up. The Westerners feel that they want to condemn our poverty, because it affronts them. Well, I want to condemn their misery. It affronts me! Let them do something about that first; fix their own miserable, unhappy lives!’
