by Tim Butcher
Victor could afford that perspective. His parents were socialists who had fled the Trujillo regime and had made money in the USA. He wanted for nothing, and had just finished a film studies degree at NYU. As cynical as I was, however, I had to concede that there was some truth in what he said. Looking back on my childhood, I saw the misery I remembered was all mine, and mine alone, and spread by me to others in the form of my constant city-girl’s grumblings about life in Cocoseco. In retrospect, I had been a beacon of gloom. Renata, and even Christina in her own way, resembled the other villagers; in spite of their squabbles they were essentially happy souls.
In New York, and America in general, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the material wealth, people often seemed so joyless and depressed. A commonplace incident brought this home to me. One day, on the subway, I was crushed next to a man reading a novel, smelling of beer and cigarettes, his pores secreting slow-mo bullets of sweat before my very eyes. His shoulder, hip and leg were welded to mine, and I could feel our breathing synchronise. I noticed suddenly that there were tears in his eyes, and as I only saw this man in profile, I would never know what this book had said to him or had triggered in him, that moved him so. I wanted to ask, but by the time I was emboldened he had risen and was gone. I thought about the madness of those transitory intimacies which doomed us to know nothing of each other, and for the first time, I yearned for home. I thought of Rudy, Christina, Mama Aida, those children I had never seen, and even Grandmother Monica Santos back in Santo Domingo. But most of all, I longed to speak to Renata.
She was supposed to be somewhere in this great city, working in a restaurant, but still there was no response to my emails and Christina would not divulge her whereabouts, if indeed she knew them. I asked around Washington Heights; nobody had seen her. Almost every time I passed a restaurant I was compelled to look inside. My phone calls to Mami invariably ended on her usual note of complaint: ‘Both my daughters have abandoned me! What selfish children I have raised!’
On graduating for the second time with a master’s degree in Applied Marketing, I took a job as a lecturer in a community college in Long Island. It was decent pay and for the first time I was able to send money back home to Mami. I would go to my local Western Union office every fortnight after I was paid my salary, and send whatever remesa I could afford on to her. This had the immediate effect of quelling her histrionics on the phone and made her less inclined to suggest that I should give up my life here and return to the Dominican Republic.
In time though, my old relationship with Christina began to reassert itself. Soon the money I sent was never enough. She would call me a tacano, and worse, while I referred to her as a dirty campesino, fearing that my hard-earned cash was being squandered on shirts for Benjamin, or some other idler that she’d taken up with. Every time I sent her payments, in my mind’s eye I could see Christina inside the Vimenca in San Juan, counting out the pesos, a taut sneer of entitlement pulling at her features.
I enjoyed working in Long Island, although it was further from the city than I would have liked. The trek was arduous, involving the subway ride from 168th and Broadway to Penn Station and then an MTA commuter train to the college. I got on well with my students, but after a while, I decided I wanted to move on and applied for a similar post in Spain. I had broken up with Victor. It was yet another sad ending, as with Alexi and Eric, but like them, I felt blessed by knowing him. Victor and I were unable to keep our hands off each other, but this papered over the cracks of two fundamentally incompatible sorts; I was a doer and he was a dreamer. All he talked of were his ideas for screenplays I knew would never be written, and films that would never be made. A new business partner, usually a producer or financer, would be put on a pedestal, only for the relationship to subsequently dissolve in bitter recrimination with unreturned phone calls. Our fights were as tempestuous as our love-making, and something had to give. Spain seemed to offer a change of scene and a new adventure.
7
I flew to Madrid to attend the interview. I was staying with Mariasela, a New York Dominican friend who had earlier relocated to that city. I took some summer leave during the college recess, planning to stay in Europe for three weeks. At the interview, the Spanish spoken sounded so formal and elegant that I felt more like an ignorant peasant speaking in my own tongue than I ever did talking English in America.
There were many Dominicans in Spain, the vast majority of them women. Mariasela’s boyfriend, Severiano, was a Spaniard, and he joked about the supposed sexual insatiability of Dominican girls. I did not take too kindly to this as I had known only three boyfriends, and had led a far from promiscuous life. I have a temper, and I was somewhat on edge after the interview, so I carried the argument on that night as we went to a bar. I grew increasingly annoyed with Mariasela; she seemed to be taking Severiano’s part, against her own countrywomen. While she said nothing in essence that I did not agree with, and she was inoffensive when compared to Severiano’s increasingly hostile taunts, I did not think it appropriate to focus only on the negative side of our society in front of foreigners. At North Carolina and NewYork, I would always stress the good things about my country: its intense natural beauty and the generosity and laughter of its people.
Suddenly Severiano looked out the big window and pointed across the street to two very young women who were going into an apartment block. He said in his teasing leer, ‘They are Dominican prostitutes who work from an apartment run by an escort agency. They take their tricks there!’
I was not concerned with his words, because all I could see was that one of them was my sister Renata! Here, in Madrid.
The fury and frustration welled in me and I rose and threw my rum-and-cola drink into Severiano’s face. It trickled down onto his silk shirt and his white jacket. He screamed abuse at me, shouting at the waiter to furnish him with a cloth. As he ranted, all I saw was the spoiled face of privilege. Later, I would speculate; was that the same emotion my mother grew to feel when she looked at my father? Had his affectations and those of his family really become so repulsive to her? Was it the humiliation of their rejection that compelled her to leave Santo Domingo for Cocoseco?
We all went home, still quarrelling, Mariasela in tears, and I took my belongings and left their apartment, checking into a modest hotel. Mariasela (and, I must admit, even Severiano) protested, trying to salvage our friendship as she implored me to at least stay the night and think it over once we had calmed down. But my own temper and the cruellest coincidence had soured everything, and I needed to be alone so that I could confront Renata without outsiders knowing of our family disgrace.
8
The next day I went back to the same bar, took the identical seat in the window that faced out onto the apartment, and waited. After less than an hour I saw Renata come back with a man, an old business type who wore fine clothes. He left about thirty minutes later. Then another man came to the apartment. I could see the lights go on and off. Then another. I went out onto the street to get a closer look at the comings and goings. I once saw Renata stare out the window, before an old gringo put his arms around her and pulled her back into the room. I was cold and there were all sorts of undesirables hanging around. One slimy creep with gold teeth and greasy hair looked at me and made a lewd proposition.
‘Mama guevo! Hijo de puta!’ I cursed at him.
The smile never left his face. I moved away and rang the bell to Renata’s apartment and was buzzed in without having to speak on the intercom.
To my surprise, the door in the apartment I judged to be hers was ajar. Inside it was sweet smelling and softly lit. Renata had evidently been expecting someone: no doubt another client. I could hear her disembodied voice, coming from the bathroom. ‘You’re early tonight, you bad boy. I’m just getting myself ready for you. You are so naughty, coming early and trying to catch me unawares like this!’
My heart sank at her words. It was true, she was more than just a viajera; she was a cuero.
We
aring a black negligee, and taking a swig from a bottle of Volvic, Renata stepped into the room. She was as slender as ever, and still looked like the teenager she was, but something had hardened in her eyes. She was shocked into silence when she saw me standing beside the white leather couch, no doubt looking chaste with my handbag in front of me.
Her eyes narrowed on me, ‘Who the fuck are you and what are you doing here? If you think you’re working this apartment you can think again. Call Geraldo at the agency and you’ll find out that we’re booked in here …’
I never expected that she would fail to recognise me. But it had been seven years, eighty pounds and several dress sizes. I smiled at her. ‘You sound so like Mami!’
Her face expanded in recognition. ‘Elena! My God! I don’t believe it!’
‘Hi, Sis,’ I said, but as I advanced towards her, I saw that distraction and calculation had already entered her mind, and I received only a tense, perfunctory hug.
‘You have to go.’
‘No way, we need to catch up, the emails I sent …’
‘I’m expecting company. You really must go. Now!’
‘Look,’ I averted my eyes from her briefly to let them stray around the apartment, taking in its sleek, minimalist furnishings; a brown leather settee, glass coffee table, plasma television set and a generously filled cocktail cabinet. ‘I know what you’re doing here.’
‘You know nothing,’ she spat with ferocity. ‘Just get out of here!’
‘Renata … it’s been so long … we have to catch up …’
‘There’s nothing to catch up with! Go! Get out of my sight!’ She pointed to the door.
I didn’t know what to say. I knew that my mother had deep grievances against me, but I never imagined that Renata felt the same. ‘Why are you rejecting me like this?’
‘What the fuck are you talking about? Me rejecting you, the trust fund girl!’
‘I only left in order to better myself …’ I faltered. She had never had that opportunity, and I was now realising just what that meant to her.
‘The letter,’ she smiled cruelly. I swear my heart fell into my stomach.
There was nothing I could say.
‘Your silly little letter. The one Papi left you. The one you buried.’
‘How … how do you know? …’
‘It’s gone. I burned it.’
I fought my anger down, trying to remember my drama training. Keep thinking in the abstract. It was only a piece of paper. What mattered were the sentiments contained in it, and these will stay with me until I die. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said sadly. ‘How did you find it?’
‘Remember your Rudy, with the stammer?’
Rudy. I wanted to say that he was never mine, or at least not in the way she thought, but I resolved to keep my silence.
‘He missed you when you left and started hanging around me when I came back to Cocoseco to visit Mami. He kept asking me for news of you. We chatted and he let slip about the letter. He wouldn’t tell me where it was at first,’ she smiled, briefly a teasing little girl again, ‘but I managed to persuade him.’
‘Renata, it doesn’t matter …’
‘Correct. It doesn’t matter at all. Now get the fuck out of here and go back to New York or North Carolina or wherever. Just because you’ve lost some weight and learned how to put on make-up, it doesn’t make you any less of a stuck-up frigid lesbian bitch. Now fuck off!’
I was shaken and physically trembling. I had been totally unprepared for this rejection and her spiteful whorish vitriol.
Just as I made to depart, a tall, middle-aged man with spiky but receding blond hair came in. He was well-dressed and spoke with a Dutch or German sounding accent.
‘Aha … it is my lucky day, yes Angelina?’
I winced at the mention of Renata’s whore name. I felt sick to my core at the notion of my sister giving her body to all those strangers.
‘Two ladies for the price of one … but, it will be the price of one,’ the visitor added emphatically.
‘It’s only me, Ronald. My friend is just leaving,’ Renata looked hatefully at me.
‘OK,’ I conceded, beaten and cowed, feeling for the first time in years like the fat, stooping girl in Cocoseco, and now just wanting to be out of this nightmare and back into the sane life I had built for myself. ‘You know my email if you want to get in touch,’ I said meekly.
Renata remained silent, but her blazing eyes ushered my departure.
‘It’s a shame you are going,’ the oily Dutchman or German purred as I exited.
The next day at the hotel, I rose miserably and after breakfast checked my emails. I learned through Mariasela that the college where I had been interviewed had got in touch, and I was to call them. A departmental secretary informed me that I was regrettably unsuccessful on this occasion. This no longer concerned me; I did not want to be in Madrid if my sister was here, earning her living in this vile way. My Spanish dream was now hopelessly tainted. I cursed her and the whores like her who had given Dominican women like myself a bad name in Spain; I even managed to blame her for my failure at the interview. All I thought about was my precious letter. It represented what I loved most about Cocoseco, and she had destroyed it through spite and jealousy.
I was able to change my flight tickets and was planning to head back to New York early. It was then I had the inspiration: I still had time left before returning to work and I would use it to go back home to the Dominican Republic. Mami needed to know about Renata.
9
Santo Domingo airport had changed for the better; it was tidier and more ostentatiously wealthy. I rented a car and drove into the city. As I sat in Panavi, a chic pastry café on Gustavo Mejia Ricart, I could have been somewhere fashionable in Madrid or NewYork City. It was evident that alongside the poverty, there was a growing sophisticated professional class, and I even toyed with the notion that there might be a place for me in my home country.
I had felt the obligation to visit my grandmother Santos although we had no relationship beyond that of the sponsored and the fund administrator. In her eyes, I was not the last remnant of her dead son, but rather the living evidence of the ‘whore that had destroyed him’. Grandmother Santos believed that my mother was some kind of jezebel, who, by getting together with my father, had determined that his fate would be a grizzly one. Then she’d sealed this by abandoning him, his subsequent grief making him careless, causing him to be under the path of that tumbling bulldozer. Sometimes this passive marital distraction was refined into something more sinister; a positive curse by this country witch. This led her to another obsession, with that of the Haitian construction workers whom my father supervised. They were also candidates for culpability in his demise, especially as one of them was driving the upturned bulldozer, and survived unharmed. ‘Filthy African cannibal pigs,’ she spat, ‘let them stay in their own cesspit of a country!’
Some things never changed: no matter how bad circumstances were here, Haitians would always be worse off and the targets of our fear and loathing. Experience had taught me that every nation in the world seemed to need a detested neighbour as a scapegoat. Living in NewYork, I had learned that Puerto Ricans often entertained similar prejudices about us Dominicans.
I stayed one tense and desperate night at the home of this embittered woman before heading to what we call‘the south’ (though, for the first time I realised, I was actually travelling west) in the modest car I’d rented at the airport. The road to Azua was teeming with workmen, just as it was when I left over seven years ago. I recall this as Papi had taken me out there. In this time the work seemed to have progressed little, though my mind might be playing tricks on me.
I made progress onto the San Juan road, the country as beautiful as I remembered it, and got to Cocoseco just as the light was beginning to fade. The town was also very much the same, or so I thought until I got to my mother’s house. There I could scarcely believe the evidence of my eyes. The old clay and tin-roofed
shack was gone, and instead, there was a stucco mock-colonial house with pillars, gate, railings, patio, with the walls painted a mustard colour. There was further evidence that it was a piecemeal development with construction work to the rear still very much ongoing. It had pride of place on this side of Cocoseco.
My head made a brief, involuntary turn across the road to Freda’s home, and yes, our place was grander. As I looked back to confirm this, I noticed that my mother was sitting on the porch, with a woman who looked familiar and a man who sparked no recognition in me. They appeared very relaxed in their moulded white plastic chairs. Christina was fuller of face and body, and she wore a green tank top and side button-up jeans, which stopped at her calves. Her thighs had taken the biggest hit of fat; they looked meaty, encased in that tight denim. Her hair was pinned back and had been newly straightened, and she wore gold-hooped earrings. I suddenly recognised the smiling woman next to her. I could not believe that Freda Sanchez, Mami’s formerly detested rival, was sitting with her on the porch drinking iced mango juice.
Mami smiled wanly at me but made no attempt to rise. Instead she simply said to the others, ‘My daughter has returned. Look at her!’Then she turned to me, ‘Do they not feed you in America?’ And as she broke into a tight grin, I found myself fighting back tears that were welling in my eyes.
‘Please excuse us, Freda,’ Christina said, somewhat haughtily. ‘Federico, bring the boys to see their sister and aunt, and tell her grandmother Aida that our Elena Rosa has finally graced us with her presence.’
