Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  “It’s interesting how so many Arabs and Jews share ancestral origins, and yet there’s so much beef between them,” I respond.

  I pace back and forth in my kitchen, speculating which of many ways this branch of my family may have washed ashore in the Dominican Republic. I can only surmise how this man arrived in Hispaniola. He may have entered the country as a crypto-Muslim or a Moor, after Spain’s reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. There’s really no way to quantify exactly how many crypto-Muslims immigrated to Hispaniola or the rest of the Indies because they weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.

  The more Bennett breaks it down, the more questions and scenarios whirl through my mind.

  “There’s absolutely no doubt it’s North African. Perhaps at some point his ancestors had Jewish cousins,” Bennett says. “It’s likely that your dad’s direct paternal line descends from either North Africans or maybe Neolithic farmers who migrated west to Northern Africa from Iraq until they reached Spain. It’s looking like he may most likely be of Berber or, rather, Amazigh, descent. Either way, it’s very rare, because nobody in my entire database matches him.”

  I had no clue what to expect on either side of Dad’s family, especially his father’s side of the tracks. I still don’t know what my paternal grandfather looks like. Every time I tried to talk Dad into taking the ancestral DNA test, I’d also ask to see photographs. I was curious what his father looked like, but whenever I asked for a photo, he’d respond, “We’ll see,” and change the subject.

  I’ve rarely heard Dad talk about his father. What I do know is that he moved his family from the Dominican Republic to Aruba for some time when Dad was a child. Dad also told me they learned how to speak Papiamento, a local language that has more ingredients than a pot of sancocho: different African dialects, Spanish and Portuguese, with indigenous, English, and Dutch words. I know that Dad’s father was a successful importer/exporter for a while until he inexplicably lost everything and moved to New York City sometime in the mid-1950s. And that’s about it.

  I’m hoping that once I reveal his direct paternal ancestry to him, Dad will become inspired to start sharing something other than CliffsNotes about his life with me.

  * * *

  “Can you come over after you finish eating lunch with Djali?” I ask Dad.

  “Yeah, sure, but why? Are you going to make coffee?”

  “Yes, I have some information for you.”

  “Oh, did you buy me a one-way ticket to Matanga?”

  “I would like nothing better than to buy you a one-way ticket anywhere you want.”

  “Oh, you are sooo sweet”—pause—“like, like, a lemon.”

  About ten minutes later, Dad rings my buzzer.

  He’s wearing his trusty gray sweatpants, a bright red sweatshirt he bought in Seville with a white polo shirt underneath, and one of his gaudy fake gold watches that’s too big for his delicate wrist. I don’t think any of his watches tell time accurately. And then there’s his hair. Sometimes it’s silver, and other times it’s kind of a light brown courtesy Just For Men. Today, it’s freshly cut and somewhere in between.

  Alice is sitting opposite Dad on the antique couch in the living room. She hands me an envelope with an old report card from St. Thaddeus, a few black-and-white photos of me as a child in the Dominican Republic, and two photos of a man I’ve never seen.

  In the first photo, a handsome trigueña with eyes like mine is staring through me. She’s wearing a sheer black veil over her head and a conservative dark dress with what looks like tiny light-colored polka dots. Her expression is familiar, somewhere between dignified and wretched. The woman reminds me of an Andalusian flamenco singer I once watched belt out song after song about losing it all—love, life, men, children, her mind—while exorcising the pain by stomping her feet and clapping her hands until I was almost moved to tears by the agony of it all. I recognize the woman in the antique photograph. She is a young and distant version of Dad’s crestfallen mother, Ercilia.

  Ercilia is holding on to a small boy’s wrist with her large right hand and almost caressing part of his left cheek and ear with the other. The small boy, dressed in high-waisted slacks and a short-sleeve button-down shirt, with light hair and slanted eyes, looks somewhat like Ercilia and nothing like the well-dressed man posing with them in the photo.

  “Who is this?” I ask Alice, pointing to the man in the photo. The brown-skinned stocky man is standing only several inches over Ercilia’s petite frame. Dressed in a dapper suit with slicked-back hair kept in check with grease, he looks like someone James Van Der Zee would have photographed during the Harlem Renaissance. His nose is wide, his lips are full, and his eyes are more Asiatic than Ercilia’s. She and the man have epicanthic folds in common.

  “That man is Eduardo’s father,” says Alice. “He’s Ismael, your grandfather.”

  “That’s weird,” I say. “Dad is lighter than both of his parents. It’s like he wasn’t in the oven long enough.”

  “You know you can’t tell what you’re going to get with a Dominican family,” says Alice. “None of your father’s siblings really look alike.”

  The second photograph is smaller, somewhat damaged by a fold running across the young man’s mouth and by mold from the rust of an old staple. It looks like a passport photograph. This one is also of Ismael, Alice tells me, but he is much younger in it. I can make out the color of the well-dressed man’s feline eyes, a light green, with folds almost covering his eyelashes.

  “He was very good-looking,” Alice says.

  “Yeah, where did you get your face, Dad—the mailman?” I ask.

  Dad doesn’t bite the bait. I am somewhat disappointed by his silence. He is sinking into the couch, looking straight at Alice.

  * * *

  I’m not really too surprised to find that Dad has Arabic or Amazigh ancestry; I’ve always seen it in his face. “There’s a greater chance you’re actually part Amazigh, the right word for the folks we know as Berber.”

  “Oh, okay,” he says.

  “Well, I don’t have those origins, I think,” says Alice.

  “Oh my God, Alice, this isn’t about you right now,” I say.

  “Yeah, Grandma, you sound like you did in the hospital when you said, ‘I never had heart problems,’ when Dad was laid up in bed,” Djali says, rolling her eyes.

  We’re all laughing except Alice. Her face is bright red. “I don’t know if you know this,” I say, “but you and Dad aren’t related.”

  “You don’t seem the least bit interested in your father’s side, but you should be very happy,” I tell Dad, looking for some hint of emotion in his eyes.

  “Oh yeah, why is that?”

  “Because for some crazy reason, Arabs are classified as being white on the census, even though many people in that community are challenging the classification. I find it odd, but then again, look at how Latinos are classified.”

  He looks over at Alice and shrugs.

  “What do you know about Ismael’s side of the family?” I ask him.

  “I don’t know too much about my family—my mother’s side, I don’t know. And I don’t know my father’s side, too.”

  “Didn’t you grow up with them?”

  He shakes his head. “No, I did not.” He sinks farther into the couch and lets out a sigh. Djali looks over at Alice. What do they know that I don’t?

  “Let me see,” he says. “Who did I grow up with?” Dad smiles, as he always does when uncomfortable or lying. “When I grew up, I used to live with my grandmother, my father’s mother. And when I was about twelve, I came to this country. But then I had problems here with my father and the new wife, and they put me in the street after two, three months. It was summer. And then—”

  “She’s not talking about that time,” Alice interrupts, “she’s talking—”

  I whisper, “Shut up, Alice, God,” in her direction. “How do you know what I’m talking about?”

  Dad rolls his
eyes at her. “Dah’ling, don’t get involved in my conversations, dah’ling. You get involved in every conversation, in everything I do.”

  Dad avoids making eye contact with me, preferring to stare straight ahead at nothing in particular. This man who used to scare the shit out of me when I was a child now looks like one of those abused animals featured in ASPCA commercials. I imagine Sarah McLachlan appearing like magic in our living room and, without a word, sitting down at our piano to serenade Dad with one of her crazy sad songs. The reasons why he was such a bastard of a father to me are starting to make sense. Dad sits quietly for a few more long minutes. I can tell by the distant mien on his face that he’s thinking about things he hasn’t in a really long time.

  * * *

  “My father was very, very well off in Aruba. He was a businessman who could not make money in his own country because of Rafael Trujillo and his brothers,” Dad says, “but more important, he had natural gifts for reading people.”

  “How did he ‘read’ people?” I ask.

  “He’s no a bad guy, like that Walter Mercado character, because he never use his gift to make money,” Dad says. “My father read the tarot—he knew it naturally. Whenever his spirit told him to do it for someone, he did it good and for no money.”

  I feel like I’m meeting someone new. Dad became obsessed with tarot cards a couple years ago, during one of his dormant time machine phases. He tells me something else I didn’t know. “Some of us—we were born with these kinds of natural gifts in my father’s family.” He explains what he means by “natural.” “I was born lucky. In Santo Domingo, we believe that children born with una corona are gifted and have a special purpose in life.”

  Dad was born with a caul, a thin layer of filmy membrane covering his head and face. Many caul bearers, spanning centuries and cultures the world over, are believed to be born clairvoyant and to possess other preternatural abilities. Dad believes his caul may be the reason why he was born with “too much vision,” resulting in the capacity to see clearly at night. His night vision triggered terrible migraines that only an operation corrected years later.

  “I was never afraid of the other world,” he says, “or any spirits, anything that other people say is crazy out of their own fear.”

  I’m shocked but try to act as natural as possible. I try not to show any emotion or break his train of thought with my own stories about dreams and spirit guides, though it’s hard not to. I wonder how much more I will learn about his and my ancestors once his mother’s direct maternal lineage is traced. He pauses, so as not to leave anything out, and rests his chin on his hand to think. “I have experienced a few things I will now tell you.”

  * * *

  The first thing occurs on Avenida Félix María Ruiz in Santo Domingo when Dad is just a kid. He has a dream that alarms him. In it, he sees his neighbors and their daughter killed in a gruesome car accident on a road en route to Santiago. Dad runs over to their home and recounts the nightmare to his friend.

  “Por favor, stay here this weekend,” Dad tells his friend. “I think you will not make it to Santiago.” He spends the rest of the afternoon begging her to talk her family out of their planned excursion. The little girl is spooked enough to take heed and urges her parents to stay with her in Santo Domingo that weekend.

  “But why are you so frightened, my daughter?” the girl’s father asks. The girl recounts Dad’s dream, much to her parents’ amusement. As most adults do, they brush Dad off as a harmless little boy with a vivid imagination and decide to go anyway. The girl stays behind. En route to Santiago, her parents are killed in a car accident.

  The second thing happens on La Ravelo in the capital. Dad is walking from his paternal grandmother’s house on an errand when he is stopped in his tracks by the smell of his favorite drink, café. He notices there’s a velorio for a teenage girl happening in the house where the aroma is coming from. Her mother can be heard yelling, cursing God for not taking her instead of her baby.

  Dad, deadpan from the womb, asks the first woman he sees, “Can I have una taza de café negro with two sugars, please?”

  “Don’t you want to pay your respects to the poor child first?” responds the woman, whose face Dad doesn’t remember.

  He looks up at the plain wooden box holding the girl’s body and suddenly feels a pull he cannot explain. He walks toward the coffin, where someone has placed a wooden box underneath so Dad can view the girl. Dad hops up on the box, places two fingers on her neck, and leans in a little closer. He listens for a few seconds and jumps off.

  Dad asks to speak to the deceased’s grief-stricken mother. “Señora, if you allow that box to go into the ground, you will be burying that girl alive.” The mother faints. Dad jets, running down the street until he is out of sight, somewhat annoyed that he didn’t get a taste of the sweet café he loved so.

  The news of the girl spreads like wildfire around the barrio. Dad hears she was taken out of her coffin and laid on her mother’s bed after a visit from a strange little boy. After several hours, the girl woke up.

  My father leaves the city weeks later to visit his paternal grandfather at his farm in La Torre where a third thing happens. Within hours of his arrival, Dad walks around the farm until he reaches its perimeter, marked by a row of bushes separating his grandfather’s plot from the neighbor’s. Dad looks over the bushes and sees a pair of gigantic black dogs with immaculate fur making their way toward him. They are walking on either side of a middle-aged peasant. Dad is spellbound by the enormity of the dogs. He cannot move.

  The man and his dogs almost glide through the thick mass of bush. “These dogs belong to San Lázaro,” says the man, who doesn’t exactly look like the image of San Lázaro. Known as the Miracle Worker, San Lázaro is a Catholic saint syncretized with the Yoruba demigod Babalú, and is usually depicted as an old man on crutches, sometimes covered in boils, dressed in purple or burlap rags, and accompanied by two small dogs. Still, the energy is undeniably not of this world. The man and his dogs walk so close to Dad they nearly brush against him. They don’t stop, almost floating past him, and then disappear before his eyes like an apparition.

  “After that,” Dad says, “I never told anyone else about my experiences, because people don’t believe you. But I know better. And I know that some of us are born with these gifts.”

  I say nothing, listening to Dad’s accounts as if he’s telling me what he had for breakfast or lunch. I don’t tell him that I understand where he’s coming from more than he knows. This is the longest conversation we’ve had without arguing or dissing each other.

  While still in Aruba, Dad’s parents separated and Ercilia went back to D.R. Ismael became involved with another woman, and his children and new piece didn’t get along.

  The handsome, dapper man in the photo sent Dad and his two sisters to the Dominican Republic to be raised by their paternal grandmother, Casilda, another person whose name I haven’t heard until now. When Dad was about twelve, she felt it was time for Ismael to assume responsibility of his son and shipped him off to New York City. Ismael had relocated to an upper-Manhattan building with his new wife and their children after somehow losing his good fortune in Aruba.

  Two things struck me about what Dad just said. First, that he could leave Santo Domingo during the reign of the tarantula in chief, Rafael Trujillo, on relatively short notice. Surely Trujillo’s monos would have sweated the family hard before allowing them to leave the country. Second, I was surprised to hear that Dad had lived with his paternal grandmother and not Ercilia. Somehow I couldn’t picture Dad in the loving embrace of a caring older woman.

  Dad says he wasn’t surprised by what happened once he arrived in Nueva York. In a dream, Casilda saw a period of very harsh times for him in the new city. “Be prepared, mi hijo,” she’d tell him often on the days leading up to his departure from Santo Domingo.

  Djali embraces Dad. I’m incapable. Instead, I ask him a really stupid question with an obvious answer. “Did you
r father and stepmother ever get in trouble or arrested for what they did?”

  “Well, no, they never got arrested. I remember they had problems. I think they had some discussion, and my stepmother said, ‘Take your son out of here.’ And he let me go with no money. Nothing.”

  I’ve been stung by the stories I’ve heard and the images I’ve seen at home and abroad of discarded children because, frankly, I’ve seen my reflection in each of their faces. I wasn’t expecting, however, to find myself in Dad, of all people. At the time he was thrown out like two-day-old leftovers, Dad was younger than my daughter is now. He was a boy who’d never seen snowfall or felt the drastic changes of the seasons on his skin. He was a child who didn’t know the language or understand how easily adults could morph into scary beastly things right before your eyes.

  * * *

  For nearly two years, Dad lived on the streets of New York City. He slept in the subway, the park, and the hallway and entrances of apartment buildings. Every now and then strangers would take pity and let him use their bathroom and take a shower. Nobody ever asked him how he became homeless. Dad became a scavenger, picking up clothing from the streets and trash cans, and whatever food supermarkets threw out at closing time. Not one person offered to help Dad locate his parents when he walked around the city like a child lost in a department store.

  One day Dad found himself back on Broadway, standing almost in front of the building where his father, stepmother, and best friend Bernardo lived. Before that day, he’d passed by the block but never ran into his friend. He’d sometimes spot Ismael from across the street, walking in and out of the building, to the bodega on the corner, and McDonald’s a couple blocks down. Life hadn’t stopped for his father. Dad wasn’t surprised.

  On this particular day, he felt something was different. For the first time since becoming homeless, Dad ran right into Bernardo, who was shocked to see his friend so tattered. Bernardo, a Dominican-American kid whose mother and stepfather shared Dad’s last name but were of no known relation, said, “I haven’t seen you in such a long time, I thought maybe you moved back to Santo Domingo.”