Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  “No. I don’t have no house—living in the park and in the train and, you know, wherever the night finds me.”

  “Oh, okay” said Bernardo, “come with me.”

  Bernardo’s parents took Dad in. I’d known that the elderly couple were related to me but wasn’t exactly sure how. Over the years, I’ve heard whispers that they unofficially adopted Dad. Like his mother and later me, Dad became a child someone picked up off the street out of compassion, a recogido.

  * * *

  As I sit close to Dad on the couch, a flood of memories I’ve tried to suppress rush to the forefront of my mind. One took place at a computer center in a relatively swanky Freetown, Sierra Leone, hotel. One night I walked into the center and found a friend working the night shift. Already a serious woman, she looked particularly down. “What’s wrong?” I asked her. “You look so so sad.”

  The young woman had taken her usual route to work that evening, walking by a street sweeper whom she recognized from a time when things were much worse in the country. The man, she said, was part of a gang of former soldiers—some of whom were children—who killed her neighbor. The noise of the woman screaming from having gone into labor earlier in the day annoyed the street sweeper and his crew. Then, she told me, the screams turned into terrible sounds she had no way of describing. The cries of the woman, who was prevented from giving birth, lasted for hours and hours. They kept the baby in the womb by ramming dozens of penises, bottles, and whatever else they could find up her vagina. Her neighbor eventually stopped screaming. The street sweeper, who likely put what he did out of his mind minutes later, smiled and nodded at my homegirl when he crossed the street.

  In a New Jersey bedroom, I stood before an ancestral shrine erected by my friend in honor of her late cousin’s daughter, Elisa Izquierdo. The altar, consisting of a framed picture of the little girl, a few of her personal effects, a bunch of white daisies, and a glass of water atop a wooden table, occupied a tiny corner of her otherwise messy bedroom. The shrine was next to the side of the bed I would be sleeping on that night.

  In November 1995, the six-year-old became the beautiful face of the miserable failure that was and still is our city’s child welfare system. Elisa, whose father had died of cancer, was isolated from her other siblings by her crackhead mother, Awilda Lopez, and her mom’s boyfriend. For some reason Awilda didn’t like her daughter, believing the little girl was possessed by an evil spirit. My comadre waged a battle against the city to adopt her late cousin’s daughter. She lost. Lopez and her boyfriend starved and tortured Elisa to death.

  Izquierdo’s murder begat Elisa’s Law, signed into legislation a year after her death by then-governor George Pataki. The press dubbed her a modern-day Cinderella, and I could see why. The girl was infectious, impressing everyone she met, including Prince Michael of Greece, who offered to sponsor Elisa’s education. Unlike Cinderella, however, this child was real, and her story didn’t end well. To listen to my friend relive the day she went to identify the little girl’s body, to hear details I hadn’t read about how Elisa’s mother and her mother’s boyfriend had destroyed the child, to relive the horror with her, made my insides ache.

  I asked my friend if she wanted to see Elisa’s mother dead.

  “No, negra,” she said, to my surprise. “Just sober, so that she will be tormented by the snapshots of what she did to that little girl for the rest of her life.”

  I look over at Dad, still adrift, and try to imagine that cute little boy in the picture, suffering. I don’t think that child could have imagined he’d grow up to become the same kind of animal he detested.

  “I stayed with Bernardo’s family in apartment number twenty-six for a long time,” Dad continues. “I went to school and, you know, they helped me until I finally got into show business.”

  Dad lived in the same building and on the same floor as Ismael. The father and son sometimes shared elevator rides in deafening silence. On occasion, Dad used to hear Ismael crying in the hallway from his new family’s crib, but he never spoke to his father again. Ismael’s wife left him for a younger man and moved somewhere on Long Island. Depressed, Ismael eventually committed slow suicide by drinking himself to death either in New York or the Dominican Republic. I’m not sure.

  “My father was not a bad person,” Dad says.

  “Are you kidding me?” I ask.

  “My father was not,” Dad says defensively. He shoots me a look reminiscent of the days when he’d follow it up with a slap or a punch or a kick. “Even if he put me out on the street, the problem is the woman, because she had too much control on him.”

  Silence is filling the room. Dad is looking at nothing. Alice is frowning again, and Djali is looking down at the wooden floor, undoubtedly saddened by what she’s hearing. Why Dad never shared this piece of his life with me is baffling. I don’t understand why he speaks about it so nonchalantly, like it was all good.

  As I look at Dad and think about my own childhood, my mind wanders back to that conversation with my comadre in Jersey, who has since died of cancer. I’d like to see Awilda Lopez confined to a cell for all eternity with her daughter’s crime photos plastered on the wall, but that’s not going to happen. Instead, she’s alive, while her daughter decomposes in a New York City cemetery. I confess that I’ve never given the process of truth and reconciliation a second thought, even after witnessing it firsthand in Sierra Leone. I didn’t think I was hardwired or evolved enough to grasp the idea—especially not the reconciliation part. Knowing that the street sweeper is probably still out there cleaning the streets or maybe even driving a poda-poda somewhere in Freetown doesn’t sit well with me.

  * * *

  Dad never told anyone about those first few years in New York City, not even his mother and sisters, when they reunited as adults in Santo Domingo.

  Dad’s father Ismael may have contributed to him being such a bastard of a father to me, and may have been a conduit for why he was so hell-bent on becoming someone other than who he is. While he avoids talking about my childhood altogether, unless it’s a gentler, kinder version, perhaps this is Dad’s way of giving me insight into where our beef stems from. Where sympathy and empathy collide may be what truth and reconciliation feel like for other people. Maybe this is what I’m starting to feel—at once informed and heartbroken by the image of Dad sleeping in a subway as a child. I feel like something greater ensured my own survival. More importantly, this protective energy enabled me to learn a valuable lesson from my parents: what kind of mother not to be.

  I ask Dad if he thinks being a caul bearer helped him survive the streets. “I don’t know, maybe,” he says. “Something was on my side, with me.” Yes. I overstand where Dad is coming from. We don’t talk about Ismael again.

  * * *

  Just as I start wracking my brain about how to get to Morocco with the hope of retracing the probable footsteps of Dad’s paternal ancestors, a freelance assignment falls in my lap.

  It doesn’t matter that the TerminEditor who hooks me up with the gig is about as pleasant to deal with as drinking a forty-ounce bottle of toxic waste. The assignment, covering a world music festival in Morocco, enables me to cut through the red tape of acquiring permission to film and roam around the kingdom freely. For a few days in Rabat, I’ll be able to traverse a decent stretch of the country. From the instant I accept the gig, I start praying to and thanking the ancestral forces that made it all happen.

  Back at our Dominican joint, Dad and I are communicating in the only way we know how: with bitter sarcasm.

  “Lissen, don’t get kidnapped in that Arab country,” he says, mostly joking. “You know how dose people are.”

  “Shit, Dad, so you not only hate being Dominican but now also partially Berber?” I say. “Why don’t you come with me to Morocco?”

  “Maybe,” he says, “if you come back alive first, then next time.”

  * * *

  Now what?

  First things first. By the time I come back fro
m Morocco, Family Tree DNA should have Dad’s and my mitochondrial DNA results from the lab. I know Rocío’s side of the family better than my father’s, but I can’t guess in which direction the results will point us just by looking at her or her mother. I haven’t seen Rocío in fifteen years or spoken to her over the phone in almost a decade. And before that, when I did sporadically see her as a child, she switched up her looks almost every single time, reflecting the flavor of whichever guy she was with. I cannot begin to imagine what she may look like today.

  I have to think this one through. Reaching out to her may result in some valuable jewels about the family that my grandmother, in her eighties, may shy away from passing down. Talking to Rocío could also unearth some potentially shattering or disappointing information about our familial history. I don’t know. Either way, I have to weigh the cons against the lesser ones and keep it real with myself. Am I ready to look this woman, who represents everything I despise, squarely in the eye?

  I have never bought in to the idea that blood is thicker than water. Love and respect are meant to be earned from our children, our spouses, our families, and our friends. My relationship with Rocío, or lack thereof, has reinforced that notion. Connecting to my birth mother may do little more than inject unnecessary drama into my already chaotic life. Besides, I can’t assume Rocío will want to have anything to do with me.

  * * *

  I’m packing for Morocco, trying to figure out the easiest way to find Rocío without sucking my grandmother or uncle Antonio into it.

  “How about Facebook?” Sacha jokes.

  “I don’t think so, but whatever, I’ll try it,” I say.

  I log on and do a search on Rocío’s name. There she is. Her profile is public, and the picture is from a time when I sort of knew her. Her wall is full of biblical quotes and shout-outs to her children. I come across a current photo; she now looks over a decade older than her fiftysomething years. In another photo, she poses in matching outfits with her grown children. Their smiles are as wide and antiseptic as they were in that newspaper photo I found at her Boston crib in the late ’80s, the last time we were all together under one roof. The image is so cloying that I may slip into a diabetic coma if I stare at it any longer.

  I’m discouraged at first. I still feel nothing for this woman. I thought somehow that extending an olive branch to my ancestors would result in an awakening inside me for her. It hasn’t. Is there something wrong with me?

  There’s a Moroccan saying: “A teacher will arrive when the student is ready.” I’m not sure who the teacher and student are in this equation, but that may explain why Rocío was so easy to find: because I am ready, or maybe because she is.

  I write her a short note before jetting to the airport with my travel companion and camerawoman Lisa. I plant a kiss on my kid and husband and throw my Ellegua headstone into my tote bag for safe traveling.

  It’s a sacred ritual. Travel challenges mental hoarders of stress and other useless shit to declutter. No magazine article or movie or book can embody what it’s like to make the journey, to arrive in a new place and taste the food, to smell the air, and to see and hear the ebb and flow of life. To me, travel is more valuable than any stupid piece of bling money can buy.

  * * *

  I probably won’t read it, but I buy the travel guide, the one with the most striking cover I can find—the one with a tall man dressed in a brilliant indigo gandora with his head wrapped in a faded yellow turban and matching leather babouches, standing in front of these enormous golden doors embossed with intricate shapes. I go as far as packing the book. Even if I don’t crack it open until I’m on the plane ride back home to New York City, I can use whatever I miss doing or seeing as justification to come back.

  What I do need is a map, which I cop from Chakib at the tourism board in midtown Manhattan, where I go for suggestions on routing my trip to the country of my dad’s direct paternal ancestors.

  “I want to watch the sun rise in the Sahara, like somebody must have in my father’s father’s line. I want to lay eyes on my distant cousins, the Imazighen, living on the Atlas Mountains. I’d like to visit Fez, and drive up the Atlantic coast to Tangier. I want to look at the south of Spain from the tip of Africa,” I say. “I want to bond with her rather than just walk all over her.”

  “Oh, you will definitely see a lot of Maroc,” he says. “You may even end up wanting to send for your family and never return.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Tripping in Morocco

  The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

  —SAINT AUGUSTINE, AMAZIGH SAINT

  WE MEET OUR GUIDE, ADNANE, AT MOHAMMED V INTERNATIONAL Airport in Casablanca. I look familiar to him, he says. He looks familiar to me, too, but there’s no way I could have met him before. Adnane’s never been out of the country, and this is my first time in Morocco. The closest I’ve come to this place is Andalusia, about a three-hour boat ride from Tangier, up north.

  “You know, when God made us, He made forty versions of every single being and then scattered them around the world,” Adnane says. “This is how we are all connected.” The “me” he knows, Adnane says, lives relatively close by, about a three-hour drive east of Rabat, where we’re headed on our way to the imperial city of Fez.

  “I believe you, because a dozen of you live in New York City, and at least half of them drive Seaman taxicabs.” I say. If Adnane took off his djellaba and wore jeans and a button-down shirt, he could be from a variety of Caribbean and tropical South American countries, including the Dominican Republic. “You look Garifuna, too. Brazilian, Cuban—you have many brothers scattered around the world. At least forty.”

  He shoots me a puzzled look. “What is a seaman? Does he work on a boat?” asks Adnane.

  “No, not exactly,” I explain. “They guide people by car to wherever they want to go in the city. Every single one I’ve met in over fifteen years has come from my country.”

  “The United States?” asks Adnane.

  He makes a good point. Depending on whom I’m talking to back home, I vacillate between what comes before and after the hyphen that identifies me. Most times, when I travel abroad, it’s a different story. Before President Barack Obama took office, I preferred to unload our burdensome distinction as the world’s imperial bogeymen and women by dumping the “-American” part of who I am. The hyphen has taken on an umbilical quality. I claimed being solely Dominican at times of convenience, like during former POTUS George Bush numero two’s reign. After a while I got tired of being asked “Wow, are all you Americans as stupid as your president Bush?” for the millionth time. The ascension of Barack Obama gave us a tight face-lift abroad, especially in those first few months during his short-lived honeymoon period.

  “I’m dominiyorkian,” I say, “a transnational who isn’t all the way American or Dominican but travels between both worlds.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “An American-Latino, yes, now I see,” he says. “Okay sister, welcome, Insha’Allah, we will begin our journey.”

  Adnane says something in Moroccan Arabic, or Darija, to our driver, Mounir, who looks much younger than his nineteen years, with a clean-shaven baby face and bashful countenance. He rarely makes eye contact. Mounir nods at Adnane, and we set off for the capital city of Rabat, a two-hour drive north of Casablanca.

  It’s a good thing we’re leaving. The frantic energy and stench of gasoline, similar to that in São Paulo and Santo Domingo, is overwhelming. It feels like I’m wearing a blanket of soot and oil on my face, hands, and hair. Imagine wrapping your lips around the tailpipe of a bus and inhaling the fumes into your body as hard as you can. That’s what breathing in downtown Casablanca feels like at first.

  I roll up my window and look out at the familiar faces of men and women walking together, some dressed in hijabs and djellabas, and others like hip Parisians in tailored black clothing, skinny jeans, and big curly hair. It feels like we’re driving down a mor
e beautiful (albeit grimy) version of Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens. Globalization by way of McDonald’s and KFC has captured the hearts, the minds, and from what I can see through the window, the growing bellies of the folks here.

  * * *

  We arrive in Rabat, the French-decreed capital and current political center of the country, and are greeted by a beautiful woman from the tourism board dressed in a black tank top and blazer with a pair of tight-fitting jeans and open-toed stilettos. Amina has thick raven hair that brushes a few inches below her shoulders. Her matching smoky eye makeup accentuates her awesome feline eyes. She’s wearing translucent powder several shades too light over a thick layer of ghostly face cream.

  I learn in the first few minutes of meeting Amina that she loves salsa music and dancing (yes!), anything French (I can dig that), riding shotgun (always, to our extreme vexation), swank (after long rides with her, I welcome that), and European toilets (will prove to be an annoyance outside of Rabat). She’s prone to regular outbursts and crying fits, which is kind of weird. Later, I’ll have to make up a story about my camerawoman Lisa being on some kind of crazy American medication that makes her snap, in order to make Amina stop sobbing when the delivery of my homegirl’s Bronx accent scares the shit out of her. All I want to do is connect to one set of Dad’s paternal ancestors, and here I am, stuck like Krazy Glue to a hysterical tour guide. And yet, it’s worth the drama because we’re two women traveling with film equipment, something you must be careful doing in the kingdom. It’s not like either of us is Richard Bangs, Rick Steves, or some other random white dude rocking safari jackets and khakis.

  * * *

  Today Rabat is a relatively quiet, almost dull seaside city with a population of just over two million. If its ancient walls could testify, the roar would be so deafening that one would find it almost unbearable. Its origins lay in the eighth century BC, when Romans and Phoenicians settled around the estuary of the Oued Bou Regreg River in today’s Chellah. When the Roman Empire fell into decay and subsequently split, the Imazighen turned the former settlement into a ribat, a fortress-monastery.