Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  There are no words that could do this moment justice. More than anything, this place feels familiar. I bury my hands in the hot sand and think about the embodiment of memory or, more specifically, our natural ability to carry the past in our bodies and minds. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation. I quietly thank this ancestor of mine for surviving the trip so that I could one day return.

  * * *

  “Pull. Over! Pull over to the side of the street,” yells the police officer during our first few moments in Tangier. He noticed the tip of Lisa’s camera peeking out from the back window. He begins to yell as if we’ve been caught with kilos of cocaína rather than a video camera. Thinking about having to replace a smashed or confiscated Sony EX3 camera, and losing footage in the process, freaking nauseates me.

  “Oh shit, what the fuck?” says Lisa.

  “What the hell did we do?” I ask Adnane.

  “No worries. You are welcome. I will take care of this.” Adnane jumps out of the car and begins to reason with the cop. There is something about him that can make the biggest asshole smile. Had the man lived in the States, he would have had a promising future as a diplomat or a hip-hop exec.

  The two begin to laugh, and Adnane asks Amina to come out and introduce herself, which she does.

  The brigade touristique, or the tourist police—the tourist police is this gully—walks over to the driver’s seat and shakes Mounir’s hand. Then he walks over to shake both of ours.

  “You welcome,” he says, smiling, in broken English. “I am to sorry for scaring you, please, enjoy your time here.” I don’t answer but offer him a forced smile, thinking of how this scenario would have played out had I not been with Adnane.

  Tangier has always been the international crossroad of the world, if not one of its most seamy. Everyone has had a piece of her. Greek traders and Phoenicians were the first to settle here. The latter fashion plates introduced the djellaba to the country. The Imazighen, Morocco’s oldest inhabitants, and Arabs have maintained a long-term presence, and the city was passed back and forth for centuries between Portugal, England, and Spain. When France and Spain began carving the country up like a turkey in the 1920s, Tangier was made an international free zone with all kinds of tax breaks and incentives making it the place to be. This is what attracted a bevy of artists, writers, thrill seekers, and sexual misfits. Tangier became a place where the living was cheap, inspiration was everywhere you looked, and young boys were available to fuck at a dime a dozen—all desirable prerequisites for living la vida expat.

  Fast-forward to recent times. The current king sees the city’s potential and nurses Tangier back to health. Let’s not get it twisted, though—addicts sailing in from Andalusia are tweaking on all kinds of drogas, and there are enough prostitutes here to film a Moroccan edition of Pimps Up, Ho’s Down.

  Nevertheless, Tangier is a charming city with inspiring grit. Like the rest of the country’s cities, this one is divided into an old medina and a Ville Nouvelle. This is a city where you can see the Atlantic on your left and the Mediterranean on your right in one sweeping motion. The southernmost point of Spain is only seventeen miles away from the Cape Spartel lighthouse. I’m ultimately here to connect the dots and see where one story likely ended for my father’s own personal Adam before another one began over in Spain.

  It’s so clear today I can make out the silhouette of Andalusia across the strait from my rickety white plastic chair. We’re at the coolest open-air café on the planet, Café Hafa, with plastic bags full of chicken sandwiches and greasy french fries. Decades ago, we might have caught the Rolling Stones and Paul Bowles smoking hashish in any one of these stadium seats. We may have seen Henri Matisse, Samuel Beckett, the Beatles, William Burroughs, just about anyone who epitomized cool, sipping mint tea and creating art inspired by their surroundings.

  Today the café is packed with men talking shop and playing backgammon, and groups of schoolgirls in and out of hijab, doing homework. We order rounds of strong coffee and sweet mint tea for our crew. “Please keep them coming,” I say to our waiter.

  I’m just beginning to soak in the last several whirlwind weeks here. I think back to the fortune teller I met back in Fez. Something tells me she’s right. I’ll be back.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Running the Fukú Down

  Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.

  —ROBERT HEINLEIN, HAVE SPACE SUIT—WILL TRAVEL

  BACK HOME, I FIND A MESSAGE FROM ROCÍO SITTING IN MY Facebook inbox. Half of me hoped she hadn’t responded. The other half wasn’t sure she’d care about our mitochondrial DNA or our direct maternal ancestors’ origins.

  It turns out our haplogroup is L3d, sub-Saharan African. When sifting through the results of ancestral DNA tests, it’s not out of the ordinary to find matches across dozens of countries, with varying percentages of likely origins. However, that isn’t the case with us here. Within our haplogroup, every single match pointed to a pinprick of a place, located on the westernmost tip of Africa that’s easy to overlook. Bordered by Senegal in the north, Guinea on the south and east, and the Atlantic Ocean on the west, modern-day Guinea-Bissau is one of the smallest countries on the continent.

  When I find out that our Supreme Matriarch is West African, things begin to make perfect sense. A chill runs down my spine. I will never meet this woman Rocío and I descend from in this world, but I’ve already encountered her in my dreams. She is la africana, who in different scenarios has jumped in to save me like a guardian angel. She is the same africana whose face I’ve never seen but whose body—thick legs, a tall frame, and large healing breasts, sometimes dressed like a pauper and other times in elegant long multicolored ruffled dresses—I’ve known since I was a little girl.

  I imagine the woman we descend from is someone who had a fukú put on her by a jilted lover, a jealous woman or a diviner to whom she may not have paid a debt. I can see it clearly, how this curse between mothers and their firstborn daughters may have started with her. I broke that maldición by breaking away from my own mother and unloading the baggage I would have otherwise inherited.

  The fukú may have had origins in a marketplace in precolonial Guinea-Bissau when it was a part of the kingdom of Gabon, a territory of the Mali Empire, areas of which endured until the eighteenth century. Or it may have happened during the Portuguese invasion when parts of the region became Portuguese Guinea, known as the Slave Coast, in honor of its most booming economic activity.

  This would be a more likely scenario: My maternal ancestor’s mother or grandmother made a detour into Europe first, finding herself in the Kingdom of Castile where she had one or more children, including a daughter from whom the women in my family descend. And that daughter, known as a Black ladino, was reared as a Christianized African. In 1510, seven years after the first African slaves were forced onto the Spanish colony in present-day Dominican Republic, the first sizable shipment of Black ladinos arrived on the island. Perhaps L3d, la africana, was one of them. Or she may have migrated to the island from present-day Haiti.

  All the above scenarios are possible because there are many roads, some indirect, that bridge the African continent to both sides of Hispaniola. The one thing I know for sure is that had the transatlantic slave trade not happened, I would have never existed.

  In fact, the eastern side of Hispaniola was the first place in the New World to import African slaves to work the sugar mills and tend to their hypocritical Christian masters’ needs. Like their European counterparts, the Spanish were ill equipped to live in the tropics and thought manual labor was beneath them. They couldn’t realize their New World dreams for themselves even after they confiscated the land and drove down the numbers of the island’s Indigenous inhabitants by slavery, genocide, and disease. The genetic evidence of Columbus’s effect on human migration to the island is still there, on the bodies and in the ess
ence of Dominican people.

  * * *

  Maybe the melodrama, the moment our First Mother, if you will, was damned, played itself out on a cobblestone street in the colonial district of Santo Domingo, the first permanent European settlement in the New World that still exists today.

  I’ve had this recurring dream several times: An angry voice is screaming in a barely recognizable creolized Spanish. I can’t explain why I understand what’s being said, but I do. “From this day on, the women in your family, living and not yet born, will break from one another in total repulsion.”

  I can see la africana only from the back, this time dressed in gaudy Spanish clothes that seem too heavy for the tropics. She slowly walks up a hill, trying her best to shrug off the fukú as superstition, powerless words from an archaic hater. And yet something in her knows better. I sense that she feels uneasy. The same gods who kept her from succumbing on her journey to the New World, regardless of whether or not she acknowledged them, were fickle and sometimes irrational.

  * * *

  The curse followed us here to another land. When I gave birth to my daughter, I had to confront the fukú for fear it would present itself in our relationship. My desire to slay the curse is why I worked so hard to earn my daughter’s love and respect from the first moment I held her in my arms. It is the reason why I checked my ego and accepted Dad’s offer to help me break the first link shackling my spirit—my less than ideal choices in men—so I could direct my energy to mother my daughter in a loving environment.

  I remember looking at my newborn, sitting in an infant car seat as I packed the last of my shit, and saying to her: “Listen kid, it’s just you and me now, so let’s help each other out. Always be honest with me, and show me how to be the mother and father I never had. I’ll make a mess of things sometimes, and I’m sorry in advance, but I’ll try. My word is bond.”

  Djali, a hair over six months, may have been smiling at me or just gassy, but I started feeling better. The guides Casimiro identified in Maria’s apartment lifted me up and, with that, hooked me up with a new set of cojones. I worked through my postpartum depression by taking the pressure off myself to be perfect, and praying to my spirit guides to continue propping me up when I was too exhausted to stand on my own. The fukú was starting to reverse itself. I could feel it. For breaking that first link, the universe rewarded me with a beautiful and smart daughter, a fine career, and someone to love, you know, in that way.

  * * *

  I’m tempted to delete Rocío’s email and pretend I never reached out to her in the first place. I clearly remember the last time I saw her, though it feels like a lifetime ago. We were at Antonio’s house in upstate New York. He orchestrated the whole thing. My grandparents, who had recently relocated from Santo Domingo, came over. Rocío flew in from Florida, accompanied by a man she’d recently married. I was months shy of turning twenty-two, and pregnant. I thought this was an ideal time to connect with Rocío. It was my duty, I felt, to foster a relationship with this woman, though I hardly knew her. Not doing so, I thought in my hormonally imbalanced mind, would somehow negatively affect my relationship with my own unborn.

  I didn’t recognize her when I first saw her at the train station. Rocío’s thick dark mane was cut into a dreadfully layered strawberry-blond Dorothy Hamill bob. She was curvaceous, wore hazel contacts, and had ditched the Bostonian accent. Just by looking at her, I guessed that Rocío’s new husband was either white or Latino with a European phenotype.

  On the drive to my uncle’s house, Rocío didn’t ask how I was doing. She never inquired about my pregnancy like the rest of the family did. Rather, Antonio and I were made to sit through a long wedding video starring Rocío, dressed in a virginal white gown, and a groom wearing a dim-witted expression plastered across his face.

  “Is your husband lobotomized?” I asked.

  Rocío laughed. She was too enraptured by the telenovela unfolding before us to listen to me. Their video featured many close-ups of the new bride staring deeply into her current love’s eyes with an intensity that rivaled that of José Luis “El Puma” Rodríguez.

  “Come and meet my man,” Rocío said to me.

  We walked to the picnic table, where my grandfather was already sitting with him. Rocío’s new husband sat hunched over on a bench, avoiding eye contact with everyone at the table. We found out, after prodding him, that he’d been born in Cuba and ended up in Miami several years earlier because of a lottery.

  “What did you do in Cuba?” Antonio asked.

  “Oh, I used to cut the balls off of goats,” he replied in a Cuban accent, still avoiding eye contact. Antonio smiled, thinking the guy was joking. He wasn’t. Dude didn’t crack a smile. I wondered if this weirdo was one of the people I’d read about whom Fidel Castro, known to have flooded the States with mental patients and criminals, had rigged the lotto for.

  Rocío interrupted. “What do you think of my papi?” she asked me.

  I said nothing, concentrating on not breaking out into laughter.

  “What do you care what she thinks of your papi?” Mama snapped. “She doesn’t give a shit.”

  “Oh, Mama,” Rocío said, chuckling, “you are so tough.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” the groom blurted out. He was visibly uncomfortable, almost squirming in his seat.

  “Papi,” Rocío said, “let me go with you. Okay, mi querido?” They disappeared for almost an hour.

  “I wonder if she’s going to literally wipe his ass,” Antonio said. “He looks like he’d need the help.”

  Papa excused himself for a nap. He never returned to the table or left his room for the rest of the weekend.

  I left without saying goodbye. Several months later, Papa died.

  Rocío and I spoke once more, when she called me the week following 9/11. I sat on my bed, staring vacantly at the cable box and counting the minutes it would take this time for the conversation to go from her miserable life to how awfully Dad treated her when they were together. She went on and on, and I, zoning out, said nothing. Maybe I was exhausted, but a rush of sympathy for her washed over me about fifteen minutes or so into her soliloquy. My birth mother was so fettered by her past that she couldn’t ask, not even this time, how I was doing.

  Then I felt nothing.

  * * *

  I stare at my inbox. I like not knowing Rocío’s number or her address. I’m just as happy that she doesn’t have mine. However, after discovering Dad’s results so far I’m curious to contact her and see what I can mine that will give me clues about our ancestry. I’m also interested in whether she’ll live up to the hyped-up stereotype that all of us Dominicans, here and on the island, vehemently reject and deny, deny, deny . . . our Blackness.

  I open the email. My first impulse is to throw up in my mouth, but I don’t. Rocío starts the letter with “my beloved firstborn daughter,” which irks the hell out of me. This isn’t one of those reality shows about the reunion of a mother and the daughter she gave up for adoption at birth because she was too young or too broke to take care of her.

  I can’t believe what I’m reading. The molasses-sweet prose—granted, it may have read less dulcet had it been written in her first language—is making my gums hurt. She sounds delusional. I can’t help but think that she missed her calling as a romance novelist or a telenovela screenwriter. “I consider myself blessed for you to address yourself to me even if it is at the autumn of life, just before winter approaches and memories and life are far gone . . . A trip to roads long ago walked . . . a visit to moments not yet gone . . . memories frozen that enable us to grow . . .”

  “What did your mother say?” Sacha asks.

  “A mother isn’t the person who births you; it’s the person who rears you and shows you love,” I bark, immediately regretting it. “I’m sorry, man, it’s just annoying.”

  “Well, are you going to interview her, or did she say no?”

  “I can’t tell if she’s saying yes or if she’s tell
ing me that she’s dying of something. It’s cheesier than Velveeta and as authentic.”

  I respond to Rocío’s email with the formality I’d accord any stranger, even on Facebook: “Thank you, kindly, for your note . . . I will make plans . . . Best . . .”

  * * *

  Over the years, I’ve maintained a sporadic, mostly textual relationship with one of Rocío’s daughters. Michelle has always fascinated me because she stood out, even more than Giselle, from the rest of Rocío’s litter. I swore that Michelle was a Chinese boy when I first met her as a toddler in Boston, and when I was told she wasn’t, I argued the fact with her mother. She favors her father physically more than her other kids do, and she has Rocío’s Asiatic eyes. I imagine they came from that ancestor on Mama’s father’s paternal line. Mama and Antonio have told me the same story with no variations about this man who originally came from a land they referred to as Indochina, modern-day Vietnam. Supposedly, three brothers left the country seeking adventure. One ended up in India, the other was lost at sea, and one landed on the north coast of the Dominican Republic.

  Michelle first contacted me after she turned eighteen, then again after becoming a wife and mother grappling with her own identity. She wanted to visit New York City for a breather, and I played host.

  When we met after all those years, I still felt no spark or a familial bond. Nothing magical happened, and the feeling was mutual.

  “Raquel, really, it’s all fucking good,” she said in a straightforward, husky voice. “It is what it is, and it’s beyond us.”

  I think I would like Michelle more had she not been related to me through Rocío. She is a blunt, no-bullshit woman who spent part of her adolescence living with foster parents—I don’t know how that happened, considering she lived in the same town as both Rocío and her father.

  I text her: “I need a favor.”

  “I’ll pick you up at the airport and drive you wherever you need to go,” Michelle responds almost immediately.