Maybe this is what Ercilia meant when she told me in my dream on that August day in Boston that things would start making sense someday. Perhaps those spirits, those ancestors, had something to do with my being here. In fact, I’m sure of it.
* * *
Jorge walks back in and sits on the crate next to mine. “Sabes, I’m also blessed with the gift of seeing,” he says. “You see how we met, right? So is this not true?”
I wish I could sit here all afternoon and listen to Jorge opening one proverbial door after another, granting me access to parts of my self I’ve second-guessed most of my life. Soon people start lining up again to consult with the spiritual pharmacist. It’s time for me to go. “I’ll see you soon,” I say. He doesn’t respond.
The sun is starting to set in the Zona Colonial as I make my way to El Conde, the district’s crowded thoroughfare, to catch a cab back toward Avenida Anacaona. I look up and see a family of squatters on the second floor of a colonial home. The mother has dark brown skin and thick braided hair. Her daughter, hanging wet laundry on the house’s iron gates, has long straight hair and light-colored eyes, either hazel or green. Looking at the people walking past me on the streets and thinking back to the photographs I viewed on the plane—especially Casilda’s—I’m left wanting to know more about where our ancestors came from.
Groups of very young women are starting their shifts on El Conde. They’ll spend the rest of the evening walking up and down the avenida in tight jeans and high heels until some man, any man, rents them for the night or the duration of his stay on the island.
I sit and wait for a cab on a bench in Parque Colón, watching shoe shiners—all of whom are small children—fight for customers. Pigeons are shitting all over a bronze statue of the admiral pointing off to somewhere in the distance, as an Indigenous woman—presumably the female chieftain, Anacaona, hanged by the Spaniards in 1503—is frozen in time climbing up toward Columbus. Families are eating ice cream while their children play tag and taunt the stray dogs that are a fixture all over the Zona Colonial. I wonder if Dad’s father ever played with him here, or in any park, at least once before throwing him out on the street.
* * *
I’ve been waiting all day to jump on Skype with Djali so I can break the mitochondrial news to Dad, who’s staying at my place while I’m away.
“Hi, dah’ling, you’re as sweet as a lemon,” Dad says, “have I told you that?” Djali cracks up in the background.
“Talking to you is always a pleasure, Dad, like drinking a tall glass of vinegar.”
“Wow, that is so, so nice,” he responds.
“Dad, so, I received the results of your direct maternal ancestry today by email,” I say. “You’re not Jewish on your mother’s side.”
“Oh, really?” asks Dad. “Then what am I?”
“You came out to have a direct maternal ancestry that points to pre-Columbian indios on the island,” I say.
Dad looks confused. “What do you mean, like dose Taínos?” he asks. “They were all killed—it was a terrible thing.”
“This DNA stuff is proving that they still exist.”
“There is no such thing as an Indian,” Dad says, laughing. “Are you making these things up, or are you crazy?”
“There is no such thing as a pure Spaniard on the island, either, unless someone moved here from Madrid last week.”
“I don’t know, maybe I have Mongoloid blood,” says Alice into the camera. She is blocking Dad from view.
“What does this have to do with you—Jesus Christ, Dad—” I yell.
“Dah’ling, please, it’s not with you,” he says, a decibel away from yelling at Alice.
“But I—” Alice says. “I’m just saying that Finns have high cheekbones and, and—”
I’m desperate. “Dad, Skype costs a lot of money to use,” I lie. “Tell her to go somewhere.” It works. “Dad, I’m hoping to see Arquimedes next week,” I say. “I’m calling him next.”
“Just don’t embarrass me,” he says. “You know how you can talk.”
“Any woman who has an opinion embarrasses you.”
“Oh, isn’t that nice,” says Dad. “Just do not embarrass me.”
The phone rings once, twice, three times. The anticipation makes my knees buckle. I feel as uneasy as I did the day Maria made me walk up and down her hallway in a pair of her open-toed tacónes. She hoped that learning how to walk in high heels would make me more feminine. My wide feet busted out of every opening, making each step more painful than the last, and my knees tremble in agony.
This is what calling Arquimedes’s home feels like. He is the closest living relative to the man who is likely responsible for Dad’s own arrested development and wack parenting skills.
“Buenas,” says the woman who answers the phone. I stop pacing back and forth in the living room and sink into the couch. The woman, part servant and part caretaker to Arquimedes and his elderly wife, passes the phone to the Mrs.
“We’ve been expecting your call,” the Mrs. says, flatly. “Your father told us something about an interview.” I feel like I’m talking to a secretary and not a relative. The truth is, I deserve nothing more. Arquimedes’s daughter lived up the block from Dad, and I never visited or committed her name to memory. For years, the fact that she was Dad’s relative was enough to turn me off. That said, I felt lucky that Dad’s uncle would agree to an interview.
“Yes, sí, sí, señora, I will come to you,” I yell into the receiver as loudly as Jorge did back when I first met him at his botanica. I stare at Casilda’s photo as the Mrs. talks about her last visit to New York City a few months ago. La africana never revealed her face in my dreams before, but there’s something about Casilda’s photo that evokes her teflon spirit. For some reason I can’t explain, I’m drawn to Dad’s grandmother. “Yes, so we will expect to see you then,” the Mrs. says after we settle on a date and time for me to visit the couple in Santiago, where they recently retired, and then I jump off the phone.
I think back to the afternoon Dad gave me Casilda’s photo.
“I’m telling you—my grandmo’ther say right before I left, days before, ‘Something bery, bery bad is going to happen to you, but you will not die from it, but it will be like something you will not see coming,’ ” Dad said. “And I knew when things got bery bad that I wouldn’t be killed and I would not die during that time.” Dad never told his grandmother what happened. I wonder where she received that prescient information. If her feelings were so strong, why did she let Dad leave in the first place? Perhaps to Casilda, destiny was fixed, regardless of whether she saw the shit before it hit the fan.
* * *
I’m reminded of a dream I had while I was still at St. Thaddeus that I believe saved my life. In it, a shiny black truck emerges from the ground on Seaman Avenue, leaving a large gaping hole in its wake. I turn around to find the truck driving slowly behind me. I veer into the woods, and the truck trails behind. I run into the middle of the street, and the monster truck follows. Nobody can hear me scream or cry for help. No matter which way I turn, the truck emerges like a bully and stops me in my tracks. A tall, thin mahogany-hued man dressed in a shiny black suit and top hat steps out of the truck. The man has long curly black hair pulled into a ponytail. He turns to me and says, “Get into the truck, Raquel.”
I run as fast as I can to Mighty Burger, on the corner of 207th and Broadway, and tell a woman working behind the counter that a creepy man and his truck are following me. The man drives his truck by the eatery, stopping to smile and wave at me. I can hear what he’s thinking: “I’ll see you again real soon.”
I was so shaken that I awoke almost drowning in my own sweat. After that dream, I was on alert for months, taking note of who was walking and driving beside me on the desolate streets. I looked both ways before crossing and shuddered every time I saw a black truck.
Then it happened. I was late, rushing down Seaman Avenue with my headphones on, in a rap-induced daze. I felt s
afer because the sun had started to shine earlier in the day, so I let my guard down. The only real sign that winter was still here was a trace of gray and yellow snow melting on the wet sidewalk.
I noticed a black car that looked like a jitney cab driving slowly alongside me. It sped ahead, then stopped at the red light on the corner. It was the same street where the black truck of my dream had torn through the ground. The driver stepped out of the car. He was dressed in black from his fedora to his shoes. He peered at me and pointed at the passenger seat next to him.
“Leave me alone, you fucking pervert,” I yelled at the man. “I knew you were coming.”
The man smiled. My legs felt like they would give out. He got back into his car and drove circles around every street I walked on: Cooper, 207th, Tenth Avenue, 204th . . . He drove by St. Thaddeus. I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy to be in school as I was that morning.
I knew better than to tell the police. And Dad never seemed to give a shit about anything I told him that didn’t have to do with tennis. One afternoon after practice, I was sitting on a bench by the flagpole next to the baseball field. A middle-aged bald white guy wearing a tank top and short running shorts hissed at me from above. I looked up to find a very small man looking down at me. When he was sure I was watching, he began stroking the bright red balls exposed from the side of his shorts. I started yelling, “You dirty shit! Fucking pervert!,” but he kept going until an older woman walked over and I pointed him out. The bald man bolted. I ran over to Dad to tell him what had happened, and he shushed me away. “I’m in the middle of a game,” he said. “Get outta here!”
I wondered if the man in the black car was scoping me out in the park that summer and became convinced that nobody would notice if I vanished, or if it was just a freaky coincidence. Although I struggled with spiritual cynicism for most of my life, I couldn’t ignore feeling that someone or something had sent me that warning in a dream.
* * *
Instinctively, I wrap my left hand tightly around my right as the cabdriver slows on Arzobispo Nouel in the Zona Colonial. I feel an infinite number of tiny needles piercing my hand, and my knuckles are tingling. We stop in front of Colegio Mahatma Gandhi. I’m early for my next meeting and ask the driver to drop me off here.
“Do you know someone who goes there?” he asks.
“I used to.”
I walk through the gate slowly, rubbing my wet hands together. No kids are in school today. I don’t know if they’re out or on vacation.
“Hola, señora, do you mind if I take a quick walk around? I went to school here when I was little—”
“Just hurry.” The woman doesn’t smile back. She is as frigid as the folks I remember who taught and worked here. The building is decrepit, like the less frequented side streets around the Colonial Zone, sagging and cracking all over itself. The walls are sweating and the air is dank though the tiny classrooms are empty.
I’ve been in this room before. I can’t remember learning a thing here, but the sound—the loud whack of a thick wooden ruler smashing against my small hands and knuckles—is echoing in my head.
“That is wrong!” I remember a teacher yelling. “Come up here and stick your hand out, estúpida!”
CRACK! CRACK! I wouldn’t make noise, infuriating the teacher and making my classmates giggle.
“Oh, you’re going to be defiant Raquelita?” the teacher said calmly, sweat pouring down her forehead like that of Ms. Mabel in Dad’s building. CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! “How was that?”
I didn’t let out a sound but felt my stomach burn and my temples throb. My right arm and shoulder were almost numb. I imagined this was what being shot in the arm with Rocío’s .22—the one she kept in the kitchen back in California—would feel like.
The cruel woman, fueled by the giggling, didn’t wait for the tears to well up; she continued to hit my hand in front of the class until I couldn’t lift my arm anymore, until tears involuntarily streamed down my sweaty face. “Diabla puta asquerosa,” I whispered, with my back turned to her, “monstruo.” Like a set of falling dominoes, the class keeled over laughing.
“What did you say?” she yelled back.
“I said,” the tears burning my skin, “you are a puta asquerosa.”
Rocío was called in and told I was a terrible student. My teacher said I lacked self-control and discipline, evident in the way I hurt my hand punching the concrete wall on the playground during a fit of anger.
Rocío smacked me across the face when we got back to our converted ground-floor apartment a couple of blocks down. I didn’t bother explaining what really happened. To Rocío and the mean women who ran the school, I was una fiera, a wild girl who couldn’t manage the easy task of being seen and not heard.
I’m back in front of the wall that I allegedly punched until my hand swelled and I couldn’t feel it anymore. There are small red handprints with names like Josephina, Omar, Cesar, Lidio, and Antonio. I hope none of these kids have gotten hit with rulers.
I hurry out of Mahatma Gandhi and jump back into the cab. I don’t want to be late for my lunch with a lady who probably knows more about Taíno history than just about anyone else on the island.
A tiny woman with cropped silver hair holds court across the street from Mesón de Luis, on the corner of El Conde and Hostos. I can see her in the lobby of the hotel from my seat at the busy eatery. Her tiny dog brushes up against her legs while she talks on the hotel’s landline. At times she puts the call on hold to greet an endless stream of people, presumably American students and professors, spilling in and out of the lobby. Then the woman walks out through the double glass doors toward my table and sits down.
“I figured it was you,” she says, smiling. “Let’s order. Everything here is damn good.”
Lynne Guitar, a Michigan-born anthropologist and historian, is one of the most notable documentarians of Taíno retention on the island. It doesn’t sound controversial upon first read, but contesting almost anything written and accepted by the academia as gospel can start a revolution here.
Ancestral DNA studies have been particularly validating to Guitar because it’s enhanced her work by giving scientific support to the historical documentation she’s established.
“Too many people say that Dominicans are a European-African mix, but Dominicans are Indigenous-based, with an overlay of European and African,” Guitar says. “We know for a fact that 98.7 percent of the Europeans who came here in the first thirty years were males, and they weren’t celibate, even the priests. And so who did they make love with? Indigenous women.”
I wouldn’t call it making love, but nonetheless, the implication brought something up Bennett Greenspan tabled as a possibility for early Jewish and Moorish settlement on the island and throughout Latin America.
Fourteen ninety-two was a big year for intolerance in Spain. We already know they behaved savagely with the Indigenous people living on Quisqueya almost immediately after setting foot in modern-day Haiti. However, it was also the year that the last Moorish king, Boabdil, surrendered Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella. Soon thereafter, the Spanish monarchs signed the Alhambra Decree, expelling Jews unless they converted to Roman Catholicism. As early as 1501, Muslims and Moriscos from Granada were persecuted and expelled if they didn’t convert or, in the case of the latter, if their conversion was suspected of being a front. The oppression of Muslims and Jews in Spain lasted for centuries. Many did convert, disingenuously, after feeling the wrath of extremist Christian crusaders.
If crypto-Jews and Moors found themselves passing for Spanish Catholics after seeing so many of their people kicked out of Spain in 1492 and thereafter, we can be certain that some of them found themselves aboard the S.S. Columbus. It’s possible some would have bonded with and married Indigenous women. After all, they had an enemy in common. In that case, Indigenous women may have gotten married in a Catholic church to these men and subsequently taught Judaism and Islam at home without understanding the difference. This is t
he only way, drinking from the same goblet of hate and resentment toward the Spaniards, that I could see “making love” make sense.
Many, if not most, of the Taínos were wiped out by Spanish disease, greed, and slavery. However, there’s another reason why we should question the assumptions made in colonial accounts about how many Indigenous folks survived. As Guitar has documented, we don’t know how many Amerindians lived on the island during the colonial times because the Spanish only counted the ones working on plantations for their census records. How could they have possibly accounted for the Taínos hiding in the mountains and caves across the island? For all we know, the Spanish chroniclers, reporting on scout’s honor, may have fudged the actual numbers to justify the importation of African slaves to the island. Their actions have shown that it wasn’t beneath them.
At any rate, “all the mothers were Indigenous women, and the progeny of this mix had the immunities against those invisible allies, those viruses and bacteria that the full-blooded Indigenous peoples did not have,” says Guitar. “I tell Dominicans, ‘You’re not Spanish—be proud! You’ve got the best of three incredible races in you. The best of three roots makes for a very strong tree.’ ”
This is how the Indigenous, the African, and the European managed to survive extinction in the Dominican Republic and throughout Latin America. The mixing over centuries also explains the vast array of phenotypes and hair textures, the extreme polarities of experience that exist within the lives of a single family.
It’s complicated, though, which roots—African, Indigenous, European, Arabic, and more—we choose to sow. A few days ago I met a young man of obvious mixed ancestry here in the colonial zone. He gushed that his Y-DNA test confirmed his direct paternal ancestors were English. Admittedly, he probably didn’t realize how giddy he came across, exalting the European fragments of his self. Curious, I asked about his mitochondrial DNA results and whether he found any links to Africa or the Indigenous population in the country. His response was a flippant no. The thing is, he’s hardly alone. On our respective journeys, there are also those individuals who embrace their Indigenous and African ancestry while emphatically denying their whiteness. There are others who embrace Taíno heritage while vehemently rejecting their African ancestry and vice versa. Claiming or at least acknowledging all sides, historically good and bad, isn’t accepted in most cultural circles. Either way you slice it, we’re all selling out some branch or branches.
Bird of Paradise Page 25
