Aborto

Today in the store the girl who works for the restaurant in Mundo Artesanal handing out menus on the street came to work walking funny and around 11 AM eased up to the register and told Modesta that she was bleeding bad and thought she lost the baby. Modesta and Miriam conferred for a minute and hollered, “¿DUVALL, tu tienes la guaguita hoy?” They helped hold her up while I drove the guaguita to the door, she got in and she and I drove off to her doctor on the other side of the river. After I hit one bump going kind of fast I asked her if I should drive smooth or fast and she said smooth, so I eased over everything after that. I drove down Meriño to the Malecón and found that the riverbound lanes were backed up all the way to Quimbambas waiting for a cruise ship to offload its passengers so I U-turned at the base of Meriño and wrong-wayed it back to Isabel la Catolica at about 2 mph with my flashers on and we eventually got down to the Puente Flotante fine and crossed the river. I almost hit the same pothole I hit the other night bringing Miriam to Avenida España to make out and when I missed it the girl and I both said, “whew”. She pointed out the clinic after a couple more turns and I parked in front and went around and opened her door. There was a wide deep broken gutter between the guaguita and the sidewalk and when I asked her if I could carry her she nodded her head weakly. It’d been a long time since I picked a girl up out of a car and carried her into a hospital, maybe never. I carried her in and down the hall where a seated nurse said to go back to the first door and I did and I opened it with my foot and laid the girl as gently as I could on the bed there. She was crying softly and I held her hand and stroked her forehead while watery blood soaked its way across the mattress. The nurse came in and asked her some questions and called Dr. Castro, who was the girl’s physician, and left. I offered the girl my cell phone and she accepted since she had no minutes and when her boyfriend answered she wailed, “Oh, Poppy, ¿Donde tu estás? ¡Ven acá!” in an agonized tone that I have only heard from women’s throats at Dominican funerals. Then she called her priest and spoke with him for a minute or two in Haitian Creole. The doctor showed up just finishing off an empanada and went to wash up, I presume. The nurse came back in snapping on a pair of latex gloves and I asked if I should stay. The girl said no that her guy was on the way, I asked again and she said that he was really on the way and I left. The tiled hallway floor where we had entered was still blood spattered and the passenger side door to the guaguita on the street was still wide open. My pant legs were blood soaked to the knees and there was a puddle of blood on the seat.

            The girl was 3 months along and had had a recent sonogram that suggested there were things wrong. She had been given two pills to help her, one to swallow and one to insert. She had started to bleed shortly thereafter. She was never told that the pills were meant to abort the baby. Later I learned that her name was Rosa. Two months later she was fired from the restaurant.

The Last Fight

Life with Altagracia proceeded in an up and largely down fashion. She worked one day a week for Alexa cleaning her apartment and spent the rest of her time in Villa Mella cleaning our house incessantly. Sometimes she would cook and sometimes not—in past years there was always food on table but not now. In past years she had looked for better work, talked of taking remedial reading classes and of business ideas. Her angry outbursts and tirades became more frequent and when I came home from work or waked up in the morning I never knew if I would be embraced or cursed. Kiki is in prison for an undetermined period of time and, I think, that much of the money I left on the bureau to buy food went via Western Union to the jail in Elias Piña. She sent all the money she earned from working to Kiki and she secretly owed money to the lottery ticket booth where Chavela still works.

Alain, my French caving friend came to Santo Domingo and stayed with us. I had thought, when I invited him that he would be in the house one or two nights per week when he and I were not exploring caves but it turned into more like 4 or 5 and he was here for over a month. I told Alain that he had to wash his own caving duds and Altagracia that she had no obligation to wash them but she would ferret them out in his room, wash them and then complain about the mud and the smell. Even when I had him bag them and hide them in his room or stash them in the marquisina she would find them, wash them and then lay into me about how disgusting they were. He eats a lot and has specific food requirements. Altagracia did not like anything about him even though Alain paid for almost all the groceries and we had more fruit in the house than ever before. On the last day, just before I took him to the airport, he awkwardly handed Altagracia 500 pesos ($15) by way of saying thankyou for the extra work and she accepted it quietly. But when I got back from the airport run she blew up saying that we had treated her like a servant, that the wife of a foreigner should not have to work and then she took it to the street ranting at top holler, going from door to door screaming what an abuser I was and that I treated her like a slave, etc etc. We did not speak for three days and I began to look for an apartment to move into.

I am working these days on the Conde where I rent the inside of the corner doorway to the gift shop, Mundo Artesanal and, when I am not in caves I sell the photographs there. The commute is brutal, ranging anywhere from a half hour to an hour and half if there is a tapon, and I see a near accident every day. I leave the house around 8:45 in the morning and get home around 8:30 at night after closing the store. The guaguita does not have a radio but I put Radio France on a small transistor radio that rests on the passenger seat and it sounds fine. My original plan was to sell on only the busy days of the weekend but I went there on the slow days too, as much to get out of the house as anything. When I am not in the store the sales staff sells my stuff for me and I tip them about 10% of the sale. When I am in the store I can use my computer to write stuff like this and can go online using a wireless modem. While some days are long and slow, the worst  are painless. Around lunch time I walk up to la Sirena and buy a piece of roast chicken and tuna pasta salad from the deli counter and whatever groceries we need in the house. There is also a grocery store across the street from Mundo Artesanal and a branch of Banco Popular across the Conde. Life on el Conde is convenient.

I began to walk the streets near the Zona Colonial looking for an apartment and after about my third foray I fould an unfurnished studio apartment through a middleman named Ivan in Ciudad Nueva, about a 15 minute walk from the store, 12 minutes hotfooting it. Altagracia and I had made up by then but the truce was shaky and I reasoned that I could use the studio for matting prints, writing or even a small gallery so I rented it for $216/month. When I told Altagracia she humphed and said it sounded like nothing more than a rapadera or a place to take prostitutes. I bought a portable radio in the flea market, moved the matting and framing stuff there and hung the 26x36 original print of my main logo. I showed it to her once which turned out to be a mistake.

I then came down with either Giardia or Amoebic dysentery, probably from a bad plato de día (lunch special) and was repulsively sick for 4 days, including experiencing nocturnal leakage while sleeping (and this from a man well known for the strength of his anal pucker). As I recovered, Altagracia began her menstruation so as a result we did not make love for almost two weeks. Saturday night I went to sleep around 10 and around 11 she woke me up roughly asking why I was sleeping with my back to her all the time and when I did not have a good enough answer, because I had been asleep and did not even know she was in the bed, she went and slept on the floor of the living room. The next night she slept on the sofa and the next in Chany’s room. Monday I went to Las Maravillas cave with Domingo to take paint residue samples. Tuesday morning I bought lumber to make a bookcase for the office—as we were then calling it—brought the boards home to the marquesina, marked them for cutting and the electricity went out for 7 hours so I had nothing else to do but wait. When I came up the stairs toward the galería the ruler pocket snagged on a piece of the railing and ripped; a harbinger of more torn clothes.

Jhoanglish had been working as a night watchman but last week he shot himself in the left hand while putting the pistol in his pocket and is now furloughed until the stitches come out which means that he hangs out on the street in front of the house, borrows money and smokes pot every day. Just after lunch he wandered by and complained to Altagracia about the reheated dinner she had given him the night before and mentioned that he would slap her up if she did it again. She lit off the galleria and grabbed a softball-sized chunk of broken concrete from the curb and chased him until Niningo and Chavela restrained her. He threatened to kill her and she responded in kind, brandishing the brickbat until Niningo wrested it away. Once back in the house she grabbed a 2 foot long piece of iron pipe that she keeps handy in case of thieves and started back after him, Niningo blocked her and she turned and beat the hell out of the concrete set tub we have in the patio breaking off pieces. Channy, 3½ now, had been sleeping on the floor of the galleria on a pillow with her bottle and woke up crying because ants had invaded her crotch and were biting her. Chavela picked her up by one arm and gave her a roundhouse slap to stop her from crying. Altagracia, unarmed finally, now went out to the street harangueing about the four good-for-nothing children she has and she has to support them all by herself because the father was murdered and nobody helps her not at all not one peso and even though she is with a gringo she has to clean floors for a living. She went up one side of the street and down the other for most of the rest of the afternoon shouting this litany to anyone with their door open. When the electricity came back on around 6PM I went down to the marquesina to cut my 1x10 pine to length and make the dado cuts with my SkilSaw asking myself what I was doing in Villa Mella where mothers threaten sons with brickbats, hit children waking up from naps and holler lies up and down the street. When I finished my cuts and dados I packed the unassembled parts into the guaguita along with the tools I would need to assemble the shelves in the office.

Although we had not spoken civilly since her interrogation about sleeping orientation, Altagracia and I watched the 10 oclock episode of the novela Fantasma de Elena on TV and I went to bed at 11. She rolled and smoked a cigar out in the patio and around 11 came inside, got ready for bed and went into the spare room. A minute later she flung the bedroom door open and when I sleepily looked up she hurled the new red cell phone I had bought her the week before, the one we called the chihuahua because it was so small, on the floor and it broke into pieces ricocheting across the room. She fled the room but turned and charged in again, I was sitting up on the edge of the bed by now, and she launched a volley of punches, I tried to stand up and she stooped and tore a gaping hole in one the legs of my pajamas. She resumed the punching. I was able to grab her wrists from time to time. All the time she was screaming that I had cheated on her, that I was nothing but a no-good cheater and liar and occasionally shooting a glance at the night table. When she retreated I looked over at the night table and saw the AlkaSeltzer.

Monday morning, the day before this drama, before meeting Domingo, I had had a headache and my stomache was still a little iffy so, before the drive to the cave, I had bought a two-pack of AlkaSeltzer Extreme. Since they were, at least nominally, extreme, I only took one and put the opened foil package, which incidently has trendier graphics than the classic AlkaSeltzer blue foil pack, in my shirt pocket and forgot about it. Tuesday, before the conflagration with Jhoanglish in the street, Altagracia evidently found the open packet in my shirt pocket while doing laundry and put it on the kitchen table. When, after the blitzkrieg that night I saw it on the night table I knew what had happened. I brought the packet to her and asked her what it was, she said with scorn, “condones,” I said, “AlkaSeltzer,” as I peeled apart the foils and dumped the broken tablet on the table. “Would you like a glass of water?” I asked. I watched her face. I had never seen an expression change like that with absolutely no facial movement. Something lit in her eyes and then fell. I got the glass of water, plopped the fragments in, offered it to her, she was still expressionless, and I drank.

I went back to bed. She went to the sofa but then came into the bedroom. I said I wanted to be alone. She said that she would not bother me and got into her side of the bed. I lay on my back all night with my eyes riveted on the concrete louvre that communicates with the kitchen and was backlighted. On the underside of each slat silhouetted cockroaches moved around from time to time. I waited until 6 AM and then got up and perked coffee as usual. I packed my camera stuff like I was going to a cave, but I also packed the cash hidden under the mattress and my passport. She slept. I packed my cell phone charger and the all the camera and flash cables. I packed a box of books that I would put on the finished shelves in the office that would be where I would live. When I was done I gave her a kiss on the cheek and said, “Mándame suerte“ like I did every morning when I knew I would need good luck. She murmmered but did not waken. I closed the door quietly behind me and left.

I called her later in the morning and said that I was going to San Cristóbal because I did not want her to look for me in the store. Early in the evening I called again and said I would not be coming home. She called back, “Never?” I said, “Never”, she asked, “Really?” There were many more calls like that. In the end she became hysterical and finally ran out of cell phone minutes.

The office has the 7-foot tall bookcase that I had cut and ripped in the marquisina in Villa Mella, the card table that was Mamie’s in the 1950s and not much else. It consists of one room with a separate kitchen and a bathroom.  It is two blocks from the Malecón and the Caribbean and there is a colmado a half block away that does not play deafening music. There is a school across the street and an empanada and juice vendor set up on the corner to sell breakfast to the students in the morning. The Justice Building is nearby so there are always a lot of cops and lawyers around. I am on the 4^th floor, on the roof, with a small patio shared by two other apartments— one is empty at the moment and four young doctors live in the other. There is always a breeze and I can see the sea if I stand up and look out the back window across the adjacent rooftop. Last night I slept in my hammock.

Commute, Mundo Artesanal, Another Funeral

 Worst part of most of my days is the commute. I hope I get things organized eventually so I am not transporting boxes of stuff or bulky items every day and so can use the subway and guaguas. The traffic jams for no reason drive me nuts, just stupidity like cars filling up a clogged intersection so when the light changes nobody can go anywhere. Cars turning left from the right lane through busy intersections. Traffic cops directing traffic in intersections that have broken stoplights but then the cop wanders off and leaves chaos behind him. The other day a cop was directing traffic in a busy intersection in a shopping district, pedestrians crossing everywhere, motorcycles slinking and weaving their way to the front of the lines and squirting out across the road. I was in the middle lane stopped with a guagua to my right and a car to my left, we were in the very front waiting for the cop to signal us to go. He stops the other lanes, waves us on and just as I accelerate a Haitian runs out from in front of the guagua and I hit him. He goes flying to the pavement. I stop, the Haitian gets up, I look at the cop and he is just watching the Haitian shaking his head, the Haitian apologizes and limps off, I continue. 

A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday morning on our way to the Plaza we saw a motorcyclist down in the northbound lane of Avenida Hermanas Mirabel. He had been hit by a SUV that had sped away. By the time we stopped passerbys had hoisted and dumped him into the back of a passing pick-up that had stopped and had dragged his bike to the side of the road. The pick-up took him to the hospital but he was dead in the road.

Mundo Artesanal (Craft World would be a likely translation) is top heavy in administration. David Morrillo is the owner along with his wife, Dany. His sister-in-law, Jocasta, is the manager, a son is the evening in charge person and there is an administrator who I think is a cousin, a cash register girl, an odd jobs guy, a housekeeper and two retail sales people. One of the retailers is Richard Bristol, an intense young Haitian who speaks Spanish, Creole, French and English and has a couple of his own paintings for sale in the store. When I am not around it is usually he who makes sales for me and when he does I give him 10% which is great for him since he only makes 2% commision in the other parts of the store and it is good for me because he is motivated.

          Much of Mundo is stuff on consignment a few of us rent spaces. Ruddy the German (who makes my tee shirts as well as his own) rents two spaces. In one he has his tee shirt store right behind me and in the other he sells fancy knackworst and German beer-- Polaner at $5/bottle. On the other side of the store an Italian has a small diner type restaurant-- spaghetti with a tuna/tomato sauce, capuccino and mixed drinks and in the other doorway a jeweler who sets up on a card table and sells larimar earrings.

           Aside from Richard, the other retail person in Mundo is Modesta and she really is the glue that holds the day-to-day business together. She is also the type that will grab a mop when the house cleaner moves too slowly and she will run the hose up to the tinaco to fill it with water when the odd jobs guy is goofing off; she is paid for 8 hours but opens every morning at 9 and stays to lock up at 9 at night while her youngest kid, about 10 sleeps on the floor behind the register. When it is slow and she is caught up during the day she will go into a back room and sleep in a chair with her head on a desk for a half hour or so. She is bone thin, blonde with white-grey eyes and ears that stick out. Last Wednesday when I went in to work Modesta was not there and Richard told me that her oldest son, 22 and a recent high school graduate had been killed the night before in a motorcycle accident. Evidently the stoplight was badly timed; while he was accelerating through a green an SUV went through on a stale yellow and killed him instantly in the middle of the intersection. There were lots of witnesses and the driver of the SUV was detained by the crowd and arrested. I went to the funeral home in Gualey with Jocasta and her husband Juan Paulo and then on to the cemetary in San Luis just outside the city past Hainamosa.

They bury them quick here. That day employees from Mundo went in shifts to go see Modesta in the funeral home in Gualey, a famously tough slum. I asked Jocasta if I could go with her since I did not know the way. She said that she was going to go on to the cemetary afterwards but it would be quick and I was welcome. Around 2 PM her husband, Juan Paulo, picked us up along with about 5 other people and we crammed into the crew cab of his listing pick-up truck. The funeral home was packed. Modesta was seated in the front of the room near the coffin that was closed but had a small window over the boy's face. There was blood caked in his hair and cotton balls stuffed in his nostrils and ears, no makeup. Modesta cried wailing nonstop and hugged hanging on to each person in the line who stepped up. She recognized me and cried “OH, DuVall” and cried on.

The cemetery was a lot farther away than I thought. Outside the city and farther than Hainamosa all the way to San Luis. There were two school busses full of mourners and at least 20 other vehicles not counting motorcycles. We wove our way in through the above- ground tombs and monuments overgrown with grass and weeds, past one that said Morillo, when I asked Juan Paulo if that was his family he nodded yes. The coffin was on the ground. The boy's sister was sprawled on top of it screaming. His father, who had barely been evident in the funeral home-- he is divorced from Modesta and has his own family-- was front and center tears streaming non stop down his face and Modesta was standing quietly a few meters away. A number of tough looking teens had scaled a nearby building and watched from the roof. A preacher spoke for 10 or 15 minutes and then 6 people hoisted the coffin up on their shoulders to a crescendo of screaming and crying. Modest broke down again and they  slid the box into an opening in the tomb like the middle drawer of a giant concrete file cabinet. The preacher said a few more words and we walked slowly back through the weeds to the pick-up truck.

Short takes

While I was in Massachusetts for a few months Jeannete rented out the landing above my stairwell to a nephew who installed two barber chairs and opened a barber shop. He painted stripes and arrows on the walls of what had been my area and clumps of hair wafted through on downdrafts. After getting my own hair cut I walked two blocks down el Conde to Mundo Artesanal, where I have sold fotos on consignment for years, and eventually persuaded them to rent me the space just inside the doorway on the corner of El Conde and Duarte for much less than Jeannette had been charging.

Today I drove Altagracia to Las Mameyes where she had heard there was a cheap clothes wholesaler. En route she got a phone call from Kiki saying that he had not been able to make any money trafficking across the Haitian border because the border had been closed due to the cholera epidemic and that he was hungry. So we asked some directions to Western Union from 3 different people, got 3 different answers—some of the wrong directions were very specific but none of them lead to a Western Union. We eventually wound up at Mega Centro and sent him $27 but since he has lost his cedula again we sent it under a friend’s name. This all took an hour and about 10 cell phone calls most of which were only to find out how to spell the friend’s middle name Meran. We returned to Las Mameyes and start asking people where the big clothes wholesaler is and after a half dozen vague responses Altagracia decided to bag the idea and go to Villa Consuelo where she had bought cheap jewelry before. She walked into 6 Importers and, after looking at blouses and jeans and asking prices, asked where the stuff was made and when they told her China, walked out. Walking out of an importer in Villa Consuelo because they sell clothes made in China is like walking out of a gift shop on El Conde because it sells cheap souvenirs.

Kiki never called to say that he got the money and eventually we found out that it was because he was arrested just before he went into the Western Union in Elias Piña. Police had evidently planted some marijuana seeds in his house. On our way home I bought two sheets of plywood for a display case to use in my new retail space in Mundo Artesanal.

While I am cutting up plywood in the marquesina later that afternoon, Altagracia got a cell phone message that she won $25,000 pesos—about $800 US. I explained to her and the crowd of neighbors who quickly gathered that it was probably a scam. But Niningo took over, called the number, borrowed $25 pesos and proceeded to buy the required phone cards and remit them to the company that had promised the 25,000. At one point when I came back up out of the marquesina to cry SCAM I turn the corner to the kitchen and see Felo, with my $50 Macy’s chef’s knife inverted over a can of guandules and his fist poised to drive the tip of the knife into the can to open it. To this moment—5 hours later—no one can understand why I yelled at him. The knife is worthless anyway now after it has been used as a screwdriver and to prune the guanabana tree in the garden next to the house. But I couldn’t take it anymore. Niningo meantime borrows more money to buy more phone cards so that he can redeem the grand prize. So about this time Belita wanders into the house sniffing around for lunch and asks if anybody has heard about the phone card scam and Niningo freaks and starts calling the police because none of the phone cards that he has bought and entered in the last half hour have taken.

The Culata, Mechanical nightmare

The Culata

Last week Niningo asked to borrow the guaguita so he could attend the graduation party of his girlfriend. He brought five friends with him and returned the guaguita in one piece.  I set off for the Zona Colonial the next morning and when I was in the middle of the long bridge over the Isabela River the motor made an ominous clicking noise and died. I managed to coast it over to the right hand curb and called Cojo the mechanic. He showed up in about ten minutes, parked behind me, turned my ignition key once, got out some wrenches and had the broken timing belt out in no time. Cars trucks and motorcycles skimming past his legs as he worked bent into the driver’s side door. He said to wait for him. He got in his Hijet, which is identical to my guaguita except that it is a flatbed pick-up and not a minibus and backed up against traffic a quarter mile before he got to the end of the bridge and could U turn to go back to Villa Mella and look for a new belt. A half hour later he returned, installed the belt, turned over the ignition and pronounced the culata, or cylinder head with all its incumbent valves, dead.

He nodded toward the back of my guaguita, where I positioned myself and pushed. He steered it across the four lanes waving his free hand to slow down traffic. He then U turned through the same traffic and after backing up in front of the guaguita fished out a snarled handfull of green, nylon clothesline and braided a four foot long tow rope, tied the two vehicles together and we started off. The nylon cord had enough stretch in it and, without the motor running, my brakes were soft enough so that we never broke the rope although there was some bungy motion when I did have to brake and after about 5 kilometers we turned into the alley where his mechanic’s shade tree is. I left Cojo to work on the motor and took the Metro to work—I had luckily left my whole display with all the photos in the stairwell the night before. That evening he finished the work and I picked up the vehicle after paying him $218 for everything.

The following morning was Sunday and Altagracia and I drove to the Zona together so she could work for Bettye while I sold in the Flea Market. The guaguita had about one half the power as normal, barely even climbing the overpass at the Ovando intersection in second gear. It rained hard in the afternoon but I sold ok. Altagracia got out of work a little early so I packed up, loaded the guaguita and we set off for La Sirena to buy some birthday party stuff for Chanel. We went the back way via Avenida Central and, just as we were coming up on the broken stoplight at the entrance to the Cancino barrio, the guaguita made a brief, light grinding noise and died. I got out and pushed it through a couple of potholes to get it over to the curb and called Cojo. I waited for him out under the stoplight in the rain under my blue umbrella while Altagracia wandered off to buy pica pollo or fried chicken. He eventually showed up, popped off the valve cover, pronounced the new cualta dead and got out his green clothesline again. This time as we lurched over the potholes into the five-way intersection under the broken stoplight not all of the traffic stopped and Cojo had to hit his brakes suddenly, I hit my brake pedal, it went ro the floor and I crashed into Cojo’s rear bumper, well it was more of a jagged piece of metal than a bumper, Cojo moved forward again, flagging cars to stop by waving his arm out the window and we made it across. This time we had about 12 kilometers to go. Up hills down hills I had to brake with the emergency brake and unbrake in time so the rope did not snap. Cojo's pick-up overheated and we had to stop so he could borrow a fuse out of my guaguita so his radiator fan would run. We made it through a tapon at the interesction to Sabana Larga and went through the tunnel under Hermanas Mirabel near La Sirena and down the freeway Jacobo Macluta turning left and wending through Guaricano barrio where Cojo lives. The only damage done by our fender bender, as far as I could tell, was a loosened headlight.

The next evening Cojo drove my guaguita with its second newly installed culata in two days to my house, picked me up, I gave him a ride back to Guaricano to his house and bid farewell. I pulled out of his alley in the dark, turned left and within a kilometer felt the guaguita slowing down. I could keep going but needed more and more gas and lower and lower gears. After about two kilometers I realized I would never make it home, U turned over a median strip to return to Cojo’s and made it only a 100 meteres or so before the brakes completely locked. I called Cojo but his cell phone was turned off or the battery had died and I grabbed my umbrella and hotfooted it back to his house leaving the guaguita parked in the dark and questionable neighborhood where it had balked.

I got there in about fifteen minutes but he had already left for points unknown. His mother lives next door and after inviting me to have a seat in the galeria she sent a kid to look for Cojo’s brother Eddy. After about a half hour Eddy showed up, listened to what had happened, gathered an armload of tools and drove me back to the guaguita in his pick-up with no headlights and a maximium speed of about two kilometers per hour faster than I can walk.

Using his cell phone for a flashlight he peered up under the dashboard at the brake pedal linkages and started working the pedal up and down. He fished a fingertip full of grease out from somewhere, smeared it on a joint somewhere up under, we pushed the guaguita back and forth, braking , unbraking until he pronounced it cured. I got his cell phone number before I pulled away, but I did not have to call him and I made it home.

The next afternoon the same thing happened but this time I noticed in time to get back home. Cojo eventually came and we discovered that in our fender bender under the dark stoplight a piece of metal had been pushed up against a part of the brake pedal linkage that caused it to gradually seize in the braked position. Cojo excised the offending piece of sheetmetal with a hammer and cold chisel. I think this chapter is done.

A Day at Work on El Conde

Day at work in the Gallery.

Up between 5:30 and 6:30 depending on which day. Coffee and listen to WAMC on the computer at the kitchen table. Fill iced tea jar and a Tupperware if there are leftovers for lunch.

Drive south on Hermanas Mirabel—I finally have what I think is the best route. Straight through Ovando, over the new overpass, left on Pedro Livio Cedeño, straight to Avenida Duarte, turn right at the Texaco station go straight through the Duarte shopping district. Even at 7AM street venders are setting up their stalls with new and used clothes, baseball hats, belts, text books, fruit, cell phones; heating up cauldrons of oil to deep fry platanos, empanadas, spam, pigs ears and chicken feet to sell for breakfast. Vendors unpacking their merchandise from soggy cardboard boxes, cheap suitcases, unloading from the trunks of taxis or from horse drawn carts or tricycle carts and hand trucks.

After crossing Avenida Mexico and the two blocks of Chinatown what traffic there is drops off to almost nothing. The Colonial Zone sleeps late. I cross Avenida Mella and pass La Sirena, downhill past the Monastery of San Francisco, cross Mercedes a few blocks from where Alexa the archaeologist lives, cross El Conde, turn left on Arzobispo Noel, left on Hostos and park as near as I can to El Conde. If I am more than 4 spots from El Conde I reconnoiter during the day and often am able to get the first spot on the corner, which is important if it is Saturday when I haul everything home at night so I can sell in the Plaza in the pulguita on Sunday.

If I am early I stroll off to buy an empanada, if I am really early I nap in the guaguita.

My stairwell is closed to the street with a galvanized steel roll up door. Flor, the housekeeper or Londres or one of the nieces who live upstairs either opens the door for me or tosses me the keys from the balcony. If it is Thursday I carry my tables, cases of matted and framed photographs and tee shirts in about 5 round trips. If it is Friday or Saturday my stuff is stashed under the stairs. It takes me about an hour to set up. I bring my GE Superradio and listen to Radio Francia 93.1 FM; the news alternates between French and Castilian Spanish and the music is a mix of Euro pop, American Jazz and eclectic rock but the general mood is NPR.

I am usually the first shop owner to arrive on my block. Suqui, directly across from me also opens early as does the pleasant woman who manages Coco Zen three doors up. Domi-Habana opens next and then my immediate neighbor to the left La Morena. Suqui is a diminutive Dominicana of apparent Asian extraction and has had her gift shop for more than 25 years. She pays just $400/month and is petrified the rent will go up. She and her husband Carlos have two daughters one in Long Island and one in Paris. Suqui spends her days watching television in her shop and leafing through a French phrase book in hopefull preparation for a visit to the Paris daughter. To my right is another stairwell where Vilma sells beach clothes, mass-produced Haitian paintings, baseball hats and canvas shopping bags. Vilma lives in an apartment upstairs and mentioned once that she does not pay anything for the use of the stairwell—in fact I heard once that her building has no owner and that no one in any of the 10 apartments pays any rent to anybody. Most of the ground floor was a gift shop at one time but is now sealed up by steel doors.

Across the street from me-- and by the way, El Conde is pedestrian only, no cars allowed, street lights and benches line the center-- next to Suqui is Jeanette’s Salon. I pay Jeanette $20/day for my stairwell; Jeanette rents the building I am in. Upstairs are a series of rooms where 10 or so of Jeanette’s nieces and nephews, all brought in from Haiti, live. Most of them work in one of her two salons. The two leaders of this pack of kids are Alexandra 21 and Myrtha 25 who work in the salon across from me. They are helped by Marybell 10, when she is not in school. Gina, 17, Polita and Chantel work with Jeanette herself in her other salon near the other end of El Conde. Londres is the alpha male who once in a while washes a window or fixes something in the salon but mostly hangs out. He goes to the gym every day and plays basketball every evening in the parking lot on Luperon. Judging by his acne and rope like veins in his arms he is injecting vitamins (i.e. steroids). But he is pleasant. On days when there are many customers Myrtha and Alexandra work hard all day from 8AM to 8PM with only a short break for lunch.

Myrtha and Alexandra are either cousins or half sisters; they have each told me different stories and it could be they don’t know for sure. They are both short and very cute with large round faces and gigantic eyes. When the salon window is dark and Myrtha, who has darker skin, looks out, sometimes all you can see are the white crescents of her eyes. When I asked them how much money they made working in the salon they said nothing but that whenever they wanted to buy something there was money. When it is quiet in the evening Myrtha sometimes brings out her laptop and connects to Facebook where she is Myrtha Zamy but she recently told me her legal last name is Kelly. What could she say, she said, her mother had lived in La Romana. Alexandra likes working in the salon because, as she put it, she gets to be the little boss.

I initially inquired about renting the stairwell because I had noticed it only sadly displaying clothes for sale with never any interest. I was directed to the distant salon where I met Jeanette. She is 55, not large but imposing, high cheekboned, large eyed, dark skinned and wears flowing white tessellated dresses. She greeted me in Spanish with a thick Haitian accent and after asking where I was originally from she announced that she was not Dominican but Swiss. It eventually came out that she was once married to a Swiss and lived in Zurich for a while. I had had in my mind a daily rate of $20-25 so when she asked for $20 I agreed without bartering. During my first two weeks in the stairwell I sold very poorly and at one point I asked if she would consider lowering the rent until I got going. I had the money I owed for that week in my hand and as it dawned on her that I was asking to pay less, she kept glancing at Gina, who was sitting in a salon chair not really paying attention, and asking her to translate, and as what I was asking finally registered, as she finally allowed it to register, her eyes got even bigger and she seemed to suddenly grow taller and I handed her the money and thanked her and fled. Since then we greet each other warmly and I don’t ask for any discounts. Yesterday she came into the stairwell and sat down and we chatted. I was able to explain that I needed to go to Massachusetts for a couple of months and she assured me that the stairwell would still be mine when I returned, especially if I paid in advance but even if I didn’t. Her eyes stayed the same size the whole time, to my relief.

Much of the day is spent hanging out. I read the New Yorker and listen to the radio. Sometimes I have computer work and I bring my laptop. For example—a couple of weeks ago Alexa was able to borrow a complete set of USGS maps of the entire Dominican Republic for two days only. The first night I photographed all 150 maps at home. I had to set up a stepladder in the living room and lash a tripod horizontally to the top rung with strips of bicycle inner tubing so I could get the camera far enough away to take each map. The next day on the computer I was able to process/crop/tweak each map so I was sure we had usable files. To buy the full issue would have cost about $2000.

When it is busy I have long conversations with customers, some of whom keep in touch later through email. I get inside local gossip from Vilma and was getting it from Santos who worked in the big gift shop La Morena to my left before he was transferred. La Morena is a family operation run by the matriarch known as La Morena and her husband Eusebio. Their son Francis and Eusebio’s brother Santos work for them along with an unrelated rotund employee named Maylenny. They also use the services of guides known as Buscones who are the annoying guys on the street who tug on tourists sleeves saying things like come to my gift shop, everything 40% discount, no cost to look, cheapy cheapy, and then lead them toward holes in the pavement so they can say, Look out!, Watch you step! When a tourist who has been successfully dragged into La Morena by a buscon buys something, the buscon gets a cut as does the person who makes the sale and a cut goes to store. How they divide it up at the end of day I do not know. Sometimes there are fights. Francis almost never sells anything since he drinks all day. Motorcycles from various local colmados deliver jumbo Presidente (1L.) after jumbo Presidente, curbside estimates reckon he spends about 500 pesos a day on beer. Sometimes when I am in La Despensa, the small supermarket one block away I see him in line buying a12oz. single beer. Santos sells the most souvenirs for La Morena. He is 54, short and wiry with a shaved head and horn rimmed glasses and wears heavy-metal tee shirts that hang down past his jeans pockets, baggy jeans and oversized sneakers, but when he peers up at you over the frames of his glasses and lowers his voice to a confidential near-whisper he is very convincing.

There is a local cast of minor characters, beggars, prostitutes and homeless who come and go. Jasmin is a crack addict who also hangs around the plaza on Sundays. She is scrawny, toothless 4 feet 10 inches tall and probably no older than 25. She wears rags, sleeps in the middle of sidewalks until the tourist cops shag her off and collects empty beer bottles for a peso each and begs. She spends time in Najayo women’s prison every year and, reportedly when she sleeps on the rocks on the seaside of the Malecón the bums there fuck her for $1. I had not seen her during the past month and when I asked Vilma if she knew if anything had happened she told me that some tigueres had beaten Jasmin nearly to death, that she had spent a month in the hospital Dario Contreras, that her mother had even come to help and that she had lost an eye due to the beating.

An old woman with a bundle of rags comes every afternoon and sits on a stoop in front of the sealed up gift shop and waits for people to give her money. She is graceful about it and never begs but readily accepts. La Morena fills her water bottle for her when she is thirsty. One day a geezerly part-time peddler reeking of rum set his two or three broken souvenirs on her stoop in an unlikely attempt to sell them and when the old woman arrived she demanded her spot. When the peddler refused and the argument escalated Santos launched out of La Morena brandishing a large machete and ran past my stairwell toward the arguement—when he sped past my doorwar he glanced in at me with a wink and a smile—the peddler, who looked to be an arthritic 60 took off like a gazelle and turned the corner at Meriño without breaking stride and without looking back. Santos collapsed in laughter but passerbys gaped in horror. Eventually Asoconde, which is the equivalent of a chamber of commerce for El Conde, heard some version of this story and now Santos has been deported to another gift shop owned by his sister-in-law in the Mercado Modelo up on Avenida Mella. Along with Vilma he had been the most fun to hang out with.

Aside from the buscones there are a host of other guides who all expect a cut from somebody for any sale made on El Conde. Many gift shops have agreements with individual guides and one can see small flocks of tourists being bum-rushed past store after store until arriving at their guide’s chosen locale. Because I have unique merchandise I have no agreement with any guide—most of the gift shops here have nearly identical inventories displayed slightly differently i.e. one store puts the Indian made saris in front, another places the Panama hats more prominently and another their Haitian paintings—I sometimes have trouble with them. One day two French women stopped at my gallery, looked at some photos, asked about pricing and moved on. About an hour later they reappeared and started selecting photos and negotiating a discounted price when suddenly a guide’s head insinuated itself between the women and looked at me smiling and told me to start bagging. The women bought about $60 US worth of stuff and the three left. An hour or so later the guide reappeared looking for his due. When I looked surprised that he was asking he said, “aw just enough for a soda?” but when I offered him 30 pesos (about 75¢ almost enough for a soda) he took umbrage. We were in the street and he started yelling about how he was not like the others that he was a good and honest guide and I yelled back that he had not brought anybody to my shop, that I had met the women on their own before and that I was not going to pay anything and he could feel free to get lost. He yelled the whole way down the street and to this day (2 months later) gives me a dirty look every time he passes.

As I type this in my stairwell at 11:15 AM a hard rain has completely cleared the streets of all foot traffic. A few guides huddle, here and there, under awnings and overhangs but not under mine.

At lunchtime, if I have not brought leftovers or stuff to make sardine sandwiches (with a 45¢ avocado purchased from a fruit vendor around the corner), I put a be right back sign on the front of my display and walk fast to one of two or three comedors that are within two blocks. Lunch price ranges from 70 pesos ($2) for rice, beans and a veggie, to 100 pesos for rice, beans, potato salad and a stewed meat choice of beef, pork or chicken to 140 pesos from a different comedor for the same thing presumably tastier or from a cleaner kitchen. I bring the meal back in a Styrofoam compartment plate complete with plastic spoon and eat it when it cools off.

So, I sit in the stairwell and read or write for most of the day and when the shade reaches the bench out front I sit on it with Vilma and the girls from the salon and we shoot the shit. Sometimes Ruddy stops by after closing his concession in Mundo Artesanal and we drink beer. Ruddy is a 55 year-old (same as me, in fact Jeanette is 55 also, Santos is 54) athletic German ex-pat who had a silk-screening business in the Zona Colonial for a couple of years. He eventually got tired of the low quality of the Chinese tee shirts available so he studied and thought and bought some used sewing machines and now he designs and makes the shirts that bear his designs and he makes mine too and we have become friends. He is getting married next Saturday and I will go to his wedding.

Around 7:30 or 8 I pack up the photos and either store them under the stairs or haul them to the guaguita if it is Saturday since I still sell in the Plaza Maria de Toledo on Sundays and drive home. At 8 there rarely are traffic jams although one night, and Altagracia happened to be with me, there was a bad one before crossing the bridge after Ovando. It was so bad and so unexpected that I bet Altagracia that it could only be one of two things—an accident or a dead horse in the road. As we finally reached the other side of the bridge and passed the Metro subway station we saw the horse, dead and splayed out across a lane and a half.

Gilbert Murdered

Gilbert Murdered

Chavela now has spent the past 5 years working at the banca selling lottery tickets. The banca is a kiosk sized building just on the other side of the colmado next to our house. She opens lazily around 4 or 5 in the afternoon and then hangs out on the front step with Chany and chats with neighbors or plays dominos. Across the street in front of the banca is Gilbert’s colmado. It is a grungy little colmado in a perpetual state of failure. Gilbert is, or was, a kind of goofy harmless tiguere who, when smoking drugs, would stay up all night cranking the jukebox in the colmado. He had long arms, short legs, a drooping lower lip and had two sons one 6 and one 11 years old. Altagracia and I were out of town when she got the call that Gilbert had been killed.

The banca was open and Chavela, Chany, Gilbert and 4 or 5 others were hanging out on the front step. The phone rang inside Gilbert’s colmado; one of the kids answered it and yelled out that it was for Gilbert. Gilbert got up, went into his colmado and when he did two men no one had paid much attention to who had been loitering nearby followed him in and pumped four 9mm bullets into his chest. They ran out, sprinted up an alley and disappeared. Gilbert slumped against the counter and died almost instantly. Both his sons were there. Chany heard the shots but has since been told that Gilbert went to Nueva York.

The prevalent theory is that the two assassins were hired to kill Gilbert by the father of Omar. Omar was murdered a month ago and his father had heard a rumor that Gilbert knew who the killers were but would not tell the police. The phone call that was placed to the colmado was so that the killers could identify Gilbert by seeing who got up to go the phone. The rumor that Omar’s father heard was wrong. We are now waiting for one of Omar’s brothers to be killed in retaliation by one of Gilbert’s brothers.

Kiki mostly stays in Elias Piña but pops up from time to time. When he is in the area he stays with Chavela who has moved into an apartment down a narrow side street behind the banca (she and Calderon are back together). A couple of weeks ago before leaving to work in the Zona Colonial on Sunday, Altagracia and I swung down her side street so we could deliver Chanel’s clean laundry. I knocked on the door and after a few minutes it opened a crack and Kiki’s face appeared. We were equally surprised. He said, “Good morning“, I said, “Good morning“, I handed him the bundle of laundry and turned and left.

Joanglish continues as before. He is now working as a Municipal Policeman two days a week. Altagracia sends a plate of rice and beans daily to his apartment a block or so away. He is still not allowed in the house.

Niningo is still working 7 days/week at the casino. Altagracia has taken his banking passbook and deposits the money he gives her on paydays.

I have rented a street level stairwell on El Conde three days a week and set up a little gallery of the cave photos. In general it has gone very well although as the elections approach tourists have been warned to stay away. Yesterday I sold $0. Campaign activities paralyze the city daily creating huge traffic jams. The activities involve setting up bandstands with loudspeakers the size of tractor trailers to play reggaeton at volumes at which you cannot hear a car horn honk, itinerant clowns on 5-foot stilts and free rum. I have heard of individuals being paid as much as 1000 pesos ($27 at today’s exchange rate) for their vote. When the election results start coming out the celebration can include pistol shots either into the air in happiness or horizontally in revenge.