The Path returns from India

We are back after a transformative month in the south of India, heads spinning as we reconnect with life in Puerto Plata, which feels kind of like home, for lack of anywhere else. Actually, I love Puerto Plata and I love to see the cobalt blue of the ocean, which also feels like home, though I almost surprise myself to say it. 

US Visit

Christmas 2012

Swigging Campari straight out of the bottle at 3:30 am. Wondering briefly if the shit they make this stuff from (we harvested some, an acrid bark, in the Bahamas) has medicinal value. A thick cough. The fluid’s building up in my lungs. Reggaeton is blasting from the speakers of the club next door. Outside, in the park, empty plastic cups are strewn under the trees and the grape and apple hut--it’s a Christmas tradition, grapes and apples mostly imported from the States, artfully arranged under a roof of heavy brown banana husks, the kind of thing you find on the side of the road, that cradles, too, the roast pig carcasses, their faces shrunken but intact--is strung with blinking colored lights. People are drunk and moving slower. Talk is slower, louder--they’re starting to sing along.

The piles in bags--our belongings--pathetic they look now, as I trip over them. Is it just that I’ve stopped sleeping? The world looks strange, not so much hostile as mismatched. It makes sense to be awake, profiting from the dark, unexpected hours. I’m singing along, too--era un imbecil, un tonto, de rodillas ante ti--I’ve heard this song a hundred times coming up off the street--y ya ves--I still like it. I take another drink and wonder how I’m going to feel when the sun comes up and all these people with whom I share the night are sleeping. Sigue tu camino, sings Frank Reyes. Y yo seguiré el mio. Adios, Luperón--I’m saying goodbye, half drunk on an aperitif. Y gracias. We’re not the same people who sailed into the bay, narrowly avoiding the shallows. 

White Christmas

Dizzying

The Strange Flower

The Commute

I’m eating something called “Studentenfutter,” which they sell at the Esso station down the street from the Montessori school. In my life traveling in and among new cultures and economies, one of the things I’ve learned is to remap the landscape in order to find unsuspected pleasures in random places. I discovered they sell German food in the Esso station--beautiful European food in shiny packaging that goes straight to the part of my brain formed early on. The American part. The consumer part, the part that identifies status with shiny European objects. Those things seem to give me a sense of well-being, a sense of comfort, that I cherish while wandering through the city.

Tallulah is adaptable to almost any circumstances, the only completely unacceptable one being that there is no food. Sometimes our gears slip--the gears of different cultures meeting, turning, producing something. And we forget that everything in Luperón is closed on Sunday nights--the vegetable truck comes on Tuesdays and the only things left on the counter at the fruit and vegetable store are carrots, eggplant, and bananas. In some improbable way I guess we were still assuming a world of grocery stores open 24 hours, the world of abundance from which we came. And so I stop at the Esso station (bypassing--why?--the sidewalk fruit/dulce de leche stands, and sidewalk vendors where something I don’t recognize is being sold) to buy shiny European food, things that are familiar despite the fact that I can’t read the labels.

Farm visit

With many thanks to Dave and Marilyn, homesteaders in the DR from New York via North Carolina.

I turn 42, and expound on something or other.

I want to write an ethnography of the guagua—considering the way we all crush together, shoulder to shoulder, flesh spilling into each other’s space, bodies overlapping.

Everyone is there—the people neatly dressed for work, the woman listening to the radio in her phone—she has it tucked into her hairnet and is singing along—the old men, dignified and self-contained, and the old women who shout, hilariously, getting everyone laughing.

We take a bus next, with fringed curtains and a cobrador who makes change and somehow remembers the faces he needs to get money from. My face is often different from lots of the others—I am obviously not Dominican—I always have a large bag and a child—we are memorable, and people wonder if they can communicate with us. One morning the cobrador asks me something. It sounds like he’s saying, “How old is the girl?” And I tell him she’s five, but with a question in my voice like, What? (The language is moving almost like quicksand.) The cobrador exhanges a look with the woman in front of me like, I give up, whatever. Like, what can you do. And I sit there thinking about how what he could do is to like, enunciate.

And then, kilometers down the road, I realize what he must have said. And I realize another level of their look. The word sickness ends with the word age. Enfermedad. Edad. He asked me, “Que enfermedad tiene la nina?”--what sickness does the girl have--which I heard as “Que edad tiene la nina?”

Getting off the bus I say, “Me preguntaste si ella estuviera enferma?” Getting a couple of complicated tenses out there just to make myself feel better about not understanding before. And he almost smiles with relief and says, “Yeah.” And I tell him she’s just tired, and order is restored between us--because it is just as miserable, I remember, not to be understood as it is not to understand.