|
A midday scene in Santo Domingo, the capital city of the Dominican Republic.
It is the season of fits and starts in the sweep of land I come from, when the sky strips back clouds to reveal a fierce sun that warms the blood, and then douses you with a cold crack of rain in the same hour.
It is where my parents joined hands, and leapt across continents and a thrashing ocean, my father buckling in for his first plane ride to a silver city so unreal so as to be light-years off. My mother stepped up months later for her own otherworldly ride from Santo Domingo’s airport to New York City to join him, braced for the unknown.
Explorers both, leaping into a New-er World than the one they left behind.
But growing up, my travels to La República to visit family were as straightforward and routine an affair as heading to the beach house or summer home is for others.
I merely brought my passport, and minded the currency rate.
And save for one epic crying jag at JFK when I was eleven, come summer, the coming and going, the flying, the wending my way through boarding gates and customs was the norm.
What glories, though, awaited.
There is family, and there are tribes, and to belong to both is to inherit sovereignty. Let the questions come about identity, as inevitably they do; are you of one country or the other, or neither, etc. But when you are marked, claimed and celebrated as one of a long line of many like you, of people whose great-uncles grew coffee and cane, and of women whose hands are maps, then you are of a tribe.
You are assured a place that is marked as yours alone, one of privileged membership. In turn, you are bound to others, it is true, but the reward is compensation enough.
As a child, I spent hours on my grandmother’s patio- her watchful eyes trained on me behind las persianas [the blinds] while she prepared the midday meal. La Vieja, as we called my mother’s mother, would hand me a bowl of fresh, silt-slick red beans to sift and clean. I would dig my small hands deep to root out leaves and stones, and then pour water from a long metal pitcher to rinse them. I would do this over, and then again. She would sing as she worked, stopping only to give a quick shout to el panadero [the bread man] when he biked past with sweet rolls. I knew not to go too far beyond the bright white gate, and when I did, to always be mindful and polite.
I knew I belonged to this tribe, and that others would know it too.
I swung open the same white gate earlier this week for the first time in a few years, its neat click sounding precisely the same as when my small fingers struggled with the latch.
It was my daughter’s turn to fiddle with it, to get it to open and shut just so.
Her passport too has been stamped repeatedly, in her five and a half years, the coming and going a rite of passage I am hoping becomes as ingrained, even if La Vieja is not here to assign her a role in preparing the meal.
Days after that visit, my mother and I sat for lunch, just the two of us. I do not think there’s ever been a time when we’ve eaten together in La República without the company of others. That’s the thing about a tribe – there are a lot of you clamoring for food, and attention. But this was unplanned, just a quick stop to refuel.
She went off to find a napkin, or water. I cannot remember.
When she returned, she carried a small bowl, steaming and fragrant. She was beaming.
“Habichuelas,” she said, setting down a white ramekin with plump crimson beans in broth, with tiny buds of auyama [pumpkin] bobbing.
“Nada compara a lo de uno [Nothing compares to what is yours],” she said quietly, as she took a small, contented sip.
Nothing does.
|
