SANTO DOMINGO DIARIES

    La Primaveral de Villa Mella, where we live, is on the outskirts of the city of Santo Domingo about 9 kilometers up Maximo Gomez as far as the blue water tank on stilts and then our house is a 1 kilometer walk or a 10 peso per person ride on a Honda 70cc Cub Special motorbike away. When we use such a concho Altagracia rides sidesaddle in the middle pressed between me and the chauffeur. From our roof we can see mountains, and our street, Loma de Chivo, which was asphalt at one time but now is mostly paved with dust, is virtually a dead end as it narrows to a dirt trail near a stream a few blocks beyond our house. There are a few big houses like ours with three bedrooms and steel burglar bars over the windows and doors but mostly the houses are small and unfinished with the rough cement blocks not yet plastered or painted and with boards sometimes nailed over the windows.  A painted house usually means that the family has some relatives in New York who send money. There are chickens and stray dogs everywhere and always someone on the street unless it is raining hard. There is very little traffic and kids can play stickball in the street, which, when they don’t have a ball, they play with the small frisbee-like caps from five gallon water jugs and use broomsticks for bats. We live next door to a colmado (or bodega or corner store) where you can buy a few pesos worth of tomato paste at a time; eggs, cigarettes, tampons, mints or aspirins or shoelaces one at a time; cheese or salami by the slice, disposable razors, toilet paper, powdered milk, soda, rum and beer. There is also a pool table and a loud juke box in the colmado but it quiets down by about 9 PM on weeknights and we all like the music anyway.
    Six of us live in the house. Altagracia and I, and her four almost grown children; Kiki 21, Jhoanglish 19, Chavela 16 and Niningo 15 although their real names are Luis Manual, Luis Maria, Luisabela and Luis Antonio. Nothing is ever found in the same place twice. Toothbrushes may be found in sink drains, in mop buckets,  on the stove, in shoes or under beds. I am sure we have toothbrushes in neighbor’s houses. We have three plastic pitchers to keep water in the refrigerator and they can generally be found each with about one ounce of water in them. We evidently use over 150 matches per day, that is, to light the stove and candles when the power goes out. Someone here can eat a pint of mayonnaise at a sitting. I have a friend in the US who has just finished raising two teenagers and she assures me that living with this age group anywhere in the world can be like living with raccoons.
    Ours is a three bedroom house with two bathrooms one of which has plumbing . The indoor bathroom, full of new fixtures, is dry and not connected to any septic system that we can locate and the outdoor bathroom is a small attached room around the side at the end of the patio. The paid receipt for the city water was counterfeited by the previous owners and, since we are not going to pay someone else’s bill of over 10,000 pesos ($330) and still accruing penalties, we pump water from an exposed pipe fitting across the street on Tuesdays and Saturday nights, which are the times the city diverts water to our neighborhood, to fill our cistern, if there is electricity. The rest of the street does the same thing and assures us that even if we did pay the bill, we would still never get the water we paid for. After the cistern is full we pump water to a tinaco on the roof that holds 200 gallons and supplies water by gravity to the kitchen and the working bathroom. Many houses here do not have a cistern or tinaco and so, on water nights, the street is filled with women hauling water in five gallon buckets on their heads. The electricity works pretty much the same way. Our house is situated between two telephone poles and there is a web of lamp-cord gauge wire spliced into the main power line that leads to various outlets and bulb sockets in the house. When Altagracia turns on her blow-drier the whole neighborhood dims. There is not a fuse or a circuit breaker anywhere. The house is constructed entirely of cement, roof and all, so it can’t burn down, but I make it a point to stand on one foot when I touch a light switch cause I figure maybe the current won’t go through my heart up one leg and down the other that way. We burn up a lot of light bulbs. Occasionally the power company sends a pickup truck with a ladder and two men, called cortadores, to cut the wires to the houses of people who don’t pay their bills and people like us who don’t even have a meter on the house. After they leave, the neighbor who is the designated electrician hooks us back up for a dollar.

LA RUBIA
La Rubia lives across the street in a small pink wood house with a galvanized tin roof and sells chicken every morning. She is tall, lean, strong and perhaps in her fifties with a gauntly aged face and is missing her top front teeth. She builds a fire outside where she boils a big pot of water to scald the chickens for plucking after cutting their throats. She rinses them with water and covers them with plastic bags, hangs a scale from a tree limb and sells the poultry for about 15¢ more per pound than Hipermercado Olé, the nearest supermarket. Usually she wears jeans when she prepares the poultry but if she has just gotten home from the disco or been dropped off by one of her chulos, she may still be wearing a tight dress or stretch leisure suit. The chicken she sells is from the U.S. as is almost all the chicken sold in the Dominican Republic. Altagracia tells me that people only cook the local bred poultry “for diversion” because it is so tough.
    La Rubia owns several houses out back which she rents out and where her ex-husband lives while their teenage children live with her. One day while La Rubia was flirting with a conchista in front of her house her ex was hunkered on the ground in the shadows of the neighboring house calmly tossing pebbles at the suitor's motorcycle and when one would bounce off the spokes or the gas tank the two would glance annoyed over their shoulders at him and then go back to their quiet conversation and he would scrabble around in the dirt for more stones to fillip.

OLÉ
    I walk to Olé almost every day. It is like a large KMart with a grocery store under the same roof. The traffic pattern of the shopping carts resembles the traffic patterns on the streets, one must beware and be prepared to run. There are frequent discussions with strangers in the aisles over which guandules or ketchup or shampoo is the best. The price of rice is high at the moment, averaging about 45¢ a pound, but at Olé they have a bin that holds maybe a ton of loose rice that sells for 39¢ where you fill up plastic bags with grain scoops and then bring them to a scale to be weighed and priced. People run their fingers through the rice and smell it before deciding how much to buy. A full bin can be emptied in less than 2 hours.
    The check-outs at Olé use bar code scanners and accept credit and debit cards but nothing ever works right all the time. The cashier checks every price scanned for errors and when there is one, calls for the guy on roller skates who arrives after a while with a clipboard and notes the UPC number. Then another person is called who has gone to find out the right price, then one more person comes with a key to correct the price in the register. If your debit card isn’t accepted you simply follow your cashier to the next register or the register after that until a working card swiper is found. When you leave the store a person by the exit marks your receipt with a blue magic marker, I don’t know why.

TELLY
He was here for a couple of hours the other day while his mother was relaxing Altagracia’s hair. He has skinny legs and a gigantic head. I first saw him on the sidewalk shoving a pointed stick into glass bottles and then whipping the bottles off the stick at the dogs across the street, and he hit a couple too. Later I noticed him swinging a broomstick chasing a 16 year old across a vacant lot. While he was here he slugged our cocker spaniel, was found eating with both hands out of the icebox, moved all the padlocks to different doors and then hid the keys,  locked Chavela in the bathroom, was caught pouring bleach into the hair relaxer bottle, broke four ceramic tiles, and had to be dragged off the garage roof twice because, aside from the chance of him falling off, there are a bunch of live wires up there. The second time I hauled him off the garage I accidentally bounced his head off a low hanging curved sheet metal roof that projects from the house, and his expression never changed, if anything a faint smile crossed his lips. The next day we saw his mother in town carrying a bleeding child across the street towards the clinic. She explained that he and Telly had been just throwing rocks at each other when it somehow turned ugly and Telly laid the other kid’s head open with a stick. We call him Demonio Vivo, but his real name, as near as I can tell, is Telly Tubby, named after the television cartoon program. He is four. Altagracia says that he is going to kill someone before he is twelve.

STREET
 We sweep the sidewalk and street in front of our house every couple of days and if you let your sidewalk get too cluttered someone from the neighborhood junta comes around to talk to you. So there is always someone on our street sweeping in front of their house but there are also 5 or 6 people sweeping stuff out of their houses onto the street. If your are on your porch, or galleria, the street is where you pitch or spit all your small garbage like fruit seeds, bottle caps, candy wrappers and sugar cane fibers. If you leave unbroken bottles on the street they are picked up by morning by people who sell them for 1 peso each back to the bottle factory. Only glass soda bottles have deposits and so are never found on the street. Once you have paid a deposit on a soda bottle you own one soda bottle, you can turn it in as the deposit when you buy your next soda but you can never get your nickel back. So the average bottle on the street is a beer bottle and the choices are Presidente in green or Bohemia in brown. Bohemia costs 5 pesos less and so is found more often in poor neighborhoods. I am sure that one could calculate the average income of any street of any town in the Dominican Republic by the ratio of found Presidente/Bohemia bottles. The majority of beer is sold in 22 ounce bottles and comes with any number of plastic cups so that you can share-- the beer stays colder and is a little cheaper that way. 12 ounce bottles exist but are not the standard unit as in the U.S. When you buy a beer in a colmado you ask for either a grande or a chiquito and if it is an affluent neighborhood you get a Presidente and if you are in a poor neighborhood they ask you which brand.
    The other notable item in the ecology of the street is the excrement of dogs. By rough count there are eight dogs living at the four nearest houses and all go in the street and there is no scooper law of any kind. While it is certainly possible to step in something the road is not as mined as one would expect. A hard rain helps, especially since we are on a steep hill but I think most of it leaves stuck in car and truck tires. My own dog's droppings are very rarely in the same place the next day.

    There are always people walking past the house on the way to the colmado next door if only to hang out on the little galleria there. Children as young as 4 walk the length of the street unaccompanied, clutching a 10 peso note in one hand and carrying the jam jar or empty coffee cup in the other in which to bring home the 10 pesos worth of vegetable oil or tomato paste. Guys wait on the steps of the colmado to talk to girls and mothers with babies chat with other mothers with babies. Shirts and shoes are not required and women might be wearing anything from cocktail dresses to skintight stretch jeans to nightgowns and might be elaborately coifed or have a headfull of giant plastic hair rollers held in place with one bobby pin each. (I am told that the rollers are often used not to shape the hair but to arrange it to dry faster in the sun, not many people have blow driers and the power goes out so often anyway.)  At night however most people dress to go to the colmado and hairdos are ni-ni and slacks and tee shirts are pressed and shoes shined. The colmado has a system of inverters, a series of car batteries that charge when there is electricity and power the coolers and the juke box when the power goes out, so there is almost always music playing and the music is almost always bachata or salsa or merengue and couples might dance on the little galleria or in front of the counter inside. Lots of people go to the colmado and don't buy anything.
    At the little intersection near the bakery up the hill from our house there are usually 5 or 6 motoconchos waiting to taxi customers up Avenida Primaveral to the bigger intersection on Maximo Gomez. (Maximo Gomez has actually become Avenida Hermanas Mirabel by the time it gets this far North, but never mind). The conchos are mostly Honda 50 or 70cc bikes but there also some 115cc Suzukis. The conchistas sit on their bikes in the shade and talk and scan the horizon for someone signaling for a ride which costs 10 pesos per person and 10 pesos more if there is a lot of luggage. It costs 40 pesos to have two bags of cement brought to your house from the  building supply yard and they will drag a couple of twenty foot long re-rod home for you too.
    Once you have arrived up at Maximo Gomez  you have the choice of taking a guagua or a carro publico or a city bus or a taxi. Guaguas are privately owned buses that hold about 30 passengers and cost 10 pesos. There is a driver and also a cobrador who hangs out the bus door shouting the destination of that particular guagua and bangs on the side of the guagua to signal the driver when to stop for a fare or when to let someone off. A good cobrador stows packages and helps the elderly find seats and a bad one shortchanges or ignores requests to stop.
    Carro publicos, or more simply carros, are almost always Toyota Corolla sedans and are usually totally battered and lack all mirrors, headliners, door handles and window cranks with their seats upholstered with found, mysterious fabric and the windshield a bowed web of cracks and clear packing tape. I have been in more than one that had rope tied to the door jambs and stretched taut across the inside of the car to hold it together. They also cost 10 pesos and are faster than a guagua because they can weave in and out of traffic but run shorter routes and usually won't leave the curb unless full-- 4 in the back and two in front plus the driver. A very wide person or someone with enough shopping bags to take up an extra seat has to pay double. To signal a guagua or a carro to stop when you are on the street you wag an index finger up and down.
    City busses are rare and only stop at specific stops, but often only cost 5 pesos. Altagracia still glows when she talks about the time last month she came all the way from Gascue, where she works for only 5 pesos on the bus. Her commute if by guagua costs 10 pesos, by  two carros 20 pesos and if by taxi 120 pesos.
    To cross a large, busy street in Santo Domingo it is best to do it one lane at a time, making sure that you are standing exactly on the divider line (if there is one) while you are waiting for the next opportunity to advance. It is also advisable to cross with packs of other pedestrians and to try to keep a large padded one between you and the oncoming traffic. Always be on the lookout for motorcycles which may be speeding between lanes and for vehicles which might be dragging things like 20 foot long steel re-rods and remember to glance down to check for missing manhole covers which were stolen to sell as scrap metal. At night cars with no lights can be especially dangerous. Right of way belongs to whatever would do the most damage to the car and this includes potholes-- a person (or a dog or a horse) could jump out of the way but a pothole never. If a car suddenly swerves violently toward you it is probably avoiding a pothole-- leap for the curb. At first I tried to maintain an aloof, calm air when crossing the street here but now I am not ashamed to run like a scared chicken. Try to avoid crossing the street altogether on weekends and holidays because, while there are television ads advising against drunk driving, there is no law against it. There is a law intended to discourage drinking while driving which states that the driver must have both hands on the wheel at all times but it must be that not many people know about it. It is not unusual for a guagua driver to be seen hoisting a large Presidente from between his legs from time to time while driving.

UTILITIES
The power went out last night, as usual, but when it came back on around 10 PM it came back on with a snap, a crash and went out again but only in our house and the house across the street where the family of Titi live. Domingo (Titi's father, also known as Guangu) came over today to put the ground wire back on the phone pole. He spliced on about three extra feet of wire and made a hook in the free end, then with a long plastic pole he hoisted the wire up to the transformer and hooked the wire back on to the big ground cable at the top, it arced and sparked for a second and the lights in the two houses came back on. We share the ground wire with Titi's family but we each have independent live wires, so if our live wire burns up or becomes loose it is only our house that goes dark.

Other news is that we need a filtrante, or leach field for our septic system. As it stands now our septic tank, which is a small one, feeds into the city sewer which is evidently stopped up. So when the hole drilling truck comes tomorrow it is going to drill a hole about 16 inches in diameter and 80 feet deep and which will act as our leach field. We are going to dig it in the side street between us and the colmado, no permit, just going to do it. We do need to remember to warn the people who live on the side street that no traffic will be able to come through for about a half a day. If we don't, I am told, some of them with cars could get pretty irate.

I am a photographer and I think I just bought the last black and white photo enlarger in Santo Domingo. While searching for one I called about 40 photo labs and photographers from the yellow pages and got a total of two leads-- and they were for the same enlarger! The digital revolution has taken over completely here. There is also no black and white chemistry or paper in the country. I went to Kodak headquarters on Avenida Abraham Lincoln and spoke with Rafael Oller, who, as it turns out, is head of Caribbean Operations for Kodak and he wished me luck. Occasionally, he explained, materials can be sent from Puerto RIco, but not the stuff I was looking for, and to order it from Rochester, NY would require two months and anyway, when I went to speak with the distributor who could conceivably order it they said it would not be worth their trouble.

KIKI
    Kiki is the oldest of Altagracia's four children having turned 21 on Christmas Day, and he just pawned the washing machine we had stored in the garage, or marquisina, where he sleeps with his brother, Jhoanglish, 19. He has also taken and sold the stereo, the propane gas tank for the stove, three cell phones (including his Mother's own which was filled with nearly irreplaceable numbers), my cell phone which Chavela, Altagracia´s sixteen year old daughter, recovered by calling my number before he was out of earshot with it and, when it rang, he had to give it up. Altagracia recovered the stereo by finding out from a neighbor which pawn shop he sold it to and getting there within 24 hours after which the price would have gone up.
    Kiki is very tall and very thin and very wide and is handsome despite his foggy eye where he took a dozen birdshot from a shotgun blast last summer. Perhaps it is that eye that contributes to his outlaw charm. He is, what is known in the Dominican Republic as, a tiguere (teeg-u-ray), which is, evidently, a unique sociological variety of delinquent. Requirements for membership seem to be stealing from one's mother, never working, making the maximum mess whenever possible, breaking bottles, eating other people's food with both hands out of the refrigerator, pissing on the toilet seat, lying compulsively and smoking drugs. Some tigueres kill or kidnap or rape people, some snatch gold chains from the necks of the women wearing them (when the guagua approaches the area known as Duarte all the women on the bus take off their jewelry before getting off), some sell drugs and some form small gangs and harass other tigueres. Police are afraid to enter some neighborhoods where there are strong gangs and a police who arrests or kills many tigueres may become an assassination target. Some tigueres carry short lengths of re-rod as weapons, some use knives and a few have pistols. And some just steal from their mothers.
    Kiki has nothing. He sold the washing machine, worth 3,000 pesos for 600. When he sold the cell phones he didn't get paid more than a cheap bottle of rum for the three of them because he trusted another tiguere. He is capable of working construction (during one burst of energy he shoveled two tons of sand, almost without stopping, up onto the roof of the marquisina for me) but usually refuses because working with concrete wears his shoes out too fast. He is without conscience-- less than a week after stealing the cell phones he asked me for a “loan” to buy a fighting cock.  Somehow he cadges cigarettes and drinks and joints on the street, and likely crack from time to time, and he does not get much to eat as he now banned from entering the house. But we don't keep much food around anymore.
    He has asked to borrow the machete (which he had begun to grind into a stabbing tool) when he goes out at night. in case of seeing certain friends. He and his brother nearly completed making, what I think is known as a zip gun, a single shot pistol fabricated out of scraps of steel and springs. They called it a harpoon at first and said it was for fishing but when a neighbor's 4 year old (Demonio Vivo in fact) found it accidentally in the marquisina and reported it to his mother and she threatened to tell the police I embargoed all the tools and banned it from the premises. It has since resurfaced briefly twice but no closer to firing capability and the boys believe me now, I think, that I will throw it in the River Isabela if I see it again.
    A couple of weeks ago Kiki proposed that I loan him 10,000 pesos ($330), one half of the down payment, for a small used pickup truck that he could use to transport produce to sell. I said that if he worked for a few months as a gesture of good faith and managed to save something that I was sure we could work something out. A few days later he told me that he had the other 10,000 as good as borrowed. Deal breaker. A few days after that I found him leaving the house wearing two shirts before 8 in the morning and he said he was on his way to the docks in Haina looking to stowaway. He only wants money to leave, the 10,000 borrowed pesos would have gone for passage on a yola, one of the boats that sink on their way, illegally, to Puerto Rico. He will never work. He will eventually die on the streets or in jail or in a swamped yola.
    Altagracia is torn. She is fed up, again, but still has a mother's fear of one of her children starving to death on the street. She can cut him off 95 percent but cannot  sever the tie. No relatives will take him, and he has lots-- 31 older brothers and sisters from his father's wanderings before he met Altagracia. She is afraid he will get sick.  So am I, but I also daydream about pepper spraying and beating him up.


    Some recent drama on the home front. I forget what I've told you about the two deadbeat lying thieves, 19 and 21, that are Altagracia's malcriado oldest spawn, but things have been getting worse, worse that is after they´ve taken and sold one of the propane tanks for the kitchen stove, a washing machine, 5 cell phones including both Altagracia's and my personal cell phones with all the contacts etc. (actually miraculously got mine back, another story) the stereo, the machete, the bread knife and they even pawned their own shoes which of course Mom had to replace. And this, too, after I had to forbid them from continuing work on a homemade pistol under threat of calling the police and after they have each had friends cruising for them armed (reportedly) with pistols and shotguns. I have promised the older one that I will call the police the next time anything big disappears. He really does not want to go to jail, which is why he steals from his own family because he knows that Altagracia does not want him to go to jail because she would have to bring him dinner every day which is how it works here, but I promised him that I would love to bring him dinner every day in jail, and he believes me, as he should. Of course boxes of matches, small change, candles, tubes of toothpaste and food from the refrigerator disappear as fast as before.
    Anyway last night I caught one of them pissing on the cement patio where I am building a garden planter thing and I lost it, really screamed at him, not the first time either, (it had been smelling of piss there before and I had patiently explained to all three boys that we had a toilet etc., that old piss smells bad etc.) called him an animal, sucio (dirty, a very strong word here) etc. as loud as I could yell. So early this morning as I am still lying in bed what do I hear outside my window, in the patio? Pissing!!! So at the moment we are under a 24 hour ultimatum, the first actually although there have been 15 day ultimatums which came and went unnoticed, if those two are not out by tomorrow, I leave, and if I leave everyone starves to death. I feel bad for the two younger ones, especially Niningo because we are friends and have trust, but jesus christ!!!!!! So I was about to call my American friend here and ask to move in for a couple of months and split the rent but Altagracia called me and said she was shipping the two out to Pizarete, the last town they lived in, a good distance away. Vamos a ver (we'll see). Boy am I pissed off. This is after loaning them both money, paying for medical stuff for both of them and being a generally nice guy with them, gradually getting angrier and angrier and angrier.
    Those two were to live with their father but he was killed in August, no one ever planned for them to live with us. My relationship with Altagracia herself is still fine, although she is a little uncomfortable with this ultimatum, and the museum show (now scheduled for March 15) might actually be a big deal, the catalog I am designing has grown to 14 pages and they evidently have someone who wants to pay for the printing costs. The museum is going to pay for the glass for the pictures although I will wind up buying the other nearly half sheet of glass from the glass store because, well I don't really know why but the sheets come 40x60 inches and the pictures require glass 32x40 (which in the States was a standard size) and the glass store doesn't want to get stuck with the 28x40 inch scraps, I guess, although they are pretty big to be called scraps, but I should be able to use them up eventually as long as I don't try to store them at home.
    So Kiki moved out for a few days but didn’t pack any clothes and the other one is actually working so he got a deferment on his eviction. When I realized that Kiki was back I actually did call a taxi and did move out with my camera stuff and Chloë (my cocker spaniel) to a pension for a night. This may have served to speed up the placement process and also sent the message that I meant it. Now, however, during this same time there had been a brutal break in and double murder in the neighborhood and also the guy who has the chimi sandwich stand up at  the corner got robbed again so everyone is a little nervous and since I will be leaving in 3 months to work in the States and Altagracia is not keen on being left in the house with only her son Niningo (15) and daughter Chavela (16) and without the two big guys because tigueres don’t usually break into houses where a lot of men live so I am not sure how hard I should push the eviction actions.

KNIFE FIGHT
    I was reading on the galleria after lunch today when I heard a bottle smash up beyond the house of la Rubia, then Demonio (not Demonio Vivo 4 year old but a 20 something with long arms and an athletic gait) comes tearing down the dirt slope through the vacant lot next to La Rubia's house with Britannia, a stocky local young mother with short orange vertical hair, charging right behind him with a knife. They stop in the street in front of our house and square off about 20 feet apart, he is clutching a broken Presidente bottle as a weapon in one hand and is holding his side, where he has already been stabbed and is dripping blood, with the other. La Rubia gets between them, they each pick up throwing-sized chunks of broken concrete and each winds up and threatens to deploy, Demonio yells that he is going to kill her, La Rubia stays between them, and eventually they go separate ways. But nobody thinks it is over. Evidently Demonio’s wife had been sending Britannia food, which is a common thing here, but Britannia had not been returning the dishes. Any form of disrespect in the area of food ranks low on the list of dos and don'ts.
    Later in the day two guys came to the door looking for Kiki and calmly told Chavela that they would like to stab him because they don’t like him being friends with one of their enemies. Kiki was not here at the time so they wandered off after waiting out front for a little while. When Kiki returned and heard the news he left singing quietly to himself and casually twirling a two foot piece of steel re-rod. Later I saw him moseying down the street flipping a switch blade around and then later in the afternoon when Altagracia saw him out front with a pair of scissors she went out and grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around and  sent him to the marquisina. But a half hour or so later one of the barrio elders called for him and explained that Kiki was not in the wrong, so far. And so then they left, presumably to go try to straighten out what might only be a misunderstanding.
    So, to top it off; about five minutes after they leave two more tigueres show up outside the marquisina and announce that they are going out to look for Kiki but don’t say why, they leave, and then Joanglish comes home from work. He is working as a night watchman and because he has to go back very early in the morning the supervisor had let him take the signed-out, loaded .38 Taurus, made in Brazil, home with him. Nobody argued when I confiscated the pistol for the night, he has the shells and when he leaves for work in the morning he can have the  pistol back.

CHAVELA
    Chavela is Altagracia’s sixteen year old daughter. She is cocky and confident and energetic, well known in the neighborhood and the source of nearly all my gossip. She comes home daily from school at noon, cooks lunch of rice with beans with a side dish, sweeps and mops the house and galleria, washes the dishes left from the six lunches and does the laundry. Last year in Pizarete, Chavela had had a novio (serious boyfriend) who was in his twenties and was a police officer, one of the ones who take the risk of shooting and arresting tigueres and so eventually a small band of them chased him down on the Autopista Duarte and killed him. I was living in the States at the time carrying on a telephone courtship with Altagracia and it was in all the Dominican newspapers. Less than a year later Chavela's father, who is the father of all four of Altagracia’s children, Luis, 74 and divorced from Altagracia for three years, was killed by a night watchman, or watchy-man, who knew him and who had broken into his apartment to steal a hundred dollars. Luis evidently woke up during the robbery and got a couple of licks in with a machete before the robber clubbed him in the head and then left, locking the door from the outside which prevented Luis from crawling out for help. Kiki showed up at the apartment the next day to visit his father and Luis died only hours later. After the robbery the watchy-man, a drug user, went to work still covered with blood and so now is in prison awaiting his unscheduled trial.
    Chavela’s first novio here in Villa Mella, Andres, was  glum, taciturn and unsmiling, but handsome, and came to visit Chavela on the galleria nearly nightly to whisper and make out but began to arrive later and later each night until Chavela figured out that, as she put it-- she was not the first dish of the evening and so she dumped him. Chavela is now seeing Marwell who is charming, hardworking and large and has a motorcycle. One evening Marwell invited Kiki to take the bike for a short spin and before Altagracia could discourage the generous gesture, Kiki took off with it, not coming back until more than an hour later dragging the exhaust pipe behind him. Altagracia said that if he had not broken the exhaust  that he would have ridden until it was out of gas and left it. But Marwell and Chavela are still an item; although he does not come around quite as often, he did bring her a large stuffed bear with lots of candy on Valentine’s Day and he calls.


JHOANGLISH
    Jhoanglish, 19, is tall and thin like his older brother but lacks Kiki's dangerous physical presence; his nickname in a high school in the States might be Ichabad. He is an inveterate fictionalizer-- if he told me it was raining I would have to be getting real wet before I believed him. He sings rap and regetón and sometimes does his own laundry and sometimes finds work but never sticks to it. When he landed this job as a watchy-man we were all very happy. But the next day we found out that he would need 300 pesos as a security deposit for the uniform. And then that he would need to take two guaguas each way to and from work which comes to 40 pesos a day. And that the Clean Conduct Certificate from the Police Department would cost 50 pesos. But we loaned him the money on the promise that he would pay it back out of his first paycheck. His second night of work he fired the shotgun into the air two times outside the bank he was guarding which meant that the supervisor had to schedule him for a psychiatric exam. Evidently many watchy-men work for years without ever discharging their weapon but during his third night and before having the opportunity to see the psychologist he emptied the pistol shooting over the heads of some suspicious looking people outside a different bank . Before going in to work the fourth night he woke up from a nap in the marquisina with a fever, a boil on his upper lip and his right testicle swollen to the size of a lechoza (a football shaped fruit about the size of a grapefruit) and so we took him to a clinic where they prescribed antibiotics and no work for a few days. The next time Jhoanglish left for work the phone rang about an hour later and it’s him saying that he forgot his hat and if someone doesn’t bring it to him right away he will be fired. So we tear the house apart, find the hat (and the tie) and realize that no one knows where to take them except for Kiki who got hired once for almost a full day by the same company but who is too hungover from something to go or just doesn’t feel like going and so we figure out the name of the company by reading it on the front of the hat, find the phone number in the phone book and when Altagracia calls for directions the supervisor tells her that there is no problem, that Jhoanglish can borrow a hat for the night but that, by the way, did we know he is about half crazy? But we are relieved to know that there is someone there who knows him and that he didn’t just borrow or steal the uniform so that we would give him guagua and lunch money every day. So it is about a week later and Jhoanglish is still borrowing the guagua fares and going in to work every day, sometimes at 4 in the morning, sometimes at 4 in the afternoon, but almost inevitably returns about two hours later saying that they had nothing for him that day. Tomorrow there is no work because there is a general strike but he tells us that payday will be the day after. I can’t wait.

    On payday Jhoanglish went back to work at the bank for Guardianes Marcos, the watchy-man company, and somehow, the story is still a little blurry even after a week of clarification, during a shift change, the shotgun he was responsible for disappeared. He was promptly thrown in jail, well not exactly in jail but handcuffed to a bench behind the Mirador del Sur Destacamento (Police Department). He looked pretty scared when we went to visit him but the police did not treat him badly although we had to bring him his dinner, a warm shirt and a sheet to sleep under on the bench. He was released after a couple of days when it was revealed that his supervisor had taken the shotgun from where Jhoanglish had locked it up and had since returned it into circulation. Perhaps the supervisor borrowed it for a quick side job. Why the supervisor or the succeeding watchy-man were never locked up or questioned I will probably never know. Guardianes Marcos is now insisting, not only that they not pay Jhoanglish his wages of about 1500 pesos for his total of five days of work, but that he pay 500 pesos to be reinstated although he, evidently, did nothing wrong. As well, the Mirador del Sur's finest would like 5000 pesos for processing and for the three days room and board but we figure it will all be forgotten long before we ever get around to paying. Our total losses, on paper, to keep Jhoanglish working would come to 1200 pesos daily, not counting meals and medication. I would still like to hear the story from another angle, there are two guys about the same age as Jhoanglish who live nearby and who work for the same company and they have had no problems with Marcos Inc..

TOWN HALL
    Altagracia has decided that, despite my tales of the cold weather in Massachusetts, she would like to visit this summer when I am there working.
    Every resident of the Dominican Republic has a cedula, or I.D. card, with a number that, like a social security number in the States, is linked with one's birth certificate and that one carries for life. But for Altagracia to apply for a passport she must obtain her birth certificate from the city where she was declared. But since she was not declared until she was about 17 and still too young to vote, although she had two children by then, and was declared by an uncle instead of her father and was not given the last name of her father, Mateo, but of her mother, Garcia Poche, or Pochet depending on which document you are reading, and since the birth certificate is evidently not filed by date of birth but by the date of declaration, and none of these records are computerized, it is not so easy. We went to the Junta Electoral of Baní, about 2 hours away by guagua, where Altagracia was declared (even though she was born in Elias Piña), and went upstairs where there was a corridor lined with maybe a dozen unlabeled offices all of which had equally long, stationary lines trailing out through the doors. Altagracia asked a cleaning lady to unlock a bathroom for her and while we, the cleaning lady and I, were waiting for her to come out we chatted and when she did come out the cleaning lady brought us to a friend of hers in one of the Kafkaesque offices who, after much turning of pages of dog-eared registers and much searching through overstuffed grimy manilla folders that were precariously stacked on shelves behind her, and recopying the cedula number a couple of times with the pencil she borrowed from me, announced that it would take a lot more digging and could she call us when she found the record and so we gave her 100 pesos so she could buy a phone card to call us and have a tip left over and thanked her and now are still waiting after three weeks and have not had time to get back there because, in the meantime, Altagracia's father died.

MORE KIKI & JHOANGLISH, DIARY TYPE STUFF, DUARTE
    In the case of Kiki and Jhoanglish, there is no easy solution, they make Altagracia crazy and they know that she will never let them go hungry or throw them out on the street. She made it clear when she described what she would do to those cops and to Guardianes Marcos if any harm came to Jhoanglish that she would defend to the death anyone who had come out of her womb (more exact wording would be-- "¡de este maldito culo, coño diablo!" accompanied by unambiguous hand gestures). If she gave the boys food and rent money to live somewhere else they would just spend it and come back to eat and sleep in the marquisina. The fact that there were, what I saw to be opportunities with me, to pay for vocational training or to start them off in a small business does not seem to matter. In the beginning the boys and I had long conversations over dominos about life and work and there were plans for them to sell used cell phones with me and maybe take a cell phone programming course and they said they wanted to learn English and I was going to help them and so forth. But now I think it was all lies. They do not care. Their upbringing was rough; as I understand it there were some harsh physical punishments meted out when they were young, punishments that Niningo and Chavela escaped, and I think that maybe Kiki and Jhoanglish are now punishing Altagracia for those days by breaking or stealing things she treasures or needs; on only a few occasions have the crimes been directed at me. So I can rant and rave and set all the deadlines and ultimatums I want, sometimes I feel a little better afterwards, but they will never amount to anything. Yesterday Kiki borrowed the television from the house and after Altagracia dragged it back from the marquisina she told him to get out, for good, but later when I asked her, "when?", she answered, "when he's ready."
    In about two months, after my museum show and after the big book fair or Feria del Libro in Santo Domingo at which I am hoping to sell a lot of prints of the cave drawings, I will be going back to Massachusetts to work for the summer. If airline fares stay low I should be able to come back to Villa Mella for long weekends to see Altagracia but for me to return to the house in November, the marquisina will have to be empty. If the boys are still there I will rent a small apartment and we will put the house on the market and figure out how to move on. I can't live with having to lock my own bedroom door behind me when I go out to the bathroom and not being to leave my cell phone on the kitchen table for an hour and paying for food for two guys who spit on the floor and walk on the laundry that's fallen off the line. The other day I left 15 pesos on the kitchen table so that Chavela or Niningo could pay for drinking water when the drinking water truck came around and somebody swiped it.
    Since I don't feel much like working on the house-- I have projects like finishing plastering the garden wall and somehow rehabilitating the indoor bathroom-- I have been listening to Bruce Springsteen and reading John D. Mac Donald novels written in the 50's and 60's with titles like, The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper; A Bullet for Cinderella; and Cry Hard, Cry Fast-- full of hard-boiled private detectives and dames and lines like, "when I belted him he went down like a horse on ice." Like Springsteen, they couldn't be more American. There is a used bookstore on El Conde that has books stuffed on shelving at least 8 feet high on both sides of a passage less than 2 feet wide, I don't see how you could even set up a ladder to  reach the top shelves and there is no organization. But, if you ask, the owner will take you through a series of passages separated by padlocked doors through the back to a large storeroom full of moldering piles of books, not stacks but piles, and some of the piles are old paperback novels in English.
    The Curator for my show at the museum has been sick-- heart and stomach-- and so we are behind schedule for the design of the catalog, today, Monday Feb. 28, was to be the day to deliver the layout to the printers but I will still have about two days work after I get the text from the curator, so I don't know. Wednesday we are to go to Elias Piña for the funeral for Altagracia's father.
    This afternoon I will meet Altagracia after work in Gascue and we will go shopping for funeral clothes for her in the shopping district known as Duarte, where there is Plaza Lama and Gran Via and Almacenes Rodriguez and Almacenes Paloma and Centromoda and Sedereles California which are all relatively un-air-conditioned, somewhat grimier versions of Woolworth or Walmart and where the sidewalks out front are packed with venders set up on folding tables selling everything from alarm clocks to earrings to coconuts to belts to wigs to perfume to toothbrushes to cell phone chargers to bootleg cds to boiled corn on the cob and to the headphones they give away free on Delta flights to listen to the movie with and where I would not go at night and where no women wear shiny necklaces (only bead necklaces that fall completely apart if torn off the neck) and where sometimes you can get a better price even in the big stores that take credit cards and have UPC barcode readers by bargaining and where none of the size labels on clothes can be believed. The stores here are a lot more crowded than the stores in the fancy malls like Acropolis or Megacentro and everything is cheaper. Carry your wallet in a front pocket and keep your purse always in front of you too.

ALTAGRACIA
    Altagracia comes up to about here on me, and is slightly but powerfully and gracefully built without an ounce of fat and is the color they call india here. Her stomach sticks out and, because it is not fat, I wonder if it could be from the surgery she had to prevent more pregnancies after the life threatening birth of Niningo, her last born. Her arms are thin but very strong with highly defined muscles from wringing out cloth mops and laundry by hand daily for 30 of her 37 years. She has very high and very pronounced cheekbones and when she talks she uses all the lip pointing and hand gestures that Dominicans are known for, including the very emphatic whip finger snapping move from Elias Piña. When she tells a story she tells it with such animation that everyone in the room listens and watches even if they don´t understand Spanish.
    I met Altagracia while staying for the month of January, 2004 at a pension in Santo Domingo while I was photographing indigenous cave art near San Cristobal. Our relationship started shyly with hesitant greetings in the mornings when I was leaving the pension for the caves and it wasn't until sometime during the second week that we began to chat. My Spanish was even worse then than it is now and she speaks very colloquially so it was slow going at first but I learned that she had been divorced from a comecomida mujeriego (good for nothing womanizer), Luis, for three years and had had 4 children with him now ranging in age from 15-20 years old. She was commuting an hour and a half each way from Pizarete by guagua and worked 6 days a week to feed her kids. As child support Luis usually paid her rent of 800 pesos per month and gave her a little food money, but they lived real poor nonetheless.
    By the end of my month in the Pension I was looking forward to the short chats we would have in a hallway or by the front desk and when she said she would miss them too, we exchanged phone numbers and she did, indeed, call me about a week after I had returned to Massachusetts and after another week we were calling one another 2-3 times a day. This telephone courtship continued for two months until April when I returned to Santo Domingo to deliver my promised prints and digital archive of the cave drawings to the Museum del Hombre Dominicano and to begin arranging the next phase of my project and, of course, to see Altagracia. We met in front of Supermercado Nacional on Maximo Gomez and walked and talked together and it was wonderful. The first besito, the first embrace, then the first real kiss. At that time she was no longer working at the pension so we were able to spend a lot of time together; she shuttled back and forth from Pizarete and we stayed in pensions on nights when she could be away from the kids, all of whom I had met by then. It was a sad goodbye when I left to go back to the States. She was certain she would never see me again, and I couldn't wait to come back.
    By this time the cave photography project was looking so promising that I left my position as professor of photography at a small New England private college and began writing grant proposals and planning on how best to move to the Dominican Republic. In July, after two more months of twice or thrice daily phone calls, I returned and Altagracia and I began house hunting. We walked miles through the city looking for Se Vende (For Sale) signs, talking with the local corredors (neighborhood shysters who presumably know what is for sale), reading the classifieds and talking with real estate agents and cab drivers. Twice we very nearly bought government apartments built in the time of Trujillo after being told that a clear title could be obtained afterwards (it cannot, at least as I understand it now) and we also very nearly bought a very pretty house that needed a new roof on a dead end street on a hill with a view of the Caribbean in Maria Auxiliadora for about $12,000 U.S. before we learned that, at night, no taxi will take you there because it is so dangerous. The trick was to find something I could afford but in a barrio that I would not get killed in and, since we had started out thinking in the under $10,000 U.S. price range, that left a narrow range of possibilities. Halfway through the second week we found the house in Villa Mella through a lawyer/real estate agent named Norkis. It had been lived in by a frail looking little old lady and a smattering of extended family including two overgrown sons for the past 14 or so years and had a clear title. We believed about half of what the owners told us about the house (half too much, but so it goes), made an offer, counter offered, etc. and eventually settled on 860,000 pesos which at the time came to $18,000 US. Altagracia´s lease was expiring so we moved her and her family in in a hurry from Pizarete and I was able to sleep there two nights before returning to work in Massachusetts.
    Primaveral has some nice houses and some shabby houses and is generally a poor, but not caliente (or hot or dangerous) section of Villa Mella although we knew there would be at least a few tigueres around. The plan was for Kiki and Jhoanglish to stay in the house with Altagracia and the two younger ones for the first month or so, while I was not there, to establish a strong male presence and label the house as not an easy one to break into safely, even though the head of household was a gringo, and then they were to move in with their father, Luis, in another area of the city. Unfortunately, Luis at the age of 74 was murdered in early August. Had he died before I bought the house, I would not have bought the house until the boys were settled elsewhere. Had he died sometime after the boys had moved in with him, they could have stayed there. The fact that I am struggling with these two malcriados in my own house owes itself  to an improbable event that happened during a two or three month window of time. But here they are.
    In October, about a month before I moved into the house with Altagracia´s family she and I had a fight by telephone. She was so mad that she went and got her job back at the pension and started looking for another house or apartment to move into. It is March now and she is still working at the pension, and working hard, for about $5 a day, 6 days a week and if she is sick a day she loses her day off. It is both fierce pride that she feed her children herself, even though she doesn't earn enough, and an even fiercer, and compulsive, work ethic that keeps her there.

    Altagracia was born on June 6, 1967, in Elias Piña on the family property that borders Haiti and where her mother still lives. She was the second oldest of 14 and the oldest girl-- as I write this she is 37. Altagracia was forced to leave school in what I estimate must have been about the second grade to work on her father´s conuco (little farm) and shortly after, to begin working cleaning houses both of relatives and of people who would pay her father a little for the service. Some of these positions were located as far away as Santo Domingo, 4 hours by guagua, and were live-in, at least during the week days so she was hardly raised by anyone.
    When she was 15 one of her uncles, Ramoncito, introduced her to Luis Alvarez, a 54 year old bachelor (and about 8 years older than her father) from Baní who already had 31 children with 7 or 8 different women. Before meeting Luis Altagracia had had one almost boyfriend who she had kissed on one occasion. She found Luis handsome and liked him and they were quickly married. Her mother, Anna, was only 13 when she herself got married. I suspect there was some kind of quid pro quo between Uncle Ramoncito and Luis. She gave birth to Kiki while she was 16. Altagracia has several sisters, Viola and Nellis, who are younger than her own two oldest children. Under pressure from Altagracia (for example she once threw all of his clothes into the front yard and burned them) Luis curtailed his womanizing ways after a few years and did not father any more children with other women. Luis was employed by a factory as a night watchman for a number of years, that business was  bought by another and he was kept on until his death. At one time in the marriage, after the first rocky years of his constant cheating and before the financial demands of 31 other children drained all his resources, they were reportedly happy and lived in a nice house in Baní. Altagracia tells me that she left him because she simply did not love him anymore although, here again, I have a feeling that something else must have happened to spark her move. When Altagracia called me in Massachusetts to tell me about the murder of Luis she had wailed into the phone, “tigueres killed my children´s father.” Since then she has not said much critical about him, whereas before his death she never said much good, but I suppose that is natural. She is furious with him for dying and leaving her with all four and I think she is serious about wanting to kill his murderer with her bare hands.
    We wake up at 5:30 every morning and I make coffee and hot milk while Altagracia makes the bed. After coffee she dresses, fixes her hair which has been in rollers all night and, with Chloë my cocker spaniel, we walk the kilometer to the blue water tank where she catches a guagua to take her to work. It is about an hour ride at that hour of the morning. She works making beds and cleaning without a break until 4 PM and then takes another hour long guagua ride home.
    When she gets home from work she inspects the house, orders more mopping in the kitchen or galleria, fold these clothes, put these damp clothes back in the sun, wash those dishes cleaner etc. Chavela has made lunch of rice and habichuelas and a side dish of some kind and left it on the kitchen table. I have already eaten half of mine but have saved the other half to eat while Altagracia eats her first real meal of the day after work.
    After she eats she goes for her bath which is the only time of the day she takes for herself although she brings the clothes she wore that day in with her and washes and wrings them out by hand in the shower. She stays in there for a good hour and sometimes smokes a cigar or two while she is in there and sometimes she bleaches the floor and scours the toilet for good measure. Chavela does laundry every day in the lavadora (portable washing machine) and cleans the bathroom every day too. Cleaning is therapy or escape for Altagracia, but I do not know what for or from. When she comes out she is frozen half to death even though she has gone in with a cauldron of water heated to boiling to mix with the cold water from the tinaco. She then sends Niningo to the colmado to buy something for dinner, frequently it is just bread and milk or a wheat pudding mix thing, or corn meal to make arepitas with but sometimes it is a big sancocho or salami with mangú. After dinner we watch a few minutes of Xica de Selva, a dubbed Brazilian telenovela (soap opera) that everyone in the family has taken a fancy to, then Altagracia irons for an hour or so, drinks a cup of coffee and we go to bed around midnight.
    Kiki and Jhoanglish are different, in a damaged sort of way, than Chavela and Niningo (who I haven't written about yet, but he is a sweet, honest kid who, so far, likes to work and has won academic prizes in school). I asked Altagracia once what traumatic event, something violent or sexual they might have seen or experienced (I listen to a lot of radio talk show psychologists)  when they were young and she could not think of anything. But when I asked Chavela the same question, she answered without hesitation, “Mommy´s punishments”. She went on to describe Kiki as a 10 year old, being forced to kneel on a flattened, jagged tin pail for 4 or 5 hours holding a large rock on his head in the sun after being caught doing something wrong. I began to leap to the conclusion that these punishments, which, I believe, exceed those allowed by the Geneva Convention, were what made Kiki the way he is today but the other kids tell me that he was real bad before too and when I asked Altagracia about it she said she had not known what else to do, and that that punishment had evolved commensurately with Kiki's crimes and that a neighbor had put a stop to it well before he had logged the alleged 4 hours.
    Altagracia used to make extra money by reading taza, or tea leaves, although she usually uses coffee instead of tea and reads the drips that run down the outside of the coffee cup after the person has drunk and then turns the cup upside down over a candle to scorch the dregs to increase their resolution. She might be able to tell you what your spouse is up to nights when he or she is out, warn you about upcoming health issues or see other things in your life that might be making you unhappy. Afterwards she writes a prescription which is usually comprised of a mixture of herbs. She read taza for Britannia a week before the knife fight and when I asked if she had foreseen such an event in Britannia´s future she said no, but that she happened to know that Britannia never took her prescription. She was very matter of fact about this talent when she explained to me that, yup, her father had it but that she was the only one of her 13 siblings who had it, so it goes. There is no belief system that goes along with this activity-- some people can wiggle their ears or curl their tongue the other way or dowse for water and Altagracia can read taza.

REZO IN ELIAS PIÑA
    After spending the last five years of his life in bed, stricken with thrombosis, emaciated and unable to walk, Amado Mateo Nova, Altagracia's father, died. His wife, Anna, had left him some years ago but came back to care for him during the thrombosis. Altagracia and I went to visit them a few months before his death and, while he was not alert for much of the time, he recognized Altagracia´s voice at some distance while we were still outside the little four room house and called her by her pet name, Ninina. She was, and still is, very proud and pleased and moved, inordinately pleased and moved it seems to me, that he recognized her then because, by most accounts, he had not been a loving father and it may be that her affection for him is only because he abused her less than he did her 13 brothers and sisters. Amado's brother, Ramoncito, told me that he influenced her parents to send Altagracia away to work and that he introduced her to Luis, who she would quickly marry, to get her to safer ground-- he spat on the ground when describing his brother, and this was at the memorial or rezo. He told me that while Amado did work he did not bring the money home to his family but spent it on game cocks, rum and women and that his children often went hungry and that he was sometimes violent.
    When someone dies here they are buried quickly. At 1:30 AM of the morning that Altagracia heard that her father had died and, even though the first guagua to Elias Piña would get her there well before noon, she worried that she would be too late, but she wasn't. Nine days later a rezo, a day of remembrance and prayer, was held.
    We had arrived at the house of Altagracia's family the night before the rezo and were served some boiled pork liver with yuca cooked in a kettle set on three cement blocks over a small wood fire outside on the ground under a shelter of thatch. Although there was electricity, the house only had two dim light bulbs so it was very dark with most of the light coming from the cooking fire, or fogón. Altagracia found that the only outhouse, a snug one-holer, was packed floor to ceiling with firewood so she ordered one of her younger sisters, Momona who still walks stiffly after having had polio as a child, and some of the men to empty it out and clean it so it could be used the next day. About 20 people spent the night sleeping on makeshift mattresses, slumped in plastic chairs or on the dirt floor and we all were awake by 6 AM to begin cooking the food for the expected gathering of 200 people. By 10 in the morning there were eight fogones scattered around the compound with some having kettles big enough that it took two men to move them. The two biggest kettles were set over a long fire in a hole about two feet across, two feet deep and six feet long dug in the garden. The foods cooked were pork, goat, chicken, yuca, rice, habichuela, tayota and chenchén, a corn meal and milk based mixture. The pig, which had already been killed, was coarsely hacked apart with a machete and then women with smaller knives finished cutting up the meat and splintered bone into stew sized pieces. The chickens were killed and plucked moments before stewing and the kettles were stirred with short poles that had been freshly cut and debarked. One short wrinkled old man was stopped from shaping one of these stirring sticks with his machete because the particular type of  wood he chose was bitter and would give the food a bad taste. The house had no kitchen or bathroom or running water so all food preparation and washing of pots and pans was done on the ground or on one of several makeshift wooden tables and all washing and cooking water was carried in 5 gallon plastic buckets. Scraps of food that fell on the ground were eaten by the dog or by one of the little pigs that wandered around. Coffee was brewed throughout the day by boiling the loose grounds in a kettle and then strained by being wrung through a long fine fabric tube that was closed at the end and then sweetened and served by women in tiny plastic cups maybe twice the size of thimbles.
    Anna, the widow, spent most of the day in a small room with close family receiving well wishers who might sit and stay for a while and who might talk among themselves, but it was generally a room full of sorrow and sobbing. While men did pass through to offer condolences almost no men ever stayed or sat. During the upcoming year the women of the family will observe a luto or mourning by wearing only somber colors and refraining from dancing, but men do not observe luto.
    An even smaller room in the house housed the prayer table with a candle, some leaves and the cross that would grace the grave site, although the inscribed birth date of Amado on the cross was off by about 15 years. I spoke with 4 of his brothers and none knew exactly how old he had been. Ramoncito answered that question by saying, Well, when I was eight he was about this tall and almost a man, and held his hand up to the height of the bridge of my nose.
    Out front, on the other side of the house, there was a tarpaulin stretched between trees to provide shade for the ongoing two domino games and where many of the men sat passing small rum bottles back and forth, most of which did not contain rum but clerén, a cheap, strong aguardiente from Haiti, only a stone´s throw away.  Many of the guests walked over to the rezo from Haiti, many women smoked tobacco pipes and some had short braids of hair hanging down in front of their ears and much of the conversation was in a Haitian patois which, to me, sounded like Turkish played backwards.
    The last guagua left Elias Piña at 5:30 in the afternoon and we barely made it in time to return home to Villa Mella.

KIKI GONE?
    Kiki has now moved out, with his clothes this time, back to Pizarete and is living with a cousin named Fermin in Fermin´s little house and they seem to be getting on well. Altagracia and I bought him a folding cot and about 300 pesos worth of rice, habichuelas, sardines and other provisions. Fermin appears to be about 60, tall, gaunt and nearly toothless and told us he served some hard time many years ago but has since lived a clean life. What occasioned Kiki´s move was a problem in the barrio with Herman, a local tiguere. Evidently there were 8 joints between them and when Kiki and Herman tried to divide them evenly it came out to 5 and 3 in favor of Herman so Kiki took a couple of jabs at Herman and blackened an eye and bloodied his head so now Herman has sworn revenge and has been seen cruising the neighborhood in a car with two friends which means that they are looking to first kidnap and then kill Kiki and it is generally believed that they are serious and so Kiki, prudently, left.
    So it is, for now anyway, quieter around here-- although it is possible that Jhoanglish is rising to fill the vacant niche in the social ecosystem of the house as he recently stole Chavela´s point and shoot camera and gave it as a birthday present to a girl he had met two days before-- and food lasts longer in the fridge although Chavela still prepares a small bowl of food for Kiki every day and leaves it on the counter in case he comes back unexpectedly. Jhoanglish usually eats it.

FOOD
    The staple meal in the Dominican Republic consists of rice, habichuelas (beans) or guandules (dried peas) and chicken, and is affectionately known as the bandera or flag of the country which also has three colors, and is to be eaten at midday which is one of few laws here that is regularly observed. For sale in Olé are three piece plastic dish sets for personal servings which include a large bowl for rice, a cereal sized bowl for the habichuelas and a smaller fruit cup sized bowl for the chicken. In reality, in many households chicken is only eaten a few times a week because of the cost. Altagracia eats most of her chicken bones and leaves behind only a tiny pile of hard, gray bone gravel. Chicken feet are a favorite of many and I am getting to like them if they are cooked until the skin becomes crisp. The lunch special in almost any comedor will sometimes offer stewed pork or beef as an alternative to chicken although the very first question you should ask when entering a comedor is ¿Hay comida? (Is there food?). If there is a written menu it is likely a waste of time to read it, best to ask and find out the price before you order.
    Eating rice is obligatory for many Dominicans-- Altagracia, as well as Kiki and Chavela, cannot sleep if they have not eaten rice at least once that day. Once after a day when the only starches had been spaghetti and yuca, late at night, I heard Chavela get up to cook just enough rice for herself so that she could sleep. We cook our rice in a large, heavy aluminum pot with a good fitting lid with the rice to water ratio being about 5/7. When enough water has been absorbed by boiling so that the rice can be mounded up toward the center of the pot, it is, and then it is covered with a plastic shopping bag which is tucked in under the edges of the mound of rice until a seal forms and the plastic inflates with steam, the heat is turned down as far as it will go, the aluminum lid is replaced and the rice is steamed for about an hour. With luck a hard burnt crust of rice will form on the bottom which is called concón which may be very difficult to scrape up but is considered a delicacy by Altagracia and Jhoanglish. I find it is hard on the teeth.
    When there is no meat a side dish of some kind is desirable which may be stewed eggplant or tayota, a squash like thing, pasta or a salad of iceberg lettuce, tomato, cucumber and maybe some shredded cabbage and sliced avocado in season. One of the few acceptable substitutes for rice is platano, which is a large starchy banana which is always cooked before eating. Green, or unripe, platanos are either boiled (as may be green bananas, here called guineos) and eaten as is or mashed with garlic and oil to make mangú or-- to make tostones-- the platanos are sliced into rounds and fried in oil, removed from the fry pan and smashed flatter with the bottom of a glass coke bottle (or squashed with a special tool that consists of two blocks of wood connected by a hinge), refried, salted and eaten like french fries. Ripe platanos may be either boiled or sliced thinly lengthwise and fried and are slightly sweet. Because platanos grow like bananas on rather fragile, top heavy and very broad leafed small trees they are susceptible to wind damage and so, because of the hurricanes this past year, the price of platanos is very high, sometimes reaching 8 pesos (or 24¢) each and so we do not buy them very often. In a food article in a recent Dominican newspaper it was opined that platanos are the only food that Dominicans can be served every single day without complaining, but, from what I have seen, that is more true of rice. Mashed potatoes are another popular starch but, in my house at least, and like spaghetti, are more likely to be served alongside of than instead of rice.
    There are many roots and tubers utilized as starch foods including yuca, pipiota (also called yautia coco), yautia, sweet potatoes, ñame and maybe a lot more that I have never heard of. They all look like brown lumpy roots to me in the supermarket. Yuca, known in other tropical countries as cassava or manihot, is the most popular and there are many varieties, some people can tell where a yuca was cultivated by its flavor and texture.  Most of these root vegetables are simply peeled or debarked, cut into pieces, boiled in salted water and eaten but also are added to stews such as sancocho and some are mashed and eaten and some may be ground into flour and fried into various kinds of dough balls or fried or baked breads.
    If you have tomato paste, sopita (enhanced bouillon cubes containing significant amounts of monosodium glutamate), onion, garlic, cilantro, salt, green peppers and oregano on hand you can cook almost any Dominican dish whether it is moro, which is rice and beans cooked together, or a stewed meat or vegetable dish. In my house neither hot spices nor black pepper are ever used while sopita and plenty of salt are mandatory.
    There is a whole aisle dedicated to canned tuna fish in Hipermercado Olé so I was surprised when my family's collective jaw dropped the first time they saw me mix mayonnaise with it. I was pleased when Altagracia, after tasting some on a cracker, said that it was delicious, but she has since politely declined to eat any more. The two younger kids really like this exotic combination though. I got the same reaction the first time I made poached eggs and they are now referred to as huevos crudos or raw eggs and nobody will even try one because they think the runny yolk is repulsive.
    While chicken is the most popular meat by far and can be bought live or cooked  everywhere, pork is a close second. Villa Mella, in fact, is still famous for its chicharrón venders, although in past years they reportedly lined the streets much more numerously than today, but there are still more than a dozen found over the last few kilometers of Avenida Hermanas Mirabel approaching Avenida Charles de Gaulle. Often when I tell a cab driver where I live he sighs, “Ahhh, la chicharrón de Villa Mella”. Chicharrón is fried pork skin and fat with a little meat attached, sometimes fried to popcorn dryness and sometimes left moist and juicy and sometimes includes ribs and costs about 140 pesos a pound which is not cheap compared to uncooked chicken at about 30 pesos a pound.
    Although the economy is no longer based on sugar cane as it was for hundreds of years it is still, in many ways a sugar based culture. The five of us consume almost one pound of unrefined granulated sugar per day. Coffee is drunk black and very sweet and sugar is added to fruit juice and milk and used to help brown chicken when frying and when small children visit they are often given a fistful of sugar as a treat. Also chunks of sugar cane bought from the guaguita that cruises the street much like an ice-cream wagon in an American suburb are very sweet and very cheap making them very popular. Strolling vendors sell hard candies and other sweets through the windows of guaguas in stalled traffic and, at long red lights, might hop on the guagua to sell in the aisle. The most talked about traditional holiday food is habichuela con dulce, or sweet beans which is habichuelas pureed with sugar (at least 1 pound of sugar to 1 pound of habichuelas) coconut milk, sweetened evaporated milk, sweet potatoes, raisins and vanilla with crackers added just before eating. We prefer it chilled, I don´t know how other households like it-- in fact if I eat much of it hot I get a kind of acid reflux stomach reaction.

MOMENTITOS, OBSERVACIONES
--There is a big tree right across the street from the house that always has at least a few and sometimes many small, white cherry blossom-like flowers. One drizzly day when occasional petals were spiraling toward the ground I watched a small barefoot boy dancing back and forth under the tree, looking upwards, catching and eating the falling blossoms in his mouth.

--La Rubia tells me that the tree with the little white flowers is called a roble and that it is good for nothing but making a mess with its constant shedding of flowers, and shade which means that her house always has a bunch of lazy tigueres sitting in front of it. But as she pointed to a machete gash in the trunk she added that the bark, which is very bitter, is used to make a tea which pregnant women drink just before giving birth, or giving the light as they say in Spanish.

--Early this morning while walking with Altagracia to the bus stop a barefoot  woman dressed in a dirty white knit dress stopped us and pointed to a lumpy burlap sack closed with a knot at the top and abandoned near the side of the road and excitedly explained that there was a dead dog in it and that it stank.

--People walking by the house frequently sing snatches of popular songs. The phrases I hear most these days translate as-- “I like the gasoline, give me some gasoline”, “Lean back mama, lean back”, “Bad bird, bad bird” and  “I love this darned thing”.

--I can´t think of any way to verify this, but I think that Dominicans accidentally drop more things than North Americans like fruit in supermarkets, cell phones in guaguas, plates and glasses in the kitchen, small change, earrings and I don't know why this might be true. It may be that I only notice this because in my house, which has all concrete floors, every cup, glass, plate, bottle and bowl that is dropped breaks so these events are memorable. As I just finished writing that last sentence Jhoanglish walked past and dropped his comb.

--There is much public spitting and picking of noses but gas emitted from either end at any time is considered rude.

--It seems to be considered de rigeur for some men to maintain a grasp on their crotches while walking and men of any age may make blatant adjustments in this area in public. Women may spontaneously adjust or pat into place the breasts of other women, or their own, and may reach inside to do so.

-- La Rubia is plucking white chickens, pinkened by their own blood after  having their throats cut, across the street. She is sitting on a broken cement block and when she lobs each plucked chicken into the shell of an overturned chest freezer it makes a hollow clang. There is a gallery of two cats, a dog which appears to be part corgi and basset hound and a bunch of loose chickens nearby paying close attention waiting for the offal to be tossed their way. At night the loose chickens roost high up in the big tree with the little white flowers and one of them is a rooster who is missing the end of his right wing. Twice I have witnessed him fall out of the tree-- first there were about 4 seconds of desperate flapping as he crashed unseen down through the leaves and small branches and then he cleared the bottom of the canopy and free fell for eight feet and hit the street with a soft thud, picked himself up, looked around to get his bearings and then ran back up the trunk flapping his wings furiously to help climb.

--At the fruit stand at the top of my street guineos (bananas) are three for 10 pesos but you can buy one for 3 pesos.

--When the tops of feet get sunburned, why doesn't the skin under the toenails burn too?

--While the streets may be filthy, the people are not. How can seven people wedge themselves into an un-airconditioned Toyota Corolla at 4 PM on a 90 degree day in slow city traffic and everybody still smell great after a half hour? I have an aunt who, while in nursing school, learned to inspect ears in Washington Heights in New York City, a predominantly Dominican neighborhood, and, after inspecting the ears of Dominican women for 3 months was moved to a different borough and was horrified when she first saw the piles of detritus in the ears of native New Yorkers. Altagracia cleans hers often and deeply and uses bobby pins, leaving no residue behind.

--An old mango pit with plenty of fibers still attached and a rat each flattened in the road look the same but the pit never has a tail.

--My cocker spaniel's name is Chloë and she is better known in the neighborhood than I am. Early the other morning as Chloë and I were walking back to the house from the bus stop down a still deserted side street and still blocks from the house, a motorcycle comes speeding up behind us and flies by with La Rubia on the back, dressed all in red to match her hair color of the night before, returning home from the disco and she is clutching three live, white chickens by the legs in each hand and she is yelling ChloëChloëChloëChloëChloëChloëChloëChloëChloëChloë and the bike is going fast enough so that the frequency is higher as she approaches than as she disappears around the bend in the street ahead like the Doppler effect of a passing train whistle.

--Sounds
The Papa of Titi chiseling concrete across the street; the ear splitting blast of the air horn of the garbage truck; murmurs of conversation between La Rubia and chicken buying customers; an approaching motor scooter with a bad muffler; many chirping house sparrows in the big tree across the street; a subdued groaning sound as the breeze sways the neighbor´s mango tree which rubs on the metal roof of the galleria; the clucking of chickens; men´s voices talking with the Papa of Titi as he works; another motorcycle with another leaky exhaust; Chindón, a local hipster greets Jhoanglish with the hipster greeting of ¿Que lo que? which is popularly translated as Wasssup? and Jhoanglish answers with the formula answer of Tranquilito or Really calm, man; a mingling of distant radio bachata from the south with a romantic ballad from the east; the sounds of recess at the day care center from around the corner; some barking from the house right next door and then the quick whistle of a broomstick through the air and the shrill kee-yidling of the dog it hit.

IS THE POPE DEAD?
    When I came home the other day after reading in The Times online in an internet cafe that the Pope's health was worsening rapidly Chavela and Niningo were glued to Spanish CNN coverage of the situation on television and I asked, and this is something I am sure I know how to say understandably in Spanish, whether he was dead yet and they answered almost in unison Yes. I double checked asking not whether he was almost dead but really dead? and they chorused again that Yes, he died. But this was Friday and the next time I read a newspaper I see that he died the next day on Saturday.
    When my Uncle, a strict grammarian, was here visiting we both became momentarily confused as to whether the Spanish word for water, agua, was masculine or feminine, that is, whether one should say la agua or el agua and so we asked a Dominican sitting next to us at the time on the back of a pickup truck bouncing up a dirt road and he said, definitively, that it was el agua. Which, it turns out, is wrong.
    I wonder if somehow, in an inflection of my voice or by the ordering of my wording or by some other subtle gesture, I somehow hinted that I was expecting one answer or another and so Niningo and Chavela and the man on the truck gave me the answers they thought I was expecting in a spirit of agreeability? I think it is possible that if you ask someone on the street if the stadium, for example, is this way that they are likely to say yes even if it is not, but if you ask where the stadium is they are then freer to either say they do not know or to tell you where it really is. So I wonder how the answer would have differed if I had asked how the Pope was doing rather than had he died yet

DIRECTIONS
    While standing on the galleria one morning I casually asked Jhoanglish where he was headed that day and he pointed up the hill beyond La Rubia's little pink house and said he was going up that way. A few days later when, again from the galleria, I asked him where he was going he pointed in the exact same direction and said down that way and when one is getting directions from someone on the street it works the same way. The person doing the directing may tell you to keep going up (or down) in a certain direction and that up (or down) may be toward the north or the south and it may be back the way you came or where you were headed and it may be toward the center of town or heading out of town or toward the river or away from the river or up the hill or down the hill. Many times the person giving directions will turn, guided by some kind of internal compass, and use their arms, pointing or waving while saying that you then go more that way and then down by there and then all the way up and then there you are!
    If one tells a conchista or a taxi driver to take the next right they will often turn to look at you to see which way you are indicating (if you are on the back of a motorcycle it is advisable to point so the driver can see). That particular right hand turn is not inherently, essentially always a RIGHT HAND TURN in the most absolute sense of the phrase because it always depends on which way you are facing and so it might be more a distrust of abstraction on the part of the driver than not knowing right from left.
    To get to my house you continue straight for about a kilometer and take the first left after the bakery and when I explain the directions that way North Americans always find the house but Dominicans seldom take the right turn, and I do not know why. For a long time I thought that it was only me who was getting it wrong, that there existed some kind of secret but consistent code that everyone else understood and that had perhaps evolved due to the lack of street signs or due to the fact that while there is a high illiteracy rate here, even many of the people who can read tend not to and so the habit develops of navigating as one would while walking through the woods where there are zero street signs so one needs to know to turn by the big tree, or at the two boulders or by the prickly shrubs, but I often see people lost here and I have heard a lot of bad directions given and so I carry a street map with me and a good one is the one by Mapas Gaar and you can always find one in the Thesaurus book store on Sarasota and Abraham Lincoln.

RAIN
    It had not rained in 6 weeks. Clouds of dust followed trucks and motorcycles up the street and settled everywhere and even a dog or a chicken or a child running could raise up a small rooster tail. At night, even when nothing was stirring it up, you could see the dust in the air through the slanting light of the headlights of standing cars waiting in front of the colmado. Chavela mopped the galleria and the kitchen floors twice a day and then would fling the dirty water out of the bucket in a fan shaped spray onto the street to try to keep the dust down and we would try to keep the persianas closed on the windows to keep the dust out but it would get too hot in the house. If a big Coca-cola or Presidente truck rumbled by on its way to the last colmado the roiled dust could get so thick that, for a moment, you could not even see Titi's house clearly which is just across the street and only two houses down.
    But then today it rained for about an hour before lunch. La Rubia fashioned a Hipermercado Olé plastic bag into a shower cap and threw several more plastic bags over the cut up chicken still on her table and sat back down in the rain to wait for customers and a bunch of little kids wearing just underwear came out of nowhere and took baths under the down spouts that drain the water off the flat roofed houses. A girl of about 12 who had been mopping the floor in a marquesina across the street and one house up leaned her mop against the wall and stood in the doorway, half in the rain, and danced slowly in the water running down the sidewalk.
    I had been painting a patio wall of the garden just outside the house with orange paint and the rain came suddenly. I just had time to get the laundry off the line and into the house and put my brush and roller and paint under cover and then there was nothing to do but to sit under the roof of the galleria and watch the drain water that ran off the patio turn oranger and oranger. Niningo and Chavela came home from school just as it was letting up and when I showed them the stained blotchy paint job they each said, “What bad luck.”

PAN (Bread)
    The daily plain yeast bread in the DR is called pan de agua or water bread, is generally about the size of a hotdog bun but a little wider and a little flatter and costs 3 pesos while a smaller version costs 2 pesos. It is baked in grooved sheets so that the pieces can be separated later like postage stamps. All colmados sell pan de agua but we buy ours from the bakery because it is nearby, a little cheaper and the bread is a little fresher. There are four grades of freshness-- pan caliente or hot bread, pan de hoy or today's bread, pan de ayer or yesterday's bread and pan de piedra or bread as hard as stone and all cost the same.
    Pan sobao lacks the groove of pan de agua and is made with milk and butter and so tastes richer and sweeter and is usually the size of a bun but may be as large as a platter. .
    Pan carioca. Right now I cannot find anyone who knows what is in pan cariochi, but I will ask at the bakery tomorrow morning.

ANAHAI, JHOANGLISH WORKS, DENTIST-- April 7, 2005
    Kiki is still living with cousin Fermin in Pizarete, apparently uneventfully, although there were some unsubstantiated rumors of renewed trouble with old enemies from when he lived there before, the same enemies who, in fact, had shot him in the face with a shotgun last year. What reliable news we do get from those parts comes from Anahai who lived next door to Altagracia and her family in Pizarete after Altagracia's separation from Luis and was Altagracia's best friend when best friends were scarce. Anahai is 20 something, has a two year old boy, many boyfriends-- all of whom drive SUVs-- loves beer and is astonishingly beautiful. So she and Kiki are friends, having lived next door to one another for three years and Kiki is probably a little in love with her and who wouldn't be and so he keeps in touch with her and she keeps in touch with Altagracia.
    Anahai may have to move soon because she was living in a house that was owned by her father, Chulo, but he died just after Christmas when a dump truck rolled over on him at the turn off for Pizarete on Route 2 and the laws of inheritance here give preference to any children who are minors so Anahai is sure to lose the house. At first it was thought that Chulo would just lose a leg and Altagracia and I tried to visit him one evening in Hospital Dr. Dario Contreras because he had always been nice to Altagracia but because it was after visiting hours we could not get in and that is evidently a strict rule because the hospital's entrances were all gated shut and any visitors who were still inside had to stay inside until morning but we got word to Anahai, who was inside, that we were there and she came down to the gate and we were able to hand in 200 pesos and some fried chicken to her through the bars. But Chulo, who I never did get to meet, died a few days later. Chavela jokes that during the three years the family lived in Pizarete they did not know anyone who died of natural causes. We went to the rezo in Pizarete nine days later and it was a quiet affair, unlike the rezo for Altagracia's father, with about 100 whispering mourners seated under an enormous tree with little refreshment. The little country cemetery where Luis, Altagracia's ex-husband was buried was only a short walk away so we visited it and it was the first time Altagracia had seen it; she had refrained from attending his rezo in August because of dreaded squabbles with his 31 offspring and their mothers, all of whom would feel entitled to whatever inheritance there might have been.  I took a picture of Altagracia solemnly contemplating his tomb which was a concrete box on top of the ground, painted white with a cross and an inscription and she was sad for a few minutes, after all they had spent almost 20 years together, and then she peed on the ground near the head of the grave and then we walked around the cemetery looking at the other tombs, including that of Chulo, as yet unmarked and unpainted, before returning to the rezo.

    Jhoanglish, after not returning to work with Guardianes Marcos, spent a couple of weeks moping around the marquisina and then the phone rang one evening and it was the owner of a colmado near the pension where Altagracia works asking Jhoanglish to come to work making home deliveries by motor scooter for the colmado. We were all very happy, especially because room and board were included in the offer, and Jhoanglish went grumbling off to work at the colmado early the next morning but showed back up at the house around 10:30 that night saying that the motor scooter he was to use had been in an accident the day before and did not run right and so he got hit by a car while stalled in an intersection and he showed us a scrape on his arm to prove it and then he slept all night and most of the next day  but the colmado called Altagracia at work later that next day and asked where Jhoanglish was and where was the money he was carrying to make change for customers with and then mentioned that the motor scooter was fine and that there had never been any accident of any kind. But he never went back and the change that he kept was less than the day's pay would have been anyway and we still don't know how he scraped up his arm.
    Yesterday Jhoanglish went to San Isidro to enlist in the Air Force. Today he is trying to get his paperwork in order to continue the enlistment process tomorrow which means going to Pizarete and getting a copy of his Declaration of Birth as well as a record of having completed high school which he never actually completed but there is evidently an old teacher of his there who will write a note of some kind and stamp it saying he all but completed school and that should be good enough. So Jhoanglish borrowed 200 pesos from Niningo, his younger brother, for guagua fares then woke up at 3AM and washed his clothes and ironed them dry then went back to bed and got back up at 6AM and left for Pizarete. He enlisted in the National Guard once but lasted less than a day when he twisted his ankle during a wind sprint and was sent home so we are not very optimistic about the Air Force.

    Altagracia, after years of procrastination and gnawing on sugar cane,  went to a dentist today. She first called the dentist who has an office very close by and near the blue water tank but it turned out to be a woman dentist and Altagracia refused to go to her. Our second choice was a dental office I had actually reconnoitered once before and was about a mile down Ave. Hermanas Mirabel and was staffed by two male dentists with modern looking equipment and no appointment was needed. Dr. Milton Pinales, a short alert man with very crooked lower incisors, agreed to calculate a price for everything and after about five minutes of peering around in her mouth with the standard tiny round mirror on the little bent stick wrote us up an itemized list of work which included one complete cleaning, one complete destartraje (?), one root canal, two replacement molars and 17 fillings for 14,600 pesos ($500) and promised to be done in two weeks. By the time I got back from the ATM machine with the initial deposit of 4,000 pesos he had already extracted the biggest rotten filling and had drilled the nerve of the worst tooth. He is, so far, getting good reviews from Altagracia.

MONEY
    Pesos exist in denominations of 2000, 1000, 500, 100, 50, 20 and 10 peso notes as well as 5 and 1 peso coins. The 20 and 100 are nearly the same color as are the 50 and 500 and so are possible to confuse with one another. Cash registers still total your bill using centavos which are also known as cheles but this figure will be rounded off as nobody uses cheles anymore because there are 100 cheles in each peso and the only thing you can buy with one peso is one mint, and not one of the best mints either.  A 50 centavo piece was called a half-peso and a 25 centavo coin was called a peseta. The most important thing to remember when you are about to spend pesos is to offer the largest bill you have that you think the vendor could possibly have change for because small bills, known as menudos, are surprisingly scarce. I have visited as many as five colmados during the afternoon of a weekday looking to break a 500 peso bill (about $17) unsuccessfully and I eventually had to walk all the way to Hipermercado Olé and buy a box of matches for 4 pesos to do so. If you have only a 500 peso bill you need to ask the cobrador if he has that much change before getting on a guagua even though you might reckon that hundreds of people have already paid their 10 peso fares before you got on and if you want to pay your guagua fare with a 100 peso bill you should pay well before your stop to give the cobrador time to find change. I was once called an abusador by an irate cobrador for handing him a 50 peso bill to change as I hopped off his crowded guagua. I believe that there is often a locked box under the driver's seat and that that is where they stash the menudos and if they squirrel away too many of them at once they are stuck for change for a while.
    Unlike in the U.S., where if you posses more than half the bill you still have all its value, Dominican paper money, particularly a large denomination bill, may be refused even if it is only missing a tiny corner or is torn or has some ink on it and you then have to bring it to a bank where they examine it under ultraviolet light and with a magnifying glass before exchanging it for an unblemished one. Many of the larger stores scan all large bills with an ultraviolet scanner and almost everyone will hold the 500 up to the light to check for the watermark of the bust of Juan Pablo Duarte, one of the leaders in the struggle for independence from Haiti which was achieved in 1844. There are little silver foil things embossed on the front and a gold shiny stripe with BCRD standing for Banco Central República Dominicana printed on the back of each 500 peso note as well as the watermark so it would seem to be difficult money to counterfeit, and maybe hardly worth it, but I suppose one can't be too careful.
    Bancos are banks but bancas only sell lottery tickets or, if it is a banca deportiva, it is for betting on sports and might have as many as a dozen televisions showing various sporting events to the bettors. Banco Popular, Ban de Reservas, Banco de Leon, Scotia Bank and Banco BHD are the most prominent banks in Santo Domingo and all have many automated teller locations and many branches and, often, waits of over a half hour to make a simple cash withdrawal and sometimes much longer just before holidays and on the first and fifteenth of each month when many people get their paychecks. I have, at times taken two guaguas to go to the Ban de Reservas in Lucerna because it usually has a much shorter line than the one in Villa Mella and I think I have saved time doing it that way.
    I once brought a bunch of Traveler's Checks to cash at the Banco Popular tower on the corner of Maximo Gomez and John F. Kennedy because none of the branch banks would accept them. After waiting on line for 20 minutes or so I reached the appropriate teller and, making sure she was watching me, I countersigned all the checks and then she took them along with my passport and driver's license and disappeared into some farther reaches of the bank and she finally returned after what seemed like a long time and said that my signatures did not match and so the bank would not cash the checks without the pieces of paper with the corresponding check numbers on them along with more of my signatures that the bank in Massachusetts said to NEVER carry with the checks themselves and so I had to go all the way back to my room in the pension carrying all the checks with two signatures on each one and get the verifying scraps of paper and come back to the bank with all of it in one bulging pocket hoping that I could find the same teller who had watched me countersign them and everything worked out okay but I don't think I will bring Traveler's Checks here again.

April 10, 2005
    The garbage truck did not come yesterday to pick up the garbage and there has been no power for 30 hours. The inside of the refrigerator is warmer than room temperature, which is about 80∞ and the cell phone batteries are low and, soon the tinaco on the roof will be empty and, without electricity to run the pump to fill it, we will need to take bucket baths and flush the toilet by dumping water into the bowl. Other than that, plus the fact that sleeping is a little less comfortable without a fan, both because of the heat and the fact that it is not blowing the mosquitos away, not much else is affected. Since surrounding streets have had normal amounts of power lately we suspect that some main cable supplying only Loma de Chivo is damaged and should probably prepare to wait a long time because this end of our street is not rich in paying customers.
    (About a half hour after writing the paragraph above the lights came back on to smatterings of cheers and applause throughout the neighborhood.)

BASEBALL
    I went to the big colmado on the little winding street, Calle #12, that parallels ours on its way to Ave. Hermanas MIrabel to watch Pedro Martinez , the all-star Dominican pitcher, pitch yesterday in his second start of the season for the New York Mets who were 0-5. The television was mounted high on a wall behind the counter and next to one of the enormous speakers that blasted merengue and bachata throughout the game. Five or six men were seated on upturned Presidente crates watching the game and there were two couples who got up to dance bachata from time to time seated on stools at the counter which was covered with a forest of empty Bohemia bottles. One of the men had a long thin scar on the back of his head, the other man was missing a finger, one of the women had a wide, dark, dramatic vertical scar in the center of her forehead that looked like her head had been cleaved open once and the other woman had burn scar on her chest showing just over the scooped throat of her tank top and extending down behind the shirt. The woman with the burn scar had a four or five year old boy with her who had an area about the size of a 50¢ piece shaved on the side of his head, but with no apparent wound, and at one point the woman bought one clove of garlic, peeled it, crushed it between her fingers and rubbed it on that spot to help cure a fungal infection.
    Baseball fans here root for the Dominican players in the major leagues more than for particular teams so as long as the Mets were losing only listless attention was paid to the game because Pedro was not in position to earn a win but the minute that Jose Reyes, the Met's hot Dominican shortstop, singled and Beltran homered to put the Mets ahead in the eighth the colmado erupted with enthusiasm and fist pumps and everyone paid rapt attention as Pedro finished pitching a complete game two hitter winning his first for the Mets and their first of the season. After the game, and after the happy recap and many tv replays I timidly asked if the last round of the Masters golf tournament could be put on as Tiger Woods was in position to make more sports history but was firmly told no, not golf.
    The six team winter baseball season here begins sometime in late October and, as more and more major league players arrive, receives more and more attention (and attendance) until it culminates in a round robin tournament of the top four teams and then a best of seven game playoff to determine the winner. When the economy is bad, as it is now, the regular season games may be attended by as few as one or two hundred fans in a stadium that must hold 15,000 but when the two rival teams, Las Aguilas of Santiago and the Licey Tigres of Santo Domingo meet in the playoffs there can be unbridled pandemonium. Somewhere I read that the Dominican Republic has the highest ambient noise level of any country and this statistic is never more believable than at a sold out baseball game where noise makers range from car battery powered air horns that are connected by hoses to separate tanks of compressed air to thousands of free pairs of two foot long, tube shaped balloons inflated to near total rigidity that one slaps violently together to produce a resonant whonking noise that you can feel in your chest. Vendors walk the aisles selling all the standard stadium snack foods as well as cans of Presidente and plastic pint bottles of Brugal rum with accompanying styrofoam cups filled with Coca-cola and ice to go with the rum. Seas of yellow pennants of Las Aguilas or the blue pennants of Licey are whipped around wildly when the corresponding team scores a run, gets a hit or even sends a batter to the plate. When I went to the seventh game of the final playoff in 2003 between these two teams I had to yell as loud as I could just to talk to the person next to me even between innings when nothing was happening. After the game the cars leaving the parking lot blow their horns nonstop and have people sitting on the roof, trunk and hood still waving the banners around, yelling and whonking their balloons.

PUMPING WATER, AFTER MARWELL-- APRIL 12, 2005
    At about 5 PM after walking the two kilometers home with me from her now daily afterwork visit to the dentist Altagracia eats her lunch of guandules, white rice and chicken and drinks a cup of coffee on the galleria and then retires to the bathroom with the mop and a bucket and an armload of clothes to wash by hand in the shower while she is bathing and shampooing and locks herself in for a couple of hours. When she emerges she hangs the clothes on the line and has Chavela put her hair in big rollers, then drags the lavadora out to the patio to wash more clothes even though I keep pointing out that that shirt is clean, those pants have only been worn one hour etc. and in between cycles she sweeps and mops the three bedrooms, living room, kitchen and galleria even though most of them were mopped earlier in the day and then, since it is a water pumping night and the pump is hooked up, she brings the garden hose into the marquisina and hoses that down, walls and all, all the time swearing and muttering like Yosemite Sam about what slobs her kids are and especially Jhoanglish who never cleans anything except his own clothes and, in fact, he has left his opened bottle of liquido, or shoe blacking, on his bed and so she hoses that down too to try to teach him a lesson but when she calls him in off the street where he is hanging out with the other youth of Primaveral and he sees his dripping mattress he just shrugs and wanders back out into the night to bum more cigarettes and talk about what it will be like to be in the Air Force. She then smokes half of a five peso cigar and sets up the wooden ironing board in the living room even though it is still hot as hell in there and irons clothes until 11PM when she drinks a little more coffee and puts her hair in the smaller rollers for sleeping and we go to bed. Tomorrow is, Wednesday, her day off.
    It had been a fine night for pumping water. There was plenty of water pressure as well as electricity for the pump and so a lot of green garden hose ran from the exposed curbside plastic pipe nubs and crisscrossed across the street, and sometimes for hundreds of feet and sometimes up to roof tops where it filled tinacos and barrels in second floor kitchens. People without hose or a pump or access to a water pipe walked around with empty plastic five gallon Tropical brand paint buckets, which are as ubiquitous here as joint compound buckets are in the States, looking for a place to fill them and so occasionally Niningo or I would pause in filling our cistern to fill a couple of buckets for neighbors like Ambar from three houses up and across the street who was wearing a short nightgown and carried the heavy buckets home slung between her and two girls who live next door.
    In past weeks Marwell, like Andres before him, began appearing later and later and more sporadically in the evenings to visit Chavela and has now gone the way of Andres which frees Chavela up to mingle in the street in front of the house and to receive a variety of male visitors-- some of them are friends, some of them are clearly too young for her even though their hopeful greetings often involve a little more than a momentary embrace and a quick besito, or peck on the cheek, and some of them are suitors. Chavela has told both her mother and me that, while she liked kissing Andres and Marwell, any touching beyond that made her uncomfortable (and Altagracia, who can spot a lying teenager from a much greater distance than I can, believes her too) so I am not very worried about her turning up unexpectedly pregnant even though 27% of all pregnant women here are girls younger than nineteen, but Altagracia is furious with this behavior. Last night she pulled Chavela inside at 10:30 and had Niningo lock the doors because Chavela was talking with a boy out front and at six this morning while Altagracia and I were drinking coffee in the kitchen, which has a window into Chavela's bedroom, Altagracia launched an unending barrage of critique toward Chavela who barely protested because she was still half asleep and words such as puta (whore), cuero (whore), sinvergüenza (shameless), mala reputación (bad reputation), and coño-- the most popular curse word by far in our barrio and which is often used by mothers to motivate even small children e.g. Muévate, coño which you might translate as Hurry up, damnit and which translates literally as cunt in English but does not carry even nearly the force of that ancient English word which may even be referred to as the c word on all male construction sites-- were much in evidence and I was taken aback until I remembered that Altagracia herself was never sixteen years old and single.

NININGO
    Niningo is Altagracia's youngest at fifteen years old and is quiet and studious and is the only boy who does chores, often without being asked, and who runs practically all the errands to the colmado and who has worked in the colmado and who now works on either Saturday or Sunday every week painting rooms in the pension where Altagracia works and gives me money to save for him because he would like to buy a cell phone. Both he and Chavela are now enrolled in a computer course which meets every afternoon on weekdays and will last for three months and it is he, more than Chavela, who is reading ahead in the manual and asking me questions about Windows and files and bytes.
    One evening when Niningo, Chavela, Altagracia and I were watching television we thought we heard a gun shot outside and we all got up and, as it happened, it was Altagracia who was the first to the door to go out to see what had happened but Niningo lunged and tackled her yelling No, no not you too! and he would not let her out until Chavela and I had ascertained that it had been a truck that had backfired. Their father, Luis, had been the parent who had spoiled the children and had been the good cop with them and, I think, the older three may resent that he was the parent they lost and not Altagracia and this may be part of the reason for the recalcitrance of Jhoanglish and Kiki. But the relationship with Niningo had been different, Luis had ridiculed him from a young age and gave him the nickname Enano which means dwarf and which Chavela uses affectionately sometimes but neither Altagracia nor I ever call him that and it may be that I am the first man who has ever treated him respectfully, has ever handed him the sports section of the newspaper before he has read it himself, for example. So Niningo and I have rapport, often unspoken because he speaks very fast and mumbles so I have a hard time understanding him, but it was to him that I entrusted a special phone number in the States where I would always get the message in case things blew up in Villa Mella or I ever had to leave suddenly.
    Niningo and Chavela are close and he and Jhoanglish get along okay but he is as relieved as I am that Kiki has moved out and even Altagracia will point out that it is best to keep all young boys away from Kiki because he might throw a kick or a punch their way and he has reportedly beaten up Niningo in the past although not since I have been around and my theory is that because Kiki was punished severely as a  boy he takes it upon himself to try to assure the same treatment for all boys.

LANGUAGE
    Dominican Spanish along with Puerto Rican has the reputation for being among the most degraded, or perhaps evolved, or perhaps devolved from the Spanish of textbooks and literature and I encounter many words  that are in common usage here but do not appear in, for example, the Harper Collins Unabridged Spanish/English Dictionary (2003) but only appear, if they appear at all in print, in the Dictionary of Dominicanisms by Carlos Esteban Deive (2002).
    My favorite of these dominicanisms, and perhaps the most commonly cited as a purely Dominican word, is chin which means a little bit as in, “I only want a little or a chin of coffee”, and you might say muy chin or chinchín or chinichin or chininin to mean a very little bit  like, “I only want a tiny bit or a chinchín of coffee” and chin is used much more here than its common synonym poco.
    The suffix ita or ito is usually an affectionate diminutive when attached to a noun  as in muchacha (girl) and muchachita (cute little girl) or ladron (thief) and ladroncito (cute little thief) but note that nada, which means nothing, means less than nothing as nadita and rojo, or red, is redder when it is rojito and gordito is fatter than gordo and likewise tranquilito is calmer than tranquilo and igualito is even more equal than igual and muerticito deader than muerto. I have heard Dominican Spanish criticized by Latinos from other countries as sounding childish and, I think, it is because of this enthusiastic use of the affectionate diminutive.
    I suspect that concón, or the layer of partly burnt crusty rice found at the bottom of the cooking pot, exists in every country in the world that cooks rice which I suspect is every country in the world, but I have never heard of it as a popular delicacy or as having its own coinage and it is very popular here-- I have heard it asked for in comedors like someone might ask for an end cut of prime rib at a buffet in the States and once, when I did not have any money for the tip and it was near lunchtime, one of the garbage truck guys asked for a glass of water and a chin of concón.
    Oranges are always naranjas in the dictionary but here are chinas when eaten and are only naranjas after they are juiced.
    A lot of words and phrases are truncated here when spoken, that is, not all of the words are pronounced as they are written and may be missing sounds, which is contrary to standard Spanish instruction which tells you, on the first day, that in Spanish, unlike English, all the written letters should be enunciated, that there are no silent e's or diphthongs and that each letter has its own invariable sound. But to my dismay here-- Madre and padre (mother and father) become mai and pai; ¿cómo tu estás? (how are you?) becomes cómo tu 'ta; gallinas (chickens) become gai' and so forth. One of the great ongoing debates in any Spanish language student's mind is when to use por (for) or para (for) but here both are pronounced p' the majority of the time so the decision of which to use can often be ducked.
    There is a rich vocabulary of face and hand gestures that perhaps evolved to compensate for the missing spoken sounds. One of the most important of these is lip pointing which is an exaggerated pucker which may be aimed left, right or straight ahead, is usually expressed without turning the head and may be used to silently tell someone to look over that way or this way but which may also be used as a voiceless howdy, which I thought at first was meant as a kissy, seductive gesture but it is used between men as well as between men and women. Other gestures include tapping ones elbow with your fingers to indicate a cheapskate; holding the little finger up by itself to indicate scrawniness or that something is dried up and aged; and snapping your fingers fast while whipping your hand in front of you to indicate how hot or angry or fast someone or something was and is usually used when telling a story.
    Dominicans, instead of saying Hey you! or Waiter! or Taxi! attract attention by hissing, a sound that carries a surprising distance and at first sounded rude to me but is not intended that way. It is evidently a peculiarly Dominican device so much so that, so I have heard, Puerto Rican customs officials trying to spot illegal Dominicans will walk through a crowd in the San Juan airport and make that hiss and watch to see who turns their heads first .
    Since it seems to me that the language of the Dominican Republic, which is islandic, is more richly idiosyncratic than in other countries that there might be a comparison of this evolution to the speciation of the animals of the Galapagos Islands which is also richly idiosyncratic because of having been allowed to evolve in an isolated, or islandic, setting. When I have mentioned this half baked theory to friends they invariably point to the fact that nowhere is like an island anymore because of internationality and the homogeneity of television, newspapers and the internet but here, in my barrio, people only read Dominican newspapers, most do not know what the internet is and it is difficult to watch much television because the power usually goes out at dark. So I wonder if language might evolve in Darwinian ways.

HERMAN, AMBAR-- APRIL 15, 2005
    So last  night Niningo, who sleeps in the bedroom closest to the street, heard someone outside buy some pot from Herman, then smelled them smoking it and then heard that they were hiding it under a stone by the marquisina and so he tells Jhoanglish this morning who then goes and finds Herman and tells him to find some other house to make his drug deals in front of because even if you know nothing about them and police find drugs associated with your house it can be big trouble and you can actually lose all your furniture and other possessions as potential evidence and who knows how long it could take to get it back from being stored comfortably arranged in some cop's living room. I am on the galleria later in the morning when Herman, who reminds me of a snake in every way because he has a snaky walk, snaky slit eyes and long skinny snaky arms and legs, and he wears the most gigantic shorts with the cuffs coming almost to his ankles and the crotch is not much higher and I don't know what keeps them up because it's not his ass, approaches with some other Fulano (a Fulano is a Tom, Dick or Harry or Joe Bagadonuts) and quickly flashes me a walnut sized bag of brown dried looking herbage he has hidden in his hand and then hands it to his friend and the friend hands him a little money and Herman says loudly and in my direction that he is going to sell drugs any damn place he pleases and I just look at him confused not knowing why he just made this big show because now I know that he sells drugs whereas I only suspected before and later when Jhoanglish explained this to Herman he, reportedly, apologized and felt appropriately stupid.
    After Ambar borrowed the buckets of water the other night I have seen her several times sitting on the roof  outside her second story room with several women, one of whom is extremely pregnant, and an assortment of little kids and once I smiled and waved and she smiled and waved back and another time I said hola to her as she was passing the house and she said hola back and then yesterday afternoon Chloë and I passed the roof group but this time they were sitting in plastic chairs down on the sidewalk eating chicken noodle soup out of washed out two pound margarine containers and the pregnant one asked if I owned a hammer and could she borrow it and I said sure and so one of the kids followed me home and I sent the hammer back with her and about an hour later, which is a record here for returning tools, she returned it using the same courier. Later that evening, unusually and for no particular reason, I walked Chloë the other way past the last colmado and Guangu, the father of Titi, was there and so I bought him a Bohemia grande and we sat outside the colmado and Ambar and two other women and the usual group of kids entered the colmado and left after a minute but a half hour or so later the little hammer courier girl came back and shyly asked me if I would buy a beer for Ambar and I figured why not which is probably what Ambar was figuring when she got the idea to ask and so I sent the courier back with a Bohemia. If one of Guangu's children, for example, came up to me and asked the same favor I would have done the same thing so, even though when I told Altagracia what I did, which was better than waiting for her to hear it, embellished, as street gossip, she only shrugged and said that I was free to waste my money any way I liked, why do I feel guilty? Because Ambar is 23, single, and stacked? I also feel flattered even though I know that Ambar did not risk asking me for a beer because I am so handsome and/or charming or because she likes the cut of my jib but because I am a gringo and undoubtedly rich, and so to be flattered is my prerogative whether it is a foolish one or not.

SUNDAY MORNING
    Altagracia woke up at 5:15 cranky this morning and half way through her cup of coffee began swearing a string of invective that continued nonstop until she got on the guagua to go to work and waved to me through the window. This litany included critique of her thankless lazy children, particularly Jhoanglish who wrecked the left member of his only pair of shoes yesterday, but also included Chavela and her increasingly perceived slutty behavior and Niningo who forgot to put water in the ice cube trays, as well as to Kiki  and who he is allegedly consorting with in Pizarete and of her sister Francia, who borrowed the blow-drier and broke it and now does not answer her phone when we call and her brother Tito, who had always been upright and honest with her since she raised him practically single-handed from a baby but who now owes her 13,000 pesos that he was supposed to pay back when he got the insurance check for their father's burial but who now does not answer his cell phone (which he borrowed from me) either. We are especially disappointed in Tito's delinquency as he is in the Army and so has a regular paycheck and also because some months ago when he accidentally shot the driver of a car he had stopped at a checkpoint with the same pistol he was relieving the driver of because he suspected it was an illegal one (but was not, unfortunately) we did bring him dinners while he awaited his hearing in Polverín, the military prison near the River Isabela on Maximo Gomez. It turned out that the driver was only shot in the leg and declined to press charges which, although it made everyone suspicious that he must have been doing something illegal, was good for Tito who was released after only a week with a warning not to shoot any more motorists accidentally or otherwise.
    But by 6:30 Chloë and I walked Altagracia up to the blue water tank where she caught a guagua for work and we walked back home slowly. The street was still almost deserted but we did see Anthony Richard who lives on the corner by the bakery and who looks exactly like Bill Cosby and whose father immigrated here from the island of St. Kitts in the twenties to work as a cocolo in the cane fields and who himself moved to and worked in a factory in the Bronx for many years before retiring back home in Villa Mella. His wife, a bustling beetle-browed woman, is named Luz, which means light in Spanish, so he is fond of affectionately joking that even when the whole barrio is dark, that he always has Luz.
    The days now are hot but there are light breezes at night and the mornings are cool enough until about 8:00 when the sun gets above the rooftops. Sitting on the galleria I watch the street wake up. Guangu walks slowly up to his house carrying a jaggedly broken mirror fragment and a piece of pan de piedra which he throws at a dog who is following him too closely and who has just finished breeding a bitch at the bottom of the hill in the middle of the street and the dog yipes and scurries. La Rubia strides down the hill alongside her house with the daily six chickens to kill, stows them in the chest freezer shell and starts her fire lighting a couple of plastic cups to get it going. The beefy girl, Rosie, who lives in the house between Guangu and La Rubia with her boyfriend, her brother Alvaro and their aged arthritic father who still works at a local lumber yard, comes out barefoot in her nightgown and runs a homemade extension cord up the hill to a house behind hers that fronts Calle #12 and plugs in a water pump to fill the fifty gallon water tank in her kitchen.  A shoeshine boy trudges up the street leaning forward under the weight of his wooden box filled with polish and brushes, and the dapper little man who sometimes walks past curling a tiny barbell with each arm for exercise walks by clutching an open Bohemia grande in a brown paper bag. I wait by the railing of the galleria to catch a glimpse of Ambar on her rooftop but it must still be too early. The cats and the big corgi wait near the fire that still smells a little of burnt plastic and one of the itinerant roosters grabs a beak full of feathers on the back of the neck of a scrawny hen and mounts her fast by the curb.
    Because there is electricity I pump water up to the tinaco. Chavela gets up and yells sharply to Niningo through his bedroom door to wake up but he does not stir. She tunes a salsa station on the radio loud enough to hear over the noise of the water pump. I haul the lavadora out of the kitchen and set it up in the patio for her to wash clothes in later and she carries a plastic basin full of dirty dishes out to the outdoor sink because it is cooler there than in the kitchen. A drumming noise echoes from the chest freezer across the street as the dying chickens thrash and kick against the thin sheet metal walls. It is 8:30.

APRIL 20, 2005
    The weather changed suddenly and the last three days have been cool with lows in the mid 70s (I can only estimate because my thermometer was dropped and broke), breezy and overcast so many people wear denim jackets or two shirts to protect against the cold, although when the sun does break through it is burning hot. I continue to receive little waves and smiles from Ambar from her rooftop but I have not sent her any more Bohemia after hearing that she does, in fact, have a boyfriend who lives in Capotillo which is one of the most dangerous, drug addled barrios and who in one jealous rage some time ago shot her twice in the thigh and even though this information comes from Jhoanglish, who claims to have seen the scars but who almost never tells the truth, I have taken the flirtation under advisement.
    Altagracia has continued her daily visits to Dr. Pinales although now is complaining that he never gives her even a topical anesthetic while he is drilling and filling her cavities and it is now past the two week mark within which the work was supposed to have been finished so she had me call yesterday to cancel for her and today we will see if he will agree to anesthetize her and get cracking.


TOP TEN THINGS HEARD IN A CARRO PUBLICO* IN SANTO DOMINGO
Inspired by David Letterman's Top Ten Lists
Is that a cell phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Could I rest the dashboard on your lap for a while, mine is getting tired?
I think we can fit five across if everyone takes their pistols out of their waistbands.
I found if I loosen up all the lugnuts there is much less wear and tear on the tie rod ends.
Change for 20 pesos, are you out of your mind??
When the wipers stopped working I figured what did I need a windshield for.
Careful how you sit on that shift lever.
These seat covers are made from a horse I hit.
Oops, time to add another quart of gas.
On the count of three everybody-- HEAVE!!
*Carro publicos, or more simply carros, are almost always Toyota Corolla sedans and are usually totally battered and lack all mirrors, headliners, door handles and window cranks with their seats upholstered with found, mysterious fabric and the windshield a bowed web of cracks and clear packing tape. I have been in more than one that had rope tied to the door jambs and stretched taut across the inside of the car to hold it together. They also cost 10 pesos and are faster than a guagua because they can weave in and out of traffic but run shorter routes and usually won't leave the curb unless full-- 4 in the back and two in front plus the driver.  (p.6)

APAGONE-- APRIL 21, 2005
    The Power outages, or apagones as they are called, are worsening and we now have electricity for an average of less than eight hours per day and occasionally it will flash on and off for only a second or two as many as 18 times in a row before deciding to stay either on or off.
    During the mid afternoon the skies clouded up darker than before and the rain started lightly and increased steadily with a mounting cool breeze. It rained all night and into the morning and the apagone persisted beyond the 24 hour mark. It got so cold we slept under a doubled sheet for the first time in a long time.
    Laptop computer battery now nearly exhausted, cell phone battery already dead. The tigueres, dark shadows against a dark night, circle closer just outside the flickering light of the dying campfire with only the glint of their eyes visible, not sure we can hold them off till morning, hope the sentry we posted to guard the horses stays awake.

READING
    Yesterday was a day off for Altagracia and she spent most of it muttering like el Diablo de Tasmania, as Niningo calls him, while she scrubbed corners and crannies in the house and rewashed dishes that she found dried crud on and fretted about the power coming back on because she wanted to iron the mountain of clothes she had washed by hand. But the power never came. When I joked that she could build a fire to heat up the electric iron with, I think she considered doing it for a minute. At two in the afternoon we went for her penultimate appointment with Dr. Pinales and he finally worked on her worst tooth which had been drilled empty for the last two weeks and he even used a hammer and chisel to get it just right for filling, and he did give her Novocain, then he filled and sculpted it with hard white stuff and now it looks great. As we left the dentist's office Altagracia happened to mention that she hoped that Chavela had finished the ironing while we were gone and I said that no she could not have because she had computer class in the afternoon and Altagracia said that she told her not to go to computer class today because ironing was more important and I said, hold the horses and that Chavela had sixty years of ironing ahead of her but only two more months of opportunity to learn something about computers which could give her a fighting chance to get ahead a little in life and Altagracia said that no, that the clothes must be ironed and she herself didn't have time to do everything and that that was that. But when we got home we found that Chavela had gone to computer class against orders after all and Altagracia was furious but I got between them and eventually called Altagracia a bruta, or an uneducated boor, which she did not like at all but she stopped yelling and locked herself in the bedroom and later I told her that she was not really a bruta but that sometimes she acted like one because she does not understand, at all, what this book learning and school and computer stuff is all about because she can neither read nor write and can only sign her own name concentrating mightily since she was forced to quit school at the age of eight. When I came proudly home one day with nine used paperbacks by John D. Mac Donald that I had bought for 50 pesos each during a period when I was bored out of my skull she had asked What on earth for? and when she heard that the dictionary I bought for Chavela and Niningo cost almost 200 pesos or nearly seven dollars she was astounded and could not understand how any book could be worth more than 13 pounds of rice.
    When Altagracia does read she sounds each syllable out hesitantly once or twice and then, if it is a word she knows, says it all at once triumphantly and she argues that she can, in fact, read, and that it is writing that she is bad at but her reading does her no good because while she may often get the word right she does not understand the message of the word. That is, if she received a note that had muchas gracias (thank you) written on it she would know that the words were muchas gracias, and she would be happy that she had figured them out, but she would not understand that someone had actually thanked her for something and if the note had muchas gracias written on it twice she would take almost as long to recognize the words the second time as the first. There are words that she recognizes on sight like se vende and se alquila (for sale and for rent) but here she is helped by the fact that they are usually on a sign nailed to an empty house, and, too, we had a lot of practice with these words when we were house hunting, and I also think that she distinguishes them by their shape, more than by the order of their letters, like one distinguishes the shape of a dog from that of a cat.
    Altagracia is very bothered by the fact that she is on her feet all day and works hard in the pension but is paid substantially less than the desk person who only locks and unlocks the front door and makes change and writes receipts for the guests and watches television sitting down in the lobby and so she wants to be able to write so that she can make more money doing less work. I went to the Department of Education building on Maximo Gomez about 4 months ago and they were very friendly and gave me a hefty, free package of work books and a manual for teaching adults to read and write and Altagracia and I did spend almost an hour one evening working with some vowels and she practiced tracing them at first and then free handing them and I thought she might have been genuinely interested and I thought that we stopped before it got boring or frustrating but that was 4 months ago.
    Altagracias's prime concern is basic survival and so spending time learning how to read is not a priority. Basic survival is why she married Luis and that is why she had children (even though that second stratagem might have backfired, as so often happens) but these were not conscious strategies, they are built-in strategies in a poor culture where a woman needs to have a man to protect her and give her babies who will then take care of her after the man has left or died and she is old. Survival only crosses my mind when I cross the street or notice a passing tiguere eyeing my shoes. I always assume that I am going to be able to eat tomorrow, but Altagracia does not, even though I have put a bunch of money in her own personal bank account and I am sure that it is more than she has ever had at one time before in her life and she and all four kids could live for a year on it but she still walks more than a kilometer each way to the bus stop rather than pay the 10 peso fare for a concho even when her feet hurt, and she never lights the second stove burner with a new match but lights the other end of the last burnt match on the lit burner to save a match and she saves and rinses off dental floss to reuse unless I catch her doing it. So it is hard for her to spend time learning how to read and write when she is always afraid, even though that fear is irrational now that she owns this house with me and has a healthy bank balance, that we will run out of food.
    Among the things I wonder about is to what extent has the way I think been formed by reading, by the fact that I am conscious of syntax and of one thought leading logically to another on a page and of one page transitioning to the next? How did the patterns of plot, mystery, disclosure, description and fiction of the stories I was read aloud as a child make me think the way I think and shape my expectations in life? I cannot help but to read; any and all words that pass in front of my eyes are read automatically at least subliminally, but all the barrage of signage in Santo Domingo that one sees when riding on the guagua, all the posters and store signs and street signs and tee shirt lettering and headlines on newspapers being hawked in the streets at red lights, all mean nothing to Altagracia, all is just a chaotic jumble of painted or printed shapes, not even letters with names.
    I was surprised the other day when the subject of the alphabet came up at the kitchen table and Chavela blithely admitted that she herself could not repeat the whole alphabet in order, that she knows the letters when she sees them and knows how to spell (although once I saw a note she left in the kitchen begging her brothers to wash some dishes in which she spelled por favor, which means please, as p-o-l  f-a-b-o-l) and that that is good enough. She is almost 17 and doing okay in school and it is not the worst school available, there is a tuition of 450 pesos per month. All four kids were amazed one day when they watched me find our own phone number in the Santo Domingo phone book in a matter of seconds by following alphabetical order. Once when I was looking for a name in the phone book that turned out not to be there Niningo, who knows the alphabet and understands alphabetical ordering suggested that I look on another page just in case. Another time Kiki, who is 21 and who has finished high school such as it is and who I have heard read so I know he can, looked so bored, or super tranquilo as he put it, that he was going to cry that I gave him a Spanish copy of the first Harry Potter book, which is not the tome that some of the later ones are, and he browsed a few pages and took it with him to the marquisina but then gave it back to me the next day saying that it looked kind of too long, thanks just the same.
    I think that I expect my life to have beginnings, middles and endings and that they fit into some kind of template of meaning even if that meaning amounts to no more than noticing that such and such an event happened like some other event in a novel or fable or fairy tale or movie. I expect my life to be structured with the sense of a story and whether it will be a long story or have a satisfying or disappointing ending remains to be seen. Many, if not most, of the people I know here in Primaveral have never read a book and have never been to the movies or even seen a non-action thriller movie on television and I think we have fundamentally different expectations in life because of this. After Chavela was recently assigned to read No One Writes to the Coronel, a 100 page novella by Gabriel Garcia Márquez she completed the assignment by reading the first and last chapters and then filling in her report with what biographical data I could remember on Garcia Márquez. I had read it years ago but in English and had forgotten the story and so I read it before she returned it to Ezekiel, a classmate of Niningo´s who works in the colmado and I was pleased to note that inside the back cover was scrawled Read by Ezekiel and Niningo-- Members of the Reader's Club. However when I got to the end of the novella I was crushed to find the last few pages of the book had been omitted by the printer and when I asked Niningo how it ended he said Huh, it just ends. I showed him the last page and where it ended in mid dialogue and said how I thought that, in terms of the story, that either the Coronel, his wife or the rooster had to die and he shrugged and said he supposed so too. I added my name to those of the Reader's Club and Ezekiel tells me the rooster dies fighting in the ring.
    I read yesterday that one out of every five adults in the world cannot read and that two thirds of those are women and 98% live in what were, perhaps euphemistically, called developing countries. But what percent of those who can read do? It could be that more than half of the world's population are like Kiki and have never read and do not read anything, even street signs, although they could. It could be more than 80 or 90% for all I know; a lot of people live in developing countries. And what does this mean? It is too late for me to know what it is like to not have a store of stories that range from Thidwick the Big Hearted Moose to Lonesome Dove tucked away in my head so I do not know, for sure, that they do not just create frustration and disappointment because no one's real life can be formed perfectly like a story (or even a joke) and even if it were, one would not know it because of the problem of perspective. What a hoot it would be if all high culture turned out to be a perversion and that the real meaning of life was to be found in only feeling the weight of of a five gallon bucket of water on your head and being sharply aware that lunch tomorrow is not guaranteed and if I become convinced of this I reckon that there are plenty of my neighbors as well as many religious and spiritual groups who would be happy to offer me lessons.

FERIA DEL LIBRO
    Tonight at 7 PM the 10 day long Feria del Libro or Book Fair begins in Santo Domingo in the Plaza de la Cultura and it is touted as the biggest cultural event of the year and is expected to attract over one million visitors. I was there today when I went to the Museum of the Dominican Man to deliver 14 photographs for them to try to sell during the fair and the whole plaza, which covers about six city blocks, smelled of fresh paint and sawdust as workers put the finishing touches on the booths and kiosks and there was the sound of generators and hammering and electric cables ran everywhere and there were lots of watchy-men and military on duty for security.
    Saturday I returned to the Feria, which is free, in the late afternoon and the place was bustling. I do not know how they estimate the attendance because there were many entrances and none were being monitored that I could tell. The little streets and footpaths throughout the plaza, some of which are straight and some of which wind around like cloverleaves, were all lined with rows of new looking modular kiosks, and the kiosks themselves were lined with bookshelves. Some of the kiosks were large and air conditioned but most were only big enough to accommodate 4 or 5 customers and the kiosks were organized into groups so there were rows or areas that represented local book stores such as Thesaurus, Mateca and Cuesta, used and collectible book sellers, Dominican publishers, international publishers, publishers of children's books, publishers of periodicals, government agencies such as the Department of Culture (which runs the event) and the Department of the Environment, local colleges and universities, telecommunication companies, the city police department, various private and religious foundations and even included one devoted to the president of the Republic; Leonel Hernandez. The Armed Forces built a large wooden ship full of books and posters on the military history of the Republic through which visitors could pass after waiting on line for some time. Other sections included several food courts mostly featuring hot-dogs, pizza and ice cream and where alcohol was conspicuously not being sold, a crafts area, several music venues and the museums of Modern Art, History and Geography and the Dominican Man (where my photos were presumably for sale although the museum store was closed while I was there), were all open free of charge with special exhibits and with bathrooms available. This year's Feria, which is the 8th of its kind also pays special tribute to the 400th anniversary of Cervantes's Don Quixote as well as to the country of Italy and the italian writer Anna Something Portalatin and will host an Italian neo-realist film festival that additionally includes movies from anywhere else that have to do with Don Quixote.
    I entered La Vaina's kiosk (vaina means whatever dratted thing and, in this case, could be compared to Socrates' pestering, stinging fly that trys to provoke the sleeping rabble to think critically) and bought a magazine called Matatain which resembled student art and writing publications available on most college campuses in the U.S. A brief introduction inside the front cover explained that this was La Vaina's third year at the Feria del Libro and that they had observed in the two previous years that, while the Feria was very well attended, that most of the visitors did not buy books but mostly walked around eating snacks and maybe bought a light entertaining magazine and that this issue was aimed at them.  On riffling the coloring-book quality pages one sees that it is indeed a coloring book that contains puzzles, mazes, crosswords, matching games and the pairs of seemingly identical drawings for which one is asked to try to spot subtle tricky differences, but all the games are pointed critiques and lampoons of Dominican life and culture. For example, in the nutrition section the food group pyramid has, as its base, fried chicken, hamburgers, soda and french fries and at its apex, as optional foods, fresh fruits and vegetables. In another section there were two unnavigable labyrinths one of which would have led a pregnant single mother of a dehydrated baby to a hospital and the other a wheelchair bound person to either a bathroom or a classroom both of which contrasted to a third labyrinth which consisted of a short, unmistakable straight line which will lead a politician to an overstuffed suitcase of grafted cash.
    The centerfold puzzle in Matatain consists of line drawings of 12 numbered people in various postures at a swimming hole with a list of their skin colors correspondingly numbered in an inset. The colors and their translations are:
Blanco (white)
Rubio (blonde)
Deteñío (albino)
Blanquito (very white)
Jojote (anemic)
Jabao (white with red patches)
Indio (brown)
Indiecito (lighter brown than indio)
Indiecito claro (lighter brown than indiecito)
Morenito (darker brown than moreno)
Moreno lavaíto ( faded dark brown)
Moreno oscuro (dark dark brown)
The darker the color the more inimical the activity of the person in the water e.g. #8 and #9 are men showing obvious erections under their trunks, #10 and #11 are drinking and #12 has been completely ostracized to a far shore. The Diccionario de Dominicanismos (DDD) defines Indio as a euphemism used to describe people with black skin as mulatto but I have never heard this usage this in practice. In my neighborhood the darkest skin is called prieto and, as a footnote for the puzzle points out, the word black is almost never used to describe skin color. Also problematic is the fact that some of these terms normally take other physical features into account, for example someone who is rubio may have dark skin as long as they either have light colored hair or eyes and hair type i.e. coarse or fine; curly, kinky or straight may also influence membership in one category or another.
    I returned to the Feria again a few days later to see the movies Don Quixote with Orson Welles and a Federico Fellini movie called Los Inutiles in Spanish and Les Ver somethings in Italian. Quixote was dubbed in Spanish and Quixote himself and Sancho Panza could not have been more perfectly cast. The film was beautifully shot using heavy, contrasty diffusion which gave an appropriately confusing  surreal quality to scenes as when Quixote is trampled by the flock of sheep; and the long shots of the two riding in profile along the horizon were very beautiful. The sound was a little garbled so I had trouble understanding much of the dialogue and how the two got mixed up in the running of the bulls in Pamplona and what Sancho Panza was saying to Orson Welles, who played himself, while stopped in traffic in his automobile. The Fellini film was somehow less memorable even though I was able to follow the Spanish subtitles well enough and even though it was about a group of young men who could not hold jobs, stole stuff occasionally and many of whom depended on their mothers for support.
    
ALTAGRACIAS'S JOB-- APRIL 24, 2005
    And suddenly it is Sunday again. The walk with Altagracia and Chloë to the blue water tank was quieter than usual because the bakery on the corner has closed so there were fewer people on the street heading there or coming back from there with bread. Altagracia was in a chipper mood although not feeling much like going to work saying that always in April everybody likes to sleep late and she is also trying to figure out a way to get laid off from the pension because if you can manage to get laid off the ex-employer has to give you some severance pay but if you quit, even with notice, you get nothing. It will be hard for her to get laid off because she cannot resist working hard and she is too honest to steal anything, which is how most workers get fired, so the worst she can manage is to try to walk as slowly as possible to the bus stop so she will arrive late and annoy Elvira, her boss. Altagracia has been at the pension for eight consecutive months now and because after one year of continuous employment she will be eligible for higher pay and additional benefits it seems that Elvira is trying to force Altagracia into quitting by ordering her to kneel in the bathtubs to fish hair from deep out of the drain, feel the inside surfaces of the toilet bowls for any unseen crust buildup (and Elvira demonstrated this herself barehanded), has refused to buy rubber gloves and demanded that she wear shorts instead of skirts to work but Altagracia has flatly refused all of these impositions, particularly the dress code as she has not worn pants or shorts even once in more than twenty years, brings her own gloves and points out that that far down a drain is plumber's territory. So, to date, it is a standoff although the odds at the local banca deportiva favor Elvira because, here, the employer nearly always wins.

GREASE TRAP, FEVER-- APRIL 27, 2005
    Our lio, or mess, of plumbing in this house includes a grease trap buried under the concrete floor of the kitchen from which smelly water has been surfacing lately and is one of the reasons Chavela has been washing the dishes in the outside sink. This morning I took a hammer and chisel and proceeded to dig into the matter and after about an hour of easy chiseling through punky concrete I uncovered the grease trap which was a concrete box about 30“x16” and about 20” deep and was full of nasty stuff. I cut the top off an empty one gallon plastic water jug, leaving the handle attached, and used it to bail out the water, chunks of congealed grease and clotted food. It was disgusting. I had previously asked Guangu where I should dispose of this stuff and he had pointed me to the manhole cover at the bottom of the hill beyond the colmado, the same manhole where we had dumped the contents of my septic tank when we had installed the filtrante. Just as I was dumping the first bucket of slop down the manhole a short, fat angry woman emerged from her house nearby and yelled who did I think I was to dump here and this kind of thing was not allowed and I explained that I had asked such authorities as there were and that it seemed to me that there was no more appropriate place to throw this kind of waste and I walked away while she was still ranting. The angry woman did not reappear until just as I was leaving after my fourth, and last, trip to the manhole which was lucky because this time she brandished a broom stick.
    With the grease trap cleaned, I tested the outflow pipe which took water as it should, replaced the cover and mixed, placed and trowelled concrete smooth to blend it back in with the rest of the kitchen floor and warned Jhoanglish and Kiki, who was visiting for the day, not to step in it and about five minutes later saw Kiki trying to smooth out his first footprint. An hour later another footprint appeared and so I set up a flimsy barricade as a reminder using a short piece of plastic pipe laid across two cardboard boxes and when I returned after a couple of hours some friends of the kids had come to visit and had evidently not understood the meaning of the barricade and the patch was full of footprints and the signs of Kiki trying to fix them but the concrete was almost hard by then so the damage was not too deep. Incidentally, late that afternoon the angry woman happened to walk past the house while I was on the galleria and I smiled at her and said buenas tardes or good afternoon and I braced myself but to my surprise, she greeted me pleasantly and smiled back.
    Around 5 PM that same day I could begin to feel my hair start to tingle in the barber's chair while he was running the clippers up and down the back of my head and a few hours later felt more flushed while in the hammock on the galleria and then I felt hotter around 10PM and started having diarrhea by midnight, vomiting by 1AM and my fever spiked at 102∞ so after the second set of vomiting (and when she was able to stop laughing because she thought I meant 102∞ Centigrade) Altagracia called Rueda Taxi which has a poster with its phone number on a telephone pole visible from the house, and brought me to a clinic. The waiting room and the examining room were the same so while we waited we were able to watch Dr. Ureña, an unsmiling and prematurely tired looking woman, clean up multiple road burns on a teenaged male who had crashed his motorcycle and who was luckily still drunk and so did not feel the pain. When it was my turn an equally unsmiling nurse took my blood pressure and temperature and after I answered that I had no allergies to any medications they gave me an injection for the fever and one for the diarrhea, we paid them 600 pesos or about $20 and called the taxi back. I dozed on the examining table while we waited and we were home by 3AM.
    The next day I only slept and drank juice and water and my fever crept steadily back down to near normal and the day after that I took an Imodium. On one of my trips to the bathroom I tripped on a small concrete step and tore the pad off of my right big toe which bled all over and now it is soaked with mercurochrome with the pad bandaided back into place.
    I still have no idea where this sickness came from, perhaps from the grease trap. I am convinced that if Pasteur's Germ Theory was correct that none of us would be alive today. Our 5 gallon drinking water jug rarely has the cap in place, silverware is freely shared, leftover food from plates may be scraped back into the serving bowl and leftovers are often left at room temperature overnight and eaten the next day. The boys in the neighborhood shave each other's necks using the same razor blade and combs and brushes and hair rollers travel from head to head without washing and people spit everywhere and with animals living in the street anything might be tracked into the house. The guy in the colmado who has just handed four greasy 10 peso bills in change to a customer might put your bread in the plastic bag for you with the same hand. Some of these habits relate to the feeling of everyone here being a member of a giant extended family, and after all, I too would share a water glass or a toothbrush with my brother before I would with a stranger even against Pasteur's recommendation. The fact that all our floors are mopped with Mistolin, a disinfectant, and the bathroom and the kitchen counters are doused with bleach every day must help as must the high degree of personal hygiene that most people practice but it still seems surprising that there is not more apparent illness. In six months I have had one cold, one brief sudden bout of diarrhea that I think was caused by drinking some lukewarm guarapo, or sugarcane juice, without lime on the street, one more prolonged period of the same that I suspect had to do with long term diet change and this recent violent fever which is still abating as I write this.
    Life expectancy in the Dominican Republic is 67 years compared to the USA's of 77 years. Could the facts that the reported leading cause of death of men aged 16-26 in the DR is motorcycle accidents and almost a third of all pregnancies reported by hospitals are teenage women with a concomitant higher infant mortality rate mean that sanitary conditions are not what are responsible for a life expectancy 10 years less than the US?  A couple of months ago a Dominican aid organization began a campaign to feed people in the poorest barrios of Santo Domingo and estimated the needs using census figures but when they entered their first neighborhood with the calculated number of meals they thought they would need they discovered that there were thousands of undocumented people living there. Since nobody knows how many people are living here how can anyone know how long each person lives for?

    One week from today I fly back to the US to work painting houses for the summer.

JHOANGLISH BACK TO COLMADO-- APRIL 29, 2005 Friday
    Wednesday afternoon Colmado Soto, where Jhoanglish, who I have come to think of as Bartleby “I would prefer not to” the Scrivener, worked for nearly a day a month ago, called him back. They now had a new manager who did not know Jhoanglish and two motor scooter home delivery men had had accidents trying to cross Maximo Gomez, one of whom died (both had been drinking) and Jhoanglish's remaining friend at the colmado, Jose, suggested Jhoanglish as a replacement to start making deliveries with one of the motor scooters immediately, meaning right now. Jhoanglish's Wednesday to that point had consisted of waking up at 10AM and again at 11, eating breakfast, washing and ironing a shirt and pair of pants, polishing his shoes (using his last pair of socks to apply the black liquido), crossing the street and sitting under the tree with the little white flowers for an hour with some sons and a few tenants of La Rubia and then retiring to the rocking chair on the galleria. When Altagracia rushed out onto the galleria (she was home on her day off) with the news of the call his face turned into one single bitter pucker. She crushed all his excuses, the most legitimate sounding of which was that the next stage in the Air Force entry process was to be Tuesday, and it was finally agreed that Jhoanglish would work at the colmado until that Monday and while he was away standing in the enlistment line Kiki, who also had past experience at Colmado Soto would take over, either permanently or until Jhoanglish either deserted or was dropped from patriotic service. Finally after packing his backpack for him and putting it on his back and stuffing a pan de agua into one of his hip pockets she pushed him, grumbling all the way, out the galleria gate to the street and he did, in fact go to the colmado and has been there for two days now.
    Since the job includes room and board it could work out well for Kiki who, as Anahai tells it, was last seen walking the streets of Pizarete, towing the new folding cot we bought behind him trying to sell it and who has tried to time his few overnight visits to the house to coincide with Altagracia's pay days, and has brought boxes of Banilejo mangos as offerings, but has missed payday each time, usually due to not knowing what day of the week it was, and, since I will not give or loan him any more money and he knows better than to ask, he has gone away with only a meal or two under his belt and is looking even leaner than before and is maybe getting ready to work. He has been picking up occasional day labor in the field of Agriculture, as he puts it, but then buys beer and fried food on the street instead of buying rice and habichuelas in bulk and saving a little or giving Fermin any money for rent.

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY or EL BULLISO  (or big good ruckus, a bullaso would be a big bad ruckus, a bulla is any average sized ruckus and a bullito is a little ruckus)  (4-29-05)
    While Altagracia was at work and I was at the Feria del Libro Chavela prepared the house for her seventeenth birthday party. When we got home around 6 PM the house was decorated with coconut palm fronds and balloons, the 500 peso cake had arrived from the bizcochero, or cake baking guy and Niningo and Alvaro were setting up four footlocker sized speakers on the galleria. All that was missing was the electricity which had been out since 9 that morning.
    Flocks of teenage girls wearing spandex jeans or short skirts and blouses that exposed some combination of stomach, back and cleavage circulated through the candlelit house looking to borrow hair repair tools and asking each other hair repair advice and Julia, one of La Rubia's young tenants reputed to have make-up experience, drew new eyebrows on Chavela and anyone else who would sit for her in the living room. The boys, some of whom looked to be in their 30's but only a  few of whom had pistols in their belts, hung out sharing beers and leaning against a car parked in front of the house with its stereo blaring regetón. Chavela had made five gallons of a red punch of lechoza, mango, pineapple and a hint of rum with a base of strawberry Zuko, a Tang like powdered juice that is very popular here and is available in a rainbow of flavors from apple to strawberry to chinola to guanabana, and a woman who owed Chavela a favor came and cooked a caldron of spaghetti al sopita in the kitchen by candlelight.
    At 10:30 the lights came on to a moment of cautious silence and then big applause when they stayed on and, within a minute, booming regatón music thronged the galleria with grinding couples (dancing regatón involves much solid, frictional contact from every possible angle in the hip, buttock and pelvis regions) and trays of plastic cups of the punch were passed around. A little after 11 the spaghetti was served on small styrofoam plates and around midnight Chavela cut the cake after I took pictures of her posing next to it with different cliques of friends and then with Altagracia and Niningo and then Niningo took one of Chavela and me. At 1:30 everyone on the galleria spilled out into the street, smashed an empty bottle or two and either wandered home or went to the colmado. Chavela was very happy with the success of her party.
    Altagracia was happy too that Chavela was able to have a party because she had not been able to have a fifteenth party, which is the big one here like the sweet sixteenth is in the US because that was the year that Luis lost the house, although at the same time she thought the whole expense was a waste. Early the morning after as Altagracia, Chloë and I were starting off down the street on the way to the blue water tank Altagracia turned and looked back at the house, still sporting its now sagging facade of palm fronds and at Chavela who was already out raking oily styrofoam plates and glass off the street and yelled at her-- ¿Enjoying your big party now, are you? but Chavela just smiled sleepily, turned her back and kept raking.

BELITA
    Belita is a woman in the neighborhood who is separated from her husband, a bad tiguere, and who fell in love with Kiki and, after a brief romance with him, became close friends with Chavela and has always been a regular visitor to our house. Recently she has taken up with a new fellow and evidently because they seem serious her estranged husband has become jealous. Five days ago, while their baby was being cared for by a friend and on a day when the ex was to drop off some money for her, Belita disappeared with only the clothes she had on.

MAY 2, 2005, MONDAY
    Belita called last night after visiting her Mother for a few days.
    Kiki came and spent the day Saturday singing off key to the salsa on the radio while doing his laundry getting ready to relieve Jhoanglish at Colmado Soto. He seemed content and spent no time on the street although he did manage to buy a young fighting cock from Guangu which he tethered by one leg in the marquisina, and he and I, Kiki and I that is, were able to chat and joke amicably throughout the day. Sunday morning he walked with me, Altagracia and Chloë up to the blue water tank and was relieved when it became clear that he would arrive for his first day of work on time. When the other delivery guy did not show for work both Kiki and Jhoanglish worked the whole day. When Kiki's bike broke down, through no fault of his own, he diagnosed the problem, was sent for parts all the way to Ovando and used his mechanic experience to repair it himself. When Jhoanglish got home around 10 PM wanting to sleep all night and all the next day to prepare for standing on the Air Force enlistment line we found that the rooster had slipped his tether and had spent much of his day shitting on Jhoanglish's bed.

    While I now feel strong and healthy after my fever crisis, life in the rear of the premises is still troubled. Internet research has led me to conclude that one of the injections that Dr. Ureña gave me contained a strong constipative and that what I have now is a fossilized rice block in my colon past which sneaks what is repulsively, but accurately, known as watery stool which means that I am now simultaneously enjoying symptoms of both diarrhea and constipation. Since I cannot keep supositorios glycerinos up there long enough to do their job, today, in an ingenious end-around maneuver, I will try drinking some leche de magnesio. The mighty Internet actually recommended physical removal of the offending megalith by a doctor but since I happened to notice the rusting cast iron prying tools with the paint peeling off of them hanging in Dr. Ureña's examining room I am hoping for a less invasive chemical solution. I'll keep you posted. You're welcome.

Daniel DuVall 2005