With the water so clear, it was easy to pull out octopuses, starfish, and sea snails from under the rocks. Willito had come alone because none of his homies would dare go to Nenuco’s beach. The last time the group had gone fishing there, Pachico had wound up with a shot in the ass, the cops telling them they were on Nenuco’s property and he had the right to fire on them.
Nenuco was a real bastard, with more fish in his waters than he and his family could possibly eat or sell, and Willito had two little brothers and a sick grandfather. He supported them by selling whatever he could find on the coral reefs to the gift shops and restaurants in Sosúa.
The pool formed by the reefs on Playa Bo was full of animal life because, unlike the others, it had a madman with a shotgun who wouldn’t let anyone near. It’s better this way, thought Willito. Alone, with a wetsuit, fins, and a harpoon, he’d make very little noise.
He’d left the house at five in the morning, when it was still dark. He skirted the coast in his grandfather’s skiff, leaving it anchored behind a crag so he could leap and swim over to that trove of natural treasures at the first ray of light. Willito had been there three times before; he knew how to get to the reef underwater, through a hole in a rock several meters long and two feet wide. Pachico had shown him how to swim through it without getting stung by the anemones.
Willito was wearing a belt with weights so he wouldn’t float. He moved quickly, propelled by the fins, holding the harpoon with both hands until he reached the mouth of the rock and saw a body, a dead body, in the hole. His fear was greater than the weights and he shot up to the surface, splashing and screaming as though he didn’t know how to swim. His vision blurred by water, Willito saw Nenuco in his underwear, standing on the reef and pointing at him with his shotgun. “There’s a body in the hole, Nenuco, don’t kill me,” he yelled.
“Get out of here,” said Nenuco, with his broad forehead and slanted eyes. “Go before I blow your brains out, you son of a fucking whore.” Willito reached his skiff in just three strokes, with a fear that had nothing to do with Nenuco’s shotgun. He told Pachico, who still had a limp, what he’d seen and they went back to the local officials, trying to sell the idea that Nenuco had killed somebody and hidden the body in the hole. Corporal Fonso didn’t give them the time of day until, after a week of nonstop pestering, he decided to go take a look.
Fonso had never liked Nenuco. To his mind, Nenuco might have been the owner of the land at Playa Bo but water was nobody’s property. In spite of that, his supervisors had made it crystal clear that Nenuco had people in government and Fonso couldn’t mess with him. Nenuco’s property had three parcels of land on the coast. They were partly fertile black earth where his family grew plantains, cassava, squash, and avocados, and partly red dirt and reef with an abundance of almond trees, sea grapes, and coconut trees. In fact, the real owner of the land was Ananí, Nenuco’s cousin, whom he had married. She was very small, black, with cinnamon skin and very straight black hair she’d inherited from her parents.
The coconut trunks that grew along the path to Playa Bo had been painted red, with white letters spelling out “Balaguer 90-94,” vestiges of the most recent electoral campaign. Nenuco’s fence posts were painted the governing party’s colors, too, and the door of the house had a photo of the “Doctor” giving a speech. Fonso parked his Honda 70 at the edge of the house and, taking off his hat, greeted a woman who was cleaning rice in a bowl as she swayed in a rocking chair by the door. “What do you want?” said Ananí. She picked out a bad grain and threw it toward his feet. “I came to talk with Nenuco,” said Fonso, peeking in at the tiny kitchen, which smelled of fresh fish and lemon. Nenuco was cleaning a grouper skillfully and tossed its roe at the floor for a ginger cat. At the back of the living room, a young woman was watching El Gordo de la Semana on TV. A contestant was throwing the Knorr Lucky Dice, trying to win a refrigerator, an electric knife, or a toaster. “Did someone complain about me, Fonso?”
“Those boys make up a lot of stuff,” he said, feeling like an idiot.
“So what did they make up now?” Nenuco asked, leaving his task to pick up a pewter cup and offer the officer some coffee.
“Crazy stuff,” said Fonso, who drank the coffee without bringing the subject up again, talking instead about the week’s local news: the old people who’d died, the mothers who’d given birth, and a machete fight that had broken out when someone put up a fence a meter farther than what had been agreed. For his part, Nenuco told the corporal about the new mansions the Russians and Australians were building all over Puerto Plata, where he’d been working for years as a gardener to help with the family’s cash flow. Nenuco’s son, who had slanted eyes like his father and long hair like his mother, brought over a bunch of green plantains and a bag of cassava for the corporal, as he had been trained to do when they had company. Fonso thanked him and asked to use the latrine. Next to the wooden structure near the back of the house, he saw a cement basin painted blue and filled with a white liquid. Piled by the basin were the young coconuts from which they’d stripped the meat. What do they need so much milk for? Fonso asked himself as he tied the bunch of plantains to the back of the Honda 70.
As soon as the roar of Fonso’s motor had faded, Nenuco abandoned his chores and ran to the back bedroom, where a man lay covered with a white sheet on a bed raised by four cement blocks. A cemí made of yellow cotton and attached to a trembling string hung over the body. There was a cross and a circle drawn in chalk on the untreated wood that made up the back wall. A line snaked diagonally from the center of the cross. If the corporal had come in here, thought Nenuco, he would have run away in horror, people are that stupid. He lifted up the man, who was half asleep, and draped him across his shoulders to help him walk. Out in the yard, Ananí knelt before their naked guest, who was approaching while leaning on her husband. She spoke to him with the words she’d been taught, words she knew she had to use to receive the one who came from the water: “Bayacú Bosiba Guamikeni.” They eased his body into the cement basin with utmost care. Then they submerged him up to his neck and poured coconut milk on the moles that circled the top of his head.
Ananí had been born in water, but not like the Great Lord they now bathed; he had not been born of woman. Mama Guama, the old blind woman who still lived with them, had given birth to Ananí in a pool at Playa Bo all by herself. Ananí’s father, Jacinto Guabá, had disappeared on orders from Trujillo, who wanted to take his land and add them to those he was giving the Jews to whom he’d offered refuge during the great war. In the end, something made Trujillo reconsider and he left them with a quarter of what they had once had, including Playa Bo.
Since then, Ananí had wanted nothing to do with politics. Nenuco had to convince her to not spurn the gifts the current president sent from the city. At Christmas, a van with the party logo would show up, filled with sacks of rice, wine, apples, chocolate, bikes, balls and dolls for the kids, and some electric appliances. The gifts would be accompanied by a card addressed to Princess Ananí and signed by his Excellency, asking for her blessing. Her response was always the same: she’d tear the card and throw the pieces in the latrine before ordering Nenuco to distribute everything among the neighbors, except for the toys, which she kept for her own kids, Guaroa and Yararí.
She didn’t accept the gifts because she believed Balaguer was complicit in her father’s death, and she tore up the cards because she didn’t want anything to do with letters; Ananí always said they were pure lies, trash. When she was little and it became compulsory to go to school, Ananí learned her letters and numbers. She loved to look at the images of her ancestors in the illustrated history books, hunting, sowing, fishing, and dancing the areíto, though she knew what was written in those books wasn’t true. The books said there were fewer than six hundred Taínos by 1531 and that, a little later, they had completely disappeared. Her family, descended from caciques and behíques, had survived, like many others in the Republic they’d stayed in contact with to marry their young people and enact their rituals. The books said nothing of the men from the water, who came every so often to help them, nor of the Spanish, who’d stolen power from the Arawaks to conquer the other tribes on the continent. Ananí had been taught never to speak of these things with anyone, and she had always complied with that order. She left school in fourth grade. Nenuco made it to eighth grade; his parents had said that to deal with those who were sleeping, you had to know what they were thinking.
Nenuco was born in Barahona, on the southern part of the island, where his father, Ananí’s uncle, had gone on to marry a descendant of Enriquillo. In 1973, when he was seventeen, his parents had sent Nenuco on a bus with a sack of clothes, a golden vest, a machete, some shears to cut grass with, and the family cemí, to marry his cousin.
The first thing he did when he got to Playa Bo was plant flowers in front of the house, red, yellow, and white blooms that grew with the health and beauty of everything Nenuco planted in the earth. He didn’t speak directly, only through Mama Guama, and only about the garden, which he slowly brought to life all around the house.
Even amidst the dryness of the beach, the garden blossomed in the shade of the almond trees, roses, bromeliads, dwarf palms, and ferns, which Nenuco brought from the gardens he tended so beautifully in the houses and hotels where he found work. When she was ready to be in love, Ananí gave him a clay potiza in the shape of a heart, from whose breasts emerged a penis as a symbol of their union: they would cease being male and female to become one single beating organism.
Beyond their love and their children, what united them was taking care of the Great Lord, Playa Bo, where the most precious and sacred creature on the island dwelled, the portal to the land of the beginning, through which the men of the water would come, the big heads, whenever they were needed. That was why every summer Nenuco would pay special attention to the pool, monitoring the tunnel with the anemones where the phenomenon took place.
Their supervision had become routine until one day when, during the night, a blister about a foot long broke out on the main anemone. Mama Guama, blind now, came down every evening with Nenuco to play a gourd and give thanks to Yocahú, the creator, for letting her live so she could experience the miracle. Nenuco would sleep on the beach with a shotgun on his shoulder to protect the nest from the boys who hoped to sneak in to fish at first light; their hooks and harpoons could hurt the envoy, as fragile as an embryo in the water.
Willito had had the misfortune of running into that half-finished body, but Nenuco hadn’t killed him because he knew his grandfather and prayed the boy wouldn’t go talk all over town.
Yararí was fourteen years old and sick of all the ceremony and weird stuff. She didn’t want to belong to her parents’ world of mystery and whispers and had convinced Ananí to keep the Sony Trinitron TV Balaguer had sent her the previous Christmas. She didn’t convince her exactly: she’d threatened to kill herself if Ananí said no. In the afternoons, she’d ride by the houses of the rich on her bike and pretend she lived in one of them. Unlike her brother, she didn’t know a single word of Taíno and she loved school, especially her English teacher, who was a gringo priest with blue eyes. When Nenuco came home from the beach one afternoon with a man in his arms and asked everyone to help him, she stayed on the couch, feet up, watching the Coco Band play live on Súper Tarde on Channel 9. “Girl, turn that down,” Mama Guama begged her. Yararí, full of malice, turned the volume up a little: “I already did,” she said. The worst part was she and Guaroa now had to sleep on the hammocks in the living room to give their room to the damned sick man. She was sure the guy was just a drunk tourist her father had rescued from the waves, even if her parents had spent a lifetime telling her otherwise. Yararí would choose what she wanted to believe, and every time she bruised her knuckles washing her father and brother’s pants, she’d curse her mother for having given away the Korean washing machine she’d received as a gift alongside the TV. She was hanging clothes on the fence when Willito, whose curiosity had not been satisfied by Fonso’s visit, passed in front of her on a mule. He’d seen her before at school in town, slender and vibrant, with still-growing breasts and that black mane kissing her ass. She didn’t even glance at him; she dismissed him because he was riding an animal. Willito realized this. The next day he rode past on a Sanyang motorbike he’d borrowed, except this time Yararí wasn’t outside and didn’t see him, though Nenuco did, and wondered if the little thief was still trying to find out more about what he’d seen at the reef.
We have to speed this up, the gardener said to himself. That night, while everyone slept, he took a hand mirror over to the guest’s room; the man had dropped the scales from his eyes and was now sitting up on the edge of the bed. “We’ve been waiting for you,” Nenuco said in a very gentle voice. “You came from far away, bright star of the waters, and now I’m going to help you remember.” The man said nothing. He seemed scared, confused, and moved his eyes around all over the place, as though he were seeing things that weren’t in the room with them. Nenuco put the mirror in his hand and guided it in front of his face, with its wide jaw and dark brow. “Where am I?” the man asked in a sweet and raspy voice. “You’re in Playa Bo, in Sosúa, in the Dominican Republic.” He tried to get up but he still didn’t have the strength. Nenuco made him get back in bed, turning on the pedestal fan and switching the electric light as he left.
The man’s gaze went past his penis, which rested on his testicles, to the window in front of the bed, where the smell of the Atlantic came in to penetrate the darkened room. The waves roared against the cliff and the recurring sound brought him the image of a woman bleeding from her belly and looking at him with both resignation and urgency. “Esther Escudero,” he said, without knowing what that meant, although he discovered a certain familiarity in his own voice. The marine smells brought other memories: an animal with tentacles at the bottom of a jar, a steaming coffee pot, a penis entering his mouth. “Esther Escudero,” he said again, and the resonance of his voice in his body made him aware of its limits and those of the objects around him. He repeated the name several times. It was as though the letters of that name were fishing hooks searching the depths of his mind as he captured fragments of images that, just as they were taking shape, would once more dissolve. “Fan,” he said, watching the blades on the machine turn and turn as he got up, naked, and started toward the light in the living room. Yararí was sitting on the couch watching TV. Al Pacino had just ordered pizza for his hostages in Dog Day Afternoon. The man sat down next to her, looked curiously at the small screen, the furniture, the pots and pans hanging from nails on the kitchen walls, and the 1991 Nestlé calendar. Without taking her eyes off the movie, Yararí closed her fingers around his olive-colored penis and pumped it rhythmically with her right hand; when it got hard she took off her panties and sat on top of him, never taking her eyes off the TV, using her hand to guide him inside her and then moving up and down as he directed her with his hands on her waist. In minutes he’d filled her with cum. A cold sensation in his head brought the past rushing back. Just before he’d come, he’d seen Eric Vitier’s face telling him: “You’re the chosen one,” as though he were completely drunk, followed by the foamy, coherent recollection of his days back in the Santo Domingo of 2027. In the same way he’d muttered the name of the priestess before, he now pronounced his own: “Acilde Figueroa,” and his mind, reacting to it like a password, made all its contents accessible as the daughter of his hosts put her panties back on and changed the channel.