It was them: Dionisio Domínguez y Ibarra wed Altagracia Lopez y Centurion in the cathedral of Santa María la Menor on January 28, 1950. The date caught me. “Their anniversary just passed,” I said. My eyes stung. I glanced up at the woman, embarrassed, and saw that she was searching my face. “My aunt and uncle,” I said.
“Are they living?” she said softly.
There it was, the newlyweds’ address, as I had hoped: Hacienda la Romana, Avenida de las Caobas, Prov. de San Cristóbal.
“Yes,” I said. “Still living.”
CHAPTER 15
I needed a driver. I went back to my room at the hotel and changed into an outfit that looked Californian to me, a dress with a complicated print and sandals. I put most of the cash I had left in the safe. I went out to the balcony and smoked a cigarette and had another stare down with the casino girl on the billboard.
I worried that there would be no one there. I hoped for servants who could tell me something—anything—about where the Ibarras had gone. I felt hot. I had heard that a lot of the old families kept a place in the capital but really lived out there, on haciendas. Maybe this was the home the boy thought of, more than wherever they had lived in Santo Domingo when the war started. There was a buzz in the air like static, which I recognized from old times: it was fear, the trace that fear left when you pushed it out of your mind. I took the camera case out of my suitcase and loaded the gun inside with the bullets I had brought in an empty cold cream jar. I disliked guns but would have liked the idea of this trip into the country even less without it. I had packed it to give me courage. A gun rearranged things around itself.
I stood over the pad of hotel stationery on the side table for a few minutes, thinking, and then picked up my purse and went to the door. I stopped there and closed my eyes and tried to think. There was a lightness I distrusted in my arms and shoulders, in my hands wrapped around my bag. I went back to the table and wrote a few lines on the pad, folded the note, and sealed it in a cream-colored envelope. On the outside I wrote Nick.
In the lobby I asked the girl at the desk for a driver for the day and waited in a low vinyl chair while she called someone whom I understood to be, from her muttered phone conversation, a cousin of hers.
“Miguel will be here in thirty minutes,” she said to me after she hung up.
An hour passed. I read most of the paper while I waited. Strikes, robberies, murders. An editorial about the sanctity of Dominican motherhood. Miguel appeared at one o’clock, a pockmarked young man in jeans, and greeted his cousin with a kiss on the cheek. I hoisted myself out of the chair and came to the desk.
“I’m Anne,” I said.
He nodded but hardly looked at me. Up close he had a petrochemical smell, like he had been interrupted while under a car, and seemed shy. I checked my bag again to be sure I had everything I needed and then slid the envelope to the girl.
“Please give this to the gentleman in room 302,” I said.
The sea glittered as we drove out of Santo Domingo. It was the dry season, someone had told me. The car was an old Ford, and Miguel drove it carefully but fast, doing more with the clutch than was really necessary, patting the dash when the engine complained. We passed a monument of some kind in a plaza, a peristyle with smooth white columns and a series of flags; it was gone before I could get a good look at it. This was such an old city, but the parts that I had seen were so new, a profusion of whitened concrete, brightly printed advertisements, fresh asphalt. The salt wind kept the trees from growing high near the beach, and that made them seem new as well. The beach spread away to our left, strewn with sunbathers and umbrellas. Shaved-ice carts wobbled across the sand. On the right we passed low warehouses, the lots filled with row upon row of battered trucks, and then a collection of shops in primary colors with their names painted in white on the walls—ROPA, ZAPATOS, BIENES PARA LA CASA, FERRETERÍA, GOMERÍA, CARNECERÍA, PANADERÍA. At intervals, immense hotels interrupted all this ordinary human activity.
“Have you always lived in Santo Domingo?” I said to Miguel in Spanish.
He glanced at me in the rearview mirror and then looked away, as if he had just confirmed that I was talking to someone else.
“In Santo Domingo?” I tried again. “Have you always lived here?”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. We were separated from the beach at that moment by a line of palms, and through their trunks the water was electric blue, with a gentle surf breaking like a crust of sugar against the beach. A woman was selling plastic flowers from a cart on the median of the highway and the sunlight made them gorgeous, poignant: bundles of fake lilies and roses in yellow and pink, wrapped in green cellophane.
“It reminds me a little of Los Angeles,” I said.
In the mirror I could see him frowning at the road. On an impulse I said, “I wish my husband could have come with me on this trip, but his mother is sick. We usually travel together.”
An expression passed over his face that I could only describe as relief. It seemed obvious then, his shy silence since the hotel. My solitude was too much. It was indecent. I should have worn a ring.
“You’ve been here before?” he said, relaxing into his seat.
“No, never,” I said.
Congestion at a traffic circle, and then a shift, the city thinning. The hotels stopped appearing. The shops remained, and houses filled in the gaps, crowded together to make corrugated rooflines that bent and met at angles. As these houses grew smaller and then farther apart, the flora of the island began to overwhelm them. Piles of vines spilled over walls, trailing orange flowers. Chickens scratched warily on the shoulder of the highway. The land was flat here, the horizon close; whatever was close to the highway obscured everything behind.
It was two o’clock by my watch. Miguel turned the radio dial until he found a baseball game and settled in. He looked at me once more in the mirror. “Los Angeles, yes?” he said.
“Yes, but I’m from New York before that.”
“Oh, New York! I have cousins there. Yankees fan?”
“Mets!”
He clucked disapprovingly and laughed. My father had been an Orioles fan. I remembered him on spring Saturdays, out in the yard with a pair of clippers, pruning the delicate Japanese maples he had planted in islands of soft mulch, listening to the Orioles game on a portable radio propped up in the grass. Or working on the car in the drive, wearing his single pair of blue jeans, which he owned for those occasions, with the car radio tuned to the WQBR broadcast. He was a genteel kind of person, unsure with other men, slow to join in jokes, but he had liked baseball. By the time I was old enough to understand where he had actually come from, the frontier where he had grown up, and wonder about the discrepancy between that place and this bespectacled editor with his complete set of Tolstoy and his ironed neckties, he was already gone. From his brother I heard a childhood story about him killing a rattlesnake with a chisel when it surprised them in the barn one day. “That was all he had in his hand,” my uncle said. Little things—the hysterical murmur of the color commentary on the radio—brought him back so clearly that he could have been sitting beside me in the car, and yet he answered no questions, offered no explanations. The dead linger, they stay with us, but they don’t speak, and anyone who says different is selling something.
Félix had brought the cat home, which made it his. Or really, the cat had followed him home from the restaurant on a Friday night, and he had let it come into the big cold kitchen of the house on the hill and given it a meatball that he had mashed flat with a fork. It was a black cat with yellow eyes. You could feel its backbone when you petted it, but it didn’t seem sick, or weak, or even all that worried about anything. Dean, who slept in the living room, said that it was a tom and it would piss everywhere. Félix said it wouldn’t. Later he had seen Dean sitting and petting the cat so he must not have been too annoyed about it.
“What’s his name?” Charlie had said. He was one of the
older boys who slept in the warmer bedroom. Félix mostly stayed out of his way.
“I don’t know,” Félix said.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? So you give him one.”
But Félix couldn’t think of anything that didn’t seem too childish. Naming a cat felt like playing pretend. He wished the cat had come with a name, somehow. He sat with him in the cold front bedroom and the cat nudged and nosed him and climbed into his lap, and turned around twice before lying down, settling over his crossed ankles and his sneakers, which were already starting to fall apart.
Rubén, Félix thought. The name of an old yellow dog he had known once on the island. The groundskeeper’s dog, who walked around with a stick in his mouth all the time.
In the morning Félix gave Rubén another meatball, and when he left for work the cat was asleep on a chair in the living room. When he returned that night, he searched the house and found the cat in a closet that had been left open, on a forgotten coat with the lining torn out. A week went by like that, then another week. Félix started going to the five and dime at the bottom of the hill and buying cans of cat food. He kept them in the pantry, which was otherwise empty of anything but flyspecks and old mousetraps. The house was dirty and bare, except for the mattresses upstairs and a few chairs salvaged from the street, but it felt more comfortable with the cat around. The cat often stood by the door and looked up at Félix, serene but insistent; it amazed Félix that the cat was so sure he could make himself understood. If he opened the door, Rubén would slip out into the dark yard. Félix sometimes fell asleep in the armchair in the front room, waiting to hear him come back. If he went up to bed instead, he often found the cat in his room in the morning, let in by one or another of the boys who had come in late.
What Félix really wanted was to keep Rubén inside and close by all the time, so it was hard to let him out. One day, a day off, he refused to do it. Rubén paced and complained. Félix told him to hush. He walked away, hoping Rubén would follow him like he usually did, but Rubén crouched on the rubber mat at the door and wouldn’t move. Félix hauled him away and shut him in the hall closet. He sat in the chair by the window and listened to Rubén calling in the dark. There was something vibrating in Félix’s chest; his eyes skipped around when he tried to read. He was alone in the living room.
“Hush,” he said. “Don’t I feed you?”
But he was crying. There was no one to see. Rubén only got louder. Félix dropped the book and opened the hall closet, his face wet and red, and the cat spilled out, looking up steadily at him with his yellow eyes. He bumped his head against Félix’s shin and did a figure eight between his feet.
Just a few days after that, Félix didn’t see Rubén in the morning before he left for work. He tried not to think about it all day while he carried bins of dishes back and forth and unloaded the scalding Hobart. But Rubén still wasn’t there when he got home, and he didn’t come the next morning either, or that night or the day after that. Félix could see now that the forgiveness he had felt when he freed the cat from the hall closet had been provisional and that he had failed to show that he deserved it. He crumpled when he thought of it, so he had to stop thinking of it. He cried only on his walk home, safely alone in the dark, before the scarce lights of the big house came into view.
“San Cristóbal,” Miguel said, pointing out the window at an exit sign. In the distance, a low range of mountains rose up, dense with green-gray forest. “It’s the capital of the province.” The gas stations and shops had thickened again along the sides of the road, but the city of San Cristóbal itself was not visible as we passed. The landscape here had more turns and folds, and things were hidden. “Trujillo was born here,” he said.
“Ah,” I said. It seemed safer not to comment further. “So we’re close?” I said instead.
“Yes. They’re family, these people you’re going to see?”
“No, this is for business.”
“Business?” His eyebrows went up. I glanced at the gold-washed case in my bag with the business cards in it.
“Did you see Zombie Woman?” I hazarded.
“Yes, of course!” He lit up. “They made it here! That was a great movie.”
I had seen the placards for the movie still up near the hotel, and someone had proudly told me this already, that it was filmed in a beach town an hour or two east of the capital.
“Yes, I work for the studio that made that movie,” I said. “When they need a place to make a movie, they send me out to find one. We need a mansion. And they like to work here on the island.”
“What about your husband?”
“He works for the studio too. That’s how we met. I was his assistant.”
He nodded, satisfied. He stopped for gas and I watched him conferring over the road map with the man in the shop. A few miles later, we took an exit by a fruit stand selling guavas and descended on a narrow road. After the speed and the open sky of the highway, this was an abrupt change, the road spotted with potholes that had been filled with gravel, the forest encroaching on small houses and pens of animals on either side. Three dogs loped alongside the car, barking, darting forward when we slowed to inch across a stretch where the asphalt was in pieces, and then falling back again as the road grew smoother and began to curve upward. I kept swallowing and touching the sunglasses on my head. The camera case was heavy on my leg and I kept one hand on it. Nothing like going into the woods alone.
“Another ten, twenty minutes,” Miguel said, driving now with the road map unfolded on his knee.
The forest was cleared here, and farms appeared on the slopes, small houses among thick rows of coffee bushes and stands of banana trees. A group of children walking along the road broke into a run as the car passed, shrieking and laughing and throwing things after us. Then Miguel turned off to the right and beneath the wheels the pavement went smooth as silk.
“Money,” Miguel said, with a little sigh.
“Is this it?” I sat up, peering out the window. Nothing but rows of coffee bushes on either side.
“Yes, Avenida de las Caobas. Must be a private road.”
The sky was overcast here in the mountains. I hadn’t noticed the change until now. The air was still, the leaves were still; over the fields, birds circled and dove. There was a man out there pointing a rifle at the sky.
The caobas came into view—mahogany trees. We entered an avenue of them, like the live oaks that line the roads to plantations. The roots stood up from the ground, and the trunks were straight and broad, lost in the space above the car. I leaned out the window, looking up into the crowns against the white of the sky. I imagined Altagracia as a young bride, being driven down this avenue on her wedding day. A yellow stucco guardhouse appeared beside an open gate.
Miguel slowed to a stop. I leaned forward in the back seat. He put the car in neutral and set the brake, and I watched him get out and approach the smoked-glass window. The quiet of the mountain pressed in, even over the idling engine. A breeze moved through the caoba leaves, a faintly oceanic sound. Maybe a warning of rain. Miguel had cupped his hands around his eyes and was trying to see into the guardhouse. He stepped to one side and knocked on a door. I watched it fall open under his hand.
“Señora?” he called back to me, helplessly.
“Let’s go on,” I said. “Since the gate is open.”
We drove through, past a turnoff for a dirt road that led away across a field. I thought of the man with the rifle. The place wasn’t empty. But we saw no one now. Lawns opened up on either side of the avenue—lawns that had not been cut in some time. A red clay tennis court, surrounded by low topiary, with the net fallen in. At a turn, a horse stood across the road. It shied back when we stopped, and ambled away through bushes dotted with fruit.
“You’re sure there are people here?” Miguel said.
“I don’t really know,” I said. “I just heard it was a nice estate. Maybe I’m too late.”
“People leave, sometimes—they le
ave suddenly.”
The car emerged from the avenue of trees into a circular drive, and the house rose up before us. Miguel and I both sat back involuntarily in our seats. The car coasted to a stop, as if too shy to approach any closer. The yellow stucco of the guardhouse was repeated here, but on a grand scale, fringed with palms, circled by a double row of verandas. Two staircases rose from the ground to meet at the broad front door. Tall casement windows looked down on us; their gaze was chaotic, and I realized while I looked at them that it was because some of the curtains were drawn and some were open or half open, and some were covered with shutters, with no particular pattern. At the far end, one of these shutters hung crookedly from a hinge. A few large and anonymous objects—furniture?—were sheltered in the first-floor veranda, covered with canvas. Concrete urns ran along the front of the house, some empty, some filled with a flowering bush I didn’t recognize, some broken, one hosting a ravaged stick netted with spiderwebs.
“Grand people,” Miguel said. He turned off the engine, and the ticking as it cooled filled the silence. “But where are they?”
“No way to find out but knock, is there?” I said. I gathered my things together and got out of the car. The heat reasserted itself under the low roof of clouds. I lifted the hair off the back of my neck. The lawn was terraced, the way the English do it, and on the nearest terrace a flock of chickens was scratching in grass that looked incongruous in this riot of nature—the island in general being a place where the earth either burst forth with serrated leaves and vines and flowers or was kept laboriously bare, showing the red dirt. The chickens and their skinny rooster huddled away from me at the sound of the car door closing, making cooing noises of alarm. Off to the left of the circular drive, a goat wearing a bell grazed at the foot of a gazebo that could have housed a modest orchestra.
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 13