To my astonishment the camouflaged man didn’t just take the purse and then inform his colleague that the mission was completed. He used a knife or a screwdriver to try to bend open the entire plastic pocket underneath to try to find more. But there was nothing there. I knew it, but I didn’t want to see the result of their disappointment. The moment had come. I wouldn’t fight them, although I would have loved to give that big, fat, black ass crawling on all fours on my floor a jolly good kick. Let me be as close to honest as I possibly can: the reason I didn’t do it is because, I think, I was afraid of what harm they still might be able to inflict on me. Because this is also when I had my chance — to escape. Suddenly — and for once that dreaded word inimical to all literature is entirely appropriate — suddenly, I discovered that by blocking my exit through the kitchen door — remember I still have a knife and a machete pointing at me — while the other guy was searching for my money, they had both left the steep staircase leading back up to the bedroom unguarded. So I just took a tiger leap (or two) up these stairs, then ran like a stampeding wildebeest through the bedroom out on the balcony. Once there I turned into a monkey and allowed myself to slide down the thatched roof, only to land, barefoot, as a human, on the sharp coral rock underneath.
In retrospect, the pain of my feet were worse than that of my head, but this leap had set me free. For the first time I unleashed the remaining power of my lungs, while my heart was beating its way up my throat: ‘Ladrones! Ladrones!’(for some reason I know I only shouted this word twice). At the same time I continued running on my mutilated feet, with my face, body, white shirt and trousers entirely covered in blood. I knew there were plenty of neighbours around, but I wasn’t too sure they would respond to my distress. Once I was outside the gates of the property I knew that the burglars would not risk coming after me. I guess that at this time they were quickly packing up and preparing to disappear. Although I had probably lost quite a substantial amount of blood, I felt pretty sure I hadn’t been mortally wounded since I could still walk, even run without losing consciousness. Nonetheless, I had to get all the way down to the central crossing in the village, a good 500 metres from my home, before I finally met another living soul, and that alone must have been a sight like something out of a third-rate horror movie: a ghost in white clothes drenched in blood, staggering down the dirt road in search of someone to scare.
At first I tried to get into the hotel where an Englishman of my recent acquaintance was staying. But although I was pretty sure I could find his room, I was stalled in my attempt by the bloodhound on guard on the premises. I could hear him come after me through the corridor, and I quickly retired, closing the otherwise open door of the hotel behind me. As I re-entered the street, I saw, to my relief, two young cops on a motorbike coming down the Samaná road. They saw me too but, rather surprisingly, didn’t seem to take much interest in my appearance. I had to approach and describe to them where my house was located, and limped after them as they set off in its general direction on their bike. As I came closer, still limping on sore feet, I met them on their return. They claimed they couldn’t find the house. I pointed it out to them, but although they now went to its gate, they never dared to enter the property, let alone the house itself. I shouted to them that the thieves only had knives and machetes (they on the other hand were equipped with handguns), but they still refused to make the effort to search the house. They were just standing there, dumbfounded as it appeared to me then. At this point people started to appear around me, notably a Belgian couple running a guesthouse across from my home.
The forces of civilisation thereafter began to mobilise. It was, I guess, around two o’clock in the morning when the female village doctor arrived. I was sitting in a patio chair, attended to by the Belgian couple, patiently awaiting her verdict. She took my blood pressure, inspected my wounds, and then determined I was in a general condition stable enough to permit an operation on the spot. She brought out her equipment and began to stitch me up. It turned out I had several more wounds than I was aware of. In the end I believe she had to make some 60 stitches to five different cuts in my head. She didn’t have to shave my crane though, and she must have made an amazing job, since all the wounds are now perfectly healed, and the scar conspicuously running obliquely across the right side of my forehead is only to be detected at a certain angle, with the light coming in from the right direction. Three hours later, the operation was over and I was sent to wash off in the shower. I was given some dry clothes and a clean bed to sleep in. Before I was left to recover in the small bungalow, she again read my blood pressure, confirming that it was ever so slightly above normal, but, considering the circumstances, this was, in her opinion, perhaps not so strange. She also insisted I must keep ingesting a pretty awful tasting cocktail containing what one would normally receive intravenously. She then gave me a sedative in the butt and I dozed off, not too unhappy with the night’s events. After all, I was going to survive this unfortunate encounter with people who couldn’t care less if, at this point, I was dead or alive.
The next day I was awakened by the arrival of the police who began to ask their usual questions. After having made some notes, hopefully pertaining to my answers, they left. I had decided that I was in no mood to move back home. Jean arrived, confirming that the place had literally been a bloody mess; it had taken the cleaning lady several hours to finish up after me. Strangely he was also able to confirm that neither my violin, nor my computer had been stolen. This was undoubtedly good news, and it confirmed my suspicion that if I wouldn’t have escaped, and they would have instead tied me up against the iron lattice, they would undoubtedly also have taken everything of value they could possibly carry. It’s possible the violin represented nothing of value to them: if only they’d known that — given the right time, customer and place — they might have got 6,000 dollars for it! Instead they almost killed me over a mere 100 bucks, a bunch of credit cards they were unable to use and a camera, which, as I discovered later, they had thrown onto the coral reef while hastily retreating from the crime scene. It wasn’t even broken; as a matter of fact, until quite recently I was still using it.
There followed a week in which I was interviewed by local police and even taken to identify an individual apprehended. He was taken out of the local arrest and paraded in manacles in front of the building. Another woman, robbed in her home too, had been asked to join me in the effort. But we both had to conclude it wasn’t the one, and without further ado the guy was accompanied back to the arrest.
I stayed in the Belgian guest house for almost a week recovering from my wounds. Once my head had been stitched up it was my feet that hurt the most. The flesh had been torn off its undersides, quite especially the sensitive middle area between heel and toe. To walk was a bit like I imagine was the case for the mermaid in H.C. Andersen’s tale. She had been granted the parting of her tail at the cost of feeling each step as cuts of knives through her legs. As a rule I managed to make it to the nearby bars in the evening and after a couple of drinks I would forget most of my handicap.
I had lost all of my credit cards along with the cash, but Mr. Toulouse kindly let me run a tab at his establishment until I got hold of some money. This I managed to do by transferring funds directly from my bank account into Jean’s bank in Brussels. The reason again I could do that was that the thieves had not stolen the small electronic device by which I could access my Internet bank and my personal account. Once he had received the money into his account he was able, in principle, to give me the equivalent in local currency, or dollars, but he nevertheless had to drive down to Samaná to get the cash, and that didn’t happen until several days later.
Meanwhile I was stuck with the Belgian couple. It was one still holding together because of the husband’s consistently repeated ‘Yes Dear’. He was under her thumb and I believe his greatest happiness consisted in being able to go off for a swim in the ocean every day. I guess he was gentil as the French
say, but he was also con, as they might add — a devastating qualifier. That he was also Belgian wouldn’t have made him any more endearing in their eyes, and I shall refrain from speculating further on his character.
She on the other hand was obnoxious. She had an ocular malfunction that made her eyes stare at a 45 degree angle apart from one another. This trait became particularly annoying when she tried to focus and scrutinise my eyes, which happened all the time. I tried to stare her in the forehead every time she addressed me to avoid being caught in the dizzying oscillation. On top of this she was bossing me around with relentless ‘the Doctor said’, pretending to be a nurse, or, still worse: my mother! Although they invited me to partake in their lunch every day, they proved in the last instance to be neither very generous nor understanding. I don’t know if he was just too subjugated to even dare to argue against her.
Whatever the case, I from early on suspected I was eventually going to be in for another nasty surprise. I knew their guesthouse to be overpriced for clients coming over by plane from Europe. I was also rightly suspecting that she just might in the end treat me as one, and consequently ask me to pay for my stay on the same conditions. She did. Although well aware of my financial situation, especially in regard to lost credit cards and cash funds, she demanded me to pay 50 Euros a day for the near week I had spent on the premises. I told her this was too much to ask for and after some hustling managed to negotiate slightly better terms. But their pretension of being ever so helpful and caring was irreparably gone. After having laid the money on the table (I had to get an advance from Jean and an impromptu loan from a visiting Dutchman to manage it) I just turned around, thanked them for their initial help, which had been real although almost impossible not to render, and then refused to give them even the benefit of a second glance. I just walked out of there.
Even today I don’t have much to add in their defence. Their behaviour was poor. They knew, since I kept telling them so, that I would of course be willing to pay for accommodation, but to ask for 50 Euros a night for a simple hotel room at the back of beyond of the rural Dominican Republic, was downright outrageous. When I told the rest of the European enclave about what had happened, it infuriated them too, and I know Jean almost got into a fist fight with the husband over the issue, which he too apparently considered an outrage. Most French (except one of them, being a friend of the Belgian couple) were appalled (or at least convincingly pretended to be so), and further confirmed in their entrenched anti-Belgian sentiments.
Notwithstanding, I have to admit, that apart from the occasional benevolent gesture, the entire village, whether represented by indigenous elements or foreigners, was ferocious in its pursuit of money. Behind whatever civilised façade there was a crude calculation for survival in terms of money. Not that the people behind bars, shops and restaurants would try to openly cheat you, but they were never quite generous either and would rarely grant you a deal if you suggested one. Even as I passed by an inch from the sword of death and everybody knew I was out of money by an understandable cause, few, except the ones mentioned, stepped in to offer me a drink or some credit. I thus felt the sting and stigma of being poor in an unforgiving world.
As soon as I had left the guesthouse the Belgian woman must have called the female doctor, whom I also owed money for the operation, and alerted her to that I might be about to leave Galéras without paying my medical expenses. How otherwise to explain that as I reached the street corner of Little France, Germany and Italy 300 metres down the road from the Guest House, the Doctora herself stood waiting for me there, in this way making sure I wasn’t hopping on a bus or taxi without having paid her first. Explaining the situation to her I did manage to also negotiate her invoice, this time with a smile from the understanding woman who knew she might have salted the bill just a bit.
At this point I was nonetheless almost completely out of money again, and still needed to stay two more days in town before I could take a bus to the airport in Puerto Plata, from where I had booked a flight to Dusseldorf by using my German friend Simone’s credit card, the details of which she had given me over the phone. Explaining my dilemma to a Frenchman who runs a hotel close to the ominous street corner where all the scooter and motorbike taxis also hang out, I was at first offered a room for free, but he soon changed the terms to ‘whatever I could spare’, since ‘we too are struggling to stay afloat’, etc. I can’t remember what I finally ended up paying him, but it wasn’t exorbitant.
The room was actually very nice. By now, however, my goodwill was clearly running out, and Wolfgang, the German, who was probably sour that I hadn’t rented the rickety extra house on his property as my vacation abode, would typically sit at some table drinking beer while shouting to me passing by that: ‘Your sunglasses are too small for your fucking big head, Lars!’. Had he backed up such compliments by also buying me a beer, I think I wouldn’t have bothered. But he made it clear he wouldn’t and I felt that lack of generosity to be an impediment to what might otherwise have been a budding friendship. In the end it was perhaps the German Peter — who together with his indigenous wife (she’s the owner) has run the Hotel-Restaurant I refer to as Little Germany for 17 years — who summed up the general attitude of the people of Galéras most succinctly: ‘I don’t trust anyone and I have no friends except my wife and my dog’. I have no doubt that he meant it, literally.
As my sojourn there was coming to its precipitated end, I was inclined to feel the same way, except I had neither wife nor dog. But I did have the Dutchman Tom, owner of the El Cabíto who would sometimes come down to town in his jeep. Tom must be one of the few remaining true romantics who created his eagle’s nest without even thinking about what it should be used for or what the balance sheet was going to look like. He certainly would invite me for beers every time he was in Galéras. But although he really is the nicest guy, he had somehow managed to attract the evil eye of Audrey, the cordon bleu chef of the Tainos restaurant (Little France). She made sure he knew he was no longer welcome in their bar-restaurant since, allegedly, he was ‘stealing clients from them’. Tom was completely bewildered by this absurd accusation, but then again there might be another picture here which I, the newcomer, was unaware of. Be that as it may. I hope they have by now found it in their hearts to forgive one another. I quite especially remember when Tom — always fresh looking, with a neatly groomed beard and a stylish long hippie shirt — and I finished off a late evening at a very local bar off the main district. We were standing at the bar having rums and there was absolutely no way we could talk ourselves us out of the fact that a young woman wanted to have us both at the same time. Tom even offered her money to leave us alone. She might have wanted the money too but not without also being used by the two of us. ‘It really is quite difficult’, I remember Tom musing wistfully, ‘when they are so young and beautiful’.
Indeed, human nature is inscrutable, and it was, believe it or not, with some regrets in my heart, that I had my last coffee and Internet session in the French bakery before squeezing myself into the crowded taxi taking me down to Samaná, where the bus to Puerto Plata was waiting. I guess the nostalgia I felt, and still feel, in regard to this rather indescribable place, is that the people there, with all their petty schemes, have something unabashedly real about them, as though the general indifference of this place to Western conventions of morality has rubbed off on Europeans and Canadians too and made them seem more unabashedly egotistical and brutal for sure, but also more genuine and true than many other people in the Western world hiding their naked greed behind corporate or other ‘respectable’ facades. One last example may serve to round off this account of human eccentricities — my own included.
One day prior to when all the financial commotion described above took place, Jean and I finally made it to town in his four-wheel drive to pick up some money. I thought it might be a good idea to combine this with a visit to the local police station in order for me to get a writ
ten report that I in turn could present to the insurance company providing travel insurance via my Visa card. Arriving and staying at the police station in Samaná was yet another quite otherworldly instance. Jean left me on its door step. Since he too had some errands to run we decided to meet an hour later at a beach café.
I was shown into the police headquarters by a policeman dressed in civilian clothes. He had no holster for his gun. Instead he had stuck it inside his pants in such manner that the gun barrel reached all the way from inside the buckle of his belt down to his crotch. Once inside the office — a naked room with huge flakes of peeled off paint and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling — I was asked to hand over my passport to another policeman behind a computer screen. He threw it over his shoulder into a heap of paper at the far end of the table. Without even noticing where the official travel document landed, he continued typing away on the computer. I found myself a seat although I hadn’t been asked to take one. I just waited for something to happen. Not much did. Except that the guy with the Beretta enhancing the relief of his jean showed up a couple of times, whereby the two men entertained loud conversations. Their Spanish was incomprehensible to me. Finally, the one with the gun left the room.
I waited a little more, still amazed by the scene. The remaining policeman resumed his typing, frequently commenting the process aloud to himself. Seeing that I hardly filled any intelligible function in this context, I asked him if there was any idea for me to hang around much longer, since obviously he had not the slightest intention to even ask me what I wanted. He looked over his computer, semi-closing his eyes as though trying in vain to focus on my person, and retorted: ‘What did you say you wanted?’ I replied that I hadn’t so far hardly said anything because nobody had asked me. At this point my reticent interlocutor seemed to understand that the dread wouldn’t go away by itself and that he might, in fact, have to do some work. I began to tell him my story which he wrote down in a surprisingly flowery Spanish, speaking of me as being savagely attacked not just when asleep but while ‘disfrutando de su sueño’ (enjoying his sleep). On the other hand, the 18k gold chain with its stylised Thor’s Hammer — the former bought from a Lebanese jeweller in Abidjan, the latter acquired on a visit to Reykjavik — which the perpetrators had ripped off my neck, in the report turned into some yellow adornment, discarded as an almost irrelevant loss.
Incidents of Travel in Latin America Page 13