Bird of Paradise

by Raquel Cepeda

  “It’s going to be weird,” I write back. “Glad I’m only staying in Orlando for two days and then heading to D.R.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I want to fucking be there, dude,” Michelle replies. “It’s going to be so freaking weird.”

  I almost miss my flight. I lag at the boxing gym, doing extra rounds of the heavy bag and mitts, extra crunches, extra everything with Coach Sanchez until my arms feel like they’ll fall off if I try to lift them over my head. I’m one of the last people to board the American Airlines flight. On the plane, I try to think about everything but my imminent meeting with Rocío. Instead, I sketch out a plan for my forthcoming trip to Santo Domingo that’s totally ridiculous, because there’s no such thing as planning for Santo Domingo.

  We make a smooth landing at Orlando’s International Airport. I’m hoping it’s a good omen that all will go well over the next forty-eight hours. I take my time walking out to meet Michelle.

  I can’t remember a time when there was peace between Rocío and me, even during the periods of my life with Dad and Alice when she made brief appearances. It’s as if she dropped in only to prove to the men in her life, maybe even to herself, that she had a child whom she gave a shit about and who gave a shit about her. We both failed miserably at pretending. I wonder what, if anything, will change.

  Orlando is rather depressing. A blanket of fat clouds and gray skies follow me for the next two days.

  “It was gorgeous and hot before you came, and funny enough, it’ll be nice the day after tomorrow, when you leave,” says Michelle.

  “Yes, it figures,” I say. “Does Rocío know you’re picking me up?”

  “Yeah, she’s called like a million times—she’s anxious.”

  “Okay, let’s do this.”

  “Yes, let’s,” says Michelle. “I wonder if my mom’s going to be in denial or if she’s going to insist you meet the new guy. You know, I heard she told Giselle that her dad was French Polynesian and not from Haiti.”

  “That craziness sounds about right. The guy was a monster, but still, French Polynesian? Hysterical,” I say.

  “Listen, if it means anything at all, Mom is a wonderful grandmother to my daughter,” Michelle says. “I think she spoils her to make up for the past, you know?”

  “It doesn’t really matter to me, but I do understand your mother trying to make up for the past.” I stare out the window. “My father treats Djali like I think he wishes he treated me when I was a kid.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to hear about where this maternal ancestor of ours came from,” Michelle says. “You know, during one of Mom’s spells of delusion, she started looking, out of the blue, into getting the twins bar mitzvahed. Then she just let it go. Weird, right?”

  “Yo, have you ever heard of a fukú?” I ask Michelle.

  After what seems like too short a ride, we pull into Rocío’s driveway.

  Michelle enters the house first, positioning herself as if she has floor seats to an NBA final. I walk in slowly behind her.

  There’s a tiny woman standing in front of me sporting an eggplant-colored velvet sweatsuit. I can tell by the way she squints at me through her thick glasses that she barely recognizes me.

  “’Ello, Raquel.” She smiles nervously, leaning in to embrace me with her miniature arms. “How ar’ you?” Her voice is still soft and monotone. I lean in as if greeting an acquaintance who grew up with my mother rather than the woman who bore me.

  I’m underwhelmed, but I won’t tell her that. I had hoped, at the bottom of the well, that I’d feel something magical. But I feel nothing for this stranger in front of me, nada, except maybe a little compassion. Rocío isn’t carrying her genetic familial history only within her; a few new chapters are etched across her face like battle scars.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “How are you?”

  Rocío looks as if life itself has been an emotionally and physically abusive partner. She is missing teeth, a genetic flaw inherited from her father’s side of the family. Her hair is dyed a reddish brown, covering the silver stands that started sprouting on her head when she was still in her teens.

  I follow her a few feet into the crowded living room. Rocío has a huge leather sectional wrapped around two walls. I saw the same one in the Brooklyn apartment of Biggie Smalls and his former wife, Faith Evans, when I interviewed her there in the ’90s. Rocío’s is black with animal-print pillows, and Biggie’s was dark teal-meets-money-green. A collection of lighthouses adorns a table to my right. Above them on the wall are porcelain macaws and other tropical birds. Real and fake plants are everywhere, and a large indoor water fountain sits at the edge of a hallway leading to one of three bedrooms. I feel like I’m back in the Costa Rican rain forest but without the sensation of sitting in the lap of Mother Nature.

  The tchotchkes compete with the wall in front of me; it’s cluttered with photos of the five children she had after me, their children, and other family members I’ve never met.

  Everything sparkles. Perhaps the exhaustion of cleaning every ornament in this room is preventing Rocío from unwrapping a shitload of exercise and dance DVDs stacked next to the TV set.

  I haven’t heard a thing she’s whispered since I sat down. “Excuse me, can you repeat that?” I ask her.

  “Yes, I try to be transparent, which I have never been with you, unfortunately,” she lisps. “With your first child, you know, you make mistakes that, later on, you look back and you say, ‘Oh my God, how could I ever?’ ”

  “I never thought I’d see the day when you admit to anything—”

  “I became a woman in the States, and when I had my first child, and I was going through a lot of stuff like leaving the old, you know, the country for the first time.”

  This is the first of many times Rocío will refer to me, that first child, in the third person. It’s as if she’s talking about the black baby doll sitting on the miniature chocolate suede chair that I’m assuming belongs to Michelle’s daughter.

  “I lost my identity in the marriage with your father. You are somebody that you don’t know—”

  “I know myself,” I say.

  “I am somebody that you don’t know.”

  “Oh, you’re somebody, yes, I don’t know you.”

  “Yes, you don’t know me.”

  “Yes, that was by your design,” I say. “Today, honestly, I’m glad things worked out the way they did, or I would not be the person and mom I’ve become. And I don’t think I’m dissing you in your own home by stating that.”

  “No, no, no, no, as a matter of fact, I have a lot to ask for—forgiveness,” Rocío says. The edges of her eyes are wet. “Because I was not a good mother to you.”

  Speaking of mothers, I try to broach the subject of our mitochondrial DNA results with Rocío and Michelle. All the women on our maternal line, as well as their daughters and sons, share a haplogroup. We all descend from one woman who lived some twenty-six generations or so ago.

  “I want to know—now,” Michelle says. Like me, she doesn’t do mush.

  “Our First Woman, the female we all descend from, is West African. Through my sample, we were able to discern that all of our matches point to the region where Guinea-Bissau is located.”

  “Wow, that’s cool,” Michelle says. “I’ve never heard of Guinea-Bissau.”

  “Yes, it’s intriguing,” Rocío says. “We are so mixed, Dominicans and other Hispanics, so I don’t know why that tyrano used to kill Haitians when they crossed the border.”

  “Yeah, especially since the dictator was reportedly part Haitian,” I respond.

  “Do you want to go to that place someday—Guinea-Bissau?” Michelle asks me.

  “I thought of going, but my instinct tells me just not now every time. And then there’s this thing, this curse I think we have, that prevents me—”

  Rocío’s eyes widen. She’s ditched the light contacts somewhere along the road to now, and is back to rocking her natural brown eyes. “What do you mean—a fukú?�
��

  “Yes, between mothers and at least their eldest daughters.”

  “I think it’s with all mothers and daughters,” Michelle says. “Besides, Mom, you have three firstborn daughters with different men.”

  Rocío ignores Michelle. “My mother and I didn’t have a good relationship growing up. I thought I was adopted.”

  “I wish I were adopted, but then again, maybe I chose this path,” I say.

  I tell Rocío and Michelle about the woman in my dreams whom I’ve always somehow felt related to, as if she’s a spiritual guide or guardian of sorts. Rocío looks at me like she’s listening to a horror story.

  “You know, I’ve had similar dreams throughout the years,” she says, “but I thought it was some brujería that Haitian whose name I won’t say put on me to terrorize me even in my sleep.”

  “I don’t think that was brujería, Rocío,” I say. “I think there are other ways to look at it—this could be seen as insight. Many different cultures of people around the world believe in the power of dreams.”

  “So, you know, Jim is in the room down the hall, and he wants to meet you,” says Rocío, just when I thought we were getting somewhere.

  Jim is Rocío’s latest tragedy, or boyfriend. He’s a quadriplegic. I’m told the man resting in the room at the end of the hallway is a Hershey, Pennsylvania, native and former truck driver who lived in a trailer park before fate brought him to this house. One day while driving his Ford Explorer after trucking for hours, Jim dozed off and crashed, and was pinned underneath a wheel. His spine shattered into pieces, and he was left totally paralyzed except for some mobility in his arms. I’m not sure how Rocío met him or how he ended up in the room down the hall and not with his own family, but she claims it was love that brought them together. Rocío has always loved fixing broken men, and I guess this guy is no different.

  “I’m not interested in ever meeting another one of your boyfriends or husbands. It’s not what I came here for,” I say.

  “He really helps me more than any man I’ve known, and he doesn’t expect anything from me in return.”

  “Rocío, he cannot move. He can’t walk away from you.”

  “But he is different,” she says. Her eyes are wet again.

  “Different from whom? Different from the awkward Cuban goat castrator? The Mexican closeted gay dude I kind of wished I met just because? The Dominican jodedor-looking guy who’s the reason why I don’t want to learn how to drive and I’m terrified of cars that go faster than forty miles an hour? I know he must be different from our Haitian Lord Voldemort—at least this guy can’t beat the shit out of anybody. He can’t move.”

  “I’m sorry I put my child in harm’s way, but I was not myself in California.” Pause. “I was so scared,” Rocío says.

  “Are you referring to me?” I ask.

  Rocío holds on to each one of her elbows with the opposite hand, rubbing them as if she’s cold. She changes the subject. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer, to write my memoirs. I always wanted to travel.”

  “You can still do that. You only look older than you really are,” I say. We break into laughter. Tears are running down Rocío’s cheeks. She excuses herself to go to the bathroom before coming back and asking me her first direct question; I no longer exist in the third person.

  “So, Raquel, what can we do to make things right from now on? Or are we going to live in the past?”

  “Well, I’m not a born-again anything, so I do look back. It’s what lets me know where I’m going, and it reminds me what I’ve learned in order to get here.”

  “So what is your verdict?”

  “The verdict is still out,” I say. I don’t know how to tell her what my intuition is screaming into my ear, which is to run in the other direction as fast and far as I can. I decide to tell her a different truth. “I can tell you that I have no hatred for you or resentment. My wish for you is that you start taking care of yourself and focus on the kids hanging on that wall.”

  Rocío says nothing. She excuses herself to turn Jim over, which she has to do every couple of hours. “Are you sure you can’t come back here for a few minutes? He really wants to meet you.”

  “No. No, thank you.”

  Rocío walks down the hall. “I think now is a good time to go,” I whisper to Michelle. She agrees.

  We slip out the front door and quietly walk to the driveway. I can see Rocío through the French-style windows of her bedroom. She looks beaten down and almost depressed as she preps her boyfriend to turn him over. I can see his emaciated body from the waist down.

  Their codependent relationship works: Rocío and Jim reflect each other. What he is on the outside—immobile, wounded, and perhaps, unwanted—is likely what Rocío feels on the inside. I sit in the passenger seat of Michelle’s silver Nissan Altima and watch my birth mother labor through the routine she’s confined herself to for years now. I think this may be the last time we see each other in this lifetime.

  “At first I was nervous about the situation escalating into a fight or something,” Michelle says on the way to the hotel. “But it wasn’t that bad at all. It was more like you two were acquaintances from long ago—a lot of heavy words were exchanged with no real chemistry from either side.”

  “You’re right,” I say. Rocío and her kids and I aren’t close. And so life must go on, like it has before, but with more understanding. “I don’t know if I’ll bother telling her what her direct paternal origin is when that cousin you introduced me to on Facebook, the one from one of Papa’s affairs before Mama, takes the Y-DNA test.”

  “Why didn’t Uncle Antonio do it?” Michelle asks.

  “To be honest, I think he just doesn’t want to have anything to do with Papa. Who could blame him?” I reply. “But our cousin didn’t hesitate and took the test as soon as I sent it to him. We don’t stay in contact, either.”

  Antonio was the second person after Dad who agreed to take the test when I approached him about it months ago. However, when the Y-DNA kit arrived, he freaked out and disappeared for weeks. When I caught Antonio on the phone, he said, “Why are you bothering me? Go fuck yourself.”

  “But what did I do?” I responded. “If you changed your mind, you should just have told me.”

  “I don’t have time for your bullshit,” he said, followed by “Don’t call me anymore,” to which I obliged.

  For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound. Still, I didn’t have time to wait and see whether he’d change his mind. Papa’s spirit, or Michelle’s know-how, led me down another, less dramatic avenue.

  I am now halfway through my yearlong journey.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Flash of the Spirit

  You kept us caged in / Destroyed our culture and said that you civilized us / Raped our women and when we were born you despised us . . .

  —IMMORTAL TECHNIQUE, “THE THIRD WORLD”

  I FIRST GOT INTO THE HABIT OF ARRIVING AT THE AIRPORT OVER three hours ahead of schedule when Djali was a toddler. At four, she became my travel buddy. If she didn’t have school now, Djali would have been standing on this long line next to me, rolling her eyes at this all too familiar sight. As always, I’m stuck behind a family of seven traveling with fifteen plastic-wrapped suitcases, a brood of screaming children to regulate, and impatient men in tow. This is par for the course when heading anywhere in the Caribbean, but for some reason, the drama is always super-sized when Santo Domingo is the final destination.

  By the time I arrive at the gate, I’m spent, and looking forward to relaxing on this huge steel bird that’ll drop me off in paradise in a matter of hours. A middle-aged woman, accompanied by an elderly man, sits down in front of me. She is dressed in skintight black slacks and a matching button-down shirt. Her face is many shades lighter than her hands and neck. Her electric-blue eyeliner takes me back to a school lunchroom in Yonkers, where Socorro tried to convince me that it brought out the blue sp
ecks in her almost black eyes.

  The lady starts talking to the woman next to her like I imagine Hipólito Mejia would his boys in private. She’s homesick and deliriously happy to be going back. “I just hope, just pray,” she says in campesinaese, “that I don’t run into any filthy maldito haitianos invading mi barrio.” If the woman kept her mouth shut she could have easily been mistaken for West African or, to her horror, Haitian.

  The lady next to her says nothing. She halfway smiles and looks at me like she’s thinking, Ven acá loca, have you not seen yourself in the mirror lately? Has living in this country not shown you that you ain’t white?

  I can’t help but blurt out, while looking squarely in the lady’s direction, “Wow, what a stupid woman” in the relatively small lounge area. “Sonia Pierre you ain’t.”

  The woman pretends not to hear me, but the people around her do, and a handful smirk, except her traveling companion, who hisses and sucks his teeth at me. Still. The acknowledgment from the handful of my compatriots makes me feel better about going back to the old country. I may be a bit idealistic, but transcultural latinoamericanos—rooted in the States with a foot firmly planted in our parents’ respective homelands—might be impacting how some of our elders are starting to think about racial identity.

  As we board the plane, the woman’s neighbor says to me in Spanglish, “I’m glad you said something to that horrible estúpida. Lo odio cuando una cabróna ruidosa makes all of us look like we’re in those times.” The woman tells me she lives in Washington Heights and was born in Salcedo, the birthplace of the Mirabal sisters. I think I’m safe to assume that “those times” refers to the decades spanning Rafael Trujillo’s evildoing, or perhaps the propagation of his ideals by Joaquín Balaguer for years after he was snuffed out in 1961. Though it’s been over a half-century since his death, Trujillo’s self-loathing legacy still haunts the Dominican consciousness both here and in la república.

  “I couldn’t help myself, that kind of talk gets me heated and anxious about visiting the country,” I say. “I don’t want to get into stupid arguments over there.”