The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean

by Rita M. Gardner

  Daddy and Mama welcome him and offer him coffee. The minute the Padre mentions the church and how he’d like us to join, Daddy tightens his jaw. Before he can speak, Mama opens her mouth and speaks in Spanish.

  “I’m sorry, Padre. We’re Protestant.”

  “The hell I am,” Daddy says in English and stomps out of the house.

  The priest shakes his head and takes Mama’s hand in his. “I’ll pray for you anyway.”

  Daddy turns his head, still in hearing distance. “We don’t need your prayers.”

  Mama’s face is red. Her hands rub each other, her knuckles tight knots. My face is hot too, and I stare at the ground in shame. I’m only seven, but I know better than to speak. Berta escapes by cutting around the corner of the house with some washing she’s hanging up on the clothesline by the bougainvillea bush.

  Mama finds words. “Thank you, Padre, for taking the time. I’m so sorry.”

  The priest lowers his voice. “It’s all right. God bless you and your family. If you ever need anything, I’m at your service.”

  He nods and smiles at me, patting my cheek before walking slowly down the path. After he’s gone, Daddy slams the gate closed and crunches back up the gravel path as if he’s still sore. Mama raises her arm limply, as if asking permission to speak.

  Daddy interrupts. “He’s not setting foot in this house again, and don’t you forget it. I don’t trust those do-gooders.” Daddy is just winding up now, and once again we get to hear how the world is going to end badly because of the Catholics. There won’t be enough food for all of them until the goddamned church stops telling them to be fruitful and multiply.

  When my friends learn we’re not Catholic, Niña says she prays for my soul. Daisy says she is sorry that I’ll be going to hell when they will all, “si Dios quiere”—God willing—be in heaven. I don’t care about that, because heaven sounds like a fairy tale and I know fairy tales are not true. The only time I feel like I’m in church is when I visit Niña. The word niña just means “girl,” and the name stuck after her mother died and she went to live with her grandmother. The other girls think she’ll become a nun. Her house is wooden and very small. In the tiny living room a painting of Jesus bleeding on the cross hangs next to the Virgen de Altagracia holding a baby Jesus. A portrait of Trujillo hangs crooked on the opposite wall. A table is covered with a tablecloth with lace borders that Niña stitched by hand. Candles flicker in cloudy glasses next to a Bible and book of prayers. A set of amber rosary beads glow in the candlelight. My achy stomach calms down in Niña’s house; there’s no danger here.

  Whether it’s because of religion or not, Daddy doesn’t usually drink on Sundays, so it’s a day of rest for all of us. I lie awake in the early morning watching the light breeze riffle the mosquito netting above my head. The church bells add music, and I’m safe in my mesh cocoon. I hear Daddy talking and Mama making breakfast. It’s Berta’s turn to set the table. I wiggle under the sheets to the twitter of birds in the orange tree. On Sundays Mama lets Berta have a little coffee in her hot milk, but I won’t be allowed coffee until I’m older. Berta brings her cup into the bedroom and gives me a sip. Making little eye contact with Daddy, who gave us a three-hour sermon last night on the evils of the church, I take my place at the table. He coughs, says good morning, and attends to his food. I put on a smile. The bells ring again—last call for the eight o’clock mass.

  Even though Daddy has forbidden me to set foot inside the church, I’ve peeked in as the stained glass light streams in, turning everything red and gold. I’ve seen the statue of Jesus on his cross, blood dripping down from the holes where he’s nailed to the wood, and the clay Virgin Mary holding him in her arms.

  All my friends are in church now, sprinkling holy water, fingering their rosary beads, praying, or getting their sins absolved. I wish I were there, sitting on the hard wooden seat that smells of moldy wood and incense, getting my sins washed away. I have lots of bad thoughts. I know it’s wrong to think how wonderful life would be if Daddy were out of our lives, but I dream of standing tall and yelling right back at him to STOP yelling, drinking, and hurting us. I never do that, of course—those are evil thoughts. It sure would be nice to be absolved of my terrible sins; like Daisy was the time she cursed after her brother knocked her into a mud puddle. “Padre Daniel said to do three hail Marys, and that was it—God forgave me.”

  Zuleica says Padre Daniel prays for our souls in church, but he never again tries to bring us into his fold. But even so, he manages to gain Daddy’s respect. When Berta has a fever of 104 degrees for a whole week, it’s Padre Daniel who drives her and Mama over the mountain in his jeep, hurrying, hurrying to the medical clinic in El Seybo, where they have antibiotics and doctors. He sits by my sister’s bedside while she hallucinates with fever, and gets permission for Mama to stay with Berta, right in the same room, until it’s safe to bring her home to Miches. And it’s the Padre who knocks on our door with reports from the clinic, and whose housekeeper brings over a stew for Daddy and me, alone together in our house for days. Sundays remind me of Padre Daniel and his goodness, and while Daddy ignores the sound of the church bells, they hum inside me like a bright hope.

  By noon, all the worshipers go home for the Sunday meal, followed by siesta time until two o’clock. Miches is silent in the heat of midday, gathering in on itself, breathing for a while, sins washed away by the bright morning sun and God’s love.

  Another religion takes over in the afternoon. After siesta, men throughout the village begin their weekly pilgrimage for the afternoon service—not at the church this time. Men and boys flood steadily down San Antonio Street toward the gallera. I’ve bicycled by the village’s cockfighting arena on days when no one is around and peeked through the warped slats. A few blocks away from our house, the circular structure is rimmed with five rows of crude benches. At the center is hard-packed ground, the ring where the roosters will fight. Mama says this is no place for us, so I don’t tell her I’ve already explored the empty ring where the dirt smells bad and bloodied feathers lie scattered like leaves.

  On Sundays, spectators crowd the battlefield and small boys hang from poles or any place they can get a good view after all the benches fill up. There are no women or girls in sight, except for Maria La Sorda, who sets up her candy cart outside. The siesta-time quiet gives way first to small waves of shouts, then the sound becomes a roar, punctuated by curses or yells of victory. The gallera is the afternoon worship, and the offerings to the gods are the fighting machines that two men hold in their arms down on the ground. These roosters have been trained for months, and the best of them fight on Sunday afternoons. In the Dominican version of fights at an ancient Roman coliseum, bets are placed, rum flows, and the battles are waged for hours. By mid-afternoon the roar of the gallera is amplified as hundreds of feet pound the benches in excitement or frustration. It becomes just noise after a while, like when there’s a downpour and you can’t hear a thing because it’s so loud. As the sun begins to set, the thunder fades, and the winners and losers filter out and stumble home. They can repent their sins next Sunday morning in church.

  I wonder what it’s like to yell and root for a bird to kill another. I feel so sorry for the roosters. Days before a fight, grown men carry their gallos under their arms like you’d cradle a kitten, taking them everywhere, showing them off. The birds have shiny feathers, bright eyes, and sharp spurs. Afterwards, the ones who live through a day at the fights are all tattered, and they’re left in their coops to heal while a fresh young bird is groomed for the next fight.

  If I wasn’t forbidden to go into the church, I’d be praying there every Sunday morning for the poor roosters. Instead, I read my book and try to ignore the sour taste in my mouth when the noise from the gallera grows into a roar—the sound of victory and the sound of death.

  Chapter Eight

  Light and Noise

  One of my jobs is to trim the wick on the kerosene lanterns, our only source of light the first f
ew years in Miches. I also have to pick out the insects that fall in, attracted to the light, burned by the flame. When I try to rescue them I end up burning myself too so I watch them flutter and crumble to ash. I also have to wash the lantern chimneys when one of us has turned the wick up too high for better light, causing the glass to get all smoky and dark.

  Light also attracts crickets; their high-pitched buzz reverberates through Casalata’s aluminum walls, causing Daddy to scream at one of us to take the Flit gun and find and kill them. Since all we want is for Daddy to not get mad at us at night, Berta and I become adept at hunting down these night creatures and annihilating them with the poison spray from the gun. Our mostly green lawn is pockmarked with yellowing grass, battlegrounds where we’ve won or lost the wars against the invaders. Other than the crickets, nights in Miches (except for Daddy’s ranting) are quiet.

  The only exception is in June, when an ancient drumming ceremony called a velorio takes place over nine nights, just before the celebration of the town’s patron saint. It’s always a surprise, that first evening. The drumbeats are low, slow, far away, then faster, and it becomes part of the night-song along with the rhythm of breaking waves. The beat makes my bones dance and sends shivers through my arms and legs. It’s hard to sleep then, a little scary, but not bad scary. When I dream, it’s in rich reds and oranges, sparks of fire. Daddy is intrigued by the velorio and attends one of the ceremonies. He writes about it in the article for National Geographic.

  You enter the parlor of the house where it is being held to pause for a short prayer in front of a homemade, quite decorative altar or shrine, and to make a contribution. You pass on through the house, greeting members of the family, and on out to an enramada lit by oil-wick lamps. There are benches all around and you are immediately served a special herb-scented brew of coffee.

  And then comes the music, if it can rightly be called that! It is made by two log drums, a stick rubbed on a grater, and a gourd rattle. The theme is halfway between a chant and a song, and is repeated continuously to the pounding, varying rhythms of the drums. The floor soon fills up with dancing couples of all ages. The ritual is quite unvarying. It is not “voodoo” but has its own comparative appeal and flavor. It certainly gives us an out-of-the-world feeling to wake up in the middle of the night and hear the incessant throbbing of drums in an otherwise silent tropical night.

  IT STAYS MOSTLY A MYSTERY TO ME, this time of drums. My friends say velorios are the work of the devil; strange customs brought over by African slaves centuries ago—part Haitian voodoo and pure blasphemy. All kinds of earth spirits are worshipped, not God, not Jesus. Daisy says it’s only for ignorant heréticos. She shakes her head and lowers her voice. “The spirits—they get agitated. I’ve heard of strange things that happen—people start frothing at the mouth and their eyes roll into their heads and they start speaking languages no one understands. It’s not good to call up the spirits like that. Not that I believe in them.” When she finds out Daddy went to a velorio, she crosses herself and says she’ll say a rosary for him. I never learn the purpose of it all, or what spirits are being prayed to, in the smoky firelight. I just know it wakes some flame inside me, something hot and burning, that makes me restless. Ba boom, ba boom, ba boom.

  It seems that the only things I can count on might be the earth spirits; at least the ones that bring trade winds and rain that wakens seeds below the surface to pierce through the hard ground and face the sunlight. It’s also the same rain that pounds everything into submission, like Daddy’s deluges of stinging words. Still, we shake off the muck and face the sunlight every day, even if it’s all we have to look forward to.

  Earth spirits or not, the drumbeats slowly fade as Miches gets electrical power. It’s part of Trujillo’s plan to modernize the country, but the generator breaks down so frequently everybody keeps their kerosene lanterns in the same places they’ve always hung—just in case. But gradually nights grow ever noisier. Radios wash over the evening sounds, drowning the croak of frogs, the whistle of night birds, and the slapping of waves. And in June, when the drums of the velorio begin, the drumbeats are faint, far away, no longer the heartbeat of the night. Now it’s the spirits—and our own heartbeats—getting battered.

  There’s nothing we can do to stop the onslaught of night noise when Miches becomes electrified twenty-four hours a day. Mama stows away the kerosene lanterns for the nights we have power outages, but those are few. Maria Antonia’s bar gets a new jukebox and the bar up in the hills gets an even louder one. A couple of radio stations join the fray. Now our evenings are shrill with thumping notes that silence the frogs’ guttural symphony, the swish of palm fronds, and the splash of waves. The fragile web of nature sounds that used to calm Daddy is now just a faint backdrop to the assault, which closes in on Casalata with a force that agitates Daddy even more than usual.

  Berta says it serves him right; that his past job is catching up with him here. I don’t understand what she means, so she explains. Our father, the electrical engineer who installed hydroelectric power dams in poor countries before he became a coconut farmer, is now at the mercy of electrical power himself. She whispers that it was dumb of him not to know electricity would come to Miches, that of course everything would get noisier. All I know is that nights are worse now, even if we all stuff cotton in our ears and wrap pillows around our heads.

  Daytime is safety—a time when I can wrap myself in morning light and once again hear the muffled music of morning: the slow lap lap of waves, a rooster crowing, some barking dogs, the rattle of the milk vendor’s can, and the clop of horses’ hooves on the path outside our gate. It’s all flavored with the scent of orange blossoms and Mama’s cooking pots on the stove. It’s when I can breathe easier and try to forget a torturous night. But one day the safety disappears at dawn when a loud clatter startles us from sleep. A thief, just a young boy, has tried to get into our bathroom window. Daddy grabs his arms and yells at Mama to get the police, who come and take the would-be robber away. The kid has cut himself on the sharp aluminum bathroom sill, and when he’s released after a few days, he spreads a story about how Daddy actually beat him with a chain.

  There is no logic to the boy’s story, but it catches fire like a piece of dry straw and spreads all through Miches. Now my friends ask me what really happened, “Did your father actually go crazy and do that?” It gets worse when the village police decide they need to have a court hearing to “find the facts” of the case, since the boy’s father has decided to sue Daddy for beating his son in the pasture. So we appear before the town judge. Daddy says, “This is nuts, what the hell are we doing here? We’re the goddamn victims for Chrissakes!”

  The air is still and muggy, and sweat and fear trickle down my armpits. Berta and Mama are wearing dresses for the occasion. Daddy looks worried in his blue cotton shirt and khaki pants. He keeps shaking his head and repeating “This is nuts.” Mama’s eyes are anxious, her skin pale. She fiddles with a strand of hair that has escaped its clip. Daddy sits straight up and he’s holding Mama’s hand. I can tell he’s simmering with anger. I expect it will show up this night, at home, with a drunken rage. But it’s too early in the day to worry about that so I daydream about being in the United States where nothing like this could ever happen, and where no one would notice us anyway, because we look just like them. The judge agrees it would be impossible for the kid to be telling the truth, but he decides to fine Daddy anyway for allowing the boy to injure himself on the window frame. Daddy practically jumps out of the seat, but then sits down again, silent. As we escape the stifling mob in the building and step into the midday heat, I feel lightheaded and unbalanced, my heart a loud drumbeat. I stumble and Berta rights me. It seems impossible that anyone can possibly believe Daddy would beat a helpless child with a chain. Daddy’s beatings are with words, not with chains.

  Chapter Nine

  Portrait of a Birthday

  It’s my birthday today. I was to have an afternoon party, but Daddy start
ed drinking early, so I have to get on my bicycle and ride through town until I find all of my friends and tell them the party is off because Daddy’s sick. They know what I really mean. He’s already known as el Americano loco, so these outbursts don’t seem to bother others too much. Niña gives me an extra hug and tells me she’ll say a rosary for us.

  It’s now nighttime. Daddy’s shorts hang on his hipbones like clothes threatening to slide slowly off a wire hanger. The khaki sags in front down to a vee below his belly. Tobacco-brown skin sends out the faint smell of stale sweat, rum, and smoke. I watch as the cigarette glued by spittle to his lower lip bobs and sheds ashes as he talks at us, to us, or in spite of us. I don’t understand these rants—this time he’s mad at the company that buys our copra and the trucking company, which is two weeks late in picking up the latest crop. Another forgotten cigarette burns a shallow grave in the flat arm of his chair next to his drink. The rug by his feet is pocked with burn holes. Large hands push through thinning hair and then swoop in wild arcs, almost knocking off the glass of rum.

  I stare past him at the large National Geographic map of the world. It takes up the entire wall behind his chair. It’s filled with pushpins—red for places he’s been to by himself, blue for travels with Mama, and white ones for the whole family. The llama rug, a large carved gourd, and a phonograph record of Andean flute music are from a blue-pushpin time—the two years Daddy and Mama spent in the Peruvian Andes just after they got married. Under the map, a bookcase is filled with weary paperbacks, a mongrel collection of Zane Grey Westerns and mysteries mostly by Earl Stanley Gardner (no relation to us). Yellow lamplight carves deep shadows under Daddy’s nose. He made the lamp base from a coconut. The shade is a sheet of coco fiber wrapped around a wire frame. I shift my eyes slightly and lose myself in the swirling pattern cast by the tightly woven fibers. I try to look as if I’m paying attention to Daddy without seeing him at all, just waiting for him to exhaust himself. Eventually he will; only then will Berta and I be allowed to go to bed.