by Rita Indiana
Altos de Chavón was a replica of a Mediterranean village from the sixteenth century. A millionaire came up with the idea when his highway project ran into a stone mountain. Charles Bluhdorn, the president of Gulf+Western, and his friend Roberto Coppa, a set designer for Paramount, built the place with the very stones that, for other men, might have been an obstacle. The idea for a school of art and design came as soon as the town was completed; it would be the only alternative on the island to the pathetic School of Fine Arts.
A month after arriving, Argenis had not made a single friend and was envious of the parties in the dorms the kids from the Lycée Français and Carol Morgan would throw. The parties would wind up at the pool or the beaches in Bayahibe, where the kids would drive in their brand-new Alfa Romeos. With his studio door open, just in case anybody wanted to ask him to join in, he’d pretend to read The Shock of the New, which he’d borrowed from the library. When he finally gave up, he’d walk aimlessly around the faux structures, which could offer no history for that fake medieval village.
One of those nights Argenis emptied a bottle of Brugal Añejo by himself and was wandering around the school until, without realizing it, he ended up in a small patch of bougainvillea. Thorns spanning half a hand in length scratched his face and arms. The full moon snuck through the creeper’s manic shadows, as did the voices of a group of students who saw him from outside and tried to contain their laughter. When he couldn’t find his way out, he threw himself on the ground, whimpering in a puddle of vomit until he fell asleep. From the depths of that disgusting dizziness, he heard a woman’s voice. She called to him: “Goya, Goya,” and he thought: My prayers have been answered and I’ve woken from my nightmare as Goya.
He opened his eyes and saw Professor Herman, wearing a pink Nike jacket for her early morning jog, kneeling next to him. The first rays of sunlight drenched her face, half Moorish and half Inca, in orange. She’d crossed the tangle of thorns to help him. “Goya, get up.” He sat and saw the dried bloody scratches on his arms and smelled the dry vomit, and he felt shame and, then, more shame when he learned that that was what everyone at school called him, Goya, because they didn’t recognize his insecurities and thought he was full of shit. Professor Herman explained all this to him in her apartment, where she’d taken him so the others wouldn’t see him come back to the dorm in his condition. She let him take a shower, lent him a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and put hydrogen peroxide and mercurochrome on his wounds. Later, she made him a cup of black coffee so he could take two aspirins and she stacked a pile of books on the table: The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Society of the Spectacle, Mythologies, The Kingdom of This World, The Invention of Morel, and Naked Lunch. He hadn’t said a word. She yanked on his dreadlocks and said, “Wake up, Goya, get it together. You have impeccable technique but nothing to say. Look around, damn it, do you think a bunch of little angels is what’s needed here??”
Professor Herman managed to get him excused from the anatomical drawing classes, which Argenis didn’t need, so he could study what she assigned to him: mostly books and films. By the end of the first year, Goya had made a couple of friends he’d lured in with the Haitian marijuana he copped in the city, and though his work still looked like illustrations by a Jehovah’s Witness, they now had a certain irony.
What would Professor Herman say if she saw him now? In a fucking call center, fucking “Psychic Goya,” with a goddamned fat ass charging him ten percent on each peso he borrowed, with not a single exhibition to his name since graduation—divorced, bitter, and aimless. He heard the woman’s voice on the other end of the line: “Goya, Goya, are you there?” And then he felt the cold shock of an ice cube somebody had slipped down his sweater as it rolled down the crack of his ass and soaked his butt cheeks. He turned to kill the son of a bitch and found Yeyo, a Burger King cup in her hand, choking from laughter along with Diala and Ezequiel. With one hard slap, he knocked the drink out of her hand, sending it flying along with the cup. “I’ve had it with you, you fucking nigger!” he heard himself exclaim. Yeyo’s eyes watered and she marched straight to Mike’s office. Fifteen minutes later, Mike came out hugging Yeyo with one arm and holding out Argenis’ last check with the other.
Etelvina Durán, a Spanish professor at the Autonomous University, was a strong light-skinned woman, the daughter of peasants from La Vega, who had been a militant with various leftist movements since she was sixteen. She’d met Argenis’ father at a meeting of the Communist Party of the Dominican Republic. They had seen half their friends killed by Balaguer’s assassins. Their own lives had been spared because Etelvina’s brother, a Marine lieutenant, had pulled them out from in front of a firing squad in Ensanche Ozama one early morning in 1975 when he recognized Etelvina among the hotheads he was supposed to execute. At dawn, José Alfredo, the slim leftist who did the best impression of Johnny Ventura, married her, left his life in hiding, and joined the ranks of the recently established Party for Dominican Liberation, to which he remained faithful, selling newspapers for the two decades it took for them to come to power. Etelvina had supported José Alfredo so he could dedicate all his time to the party. She’d managed by sewing, studying, and raising Argenis and his older brother, Ernesto, until José Alfredo left her for a fellow member of the party, who had agreed to pay for him to go to law school in Pucamaima. Etelvina had not been with a man since. She had devoted herself to her sons and her work. She’d stayed close to her leftist friends, watching as they settled, like her, into inoffensive lives as dentists, insurance salesmen, and veterinarians who got together on Saturdays to sing songs by Silvio at karaoke. Ernesto had proven outstanding at school and sports, winning a scholarship to study political science in Argentina while Argenis had smoked pot, listened to Alpha Blondy cassettes, and grown dreadlocks, which his father never forgave him for. Etelvina loved it whenever José would look at the dreads with disgust; she supported her son, forcing his father to pay for his studies and send him a monthly allowance. Back then Argenis was her treasure. In his rebelliousness and artistic talent she saw a harmless reflection of her own protest days and her secret desire to write poetry. She’d kept a little notebook since the seventies in which she’d written free verse, and she still returned to it on special occasions. No one knew about this. The notebook, yellowed now, sat next to a Roque Dalton anthology on the one bookshelf in the house. These days, her expectations of Argenis had also yellowed.
As soon as he’d finished at Altos de Chavón, Argenis had married a girl who worked at a bank. She was a woman with an incredible body who’d read everything she could and chosen to study business so she didn’t have to hustle. She’d used her salary as an assistant manager to support Argenis for an entire year while he supposedly put together his first solo show. Then, one day, she’d packed his stuff into three suitcases and taken them over to Etelvina’s. “Your son is worthless,” she said. “He spends all day doing coke and watching porn on his computer while I’m working my ass off nine to five.” Argenis showed up at his mother’s apartment two days later with stitches on his brow because, when he’d refused to leave the apartment, Mirta had smashed a bottle on his head and told him she was two months pregnant but was getting rid of the shitty little creature inside her that very afternoon.
What hurt Argenis most was the abortion and he fell into a deep depression in his childhood bedroom, which Etelvina had turned into a sewing room. She filled him up with sedatives she bought without a prescription from a pharmacist friend so she wouldn’t have to listen to him crying and slurping snot. A month after the divorce, she got him out of bed with a bucket of cold water. One week later, Argenis was at Plusdom and every morning, when he came home from work, he’d bring her a fresh loaf of bread and a Tetra Pak of milk. She could not figure out how he’d managed to get himself fired from such an idiotic job, and when he got home, still coming down from the coke and weak and tired, to tell her he was jobless again, she didn’t let him sleep until almost midnight, yelling at him that he was a “
layabout, sad sack, August turd,” among other insults, each one a gem from the Cibao region.
At six the following morning, she got him up so he could make her breakfast, clean the house, and wash the car. “I’m not gonna continue to be a sucker supporting a grown man, goddamn it.” Argenis made her some toast and scrambled eggs but she bitched about the texture of the eggs as she chewed open-mouthed. The egg spittle flying in the air let Argenis know he’d lost the only thing he’d had left in the world.
At about ten, he rolled up his trousers and went down to the garage with a bucket, a hose, and a sponge to wash the green Toyota Corolla his mother had managed to buy only recently, after having raised them exclusively on public transportation. When the party came to power in 1996, José Alfredo had begun working as an advisor to the president and had signed over a check for one hundred and fifty thousand pesos to Etelvina to make up for the little he’d contributed in support while the boys were growing up. She wasn’t interested in finding out how her ex-husband had gotten his hands on such a large sum of money and bought herself a car that, to date, she had not once lent to her son. Argenis connected the hose to the faucet, poured some water on his head and face, and then turned it on the Toyota to dissolve the hardened dirt. He stuck the soapy sponge in the bucket and saw himself reflected in a window: unshaven, cheeks prominent, a scar on his brow, and the dreadlocks, which, thanks to his sudden hair loss, looked like strings of cat turds. His mother was up on the apartment’s balcony, supervising him as though he were not even capable of washing a car.
On the other side of the street, a brand-new Montero slid into a parking space and a man emerged with his hair combed back like Robert De Niro in The Godfather Part II, wearing a blue linen shirt, khaki Bermuda shorts, and canvas sandals. Giorgio Menicucci looked more like he was about to get on a catamaran than run around the streets of Santo Domingo. He didn’t wait to close the door of the Montero before he checked himself in the window, like Argenis had just done, fixing his hair with his hand though it didn’t need it, and adjusted his pants, which he’d cinched with a braided leather belt. As he crossed the street, he recognized the car washer and smiled and picked up his pace.
Argenis knew Giorgio from the cultural activities sponsored by the Chavón Foundation, which he attended with his wife, Linda Goldman, the daughter of Jewish refugees to whom Trujillo had given lands in 1939 in the town of Sosúa, on the northern coast. Linda was the most beautiful thing Argenis had ever seen in his life. She had perfect tits, which would fill but not overflow his hands, alert green eyes that suggested she’d never done one stupid thing in her life, and almond hair. She gathered her locks in a bun, which showed off her ears and gave advance notice of her other deliciously sweet holes. Argenis knew they had bought work from other students for their Caribbean art collection and threw parties that lasted three days at their private beach in Sosúa.
For both these reasons he’d approached them during an opening at the Chavón Archaeology Museum, back when he still had enough self-esteem to do that kind of thing. Argenis had found them admiring a Taino pot; the heart-shaped piece with a phallic growth emerging between two breasts was the inspiration for a lot of jokes at school. Argenis had known to keep that kind of childish humor in check. “A very sophisticated notion of sexuality, no?” he’d said, repeating one of Professor Herman’s phrases. “I would have made a bigger penis,” Giorgio said, which made his wife laugh aloud. Nonetheless, they showed interest in him. They were charming and straightforward, because people with money don’t have to engage in the usual bullshit to rise above others. After the opening, Argenis invited them to his studio and, after sacrificing his last joint, he showed them what he’d been painting now that Altos de Chavón had saved him from becoming an illustrator for catechism books. He explained that he still believed in painting, even though others dismissed the discipline as though it were macramé. He was working on a large-format piece: deep in a forest of thorns, and recasting the roles from Michelangelo’s Pietà, a nude man read a comic in the lap of a woman wearing a Nike jacket with a sky-blue hood. Up close, you could see the comic’s cover: New Gods 1 by Jack Kirby, from 1971. Giorgio was more impressed with Argenis’ technique than the costumes he had assigned the figures in the proposed piece, and he commissioned a portrait of him, Linda, and their dog, a Weimaraner called Billy.
The portrait was the last piece Argenis had sold. Now he regretted having just given Giorgio the pencil studies he’d done before completing the forty-eight-by-seventy-inch painting in which the Menicuccis appeared with hair-raising exactitude on their terrace facing the sea. Linda sat on a grand wicker sofa with her foot on top of Billy, who was on his back for her to rub his belly, while Giorgio stood, wearing only swim trunks, and challenged the spectator with both his fists out front like a boxer. A Wifredo Lam painting they’d received as a wedding present hung on the back wall. It featured a black and red thorny figure that Argenis had reproduced with rough brushstrokes. Everything was drenched in the light of a late afternoon in which the limits of the flesh dissolved into white and yellow particles in the same way life itself appears to dissolve under a microscope. If I had those studies now, I could sell them to him, Argenis thought, as Giorgio, smelling of Issey Miyake, hugged and greeted him in Italian, like he did his dog.
“I’ve come to make you an offer you can’t refuse,” said Giorgio, putting a hand on his shoulder. His hand was warm and soft but, for Argenis, any kind of physical closeness with another man made him break out in hives. He used turning off the hose as an excuse to get out from under the uncomfortable contact. Giorgio kept talking. He’d come to invite him to participate in a project; he’d get room and board for six months and the assistance of a Cuban curator. The Sosúa Project, as Giorgio called it, was a cultural, artistic, and social endeavor that he hoped would give something back to the country that had made him rich.
What Argenis knew about Giorgio’s past was what Professor Herman, a friend of the Menicuccis, had told him. He’d arrived in 1991, an Italian from Switzerland, without a dime to his name. His talents had helped him get a job as a chef in the kitchen of an all-inclusive hotel called Playa Dorada. Soon he had his own artisanal pizzeria in Cabarete, the Caribbean capital of water sports, where he’d met Linda, back then a rich girl windsurfing champion who offered lessons to tourists on the beach. She was going through an I-hate-being-rich phase and supported herself with what she earned from the lessons. Her father, Saul Goldman, who’d arrived on the island as a young boy fleeing concentration camps and had made his fortune from scratch with a dairy, found her attitude heartwarming and talked about his independent daughter with a wink. Years before, he’d seen her go off to study marine biology at Duke University and had asked God to put a Jewish boy in her path. But Linda found gringos insipid and came home with the idea of starting a foundation to protect the coral reefs in Sosúa and, later, the entire island. Her father said no, that it would mean risking the livelihoods of the local fishermen, who had families just like he did. Linda tried to explain, in a language that was perhaps too scientific, that we were headed toward the complete extermination of all our marine life. “Extermination is a strong word, you shouldn’t use it when talking about animals,” the old man said.
With what he made at the pizzeria, Giorgio had been saving to buy a slice of the beach at Sosúa, a strip of sand at the foot of a cliff called Playa Bo that he’d become obsessed with. Giorgio let Linda keep the surfboards she gave her lessons with in the alley by his restaurant—neighborly camaraderie—until the day he took her to the little beach of his dreams to impress her with a corner of the town that even she, who’d been born there, didn’t know existed. As they made their way down from the indented cliff to the sand, they saw an enormous school of surgeonfish, an electric-blue stream shooting out of a hole in the coral reef that framed the beach. Giorgio told her that when he’d first arrived, he used to sleep in the little shanty the peasant owners had built there. Later he explained that he wanted to
buy the place to make it a sanctuary, free of fishing and other pillaging. They were both up to their necks in the water and he had started to float on his back with his eyes closed, very close to her, relaxed and beautiful, like a dolphin with his wet and nearly hairless skin. She didn’t wait for him to sit up. “You’re going to marry me,” she said, “and we’re going to buy this beach.”
The Playa Bo Argenis saw in 2001 had gone through a process of eco-friendly construction. Where before there had been a forest of brambles and guasábaras, there was now a modern one-story concrete and wood house, with an enormous brick terrace that looked out at the sea. The cliff and the beach were to the left of the house, where they had built a wooden staircase for better access to the water. The exterior walls were glass and the interior walls were wooden modules the owners moved around according to their needs and that of their guests. The kitchen and the bathrooms were the only permanent rooms; the constant coming and going of art, appliances, and furniture kept everything “in process,” as Linda liked to say. Argenis—who knew the house from photos he’d been given to help him render the family portrait—and the other members of the Sosúa Project weren’t regular guests and instead took up residence for the duration of the project in some cabins, recently built for them, a few meters from the house. The studios would serve as both workspaces and shelter; they were well-lit and breezy, each with a bed, a couch, a worktable, a TV, and a ceiling fan, all painted white and devoid of decor. Giorgio took Argenis to his, though he hadn’t signed the contract yet because he wanted to see the lodgings for himself.