Cave of Little Faces. Aída Besançon Spencer
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on the western coast.
Dominicans are a gracious and generous people, friendly and helpful, spending hours sitting together socializing—on their porches, in front of little shops, in gatherings of parked motorcycles at roadside bus stops, really anywhere they can gather. All of this camaraderie, however, evaporates completely when they are installed behind the wheel of any vehicle. The split second lights change—in fact, often several seconds before they do—horns begin to blare. For the countless motorcyclists, every two-lane road is a five-lane road, and four-lane roads are nine-lane roads. Yellow traffic lights for motorcyclists are barely suggestions. Stop signs are decorations. Stoplights will give most motorists pause, after four or five extra SUVs have gone through the red light, so that they now block the cross street, eliciting a cacophony of protest from the completely thwarted and seething oncoming traffic, whose dreams of progress have been maliciously dashed, but taxi drivers will not only turn right on a red light, but occasionally left as well. The sidewalks are, at times for some, access roads, even trucks bumping onto them and heading down them for half a block to take a right turn. And the normal state of any cross street in the capital is for all four entering streets to empty into the center of the crossroads, everyone crowding into each of them so that no one of them can progress until all the cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles are sliding along each other’s sides at glacial speed, no more than a half inch apart, nobody able to break free, and, thus, everyone’s horn blaring at once. It was frightening how Coach Ruby took to this state of affairs with complete aplomb.
The dividing line into the metropolis of Santo Domingo proper is a passage over what is called “the floating bridge,” an apparently permanent temporary structure only accessed by going the wrong way up a one-way street and then wrenching the wheel awkwardly in a harrowing last-minute U-turn to merge into the proper flow of traffic. Since this is the oldest city in the new world and many of its streets are, therefore, only paved cow paths, a lot of similar, dizzying anomalies present themselves. But Ruby was completely up for it, as she put it. Bouncing over the speed bump in front of the naval academy, Ruby dove into the city traffic with great relish, pumping on the horn like she was beating a conga drum. If every other driver had apoplexy when the front runners were not off the mark like Olympic racers two seconds before the end of a red light, so did Ruby. She matched every young Dominican woman with a cell phone and a large gas-guzzling SUV horn blast for horn blast. Assuming white lines were only indicators this indeed was a road, Ruby was all over the place, passing on the right—along with all the buses careening in every direction—as Ben cheered. Daniela and Jo huddled, strapped up in the back seat, cringing.
Major thoroughfares in the capital are often named for significant dates, and the Twenty-Seventh of February is the main street into and out of the city. It was loaded with clones of Ruby at the wheel.
One might note that the Republic itself is a beautifully lush green nation, and this is not by chance. Rain is frequent, and this day was no exception. As they all shouldered their way together in one great mass of vehicles, no one of which was giving way in any shape or form to any other, the sky suddenly opened up and deluged them with water. Every corner of the Twenty-Seventh of February Boulevard is filled with street vendors, washers throwing sponges on one’s windshield and offering to wipe the splash off for a little tip, phone card representatives in colors coordinated with their particular company, fruit hawkers, mop sellers, water higglers, ice cream pushers, bonafide beggars—and, when it rains, suddenly some of these become windshield wiper vendors. Ruby managed not to hit any of them as she splashed through the instant flooding and soldiered on. Almost immediately the rain stopped, and they began working their way to the great circle that led to the country roads, when a red light halted them all momentarily and—splat!—a sponge hit their front windshield.
“Oh, for crying out loud!” snorted Ruby. “The rain just stopped!” Furious, she turned on the windshield wiper, gesticulating at a small dark boy, waving him away from the car. But Jo leaned out the back window and put a small bag of airline peanuts in the boy’s hand.
“Gracias, Señorita,” he said, delighted, “¡Dios te bendiga! God bless you,” he added in faltering English. Ripping the bag open on the spot, he stuffed it all in his mouth as Ruby scowled, floored the pedal, and they barreled off in Ruby’s great haste to break free of the mass of cars and fly down the main road out of town.
“Ruby,” said Jo, from the backseat. “You missed the turn. It’s the little side road, remember? That’s actually the main road, not the continuation of Veinte Siete de Febrero.”
“Oh, rats!” snorted Ruby, screeching to a halt and, with her head out the window and her left arm now gesturing wildly at drivers swerving around her, she backed all the way up to the turnoff and insinuated them all onto the right road while horns blared, Jo groaned, Daniela screamed, and Ben grinned and hung on tightly. This took them over a bridge and into a new world. The industries that lined the city limits soon gave way to numerous tiny fruit stands which gathered as plentifully as fruit flies on a pineapple, some no more than buckets filled to the brim, harbingers of the countryside and the great orchards to come.
As the first glimpse of high distant mountains began to appear, Jo felt a sharp emotive pain shoot through her heart. Her memory filled with her many long mountain walks with Uncle Sol. She could hear his voice, see him stop to point out a particular flower, a significant medicinal herb, a scurrying iguana.
“Oh, look, beautiful pots,” cried Daniela. “Can we stop and buy some?” Jo snapped back to see that the fruit stands had yielded to pottery stalls of all sizes and shapes, including eight-foot-high fountains made entirely of pottery, displayed with gushing water before large and impressive roadside shops and warehouses.
“No!” snapped Ruby, racing along on a now clear and fast road.
As in the city, where nearly no one receives a ticket without an actual accident, no matter how flagrant a violation the driving atrocity they are in the process of committing appears to be, here too the police simply lounged next to their motorcycles as drivers flew by like contenders at LeMans.
Jo noticed a culvert at the side of the road whizzing by, no doubt a runoff ditch for the frequent rains, but on the white cement at every crossover, someone had painted the words Ya Cristo Viene, “Christ comes soon.” With Ruby’s driving, Jo speculated, that might be sooner for all of them than any of them had expected. A road sign above them also announced the small town of Semana Santa or “Holy Week,” which was certainly appropriate, and, even at their accelerated speed, Jo found the air suddenly filling with a sweet scent not unlike the incense at a high church service.
“Smell the cane!” murmured Ben, inhaling theatrically. Large fields of sugarcane were stretching now on both sides of the road.
But Ruby simply jetted through the expanding, panoramic countryside, flying by the little knot of uniformed children who emerged from the cane fields and waited patiently for a bus, racing by a knot of uniformed highway workers cutting back the overgrowth from the side of the road with machetes, and zipping by a lone walker with a black T-shirt that sported the puzzling inscription, “I hunt the Jabber wok.” That seems appropriate to our present quest, thought Jo. And she remembered her Uncle had told her that Route 2, which their highway had now become, followed the very route the Taino Indians had taken to escape Spanish oppression as they fled to the sanctuary of the region where Jo and her family were now heading.
“Look at that!” cried Ben, and Jo’s attention was once more diverted, this time to a truck with an open flatbed in which was crammed an entire baseball team, bats propped up against the sides, gloves in each lap, all uniformed and ready to play. Passing them, on a motorcycle, whizzed an entire family: father driving with a child in his lap, two middle-sized children wedged between him and mother, who carried a baby on her back in a tight sling. What a different world this was from Richfield, Jo mused, where nearly everyone who shared the road with them, including Ruby, would be by now ticketed or jailed for driving to endanger. But, as another motorcycle with a father and son sped by, the father awkwardly cuddling his son, his left arm stretched around behind his boy’s body like a safety belt, she realized it was not so different at all. Maybe it was like the Wild West, at least on its roads, but it was a land full of love.
Finally,