Cave of Little Faces. Aída Besançon Spencer
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Danny—no not Danny, but Daniela—a new maturer Daniela—could look straight into the eyes of the decisive Ruby, the daring and adventurous Benjamin—why, she gasped, she could even look face to face at the spiritual Josefina and even be more spiritually attuned to the universe than was her sister: the all so venerated “Reverenda” Jo. Oh, it was rich. Rich!
“Dear, one more thing I have to warn you,” Star said leaning toward her, her face full of concern. “You are wearing amber.”
“Yes,” faltered Daniela. “Is that bad?”
“Well, no, not exactly, but the problem is that amber has a great magnetic quality. Oh, it doesn’t affect the masses who are disoriented, but, now that you are beginning on the path to true enlightenment, it could be a serious drawback for you. You see, the magnetism of common things can conflict with the sacred magnetism of the Magnetic Pole. Things like amber can pull you back.”
“I don’t want that,” said Daniela, startled and concerned. “What should I do?”
“I can take them for you, so you won’t be tempted,” said Star kindly.
“Oh, thank you. Here, here,” cried Daniela, hurriedly taking the amber earrings out of her ears. “You are doing so much for me. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Oh, no, dear, we Polarians—for that is what we call ourselves—never ask for money. You saw no collection plate at our brief orienting service, did you?”
Daniela shook her head.
“Eventually, as you deepen in the truth, you may want to share something to help our mission enlighten others, but always remember—and tell everyone who asks—it is a joint mission. We are all in this together.”
“Together,” agreed Basil.
“Yes, yes, together—always,” added Ismael Balenzuela.
As Daniela walked back into the casino, she felt warm and found and oriented altogether. Ben simply waved her away. Los Diamantes del Mar Hotel was not so far away she could not take a taxi or even walk if she wanted to think. It was a beautiful night. It might take her a half hour, but she had so much to think about. One thing she was agreed upon with herself: She would not tell Jo or Ruby anything about this. She would keep this discovery and this secret strictly to herself. What Daniela did not notice, however, as she walked slowly home, was that she had not gotten her promised piña colada.
“Nice earrings,” said Basil approvingly, as he and Star and Ismael went laughing back to their rooms.
“Yes, I thought they’d go great with my green dress,” explained Star.
11
All night long, Jo was restless and her dreams were troubled. She woke up feeling cramped and queasy. She felt like she expended all her effort just to get out of bed. Her head felt sleep-drugged, her chest constricted, her arms and legs heavy. She managed to drag herself to the window and peered between the heavy curtains out across the water of the bay of Neiba, toward the stately white walls of Martin Garcia Point, where she saw the sunrise struggling with an equally difficult effort to free itself from a ponderously heavy cloud cover. She knew how it felt.
“Uhhh,” she groaned and told the dawn, “I feel terrible.”
The last several days had been so hectic. The stark interruption of sorrow and sudden travel piled itself on an already overwrought schedule of overcommitments. It added poundage to the already thick tonnage of launching her fledgling ministry to immigrants who needed so much to survive in the swift, urban, East Coast northern American society that demanded they hit the pavement at a run to keep up. All of this had begun factoring itself in with her new but now central spiritual dimension that had become the mediator for what she chose to do—determining to what she could say yes, as usual, and to what she now had to say no—all to baffled, uncomprehending stares. It had finally overwhelmed her. All this redefining of her role to people she had already served before, Jo wondered, maybe this was all a mistake?
She groaned again and leaned wearily on the window sill. How could she reinvent herself when the redefinition was only somewhat clear to her? Small wonder it was thoroughly murky or completely missed by most of those with whom she had already forged a relationship. She was their community organizer, returned to them, in their eyes, as a “nun” now—a kind of one-stop spiritual and social shopping that streamlined the meeting of their many needs of enculturation.
Jo groaned again. Two years of pending doubt came pouring down on her like a sullen rain, soaking her resolve, leaving her self-image totally bedraggled. I guess it’s because I’m here, she thought, back on safe ground in my childhood retreat. Here, where I’ve always felt safe, where I have to explain nothing about the way I look or the things we value or the weight of our heritage that always marked us off from the kids among whom we grew up in Richfield. Multicultural enough to avoid out-and-out prejudice, still the mix in her adopted hometown of Richfield had invited cliques and marginalization. “Where are you from?” some of them had asked when she was very young. “Where’s that?”
Then the tsunami of Dominican immigrants had swept across the state and the Republica had become familiar and even notorious in some spots. But even among the Dominicans, Jo and her siblings had been marked off as indios. Each of the siblings had sought to close the gap of heritage in her or his own way. Ruby had become a sports star—driven, excelling, hard, directed. Daniela had her beauty, and it got her into parties and into school plays—always in decorative, nonspeaking parts. She was not the football queen—her personality was not strong enough—but she was a member of the court—a “lady in waiting.” And that term had summed up her life so far. Danny as well summarized herself as a “looker,” and so she played that through high school like a trump card. But now that was over, and junior college had not worked out. She ended up driving a school bus to the disregard of a cruel new generation to whom she looked old and out of date. No wonder she dreaded aging, Jo thought—and not for the first time. What else does Danny have—and what have I ever done to help her find more in herself? And then Ben—his trump cards were devastatingly exacting.
Sick and helpless before pent-up feelings she could no longer hold at bay, Jo staggered off to the bathroom. The reckoning she had been holding off for two years followed inexorably and banged on the door of her heart like a summons server. This time she had no escape into her daily routine. “I’ve got to work this through,” she muttered to herself. “I’ve been putting this off too long. I’ve got to face the inevitable. What on earth am I doing? This whole job change, the way things are working out with the family, this is all a mess.” She felt like the summons had been shoved under the bathroom door and “Inadequate” was stamped on it as the charge. “It’s all worse because I’m sick,” she cried.
Three days in the Dominican Republic with its different water—all bottled now because you could not drink anything from the tap—its own current flus of the week that everyone was passing around and sharing communally, its specific subtropical mosquitos and microbes that formed a welcoming committee with the attention of a Bravado casino dealer sensing new amateur blood, usually meant the next three days were given over to té criolla and the mandatory proximity of a network of lavatories wherever one had to go. This time, however, she had not even made it through twenty-four hours. “I must have brought this with me,” she lamented, “or I must be getting old.” Thirty was looming like a watchful security guard outside a Barahona bank, looking her over intently. Reckoning was now like a financial counselor, shuffling through her personal accounts with a jaundiced eye and challenging, “Are you putting anything in reserve from this decade you just spent in overactivity? Have you got anything at all to show for it? Remember, energy is like income; it’s not inexhaustible. . . .”
“Uhhhhhhh,” Jo groaned and stumbled from the bathroom to the bed. “I’m not ready to do anything, but sleep.” And that’s what she did.
About eleven a.m.—nearing the witching hour of the Polarians, on tap twice daily whenever they needed it, and which, at this point, Jo, providentially, knew nothing about—Doña Lucia decided it was more than