Midnite Waters

In my early years Mom would take me with her to visit Bonao. Our distant cousins had a little shop in the middle of town and they used to invite us over. It was horrible, back then in the 60’s. My little cousin Toni was a nerd. My aunt’s cooking was terrible and her endless conversations with my mother bored us all with interminable monologues on bingo, lotto, soaps and alien husbands. All their talk made me sit as far away as I possibly could, at the front of the shop, right in Bonao’s main street, to see people pass-by. Most of them poor peasants trying to sell some of their crops on the sidewalks, they looked as if they hardly made enough money to survive their day-to-day and shopping at my aunt’s place out of the question for them. They will stare fixedly at the only glass filled with plastic bottles and cheap underwear.

Many years later I would return to the small city in the Cibao valley when I was 15 and by then traveling alone. My friends from the Episcopal church took me. They were opening a branch with a new chapel and asked me to take part in a popular theater piece about, who else Jesus himself. In this short piece of course, I would negotiate anything but playing the role of the son of God. After the small presentation and the benedictions took place everyone was taken around town to hang out. I was invited, by three girls from church, to go to the central plaza. As odd as it sounds, in my country mostly every town is built around three main things: and old Fortaleza, a church and a centrally located park. At our arrival in the plaza, the Mayor’s band was playing as it was usual on Thursday evenings. The tunes were unbelievable old and the band played inside a marble gazebo so beautiful that it was shocking in comparison with the rest of the town’s poverty. It looked as if the fire-fighters Mayor’s band would be playing on top of a pink wedding cake, dropped right there in the middle of the park. Dozens of guys, girls, children and their parents or nannies (they could not be completely differentiable) walked around the park while making little talk, giving each other “eyes” (the Dominican word for flirting or cruising.) People would even send little notes and other silly things to each other. Well, I had to go through all that and didn’t enjoy a minute of it for in 1970, I was already thinking of boys (quite precociously.) Even more, I was enthusiastic about being by myself and enjoying my dirty little crushes with other boys boiling inside my mind. In an unknown city, with some money, being the foreigner for the first time of my life and having to be around these chicks was really impossible so I did my best and escaped from them.

I returned to the church building just to find out that Marino was alone in the back bedroom. Alone and naked on top of the bed where I was supposed to sleep too.

Fifteen years later, I returned to see my gynecologist ….. friend. Being gay, he had the balls to establish his medical practice in his small hometown after 15 years of schooling in the capital. One million miles away from the mentally closed Bonaenses. Although the Canadians had arrived earlier and been established for more than 10 years the city maintained almost all of its old mentality stability. The Canadians who cleaned the streets, organized the transit, provided more than electricity to lighten up the lights: they brought other modernity measures as well. With all that technology the inevitable possibility of having a job also arrived in Bonao. However, at sun set, behind the mountains and from at least 20 miles around town, the sky above turned flaming red because of an open-sky nickel mine had changed the color of the nights in the Bonao valley.

My friends practice became successful and guys flew around both of us, like flies around cake, every time I came to visit him. He had rented a complete third floor apartment with a long open terrace overlooking the blue mountains that separated the town from the nickel mine. Visitors to Marino’s place arrived early in the morning and stayed with us until very late all weekend long. They had little or no sense of time. At the beginning, I felt overwhelmed by so many handsome men and so much attention towards me. They made themselves clearly available at any time and always seemed hungry and never in a hurry. The big thing, back on those days was getting drunk and then taking a plunge in the river by midnite.

When I discovered this paradise my visits to my gynecologist increased. I would use any pretext to show up at Marino’s apartment for the weekend. He knew though, that the discovery of a renewed friendship had little to do with it. He never brought anything up but I knew he knew. He never made it an issue. I had had a fling with him myself when I was in college and he understand what I was. I guess that our past experience alone welcomed my by now constant weekend presence.

His lover by then, married with two children (both of whom Marino had godfathered in the Catholic church in front of the plaza) had a lovely wife who loved to cook for all of us. We all pretended to be just “friends” but, one night when Marino had an emergency in a nearby village, his lover made a pass to me. Afterwards, I felt pretty bad that I did not reject him but I knew that it will eventually happen (most of my friends’ lovers tried to get me or vice versa, those were the 70s) so I reasoned that I should have him before he started making my life difficult with the other guys always around us. Besides, he was the one who set me up into the river scene.

On that hot night, full of rum and with a full moon, he rode his motorcycle for two miles right inside the mountain to a water pond where only –he said- he knew. I had him on top of a rock from where later we would both plunge into the dark fresh water. He was young, with the hard body of a miner, expendable… He cried loudly as I fucked him because he knew we were alone and almost free. From that night on, my heart would always cry water after midnight.

Returning back to the routine of Santo Domingo became an agony. I felt desolated every time I had to take the bus back to the capital. I would be missing the midnite waters and urban Santo Domingo couldn’t offer what the Canadian dollars had helped bring to a small town dying out of poverty at the border of the most beautiful mountains of the island. They arrived with their Caterpillars to expose nickel, the sensuality of the young miners and the independence that having a job means. What a difference from my first couple of visits back then when nobody had the slightest idea of the presence of nickel in their lives.