Readings
Alice In WonderlandI suggested at the end of my last column (“Ducking Away,” in the April issue), that this time I would give you a “reading” of the town of Esperanza, in the Dominican Republic, where my older son works as a Peace Corps volunteer. I’m wondering now what I could have meant by that. I know how to read a book — or, at least, how I read one. I look at the cover. I open it to the title page. I scan that, and the publication information on the verso. I glance through the table of contents, if there is one, through the various prefaces and introductions. And I settle down, in a quiet place, at chapter one, page one, and I begin: left to right, top to bottom, front to back, in a certain rhythm, syncopated as I pause to make marks in the margins, or to go back to check on something I might have missed at first reading. That is one of the delightful aspects of book-reading. The words stay in their order on the page; the pages stay in their order in the binding. You can go back. In a book, Heracleitus, you can put your foot in the same stream twice. (Heracleitus (540-480 BCE), you’ll recall, was the Greek philosopher (from Ephesus) who said you couldn’t do that — because the stream was always changing.) I have no doubt that there are ways of reading towns like Esperanza. City planners have a way. Anthropologists have another. Sociologists have still another, I suspect, somewhat different. But I am none of those things. I am a confused layperson, of certain years, who knows only that while I can go back to a certain corner (of one unnamed street and another), I can never go back to the same corner, because he was right about life, Heracleitus: there, you can’t put your foot in the same stream twice. This will surprise my friends, but it’s true: I don’t mind being confused — as long as I am not utterly lost. I don’t mind being confused, because I believe the world to be an ultimately friendly place, an orderly place, where confusion will finally be sorted out. That’s the story of Revelation: we live in a comic universe. Nothing is much more comic, I found on my trip to the Dominican Republic — though this happened not in Esperanza but in the capital, Santo Domingo — nothing is much more comic that a confused man of certain years, stepping into an open manhole and plunging into the city sewer. It is funnier if it happens at night. It is funnier still if the man is your father. This is what happened. I was walking down the darkened city street, talking over my shoulder to my younger son, Nathanael. And, as he said, many times during the remaining five days of our Caribbean visit, “There my dad was; and, then . . . [dramatic pause] . . . there he wasn’t. He was almost six feet tall, then . . . [another pause] a midget.” Because I didn’t go all the way into the sewer. I managed to catch myself with my arms and with one, mangled shin. It was quite athletic, my older son Christopher And I am letting him believe that it was indeed. It was only my quick reflexes that saved me from going into this stream, Heracleitus, up to my waist, or over my head. Still, I did manage to get one leg in to above my knee — to soak my sandal and my sock and my pants in fetid, fusty, lukewarm ooze. And I did manage to mangle the other shin. But, they pulled me out, my sons, with a little help from my athletic self. And I limped away. That was the important thing: I limped away. We didn’t have to deal with the sock full of blood until we had walked, or gamely limped, the two blocks back to our hotel, where we treated it with dish soap, gauze from the front desk, and Swim-EAR®. By then — happy is the man who has a quiver full of sons — my boys had already decided, since I could walk, that this was one of the funnier things they’d ever seen, certainly the funniest since I’d fallen off the ladder in the garage back home. There are three things to say about the Dominican Republic, from my limited experience. It is almost the noisiest place I have ever seen. Santo Domingo is noisier than Cairo, for there is not only the clamor of traffic, every driver leaning on his horn: there is not only the clatter of voices, people chattering at every decibel from whisper to shout, their tone always rising; there is also the constant push, push, push and pull of the music — always merengue, all merengue all the time — blaring from speakers attached to every restaurant, every shop, every bodega along every avenue, street and alleyway. It is a place where people live close together, large families in small introverts. It is a marvelously friendly place. The morning after my fall, Christopher took me to the Peace Corps office, so the nurse, a Canadian, could look at my leg. She did, and shook her head, and sent me to the emergency room. There, the doctor looked at my leg, and shook her head, and smiled, especially when Christopher explained to her what had happened. These open manholes, it seems, are locally referred to as “gringo traps.” She smiled, and cleaned me up (with her own hands). A nurse gave me a tetanus shot — I had been in the sewer, after all — and the doctor returned with her smile and a prescription for antibiotics and sent me on my way. It was the pleasantest emergency room visit of my life. Thirty-five minutes (of no merengue) — thirty-five minutes, thirty-five dollars (including the shot), and I paid when I went out. It didn’t matter that by the time I had gotten back to the states my foot had swollen to cantaloupe size and infection had set in — those things had nothing to do with the Dominican Republic or the medical care I’d gotten there (my doctor here assures me), though it may have had to do with the way I treated myself. For, in the meantime, I limped everywhere, almost always confused, usually lost, but ever curious, on the go, learning to read despite all the noise. After all, some of it was the music. << Previous | Contents | Next >>
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