El Campo

It’s been six months since I stood in the mud. I had been on this road hundreds of times as a child visiting my family. The town had a name, but I knew it as El Campo. It’s the deep countryside in the Dominican Republic where most of its plantains are grown, along with tobacco, coffee beans, and cocoa. I was there with my brother, parents, grandma, and uncle. I had convinced my parents to go on a vacation since it was spring break and I hadn’t seen the sun in months, or my family in years. 

We traveled down this narrow road, the same road that my cousins and I turned into a baseball field when we were little.  We stopped at several houses, first at my Tio Heriberto’s to see the new addition he’d been working on. His house was a mansion in this area, made of cement, with two floors, and several acres of prosperous land. Most of the homes were made of stacked cinder blocks and tin roofs.  They still used the earth as their foundation, the sun as light, and barrels of stored water for drinking and bathing. There was no source of heat, but then again it was mid-March and the short distance we walked already had me sweating.  

Next, we went to Tata’s house. I didn’t know her. She isn’t a relative or family friend, just a neighbor I guess. My mother walked up to Tata, who looked like she’d seen a ghost. “Mi niña,” she cried. She hugged my mom, who started to cry, too. They tried to talk, but Tata was sobbing heavily as if she’d lost a loved one. I guess she had, in a way, since she hadn’t seen my mother in twenty years. When she left, she was still swaying between adolescence and adulthood. My father had taken her away from here, returning to the U.S. with the medical degree that he came for, and with a family. When I was growing up, she’d tease me about living in the Dominican Republic, saying we were moving just to see how I’d react. I never considered that she might have wanted her old life back. Suddenly, I started to cry too. 

Our last stop was at my great aunt and uncle’s house. This is a place I remembered from several family gatherings. Joining around the fire, breathing in the smell of smoked pork and burnt wood that would stain our clothes for hours. I was seven, watching the swine rotate over the flames with my uncle’s guidance. He turned the long, wooden skewer that penetrated the pig’s mouth, awkwardly dislocating its jaw, and then piercing through its back. Slices of limes were cut to top off slabs of fresh meat that my family hastily devoured. My mother asked me if I wanted to have some. Although cut up it resembled the oregano and garlic flavored pork roast that my mother made every Christmas, I couldn’t. Not with those eyes still fixed towards whatever had last captured its attention, or with its hairs still on end, poking up through its now crispy skin.  I knew that meat food came from animals, but I had never imagined eating it off the corpse like a predator in the wild. At seven, I asked, “How did that pig swallow such a large stick?” And they’ll never let me live it down. 

My mom went into this house alone. Several of her aunts and uncles had become physically or mentally ill, so it was a better idea for us to stay outside. That didn’t matter because they all came outside anyway, barefoot and covered in mud, and bombarded her. They hugged her, kissed her, cried, and pulled her, each trying to get their own alone time in. Many of them were wearing clothes I recognized: my mother’s old dresses, my dads sweaters, my t-shirts. It reminded me of the boxes in my living room that my mom was constantly filling. I’d clean out whatever didn’t fit me every year, and this is where it ended up. 

As my mom reconnected with her family, my dad told my brother and me about each of them. One of her cousins had been born with deformities, and two were mentally disabled. Problems he associated with their poverty and lack of care. I stood in the middle of the muddy road, watching my mother through the wired fence that separated us. My mother, who was wearing jean shorts and a new Calvin Klein shirt, who wouldn’t let me leave a bathroom without washing my hands, who couldn’t go to work with her nails chipped, was home. She grew up here, on this road, with these people.

I had heard all of the stories, every parent tells them (right?)– I walked ten miles to school each way, all my clothes were hand me downs, etc. I remembered how my mother told me about the nights she went to bed hungry, and how she picked coffee beans to help her mother buy dinner. I thought of these stories all as one in the same, as if parents took a course and were directed to say that. Here I was, though, in El Campo, which was so familiar to me, watching my mother as if she were a stranger. 

There were times I thought my mother was evil, literally meant to prevent anything fun in my life. Why would she pick me up at midnight at every slumber party, or call me in before sundown on summer days? Why couldn’t another parent bring me to a concert, or to anything? It wasn’t fair. That day in March, on our long, silent car ride back to my abuela’s house in Santo Domingo, I wondered if the answers were hidden between the cinder block walls of that house, or somewhere in the fields of El Campo. Is it why, at nine, I could perfectly replicate her arroz con pollo, or why in college I would continue to do clothe drives?  

The next day, my mother, who had a bag for clothes and a bag for shoes, who wouldn’t wear the same dress to two different events, who had been strolling in the mud a day before, took us to a resort. We lay by the pool, like the other tourists, absorbing the rays from the blazing, tropical sun. Breaking the silence, my mother said, “You know, that’s where I used to go when I came here on vacation.” Feeling a flush of guilt as I thought of El Campo, I responded, “Well, we can go back if you want.” From behind her dark, round sunglasses, she scanned our area. There were groups of college students sitting in the pool with drinks in each hand. Kids ran towards the beach, followed by parents carrying buckets, shovels, and bottles of sun block.  In a soft, low, tone, she simply answered, “No, I’ve spent too much time there already.” Instead, for the next few days, we took advantage of the pool, free drinks, and buffet, uncertain if we were enjoying ourselves at all.