Bird of Paradise Read online

  So it came out of nowhere, like a lightning bolt on a sunny day. This is what I was told years later. Not even the barrio’s most prolific santera could have divined how Rocío came completely undone at fifteen. It happened on the day Eduardo Cepeda dropped into town from Nueva York and into her life like Chango himself, with a drum in one hand and his dick in the other.

  On that day Paloma insisted that Rocío stop acting bizarre and accompany her to visit Perla’s neighbor on the outskirts of their ’hood. Everybody knew that Perla, an acquaintance, was expecting her only brother—the one she hadn’t seen since they were kids—to drop in that day for a visit. If the girls were lucky, Paloma thought, they’d catch a glimpse of him on her block that afternoon. That was where they met, walking up the stairs to another teen’s house. Paloma introduced herself and her sister to Eduardo. And from that moment, it was on.

  Eduardo had a twofold mission in Santo Domingo that spring in 1971. He flew in to make an appearance on a popular TV variety show that promised to catapult him from being a singer with decent street credibility to full-fledged Desi Arnaz baller status. He was also in town to reunite with his mother, Ercilia, and his sisters. Eduardo hadn’t seen them since before his paternal grandmother, acting on a strong hunch, sent him to live with his father in Nueva York.

  From that afternoon on, Rocío and Eduardo, a man twelve years her senior, started to see each other on the low for as long as they could keep it a secret. Out of nowhere, she started listening to boleros. At first her younger siblings couldn’t wrap their heads around their fifteen-year-old sister’s sudden obsession with old folks’ music, especially when Héctor Lavoe and the santiagero Johnny Pacheco were killing it. Soon, however, they started to suspect that it was a certain bizco, a cross-eyed masked singer, who inspired her fanaticism. It didn’t matter to Rocío. “Boleros are for mature people,” she said. “You two wouldn’t understand.” The more they stole away with each other, the more Rocío realized Eduardo had been sent to her by God Himself. Nobody, she felt, understood her—not her mother, not her father, not her sister or brother, none of the girls or boys at school, nadie—except her man.

  Rocío nearly swooned the first time she saw him onstage in Santo Domingo, ritualistically wresting off his mask to reveal a thin chiseled face and slanted eyes. When he gyrated his stiff hips—he didn’t even try to catch the beat—his slicked-back hair took on a life of its own. Eduardo’s stage name, El Cantante Enmascarado, struck her as genius. He must have been illustrating the complex duality of man, she thought. In reality, Eduardo hoped the mask would make him appear vulnerable and self-conscious, like a wounded animal these stupid women would fight each other over to mend. Eduardo was a broken man willing—coño, hell-bent—to play patient with any chick willing to take his temperature with her mouth or any other available orifice. And then he met Rocío, his reina, the one girl whose curves fucked his head up. On the afternoon they met, Eduardo told her as much. “Mujer,” he said, “you make my world come to a complete standstill.”

  * * *

  Rocío is a born stubborn Capricorn and fixed in her beliefs, the way she loved, the way she hated. Her resolve back home paid off, she thinks, watching the gringos coming and going on the street below her. She now sat triumphantly across from this beautiful man whom so many other women loved but who loved only her. “Nosotros estamos felices,” she whispers to herself over and over again, we are so happy.

  “Rocío, we have to buy a few things for my sister’s baby,” Eduardo says, reaching for a tennis magazine.

  Rocío doesn’t respond, pretending not hear him go on about Esperanza, who’s married and apparently capable of providing for her own son.

  Esperanza’s a leech in Rocío’s eyes, a jealous sister-in-law who too frequently drops in from Newport, Rhode Island, unannounced, and almost always with her comadre Sara in tow. A handsome Puerto Rican brunette, she runs to New York City at every chance in order to get away from a husband she desperately wants to leave. Sara is just as bad as Esperanza, if not worse. There is something about Sara that Rocío doesn’t trust, and it isn’t only her association with Esperanza. Plus, she has the weirdest fucking accent. She pronounces the double R in words like arroz and carro like she’s going to spit up a wad of mocos right in your face. Rocío prefers Ecuadorian and Mexican Spanish because they sing their words.

  Today Rocío is going to ignore any talk about Esperanza to avoid another argument, choosing instead to remember the soft timbre in Eduardo’s voice back when he was courting her, singing to her, writing to her from New York. He was so passionate in those days. She tries not to dwell on how much more excited Eduardo seems to be about Esperanza’s son than me, their baby.

  “Did you hear me, Rocío?” Eduardo barks. “What are you looking at down there on the street?”

  “Ay, Eduardo, nada. This is the first day I’ve had off in many. I’m just relaxing—are you letting your hair grow out?”

  Eduardo’s dark hair and sideburns are, in fact, longer. His hair looks as disheveled as it did on their honeymoon night, when he first, like a vampire, accepted his bride’s most sacred gift.

  Before Eduardo, Rocío hadn’t allowed anyone to touch her. At almost sixteen and a half, she was barely halfway through high school and more interested in her books than getting laid. And she didn’t need her mother, Doña Dolores, to remind her what was common knowledge across the island. Everybody knew Dominican men were a bunch of rubirosas, players. Regardless of class, color, and creed, they turned savage over fresh meat. And after feasting on the finest cuts and, shit, even their compai’s leftovers, gristle and all, the bones were spat out before these horny men headed back out to the human viveros on El Malecón and here on the pewter streets of Nueva York. Eduardo convinced the girl that he was the exception.

  * * *

  Rocío imagines that the baby she’s carrying will look just like him and inherit his perfectly straight white teeth and tall stature. She fantasizes looking after a houseful of his children, at least six of them. Rocío is certain Eduardo will make good on his promise to her and her family and finally leave the music bullshit alone and focus on becoming a dental technician. She’ll go back to school and devote herself to raising children and learning how to cook something other than rice and beans. They are all wrong, Rocío thinks, looking out at nothing in particular. Her family said Eduardo wouldn’t take care of her in the long run, but she is convinced things will only get better. They have to.

  Rocío has resolved to create her own paraíso here. Paradise is a state of being, more than just the name of a suburb or a home. If she works harder cleaning the homes of the rich Americans and Europeans living in Lincoln Towers and, in between classes, pulls in more shifts at the factory to help Eduardo pay for school, paradise will be her reward. Someday Rocío will assume the same position here that she had back home in respectable dominiyorkian society. Wadsworth Terrace is only the first step.

  * * *

  Eduardo sits on the couch, thinking about the future, his future, and, more important, his miserable present. How did I get here? he thinks. Eduardo retraces every moment of the last several months that led him to this couch. Then he thinks about which one of his girlfriends he’ll go out with tonight, comparing each one to Rocío. His reina, with her thick long wavy hair and ojos de almendra. She isn’t the girl he met in Santo Domingo. She doesn’t look as sexy pregnant. And worse, Rocío has turned into a bossy nag.

  “¿A quien estas mirando, Eduardo?” she barks almost every time they go to a restaurant, host one of their get-togethers, even on line at the supermercado, every-fucking-where.

  “I’m not looking at no one. What you talking about, Rocío?”

  “Bueno, I think I saw you looking over at her.”

  “Rocío, come on, you’re listening to those tontos you work with again, they—”

  “Stand over here next to me right now, Eduardo,” she demands, before he has a chance to make his case. “¡Ahora!”

&nb
sp; Coño, qué lío, he thinks. Eduardo sits, taking stock. Theirs was an intense, mostly long-distance affair consisting of stolen moments after gigs in Santo Domingo and letters that definitely would have been plagiarized by Shakespeare himself had the man laid eyes on each scalding word. Te lo juro, Eduardo thinks, I swear. The other women keeping him company at the nightclubs and speakeasies he performed in, whether in New York, South America, or La República Dominicana, were only good for providing evanescent relief for the physical pain he felt when his reina wasn’t by his side.

  Eduardo swore to himself on the day he met her that he’d make a woman out of Rocío. He didn’t understand why, but he spent more time thinking about her than any other woman he’d met. And it most definitely didn’t hurt that Rocío was the mother he never had.

  Rocío was the ideal girl back then, without life experience or a past, like these putas in the city. Regardless of what her family thought of him and his family, they would be together. Rocío became Eduardo’s muse. She was good to him and for him, an unexplored cueva he could mold into his own personal puta in between the sheets and lady on the streets. But now Eduardo, who fancied himself the Romeo to Rocío’s Juliet, sits on the couch utterly underwhelmed.

  Eduardo feels duped, as if Shakespeare had the last laugh. Maybe he wrote the ending that way for a reason. Had Romeo and Juliet awakened from their slumber, fucked until their bodies were nearly gripped by atrophy, and Romeo become totally pussy-whipped, any real man could have foreseen that he would eventually get over it. I don’t think he would have been stupid enough to go through with it, he thinks, sitting there pretending to read the paper. Man, I did a shitty thing. How did I get here?

  * * *

  Back in Santo Domingo, Eduardo took Rocío any way he could have her. It didn’t matter that the wedding went on without the sincere blessings of his bride’s family and the two hundred and fifty witnesses made up of Santo Domingo’s finest. Only two people from Eduardo’s side were in attendance: his perpetually sad mother Ercilia, dressed like a church lady in shit brown, and the stunning india Perla. An opera singer serenaded the newlyweds during the civil ceremony. What a fucking freak show, Antonio thought as he bore witness to the entire spectacle.

  For months, Paraíso had turned into everything but paradise for the family. It was no longer a safe haven for Don Manuel and Doña Dolores’s children but, rather, the scene where, in a formal dining room the family grimaced through dinners with their blushing daughter and that man. Paraíso became the site where an upper-middle-class family gave their favorite daughter and eccentric sibling away to an undesirable.

  “Rocío, mi hija, that man is running around with other women,” Doña Dolores pleaded. “We hear his father is an even bigger mujeriego.”

  “He loves me more than life itself,” she responded. “I don’t care what his father has done or does. He didn’t even raise him. Eduardo is different.”

  “That man doesn’t love you, he conquers women, and I hear he has a stable of them in Nueva York,” Don Manuel interjected.

  “Nothing will come in between me and my Samson, my Romeo. We’re going to be married one day and have many children,” she yelled. Rocío was becoming a raving teenager. Nobody in Paraíso recognized her anymore.

  The beatings once reserved for her siblings were now directed at Rocío. Every whipping made her all the more determined to be with Eduardo. She locked herself in her bedroom for hours, in protest, screaming, “We. Will. Be. Married.”

  * * *

  Don Manuel was dressed as if attending a funeral in a somber yet impeccably tailored black suit and tie and starched white dress shirt. Rocío wore an exquisite yet conservative white gown and veil that looked like it had been designed for a woman twice her age. Her train was long, dragging dirt from the large front lawn into the house. The irony wasn’t lost on her quick-witted mother.

  Rocío looked like a child—hair coiffed in loose curls not quite touching her shoulders, sparkling white gloves, fantasy-blue eyelids—playing dress-up in a life-size dollhouse. The child bride cheesed throughout the entire ceremony. She was the only one. The next day, on their honeymoon, the couple was still infatuated, though Eduardo was a little less so.

  “Nosotros estamos felices, nosotros estamos felices,” Rocío assured Dolores and Antonio back in the Dominican Republic while on the honeymoon, almost a hundred miles away from home in the dreamy town of Jarabacoa. Eduardo sat quietly. He didn’t care much for waterfalls and long nature walks, like his new bride did. “We are sooo happy, so very happy,” she said, hobbling around like an injured puppy.

  Less than a whirlwind year after Rocío and Eduardo started fooling around, Antonio sat in a restaurant watching his eldest sister limp in his direction. He wondered whether all the threats to commit suicide if the family forbade the wedding and the intervention of Dr. Zaglul on her behalf would pay off. El doctor had convinced Don Manuel and his wife to allow Rocío to stay with Eduardo. She was a determined girl, so much so that Zaglul felt she was capable of running away with Eduardo, or worse, killing herself, if they didn’t let Rocío have her way.

  Antonio sat, watching his eldest sister labor through each step, imagining her, a sainted virgin, getting banged by this reputed desvergonzado nymphomaniac. Eduardo had been around the block in more ways than one. This was a fact everybody seemed hip to except Rocío.

  It was bad enough that Rocío’s parents had to swallow becoming in-laws with Eduardo’s father, Ismael, a tigere whom Don Manuel had investigated. He reportedly fucked every woman in sight and without discretion. And worse, they found out that Ercilia was a recogida, a street child picked up by the prieta Doña Francisca Prandis and Don Pedro Rabassa. Was leaving a big house, her family, and a comfortable life in Santo Domingo to be with this man from a broken family and no history all worth this one fuck? To Rocío, it was.

  Rocío may have been a bookish nerd, but she was also kind of a social retard, a person incapable of sympathizing with anyone who didn’t share her conservative views, including Doña Dolores. Rocío felt like a victim of her mother’s circumstances. She believed that la doña had warped priorities and cared more about being a revolutionary and activist than a mother and wife. However, it was Rocío who had it twisted.

  Dolores was a woman ahead of her time, a proud cibaeña and outspoken critic of the tyrant Rafael Trujillo. When she was a teenager, Dolores and her father, Don Felipe Valdez—a well-known civil judge and padrino to almost every child born in their barrio—were labeled communistas by the regime. Don Valdez was too popular in the ’hood to kill, so the dictator waged a devastating economic war against the family’s deep pockets they would never recover from. Being branded an enemy of the state by Trujillo’s monos only made Dolores more fierce and resistant to shit most other men and women would have cowered before.

  Dolores’s political convictions gave her a sense of purpose, something she sorely lacked at home. If not for the striking resemblance she bore to her father, she might have started believing that she was, like her siblings declared, adopted. Most of them favored their mother, Rosario: They were tall for girls, and thin, with pelo lacio in dark blond and bright reddish tones. Dolores’s sisters taunted her for being physically astrasado, like their father. She struggled with her weight, had thick brown skin, a wide nose, and almond-shaped eyes como una africana. “Tú eres una recogida, negra haitiana,” they’d mock her, “you’re adopted, you black Haitian street child.” Rosario said nothing as Dolores bled inside from the emotional wounds her sisters dealt her.

  Dolores started believing that her lighter-skinned sisters, with their pretty thin noses and fine hair, were not only more beautiful but also better, more human. She became convinced at a young age that she belonged to some other, less developed species. After years of jabs to her ego and self-esteem from the mouths of her own family, Dolores learned to deliver blows and absorb them with the grace of a boxer.

  Today Dolores didn’t want to stay quiet, like her own moth
er did when she was being publicly humiliated. She wanted to protest the wedding, to scream and shake her daughter until Rocío awoke from the lovesick stupor she was in, but alas, she didn’t. Despite her eldest daughter’s devastating stupidity and her own husband’s marital shortcomings, Doña Dolores kept a cool head throughout the ordeal, hoping things would somehow correct themselves.

  * * *

  From the moment she landed in Nueva York, Rocío started missing her father terribly. And Don Manuel was grief-stricken in those first few months without his favorite child. Don Manuel loved her so much that he often chose to spend time with Rocío over his harem of prostitutes on Avenida Nicolas de Ovando, a sleazy artery of the capital littered with pawnshops and whorehouses. Now that Rocío had broken out to New York City, Don Manuel shifted all his attention to his least favorite child, Antonio. He spent the next several months trying to convince the boy that he wasn’t gay.

  Don Manuel had been stung, his world rocked to the core, when Antonio broke the news. ¿Un maricón dominicano? Not in this family. After a few long moments thinking about his son’s unfortunate affliction, he countered, “What makes you so sure that you are gay? You know, most teenagers have confusion.”

  “Because I don’t recall ever being sexually turned on by girls,” Antonio responded.

  “I have an idea,” Don Manuel said. “I think you should consider having sex with a prostitute who can teach you what a woman is.” Surely this would cure Antonio of his bout with insanity.

  “Well, the whole idea repulses me a great deal, but I’ll think about it.”

  “Oh, I’ll remind you,” Don Manuel said. And he did a couple of weeks later.

  Together, the distressed father and bewildered son ventured into the seedy avenida, far away from Paraíso.