Haris A. Durrani

“Maybe I will be more explicit about why is it that I am reticent to speak about love. It is because the discourse of love has continued absolutely unbroken through the transformation that interests me. America was conquered in the name of love. Today, people can be bombed in the name of love. So, if everything is love, if religion is love, and if love is everywhere, and, you know, all you need is love—then fine. It’s just that it appears that much more than religion and Church, people have killed each other in the name of love, in a way that is… brutal. And you would think by now it’s time that, rather than rave against the Church—not that there’s nothing to rave against, I am in agreement—why is it that no one is against love? Because it’s about time—no?—that we recognize the damages that love has done. Now please don’t construe me as some kind of pessimistic, solipseric whatever. But I don’t see any reason why it’s more justified today to criticize religion than it is to criticize love… I have people who tell me that they love so much that they will burn me to death. Then I say you have a peculiar way of love, but I’m not going to say, oh, you were lying. No, fine, this is your love. It’s one that burns and kills. You’re strange that way.”

In 1965, Tomás Paoli made love to a ciguapa on the sandy banks of the Ozama River. He would say later that he fell in love with other women, but my uncle is the kind of man who lies to himself. He would go on to survive several tangles with death, and no matter how many cigarettes he smoked, no matter the kind of trouble he got himself into, he lived to tell the tale of each dance with mortality. “God loves me,” he says these days, to himself as much as to the family. “I ain’t never gonna die!” Sixty-something and counting, he remains unmarried. Picks up women at the Port Authority GW bus stop on 178th Street, where he hangs out with his homeless friends, druggies and rehab rejects discarded by their families as he was by his. I’ve learned not to listen to Uncle Tomás, no matter what he tells me about the women he meets. He hasn’t fallen in love since 1965. In the end, the ciguapa was the only woman who reached his heart.

In 1958, Tomás and his brothers spent their days swimming across the Ozama River. Tomás was eleven, and his brothers were about the same age. They raced the neighborhood boys into the distant water, through the sun and heat, and by the time they reached the other side their friends would have only traversed two-thirds of the river’s breadth. The Paoli brothers were fast as barracuda in the dark blue waves. They had the stamina of bluefin and the lungs of whales. No one on the island could swim like they did, could lay strokes through the waves and kick into their wake without a splash, could last that many minutes beneath the surface.

Uncle Mike describes this to me at Thanksgiving. His four other siblings, their spouses, and their children have gathered around Titi Lourdes’s living room in the apartment on 169th, plates filled with steaming chicken and moro. Some of us sit on the couch or a chair, and others are standing. Conversation has scattered. Mom, Uncle Tomás, Uncle Carlos, and I listen as Uncle Mike describes one of the days they raced their friends in 1958. He relishes the memory. It looks as if he is about to close his eyes.

“Tomás was always ahead of us,” he says, shaking his head but smiling. I picture Tomás’s arms moving in and out of the river with the efficiency of a trained rower’s oar. The water would flow around him, filling his pores, eyes, mouth, ears, and nostrils with its cool touch. “But Carlos and I, we were close behind,” Uncle Mike adds. “Más o menos.Not that far. He thinks he was.” The neighborhood boys remained pricks of foam far away.

“He never looked back,” Mom explains to me from across the couch. There is salad stuck between her teeth. “Like those brothers in that movie. 

Uncle Tomás, seated beside me and smelling of cigarette ash, nods to her, swallows a glob of plátanos maduros, and points his fork into an invisible distance.

“Straight ahead,” he says, nose raised.

He kept swimming, already five-foot-three with arms as long as the trunks of baby trees.

The Paoli brothers climbed onto the opposite bank and collapsed into the sand and grass. Caked with grains of coral, salt, and seashells and basking in the sun like breaded fish on the frying pan, they turned onto their backs and watched the river of sky overhead. Tomás had never seen an ocean without waves, a river without rapids, a pool without ripples. The Dominican sky was not like this. This sky was a body no one, man or nature, had tampered with. One day, Tomás thought, I will swim those waters.

He turned to his brothers and smiled. “Too slow!” he stuttered. “I b-beat you again!”

“You had a head start!” Miguelito yelled back.

“You shoulda started faster,” Tomás replied.

Miguelito and Tomás stumbled to their feet, swinging at one another madly with arms heavy from exhaustion. Still they fought. “There are no Indians in our family,” their father, Rafael, used to say. “There are only Chiefs.” Miguelito tackled Tomás to the ground, dispersing sand as Carlos watched on. Mud and sand clung to their wet skin and their water-clogged swim trunks.

They wrestled until the other boys’ uneven, noisy strokes reached their ears. Tomás and Miguelito rose, bustling shoulder to shoulder, until the boys hobbled ashore, legs quivering. The three brothers stood.

These were the same boys who taunted Tomás when he was seven-years-old and mute. He still spoke funny to them. He still used the words they taught him. The bad words, words for maleducados. They were jealous that he was so blond. “Tan hermoso,” the mothers in the neighborhood would say. “The girls will go crazy for him.” Sometimes they would pay him to sit on their porch for an afternoon, a living decoration, because his hair was so blond and his skin so pearly white. Mom tells me the other boys didn’t like that someone their age, someone as blond and tall as Tomás, could be so slow to understand, that at first he could not distinguish their insults from praise. They didn’t like that he could outswim them and, eventually, beat them in a fistfight, a skill previously their exclusive domain.

In the long run, they won. Tomás may have been bound for handsome, but he didn’t stay that way. I know that now as I stare into my uncle's misshapen face beside me, a face that reminds me of fried plátanos, with a scar along his cheek like a ragged Martian canal. These days Uncle Tomás is loud-mouthed, foul-mouthed, grimy, unshaven, and accompanied always by the ineradicable stench of cigarette smoke and smelly feet. When I’m walking with him down the street and a pretty woman passes, he points and says, “You gotta look, man! You gotta fucking look!” Mom makes him shower before entering the house and wash his hands before plunging them into popcorn at the movies. She doesn’t even want him to show his face when her suburban friends knock on the door because she complains he’s feo and nosy and smells like old wet socks.

But at age eleven in 1958, Tomás believed he was destined for greatness. In fact, he would spend the rest of his life believing this, as if, now a registered senior, he can find the time to grow up. He still smokes voraciously. He invited prostitutes into this apartment, where he used to live with Titi Lourdes until the TSA arrested him for smuggling Colombian heroine into JFK. And he buys bootlegged DVDs from his friend in the Bronx. I can see it now in his eyes, determined but elsewhere. The way he chews his chicken and rolls the moro around his mouth with his tongue, as if he’s got all the time in the world. If he was never going to die, as he saw it, what fate could he look forward to? His destiny was not ahead of him but behind, in the circumstances of his birth. But, as when racing the boys across the Ozama, Tomás never looked back. He was a man pinned to the present, running circles around it, a whirlpool in the flow of the Ozama River.

“You were f-fucking slow!” he told the neighborhood boys when they collapsed onto the sand.

“Yeah, what took so long?” Miguelito demanded. “Had to adjust your bra strap?”

Carlos grunted assent. “You swim like girls.”

“That’s right,” Tomás said, pounding his chest. “I’m the R-R-Road Runner. You better b-believe it!”

Carlos nodded again. He didn’t mind. He was the least Chief among the Chiefs. “Yeah,” he said. “One of them’s the Road Runner.”

The other boys shook their heads and glared.

Tomás and his brothers knew they were the best swimmers in their neighborhood. This meant they were the best on the island. Chiefs of the Dominican Republic, here to reconquer the place where Columbus spoiled the virginity of the New World. This place that was now theirs.

At the Thanksgiving party, Titi Gloria, overhearing from her seat on the arm of the couch, grips Uncle Tomás’s wrist and leans toward me. She tells me this was only the banter of pubescent boys. In their way the neighborhood boys liked the Paoli brothers. And the brothers—except for Tomás now and then—liked them. “Next time I’ll beat you,” the neighborhood boys would say, and next time they’d try. And next time they’d lose. They lied to themselves, told themselves they could compete with the Paolis, but beyond the machismo they regarded them as brothers. After all, the Paolis owned the TV. When the cartoons went on, Tomás, Miguelito, and Carlos would call from their front door: “The cartoons! The cartoons are on!” Children would pour from the streets into the Paolis’ living room, where my abuela, Milagros, resident matriarch of the block, would cook them okra and sancocho and my abuelo, Rafael, would ruffle their hair. The Paolis weren’t filthy rich, not Trujillato rich, but the neighborhood boys valued their role in the community. Rich and poor walked the same streets, sweltered in the same gecko-infested homes, shared the same meals, waited out hurricanes behind the same concrete walls, watched Bugs Bunny on the same kiwi-fuzzy screen.

But the Dominican Republic in 1958 was no utopia. “If Trujillo or his generals pointed at you and said, ‘I want you,’ ” Titi Gloria tells me, “then you didn’t complain. You said, ‘With pleasure.’ ” There were three sisters in the Paoli family: Gloria, Lourdes, and my mother, Dolores, who was four-years-old. Gloria was the eldest at sixteen. “I was very pretty,” she tells me. Trujillo would’ve plucked her from the curb if he spotted her. If he so much as smelled a whiff of her. If he so much as heard a rumor of a rumor. “The man was a giant chick radar,” a cousin interrupts, smirking, “as if to compensate for something smaller.” Milagros said she would wear a burqa and force her daughters to follow suit, if it came to that. Rafael’s mother, of German descent, had fed Trujillo’s family when they were living off scraps. In fact, she was Trujillo’s midwife. She carried him into this world with a generosity equal in magnitude to his otherworldly evil, a wolf birthed into the arms of a lamb. Had she known, then? Until she died, she would intercede on behalf of Trujillo’s many prisoners, delivering food and prayers to the bodies of the violated. Rafael’s cousin was a prestigious lawyer, one of a handful of notables in the DR who openly opposed the regime. By guilt of association, the Paolis were denied access to food and Rafael lost his job. “It got to the point where we didn’t even have milk in the house,” Titi Gloria recalls. No one would help them, as others feared a similar fate. “Because of my German grandmother’s history with Trujillo, my dad could’ve held any position in the regime,” Mom tells me. “But our family doesn’t do that kind of thing.”

In 1961, conspirators gunned down Trujillo in his ’57 Chevy. Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, continued his father’s dictatorship. The Paolis lived between two army strongholds, and every few days Ramfis would ride by in his military convoy and peer into their home. Gloria would cover herself and hide in the depths of the house; she would not allow him to undress her with his gaze. Against her mother’s prudence, she joined demonstrations opposing the regime. She describes herself to me as a prophet, a radical, sacrificing the security of her livelihood for the cause. “Not a prophet,” she amends. “Prophet-like. This is the kind of thing prophets did.” She gives me a 

 speech and recites her father’s words. “I want you to be your own person,” he always told his children. But Milagros knew the punishment reserved for the family of open dissidents. Gloria ignored her mother’s warnings, and Milagros beat her with escalating intensity until one day she cracked open Gloria’s skull. “You will not ruin this family!” Milagros bellowed. “I will sacrifice my daughter for the lives of this family, if it comes to that.” But Gloria was as stubborn and stupid as Tomás. That’s how Mom puts it, anyway.

Titi Gloria and Uncle Tomás snort in Mom’s direction. She is the only child, “the spoiled brat,” Titi Gloria teases. Mom waves a hand and continues the family history, this time with my abuelo.

She explains that during all this, Rafael was forging ground in America. His grandfather was an Italian-American soldier in the DR during the U.S. occupation; he’d fallen in love with my half-German great-great-grandmother and settled on the island in 1918. Six years passed before the country declared its independence. Despite being born in the DR when it was under American occupation and spending a few years in the States, Rafael had voted in Dominican elections. He could not claim American citizenship. He had to work connections, travelling frequently between America and the Dominican Republic, although no one in the family knew precisely what he did. He was supposedly a businessman, the first employee of the Alcoa mining company, but they suspected he worked for the CIA. Eventually, he arrived in New York with four dollars in his pocket, about to live the American dream he had perhaps, in one way or another, already lived. One by one, Rafael and Milagros shipped their family to the land of the free, ladies first, beginning with Gloria and Dolores.

Arriving almost half a century after his Italian-American grandfather, Abuelo’s connection to this place felt like something to be read in a book. That’s how it sounds when Mom tells me this story. Distant. But this is her favorite part.

“Were we leaving or returning?” she asks me over the dwindling piles of food on our plates. The chicken is beginning to cool. She asks me this question each time she tells this story, as if the thought is born anew.

“Mom, I know,” I complain. “You always say the same thing.”

She smiles. “Every day is a new day for me. I wake up, no regrets, no memory, nothing! 

,” I correct. Her Spanish is about as bad as her English. She doesn’t have an accent, but her vocabulary requires years of practiced interpretation. Dad and I tease her. We say she only preserved half of each language.

,” she replies. “You know the Renaissance guy got that from the Muslim guy?”

“Yeah. It’s Locke and Ibn Tufayl.” I wave a hand. “Keep going.” I want to know the family history. I want to know how Uncle Tomás became who he is.

Before Mom can continue, Uncle Tomás interrupts. “No, no,” he says, bits of avichuela spewing from his lips. “She doesn’t know about the ciguapa. She doesn’t believe that shit.”

Mom rolls her eyes. The other siblings groan.

“Coño, Tomás…” Titi Lourdes says from across the room. She trails off the “s” in Tomás so that it sounds like “toma.” Take. Everyone has a habit of saying his name that way, often when exasperated. “You never met a ciguapa. There’s no such thing.”

He laughs. “I more than met that chick,” Uncle Tomás replies. And then, as if it isn’t clear already: “I banged her!” There is a collective sigh. My aunts wring their hands. He turns to me, eyebrows jumping. “I’ll tell you the rest, boy, you listen up…”

He tells me how Abuelo settled the family in Spanish Harlem. In the family apartment on 135th Street across from City College, Tomás missed the days when he and his brothers would swim and swim. The water in New York was cold and polluted, dark like the night sky, not blue like the day. Even the days were cloudy, tarnished by plumes of smoke that rose over the skyscrapers. Someone had tampered with this sky.

In the summer of 1965, the Paolis returned to the Dominican Republic. Tomás and his brothers dove back into the Ozama River, into the warm water and the grassy sand and the sky that could not be tampered with. They raced each other and the neighborhood boys until the sky blushed.

One day, Tomás told the others to go home for the night.

“Gonna cross one more time,” he said, surveying the currents with an unthinking gaze. Was this home? He liked it better than Manhattan. The air here was fresh and salty. But he didn’t live here anymore, did he? He lived in the streets of Spanish Harlem, where the space between buildings hummed, where the air was thick and loud and smoke tarnished the brick-and-metal-pricked sky.

They jeered. “You won’t cross before it gets dark.”

“We’re not gonna watch some pendejo drown. We got bellies to fill, eh? We’re going to go eat your mama’s ropa vieja, eh?” The boys and his brothers clapped each other’s palms and beat their chests. “Eh? Watch TV and shit.”

“Go to hell,” Tomás said. “I’ll be b-back. Watch me. You’ll see. I’ll be b-back,” he repeated, like Schwarzenegger’s T-800 on a feedback loop.

He watched them laugh and swagger home as he turned toward the Ozama, breathing through his nose. He stretched his arms, swung them around his torso, gazed for a moment at the colors overhead, and ran headfirst into the water. This time he looked neither behind nor ahead. He simply closed his eyes and swam until his muscles grew numb and until the sand of the opposite bank came running down his torso. He beached himself like a canoe and lay face down for a quarter hour, waves crashing around his ankles.

When Tomás flipped onto his back, the sky was dark.

He dusted himself and climbed to where the sand was cool and dry and breathed heavily through his mouth. He decided to rest before making his way to the bridge a mile down. While his chest rose and fell, stars began to appear overhead. He hadn’t seen stars in so long. He couldn’t see stars in New York.

As Tomás reclined, he heard a splash interrupt the sound of flowing water. At first he mistook the noise for a small animal in the surf, but when he turned absently to the bank, he spotted what looked like a thick wad of hair crowning the waves. The figure emerged from the water, revealing a bony face, then broad shoulders, and finally a tall, slender body swaying in the breeze. It was a she. She wore a thin, wet shawl that wrapped around her torso and legs. The shawl, Tomás realized, was a long band of algae. Fine gills, pink in the starlight, perforated her neck and fluttered along the exposed sides of her torso. Her face was narrow and filled with broad angles, occupied by long niches of shadow along the ridges of her cheekbones.

She stepped forward, moving with care over the sand and grass, as if treading the surface of an alien planet. Her backward feet laid a trail of footsteps leading into the ocean.

His mother had told Tomás and his brothers stories about the ciguapas when he was small. That they had backward feet. That they lived on the seafloor and riverbeds. That they emerged in the night and returned in the night, the pattern of their footsteps made to deceive the unthinking eye into believing someone had entered and left rather than left and entered.

Her jade eyes glimmered, and she spoke in a voice like falling crests.

“I have never seen a boy as pretty and stubborn as you.”

He stood. He didn’t talk to girls other than his sisters. Not yet at least.

“You have hair like the sun,” she whispered, taking another step.

His heart began to thud. The night air settled into his damp skin. He shivered and struggled to part his lips. What could he say? What should he say? He was the brutish, handsome retard on the block, the hermoso with a brick for a brain and gold for hair. Ridiculous, beautiful, and speech-impaired.

She stepped again. He could smell her now. Fresh soil and a fragrance heavy and sweet that he could not identify. The bare, slick skin between her sternum and her gilled neck reflected constellations.

Are these stars the same here as there? he wondered, remembering New York.

He moved his tongue between his teeth. “Who…”

She placed her backward heels against the tips of his toes. Her heels were smooth, not calloused and hard as most feet are. They were cold. Colder than the sand. Colder than the night air or the black between the stars or the Hudson River in New York.

“You could not pronounce my name,” the ciguapa murmured in stilted Spanish, almost Catalan.

She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, and scratched her heels against his blunt toenails. She moaned softly.

“That feels better.” She smiled and opened her eyes, looking down to where their feet touched, his toes to her heels, before meeting his gaze. She bit her lower lip. “I had an itch.”

“Who...” Tomás repeated. Her reversed feet confused him like an impossible staircase.

She rested her elbows on his shoulders and crossed her wrists behind his neck. Her arms were hard and cold and stretched a distance longer than her legs.

“You have never met a ciguapa, have you?”

“Well know this, my friend: Few do. But I decided to break a promise. I broke my promise for you… Who are 

“Rafael Tomás Paoli,” he said, confidence growing, adopting for the first time his father's tenor. His great uncle was Antonio Paoli, one of history’s great opera singers, nicknamed The King of Tenors and the Tenor of Kings. His ancestor was General Pasquale Paoli, who founded the first constitutional democracy when he freed Corsica from Italy, only for it to fall into French hands. Titi Gloria has told me that Napoleon was Pasquale’s bastard son, but the dates don’t quite check out. What I do know is that if not for Pasquale, Napoleon wouldn't have been born French, so there's that blunder for the family name. Abuelo, the tenor, and the general—they blundered occasionally but they were grandiose men always, spoke of failure like singing opera from the Senate Floor. This is the voice Tomás used to pronounce his name for the ciguapa.

They stood, breathing one another’s air, until she raised her arms and laughed.

“What are you going to do? Rafael Tomás Paoli.” She stopped laughing. “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

He frowned and looked away. She returned her elbows to his shoulders.

“You have never fallen in love, have you, Rafael Tomás Paoli?” She stepped back and skirted in a circle, drawing a moat in the sand. Her hair spun round her, sprinkling him with water. “Do not worry,” she said. “I will teach you how to fall in love.”

She strode toward the shore, toenails glimmering behind her in the starlight.

“How—” Tomás began and stopped. She turned, forehead raised. “How do I, uh, f-f-find you?”

“Tomorrow at midday, look for the city beneath the church.”

 she turned and flared her gills. Uncle Tomás tells me that, if he looked only at her legs, it would’ve seemed as though she were doing the electric slide into the surf.

“Shoulda looked just for her legs,” he says to me. He’s finished his meal and his siblings have already migrated to the kitchen to drop their plates in the sink. It’s only the two of us now. Uncle Tomás looks away. “Damn, those legs.”

I roll my eyes. “And she spoke like that?” I ask him. “Who speaks like that?”

“Oh, that chick did!” he says. “Just like that. All formal. Like she was dressed up or something. You know. Like an old lady. But that body, boy...”

’re old, Uncle Tomás,” I say, smiling.

The family’s discarded him, yet somehow he was once loved by this impossible creature. I can’t help but wonder how he pulled it off, how he attracts the strangest friends. There is something in him not worth discarding, something I think the ciguapa knew better than any of us, perhaps better than Tomás himself.

Haris A. Durrani

Haris A. Durrani

Fiction

Winter 2018 - Noise

Ciguapa