The River

What follows comes from a notebook with no date, found near Dajabón. Its author appears to claim an impossible condition: being a river. The prose oscillates between chronicle, vision, and confession. I have decided to preserve its unstable form, though the reader will notice, here and there, the intrusion of other hands, other times, and other fears.¹

I. Origin and Wound

Iwas born, or if such a verb can apply to a current, in the Central Mountain Range, on Pico de Gallo, where the earth still exhales the mist of the clouds. At first I was clear, clean, almost invisible. I ran between green stones and ancient roots, without names or borders. One afternoon, the first in my memory, men drew me on a piece of paper. That line, ironic in its fragility, decided my fate: border. The map preceded me. The map decreed me a wound.

I cannot erase what I have been. Or rather: I cannot erase what men made of me. I was water passing through, moistening dreams. Then came ropes, hands, machetes. I became border. I became grave. I became the mirror in which fear learns its shape. Every night I hear voices that no longer have bodies. Every day a name returns, a heartbeat, a corpse floating upon my surface. History repeats itself like an infinite reworking of the same nightmare, as if the world knew only how to rewrite the same scene with different actors.

That night in 1937, the night they would later call the Parsley Massacre, I felt a stabbing pressure sink into my depths. The clouds crawled like slow-moving beasts. The stars glowed faintly, tired of watching. The moon, which usually doubles the world, refused to reflect in me. It knew what was coming.

“The map preceded me. The map decreed me a wound.”

II. Santilu and the Mechanics of Horror

Santilu arrived with the caution of someone who senses his end. He carried two bundles of cassava and corn to sell in Haiti. As he walked, he kept smoothing the husks with his thumb, the way he did when he was nervous, the way he did when he did not want the children to notice.

—Compadre Jaime assured me it was all just a rumor —he whispered—.

And then, invoking a mercy that no longer existed:

—You know me, compadre. You know I never lied to you.

The order had been conceived far from him, in a room where Trujillo, drunk, had decided the world needed another demonstration of his power. The local authorities staged a theater: meetings, accusations of “cattle theft,” a speech. The final phrase was a dry blow:

—Let not one remain alive.

—¡Long live Trujillo! —the crowd replied, a single organism moved by fear.

Jaime took Santilu by the arm, drew him aside. His eyes were clouded.

—Compadre… forgive me… they ordered me to kill you.

It is possible that, in that instant, the world stopped. Sophae embraced their two children. Their whimpers, which had been mere murmurs during the day, became screams tearing open the air.

The machetes rose. The smell was a mixture of rancid liquor, unfired gunpowder, sweat, and resignation. Bodies fell upon my banks like logs thrown into a fire. I could not stop my current. Only receive. A woman ran carrying her child. The executioner tore the boy from her arms, hurled him into the air, and raised his machete to catch him on the way down.

The sky was blue, insultingly indifferent; below, hell executed its geometry of death.

My waters turned red. They collided with stones and bodies as though producing sad metallic sounds. In the mangroves, vultures extended their wings over the remains trapped in the roots. Nature, innocent of its role, or responsible without knowing, joined in, as if everything had been written before history itself.

Long after the machetes rested, I understood that what had touched my banks would not remain there. Violence does not stay where it begins; it learns to travel. It waits. It changes its vocabulary. It returns wearing the face of necessity, hygiene, order, or fear. When it came back to me, it did not call itself massacre.

III. Juan Domingue, or the Contemporary Form of Fear

Long after, or perhaps that same night, because to me time is not succession but expansion, I met Juan Domingue.

A thin man, weary in his gait, his shirt clean but wrinkled, his shoes two sizes too large. He had crossed my waters once, and whoever crosses a river like me carries the mark forever.

On the day he approached his final destination, he pushed a green wheelbarrow. Inside lay a wasted woman beneath a dirty sheet.

The doctor examined her quickly. I saw in his eyes the sudden brightness of someone confirming an old suspicion.

—Who is she? —he asked.

—My sister —Juan said—. She has cancer.

He lied. He lied because the truth was worse. His wife, Sephonie, had AIDS. She had been a nurse and, for a time, a prostitute. Here, Haitian women who work are often paid in contempt. The doctor knew it. Lola, his secretary, hid money under the bottles for medicine he refused, as though protecting his own image mattered more than easing someone’s pain.

Juan was afraid. Afraid of people finding out. Afraid of his neighbors. Afraid of the soldiers. Afraid of everything. To have the disease was shame. To name it, a sentence. Many had died for far less.

When the doctor turned to leave, Juan grabbed his arm.

—When will she die, doctor?

—Whenever you want —the doctor answered, with a weariness more moral than physical.

He handed him ten vitamin C tablets. A symbolic cure for a real condemnation. Soon after, Sephonie died. No one wept. Silence was her shroud.

From the walls I heard whispers carried by the wind:

—They are invading us little by little…

A fifth column…

Our people will disappear…

Clumsy graffiti repeated their hatred: Haitians out. Improvised patrols collected names the way one collects garbage.

“Violence does not stay where it begins; it learns to travel. It waits. It changes its vocabulary.”

IV. The Girl, the Cemetery, and the Final Flight

Juan stopped leaving his house.

One day, Three Kings’ Day, the only day of the year when children run wild, he found a large box of dolls in the yard. He carried it inside. The girl lying there breathed weakly. A thread of life held by nothing. A small balloon losing air. Juan watched her for a long moment, as if trying to memorize her face in advance. He understood the essential: if the girl died in his home, everything would turn against him. The infection. The shame. The inevitable accusation.

He did not wait for dawn.

He took the fragile body, almost weightless, as if the soul had already abandoned the flesh, placed her inside the box among the dolls, and stepped into the dark carrying her. He walked like someone turned into shadow. At the crossroads leading to the central market, he hesitated. At that hour, the streets belonged to no one: leaning posts, skinny dogs, an extinguished food stall, the sign of a corner store swinging like a tired pendulum. He turned down a row of leafless trees, old trees that had seen too many processions, too many burials, too many sirens. He took the path bordering the poorest neighborhood: wooden houses eaten by rot, zinc roofs held down with rocks, a plastic chair overturned, a tireless bicycle propped against a wall. Every closed door felt like an eye pretending to sleep.

At the end of the row of houses, he opened the iron gate to the cemetery. The screech echoed unbearably through the early morning. He entered. He walked over graves without reading their names. Passed a tall mausoleum rising like a concrete guardian, stained with moss and crude crosses. Deeper inside, he stopped before a mound of earth that seemed recently disturbed. He laid the box beside it. Kneeling, he began to dig with his hands. The soil was damp at first; then dry as ash. It clung to his fingers. His nails bled. The blood stuck to his skin, but he felt no pain, only the urgency to finish before sunrise, before anyone saw him, before fear changed its shape.

When the hole was deep enough, he placed the box inside and began to cover it. He did not know, did not want to know, whether the girl still breathed. The act was burial, concealment, and supplication all at once. He had almost finished when he heard a shout. The voice seemed to come from everywhere. Panic drove him to stand and run. He heard a gunshot. Felt a sting on his right side, like a quick burn. He did not stop. The second bullet struck his chest like an iron weight. He collapsed at the feet of a man holding a gun.

He lay still. Felt the piercing pain flood his body, immense, compact, like a wall falling upon him. For a second he wanted to remain there, crushed, suspended. He tried to move and could not. He discovered, with strange clarity, that pain was a deep form of relief: it ran through his body only to vanish, as if taking something else with it. Fear slipped from his back the moment the pain began to fade. For an instant, brief and absolute, he felt free for the first time. Then he knew nothing more.

He did not see the onlookers drawn by the echo of gunfire. They listened closely to the guard’s statement, delivered with the confidence of someone certain his version would be the only accepted one:

—I was hiding behind that columbarium —he said— and saw him searching among the graves. Looked to me like he wanted to make sure it was the grave of a little angel of God, because they say those innocent little ones are what voodoo rituals need. Then he knelt and started digging. I shouted, and he charged at me like a starving animal. Thank God my aim didn’t fail. That Haitian looked like a demon. I saw him digging. He wanted the little angel’s body. Thank the Lord I didn’t miss.

The lie absolved the murderer. Lies have always enjoyed prestige in this part of the world.²

V. Return to the Original Vision

In his final flicker of consciousness, Juan saw Sephonie crossing a river. Bluish skin. Outstretched arms. A current that does not forgive. And then he saw everything:

What I see. What I am forced to remember.

He saw the thick air, rotting with bodies. Heard the screams shredding the wind. Saw machetes repeating their mechanical motion. Felt my current striking corpses with a sad sound. Saw the blue sky, insulting the tragedy. Saw the mangroves gripping torsos no one would claim.

He saw the woman. He saw the child. He saw the executioner. He saw the brief flight. He saw the waiting machete. I roared. Struck the shore like furious fists. Everything was supplication. Everything was horror. I have learned there is no distance between the machetes of 1937 and the bullets of the present: they are variations of the same score. The pretexts change, the names change, but the melody of hatred repeats.

VI. Epilogue of Water

I have watched centuries pass like bodies: dragged, denied, abandoned. They claim I divide Haiti from the Dominican Republic.

That is false.

They divided me first in their imagination. Turned my course into doctrine. My water into suspicion. My flow into political argument. They used me to wash away guilt. To hide evidence. To invent absolutions.

And still I flow. I cannot erase what I have been. I was peace. They made me wound. That is why I speak. Softly, like a prayer. In the language of leaves and mud. And when no one listens, I return. I whisper through roots. I repeat names until they wear away. But they never truly do. Because a river, like me, does not forget. It has nowhere to store oblivion.