OPPORTUNITIES
Almost all of the most recent political exiles, industrialists and intellectuals who defected from Baby Doc’s regime, took refuge in Arroyo Manzano, an inviting, cool, forested little hideaway in the hills overlooking the Isabela River five or six kilometers from Cuesta Hermosa. They built grandiose mansions and created, generally speaking, a highly insular and narcissistic community composed of the crème de la crème of the mulatto social ladder of the country they had renounced.
At first they didn’t feel the need to socialize with their local counterparts. They were self-sufficient and arrogant. They lived off of ancient dues and interests; some were diplomats who made a living giving lectures sponsored by international organizations throughout the world. Others were successful international businessmen who had been able to retain their lists of clients and contacts.
Everything changed when these exiles had children and needed to send them to school. This second generation had to integrate into their host society, adopting their language and customs, thus expanding their social circles beyond the borders of the small redoubt of Arroyo Manzano.
The various and predictable social obligations incurred by the new brood forced the original fugitive group to incorporate themselves as well. The small community was infiltrated for the first time during birthday festivities to which they were compelled to invite their children’s native schoolmates and during which, for better or for worse, the distrustful exiles struck up friendships with the mothers and fathers who dropped off their children and stayed to chat.
The small community’s interactions with the external world became exponentially more complicated when their sons and daughters reached adolescence and young adulthood. For example, the illustrious families of Arroyo Manzano began to receive visits from girlfriends and boyfriends, and not always of the desired color and class. In no other place on earth are the rules of racial segregation stricter than they are in Haiti. The ignorant (the racists) will declare this a great irony.
In any event, the consternated exiles decided to take matters into their own hands and put a stop to the democratization of their progeny, which required them to cultivate the right kinds of friendships and to engender proper discernment among their children. And as they did this, they gradually shed their previous pride and discovered that, beyond their cultural and linguistic differences, they were linked to these other families through the delightful and all-powerful fraternity of money—especially the women.
They didn’t always succeed; their children’s friendships were not always to the exclusive circle’s liking. In fact, some of those friends caused a visceral displeasure—friends like me, a daughter of immigrants who shared their nationality but not their social class, which is the same as saying their skin color.
Of course, none of this mattered in the least to Valérie, who paid less attention to the circumstances and twists of fate that divided us than to those that brought us together, especially within a society that was, in and of itself, already rather exclusive towards those of us from the adjacent nation. She was a yellow-skinned mulatta with green eyes and stubbornly frizzy hair. I was an unmistakable Ethiopian. I liked being with her because of her ease and lightheartedness. Nothing stressed her out and everything made her smile. She seemed to think that showing her teeth off to everyone was a kind of universal panacea. It goes without saying that she was a boy magnet.
I tended to be more obsessive and workaholic. When I was with her I relaxed, forgot about my studies, and allowed myself the occasional indulgence in leisure; a lesson that, once learned, I never forgot, even when Valérie was no longer around. In any case, it never mattered; I always excelled beyond everyone else in all my premed courses.
The poor or mediocre students develop early on the ability to latch on to the more outstanding students as a means of survival within the university context. Timid and compulsive students almost always trade popularity for academic triumph. Seen from this perspective, our friendship was an impeccable symbiotic relationship. Although the initial reasons we were drawn together were, at first, opportunistic, in the end we were bound together by sincere affection. We were inseparable.
We always studied at her house; my neighborhood would have scared her to death. Her mother would have preferred a different best friend for her daughter, someone of considerably more noble appearance, but she appreciated my intellectual superiority and the positive influence I had on Valérie. Her name was Adeline, and she was a high-yellow Fula with ironed hair and a narrow backside. A high-assed Negress, as my mother would say—one of those who came to our country fleeing from Nevis and Virgin Gorda two centuries ago. Adeline, of course, would have taken offense at that, given that she traced her lineage, circuitously but with insufferable arrogance, back to a medieval family from Aix-en-Provence.
She couldn’t stand to be spoken to in Creole and pretended that she didn’t understand me when I did. She spoke Spanish if it was strictly necessary, but she exaggerated her accent in order to lend an exotic and snobbish air to her speech, and she used, without apparent justification, the Peninsular Spanish declensions. She was a source of fascination to her friends, high society white matrons from the capital. Spending time in the company of such a woman—black, exquisite, French, and wealthy—awoke in them a rare nostalgia, a melancholy for times they never lived through, and they imagined themselves part of an Algerian or Moroccan colonial tableau. But these are only guesses.
One evening Valérie and I were studying in the living room at her house when Adeline came in and asked us to move to the dining room table because she was expecting company. Valérie protested, not wanting to relinquish the comfort of the sofa and, especially, access to the television, without which she couldn’t concentrate. I was happy to move, since I find tables better suited for studying. Sofas make me sleepy.
Having evacuated us, Adeline covered the end tables and the coffee table with all manner of hors d’oeuvres: pâté, cheeses, grapes, cured ham, cold cuts. There were also sweets and liqueurs. She stocked the bar with ice; set out wine glasses, tumblers, and highball glasses; and finally lined up two bottles of Grey Goose, one twelve-year-old Chivas Regal, a bottle of Barbancourt Estate Reserve, and several bottles of wine that had already been uncorked to allow them to breathe. She declined all of our offers to help and warned us not to even think of touching anything.
We were halfway through an endocrinology review when Adeline’s friends, a select group of her most refined cohorts from the health club, began to arrive. Represented were the nearby and fluvial Cuesta Hermosa, the melodic Arroyo Hondo, the lively Piantini, and the distant and palatial Los Cacicazgos neighborhoods. These were followed by Bella Vista, Evaristo Morales, and Los Ríos.
Shortly thereafter, Adeline and her friends declared a quorum, officially opened the bar, attacked the trays, and got the party started. It was a boisterous group of eight. They made it impossible for us to concentrate. At first I found their conversation unbearable for its barefaced banality. It wasn’t long, however, before the same shamelessness with which they discussed every trifling detail of their lives as though it were a transcendental landmark event in the history of the universe became irresistible to me, and I began to listen with rapt fascination. Throughout the course of the evening, as they diminished considerably the bar’s provisions, their topics of conversation were the following:
Husbands
“Felipe is insufferable,” declares Cuesta Hermosa. “You ladies have no idea how many times I’ve told that man to get a new golf bag, and he simply won’t hear of it. I just die of embarrassment every time I have to go to a tournament with him. I tell him: Felipe, in these types of events winning is not the most important thing. A man like you can’t neglect his appearance. Your golf bag is super old fashioned. And do you know what he says to me?”
“What?”
“That
