Much later, learn that a batey has nothing to do with Haitians, despite the insistence of everyone around you. Actually, a Batey is a shanty town built around a sugar plantation. Sugar companies used to build company tenements, which would house local workers. It's exclusively a Dominican and Cuban term, and its ghetto implication is a latter-day slur, like projects in the U.S. Sosuans only fear their batay because Haitians have moved in, seeking a cheap place to live. Regret the misunderstanding, even though it's hardly your fault.
Drag your girlfriend to El Museo de Judeo, because you have always wanted to visit a kibbutz, even a retired one. The Museo will have odd hours and a surly, fat security guard. He will tell you to go away for a half-hour. Kill time by watching young men play baseball on a weathered field as girls on bicycles whistle from behind the chain-link fence. Wonder what will happen to these youngsters — will they be discovered by scouts and exported to New York to play for the Yankees? Or will they sell trinkets on the beach like their fathers?
The museum will be small but moving. Walk slowly around the circular floor-plan, examining records of passage and photographs of Jewish settlers, back when "settling" wasn't a loaded term that smacked of Palestinian displacement. Study the black-and-white photographs of European Jews building their houses. Read about how the Dominican Republic was the only country in the world to officially welcome Jews escaping from the Holocaust. Wonder why, of all places, a Catholic Caribbean island would admit these terrified multitudes, saving them from slave labor and liquidation and incinerating ovens. Why did New York and Geneva and London accept them only reluctantly? Here they colonized, hammered together their homes, raised crops, even established a community theatre. Here, thousands of miles from the nearest German post office or Polish road sign, they learned Spanish and observed Shabbat and held Hebrew services in a makeshift synagogue — a makeshift synagogue that still holds services today. And then wonder how, when Armistice was declared, they could simply leave again, taking steamers to Palestine and America. What drove these daring few to pick through the rubble of Warsaw and seek the straggling survivors?
Decide that Sosua is not utopia, but a kind of purgatory. These European expatriates, teaching snorkeling to tourists, waking up to naked palms and sunshine. It is neither somewhere nor nowhere, but a haphazard colony of crossed destinies. Are babies born in a place with no hospital? Are they buried where there is no obvious cemetery? Or do they merely bide their time, resentful of rain and snow and headlines, weary of their homelands and the drudgery of politics and good citizenship, spending their middle years in a vacuum of time and space, an island within an island, cut off by jungle and sea? When they leave here, as you will soon leave, do they feel relief? Sadness? Or only the grogginess of a long and fitful sleep?
One night, trying to unlock the door to your hotel room, your girlfriend will grab your arm.
What's wrong?
Look! Is that a spider?
And sure enough, an enormous black spider will cling to the glass door. The body will measure the size of a penny, but the eight legs will extend four inches each. The legs will be thick and smooth as matchsticks. Tell your girlfriend to back away from the door as you slowly turn the handle and open it wide. Slip inside, keeping your eye on the unmoving spider, and root through your backpack until you find a heavy book. Go the door, which still hangs ajar, and lift the book until it's level with the spider. Grasp the edge of the door for leverage, so that it doesn't bounce back.
Take a deep breath. Consider how severe your arachnophobia is. Consider that you are scared shitless by spiders of any size, shape, or subspecies.
Ram the book into the glass. Don't hold back, because even if the glass cracks, at least you'll hit the spider. Listen to the crackle of breaking legs, the splat of the spider's flattened thorax. Remove the book for an instant and watch the spider slip from the door. When it hits the tile floor, notice that it's still moving. It will try to drag its crushed body with drunken legs. Drop the book again, letting it smash, then step on the book, dragging it across, so the spider leaves a smear of slime and innards. When the spider stops moving, pick it up by a leg and toss it into the toilet bowl. Flush the toilet. Wait for the water to drain. When it doesn't, the spider will still be floating, enormous and dead. Keep flushing throughout the night, even though the water pressure is clearly not sufficient to suck away the spider.
Have nightmares about giant spiders injecting eggs into your eyeball.
Wary of hawkers, you will search for a more isolated beach. Wander the back-streets of Sosua until you reach a row of private resorts. The buildings will look like columned Colonial mansions. Dominican men will wear uniforms and open the door for you. Chains will keep you from passing into the hotel; you won't be allowed to mingle with the vacationers within, so don't try. Peruse the gift-shop and consider buying a glazed coconut, just for kicks. Buy an authentic Dominican cigar instead. Notice the grey-haired American women, pale and flabby, examining plastic key-chains made in China. Resolve never to take a cruise or stay in a resort, no matter how terrifying the Batey's denizens.
Accept that you are also a tourist, and so is almost everybody else in Sosua. Never mind. You'll still never take a cruise. Life is too short. Plan to die young.
Take more back-streets until you reach a dead-end. The street will blend into yards and stone walkways that lead nowhere. Notice a young boy on a bicycle.
Pardon, nino, your girlfriend will say. Donde esta la playa?
Aqui! he'll say in a deadpan voice. As if to say: Isn't it obvious?
Como arrivimos a la playa?
The boy will point at the backyard of a three-story bungalow. The house is big and built out of clapboard siding. Examine it for a moment, but before you can ask another question, the little boy will have biked away. Meander along the sod of the bungalow's yard, round the house, and arrive on the beach. Mounds of coral will rise out of the sand, forming a maze of primitive reef. The sun will blaze. The waves will play at your feet. The breeze will scintillate. No-one — not one single person — will bother you, even though you are only a few hundred yards from the batey.
Walk on the beach. Stand on a coral reef and pose heroically. Your girlfriend will take funny pictures and you will laugh about them for years.
Grow bored. Realize how green your relationship is. Ponder, for hours, what to talk about, where to go, what to do. Ask: Are you tired? Ask this so many times that your girlfriend will get annoyed.
And yet, be astounded how much you love this woman. How is it you want to amuse her, protect her, watch her do literally anything? Amaze at the way she straightens her hair with a curling iron, the sloppy way she brushes her teeth. Marvel at her random jokes. Gladly pay for meals, just to watch her eat. Notice that she always lays a napkin on her lap, no matter how informal the meal. Take her to the buffet for skewers of shish and browned zucchini and squash. When you walk together on the beach, spontaneously leap into the waves, heels-over-head, so that her pate smashes the wet sand. Impress her the way you tried to impress girls in grade school — with feats of physical stupidity. Lie next to her on the sand, comforted by her presence in the golden fog of sunlight, uncertain whether she's asleep or awake.
Notice the way her gold hair wilts and curls in the heat. Watch her eyebrow rise with skepticism. Listen to her giggle — a pearly twitter. Watch her eyes brim with scientific curiosity, large and Mediterranean blue, wondering at everything around her, then narrowing with disdain.
Oh, my God, she'll exclaim as you sit at a veranda table. She'll point to the beach, eyes wide with horror. That guy's fucking naked!
Swivel in your chair and see the two French Canadians splashing in the water, big and flabby and sunburned. They will link arms over shoulders and walk toward the beach, laughing. Their waists will emerge, then the black savannas of their groin-hair and their bouncing scrota. By the time their knees surface, you will turn around again, cackling with disgust.
That's just wrong! your girlfriend will say. But you will always relish the hilarity of this moment, that time that you saw two French Canadian guys skinny-dipping in the ocean while you were eating, and remember that it's a moment that could only start here, now, with her.
Be surprised by your commitment. After years of odd relationships, the pleasures of a solo existence, you will no longer lust for the topless brunette sprawled nearby, or the skinny Latinas swaggering down the surf, even though every movement of their hips is a salsa in miniature. This first vacation, this first test of unity in a strange place, will make you wonder how there was life before her. How did you live? How did you claim to love the woman who now seem so imperfect? Restrain yourself — try not to gush your affection on drunken evenings, though your senses will flare, metamorphic, your cheeks will mix sticky sweat with clandestine tears of joy.
On your final night, lie around the hotel room, wondering what to do. By this time, the hawkers and potential muggers will make you feel cloistered and paranoid. Know that tomorrow, you'll have to take a bus to Santiago, where you'll wait all day for the plane to New York. Sulk and sigh at everything. Feel your energy drain. Decide to leave the decisions to your girlfriend. You're tired of making decisions. Drink water and urinate and drink more water.
For the first time in your life, wish that there was a TV to watch.
Hey, your girlfriend will say. Why don't we go on a mission?
A mission?
Yeah.
Your girlfriend will pull our her camera bag and sling it around her shoulder. Hesitate, but follow her lead. When she opens the hotel room door, follow her into the street. Trace her steps down the block. Take a photograph of the motorcycle parked in an open shed. Photograph two women with big hair and high-heels walking down the dark sidewalk. Turn off your flash. Snap a picture of passing cars, swarming crowds. Duck into a café and sit down at a table and order café con leche in Spanish that is rapidly improving.
The power will go out. The entire neighborhood will suddenly be swallowed in darkness. Cigarette cherries will burn in the night. The waitress will disappear into the back, then return with an armload of candles. She will place them on the tables and light them one by one, and suddenly you and your girlfriend will be basking in their orange glow, trading stories and laughing and marveling that the neighborhood could endure a black-out and nobody's complaining. Take a picture of her, smiling in the orange darkness.
Fly down the streets, dart around cars and mopeds, seek the wine-dark ocean. Listen to the whir of electricity coming back on, the lights flickering to life, the batay suddenly bathed in the light of street-lamps and neon signs. They will drown out the stars, which were briefly visible. Watch humanoid silhouettes flash into faces mustaches and baseball caps and T-shirts. Let your camera fall limp by your side. Grab your girlfriend and embrace her, right here on the street corner, because this is as good as anyplace to be held in loving stasis. Ignore the stickiness of your bodies, the ear-splitting chopping of a motorcycle, the stench of exhaust and fried fish. Just stand here, together and happy, an island within an island within an island.
As the years go by, tell this story often. Tell it together, in loud voices robust with laughter, no matter how many people it mystifies or irritates. Marvel every time you recount these events, because you are telling them with someone who was there, and is still here.