THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES
Ouanaminthe is the Haitian “creole” name for a town which the Spaniards
founded under the more euphonious title of Juana Mendez. It is the
eastern frontier station for those who travel overland by the northern
route from Haiti to Santo Domingo. We might have been stranded there
indefinitely but for the already familiar kindness of our
fellow-countrymen in uniform who are scattered throughout the negro
republic. Public conveyances are unknown in Ouanaminthe. Strangers are
more than rare, and the natives trust to their own broad, hoof-like
feet. Walking is all very well for a lone bachelor with no other cares
than a half-filled knapsack. But with a wife to consider, the long trail
loses something of its primitive simplicity; moreover there sat our
baggage staring us in the face with a contrite, don’t-abandon-me air. In
what would otherwise have been our sad predicament, Captain Verner,
commanding the gendarmérie of Ouanaminthe, came to our rescue most
delicately with the assertion that he had long been planning to run over
to Monte Cristi on a pressing matter of business.
The captain’s Ford—his own, be it noted in passing, lest some committee
of investigation prick up its ears—was soon swimming the frontier river
Massacre with that amphibian ease which the adaptable “flivver” quickly
acquires in the often bridgeless West Indies. The change from one
civilization to another—or should I call them two attempts toward
civilization?—was as sudden, as astonishingly abrupt, as the dash
through the apparently unfordable stream. Dajabón, strewn from the sandy
crest of the eastern bank to the arid plains beyond, reminded us at once
of Cuba; to my own mind it brought back the memory of hundreds of
Spanish-American towns scattered down the western hemisphere from the
Rio Grande to Patagonia. With one slight exception the island of Santo
Domingo is the only one in the New World that is divided between two
nationalities; it is the only one on earth, unless my geography be at
fault, where the rank and file speak two different languages. Yet the
shallow Massacre is as definite a dividing line as though it were a
hundred leagues of sea.
Unlike the Haitian shacks behind us, the dwellings of Dajabón were
almost habitable, even to the exacting Northern point of view. Instead
of tattered and ludicrously patched negroes of bovine temperament
lolling in the shade of as ragged hovels of palm-leaves and jungle
rubbish, comparatively well-dressed men and women, ranging in complexion
from light brown to pale yellow, sat in chairs on projecting verandas or
leaned on their elbows in open windows, staring with that fixed
attention which makes the most hardened stranger self-conscious in
Spanish-America, yet which, contrasted with the vacant black faces of
Haiti, was an evidence at least of human intelligence and curiosity. The
village girls, decked out in their Sunday-afternoon best, were often
attractive in appearance, some undeniably pretty, qualities which only
an observer of African ancestry could by any stretch of generosity grant
to the belles of the Haitian _bourgs_ behind us.
Even the change in landscape was striking. Whether the Spaniard
colonized by choice those regions which remind him of the dry and rarely
shaded plains of his own Castille and Aragón, or because he makes way
with a forest wherever he sees one, he is more apt than not to be
surrounded by bare, brown, semi-arid vistas. Haiti had, on the whole,
been densely wooded; luxuriant vegetation, plentifully watered, spread
away on every hand. The great plain that stretched out before us beyond
Dajabón was almost treeless; except for a scattering of withered, thorny
bushes, there was scarcely a growing thing. The rainfall that had been
so frequent in the land of the blacks behind us seemed not to have
crossed the frontier in months. In contrast to _caco_-impoverished
Haiti, large herds of cattle wandered about the brown immensity, or
huddled in the rare pretenses of shade; but what they found to feed on
was a mystery, for there was nothing in the scarce, scanty patches of
sun-burned herbage that could have been dignified with the name of
grass. Even where something resembling a forest appeared farther on it
turned out to be a dismal wilderness of dwarf trees with spiny trunks
and savage thorny branches without a suggestion of undergrowth or ground
plants beneath them. Dead, flat, monotonous, made doubly mournful by the
occasional moan of a wild dove, a more dreary, uninspiring landscape it
would be hard to imagine; the vista that spread away as far as the eye
could see seemed wholly uninviting to human habitation.
It must be an unpromising region, however, that does not produce at
least its crop of mankind. Clusters of thrown-together huts, little less
miserable in these rural districts, it must be admitted, than those of
Haiti, jolted past us now and then, their swarms of stark-naked children
of eight, ten, and even twelve years of age scampering out across the
broken, sun-hardened ground to see us pass. Yet in one respect at least
even these denizens of the wilderness were superior to their Haitian
prototypes—they really spoke their native language. Familiar as we had
both been for years with French, it was rare indeed that we got more
than the general drift of a conversation in Haitian “creole.” The most
uneducated _dominicano_, on the other hand, spoke a Spanish almost as
clear and precise as that heard in the streets of Madrid. There must be
something enduring, something that appeals to the most uncouth tongue,
in the Castilian language. Hear it where you will, in all the broad
expanse of Central and South America, in the former Spanish colonies of
the West Indies, from the lips of Indians, negroes, _mestizos_, or the
Jews of the Near East, banished from Spain centuries ago, with minor
variations of pronunciation and enriching of vocabulary from the tongues
it has supplanted, it retains almost its original purity. What a hybrid
of incomprehensible noises French, on the other hand, becomes in the
mouths of slaves and savages we had all too often had impressed upon us
in Haiti, and were due to have the lesson repeated in the French islands
of the Lesser Antilles. Even our own English cannot stand the wear and
tear of isolation and slovenly vocal processes with anything like the
success of the Castilian. The speech of Canada and of Barbados, closely
as those two lands are linked to the same mother country, seem almost
two distinct languages. But if the Dominicans spoke their language more
purely, their voices had none of the soft, almost musical tones of the
negroes beyond the Massacre. There was a brittle, metallic,
nerve-jarring twang to their speech that was almost as unpleasant as the
high-pitched chatter of Cuban women.
If we noted all these differences between the two divisions of the
island, there was another that impressed us far more forcibly at the
moment. In all our jolting over the roads of Haiti, good, bad, and
unspeakable, we had never once been delayed by so much as a puncture. In
the first mile out of Dajabón we were favored with four separate and
distinct blow-outs. The twenty-eight miles between the frontier and
Monte Cristi—for it is best to hear the worst at once—netted no fewer
than ten!
It was shortly after the fifth, if my memory is not failing, that the
open plain gave way to a thorn-bristling wilderness through which had
been cut a roadway a generous twenty feet wide—_shortly_ after
certainly, otherwise the sixth blow-out would have intervened. I use the
term roadway advisedly, for road there was really none. The Dominican
scorns the building of highways as thoroughly as do any of his cousins
of Spanish descent. With American intervention he was forced, much
against his will and better judgment, to divert a certain amount of
public moneys and labor to making wheeled communication between his
various provinces possible. But though you can drive an unbridled horse
along any open space, you cannot choose the path he shall make within
it. Wide as it was, the roadway was an unbroken expanse of deeply
cracked and thoroughly churned brown mud, sun-burned to the consistency
of broken rock. Along this the first traveler after the long forgotten
rains had squirmed and waded his way where the mud was shallowest, with
the result that the only semblance to a road wandered back and forth
across the misshapen roadway like a Spanish “river” in its ludicrously
over-ample bed.
Here and there we were forced to crawl along the extreme edge of one or
the other of the bristling walls of vegetation; frequently the only
passable trail left the roadway entirely and squirmed off through the
spiny forest, the thorny branches whipping us in the faces. Huge clumps
of organ cactus and others of the same family forced us to make
precarious detours. At the top of a faint rise we sighted the “Morro” of
Monte Cristi, a great bulking rectangular hill that guides the mariner
both by land and sea to the most western port of Santo Domingo. Our
hopes began slowly to revive when—“Groughung!” the sixth mishap befell
us—or was it the seventh? I remember that the eighth overtook us at the
bottom of the rise, when both daylight and our patches were giving out.
The ninth found us in total darkness, and disclosed the fact that there
was not a match on board. The lamps of the car had ceased to function
months before; one does not Ford it by night in the island of Santo
Domingo except upon extreme provocation. A hut discovered back in the
bush was likewise matchless, but the supper fire on the ground beside it
still had a few glowing embers. While Rachel held the blaze of one of
those dried hollow reeds that do duty as torches in Santo Domingo as
near us as was prudent, we improvised a patch that would have caused an
experienced chauffeur to gasp with astonishment. Each rustling of the
thorny brush about us drew our fixed attention. There are bandits in
Santo Domingo as well as in Haiti, and they have far less reputation for
making speed to the rear. The captain carried a revolver, an American
Marine being equally at home in either of the island republics. But the
danger of international complications had prevented his black gendarme
assistant from bringing with him the rifle that might be badly needed.
My visions of losing a congenial companion were vastly enhanced once
when a crashing in the bushes caused us to whirl about on the defensive.
A stray cow ambled past us and away into the black night.
[Illustration: The Plaza and clock tower of Monte Cristo, showing its
American bullet hole]
[Illustration: Railroading in Santo Domingo]
[Illustration: The tri-weekly train arrives at Santiago]
[Illustration: Dominican guardias]
With the tenth mishap, lightless and patchless, we lost the final
remnants of patience and forced our sorry steed to hobble along on three
feet. The road had a pleasant little way of eluding us when least
expected, and a dozen times within the next hour we brought up against
the forest wall, finding our way again only by the sense of touch. Then
at last appeared a flicker of light. But it was only the hamlet on the
bank of the River Yaque, across which we must be ferried on what looked
in the darkness like the top of a soap-box. Fortunately it takes little
to float a Ford. Our crippled charger staggered up the steep bank beyond
this principal stream of northern Santo Domingo, and a half hour later
we rattled into the considerable town of Monte Cristi.
Its streets were as wide as the hilltop roadway behind us, but like it
they had only reached the first stage of development. Worst of all we
were forced to run the full length of nearly every one of them in the
vain quest of some suggestion of hostelry. Our predicament would have
been one to bring salt tears to the most hardened eyes but for the
saving grace of all the island of Santo Domingo—our own people in
uniform. Barely had we discovered the commander-in-chief of Monte
Cristi, a Marine captain bearing the name of one of our early and
illustrious Presidents, than he broke all records in hospitality within
our own experience by turning his entire house over to us. We were never
more firmly convinced of the wisdom of American intervention in Santo
Domingo than at the end of that explosive day.
* * * * *
The otherwise dark and deserted town was gathered in its best starched
attire in the place where any Spanish-American town would naturally be
on a Sunday evening—in the central plaza. This, to begin with, was
strikingly unlike the bare open squares of Haiti, with their unfailing
tribune-and-palm-tree “patrie.” First of all, it was well paved, an
assertion that could not be made of any other spot in town. An elaborate
iron fence surrounded it, comfortable benches were ranged about it,
trees and flowering shrubs shaded it by day and decorated it by night,
the only public lights in town cast an unwonted brilliancy upon the
promenading populace, circling slowly round and round the square, the
two sexes in opposite directions, their voices and footsteps half
drowning the not too successful efforts of a group of misfitted males in
the center of the plaza to produce musical sounds. It was as typically
Spanish a scene as the deserted barren _place_, with the weird beating
of tomtoms floating across it, is indigenous to the republic of Haiti.
It was not until morning, however, that we caught full sight of the
chief feature of the plaza and the pride of Monte Cristi. By daylight a
monument we had only vaguely sensed in the night stood forth in all its
dubious beauty. In the center of the now deserted plaza rose a near
replica of the Eiffel Tower, its open-work steel frame crowned by a
large four-faced clock some fifty feet above our dizzy heads. Well might
the Monte Cristians pride themselves on a feature quite unique among the
plazas of the world.
From this clock tower hangs a tale that is too suggestive of Dominican
character to be passed over in silence. Some years ago, before the
intrusive Americans came to put an end to the national sport, a
candidate for the Dominican Congress came parading his candidacy about
the far corners of the country. In each town he promised, in return for
their aid in seating him in the august assembly, that the citizens
should have federal funds for whatever was most lacking to their civic
happiness. Monte Cristi, being farthest from the cynical capital of any
community in Santo Domingo, took the politician seriously. The town put
its curly heads together and decided that what it most wanted was—not a
real school building to take the place of the rented hut in which its
children fail to learn the rudiments of the three R’s, nor yet pavements
for some of the sandhills that are disguised under the name of streets.
What it felt the need of more than anything else was a town clock that
would cast envy on all its rivals for many miles around. The politician
approved the choice so thoroughly that he advised the opening of
negotiations for its purchase at once, without waiting for the mere
formality of congressional sanction. In due time the monstrosity was
erected. But for some reason the newly elected congressman’s influence
with his fellow-members was not so paramount as his faithful supporters
had been led to believe. Some of them still contend that he did actually
introduce a resolution to provide the noble and patriotic pueblo of
Monte Cristi with a prime necessity in the shape of a community
time-piece; if so the bill died in committee, unattended by priest or
physician. For months Monte Cristi bombarded the far-off capital with
doleful petitions, until at length, with the sudden coming of the
Americans, congress itself succumbed, and the two thousand or so good
citizens of the hapless town found themselves face to face with a
document—bearing a foreign place of issue at that, caramba!—reading
succinctly:
“To one clock and tower, Dr........$16,000
_Please Remit_”
To cap the climax, the ridiculous Americans who had taken in charge the
revenues of the country brought with them the absurd doctrine that
municipalities should pay their bills. Years have passed since the
successful politician visited the northwest corner of the country, yet
Monte Cristi is only beginning to crawl from beneath its appalling clock
tower, financially speaking, and to catch its breath again after relief
from so oppressive a burden. Small wonder that her sand-hill streets are
unpaved and that her children still crowd into a rented hovel to glean
the rudiments of learning.
But the history of the famous clock tower does not end there. Those who
glance at the top-heavy structure from the south are struck by a jagged
hole just above the face of the dial, midway between the XII and the I.
It is so obviously a bullet-hole that the observer could not fail to
show surprise were it not that bullet-holes are as universal in Santo
Domingo as fighting cocks. Thereby hangs another tale.
In the early days of American occupation the choice of commanders of the
_Guardia Nacional_ detachment in Monte Cristi was not always happy. It
was natural, too, that a group of marine officers, bubbling over with
youth, sentenced to pass month after month in a somnolent Dominican
village, should have found it difficult to devise fitting amusement for
their long leisure hours. Pastimes naturally reduced themselves to the
exchange of poker chips and the consumption of certain beverages
supposedly taboo in all American circles and doubly so in the Marine
Corps. The power of Dominican joy-water to produce hilarity is
far-famed. It came to be the custom of the winning card player to
express his exuberance by drawing his automatic and firing several shots
over his head. This means of expression would have been startling enough
to the disarmed Dominicans had the games been played in the open air
with the sun above the horizon. But the rendezvous was naturally within
doors, usually in the dwelling of the commander, and the climax was
commonly reached at an hour when all reputable natives were wrapped in
slumber. The sheet-iron roof that sheltered us during our night in Monte
Cristi corroborated the testimony of the inhabitants that they had
frequently sprung from their beds convinced that yet another revolution
was upon them.
One night a difference of opinion arose among the players as to the hour
that should be set for the cashing in of chips. The commander offered to
settle the problem in an equitable manner. Stepping to the door, he
raised his automatic toward the famous $16,000 clock and fired. The
decision was made; the game ended at twelve:thirty. It is not
particularly strange under the circumstances that the inhabitants of
Monte Cristi are not extraordinarily fond of Americans or of marine
occupation.
* * * * *
The mail coach—in real life the inevitable Ford—left Monte Cristi the
morning after our arrival, obviating the necessity of wiring to Santiago
for a private car. The fare was within reason, as such things go in the
West Indies—sixteen dollars for a journey of some eighty miles—and
despite the pessimistic prophecies of our host we had the back seat to
ourselves the entire distance. Our driver, of dull-brown hue, was of the
same quick, nervous temperament as his Cuban cousins, and scurried away
at thirty miles an hour over “roads” which few American chauffeurs would
venture along at ten. Yet he was surprisingly successful in avoiding
undue jolts; so often had he driven this incredibly rough-and-tumble
route that he knew exactly when and where to slow up for each dry
_arroyo_, to dodge protruding boulders or dangerous sand beds, to drop
from one level to another without cracking a spring or an axle. The
machine was innocent of muffler, hence it needed no horn, and as an
official conveyance it yielded the road to no one, except the few placid
carts whose safety lay in their massiveness.
Many miles of the journey were sandy barren wastes producing only dismal
thorn-bristling dwarf forests. Every now and then we dodged from one
wide caricature of a road to another still more choppy and rock-strewn;
occasionally we found a mile or two of tolerable highway. The scarcity
of travelers was in striking contrast to Haiti. The few people we met
were never on foot, but in clumsy carts or astride gaunt, but hardy,
little horses. Houses of woven palm-leaves, on bare, reddish, hard soil
sheltered the poorer inhabitants; the better-to-do built their dwellings
of split palm trunks that had the appearance of clapboards. Villages
were rare, and isolated houses wholly lacking. Outdoor mud ovens on
stilts, with rude thatched roofs over them, adorned nearly every back or
side yard. At each village we halted before a roughly constructed post
office to exchange mailbags with a postmaster who in the majority of
cases showed no visible negro strain. Pure white inhabitants were
frequent in the larger pueblos; full-blooded African types extremely
rare. Santo Domingo has been called a mulatto country; we found it more
nearly a land of quadroons.
What even the sparse population lived on was not apparent, for almost
nowhere were people working in the fields, and the towns seemed to be
chiefly inhabited by fairly well-dressed loafers, or at best by lolling
shop-keepers. Probably they existed by selling things to one another.
The stocks of the over-numerous shops were amply supplied with bottled
goods, but with comparatively little else, and that chiefly tinned food
from the United States. No old sugar kettles, no ruined French estates,
no negro women in broad straw hats or slippers flapping with the gait of
their donkeys, no improvised markets or clamoring beggars along the
way—none of the familiar things of Haiti were in evidence, except the
fighting cocks. Such horsemen as we passed rode in well upholstered
saddles, doubly softened by the Spanish-American _pellon_, or shaggy
saddle rug. The women accompanying them clung uncomfortably to clumsy
side-saddles, and were dressed in far more style than their Haitian
prototypes, pink gowns being most in favor, and in place of the loose
slippers the majority wore shoes elaborate enough to satisfy a New York
shop-girl. Cemeteries at the edge of each town were forests of wooden
crosses, contrasting with the coffin-shaped cement tombs of Haiti.
Guayovin, a town of considerable size and noted for its revolutionary
history, the scattered hamlet of Laguna Salada, the larger village of
Esperanza, one pueblo after another was the same blurred vista of wide,
sandy streets, of open shop fronts and gaping inhabitants. We soon
detected a surly attitude toward Americans, a sullen, passive resentment
that recalled the attitude of Colombia as I had known it eight years
before. There was more superficial courtesy than in our own brusk and
hurried land; the Dominican, like all our neighbors to the southward,
cultivates an exterior polish. But with the exception of a few who went
out of their way to demonstrate their pro-American sentiments, to
express themselves as far more pleased with foreign occupation than with
the continual threat of revolution, the attitude of silent protest was
everywhere in the air.
At the end of fifty kilometers, in which we had forded only one pathetic
little stream, the landscape changed somewhat for the better, though at
the same time the “road” became even more atrocious. Hitherto the only
beauty in the scene had been a pretty little flowering cactus bush, like
an inverted candelabra, and the soft velvety colors of the barren brown
vistas. Now the thorny vegetation, the chaparral, and the cactus gave
way to clumps of bamboo, to towering palms, and other trees of full
stature, while corn and beans began to clothe the still deadly-dry soil.
High hills had arisen close on the left, higher ones farther off to the
right; then ahead appeared beautiful labyrinths of deep-blue mountains,
range after range piled up one behind the other in amphitheatrical
formation, culminating in the cloud-coiffed peak of Tino, some ten
thousand feet above the sea and the highest point in the West Indies.
Navarrete, strung along the beginning of an excellent highway that was
to continue, except for two unfinished bridges, to Santiago, boasted
real houses, some of palm trunks, most of them of genuine lumber with
more corrugated iron than thatched roofs, some of their walls of faded
pink, green, or yellow, many of them frankly unpainted. A considerable
commercial activity occupied its inhabitants. Beyond, the country grew
still greener, with groves of royal palms waving their ostrich plumes
with the dignified leisureliness of the tropics, and the highway began
to undulate, or, as it seemed to us behind our over-eager chauffeur, to
pitch and roll, over low foot-hills. We picked up a rusty little
railroad on the left, farther on a power line and a dozen telegraph
wires striding over hill and dale, raced at illegal speed through Villa
Gonzalez, and entered a still more verdant region of vegetable gardens
in fertile black soil. Then all at once we topped a rise from which
spread out all the splendid green valley of Yaque, Santiago de los
Caballeros piled up a sloping high ground a couple of miles away, with
mountains that had grown to imposing height still far distant to the
right. A truck-load of marines, monopolizing the right of way in the
innocently obstructive manner we had often seen in France, blocked our
progress for a time; then we swung past the inevitable shaded plaza of
all Spanish-American towns, and drew up with a snort at the Santiago
post office just as the cathedral clock was striking the hour of three.
* * * * *
Before we had time even to set foot in Santiago we were greeted by my
old friend “Lieutenant Long” of Canal Zone police fame, who had already
put the town in a proper mood for our reception. Since the days when we
had pursued felons together along the ten-mile strip of Panamanian
jungle the erstwhile lieutenant, now more fittingly known as “Big
George,” had added steadily to his laurels as a good and true servant of
mankind. From the defelonized banks of the canal to the command of the
sleuths of Porto Rico had been a natural step, and when he had detected
everything worth detecting in our West Indian isle, and fathered a
company of the 17th Infantry during the late international
misunderstanding, “Big George” accepted the Augean task of initiating
the Dominicans into the mysteries of their new American-sired land tax.
Considerably more than four hundred years ago, when the redskin north of
the Rio Grande had yet to scalp his initial pale face, there was founded
in the fertile valley of the Yaque the first of the many Santiagos that
to-day dot the map of more than half the western hemisphere. Thirty
Spanish gentlemen, as the word was understood in those roistering days,
_hidalgos_ who had followed on the heels of Columbus, were the original
settlers, and because of their noble birth they were permitted by royal
decree to call their new home by the name it still officially
bears,—Santiago de los Caballeros. Although the present inhabitants of
the aristocratic old town by no means all boast themselves “gentlemen”
either in the _conquistador_ or the modern sense of the term, some of
the leading families can trace their ancestry in unbroken line from
those old Spanish hidalgos. Many of these descendants of fifteenth
century grandees still retain the armor, swords, and other quaint
warlike gear of their ancestors. A few have even kept their Caucasian
blood pure through all the generations and frequent disasters of that
long four hundred years, but the vast majority of them give greater or
less evidence of African graftings on the family tree. The Cibao, as the
northern half of Santo Domingo is called, is the region in which the
Spaniards first found in any quantity the gold they came a-seeking, and
gentlemanly Santiago has ever been its principal city. Twice destroyed
by earthquakes, like so many cities of the West Indies, sacked by
pirates and invaders more times than it cares to remember, it has
persisted through all its mishaps.
But in spite of its flying start Santiago has by no means kept pace with
many a parvenu in the New World. Barely can it muster twenty thousand
inhabitants, and in progress and industry it has drifted but slowly down
the stream of time. Revolutions have been its chief setback, for the
innumerable civil wars that have decimated the population of the
republic ever since it asserted its freedom from the Spanish crown have
almost invariably centered about the city of caballeros. A hundred
Spanish-American towns can duplicate its every feature. About the
invariable central plaza, with its shaded benches, diagonal walks, and
evening promenaders, stand the bulking, weather-peeled cathedral with
its constantly thumping, tin-voiced bells, the _casa consistorial_ where
the municipal council dawdles through its weekly meetings, the wide open
yet exclusive clubs, and the residences of the most ancient families,
their lower stories occupied by shops and cafés. In contrast to this
proudly kept square the wide, right-angled streets that radiate from it
are either congenitally innocent of paving or littered with the remnants
of what may long ago have been cobbled driveways. As in all
Spanish-America the lack of civic team-work is shown in the sidewalks;
which are high, low, ludicrously narrow, or lacking entirely, according
to the personal whim of each householder, and rather family porches than
public rights of way. Its houses, mostly of one story, never higher than
two, are something more than half of wood, the remainder being adobe or
baked-mud structures that some time in the remote past had their façades
daubed with whitewash or scantily painted in various bright colors. The
cathedral, the municipal building, many a private residence, our very
hotel room were speckled with bullet-holes more or less diligently
patched, corroborating the verbal evidence of Santiago’s revolutionary
activities. There is a faint reminder of the Moors in the tendency for
each trade to monopolize one street to the exclusion of the others. A
dozen barbershops may be found in a single block, cafés cluster
together, drygoods shops with their languid male clerks shoulder one
another with a certain degree of leisurely, unindividualistic
aggressiveness. Farther out, the unkempt streets dwindle away between
lop-shouldered little huts that seem to need the supporting mutual
assistance shared by their neighbors nearer the center of town.
There is not a street car in all the island of Santo Domingo, or Haiti,
as you choose to call it. Dingy, wretched old carriages, their horses
only a trifle less gaunt and ungroomed than those of Port au Prince,
loiter about a corner of the plaza, behind the cathedral, shrieking
their pleas at every possible fare who passes within their field of
vision. Automobiles are not unknown, but they have not yet invaded
Santiago in force. The inevitable venders of lottery tickets, which in
Santo Domingo are of municipal rather than national issue and resemble
the handbills of some itinerant family of barn-stormers, pester the
passer-by every few yards with spurious promises of sudden fortune. In
the cathedral the visitor finds himself face to face at every step with
admonitions that women must have their heads covered and that worshipers
shall not spit on the floor. The first command is universally
recognized, if only by the spreading of a handkerchief over the frizzled
tresses, but the latter is by no means so faithfully obeyed. If there is
anything whatever individualistic about St. James of the Gentlemen that
distinguishes it from its countless cousins below the Rio Grande, it is
the stars and stripes that wave above the ancient fortress overlooking
the placid River Yaque, and the groups of American marines who come now
and then striding down its untended streets.
The average santiagueño reaches the dignity of clothes somewhat late in
life. Naked black or brown babies adorn every block, the sight of a
plump boy of five taking his constitutional dressed in a pair of
sandals, a bright red hat, and a magnificent expression of unconcern
attracts the attention of no one except strangers. Girls show the
prudery of their sex somewhat earlier in life, but many a boy learns to
smoke cigarettes, and even long black cigars, before he submits to the
inconvenience of his first garment. It may be this sartorial freedom of
his earlier life that makes the Santiago male prone to sport a costume
that belies his years. Youths of sixteen, eighteen, and some one might
easily suspect of being twenty, display an expanse of brown legs between
their tight knee-breeches and short socks that makes their precocious
tendency to frequent cafés, consume fiery drinks and man-size cigars,
and _enamorar las muchachas_ doubly striking. They are intelligent
youths, on the whole, compared with their Haitian neighbors, with a
quick wit to catch a political argument or the mysteries of a mechanical
contrivance, though they have the tendency of all their mixed race to
slow down in their mental processes soon after reaching what with us
would be early manhood. _La juventud_ of Santo Domingo is beginning to
look with slightly less scorn upon the use of the hands as a means of
livelihood, an improvement which may be largely credited to American
occupation, not so much through precept and example as by the reduction
in political sinecures and the institution of genuine examinations for
candidates to government office.
In character, as in physical aspect, Santiago is true to type. The
outward forms of politeness are diligently cultivated; actual, physical
consideration for the comfort or convenience of others is conspicuous by
its scarcity. The same man who raises his hat to and shakes hands with
his neighbor ten times a day shows no hesitancy in maintaining any
species of nuisance, from a bevy of fighting cocks to a braying jackass,
against the peace and happiness of that same neighbor, nor in hugging a
house-wall when it is his place to take to the gutter. A haughtiness of
demeanor, an over-developed personal pride that it would be difficult to
find real reason for, burden all except the most poverty-stricken class.
Amid the medley of tints that make up the population the casual observer
might conclude that the existence of a color-line would be out of the
question in Santiago. As he dips beneath the surface, however, he finds
a very decided one, nay, several, dividing the population not into two,
but into three or four social strata, though the lines of demarkation
are neither as distinct nor as adamant as with us. Thus one of the
tile-floored clubs on the central plaza, the chair-forested parlor of
which stands ostensibly wide open, admits no member whose ancestry has
not been unbrokenly Caucasian, while another across the square welcomes
neither pure whites nor full-blooded Africans. An amusing feature of
this club exclusiveness is that the first society, after what is said to
have been violent debate, declined to admit American members, as a
protest against “the unwarranted interference by superior force in our
national affairs.” In retaliation, or rather, in supreme indifference to
this attitude, the forces of occupation have acquired the premises next
door and take no back seat to the Dominicans in the matter of
exclusiveness. It may be the merest coincidence that whenever a dance is
given in the American clubrooms a still more blatant orchestra, seated
close up against the thin partition between the two social rendezvous,
furnishes the inspiration for a similar recreation.
The principal business of Santiago, if one may judge by the frequent
warehouse doors from which issues the acrid smell of sweating tobacco,
is the buying and selling of the narcotic weed. It comes in great bales,
wrapped in _yagua_, or the thick, leathern leaf-stem of the royal palm,
of which each tree sheds one a month and which is turned to such a
variety of uses throughout the West Indies. Women and boys are
constantly picking these bales apart and strewing their contents about
in various heaps, to just what purpose is not apparent to the layman,
for they always end by bundling them up again in the self-same _yagua_,
in which dusky draymen carry them off once more to parts unknown. A
considerable amount of the stuff is consumed locally, however, for
Santiago boasts one large cigar factory and a number of small ones,
ranging down to one-room hovels in which the daily output could probably
be contained within two boxes—were it not the custom in Santo Domingo
simply to tie them in bundles.
The smoker must conduct himself with circumspection in American-governed
Santo Domingo. Each and every cigar is wrapped round not only with the
usual banded trademark, but also with a revenue stamp. Now beware that
you do not indulge that all but universal American habit of removing the
band before lighting the cigar. In Santo Domingo it is unlawful to
withdraw this proof of legal origin until the weed has been “partially
consumed,” and the official expert ruling on that phrase is that the
clipping off of the consumer’s end does not constitute even partial
consumption, which only the burning of a certain portion of the
customarily, opposite extremity, accomplishes. Furthermore, when at last
you do venture to remove the decoration, do not on any account fail to
mutilate it beyond all semblance to its original state. If you are
detected in the perpetration of either of the unlawful acts above
specified, no power can save you from falling into the hands of “Mac,”
who sits in the same office with “Big George”—whenever one or both of
them are not pursuing similar malefactors in another corner of the
Cibao—facing the charge of unlawfully, wilfully, and maliciously
violating Article 12 of the Internal Revenue Law of the sovereign
República Dominicana, and there is no more certain road to the
prisoner’s dock.
But I am getting ahead of my story. “Mac” will make his official entry
all in due season. What I started to explain was why one may frequently
behold an elephantine Dominican market woman, often with a brood of
piccaninnies half concealed in the folds of her ample skirt, parading
down the street with the air of a New York clubman in spite of the
bushel or two of yams or plantains on her head, puffing haughtily at a
cigar the band of which falsely suggests that she has recently
squandered a dollar bill with her tobacconist. Indeed, many an
over-cautious Dominican avoids all possibility of falling into the net
by smoking serenely on through band, stamp, and all, which, to tell the
truth, does not particularly depreciate the aroma of the average native
cigar.
There is sound basis for Article 12. In the good old days when there
were no battalions of marines to interfere with the national sport of
Santo Domingo the stamp tax was already in force, and the consumption of
cigars was almost what it is to-day; yet for some occult reason it
scarcely produced a tenth of its present revenue. First of all there
were the “chivo” cigars,—_chivo_ meaning not merely goat but something
corresponding to our word “graft” in the Spanish West Indies—which never
made any pretense of bearing a stamp. Some of them were made secretly; a
veritable pillar of the social structure of Santo Domingo was discovered
to be operating a clandestine cigar-factory long after the Americans
took up this particular bit of the white man’s burden. Others were
privately placed on the market by legitimate manufacturers, who supplied
a certain percentage of legal stock also. A third scheme was to fill the
pockets of the native inspector with a choice brand and advise him to
forget the matter; still another alternative was to buy the stamps at a
bargain from some revenue official who was hard pressed for ready cash.
But the favorite means of avoiding contributions to the wily politicians
in the capital was simplicity itself. A cigar-maker purchased a hundred
revenue stamps and wrapped them about his first hundred cigars. His
retailer, who might be himself, his wife, his cousin, or at least his
_compadre_, greeted the purchaser with a smiling countenance. “Cigars?
Why certainly. Try these. _Cómo va la señora hoy?_ _Y los niños?_
Curious exhibition that fourth pair of cocks gave on Sunday, _verdad?_”
Bargains are not struck hastily in Santo Domingo. By the time the
transaction was completed the retailer had ample opportunity idly to
slip the bands off the cigars and drop them into his counter drawer. The
purchaser made no protest, even if he noticed the manipulation, for he
was buying cigars, not revenue stamps. It is vouched for that the same
band saw continual service in the old days for a year or two. But it is
a careless smoker to-day who ventures to thrust a cigar into his pocket
without making sure that its proof of legality is intact.
* * * * *
“Big George” arranged that we should spend the first Sunday after our
arrival in the most typical Dominican style of celebration,—the
partaking of _lechón asado_. His choice of scene for the celebration,
too, was particularly happy. An hour’s easy jog from town—easy because
the saddle-horses of Santo Domingo, like those of Cuba, are all
“gaited,” that is, gifted with a singlefoot pace that makes them as
comfortable seats as any rocking-chair—brought us to the estate of
Jaragua, the exact site of the first founding of Santiago by the
Castilian _hidalgos_. It was the first earthquake that caused them to
transfer it from this heart of the valley to the bluff overlooking the
Yaque. The ruins of an old brick-and-stone church, of a water reservoir
or community bath, and long lines of stones embedded in the ground
marking the remnants of cobbled streets and house walls, are half
covered with the brush and jungle-grass of a modern hog farm.
Magnificent royal palms rise from what were once private family nooks;
immense tropical trees spread over former parlors more charming roofs
than their original coverings of thatch; the pigs frequently root up
ancient coins that may long ago have jingled in Columbus’ own pocket.
Under the dense, capacious shade of a fatherly old mango-tree sat a
negro peon, slowly turning round and round over a fire of specially
chosen, aromatic fagots a suckling pig, or _lechón_, spitted on a long
bamboo pole. In the outdoor kitchen of the rambling, one-story,
tile-roofed, delightful old Spanish country house a group of ebony
servants of both sexes and all ages were preparing a dozen other native
dishes the mere aroma of which made a hungry man withdraw to leeward and
await the summons with what patience he could muster. Our host and his
family, with just enough African tinge to their ancestry to make their
hair curl, hurried hither and yon, striving to minister to our already
perfect comfort. There is no more genuine hospitality than that of the
higher class _hacendados_ of rural Latin-America, once they have cast
aside the mixture of shyness and rather oppressive dignity in which they
commonly wrap themselves before strangers.
In due leisurely season the chief victim of the day’s feast, his
mahogany skin crackling from the recent ordeal, bathed in his own tender
juices, was slid down the bamboo pole to a giant platter and given the
place of honor on the family board. Flanked on all sides by the results
of the kitchen industry,—heaping plates of steamed yuca, mashed yams
bristling with native peppers, boiled calabash, plump _boniatos_, golden
Spanish chick-peas, even a Brobdingnagian beefsteak—and these in turn by
the now thoroughly congenial hosts and guests, a barefoot, wide-eyed
servant behind every other chair, the celebration began. Spanish wines
which one would never have credited with finding their way to this
far-off corner of the New World turned the big bucolic tumblers red and
golden in perhaps too rapid succession. Dominican tales of the olden
times, American pleasantries reclothed in rattling Castilian,
reminiscences of Haitian occupation from the still bright-eyed
grandmother, all rose in a babel of hilarity that floated away through
the immense open doorways on the delightful trade winds that sweep
constantly over the West Indies. But alas for the brevity of human
appetite! Long before the center of attraction had lost his resemblance
to the eager little rooter of the day before, while the Gargantuan
beefsteak still sat intact, eyeing the circle with a neglected air, one
after another of the sated convivialists was beckoning away with a
scornful gesture of disinterest the candied and spiced papaya which the
servants were bent on setting before him. What, too, shall I say of the
dastardly conduct of “Big George?” For with his help the _lechón_, nay,
even the neglected beefsteak, might have been reduced to more seemly
proportions before they were abandoned to the eager fingers of the
gleaming-toothed denizens of the kitchen. The painful truth is that the
defelonizer of Porto Rico, the erstwhile dread of Canal Zone criminals,
the man who had so often given a “summary” to a hapless member of the
17th Infantry for being a moment late at reveille, was absent without
leave. Even “Mac,” with his whole family of little Mackites, their
chubby faces giving a touch of old Erin to this Dominican landscape, had
arrived on the scene at the crucial moment. What excuse, then, can one
fabricate for an unhampered bachelor whose seven-league legs might have
covered the paltry distance between new and old Santiago in a twinkling,
yet who had chosen to desert his bidden guests in the heart of a
bandit-infested island? Can even poetic license pardon a man,
particularly a man who dents the lintels of half the doors he passes
through, who remains at home to write sonnets when he might be partaking
of _lechón asado?_ Certainly the admission of such irrelevant testimony
as the fact that the horse furnished him by an unobserving Dominican was
not capable of lifting clear of the ground the seven-league legs already
stigmatized cannot rank even as extenuating circumstances.