Macao Village, Dominican Republic
‘Iye, iye, iye,’ they cried.
A skinny kid wearing a YSL belt that held up the trousers of his funeral suit played a bamboo trumpet. It wailed above the revving scooters and pounding drums. The sun flashed on his belt buckle. His eyes were too big for his head. Perspiration stippled his temples, just like Joubert’s.
Spirits didn’t mind the heat, thought Joubert, in fact it gave them flight. He gripped the sweaty hand of his wife, trying not to outstep her in his ill-fitting shoes, and she squeezed back without looking. The funeral procession threaded past a broken concrete wall along the rock-strewn road beneath a blistering sun, heading for the crematorium just a block from Baptiste’s Holiday Auto Rental (We wish you Happy Rides!). A flaking billboard declared ‘Texaco for life’ and featured a smiling white man filling up a Toyota. The motley crowd kicked up a dust that choked the nostrils and smelled of gasoline. The sun glared down, producing a hostile, arid heat that parched throats and minds.
Still, they sang.
Music filled the air—a band played a rara parade with drums that beat a tattoo to the rhythm of a pulse inside Joubert’s head. Behind them the tourist SUVs and saloons backed up, ponderous and snarling as they bounced over speed ramps or weaved around potholes. A bony bitch with teats like buttons trotted beside the band barking at the drummers, and an old man sat on his step and waved at the children in their oversized formal clothes. Fotina might have been one of those children if she had lived.
The coffin was small, glossy and white. It had cost more than a month’s takings at Joubert’s beach restaurant. He couldn’t see why it cost so much, but Fotina was his only daughter and this would be her only funeral. He oozed sweat in the black jacket borrowed from his brother, a waiter at the Paradise Club—smaller than him by six inches. The sleeves were an inch too short and the fabric made his skin itch.
The banzas twanged as the band struck up ‘Pran Kwa Mwen’ (Take Care of Me) in Haitian Creole and everyone knew the words, which rose defiantly in a wave of timbres, especially: ‘Nou tout se moun sou late e’ (we are all people on the sidelines). Some women moved their hips and clapped. ‘Iye, iye, iye,’ they cried. Tambourines jangled like loose change, while high above the speck of a drone buzzed along to the music—an unwelcome guest. They didn’t want an incident—didn’t want it recorded on El Periodica for everyone to read about. He was conflicted too: even he didn’t want to frighten away the tourist dollars brought here by the ocean and the beaches. The ocean giveth and the ocean taketh away. Tooketh away his daughter, he parodied—looking down at the dirt as he shambled along beside his wife. If only the ocean could speak up for itself. He was no eco-warrior nor was meant to be. A simple man.
On the sidelines.
Joubert kicked a discarded plastic bottle that went scuttling to the kerb between the legs of the mourners. His wife shot him an angry look, grief carved in the lines on her face. Only the little people were on the sidelines, like in the song, reflected Joubert. The big people drove SUVs and dumped seaweed from their flashy beach resorts to rot where it poisoned the people on the sidelines. It was tourism that killed Fotina, and tourism that paid for her funeral.
Joubert brushed away the first and the last tear of the day.
‘Take care of me,’ sang the mourners.
