Nico

nico´s father

i am not sure even of his name.

I met him once in a small village off the side of a road

Heading towards Haiti in the middle of sugar cane fields

In the middle of a valley of dark rich soil.

He was the father of Nico, a friend and roommate I had for

One summer in the Dominican Republic, I a volunteer in a

Coastal pueblo helping with literacy.

We had gone to visit his family. Beforehand he tells me, ¨My family has

Nothing.¨ Poverty was exotic to me, so I welcomed seven

Communal latrines, no water, a cinderblock church with

Kriol bibles, houses of sticks and palm fronds, boiled

Plantain and yucca for dinner.

We went to visit, to walk around, to meet the families sitting

On porches, the young men standing in circles smoking cigarettes, their

Black skin and lean bodies glistening in the night.

His father spoke little Spanish. He gave me his hand when

We walked inside his house, a small room in what once was

A dormitory for Haitians who cut sugar cane on the plantation of a

Santo Domingo aristocrat.

He gave me his hand and it was a jagged rock of calluses

And creases and I felt a life so tired.

He turned on the radio and Nico and I sat, not talking to his father,

Who slumped in front of us, weary.

We got up and walked some more, everything on my lips now—

Blood sweat dirt chickens rice rain sugar fire. I no longer wanted to know

His friends, their stories, their anger. We slept.

In the morning we swam in the river and got on the bus and went

Back across the valley to the beach and the pool and we drank

Presidente beer and I occasionally remember that night when I feel as

Lonely and lost as Nico´s father who cuts sugar cane and tends fields and

I am a world away.

His hands were so thickly callused from the machete,

His body bent. Nico and I walked the concrete steps to his house,

Jagged with rebar and holes, the sounds of his neighbors fighting, cooking,

Making love, mosquitoes buzzing, children crying, bachata music, a woman

Selling fried bananas. Head bent, waiting for dawn, the night air washing over

Him, over me.

It is the same sky, I think, here in El Salvador.

And my father? I look to the stars and find him tired like me, in a room with The radio on.