all having to do with food. In keeping with his name, Homero is the kind of companion you want to take with you on a journey. At first glance, he might not look the part—a family man with three young children, a wife, a government office job—but once he hits the road, he turns into a free spirit and bon vivant. He’ll show you a hell of a good time. And when need be, he can morph into Daniel in the lion’s den or undercover haggler finding you the best bargain on bribes going.
Vianela and her son, Nelson, on the road to Loma de Cabrera, sell us dulce en yagua, a kind of thick fudge made with milk, sugar, and any number of other ingredients (orange, cashew fruit, coconut), then wrapped in yagua, the husk shed by a palm tree. We buy one and a half pounds, and when she weighs the wedge on her old-fashioned hanging scale, she says, “Le falta conciencia para ser una y media.” It lacks a conscience to be one and a half pounds. I’m taken with this roadside moralist of what amounts to ounces. And maybe because we are so close to the border, I find myself wondering how such a fine moral sensibility would have responded to the 1937 massacre.
At Loma de Cabrera, we stop to watch casave being made the old-fashioned way by Luisa and her crew. It is a long, exacting, knuckle-scraping process. Now, most of the casave in the country is manufactured by machines in factorías. But here, we’re back to pre-Colombian time, when the island was named Quisqueya, meaning “Mother of all the Islands.” The casave rounds, as big as pizzas, are stacked up, appealingly irregular, which makes them look fresher, more homemade than the perfectly round packaged cakes, dry and crumbling, sold in the supermarket. Hanging from a rafter is an old leather purse, used as the cash register.
All around Luisa, boys and men are working at the different parts of the laborious process (from the peeling and washing of the yuca root, to the grinding, the first soaking, the second soaking, the forming of the cake, the patting on a burén —a round stone on which the casave is baked—the feeding of the fire, on and on). The hardest of all the jobs is the grinding, traditionally done by hand with many bleeding knuckles. (The grinding is the one part of the process that Luisa does do with a gasoline-powered grinder.) This stage is the source of the expression, “Estoy guayando la yuca.” I am grinding the yuca, you say, when you have been working bone-achingly hard. Even with a grinder, it is a sweaty, nasty job, with the generator belching out black smoke, each yuca having to be peeled and thrust into a huge maw, the pulp collected, rinsed, the water squeezed out by hand. Again, because Haiti is on my mind, I can’t help noticing how the lighter guys are up front in the retail area, doing the light work, whereas the darker boys—Haitians?—are in back, literally grinding the yuca.
This is one life I am living—stopping and chatting and learning about different artisan crafts and sampling the results. But all the while I am wondering about Piti and Eseline and Ludy. What are they going through right now? Is the Dramamine working? Has the baby fallen asleep? And more nerve-racking, have they successfully passed through the first checkpoint, the second, the third? I keep trying to call, but every time, I get the same recording: the person I am trying to reach is not available.
“He’s probably got it turned off,” Homero wagers. A cell phone ringing inside the bus might disturb fellow passengers. When you are breaking the law, you want to be inconspicuous.
Even on these back roads, we pass half a dozen military checkpoints. Usually it’s two or three guardias sitting under a shade tree, shooting the breeze, a motorcycle parked nearby, just in case they have to chase down a vehicle. As we approach, one of the guardias stands (do they take turns?), cranes his neck, sees three white faces and one light brown man, and waves us on. But at a couple
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