Cave des Oubliette, scene 2.

That tight, hollow ache in her chest starting filling with strenuous palpitations. She noticed her fists were clenched. As she loosened her grip and stroked her hot clammy palms, she gave herself a little pep talk.

"You can do this, Cybol," she thought. "You were made for this moment. Don't blow it. Be yourself."

The voice of her mother and father, berating and encouraging.

She fell back into the booth, slinking into the cover of the unlighted boundary. Mindlessly, she raised her hand to her face and cupped her lower jaw, delicately dabbing her cheek. This unconscious habit always followed the sudden anxious flutter that flushed her cheeks and sent a hot chill down her arms.

He hadn't spoken again. How long had they been silent? She turned her faced to the entrance, still cradling her cheek and could just make out the corner of a window to confirm that it was still morning.

He hadn't moved. He watched her shift and relaxed at her subtle self-conscious movements. He knew women. He smiled as her pale, slender fingers passed through the amber light and reach toward her face. When she turned her head, her hair, clumsily pulled into a loose twist flashed from behind the darkness, a crimson, copper red. His dream flooded back into his memory and filled him up.

That red hair. It was loose and fell down her back. Her skin wasn't pale, but iridescent; not reflecting the light, but somehow, emanating it. Though at first her visits were ethereal and filled his mind with a voice that carried wisdom and inspiration, it wasn't long before they became sexual. It didn't take long for anything to become sexual in his life. Women were always drawn to his inner fury, an insatiable, incendiary passion that inevitably destroyed every moth to the flame.

He sat, silent, regretting his last confession. He didn't want to tell her. He watched her sip on her scotch again. He waited for her to speak.

"I hadn't thought of that. It didn't occur to me that you would be told of me as well. Do you know my name?"

"No."

He folded deeper into the memory of those vivid dreams. Had he heard a name? Sigh. He heard himself call out, "Sigh."

Her long fingers coiled around the highball glass and her left forearm stretched over the sticky brown table. With the instinct of a familiar lover, he let his right hand fall over hers, the thick expanse of it covering it completely.

"Sigh?"

She leaned forward. He followed suit. He watched her green eyes flash fiercely with betrayal.

"Only my mother calls me that, Cy. My name is Cybol. And, you're Vincent."

La Dominicana

She speaks to me. Every day I hear some new aspect of her being, crying out to me. She wants to be written. She wants me to tell her story.

She was born into poverty on the sugar cane fields, the neglected third child of five. She compulsively sought out hiding places. She would sit in darkness, letting the images of her mind overtake the shadows shrouding her. She stole chalk from the schoolhouse, lipstick from her mother, anything she could find to paint her world. She drew on the adobe walls of her secret nook under the house. She drew on the stone pillars that kept it off the ground, away from the insects. She scraped faces in the sand with a stick, the faces of a happy children. She plucked flowers, staring at them in silence for hours.

It wasn't until a few years after puberty that she became aware of her beauty. Older men would touch her in the street as she ran errands for her mother. Local artists would sell their paintings at the docks. She always passed longingly, so many colors. She received her first paintbrush and bottle of tomato red paint from a man whom she let see her newly formed breasts. When she became wise to this ancient bartering system, she collected sixteen different colors, three brushes and a canvas she used over and over again. She learned that the less she gave them, the more they wanted and the more worth she accrued.

By the time she was eighteen two of her sisters had died of pneumonia, and her father was weakened beyond the ability to work. She provided for her family through the only trade and talent she knew. It wasn't prostitution, not like those dirty, diseased women on the streets cackling at passers-by. She was a companion to lonely men, unhappy men, with only their money to show for a long wasted life, which they were only too happy to shower upon her. Her mother shamed aloud her each night as she prayed to Sta. Maria over the meal that her sin procured. Though she kept little money for herself, what she did take, she spent on painting supplies.

She took her work to the docs each weekend, the only woman with the audacity to merchant her work in such a way. But, she had long since abandoned listening to the interminable whispers and snide hissing from the townspeople. Occasionally, she sold a painting to one of the tourists that had arrived on the boats from Miami to Santa Domingo. The paintings of calla lilies, fishing boats, and broad views of the cane fields with the mountains towering majestically in the background always sold better. But, she really loved painting the old women who sat on the stoops in front of their blue doors chewing sugar canes, the drunken men collapsed in front of the market still passed out the morning after, children clustered ominously around the tour buses begging for an American Dollar. These paintings never sold, but they freed her.

She knew she could never marry, women of her kind, never did. She had offers, certainly, but they were not sincere, only half-hearted musings of men desperate for her sex. She was in love once. A painter who often discussed art with her for long hours. They would make love in the cane fields and he would paint her nude. She watched hungrily at each stroke. She lost herself in her love and admiration for him, and found herself dreaming aloud of a career as an artist. Bent double in laughter, he cupped her naked breast, tickling her nipple with his extended thumb, and assured her that her only advancement in the art world would be to model her curves. "Nobody wants to see the world as it is, and certainly not through the eyes of a whore."

After her mother died, and her siblings had married off, she let an apartment in town. She never sold her body for money again. She painted until her wrists shook. She painted with the desperation of a hundred starved soldiers in a trench. She painted to atone for her sins, each stroke a lashing on her back. She painted her sexual encounters with men, the feverish ogling expression of a man watching her undress, the blissful calm of a man asleep and satisfied by her, and she painted self-portraits of each emotion that arose whenever she remembered these events. She was purging herself, lusting after salvation.

the layers of my life: a memoir in the making

this is a project i began in the summer of 2002 with my grandmother, Barbara Helen Seufert. She passed the following February before she could take me to her Dominican. she did make one thing very clear, however. she wanted her memoir to be called, The Layers of My Life, and so it shall be.

i have long known that i would need to separate her into several women to give any kind of genuine representation to the degree of fullness which depicts her life. so, i intend to write a fictional biography utilizing the following characters to tell her complex, dramatic, dark, magnificent story.

i haven't named the women yet, but here they are:

only child: deceptive, controlled, fearful, constant correspondence, co-dependent
thespian: flirtatious, confident, independent, glamorous
major's wife: hostess, gossiper, resentful, gimlets, japan
mother: distant, secretary, demanding, well-meaning, jealous
dominican artist: sensual, mysterious, passionate, legendary, suicidal
nana: exuberant, humorous, community director, unwitting caretaker
cancer patient: girlfriend, distrustful, intelligent, beloved

i'm in desperate need to finish something, for the sake of knowing closure again. but, this project in particular is winsome to me. i look forward to embarking on this project with you.