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.