A Dominican Adventure

I saw him my first weekend living in the village. I was three days into my three-week stay in Los Higos, a small community in the dead centre of the Dominican Republic--equidistant from all the country’s innumerable beach resorts, but close to none--and my fellow travellers and I were horseback riding, to get a feel for the countryside. My horse was a spindly fellow with stubby legs, which I liked because he kept me close to the ground and feeling safe.
We passed through the countryside on display, children and adults alike watching us from porches and lawn chairs. Most things in this friendly country became a community event. It also seemed obvious that the locals never rented these horses for their own leisure; I had the feeling they were only trotted out as a gesture whenever an American dogooder or two visited the village, a lucky little side business for the horses’ owners and a bumpy but pleasant day trip for us.
Here, the Dominican Republic was only green--all banana leaves and tall grass and palm. Every now and then an enormous drug-money mansion sat entrenched on a hillside, and they were also beautiful, all peaches and pinks with tiled roofs and iron gates emerging from the green earth.
We passed from more open country into a jungle, where light and shadow tangled under a dense canopy, and along a rutted path, which most of the horses took to amiably, except for a friend’s more ornery horse, who gave my ankle a good kick for no reason I could discern.
As we trotted (my ankle bruised but unbroken), a different structure emerged from the shade: among the trees there was a gray concrete structure no more than five feet cubed. It had a window and a door, both heavily barred. It looked as though a tornado had swept through a prison and left nothing but a single, perfect cell intact. Inside stood a man, mumbling, his eyes empty and his brow heavy. He stood leaning against the door dangling an empty tin cup through the bars.
“He’s crazy, so that’s where they keep him,” says our guide. There wasn’t much more to tell. We looked, and kept trotting. Even here, I thought, in this beautiful, open country, we hide the things we can never understand.
After we returned the horses and my ankle healed, after three more weeks in this isolated village, after flying home and forgetting so much of my time in Los Higos, this image stayed with me, imprinted. A man in the jungle, passing his days in solitude. A man holding a tin cup, hoping for someone to fill it.