Dominican Republic, Chapter I — Bayahibe and Time in No Hurry
The problem with postcards is that they always arrive afterward.
After someone has swept away the dirty sand, hidden the empty bottles, moved the old man sitting awkwardly, and waited for the cloud to have the decency to get the fuck out of the way. Then come the blue sea, the palm leaning at precisely the right angle, a woman without cellulite walking along the waterline, and the usual promise from the catalog: come here, spend enough, and for seven days you can pretend your life is not the one you left at home.
My Dominican Republic, instead, began before the postcard.
It began where paradise still had dirty hands.
This is the first of four chapters. Not because the journey needed to become a saga—the world already has enough trilogies dragged past the last scraps of their dignity—but because one hundred and sixty-two photographs are too many for one story and too alive to be thrown onto a single page like drunken relatives at a wedding.
They needed room to breathe.
And, above all, I needed to understand what I was trying to tell.
Not the Dominican Republic.
That would have been presumptuous. One journey, a few roads, a camera, and suddenly you think you understand an entire country. It is the same arrogance with which you know a woman for three nights, learn how she takes her coffee, and think you have understood every dark room she carries inside.
It does not work that way.
I could tell only what that place had done to me.
The emotions it had stirred. The details where my gaze had chosen to stop. The people who entered my life for a few seconds without knowing they were becoming part of my memory.
I did not want to tell anyone where to go, what to see, or which restaurant served lobster with an ocean view. That is what guidebooks, blogs with discount codes, and some cheerful idiot smiling in front of every monument as though he built it himself are for.
I wanted to do something different.
Use the journey to pull whoever was looking not into a place, but into me as I crossed that place.
It sounds like a minor distinction.
It is anything but.
A photograph documents what stood in front of the lens. An image, when it truly succeeds, tells you what was happening behind it.
Behind the camera.
Behind the eyes.
Behind all those defenses we normally use to avoid admitting that something touched us.
I realized it later, while post-processing these photographs.
I sat before the monitor, moving from one image to the next, adjusting light, color, shadow. The kind of activity capable of turning a normal person into a maniac who argues with half a point of magenta for twenty minutes.
Then something happened.
I felt those images strike a nerve.
They were not perfect. They did not pretend to be. But they were mine in a way that went beyond a signature, copyright, and all that administrative bullshit with which we try to certify something that ought to be obvious.
They contained my way of seeing.
My way of choosing a person over a monument, a puddle over a beach, a man leaning against a palm over yet another tanned ass stretched beneath an umbrella.
It was almost physical—a raging hard-on, a powerful current running through body and mind at once, leaving me with the sudden certainty that I was standing exactly where I belonged.
An artistic, existential erection, probably inelegant but brutally sincere. The kind of arousal born not from someone else’s body, but from the sudden feeling that, for once, your life had stopped wandering around at random and found a point toward which everything could converge.
Photographing.
Traveling.
Watching other people’s lives without pretending to understand them completely, then returning them after they had passed through mine.
Perhaps that was the purpose.
Or perhaps I had simply spent too many hours in front of the computer.
But tell me: when was the last time you did something and felt, without having to persuade yourself, that you could keep doing it for the rest of your life?
When did you last feel that primitive excitement telling you: there, asshole, that is why you are here?
If it has never happened to you, I am sorry.
If it happened and you stopped, I am even sorrier.
The first photograph looks at the sea through the trees.
The boat is there, small and surrounded by clear water. It could be the beginning of any vacation. The Caribbean Sea, vegetation, horizon, and all that natural beauty that looks as though it were designed by a particularly inspired marketing department.
But all you have to do is shift your gaze.
There were children on the shore.
They were catching a large crab. They pulled it out with the excitement of people who had just wrested a small treasure from the sea and, when they saw me, tried to sell it to me.
I do not remember how much they asked.
I remember their eyes.
I had no earthly idea what I was supposed to do with a live crab. I had no kitchen, no pot, and no sudden gift for Caribbean cuisine. So I gave them some money and let them keep the crab too.
They could have sold it to someone else.
They could have taken it home.
They could have eaten it, set it free, or founded a small crustacean multinational. I never found out.
And that was fine.
It was probably the first transaction of my life in which I paid to own nothing.
They kept the crab.
I carried away the scene.
And perhaps I was the one who gained more.
I do not want to turn those children into the usual sentimental ornament about poverty. People do not exist to teach moral lessons to Western travelers. They were not extras sent by the universe to make me more sensitive. They were children who had caught something and were trying to make money from it.
Period.
The poetry came later.
It always comes later, once memory has had enough time to betray the facts and make them resemble us more closely.
I continued along the coast.
Boats floated near the shore, colorful, weathered, tied with ropes that had probably seen better days. They were not decorative elements placed there to complete the scenery. They were tools of work. Wood, paint, salt, and necessity.
A little farther on, life gathered around a bar.
Bottles lined up, hand-painted signs, thatched roofs, people sitting without that neurotic hurry which, where we come from, is mistaken for importance.
Back home, a man walks quickly, answers three calls at once, and checks his watch every forty seconds. It does not matter whether he is closing a million-dollar deal or buying cat food. He has to look busy.
Being busy has become our favorite way to feel necessary.
There, instead, time seemed to have been domesticated.
Not stopped.
Not lazy.
Simply less willing to be kicked around by productivity.
A woman worked in the kiosk. Some people drank. Someone talked, someone waited, and someone else seemed to have attained that enviable spiritual state in which you are doing absolutely fuck-all and do not even feel the need to justify yourself.
I watched them and felt a kind of envy.
Not the ugly kind.
The kind that comes when you recognize in someone else a freedom you have forgotten you possess.
The houses came next.
Low, colorful, imperfect. Some seemed held together more by habit than architecture. A blue truck sat parked beside a pale building. The roads were scarred and patched, traveled by cars, motorcycles, and people who seemed to know every pothole by name.
There was nothing spectacular about it.
And that was precisely what made it interesting.
Once you stop demanding that a journey entertain you, it finally begins to speak.
A truck passed along a road surrounded by green.
An old vehicle painted in colors that looked as though they had fought the sun and lost with honor. It moved without elegance, carrying noise, dust, and its own stubborn usefulness behind it.
Things there did not seem to be replaced the moment they stopped being new.
They were used.
Repaired.
Adapted.
They kept living even after losing the shine that we consider essential if something is to deserve space.
Perhaps the same was true of people.
Perhaps that was why certain faces drew me more than the beaches.
The cannon aimed at the sea no longer defended anything. It had become a rusted presence, an old war animal retired beneath the palms. Men had stopped using it to kill one another, and now tourists could photograph it between a beer and a coat of sunscreen.
A considerable moral advancement.
Or only a pause between two wars.
A woman appeared behind a blue window.
The wood around her was worn, the color vivid. She remained there for an instant, long enough for me to photograph her, not long enough for me to know anything about her.
And yet her presence changed everything.
Without that woman, it would have been a photograph of a house.
With her, it became the photograph of a life continuing behind a wall.
That is the power people have inside images: they give a past even to something you are seeing for the first time.
Stalls opened along the road.
Clothes piled together, objects for sale, colors exposed to the sun. A woman in a hat carried her merchandise around looking for customers, probably tourists. She had no store, no marketing strategy, no quarterly presentation filled with colorful charts.
She had her own legs, her own voice, and whatever she could carry.
I do not know whether her life was simpler.
It would be foolish to confuse a lack of means with freedom. Poverty is not poetic when you have to live it. It becomes poetic mostly in photographs taken by someone who knows he will return that evening to an air-conditioned room.
But there was something in the way she inhabited the day that struck me.
She did not seem to be waiting for life to begin after work.
Life was already happening while she worked.
Perhaps that was the difference.
We divide everything: work from pleasure, duty from desire, the week from the weekend, existence from the two weeks of vacation during which we desperately try to remember how to breathe.
There, the boundaries seemed less clear.
People worked, talked, stopped, laughed, began again.
The day was not a prison to cross on the way to evening.
It was the day.
In a courtyard, I came across another group of kids.
They were dressed better, perhaps from slightly luckier families. They were all together, close and noisy, with that brutal, marvelous complicity that exists before life teaches us to mistrust.
They were a team.
They reminded me of my childhood friends. Back when a street, a ball, a few stupid ideas, and the absolute conviction that the afternoon would never end were enough.
We did not need to schedule a meeting three weeks in advance.
We did not check our calendars.
We went outside.
Someone shouted a name beneath a window and the world began.
Then you grow up.
Work appears, relationships, distance, misunderstandings, installments, exhaustion, and that particular form of adult dementia by which you own devices capable of connecting you with anyone but cannot find a free evening to see a friend.
Those kids did not know it yet.
Or perhaps they did and were laughing anyway.
I photographed them before time could explain it.
Farther on sat a man.
He had a piece of paper with him. He looked at it, then stopped looking and stared into nothing. Nearby, lined-up bottles occupied the space with a presence too obvious to ignore.
I do not know whether he was drunk.
I do not know what was written on that paper. A bill, a letter, a bet, a note, or one of those official communications capable of ruining your day in perfectly courteous language.
But his gaze was already elsewhere.
Some people do not drink to have fun.
They drink to make the silence a little less loud.
I watched him from a distance, trying not to turn his pain—assuming it was pain—into a spectacle. Photography has this morally ambiguous territory too: you approach other people’s lives, take a fragment, and leave before having to bear its weight.
You press a button.
They remain there.
You carry away a metaphor.
A few photographs later, I came across a security guard looking at his phone.
He was supposed to be watching something. An entrance, a building, perhaps the thin boundary between order and chaos. Instead, he stood there blissfully minding his own fucking business.
I liked him immediately.
In the West, they would probably have summoned him to an office, subjected him to a performance review, and invited him to attend a motivational course called Become the Best Version of the Servant You Already Are.
He had a phone.
And time to waste.
Perhaps he was writing to the woman of his life. Perhaps he was watching a game. Perhaps he was scrolling through photographs of people with better lives than his, as we all do when we want to feel moderately miserable.
Whatever he was doing, he did not seem tormented by the idea of optimizing every minute.
And I, child of a world that measures even sleep with an app, began to wonder who was truly distracted.
Him?
Or us, who managed to turn existence into a work shift we never clock out of?
A man sat beside a minibus, probably one of the drivers. He too was looking at his phone. The vehicle waited, he waited, and the world, despite every economic prediction, did not collapse.
Two women inside a small kiosk watched something on a screen and smiled.
They did not seem especially concerned with selling anything.
They laughed.
How many times, instead, have we stopped laughing because there was something to finish?
How many conversations have we cut short to answer an email that could easily have died on its own overnight?
How many people have we neglected in the name of a productivity we will not even remember when we are too old to enjoy what we produced?
I do not want to idealize that place.
Those people probably had problems I could not see. Debts, families to support, illnesses, inadequate wages, and fears that did not fit inside the frame.
I was a traveler.
And travelers often enjoy the privilege of mistaking for philosophy what is necessity for everyone else.
But what I felt remains true.
The sense that life there could still seep into work.
That it had not been completely expelled in the name of efficiency.
A painter worked beside the road.
Canvas before him, colors, the world passing without asking him to hurry. He painted while traffic, voices, and the day continued around him.
Another person sat reading on a simple chair.
No panoramic terrace, no bookstore designed to look intellectual on social media. One chair, a few pages, and the time needed to cross them.
An old man in poor clothing leaned against a palm at the corner of the street.
He watched the traffic.
He did not seem impatient to cross. Perhaps he had nowhere to go. Perhaps he had already understood what we spend an entire lifetime avoiding: not every road has to be crossed immediately.
Some can be watched.
You can let the cars pass.
You can wait.
You can even have no destination without feeling like a failure.
A little farther on, a woman walked along selling what she carried. A deliveryman sat on an orange wall near his old scooter.
He too had taken a break.
Or perhaps that was his way of working.
The scooter looked like a tired animal that knew every road in the area. The man sat there inside a geometry of orange, shadow, and waiting.
If I had been hired to document the delivery service, that photograph would probably have been useless.
But I was not documenting a service.
I was photographing a man’s right to stop.
The statue of the Taíno appeared like a memory that had survived tourism, colonization, and our insatiable habit of building hotels on any patch of land blessed with a decent sea.
Its face seemed to come from a time that was still watching everything.
Empires had arrived.
Men had conquered, converted, slaughtered, renamed.
Then came the resorts, international buffets, and plastic wristbands.
History changes clothes.
The appetite remains remarkably similar.
Beside that ancient memory passed small electric vehicles, cars, scooters, and people occupied by their normal lives. Old and new brushed against one another without needing an explanation.
Then I photographed a puddle.
Because naturally, in front of the Caribbean Sea, I ended up interested in a hole filled with water.
The road was broken and no one seemed particularly intent on fixing it.
Back home, they probably would have cordoned off the area for eight months, opened three public tenders, awarded the work to someone who knew someone, torn up half the road, and left the hole exactly where it was, only vastly more expensive.
There, perhaps the explanation was simpler.
It was hot.
The beach was close.
And no one felt like sacrificing an hour of sunshine for the honor of filling a hole in the asphalt.
Understandable.
Almost admirable.
Nature, meanwhile, kept working without a contract, a supervisor, or a lunch break. A leaf grew toward the light with the brazen naturalness possessed only by things unaware they are supposed to prove something.
It did not produce content.
It did not build a personal brand.
It did not update its résumé.
It grew.
And that already seemed enough.
The roads stretched between houses, vegetation, power lines, and colorful walls. A man walked with his dogs. Or perhaps the dogs were accompanying him. In photographs, certain hierarchies become less important.
They went together.
That was enough.
Near the end, I came across another scene.
A driver sat inside a bus. He probably worked for a larger establishment, perhaps one of the tourist chains that import efficiency, schedules, and all the discipline required so Westerners can relax without having to endure even five minutes of delay.
Outside, a woman walked freely along the road.
He watched her through the window.
I do not know what he was thinking. He may have recognized her. He may have found her beautiful. He may simply have followed a movement with his eyes.
But in the photograph, his gaze looked melancholy.
He was inside.
She was outside.
He sat in his assigned seat, trapped between a schedule and a destination.
She was on the road, master at least of the direction of her steps.
Perhaps I am inventing all of it.
It is possible.
Photography is not truth. It is a surface onto which we project the truths we need.
In that man, I saw someone forced to live according to a time that did not belong to that place. An imported, scheduled, Western time. The time of shifts, reservations, arrivals, and departures.
He watched the woman walk the way we watch something we cannot reach for some reason.
And perhaps what he envied was not her.
It was the possibility of leaving.
The final photograph does not show the sea.
It does not show a boat, a face, or a colorful house.
It shows my shadow.
I am standing with the camera in my hands. My body is not visible, only that dark shape cast across the ground.
After watching other people’s lives throughout the chapter, I had finally entered the image too.
Not with my face.
Not yet.
As a discreet presence, a witness without features. The man who had passed through those streets gathering children, crabs, drinkers, vendors, distracted guards, melancholy drivers, leaves, and potholes.
And yet that photograph said more than I would understand then.
Because this journey was not telling only their story.
It was beginning to tell mine.
The man searching for his place behind a camera.
The man who did not want merely to show where he had been, but needed to understand what had happened to him while he was there.
The photographer is never outside the photograph.
Even when absent from the frame, he leaves inside every image his hunger, his prejudices, his obsessions, and all the wounds that determine the precise point where he chooses to stop.
I had stopped before everything that breathed slowly.
Before people who did not seem to have surrendered their lives entirely to work.
Before a country that possessed little and yet, at least through my eyes, seemed to retain something we had sold in exchange for punctuality, a career, and a phone capable of reminding us of every appointment except the one with ourselves.
Perhaps I was wrong.
Perhaps I had seen only what I needed to see.
But this too is part of the journey.
We leave convinced we are observing the world and end up discovering which parts of the world we were desperately searching for.
I was searching for a different kind of time.
A life that did not always have to justify its existence through what it produced.
I was searching for the possibility of sitting on a wall without feeling guilty, watching traffic without having to cross it, giving children money without taking their crab, and photographing a puddle in front of the Caribbean because, for some fucking reason, it was the thing that most resembled whatever I carried inside.
In the end, my shadow remained.
A dark shape on a land filled with color.
Proof that I had been there.
But above all, proof that for the first time in a long while, I had felt exactly where I was meant to be.
Behind the lens.
With the world before me.
And that raging, undeniable hard-on of the soul finally pointing me in a direction.