Dominican Republic, Chapter IV — Montaña Redonda, Playa Limón, and the Final Horizon
Some journeys end at the airport.
With an overstuffed suitcase, clothes smelling of damp, a lighter wallet, and that boarding-gate depression not even a six-euro coffee can make more dignified.
This journey began to end on top of a mountain.
But before the mountain, there was a sparrow.
Small, perched on a pale surface, feathers ruffled and wearing the serious expression of someone with no time to waste on an Italian photographer’s existential crises.
It stood there.
It did nothing memorable.
It was not flying into a sunset, clutching some universal symbol of freedom in its beak, or showing the slightest interest in becoming the opening metaphor of the final chapter.
Naturally, it became one anyway.
That is the problem with writers and photographers: leave us alone with a sparrow long enough and we will end up giving it a difficult childhood, a drinking problem, and a remarkably nuanced opinion on the failure of the West.
It was probably just looking for something to eat.
I was looking for a way to say goodbye to a country I still did not understand and which, for that very reason, had found its way inside me.
Immediately afterward, the landscape opened.
Montaña Redonda.
From above, the land seemed endless. Green hills, fields, thin roads, small settlements, lagoons, and finally the sea, stretched across the horizon like a promise that did not need to be kept.
Enormous clouds crossed the sky.
Light fell in pieces across the vegetation, igniting some areas and leaving others in shadow. The landscape changed as I watched, as though the mountain breathed beneath the passing sun.
From up there, everything seemed peaceful.
Not perfect.
Peaceful.
Those are two different things.
Perfection is a human neurosis. It requires order, control, symmetry, and an exhausting amount of maintenance. Peace, instead, accepts that a cloud may ruin the light, that grass may grow wherever it pleases, and that the horizon is not concerned with appearing perfectly straight.
Nature had not prepared the scene for me.
It had not cleaned the background.
It had not moved the mountains to improve the composition.
It had been there before I arrived and, with reasonable certainty, would remain after every photograph of mine had been forgotten on some old hard drive.
From above, I could see an enormous part of that world.
And still understood almost nothing about it.
Perhaps this is the most beautiful humiliation of immense landscapes: they let you see far while reminding you how short your understanding is.
We believe seeing from above means understanding better.
Executives study charts.
Generals study maps.
Rich men buy penthouses.
From above, everything looks more orderly, reducible, controllable.
But a valley is not only a valley.
It contains people who wake, work, argue, have children, lose someone, laugh at stupid shit, and try to reach evening with enough energy to begin again the next day.
From up there, houses were dots.
Roads were lines.
Lives were invisible.
A panoramic photograph could show the beauty of the land, but not the weight carried by those who inhabited it.
For that, I had to return up close.
An iguana appeared in the grass.
Large, wrinkled, resting on the ground with the confidence of an old landowner who has seen too many visitors pass to bother greeting them anymore.
Its eyes were half closed, its face faintly disgusted.
The same expression a bartender wears at three in the morning when the final group of kids walks in convinced that ordering twelve mojitos is an act of rebellion.
The view did not impress the iguana.
It did not turn toward the sea.
It did not contemplate infinity.
It lived there.
When beauty becomes ordinary, it stops introducing itself.
Perhaps it had looked at those mountains its entire life without thinking even once: what a magnificent view.
And it was right.
We visitors are astonished because we know we will have to leave.
Wonder is born partly from an expiration date.
Along the paths, beneath the trees, people began to appear.
A little girl watched me from some distance away.
She held her hands near her face, as though hiding behind her fingers without surrendering her curiosity. Her body seemed restrained, but her eyes kept coming toward me.
I could not say whether she was shy.
Photographs cannot read minds, and anyone claiming otherwise probably sells online courses.
But in her gesture I saw the tension every child knows when facing something new: the desire to come closer and the need to preserve an escape route.
She watched me.
She watched the camera.
Perhaps she was trying to understand why a stranger found interesting what, to her, was simply the place where she had been born.
I saw a little girl immersed in Dominican nature.
She saw a tall, bald man armed with a black object pointed in her direction.
Come to think of it, her suspicion was perfectly reasonable.
I did not ask her to smile.
That unbearable presumed wisdom with which we Westerners photograph a barefoot child and immediately convince ourselves that, despite owning nothing, they are far happier than we are.
Perhaps she was.
Perhaps not.
Perhaps she wanted a new pair of shoes, a phone, and all those things that we, after buying them, dream of escaping during a spiritual retreat.
Her face did not have to teach me anything.
It could simply exist.
And that was already enough.
A little farther on, a man emerged among the leaves.
Branches crossed his body and light filtered onto his face. He held one of the fruits grown in that soil and smiled with an openness that did not seem rehearsed for tourists.
It was not the professional smile of resort staff.
The programmed, durable kind capable of surviving even a family complaining that the sea contains too much sand.
It was a smile that took over his whole face.
He seemed amused by my curiosity, by the way I searched for a frame through the branches, or perhaps simply by the fact that, for some reason, it was a good day.
The leaves almost concealed him.
And yet his presence illuminated the image more than the sun.
Some people enter a photograph without occupying space.
The way they look is enough.
The way they seem to grant you, for a few seconds, permission to be there.
That man was not handing me his story. I did not know his hardships, how much money he made, the people he returned to in the evening, or the worries that kept him awake.
He was offering me an instant.
All I could do was accept it without presuming to own the rest.
Another man stood farther back, along a narrow path between plants, trunks, and shadow.
He was older.
He stood with the calm of someone who knew every foot of that land. His face lacked the other’s explosive enthusiasm. It carried something more contained: perhaps fatigue, perhaps caution, perhaps the simple dignity of someone who feels no need to please a stranger.
He looked directly at me.
No hostility.
No reverence.
Only an awareness of his own presence.
It was the kind of face across which time does not pass silently.
It leaves marks.
It carves around the eyes.
It hardens some expressions and softens others.
We spend grotesque amounts of money erasing from our bodies the evidence that we have lived. Creams, injections, filters, and faces polished so smooth they resemble a post-production error.
That man wore his years without apology.
His skin told of sun, work, earth, and all those days that would never enter my photographs.
He did not smile openly.
And he did not have to.
Sometimes serenity has nothing to do with a smile.
It is the way a person remains still within themselves.
The plants around him kept growing.
Leaves crossed by light, small fruit still green, gathered seeds, rough surfaces, and tools worn through use.
Nature did not present itself as landscape.
It became material.
Something that could be gathered, worked, dried, transformed by hands.
Inside a small space, a woman concentrated on her work.
Her head covered, gaze lowered, hands busy above the table. Around her were containers, tools, powders, and objects that looked as though they had known hundreds of similar gestures.
She was not working to stage a tradition.
That was knowledge.
A memory passed through hands.
Take what grows.
Open it.
Clean it.
Reduce some parts.
Mix others.
Wait.
Repeat.
Many products reach our homes already stripped of their history. Clean packaging, reassuring logos, ingredients printed in type small enough to discourage any curiosity.
We do not see the soil.
We do not see the hands.
We do not see who gathers, carries, selects, and transforms.
We pay at the register and believe things are born on shelves.
There, every seed still had an origin.
Every object contained the time required to make it.
The woman worked with an almost intimate concentration. She did not seem interested in demonstrating skill. She knew what she was doing, and that was enough.
I photographed her hands.
Hands often tell more than faces.
A face knows how to lie.
It can smile out of politeness, conceal fatigue, compose itself before a lens.
Hands cannot.
Hands retain calluses, cuts, habits, and the precise way a person learned to touch the world.
Beside her were seeds, fragments, rudimentary tools, and scarred containers.
Nothing looked new.
Everything looked useful.
The objects had passed beyond that brief phase of life when they must look beautiful and entered the nobler one when they actually serve a purpose.
In the West, we furnish enormous kitchens so we can order dinner through an app.
We buy professional knives to slice mozzarella and coffee machines capable of communicating with a phone, in case pressing a button while remaining in the same room has become too exhausting.
There, simple tools and someone who knew how to use them were enough.
The most important technology was still knowledge.
Another little girl sat on a small pink chair.
She was absorbed in whatever she held, gaze lowered and feet resting on the earth. Around her, the adult world continued with its work, conversations, and necessities.
She had other things to do.
Children possess a capacity for concentration that we lose as we grow. They can devote their entire existence to an insignificant object for five minutes, then abandon it without remorse.
We adults do the opposite.
We devote twenty years to something we hate, then continue because we have already devoted twenty years.
That little girl was completely inside her moment.
She sought no approval.
She did not know she represented something.
She was not childhood, poverty, the future, or hope.
She was a little girl sitting on a pink chair.
And she was beautiful precisely because she had no intention of being so.
Nearby, I met two older children.
Both looked at me.
The younger boy was bare-chested with markings drawn across his skin, a kind of illustrated armor, the improvised costume of a hero who did not need to wait for Carnival.
The other wore a blue shirt and a more cautious expression.
They stood close, but not in the same way.
The younger seemed to confront the lens head-on, with that absolute seriousness children possess when playing at being adults.
The older stayed slightly behind, as though wanting to understand before granting me his trust.
Perhaps they were friends.
Perhaps brothers.
Perhaps they had argued a few minutes earlier and would do so again immediately afterward.
In the photograph, however, they formed a small alliance.
Two bodies beneath the trees.
Two different gazes turned toward the same stranger.
They did not smile.
There was something severe in their curiosity.
It reminded me that being photographed does not necessarily mean being pleased about it. A camera creates an uneven relationship: I choose when to shoot; they decide only what they will let me see.
Those children left me with doubt.
And it was far more interesting than a smile.
As I continued toward the summit, the landscape broadened again.
A row of red flowers separated the meadow from the valley. Mountains overlapped in the distance, and clouds dragged their shadows across the fields.
A palm leaned toward the view.
Several cows rested beneath a tree, completely indifferent to one of the most impressive landscapes of the entire journey.
They too possessed the wisdom of the iguana.
No need to become emotional in front of home.
They chewed.
Waited.
Every so often, they moved a few yards.
The kind of existence a motivational entrepreneur would call aimless and that, after enough years of therapy, many of us would end up considering enlightened.
Some kids passed along the edge of a road.
Daily life continued even inside a landscape I observed as though it were sacred. To them, those mountains were not a destination. They were the backdrop to a trip, an errand, a return home.
It is always like that.
Someone crosses the place you waited your whole life to reach while thinking only about what to eat for dinner.
Beauty does not suspend necessity.
It lives beside it.
At the summit, there was a swing.
Two ropes, a seat, and the void behind it.
It had been built for visitors, naturally. To offer the sensation of flying above the valley and produce photographs spectacular enough to justify the journey.
At that moment, however, it was empty.
No girl in a billowing dress.
No man busy proving his courage.
No smile frozen for the eternity of a story destined to vanish after twenty-four hours.
Only the swing and the landscape.
Empty, it seemed more sincere.
Every swing is an absurd device.
It lets you move back and forth without actually taking you anywhere. It gives you wind, vertigo, and the illusion of flight, then returns you to the exact point where you began.
A fairly accurate representation of many relationships and much of our ambition.
Perhaps travel is like that too.
You leave to put distance between yourself and the person you were.
You cross oceans.
You accumulate images, encounters, and stories.
Then you return to the same place.
But you no longer sit there in the same way.
From Montaña Redonda, an arrow pointed toward Playa Limón.
Signs always carry this presumption: they believe indicating a direction is enough for someone to know where they are going.
I followed the one toward the sea.
A red vehicle crossed the dark earth, small inside the enormity of the landscape. It descended the mountain carrying people, dust, and the practical certainty that after every moment of contemplation, someone still has to handle the ride back.
Spirituality is marvelous until it is time to return.
Then you need an engine, a road, and someone who knows how to drive.
Playa Limón appeared behind a forest of palms.
It did not announce itself through a monumental entrance.
No lobby.
No gate.
No attendant ready to fasten a wristband around my arm and explain which parts of paradise were included in the price.
There were trees leaning toward the water, marked sand, roots, fallen trunks, and waves arriving with a force entirely different from the tourist-friendly docility of Dominicus.
The sea did not seem domesticated.
It had hired no one to please me.
It was beautiful and did not give a damn.
A less reassuring beauty.
Dirtier.
More real.
The palms grew almost inside the water. Some endured at an angle, roots exposed and trunks bent by the wind. Others had already fallen, left on the sand like old bodies no one had rushed to remove.
On a resort beach, they would have been cleared away.
They spoiled the view.
They made it difficult to arrange lounge chairs in orderly rows.
They might remind guests that even in paradise, things give way, grow old, and die.
At Playa Limón, they remained.
Nature did not hide its ruins.
It incorporated them.
A dead palm became a seat, shade, shelter, or simply a line in the landscape. It did not lose value merely because it had stopped standing.
Perhaps the same is true of us.
Perhaps we do not become useless when life breaks the shape we once had.
We change the way we occupy the world.
An old red truck was parked among the palms.
It looked as though it had arrived after a minor war, survived impossible roads, creative repairs, and mechanical decisions better left unquestioned.
It did not look out of place.
It belonged to the beach as much as the trees.
Not because it was natural, but because it was necessary.
It carried people, materials, animals, or whatever else was needed to make life function far from tourism’s comfortable circuits.
We reach paradise in air-conditioned shuttles.
They reach it in vehicles that have learned not to surrender.
The beach was almost empty of tourists.
But it was not empty.
Local people crossed it.
Someone walked along the shore.
Someone else rode a scooter, its wheels sinking slightly into the wet sand with waves only a few yards away.
The beach was not a space consecrated to idleness.
It was a road.
A place of passage.
A point where people worked, waited, sold, and met someone.
We arrive before the sea and demand that every activity cease out of respect for our idea of peace.
They kept living.
And that life made the place more beautiful than any immaculate beach.
A man rode a motorcycle across the sand.
Red hat, simple clothes, body tilted slightly forward. Behind him, the sea broke into white waves.
He looked absurd and perfectly ordinary at the same time.
Another person passed soon afterward, again on two wheels, following the waterline.
They were not taking part in an adventurous experience purchased from a brochure.
They had somewhere to go.
Paradise, when you live there, contains errands too.
A woman leaned against a green structure near the shore.
The sea blurred behind her.
Her arms folded.
Her face turned slightly to one side.
Her expression contained something difficult to name.
Not sadness.
Not happiness.
Perhaps fatigue.
Perhaps that rough peace that comes after you have worked enough to have nothing left to prove for the rest of the day.
Her eyes seemed to follow a distant thought.
Maybe she was waiting for someone.
Maybe she was listening to a conversation.
Maybe she had stopped to rest her back and was not developing any profound theory of existence at all.
But in photographs, thoughts we cannot know become open rooms.
We enter.
Furnish them.
Leave something of ourselves inside.
In her face, I saw a woman accustomed to that sea.
Not impressed.
Not indifferent.
Intimate with it.
The way you sit beside someone loved for many years: you no longer need to keep looking at them to know they are there.
Nearby, a man stood on a wooden platform built among the palms.
He rested his face in one hand and looked down.
He could have been the keeper of a tower built to watch over nothing.
His face hovered between boredom and irony, patience and that form of resignation possessed by someone who knows the afternoon will be long but not necessarily unpleasant.
Behind him were sky and sea.
Below, the sand.
And yet he seemed more interested in whatever was happening inside his own head.
I liked him.
Before him was a landscape for which others would pay thousands, and he retained the sacred right to be bored.
Beauty does not oblige us to be happy.
It is one of the least photogenic truths in the world.
You can live before the Caribbean and be tired.
You can live in a gray city and fall in love on a rainy morning.
Places influence what we feel, but they do not possess the remote control to our souls.
That man did not have to smile just because the sea was behind him.
He could be bored, worried, or simply lost in his own fucking business.
That too meant belonging to the place.
Another man walked with a stack of hats balanced on his head.
One atop another.
A small vertical store carried across the beach.
One hand touched the side of his face. His gaze was lowered, focused, perhaps weary. The hats did not look terribly heavy, but the day probably had been.
The sea behind him could have made the scene cheerful.
It did not.
That man was not a folkloric detail placed there to complete my Caribbean photograph.
He was working.
He walked beneath the sun hoping someone would buy what he carried.
Perhaps he had a family.
Perhaps a minimum amount he needed to make.
Perhaps he would sell enough.
Perhaps not.
We look at a hat and think of vacation.
He probably looked at the same hat and saw lunch, a bill, or the money required to reach the next day.
The same object.
Two completely different worlds.
His face did not ask for pity.
It showed concentration.
A quiet dignity free from the rhetoric we so often paste onto those who work under harsher conditions than our own.
He was not a hero.
He was not a victim.
He was a man carrying his business on his head, moving along a beach that represented freedom to me and, perhaps, only another day of work to him.
The horses waited beneath the palms.
Some tied.
Others gathered close together.
Saddles, ropes, and tack showed that they too were part of the place’s work. They carried people along the beach, crossed trails, and stood still during the hours between one trip and another.
One looked at me from close range.
A dark eye, light crossing its coat, rope taut across its muzzle.
In its eyes, I saw an ancient patience.
I am probably exaggerating.
It was a horse.
But some animals possess a gaze capable of making all our agitation look childish.
It waited.
It did not know when it would leave again.
It did not check the time.
It did not complain about the shift.
It remained inside its body, in the heat, among insects and the sound of waves.
Another animal held its ears upright, alert to something outside the frame. Behind it, the others formed a disorderly row of manes, saddles, and dust.
They were not romantic horses galloping along the waterline.
They were working animals.
Tired, beautiful, present.
True beauty is rarely separate from labor.
We are the ones who crop out everything that disturbs the fantasy.
We photograph the horse and hide the rope.
We photograph the sea and hide the vendor.
We photograph the resort and hide the people cleaning the rooms.
We photograph paradise and make sure no one can see the work shift required to keep it that way.
At Playa Limón, I had no need to hide anything.
The beach was beautiful precisely because it contained everything.
The truck.
The scooters.
The people.
The hats.
The horses.
The fallen trees.
The waves too strong.
The unraked sand.
Life passing without wondering whether it was ruining the frame.
I kept walking until the people began to thin out.
The palms remained.
One grew alone toward the water, leaning as though it had spent its entire life trying to hear the sea more clearly.
Farther on, the coast disappeared into a succession of trees and shadows.
Waves climbed the sand and withdrew, erasing footprints, tire tracks, and everything we had tried to leave behind.
The sea preserves no evidence.
Perhaps that is why we keep photographing it.
We want to save something that, by its nature, holds on to nothing.
The final image looked at the beach through a dark frame of vegetation.
I was no longer entirely inside the landscape.
I already seemed to be watching it from outside.
Like when, before leaving an important room, you turn one last time at the door knowing the person you were inside it will not leave with you in quite the same way.
The palms occupied the shore.
The sea continued.
No one was saying goodbye.
Places do not.
They have no need to close stories neatly.
We are the ones who demand endings, explanations, and final sentences capable of making sense of everything that happened.
The Dominican Republic handed me no moral.
It did not tell me how to live.
It did not resolve my confusion or suddenly turn my existence into a coherent plan.
It left me with something less orderly and far more useful.
A restlessness.
The sense that the world could be inhabited in ways different from the one I knew.
That work could occupy the hands without owning the whole soul.
That a street could become a living room.
That a man could be bored before the sea without being ungrateful.
That a little girl did not have to smile to deserve a photograph.
That an object could be old, broken, and still perfectly capable of serving a purpose.
That art could be born at the edge of a road without asking the market’s permission.
And that a life did not necessarily have to produce something at every moment to be considered worthy.
Four chapters are not enough to tell a country.
Perhaps even four lifetimes would not be enough.
I had crossed only a few places, met a handful of faces, and gathered fragments of days that continued far beyond the edges of my photographs.
I did not know what came next.
I did not know what happened to the children, the craftspeople, the woman near the sea, the man with the hats, or the one leaning on the platform.
I did not know how many horses crossed that beach the following day.
I did not know whether the old bartender had raised his eyes to the horizon again.
I did not know whether the owner of the closed shop had gone back to work or decided once more to tell everyone to go to hell and spend another day elsewhere.
I had only the images.
The crab in the children’s hands.
My shadow on the asphalt.
The lighthouse.
The bartender and the heron.
The beat-up cars.
The painter.
The candles.
The man rolling cigars.
The child sitting on a cannon.
The mountain.
The eyes of the people I met among the trees.
The hats stacked on a head.
The horses.
The leaning palms.
The sea.
I thought I had left to photograph a place.
In truth, I had photographed everything I needed to find again at that moment in my life.
Slowness.
Presence.
Imperfection.
The right not to be useful all the time.
The possibility of living without turning every experience into a fucking performance.
Perhaps I had seen only what I wanted to see.
But that is what all of us do.
We cross the world searching for evidence of the questions we carry inside.
I had found mine in the faces of people who did not know my name.
In the eyes of a little girl uncertain whether to come closer.
In the smile of a man among leaves.
In the steadiness of an old man on a path.
In the concentration of a woman at work.
In the silent fatigue of someone crossing the beach selling hats.
In the patience of animals.
And in that horizon that kept showing me how vast the world was and how little, in the end, it took to feel part of it.
In the end, I left.
Naturally.
Travelers always do.
They arrive, observe, assign enormous meaning to other people’s daily lives, then leave again before the place has time to become ordinary.
I took the photographs with me.
They remained with everything else.
With the sun.
The work.
The roads.
The mountain.
The children.
The horses.
The easy days and the shitty ones.
I had enjoyed the privilege of turning a few moments into memory.
They would continue turning that place into life.
As I moved away, the sea did not change its rhythm.
The palms kept bending.
Somewhere, someone sat down, someone worked, someone sold something, and someone else decided that enough was enough for one day.
No one needed me to still be there.
And that was right.
The journey ended.
Paradise, fortunately, did not.