Dominican Republic, Chapter III — Higüey and Life Outside the Brochure
The second chapter had ended with a world in no hurry.
The bartender behind the counter, the heron on the shore, the sun going down without filing a report on its performance.
Then came Higüey.
Higüey moved fast.
But in its own way.
Not with that Western hurry made of horns, appointments, notifications, and people crossing the street with the expression of someone about to save the planet when they are probably just headed to a meeting where the date of the next meeting will be decided.
The city moved.
Shouted.
Sweated.
Sold.
Waited.
And above all, it seemed to have no intention of placing itself at my service.
That was the first thing I liked about it.
Higüey was not there for me.
It had not polished the sidewalks, hidden the beat-up cars, or taught its residents to smile toward tourists. It had not built a simplified version of itself so I could understand it, photograph it, and go home convinced I had discovered the real Dominican Republic.
It was not trying to sell me paradise.
It had better things to do.
Or perhaps, sometimes, it simply did not feel like doing a fucking thing.
And that was fine too.
After Dominicus, with its turquoise sea, orderly umbrellas, and Westerners diligently relaxing according to schedule, Higüey looked like the back of a movie set. The point where the performance ended and life began for those who had to serve paradise, clean it, transport it, and make it comfortable enough for someone else to buy for a week.
On the coast, we had monetized everything.
The sea.
The sand.
The sunset.
Even slowness.
We had taken a natural wonder, built fences, buffets, excursions, and rooms with a view around it, then hired local people to serve us cocktails before what, prior to our arrival, had simply belonged to their horizon.
Modern colonialism wears fewer uniforms and more all-inclusive wristbands.
It does not conquer land with cannons.
It books it with free cancellation.
Higüey, instead, continued to exist beyond that servility.
It did not ask for a review.
It did not ask whether my stay was meeting expectations.
The city did not need me to enjoy myself.
Beneath a canopy of suspended umbrellas, colors formed an artificial sky over the street. Reds, yellows, blues, and greens. A cheerful shelter from the sun, a kind of rainbow placed there to protect the chaos.
Below it, life was not nearly as orderly.
People passing, cars, scooters, shops, power lines, and overlapping voices. No one seemed to have noticed that the composition would be perfect for a photograph.
And that was precisely what made it perfect.
Places become truly interesting when they stop behaving as though they know they are being watched.
Soon afterward came the candles.
Small flames enclosed in colored glasses, gathered side by side. Amid the noise of the city, someone had lit a light for something I could not know.
A prayer.
A promise.
A thank-you.
A desperate request addressed to a deity who, like many government employees, seemed to have rather variable response times.
Those flames made no noise.
They demanded no attention.
And yet they endured.
Outside were traffic, commerce, and a sun crushing everything beneath it. Inside those glasses remained a minimal form of hope.
Perhaps that is faith.
Lighting something fragile and pretending not to know how much wind is waiting outside.
I kept walking.
The streets were filled with small businesses, stalls, faces, objects on display, and people who seemed able to work without allowing work to become the day’s only reason for existing.
Then I found a closed shop.
The shutter pulled down.
The kind of day when, by our rules, it should have been open. There were people around, possible customers, potential money, and all those opportunities a business consultant would point to on a slide before uttering words like *growth*, *performance*, and *optimization*.
And instead, nothing.
Closed.
Perhaps the owner was sick.
Perhaps there were no customers.
Perhaps he had a problem.
Or perhaps he woke up, looked at the sun, and decided working that day was not quite so essential after all.
I like to imagine the last version.
Not because work is unnecessary.
It is necessary.
It pays for food, housing, medical care, vices, and that surprising quantity of bullshit we buy to console ourselves for the time lost earning the money required to buy it.
But when did leaving a shop closed become a moral crime?
When did we begin treating rest as a character flaw?
We live in a society where, if you say you worked twelve hours, someone congratulates you. As though a nervous breakdown were a promotion and neglecting everyone you love demonstrated an extraordinary work ethic.
There, the shutter was down.
The world kept turning.
No international stock exchange collapsed.
No tourist died for lack of a magnet or a bottle of water.
The city simply accepted that sometimes a man might not be there.
In the street, people occupied space without asking its permission.
Some worked, some talked, and one person had dragged a chair practically into traffic, turning a patch of asphalt into an office, living room, and observation post.
Cars passed.
Scooters slipped by beside him.
He remained seated.
Perhaps he was waiting for a customer. Perhaps someone was supposed to stop. Perhaps he was selling something I could not even see in the photograph.
But he did not seem worried.
If someone stopped, good.
If no one did, he would still have spent the afternoon sitting in the middle of life.
Back home, a scene like that would immediately provoke a task force.
Police officers, forms, barriers, public-land-use regulations, and some outraged citizen ready to explain on Facebook that an improperly placed chair represented the final collapse of civilization would all appear.
There, it was only a chair.
And around that chair, a community formed.
Someone stopped.
Someone talked.
Someone laughed.
The street was not only for passing from one point to another. It was a place to remain.
Perhaps that is what we lost.
We constantly cross spaces without inhabiting them. We race along streets, enter stores, board vehicles, return home, and close the door.
Everything is a connection to whatever comes next.
Almost nothing is a place where we can simply be anymore.
They took a chair and sat in the middle.
A fairly effective way of telling the world: you may continue without me, but you will have to go around.
Inside a small shop, a man rolled cigars.
His hands worked slowly.
Leaf after leaf.
No industrial machine, no assembly line, no illuminated counter reminding him how many pieces remained before the daily target.
Only fingers, tobacco, habit, and time.
He had probably repeated that gesture thousands of times.
He could have done it almost without looking, letting his hands remember what his mind no longer needed to control.
Certain trades enter the body.
Work stops being a set of instructions and becomes rhythm. A movement handed down, corrected, refined until it reaches the natural ease possessed by things done long enough to appear simple.
The cigar came into being slowly.
And perhaps that was exactly the point.
We want everything immediately.
Instant coffee, same-day delivery, real-time replies, love without waiting, and success preferably by Friday afternoon.
Then we encounter something built slowly and call it handmade, authentic, precious.
We pay more to purchase the time we are no longer willing to live.
That man, instead, held time between his fingers.
He did not fight it.
He gave it a shape.
A little farther on, I met a painter.
He sat beside the road with his colors and his work before him. Around him passed people, vehicles, noise, and everything that might have distracted him.
He painted.
He did not seem interested in whether the algorithm would approve.
He did not need to publish a time-lapse of the process, write a motivational caption, or explain to some potential customer how important it was to support local art.
He painted because, evidently, at some point in his life he had understood that images existed inside him and needed to come out.
I understood him.
I was doing the same thing.
He with colors.
I with a camera and, years later, with these words.
Both of us engaged in an economically suspicious activity, inadvisable to anyone possessing common sense and difficult to explain over dinner with people convinced every gesture must yield a measurable return.
Why do we keep creating?
Why do we photograph, paint, write, or play even when no one guarantees it will be useful?
Perhaps precisely because it is not useful.
Not in the way a car, a refrigerator, or an accountant willing to lie with sufficient elegance is useful.
Art does not necessarily carry you from one point to another.
Sometimes it keeps you from dying while you remain in the same place.
That painter was not building a strategy.
He was letting something out.
And perhaps the sincerest freedom is the one that looks completely unreasonable to those who spend their lives doing only what is advantageous.
I photographed him.
He kept painting.
Two men beside a road, thoroughly unconcerned with the odds that anyone would understand.
The cars around us had seen better days.
Some had seen better decades.
Dented bodies, paint burned by the sun, missing bumpers, and pieces held together by a combination of wire, resignation, and mechanical miracles.
A few were even missing a little dignity.
But they started.
Almost always.
And when they started, they carried people where they needed to go.
Point A.
Point B.
End of the automobile’s grand mystery.
We, instead, have turned cars into parked résumés.
They must tell the world how much we earn, who we would like to be, where we stand in the social pyramid, and how deeply we are willing to go into debt to convince a stranger at a stoplight that our life is going splendidly.
We replace a perfectly functional car because the new model has a larger screen on which to ignore the road.
We work for years to buy an object that carries us to the same office where we will work to pay its installments.
A form of circular poetry, if it were not so fucking sad.
There, a car could lose a piece and keep going.
No bumper?
So what.
One door a different color?
Avant-garde.
The engine sounded like a wounded animal in the middle of an exorcism?
You turned up the music.
When it truly broke, they would deal with it.
They would repair it again or replace it with another equally stubborn wreck.
Not because poverty is a philosophy to celebrate.
It is not.
Driving an unsafe vehicle does not become poetic just because there are palms behind it. Necessity remains necessity, even when a Western photographer decides to put it in flattering light.
But what I saw was a different relationship with objects.
Things served life.
Life was not sacrificed to things.
Meanwhile, the children ran.
The entire city seemed to be their playground.
No fenced-off area, no impact-absorbing flooring, no adult with an insulated water bottle ready to sterilize every surface their hands touched.
They had streets, sidewalks, courtyards, and the sea.
They ran toward the water with the absolute confidence you possess only before discovering how many things can go wrong.
As a child, I too turned any space into a world.
A low wall became a castle.
A bicycle was a motorcycle.
An empty field could contain wars, journeys, championships, and adventures large enough to last until dinner.
Then you grow up and someone explains that every place has a precise function.
The sidewalk is for walking.
The road for driving.
The table for working.
The bed for sleeping.
And life for producing enough money to buy places where, someday, you may finally play again.
The children of Higüey did not seem to have received the news yet.
Thankfully.
Some people rested while sitting directly on the sidewalk.
There were no chairs.
The need to stop was there.
So they sat wherever they happened to be, allowing concrete to become bench, waiting room, and public living room.
There was no embarrassment.
No fear of looking unproductive.
They were tired, and they stopped.
A scandalously honest solution.
We manage to be exhausted without admitting it. We keep answering emails, drinking coffee, and saying “everything’s fine” while the body politely tries to inform us it has had enough.
They sat down.
Perhaps they had fewer comforts.
But they seemed to have retained the right to listen to their fatigue.
The minivan station was busier than the first time.
People waiting, drivers, luggage, vehicles ready to leave, and a quantity of movement lacking the reassuring order to which we are accustomed.
There were no perfect lines.
There was no electronic board capable of announcing a forty-minute delay in the serene voice of someone who knows they will not have to endure it.
And yet, somehow, people left.
Someone asked.
Someone pointed.
Someone loaded a bag.
The system seemed to be sustained more by relationships than procedures.
People had to speak to one another.
An almost revolutionary detail by now.
Soon afterward, I saw several passengers sitting in the bed of a pickup truck.
They rode in the open air as though it were the most normal thing in the world.
And there, it was.
Back home, codes, fines, statistics, insurance companies, and a television expert ready to explain the many different ways one could die on such a trip would have arrived immediately.
He would probably have been right.
Safety matters.
Rules save lives.
But is there a point at which protection becomes a cage?
How much risk can we eliminate before eliminating the experience too?
We have helmets, seat belts, sensors, warnings, waivers, and instruction manuals for objects we once would simply have touched while trying not to act like idiots.
And yet we are terrified.
They rode in the truck bed.
Wind against them.
Hands gripping the sides.
I do not mean they were freer because they could break their necks more easily.
That would be the conclusion of a privileged asshole.
But that scene contained something we have lost: the ability to accept that living inevitably involves some risk, dust, discomfort, and unpredictability.
We want to arrive intact.
They seemed to want to arrive alive.
Those are not always the same thing.
Near the sea, the old cannon returned.
The one I had already encountered in the first chapter, rusted and useless beneath the palms.
This time a child sat on top.
He sat astride war and looked toward the horizon.
Perhaps he was pretending to fire at imaginary ships.
Perhaps he was a commander, a pirate, a soldier, or the captain of a fleet that existed only inside his head.
Or perhaps he was thinking about nothing.
That too is a possibility we adults constantly forget. We see a child before the sea and immediately want to assign him philosophical depth.
Maybe he was simply hot.
But the photograph allowed for something else.
A weapon built by men to destroy became a child’s horse.
Metal, history, violence, and power were confiscated by imagination.
Adults build cannons.
Children climb on top and turn them into toys.
Perhaps we should leave the world to them a little sooner, before we ruin it completely.
I returned downtown.
Traffic had grown denser. Cars, minibuses, scooters, and people wedged themselves between buildings, signs, and power lines. Noise came from every direction and, for a moment, the city seemed to contradict all its slowness.
I crouched almost to the ground.
From that point of view, the street became enormous.
Cars loomed, wheels filled the frame, and people emerged between vehicles like figures inside a metallic current.
It was a frantic city.
But it did not possess the sterility of our frenzy.
Back home, traffic is a private illness experienced collectively. Everyone sealed inside their own car, isolated, angry, ready to consider every other human being a personal obstacle.
There, the confusion still seemed capable of producing contact.
A voice from a window.
A greeting.
A raised hand.
Someone crossing where they should not and someone else slowing down without turning the gesture into an existential crisis.
The city could hurry without forgetting it was made of people.
Photographing it from the ground meant surrendering the observer’s comfortable position.
Not looking down on it.
Letting myself nearly be trampled.
Entering the flow and accepting that the photograph should not impose order, but return that living confusion.
Street photography, for me, has always been this.
Not explaining the street.
Letting it pass through you.
Allowing the place to soil the image, make it imperfect, fill it with elements you never anticipated.
Life does not compose by the rules.
It does not wait for a clean background.
It does not ask whether the exposure is correct.
It happens.
And you have to be present enough to notice.
Then the light began to change.
The day slowly shifted toward the sea.
There was no definitive sunset yet, the kind that demands silence, gathers everyone on the beach, and turns even the most cynical human being into an automatic dispenser of vertical photographs.
Not yet.
It was only the end of the afternoon.
The moment when shadows lengthen, colors stop shouting, and people keep living while the day slowly loses substance.
A woman raised her phone toward the horizon.
She photographed the light.
I photographed her.
Two people trying to hold on to something already disappearing.
Perhaps this is photography’s most absurd and human gesture.
We see something beautiful and, instead of simply looking, feel compelled to possess a trace of it.
We know the sun will return.
That the sea will still be there.
That millions of almost identical photographs exist.
But that light is ours.
That moment is happening before our eyes, and we want proof capable of outliving us at least until the next phone upgrade.
She photographed the sunset.
I photographed her need to photograph it.
Someone else could probably have photographed me and built another needlessly complicated theory on top of it.
The pier stretched across the water.
People walked, lingered, looked at the sea. Some had become dark shapes against a light that had not yet decided to die.
A boat remained offshore.
Small.
Far enough away to seem free of everything.
Naturally, it was not. It must have had a destination, an owner, an engine to check, fuel to pay for, and some problem that distance had the good taste to conceal.
But from the shore, it was only a shape on the horizon.
The possibility of going elsewhere.
We often photograph boats because they make the world appear crossable.
They remind us the horizon is not a wall.
It is a line invented by our eyes because the brain needs to pretend immense things can have an end.
On the pier, people became silhouettes.
A woman.
A man.
A couple.
Someone standing.
Someone else sitting.
They lost their features and, precisely because of that, could become anyone.
When a face disappears, we fill it in.
We give those figures our stories, our loves, and the people we still wish were beside us before a light like that.
Perhaps that couple was happy.
Perhaps they had argued ten minutes earlier.
Perhaps one was thinking of leaving the other and had chosen the sunset to postpone the conversation.
Beauty solves nothing.
But sometimes it grants a truce.
Nearby, someone moved across the water on a board.
A paddle.
A body.
The sea.
The figure moved slowly, suspended between reflection and sky. Each stroke shifted them only slightly, without truly disturbing the vastness around them.
They were not conquering the horizon.
They were crossing it for a few yards.
The difference seemed important to me.
We are obsessed with conquest.
We have to reach, surpass, obtain, prove.
Even on a walk, we want to know how many steps we took and calories we burned, as though an experience unrecorded by a device might never have existed.
That figure paddled.
One stroke.
Then another.
Without noise.
Without applause.
Moving enough not to remain still and slowly enough not to lose the landscape.
The plants along the shore had turned black against the sky.
Branches and leaves formed intricate, almost motionless outlines. They too took part in the day’s ending without doing anything to deserve it.
They grew.
Waited.
Let the light pass.
From the painter to the plants, from the man rolling cigars to the people on the pier, everything seemed to follow the same rule.
Do what must be done.
But do not let the gesture devour the moment.
The day was not ending.
It was changing exposure.
The city, the sea, the children, the beat-up cars, and the people sitting on sidewalks did not disappear when the light faded.
They became shapes.
Voices.
Presences.
Higüey had shown me a life that did not need to be made tourist-friendly to become interesting.
A city not built to serve us.
People who worked, certainly, but who still seemed capable of sitting, talking, waiting, and leaving a shop closed without believing they had betrayed their destiny.
Cars missing pieces but not usefulness.
Craftsmen who gave time a shape.
A painter who created because he had something to let out.
Children running through a city not yet transformed into a series of prohibitions.
Men and women occupying the street as though it belonged to them too.
Because it did belong to them too.
Perhaps I had romanticized everything.
It is possible.
A traveler sees a chair on a sidewalk and talks about freedom. The person sitting there may simply wish for a more comfortable home.
He sees a wrecked car and builds a theory against consumerism. The driver may have dreamed of a new car for years.
He sees a closed shop and imagines a rebellion against productivity. The owner may be in bed with a fever or unable to afford new merchandise.
Photographs do not explain.
They suggest.
And we fill them with whatever we lack.
What I lacked was a less controlled life.
A day allowed to lose time without being considered wasted.
The possibility of creating something without immediately asking whether it was useful, marketable, or worthwhile.
What I lacked was a chair to place in the middle of my own frenzy.
To sit.
Watch everything pass.
And understand that I was not obliged to chase it.
As the light faded, people still remained on the pier.
The boat was still on the horizon.
Someone paddled.
Someone took photographs.
Someone else did nothing in particular, which may have been the most important activity of all.
The chapter did not end with the sunset.
It ended shortly before.
At the moment when the day still had life in it but no longer felt the need to prove it.
The figures turned black.
The sky held on to its final colors.
The sea kept moving.
And Higüey, far from postcards and Westerners convinced that every paradise should be at their service, remained what it had always been.
A city full of people occupied with living.
Not perfectly.
Not comfortably.
Not by our rules.
But with that marvelous, irreducible ability to tell hurry to go fuck itself before hurry took everything else.