Dominican Republic, Chapter II — Dominicus and the Rhythm of the Shore*
The first chapter had ended with my shadow on the ground.
Me, the camera, and that growing feeling that I had finally found something resembling a direction. Not a definitive answer—I gladly leave those to gurus, priests, and men drunk enough to believe they are sober—but at least a road along which I could keep walking.
Then came the beach.
Not as a reward.
As a change of breath.
After the houses, stalls, broken roads, and daily life of Bayahibe, Dominicus looked as though it had combed its hair for company. Pale sand, turquoise water, palms, umbrellas, and a black-and-white striped lighthouse planted at the edge of the sea like one particularly photogenic exclamation point.
The kind of place that needs no introduction.
You look at it and immediately understand why someone crossed an ocean, endured a ten-hour flight, two screaming children, and an airline’s plastic meal tray just to get there.
It was beautiful.
Fucking beautiful.
And not with the kind of beauty assembled through an advertising campaign. Tourism could clean the sand, arrange the lounge chairs, and sell cocktails with tropical names, but no one had invented the color of that sea.
That blue existed before the resorts.
Before the reviews.
Before some executive in a conference room decided what a room with a view should cost.
The first photograph shows a small bird on the sand.
Not the lighthouse.
Not the sea.
Not the grand view any reasonable person would have chosen to introduce a Caribbean beach.
A bird.
It stood there, thin legs planted in the sand and the wary expression of someone who does not trust the next human armed with a camera. Around it, the landscape disappeared into a pale expanse.
It was tiny.
And yet it seemed perfectly at home.
Perhaps because peace does not need to occupy much space.
We are the ones who must keep expanding our territory to feel alive: a larger house, a bigger car, more money, more attention, more people publicly prepared to testify that we exist.
It had a few inches of sand.
They seemed sufficient.
The lighthouse appeared immediately afterward.
Black and white, vertical, almost arrogant amid all that color. It kept returning in the photographs: near, far, framed by people, surrounded by lounge chairs, or alone before the sea.
It was more than a building.
It was the metronome of the beach.
It remained still while light, bodies, waves, and clouds changed around it. Tourists arrived, spread their towels, burned their backs, and returned home with a wristband, a few photographs, and the illusion of having been happy in some exotic way.
The lighthouse stayed.
It had probably watched thousands of people cross that sand convinced those seven days were an unrepeatable event.
To the lighthouse, it was only Tuesday.
And this is one of travel’s healthiest humiliations: discovering that the place changing your life does not even notice you passing through.
The sea will not remember your name.
The sand will erase your footprints.
The lighthouse will continue being a lighthouse without keeping a single photograph of you.
There is something strangely liberating about being so unimportant.
I walked along the beach.
People sat near the water, some in groups, others facing the sea. There were couples folded into conversations I could not hear and motionless bodies beneath the sun, surrendered to that temporary innocence we grant ourselves on vacation.
No boss.
No alarm clock.
No email saying “friendly reminder” when what it really means is “move your ass, asshole.”
Only skin, salt, and apparently free time.
But even in paradise, Westerners remain Westerners.
They arrive wearing their watches.
They schedule the excursion, breakfast, tanning, even the moment when they intend to relax. They ask how long peace takes to reach and grow irritated if the answer does not arrive on schedule.
They want to experience spontaneity, provided it is included in the package.
I watched them leaning against the bar, sitting near the shore, or lined up on lounge chairs. Some looked at the sea, others at their phones. They had crossed half the world only to find themselves before the same little screen they had been trying to escape at home.
It is our greatest talent.
We can carry the cage anywhere.
All it takes is Wi-Fi.
And yet the beach kept working on them.
The sun slowed their movements. The wind interrupted conversations. The sound of the waves entered their silences, and little by little, even the most stubbornly productive people began to surrender.
Peace did not ask permission.
It slipped between one thought and the next.
I crossed a wooden walkway leading toward the sea.
The planks divided sand from water like a line drawn between what I knew and something that had no need to be understood. People walked back and forth, some headed for the boats, others simply curious about the horizon.
Every walkway contains a promise.
It tells you that you can move forward without having to swim just yet.
It is a kind of compromise between courage and fear. You still have something solid underfoot, but the water comes close enough to remind you that sooner or later, the land will end.
Perhaps much of life is exactly this.
Walking along piers built toward the things that frighten us, pretending the wood can continue forever.
On either side, the sea glittered.
A woman bent toward the sand. Other people crossed the shoreline. Someone spoke beneath a white canopy stirred by the wind. Fabric, bodies, and light overlapped in a scene that did not need to tell anything precise.
And that was exactly where the feeling began.
A photograph does not always have to explain.
Sometimes it should only leave a feeling on the table and walk away before anyone asks it to justify itself.
That beach gave me peace.
Not the mystical peace of meditation manuals, where a woman dressed in white smiles atop a rock while trying to sell you a $999 course.
A simpler peace.
Physical.
Wind on skin.
Colors that did not need correcting.
Water moving without wondering whether it was doing so correctly.
The local people seemed tuned to that rhythm.
They did not fight the landscape.
They did not try to dominate it.
They lived inside it.
And then he arrived.
The bartender.
It is photograph number sixty-three, if you need a number to locate the exact point where this chapter stops talking about the beach and starts talking about life.
An old man behind the bar.
A weathered face, a hat, hands occupied by his work. Before him, bottles, tools, glasses, and orders. Behind him, out of focus, one of the most beautiful seas I had ever seen.
The sea is not in focus.
He is.
And that was exactly as it should be.
Because paradise, in that photograph, is not the background.
It is the way that man stands before the background.
He works.
He has probably worked there for years. Perhaps decades. He must have served thousands of beers, listened to orders mispronounced in four languages, endured customers convinced that paying for a vacation granted them the constitutional right to be impatient.
And yet he does not seem to be in a hurry.
He listens.
He takes an order.
Then another.
He makes every gesture at the exact speed required by the moment, not the speed demanded by whoever is waiting.
Someone must have drummed their fingers on the bar.
Someone else must have checked their watch.
Perhaps some tourist thought: Jesus Christ, how long does one beer take?
He probably kept doing whatever he was doing.
Because the rhythm of the beach does not change for the anxiety of a man from Düsseldorf wearing an all-inclusive wristband.
You will wait.
The beer will come.
The sun will keep descending.
And your life will not be ruined by the ninety seconds during which you were not served immediately.
Looking at that photograph, I wondered who was really at work.
Him, behind the bar?
Or everyone else, incapable of stopping the production of impatience even while on vacation?
The bartender had that spectacle before him every day.
Turquoise water, enormous clouds, light changing shape across the sea. Perhaps he no longer looked at it. Perhaps, as happens to all marvelous things that become ordinary, he had stopped noticing.
Or perhaps he still saw it.
I like to think that every now and then, while drying a glass or waiting for a bottle to finish filling, he raised his eyes.
Only for a few seconds.
Long enough to remember where he was.
Long enough to understand that yes, he had to work, but no wall kept him from seeing the horizon.
We build offices where the windows do not open, light rooms with fluorescent tubes capable of making even a ficus look depressed, then hang photographs of beaches on the wall to remind ourselves that somewhere, the world still has colors.
He worked inside that photograph.
Not hung on a wall.
Alive.
In motion.
With wind, salt, and real light.
Naturally, I do not know whether he was happy.
A beautiful view does not pay the bills, and the sea does not automatically make a wage fair. It would be childish to believe that working before the Caribbean erases exhaustion, aching joints, asshole customers, or all the worries a photograph cannot show.
But what struck me was the harmony.
He did not look like a man torn from the landscape and nailed to a shift.
He looked like part of that place.
Like the bar.
Like the lighthouse.
Like the heron walking along the shore nearby.
The heron and the bartender had much in common.
Both stood near the water.
Both waited.
Both watched that curious fauna made up of fish, tourists, and people convinced they always had the right of way.
The heron waited for the sea to bring it something.
The bartender waited for someone to order a drink.
Neither seemed willing to run.
The heron did not throw itself into the water cursing the ocean because the fish was late. It stood still, let the moment ripen, then made the necessary move.
The bartender did the same.
Perhaps that is all wisdom is.
Not surrender.
Not immobility.
The ability to recognize the precise moment to act without spending an entire life nervously waiting for whatever comes next.
We, instead, live in anticipation.
While working, we think about the break.
During the break, we think about work.
When we are alone, we want someone.
When someone arrives, we begin wanting to be left alone.
We go on vacation thinking about the photographs we will post and, once home, stare at those photographs wondering why we were unable to truly be there.
The bartender was there.
That was the difference.
The photograph does not tell the story of a man serving drinks.
It tells the story of a man who does not seem to have been expelled from his own present.
Behind him, the sea remains out of focus because, in the end, there is no need to see every wave.
It is enough to know it is there.
Paradise does not always need to be at the center of the frame.
Sometimes it is whatever allows a face to carry that peace.
The small scenes of the beach continued around him.
Another stretch of bar.
The lighthouse’s black-and-white stripes repeated in the bar’s architecture.
People leaning, bottles lined up, bodies warmed by the sun. Workers and tourists occupied the same space but seemed to belong to two different ideas of time.
One group sold the day.
The other had bought it.
And there was no guarantee they knew how to use it any better.
A local man sat beneath a palm, surrounded by lounge chairs and green umbrellas. Even amid the relaxation industry, he retained a tranquil expression. The tourists had paid to be there. Somehow, he seemed to belong there.
There is an enormous difference between occupying a place and inhabiting it.
You can spend ten days on a beach without ever truly having been there.
Or you can spend your life behind a bar and know the movement of every cloud.
I continued through the colors.
A small souvenir shop displayed objects, lettering, and bright shapes. Everything tried to turn the journey into something that could be tucked inside a suitcase.
A T-shirt.
A hat.
A magnet.
An object bearing the name of the place, in case memory needed assistance.
We buy memories because we fear emotions will not make it through baggage control.
And perhaps we are right.
Many journeys end the moment we return to our lives. The colors fade, the smells disappear, and the peace we promised to preserve is strangled by the first traffic jam.
A magnet remains on the refrigerator.
A small certificate proving that, for a few days, we were somewhere else.
I had photographs.
But even they could not hold everything.
They could not preserve the wind.
The temperature of the water.
The bartender’s voice.
The way the clouds changed color above the lighthouse.
They could only leave a wound precise enough for memory to find its way back inside.
I raised the lens toward the umbrellas.
Seen from below, they became abstract geometries, colored surfaces suspended between me and the sky. They did more than protect people from the sun: they cut the light, divided it, transformed it.
A little farther away, a parasail had become a tiny point above the horizon.
Someone flew while being pulled by a boat, suspended between sky and sea, high enough to feel free yet still firmly tied to an engine deciding the direction.
A fairly accurate image of modern freedom.
You may fly.
Provided you have paid for the ticket and do not stray from the established route.
I remained on the sand.
I watched the lighthouse appear and disappear between people. Every photograph returned a different version: surrounded by tourists, isolated against the sky, overlooking the sea, immersed in the afternoon light.
Perhaps I kept photographing it because I needed something to remain still.
Travel, after all, is a form of voluntary instability. The bed changes, the roads, the faces, the habits. You move to feel free and sometimes end up longing for a point that does not move.
The lighthouse was that point.
It did not tell me where to go.
It reminded me where I was looking from.
The afternoon slowly began to surrender.
The light lowered, the sea lost its noonday arrogance, and the people on the beach grew quieter. Even the colors seemed to speak more softly.
The lighthouse remained in the distance.
Bodies scattered along the shore.
The day did not end abruptly. It withdrew with the same calm in which it had arrived, giving the sky time to change its mind several times.
Then the sun reached the horizon.
An orange disk above the sea.
No people in the foreground.
No lighthouse.
No order waiting to be served.
Only water, sky, and that bright sphere staging its own death every evening while knowing perfectly well it will return the next day.
I stood watching.
I thought of the bartender still behind the bar, the heron on the shore, the tourists who would soon leave the beach to dress for dinner, and the bottles that would line up again the following morning.
Everything would begin again.
But not in the same way.
The light would be different.
The sea would shift the sand.
Someone would arrive, someone else would leave, and the old bartender might serve another beer to a man too impatient to notice the spectacle before him.
This second chapter did not teach me that we should not work.
That would be a convenient conclusion, especially when written by someone who at that moment stood on the other side of the bar holding a camera.
It showed me something subtler.
That work can occupy the hands without necessarily taking the whole soul.
That you can serve a beer without becoming a slave to the haste of the person demanding it.
That peace is not the absence of obligations, but the ability not to let those obligations decide the rhythm of every breath.
We Westerners had brought our watches, expectations, and demand to be served onto the beach.
They placed a sea before us and seemed to say: all right, you will get what you ordered. But first, learn to wait.
The bartender was still there.
So was the heron.
The sun descended.
The clouds passed.
The world did not hurry.
And for once, neither did I feel the need to catch up with it.