The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [58]
But for all the exuberance of this display, there was also a touch of realism: climbing up the platform were giant land crabs that seemed about to eat the cane cutter, the baseball players—everyone. At sunset, when the shadows are long, it becomes clear that San Pedro really is full of land crabs that, for unknown reasons, cross the roads at that time of day, ready—like mold, humidity, mosquitoes, hurricanes, and a thousand other tropical menaces—to devour this town.
The different reincarnations of San Pedro were apparent along the city streets like rings in the cross section of a tree. Downtown was a mix of architectures, all made homogeneous by the same palette of turquoise, pink, yellow, and apricot. There were old pre-sugar-boom, rural Caribbean wood-shingle houses with fretwork above the doorways. The sun parched the brightly painted wood of these houses, some of which listed slightly, while the darkness inside made them look abandoned. But they were designed to keep out sunlight, and their simple architecture with pitched roofs was conceived with an understanding of the climate and so they last forever, surviving sun and rot and hurricanes.
The fine old late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings from the days of the sugar boom, with high arched doorways and ornate cornices and charming balconies, had not fared as well. A few of these buildings were well preserved; others were worn but surviving; many were gutted; some were roofless; and some were no more than a miraculously preserved façade in a vacant lot.
The cathedral was perfectly maintained, and so fresh and bedecked with bobbles and swirls that it looked as though it would melt in the tropical heat. It was the tallest, whitest thing around, the steeple looking almost electric in the hard sun with a black afternoon storm sky in the background. And the yellow City Hall still looked as decorated as the gooey piped cakes displayed under glass at the pastry shops.
And there was modern concrete, the innovation San Pedro is proud to have introduced to the Dominican Republic. Since that first concrete structure went up, many more followed, including four big chain department stores, office buildings, apartment buildings, and, inexplicably, numerous shoe stores—none more than a few stories high.
The port, where seaplanes once landed and sugar once was shipped but was now barely used, filled a long swath of riverfront with abandoned hangars and warehouses. The Parque Central, or Central Park, on the other hand, was still the social center it was intended to be. Between street vendors, sidewalk musicians, people taking a break and those with simply nothing to do, this square of palms and local tropical trees and plants was never empty.
Across from the park was a popular restaurant, Amable, which specialized in pasteles en hojas and batidas de lechosa. With its plastic chairs and tables, it looked like a fast-food restaurant except that it was decorated with San Pedro paintings and sculptures. Macorisanos would tell you with their local pride that the pasteles were a local specialty. They were either mashed cassava root or ground bananas filled with meat and steamed in banana leaves. In fact they were tamales, a food invented in central and southern Mexico by an indigenous people—anthropologists disagree about which one—long before the arrival of the Spanish. After the Cubans got tamales, they brought them—as well as sugar and baseball—to San Pedro, where they became part of local life. Batidas de lechosa, papaya milk shakes with lots of sugar, probably did not originate locally, either, although the word