The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [60]
Gladys María José was born in San Pedro in 1923. Her father was Haitian and her mother was from Dominica. Her mother died when she was very young. Her father came to cut cane and stayed illegally, making up the name José for her because he was afraid that with his foreign family name she might be deported. She was the cook at Rincón Cocolo and she gave this recipe for fungi:
Take cornmeal and put it in a pot with salt over low heat. Then wet flour with cold water. Then gather up the wet flour and put it in the pot that has the cornmeal. Stir fast so that it doesn’t make balls. Add a little butter and stir it in.
Cocolo cooking, like drinking guavaberry and playing plaquita, has become a part of San Pedro life adopted by the rest of the population. Almost every housewife in San Pedro makes pescado y domplin. The domplin, or dumplin, pronounced “doompleen,” is the typical British Caribbean dumpling served from Jamaica to Saint Kitts: a heavy little ball made from flour and water. If a town can have its own dish, this would be San Pedro’s. Most Macorisanos do not know that domplin is from an English-language word.
Linda was born in a neighborhood called Miramar, meaning “see the sea,” which is literally true. Because San Pedro’s waterfront was on the river, the side facing the Caribbean Sea was an undeveloped back barrio where poor people, many of them sugar workers, lived. Miramar has produced a number of major-league players in recent years, including catcher Ángel Peña, infielder Fernando Tatis, pitcher Lorenzo Barceló, and outfielder Luis Mercedes. They played on the streets. Tatis described tearing up blankets to make balls: “We tore blankets in strips and rolled them tight and sewed them together. We loved baseball so much, we would play with anything.” Miramar is no longer poor. In the 1960s, in the push to make San Pedro more tourist friendly, a broad boulevard was built by the oceanfront where a rocky coral coast leads to a perfect, bright Caribbean Sea, blue for miles on a good day. Like the longer seaside boulevard in Santo Domingo and the one in Havana, it is called the Malecón.
A whole other town grew by the Malecón. There was a huge and sumptuous school of hotel management, clean and well-presented private schools, government buildings, well-kept modern apartment buildings, and gardened, one-story, California-style ranch houses. It became an expensive neighborhood. Even water and electricity cost more, and few could afford to live there. Much of this neighborhood was oddly deserted. The clean and well-paved streets were empty. In an otherwise bustling town, this center was devoid of cars: even the ubiquitous scooters and motorcycles of the rest of the town, and the rest of the Dominican Republic, were absent. There were not even pedestrians.
Tourism settled into the beaches outside of town. Only a few tourists came in for a brief walk around the park and a look at the cathedral. The Malecón was for locals: a quiet stretch of oceanfront by day with a few coconut or sugarcane vendors. Past the coral rocks and the palm trees was a postcard-perfect vista of a turquoise and cobalt-blue Caribbean Sea interrupted only by a few local touches, such as the rusting carcasses of ships wrecked in storms and, perched dramatically on a rock above the sea, an outhouse, because a lot of Presidente beer was consumed at night along the Malecón. After dark it was the place, with merengue exploding from phenomenally powerful speakers that rattled the windows in the nearby hotel, the only attempt at a business- or tourist-class hotel in town. The music came from