A Numbered Street

Carlos Alonzo

Copyright © 2024 Carlos Manuel Alonzo Abreu

All rights reserved

In 'A Numbered Street' you will encounter situations based on real events, presented by fictional characters. Therefore, any resemblance to persons living or deceased would be purely coincidental, except for colorful characters and politically exposed individuals who must be cited as part of historical facts.

We certify that neither the author nor the publisher have had any commitment or connection with the people, places, brands, or companies mentioned in these pages.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-9945-18-962-9

Cover design: Fiesky Rivas (Editorial Salto al reverso)

Daughter: If you ever wish to know the origin of your father, these pages will take you to that place.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

The neighborhood

1 - Children

2 - Travel

3 - Mortal

4 - Neighbors

5 - Time

6 - Blood

7 - Different

8 - Characters

9 - Couple

10 - Airport

11 - Tania

12 - Bicycle

13 - Alluring

14 - Lovers

15 - Unemployment

16 - Hurricane

17 - Foreigners

18 - Rascal

19 - Puberty

20 - Angela

21 - Orphanhood

22 - Suspicion

23 - Fallen

24 - Evolution

25 - Guayka

26 - Delonier

27 - Curiosity

28 - Explorers

29 - Intimidation

30 - Confrontation

31 - Response

32 - Revelation

33 - Strike

34 - Lídice

35 - Warning

36 - Reunion

37 - Enough

38 - Letters

39 - Memorabilia

40 - Selfish

41 - Pawned

42 - Work

43 - Luck

44 - Drugs

45 - Realities

46 - Sybil

47 - Travel

48 - Destinations

49 - Excursion

50 - Money

51 - Prisoners

52 - Distress

53 - Bank

54 - Yola

55 - Immigrants

56 - Unexpected

57 - Adults

58 - Resignation

59 - Discretion

60 - Moving

61 - New York

Contact

About The Author

Introduction

It's a strange coincidence that in Santo Domingo, streets identified by numbers are, with rare exceptions, places where many people who commit or tolerate crimes live. But that's just the superficial observation of a reality that stems from the struggle against prevailing issues and the resilience of those who suffer from them.

The following pages tell stories of some of these individuals and their pursuit of well-being that was not guaranteed in their own country. They speak about frustrations and tragedies that laid the groundwork for a group of young people to declare emigration as an objective to be achieved legally or illegally.

The mainsetting is 39th Street in the Cristo Rey neighborhood, inhabited by people who made work their life and were witnesses or victims of situations such as poverty, orphanhood, unemployment, crime, persecution, corruption, vices, vulnerability, and abuses of power during the decades of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. The events are seen and described through the eyes of a group of boys, their parents, and some neighbors with extraordinary abilities that manifested themselves in a timely manner.

The protagonists maintained a prolonged friendship that was consolidated as they grew and found ingenious solutions to their respective personal and family situations, discovering along the way the influence of sexuality, power, and money in a neighborhood where cunning, secrecy, and powerful sponsors were required to survive.

The neighborhood

Old Map of Cristo Rey in 1943, when it was still known as Barrio Obrero. This story is based on real events, which mainly occurred within this perimeter between the years 1966 and 1993.

1 - Children

Iván

Juana arrived alone at the maternal and child hospital alone. Dirty, hungry, and in labor pains. Her face reflected the bitterness and suffering caused by a creature that forced her weak muscles and bones from within. For nine months, she carried within her what for her was an unjust condemnation, the result of the brutal rape perpetrated by a soldier who disappeared after savagely satisfying his sexual appetite. This traumatized her so much that on three occasions she was arrested for stoning men in olive-green uniforms who crossed her path. Her painful contractions increased as she awaited her turn, under the gaze of nurses who whispered their doubts about the survival chances of a child born to such a malnourished mother.

But Juana, 23 years old though she looked older, with skin weathered by the sun, her hair unkempt, with an obvious lack of teeth, and scars on her skin as a reminder of street fights, had to bring that life into the world because she knew herself incapable of abortion. Even if she had wanted to, she wouldn't have had the means to pay a doctor for that solution.

At 9:50 on October 17th, 1966, in one of the hottest months on record in the Dominican Republic, the cry of a child conceived during moments of anguish, hunger, nights exposed to the elements, and resentment during Juana's pregnancy was heard. Juana was a woman who knew no other way to survive than begging, with no possible way out to guarantee her child's life after leaving the hospital, where at least she had ensured food while she recovered and experienced what it was like to sleep in a bed with clean sheets.

Juana left the hospital seven days later with a baby for whom she hadn't even thought of a name. As she left, she thanked the last nurse who attended to her and took with her a basket with diapers and bottles donated by doctors moved by pity, who also collected a few pesos for her. She walked 350 meters from the hospital gate to the corner where cars offering shared taxi service were boarded. With her left arm carrying the baby and her right arm raised, she pointed westward with her index finger, a signal that she was heading to one of the neighborhoods north of Santo Domingo, the capital city.

After fifteen minutes under the sun, she became the first passenger of a driver who drove a blue Austin Cambridge with a red-painted roof. Get in, my lady. It pains me to see you suffering this heat and carrying that baby, said the driver. Juana set off in search of the only relative in the city who had treated her with dignity, confident that she would do everything possible to prevent the fatal predictions for a child unaware of all the evils that preceded its arrival in the world.

Please drop me off up there, Juana said, signaling to the driver, who refused to accept payment for his service, sensing that she would need those coins sooner or later. Juana arrived at the corner formed by Nicolás de Ovando Avenue and 39th Street in the Cristo Rey neighborhood. Wearing the same ragged clothes she wore to give birth, she walked with her rubber sandals on the hard-packed dirt that served as pavement for what was a street project, heading towards the house of Doña Carmen, her aunt, who, like her, was born in the Las Charcas village in the southern region.

The 39th street measures almost a mile and is bordered to the north by the lateral wall of a workers' cemetery and to the south by the rear wall of a hospital that only attended to children sick with tuberculosis. It has two slopes whose highest points converge on Ovando Avenue. Juana walked along the slope that leaned towards Carmen's house. Along the way, she noticed that very few houses were more than one level; some were made of wood while others were sturdier with concrete blocks, all topped with zinc sheets in a gabled roof.

A common feature of these houses was their internal division that did not reach the ceiling, allowing for good ventilation and the use of a single light bulb for multiple areas. Some of these houses had a small covered gallery with wooden or concrete ceilings, leaving a small loft inside where residents stored occasional use items.

The houses had wooden doors and windows sometimes secured with hardware, although theft was not a concern in a neighborhood where there wasn't much to steal. Most were separated by very narrow boundaries, except for places where there were alleyways to access houses built on interior lots. Since the street wasn't paved, Juana saw some women pouring water with buckets to prevent the wind from lifting dust in front of their houses. 39th Street also had no sidewalks or drains, and all wastewater or rainwater was drained through ditches dug by the residents themselves.

Cristo Rey was a quiet neighborhood, and at that hour, only the sound of kitchen utensils or the transmission of the radio drama Kalimán could be heard in some houses, indicating that it was already ten in the morning. The last sound Juana heard before reaching her destination came from the house next to Carmen's: a saxophone played the ballad Stranger in Paradise. A musician who lived there with his pregnant wife rehearsed the musical pieces he would perform that night at the Mona Lisa club, famous for its live music and for being a meeting point for executives, politicians, and businessmen.

Carmen, as she welcomed Juana onto the gallery furnished with four wooden rocking chairs of her humble house, hugged her and took the child. Both were natives of Las Charcas in the Azua province, a place of rugged terrain and desert climate where most people made a living by making brooms from palm leaves, a common material for making seats and chair backs. It was also used to make bags called macutos and pack saddles for pack animals called árganas. Carmen and Juana were born in a neighborhood of small huts built with wooden poles covered with a mixture of mud and cow dung, roofed with palm leaves or yaguas. It was normal for them to stay inside these houses only when it rained, while they cooked or at bedtime. It was a time when rural houses had no electricity, and their latrines were built out of the houses, and to get water, it was necessary to carry it in jars from a river or collect it in a cistern when it rained.

Both women drank coffee, reminiscing about anecdotes from their homeland and talking about their relatives. Juana told Carmen the painful story of the baby's origin, unable to stop her tears as she relived the terrible moments she experienced until his birth. Carmen said, holding the baby tenderly, Don't worry, Juana, leave the child with me. I have little to give in my home, but a child is always a blessing. I will care for him, ensure his health, and keep you informed.

She hoped this commitment would help her overcome the pain and loneliness left by the sudden death of her husband, Pedro, who died months earlier from pulmonary fibrosis, possibly contracted during his years as a worker in the asbestos sheet factory. In front of his photograph in the living room, there was always a lit candle, as if he were the saint he was to her while they were life companions.

Juana said goodbye to Carmen, kissed her baby, and whispered forgive me in his ear, feeling relief and pain at the same time. She handed over the bundle with the bottles and diapers that were given to her at the hospital. She left, confident she had left him in the best hands, thinking she might see him again someday. But inexplicably, all trace of her was lost. Neither Carmen nor her relatives in Las Charcas heard from her again after that encounter, and they received no response from the authorities, to whom they reported her disappearance. It was as if she had vanished into thin air.

When the child was six months old, Carmen decided to name him Iván. She came up with the name after hearing a history professor on the radio talking about the first Russian czar known as Ivan the Terrible. Since he was a very restless boy, she thought the name would suit him perfectly.

He became the youngest member of a household headed by a 44-year-old widowed and illiterate woman, with three sons: Atilio, who was 19 at the time and had been diagnosed with manic depression, a condition that made him suddenly switch from friendly to violent, furious, and threatening, with the ability to constantly expand his repertoire of obscenities and pronounceable curses. Another son was Fede, 23 years old, who was beginning a string of job failures due to his penchant for alcohol consumption.

The family's great hope was Augusto, 25, an entrepreneur who had taken the initiative to pursue technical studies and had gained the trust of a wealthy family that installed a company to clean floors, carpets, and curtains, entrusting him with the responsibility of hiring staff, and he did not hesitate to choose the most disciplined boys from 39th Street. The other great promise was Tania, who before Iván's arrival was the youngest in the family at 17. She did not fit into that part of society that exalted delicate features, where the phrase with good appearance was not missing from job postings published in the newspapers, elevating the fulfillment of certain aesthetic canons to the category of indispensable requirements for accepting a woman in a job that involved facing the public. Tania successfully strove to be the life of parties, a community leader, and a promoter of solidarity actions for neighbors in difficult situations. Her mother affectionately called her my little black girl, sure that Tania would never cause her a headache or sleepless night.

Iván grew up, and amidst the hardships, there was milk and baby food for him, in addition to some neighbors giving Carmen the clothes their children had outgrown. Thanks to Augusto's financial support, the domestic work Tania did for pay, along with the sale of some handicrafts, and what little Fede could contribute from the jobs he managed to get, the child's food was guaranteed in a two-bedroom house—the boys' room and the girls' room—where there was no refrigerator, and cooking was done on a charcoal stove located next to a backyard where the soil and ashes mixed. The house had a small room inside which housed a latrine, a bathing area, and a tank for storing water used for personal hygiene.

Max

The dramatic life unfolding in Carmen's house was discreetly observed, but not with indifference, by her neighbors next door, although her door facing the street and some windows remained closed most of the time to prevent dust kicked up by the wind from entering. The saxophonist neighbor and his pregnant wife preferred to use a side door next to the kitchen, which was accessed through an open hallway 1.7 meters wide, marking the boundary between that house and the one opposite Carmen's. This house was less spacious than its neighbors' and seemed lower due to its position on the slope. It had a small gallery barely fitting two chairs, preceded by a two-meter open-air space between the gallery and the wall that reached where a sidewalk would later be. The front of the house measured ten meters wide, four of which were occupied by a small garden with roses, sunflowers, lilies, some oregano and cilantro plants that its owner used for seasoning her meals. It also had aloe vera for cosmetic use.

The woman living there was named Beatriz, a homemaker originally from Jarabacoa, a mountainous town with forests and temperate weather, and this garden was like having a piece of her homeland nearby. Her husband was Tony, a musician and tailor who had come to the capital four years earlier from his native Río San Juan, a town of fishermen, ranchers, and farmers where beaches were simply uncultivable land that in some towns was designated for cemeteries, quarries, or fishing boat docks. When Tony turned seventeen, his father gave him a sewing machine with the purpose of ensuring him a source of income.

His life as a tailor changed two years later when a music teacher arrived in town and decided to create a band for the town hall, managing to get the government to donate musical instruments to the town, including a Hohner President saxophone, which was given to him in recognition of his skills with wind instruments. After becoming an accomplished disciple, he ventured to live in the capital in August of 1963, a month before the coup against President Juan Bosch. He settled on the second floor of a tenement located in an old colonial building on El Conde street, near Las Damas street, from where he began to establish contacts with club owners and orchestra directors.

While waiting for his opportunity to work as a musician, Tony worked as a fabric cutter in a pants factory located in a large house next to the Los Imperiales ice cream parlor. There, he met and won over Beatriz, who at that time was one of the assemblers of the pieces before they were passed on to those responsible for hemming, sewing on buttons and zippers, and ironing them before delivering them to customers. It was a union that few saw as having the possibility of lasting over time, because their temperaments were quite different, and in them there were as many coincidences as divergences.

Tony was more gestural than talkative and had no buddies. In contrast, Beatriz was outgoing and had no reservations about expressing her opinions even if they were opposed to the majority, which earned her the label of agitator in Jarabacoa during the era of the tyrant Rafael Trujillo. As a devout Catholic, she was part of the groups that protested against the egomaniac dictator being declared Benefactor of the Catholic Church. These people carried sand and gravel from the river on muleback to build the temple that now stands in the center of the town because Catholics were not willing to accept that Trujillo would do it in exchange for everyone's submission to a regime of blood and death.

Although baptized by the Catholic rite, Tony had no spiritual guidance other than his own conscience and his ethical and moral convictions. He was raised under his father's stern character and the great influence on the value of work instilled by his paternal grandmother. Both he and Beatriz were of Spanish descent, with fair skin and wavy black hair. He was of medium height, and she was barely five feet three inches tall. They were a couple without being married, something that did not matter to them but was frowned upon by Beatriz's family, until one night she had nightmares in which her deceased father reproached her for it, and then they decided to go to the civil registry. They made decisions together and complemented their temperaments, forming a team that, when needed for calculated actions, acted calmly, and when an impetuous, loud, and assertive action was required, she took charge.

By February 1965, they had moved to the tenement where Tony lived, and despite their great love, Beatriz never stopped reminding him that there were no conditions to start a family there because the property was occupied by fifteen other families, and the overcrowding was such that the use of the shower had to be regulated through shifts and schedules. They occupied a small room on the second level with a wooden floor, and when Beatriz cleaned it, she had to avoid letting water fall to the lower floor. The worst came after April 24, 1965, the day an armed revolt erupted to demand Bosch's return to power. The tenement where they lived was on the same street as the rebels' headquarters and along the trajectory of the projectiles fired by American snipers from the silos of the Molinos Dominicanos company. If we survive all this, remember that you won't see one of your children climbing those stairs, Beatriz warned Tony, although it was something he already considered for when he got a second job as a musician.

By September 3 of that year, the armed struggle had passed, and in October, Tony was several days upset and irritable, thinking about the need to move. One day, he decided to clear his mind by going to his only entertainment activity: horse races at the Perla Antillana racetrack. Usually, he preferred to listen to the radio commentary while working in the pants factory, but that day he cut as many pieces as possible early in the morning and asked for permission to go see the races in the afternoon. With the faith not of a religious person, but of a believer in divine justice, he looked up at the sky, closed his eyes for a moment, went to the betting booth, and looked at the billboard with the names of the horses that would run in seven races, their stables of origin, and their jockeys for that day.

He placed a pool bet, paid for his play, and sat in the stands. That day, what was missing for Tony's beliefs to include miracles happened. He guessed most of the results correctly and collected winnings with higher dividends than he had obtained since he became interested in horse racing. Days later, he began the search for the house he would buy, and that's how he ended up on 39th Street in Cristo Rey, where he bought a property that was still under construction. He added his winnings and savings to commission the completion to a carpenter and mason named Inocencio, who lived a few houses ahead. Beatriz's only request regarding the new house was to leave space for her small garden and for the kitchen to have a large window to endure the heat.

By March 1967, during the first government of Joaquín Balaguer, Tony had been living in Cristo Rey for a year and three months, working at the pants factory during the day and going to the Mona Lisa club at night, where he had obtained a job along with other musicians from different parts of the country to liven up the nights.  Tony always went to work dressed impeccably in a suit and tie, and for his neighbors, it was usual to see him like that, unlike others who aroused suspicions when they wore their more formal clothes and always heard the question, Are you applying for your visa?. In the club's kitchen, they prepared sandwiches for him and Beatriz to have for dinner. One night, when he arrived home from work, she gave him the big news: she was pregnant.

On Saturday, November 22, 1967, shortly after the siren located atop the building of a vegetable oil factory called La Manicera signaled to its workers and the neighborhood that it was eight in the morning, Beatriz, who was already on prenatal medical leave, felt the pains of labor, and Tony took her to the same maternal and child hospital where Iván had been born a year and a month earlier, and where almost all the children of the poor people living in the capital were born. She felt the frequency of contractions increase and had a labor of approximately seven hours.

At seven o'clock in the evening, and after a delivery that ultimately required a cesarean section, Beatriz gave birth to a baby boy weighing three and a half kilos. At birth, she did not hear him cry, so she asked the doctor, Is he okay? And he replied affirmatively, seeing that he was robust with a head full of black hair. And if he's okay, why isn't he crying? the mother said, to which the doctor replied, Don't worry, we'll take care of that now. He lifted the baby by his feet and spanked him as