On Tuesday, 30 May 1961 , the dictator Rafael Trujillo was shot and killed
when his blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air was ambushed on a road outside Santo Domingo Trujillo Paris Trujillo Trujillo Trujillo France
At the insistence of the United States January 1, 1962 , which included moderate members of the opposition. After
an attempted coup, Balaguer resigned and went into exile on January 16. The
reorganized Council of State, under President Rafael Bonnelly headed the
Dominican government until elections could be held.
These elections, in December 1962, were won by
Juan Bosch, a scholar and poet who had founded the opposition Partido
Revolucionario Dominicano (Dominican Revolutionary Party, or PRD) in exile,
during the Trujillo Cuba Puerto Rico .
Afterwards a supposedly civilian triumvirate established a de facto
dictatorship.
Those were years of political unrest, but, being
a boy of seven years of age, I don’t remember much of it. What I mostly retain
from that time are happy memories of summers spent at my grandma’s farm. Sometimes
I was accompanied by some of my brothers or cousins. The stay at grandma’s farm
was always a cornucopia of extraordinary activities: tobogganing on a yagua
(the thick woody sheathing of the yagua palm tree branches), over the carpet of
slippery leaves under the cocoa trees; collecting the mangoes and avocadoes
that the wind had knocked down the night before; digging sweet potatoes.
Grandma was a widow. Only two of her unmarried
daughters lived with her, and they had to work on the field. I particularly
enjoyed accompanying her when she went to the fields to plant seeds. With her
machete she would inflict a wound on the ground, and I would put the seed in
it.
The countryside was beautiful, shining, and
magical during the day. Birds and cicadas sang and buzzed in the branches of
the chestnut trees. The hills loomed high across the stream. The wind whistled,
sometimes furiously, sometimes playfully, on the tops of the mango trees,
making them look like living giants. The fields of corn, plantain, cassava,
coffee, and cocoa were a testimony to the generosity of mother earth. But at
nightfall, without electric lighting, the dell where grandma lived, escorted by
two hills, whose elevation seemed to have no end, was dark. Looking through the
windows of the ranch to the spooky shadows that ruled outside, the countryside
became a fearsome place, haunted by monsters, ghosts, and demons.
That’s when I would seek grandma’s company who,
sitting at the dining table, was doing something, like making a quilt, by the light
of the kerosene lamp. She knew me very well, and knew what was going through my
mind. I would sit on a chair next to her, cross my arms on the table, and bury
my face in them, as though ignoring the shadows covering the ranch were to
protect me against the evil creatures lurking in the night, hiding behind the
trees. After that I would wait for grandma’s hand, which invariably would start
caressing my hair until I fell asleep.
© William Almonte Jiménez, 2015
