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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
That summer! Eleven years ago, and I still remember every bit of it. Me and the girlfriend had decided to spend our vacation in Santo Domingo, a big milestone for me, one of the biggest, really: my first time "home" in nearly twenty years. (Blame it on certain "irregularities" in paperwork, blame it on my threadbare finances, blame it on me.) The trip was to accomplish many things. It would end my exile--what Salman Rushdie has famously called one's dreams of glorious return; it would plug me back into that island world, which I'd almost forgotten, closing a circle that had opened with my family's immigration to New Jersey, when I was six years old; and it would improve my Spanish. As in Tom Waits's song "Step Right Up," this trip would be and would fix everything.
Maybe if I hadn't had such high expectations everything would have turned out better. Who knows? What I can say is that the bad luck started early. Two weeks before the departure date, my novia found out that I'd cheated on her a couple of months earlier. Apparently, my ex-sucia had heard about our planned trip from a mutual friend and decided in a fit of vengeance, jealousy, justice, cruelty, transparency (please pick one) to give us an early bon-voyage gift: an "anonymous" letter to my novia that revealed my infidelities in excruciating detail (where do women get these memories?). I won't describe the lio me and the novia got into over that letter, or the crusade I had to launch to keep her from dumping me and the trip altogether. In brief, I begged and promised and wheedled, and two...
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