Drown

This story is told in past-tense, and chronicles Yunior’s imaginings of his father’s life. 

Yunior tell us that his father—whom he calls Papi, but whose real name is Ramón de las Casas—left Santo Domingo just before Yunior’s fourth birthday. Ramón had been planning to leave for months, and was hustling and borrowing from friends and anyone else who owed him money. However, the timing of his visa approval was just plain luck. Yunior remarks that this was the last of his luck in the Dominican Republic—as Yunior’s mother had just found out that Ramón was cheating on her with an “overweight puta” he had met while breaking up a fight on her street in Los Millonitos.

Yunior remembers that during the initial fights between his mother and his father, which lasted a week, Yunior’s grandmother, named Virta, would throw the silverware into “ferocious orbits” (163). After a fork cut Ramón in the cheek, he decided to move out and stay with his mistress until things calmed down. Yunior tells us that on his father’s second night away from the house, Ramón “had a dream that the money Mami’s father had promised him was spiraling away in the wind like bright bright birds. The dream blew him out of bed like a gunshot” (163-164). He then borrowed a clean mustard-colored guayabera hat from a friend, put himself in a cab, and paid his father-in-law a visit.

Yunior narrates that his grandfather, whom he calls Abuelo, had his rocking chair in its usual place: “out on the sidewalk where he could see everyone and everything” (164). It was November and the mangoes were budding on the trees. Despite his poor eyesight, the man saw Ramón coming the moment he stepped onto the street. Yunior imagines his grandfather sighing, fed up with Ramón.

Yunior imagines his father talking to his grandfather. Ramón had sworn to him that none of the rumors about his infidelities were true. He promised that he wanted nothing other than his wife, and to provide a good life for his family. Yunior imagines the neighbors gravitating towards the front of their houses to listen in on the exchange. Finally, Abuelo asked Papi about the other woman. Ramón answered that it was true that he went to her house, but that it was a mistake. He claimed that she lied to him. He claimed that Virta, swayed too much by gossip, would not listen to him. He groveled for the money that Abuelo said he would lend to him. Abuelo told Ramón that he believed him, but that Virta would remain influenced by the gossip. He told Ramón to go home and be good to her, and not to yell or hit the children. Abuelo promised to tell Virta that Ramón was leaving soon, in an attempt to smooth things over. Ramón moved back in that night. Virta avoided him and treated him like a “troublesome visitor who had to be endured” (165). She stayed out of the house as often as she could.

Yunior remembers that during this time his father tried on multiple occasions to physically restrain his mother “against the slumping walls of the house” (166). He tried guilting her into forgiving him and taking him back, reminding her that he was leaving soon. His entreaties were met with slaps or kicks:

In a house as loud as ours, one woman’s silence was a serious thing. Papi slouched for about a month, taking us to kung-fu movies we couldn’t understand and drilling into us how much we’d miss him. He’d hover around Mami while she checked our hair for lice, wanting to be nearby the instant she cracked and begged him to stay (166).

One day, Abuelo hands Ramón a cigar box full of money. He tells him to make his children proud. The next day, Ramón buys a plane ticket for a flight leaving in three days. He waves the ticket in Mirta’s face, and she nods tiredly. She already has his clothes packed and mended. She doesn’t kiss him when he leaves. Instead, she sends the children over to him so that they could tell him goodbye. Yunior remembers, “When [Ramón] tried to embrace [Virta] she grabbed his upper arms, her fingers like pincers. You had best remember where this money came from, she said, the last words they exchanged face-to-face for five years” (166-167).

Ramón arrives in Miami at four in the morning. He passes easily through customs, “having brought nothing but some clothes, a towel, a bar of soap, a razor, his money and a box of Chiclets in his pocket” (167). He has saved money by flying into Miami, but intends to make his way to Nueva York (New York)—“the city of jobs, the city that had first called the Cubanos and their cigar industry, then the Boostrap Puerto Ricans and now him” (167).

Yunior imagines that Ramón has trouble finding his way around the terminal, as everyone speaks English and the signs are no help. He imagines Ramón has smoked half a pack of cigarettes while wandering around. When he finally makes it out of the terminal, Ramón glimpses bits of North America in the dark. A cabdriver calls out to him in Spanish, and Ramón throws his bag into the backseat.

The cabdriver asks Ramón if he has family in the States. When Ramón answers no, the cabdriver gives him an impromptu tour of the city. Although the stores are closed and gated off, Ramón recognizes the comparative richness of the country. He imagines he is being shown his new dwellings in order to ensure that they meet with his approval. The cabbie tells him to find a place to sleep, and to get any job that he can. He then drops him off at a hotel and charges him a discounted fare.

Yunior imagines that his father then begins to stroll, “smelling the dust and the heat filtering up from the pressed rock of the streets” (168). He imagines that Ramón at first considers sleeping on a bench, but that the foreignness of Miami and his lack of knowledge about a possible curfew prevent him from doing so. Ramón decides not to take the risk, knowing that fortune has turned brutally against him in the past. Yunior imagines that Ramón then communicates with the hotel clerk with difficulty, and locates his room. He imagines that Ramón, after some difficulty, manages to work the bathtub. Ramón trims his mustache with the radio tuned in and broadcasting its foreign tongue: “[Ramon] was twenty-four. He didn’t dream about his familia and wouldn’t for many years. He dreamed instead of gold coins, like the ones that had been salvaged from the many wrecks about our island, stacked high as sugar cane” (169).

Yunior imagines that the next morning Ramón assembles a new outfit, using wet fingers to smooth out the wrinkles. Even when he lived with Virta, he had always washed and ironed his clothes: “[Papi’s] generation had, after all, been weaned on the sartorial lunacy of the Jefe, who had owned just under ten thousand ties on the eve of his assassination. Dressed as he was, trim and serious, Papi looked foreign but not mojado [English: illegal]” (169).

On Ramón’s first day, he lands a room in an apartment with three Guatemalans, along with a job washing dishes at a Cuban sandwich shop. The Cuban shop used to be a “gringo diner of the hamburger-and-soda variety”, but was “now filed with Óyeme’s and the aroma of lechón” (170). The owner gives him two ankle-length aprons and tells him to keep them clean.

Two of Ramón’s roommates are brothers, Stefan and Tomás Hernandez. Stefan is older than Tomás by twenty years. They both have families back home. Cataracts are slowly devouring Stefan’s eyes, and they cost him his last job: “He now swept floors and cleaned up vomit at the train station” (170). Stefan tells Ramón that his current job is much safer, “working at a fábrica [English: factory] will kill you long before any tíguere [English: thug] will” (170). Eulalio, Ramón’s third roommate, has been in the States for two years, and tells Ramón that he is going to have to practice and learn English if he expects to get anywhere. He shames Ramón for not knowing any English. Ramón decides that he likes Eulalio the least.

Ramón sleeps in the living room, first on the floor, and then on a salvaged mattress. He works two long shifts a day, with two four-hour breaks in between. On one of the breaks, he naps at home, and on the other, he washes his aprons in the restaurant’s sinks and naps in the storage room. Sometimes, he reads the Western dreadful that he has grown fond of. Other times, he walks “the neighborhoods, amazed at streets unblocked by sewage and the orderliness of the cars and houses” (171). He is impressed by the transplanted Latinas, “who had been transformed by good diets and beauty products unimaginable back home” (171). He tries to be polite to them, but they spurn him. Not to be discouraged though, Ramón goes bar-hopping with Eulalio, who is poor company but better than none.

Eulalio and Ramón go out two to three times a week, and Eulalio tells the same story, slightly altered, every night—about thefinca [English: estate] that he had come from, a large plantation near the center of his country. He brags that he and the owners’ daughter fell in love. They would have sex in her mother’s bed. Ramón lets him talk, although he does not believe him.

Yunior imagines that after an hour or two, Ramón would pay his bill and leave. He imagines him pushing through the breeze in a short-sleeved shirt, walking the mile home and talking to anyone who will stop to talk to him. Sometimes, strangers invite him into house parties after hearing his Spanish. Ramón likes these house parties the best, and uses them as opportunities to practice his English, “away from Eulalio’s gleeful criticisms” (173).

Yunior imagines his father coming back to the apartment, lying down on his mattress, and stretching out his limbs. He conjectures that his father thinks of his family as little as he can, and that his father tells himself only to think of today and tomorrow. He imagines that, whenever Ramón feels weak, he takes the road map he bought at a gas station and traces his fingers up the coast, enunciating the city names slowly, “trying to copy the awful crunch of sounds that was English” (173). Yunior says that the northern coast of the Dominican Republic is visible on the bottom right-hand corner of the map.

Ramón leaves Miami in the winter. By this point, he has lost his job and gotten a new one. However, he is paying too much to sleep on the living room floor, and has figured out that Eulalio does not contribute to rent. Stefan and Tomás are indifferent, saying that Eulalio is the one with the car. Fed up by paying too much for too little, Ramón leaves. Yunior concedes that there are two stories about what happens next: Ramón’s version, in which Ramón leaves peacefully with a suitcase filled with Eulalio’s best clothes, or Virta’s version, in which Ramón beat the man first.

Ramón ends up on a bus to Virginia. He makes the rest of his way to New York on foot—to save as much money as he could—as to be homeless in New York “was to court the worst kind of disaster” (174). He stores his money in a fake alligator skin change purse sewn into his boxers. Although it chafes at him, it is the best insurance against a robber. He walks through the cold and hitches a ride from two truckers who take pity on him.

Just outside of Delaware, a K-car stops him on the side of the I-95. Ramón recognizes the men inside of it as federal marshals. He considers running into the woods behind him: “his visa had expired five weeks earlier and if caught, he’d go home in chains” (175). He had also heard many stories about North American police from other illegals: “how they liked to beat you before they turned you over to la migra and how sometimes they just took your money and tossed you out toothless on an abandoned road” (175). For some reason, though, Papi accepts a ride from the two white men in the car.

After ten miles, he finally begins to recover from the cold, and realizes that there is a small and fragile man, handcuffed, shackled, and weeping, in the backseat. When the driver asks him how far he is going, Ramón answers “New York” in his best English. They tell him that they aren’t going that far, but they can bring him to Trenton. When Ramón tells him that he plays the accordion, one of them gets excited, saying “My old man played the accordion but he was a Polack like me. I didn’t know hyou spiks played it too” (176). He then asks Ramón what polkas he plays. The other man, exasperated, tells him that Cubans don’t play polkas. They tell him that the man in the backseat is Scott Carlson Porter—a murderer. They then drop him off in Trenton, and Ramón is so relieved to not be in jail that he doesn’t mind walking the four hours it takes for him to begin hitch-hiking again.

Ramón lives in Washington Heights during his first year in New York. As soon as he secures his apartment and two jobs—one cleaning offices and the other washing dishes—he starts writing home. He folds four twenty-dollar bills in his first letter. Unlike his friends, he does not pre-calculate the sums he sends, which sometimes leaves him broke and borrowing money until his next payday.

During his first year, he works nineteen or twenty hour days, seven days a week. His body has a difficult time adjusting to the bitter cold. Virta forgives him and sends him news from the barrio. His return letters are scribbled on anything he can find, and are often full of typos, due to his exhaustion. Yunior imagines: “The pictures [Ramón] received from [Virta] were shared with his friends at work and then forgotten in his wallet, lost between old lottery slips” (178).

Ramón succeeds in saving enough money to start thinking about a green card marriage scheme. On the recommendation of a friend at his cleaning job, he meets up with a balding, overweight man named el General who promises to fix him up with a viable marriage candidate for fifty dollars. Yunior reveals that, by this point, Ramón has been robbed and beaten twice already. He often drinks too much and becomes “angry at the stupidity that had brought him to this freezing hell of a country, angry that a man his age had to masturbate when he had a wife, and angry at the blinkered existence his jobs and the city imposed on him” (179). He never has time to sleep, let alone to go to any museums, and his apartment is filled with cockroaches. He is unsure if he can go through with a sham marriage and thus be one step closer to bringing his family over. He is not sure if he can face them.

He asks his friends for advice. They assume that he is reluctant because of money. They tell him to get over it and pay for the sham marriage. He meets el General and hands over the money. A day later, el General gives him a name: “Flor de Oro. That isn’t her real name of course, el General [assures] Papi. I like to keep things historical” (180). (Flor de Oro is the name of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.)

Ramón meets the woman at a cafeteria and although $1000 is her rate for a sham marriage, she agrees to accept $800 from him. He manages to give her the money, and she gives him a pink receipt, which he pins over the head of his bed. His friends grow excited and his boss at the cleaning job takes him out for drinks and appetizers in Harlem. A week later, with no word from el General or the woman, and with the friend evasively telling him that he will hear from them, Ramón figures out that he has been robbed. He loses the cleaning job soon after, for punching this friend off a ladder.

Ramon loses his apartment and has to move in with a family. He finds a job frying wings at a Chinese take-out restaurant. He pens a warning letter on the back of his pink receipt and leaves it in the apartment for whatever poor soul may end up there next. He sends no money home for close to six months, while reading and stowing Virta’s letters.

One day, Ramón meets a woman named Nilda in a laundromat: “She was short, had daggers of black hair pointing down in front of her ears, and lent him her iron” (182). Nilda is Dominican, too, and has been in the States for six years. Ramón is tempted to invite her to a party in Corona, Queens, where fellow Dominicans are celebrating la Noche Buena (English: Christmas Eve). However, he settles on asking her for English lessons. He goes to the party alone and enjoys himself, and then calls Nilda a few days later. He learns that the only family she has is one daughter. She invites him over, and because he is sly, he says he doesn’t want to intrude.

Nilda owns the top floor of a house on a bleak, quiet street in Brooklyn. Her taste in decorating strikes Ramón as low-class. Her daughter, Milagros, is excruciatingly polite to Ramón and has what seems like an endless supply of dresses that are more fit for a quinceañera than real life. Ramón impresses and pleases Nilda with his endless supply of Cantonese and Cuban recipes. Nilda likes to talk about the restaurant she owns, as well as her ex-husband, who had a habit of beating her and expecting her to feed all of his friends for free. She pores over photos of Milagro, “showing [Ramón] each stage of Milagros’s development as if the girl were an exotic bug” (185). Ramón does not mention his own family.

Two weeks into his English lessons, Ramon kisses Nilda. She tells him to leave immediately. He rides the train home in a bitter mood and tells his friends that she has a snake coiled up in her heart. A week later, though, he is back in her kitchen. He tries, over and over, to kiss her. Each time, she throws him out.

Yunior remarks that his father told him that no one had coats in those days, despite the bitter cold, because no one expected to stay. Ramón continues to kiss Nilda and be kicked out by her, until she finally kisses him back. Ramón recounts: “By then I knew every maldito [English: damn] train in the city and I had this big wool coat and two pairs of gloves. I looked like an Eskimo. Like an American” (186).

Within a month, Ramón moves out of his apartment and into Nilda’s Brooklyn house. In March, he marries Nilda. Yunior remarks that although he wears a ring, Ramón does not act like a husband. He lives with her, shares her bed, pays no rent, and talks to Milagros when the TV is broken. He sets up a weight room in the cellar and regains his health. He works two jobs close to her home. At one, he solders at a radiator shop; at the other, he is a cook at Chinese restaurant.

One day, Ramón tells his boss at the Chinese restaurant about the family he left behind in Santo Domingo. The boss, with a sour expression, tells him that he can’t just forget about them, and asks him if they helped him get to America. Ramón, defensive, says that he is not forgetting about them, and that now simply isn’t the right time to send for them: he has large bills. His boss doesn’t buy it. However, Yunior gathers that Ramón must not have felt that much guilt, as that year, he sent no money home.

Nilda eventually learns of Ramón’s first family through an intercontinental gossip chain. He delivers some of his “most polished performances” to convince Nilda that he no longer cares about his first family (187).He’s careful to direct Virta’s letters to his workplace, and not Nilda’s home.

Nilda and Ramón enjoy a life together, full of simple pleasures and the rituals of coupledom. Ramón becomes best friends with Nilda’s neighbor, a man named Jorge Carretas Lugones, or Jo-Jo, for short. Jo-Jo counsels Ramón to use his current stability to start an entrepreneurial enterprise and then send for his family. Jo-Jo offers to sell Ramón one of his hot-dog carts for cheap, citing hot-dog vending as a sold money-maker. However, Yunior intimates:

Papi wanted a negocio [English: business] of his own, that was his dream, but he balked at starting at the bottom, selling hot dogs. While most of the men around him were two-times broke, he had seen a few, fresh off the boat, shake the water from their slacks and jump right into the lowest branches of the American establishment. That leap was what he imagined for himself, not some slow upward crawl through the mud(190-191).

Jo-jo’s speeches about negocios are inextricable from his lectures about Ramón’s duty to bring his family to the U.S., which troubles Ramón even more. Yunior remarks: “With the hum of his new life [Ramón] should have found it easy to bury the memory of us but neither his conscience, nor the letters from home that found him wherever he went, would allow it. Mami’s letters, as regular as the months themselves, were corrosive slaps in the face” (191). The correspondence becomes one-sided: Virta writes to him about how his children are suffering. She claims that Yunior is deathly anemic and Rafa tears his feet open while fighting other boys in the barrio. She calls Ramón “a desgraciado and a puto of the highest order for abandoning them, a traitor worm, an eater of pubic lice, a cockless, ball-less cabrón” (191-192). During bitter, drunken moments, Ramón shows Jo-Jo the letters, and Jo-Jo shakes his head, telling Ramón that his life will fall apart due to his mistakes, if he keeps them up. He repeats his assertion that Ramón must bring his family to the U.S.

Yunior intimates that Ramón is lost during this time. He takes long, dangerous walks home from his jobs, and arrives home disheveled. Nilda gives birth to their child in the spring—a boy that they name Ramón. Yunior says that the baby is the third Ramón—Rafa’s full name is Ramón. There is no party because too many of their friends know about Ramón’s previous family. Nilda knows that something is wrong, but Ramón brushes her off.

Jo-Jo regularly has Ramón drive him to JFK Airport to meet the array of relatives that he has sponsored to come to the U.S. The two use Nilda’s station wagon. Ramón witnesses their joyous reunions and imagines the reunions as his own, with his family. He begins to send money to Santo Domingo. Nilda notices the missing money and confronts him about it. He lies and says that one of his children has died. When she presses him for more details, he hits her, and she falls down. Afterward, they are both silent.

Ramón lands a job with Reynolds Aluminum in West New York that pays triple what he earns at the radiator shop. It’s a nearly two-hour commute, followed by hard labor, but the money and benefits are exceptional. It is the first time that he rises above most of the people in his immigrant community. However, the racism there is pronounced. The two fights he is involved in are reported to the bosses, who put him on probation. He makes it through probation with a raise and the highest performance rating in his department. Despite this, he is given the worst schedule in the entire factory: “The whites [are] always dumping their bad shifts on him and his friend Chuito. Guess what, they’d say, clapping them on the back. I need a little time with my kids this week. I know you wouldn’t mind taking this or that day for me” (194). Chuito complains to the bosses and gets written up for “detracting from the familial spirit of the department” (194). They both know better than to try to speak up again.

Ramón becomes too exhausted to visit with Jo-Jo regularly. He delights himself with the violence of Tom and Jerry. One day, he skips dinner and rides out to New Jersey with Chuito. They pull up in a neighborhood under construction. Chuito tells him he has a friend hiring superintendents for this construction project. These superintendents get salary and free rent. Chuito remarks that it’s a good job: “the towns nearby are quiet lots of good gringos [English: white people]” (195). He tells Ramón he can help get him a gig as a superintendent, which would help him move out of the city. On the way home, Ramón starts formulating a plan. The New Jersey location could be the perfect place for him to move his first family: no one would know of his life in Brooklyn.

Ramón continues sending money to Santo Domingo and saving up money in Jo-Jo’s lockbox for plane tickets. Then, out of the blue, Nilda announces that she would like to go to the Dominican Republic to see her parents, and introduce the baby to them. She doubts that Ramón will come with her, but he does. He stays in Santo Domingo for five days. She asks him if he will see his first family, and he bitterly tells her that he would not begrudge it if she had to see a first husband while there. He lies and tells her that his first family is totally out of the picture.

Once in Santo Domingo, Ramón is shocked to once again be among his people, who all speak the Spanish that causes him to sorely stick out in the States. His pores open up in the heat and the poverty is both familiar and stifling. He feels like a tourist. He no longer belongs. His resolve crumbles each time he considers seeing his first family. Finally, on the fourth day, he rides through the heart of his old barrio in a cab. He observes the bustle of life and finally disembarks. Yunior imagines he must have seen people he knew from his old life. He muses about how close Ramón got to the house before turning around: “His absence was a seamless thing to me. And if a strange man approached me during my play and stared down at me and my brother, perhaps asking our names, I don’t remember it now” (199).

Ramón returns to New York and has trouble resuming his routine. He turns down business ventures from Jo-Jo. One of Jo-Jo’s ventures tanks badly, but another succeeds. Nilda puts on weight, resulting in a rift between the two. They begin fighting regularly: “Locks [are] changed, doors broken, slaps exchanged but weekends and an occasional weekday night [are] still spent together” (200).

In the dead of summer, Ramón injures his back badly on the job. Chuito calls him a cab. None of his coworkers help him into it. Nilda cares for him, trying to restore his health with folk medicine from an herbal remedy store. After four days, he heals enough to sit up. He begins hatching a plan to sue the company, and visions of money and gold dance in his head. Nilda is skeptical of his plan, as is Chuito. Yunior intimates that Ramón’s father, José Edilio, a “loudmouthed ball-breaking vagrant who had never married [Ramón’s] mother but nevertheless had given her nine children, had attempted a similar stunt when he worked in a hotel kitchen in Río Piedras” (203). He had injured himself in the kitchen, and, instead of getting it treated, decided to milk it. Eventually, his foot had to be amputated.

After another week and no calls from the lawyers Ramón was consulting with, Ramón sees the company doctor. Despite the excruciating pain, he is only given three weeks of medical leave. He swallows ten pills a day for the pain, and gets better. He returns to work. However, the bosses unanimously vote down his next raise, and he is demoted to the rotating shift he’d been on when he first started at the job. Ramón blames this humiliation on Nilda. They begin fighting with renewed vigor. The third Ramón, who Yunior calls his half-brother, looks like Ramón’s first children. When Nilda catches Ramón calling little Ramón “Yunior,” she flies into blind rages.

Yunior intimates that as both Ramón’s life with Nilda and his back deteriorate, Ramón begins regarding his first family as an escape. He begins to see his first family “as his saviors, as a regenerative force that could redeem his fortunes” (204-205). Chuito’s imminent departure from the factory also emboldens him. London Terrace Apartments, one of the properties in New Jersey that Chuito showed him, is finally slated to open. It had been delayed because of a rumor that it was being built on the site of a chemical dumping ground. Ramón begins smuggling his things slowly out of Nilda’s house in Brooklyn, storing them at an apartment in London Terrace.

Yunior intimates that, years later, he would speak to Nilda, after his father had left his family, again, but for good. He would examine pictures of the third Ramón and see the family resemblance. He would sit in the same house that his father had once lived in. They would talk about their differing experiences of the same man.

Nilda explains to Yunior that Ramón left in the morning one day. She knew something was wrong because he stayed in bed stroking her hair, which he never did. She asked him if he was okay, and when he said he was, she went back to sleep. She had a dream that she still thinks about: she was a young girl eating a plate of quail eggs on her birthday. When she awoke, all of Ramón’s things were gone. She says that she knew then what it must have been like for Yunior’s mother.

Yunior imagines his father’s last moments in Nilda’s house. At that point, the factory had given him a two-week vacation, which Nilda knew nothing about. Ramon drinks a cup of black coffee, washes the cup, and leaves it drying in the caddy. He lights a cigarette, tosses the match on the kitchen table, and heads out into the cold wind. He smokes cigarette after cigarette as he walks down the street, ignoring the gaggle of cabs. He buys a carton of cigarettes at a stand, knowing how expensive they are abroad. Yunior knows that the first subway station on Bond would have taken him to the airport, but he prefers to think that Ramón grabbed the first train, “instead of what was more likely true, that he had gone out to Chuito’s first, before flying south to get [his first family]” (208).