A Generational Story of Island Women Haunted by Restlessness

SONG OF THE WATER SAINTS

A Novel

By Nelly Rosario

Pantheon

256 pages; $23

*

As Edwidge Danticat has sketched Haitian life and Junot Diaz has limned the experience of Dominican Americans, Nelly Rosario writes of the pastoral West Indies slamming up against American apple pie with “Song of the Water Saints,” a first novel depicting intractable Dominican women.

Beginning in 1916 Santo Domingo, the tale follows a family’s women over four generations: willful Graciela, whose hunger for another life is her downfall; Graciela’s daughter Mercedes, pious, the opposite of her mother, yet whose strong will is equally evident; and Leila, Mercedes’ granddaughter, whose modern-day New York existence caps the narrative.

The novel begins with a scene that haunts the reader: The poverty-stricken Dominican Republic is under cruel “yanqui” occupation when Graciela and her 15-year-old boyfriend Silvio are seen embracing, “lost in their tangle of tongues,” by a yanqui photographer. Specializing in postcard art of piquant scenes--”brothel quad- roons bathed in feathers, a Negro chambermaid naked to the waist”--the photographer pays Graciela and Silvio a handful of pesos to pose in a risque manner for his black box.

For much of her restless life, Graciela views this moment as portentous. Did the photographer somehow steal her soul and that of her lover? Had he cast a spell over them with his box?

Because the resulting postcard is described on the novel’s first page, cataloged in Hamburg, Germany, as part of the Peter J. West collection, the reader wonders the same thing. A certain weight is given to the photograph by its prominent placement, and we read on, waiting for clarification of that significance.

Later, when Graciela meets Eli Cavalier, a German vegetarian who has amassed a collection of West’s postcards, we think the moment of revelation is at hand. But rather than disclose what happened to the photo, Eli rubs Graciela’s skin with dried lavender--”What is this for?” Graciela asks him. “Seasoning for my meal,” Eli replies--leaving the reader to wonder what became of the postcard. Like Graciela’s fleeting luck and the overwhelming passions that buffet her, a copy of the postcard is never within her grasp.

The book’s strongest moments involve Graciela. For example, her second husband Casimiro wants to give her what she desires--a glimpse of the world beyond her own. Travel between countries is dangerous, so he arranges an excursion down river to visit friends who used to live in Puerto Rico. The friends’ accents are convincingly foreign, allowing Casimiro to persuade Graciela he’s taken her to Puerto Rico. The poignant scene resonates throughout the novel.

Graciela is gullible at first, thrilled by the spectacle of the larger world, but soon figures out his ploy. The wife of the family they visit counsels Graciela, when she realizes the duping, that it’s best to play dumb. Graciela does so to preserve what Casimiro has tried to give her.

In this, one of the few moments in which Graciela is not grasping for something beyond herself, we’re given a glimpse of the contented life she might have had, had she been able to accept it.

But such is not to be her life. Graciela is characterized throughout as a woman who can’t get enough, whose restlessness causes her to abandon her daughter, to leave her dedicated husband and to search in vain for a vision of life she cannot even name.

“Too much passion and curiosity for her own good, Mai and Pai always told her,” we learn of Graciela early in the book, and she stays true to this portrait.

Meanwhile, Graciela’s daughter Mercedes raises herself and directs her own restlessness toward an ability to manipulate numbers. Mercedes becomes a business success, accomplishing in her own life one of Graciela’s greatest unmet desires--a turquoise, palm wood house with a zinc roof. Yet, as with her mother, it’s not enough.

Together with her husband, her son and her granddaughter Leila, Mercedes moves to New York for a better life, leaving behind Leila’s mother (her own daughter) who cannot extricate herself from Dominican life.

Mercedes is wide-eyed upon arriving in New York--”jackpot video games and the Puerto Rican lottery at the bodega, a chute in the hallway that swallows up the garbage, little black discs that magically destroy roaches”--while granddaughter Leila’s adaptation to the United States is predictable.

Though her grandparents wish her to be chaste and pious, she’s as damned by her desire as her great-grandmother was, with unrelenting fate playing a leading role.

Author Rosario does an excellent job conjuring colorful, vibrant scenes of Caribbean life. Those vivid scenes, though, never cohere as a whole. The stories, even the most compelling ones of Graciela, do not add up to a fully imagined narrative arc. Like the postcard from the first page, many of the seemingly portentous moments remain unclear in their significance. Still, Rosario succeeds in giving us that for which Graciela so hungered: passage into a world beyond our own horizon.