She had always been a very good woman, this illegitimate daughter of Haitian immigrants to San Cristóbal, whose features he and his siblings had inherited, something that never failed to mortify him despite his great love for her. Sometimes, however, at the Hipódromo, the Country Club, or Fine Arts, when he saw all the aristocratic Dominican families paying him homage, he would think mockingly: “They’re licking the ground for a descendant of slaves.” How was the Sublime Matriarch to blame for the black blood that ran in her veins?
