It was a cramped little room with tiled walls. The dimensions and lack of windows suggested that it might have once been a closet. There was enough space for a desk, a file cabinet, and three chairs. Benancio Rodríguez Montaño, a thin, four-foot-tall elderly man with sunken cheeks and no teeth, was in charge. On the rare occasion when a visitor came to the Department of Culture, he would show them to a seat, pour a cup of strong, sugary Dominican coffee, and remain standing, which usually brought him to the visitor’s eye level. Questions about baseball irritated him. “Everyone says this is the city of baseball players, but before that it was the city of poets. There was Gastón Fernando Deligne, Pedro Mir, and here, there is me,” he said proudly. “I am a poet too. Look, I was improvising just this morning.” Then he took out a dog-eared envelope covered with writing and recited in cadence his latest sixteen lines about loss and vanishing culture in a style vaguely reminiscent of Gastón Deligne.
