Urania Cabral has returned to the Dominican Republic for the first time since she left in 1961, when she was just 14 years old. Just before dawn, in her room at the Hotel Jaragua, she recalls her earlier days in the country and wonders if she was right to come back. Although much has changed—the growing population, the extension of the city limits, streetlights, and other modern elements—she assumes the colonial city and her old neighborhood, Gazcue, will remain unchanged. She knows that her father will no longer be the same: Although she never responds to her family’s letters, she reads them and thus knows of his declining health.

At seven o’clock, she leaves the hotel. She feels the commotion of the streets, which had been far quieter when she was a child: “Animated chaos, the profound need in what was once your people, Urania, to stupefy themselves into not thinking and, perhaps, not even feeling” (6). As she walks, she notices Haitians on the streets, something that would not have been allowed when she was a child, and thinks back to her father’s claim that “history, at least, will recognize that [Trujillo] has […] put the Haitians in their place” (7).