The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

  And then there was Lillian, the other waitress, a squat rice tub, whose rancor against the world turned to glee only when humanity exceeded in its venality, brutality, and mendacity even her own expectations. She didn’t take to Beli at first, thought her competition, but eventually would treat Beli more or less with courtesy: She was the first woman our girl met who read the paper. (Herson’s biblio-mania would remind her always of Lillian. How’s the world keeping? Beli asked her. Jodido, was always her answer.) And Indian Benny, a quiet, meticulous waiter who had the sad airs of a man long accustomed to the spectacular demolition of dreams. Rumor at the restaurant had it that Indian Benny was married to a huge, lusty azuana who regularly put him on the street so that she could bunk some new sweetmeat. The only time Indian Benny was known to smile was when he beat José at dominoes—the two were consummate tile slingers and of course bitter rivals. He too would fight in the revolution, for the home team, and it was said that throughout that Summer of Our National Liberation Indian Benny never stopped smiling; even after a Marine sniper cavitated his brains over his entire command he didn’t stop. And what about the cook, Marco Antonio, a one-legged, no-ear grotesque straight out of Gormenghast? (His explanation for his appearance: I had an accident.) His bag was an almost fanatical distrust of cibaeños, whose regional pride, he was convinced, masked imperial ambitions on a Haitian level. They want to seize the Republic. I’m telling you, cristiano, they want to start their own country!

  The whole day she dealt with hombres of all stripes and it was here Beli perfected her rough-spun salt-of-the-earth bonhomie. As you might imagine, everybody was in love with her. (Including her coworkers. But José had warned them off: Touch her and I’ll pull your guts out your culo. You must be joking, Marco Antonio said in his own defense. I couldn’t climb that mountain even with two legs.) The customers’ attention was exhilarating and she in turn gave the boys something that most men can never get enough of—ribbing, solicitous mothering from an attractive woman. Still plenty of niggers in Baní, old customers, who remember her with great fondness.

  La Inca of course was anguished by Beli’s Fall, from princesa to mesera—what is happening to the world? At home the two rarely spoke anymore; La Inca tried to talk, but Beli wouldn’t listen, and for her part La Inca filled that silence with prayer, trying to summon a miracle that would transform Beli back into a dutiful daughter. As fate would have it, once Beli had slipped her grasp not even God had enough caracaracol to bring her back. Every now and then La Inca would appear at the restaurant. She’d sit alone, erect as a lectern, all in black, and between sips of tea would watch the girl with a mournful intensity. Perhaps she hoped to shame Beli into returning to Operation Restore House of Cabral, but Beli went about her work with her customary zeal. It must have dismayed La Inca to see how drastically her ‘daughter’ was changing, for Beli, the girl who never used to speak in public, who could be still as Noh, displayed at Palacio Peking a raconteur’s gift for palaver that delighted a great many of the all-male clientele. Those of you who have stood at the corner of 142nd and Broadway can guess what it was she spoke: the blunt, irreverent cant of the pueblo that gives all dominicanos cultos nightmares on their 400-thread-count sheets and that La Inca had assumed had perished along with Beli’s first life in Outer Azua, but here it was so alive, it was like it had never left: Oye, parigüayo, y que pasó con esa esposa tuya? Gordo, no me digas que tú todavía tienes hambre?

  Eventually there came a moment when she’d pause at La Inca’s table: Do you want anything else?

  Only that you would return to school, mi’ja.

  Sorry. Beli picked up her taza and wiped the table in one perfunctory motion. We stopped serving pendejada last week.

  And then La Inca paid her quarter and was gone and a great weight lifted off Beli, proof that she’d done the right thing.

  In those eighteen months she learned a great deal about herself. She learned that despite all her dreams to be the most beautiful woman in the world, to have the brothers jumping out of windows in her wake, when Belicia Cabral fell in love she stayed in love. Despite the trove of men, handsome, plain, and ugly, who marched into the restaurant intent on winning her hand in marriage (or at least in fuckage), she never had a thought for anyone but Jack Pujols. Turns out that in her heart our girl was more Penelope than Whore of Babylon. (Of course La Inca, who witnessed the parade of men muddying her doorstep, would not have agreed.) Beli often had dreams where Jack returned from military school, dreams where he’d be waiting for her at the job, spilled out at one of the tables like a beautiful bag of swag, a grin on his magnificent face, his Eyes of Adantis on her at last, only on her. I came back for you, mi amor. I came back.

  Our girl learned that even to a chooch like Jack Pujols she was true.

  But that didn’t mean she reclused herself entirely from the world of men. (For all her ‘fidelity’ she would never be a sister who liked being without male attention.) Even in this rough period, Beli had her princes-in-waiting, brothers willing to brave the barbed-wired minefields of her affections in the hopes that beyond that cruel midden Elysium might await. The poor deluded chumps. The Gangster would have her every which way, but these poor sapos who came before the Gangster, they were lucky to get an abrazo. Let us summon back from the abyss two sapos in particular: the Fiat dealer, bald, white, and smiling, a regular Hipólito Mejia, but suave and cavalier and so enamored of North American baseball that he risked life and limb to listen to games on a contraband shortwave radio. He believed in baseball with the fervor of an adolescent and believed also that in the future Dominicans would storm the Major Leagues and compete with the Mandes and the Marises of the world. Marichal is only the beginning, he predicted, of a reconquista. You’re crazy, Beli said, mocking him and his ‘jueguito’. In an inspired stroke of counterprogramming, her other paramour was a student at the UASD—one of those City College types who’s been in school eleven years and is always five credits shy of a degree. Student today don’t mean na’, but in a Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the Fall of Arbenz, by the Stoning of Nixon, by the Guerrillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs—in a Latin America already a year and half into the Decade of the Guerrilla—a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. Such a student was Arquimedes. He also listened to the shortwave, but not for Dodgers scores; what he risked his life for was the news leaking out of Havana, news of the future. Arquimedes was, therefore, a student, the son of a zapatero and a midwife, a tirapiedra and a quemagoma for life. Being a student wasn’t a joke, not with Trujillo and Johnny Abbes↓ scooping up everybody following the foiled Cuban Invasion of 1959.

  ≡ Johnny Abbes Garcia was one of Trujillo’s beloved Morgul Lords. Chief of the dreaded and all-powerful secret police (SIM), Abbes was considered the greatest torturer of the Dominican People ever to have lived. An enthusiast of Chinese torture techniques, Abbes was rumored to have in his employ a dwarf who would crush prisoners’ testicles between his teeth. Plotted endlessly against Trujillo’s enemies, the killer of many young revolutionaries and students (including the Maribal Sisters). At Trujillo’s behest Abbes organized the plot to assassinate the democratically elected president of Venezuela: Rómulo Betancourt! (Betancourt and T-zillo were old enemies, beefing since the forties, when Trujillo’s SIMians tried to inject Betancourt with poison on the streets of Havana.) The second attempt worked no better than the first. The bomb, packed into a green Olds, blew the presidential Cadillac clean out of Caracas, slew the driver and a bystander but failed to kill Betancourt! Now that’s really gangster! (Venezolanos: Don’t ever say we don’t have history together. It’s not just the novelas that we share or the fact that so many of us flooded your shores to work in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Our dictator tried to slay your president!) After Trujillo’s death Abbes was named consul to Japan (just to get him out of the country) and ended up workin
g for that other Caribbean nightmare, the Haitian dictator François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. Wasn’t nearly as loyal to Papa Doc as he was to Trujillo—after an attempted double-cross Papa Doc shot Abbes and his family and then blew their fucking house up. (I think P. Daddy knew exactly what kind of creature he was dealing with.) No Dominican believes that Abbes died in that blast. He is said to still be out there in the world, waiting for the next coming of El Jefe, when he too will rise from the Shadow.

  Wasn’t a day that passed that his life wasn’t in danger, and he had no fixed address, appeared in Beli’s day with no warning. Archie (as he was known) had an immaculate head of hair and Hector Lavoe glasses and the intensity of a South Beach dietician. Reviled the North Americans for their Silent Invasion of the DR and Dominicans for their annexationatist subservience to the North. Guacanagari has cursed us all! That his most beloved ideologues were a couple of Germans who never met a nigger they liked was beside the point.

  Both of these dudes Beli played hard. Visited them at their digs and at the dealership and dished them their daily recommended allowance of noplay. A date couldn’t pass without the Fiat dealer begging her for a single grope. Just let me touch them with the back of my hand, he mewled, but nearly every time she picked him off in a fielder’s choice. Arquimedes, when rebuffed, at least showed some class. He didn’t pout or mutter, What the hell am I wasting my money for? He preferred to stay philosophical. The Revolution is not made in a day, he’d say ruefully and then kick back and entertain her with stories about dodging the secret police.

  Even to a chooch like Jack Pujols she was true, yes, but eventually she did get over him. A romantic she was, but not a pendeja.

  When she finally came to, however, things had turned dicey, to say the least. The country was in an uproar; after the failed invasion of 1959 an underground conspiracy of youth had been uncovered and everywhere young people were being arrested and tortured and killed. Politics, Juan spat, staring at all the empty tables, politics. José didn’t offer comment; he simply cleaned his Smith & Wesson in the privacy of his upstairs room. I don’t know I’ll make it out of this one, Arquimedes said in a barefaced attempt to cadge a pity fuck. You’ll be fine, Beli snorted, pushing off his embrace. She was right in the end, but he was one of the few who made it through with his balls unfried. (Archie survives into the present, and when I drive through the capital with my man Pedro, I occasionally spot his grill on campaign posters for one of the radical splinter parties whose sole platform is to bring electricity back to the Dominican Republic. Pedro snorts: Ese ladrón no va’ pa’ ningún la’ o.)

  In February, Lillian had to quit the job and return to her campo to care for her ailing mother, a señora who, Lillian claimed, had never given a damn for her well-being. But it is the fate of women everywhere to be miserable always, Lillian declared, and then she was gone and only the cheap freebie calendar she liked marking off remained. A week later the Brothers Then hired a replacement. A new girl. Constantina. In her twenties, sunny and amiable, whose cuerpo was all pipa and no culo, a ‘mujer alegre’ (in the parlance of the period). More than once Constantina arrived to lunch straight from a night of partying, smelling of whiskey and stale cigarettes. Muchacha, you wouldn’t believe el lío en que me metí anoche. She was disarmingly chill and could curse the black off a crow, and, perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit alone in the world, took an immediate liking to our girl. My hermanita, she called Beli. The most beautiful girl. You’re proof that God is Dominican. Constantina was the person who finally pried the Sad Ballad of Jack Pujols out of her.

  Her advice? Forget that hijo de la porra, that comehuevo. Every desgraciado who walks in here is in love with you. You could have the whole maldito world if you wanted.

  The world! It was what she desired with her entire heart, but how could she achieve it? She watched the flow of traffic past the parque and did not know.

  One day in a burbuja of girlish impulse they finished work early and, taking their earnings to the Spaniards down the street, bought a pair of matching dresses.

  Now you look candela, Constantina said approvingly.

  So what you going to do now? Beli asked.

  A crooked-tooth smile. Me, I’m going to the Hollywood for a dance. I have un buen amigo working in the door and from what I hear there’ll be a whole assembly line of rich men with nothing to do but adore me, ay sí. She shivered her hands down the slopes of her hips. Then she stopped the show. Why, does the private-school princess actually want to come along?

  Beli thought about it a moment. Thought about La Inca waiting for her at home. Thought about the heartbreak that was beginning to fade in her.

  Yes. I want to go.

  There it was, the Decision That Changed Everything. Or as she broke it down to Lola in her Last Days: All I wanted was to dance. What I got instead was esto, she said, opening her arms to encompass the hospital, her children, her cancer, America.

  EL HOLLYWOOD

  El Hollywood was Beli’s first real club.↓

  ≡ A favorite hangout of Trujillo’s, my mother tells me when the manuscript is almost complete.

  Imaginate: in those days El Hollywood was the It place to be in Baní, it was Alexander, Café Atlántico, and Jet Set rolled into one. The lights, the opulent decor, the guapos in the fine threads, the women striking their best bird-of-paradise poses, the band upon the stage like a visitation from a world of rhythm, the dancers so caught up in the planting of heel you would have thought they were bidding farewell to death itself—it was all here. Beli might have been out of her league, couldn’t order drinks or sit in the high chairs without losing her cheap shoes, but once the music started, well, it didn’t matter. A corpulent accountant put his hand out and for the next two hours Beli forgot her awkwardness, her wonderment, her trepidation, and danced. Dios mío did she dance! Dancing café out of the sky and exhausting partner after partner. Even the bandleader, a salt-and-pepper veterano from a dozen campaigns throughout Latin America and Miami shouted her out: La negra está encendida! La negra esta encendida indeed! Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won’t see it often. Everybody mistook her for a bailarina cubana from one of the shows and couldn’t believe that she was dominicana like them. It can’t be, no lo pareces, etc., etc.

  And it was in this whirligig of pasos, guapos, and aftershave that he appeared. She was at the bar, waiting for Tina to return from ‘a cigarette break’. Her dress: wrecked; her perm: kicking; her arches: like they’d been given a starter course in foot binding. He, on the other hand, was the essence of relaxed cool. Here he is, future generation of de Leóns and Cabrals: the man who stole your Founding Mother’s heart, who catapulted her and hers into Diaspora. Dressed in a Rat Pack ensemble of black smoking jacket and white pants and not a dot of sweat on him, like he’d been keeping himself in refrigeration. Handsome in that louche potbellied mid-forties Hollywood producer sort of way, with pouched gray eyes that had seen (and didn’t miss) much. Eyes that had been scoping Beli for the better part of an hour, and it wasn’t like Beli hadn’t noticed. The nigger was some kind of baller, everybody in the club was paying tribute to him, and he rocked enough gold to have ransomed Atahualpa.

  Let’s just say their first contact was not promising. How about I buy you a drink? he said, and when she turned away como una ruda, he grabbed her arm, hard, and said, Where are you going, morena? And that was all it took: a Beli le salío el lobo. First, she didn’t like to be touched. Not at all, not ever. Second, she was not a morena (even the car dealer knew better, called her india). And, third, there was that temper of hers. When baller twisted her arm, she went from zero to violence in under.2 seconds. Shrieked: No. Me. Toques. Threw her drink, her glass, and then her purse at him—if there had been a baby nearby she would have thrown that too. Then let him have it with a stack of cocktail napkins and almost a hundred plastic olive rapiers, and when those were done dancing on the tile she unleashed one of the great Street Fighter chain attacks of all time. Dur
ing this unprecedented fusillade of blows the Gangster hunkered down and didn’t move except to deflect the stray chop away from his face. When she finished he lifted his head as though out of a foxhole and put a finger to his lips. You missed a spot, he said solemnly.

  Well.

  It was nothing but a simple encounter. The fight she had with La Inca upon her return was far more significant—La Inca waiting up for her with a belt in her hand—and when Beli stepped into the house, worn out from dancing, La Inca, lit by the kerosene lamp, lifted the belt in the air and Beli’s diamond eyes locked on to her. The primal scene between daughter and mother played out in every country of the world. Go ahead, Madre, Beli said, but La Inca could not do it, her strength leaving her. Hija, if you ever come home late again you’ll have to leave this house, and Beli saying, Don’t worry, I’ll be leaving soon enough. That night La Inca refused to get into bed with her, sleeping in her rocking chair, not speaking to her the next day either, going off to work by herself: her disappointment looming above her like a mushroom cloud. No question: it was her madre she should have been worried about, but for the rest of that week Beli found herself instead brooding on the stupidity of that gordo azaroso who (in her words) had ruined her whole night. Almost every day she found herself recounting the details of the confrontation to both the car dealer and Arquimedes, but with each telling she added further outrages which were not exactly true but seemed accurate in spirit. Un bruto, she called him. Un animal. How dare he try to touch me! As though he were someone, ese poco hombre, ese mamahuevo!