The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

  What happened to college?

  I don’t want to go to college.

  So what are you going to do? Be a Gangster’s girlfriend your whole life? Your parents, God rest their souls, wanted so much better for you. I told you not to talk to me about those people. You’re the only parents I have.

  And look how well you’ve treated me. Look how well. Maybe people are right, La Inca despaired. Maybe you are cursed.

  Beli laughed. You might be cursed, but not me.

  Even the chinos had to respond to Beli’s change in attitude. We have you go, Juan said.

  I don’t understand.

  He licked his lips and tried again. We have to you go.

  You’re fired, José said. Please leave your apron on the counter.

  The Gangster heard about it and the next day some of his goons paid the Brothers Then a visit and what do you know if our girl wasn’t immediately reinstated. It wasn’t the same no more, though. The brothers wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t spin no stories about their youth in China and the Philippines. After a couple of days of the silent treatment Beli took the hint and stopped showing up altogether.

  And now you don’t have a job, La Inca pointed out help fully.

  I don’t need a job. He’s going to buy me a house.

  A man whose own house you yourself have never visited is promising to buy you a house? And you believe him? Oh, hija. Yessir: our girl believed. After all, she was in love! The world was coming apart at the seams—Santo Domingo was in the middle of a total meltdown, the Trujillato was tottering, police blockades on every corner—and even the kids she’d gone to school with, the brightest and the best, were being swept up by the Terror. A girl from El Redentor told her that Jack Pujols’s little brother had gotten caught organizing against El Jefe and the colonel’s influence could not save the boy from having an eye gouged out with electric shocks. Beli didn’t want to hear it. After all, she was in love! In love! She wafted through her day like a woman with a concussion. It’s not like she had a number for the Gangster, or even an address (bad sign number one, girls), and he was in the habit of disappearing for days without warning (bad sign number two), and now that Trujillo’s war against the world was reaching its bitter crescendo (and now that he had Beli on lock), the days could become weeks, and when he reappeared from ‘his business’ he would smell of cigarettes and old fear and want only to fuck, and afterward he would drink whiskey and mutter to himself by the love-motel window. His hair, Beli noticed, was growing in gray.

  She didn’t take kindly to these disappearances. They made her look bad in front of La Inca and the neighbors, who were always asking her sweetly, Where’s your savior now, Moses? She defended him against every criticism, of course, no brother has had a better advocate, but then took it out on his ass upon his return. Pouted when he appeared with flowers; made him take her to the most expensive restaurants; pestered him around the clock to move her out of her neighborhood; asked him what the hell he’d been doing these past x days; talked about the weddings she read about in the Listin, and just so you can see that La Inca’s doubts were not entirely wasted: wanted to know when he was going to bring her to his house. Hija de la gran puta, would you stop jodiéndome! We’re in the middle of a war here! He stood over her in his wifebeater, waving a pistol. Don’t you know what the Communists do to girls like you? They’ll hang you up by your beautiful tits. And then they’ll cut them off just like they did to the whores in Cuba!

  During one of the Gangster’s longer absences, Beli, bored and desperate to escape the schadenfreude in her neighbors’ eyes, took it upon herself to ride the Blue Ball Express one last time in other words, she checked in on her old flames. Ostensibly she wanted to end things in a formal way, but I think she was just feeling down and wanted male attention. Which is fine. But then she made the classic mistake of telling these Dominican hombres about the new love of her life, how happy she was. Sisters: don’t ever ever do this. It’s about as smart as telling the judge who’s about to sentence you that back in the day you fingerfucked his mother. The car dealer, always so gentle, so decorous, threw a whiskey bottle at her, screaming, Why should I be happy for a stupid stinking mona! They were in his apartment on the Malecón—at least he showed you his house, Constantina would later crack—and if he had been a better righty she would have ended up brained, perhaps raped and killed, but his fastball only grazed her and then it was her turn on the mound. She put him away with four sinkers to the head, using the same whiskey bottle he’d thrown at her. Five minutes later, panting and barefoot in a cab, she was pulled over by the Secret Police, tipped off because they’d seen her running and it was only when they questioned her that she realized that she was still holding the bottle and it had bloody hair on one of its edges, the car dealer’s straight blond hair.

  (Once they heard what happened they let me go.)

  To his credit, Arquimedes acquitted himself in a more mature fashion. (Maybe because she told him first and had not yet grown flip.) After her confession she heard a ‘little noise’ from the closet where he was hiding and nothing else. Five minutes of silence and then she whispered, I’d better go. (She never saw him again in person, only on the TV, giving speeches, and in later years would wonder if he still thought of her, as she sometimes did of him.)

  What have you been up to? the Gangster asked the next time he appeared.

  Nothing, she said, throwing her arms around his neck, absolutely nothing.

  A month before it all blew up, the Gangster took Beli on a vacation to his old haunts in Samaná. Their first real trip together, a peace offering prompted by a particularly long absence, a promissory note for future trips abroad. For those capitaleños who never leave the 27 de Febrero or who think Güaley is the Center of the Universe: Samaná es una chulería. One of the authors of the King James Bible traveled the Caribbean, and I often think that it was a place like Samaná that was on his mind when he sat down to pen the Eden chapters. For Eden it was, a blessed meridian where mar and sol and green have forged their union and produced a stubborn people that no amount of highfalutin prose can generalize.↓

  ≡ In my first draft, Samaná was actually Jarabacoa, but then my girl Leonie, resident expert in all things Domo, pointed out that there are no beaches in Jarabacoa. Beautiful rivers but no beaches. Leonie was also the one who informed me that the perrito (see first paragraphs of chapter one, ‘Ghetto Nerd at the End of the World’) wasn’t popularized until the late eighties, early nineties, but that was one detail I couldn’t change, just liked the image too much. Forgive me, historians of popular dance, forgive me!

  The Gangster was in high spirits, the war against the subversives was going swell, it seemed. (We got ‘em on the run, he gloated. Very soon all will be well.)

  As for Beli, she remembered that trip as the nicest time she’d ever had in the DR. She would never again hear the name Samaná without recalling that final primavera of her youth, the primavera of her perfection, when she was still young and beautiful. Samaná would forever evoke memories of their lovemaking, of the Gangster’s rough chin scraping her neck, of the sound of the Mar Caribe romancing those flawless resortless beaches, of the safety she experienced, and the promise.

  Three photos from that trip, and in every one she’s smiling.

  They did all the stuff we Dominicans love to do on our vacations. They ate pescado frito and waded in the río. They walked along the beach and drank rum until the meat behind their eyes throbbed. It was the first time ever that Beli had her own space totally under her control, so while the Gangster dozed restfully in his hamaca she busied herself with playing wife, with creating a preliminary draft of the household they would soon inhabit. Mornings she would subject the cabana to the harshest of scourings and hang boisterous profusions of flowers from every beam and around every window, while her bartering produce and fish from the neighbors resulted in one spectacular meal after another—showing off the skills she acquired during the Lost Years—and the Gangster’
s satisfaction, the patting of his stomach, the unequivocal praise, the soft emission of gases as he lay in the hamaca, it was music to her ears! (In her mind she became his wife that week in every sense but the legal.)

  She and the Gangster even managed to have heart-to-hearts. On the second day, after he showed her his old home, now abandoned and hurricane-ruined, she asked: Do you ever miss having a family?

  They were at the only nice restaurant in the city, where EI Jefe dined on his visits (they’ll still tell you that). You see those people? He pointed toward the bar. All those people have families, you can tell by their faces, they have families that depend on them and that they depend on, and for some of them this is good, and for some of them this is bad. But it all amounts to the same shit because there isn’t one of them who is free. They can’t do what they want to do or be who they should be. I might have no one in the world, but at least I’m free.

  She had never heard anyone say those words. I’m free wasn’t a popular refrain in the Era of Trujillo. But it struck a chord in her, put La Inca and her neighbors and her still-up-in-the-air life in perspective.

  I’m free.

  I want to be like you, she told the Gangster days later when they were eating crabs she had cooked in an achiote sauce. He had just been telling her about the nude beaches of Cuba. You would have been the star of the show, he said, pinching her nipple and laughing.

  What do you mean, you want to be like me?

  I want to be free.

  He smiled and chucked her under the chin. Then you will be, mi negra bella.

  The next day the protective bubble about their idyll finally burst and the troubles of the real world came rushing in. A motorcycle driven by a hugely overweight policeman arrived at their cabana. Capitan, you’re needed in the Palacio, he said from under his chinstrap. More trouble with the subversives, it seems. I’ll send a car for you, the Gangster promised. Wait, she said, I’ll go with you, not wanting to be left, again, but he either didn’t hear or didn’t care. Wait, goddamn it, she shouted in frustration. But the motorcycle never slowed. Wait! The ride never materialized either. Fortunately Beli had gotten into the habit of stealing his money while he slept so that she could maintain herself during his absences; otherwise she would have been stranded on that fucking beach. After waiting eight hours like a parigüaya she hoisted her bag (left his shit in the cabana) and marched through the simmering heat like a vengeance on two legs, walked for what felt like half a day, until at last she happened upon a colmado, where a couple of sunstroked campesinos were sharing a warm beer while the colmadero, seated in the only shade in sight, waved the flies from his dukes. When they realized she was standing over them they all scrambled to their feet. By then her anger had drained away and she only wanted to be spared further walking. Do you know anybody who has a car? And by noon she was in a dust-choked Chevy, heading home. You better hold the door, the driver advised, or it might fall of.

  Then it falls, she said, her arms firmly crossed.

  At one point they passed through one of those godforsaken blisters of a community that frequently afflict the arteries between the major cities, sad assemblages of shacks that seem to have been deposited in situ by a hurricane or other such calamity. The only visible commerce was a single goat carcass hanging unfetchingly from a rope, peeled down to its corded orange musculature, except for the skin of its face, which was still attached, like a funeral mask. He’d been skinned very recently, the flesh was still shivering under the shag of flies. Beli didn’t know if it was the heat or the two beers she drank while the colmadero sent for his cousin or the skinned goat or dim memories of her Lost Years, but our girl could have sworn that a man sitting in a rocking chair in front of one of the hovels had no face and he waved at her as she passed but before she could confirm it the pueblito vanished into the dust. Did you see something? Her driver sighed, Please I can barely keep my eyes on the road.

  Two days after her return the cold had settled in the pit of her stomach like something drowned in there. She didn’t know what was wrong; every morning she was vomiting.

  It was La Inca who saw it first. Well, you finally did it. You’re pregnant. No I’m not, Beli rasped, wiping the fetid mash from her mouth. But she was.

  REVELATION

  When the doctor confirmed La Inca’s worst fears Beli let out a cheer. (Young lady, this is not a game, the doctor barked.) She was simultaneously scared shitless and out of her mind with happiness. She couldn’t sleep for the wonder of it and, after the revelation, became strangely respectful and pliant. (So now you’re happy? My God, girl, are you a fool!) For Beli: This was it. The magic she’d been waiting for. She placed her hand on her flat stomach and heard the wedding bells loud and clear, saw in her mind’s eye the house that had been promised, that she had dreamed about.

  Please don’t tell anyone, La Inca begged, but of course she whispered it to her friend Dorea, who put it out on the street. Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one. The bochinche spread through their sector of Baní like wildfire.

  The next time the Gangster appeared she had dolled herself up lovely, a brand-new dress, crushed jasmine in her underwear, got her hair done, and even plucked her eyebrows into twin hyphens of alarm. He needed a shave and a haircut, and the hairs curling out of his ears were starting to look like a particularly profitable crop. You smell good enough to eat, he growled, kissing the tender glide of her neck.

  Guess what, she said coyly.

  He looked up. What?

  UPON FURTHER REFLECTION

  In her memory he never told her to get rid of it. But later, when she was freezing in basement apartments in the Bronx and working her fingers to the bone, she reflected that he had told her exactly that. But like lovergirls everywhere, she had heard only what she wanted to hear.

  NAME GAME

  I hope it’s a son, she said.

  I do too, half believing it.

  They were lying in bed in a love motel. Above them spun a fan, its blades pursued by a half-dozen flies.

  What will his middle name be? she wondered excitedly. It has to be something serious, because he’s going to be a doctor, like mi papa. Before he could reply, she said: We’ll call him Abelard.

  He scowled. What kind of maricón name is that? If the baby’s a boy we’ll call him Manuel. That was my grandfather’s name.

  I thought you didn’t know who your family was. He pulled from her touch. No me jodas. Wounded, she reached down to hold her stomach.

  TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES 1

  The Gangster had told Beli many things in the course of their relationship, but there was one important item he’d failed to reveal. That he was married.

  I’m sure you all guessed that. I mean, he was dominicano, after all. But I bet you never would have imagined whom he was married to.

  A Trujillo.

  TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES 2

  It’s true. The Gangster’s wife was—drumroll, please—Trujillo’s fucking sister! Did you really think some street punk from Samaná was going to reach the upper echelons of the Trujillato on hard work alone? Negro, please—this ain’t a fucking comic book!

  Yes, Trujillo’s sister; the one known affectionately as La Fea. They met while the Gangster was carousing in Cuba; she was a bitter tacaña seventeen years his senior. They did a lot of work together in the butt business and before you knew it she had taken a shine to his irresistible joie de vivre. He encouraged it—knew a fantastic opportunity when he saw one—and before the year was out they were cutting the cake and placing the first piece on El Jefe’s plate. There are those alive who claim that La Fea had actually been a pro herself in the time before the rise of her brother, but that seems to be more calumny than anything, like saying that Balaguer fathered a dozen illegitimate children and then used the pueblo’s money to hush it up—wait, that’s true, but probably not the other—shit, who can keep track of what’s true and what’s false in a country as baká as ours—what is known is that
the time before her brother’s rise had made her una mujer bien fuerte y bien cruel; she was no pendeja and ate girls like Beli like they were pan de agua—if this was Dickens she’d have to run a brothel—but wait, she did run brothels! Well, maybe Dickens would have her run an orphanage. But she was one of those characters only a kleptocracy could have conceived: had hundreds of thousands in the bank and not one yuen of pity in her soul; she cheated everyone she did business with, including her brother, and had already driven two respectable businessmen to early graves by fleecing them to their last mota. She sat in her immense house in La Capital like a shelob in her web, all day handling accounts and ordering around subordinates, and on certain weekend nights she would host tertulias where her ‘friends’ would gather to endure hours of poetry declaimed by her preposterously tone-deaf son (from her first marriage; she and the Gangster didn’t have any children). Well, one fine day in May a servant appeared at her door.

  Leave it, she said, a pencil in her mouth.

  An inhalation. Dona, there’s news.

  There’s always news. Leave it.

  An exhale. News about your husband.