by Junot Díaz
FUKÚ VS. ZAFA
There are still many, on and off the Island, who offer Beli’s near-fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the House Cabral was indeed victim of a high-level fukú, the local version of House Atreus. Two Truji-líos in one lifetime—what in carajo else could it be? But other heads question that logic, arguing that Beli’s survival must be evidence to the contrary. Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of cane-fields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a ‘mother’ with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything, say these heads, it is that our Beli was blessed.
What about the dead son? The world is full of tragedies enough without niggers having to resort to curses for explanations.
A conclusion La Inca wouldn’t have argued with. To her dying day she believed that Beli had met not a curse but God out in that cane-field.
I met something, Beli would say, guardedly.
BACK AMONG THE LIVING
Touch and go, I tell you, until the fifth day. And when at last she returned to consciousness she did so screaming. Her arm felt like it had been pinched off at the elbow by a grindstone, her head crowned in a burning hoop of brass, her lung like the exploded carcass of a piñata—Jesú! Cristo! She started crying almost immediately, but what our girl did not know was that for the last half-week, two of the best doctors in Baní had tended her covertly; friends of La Inca and anti-Trujillo to the core, they set her arm and plastered it, stitched shut the frightening gashes on her scalp (sixty puntos in all), doused her wounds with enough Mercurochrome to disinfect an army, injected her with morphine and against tetanus. Many late nights of worry, but the worst, it seemed, was over. These doctors, with a spiritual assist from La Inca’s Bible group, had performed a miracle, and all that remained was the healing. (She is lucky that she is so strong, the doctors said, packing their stethoscopes. The Hand of God is upon her, the prayer leaders confirmed, stowing their Bibles.) But blessed was not what our girl felt. After a couple of minutes of hysterical sobbing, of re-adjusting to the fact of the bed, to the fact of her life, she lowed out La Inca’s name.
From the side of the bed the quiet voice of the Benefactor: Don’t talk. Unless it’s to thank the Savior for your life. Mama, Beli cried. Mama. They killed my bebe, they tried to kill me—And they did not succeed, La Inca said. Not for lack of trying, though. She put her hand on the girl’s forehead.
Now it’s time for you to be quiet. For you to be still.
That night was a late-medieval ordeal. Beli alternated from quiet weeping to gusts of rabia so fierce they threatened to throw her out of the bed and reopen her injuries. Like a woman possessed, she drove herself into her mattress, went as rigid as a board, flailed her good arm around, beat her legs, spit and cursed. She wailed—despite a punctured lung and cracked ribs—she wailed inconsolably. Mama, me mataron a mi hijo. Estoy sola, estoy sola. Sola? La Inca leaned close. Would you like me to call your Gangster?
No, she whispered.
La Inca gazed down at her. I wouldn’t call him either.
That night Beli drifted on a vast ocean of loneliness, buffeted by squalls of despair, and during one of her intermittent sleeps she dreamt that she had truly and permanently died and she and her child shared a coffin and when she finally awoke for good, night had broken and out in the street a grade of grief unlike any she’d encountered before was being uncoiled, a cacophony of wails that seemed to have torn free from the cracked soul of humanity itself Like a funeral song for the entire planet.
Mama, she gasped, mama.
Mama!
Tranquilisate, muchacha.
Mama, is that for me? Am I dying? Dime, mama.
Ay, hija, no seas ridícula. La Inca put her hands, awkward hyphens, around the girl. Lowered her mouth to her ear: It’s Trujillo. Gunned down, she whispered, the night Beli had been kidnapped. No one knows anything yet. Except that he’s dead.↓
≡ They say he was on his way for some ass that night. Who is surprised? A consummate culocrat to the end. Perhaps on that last night, El Jefe, sprawled in the back of his Bel Air, thought only of the routine pussy that was awaiting him at Estancia Fundación. Perhaps he thought of nothing. Who can know? In any event: there is a black Chevrolet fast approaching, like Death itself, packed to the rim with U.S.-backed assassins of the higher classes, and now both cars are nearing the city limits, where the streetlights end (for modernity indeed has its limits in Santo Domingo), and in the dark distance looms the cattle fairgrounds where seventeen months before some other youth had intended to assassinate him. El Jefe asks his driver, Zacharias, to turn on the radio, but—how appropriate—there is a poetry reading on and off it goes again. Maybe the poetry reminds him of Galíndez.
Maybe not.
The black Chevy flashes its lights innocuously, asking to pass, and Zacharias, thinking it’s the Secret Police, obliges by slowing down, and when the cars come abreast, the escopeta wielded by Antonio de la Maza (whose brother—surprise, surprise—was killed in the Galíndez cover-up—which goes to show that you should always be careful when killing nerds, never know who will come after you) goes boo-ya! And now (so goes the legend) El Jefe cries, Coño, me hirieron! The second shotgun blast hits Zacharias in the shoulder and he almost stops the car, in pain and shock and surprise. Here now the famous exchange: Get the guns, El Jefe says. Vamos a pelear. And Zacharias says: No, Jefe, son mucho, and El Jefe repeats himself: Vamos a pelear. He could have ordered Zacharias to turn the car back to the safety of his capital, but instead he goes out like Tony Montana. Staggers out of the bullet-ridden Bel Air, holding a.38 in his hand. The rest is, of course, history, and if this were a movie you’d have to film it in John Woo slow motion. Shot at twenty-seven times—what a Dominican number—and suffering from four hundred hit points of damage, a mortally wounded Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina is said to have taken two steps toward his birthplace, San Cristobal, for, as we know, all children, whether good or bad, eventually find their way home, but thinking better of it he turned back toward La Capital, to his beloved city, and fell for the last time. Zacharias, who’d had his mid-parietal region creased by a round from a.357, got blown into the grass by the side of the road; miracle of miracles, he would survive to tell the tale of the ajustamiento. De la Maza, perhaps thinking of his poor, dead, set-up brother, then took Trujillo’s.38 out of his dead hand and shot Trujillo in the face and uttered his now famous words: Éste guaraguao ya no comerá mas pollito. And then the assassins stashed El Jefe’s body—where? In the trunk, of course.
And thus passed old Fuckface. And thus passed the Era of Trujillo (sort of).
I’ve been to the neck of road where he was gunned down many many times. Nothing to report except that the guagua from Haina almost always runs my ass over every time I cross the highway. For a while, I hear, that stretch was the haunt of what El Jeffe worried about the most: los maricones.
LA INCA, IN DECLINE
It’s all true, plataneros. Through the numinous power of prayer La Inca saved the girl’s life, laid an A-plus zafa on the Cabral family fukú (but at what cost to herself?). Everybody in the neighborhood will tell you how, shortly after the girl slipped out of the country, La Inca began to diminish, like Galadriel after the temptation of the ring—out of sadness for the girl’s failures, some would say, but others would point to that night of Herculean prayer. No matter what your take, it cannot be denied that soon after Beli’s departure La Inca’s hair began to turn a snowy white, and by the time Lola lived with her she was no longer the Great Power she had been. Yes, she had saved the girl’s life, but to what end? Beli was still profoundly vulnerable. At the end of The Return of the King, Sauron’s evil was taken by ‘a great wind’ and nearly ‘blown away,’ with no lasting consequences to our heroes;↓ but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily.
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�� ‘And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent; for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell’.
Even after death his evil lingered. Within hours of El Jefe dancing bien pegao with those twenty-seven bullets, his minions ran amok—fulfilling, as it were, his last will and vengeance. A great darkness descended on the Island and for the third time since the rise of Fidel people were being rounded up by Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, and a good plenty were sacrificed in the most depraved fashion imaginable, the orgy of terror—funeral goods for the father from the son. Even a woman as potent as La Inca, who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within Baní her own personal Lothlórien, knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the Eye. What was to keep the assassins from returning to finish what they’d started? After all, they had killed the world-famous Mirabal Sisters,↓ who were of Name; what was to stop them from killing her poor orphaned negrita?
≡ And where were the Mirabal Sisters murdered? In a cane-field, of course. And then their bodies were put in a car and a crash was simulated! Talk about two for one!
La Inca felt the danger palpably, intimately. And perhaps it was the strain of her final prayer, but each time La Inca glanced at the girl she could swear that there was a shadow standing just behind her shoulder which disappeared as soon as you tried to focus on it. A dark horrible shadow that gripped her heart. And it seemed to be growing.
La Inca needed to do something, so, not yet recovered from her Hail Mary play, she called upon her ancestors and upon Jesú Cristo for help. Once again she prayed. But on top of that, to show her devotion, she fasted. Pulled a Mother Abigail. Ate nothing but one orange, drank nothing but water. After that last vast expenditure of piety her spirit was in an uproar. She did not know what to do. She had a mind like a mongoose but she was not, in the end, a worldly woman. She spoke to her friends, who argued for sending Beli to the campo. She’ll be safe there. She spoke to her priest. You should pray for her.
On the third day, it came to her. She was dreaming that she and her dead husband were on the beach where he had drowned. He was dark again as he always was in summer.
You have to send her away.
But they’ll find her in the campo.
You have to send her to Nueva York. I have it on great authority that it is the only way.
And then he strutted proudly into the water; she tried to call him back, Please, come back, but he did not listen.
His otherworldly advice was too terrible to consider. Exile to the North! To Nueva York, a city so foreign she herself had never had the ovaries to visit. The girl would be lost to her, and La Inca would have failed her great cause: to heal the wounds of the Fall, to bring House Cabral back from the dead. And who knows what might happen to the girl among the yanquis? In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüenceria as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes. How La Inca wrestled with herself those long nights! But which side was Jacob and which side was the Angel? After all, who was to say that the Trujillos would remain in power much longer? Already the necromantic power of El Jefe was waning and in its place could be felt something like a wind. Rumors flew as thick as ciguas, rumors that the Cubans were preparing to invade, that the Marines had been spotted on the horizon. Who could know what tomorrow would bring? Why send her beloved girl away? Why be hasty?
La Inca found herself in practically the same predicament Beli’s father had found himself in sixteen years earlier, back when the House of Cabral had first come up against the might of the Trujillos. Trying to decide whether to act or to stay still.
Unable to choose, she prayed for further guidance—another three days without food. Who knows how it might have turned out had not the Elvises come calling? Our Benefactor might have gone out exactly like Mother Abigail. But thankfully the Elvises surprised her as she was sweeping the front of the house. Is your name Myotis Toribio? Their pompadours like the backs of beetles. African muscles encased in pale summer suits, and underneath their jackets the hard, oiled holsters of their fire-arms did creak.
We want to speak to your daughter, Elvis One growled.
Right now, Elvis Two added.
Por supuesto, she said and when she emerged from the house holding a machete the Elvises retreated to their car, laughing.
Elvis One: We’ll be back, vieja.
Elvis Two: believe us.
Who was that? Beli asked from her bed, her hands clutching at her nonexistent stomach. No one, La Inca said, putting the machete next to the bed. The next night, ‘no one’ shot a peephole clean through the front door of the house.
The next couple of nights she and the girl slept under the bed, and a little bit later in the week she told the girl: No matter what happens I want you to remember: your father was a doctor, a doctor. And your mother was a nurse.
And finally the words: You should leave.
I want to leave. I hate this place.
The girl by this time could hobble to the latrine under her own power. She was much changed. During the day she would sit by the window in silence, very much like La Inca after her husband drowned. She did not smile, she did not laugh, she talked to no one, not even her friend Dorca. A dark veil had closed over her, like nata over café.
You don’t understand, hija. You have to leave the country. They’ll kill you if you don’t.
Beli laughed.
Oh, Beli; not so rashly, not so rashly: What did you know about states or diasporas? What did you know about Nueba Yol or unheated ‘old law’ tenements or children whose self-hate short-circuited their minds? What did you know, madame, about immigration? Don’t laugh, mi negrita, for your world is about to be changed. Utterly. Yes: a terrible beauty is etc., etc. Take it from me. You laugh because you’ve been ransacked to the limit of your soul, because your lover betrayed you almost unto death, because your first son was never born. You laugh because you have no front teeth and you’ve sworn never to smile again.
I wish I could say different but I’ve got it right here on tape. La Inca told you you had to leave the country and you laughed. End of story.
THE LAST DAYS OF THE REPUBLIC
She would remember little of the final months beyond her anguish and her despair (and her desire to see the Gangster dead). She was in the grips of the Darkness, passed through her days like a shade passes through life. She did not move from the house unless forced; at last they had the relationship La Inca had always longed for, except that they didn’t speak. What was there to say? La Inca talked soberly about the trip north, but Beli felt like a good part of her had already disembarked. Santo Domingo was fading. The house, La Inca, the fried yuca she was putting into her mouth were already gone—it was only a matter of allowing the rest of the world to catch up. The only time she felt close to her old sense was when she spotted the Elvises lurking in the neighborhood. She would cry out in mortal fear, but they drove off with smirks on their faces. We’ll see you soon. Real soon. At night there were nightmares of the cane, of the Faceless One, but when she awoke from them La Inca was always there. Tranquila, hija. Tranquila.
(Regarding the Elvises: What stayed their hand? Perhaps it was the fear of retribution now that the Trujillato had fallen. Perhaps it was La Inca’s power. Perhaps it was that force from the future reaching back to protect the third and final daughter? Who can know?)
La Inca, who I don’t think slept a single day during those months. La Inca, who carried a machete with her everywhere. Homegirl was bout about it. Knew that when
Gondolin falls you don’t wait around for the balrogs to tap on your door. You make fucking moves. And make moves she did. Papers were assembled, palms were greased, and permissions secured. In another time it would have been impossible, but with El Jefe dead and the Plátano Curtain shattered all manner of escapes were now possible. La Inca gave Beli photos and letters from the woman she’d be staying with in a place called El Bronx. But none of it reached Beli. She ignored the pictures, left the letters unread, so that when she arrived at Idlewild she would not know who it was she should be looking for. La pobrecita.
Just as the standoff between the Good Neighbor and what remained of Family Trujillo reached the breaking point, Beli was brought before a judge. La Inca made her put ojas de mamón in her shoes so he wouldn’t ask too many questions. Homegirl stood through the whole proceedings, numb, drifting. The week before, she and the Gangster had finally managed to meet in one of the first love motels in the capital. The one run by los chinos, about which Luis Díaz sang his famous song. It was not the reunion she had hoped for. Ay, mi pobre negrita, he moaned, stroking her hair. Where once was lightning now there was fat fingers on straight hair. We were betrayed, you and I. Betrayed horribly! She tried to talk about the dead baby but he waved the diminutive ghost away with a flick of his wrist and proceeded to remove her enormous breasts from the vast armature of her bra. We’ll have another one, he promised. I’m going to have two, she said quietly. He laughed. We’ll have fifty.