The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

  Poor Abelard. It was also on day four that someone from the outside world finally paid him attention. Late in the evening, when everybody else was asleep, a detachment of guards dragged him into a smaller, crudely lit cell. He was strapped down, not unkindly, to a table. From the moment he’d been grabbed he’d not stopped speaking. This is all a misunderstanding please I come from a very respectable family you have to communicate with my wife and my lawyers they will be able to clear this up I cannot believe that I’ve been treated so despicably I demand that the officer in charge hear my complaints. He couldn’t get the words out of his mouth fast enough. It wasn’t until he noticed the electrical contraption that the guards were fiddling with in the comer that he fell quiet. Abelard stared at it with a terrible dread, and then, because he suffered from an insatiable urge to taxonomize, asked, What in God’s name do you call that?

  We call it the pulpo, one of the guards said.

  They spent all night showing him how it worked.

  It was three days before Socorro could track down her husband and another five days before she received permission from the capital to visit. The visiting room where Socorro awaited her husband seemed to have been fashioned from a latrine. There was only one sputtering kerosene lamp and it looked as though a number of people had taken mountainous shits in the comer. An intentional humiliation that was lost on Socorro; she was too overwrought to notice. After what felt like an hour (again, another señora would have protested, but Socorro bore the shit-smell and the darkness and the no chair stoically), Abelard was brought in handcuffed. He’d been given an undersized shirt and an undersized pair of pants; he was shuffling as though afraid that something in his hands or in his pockets might fall out. Only been inside a week but already he looked frightful. His eyes were blackened; his hands and neck covered in bruises and his tom lip had swollen monstrously, was the color of the meat inside your eye. The night before, he had been interrogated by the guards, and they had beaten him mercilessly with leather truncheons; one of his testicles would be permanently shriveled from the blows.

  Poor Socorro. Here was a woman whose lifelong preoccupation had been calamity. Her mother was a mute; her drunk father frittered away the family’s middle–class patrimony, one tarea at a time, until their holdings had been reduced to a shack and some chickens and the old man was forced to work other people’s land, condemned to a life of constant movement, poor health, and broken hands; it was said that Pa Socorro had never recovered from seeing his own father beaten to death by a neighbor who also happened to be a sergeant in the police. Socorro’s childhood had been about missed meals and cousin-clothes, about seeing her father three, four times a year, visits where he didn’t talk to anybody; just lay in his room drunk.

  Socorro became an ‘anxious’ muchacha; for a time she thinned her hair by pulling it, was seventeen when she caught Abelard’s eye in a training hospital but didn’t start menstruating until a year after they were married. Even as an adult, Socorro was in the habit of waking up in the middle of the night in terror, convinced that the house was on fire, would rush from room to room, expecting to be greeted by a carnival of flame. When Abelard read to her from his newspapers she took special interest in earthquakes and fires and floods and cattle stampedes and the sinking of ships. She was the family’s first catastrophist, would have made Cuvier proud.

  What had she been expecting, while she fiddled with the buttons on her dress, while she shifted the purse on her shoulder and tried not to unbalance her Macy’s hat? A mess, un toyo certainly, but not a husband looking nearly destroyed, who shuffled like an old man, whose eyes shone with the sort of fear that is not easily shed. It was worse than she, in all her apocalyptic fervor, had imagined. It was the Fall.

  When she placed her hands on Abelard he began to cry very loudly, very shamefully. Tears streamed down his face as he tried to tell her all that had happened to him.

  It wasn’t long after that visit that Socorro realized that she was pregnant. With Abelard’s Third and Final Daughter.

  Zafa or fukú?

  You tell me.

  There would always be speculation. At the most basic level, did he say it, did he not? (Which is another way of asking: Did he have a hand in his own destruction?) Even the family was divided. La Inca adamant that her cousin had said nothing; it had all been a setup, orchestrated by Abelard’s enemies to strip the family of their wealth, their properties, and their businesses. Others were not so sure. He probably had said something that night at the club, and unfortunately for him he’d been overheard by the Jefe’s agents. No elaborate plot, just drunken stupidity. As for the carnage that followed: que se yo—just a lot of bad luck.

  Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard’s daughter, but when he couldn’t snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family’s ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened.

  So which was it? you ask. An accident, a conspiracy, or a fukú? The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you’ll have to decide for yourself. What’s certain is that nothing’s certain. We are trawling in silences here. Trujillo and Company didn’t leave a paper trail—they didn’t share their German contemporaries’ lust for documentation. And it’s not like the fukú itself would leave a memoir or anything. The remaining Cabrals ain’t much help, either; on all matters related to Abelard’s imprisonment and to the subsequent destruction of the clan there is within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations, that sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction. A whisper here and there but nothing more.

  Which is to say if you’re looking for a full story, I don’t have it. Oscar searched for it too, in his last days, and it’s not certain whether he found it either.

  Let’s be honest, though. The rap about The Girl Trujillo Wanted is a pretty common one on the Island.↓

  ≡ Anacaona, a.k.a. the Golden Flower. One of the Founding Mothers of the New World and the most beautiful Indian in the World. (The Mexicans might have their Malinche, but we Dominicans have our Anacaona.) Anacaona was the wife of Caonabo, one of the five caciques who ruled our Island at the time of the ‘Discovery’. In his accounts, Bartolomé de las Casas described her as ‘a woman of great prudence and authority, very courtly and gracious in her manner of speaking and her gestures’. Other witnesses put it more succinctly: the chick was hot and, it would turn out, warrior-brave. When the Euros started going Hannibal Lecter on the Tainos, they killed Anacaona’s husband (which is another story). And like all good warrior-women she tried to rally her people, tried to resist, but the Europeans were the original fukú, no stopping them. Massacre after massacre after massacre. Upon being captured, Anacaona tried to parley, saying: ‘Killing is not honorable, neither does violence redress our honor. Let us build a bridge of love that our enemies may cross, leaving their footprints for all to see’. The Spanish weren’t trying to build no bridges, though. After a bogus trial they hung brave Anacaona. In Santo Domingo, in the shadow of one of our first churches. The End.

  A common story you hear about Anacaona in the DR is that on the eve of her execution she was offered a chance to save herself: all she had to do was marry a Spaniard who was obsessed with her. (See the trend? Trujillo wanted the Mirabal Sisters, and the Spaniard wanted Anacaona.) Offer that choice to a contemporary Island girl and see how fast she fills out that passport application. Anacaona, however, tragically old-school, was reported to have said, Whitemen, kiss my hurricane ass! And that was the end of Anacaona. The Golden Flower. One of the Founding Mothers of the New World and the most beautiful Indian in the World.

  As common as krill. (Not that krill is too common on the Island but you get the drift.) So common that Mario Vargas Llosa didn’t have to do much except open his mouth to sift it out of the air. There’s one of these belaco tales in almost everybody’s hometown. It’s one of those easy stories because in essence it explains it all. Trujillo took
your houses, your properties, put your pops and your moms in jail? Well, it was because he wanted to fuck the beautiful daughter of the house! And your family wouldn’t let him!

  Shit really is perfect. Makes for plenty of fun reading.

  But there’s another, less-known, variant of the Abelard vs. Trujillo narrative. A secret history that claims that Abelard didn’t get in trouble because of his daughter’s culo or because of an imprudent joke.

  This version contends that he got in trouble because of a book.

  (Cue the theremin, please.)

  Sometime in 1944 (so the story goes), while Abelard was still worried about whether he was in trouble with Trujillo, he started writing a book about—what else?—Trujillo. By 1945 there was already a tradition of ex-officials writing tell-all books about the Trujillo regime. But that apparently was not the kind of book Abelard was writing. His shit, if we are to believe the whispers, was an expose of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the president—that he was supernatural, that he was not human—may in some ways have been true. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!

  I only wish I could have read that thing. (I know Oscar did too.) That shit would have been one wild mother-fucking ride. Alas, the grimoire in question (so the story goes) was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. No copies survive. Not his wife or his children knew about its existence, either. Only one of the servants who helped him collect the folktales on the sly, etc., etc. What can I tell you? In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow. It was one of those fictions with a lot of disseminators but no believers. Oscar, as you might imagine, found this version of the Fall very very attractive. Appealed to the deep structures in his nerd brain. Mysterious books, a supernatural, or perhaps alien, dictator who had installed himself on the first Island of the New World and then cut it off from everything else, who could send a curse to destroy his enemies—that was some New Age Lovecraft shit.

  The Lost Final Book of Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral. I’m sure that this is nothing more than a figment of our Island’s hypertrophied voodoo imagination. And nothing less. The Girl Trujillo Wanted might be trite as far as foundation myths go but at least it’s something you can really believe in, no? Something real.

  Strange, though, that when all was said and done, Trujillo never went after Jackie, even though he had Abelard in his grasp. He was known to be unpredictable, but still, it’s odd, isn’t it?

  Also strange that none of Abelard’s books, not the four he authored or the hundreds he owned, survive. Not in an archive, not in a private collection. Not a one. All of them either lost or destroyed. Every paper he had in his house was confiscated and reportedly burned. You want creepy? Not one single example of his handwriting remains. I mean, OK, Trujillo was thorough. But not one scrap of paper with his handwriting? That was more than thorough. You got to fear a motherfucker or what he’s writing to do something like that.

  But hey, it’s only a story, with no solid evidence, the kind of shit only a nerd could love.

  THE SENTENCE

  No matter what you believe: in February 1946, Abelard was officially convicted of all charges and sentenced to eighteen years. Eighteen years! Gaunt Abelard dragged from the courtroom before he could say a word. Socorro, immensely pregnant, had to be restrained from attacking the judge. Maybe you’ll ask, Why was there was no out cryin the papers, no actions among the civil rights groups, no opposition parties rallying to the cause? Nigger, please: there were no papers, no civil rights groups, no opposition parties; there was only Trujillo. And talk about jurisprudence: Abelard’s lawyer got one phone call from the Palacio and promptly dropped the appeal. It’s better we say nothing, he advised Socorro. He’ll live longer. Say nothing, say everything—it didn’t matter. It was the Fall. The fourteen-room house in La Vega, the luxurious apartment in Santiago, the stables in which you could comfortably billet a dozen horses, the two prosperous supermercados and the string off fíncas vanished in the detonation, were all confiscated by the Trujillato and ended up dispersed among the Jefe and his minions, two of whom had been out with Abelard the night he said the Bad Thing. (I could reveal their names but I believe you already know one of them; he was a certain trusted neighbor.) But no disappearance was more total, more ultimate, than Abelard’s.

  Losing your house and all your properties, that was par for the course with the Trujillato—but the arrest (or if you’re more into the fantastic: that book) precipitated an unprecedented downturn in the family fortune. Tripped, at some cosmic level, a lever against the family. Call it a whole lot of bad luck, outstanding karmic debt, or something else. (Fukú?) Whatever it was, the shit started coming at the family something awful and there are some people who would say it’s never ever stopped.

  FALLOUT

  The family claims the first sign was that Abelard’s third and final daughter, given the light early on in her father’s capsulization, was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black—kongo-black, shango-black, kali-black, zapote-black, rekha-black—and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen.

  You want a real first sign?

  Not two months after giving birth to the third and final daughter (who was named Hypatia Belicia Cabral) Socorro, perhaps blinded by her grief: by her husband’s disappearance, by the fact that all her husband’s family had begun avoiding them like, well, a fukú, by postpartum depression, stepped in front of a speeding ammunition truck and was dragged nearly to the front of La Casa Amarilla before the driver realized something was wrong. If she wasn’t dead on impact she was certainly dead by the time they pried her body from the truck’s axles.

  It was the very worst kind of luck, but what could be done? With a dead mom and a dad in prison, with the rest of the family scarce (and I mean Trujillo-scarce), the daughters had to be divvied up among whoever would take them. Jackie got sent to her wealthy godparents in La Capital, while Astrid ended up with relatives in Sanjuan de la Maguana.

  They never saw each other or their father again.

  Even those among you who don’t believe in fukú’s of any kind might have wondered what in Creation’s name was going on. Shortly after Socorro’s horrible accident, Esteban the Gallo, the family’s number-one servant, was fatally stabbed outside a cabaret; the attackers were never found. Lydia perished soon after, some say of grief: others of a cancer in her womanly parts. Her body was not found for months. After all, she lived alone.

  In 1948, Jackie, the family’s Golden Child, was found drowned in her godparents’ pool. The pool that had been drained down to its last two feet of water. Up to that point she’d been unflaggingly cheerful, the sort of talkative negra who could have found a positive side to a mustard-gas attack. Despite her traumas, despite the circumstances around her separation from her parents, she disappointed no one, exceeded all expectations. She was number one in her class academically, beating out even the private-school children of the American Colony, so off-the-hook intelligent she made a habit of correcting her teachers’ mistakes on exams. She was captain of the debate team, captain of the swim team, and in tennis had no equal, was fucking golden. But never got over the Fall or her role in it, was how people explained it. (Though how odd is it that she was accepted to medical school in France three days before she ‘killed herself’ and from all evidence couldn’t wait to be gone from Santo Domingo.)

  Her sister, Astrid—we scarcely knew you, babe—wasn’t much luckier. In 1951, while praying in a church in San Juan, where she lived with her tíos, a stray bullet flew down the aisle and struck her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. No one knew where the bullet had come from. No one even recalled hearing a weapon discharge.

&nb
sp; Of the original family quartet, Abelard lived the longest. Which is ironic since nearly everyone in his circle, including La Inca, believed the government when they announced in 1953 that he was dead. (Why did they do this? Because.) It was only after he died for real that it was revealed that he’d been in Nigüa prison all along. Served fourteen straight years in Trujillo’s justice. What a nightmare.↓

  ≡ Nigüa and El Pozo de Nagua were death camps—Ultamos—considered the worst prisons in the New World. Most niggers who ended up in Nigüa during the Trujillato never left alive, and those who did probably wished they hadn’t. The father of one of my friends spent eight years in Nigüa for failing to show proper deference toward the Jefe’s father, and he once spoke of a fellow prisoner who made the mistake of complaining to his jailers about a toothache. The guards shoved a gun in his mouth and blew his brains into orbit. I bet it don’t hurt now, the guards guffawed. (The one who actually committed the murder was known thereafter as El Dentista.) Nigüa had many famous alumni, including the writer Juan Bosch, who would go on to become Exiled Anti-Trujillista Number One and eventually president of the Dominican Republic. As Juan Isidro Jiménes Grullón said in his book Una Gestapo en América, ‘es mejor tener cien niguas en un pie que un pie en Nigüa’.