The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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?

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.

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.

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.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE JACARANDA

Two days later Beli was wandering about the parque central in a restless fog. Her hair had seen better days. She was out in the world because she couldn’t stand to be at home with La Inca and now that she didn’t have a job she didn’t have a sanctuary into which to retreat. She was deep in thought, one hand on her belly, the other on her pounding head. She was thinking about the argument she and the Gangster had gotten into earlier in the week. He’d been in one of his foul moods and bellowed, suddenly, that he didn’t want to bring a baby into so terrible a world and she had barked that the world wasn’t so terrible in Miami and then he had said, grabbing her by the throat, If you’re in such a rush to go to Miami, swim. He hadn’t tried to contact her since and she was wandering around in the hopes of spotting him. As if he hung around Baní. Her feet were swollen, her head was sending its surplus ache down her neck, and now two huge men with matching pompadours were grabbing her by the arms and propelling her to the center of the parque, where a well-dressed old lady sat on a bench underneath a decrepit jacaranda. White gloves and a coil of pearls about her neck. Scrutinizing Beli with unflinching iguana eyes.

Do you know who I am?

I don’t know who in carajo—

Soy Trujillo. I’m also Dionisio’s wife. It has reached my ears that you’ve been telling people that you’re going to marry him and that you’re having his child. Well, I’m here to inform you, mi monita, that you will be doing neither. These two very large and capable officers are going to take you to a doctor, and after he’s cleaned out that toto podrido of yours there won’t be any baby left to talk about. And then it will be in your best interest that I never see your black cara de culo again because if I do I’ll feed you to my dogs myself. But enough talk. It’s time for your appointment. Say good-bye now, I don’t want you to be late.

Beli might have felt as though the crone had thrown boiling oil on her but she still had the ovaries to spit, Cómeme el culo, you ugly disgusting vieja.

Let’s go, Elvis One said, twisting her arm behind her back and, with the help of his partner, dragging her across the park to where a car sat baleful in the sun.

Déjame, she screamed, and when she looked up she saw that there was one more cop sitting in the car, and when he turned toward her she saw that he didn’t have a face. All the strength fell right out of her.

That’s right, tranquila now, the larger one said.

What a sad ending it would have been had not our girl rolled her luck and spotted José Then ambling back from one of his gambling trips, a rolled newspaper under his arm. She tried to say his name, but like in those bad dreams we all have there was no air in her lungs. It wasn’t until they tried to force her into the car and her hand brushed the burning chrome of the car that she found her tongue. José, she whispered, please save me.

And then the spell was broken. Shut up! The Elvises struck her in the head and back but it was too late, José Then was running over, and behind him, a miracle, were his brother Juan and the rest of the Palacio Peking crew: Constantina, Marco Antonio, and Indian Benny. The grunts tried to draw their pistols but Beli was all over them, and then José planted his iron next to the biggest one’s skull and everybody froze, except, of course, Beli.

You hijos de puta! I’m pregnant! Do you understand! Pregnant! She spun to where the crone had held court, but she had inexplicably vanished.

This girl’s under arrest, one grunt said sullenly.

No she’s not. José tore Beli out of their arms.

You alone her! yelled Juan, a machete in each hand.

Listen, chino, you don’t know what you’re doing.

This chino knows exactly what he’s doing. José cocked the pistol, a noise most dreadful, like a rib breaking. His face was a dead rictus and in it shone everything he had lost. Run, Beli, he said.

And she ran, tears popping out of her eyes, but not before taking one last kick at the grunts. Mis chinos, she told her daughter, saved my life.

She should have kept running too but she beelined for home instead. Can you believe it? Like everybody in this damn story, she underestimated the depth of the shit she was in.

What’s the matter, hija? La Inca said, dropping the frying pan in her hand and holding the girl. You have to tell me.

Beli shook her head, couldn’t catch her breath. Latched the door and the windows and then crouched on her bed, a knife in her hand, trembling and weeping, the cold in her stomach like a dead fish. I want Dionisio, she blubbered. I want him now!

What happened?

She should have scrammed, I tell you, but she needed to see her Gangster, needed him to explain what was happening. Despite everything that had just transpired she still held out the hope that he would make everything better, that his gruff voice would soothe her heart and stop the animal fear gnawing her guts. Poor Beli. She believed in the Gangster. Was loyal to the end. Which was why a couple hours later, when a neighbor shouted, Oye, Inca, the novio is outside, she bolted out of bed like she’d been shot from a mass driver, blew past La Inca, past caution, ran barefoot to where his car was waiting. In the dark she failed to notice that it wasn’t actually his car.

Did you miss us? Elvis One asked, slapping cuffs on her wrist.

She tried to scream but it was too late.

After the girl had bolted from the house, and after she was informed by the neighbors that the Secret Police had scooped her up, La Inca knew in her ironclad heart that the girl was fun-toosh, that the Doom of the Cabrals had managed to infiltrate her circle at last. Standing on the edge of the neighborhood, rigid as a post, staring hopelessly into the night, she felt herself borne upon a cold tide of despair, as bottomless as our needs. A thousand reasons why it might have happened (starting of course with the accursed Gangster) but none as important as the fact that it had. Stranded out in that growing darkness, without a name, an address, or a relative in the Palacio, La Inca almost succumbed, let herself be lifted from her moorings and carried like a child, like a tangle of seagrape beyond the bright reef of her faith and into the dark reaches. It was in that hour of tribulation, however, that a hand reached out for her and she remembered who she was. Myotís Altagracia Toribio Cabral. One of the Mighty of the Sur. You must save her, her husband’s spirit said, or no one else will.

Shrugging off her weariness, she did what many women of her background would have done. Posted herself beside her portrait of the Virgen de Altagracia and prayed. We postmodern phitanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion.

Let me tell you, True believers: in the annals of Dominican piety there has never been prayer like this. The rosaries cabling through La Inca’s fingers like line flying through a doomed fisherman’s hands. And before you could say Holy! Holy! Holy! she was joined by a flock of women, young and old, fierce and mansa, serious and alegre, even those who had previously bagged on the girl and called her whore, arriving without invitation and taking up the prayer without as much as a whisper.

Dorca was there, and the wife of the dentist, and many many others. In no time at all the room was filled with the faithful and pulsed with a spirit so dense that it was rumored that the Devil himself had to avoid the Sur for months afterward. La Inca didn’t notice. A hurricane could have carried off the entire city and it wouldn’t have broken her concentration. Her face veined, her neck corded, the blood roaring in her ears. Too lost, too given over to drawing the girl back from the Abyss was she. So furious and so unrelenting, in fact, was La Inca’s pace that more than a few women suffered shetaat (spiritual burnout) and collapsed, never again to feel the divine breath of the Todopoderoso on their neck. One woman even lost the ability to determine right from wrong and a few years later became one of Balaguer’s chief deputies. By night’s end only three of the original circle remained: La Inca of course, her friend and neighbor Momóna (who it was said could cure warts and sex an egg just by looking at it), and a plucky seven-year-old whose piety, until then, had been obscured by a penchant for blowing mucus out her nostrils like a man.

To exhaustion and beyond they prayed, to that glittering place where the flesh dies and is born again, where all is agony, and finally, just as La Inca was feeling her spirit begin to loose itself from its earthly pinions, just as the circle began to dissolve—

They drove east. In those days the cities hadn’t yet metastasized into kaiju, menacing one another with smoking, teeming tendrils of shanties; in those days their limits were a Corbusian dream; the urban dropped off as precipitous as a beat, one second you were deep in the twentieth century (well, the twentieth century of the Third World) and the next you’d find yourself plunged 180 years into rolling fields of cane. The transition between these states was some real-time machine-type shit. The moon, it has been reported, was full, and the light that rained down cast the leaves of the eucalyptuses into spectral coin.

The world outside so beautiful, but inside the car…

They’d been punching her and her right eye had puffed into a malignant slit, her right breast so preposterously swollen that it looked like it would burst, her lip was split and something was wrong with her jaw, she couldn’t swallow without causing herself excruciating shocks of pain. She cried out each time they struck her but she did not cry, entiendes? Her fierceness astounds me. She would not give them the pleasure. There was such fear, the sickening blood-draining fear of a drawn pistol, of waking up to find a man standing over your bed, but held, a note sustained indefinitely. Such fear, and yet she refused to show it. How she hated these men. For her whole life she would hate them, never forgive, never forgive, and she would never be able to think of them without succumbing to a vortex of rage. Anyone else would have turned her face from the blows, but Beli offered hers up. And between punches she brought up her knees to comfort her stomach. You’ll be OK, she whispered through a broken mouth. You’ll live.

Dios mío.

They parked the car on the edge of the road and marched her into the cane. They walked until the cane was roaring so loud around them it sounded as if they were in the middle of a storm. Our girl, she kept flinging her head to get her hair out of her face, could think only about her poor little boy, and that was the sole reason she started to weep.

The large grunt handed his partner a nightstick.

Let’s hurry up.

No, Beli said.

How she survived I’ll never know. They beat her like she was a slave. Like she was a dog. Let me pass over the actual violence and report instead on the damage inflicted: her clavicle, chicken-boned; her right humerus, a triple fracture (she would never again have much strength in that arm); five ribs, broken; left kidney, bruised; liver, bruised; right lung, collapsed; front teeth, blown out. About 167 points of damage in total and it was only sheer accident that these motherfuckers didn’t eggshell her cranium, though her head did swell to elephant-man proportions. Was there time for a rape or two? I suspect there was, but we shall never know because it’s not something she talked about. All that can be said is that it was the end of language, the end of hope. It was the sort of beating that breaks people, breaks them utterly.

Throughout most of the car ride, and even into the first stanzas of that wilding, she maintained the fool’s hope that her Gangster would save her, would appear out of the darkness with a gun and a reprieve. And when it became clear that no rescue was forthcoming, she fantasized, in the instance of a blackout, that he would visit her at the hospital and there they would be married, he in a suit, she in a body cast, but then that too was revealed to be plepla by the sickening crack of her humerus, and now all that remained was the agony and the foolishness. In a blackout she caught sight of him disappearing on that motorcycle again, felt the tightness in her chest as she screamed for him to wait, wait. Saw for a brief instant La Inca praying in her room — the silence that lay between them now, stronger than love — and in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she’d not even had her own name. And it was into that loneliness that she was sliding, and it was here that she would dwell forever, alone, black, fea, scratching at the dust with a stick, pretending that the scribble was letters, words, names.

All hope was gone, but then, True believers, like the Hand of the Ancestors themselves, a miracle. Just as our girl was set to disappear across that event horizon, just as the cold of obliteration was stealing up her legs, she found in herself one last reservoir of strength: her Cabral magis — and all she had to do was realize that once again she’d been tricked, once again she’d been played, by the Gangster, by Santo Domingo, by her own dumb needs, to ignite it. Like Superman in Dark Knight Returns, who drained from an entire jungle the photonic energy he needed to survive Coldbringer, so did our Beli resolve out of her anger her own survival. In other words, her coraje saved her life.

Like a white light in her. Like a sun. She came to in the ferocious moonlight. A broken girl, atop broken stalks of cane. Pain everywhere but alive. Alive.

And now we arrive at the strangest part of our tale. Whether what follows was a figment of Beli’s wracked imagination or something else altogether I cannot say. Even your Watcher has his silences, his páginas en blanco. Beyond the Source Wall few have ventured. But no matter what the truth, remember: Dominicans are Caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena. How else could we have survived what we have survived? So as Beli was flitting in and out of life, there appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt. This one was quite large for its species and placed its intelligent little paws on her chest and stared down at her.

My baby, Beli wept. Mi hijo precioso.

No, no, no, no, no. It pulled at her unbroken arm. You have to rise now or you’ll never have the son or the daughter.

What son? she wailed. What daughter?

The ones who await.

It was dark and her legs trembled beneath her like smoke.

It rivered into the cane, and Beli, blinking tears, realized she had no idea which way was out. As some of you know, cane-fields are no fucking joke, and even the cleverest of adults can get mazed in their endlessness, only to reappear months later as a cameo of bones. But before Beli lost hope she heard the creature’s voice. She (for it had a woman’s lilt) was singing! In an accent she could not place: maybe Venezuelan, maybe Colombian. Sueño, sueño, sueño, como tú te llamas. She clung unsteadily to the cane, like an anciano clinging to a hammock, and, panting, took her first step, a long dizzy spell, beating back a blackout, and then her next. Precarious progress, because if she fell she knew she would never stand again. Sometimes she saw the creature’s chabine eyes flashing through the stalks. Yo me llamo sueño de la madrugada. The cane didn’t want her to leave, of course; it slashed at her palms, jabbed into her flank and clawed her thighs, and its sweet stench clogged her throat.

Each time she thought she would fall she concentrated on the faces of her promised future — her promised children — and from that obtained the strength she needed to continue. She pulled from strength, from hope, from hate, from her invincible heart, each a different piston driving her forward. Finally, when all were exhausted, when she began to stumble headfirst, heading down like a boxer on his last legs, she stretched her uninjured arm out and what greeted her was not cane but the open world of life. She felt the tarmac under her bare broken feet, and the wind. The wind! But she had only a second to savor it, for just then an unelectrified truck burst out of the darkness in a roar of gears. What a life, she mused, all that lucha only to be run over like a dog. But she wasn’t flattened. The driver, who later swore he saw something lion-like in the gloom, with eyes like terrible amber lamps, slammed on the brakes and halted inches from where a naked blood-spattered Beli tottered.

Now check it: the truck held a perico ripiao conjunto, fresh from playing a wedding in Ocoa. Took all the courage they had not to pop the truck in reverse and peel out of there. Cries of, It’s a baká, a ciguapa, no, a haitiano! silenced by the lead singer, who shouted, It’s a girl! The band members lay Beli among their instruments, swaddled her with their chacabanas, and washed her face with the water they carried for the radiator and for cutting down the klerín. Down the band peered, rubbing their lips and running nervous hands through thinning hair.

What do you think happened?

I think she was attacked.

By a lion, offered the driver.

Maybe she fell out of a car.

It looks like she fell under a car.

Trujillo, she whispered.

Aghast, the band looked at one another.

We should leave her.

The guitarrista agreed. She must be a subversive. If they find her with us the police will kill us too. Put her back on the road, begged the driver. Let the lion finish her.

Silence, and then the lead singer lit a match and held it in the air and in that splinter of light was revealed a blunt-featured woman with the golden eyes of a chabine. We’re not leaving her, the lead singer said in a curious cibaeña accent, and only then did Beli understand that she was saved.↓ ≡ The Mongoose, one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its greatest travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Mrica and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, a.k.a. the Caribbean. Since its earliest appearance in the written record — 675 H.C.E., in a nameless scribe’s letter to AshurBanípal’s father, Esarhaddon — the Mongoose has proven itself to be an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies. Believed to be an ally of Man. Many Watchers suspect that the Mongoose arrived to our world from another, but to date no evidence of such a migration has been unearthed.