The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

  Hiding your doe-eyed, large-breasted daughter from Trujillo, however, was anything but easy. (Like keeping the Ring from Sauron.) If you think the average Dominican guy’s bad, Trujillo was five thousand times worse. Dude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass; if the procurement of ass had been any more central to the Trujillato the regime would have been the world’s first culocracy (and maybe, in fact, it was). In this climate, hoarding your women was tantamount to treason; offenders who didn’t cough up the muchachas could easily find themselves enjoying the invigorating charm of an eight-shark bath. Let us be clear: Abelard was taking an enormous risk. It didn’t matter that he was upper-class, or that he’d prepared the groundwork well, going as far as having a friend diagnose his wife as manic, then letting the word leak through the elite circles in which he ran. If Trujillo and Company caught wind of his duplicity they’d have him in chains (and Jacquelyn on her back) in two seconds flat. Which was why every time El Jefe shuffled down the welcome line, shaking hands, Abelard expected him to exclaim in that high shrill voice of his, Dr. Abelard Cabral, where is that delicious daughter of yours? I’ve heard so much about her from your neighbors. It was enough to make Abelard febrile.

  His daughter Jacquelyn of course had absolutely no idea what was at stake. Those were more innocent times, and she was an innocent girl; getting raped by her Illustrious President was the furthest thing from her excellent mind. She of his two daughters had inherited her father’s brains. Was studying French religiously because she’d decided to imitate her father and go abroad to study medicine at the Faculté de Médecine de Paris. To France! To become the next Madame Curie! Hit the books night and day, and would practice her French with both her father and with their servant Esteban El Gallo, who’d been born in Haiti and still spoke a pretty good frog.↓

  ≡ After Trujillo launched the 1937 genocide of Haitian and Haitian-Dominicans, you didn’t see that many Haitian types working in the DR. Not until at least the late fifties. Esteban was the exception because (a) he looked so damn Dominican, and (b) during the genocide, Socorro had hidden him inside her daughter Astrid’s dollhouse. Spent four days in there, cramped up like a brown-skinned Alice.

  Neither of his daughters had any idea, were as carefree as Hobbits, never guessing the Shadow that loomed on the horizon. On his days off, when he wasn’t at the clinic or in his study, writing, Abelard would stand at his rear window and watch his daughters at their silly children’s game until his aching heart could stand it no more.

  Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa.

  To the latecomers are left the bones.

  He spoke of these matters to only three people. The first, of course, was his wife, Socorro. Socorro (it must be said here) was a Talent in her own right. A famous beauty from the East (Higüey) and the source of all her daughters’ pulchritude, Socorro had looked in her youth like a dark-hued Dejah Thoris (one of the chief reasons Abelard had pursued a girl so beneath his class) and was also one of the finest nurse practitioners he had ever had the honor of working with in Mexico or the Dominican Republic, which, given his estimation of his Mexican colleagues, is no small praise. (The second reason he’d gone after her.) Her workhorse-ness and her encyclopedic knowledge of folk cures and traditional remedies made her an indispensable partner in his practice. Her reaction, though, to his Trujillo worries was typical; she was a clever, skilled, hardworking woman who didn’t blink when faced with arterial spray hissing from a machete-chopped arm stump, but when it came to more abstract menaces like, say, Trujillo, she stubbornly and willfully refused to acknowledge there might be a problem, all the while dressing Jacqueline in the most suffocating of clothes. Why are you telling people that I’m loca? she demanded.

  He spoke of it as well with his mistress, señora Lydia Abenader, one of the three women who had rejected his marriage offer upon his return from his studies in Mexico; now a widow and his number-one lover, she was the woman his father had wanted him to bag in the first place, and when he’d been unable to close the deal his father had mocked him as a half-man even unto his final days of bilious life (the third reason he’d gone after Socorro).

  Last he spoke with his longtime neighbor and friend, Marcus Applegate Roman, whom he often had to ferry back and forth from presidential events because Marcus lacked a car. With Marcus it had been a spontaneous outburst, the weight of the problem truly pressing on him; they’d been cruising back to La Vega on one of the old Marine Occupation roads, middle of the night in August, through the black-black farmlands of the Cibao, so hot they had to drive with the windows cranked down, which meant a constant stream of mosquitoes scooting up their nostrils, and out of nowhere Abelard began to talk. Young women have no opportunity to develop unmolested in this country, he complained. Then he gave, as an example, the name of a young woman whom the Jefe had only recently despoiled, a muchacha known to both of them, a graduate of the University of Florida and the daughter of an acquaintance. At first Marcus said nothing; in the darkness of the Packard’s interior his face was an absence, a pool of shadow. A worrisome silence. Marcus was no fan of the Jefe, having more than once in Abelard’s presence called him un ‘bruto’ y un ‘imbécil’ but that didn’t stop Abelard from being suddenly aware of his colossal indiscretion (such was life in those Secret Police days). Finally Abelard said, This doesn’t bother you?

  Marcus hunched down to light a cigarette, and finally his face reappeared, drawn but familiar. Nothing we can do about it, Abelard.

  But imagine you were in similar straits: how would you protect yourself?

  I’d be sure to have ugly daughters.

  Lydia was far more realistic. She’d been seated at her armoire, brushing her Moorish hair. He’d been lying on the bed, naked as well, absently pulling on his ripio. Lydia had said, Send her away to the nuns. Send her to Cuba. My family there will take care of her.

  Cuba was Lydia’s dream; it was her Mexico. Always talking about moving back there.

  But I’d need permission from the state!

  Ask for it, then.

  But what if El Jefe notices the requests?

  Lydia put down her brush with a sharp click. What are the chances of that happening? You never know, Abelard said defensively. In this country you never know.

  His mistress was for Cuba, his wife for house arrest, his best friend said nothing. His own cautiousness told him to await further instructions. And at the end of the year he got them.

  At one of the interminable presidential events EI Jefe had shaken Abelard’s hand, but instead of moving on, he paused—a nightmare come true—held on to his fingers, and said in his shrill voice: You are Dr. Abelard Cabral? Abelard bowed. At your service, Your Excellency. In less than a nanosecond Abelard was drenched in sweat; he knew what was coming next; the Failed Cattle Thief had never spoken more than three words to him his whole life, what else could it be? He dared not glance away from Trujillo’s heavily powdered face, but out the corner of his eyes he caught glimpses of the lambesacos, hovering, beginning to realize that an exchange was in the making.

  I have seen you here often, Doctor, but lately without your wife. Have you divorced her? I am still married, Your Enormity. To Socorro Hernandez Batista.

  That is good to hear, El Jefe said, I was afraid that you might have turned into un maricón. Then he turned to the lambesacos and laughed. Oh, Jefe, they screamed, you are too much.

  It was at this point that another nigger might have, in a fit of cojones, said something to defend his honor, but Abelard was not that nigger. He said nothing.

  But of course, El Jefe continued, knuckling a tear from his eye, you are no maricón, for I’ve heard that you have daughters, Dr. Cabral, una que es muy bella y elegante, no?

  Abelard had rehearsed a dozen answers to this question, but his response was pure reflex, came out of nowhere: Yes, Jefe, you are correct, I have two daughters. But to tell yo
u the truth, they’re only beautiful if you have a taste for women with mustaches.

  For an instant El Jefe had said nothing, and in that twisting silence Abelard could see his daughter being violated in front of him while he was lowered with excruciating slowness into Trujillo’s infamous pool of sharks. But then, miracle of miracles, El Jefe had crinkled his porcine face and laughed, Abelard had laughed too, and El Jefe moved on. When Abelard returned home to La Vega late that evening he woke his wife from a deep slumber so that they could both pray and thank the Heavens for their family’s salvation. Verbally, Abelard had never been quick on the draw. The inspiration could only have come from the hidden spaces within my soul, he told his wife. From a Numinous Being.

  You mean God? his wife pressed.

  I mean someone, Abelard said darkly.

  AND SO?

  For the next three months Abelard waited for the End. Waited for his name to start appearing in the ‘Foro Popular’ section of the paper, thinly veiled criticisms aimed at a certain bone doctor from La Vega—which was often how the regime began the destruction of a respected citizen such as him—with disses about the way your socks and your shirts didn’t match; waited for a letter to arrive, demanding a private meeting with the Jefe, waited for his daughter to turn up missing on her trip back to school. Lost nearly twenty pounds during his awful vigil. Began to drink copiously. Nearly killed a patient with a slip of the hand. If his wife hadn’t spotted the damage before they stitched, who knows what might have happened? Screamed at his daughters and wife almost every day. Could not get it up much for his mistress. But the rain season turned to hot season and the clinic filled with the hapless, the wounded, the afflicted, and when after four months nothing happened Abelard almost let out a sigh of relief.

  Maybe, he wrote on the back of his hairy hand. Maybe.

  SANTO DOMINGO CONFIDENTIAL

  In some ways living in Santo Domingo during the Trujillato was a lot like being in that famous Twilight Zone episode that Oscar loved so much, the one where the monstrous white kid with the godlike powers rules over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of the world, a town called Peaksville. The white kid is vicious and random and all the people in the ‘community’ live in straight terror of him, denouncing and betraying each other at the drop of a hat in order not to be the person he maims or, more ominously, sends to the corn. (After each atrocity he commits whether it’s giving a gopher three heads or Baníshing a no longer interesting playmate to the corn or raining snow down on the last crops—the horrified people of Peaksville have to say, It was a good thing you did, Anthony. A good thing.)

  Between 1930 (when the Failed Cattle Thief seized power) and 1961 (the year he got blazed) Santo Domingo was the Caribbean’s very own Peaksville, with Trujillo playing the part of Anthony and the rest of us reprising the role of the Man Who Got Turned into Jack-in-the-Box. You might roll your eyes at the comparison, but, friends: it would be hard to exaggerate the power Trujillo exerted over the Dominican people and the shadow of fear he cast throughout the region. Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor;↓ not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before.

  ≡ Anthony may have isolated Peaksville with the power of his mind, but Trujillo did the same with the power of his office! Almost as soon as he grabbed the presidency, the Failed Cattle Thief sealed the country away from the rest of the world—a forced isolation that we’ll call the Plátano Curtain. As for the country’s historically fluid border with Haiti—which was more baká than border—the Failed Cattle Thief became like Dr. Gull in From Hell; adopting the creed of the Dionyesian Architects, he aspired to become an architect of history, and through a horrifying ritual of silence and blood, machete and perejil, darkness and denial, inflicted a true border on the countries, a border that exists beyond maps, that is carved directly into the histories and imaginaries of a people. By the middle of T-illo’s second decade in ‘office’ the Platano Curtain had been so successful that when the Allies won World War II the majority of the pueblo didn’t even have the remotest idea that it had happened. Those who did know believed the propaganda that Trujillo had played an important role in the overthrow of the Japanese and the Hun. Homeboy could not have had a more private realm had he thrown a force-field around the island. (After all, who needs futuristic generators when you have the power of the machete?) Most people argue that El Jefe was trying to keep the world out; some, however, point out that he seemed equally intent on keeping something in.

  His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyone’s who lived in the States; a security apparatus so ridiculously mongoose that you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass. (Who says that we Third World people are inefficient?) It wasn’t just Mr. Friday the Thirteenth you had to worry about, either, it was the whole Chivato Nation he helped spawn, for like every Dark Lord worth his Shadow he had the devotion of his people.↓

  ≡ So devoted was the pueblo, in fact, that, as Galíndez recounts in La Era de Trujillo, when a graduate student was asked by a panel of examiners to discuss the pre-Columbian culture in the Americas, he replied without hesitation that the most important pre-Columbian culture in the Americas was ‘the Dominican Republic during the era of Trujillo’. Oh, man. But what’s more hilarious is that the examiners refused to fail the student, on the grounds that ‘he had mentioned El Jefe’.

  It was widely believed that at anyone time between forty-two and eighty-seven percent of the Dominican population was on the Secret Police’s payroll. Your own fucking neighbors could acabar con you just because you had something they coveted or because you cut in front of them at the colmado. Mad folks went out in that manner, betrayed by those they considered their panas, by members of their own families, by slips of the tongue. One day you were a law-abiding citizen, cracking nuts on your galería, the next day you were in the Cuarenta, getting your nuts cracked. Shit was so tight that many people actually believed that Trujillo had supernatural powers! It was whispered that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away, that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the Island. (You wonder why two generations later our parents are still so damn secretive, why you’ll find out your brother ain’t your brother only by accident.)

  But let’s not go completely overboard: Trujillo was certainly formidable, and the regime was like a Caribbean Mordor in many ways, but there were plenty of people who despised El Jefe, who communicated in less-than-veiled ways their contempt, who resisted. But Abelard was simply not one of them. Homeboy wasn’t like his Mexican colleagues who were always keeping up with what was happening elsewhere in the world, who believed that change was possible. He didn’t dream of revolution, didn’t care that Trotsky had lived and died not ten blocks from his student pension in Coyoacán; wanted only to tend his wealthy, ailing patients and afterward return to his study without worrying about being shot in the head or thrown to the sharks. Every now and then one of his acquaintances—usually Marcus—would describe for him the latest Trujillo Atrocity: an affluent clan stripped of its properties and sent into exile, an entire family fed piece by piece to the sharks because a son had dared compare Trujillo to Adolf Hitler before a terrified audience of his peers, a suspicious assassination in Bonao of a well-known unionist. Abelard listened to these horrors tensely, and then after an awkward silence would change the subject. He simply didn’t wish to dwell on the fates of Unfortunate People, on the goings-on in Peaksville. He didn’t want those st
ories in his house. The way Abelard saw it—his Trujillo philosophy, if you will—he only had to keep his head down, his mouth shut, his pockets open, his daughters hidden for another decade or two. By then, he prophesied, Trujillo would be dead and the Dominican Republic would be a true democracy.

  Abelard, it turned out, needed help in the prophecy department. Santo Domingo never became a democracy. He didn’t have no couple of decades, either. His luck ran out earlier than anyone expected.

  THE BAD THING

  Nineteen forty-five should have been a capital year for Abelard and Family. Two of Abelard’s articles were published to minor acclaim, one in the prestigious—and the second in a small journal out of Caracas, and he received complimentary responses from a couple of Continental doctors, very flattering indeed. Business in the supermercados couldn’t have been better; the Island was still flush from the war boom and his managers couldn’t keep anything on the shelves. The fincas were producing and reaping profits; the worldwide collapse of agricultural prices was still years off Abelard had a full load of clients, performed a number of tricky surgeries with impeccable skill; his daughters were prospering (Jacquelyn had been accepted at a prestigious boarding school in Le Havre, to begin the following year—her chance to escape); his wife and mistress were pouring on the adoration; even the servants seemed content (not that he ever really spoke to them). All in all, the good doctor should have been immensely satisfied with himself. Should have ended each day with his feet up, un cigarro in the comer of his mouth, and a broad grin creasing his ursine features.