2007 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

  Anyway, I thought maybe the feeling was about Max and so one day I let him take us to one of the love motels. He was so excited he almost fell off the bed and the first thing he wanted was to look at my ass. I never knew my big ass could be such a star attraction but he kissed it, four, five times, gave me goose bumps with his breath and pronounced it a tesoro. When we were done and he was in the bathroom washing himself I stood in front of the mirror naked and looked at my culo for the first time. A tesoro, I repeated. A treasure.

  Well? Rosio asked at school. And I nodded once, quickly, and she grabbed me and laughed and all the girls I hated turned to look but what could they do? Happiness, when it comes, is stronger than all the jerk girls in Santo Domingo combined.

  But I was still confused. Because the feeling, it just kept getting stronger and stronger, wouldn’t let me sleep, wouldn’t give me any peace. I started losing races, which was something I never did.

  You ain’t so great, are you, gringa, the girls on the other teams hissed at me and I could only hang my head. Coach Cortes was so unhappy he just locked himself in his car and wouldn’t say anything to any of us.

  The whole thing was driving me crazy, and then one night I came home from being out with Max. He had taken me for a walk along the Malecón — he never had money for anything else — and we had watched the bats zigzagging over the palms and an old ship head into the distance. He talked quietly about moving to the U.S. while I stretched my hamstrings. My abuela was waiting for me at the living room table. Even though she still wears black to mourn the husband she lost when she was young she’s one of the most handsome women I’ve ever known. We have the same jagged lightning-bolt part and the first time I saw her at the airport I didn’t want to admit it but I knew that things were going to be OK between us. She stood like she was her own best thing and when she saw me she said, Hija, I have waited for you since the day you left. And then she hugged me and kissed me and said, I’m your abuela, but you can call me La Inca.

  Standing over her that night, her part like a crack in her hair, I felt a surge of tenderness. I put my arms around her and that was when I noticed that she was looking at photos. Old photos, the kind I’d never seen in my house. Photos of my mother when she was young and of other people. I picked one up. Mami was standing in front of a Chinese restaurant. Even with the apron on she looked potent, like someone who was going to be someone.

  She was very guapa, I said casually. Abuela snorted. Guapa soy yo. Your mother was a diosa.

  But so cabeza dura. When she was your age we never got along. I didn’t know that, I said. She was cabeza dura and I was…exigente. But it all turned out for the best, she sighed. We have you and your brother and that’s more than anyone could have hoped for, given what came before. She plucked out one photo. This is your mother’s father, she offered me the photo. He was my cousin, and—

  She was about to say something else and then she stopped.

  And that’s when it hit with the force of a hurricane. The feeling. I stood straight up, the way my mother always wanted me to stand up. My abuela was sitting there, forlorn, trying to cobble together the right words and I could not move or breathe. I felt like I always did at the last seconds of a race, when I was sure that I was going to explode. She was about to say something and I was waiting for whatever she was going to tell me. I was waiting to begin.

  THREE

  The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral

  1955-1962

  LOOK AT THE PRINCESS

  Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral:

  A girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked who, like her yet-to-be-born daughter, would come to exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise — the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.

  UNDER THE SEA

  She lived in those days in Baní. Not the frenzied Baní of right now, supported by an endless supply of DoYos who’ve laid claim to most of Boston, Providence, New Hampshire. This was the lovely Baní of times past, beautiful and respectful. A city famed for its resistance to blackness, and it was here, alas, that the darkest character in our story resided. On one of the main streets near the central plaza. In a house that no longer stands. It was here that Beli lived with her mother-aunt, if not exactly content, then certainly in a state of relative tranquility. From 1951 on, ‘hija’ and ‘madre’ running their famous bakery near the Plaza Central and keeping their fading, airless house in tip-top shape. (Before 1951, our orphaned girl had lived with another foster family, monstrous people if the rumors are to be believed, a dark period of her life neither she nor her madre ever referenced. Their very own página en blanco.)

  These were the Beautiful Days. When La Inca would recount for Beli her family’s illustrious history while they pounded and wrung dough with bare hands (Your father! Your mother! Your sisters! Your house!) or when the only talk between them was the voices on Carlos Moya’s radio and the sound of the butter being applied to Beli’s ruined back. Days of mangoes, days of bread. There are not many surviving photos from that period but it’s not hard to imagine them — arrayed in front of their immaculate house in Los Pescadores. Not touching, because it was not their way. Respectability so dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequeña that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it. Theirs was the life of the Good People of Sur. Church twice a week, and on Fridays a stroll through Baní’s parque central, where in those nostalgic Trujillo days stickup kids were nowhere to be seen and the beautiful bands did play. They shared the same sagging bed, and in the morning, while La Inca fished around blindly for her chancletas, Beli would shiver out to the front of the house, and while La Inca brewed her coffee, Beli would lean against the fence and stare. At what? The neighbors? The rising dust? At the world?

  Hija, La Inca would call. Hija, come here!

  Four, five times until finally La Inca walked over to fetch her, and only then did Beli come. Why are you shouting? Beli wanted to know, annoyed. La Inca pushing her back toward the house: Will you listen to this girl! Thinks herself a person when she’s not!

  Beli, clearly: one of those Oya-souls, always turning, allergic to tranquilidad. Almost any other Third World girl would have thanked Dios Santísimo for the blessed life she led: after all, she had a madre who didn’t beat her, who (out of guilt or inclination) spoiled her rotten, bought her flash clothes and paid her bakery wages, peanuts, I’ll admit, but that’s more than what ninety-nine percent of other kids in similar situations earned, which was nathan. Our girl had it made, and yet it did not feel so in her heart. For reasons she only dimly understood, by the time of our narrative, Beli could no longer abide working at the bakery or being the ‘daughter’ of one of the ‘most upstanding women in Baní’. She could not abide, period. Everything about her present life irked her; she wanted, with all her heart, something else. When this dissatisfaction entered her heart she could not recall, would later tell her daughter that it had been with her all her life, but who knows if this is true? What exactly it was she wanted was never clear either: her own incredible life, yes, a handsome, wealthy husband, yes, beautiful children, yes, a woman’s body, without question. If I had to put it to words I’d say what she wanted, more than anything, was what she’d always wanted throughout her Lost Childhood: to escape. From what was easy to enumerate: the bakery, her school, dull-ass Baní, sharing a bed with her madre, the inability to buy the dresses she wanted, having to wait until fifteen to straighten her hair, the impossible expectations of La Inca, the fact that her long-gone parents had died when she was one, the whispers that Trujillo had done it, those first years of her life when she’d been an orphan, the horrible scars from that time, her own despised black skin. But where she wanted to escape to she could not tell you. I guess it w
ouldn’t have mattered if she’d been a princess in a high castle or if her dead parents’ former estate, the glorious Casa Hatüey, had been miraculously restored from Trujillo’s Omega Effect. She would have wanted out.

  Every morning the same routine: Hypatia Belicia Cabral, ven acá!

  You ven acá, Beli muttered under her breath. You.

  Beli had the inchoate longings of nearly every adolescent escapist, of an entire generation, but I ask you: So fucking what? No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated. This was a country, a society, that had been designed to be virtually escape-proof. Alcatraz of the Antilles. There weren’t any Houdini holes in that Platano Curtain. Options as rare as Tainos and for irascible dark-skinned flacas of modest means they were rarer still. (If you want to cast her restlessness in a broader light: she was suffering the same suffocation that was asphyxiating a whole generation of young Dominicans. Twenty-odd years of the Trujillato had guaranteed that. Hers was the generation that would launch the Revolution’ but which for the moment was turning blue for want of air. The generation reaching consciousness in a society that lacked any. The generation that despite the consensus that declared change impossible hankered for change all the same. At the end of her life, when she was being eaten alive by cancer, Beli would talk about how trapped they all felt. It was like being at the bottom fan ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.)

  But what could she do? Beli was a girl, for fuck’s sake; she had no power or beauty (yet) or talent or family that could help her transcend, only La Inca, and La Inca wasn’t about to help our girl escape anything. On the contrary, mon frère, La Inca, with her stiff skirts and imperious airs, had as her central goal the planting of Belicia in the provincial soil of Baní and in the inescapable fact of her Family’s Glorious Golden Past. The family Beli had never known, whom she had lost early. (Remember, your father was a doctor, a doctor, and your mother was a nurse, a nurse.) La Inca expected Beli to be the last best hope of her decimated family, expected her to play the key role in a historical rescue mission, but what did she know about her family except the stories she was told ad nauseam? And, ultimately, what did she care? She wasn’t a maldita ciguapa, with her feet pointing backward in the past. Her feet pointed forward, she reminded La Inca over and over. Pointed to the future.

  Your father was a doctor, La Inca repeated, unperturbed. Your mother was a nurse. They owned the biggest house in La Vega.

  Beli did not listen, but at night, when the alizé winds blew in, our girl would groan in her sleep.

  LA CHICA DE MI ESCUELA

  When Beli was thirteen, La Inca landed her a scholarship at El Redentor, one of the best schools in Baní. On paper it was a pretty solid move. Orphan or not, Beli was the Third and Final Daughter of one of the Cibao’s finest families, and a proper education was not only her due, it was her birthright. La Inca also hoped to take some of the heat off Beli’s restlessness. A new school with the best people in the valley, she thought, what couldn’t this cure? But despite the girl’s admirable lineage, Beli herself had not grown up in her parents’ upper-class milieu. Had had no kind of breeding until La Inca — her father’s favorite cousin — had finally managed to track her down (rescue her, really) and brought her out of the Darkness of those days and into the light of Baní. In these last seven years, meticulous punctilious La Inca had undone a lot of the damage that life in Outer Azua had inflicted, but the girl was still crazy rough around the edges. Had all the upper-class arrogance you could want, but she also had the mouth of a colmado superstar. Would chew anybody out for anything. (Her years in Outer Azua to blame.) Putting her darkskinned media-campesina ass in a tony school where the majority of the pupils were the whiteskinned children of the regime’s top ladronazos turned out to be a better idea in theory than in practice. Brilliant doctor father or not, Beli stood out in EI Redentor. Given the delicacy of the situation, another girl might have adjusted the polarity of her persona to better fit in, would have kept her head down and survived by ignoring the 10,001 barbs directed at her each day by students and staff alike. Not Beli. She never would admit it (even to herself), but she felt utterly exposed at EI Redentor, all those pale eyes gnawing at her duskiness like locusts — and she didn’t know how to handle such vulnerability. Did what had always saved her in the past. Was defensive and aggressive and mad over-reactive. You said something slightly off-color about her shoes and she brought up the fact that you had a slow eye and danced like a goat with a rock stuck in its ass. Ouch. You would just be playing and homegirl would be coming down on you off the top rope.

  Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone. (It wasn’t like In the Time of the Butterflies, where a kindly Mirabal Sister↓ steps up and befriends the poor scholarship student.

  ≡ The Mirabal Sisters were the Great Martyrs of that period. Patria Mercedes, Minerva Argentina, and Antonia Maria — three beautiful sisters from Salcedo who resisted Trujillo and were murdered for it. (One of the main reasons why the women from Salcedo have reputations for being so incredibly fierce, don’t take shit from nobody, not even a Trujillo.) Their murders and the subsequent public outcry are believed by many to have signaled the official beginning of the end of the Trujillato, the ‘tipping point,’ when folks finally decided enough was enough.

  No Miranda here: everybody shunned her.) Despite the outsized expectations Beli had had on her first days to be Number One in her class and to be crowned prom queen opposite handsome Jack Pujols, Beli quickly found herself exiled beyond the bonewalls of the macroverse itself flung there by the Ritual of Child. She wasn’t even lucky enough to be demoted into that lamentable subset — those mega-losers that even the losers pick on. She was beyond that, in Sycorax territory. Her fellow ultra-dalits included: the Boy in the Iron Lung whose servants would wheel him into the corner of the class every morning and who always seemed to be smiling, the idiot, and the Chinese girl whose father owned the largest pulperia in the country and was known, dubiously, as Trujillo’s Chino. In her two years at El Redentor, Wei never managed to learn more than a gloss of Spanish, yet despite this obvious impediment she reported dutifully to class every day. In the beginning the other students had scourged her with all the usual anti-Asian nonsense. They cracked on her hair (It’s so greasy!), on her eyes (Can you really see through those?), on chopsticks (I got some twigs for you!), on language (variations on ching chong-ese.) The boys especially loved to tug their faces back into bucked-tooth, chinky-eyed rictuses. Charming. Ha-ha. Jokes aplenty.

  But once the novelty wore off (she didn’t ever respond), the students exiled Wei to the Phantom Zone, and even the cries of China, China, China died down eventually.

  This was who Beli sat next to her first two years of high school. But even Wei had some choice words for Beli.

  You black, she said, fingering Beli’s thin forearm. Black-black.

  Beli tried her hardest but she couldn’t spin bomb-grade plutonium from the light-grade uranium of her days. During her Lost Years there had been no education of any kind, and that gap had taken a toll on her neural pathways, such that she could never fully concentrate on the material at hand. It was stubbornness and the expectations of La Inca that kept Belicia lashed to the mast, even though she was miserably alone and her grades were even worse than Wei’s. (You would think, La Inca complained, that you could score higher than a china.) The other students bent furiously over their exams while Beli stared at the hurricane whorl at the back of Jack Pools’ crew cut.

  Senorita Cabral, are you finished? No, maestra. And then a forced return to the problem sets, as though she were submerging herself in
water against her will.