2007 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

  But I don’t want to go! I protested. I want to stay here!

  But she wouldn’t listen. She held her hands in the air like there was nothing she could do. It’s what your mother wants and it’s what I want and it’s what’s right.

  But what about me!

  I’m sorry, hija.

  That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.

  I wasn’t mature. I quit the team. I stopped going to classes and speaking to all my girlfriends, even Rosio. I told Max that we were through and he looked at me like I’d just shot him between the eyes. He tried to stop me from walking away but I screamed at him, like my mother screams, and he dropped his hand like it was dead. I thought I was doing him a favor. Not wanting to hurt him any more than was necessary.

  I ended up being really stupid those last weeks. I guess I wanted to disappear more than anything and so I was trying to make it so. I fooled around with someone else, that’s how messed up I was. He was the father of one of my classmates. Always after me, even when his daughter was around, so I called him. One thing you can count on in Santo Domingo. Not the lights, not the law.

  Sex.

  That never goes away.

  I didn’t bother with the romance. I let him take me to a love motel on our first ‘date’. He was one of those vain politicos, a peledista, had his own big air-conditioned jípeta. When I pulled my pants down you never saw anybody so happy.

  Until I asked him for two thousand dollars. American, I emphasized. It’s like Abuela says: Every snake always thinks it’s biting into a rat until the day it bites into a mongoose.

  That was my big puta moment. I knew he had the money, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked, and it’s not like I was robbing from him. I think we did it like nine times in total, so in my opinion he got a lot more than he gave. Afterward I sat in the motel and drank rum while he snorted from these little bags of coke. He wasn’t much of a talker, which was good. He was always pretty ashamed of him self after we fucked and that made me feel great. Complained that this was the money for his daughter’s school. Blah blah blah. Steal it from the state, I told him with a smile. I kissed him when he dropped me off at the house only so that I could feel him shrink from me.

  I didn’t talk to La Inca much those last weeks but she never stopped talking to me. I want you to do well at school. I want you to visit me when you can. I want you to remember where you come from. She prepared everything for my departure. I was too angry to think about her, how sad she would be when I was gone. I was the last person to share her life since my mother. She started closing up the house like she was the one who was leaving.

  What? I said. You coming with me?

  No, hija. I’m going to my campo for a while.

  But you hate the campo!

  I have to go there, she explained wearily. If only for a little while. And then Oscar called, out of the blue. Trying to make up now that I was due back. So you’re coming home.

  Don’t count on it, I said.

  Don’t do anything precipitous.

  Don’t do anything precipitous. I laughed. Do you ever hear yourself, Oscar? He sighed. All the time. Every morning I would wake up and make sure the money was still under my bed. Two thousand dollars in those days could have taken you anywhere, and of course I was thinking Japan or Goa, which one of the girls at school had told me about. Another island but very beautiful, she assured us. Nothing like Santo Domingo.

  And then, finally, she came. She never did anything quiet, my mother. She pulled up in a big black town car, not a normal taxi, and all the kids in the barrio gathered around to see what the show was about. My mother pretending not to notice the crowd. The driver of course was trying to pick her up. She looked thin and worn out and I couldn’t believe the taxista.

  Leave her alone, I said. Don’t you have any shame?

  My mother shook her head sadly, looked at La Inca. You didn’t teach her anything. La Inca didn’t blink. I taught her as well as I could. And then the big moment, the one every daughter dreads.

  My mother looking me over. I’d never been in better shape, never felt more beautiful and desirable in my life, and what does the bitch say?

  Coño, pero tú sí eres fea.

  Those fourteen months — gone. Like they’d never happened.

  Now that I’m, a mother myself I realize that she could not have been any different. That’s who she was. Like they say: Plátano maduro no se vuelve verde. Even at the end she refused to show me anything close to love. She cried not for me or for herself but only for Oscar. Mi pobre, hijo, she sobbed. Mi pobre, hijo. You always think with your parents that at least at the very end something will change, something will get better. Not for us.

  I probably would have run. I would have waited until we got back to the States, waited like paja de arroz, burning slow, slow, until they dropped their guard and then one morning I would have disappeared. Like my father disappeared on my mother and was never seen again. Disappeared like everything disappears. Without a trace. I would have lived far away. I would have been happy, I’m sure of it, and I would never have had any children. I would let myself grow dark in the sun, no more hiding from it, let my hair indulge in all its kinks, and she would have passed me on the street and never recognized me. That was the dream I had. But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

  And that’s what I guess these stories are all about.

  Yes, no doubt about it: I would have run. La Inca or not, I would have run. But then Max died. I hadn’t seen him at all. Not since the day of our breakup.

  My poor Max, who loved me beyond words. Who said I’m so lucky every time we fucked. It was not like we were in the same circles or the same neighborhood. Sometimes when the peledista drove me to the moteles I could swear that I saw Max zipping through the horrendous traffic of the midday, a film reel under his arm (I tried to get him to buy a backpack but he said he liked it his way). My brave Max, who could slip between two bumpers the way a lie can slide between a person’s teeth.

  What happened was that one day he miscalculated — heart broken, I’m sure — and ended up being mashed between a bus bound for the Cibao and one bound for Baní. His skull shattering in a million little pieces, the film unspooling across the entire street.

  I only heard about it after they buried him. His sister called me.

  He loved you best of all, she sobbed. Best of all.

  The curse, some of you will say.

  Life, is what I say. Life.

  You never saw anybody go so quiet. I gave his mother the money I’d taken from the peledista. His little brother Maxim used it to buy a yola to Puerto Rico and last I heard he was doing good for himself there. He owned a little store and his mother no longer lives in Los Tres Brazos. My toto good for something after all.

  I will love you always, my abuela said at the airport. And then she turned away.

  It was only when I got on the plane that I started crying. I know this sounds ridiculous but I don’t think I really stopped until I met you. I know I didn’t stop atoning. The other passengers must have thought I was crazy. I kept expecting my mother to hit me, to call me an idiota, a bruta, a fea, a malcriada, to change seats, but she didn’t.

  She put her hand on mine and left it there. When the woman in front turned around and said: Tell that girl of yours to be quiet, she said, Tell that culo of yours to stop stinking.

  I felt sorriest for the viejo next to us. You could tell he’d been visiting his family. He had on a little fedora and his best pressed chacabana. It’s OK, muchacha, he said, patting my back. Santo Domingo will always be there. It was there in the beginning and it will be there at the end.

  For God’s sake, my mother muttered, and then closed her eyes and went to sleep.

  FIVE

  Poor Abelard 19
44-1946

  THE FAMOUS DOCTOR

  When the family talks about it at all — which is like never they always begin in the same place: with Abelard and the Bad Thing he said about Trujillo.↓

  ≡ There are other beginnings certainly, better ones, to be sure — if you ask me I would have started when the Spaniards ‘discovered’ the New World — or when the U.S. invaded Santo Domingo in 1916 — but if this was the opening that the de Leóns chose for themselves, then who am I to question their historiography?

  Abelard Luis Cabral was Oscar and Lola’s grandfather, a surgeon who had studied in Mexico City in the Lazaro Cardenas years and in the mid-1940’s, before any of us were even born, a man of considerable standing in La Vega. Un hombre muy serio, muy educado y muy bien plantado.

  (You can already see where this is headed.) In those long-ago days — before delincuencia and bank failures, before Diaspora — the Cabrals were numbered among the High of the Land. They were not as filthy-rich or as historically significant as the Ral Cabrals of Santiago, but they weren’t too shabby a cadet branch, either. In La Vega, where the family had lived since 1791, they were practically royalty, as much a landmark as La Casa Amarilla and the Rio Camu; neighbors spoke of the fourteen-room house that Abelard’s father had built, Casa Hatüey↓, a rambling oft-expanded villa eclectic whose original stone core had been transformed into Abelard’s study, a house bounded by groves of almonds and dwarf-mangos; there was also the modern Art Deco apartment in Santiago, where Abelard often spent his weekends attending the family businesses; the freshly refurbished stables that could have comfortably billeted a dozen horses; the horses themselves: six Berbers with skin like vellum; and of course the five full-time servants (of the rayano variety).

  ≡ Hatüey, in case you’ve forgotten, was the Taino Ho Chi Minh. When the Spaniards were committing First Genocide in the Dominican Republic, Hatüey left the Island and canoed to Cuba, looking for reinforcements, his voyage a precursor to the trip Maximo Gomez would take almost three hundred years later. Casa Hatüey was named Hatüey because in Times Past it supposedly had been owned by a descendant of the priest who tried to baptize Harney right before the Spaniards burned him at the stake. (What Hatüey said on that pyre is a legend in itself: Are there white people in Heaven? Then I’d rather go to Hell.) History, however, has not been kind to Harney. Unless something changes ASAP he will go out like his camarada Crazy Horse. Coffled to a beer, in a country not his own.

  While the rest of the country in that period subsisted on rocks and scraps of yuca and were host to endless coils of intestinal worms, the Cabrals dined on pastas and sweet Italian sausages, scraped Jalisco silver on flatware from Beleek. A surgeon’s income was a fine thing but Abelard’s portfolio (if such things existed in those days) was the real source of the family wealth: from his hateful, cantankerous father (now dead) Abelard had inherited a pair of prosperous supermercados in Santiago, a cement factory, and titles to a string of fincas in the Septrionales.

  The Cabrals were, as you might have guessed, members of the Fortunate People. Summers they ‘borrowed’ a cousin’s cabana in Puerto Plata and decamped there for a period of no less than three weeks. Abelard’s two daughters, Jacquelyn and Astrid, swam and played in the surf (often suffering Mulatto Pigment Degradation Disorder, a.k.a. tans) under the watchful gaze of their mother, who, unable to risk no extra darkness, remained chained to her umbrella’s shadow — while their father, when not listening to the news from the War, roamed the shoreline, his face set in tense concentration. He walked barefoot, stripped down to his white shirt and his vest, his pant legs rolled, his demi-afro an avuncular torch, plump with middle age. Sometimes a fragment of a shell or a dying horseshoe crab would catch Abelard’s attention and he’d get down on all fours and examine it with a gem-cutter’s glass so that to both his delighted daughters, as well as to his appalled wife, he resembled a dog sniffing a turd.

  There are still those in the Cibao who remember Abelard, and all will tell you that besides being a brilliant doctor he possessed one of the most remarkable minds in the country: indefatigably curious, alarmingly prodigious, and especially suited for linguistic and computational complexity. The viejo was widely read in Spanish, English, French, Latin, and Greek; a collector of rare books, an advocate of outlandish abstractions, a contributor to the Journal of Tropical Medicine, and an amateur ethnographer in the Fernando Ortiz mode. Abelard was, in short, a Brain — not entirely uncommon in the Mexico where he had studied but an exceedingly rare species on the Island of Supreme General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. He encouraged his daughters to read and prepared them to follow him into the Profession (they could speak French and read Latin before they were nine), and so keen was he about learning that any new piece of knowledge, no matter how arcane or trivial, could send his ass over the Van Allen belt. His parlor, so tastefully wallpapered by his father’s second wife, was hangout number one for the local todologos. Discussions would rage for entire evenings, and while Abelard was often frustrated by the poor quality — nothing like at the UNAM — he would not have abandoned these evenings for anything. Often his daughters would bid their father good night only to find him the next morning still engaged in some utterly obscure debate with his friends, eyes red, hair akimbo, woozy but game. They would go to him and he would kiss each in turn, calling them his Brillantes. These youthful intelligences, he often boasted to his friends, will best us all.

  The Reign of Trujillo was not the best time to be a lover of Ideas, not the best time to be engaging in parlor debate, to be hosting tertulias, to be doing anything out of the ordinary, but Abelard was nothing if not meticulous. Never allowed contemporary politics (i.e., Trujillo) to be bandied about, kept shit on the abstract plane, allowed anybody who wanted (including members of the Secret Police) to attend his gatherings. Given that you could get lit up for even mispronouncing the Failed Cattle Thief’s name, it was a no-brainer, really. As a general practice Abelard tried his best not to think about EI Jefe at all, followed sort of the Tao of Dictator Avoidance, which was ironic considering that Abelard was unmatched in maintaining the outward appearance of the enthusiastic Trujillista.↓

  ≡ But what was even more ironic was that Abelard had a reputation for being able to keep his head down during the worst of the regime’s madness — for unseeing, as it were. In 1937, for example, while the Friends of the Dominican Republic were perejiling Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans and Haitian-looking Dominicans to death, while genocide was, in fact, in the making, Abelard kept his head, eyes, and nose safely tucked into his books (let his wife take care of hiding his servants, didn’t ask her nothing about it) and when survivors staggered into his surgery with unspeakable machete wounds, he fixed them up as best as he could without making any comments as to the ghastliness of their wounds. Acted like it was any other day.

  Both as an individual and as the executive officer of his medical association he gave unstintingly to the Partido Dominicano; he and his wife, who was his number-one nurse and his best assistant, joined every medical mission that Trujillo organized, no matter how remote the campo; and no one could suppress a guffaw better than Abelard when El Jefe won an election by 103 percent! What enthusiasm from the pueblo! When banquets were held in Trujillo’s honor Abelard always drove to Santiago to attend. He arrived early, left late, smiled endlessly, and didn’t say nothing. Disconnected his intellectual warp engine and operated strictly on impulse power. When the time came, Abelard would shake El Jefe’s hand, cover him in the warm effusion of his adoration (if you think the Trujillato was not homoerotic, then, to quote the Priest, you got another thing coming), and without further ado fade back into the shadows (a la Oscar’s favorite movie, Point Blank). Kept as far away from El Jefe as possible — he wasn’t under any delusion that he was Trujillo’s equal or his buddy or some kind of necessary individual — after all, niggers who messed with Him had a habit of ending up with a bad case of the deads. It didn’t hurt that Abelard’s family was not totally in
the Jefe’s pocket, that his father had cultivated no lands or negocios in geographic or competitive proximity to the Jefe’s own holding. His Fuckface contact was blessedly limited.↓

  ≡ He wished that could also have been the case with his Balaguer contact. In those days the Demon Balaguer had not yet become the Election Thief; was only Trujillo’s Minister of Education — you can see how successful he was at that job — and any chance he got to corner Abelard, he did. He wanted to talk to Abelard about his theories — which were four parts Gobineau, four parts Goddard, and two parts German racial eugenics. The German theories, he assured Abelard, were all the rage on the Continent. Abelard nods. I see. (But, you ask, who was the smarter? No comparison. In a Tables and Ladders match, Abelard, the Cerebro del Cibao, would have 3D’d the ‘Genio de Genocidio’ in about two seconds flat.)

  Abelard and the Failed Cattle Thief might have glided past each other in the Halls of History if not for the fact that starting in 1944, Abelard, instead of bringing his wife and daughter to Jefe events, as custom dictated, began to make a point of leaving them at home. He explained to his friends that his wife had become ‘nervous’ and that Jacquelyn took care of her but the real reason for the absences was Trujillo’s notorious rapacity and his daughter Jacquelyn’s off-the-hook looks. Abelard’s serious, intellectual oldest daughter was no longer her tall awkward flaquita self; adolescence had struck with a fury, transforming her into a young lady of great beauty. She had caught a serious case of the hips-ass-chest, a condition which during the mid-forties spelled trouble with a capital T to the R to the U to the J to the illo.