2007 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

  It was — dare we say it? — a good life.

  Except it wasn’t.

  In February there was another Presidential Event (for Independence Day!) and this time the invitation was explicit. For Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral and wife and daughter Jacquelyn. The daughter Jacquelyn part had been underlined by the party’s host. Not once, not twice, but three times. Abelard nearly fainted when he saw the damn thing. Slumped back at his desk, his heart pushing up against his esophagus. Stared at the vellum square for almost a whole hour before folding it and placing it inside his shirt pocket. The next morning he visited the host, one of his neighbors. The man was out in his corral, staring balefully as some of his servants were trying to get one of his stallions to stud. When he saw Abelard his face darkened. What the hell do you want from me? The order came straight from the Palacio. When Abelard walked back to his car he tried not to show that he was shaking.

  Once again he consulted with Marcus and Lydia. (He said nothing of the invitation to his wife, not wanting to panic her, and by extension his daughter. Not wanting even to say the words in his own house.)

  Where the last time he’d been somewhat rational, this go-around he was fuera de serie, raved like a madman. Waxed indignant to Marcus for nearly an hour about the injustice, about the hopelessness of it all (an amazing amount of circumlocution because he never once directly named who it was he was complaining about). Alternated between impotent rage and pathetic self-pity. In the end his friend had to cover the good doctor’s mouth to get a word in edgewise, but Abelard kept talking. It’s madness! Sheer madness! I’m the father of my household! I’m the one who says what goes!

  What can you do? Marcus said with no little fatalism. Trujillo’s the president and you’re just a doctor. If he wants your daughter at the party you can do nothing but obey.

  But this isn’t human! When has this country ever been human, Abelard? You’re the historian. You of all people should know that.

  Lydia was even less compassionate. She read the invite and swore a coño under her breath and then she turned on him. I warned you, Abelard. Didn’t I tell you to send your daughter abroad while you had the chance? She could have been with my family in Cuba, safe and sound, but now you’re jodido. Now He has his Eye on you.

  I know, I know, Lydia, but what should I do? Jesú Cristo, Abelard, she said tremulously. What options are there. This is Trujillo you’re talking about.

  Back home the portrait of Trujillo, which every good citizen had hanging in his house, beamed down on him with insipid, viperous benevolence.

  Maybe if the doctor had immediately grabbed his daughters and his wife and smuggled them all aboard a boat in Puerto Plata, or if he’d stolen with them across the border into Haiti, they might have had a chance. The Plátano Curtain was strong but it wasn’t that strong. But alas, instead of making his move Abelard fretted and temporized and despaired. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, paced the halls of their house all night long and all the weight he regained these last months he immediately lost. (If you think about it, maybe he should have heeded his daughter’s philosophy: Tarde venientibus ossa.) Every chance he got he spent with his daughters. Jackie, who was her parents’ Golden Child, who already had memorized all the streets in the French Quarter and who that year alone had been the object of not four, not five, but twelve marriage proposals. All communicated to Abelard and his wife, of course. Jackie knowing nothing about it. But still. And Astrid, ten years old, who took more after their father in looks and nature; plainer, the jokester, the believer, who played the meanest piano in all of the Cibao and who was her big sister’s ally in all things. The sisters wondered about their father’s sudden attentiveness: Are you on vacation, Papi? He shook his head sadly. No, I just like spending time with you is all.

  What’s the matter with you? his wife demanded, but he refused to speak to her. Let me be, mujer. Things got so bad with him that he even went to church, a first for Abelard (which might have been a really bad idea since everybody knew the Church at that time was in Trujillo’s pocket). He attended confession almost every day and talked to the priest but he got nothing out of it except to pray and to hope and to light some fucking stupid candles. He was going through three bottles of whiskey a day.

  His friends in Mexico would have grabbed their rifles and taken to the interior (at least that’s what he thought they would have done) but he was his father’s son in more ways than he cared to admit. His father, an educated man who had resisted sending his son to Mexico but who had always played ball with Trujillo. When in 1937 the army had started murdering all the Haitians, his father had allowed them to use his horses, and when he didn’t get any of them back he didn’t say nothing to Trujillo. Just chalked it up as the cost of doing business. Abelard kept drinking and kept fretting, stopped seeing Lydia, isolated himself in his study, and eventually convinced himself that nothing would happen. It was only a test. Told his wife and daughter to prepare for the party. Didn’t mention it was a Trujillo party. Made it seem like nothing was amiss. Hated himself to his core for his mendacity, but what else could he have done?

  Tarde venientibus ossa.

  It probably would have gone off without a hitch too, but Jackie was so excited. Since it was her first big party, who’s surprised that it became something of an event for her? She went shopping for a dress with her mother, got her hair done at the salon, bought new shoes, and was even given a pair of pearl earrings by another of her female relatives. Socorro helped her daughter with every aspect of the preparation, no suspicions, but about a week before the party she started having these terrible dreams. She was in her old town, where she’d grown up before her aunt adopted her and put her in nursing school, before she discovered she had the gift of Healing. Staring down that dusty frangipani-lined road that everybody said led to the capital, and in the heat-rippled distance she could see a man approaching, a distant figure who struck in her such dread that she woke up screaming. Abelard leaping out of bed in panic, the girls crying out in their rooms. Had that dream almost every damn night that final week, a countdown clock.

  On T-minus-two Lydia urged Abelard to leave with her on a steamer bound for Cuba. She knew the captain, he would hide them, swore it could be done. We’ll get your daughters afterward, I promise you.

  I can’t do that, he said miserably. I can’t leave my family. She returned to combing her hair. They said not another word.

  On the afternoon of the party, as Abelard was dolefully tending to the car, he caught sight of his daughter, in her dress, standing in the sala, hunched over another one of her French books, looking absolutely divine, absolutely young, and right then he had one of those epiphanies us lit majors are always forced to talk about. It didn’t come in a burst of light or a new color or a sensation in his heart. He just knew. Knew he just couldn’t do it. Told his wife to forget about it. Said same to daughter. Ignored their horrified protestations. Jumped in the car, picked up Marcus, and headed to the party.

  What about Jacquelyn? Marcus asked.

  She’s not coming.

  Marcus shook his head. Said nothing else.

  At the reception line Trujillo again paused before Abelard. Sniffed the air like a cat. And your wife and daughter?

  Abelard trembling but holding it together somehow. Already sensing how everything was going to change. My apologies, Your Excellency. They could not attend.

  His porcine eyes narrowed. So I see, he said coldly, and then dismissed Abelard with a flick of his wrist. Not even Marcus would look at him.

  CHISTE APOCALYPTUS

  Not four weeks after the party, Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral was arrested by the Secret Police. The charge? ‘Slander and gross calumny against the Person of the President’.

  If the stories are to be believed, it all had to do with a joke.

  One afternoon, so the story goes, shortly after the fateful party, Abelard, who we had better reveal was a short, bearded, heavyset man with surprising physical strength and curious, closeset eyes,
drove into Santiago in his old Packard to buy a bureau for his wife (and of course to see his mistress). He was still a mess, and those who saw him that day recall his disheveled appearance. His distraction. The bureau was successfully acquired and lashed haphazardly to the roof of the automobile, but before he could shoot over to Lydia’s crib Abelard was buttonholed by some ‘buddies’ on the street and invited for a few drinks at Club Santiago. Who knows why he went? Maybe to try to keep up appearances, or because every invitation felt like a life-or-death affair. That night at Club Santiago he tried to shake off his sense of imminent doom by talking vigorously about history, medicine, Aristophanes, by getting very very drunk, and when the night wound down he asked the ‘boys’ for assistance in relocating the bureau to the trunk of his Packard. He did not trust the valets, he explained, for they had stupid hands. The muchachos good-naturedly agreed. But while Abelard was fumbling with the keys to open the trunk he stated loudly, I hope there aren’t any bodies in here. That he made the foregoing remark is not debated. Abelard conceded as much in his ‘confession’. This trunk-joke in itself caused discomfort among the ‘boys,’ who were all too aware of the shadow that the Packard automobile casts on Dominican history: It was the car in which Trujillo had, in his early years, terrorized his first two elections away from the pueblo. During the Hurricane of 1931 the Jefe’s henchmen often drove their Packards to the bonfires where the volunteers were burning the dead, and out of their trunks they would pull out ‘victims of the hurricane’. All of whom looked strangely dry and were often clutching opposition party materials. The wind, the henchmen would joke, drove a bullet straight through the head of this one. Har-har!

  What followed is still, to this day, hotly disputed. There are those who swear on their mothers that when Abelard finally opened the trunk he poked his head inside and said, Nope, no bodies here. This is what Abelard himself claimed to have said. A poor joke, certainly, but not ‘slander’ or ‘gross calumny’. In Abelard’s version of the events, his friends laughed, the bureau was secured, and off he drove to his Santiago apartment, where Lydia was waiting for him (forty-two and still lovely and still worried shitless about his daughter). The court officers and their hidden ‘witnesses,’ however, argued that something quite different happened, that when Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral opened the trunk of the Packard, he said, Nope, no bodies here, Trujillo must have cleaned them out for me.

  End quote.

  IN MY HUMBLE OPINION

  I t sounds like the most unlikely load of jiringonza on this side of the Sierra Madre. But one man’s jiringonza is another man’s life.

  THE FALL

  He spent that night with Lydia. It had been a weird time for them. Not ten days earlier Lydia had announced that she was pregnant — I’m going to have your son, she crowed happily. But two days later the son proved to be a false alarm, probably just some indigestion. There was relief — like he needed anything else on his plate, and what if it had been another daughter? — but also disappointment, for Abelard wouldn’t have minded a little son, even if the carajito would have been the child of a mistress and born in his darkest hour. He knew that Lydia had been wanting something for some time now, something real that she could claim was theirs and theirs alone. She was forever telling him to leave his wife and move in with her, and while that might have been attractive indeed while they were together in Santiago, the possibility vanished as soon as he set foot back in his house and his two beautiful daughters rushed him. He was a predictable man and liked his predictable comforts, but Lydia never stopped trying to convince him, in a low-intensity way, that love was love and for that reason it should be obeyed. She pretended to be sanguine over the non-appearance of their son. Why would I want to ruin these breasts, she joked — but he could tell she was disheartened. He was too. For these last few days Abelard had been having vague, troubled dreams full of children crying at night, and his father’s first house. Left a disquieting stain on his waking hours. Without really thinking about it, he’d not seen Lydia since that night the news turned bad, had gone out drinking in part, I believe, because he feared that the boy’s non-birth might have broken them, but instead he felt for her the old desire, the one that nearly knocked him over the first time they’d met at his cousin Amilcar’s birthday, when they’d both been so slender and young and so jam-packed with possibilities.

  For once they did not talk about Trujillo. Can you believe how long it’s been? he asked her in amazement during their last Saturday-night tryst. I can believe it, she said sadly, pulling at the flesh of her stomach. We’re clocks, Abelard. Nothing more. Abelard shook his head. We’re more than that. We’re marvels, mi amor.

  I wish I could stay in this moment, wish I could extend Abelard’s happy days, but it’s impossible. The next week two atomic eyes opened over civilian centers in Japan and, even though no one knew it yet, the world was then remade. Not two days after the atomic bombs scarred Japan forever, Socorro dreamed that the faceless man was standing over her husband’s bed, and she could not scream, could not say anything, and then the next night she dreamed that he was standing over her children too. I’ve been dreaming, she told her husband, but he waved his hands, dismissing. She began to watch the road in front of their home and burn candles in her room. In Santiago, Abelard is kissing Lydia’s hands and she is sighing with pleasure and already we’re heading for Victory in the Pacific and for three Secret Police officers in their shiny Chevrolet winding up the road to Abelard’s house. Already it’s the Fall.

  ABELARD IN CHAINS

  To say it was the greatest shock in Abelard’s life when officers from the Secret Police (it’s too early for the SIM but we’ll call them SIM anyway) placed him in cuffs and led him to their car would not be an overstatement, if it wasn’t for the fact that Abelard was going to spend the next nine years receiving one greatest shock of his life after another. Please, Abelard begged, when he regained his tongue, I must leave my wife a note. Manuel will attend to it, SIMian Numero Uno explained, motioning to the largest of the SIMians, who was already glancing about the house. Abelard’s last glimpse of his home was of Manuel rifling through his desk with a practiced carelessness.

  Abelard had always imagined the SIM to be filled with lowlifes and no-reading reprobates but the two officers who locked him in their car were in fact polite, less like sadistic torturers than vacuum-cleaner salesmen. SIMian Numero Uno assured him en route that his ‘difficulties’ were certain to be cleared up. We’ve seen these cases before, Numero Uno explained. Someone has spoken badly of you but they will quickly be revealed for the liars they are. I should hope so, Abelard said, half indignant, half in terror. No te preocupes, said SIMian Numero Uno. The Jefe is not in the business of imprisoning the innocent. Numero Dos remained silent. His suit was very shabby, and both men, Abelard noticed, reeked of whiskey. He tried to remain calm — fear, as Dune teaches us, is the mind killer — but he could not help himself. He saw his daughters and his wife raped over and over again. He saw his house on fire. If he hadn’t emptied his bladder right before the pigs showed up, he would have peed himself right there.

  Abelard was driven very quickly to Santiago (everyone he passed on the road made sure to look away at the sight of the VW bug) and taken to the Fortaleza San Luis. The sharp edge of his fear turned knife once they pulled inside that notorious place. Are you sure this is correct? Abelard was so frightened his voice quaked. Don’t worry, Doctor, Numero Dos said, you are where you belong. He’d been silent so long Abelard had almost forgotten that he could speak. Now it was Numero Dos who was smiling and Numero Uno who focused his attention out the window.

  Once inside those stone walls the polite SIM officers handed him over to a pair of not-so-polite guards who stripped him of his shoes, his wallet, his belt, his wedding band, and then sat him down in a cramped, hot office to fill out some forms. There was a pervasive smell of ripe ass in the air. No officer appeared to explain his case, no one listened to his requests, and when he began to raise his voice abou
t his treatment the guard typing the forms leaned forward and punched him in the face. As easily as you might reach over for a cigarette. The man was wearing a ring and it tore open Abelard’s lip something awful. The pain was so sudden, his disbelief so enormous, that Abelard actually asked, through clutched fingers, Why? The guard rocked him again hard, carved a furrow in his forehead. This is how we answer questions around here, the guard said matter-of-factly, bending down to be sure his form was properly aligned in the typewriter. Abelard began to sob, the blood spilling out between his fingers. Which the typing guard just loved; he called in his friends from the other offices. Look at this one! Look at how much he likes to cry!

  Before Abelard knew what was happening he was being shoved into a general holding cell that stank of malaria sweat and diarrhea and was crammed with unseemly representatives of what Broca might have called the ‘criminal class’. The guards then proceeded to inform the other prisoners that Abelard was a homosexual and a Communist — That is untrue! Abelard protested — but who is going to listen to a gay comunista? Over the next couple of hours Abelard was harassed lovely and most of his clothes were stripped from him. One heavyset cibaeño even demanded his underwear, and when Abelard coughed them up the man pulled them on over his pants. Son muy cómodos, he announced to his friends. Abelard was forced to hunker naked near the shit pots; if he tried to crawl near the dry areas the other prisoners would scream at him — Quédate ahí con la mierda, maricón — and this was how he had to sleep, amidst urine, feces, and flies, and more than once he was awakened by someone tickling his lips with a dried turd. Pre-occupation with sanitation was not high among the Fortalezanos. The deviants didn’t allow him to eat, either, stealing his meager allotted portions three days straight. On the fourth day a one-armed pickpocket took pity on him and he was able to eat an entire banana without interruption, even tried to chew up the fibrous peel, he was so famished.