The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

THE GOLDEN AGE

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock. And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).

He was seven then.

In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a Casanova. One of those pre-school loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it any chance he got. Because in those days he was (still) a ‘normal’ Dominican boy raised in a ‘typical’ Dominican family, his nascent pimpliness was encouraged by blood and friends alike. During parties, and there were many many parties in those long-ago seventies days, before Washington Heights was Washington Heights, before the Bergenline became a straight shot of Spanish for almost a hundred blocks—some drunk relative inevitably pushed Oscar onto some little girl and then everyone would howl as boy and girl approximated the hip-motism of the adults.

You should have seen him, his mother sighed in her Last Days. He was our little Porfirio Rubirosa.↓

^{≡ In the forties and fifties, Porfirio Rubirosa—or Rubi, as he was known in the papers—was the third-most-famous Dominican in the world (first came the Failed Cattle Thief, and then the Cobra Woman herself, María Montez). A tall, debonair pretty boy whose ‘enormous phallus created havoc in Europe and North America,’ Rubirosa was the quintessential jet-setting car-racing polo-obsessed playboy, the Trujillato’s ‘happy side’ (for he was indeed one of Trujillo’s best-known minions). A part-time former model and dashing man-about-town, Rubirosa famously married Trujillo’s daughter Flor de Oro in 1932, and even though they were divorced five years later, in the Year of the Haitian Genocide, homeboy managed to remain in El Jefe’s good graces throughout the regime’s long run. Unlike his ex-brother-in-law Ramfis (to whom he was frequently connected), Rubirosa seemed incapable of carrying out many murders; in 1935 he traveled to New York to deliver El Jefe’s death sentence against the exile leader Angel Morales but fled before the botched assassination could take place. Rubi was the original Dominican Player, fucked all sorts of women—Barbara Hutton, Doris Duke (who happened to be the richest woman in the world), the French actress Danielle Darrieux, and Zsa Zsa Gabor—to name but a few. Like his pal Ramfis, Porfirio died in a car crash, in 1965, his twelve-cylinder Ferrari skidding off a road in the Bois de Boulogne. (Hard to overstate the role cars play in our narrative.)}

All the other boys his age avoided the girls like they were a bad case of Captain Trips. Not Oscar. The little guy loved himself the females, had ‘girlfriends’ galore. (He was a stout kid, heading straight to fat, but his mother kept him nice in haircuts and clothes, and before the proportions of his head changed he’d had these lovely flashing eyes and these cute-ass cheeks, visible in all his pictures.) The girls—his sister Lola’s friends, his mother’s friends, even their neighbor, Mari Colon, a thirty-something postal employee who wore red on her lips and walked like she had a bell for an ass—all purportedly fell for him. Ese muchacho está bueno! (Did it hurt that he was earnest and clearly attention-deprived? Not at all!) In the DR during summer visits to his family digs in Baní he was the worst, would stand in front of Nena Inca’s house and call out to passing women—Tú eres guapa! Tú eres guapa!—until a Seventh-day Adventist complained to his grandmother and she shut down the hit parade lickety-split. Muchacho del diablo! This is not a cabaret!

It truly was a Golden Age for Oscar, one that reached its apotheosis in the fall of his seventh year, when he had two little girlfriends at the same time, his first and only ménage a trios. With Maritza Chacon and Olga Polanco.

Maritza was Lola’s friend. Long-haired and prissy and so pretty she could have played young Dejah Thoris. Olga, on the other hand, was no friend of the family. She lived in the house at the end of the block that his mother complained about because it was filled with puertoricans who were always hanging out on their porch drinking beer. (What, they couldn’t have done that in Cuamo? Oscar’s mom asked crossly.) Olga had like ninety cousins, all who seemed to be named Hector or Luis or Wanda. And since her mother was una maldita borracha (to quote Oscar’s mom), Olga smelled on some days of ass, which is why the kids took to calling her Mrs. Peabody.

Mrs. Peabody or not, Oscar liked how quiet she was, how she let him throw her to the ground and wrestle with her, the interest she showed in his Star Trek dolls. Maritza was just plain beautiful, no need for motivation there, always around too, and it was just a stroke of pure genius that convinced him to kick it to them both at once. At first he pretended that it was his number one hero, Shazam, who wanted to date them. But after they agreed he dropped all pretense. It wasn’t Shazam—it was Oscar.

Those were more innocent days, so their relationship amounted to standing close to each other at the bus stop, some undercover hand-holding, and twice kissing on the cheeks very seriously, first Maritza, then Olga, while they were hidden from the street by some bushes. (Look at that little macho, his mother’s friends said. Que hombre.)

The threesome only lasted a single beautiful week. One day after school Maritza cornered Oscar behind the swing set and laid down the law, It’s either her or me! Oscar held Maritza’s hand and talked seriously and at great length about his love for her and reminded her that they had agreed to share, but Maritza wasn’t having any of it. She had three older sisters, knew everything she needed to know about the possibilities of sharing. Don’t talk to me no more unless you get rid of her! Maritza, with her chocolate skin and narrow eyes, already expressing the Ogún energy that she would chop at everybody with for the rest of her life. Oscar went home morose to his pre-Korean-sweatshop-era cartoons—to the Herculoids and Space Ghost. What’s wrong with you? his mother asked. She was getting ready to go to her second job, the eczema on her hands looking like a messy meal that had set. When Oscar whimpered, Girls, Moms de León nearly exploded. Tú ta llorando por una muchacha? She hauled Oscar to his feet by his ear.

Mami, stop it, his sister cried, stop it! She threw him to the floor. Dale un galletazo, she panted, then see if the little puta respects you.

If he’d been a different nigger he might have considered the galletazo. It wasn’t just that he didn’t have no kind of father to show him the masculine ropes, he simply lacked all aggressive and martial tendencies. (Unlike his sister, who fought boys and packs of morena girls who hated her thin nose and straightish hair.) Oscar had like a zero combat rating; even Olga and her toothpick arms could have stomped him silly. Aggression and intimidation out of the question. So he thought it over. Didn’t take him long to decide. After all, Maritza was beautiful and Olga was not; Olga sometimes smelled like pee and Maritza did not. Maritza was allowed over their house and Olga was not. (A puertorican over here? his mother scoffed. Jamas!) His logic as close to the yes⁄no math of insects as a nigger could get. He broke up with Olga the following day on the playground, Maritza at his side, and how Olga had cried! Shaking like a rag in her hand-me-downs and in the shoes that were four sizes too big! Snots pouring out her nose and everything!

In later years, after he and Olga had both turned into overweight freaks, Oscar could not resist feeling the occasional flash of guilt when he saw Olga loping across a street or staring blankly out near the New York bus stop, couldn’t stop himself from wondering how much his cold-as-balls breakup had contributed to her present fucked-upness. (Breaking up with her, he would remember, hadn’t felt like anything; even when she started crying, he hadn’t been moved. He’d said, No be a baby.)

What had hurt, however, was when Maritza dumped him. Monday after he’d fed Olga to the dogs he arrived at the bus stop with his beloved Planet of the Apes lunch box only to discover beautiful Maritza holding hands with butt-ugly Nelson Pardo. Nelson Pardo who looked like Chaka from Land of the Lost! Nelson Pardo who was so stupid he thought the moon was a stain that God had forgotten to clean. (He’ll get to it soon, he assured his whole class.) Nelson Pardo who would become the neighborhood B&E expert before joining the Marines and losing eight toes in the First Gulf War. At first Oscar thought it a mistake; the sun was in his eyes, he’d not slept enough the night before. He stood next to them and admired his lunch box, how realistic and diabolical Dr. Zaius looked. But Maritza wouldn’t even smile at him! Pretended he wasn’t there. We should get married, she said to Nelson, and Nelson grinned moronically, turning up the street to look for the bus. Oscar had been too hurt to speak; he sat down on the curb and felt something overwhelming surge up from his chest, scared the shit out of him, and before he knew it he was crying; when his sister, Lola, walked over and asked him what was the matter he’d shaken his head. Look at the mariconcito, somebody snickered. Somebody else kicked his beloved lunch box and scratched it right across General Urko’s face. When he got on the bus, still crying, the driver, a famously reformed PCP addict, had said, Christ, don’t be a fucking baby.

How had the breakup affected Olga? What he really was asking was: How had the breakup affected Oscar?

It seemed to Oscar that from the moment Maritza dumped him—Shazam!—his life started going down the tubes. Over the next couple of years he grew fatter and fatter. Early adolescence hit him especially hard, scrambling his face into nothing you could call cute, splotching his skin with zits, making him self-conscious; and his interest—in Genres!—which nobody had said boo about before, suddenly became synonymous with being a loser with a capital L. Couldn’t make friends for the life of him, too dorky, too shy, and (if the kids from his neighborhood are to be believed) too weird (had a habit of using big words he had memorized only the day before). He no longer went anywhere near the girls because at best they ignored him, at worst they shrieked and called him gordo asqueroso! He forgot the perrito, forgot the pride he felt when the women in the family had called him hombre. Did not kiss another girl for a long long time. As though almost everything he had in the girl department had burned up that one fucking week.

Not that his ‘girlfriends’ fared much better. It seemed that whatever bad no-love karma hit Oscar hit them too. By seventh grade Olga had grown huge and scary, a troll gene in her somewhere, started drinking 151 straight out the bottle and was finally taken out of school because she had a habit of screaming NATAS! in the middle of homeroom. Even her breasts, when they finally emerged, were floppy and terrifying. Once on the bus Olga had called Oscar a cake eater, and he’d almost said, Look who’s talking, puerca, but he was afraid that she would rear back and trample him; his cool-index, already low, couldn’t have survived that kind of a paliza, would have put him on par with the handicapped kids and with Joe Locorotundo, who was famous for masturbating in public.

And the lovely Maritza Chacon? The hypotenuse of our triangle, how had she fared? Well, before you could say Oh Mighty Isis, Maritza blew up into the flyest guapa in Paterson, one of the Queens of New Peru. Since they stayed neighbors, Oscar saw her plenty, a ghetto Mary Jane, hair as black and lush as a thunderhead, probably the only Peruvian girl on the planet with pelo curlier than his sister’s (he hadn’t heard of Afro-Peruvians yet, or of a town called Chincha), body fine enough to make old men forget their infirmities, and from the sixth grade on dating men two, three times her age. (Maritza might not have been good at much—not sports, not school, not work—but she was good at men.) Did that mean she had avoided the curse—that she was happier than Oscar or Olga? That was doubtful. From what Oscar could see, Maritza was a girl who seemed to delight in getting slapped around by her boyfriends. Since it happened to her all the time. If a boy hit me, Lola said cockily, I would bite his face.

See Maritza: French-kissing on the front stoop of her house, getting in or out of some roughneck’s ride, being pushed down onto the sidewalk. Oscar would watch the French-kissing, the getting in and out, the pushing, all through his cheerless, sexless adolescence. What else could he do? His bedroom window looked out over the front of her house, and so he always peeped her while he was painting his D&D miniatures or reading the latest Stephen King. The only things that changed in those years were the models of the cars, the size of Maritza’s ass, and the kind of music volting out the cars’ speakers. First freestyle, then III Will-era hiphop, and, right at the very end, for just a little while, Hector Lavoe and the boys.

He said hi to her almost every day, all upbeat and faux-happy, and she said hi back, indifferently, but that was it. He didn’t imagine that she remembered their kissing—but of course he could not forget.

THE MORONIC INFERNO

High school was Don Bosco Tech, and since Don Bosco Tech was an urban all-boys Catholic school packed to the strakes with a couple hundred insecure hyperactive adolescents, it was, for a fat sci-fi-reading nerd like Oscar, a source of endless anguish. For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he knew exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.

Sophomore year Oscar found himself weighing in at a whopping 245 (260 when he was depressed, which was often) and it had become clear to everybody, especially his family, that he’d become the neighborhood parigiiayo.↓

^{≡ The pejorative parigiüayo, Watchers agree, is a corruption of the English neologism ‘party watcher’. The word came into common usage during the First American Occupation of the DR, which ran from 1916 to 1924. (You didn’t know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the U.S. occupied Iraq either.) During the First Occupation it was reported that members of the American Occupying Forces would often attend Dominican parties but instead of joining in the fun the Outlanders would simply stand at the edge of dances and watch. Which of course must have seemed like the craziest thing in the world. Who goes to a party to watch? Thereafter, the Marines were parigüayos—a word that in contemporary usage describes anybody who stands outside and watches while other people scoop up the girls. The kid who don’t dance, who ain’t got game, who lets people clown him—he’s the parigüayo.}

^{If you looked in the Dictionary of Dominican Things, the entry for parigüayo would include a wood carving of Oscar. It is a name that would haunt him for the rest of his life and that would lead him to another Watcher, the one who lamps on the Blue Side of the Moon.}

Had none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it. Couldn’t play sports for shit, or dominoes, was beyond uncoordinated, threw a ball like a girl. Had no knack for music or business or dance, no hustle, no rap, no G. And most damning of all: no looks. He wore his semi-kink hair in a Puerto Rican afro, rocked enormous Section 8 glasses—his ‘anti-pussy devices,’ Al and Miggs, his only friends, called them—sported an unappealing trace of mustache on his upper lip and possessed a pair of close-set eyes that made him look somewhat retarded. The Eyes of Mingus. (A comparison he made himself one day going through his mother’s record collection; she was the only old-school dominicana he knew who had dated a moreno until Oscar’s father put an end to that particular chapter of the All-African World Party.) You have the same eyes as your abuelo, his Nena Inca had told him on one of his visits to the DR, which should have been some comfort—who doesn’t like resembling an ancestor?—except this particular ancestor had ended his days in prison.

Oscar had always been a young nerd—the kind of kid who read Tom Swift, who loved comic books and watched Ultraman —by high school his commitment to the Genres had become absolute. Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers’ cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents’ eyes, he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein, and even the Old Ones who were already beginning to fade—E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Stapledon, and the guy who wrote all the Doc Savage books—moving hungrily from book to book, author to author, age to age. (It was his good fortune that the libraries of Paterson were so under funded that they still kept a lot of the previous generation’s nerdery in circulation.) You couldn’t have torn him away from any movie or TV show or cartoon where there were monsters or spaceships or mutants or doomsday devices or destinies or magic or evil villains. In these pursuits alone Oscar showed the genius his grandmother insisted was part of the family patrimony. Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic. (If only he’d been good at videogames it would have been a slam dunk but despite owning an Atari and an Intellivision he didn’t have the reflexes for it.) Perhaps if like me he’d been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn’t. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.↓

^{≡ Where this outsized love of genre jumped off from no one quite seems to know. It might have been a consequence of being Antillean (who more sci-fi than us?) or of living in the DR for the first couple of years of his life and then abruptly wrenchingly relocating to New Jersey—a single green card shifting not only worlds (from Third to First) but centuries (from almost no TV or electricity to plenty of both). After a transition like that I’m guessing only the most extreme scenarios could have satisfied. Maybe it was that in the DR he had watched too much Spider-Man, been taken to too many Run Run Shaw kung fu movies, listened to too many of his abuela’s spooky stories about el Cuco and la Ciguapa? Maybe it was his first librarian in the U.S., who hooked him on reading, the electricity he felt when he touched that first Danny Dunn book? Maybe it was just the zeitgeist (were not the early seventies the dawn of the Nerd Age?) or the fact that for most of his childhood he had absolutely no friends? Or was it something deeper, something ancestral?}

^{Who can say?}

^{What is clear is that being a reader⁄fanboy (for lack of a better term) helped him get through the rough days of his youth, but it also made him stick out in the mean streets of Paterson even more than he already did. Victimized by the other boys punches and pushes and wedgies and broken glasses and brand-new books from Scholastic, at a cost of fifty cents each, tom in half before his very eyes. You like books? Now you got two! Har-har! No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed. Even his own mother found his preoccupations nutty. Go outside and play! she commanded at least once a day. Pórtate como un muchacho normal.}

^{(Only his sister, a reader too, supporting him. Bringing him books from her own school, which had a better library.)}

^{You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.}

^{Pa’ ‘fuera! his mother roared. And out he would go, like a boy condemned, to spend a few hours being tormented by the other boys—Please, I want to stay, he would beg his mother, but she shoved him out—You ain’t a woman to be staying in the house—one hour, two, until finally he could slip back inside unnoticed, hiding himself in the upstairs closet, where he’d read by the slat of light that razored in from the cracked door. Eventually, his mother rooting him out again: What in carajo is the matter with you?}

^{(And already on scraps of paper, in his composition books, on the backs of his hands, he was beginning to scribble, nothing serious for now, just rough facsimiles of his favorite stories, no sign yet that these half-assed pastiches were to be his Destiny.)}

Oscar was a social introvert who trembled with fear during gym class and watched nerd British shows like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, and could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi walker, and he used a lot of huge sounding nerd words like indefatigable and ubiquitous when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school.

One of those nerds who was always hiding out in the library, who adored Tolkien and later the Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novels (his favorite character was of course Raistlin), and who, as the eighties marched on, developed a growing obsession with the End of the World. (No apocalyptic movie or book or game existed that he had not seen or read or played—Wyndham and Christopher and Gamma World were his absolute favorites.) You get the picture. His adolescent nerdliness vaporizing any iota of a chance he had for young love. Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, behind his DM’s screen, and watched his adolescence stream by. Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years. It would have been one thing if like some of the nerd boys I’d grown up with he hadn’t cared about girls, but alas he was still the passionate enamorao who fell in love easily and deeply. He had secret loves all over town, the kind of curly-haired big-bodied girls who wouldn’t have said boo to a loser like him but about whom he could not stop dreaming. His affection—that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire, and lust that he directed at any and every girl in the vicinity without regard to looks, age, or availability—broke his heart each and every day. Despite the fact that he considered it this huge sputtering force, it was actually most like a ghost because no girl ever really seemed to notice it. Occasionally they might shudder or cross their arms when he walked near, but that was about it. He cried often for his love of some girl or another. Cried in the bathroom, where nobody could hear him.

Anywhere else his triple-zero batting average with the ladies might have passed without comment, but this is a Dominican kid we’re talking about, in a Dominican family: dude was supposed to have Atomic Level G, was supposed to be pulling in the bitches with both hands. Everybody noticed his lack of game and because they were Dominican everybody talked about it. His tió Rudolfo (only recently released from his last and final bid in the Justice and now living in their house on Main Street) was especially generous in his tutelage. Listen, palomo: you have to grab a muchacha, y metéselo. That will take care of everything. Start with a fea. Coje that fea y metéselo! Tío Rudolfo had four kids with three different women so the nigger was without doubt the family’s resident metéselo expert.

His mother’s only comment? You need to worry about your grades. And in more introspective moments: Just be glad you didn’t get my luck, hijo.

What luck? his do snorted.

Exactly, she said.

His friends AI and Miggs? Dude, you’re kinda way fat, you know. His abuela, La Inca? Hijo, you’re the most buenmoso man I know!

Oscar’s sister, Lola, was a lot more practical. Now that her crazy years were over—what Dominican girl doesn’t have those?—she’d turned into one of those tough Jersey dominicanas, a long-distance runner who drove her own car, had her own checkbook, called men bitches, and would eat a fat cat in front of you without a speck of vergüenza. When she was in fourth grade she’d been attacked by an older acquaintance, and this was common knowledge throughout the family (and by extension a sizable section of Paterson, Union City, and Teaneck), and surviving that urikán of pain judgment, and bochinche had made her tougher than adamantine. Recently she’d cut her hair short—flipping out her mother yet again—partially I think because when she’d been lime her family had let it grow down past her ass, a source of pride, something I’m sure her attacker noticed and admired.

Oscar, Lola warned repeatedly, you’re going to die a virgin unless you start changing. Don’t you think I know that? Another five years of this and I’ll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me.

Cut the hair, lose the glasses, exercise. And get rid of those porn magazines. They’re disgusting, they bother Mami, and they’ll never get you a date.

Sound counsel that in the end he did not adopt. He tried a couple of times to exercise, leg lifts, sit-ups, walks around the block in the early morning, that sort of thing, but he would notice how everybody else had a girl but him and would despair, plunging right back into eating, Penthouses, designing dungeons, and self-pity.

I seem to be allergic to diligence, and Lola said, Ha. What you’re allergic to is trying. It wouldn’t have been half bad if Paterson and its surrounding precincts had been like Don Bosco or those seventies feminist sci-fi novels he sometimes read—an all-male-exclusion zone. Paterson, however, was girls the way NYC was girls, Paterson was girls the way Santo Domingo was girls. Paterson had mad girls, and if that wasn’t guapas enough for you, well, motherfucker, then roll south and there’d be Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, the Oranges, Union City, West New York, Weehawken, Perth Amboy-an urban swath known to niggers everywhere as Negrapolis One. So in effect he saw girls—Hispanophone Caribbean girls—everywhere.

He wasn’t safe even in his own house, his sister’s girlfriends were always hanging out, permanent guests. When they were around he didn’t need no Penthouses. Her girls were not too smart but they were fine as shit: the sort of hot-as-balls Latinas who only dated weight-lifting morenos or Latino cats with guns in their cribs. They were all on the volleyball team together and tall and fit as colts and when they went for runs it was what the track team might have looked like in terrorist heaven. Bergen County’s very own cigüapas: la primera was Gladys, who complained endlessly about her chest being too big, that maybe she’d find normal boyfriends if she’d had a smaller pair; Marisol, who’d end up at MIT and hated Oscar but whom Oscar liked most of all; Leticia, just off the boat, half Haitian half Dominican, that special blend the Dominican government swears no existe, who spoke with the deepest accent, a girl so good she refused to sleep with three consecutive boyfriends! It wouldn’t have been so bad if these chickies hadn’t treated Oscar like some deaf-mute harem guard, ordering him around, having him run their errands, making fun of his games and his looks; to make shit even worse, they blithely went on about the particulars of their sex lives with no regard for him, while he sat in the kitchen, clutching the latest issue of Dragon. Hey, he would yell, in case you’re wondering there’s a male unit in here.

Where? Marisol would say blandly. I don’t see one.

And when they talked about how all the Latin guys only seemed to want to date white girls, he would offer, I like Spanish girls, to which Marisol responded with wide condescension. That’s great, Oscar. Only problem is no Spanish girl would date you.

Leave him alone, Leticia said. I think you’re cute, Oscar. Yeah, right, Marisol laughed, rolling her eyes. Now he’ll probably write a book about you.

These were Oscar’s furies, his personal pantheon, the girls he most dreamed about and most beat off to and who eventually found their way into his little stories. In his dreams he was either saving them from aliens or he was returning to the neighborhood, rich and famous—It’s him! The Dominican Stephen King!—and then Marisol would appear, carrying one each of his books for him to sign. Please, Oscar, marry me. Oscar, drolly: I’m sorry, Marisol, I don’t marry ignorant bitches. (But then of course he would.) Maritza he still watched from afar, convinced that one day, when the nuclear bombs fell (or the plague broke out or the Tripods invaded) and civilization was wiped out he would end up saving her from a pack of irradiated ghouls and together they’d set out across a ravaged America in search of a better tomorrow. In these apocalyptic daydreams he was always some kind of plátano Doc Savage, a supergenius who combined world-class martial artistry with deadly firearms proficiency. Not bad for a nigger who’d never even shot an air rifle, thrown a punch, or scored higher than a thousand on his SATs.

OSCAR IS BRAVE

Senior year found him bloated, dyspeptic, and, most cruelly, alone in his lack of girlfriend. His two nerd boys, AI and Miggs, had, in the craziest twist of fortune, both succeeded in landing themselves girls that year. Nothing special, skanks really, but girls nonetheless. AI had met his at Menlo Park. She’d come onto him, he bragged, and when she informed him, after she sucked his dick of course, that she had a girlfriend desperate to meet somebody, AI had dragged Miggs away from his Atari and out to a movie and the rest was, as they say, history. By the end of the week Miggs was getting his too, and only then did Oscar find out about any of it. While they were in his room setting up for another ‘hair-raising’ Champions adventure against the Death-Dealing Destroyers. (Oscar had to retire his famous aftermath! campaign because nobody else but him was hankering to play in the post-apocalyptic ruins of virus-wracked America.) At first, after hearing about the double-bootie coup, Oscar didn’t say nothing much. He just rolled his dio’s over and over. Said, You guys sure got lucky. It killed him that they hadn’t thought to include him in their girl heists; he hated AI for inviting Miggs instead of him and he hated Miggs for getting a girl, period. AI getting a girl Oscar could comprehend; AI (real name Alok) was one of those tall Indian prettyboys who would never have been pegged by anyone as a role-playing nerd. It was Miggs’s girl-getting he could not fathom, that astounded him and left him sick with jealousy. Oscar had always considered Miggs to be an even bigger freak than he was. Acne galore and a retard’s laugh and gray fucking teeth from having been given some medicine too young. So is your girlfriend cute? he asked Miggs. He said, Dude, you should see her, she’s beautiful. Big fucking tits, AI seconded. That day what little faith Oscar had in the world took an SS-N-17 snipe to the head. When finally he couldn’t take it no more he asked, pathetically, What, these girls don’t have any other friends?

AI and Miggs traded glances over their character sheets. I don’t think so, dude.

And right there he learned something about his friends he’d never known (or at least never admitted to himself). Right there he had an epiphany that echoed through his fat self: He realized his fucked-up comic-book-reading, role-playing-game-loving, no-sports-playing friends were embarrassed by him.

Knocked the architecture right out of his legs. He closed the game early, the Exterminators found the Destroyers’ hideout right away—That was bogus, AI groused. After he showed them out he locked himself in his room, lay in bed for a couple of stunned hours, then got up, undressed in the bathroom he no longer had to share because his sister was at Rutgers, and examined himself in the mirror. The fat! The miles of stretch marks! The tumescent horribleness of his proportions! He looked straight out of a Daniel Clowes comic book. Or like the fat blackish kid in Beto Hernández’s Palomar.

Jesus Christ, he whispered. I’m a Morlock.

The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly?

She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don’t take after me.

Dominican parents! You got to love them!

Spent a week looking at himself in the mirror, turning every which way, taking stock, not flinching, and decided at last to be like Roberto Duran: No más. That Sunday he went to Chucho’s and had the barber shave his Puerto Rican ‘fro off (Wait a minute, Chucho’s partner said. You’re Dominican?) Oscar lost the mustache next, and then the glasses, bought contacts with the money he was making at the lumberyard and tried to polish up what remained of his Dominicanness, tried to be more like his cursing swaggering cousins, if only because he had started to suspect that in their Latin hypermaleness there might be an answer. But he was really too far gone for quick fixes. The next time AI and Miggs saw him he’d been starving himself for three days straight. Miggs said, Dude, what’s the matter with you?

Changes, Oscar said pseudo-cryptically:

What, are you some album cover now?

He shook his head solemnly. I’m embarking on a new cycle of my life. Listen to the guy. He already sounds like he’s in college.

That summer his mother sent him and his sister to Santo Domingo, and this time he didn’t fight it like he had in the recent past. It’s not like he had much in the States keeping him.

He arrived in Baní with a stack of notebooks and a plan to fill them all up. Since he could no longer be a game master he decided to try his hand at being a real writer. The trip turned out to be something of a turning point for him. Instead of discouraging his writing, chasing him out of the house like his mother used to, his abuela, Nena Inca, let him be. Allowed him to sit in the back of the house as long as he wanted, didn’t insist that he should be ‘out in the world’. (She had always been overprotective of him and his sister. Too much bad luck in this family, she sniffed.) Kept the music off and brought him his meals at exactly the same time every day. His sister ran around with her hot Island friends, always jumping out of the house in a bikini and going off to different parts of the Island for overnight trips, but he stayed put. When any family members came looking for him his abuela chased them off with a single imperial sweep of her hand. Can’t you see the muchacho’s working? What’s he doing? his cousins asked, confused. He’s being a genius is what, La Inca replied haughtily. Now váyanse. (Later when he thought about it he realized that these very cousins could probably have gotten him laid if only he’d bothered to hang out with them. But you can’t regret the life you didn’t lead.) In the afternoons, when he couldn’t write another word, he’d sit out in front of the house with his abuela and watch the street scene, listen to the raucous exchanges between the neighbors. One evening, at the end of his trip, his abuela confided: Your mother could have been a doctor just like your grandfather was.

What happened?

La Inca shook her head. She was looking at her favorite picture of his mother on her first day at private school, one of those typical serious DR shots. What always happens. Un maldito hombre.

He wrote two books that summer about a young man fighting mutants at the end of the world (neither of them survive). Took crazy amounts of field notes too, names of things he intended to later adapt for science-fictional and fantastic purposes. (Heard about the family curse for like the thousandth time but strangely enough didn’t think it worth incorporating into his fiction—I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn’t think it’s cursed?) When it was time for him and his sister to return to Paterson he was almost sad. Almost. His abuela placed her hand on his head in blessing. Cuidate mucho, mi hijo. Know that in this world there’s somebody who will always love you.

At JFK, almost not being recognized by his uncle. Great, his tío said, looking askance at his complexion, now you look Haitian.

After his return he hung out with Miggs and Al, saw movies with them, talked Los Brothers Hernandez, Frank Miller, and Alan Moore with them but overall they never regained the friendship they had before Santo Domingo. Oscar listened to their messages on the machine and resisted the urge to run over to their places. Didn’t see them but once, twice a week. Focused on his writing. Those were some fucking lonely weeks when all he had were his games, his books, and his words. So now I have a hermit for a son, his mother complained bitterly. At night, unable to sleep, he watched a lot of bad TV, became obsessed with two movies in particular: Zardoz (which he’d seen with his uncle before they put him away for the second time) and Virus (the Japanese end-of-the-world movie with the hot chick from Romeo and Juliet). Virus especially he could not watch to the end without crying, the Japanese hero arriving at the South Pole base, having walked from Washington, D.C., down the whole spine of the Andes, for the woman of his dreams. I’ve been working on my fifth novel, he told the boys when they asked about his absences. It’s amazing.

See? What did I tell you? Mr. Collegeboy.

In the old days when his so-called friends would hurt him or drag his trust through the mud he always crawled voluntarily back into the abuse, out of fear and loneliness, something he’d always hated himself for, but not this time. If there existed in his high school years anyone moment he took pride in it was clearly this one. Even told his sister about it during her next visit. She said, Way to go, O! He’d finally showed some backbone, hence some pride, and although it hurt, it also felt mother-fucking good.

OSCAR COMES CLOSE

In October, after all his college applications were in (Fairleigh Dickinson, Montclair, Rutgers, Drew, Glassboro State, William Paterson; he also sent an app to NYU, a one-in-a-million shot, and they rejected him so fast he was amazed the shit hadn’t come back Pony Express) and winter was settling its pale miserable ass across northern New Jersey, Oscar fell in love with a girl in his SAT prep class. The class was being conducted in one of those ‘Learning Centers’ not far from where he lived, less than a mile, so he’d been walking, a healthy way to lose weight, he thought. He hadn’t been expecting to meet anyone, but then he’d seen the beauty in the back row and felt his senses fly out of him. Her name was Ana Obregon, a pretty, loudmouthed gordita who read Henry Miller while she should have been learning to wrestle logic problems. On about their fifth class he noticed her reading Sexus and she noticed him noticing, and, leaning over, she showed him a passage and he got an erection like a motherfucker.

You must think I’m weird, right? she said during the break. You ain’t weird, he said. Believe me—I’m the top expert in the state.

Ana was a talker, had beautiful Caribbean-girl eyes, pure anthracite, and was the sort of heavy that almost every Island nigger dug, a body that you just knew would look good in and out of clothes; wasn’t shy about her weight, either; she wore tight black stirrup pants like every other girl in the neighborhood and the sexiest underwear she could afford and was a meticulous putter-on of makeup, an intricate bit of multitasking for which Oscar never lost his fascination. She was this peculiar combination of badmash and little girl—even before he’d visited her house he knew she’d have a whole collection of stuffed animals avalanched on her bed—and there was something in the seamlessness with which she switched between these aspects that convinced him that both were masks, that there existed a third Ana, a hidden Ana who determined what mask to throw up for what occasion but who was otherwise obscure and impossible to know. She’d gotten into Miller because her ex-boyfriend, Manny, had given her the books before he joined the army. He used to read passages to her all the time: That made me so hot. She’d been thirteen when they started dating, he was twenty-four, a recovering coke addict—Ana talking about these things like they weren’t nothing at all.

You were thirteen and your mother allowed you to date a septuagenarian? My parents loved Manny, she said. My mom used to cook dinner for him all the time.

He said, That seems highly unorthodox, and later at home he asked his sister, back on winter break, For the sake of argument, would you allow your pubescent daughter to have relations with a twenty-four-year-old male?

I’d kill him first.

He was amazed how relieved he felt to hear that.

Let me guess: You know somebody who’s doing this?

He nodded. She sits next to me in SAT class. I think she’s orchidaceous.

Lola considered him with her tiger-colored irises. She’d been back a week and it was clear that college-level track was kicking her ass, the sclera in her normally wide manga-eyes were shot through with blood vessels. You know, she said finally, we colored folks talk plenty of shit about loving our children but we really don’t. She exhaled. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t.

He tried to put a hand on his sister’s shoulder but she shrugged it off. You better go bust out some crunches, Mister.

That’s what she called him whenever she was feeling tender or wronged. Mister. Later she’d want to put that on his gravestone but no one would let her, not even me.

Stupid.

AMOR DE PENDEJO

He and Ana in SAT class, he and Ana in the parking lot afterward, he and Ana at the McDonald’s, he and Ana become friends. Each day Oscar expected her to be adios, each day she was still there. They got into the habit of talking on the phone a couple times a week, about nothing really, spinning words out of their everyday; the first time she called him, offering him a ride to SAT class; a week later he called her, just to try it. His heart beating so hard he thought he would die but all she did when she picked him up was say, Oscar, listen to the bullshit my sister pulled, and off they’d gone, building another one of their word-scrapers. By the fifth time he called he no longer expected the Big Blow-off. She was the only girl outside his family who admitted to having a period, who actually said to him, I’m bleeding like a hog, an astounding confidence he turned over and over in his head, sure it meant something, and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thudded inside his chest, a lonely rada. Ana Obregon, unlike every other girl in his secret cosmology, he actually fell for as they were getting to know each other. Because her appearance in his life was sudden, because she’d come in under his radar, he didn’t have time to raise his usual wall of nonsense or level some wild-ass expectations her way: Maybe he was plain tired after four years of not getting ass, or maybe he’d finally found his zone. Incredibly enough, instead of making an idiot out of himself as one might have expected, given the hard fact that this was the first girl he’d ever had a conversation with, he actually took it a day at a time. He spoke to her plainly and without effort and discovered that his constant self-deprecation pleased her immensely. It was amazing how it was between them; he would say something obvious and uninspired, and she’d say, Oscar, you’re really fucking smart. When she said, I love men’s hands, he spread both of his across his face and said, faux-casual-like, Oh, really? It cracked her up.

She never talked about what they were; she only said, Man, I’m glad I got to know you.

And he said, I’m glad I’m me knowing you.

One night while he was listening to New Order and trying to chug through Clay’s Ark, his sister knocked on his door. You got a visitor. I do? Yup. Lola leaned against his door frame. She’d shaved her head down to the bone, Sinead-style, and now everybody, including their mother, was convinced she’d turned into a lesbiana.

You might want to clean up a little. She touched his face gently. Shave those pussy hairs.

It was Ana. Standing in his foyer, wearing a full-length leather, her trigueña skin blood-charged from the cold, her face gorgeous with eyeliner, mascara, foundation, lipstick, and blush.

Freezing out, she said. She had her gloves in one hand like a crumpled bouquet.

Hey, was all he managed to say. He could hear his sister upstairs, listening.

What you doing? Ana asked.

Like nothing.

Like let’s go to a movie, then.

Like OK, he said.

Upstairs his sister was jumping up and down on his bed, low-screaming, It’s a date, it’s a date, and then she jumped on his back and nearly toppled them clean through the bedroom window.

So is this some kind of date? he said as he slipped into her car.

She smiled wanly. You could call it that.

Ana drove a Cressida, and instead of taking them to the local theater she headed down to the Amboy Multiplex.

I love this place, she said as she was wrangling for a parking space. My father used to take us here when it was still a drive-in. Did you ever come here back then?

He shook his head. Though I heard they steal plenty of cars here now.

Nobody’s stealing this baby.

It was so hard to believe what was happening that Oscar really couldn’t take it seriously. The whole time the movie—Manhunter— was on, he kept expecting niggers to jump out with cameras and scream, Surprise! Boy, he said, trying to remain on her map, this is some movie. Ana nodded; she smelled of some perfume he could not name, and when she pressed close the heat off her body was vertiginous.

On the ride home Ana complained about having a headache and they didn’t speak for a long time. He tried to turn on the radio but she said, No, my head’s really killing me. He joked, Would you like some crack? No, Oscar. So he sat back and watched the Hess Building and the rest of Woodbridge slide past through a snarl of overpasses. He was suddenly aware of how tired he was; the nervousness that had raged through him the entire night had exhausted his ass. The longer they went without speaking the more morose he became. It’s just a movie, he told himself It’s not like it’s a date.

Ana seemed unaccountably sad and she chewed her bottom lip, a real bembe, until most of her lipstick was on her teeth. He was going to make a comment about it but decided not to.

You reading anything good?

Nope, she said. You?

I’m reading Dune.

She nodded. I hate that book.

They reached the Elizabeth exit, which is what New Jersey is really known for, industrial wastes on both sides of the turnpike. He had started holding his breath against those horrible fumes when Ana let loose a scream that threw him into his passenger door. Elizabeth! she shrieked. Close your fucking legs!

Then she looked over at him, tipped back her head, and laughed.

When he returned to the house his sister said, Well?

Well what?

Did you fuck her?

Jesus, Lola, he said, blushing.

Don’t lie to me.

I do not move so precipitously. He paused and then sighed. In other words, I didn’t even get her scarf off.

Sounds a little suspicious. I know you Dominican men. She held up her hands and flexed the fingers in playful menace. Son pulpos.

The next day he woke up feeling like he’d been unshackled from his fat, like he’d been washed clean of his misery, and for a long time he couldn’t remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.

OSCAR IN LOVE

And so now every week they headed out to either a movie or the mall. They talked. He learned that her ex-boyfriend, Manny, used to smack the shit out of her, which was a problem, she confessed, because she liked it when guys were a little rough with her in bed; he learned that her father had died in a car accident when she was a young girl in Macoris, and that her new stepfather didn’t care two shits about her but that it didn’t matter because once she got into Penn State she didn’t ever intend to come back home. In turn he showed her some of his writings and told her about the time he’d gotten struck by a car and put in the hospital and about how his tío used to smack the shit out of him in the old days; he even told her about the crush he had on Maritza Chacon and she screamed, Maritza Chacon? I know that cuero! Oh my God, Oscar, I think even my stepfather slept with her!

Oh, they got close all right, but did they ever kiss in her car? Did he ever put his hands up her skirt? Did he ever thumb her clit? Did she ever push up against him and say his name in a throaty voice? Did he ever stroke her hair while she sucked him off? Did they ever fuck?

Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he’d fallen into one of those Let’s-Be-Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love’s version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and of women.

Perhaps.

In April he got his second set of SAT scores back (1020 under the old system) and a week later he learned he was heading to Rutgers New Brunswick. Well, you did it, hijo, his mother said, looking more relieved than was polite. No more selling pencils for me, he agreed. You’ll love it, his sister promised him. I know I will. I was meant for college. As for Ana, she was on her way to Penn State, honors program, full ride. And now my stepfather can kiss my ass! It was also in April that her ex-boyfriend, Manny, returned from the army—Ana told him during one of their trips to the Yaohan Mall. His sudden appearance, and Ana’s joy over it, shattered the hopes Oscar had cultivated. He’s back, Oscar asked, like forever? Ana nodded. Apparently Manny had gotten into trouble again, drugs, but this time, Ana insisted, he’d been set up by these three cocolos, a word he’d never heard her use before, so he figured she’d gotten it from Manny. Poor Manny, she said.

Yeah, poor Manny, Oscar muttered under his breath.

Poor Manny, poor Ana, poor Oscar. Things changed quickly. First off: Ana stopped being home all the time, and Oscar found himself stacking messages on her machine: This is Oscar, a bear is chewing my legs off, please call me; This is Oscar, they want a million dollars or it’s over, please call me; This is Oscar, I’ve just spotted a strange meteorite and I’m going out to investigate. She always got back to him after a couple of days, and was pleasant about it, but still. Then she canceled three Fridays in a row and he had to settle for the clearly reduced berth of Sunday after church. She’d pick him up and they’d drive out to Boulevard East and park and together they’d stare out over the Manhattan skyline. It wasn’t an ocean, or a mountain range; it was, at least to Oscar, better, and it inspired their best conversations.

It was during one of those little chats that Ana let slip, God, I’d forgotten how big Manny’s cock was.

Like I really need to hear that, he snapped.

I’m sorry, she said hesitantly. I thought we could talk about everything. Well, it wouldn’t be bad if you actually kept Manny’s anatomical enormity to yourself.

So we can’t talk about everything?

He didn’t even bother answering her.

With Manny and his big cock around, Oscar was back to dreaming about nuclear annihilation, how through some miraculous accident he’d hear about the attack first and without pausing he’d steal his tío’s car, drive it to the stores, stock it full of supplies (maybe shoot a couple of looters en route), and then fetch Ana. What about Manny? she’d wail. There’s no time! he’d insist, peeling out, shoot a couple more looters (now slightly mutated), and then repair to the sweaty love den where Ana would quickly succumb to his take-charge genius and his by-then ectomorphic physique. When he was in a better mood he let Ana find Manny hanging from a light fixture in his apartment, his tongue a swollen purple bladder in his mouth, his pants around his ankles. The news of the imminent attack on the TV, a half-literate note pinned to his chest. I koona taek it. And then Oscar would comfort Ana with the terse insight, He was too weak for this Hard New World.

So she has a boyfriend? Lola asked him suddenly.

Yes, he said.

You should back off for a little while.

Did he listen? Of course he didn’t. Available any time she needed to kvetch. And he even got-joy of joys!—the opportunity to meet the famous Manny, which was about as fun as being called a fag during a school assembly (which had happened). (Twice.) Met him outside Ana’s house. He was this intense emaciated guy with marathon-runner limbs and voracious eyes; when they shook hands Oscar was sure the nigger was going to smack him, he acted so surly. Manny was muy bald and completely shaved his head to hide it, had a hoop in each ear and this leathery out-in-the-sun buzzardy look of an old cat straining for youth.

So you’re Ana’s little friend, Manny said. That’s me, Oscar said in a voice so full of cheerful innocuousness that he could have shot himself for it. Oscar is a brilliant writer, Ana offered. Even though she had never once asked to read anything he wrote.

He snorted. What would you have to write about?

I’m into the more speculative genres. He knew how absurd he sounded.

The more speculative genres. Manny looked ready to cut a steak off him. You sound mad corny, guy, you know that? Oscar smiled, hoping somehow an earthquake would demolish all of Paterson.

I just hope you ain’t trying to chisel in on my girl, guy.

Oscar said, Ha-ha. Ana flushed red, looked at the ground.

A joy.

With Manny around, he was exposed to an entirely new side of Ana. All they talked about now, the little they saw each other, was Manny and the terrible things he did to her. Manny smacked her, Manny kicked her, Manny called her a fat twat, Manny cheated on her, she was sure, with this Cuban chickie from the middle school. So that explains why I couldn’t get a date in those days; it was Manny, Oscar joked, but Ana didn’t laugh. They couldn’t talk ten minutes without Manny beeping her and her having to call him back and assure him she wasn’t with anybody else. And one day she arrived at Oscar’s house with a bruise on her face and with her blouse torn, and his mother had said: I don’t want any trouble here!

What am I going to do? she asked over and over and Oscar always found himself holding her awkwardly and telling her, Well, I think if he’s this bad to you, you should break up with him, but she shook her head and said, I know I should, but I can’t. I love him.

Love. Oscar knew he should have checked out right then. He liked to kid himself that it was only cold anthropological interest that kept him around to see how it would all end, but the truth was he couldn’t extricate himself. He was totally and irrevocably in love with Ana. What he used to feel for those girls he’d never really known was nothing compared to the amor he was carrying in his heart for Ana. It had the density of a dwarf-mother-fucking-star and at times he was a hundred percent sure it would drive him mad. The only thing that came close was how he felt about his books; only the combined love he had for everything he’d read and everything he hoped to write came even close.

Every Dominican family has stories about crazy loves, about niggers who take love too far, and Oscar’s family was no different.

His abuelo, the dead one, had been unyielding about one thing or another (no one ever exactly said) and ended up in prison, first mad, then dead; his abuela Nena Inca had lost her husband six months after they got married. He had drowned on Semana Santa and she never remarried, never touched another man. We’ll be together soon enough, Oscar had heard her say.

Your mother, his tía Rubelka had once whispered, was a loca when it came to love. It almost killed her. And now it seemed that it was Oscar’s turn. Welcome to the family, his sister said in a dream. The real family.

It was obvious what was happening, but what could he do? There was no denying what he felt. Did he lose sleep? Yes. Did he lose important hours of concentration? Yes. Did he stop reading his Andre Norton books and even lose interest in the final issues of Watchmen, which were unfolding in the illest way? Yes. Did he start borrowing his tío’s car for long rides to the Shore, parking at Sandy Hook, where his mom used to take them before she got sick, back when Oscar hadn’t been too fat, before she stopped going to the beach altogether? Yes.

Did his youthful unrequited love cause him to lose weight? Unfortunately, this alone it did not provide, and for the life of him he couldn’t understand why. When Lola had broken up with Golden Gloves she’d lost almost twenty pounds. What kind of genetic discrimination was this, handed down by what kind of scrub God?

Miraculous things started happening. Once he blacked out while crossing an intersection and woke up with a rugby team gathered around him. Another time Miggs was goofing on him, talking smack about his aspirations to write role-playing games—complicated story, the company Oscar had been hoping to write for, Fantasy Games Unlimited, and which was considering one of his modules for PsiWorld, had recently closed, scuttling all of Oscar’s hopes and dreams that he was about to turn into the next Gary Gygax. Well, Miggs said, it looks like that didn’t work out, and for the first time ever in their relationship Oscar lost his temper and without a word swung on Miggs, connected so hard that homeboy’s mouth spouted blood. Jesus Christ, AI said. Calm down! I didn’t mean to do it, he said unconvincingly. It was an accident. Mudafuffer, Miggs said. Mudafuffer! He got so bad that one desperate night, after listening to Ana sobbing to him on the phone about Manny’s latest bullshit, he said, I have to go to church now, and put down the phone, went to his tío’s room (Rudolfo was out at the titty bar), and stole his antique Virginia Dragoon, that oh-so-famous First Nation-exterminating Colt.44, heavier than bad luck and twice as ugly. Stuck its impressive snout down the front of his pants and proceeded to stand in front of Manny’s building almost the entire night. Got real friendly with the aluminum siding. Come on, motherfucker, he said calmly. I got a nice eleven-year-old girl for you. He didn’t care that he would more than likely be put away forever, or that niggers like him got ass and mouth raped in jail, or that if the cops picked him up and found the gun they’d send his tío’s ass up the river for parole violation. He didn’t care about nada that night. His head contained zero, a perfect vacuum. He saw his entire writing future flash before his eyes; he’d only written one novel worth a damn, about an Australian hunger spirit preying on a group of small-town friends, wouldn’t get a chance to write anything better—career over. Luckily for the future of American Letters, Manny did not come home that night.

It was hard to explain. It wasn’t just that he thought Ana was his last fucking chance for happiness—this was clearly on his mind—it was also that he’d never ever in all his miserable eighteen years of life experienced anything like he’d felt when he was around that girl. I’ve waited forever to be in love, he wrote his sister. How many times I thought this is never going to happen to me. (When in his second-favorite anime of all time, Robotech Macross, Rich Hunter finally hooked up with Lisa, he broke down in front of the TV and cried. Don’t tell me they shot the president, his tío called from the back room, where he was quietly snorting you-know-what.) It’s like I swallowed a piece of heaven, he wrote to his sister in a letter. You can’t imagine how it feels.

Two days later he broke down and confessed to his sister about the gun stuff and she, back on a short laundry visit, flipped out. She got them both on their knees in front of the altar she’d built to their dead abuelo and had him swear on their mother’s living soul that he’d never pull anything like that again as long as he lived. She even cried, she was so worried about him.

You need to stop this, Mister. I know I do, he said. But I don’t know if I’m even here, you know?

That night he and his sister both fell asleep on the couch, she first. Lola had just broken up with her boyfriend for like the tenth time, but even Oscar, in his condition, knew they would be back together in no time at all. Sometime before dawn he dreamt about all the girlfriends he’d never had, row upon row upon row upon row, like the extra bodies that the Miraclepeople had in Alan Moore’s Miracleman. You can do it, they said.

He awoke, cold, with a dry throat.

They met at the Japanese mall on Edgewater Road, Yaohan, which he had discovered one day on his long I’m-bored drives and which he now considered part of their landscape, something to tell their children about. It was where he came for his anime tapes and his mecha models. Ordered them both chicken katsu curries and then sat in the large cafeteria with the view of Manhattan, the only gaijin in the whole joint.

You have beautiful breasts, he said as an opener.

Confusion, alarm. Oscar. What’s the matter with you?

He looked out through the glass at Manhattan’s western flank, looked out like he was some deep nigger. Then he told her.

There were no surprises. Her eyes went soft, she put a hand on his hand, her chair scraped closer, there was a strand of yellow in her teeth. Oscar, she said gently, I have a boyfriend.

She drove him home; at the house he thanked her for her time, walked inside, lay in bed.

In June he graduated from Don Bosco. See them at graduation: his mother starting to look thin (the cancer would grab her soon enough), Rudolfo high as shit, only Lola looking her best, beaming, happy. You did it, Mister. You did it. He heard in passing that of everybody in their section of P-town only he and Olga—poor fucked-up Olga—had not attended even one prom. Dude, Miggs joked, maybe you should have asked her out.

In September he headed to Rutgers New Brunswick, his mother gave him a hundred dollars and his first kiss in five years, his tío a box of condoms: Use them all, he said, and then added: On girls. There was the initial euphoria of finding himself alone at college, free of everything, completely on his fucking own, and with it an optimism that here among these thousands of young people he would find someone like him. That, alas, didn’t happen. The white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of color, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You’re not Dominican. And he said, over and over again, But I am. Soy dominicano. Dominicano soy. After a spate of parties that led to nothing but being threatened by some drunk white-boys, and dozens of classes where not a single girl looked at him, he felt the optimism wane, and before he even realized what had happened he had buried himself in what amounted to the college version of what he’d majored in all throughout high school: getting no ass. His happiest moments were genre moments, like when Akira was released (1988). Pretty sad. Twice a week he and his sister would dine at the Douglass dining hall; she was a Big Woman on Campus and knew just about everybody with any pigment, had her hand on every protest and every march, but that didn’t help his situation any: During their get-togethers she would give him advice and he would nod quietly and afterward would sit at the E bus stop and stare at all the pretty Douglass girls and wonder where he’d gone wrong in his life. He wanted to blame the books, the sci-fi, but he couldn’t—he loved them too much. Despite swearing early on to change his nerdly ways, he continued to eat, continued not to exercise, continued to use flash words, and after a couple semesters without any friends but his sister, he joined the university’s resident geek organization, RU Gamers, which met in the classrooms beneath Frelinghuysen and boasted an entirely male membership. He had thought college would be better, as far as girls were concerned, but those first years it wasn’t.

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 wouldn’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.

Sñorita 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.

No one in her barrio could have imagined how much she hated school. La Inca certainly didn’t have a clue. Colegio el Redentor was about a million miles removed from the modest working-class neighborhood where she and La Inca lived. And Beli did everything possible to represent her school as a paradise where she cavorted with the other Immortals, a four-year interval before the final Apotheosis. Took on even more airs: where before, La Inca had to correct her on grammar and against using slang, she now had the best diction and locution in Lower Baní. (She’s starting to talk like Cervantes, La Inca bragged to the neighbors. I told you that school would be worth the trouble.) Beli didn’t have much in the way of friends—only Dorca, the daughter of the woman who cleaned for La Inca, who owned exactly no pair of shoes and worshipped the ground Beli walked on. For Dorca she put on a show to end all shows. She wore her uniform straight through the day until La Inca forced her to take it off (What do you think, these things were free?), and talked unceasingly about her schoolmates, painting each one as her deepest friend and confidante; even the girls who made it their mission to ignore and exclude her from everything, four girls we will call the Squadron Supreme, found themselves rehabilitated in her tales as benevolent older spirits that dropped in on Belicia every now and then to give her invaluable advice on the school and life in general. The Squadron, it turned out, were all very jealous of her relationship with Jack Pujols (who, she reminded Dorea, is my boyfriend) and invariably one member or another of the Squadron fell to weakness and attempted to steal her novio but of course he always rebuked their treacherous advances. I am appalled, Jack would say, casting the hussy aside. Especially considering how well Belicia Cabral, daughter of the world-famous surgeon, has treated you. In every version, after a prolonged period of iciness the offending Squadron member would throw herself at Beli’s feet and beg forgiveness, which, after tense deliberation, Beli invariably granted. They can’t help it that they’re weak, she explained to Dorea. Or that Jack is so guapo. What a world she spun! Beli talked of parties and pools and polo games and dinners where bloody steak was heaped onto plates and grapes were as common as tangerines. She in fact, without knowing, was talking about the life she never knew: the life of Casa Hatüey. So astonishing were her descriptions that Dorea often said, I would like to go to school with you one day.

Beli snorted. You must be crazy! You’re too stupid! And Dorea would lower her head. Stare at her own broad feet. Dusty in their chancletas. La Inca talked about Beli becoming a female doctor (You wouldn’t be the first, but you’d be the best!), imagined her hija raising test tubes up to the light, but Beli usually passed her school days dreaming about the various boys around her (she had stopped staring at them openly after one of her teachers had written a letter home to La Inca and La Inca had chastised her, Where do you think you are? A brothel? This is the best school in Baní, muchacha, you’re ruining your reputation!), and if not about the boys then about the house she was convinced she would one day own, furnishing it in her mind, room by room by room. Her madre wanted her to bring back Casa Hatüey, a history house, but Beli’s house was new and crisp, had no history at all attached to it. In her favorite María Montez daydream, a dashing European of the Jeans Pierre Aumont variety (who happened to look exactly like Jack Pujols) would catch sight of her in the bakery and fall madly in love with her and sweep her off to his château in France.↓

^{≡ María Montez, celebrated Dominican actress, moved to the U.S. and made more than twenty-five films between 1940 and 1951, including Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Cobra Woman, and my personal favorite, Siren of Atlantis. Crowned the ‘Qyeen of Technicolor’ by fans and historians alike. Born María Africa Gracia Vidal on June 6, 1912, in Barahona, bit her screen name from the famous nineteenth-century courtesan Lola Montez (herself famous for fucking, among others, the part-Haitian Alexandre Dumas). María Montez was the original J. Lo (or whatever smoking caribeña is the number-one eye-crack of your time), the first real international star the DR had. Ended up marrying a Frenchie (sorry, Anacaona) and moving to Paris after World War II. Drowned alone in her bathtub, at the age of thirty-nine. No sign of struggle, no evidence of foul play. Did some photo ops for the Trujillato every now and then, but nothing serious. It should be pointed out that while in France, María proved to be quite the nerd. Wrote three books. Two were published. The third manuscript was lost after her death.}

(Wake up, girl! You’re going to burn the pan de agua!)

She wasn’t the only girl dreaming like this. This jiringonza was in the air, it was the dreamshit that they fed girls day and night. It’s surprising Beli could think of anything else, what with that heavy rotation of boleros, canciones, and versos spinning in her head, with the Listin Diario’s society pages spread before her. Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who’s been abandoned by family, husband, children, and fortune believes in God. Belicia was, if it was possible, even more susceptible to the Casanova Wave than many of her peers. Our girl was straight boy-crazy. (To be called boy-crazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericana to cinders.) She stared at the young bravos on the bus, secretly kissed the bread of the buenmosos who frequented the bakery, sang to herself all those beautiful Cuban love songs.

(God save your soul, La Inca grumbled, if you think boys are an answer to anything.)

But even the boy situation left a lot to be desired. If she’d been interested in the niggers in the barrio our Beli would have had no problems, these cats would have obliged her romantic spirit by jumping her lickety-split. But alas, La Inca’s hope that the rarified private airs of Colegio El Redentor would have a salutary effect on the girl’s character (like a dozen wet-belt beatings or three months in an unheated convent) had at least in this one aspect borne fruit, for Beli at thirteen only had eyes for the Jack Pujolses of the world. As is usually the case in these situations, the high-class boys she so desired didn’t reciprocate her interest—Beli didn’t have quite enough of anything to snap these Rubirosas out of their rich-girl reveries.

What a life! Each day turning on its axis slower than a year. She endured school, the bakery, La Inca’s suffocating solicitude with a furious jaw. She watched hungrily for visitors from out of town, threw open her arms at the slightest hint of a wind and at night she struggled Jacob-like against the ocean pressing down on her.

KIMOTA!

So what happened? A boy happened.

Her First.

NÚMERO UNO

Jack Pujols of course: the school’s handsomest (read: whitest) boy, a haughty slender melnibonian of pure European stock whose cheeks looked like they’d been knapped by a master and whose skin was unflawed by scar, mole, blemish, or hair, his small nipples were the pink perfect ovals of sliced salchicha. His father was a colonel in the Trujillato’s beloved air force, a heavy duty player in Baní (would be instrumental in bombing the capital during the revolution, killing all those helpless civilians, including my poor uncle Venicio), and his mother, a former beauty queen of Venezuelan proportions, now active in the Church, a kisser of cardinal rings and a socorro of orphans. Jack, Eldest Son, Privileged Seed, Hijo Bello, Anointed One, revered by his female family members—and that endless monsoon—rain of praise and indulgence had quickened in him the bamboo of entitlement. He had the physical swagger of a boy twice his size and an unbearable loudmouthed cockiness that he drove into people like a metal spur. In the future he would throw his lot in with the Demon Balaguer↓ and end up ambassador to Panama as his reward, but for the moment he was the school’s Apollo, its Mithra.

^{≡ Although not essential to our tale, per se, Balaguer is essential to the Dominican one, so therefore we must mention him, even though I’d rather piss in his face. The elders say, Anything uttered for the first time summons a demon, and when twentieth century Dominicans first uttered the word freedom en masse the demon they summoned was Balaguer. (Known also as the Election Thief—see the 1966 election in the DR—and the Homunculus.) In the days of the Trujillato, Balaguer was just one of El Jefe’s more efficient ring wraiths. Much is made of his intelligence (he certainly impressed the Failed Cattle Thief) and of his asceticism (when he raped his little girls he kept it real quiet). After Trujillo’s death he would take over Project Domo and rule the country from 1960 to 1962, from 1966 to 1978, and again from 1986 to 1996 (by then dude was blind as a bat, a living mummy). During the second period of his rule, known locally as the Twelve Years, he unleashed a wave of violence against the Dominican left, death-squading hundreds and driving thousands more out of the country. It was he who oversaw⁄initiated the thing we call Diaspora. Considered our national ‘genius’, Joaquin Balaguer was a Negrophobe, an apologist to genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself, famously ordering the death of journalist Orlando Martinez. Later, when he wrote his memoirs, he claimed he knew who had done the foul deed (not him, of course) and left a blank page, a página en blanco, in the text to be filled in with the truth upon his death. (Can you say impunity?) Balaguer died in 2002. The página is still blanca. Appeared as a sympathetic character in Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. Like most homunculi he did not marry and left no heirs.}

The teachers, the staff: the girls, the boys, all threw petals of adoration beneath his finely arched feet: he was proof positive that God—the Great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy!—does not love his children equally.

And how did Beli interact with this insane object of attraction? In a way that is fitting of her bullheaded directness: she would march down the hallway, books pressed to her pubescent chest, staring down at her feet, and, pretending not to see him, would smash into his hallowed vessel.

Caramb—, he spluttered, wheeling about, and then he’d see it was Belicia, a girl, now stooping over to recover her books, and he bent over too (he was, if nothing, a caballero), his anger diffusing, becoming confusion, irritation. Caramba, Cabral, what are you, a bat? Watch. Where. You’re. Going.

He had a single worry line creasing his high forehead (his ‘part,’ as it became known) and eyes of the deepest cerulean. The Eyes of Atlantis. (Once Beli had overheard him bragging to one of his many female admirers: Oh, these ol’ things? I inherited them from my German abuela.)

Come on, Cabral, what’s your difficulty?

It’s your fault! she swore, meant in more ways than one.

Maybe she’d see better, one of his lieutenants cracked, if it was dark out. It might as well have been dark out. For all intents and purposes she was invisible to him.

And would have stayed invisible too if the summer of sophomore year she’d not hit the biochemical jackpot, not experienced a Summer of Her Secondary Sex Characteristics, not been transformed utterly (a terrible beauty has been born). Where before Beli had been a gangly ibis of a girl, pretty in a typical sort of way, by summer’s end she’d become un mujerón total, acquiring that body of hers, that body that made her famous in Baní. Her dead parents’ genes on some Roman Polanski shit; like the older sister she had never met, Beli was transformed almost overnight into an underage stunner, and if Trujillo had not been on his last erections he probably would have gunned for her like he’d been rumored to have gunned for her poor dead sister. For the record, that summer our girl caught a cuerpazo so berserk that only a pornographer or a comic-book artist could have designed it with a clear conscience. Every neighborhood has its tetúa, but Beli could have put them all to shame, she was La Tetúa Suprema: her tetas were globes so implausibly titanic they made generous souls pity their bearer and drove every straight male in their vicinity to reevaluate his sorry life. She had the Breasts of Luba (35DDD). And what about that supersonic culo that could tear words right out of niggers’ mouths, pull windows from out their mother-fucking frames? A culo que jalaba más que una junta de buey. Dios mío! Even your humble Watcher, reviewing her old pictures, is struck by what a fucking babe she was.↓

^{≡ My shout-out to Jack Kirby aside, it’s hard as a Third Worlder not to feel a certain amount of affinity for Datu the Watcher; he resides in the hidden Blue Area of the Moon and we DarkZoners reside (to quote Glissant) on ‘la face cachee de la Terre’ (Earth’s hidden face).}

Ande el diablo! La Inca exclaimed. Hija, what in the world are you eating!

If Beli had been a normal girl, being the neighborhood’s most prominent tetúa might have pushed her into shyness, might even have depressed the shit out of her. And at first Beli had both these reactions, and also the feeling that gets delivered to you by the bucket for free during adolescence: Shame. Sharam. Vergüenza. She no longer wanted to bathe with La Inca, a huge change to their morning routine. Well, I guess you’re grown enough to wash yourself La Inca said lightly. But you could tell she was hurt. In the close darkness of their wash closet, Beli circled disconsolately around her Novi Orbis, avoiding her hypersensitive nipples at all costs. Now every time she had to head outside, Beli felt like she was stepping into a Danger Room filled with men’s laser eyes and women’s razor whispers. The blasts of car horns enough to make her fall over herself. She was furious at the world for this newly acquired burden, and furious at herself.

For the first month, that is. Gradually Beli began to see beyond the catcalls and the Dios mío asesina and the y ese tetatorío and the que pechonalidad to the hidden mechanisms that drove these comments. One day on the way back from the bakery, La Inca muttering at her side about that day’s receipts, it dawned on Beli: Men liked her! Not only did they like her, they liked her a fucking lot. The proof was the day that one of their customers, the local dentist, slipped her a note with his money, and it said, I want to see you, as simple as that. Beli was terrified, scandalized, and giddy. The dentist had a fat wife who ordered a cake from La Inca almost every month, either for one of her seven children or for her fifty-some cousins (but most likely for her and her alone). She had a wattle and an enormous middle-aged ass that challenged all chairs. Beli mooned over that note like it was a marriage proposal from God’s hot son, even though the dentist was bald and paunchier than an OTB regular and had a tracery of fine red veins all over his cheeks. The dentist came in as he always did but now his eyes were always questing, Hello, Sñorita Beli! his greeting now fetid with lust and threat, and Beli’s heart would beat like nothing she’d ever heard. After two such visits she wrote, on a whim, a little note that said simply, Yes, you can pick me up at the park at tal-and-tal time, and passed it back to him with his change and by hook and crook arranged to be walking with La Inca through the park at the very moment of the assignation. Her heart going like crazy; she didn’t know what to expect but she had a wild hope, and just as they were about to leave the park, Beli spotted the dentist sitting in a car that was not his, pretending to read the paper but looking forlornly in her direction. Look, Madre, Beli said loudly, it’s the dentist, and La Inca turned and homeboy threw the car frantically into gear and tore out of there before La Inca could even wave. How very strange! La Inca said.

I don’t like him, Beli said. He looks at me.

And now it was his wife who came to the bakery to pick up the cakes. Y El dentista? Beli inquired innocently. That one’s too lazy to do anything, his wife said with no little exasperation.

Beli, who’d been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent over the moon by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring. Like stumbling into the wizard Shazam’s cave or finding the crashed ship of the Green Lantern! Hypatia Belicia Cabral finally had power and a true sense of self. Started pinching her shoulders back, wearing the tightest clothes she had. Dios mío, La Inca said every time the girl headed out. Why would God give you that burden in this country of all places!

Telling Beli not to flaunt those curves would have been like asking the persecuted fat kid not to use his recently discovered mutant abilities. With great power comes great responsibility…bullshit. Our girl ran into the future that her new body represented and never ever looked back.

HUNT THE LIGHT KNIGHT

Now fully, ahem, endowed, Beli returned to El Redentor from summer break to the alarm of faculty and students alike and set out to track down Jack Pujols with the great deliberation of Ahab after you-know-who. (And of all these things the albino boy was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?) Another girl would have been more subtle, drawn her prey to her, but what did Beli know about process or patience? She threw everything she had at Jack. Batted her eyes so much at him that she almost sprained her eyelids. Put her tremendous chest in his line of sight every chance she got. Adopted a walk that got her yelled at by the teachers but that brought the boys and the male faculty a-running. But Pujols was unmoved, observed her with his deep dolphin eyes and did nothing. After about a week of this, Beli was going out of her mind, she had expected him to fall instantly, and so, one day, out of shameless desperation, she pretended to accidentally leave buttons on her blouse open; she was wearing this lacy bra she stole from Dorea (who had acquired quite a nice chest herself). But before Beli could bring her colossal cleavage to bear—her very own wave-motion gun—Wei, blushing deeply, ran over and buttoned her up.

You showing!

Jack drifting disinterestedly away.

She tried everything, but no dice. Before you know it Beli was back to banging into him in the hall. Cabral, he said with a smile. You have to be more careful.

I love you! she wanted to scream, I want to have all your children! I want to be your woman! But instead she said, You be careful.

She was morose. September ended and, alarmingly enough, she had her best month at the school. Academically. English was her number-one subject (how ironic). She learned the names of the fifty states. She could ask for coffee, a bathroom, the time, where the post office was. Her English teacher, a deviant, assured her that her accent was superb, superb. The other girls allowed him to touch them, but Beli, now finely attuned to masculine weirdness, and certain that she was worthy only of a prince, sidled out from under his balmy hands.

A teacher asked them to start thinking about the new decade. Where would you like to see yourself: your country, and our glorious president in the coming years? No one understood the question so he had to break it down into two simple parts.

One of her classmates, Mauricio Ledesme, got in serious trouble, so bad that his family had to spirit him out of the country. He was a quiet boy who sat next to one of the Squadron, stewing always in his love for her. Perhaps he thought he’d impress her. (Not that far-fetched, for soon comes the generation who’s number-one ass-getting technique will not be to Be Like Mike, but to Be Like Che.) Perhaps he’d just had enough. He wrote in the crabbed handwriting of a future poet-revolutionary: I’d like to see our country be a democracia like the United States. I wish we would stop having dictators. Also I believe that it was Trujillo who killed Galindez.↓

^{≡ Much in the news in those days, Jesús de Galíndez was a Basque supernerd and a Columbia University grad student who had written a rather unsettling doctoral dissertation. The topic? Lamentably, unfortunately, sadly: the era of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Galíndez, a loyalist in the Spanish Civil War, had firsthand knowledge of the regime; he had taken refuge in Santo Domingo in 1939, occupied high positions therein, and by his departure in 1946 had developed a lethal allergy to the Failed Cattle Thief, could conceive for himself no higher duty than to expose the blight that was his regime. Crassweller describes Galíndez as ‘a bookish man, a type frequently found among political activists in Latin America…the winner of a prize in poetry,’ what we in the Higher Planes call a Nerd Class 2. But dude was a ferocious leftist, despite the dangers, gallantly toiling on his Trujillo dissertation.}

^{What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they’ve had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Deathstroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.}

^{Long story short: upon learning of the dissertation, El Jefe first tried to buy the thing and when that failed he dispatched his chief Nazgul (the sepulchral Felix Bernardino) to NYC and within days Galíndez got gagged, bagged, and dragged to La Capital, and legend has it when he came out of his chloroform nap he found himself naked, dangling from his feet over a cauldron of boiling oil, El Jefe standing nearby with a copy of the offending dissertation in hand. (And you thought your committee was rough.) Who in his right mind could ever have imagined anything so fucking ghastly? I guess El Jefe wanted to host a little tertulia with that poor doomed nerd. And what a tertulia it was, Dios mío! Anyway Galíndez’s disappearance caused an uproar in the States, with all fingers pointing to Trujillo, but of course he swore his innocence, and that was what Mauricio was referring to. But take heart: For every phalanx of nerds who die there are always a few who succeed. Not long after that horrific murder, a whole pack of revolutionary nerds ran aground on a sandbar on the southeast coast of Cuba. Yes, it was Fidel and Revolutionary Crew, back for a rematch against Batista. Of the eighty-two revolutionaries who splashed ashore, only twenty-two survived to celebrate the New Year, including one book-loving argentino. A bloodbath, with Batista’s forces executing even those who surrendered. But these twenty-two, it would prove, were enough.}

That’s all it took. The next day both he and the teacher were gone. No one saying nothing.↓

^{≡ Reminds me of the sad case of Rafael Yepez: Yepez was a man who in the thirties ran a small prep school in the capital, not far from where I grew up, that catered to the Trujillato’s lower-level ladroncitos. One ill-starred day Yepez asked his students to write an essay on the topic of their choice—a broad-minded Betances sort of man was this Yepez—and unsurprisingly, one boy chose to compose a praise song to Trujillo and his wife, Dona Maria. Yepez made the mistake of suggesting in class that other Dominican women deserved as much praise as Dona María and that in the future, young men like his students would also become great leaders like Trujillo. I think Yepez confused the Santo Domingo he was living in with another Santo Domingo. That night the poor schoolteacher, along with his wife, his daughter, and the entire student body were rousted from their beds by military police, brought in closed trucks to the Fortress Ozama, and interrogated. The pupils were eventually released, but no one ever heard of poor Yepez or his wife or his daughter again.}

Beli’s essay was far less controversial. I will be married to a handsome wealthy man. I will also be a doctor with my own hospital that I will name after Trujillo.

At home she continued to brag to Dorea about her boyfriend, and when Jack Pujols’s photo appeared in the school newspaper she brought it home in triumph. Dorea was so overwhelmed she spent the night in her house, inconsolable, crying and crying. Beli could hear her loud and clear.

And then, in the first days of October, as the pueblo was getting ready to celebrate another Trujillo Birthday, Beli heard a whisper that Jack Pujols had broken up with his girlfriend. (Beli had always known about this girlfriend, who attended another school, but do you think she cared?) She was sure it was just a rumor, didn’t need any more hope to torture her. But it turned out to be more than rumor, and more than hope, because not two days later Jack Pujols stopped Beli in the hallway as though he were seeing her for the very first time. Cabral, he whispered, you’re beautiful. The sharp spice of his cologne like an intoxication. I know I am, she said, her face ablaze with heat. Well, he said, burying a mitt in his perfectly straight hair.

The next thing you know he was giving her rides in his brand-new Mercedes and buying her helados with the knot of dollars he carried in his pocket. Legally he was too young to drive, but do you think anybody in Santo Domingo stopped a colonel’s son for anything? Especially the son of a colonel who was said to be one of Ramfis Trujillo’s confidants? ↓

^{≡ By Ramfis Trujillo I mean of course Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Martinez, El Jefe’s first son, born while his mother was still married to another man, un cubano. It was only after the cubano refused to accept the boy as blood that Trujillo recognized Ramfis as his own. (Thanks, Dad!) He was the ‘famous’ son that El Jefe made a colonel at the age of four and a brigadier general at the age of nine. (Lil’ Fuckface, as he is affectionately known.) As an adult Ramfis was famed for being a polo player, a fucker of North American actresses (Kim Novak, how could you?), a squabbler with his father, and a frozen-hearted demon with a Humanity Rating of 0, who personally directed the indiscriminate torture-murders of 1959 (the year of the Cuban Invasion) and 1961 (after his father was assassinated, Ramfis personally saw to the horror torture of the conspirators). (In a secret report filed by the US consul, currently available at the JFK Presidential Library, Ramfis is described as ‘imbalanced,’ a young man who during his childhood amused himself by blowing the heads off chickens with a.44 revolver.) Ramfis fled the country after Trujillo’s death, lived dissolutely off his father’s swag, and ended up dying in a car crash of his own devising in 1969; the other car he hit contained the Duchess of Albuquerque, Teresa Beltran de Lis, who died instantly; Lil’ Fuckface went on murdering right to the end.}

AMOR!

It wasn’t quite the romance she would later make it out to be. A couple of talks, a walk on the beach while the rest of the class was having a picnic, and before she knew it she was sneaking into a closet with him after school and he was slipping it to her something terrible. Let’s just say that she finally understood why the other boys had given him the nickname Jack the Ripio; he had what even she knew to be an enormous penis, a Shiva-sized lingam, a destroyer of worlds. (And the whole time she’d thought they’d been calling him Jack the Ripper. Duh!) Later, after she’d been with the Gangster, she would realize how little respect Pujols had for her. But since she had nothing to compare it to at the time she assumed fucking was supposed to feel like she was being run through with a cudass. The first time she was scared shitless and it hurt bad (4d10), but nothing could obliterate the feeling she had that finally she was on her way, the sense of a journey starting, of a first step taken, of the beginning of something big.

Afterward she tried to embrace him, to touch his silken hair, but he shook off her caresses. Hurry up and get dressed. If we get caught my ass will be in the fire.

Which was funny because that’s exactly how her ass felt.

For about a month they scromfed in various isolated corners of the school until the day a teacher, acting on an anonymous tip from a member of the student body, surprised the undercover couple in flagrante delicto in a broom closet. Just imagine: Beli butt naked, her vast scar like nothing anybody had seen before, and Jack with his pants puddled around his ankle.

The scandal! Remember the time and the place: Baní in the late fifties. Factor in that Jack Pujols was the number-one son of the Blessed B—í clan, one of Baní’s most venerable (and filthy rich) families. Factor in that he’d been caught not with one of his own class (though that might have also been a problem) but with the scholarship girl, una prieta to boot. (The fucking of poor prietas was considered standard operating procedure for elites just as long as it was kept on the do-lo, what is elsewhere called the Strom Thurmond Maneuver.) Pujols of course blamed Beli for everything. Sat in the office of the rector and explained in great detail how she had seduced him. It wasn’t me, he insisted. It was her! The real scandal, however, was that Pujols was actually engaged to that girlfriend of his, the half-in-the-grave Rebecca Brito, herself a member of Baní’s other powerful family, the R—, and you better believe Jack getting caught in a closet with una prieta kebabbed any future promise of matrimony. (Her family very particular about their Christian reputation.) Pujols’s old man was so infuriated⁄humiliated that he started beating the boy as soon as he laid hands on him and within the week had shipped him off to a military school in Puerto Rico where he would, in the colonel’s words, learn the meaning of duty. Beli never saw him again except once in the Listin Diario and by then they were both in their forties.

Pujols might have been a bitch-ass rat, but Beli’s reaction was one for the history books. Not only was our girl not embarrassed by what had happened, even after being shaken down by the rector and the nun and the janitor, a holy triple-team, she absolutely refused to profess her guilt! If she had rotated her head around 360 degrees and vomited green-pea soup it would have caused only slightly less of an uproar. In typical hard-headed Beli fashion, our girl insisted that she’d done nothing wrong, that, in fact, she was well within her rights.

I’m allowed to do anything I want, Beli said stubbornly, with my husband.

Pujols, it seems, had promised Belicia that they would be married as soon as they’d both finished high school, and Beli had believed him, hook, line, and sinker. Hard to square her credulity with the hardnosed no-nonsense femme-matador I’d come to know, but one must remember: she was young and in love. Talk about fantasist: the girl sincerely believed that Jack would be true.

The Good Teachers of El Redentor never squeezed anything close to a mea culpa from the girl. She kept shaking her head, as stubborn as the Laws of the Universe themselves—No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No NoNo No No No No No No No No No No No No No. Not that it mattered in the end. Belicia’s tenure at the school was over, and so were La Incas dreams of re-creating, in Beli, her father’s genius, his magis (his excellence in all things).

In any other family such a thing would have meant the beating of Beli to within an inch of her life, beating her straight into the hospital with no delay, and then once she was better beating her again and putting her back into the hospital, but La Inca was not that kind of parent. La Inca, you see, was a serious woman, an upstanding woman, one of the best of her class, but she was incapable of punishing the girl physically. Call it a hitch in the universe, call it mental illness, but La Inca just couldn’t do it. Not then, not ever. All she could do was wave her arms in the air and hurl laments. How could this have happened? La Inca demanded. How? How?

He was going to marry me! Beli cried. We were going to have children! Are you insane? La Inca roared. Hija, have you lost your mind?

Took a while for shit to calm down—the neighbors loving the whole thing (I told you that blackie was good for nothing!)—but eventually things did, and only then did La Inca convoke a special session on our girl’s future. First La Inca gave Beli tongue-lashing number five hundred million and five, excoriating her poor judgment, her poor morals, her poor every thing, and only when those preliminaries were good and settled did La Inca lay down the law: You are returning to school. Not to El Redentor but somewhere nearly as good. Padre Billini.

And Beli, her eyes still swollen from Jack-loss, laughed. I’m not going back to school. Not ever.

Had she forgotten the suffering that she had endured in her Lost Years in the pursuit of education? The costs? The terrible scars on her back? (The Burning.) Perhaps she had, perhaps the prerogatives of this New Age had rendered the vows of the Old irrelevant. However, during those tumultuous post-expulsion weeks, while she’d been writhing in her bed over the loss of her ‘husband,’ our girl had been rocked by instances of stupendous turbidity. A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli’s first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve. Never again would she follow any lead other than her own. Not the rector’s, not the nuns’, not La Inca’s, not her poor dead parents’. Only me, she whispered. Me.

This oath did much to rally her. Not long after the back-to-school showdown, Beli put on one of La Inca’s dresses (was literally bursting in it) and caught a ride down to the parque central. This was not a huge trip. But, still, for a girl like Beli it was a precursor of things to come.

When she returned to the house in the late afternoon she announced: I have a job! La Inca snorted. I guess the cabarets are always hiring.

It was not a cabaret. Beli might have been a puta major in the cosmology of her neighbors but a cuero she was not. No: she had landed a job as a waitress at a restaurant on the parque. The owner, a stout well-dressed Chinese by the name of Juan Then, had not exactly needed anyone; in fact he didn’t know if he needed himself: Business terrible, he lamented. Too much politics. Politics bad for everything but politicians.

No excess money. And already many impossible employees. But Beli was not willing to be rejected. There’s a lot I can do. And pinched her shoulder blades, to emphasize her ‘assets’.

Which for a man any less righteous would have been an open invitation but Juan simply sighed: No obligated be without shame. We try you up. Probationary period. Can’t promises build. Political conditions give promises no hospitality.

What’s my salary?

Salary! No salary! You a waitress, you tips.

How much are they?

Once again the glumness. It is without certainy.

I don’t understand.

His brother José’s bloodshot eyes glanced up from the sports section. What my brother is saying is that it all depends.

And here’s La Inca shaking her head: A waitress. But, hija, you’re a baker’s daughter, you don’t know the first thing about waitressing!

La Inca assumed that because Beli had of late not shown any enthusiasm for the bakery or school or for cleaning she’d devolved into a zángana. But she’d forgotten that our girl had been a criada in her first life; for half her years she’d know nothing but work. La Inca predicted that Beli would call it quits within a couple of months, but Beli never did. On the job our girl, in fact, showed her quality: she was never late, never malingered, worked her sizable ass of. Heck, she liked the job. It was not exactly President of the Republic, but for a fourteen-year-old who wanted out of the house, it paid, and kept her in the world while she waited for—for her Glorious Future to materialize.

Eighteen months she worked at the Palacio Peking. (Originally called EI Tesoro de—, in honor of the Admiral’s true but never-reached destination, but the Brothers Then had changed it when they learned that the Admiral’s name was a fukú! Chinese no like curses, Juan had said.) She would always say she came of age in the restaurant, and in some ways she did. She learned to beat men at dominoes and proved herself so responsible that the Brothers Then could leave her in charge of the cook and the other waitstaff while they slipped out to fish and visit their thick-legged girlfriends. In later years Beli would lament that she had ever lost touch with her ‘chinos’. They were so good to me, she moaned to Oscar and Lola. Nothing like your worthless esponja of a father. Juan, the melancholic gambler, who waxed about Shanghai as though it were a love poem sung by a beautiful woman you love but cannot have. Juan, the shortsighted romantic whose girlfriends robbed him blind and who never mastered Spanish (though in later years when he was living in Skokie, Illinois, he would yell at his Americanized grandchildren in his guttural Spanish, and they laughed at him, thinking it Chinese). Juan, who taught Beli how to play dominoes, and whose only fundamentalism was his bulletproof optimism: If only Admiral come to our restaurant first, imagine the trouble that could be avoided! Sweating, gentle Juan, who would have lost the restaurant if not for his older brother José, the enigmatic, who hovered at the periphery with all the menace of a ciclón; José, the bravo, the guapo, his wife and children dead by warlord in the thirties; José, who protected the restaurant and the rooms above with an implacable ferocity. José, whose grief had extracted from his body all softness, idle chatter, and hope. He never seemed to approve of Beli, or any of the other employees, but since she alone wasn’t scared of him (I’m almost as tall as you are!), he reciprocated by giving her practical instructions: You want to be a useless woman all your life? Like how to hammer nails, fix electrical outlets, cook chow fun and drive a car, all would come in good use when she became the Empress of Diaspora. (José would acquit himself bravely in the revolution, fighting, I must regretfully report, against the pueblo, and would die in 1976 in Adanta, cancer of the pancreas, crying out his wife’s name, which the nurses confused for more Chinese gobbledygook—extra emphasis, in their minds, on the gook.)

And then there was Lillian, the other waitress, a squat rice tub, whose rancor against the world turned to glee only when humanity exceeded in its venality, brutality, and mendacity even her own expectations. She didn’t take to Beli at first, thought her competition, but eventually would treat Beli more or less with courtesy: She was the first woman our girl met who read the paper. (Herson’s biblio-mania would remind her always of Lillian. How’s the world keeping? Beli asked her. Jodido, was always her answer.) And Indian Benny, a quiet, meticulous waiter who had the sad airs of a man long accustomed to the spectacular demolition of dreams. Rumor at the restaurant had it that Indian Benny was married to a huge, lusty azuana who regularly put him on the street so that she could bunk some new sweetmeat. The only time Indian Benny was known to smile was when he beat José at dominoes—the two were consummate tile slingers and of course bitter rivals. He too would fight in the revolution, for the home team, and it was said that throughout that Summer of Our National Liberation Indian Benny never stopped smiling; even after a Marine sniper cavitated his brains over his entire command he didn’t stop. And what about the cook, Marco Antonio, a one-legged, no-ear grotesque straight out of Gormenghast? (His explanation for his appearance: I had an accident.) His bag was an almost fanatical distrust of cibaeños, whose regional pride, he was convinced, masked imperial ambitions on a Haitian level. They want to seize the Republic. I’m telling you, cristiano, they want to start their own country!

The whole day she dealt with hombres of all stripes and it was here Beli perfected her rough-spun salt-of-the-earth bonhomie. As you might imagine, everybody was in love with her. (Including her coworkers. But José had warned them off: Touch her and I’ll pull your guts out your culo. You must be joking, Marco Antonio said in his own defense. I couldn’t climb that mountain even with two legs.) The customers’ attention was exhilarating and she in turn gave the boys something that most men can never get enough of—ribbing, solicitous mothering from an attractive woman. Still plenty of niggers in Baní, old customers, who remember her with great fondness.

La Inca of course was anguished by Beli’s Fall, from princesa to mesera—what is happening to the world? At home the two rarely spoke anymore; La Inca tried to talk, but Beli wouldn’t listen, and for her part La Inca filled that silence with prayer, trying to summon a miracle that would transform Beli back into a dutiful daughter. As fate would have it, once Beli had slipped her grasp not even God had enough caracaracol to bring her back. Every now and then La Inca would appear at the restaurant. She’d sit alone, erect as a lectern, all in black, and between sips of tea would watch the girl with a mournful intensity. Perhaps she hoped to shame Beli into returning to Operation Restore House of Cabral, but Beli went about her work with her customary zeal. It must have dismayed La Inca to see how drastically her ‘daughter’ was changing, for Beli, the girl who never used to speak in public, who could be still as Noh, displayed at Palacio Peking a raconteur’s gift for palaver that delighted a great many of the all-male clientele. Those of you who have stood at the corner of 142nd and Broadway can guess what it was she spoke: the blunt, irreverent cant of the pueblo that gives all dominicanos cultos nightmares on their 400-thread-count sheets and that La Inca had assumed had perished along with Beli’s first life in Outer Azua, but here it was so alive, it was like it had never left: Oye, parigüayo, y que pasó con esa esposa tuya? Gordo, no me digas que tú todavía tienes hambre?

Eventually there came a moment when she’d pause at La Inca’s table: Do you want anything else?

Only that you would return to school, mi’ja.

Sorry. Beli picked up her taza and wiped the table in one perfunctory motion. We stopped serving pendejada last week.

And then La Inca paid her quarter and was gone and a great weight lifted off Beli, proof that she’d done the right thing.

In those eighteen months she learned a great deal about herself. She learned that despite all her dreams to be the most beautiful woman in the world, to have the brothers jumping out of windows in her wake, when Belicia Cabral fell in love she stayed in love. Despite the trove of men, handsome, plain, and ugly, who marched into the restaurant intent on winning her hand in marriage (or at least in fuckage), she never had a thought for anyone but Jack Pujols. Turns out that in her heart our girl was more Penelope than Whore of Babylon. (Of course La Inca, who witnessed the parade of men muddying her doorstep, would not have agreed.) Beli often had dreams where Jack returned from military school, dreams where he’d be waiting for her at the job, spilled out at one of the tables like a beautiful bag of swag, a grin on his magnificent face, his Eyes of Adantis on her at last, only on her. I came back for you, mi amor. I came back.

Our girl learned that even to a chooch like Jack Pujols she was true.

But that didn’t mean she reclused herself entirely from the world of men. (For all her ‘fidelity’ she would never be a sister who liked being without male attention.) Even in this rough period, Beli had her princes-in-waiting, brothers willing to brave the barbed-wired minefields of her affections in the hopes that beyond that cruel midden Elysium might await. The poor deluded chumps. The Gangster would have her every which way, but these poor sapos who came before the Gangster, they were lucky to get an abrazo. Let us summon back from the abyss two sapos in particular: the Fiat dealer, bald, white, and smiling, a regular Hipólito Mejia, but suave and cavalier and so enamored of North American baseball that he risked life and limb to listen to games on a contraband shortwave radio. He believed in baseball with the fervor of an adolescent and believed also that in the future Dominicans would storm the Major Leagues and compete with the Mandes and the Marises of the world. Marichal is only the beginning, he predicted, of a reconquista. You’re crazy, Beli said, mocking him and his ‘jueguito’. In an inspired stroke of counterprogramming, her other paramour was a student at the UASD—one of those City College types who’s been in school eleven years and is always five credits shy of a degree. Student today don’t mean na’, but in a Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the Fall of Arbenz, by the Stoning of Nixon, by the Guerrillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs—in a Latin America already a year and half into the Decade of the Guerrilla—a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. Such a student was Arquimedes. He also listened to the shortwave, but not for Dodgers scores; what he risked his life for was the news leaking out of Havana, news of the future. Arquimedes was, therefore, a student, the son of a zapatero and a midwife, a tirapiedra and a quemagoma for life. Being a student wasn’t a joke, not with Trujillo and Johnny Abbes↓ scooping up everybody following the foiled Cuban Invasion of 1959.

^{≡ Johnny Abbes Garcia was one of Trujillo’s beloved Morgul Lords. Chief of the dreaded and all-powerful secret police (SIM), Abbes was considered the greatest torturer of the Dominican People ever to have lived. An enthusiast of Chinese torture techniques, Abbes was rumored to have in his employ a dwarf who would crush prisoners’ testicles between his teeth. Plotted endlessly against Trujillo’s enemies, the killer of many young revolutionaries and students (including the Maribal Sisters). At Trujillo’s behest Abbes organized the plot to assassinate the democratically elected president of Venezuela: Rómulo Betancourt! (Betancourt and T-zillo were old enemies, beefing since the forties, when Trujillo’s SIMians tried to inject Betancourt with poison on the streets of Havana.) The second attempt worked no better than the first. The bomb, packed into a green Olds, blew the presidential Cadillac clean out of Caracas, slew the driver and a bystander but failed to kill Betancourt! Now that’s really gangster! (Venezolanos: Don’t ever say we don’t have history together. It’s not just the novelas that we share or the fact that so many of us flooded your shores to work in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Our dictator tried to slay your president!) After Trujillo’s death Abbes was named consul to Japan (just to get him out of the country) and ended up working for that other Caribbean nightmare, the Haitian dictator François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. Wasn’t nearly as loyal to Papa Doc as he was to Trujillo—after an attempted double-cross Papa Doc shot Abbes and his family and then blew their fucking house up. (I think P. Daddy knew exactly what kind of creature he was dealing with.) No Dominican believes that Abbes died in that blast. He is said to still be out there in the world, waiting for the next coming of El Jefe, when he too will rise from the Shadow.}

Wasn’t a day that passed that his life wasn’t in danger, and he had no fixed address, appeared in Beli’s day with no warning. Archie (as he was known) had an immaculate head of hair and Hector Lavoe glasses and the intensity of a South Beach dietician. Reviled the North Americans for their Silent Invasion of the DR and Dominicans for their annexationatist subservience to the North. Guacanagari has cursed us all! That his most beloved ideologues were a couple of Germans who never met a nigger they liked was beside the point.

Both of these dudes Beli played hard. Visited them at their digs and at the dealership and dished them their daily recommended allowance of noplay. A date couldn’t pass without the Fiat dealer begging her for a single grope. Just let me touch them with the back of my hand, he mewled, but nearly every time she picked him off in a fielder’s choice. Arquimedes, when rebuffed, at least showed some class. He didn’t pout or mutter, What the hell am I wasting my money for? He preferred to stay philosophical. The Revolution is not made in a day, he’d say ruefully and then kick back and entertain her with stories about dodging the secret police.

Even to a chooch like Jack Pujols she was true, yes, but eventually she did get over him. A romantic she was, but not a pendeja.

When she finally came to, however, things had turned dicey, to say the least. The country was in an uproar; after the failed invasion of 1959 an underground conspiracy of youth had been uncovered and everywhere young people were being arrested and tortured and killed. Politics, Juan spat, staring at all the empty tables, politics. José didn’t offer comment; he simply cleaned his Smith & Wesson in the privacy of his upstairs room. I don’t know I’ll make it out of this one, Arquimedes said in a barefaced attempt to cadge a pity fuck. You’ll be fine, Beli snorted, pushing off his embrace. She was right in the end, but he was one of the few who made it through with his balls unfried. (Archie survives into the present, and when I drive through the capital with my man Pedro, I occasionally spot his grill on campaign posters for one of the radical splinter parties whose sole platform is to bring electricity back to the Dominican Republic. Pedro snorts: Ese ladrón no va’ pa’ ningún la’ o.)

In February, Lillian had to quit the job and return to her campo to care for her ailing mother, a señora who, Lillian claimed, had never given a damn for her well-being. But it is the fate of women everywhere to be miserable always, Lillian declared, and then she was gone and only the cheap freebie calendar she liked marking off remained. A week later the Brothers Then hired a replacement. A new girl. Constantina. In her twenties, sunny and amiable, whose cuerpo was all pipa and no culo, a ‘mujer alegre’ (in the parlance of the period). More than once Constantina arrived to lunch straight from a night of partying, smelling of whiskey and stale cigarettes. Muchacha, you wouldn’t believe el lío en que me metí anoche. She was disarmingly chill and could curse the black off a crow, and, perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit alone in the world, took an immediate liking to our girl. My hermanita, she called Beli. The most beautiful girl. You’re proof that God is Dominican. Constantina was the person who finally pried the Sad Ballad of Jack Pujols out of her.

Her advice? Forget that hijo de la porra, that comehuevo. Every desgraciado who walks in here is in love with you. You could have the whole maldito world if you wanted.

The world! It was what she desired with her entire heart, but how could she achieve it? She watched the flow of traffic past the parque and did not know.

One day in a burbuja of girlish impulse they finished work early and, taking their earnings to the Spaniards down the street, bought a pair of matching dresses.

Now you look candela, Constantina said approvingly.

So what you going to do now? Beli asked.

A crooked-tooth smile. Me, I’m going to the Hollywood for a dance. I have un buen amigo working in the door and from what I hear there’ll be a whole assembly line of rich men with nothing to do but adore me, ay sí. She shivered her hands down the slopes of her hips. Then she stopped the show. Why, does the private-school princess actually want to come along?

Beli thought about it a moment. Thought about La Inca waiting for her at home. Thought about the heartbreak that was beginning to fade in her.

Yes. I want to go.

There it was, the Decision That Changed Everything. Or as she broke it down to Lola in her Last Days: All I wanted was to dance. What I got instead was esto, she said, opening her arms to encompass the hospital, her children, her cancer, America.

EL HOLLYWOOD

El Hollywood was Beli’s first real club.↓

^{≡ A favorite hangout of Trujillo’s, my mother tells me when the manuscript is almost complete.}

Imaginate: in those days El Hollywood was the It place to be in Baní, it was Alexander, Café Atlántico, and Jet Set rolled into one. The lights, the opulent decor, the guapos in the fine threads, the women striking their best bird-of-paradise poses, the band upon the stage like a visitation from a world of rhythm, the dancers so caught up in the planting of heel you would have thought they were bidding farewell to death itself—it was all here. Beli might have been out of her league, couldn’t order drinks or sit in the high chairs without losing her cheap shoes, but once the music started, well, it didn’t matter. A corpulent accountant put his hand out and for the next two hours Beli forgot her awkwardness, her wonderment, her trepidation, and danced. Dios mío did she dance! Dancing café out of the sky and exhausting partner after partner. Even the bandleader, a salt-and-pepper veterano from a dozen campaigns throughout Latin America and Miami shouted her out: La negra está encendida! La negra esta encendida indeed! Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won’t see it often. Everybody mistook her for a bailarina cubana from one of the shows and couldn’t believe that she was dominicana like them. It can’t be, no lo pareces, etc., etc.

And it was in this whirligig of pasos, guapos, and aftershave that he appeared. She was at the bar, waiting for Tina to return from ‘a cigarette break’. Her dress: wrecked; her perm: kicking; her arches: like they’d been given a starter course in foot binding. He, on the other hand, was the essence of relaxed cool. Here he is, future generation of de Leóns and Cabrals: the man who stole your Founding Mother’s heart, who catapulted her and hers into Diaspora. Dressed in a Rat Pack ensemble of black smoking jacket and white pants and not a dot of sweat on him, like he’d been keeping himself in refrigeration. Handsome in that louche potbellied mid-forties Hollywood producer sort of way, with pouched gray eyes that had seen (and didn’t miss) much. Eyes that had been scoping Beli for the better part of an hour, and it wasn’t like Beli hadn’t noticed. The nigger was some kind of baller, everybody in the club was paying tribute to him, and he rocked enough gold to have ransomed Atahualpa.

Let’s just say their first contact was not promising. How about I buy you a drink? he said, and when she turned away como una ruda, he grabbed her arm, hard, and said, Where are you going, morena? And that was all it took: a Beli le salío el lobo. First, she didn’t like to be touched. Not at all, not ever. Second, she was not a morena (even the car dealer knew better, called her india). And, third, there was that temper of hers. When baller twisted her arm, she went from zero to violence in under.2 seconds. Shrieked: No. Me. Toques. Threw her drink, her glass, and then her purse at him—if there had been a baby nearby she would have thrown that too. Then let him have it with a stack of cocktail napkins and almost a hundred plastic olive rapiers, and when those were done dancing on the tile she unleashed one of the great Street Fighter chain attacks of all time. During this unprecedented fusillade of blows the Gangster hunkered down and didn’t move except to deflect the stray chop away from his face. When she finished he lifted his head as though out of a foxhole and put a finger to his lips. You missed a spot, he said solemnly.

Well.

It was nothing but a simple encounter. The fight she had with La Inca upon her return was far more significant—La Inca waiting up for her with a belt in her hand—and when Beli stepped into the house, worn out from dancing, La Inca, lit by the kerosene lamp, lifted the belt in the air and Beli’s diamond eyes locked on to her. The primal scene between daughter and mother played out in every country of the world. Go ahead, Madre, Beli said, but La Inca could not do it, her strength leaving her. Hija, if you ever come home late again you’ll have to leave this house, and Beli saying, Don’t worry, I’ll be leaving soon enough. That night La Inca refused to get into bed with her, sleeping in her rocking chair, not speaking to her the next day either, going off to work by herself: her disappointment looming above her like a mushroom cloud. No question: it was her madre she should have been worried about, but for the rest of that week Beli found herself instead brooding on the stupidity of that gordo azaroso who (in her words) had ruined her whole night. Almost every day she found herself recounting the details of the confrontation to both the car dealer and Arquimedes, but with each telling she added further outrages which were not exactly true but seemed accurate in spirit. Un bruto, she called him. Un animal. How dare he try to touch me! As though he were someone, ese poco hombre, ese mamahuevo!

So he hit you? The car dealer was trying to pin her hand down to his leg but failing. Maybe that’s what I need to do.

And you’d get exactly what he got, she said.

Arquimedes, who had taken to standing in a closet while she visited him (just in case the secret police burst in), pronounced the Gangster a typical bourgeois type, his voice reaching her through all that fabric that the car dealer had bought her (and which Beli stored at his place). (Is this a mink fur? he asked her. Rabbit, she said morosely.)

I should have stabbed him, she said to Constantina.

Muchacha, I think he should have stabbed you.

What the hell do you mean?

I’m just saying, you talk about him a whole lot.

No, she said hotly. It’s not like that at all.

Then stop talking about him. Tina glanced down at a pretend watch. Five seconds. It must be a record.

She tried to keep him out of her mouth but it was hopeless. Her forearm ached at the oddest of moments and she could feel his hangdog eyes on her everywhere.

The next Friday was a big day at the restaurant; the local chapter of the Dominican Party was having an event and the staff busted their ass from early to late. Beli, who loved the bustle, showed some of her magis for hard work, and even José had to come out of the office to help cook. José awarded the head of the chapter with a bottle of what he claimed was ‘Chinese rum’ but which in fact was Johnnie Walker with the label scraped off. The higher echelons enjoyed their chow fun immensely but their campo underlings poked at the noodles miserably and asked over and over if there was any arroz con habichuelas, of which of course there was none. All in all the event was a success, you never would have guessed there was a dirty war going on, but when the last of the drunks was shuffled onto his feet and ushered into a cab, Beli, feeling not the least bit tired, asked Tina: Can we go back?

Where?

To El Hollywood.

But we have to change—

Don’t worry, I brought everything.

And before you know it she was standing over his table.

One of his dinner companions said: Hey, Dionisio, isn’t that the girl que te dío una pela last week? The bailer nodded glumly. His buddy looked her up and down. I hope for your sake she’s not back for a rematch. I don’t think you’ll survive.

What are you waiting for, the bailer asked. The bell?

Dance with me. Now it was her turn to grab him and drag him onto the pista.

He might have been a dense slab of tuxedo and thew, but he moved like an enchantment. You came looking for me, didn’t you?

Yes, she said, and only then did she know.

I’m glad you didn’t lie. I don’t like liars. He put his finger under her chin. What’s your name? She tore her head away. My name is Hypatia Belicia Cabral. No, he said with the gravity of an old-school pimp. Your name is Beautiful.

THE GANGSTER WE’RE ALL LOOKING FOR

How much Beli knew about the Gangster we will never know. She claims that he only told her he was a businessman. Of course I believed him. How was I supposed to know different?

Well, he certainly was a businessman, but he was also a flunky for the Trujillato, and not a minor one. Don’t misunderstand: our boy wasn’t no ring wraith, but he wasn’t no orc either.

Due partially to Beli’s silence on the matter and other folks’ lingering unease when it comes to talking about the regime, info on the Gangster is fragmented; I’ll give you what I’ve managed to unearth and the rest will have to wait for the day the páginas en blanco finally speak.

The Gangster was born in Samaná at the dawn of the twenties, the fourth son of a milkman, a bawling, worm-infested brat no one thought would amount to na’, an opinion his parents endorsed by turning him out of the house when he was seven. But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person’s character. By the time the Gangster was twelve this scrawny, unremarkable boy had shown a resourcefulness and fearlessness beyond his years. His claims that the Failed Cattle Thief had ‘inspired’ him brought him to the attention of the Secret Police, and before you could say SIM-salabim our boy was infiltrating unions and fingering sindicatos left and right. At age fourteen he killed his first ‘comunista,’ a favor for the appalling Felix Bernardino↓ and apparently the hit was so spectacular, so fucking chunky, that half the left in Baní immediately abandoned the DR for the relative safety of Nueva York. With the money he earned he bought himself a new suit and four pairs of shoes.

^{≡ Felix Wenceslao Bernardino, raised in La Romana, one of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar. Was consul in Cuba when the exiled Dominican labor organizer Mauricio Báez was mysteriously murdered on the streets of Havana. Felix was also rumored to have had a hand in the failed assassination of Dominican exile leader Angel Morales (the assassins burst in on his secretary shaving, mistook the lathered man for Morales, and shot him to pieces). In addition, Felix and his sister, Minerva Bernardino (first woman in the world to be an ambassador before the United Nations), were both in New York City when Jesús de Galíndez mysteriously disappeared on his way home at the Columbus Circle subway station. Talk about Have Gun, Will Travel. It was said the power of Trujillo never left him; the fucker died of old age in Santo Domingo, Trujillista to the end, drowning his Haitian workers instead of paying them.}

From that point on, the sky was the limit for our young villain. Over the next decade he traveled back and forth to Cuba, dabbled in forgery, theft, extortion, and money laundering—all for the Everlasting Glory of the Trujillato. It was even rumored, never substantiated, that our Gangster was the hammer-man who slew Mauricio Baez in Havana in 1950. Who can know? It seems a possibility; by then he’d acquired deep contacts in the Havana underworld and clearly had no compunction about slaying motherfuckers. Hard evidence, though, is scarce. That he was a favorite of Johnny Abbes and of Porfirio Rubirosa there can be no denying. He had a special passport from the Palacio, and the rank of major in some branch of the Secret Police.

Skilled our Gangster became in many a perfidy, but where our man truly excelled, where he smashed records and grabbed gold, was in the flesh trade. Then, like now, Santo Domingo was to popóla what Switzerland was to chocolate. And there was something about the binding, selling, and degradation of women that brought out the best in the Gangster; he had an instinct for it, a talent—call him the Caracaracol of Culo. By the time he was twenty-two he was operating his own string of brothels in and around the capital, owned houses and cars in three countries. Never stinted the Jefe on anything, be it money, praise, or a prime cut of culo from Colombia, and so loyal was he to the regime that he once slew a man at a bar simply for pronouncing El Jefe’s mother’s name wrong. Now here’s a man, El Jefe was rumored to have said, who is capaz.

The Gangster’s devotion did not go unrewarded. By the mid-forties the Gangster was no longer simply a well-paid operator; he was becoming an alguien—in photos he appears in the company of the regime’s three witchkings: Johnny Abbes, Joaquin Balaguer, and Felix Bernardino—and while none exists of him and El Jefe, that they broke bread and talked shit cannot be doubted. For it was the Great Eye himself who granted the Gangster authority over a number of the Trujillo-family’s concessions in Venezuela and Cuba, and under his draconian administration the so-called bang-for-the-buck ratio of Dominican sexworkers trebled. In the forties the Gangster was in his prime; he traveled the entire length of the Americas, from Rosario to Nueva York, in pimpdaddy style, staying at the best hotels, banging the hottest broads (never lost his sureño taste for the morenas, though), dining in four-star restaurants, confabbing with arch-criminals the world over.

An inexhaustible opportunist, he spun deals everywhere he went. Suitcases of dollars accompanied him back and forth from the capital. Life was not always pleasant. Plenty of acts of violence, plenty of beat-downs and knifings. He himself survived any number of gank-attempts, and after each shoot-out, after each drive-by, he always combed his hair and straightened his tie, a dandy’s reflex. He was a true gangster, gully to the bone, lived the life all those phony rap acts can only rhyme about.

It was also in this period that his long dalliance with Cuba was formalized. The Gangster might have harbored love for Venezuela and its many long-legged mulatas, and burned for the tall, icy beauties of Argentina, and swooned over Mexico’s incomparable brunettes, but it was Cuba that clove his heart, that felt to him like home. If he spent six months out of twelve in Havana I’d call that a conservative estimate, and in honor of his predilections the Secret Police’s code name for him was MAX GOMEZ. So often did he travel to Havana that it was more a case of inevitability than bad luck that on New Year’s Eve 1958, the night that Fulgencio Batista sacó piés out of Havana and the whole of Latin America changed, the Gangster was actually partying with Johnny Abbes in Havana, sucking whiskey out of the navels of underage whores, when the guerrillas reached Santa Clara. It was only the timely arrival of one of the Gangster’s informants that saved them all. You better leave now or you’ll all be hanging from your huevos! In one of the greatest blunders in the history of Dominican intelligence, Johnny Abbes almost didn’t make it out of Havana that New Year’s Eve; the Dominicans were literally on the last plane smoking, the Gangster’s face pressed against the glass, never to return.

When Beli encountered the Gangster, that ignominious midnight flight still haunted him. Beyond the financial attachment, Cuba was an important component to his prestige—to his manhood, really—and our man could still not accept the fact that the country had fallen to a rabble of scurvied students. Some days he was better than others, but whenever the latest news reached him of the revolution’s activities he would pull his hair and attack the nearest wall in sight. Not a day passed when he did not fulminate against Batista (That ox! That peasant!) or Castro (The goat-fucking comunista!) or CIA chief Allen Dulles (That effeminate!), who had failed to stop Batista’s ill-advised Mother’s Day Amnesty that freed Fidel and the other moncadistas to fight another day. If Dulles was right here in front of me I’d shoot him dead, he swore to Beli, and then I’d shoot his mother dead.

Life, it seemed, had struck the Gangster a dolorous blow, and he was uncertain as to how to respond. The future appeared cloudy and there was no doubt he sensed his own mortality and that of Trujillo in the fall of Cuba. Which might explain why, when he met Beli, he jumped on her stat. I mean, what straight middle-aged brother has not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy. And if what she often said to her daughter was true, Beli had some of the finest pussy around. The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas, and while the upper-class boys might have had their issues with her, the Gangster was a man of the world, had fucked more prietas than you could count. He didn’t care about that shit. What he wanted was to suck Beli’s enormous breasts, to fuck her pussy until it was a mango-juice swamp, to spoil her senseless so that Cuba and his failure there disappeared. As the viejos say, clavo saca clavo, and only a girl like Beli could erase the debacle of Cuba from a brother’s mind.

At first Beli had her reservations about the Gangster. Her ideal amor had been Jack Pujols, and here was this middle-aged Caliban who dyed his hair and had a thatch of curlies on his back and shoulders. More like a third-base umpire than an Avatar of her Glorious Future. But one should never underestimate what assiduity can accomplish—when assisted by heaping portions of lana and privilege. The Gangster romanced the girl like only middle-aged niggers know how: chipped at her reservation with cool aplomb and unself-conscious cursí—ness. Rained on her head enough flowers to garland Azua, bonfires of roses at the job and her house. (It’s romantic, Tina sighed. It’s vulgar, La Inca complained.) He escorted her to the most exclusive restaurants of the capital, took her to the clubs that had never tolerated a non-musician prieto inside their door before (dude was that powerful—to break. the injunction against black), places like the Hamaca, the Tropicalia (though not, alas, the Country Club, even he didn’t have the juice). He flattered her with top-notch muelas (from what I heard he paid a couple of grad-school Cyranos to churn ‘em out). Treated her to plays, movies, dances, bought her wardrobes of clothes and pirate chests of jewelry, introduced her to famous celebrities, and once even to Ramfis Trujillo himself—in other words, he exposed her to the fucking world (at least the one circumscribed by the DR), and you’d be surprised how even a hardheaded girl like Beli, committed as she was to an idealized notion of what love was, could find it in her heart to revise her views, if only for the Gangster.

He was a complicated (some would say comical), affable (some would say laughable) man who treated Beli very tenderly and with great consideration, and under him (literally and metaphorically) the education begun at the restaurant was completed. He was un hombre bien social, enjoyed being out and about, seeing and being seen, and that dovetailed nicely with Beli’s own dreams. But also un hombre conflicted about his past deeds. On the one hand, he was proud of what he’d accomplished. I made myself he told Beli, all by myself I have cars, houses, electricity, clothes, prendas, but when I was a niño I didn’t even own a pair of shoes. Not one pair. I had no family. I was an orphan. Do you understand?

She, an orphan herself understood profoundly.

On the other hand, he was tormented by his crimes. When he drank too much, and that was often, he would mutter things like, If you only knew the diabluras I’ve committed, you wouldn’t be here right now. And on some nights she would wake up to him crying. I didn’t mean to do it! I didn’t mean it!

And it was on one of those nights, while she cradled his head and brushed away his tears, that she realized with a start that she loved this Gangster.

Beli in love! Round Two! But unlike what happened with Pujols, this was the real deal: pure uncut unadulterated love, the Holy Grail that would so bedevil her children throughout their lives. Consider that Beli had longed, hungered, for a chance to be in love and to be loved back (not very long in real time but a forever by the chronometer of her adolescence). Never had the opportunity in her first lost childhood; and in the intervening years her desire for it had doubled over and doubled over like a katana being forged until finally it was sharper than the truth. With the Gangster our girl finally got her chance. Who is surprised that in the final four months of her relationship with him there would be such an outpouring of affect? As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiations, loved atomically.

As for the Gangster, he normally would have tired right quick of such an intensely adoring plaything, but our Gangster, grounded by the hurricane winds of history, found himself reciprocating. Writing checks with his mouth that his ass could never hope to cover. He promised her that once the troubles with the Communists were over he would take her to Miami and to Havana. I’ll buy you a house in both places just so you can know how much I love you!

A house? she whispered. Her hair standing on end. You’re lying to me!

I do not lie. How many rooms do you want?

Ten? she said uncertainly.

Ten is nothing. Make it twenty!

The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should have arrested him for it. And believe me, La Inca considered it. He’s a panderer, she declaimed. A thief of innocence! There’s a pretty solid argument to be made that La Inca was right; the Gangster was simply an old chulo preying on Beli’s naïveté. But if you looked at it from, say, a more generous angle you could argue that the Gangster adored our girl and that adoration was one of the greatest gifts anybody had ever given her. It felt unbelievably good to Beli, shook her to her core. (For the first time I actually felt like I owned my skin, like it was me and I was it.) He made her feel guapa and wanted and safe, and no one had ever done that for her. No one. On their nights together he would pass his hand over her naked body, Narcissus stroking that pool of his, murmuring, Guapa, guapa, over and over again. (He didn’t care about the burn scars on her back: It looks like a painting of a ciclón and that’s what you are, mi negrita, una tormenta en la madrugada.) The randy old goat could make love to her from sunup to sundown, and it was he who taught her all about her body, her orgasms, her rhythms, who said, You have to be bold, and for that he must be honored, no matter what happened in the end.

This was the affair that once and for all incinerated Beli’s reputation in Santo Domingo. No one in Baní knew exactly who the Gangster was and what he did (he kept his shit hush-hush), but it was enough that he was a man. In the minds of Beli’s neighbors, that prieta comparona had finally found her true station in life, as a cuero. Old-timers have told me that during her last months in the DR Beli spent more time inside the love motels than she had in school—an exaggeration, I’m sure, but a sign of how low our girl had fallen in the pueblo’s estimation. Beli didn’t help matters. Talk about a poor winner: now that she’d vaulted into a higher order of privilege, she strutted around the neighborhood, exulting and heaping steaming piles of contempt on everybody and everything that wasn’t the Gangster. Dismissing her barrio as an ‘infierno’ and her neighbors as ‘brutos’ and ‘cochinos,’ she bragged about how she would be living in Miami soon, wouldn’t have to put up with this un-country much longer. Our girl no longer maintained even a modicum of respectability at home. Stayed out until all hours of the night and permed her hair whenever she wanted. La Inca didn’t know what to do with her anymore; all her neighbors advised her to beat the girl into a blood clot (You might even have to kill her, they said regretfully), but La Inca couldn’t explain what it had meant to find the burnt girl locked in a chicken coop all those years ago, how that sight had stepped into her and rearranged everything so that now she found she didn’t have the strength to raise her hand against the girl. She never stopped trying to talk sense into her, though.

What happened to college?

I don’t want to go to college.

So what are you going to do? Be a Gangster’s girlfriend your whole life? Your parents, God rest their souls, wanted so much better for you. I told you not to talk to me about those people. You’re the only parents I have.

And look how well you’ve treated me. Look how well. Maybe people are right, La Inca despaired. Maybe you are cursed.

Beli laughed. You might be cursed, but not me.

Even the chinos had to respond to Beli’s change in attitude. We have you go, Juan said.

I don’t understand.

He licked his lips and tried again. We have to you go.

You’re fired, José said. Please leave your apron on the counter.

The Gangster heard about it and the next day some of his goons paid the Brothers Then a visit and what do you know if our girl wasn’t immediately reinstated. It wasn’t the same no more, though. The brothers wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t spin no stories about their youth in China and the Philippines. After a couple of days of the silent treatment Beli took the hint and stopped showing up altogether.

And now you don’t have a job, La Inca pointed out help fully.

I don’t need a job. He’s going to buy me a house.

A man whose own house you yourself have never visited is promising to buy you a house? And you believe him? Oh, hija. Yessir: our girl believed. After all, she was in love! The world was coming apart at the seams—Santo Domingo was in the middle of a total meltdown, the Trujillato was tottering, police blockades on every corner—and even the kids she’d gone to school with, the brightest and the best, were being swept up by the Terror. A girl from El Redentor told her that Jack Pujols’s little brother had gotten caught organizing against El Jefe and the colonel’s influence could not save the boy from having an eye gouged out with electric shocks. Beli didn’t want to hear it. After all, she was in love! In love! She wafted through her day like a woman with a concussion. It’s not like she had a number for the Gangster, or even an address (bad sign number one, girls), and he was in the habit of disappearing for days without warning (bad sign number two), and now that Trujillo’s war against the world was reaching its bitter crescendo (and now that he had Beli on lock), the days could become weeks, and when he reappeared from ‘his business’ he would smell of cigarettes and old fear and want only to fuck, and afterward he would drink whiskey and mutter to himself by the love-motel window. His hair, Beli noticed, was growing in gray.

She didn’t take kindly to these disappearances. They made her look bad in front of La Inca and the neighbors, who were always asking her sweetly, Where’s your savior now, Moses? She defended him against every criticism, of course, no brother has had a better advocate, but then took it out on his ass upon his return. Pouted when he appeared with flowers; made him take her to the most expensive restaurants; pestered him around the clock to move her out of her neighborhood; asked him what the hell he’d been doing these past x days; talked about the weddings she read about in the Listin, and just so you can see that La Inca’s doubts were not entirely wasted: wanted to know when he was going to bring her to his house. Hija de la gran puta, would you stop jodiéndome! We’re in the middle of a war here! He stood over her in his wifebeater, waving a pistol. Don’t you know what the Communists do to girls like you? They’ll hang you up by your beautiful tits. And then they’ll cut them off just like they did to the whores in Cuba!

During one of the Gangster’s longer absences, Beli, bored and desperate to escape the schadenfreude in her neighbors’ eyes, took it upon herself to ride the Blue Ball Express one last time in other words, she checked in on her old flames. Ostensibly she wanted to end things in a formal way, but I think she was just feeling down and wanted male attention. Which is fine. But then she made the classic mistake of telling these Dominican hombres about the new love of her life, how happy she was. Sisters: don’t ever ever do this. It’s about as smart as telling the judge who’s about to sentence you that back in the day you fingerfucked his mother. The car dealer, always so gentle, so decorous, threw a whiskey bottle at her, screaming, Why should I be happy for a stupid stinking mona! They were in his apartment on the Malecón—at least he showed you his house, Constantina would later crack—and if he had been a better righty she would have ended up brained, perhaps raped and killed, but his fastball only grazed her and then it was her turn on the mound. She put him away with four sinkers to the head, using the same whiskey bottle he’d thrown at her. Five minutes later, panting and barefoot in a cab, she was pulled over by the Secret Police, tipped off because they’d seen her running and it was only when they questioned her that she realized that she was still holding the bottle and it had bloody hair on one of its edges, the car dealer’s straight blond hair.

(Once they heard what happened they let me go.)

To his credit, Arquimedes acquitted himself in a more mature fashion. (Maybe because she told him first and had not yet grown flip.) After her confession she heard a ‘little noise’ from the closet where he was hiding and nothing else. Five minutes of silence and then she whispered, I’d better go. (She never saw him again in person, only on the TV, giving speeches, and in later years would wonder if he still thought of her, as she sometimes did of him.)

What have you been up to? the Gangster asked the next time he appeared.

Nothing, she said, throwing her arms around his neck, absolutely nothing.

A month before it all blew up, the Gangster took Beli on a vacation to his old haunts in Samaná. Their first real trip together, a peace offering prompted by a particularly long absence, a promissory note for future trips abroad. For those capitaleños who never leave the 27 de Febrero or who think Güaley is the Center of the Universe: Samaná es una chulería. One of the authors of the King James Bible traveled the Caribbean, and I often think that it was a place like Samaná that was on his mind when he sat down to pen the Eden chapters. For Eden it was, a blessed meridian where mar and sol and green have forged their union and produced a stubborn people that no amount of highfalutin prose can generalize.↓

^{≡ In my first draft, Samaná was actually Jarabacoa, but then my girl Leonie, resident expert in all things Domo, pointed out that there are no beaches in Jarabacoa. Beautiful rivers but no beaches. Leonie was also the one who informed me that the perrito (see first paragraphs of chapter one, ‘Ghetto Nerd at the End of the World’) wasn’t popularized until the late eighties, early nineties, but that was one detail I couldn’t change, just liked the image too much. Forgive me, historians of popular dance, forgive me!}

The Gangster was in high spirits, the war against the subversives was going swell, it seemed. (We got ‘em on the run, he gloated. Very soon all will be well.)

As for Beli, she remembered that trip as the nicest time she’d ever had in the DR. She would never again hear the name Samaná without recalling that final primavera of her youth, the primavera of her perfection, when she was still young and beautiful. Samaná would forever evoke memories of their lovemaking, of the Gangster’s rough chin scraping her neck, of the sound of the Mar Caribe romancing those flawless resortless beaches, of the safety she experienced, and the promise.

Three photos from that trip, and in every one she’s smiling.

They did all the stuff we Dominicans love to do on our vacations. They ate pescado frito and waded in the río. They walked along the beach and drank rum until the meat behind their eyes throbbed. It was the first time ever that Beli had her own space totally under her control, so while the Gangster dozed restfully in his hamaca she busied herself with playing wife, with creating a preliminary draft of the household they would soon inhabit. Mornings she would subject the cabana to the harshest of scourings and hang boisterous profusions of flowers from every beam and around every window, while her bartering produce and fish from the neighbors resulted in one spectacular meal after another—showing off the skills she acquired during the Lost Years—and the Gangster’s satisfaction, the patting of his stomach, the unequivocal praise, the soft emission of gases as he lay in the hamaca, it was music to her ears! (In her mind she became his wife that week in every sense but the legal.)

She and the Gangster even managed to have heart-to-hearts. On the second day, after he showed her his old home, now abandoned and hurricane-ruined, she asked: Do you ever miss having a family?

They were at the only nice restaurant in the city, where EI Jefe dined on his visits (they’ll still tell you that). You see those people? He pointed toward the bar. All those people have families, you can tell by their faces, they have families that depend on them and that they depend on, and for some of them this is good, and for some of them this is bad. But it all amounts to the same shit because there isn’t one of them who is free. They can’t do what they want to do or be who they should be. I might have no one in the world, but at least I’m free.

She had never heard anyone say those words. I’m free wasn’t a popular refrain in the Era of Trujillo. But it struck a chord in her, put La Inca and her neighbors and her still-up-in-the-air life in perspective.

I’m free.

I want to be like you, she told the Gangster days later when they were eating crabs she had cooked in an achiote sauce. He had just been telling her about the nude beaches of Cuba. You would have been the star of the show, he said, pinching her nipple and laughing.

What do you mean, you want to be like me?

I want to be free.

He smiled and chucked her under the chin. Then you will be, mi negra bella.

The next day the protective bubble about their idyll finally burst and the troubles of the real world came rushing in. A motorcycle driven by a hugely overweight policeman arrived at their cabana. Capitan, you’re needed in the Palacio, he said from under his chinstrap. More trouble with the subversives, it seems. I’ll send a car for you, the Gangster promised. Wait, she said, I’ll go with you, not wanting to be left, again, but he either didn’t hear or didn’t care. Wait, goddamn it, she shouted in frustration. But the motorcycle never slowed. Wait! The ride never materialized either. Fortunately Beli had gotten into the habit of stealing his money while he slept so that she could maintain herself during his absences; otherwise she would have been stranded on that fucking beach. After waiting eight hours like a parigüaya she hoisted her bag (left his shit in the cabana) and marched through the simmering heat like a vengeance on two legs, walked for what felt like half a day, until at last she happened upon a colmado, where a couple of sunstroked campesinos were sharing a warm beer while the colmadero, seated in the only shade in sight, waved the flies from his dukes. When they realized she was standing over them they all scrambled to their feet. By then her anger had drained away and she only wanted to be spared further walking. Do you know anybody who has a car? And by noon she was in a dust-choked Chevy, heading home. You better hold the door, the driver advised, or it might fall of.

Then it falls, she said, her arms firmly crossed.

At one point they passed through one of those godforsaken blisters of a community that frequently afflict the arteries between the major cities, sad assemblages of shacks that seem to have been deposited in situ by a hurricane or other such calamity. The only visible commerce was a single goat carcass hanging unfetchingly from a rope, peeled down to its corded orange musculature, except for the skin of its face, which was still attached, like a funeral mask. He’d been skinned very recently, the flesh was still shivering under the shag of flies. Beli didn’t know if it was the heat or the two beers she drank while the colmadero sent for his cousin or the skinned goat or dim memories of her Lost Years, but our girl could have sworn that a man sitting in a rocking chair in front of one of the hovels had no face and he waved at her as she passed but before she could confirm it the pueblito vanished into the dust. Did you see something? Her driver sighed, Please I can barely keep my eyes on the road.

Two days after her return the cold had settled in the pit of her stomach like something drowned in there. She didn’t know what was wrong; every morning she was vomiting.

It was La Inca who saw it first. Well, you finally did it. You’re pregnant. No I’m not, Beli rasped, wiping the fetid mash from her mouth. But she was.

REVELATION

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?

UPON FURTHER REFLECTION

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.

NAME GAME

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.

TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES 2

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.

HESITATION

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.

LA INCA, THE DIVINE

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—

CHOICE AND CONSEQUENCES

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.

You have to rise.

My baby, Beli wept. Mi hijo precioso.

Hypatia, your baby is dead.

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.

You have to follow.

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.}

FUKÚ VS. ZAFA

There are still many, on and off the Island, who offer Beli’s near-fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the House Cabral was indeed victim of a high-level fukú, the local version of House Atreus. Two Truji-líos in one lifetime—what in carajo else could it be? But other heads question that logic, arguing that Beli’s survival must be evidence to the contrary. Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of cane-fields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a ‘mother’ with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything, say these heads, it is that our Beli was blessed.

What about the dead son? The world is full of tragedies enough without niggers having to resort to curses for explanations.

A conclusion La Inca wouldn’t have argued with. To her dying day she believed that Beli had met not a curse but God out in that cane-field.

I met something, Beli would say, guardedly.

BACK AMONG THE LIVING

Touch and go, I tell you, until the fifth day. And when at last she returned to consciousness she did so screaming. Her arm felt like it had been pinched off at the elbow by a grindstone, her head crowned in a burning hoop of brass, her lung like the exploded carcass of a piñata—Jesú! Cristo! She started crying almost immediately, but what our girl did not know was that for the last half-week, two of the best doctors in Baní had tended her covertly; friends of La Inca and anti-Trujillo to the core, they set her arm and plastered it, stitched shut the frightening gashes on her scalp (sixty puntos in all), doused her wounds with enough Mercurochrome to disinfect an army, injected her with morphine and against tetanus. Many late nights of worry, but the worst, it seemed, was over. These doctors, with a spiritual assist from La Inca’s Bible group, had performed a miracle, and all that remained was the healing. (She is lucky that she is so strong, the doctors said, packing their stethoscopes. The Hand of God is upon her, the prayer leaders confirmed, stowing their Bibles.) But blessed was not what our girl felt. After a couple of minutes of hysterical sobbing, of re-adjusting to the fact of the bed, to the fact of her life, she lowed out La Inca’s name.

From the side of the bed the quiet voice of the Benefactor: Don’t talk. Unless it’s to thank the Savior for your life. Mama, Beli cried. Mama. They killed my bebe, they tried to kill me—And they did not succeed, La Inca said. Not for lack of trying, though. She put her hand on the girl’s forehead.

Now it’s time for you to be quiet. For you to be still.

That night was a late-medieval ordeal. Beli alternated from quiet weeping to gusts of rabia so fierce they threatened to throw her out of the bed and reopen her injuries. Like a woman possessed, she drove herself into her mattress, went as rigid as a board, flailed her good arm around, beat her legs, spit and cursed. She wailed—despite a punctured lung and cracked ribs—she wailed inconsolably. Mama, me mataron a mi hijo. Estoy sola, estoy sola. Sola? La Inca leaned close. Would you like me to call your Gangster?

No, she whispered.

La Inca gazed down at her. I wouldn’t call him either.

That night Beli drifted on a vast ocean of loneliness, buffeted by squalls of despair, and during one of her intermittent sleeps she dreamt that she had truly and permanently died and she and her child shared a coffin and when she finally awoke for good, night had broken and out in the street a grade of grief unlike any she’d encountered before was being uncoiled, a cacophony of wails that seemed to have torn free from the cracked soul of humanity itself Like a funeral song for the entire planet.

Mama, she gasped, mama.

Mama!

Tranquilisate, muchacha.

Mama, is that for me? Am I dying? Dime, mama.

Ay, hija, no seas ridícula. La Inca put her hands, awkward hyphens, around the girl. Lowered her mouth to her ear: It’s Trujillo. Gunned down, she whispered, the night Beli had been kidnapped. No one knows anything yet. Except that he’s dead.↓

^{≡ They say he was on his way for some ass that night. Who is surprised? A consummate culocrat to the end. Perhaps on that last night, El Jefe, sprawled in the back of his Bel Air, thought only of the routine pussy that was awaiting him at Estancia Fundación. Perhaps he thought of nothing. Who can know? In any event: there is a black Chevrolet fast approaching, like Death itself, packed to the rim with U.S.-backed assassins of the higher classes, and now both cars are nearing the city limits, where the streetlights end (for modernity indeed has its limits in Santo Domingo), and in the dark distance looms the cattle fairgrounds where seventeen months before some other youth had intended to assassinate him. El Jefe asks his driver, Zacharias, to turn on the radio, but—how appropriate—there is a poetry reading on and off it goes again. Maybe the poetry reminds him of Galíndez.}

^{Maybe not.}

^{The black Chevy flashes its lights innocuously, asking to pass, and Zacharias, thinking it’s the Secret Police, obliges by slowing down, and when the cars come abreast, the escopeta wielded by Antonio de la Maza (whose brother—surprise, surprise—was killed in the Galíndez cover-up—which goes to show that you should always be careful when killing nerds, never know who will come after you) goes boo-ya! And now (so goes the legend) El Jefe cries, Coño, me hirieron! The second shotgun blast hits Zacharias in the shoulder and he almost stops the car, in pain and shock and surprise. Here now the famous exchange: Get the guns, El Jefe says. Vamos a pelear. And Zacharias says: No, Jefe, son mucho, and El Jefe repeats himself: Vamos a pelear. He could have ordered Zacharias to turn the car back to the safety of his capital, but instead he goes out like Tony Montana. Staggers out of the bullet-ridden Bel Air, holding a.38 in his hand. The rest is, of course, history, and if this were a movie you’d have to film it in John Woo slow motion. Shot at twenty-seven times—what a Dominican number—and suffering from four hundred hit points of damage, a mortally wounded Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina is said to have taken two steps toward his birthplace, San Cristobal, for, as we know, all children, whether good or bad, eventually find their way home, but thinking better of it he turned back toward La Capital, to his beloved city, and fell for the last time. Zacharias, who’d had his mid-parietal region creased by a round from a.357, got blown into the grass by the side of the road; miracle of miracles, he would survive to tell the tale of the ajustamiento. De la Maza, perhaps thinking of his poor, dead, set-up brother, then took Trujillo’s.38 out of his dead hand and shot Trujillo in the face and uttered his now famous words: Éste guaraguao ya no comerá mas pollito. And then the assassins stashed El Jefe’s body—where? In the trunk, of course.}

^{And thus passed old Fuckface. And thus passed the Era of Trujillo (sort of).}

^{I’ve been to the neck of road where he was gunned down many many times. Nothing to report except that the guagua from Haina almost always runs my ass over every time I cross the highway. For a while, I hear, that stretch was the haunt of what El Jeffe worried about the most: los maricones.}

LA INCA, IN DECLINE

It’s all true, plataneros. Through the numinous power of prayer La Inca saved the girl’s life, laid an A-plus zafa on the Cabral family fukú (but at what cost to herself?). Everybody in the neighborhood will tell you how, shortly after the girl slipped out of the country, La Inca began to diminish, like Galadriel after the temptation of the ring—out of sadness for the girl’s failures, some would say, but others would point to that night of Herculean prayer. No matter what your take, it cannot be denied that soon after Beli’s departure La Inca’s hair began to turn a snowy white, and by the time Lola lived with her she was no longer the Great Power she had been. Yes, she had saved the girl’s life, but to what end? Beli was still profoundly vulnerable. At the end of The Return of the King, Sauron’s evil was taken by ‘a great wind’ and nearly ‘blown away,’ with no lasting consequences to our heroes;↓ but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily.

^{≡ ‘And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent; for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell’.}

Even after death his evil lingered. Within hours of El Jefe dancing bien pegao with those twenty-seven bullets, his minions ran amok—fulfilling, as it were, his last will and vengeance. A great darkness descended on the Island and for the third time since the rise of Fidel people were being rounded up by Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, and a good plenty were sacrificed in the most depraved fashion imaginable, the orgy of terror—funeral goods for the father from the son. Even a woman as potent as La Inca, who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within Baní her own personal Lothlórien, knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the Eye. What was to keep the assassins from returning to finish what they’d started? After all, they had killed the world-famous Mirabal Sisters,↓ who were of Name; what was to stop them from killing her poor orphaned negrita?

^{≡ And where were the Mirabal Sisters murdered? In a cane-field, of course. And then their bodies were put in a car and a crash was simulated! Talk about two for one!}

La Inca felt the danger palpably, intimately. And perhaps it was the strain of her final prayer, but each time La Inca glanced at the girl she could swear that there was a shadow standing just behind her shoulder which disappeared as soon as you tried to focus on it. A dark horrible shadow that gripped her heart. And it seemed to be growing.

La Inca needed to do something, so, not yet recovered from her Hail Mary play, she called upon her ancestors and upon Jesú Cristo for help. Once again she prayed. But on top of that, to show her devotion, she fasted. Pulled a Mother Abigail. Ate nothing but one orange, drank nothing but water. After that last vast expenditure of piety her spirit was in an uproar. She did not know what to do. She had a mind like a mongoose but she was not, in the end, a worldly woman. She spoke to her friends, who argued for sending Beli to the campo. She’ll be safe there. She spoke to her priest. You should pray for her.

On the third day, it came to her. She was dreaming that she and her dead husband were on the beach where he had drowned. He was dark again as he always was in summer.

You have to send her away.

But they’ll find her in the campo.

You have to send her to Nueva York. I have it on great authority that it is the only way.

And then he strutted proudly into the water; she tried to call him back, Please, come back, but he did not listen.

His otherworldly advice was too terrible to consider. Exile to the North! To Nueva York, a city so foreign she herself had never had the ovaries to visit. The girl would be lost to her, and La Inca would have failed her great cause: to heal the wounds of the Fall, to bring House Cabral back from the dead. And who knows what might happen to the girl among the yanquis? In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüenceria as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes. How La Inca wrestled with herself those long nights! But which side was Jacob and which side was the Angel? After all, who was to say that the Trujillos would remain in power much longer? Already the necromantic power of El Jefe was waning and in its place could be felt something like a wind. Rumors flew as thick as ciguas, rumors that the Cubans were preparing to invade, that the Marines had been spotted on the horizon. Who could know what tomorrow would bring? Why send her beloved girl away? Why be hasty?

La Inca found herself in practically the same predicament Beli’s father had found himself in sixteen years earlier, back when the House of Cabral had first come up against the might of the Trujillos. Trying to decide whether to act or to stay still.

Unable to choose, she prayed for further guidance—another three days without food. Who knows how it might have turned out had not the Elvises come calling? Our Benefactor might have gone out exactly like Mother Abigail. But thankfully the Elvises surprised her as she was sweeping the front of the house. Is your name Myotis Toribio? Their pompadours like the backs of beetles. African muscles encased in pale summer suits, and underneath their jackets the hard, oiled holsters of their fire-arms did creak.

We want to speak to your daughter, Elvis One growled.

Right now, Elvis Two added.

Por supuesto, she said and when she emerged from the house holding a machete the Elvises retreated to their car, laughing.

Elvis One: We’ll be back, vieja.

Elvis Two: believe us.

Who was that? Beli asked from her bed, her hands clutching at her nonexistent stomach. No one, La Inca said, putting the machete next to the bed. The next night, ‘no one’ shot a peephole clean through the front door of the house.

The next couple of nights she and the girl slept under the bed, and a little bit later in the week she told the girl: No matter what happens I want you to remember: your father was a doctor, a doctor. And your mother was a nurse.

And finally the words: You should leave.

I want to leave. I hate this place.

The girl by this time could hobble to the latrine under her own power. She was much changed. During the day she would sit by the window in silence, very much like La Inca after her husband drowned. She did not smile, she did not laugh, she talked to no one, not even her friend Dorca. A dark veil had closed over her, like nata over café.

You don’t understand, hija. You have to leave the country. They’ll kill you if you don’t.

Beli laughed.

Oh, Beli; not so rashly, not so rashly: What did you know about states or diasporas? What did you know about Nueba Yol or unheated ‘old law’ tenements or children whose self-hate short-circuited their minds? What did you know, madame, about immigration? Don’t laugh, mi negrita, for your world is about to be changed. Utterly. Yes: a terrible beauty is etc., etc. Take it from me. You laugh because you’ve been ransacked to the limit of your soul, because your lover betrayed you almost unto death, because your first son was never born. You laugh because you have no front teeth and you’ve sworn never to smile again.

I wish I could say different but I’ve got it right here on tape. La Inca told you you had to leave the country and you laughed. End of story.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE REPUBLIC

She would remember little of the final months beyond her anguish and her despair (and her desire to see the Gangster dead). She was in the grips of the Darkness, passed through her days like a shade passes through life. She did not move from the house unless forced; at last they had the relationship La Inca had always longed for, except that they didn’t speak. What was there to say? La Inca talked soberly about the trip north, but Beli felt like a good part of her had already disembarked. Santo Domingo was fading. The house, La Inca, the fried yuca she was putting into her mouth were already gone—it was only a matter of allowing the rest of the world to catch up. The only time she felt close to her old sense was when she spotted the Elvises lurking in the neighborhood. She would cry out in mortal fear, but they drove off with smirks on their faces. We’ll see you soon. Real soon. At night there were nightmares of the cane, of the Faceless One, but when she awoke from them La Inca was always there. Tranquila, hija. Tranquila.

(Regarding the Elvises: What stayed their hand? Perhaps it was the fear of retribution now that the Trujillato had fallen. Perhaps it was La Inca’s power. Perhaps it was that force from the future reaching back to protect the third and final daughter? Who can know?)

La Inca, who I don’t think slept a single day during those months. La Inca, who carried a machete with her everywhere. Homegirl was bout about it. Knew that when Gondolin falls you don’t wait around for the balrogs to tap on your door. You make fucking moves. And make moves she did. Papers were assembled, palms were greased, and permissions secured. In another time it would have been impossible, but with El Jefe dead and the Plátano Curtain shattered all manner of escapes were now possible. La Inca gave Beli photos and letters from the woman she’d be staying with in a place called El Bronx. But none of it reached Beli. She ignored the pictures, left the letters unread, so that when she arrived at Idlewild she would not know who it was she should be looking for. La pobrecita.

Just as the standoff between the Good Neighbor and what remained of Family Trujillo reached the breaking point, Beli was brought before a judge. La Inca made her put ojas de mamón in her shoes so he wouldn’t ask too many questions. Homegirl stood through the whole proceedings, numb, drifting. The week before, she and the Gangster had finally managed to meet in one of the first love motels in the capital. The one run by los chinos, about which Luis Díaz sang his famous song. It was not the reunion she had hoped for. Ay, mi pobre negrita, he moaned, stroking her hair. Where once was lightning now there was fat fingers on straight hair. We were betrayed, you and I. Betrayed horribly! She tried to talk about the dead baby but he waved the diminutive ghost away with a flick of his wrist and proceeded to remove her enormous breasts from the vast armature of her bra. We’ll have another one, he promised. I’m going to have two, she said quietly. He laughed. We’ll have fifty.

The Gangster still had a lot on his mind. He was worried about the fate of the Trujillato, worried that the Cubans were preparing to invade. They shoot people like me in the show trials. I’ll be the first person Che looks for.

I’m thinking of going to Nueva York.

She had wanted him to say, No, don’t go, or at least to say he would be joining her. But he told her instead about one of his trips to Nueba Yol, a job for the Jefe and how the crab at some Cuban restaurant had made him sick. He did not mention his wife, of course, and she did not ask. It would have broken her.

Later, when he started coming, she tried to hold on to him, but he wrenched free and came on the dark ruined plain of her back.

Like chalk on a blackboard, the Gangster joked.

She was still thinking about him eighteen days later at the airport. You don’t have to go, La Inca said suddenly, just before the girl stepped into the line. Too late.

I want to.

Her whole life she had tried to be happy, but Santo Domingo…FUCKING SANTO DOMINGO had foiled her at every turn. I never want to see it again.

Don’t talk that way.

I never want to see it again.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

Don’t leave like this. Toma, for the trip. Dulce de coco.

On the line to passport control she would throw it away but for now she held the jar.

Remember me. La Inca kissed and embraced her. Remember who you are. You are the third and final daughter of the Family Cabral. You are the daughter of a doctor and a nurse.

Last sight of La Inca: waving at her with all her might, crying.

More questions at passport control, and with a last contemptuous flurry of stamps, she was let through. And then the boarding and the preflight chitchat from the natty dude on her right, four rings on his hand—Where are you going? Never-never land, she snapped—and finally the plane, throbbing with engine song, tears itself from the surface of the earth and Beli, not known for her piety, closed her eyes and begged the Lord to protect her.

Poor Beli. Almost until the last she half believed that the Gangster was going to appear and save her. I’m sorry, mi negrita, I’m so sorry, I should never have let you go. (She was still big on dreams of rescue.) She had looked for him everywhere: on the ride to the airport, in the faces of the officials checking passports, even when the plane was boarding, and, finally, for an irrational moment, she thought he would emerge from the cockpit, in a clean-pressed captain’s uniform—I tricked you, didn’t I? But the Gangster never appeared again in the flesh, only in her dreams. On the plane there were other First Wavers. Many waters waiting to become a river. Here she is, closer now to the mother we will need her to be if we want Oscar and Lola to be born.

She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s last light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorías, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.

She awakened just as in her dreams some ciegos were boarding a bus, begging for money, a dream from her Lost Days. The guapo in the seat next to her tapped her elbow.

Sñorita, this is not something you’ll want to miss. I’ve already seen it, she snapped. And then, calming herself, she peered out the window. It was night and the lights of Nueva York were everywhere.