Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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.

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.