Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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.