Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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.