Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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.

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.

It started with me. The year before Oscar fell, I suffered some nuttiness of my own; I got jumped as I was walking home from the Roxy. By this mess of New Brunswick townies. A bunch of fucking morenos. Two a.m., and I was on Joyce Kilmer for no good reason. Alone and on foot. Why? Because I was hard, thought I’d have no problem walking through the thicket of young guns I saw on the corner. Big mistake. Remember the smile on this one dude’s face the rest of my fucking life. Only second to his high school ring, which plowed a nice furrow into my cheek (still got the scar). Wish I could say I went down swinging but these cats just laid me out. If it hadn’t been for some Samaritan driving by the motherfuckers probably would have killed me. The old guy wanted to take me to Robert Wood Johnson, but I didn’t have no medical, and besides, ever since my brother had died of leukemia I hadn’t been hot on doctors, so of course I was like: No no no. For having just gotten my ass kicked I actually felt pretty good. Until the next day, when I felt like I had died. So dizzy couldn’t stand up without puking. My guts feeling like they’d been taken out of me, beaten with mallets, and then reattached with paper clips. It was pretty bad, and of all the friends I had—all my great wonderful friends—only Lola came fucking through. Heard about the beat down from my boy Melvin and shot over ASAP. Never so happy to see someone my whole life. Lola, with her big innocent teeth. Lola, who actually cried when she saw the state I was in.