Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

His porcine eyes narrowed. So I see, he said coldly, and then dismissed Abelard with a flick of his wrist. Not even Marcus would look at him.

Not four weeks after the party, Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral was arrested by the Secret Police. The charge? ‘Slander and gross calumny against the Person of the President’.

If the stories are to be believed, it all had to do with a joke.

One afternoon, so the story goes, shortly after the fateful party, Abelard, who we had better reveal was a short, bearded, heavyset man with surprising physical strength and curious, closeset eyes, drove into Santiago in his old Packard to buy a bureau for his wife (and of course to see his mistress). He was still a mess, and those who saw him that day recall his disheveled appearance. His distraction. The bureau was successfully acquired and lashed haphazardly to the roof of the automobile, but before he could shoot over to Lydia’s crib Abelard was buttonholed by some ‘buddies’ on the street and invited for a few drinks at Club Santiago. Who knows why he went? Maybe to try to keep up appearances, or because every invitation felt like a life-or-death affair. That night at Club Santiago he tried to shake off his sense of imminent doom by talking vigorously about history, medicine, Aristophanes, by getting very very drunk, and when the night wound down he asked the ‘boys’ for assistance in relocating the bureau to the trunk of his Packard. He did not trust the valets, he explained, for they had stupid hands. The muchachos good-naturedly agreed. But while Abelard was fumbling with the keys to open the trunk he stated loudly, I hope there aren’t any bodies in here. That he made the foregoing remark is not debated. Abelard conceded as much in his ‘confession’. This trunk-joke in itself caused discomfort among the ‘boys,’ who were all too aware of the shadow that the Packard automobile casts on Dominican history: It was the car in which Trujillo had, in his early years, terrorized his first two elections away from the pueblo. During the Hurricane of 1931 the Jefe’s henchmen often drove their Packards to the bonfires where the volunteers were burning the dead, and out of their trunks they would pull out ‘victims of the hurricane’. All of whom looked strangely dry and were often clutching opposition party materials. The wind, the henchmen would joke, drove a bullet straight through the head of this one. Har-har!

What followed is still, to this day, hotly disputed. There are those who swear on their mothers that when Abelard finally opened the trunk he poked his head inside and said, Nope, no bodies here. This is what Abelard himself claimed to have said. A poor joke, certainly, but not ‘slander’ or ‘gross calumny’. In Abelard’s version of the events, his friends laughed, the bureau was secured, and off he drove to his Santiago apartment, where Lydia was waiting for him (forty-two and still lovely and still worried shitless about his daughter). The court officers and their hidden ‘witnesses,’ however, argued that something quite different happened, that when Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral opened the trunk of the Packard, he said, Nope, no bodies here, Trujillo must have cleaned them out for me .

End quote.

It sounds like the most unlikely load of jiringonza on this side of the Sierra Madre. But one man’s jiringonza is another man’s life.

He spent that night with Lydia. It had been a weird time for them. Not ten days earlier Lydia had announced that she was pregnant—I’m going to have your son, she crowed happily. But two days later the son proved to be a false alarm, probably just some indigestion. There was relief—like he needed anything else on his plate, and what if it had been another daughter?—but also disappointment, for Abelard wouldn’t have minded a little son, even if the carajito would have been the child of a mistress and born in his darkest hour. He knew that Lydia had been wanting something for some time now, something real that she could claim was theirs and theirs alone. She was forever telling him to leave his wife and move in with her, and while that might have been attractive indeed while they were together in Santiago, the possibility vanished as soon as he set foot back in his house and his two beautiful daughters rushed him. He was a predictable man and liked his predictable comforts, but Lydia never stopped trying to convince him, in a low-intensity way, that love was love and for that reason it should be obeyed. She pretended to be sanguine over the non-appearance of their son. Why would I want to ruin these breasts, she joked—but he could tell she was disheartened. He was too. For these last few days Abelard had been having vague, troubled dreams full of children crying at night, and his father’s first house. Left a disquieting stain on his waking hours. Without really thinking about it, he’d not seen Lydia since that night the news turned bad, had gone out drinking in part, I believe, because he feared that the boy’s non-birth might have broken them, but instead he felt for her the old desire, the one that nearly knocked him over the first time they’d met at his cousin Amilcar’s birthday, when they’d both been so slender and young and so jam-packed with possibilities.

For once they did not talk about Trujillo. Can you believe how long it’s been? he asked her in amazement during their last Saturday-night tryst. I can believe it, she said sadly, pulling at the flesh of her stomach. We’re clocks, Abelard. Nothing more. Abelard shook his head. We’re more than that. We’re marvels, mi amor.

I wish I could stay in this moment, wish I could extend Abelard’s happy days, but it’s impossible. The next week two atomic eyes opened over civilian centers in Japan and, even though no one knew it yet, the world was then remade. Not two days after the atomic bombs scarred Japan forever, Socorro dreamed that the faceless man was standing over her husband’s bed, and she could not scream, could not say anything, and then the next night she dreamed that he was standing over her children too. I’ve been dreaming, she told her husband, but he waved his hands, dismissing. She began to watch the road in front of their home and burn candles in her room. In Santiago, Abelard is kissing Lydia’s hands and she is sighing with pleasure and already we’re heading for Victory in the Pacific and for three Secret Police officers in their shiny Chevrolet winding up the road to Abelard’s house. Already it’s the Fall.

To say it was the greatest shock in Abelard’s life when officers from the Secret Police (it’s too early for the SIM but we’ll call them SIM anyway) placed him in cuffs and led him to their car would not be an overstatement, if it wasn’t for the fact that Abelard was going to spend the next nine years receiving one greatest shock of his life after another. Please, Abelard begged, when he regained his tongue, I must leave my wife a note. Manuel will attend to it, SIMian Numero Uno explained, motioning to the largest of the SIMians, who was already glancing about the house. Abelard’s last glimpse of his home was of Manuel rifling through his desk with a practiced carelessness.

Abelard had always imagined the SIM to be filled with lowlifes and no-reading reprobates but the two officers who locked him in their car were in fact polite, less like sadistic torturers than vacuum-cleaner salesmen. SIMian Numero Uno assured him en route that his ‘difficulties’ were certain to be cleared up. We’ve seen these cases before, Numero Uno explained. Someone has spoken badly of you but they will quickly be revealed for the liars they are. I should hope so, Abelard said, half indignant, half in terror. No te preocupes, said SIMian Numero Uno. The Jefe is not in the business of imprisoning the innocent. Numero Dos remained silent. His suit was very shabby, and both men, Abelard noticed, reeked of whiskey. He tried to remain calm—fear, as Dune teaches us, is the mind killer—but he could not help himself. He saw his daughters and his wife raped over and over again. He saw his house on fire. If he hadn’t emptied his bladder right before the pigs showed up, he would have peed himself right there.