The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

PART II

Men are not indispensable. But Trujillo is irreplaceable. For Trujillo is not a man. He is…a cosmic force…Those who try to compare him to his ordinary contemporaries are mistaken. He belongs to…the category of those born to a special destiny.
La Nación
Of course I tried once more. It was even stupider than the first time. Fourteen months and Abuela announced that it was time for me to return to Paterson, to my mother, I couldn’t believe what she was saying. It felt like the deepest of treacheries to me. I wouldn’t feel that again until I broke with you.
But I don’t want to go! I protested. I want to stay here!
But she wouldn’t listen. She held her hands in the air like there was nothing she could do. It’s what your mother wants and it’s what I want and it’s what’s right.
But what about me!
I’m sorry, hija.
That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.
I wasn’t mature. I quit the team. I stopped going to classes and speaking to all my girlfriends, even Rosio. I told Max that we were through and he looked at me like I’d just shot him between the eyes. He tried to stop me from walking away but I screamed at him, like my mother screams, and he dropped his hand like it was dead. I thought I was doing him a favor. Not wanting to hurt him any more than was necessary.
I ended up being really stupid those last weeks. I guess I wanted to disappear more than anything and so I was trying to make it so. I fooled around with someone else, that’s how messed up I was. He was the father of one of my classmates. Always after me, even when his daughter was around, so I called him. One thing you can count on in Santo Domingo. Not the lights, not the law.
Sex.
That never goes away.
I didn’t bother with the romance. I let him take me to a love motel on our first ‘date’. He was one of those vain politicos, a peledista, had his own big air-conditioned jípeta. When I pulled my pants down you never saw anybody so happy.
Until I asked him for two thousand dollars. American, I emphasized. It’s like Abuela says: Every snake always thinks it’s biting into a rat until the day it bites into a mongoose.
That was my big puta moment. I knew he had the money, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked, and it’s not like I was robbing from him. I think we did it like nine times in total, so in my opinion he got a lot more than he gave. Afterward I sat in the motel and drank rum while he snorted from these little bags of coke. He wasn’t much of a talker, which was good. He was always pretty ashamed of him self after we f*cked and that made me feel great. Complained that this was the money for his daughter’s school. Blah blah blah. Steal it from the state, I told him with a smile. I kissed him when he dropped me off at the house only so that I could feel him shrink from me.
I didn’t talk to La Inca much those last weeks but she never stopped talking to me. I want you to do well at school. I want you to visit me when you can. I want you to remember where you come from. She prepared everything for my departure. I was too angry to think about her, how sad she would be when I was gone. I was the last person to share her life since my mother. She started closing up the house like she was the one who was leaving.
What? I said. You coming with me?
No, hija. I’m going to my campo for a while.
But you hate the campo!
I have to go there, she explained wearily. If only for a little while. And then Oscar called, out of the blue. Trying to make up now that I was due back. So you’re coming home.
Don’t count on it, I said.
Don’t do anything precipitous.
Don’t do anything precipitous. I laughed. Do you ever hear yourself, Oscar? He sighed. All the time. Every morning I would wake up and make sure the money was still under my bed. Two thousand dollars in those days could have taken you anywhere, and of course I was thinking Japan or Goa, which one of the girls at school had told me about. Another island but very beautiful, she assured us. Nothing like Santo Domingo.
And then, finally, she came. She never did anything quiet, my mother. She pulled up in a big black town car, not a normal taxi, and all the kids in the barrio gathered around to see what the show was about. My mother pretending not to notice the crowd. The driver of course was trying to pick her up. She looked thin and worn out and I couldn’t believe the taxista.
Leave her alone, I said. Don’t you have any shame?
My mother shook her head sadly, looked at La Inca. You didn’t teach her anything. La Inca didn’t blink. I taught her as well as I could. And then the big moment, the one every daughter dreads.
My mother looking me over. I’d never been in better shape, never felt more beautiful and desirable in my life, and what does the bitch say?
Co?o, pero tú sí eres fea.
Those fourteen months — gone. Like they’d never happened.

Now that I’m, a mother myself I realize that she could not have been any different. That’s who she was. Like they say: Plátano maduro no se vuelve verde. Even at the end she refused to show me anything close to love. She cried not for me or for herself but only for Oscar. Mi pobre, hijo, she sobbed. Mi pobre, hijo. You always think with your parents that at least at the very end something will change, something will get better. Not for us.

I probably would have run. I would have waited until we got back to the States, waited like paja de arroz, burning slow, slow, until they dropped their guard and then one morning I would have disappeared. Like my father disappeared on my mother and was never seen again. Disappeared like everything disappears. Without a trace. I would have lived far away. I would have been happy, I’m sure of it, and I would never have had any children. I would let myself grow dark in the sun, no more hiding from it, let my hair indulge in all its kinks, and she would have passed me on the street and never recognized me. That was the dream I had. But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
And that’s what I guess these stories are all about.
Yes, no doubt about it: I would have run. La Inca or not, I would have run. But then Max died. I hadn’t seen him at all. Not since the day of our breakup.
My poor Max, who loved me beyond words. Who said I’m so lucky every time we f*cked. It was not like we were in the same circles or the same neighborhood. Sometimes when the peledista drove me to the moteles I could swear that I saw Max zipping through the horrendous traffic of the midday, a film reel under his arm (I tried to get him to buy a backpack but he said he liked it his way). My brave Max, who could slip between two bumpers the way a lie can slide between a person’s teeth.
What happened was that one day he miscalculated — heart broken, I’m sure — and ended up being mashed between a bus bound for the Cibao and one bound for Baní. His skull shattering in a million little pieces, the film unspooling across the entire street.
I only heard about it after they buried him. His sister called me.
He loved you best of all, she sobbed. Best of all.
The curse, some of you will say.
Life, is what I say. Life.
You never saw anybody go so quiet. I gave his mother the money I’d taken from the peledista. His little brother Maxim used it to buy a yola to Puerto Rico and last I heard he was doing good for himself there. He owned a little store and his mother no longer lives in Los Tres Brazos. My toto good for something after all.
I will love you always, my abuela said at the airport. And then she turned away.
It was only when I got on the plane that I started crying. I know this sounds ridiculous but I don’t think I really stopped until I met you. I know I didn’t stop atoning. The other passengers must have thought I was crazy. I kept expecting my mother to hit me, to call me an idiota, a bruta, a fea, a malcriada, to change seats, but she didn’t.
She put her hand on mine and left it there. When the woman in front turned around and said: Tell that girl of yours to be quiet, she said, Tell that culo of yours to stop stinking.
I felt sorriest for the viejo next to us. You could tell he’d been visiting his family. He had on a little fedora and his best pressed chacabana. It’s OK, muchacha, he said, patting my back. Santo Domingo will always be there. It was there in the beginning and it will be there at the end.
For God’s sake, my mother muttered, and then closed her eyes and went to sleep.




FIVE

Poor Abelard 1944-1946


THE FAMOUS DOCTOR
When the family talks about it at all — which is like never they always begin in the same place: with Abelard and the Bad Thing he said about Trujillo.↓
≡ There are other beginnings certainly, better ones, to be sure — if you ask me I would have started when the Spaniards ‘discovered’ the New World — or when the U.S. invaded Santo Domingo in 1916 — but if this was the opening that the de Leóns chose for themselves, then who am I to question their historiography?
Abelard Luis Cabral was Oscar and Lola’s grandfather, a surgeon who had studied in Mexico City in the Lazaro Cardenas years and in the mid-1940’s, before any of us were even born, a man of considerable standing in La Vega. Un hombre muy serio, muy educado y muy bien plantado.
(You can already see where this is headed.) In those long-ago days — before delincuencia and bank failures, before Diaspora — the Cabrals were numbered among the High of the Land. They were not as filthy-rich or as historically significant as the Ral Cabrals of Santiago, but they weren’t too shabby a cadet branch, either. In La Vega, where the family had lived since 1791, they were practically royalty, as much a landmark as La Casa Amarilla and the Rio Camu; neighbors spoke of the fourteen-room house that Abelard’s father had built, Casa Hatüey↓, a rambling oft-expanded villa eclectic whose original stone core had been transformed into Abelard’s study, a house bounded by groves of almonds and dwarf-mangos; there was also the modern Art Deco apartment in Santiago, where Abelard often spent his weekends attending the family businesses; the freshly refurbished stables that could have comfortably billeted a dozen horses; the horses themselves: six Berbers with skin like vellum; and of course the five full-time servants (of the rayano variety).
≡ Hatüey, in case you’ve forgotten, was the Taino Ho Chi Minh. When the Spaniards were committing First Genocide in the Dominican Republic, Hatüey left the Island and canoed to Cuba, looking for reinforcements, his voyage a precursor to the trip Maximo Gomez would take almost three hundred years later. Casa Hatüey was named Hatüey because in Times Past it supposedly had been owned by a descendant of the priest who tried to baptize Harney right before the Spaniards burned him at the stake. (What Hatüey said on that pyre is a legend in itself: Are there white people in Heaven? Then I’d rather go to Hell.) History, however, has not been kind to Harney. Unless something changes ASAP he will go out like his camarada Crazy Horse. Coffled to a beer, in a country not his own.
While the rest of the country in that period subsisted on rocks and scraps of yuca and were host to endless coils of intestinal worms, the Cabrals dined on pastas and sweet Italian sausages, scraped Jalisco silver on flatware from Beleek. A surgeon’s income was a fine thing but Abelard’s portfolio (if such things existed in those days) was the real source of the family wealth: from his hateful, cantankerous father (now dead) Abelard had inherited a pair of prosperous supermercados in Santiago, a cement factory, and titles to a string of fincas in the Septrionales.
The Cabrals were, as you might have guessed, members of the Fortunate People. Summers they ‘borrowed’ a cousin’s cabana in Puerto Plata and decamped there for a period of no less than three weeks. Abelard’s two daughters, Jacquelyn and Astrid, swam and played in the surf (often suffering Mulatto Pigment Degradation Disorder, a.k.a. tans) under the watchful gaze of their mother, who, unable to risk no extra darkness, remained chained to her umbrella’s shadow — while their father, when not listening to the news from the War, roamed the shoreline, his face set in tense concentration. He walked barefoot, stripped down to his white shirt and his vest, his pant legs rolled, his demi-afro an avuncular torch, plump with middle age. Sometimes a fragment of a shell or a dying horseshoe crab would catch Abelard’s attention and he’d get down on all fours and examine it with a gem-cutter’s glass so that to both his delighted daughters, as well as to his appalled wife, he resembled a dog sniffing a turd.
There are still those in the Cibao who remember Abelard, and all will tell you that besides being a brilliant doctor he possessed one of the most remarkable minds in the country: indefatigably curious, alarmingly prodigious, and especially suited for linguistic and computational complexity. The viejo was widely read in Spanish, English, French, Latin, and Greek; a collector of rare books, an advocate of outlandish abstractions, a contributor to the Journal of Tropical Medicine, and an amateur ethnographer in the Fernando Ortiz mode. Abelard was, in short, a Brain — not entirely uncommon in the Mexico where he had studied but an exceedingly rare species on the Island of Supreme General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. He encouraged his daughters to read and prepared them to follow him into the Profession (they could speak French and read Latin before they were nine), and so keen was he about learning that any new piece of knowledge, no matter how arcane or trivial, could send his ass over the Van Allen belt. His parlor, so tastefully wallpapered by his father’s second wife, was hangout number one for the local todologos. Discussions would rage for entire evenings, and while Abelard was often frustrated by the poor quality — nothing like at the UNAM — he would not have abandoned these evenings for anything. Often his daughters would bid their father good night only to find him the next morning still engaged in some utterly obscure debate with his friends, eyes red, hair akimbo, woozy but game. They would go to him and he would kiss each in turn, calling them his Brillantes. These youthful intelligences, he often boasted to his friends, will best us all.
The Reign of Trujillo was not the best time to be a lover of Ideas, not the best time to be engaging in parlor debate, to be hosting tertulias, to be doing anything out of the ordinary, but Abelard was nothing if not meticulous. Never allowed contemporary politics (i.e., Trujillo) to be bandied about, kept shit on the abstract plane, allowed anybody who wanted (including members of the Secret Police) to attend his gatherings. Given that you could get lit up for even mispronouncing the Failed Cattle Thief’s name, it was a no-brainer, really. As a general practice Abelard tried his best not to think about EI Jefe at all, followed sort of the Tao of Dictator Avoidance, which was ironic considering that Abelard was unmatched in maintaining the outward appearance of the enthusiastic Trujillista.↓
≡ But what was even more ironic was that Abelard had a reputation for being able to keep his head down during the worst of the regime’s madness — for unseeing, as it were. In 1937, for example, while the Friends of the Dominican Republic were perejiling Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans and Haitian-looking Dominicans to death, while genocide was, in fact, in the making, Abelard kept his head, eyes, and nose safely tucked into his books (let his wife take care of hiding his servants, didn’t ask her nothing about it) and when survivors staggered into his surgery with unspeakable machete wounds, he fixed them up as best as he could without making any comments as to the ghastliness of their wounds. Acted like it was any other day.
Both as an individual and as the executive officer of his medical association he gave unstintingly to the Partido Dominicano; he and his wife, who was his number-one nurse and his best assistant, joined every medical mission that Trujillo organized, no matter how remote the campo; and no one could suppress a guffaw better than Abelard when El Jefe won an election by 103 percent! What enthusiasm from the pueblo! When banquets were held in Trujillo’s honor Abelard always drove to Santiago to attend. He arrived early, left late, smiled endlessly, and didn’t say nothing. Disconnected his intellectual warp engine and operated strictly on impulse power. When the time came, Abelard would shake El Jefe’s hand, cover him in the warm effusion of his adoration (if you think the Trujillato was not homoerotic, then, to quote the Priest, you got another thing coming), and without further ado fade back into the shadows (a la Oscar’s favorite movie, Point Blank). Kept as far away from El Jefe as possible — he wasn’t under any delusion that he was Trujillo’s equal or his buddy or some kind of necessary individual — after all, niggers who messed with Him had a habit of ending up with a bad case of the deads. It didn’t hurt that Abelard’s family was not totally in the Jefe’s pocket, that his father had cultivated no lands or negocios in geographic or competitive proximity to the Jefe’s own holding. His F*ckface contact was blessedly limited.↓
≡ He wished that could also have been the case with his Balaguer contact. In those days the Demon Balaguer had not yet become the Election Thief; was only Trujillo’s Minister of Education — you can see how successful he was at that job — and any chance he got to corner Abelard, he did. He wanted to talk to Abelard about his theories — which were four parts Gobineau, four parts Goddard, and two parts German racial eugenics. The German theories, he assured Abelard, were all the rage on the Continent. Abelard nods. I see. (But, you ask, who was the smarter? No comparison. In a Tables and Ladders match, Abelard, the Cerebro del Cibao, would have 3D’d the ‘Genio de Genocidio’ in about two seconds flat.)
Abelard and the Failed Cattle Thief might have glided past each other in the Halls of History if not for the fact that starting in 1944, Abelard, instead of bringing his wife and daughter to Jefe events, as custom dictated, began to make a point of leaving them at home. He explained to his friends that his wife had become ‘nervous’ and that Jacquelyn took care of her but the real reason for the absences was Trujillo’s notorious rapacity and his daughter Jacquelyn’s off-the-hook looks. Abelard’s serious, intellectual oldest daughter was no longer her tall awkward flaquita self; adolescence had struck with a fury, transforming her into a young lady of great beauty. She had caught a serious case of the hips-ass-chest, a condition which during the mid-forties spelled trouble with a capital T to the R to the U to the J to the illo.
Ask any of your elders and they will tell you: Trujillo might have been a Dictator, but he was a Dominican Dictator, which is another way of saying he was the Number-One Bellaco in the Country. Believed that all the toto in the DR was, literally, his. It’s a well-documented fact that in Trujillo’s DR if you were of a certain class and you put your cute daughter anywhere near El Jefe, within the week she’d be mamando his ripio like an old pro and there would be nothing you could do about it! Part of the price of living in Santo Domingo, one of the Island’s best-known secrets. So common was the practice, so insatiable Trujillo’s appetites, that there were plenty of men in the nation, hombres de calidad y posición, who, believe it or not, offered up their daughters freely to the Failed Cattle Thief. Abelard, to his credit, was not one of them; as soon as he realized what was what — after his daughter started stopping traffic on Calle El Sol, after one of his patients looked at his daughter and said, You should be careful with that one — he pulled a Rapunzel on her ass and locked her in. It was a Brave Thing, not in keeping with his character, but he’d only had to watch Jacquelyn preparing for school one day, big in body but still a child, goddamn it, still a child, and the Brave Thing became easy.
Hiding your doe-eyed, large-breasted daughter from Trujillo, however, was anything but easy. (Like keeping the Ring from Sauron.) If you think the average Dominican guy’s bad, Trujillo was five thousand times worse. Dude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass; if the procurement of ass had been any more central to the Trujillato the regime would have been the world’s first culocracy (and maybe, in fact, it was). In this climate, hoarding your women was tantamount to treason; offenders who didn’t cough up the muchachas could easily find themselves enjoying the invigorating charm of an eight-shark bath. Let us be clear: Abelard was taking an enormous risk. It didn’t matter that he was upper-class, or that he’d prepared the groundwork well, going as far as having a friend diagnose his wife as manic, then letting the word leak through the elite circles in which he ran. If Trujillo and Company caught wind of his duplicity they’d have him in chains (and Jacquelyn on her back) in two seconds flat. Which was why every time El Jefe shuffled down the welcome line, shaking hands, Abelard expected him to exclaim in that high shrill voice of his, Dr. Abelard Cabral, where is that delicious daughter of yours? I’ve heard so much about her from your neighbors. It was enough to make Abelard febrile.
His daughter Jacquelyn of course had absolutely no idea what was at stake. Those were more innocent times, and she was an innocent girl; getting raped by her Illustrious President was the furthest thing from her excellent mind. She of his two daughters had inherited her father’s brains. Was studying French religiously because she’d decided to imitate her father and go abroad to study medicine at the Faculté de Médecine de Paris. To France! To become the next Madame Curie! Hit the books night and day, and would practice her French with both her father and with their servant Esteban El Gallo, who’d been born in Haiti and still spoke a pretty good frog.↓
≡ After Trujillo launched the 1937 genocide of Haitian and Haitian-Dominicans, you didn’t see that many Haitian types working in the DR. Not until at least the late fifties. Esteban was the exception because (a) he looked so damn Dominican, and (b) during the genocide, Socorro had hidden him inside her daughter Astrid’s dollhouse. Spent four days in there, cramped up like a brown-skinned Alice.
Neither of his daughters had any idea, were as carefree as Hobbits, never guessing the Shadow that loomed on the horizon. On his days off, when he wasn’t at the clinic or in his study, writing, Abelard would stand at his rear window and watch his daughters at their silly children’s game until his aching heart could stand it no more.
Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa.
To the latecomers are left the bones.
He spoke of these matters to only three people. The first, of course, was his wife, Socorro. Socorro (it must be said here) was a Talent in her own right. A famous beauty from the East (Higüey) and the source of all her daughters’ pulchritude, Socorro had looked in her youth like a dark-hued Dejah Thoris (one of the chief reasons Abelard had pursued a girl so beneath his class) and was also one of the finest nurse practitioners he had ever had the honor of working with in Mexico or the Dominican Republic, which, given his estimation of his Mexican colleagues, is no small praise. (The second reason he’d gone after her.) Her workhorse-ness and her encyclopedic knowledge of folk cures and traditional remedies made her an indispensable partner in his practice. Her reaction, though, to his Trujillo worries was typical; she was a clever, skilled, hardworking woman who didn’t blink when faced with arterial spray hissing from a machete-chopped arm stump, but when it came to more abstract menaces like, say, Trujillo, she stubbornly and willfully refused to acknowledge there might be a problem, all the while dressing Jacqueline in the most suffocating of clothes. Why are you telling people that I’m loca? she demanded.
He spoke of it as well with his mistress, se?ora Lydia Abenader, one of the three women who had rejected his marriage offer upon his return from his studies in Mexico; now a widow and his number-one lover, she was the woman his father had wanted him to bag in the first place, and when he’d been unable to close the deal his father had mocked him as a half-man even unto his final days of bilious life (the third reason he’d gone after Socorro).
Last he spoke with his longtime neighbor and friend, Marcus Applegate Roman, whom he often had to ferry back and forth from presidential events because Marcus lacked a car. With Marcus it had been a spontaneous outburst, the weight of the problem truly pressing on him; they’d been cruising back to La Vega on one of the old Marine Occupation roads, middle of the night in August, through the black-black farmlands of the Cibao, so hot they had to drive with the windows cranked down, which meant a constant stream of mosquitoes scooting up their nostrils, and out of nowhere Abelard began to talk. Young women have no opportunity to develop unmolested in this country, he complained. Then he gave, as an example, the name of a young woman whom the Jefe had only recently despoiled, a muchacha known to both of them, a graduate of the University of Florida and the daughter of an acquaintance. At first Marcus said nothing; in the darkness of the Packard’s interior his face was an absence, a pool of shadow. A worrisome silence. Marcus was no fan of the Jefe, having more than once in Abelard’s presence called him un ‘bruto’ y un ‘imbécil’ but that didn’t stop Abelard from being suddenly aware of his colossal indiscretion (such was life in those Secret Police days). Finally Abelard said, This doesn’t bother you?
Marcus hunched down to light a cigarette, and finally his face reappeared, drawn but familiar. Nothing we can do about it, Abelard.
But imagine you were in similar straits: how would you protect yourself?
I’d be sure to have ugly daughters.
Lydia was far more realistic. She’d been seated at her armoire, brushing her Moorish hair. He’d been lying on the bed, naked as well, absently pulling on his ripio. Lydia had said, Send her away to the nuns. Send her to Cuba. My family there will take care of her.
Cuba was Lydia’s dream; it was her Mexico. Always talking about moving back there.
But I’d need permission from the state!
Ask for it, then.
But what if El Jefe notices the requests?
Lydia put down her brush with a sharp click. What are the chances of that happening? You never know, Abelard said defensively. In this country you never know.
His mistress was for Cuba, his wife for house arrest, his best friend said nothing. His own cautiousness told him to await further instructions. And at the end of the year he got them.
At one of the interminable presidential events EI Jefe had shaken Abelard’s hand, but instead of moving on, he paused — a nightmare come true — held on to his fingers, and said in his shrill voice: You are Dr. Abelard Cabral? Abelard bowed. At your service, Your Excellency. In less than a nanosecond Abelard was drenched in sweat; he knew what was coming next; the Failed Cattle Thief had never spoken more than three words to him his whole life, what else could it be? He dared not glance away from Trujillo’s heavily powdered face, but out the corner of his eyes he caught glimpses of the lambesacos, hovering, beginning to realize that an exchange was in the making.
I have seen you here often, Doctor, but lately without your wife. Have you divorced her? I am still married, Your Enormity. To Socorro Hernandez Batista.
That is good to hear, El Jefe said, I was afraid that you might have turned into un maricón. Then he turned to the lambesacos and laughed. Oh, Jefe, they screamed, you are too much.
It was at this point that another nigger might have, in a fit of cojones, said something to defend his honor, but Abelard was not that nigger. He said nothing.
But of course, El Jefe continued, knuckling a tear from his eye, you are no maricón, for I’ve heard that you have daughters, Dr. Cabral, una que es muy bella y elegante, no?
Abelard had rehearsed a dozen answers to this question, but his response was pure reflex, came out of nowhere: Yes, Jefe, you are correct, I have two daughters. But to tell you the truth, they’re only beautiful if you have a taste for women with mustaches.
For an instant El Jefe had said nothing, and in that twisting silence Abelard could see his daughter being violated in front of him while he was lowered with excruciating slowness into Trujillo’s infamous pool of sharks. But then, miracle of miracles, El Jefe had crinkled his porcine face and laughed, Abelard had laughed too, and El Jefe moved on. When Abelard returned home to La Vega late that evening he woke his wife from a deep slumber so that they could both pray and thank the Heavens for their family’s salvation. Verbally, Abelard had never been quick on the draw. The inspiration could only have come from the hidden spaces within my soul, he told his wife. From a Numinous Being.
You mean God? his wife pressed.
I mean someone, Abelard said darkly.



AND SO?
For the next three months Abelard waited for the End. Waited for his name to start appearing in the ‘Foro Popular’ section of the paper, thinly veiled criticisms aimed at a certain bone doctor from La Vega — which was often how the regime began the destruction of a respected citizen such as him — with disses about the way your socks and your shirts didn’t match; waited for a letter to arrive, demanding a private meeting with the Jefe, waited for his daughter to turn up missing on her trip back to school. Lost nearly twenty pounds during his awful vigil. Began to drink copiously. Nearly killed a patient with a slip of the hand. If his wife hadn’t spotted the damage before they stitched, who knows what might have happened? Screamed at his daughters and wife almost every day. Could not get it up much for his mistress. But the rain season turned to hot season and the clinic filled with the hapless, the wounded, the afflicted, and when after four months nothing happened Abelard almost let out a sigh of relief.
Maybe, he wrote on the back of his hairy hand. Maybe.


SANTO DOMINGO CONFIDENTIAL
In some ways living in Santo Domingo during the Trujillato was a lot like being in that famous Twilight Zone episode that Oscar loved so much, the one where the monstrous white kid with the godlike powers rules over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of the world, a town called Peaksville. The white kid is vicious and random and all the people in the ‘community’ live in straight terror of him, denouncing and betraying each other at the drop of a hat in order not to be the person he maims or, more ominously, sends to the corn. (After each atrocity he commits whether it’s giving a gopher three heads or Baníshing a no longer interesting playmate to the corn or raining snow down on the last crops — the horrified people of Peaksville have to say, It was a good thing you did, Anthony. A good thing.)
Between 1930 (when the Failed Cattle Thief seized power) and 1961 (the year he got blazed) Santo Domingo was the Caribbean’s very own Peaksville, with Trujillo playing the part of Anthony and the rest of us reprising the role of the Man Who Got Turned into Jack-in-the-Box. You might roll your eyes at the comparison, but, friends: it would be hard to exaggerate the power Trujillo exerted over the Dominican people and the shadow of fear he cast throughout the region. Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor;↓ not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before.
≡ Anthony may have isolated Peaksville with the power of his mind, but Trujillo did the same with the power of his office! Almost as soon as he grabbed the presidency, the Failed Cattle Thief sealed the country away from the rest of the world — a forced isolation that we’ll call the Plátano Curtain. As for the country’s historically fluid border with Haiti — which was more baká than border — the Failed Cattle Thief became like Dr. Gull in From Hell; adopting the creed of the Dionyesian Architects, he aspired to become an architect of history, and through a horrifying ritual of silence and blood, machete and perejil, darkness and denial, inflicted a true border on the countries, a border that exists beyond maps, that is carved directly into the histories and imaginaries of a people. By the middle of T-illo’s second decade in ‘office’ the Platano Curtain had been so successful that when the Allies won World War II the majority of the pueblo didn’t even have the remotest idea that it had happened. Those who did know believed the propaganda that Trujillo had played an important role in the overthrow of the Japanese and the Hun. Homeboy could not have had a more private realm had he thrown a force-field around the island. (After all, who needs futuristic generators when you have the power of the machete?) Most people argue that El Jefe was trying to keep the world out; some, however, point out that he seemed equally intent on keeping something in.
His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyone’s who lived in the States; a security apparatus so ridiculously mongoose that you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass. (Who says that we Third World people are inefficient?) It wasn’t just Mr. Friday the Thirteenth you had to worry about, either, it was the whole Chivato Nation he helped spawn, for like every Dark Lord worth his Shadow he had the devotion of his people.↓
≡ So devoted was the pueblo, in fact, that, as Galíndez recounts in La Era de Trujillo, when a graduate student was asked by a panel of examiners to discuss the pre-Columbian culture in the Americas, he replied without hesitation that the most important pre-Columbian culture in the Americas was ‘the Dominican Republic during the era of Trujillo’. Oh, man. But what’s more hilarious is that the examiners refused to fail the student, on the grounds that ‘he had mentioned El Jefe’.
It was widely believed that at anyone time between forty-two and eighty-seven percent of the Dominican population was on the Secret Police’s payroll. Your own f*cking neighbors could acabar con you just because you had something they coveted or because you cut in front of them at the colmado. Mad folks went out in that manner, betrayed by those they considered their panas, by members of their own families, by slips of the tongue. One day you were a law-abiding citizen, cracking nuts on your galería, the next day you were in the Cuarenta, getting your nuts cracked. Shit was so tight that many people actually believed that Trujillo had supernatural powers! It was whispered that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away, that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the Island. (You wonder why two generations later our parents are still so damn secretive, why you’ll find out your brother ain’t your brother only by accident.)
But let’s not go completely overboard: Trujillo was certainly formidable, and the regime was like a Caribbean Mordor in many ways, but there were plenty of people who despised El Jefe, who communicated in less-than-veiled ways their contempt, who resisted. But Abelard was simply not one of them. Homeboy wasn’t like his Mexican colleagues who were always keeping up with what was happening elsewhere in the world, who believed that change was possible. He didn’t dream of revolution, didn’t care that Trotsky had lived and died not ten blocks from his student pension in Coyoacán; wanted only to tend his wealthy, ailing patients and afterward return to his study without worrying about being shot in the head or thrown to the sharks. Every now and then one of his acquaintances — usually Marcus — would describe for him the latest Trujillo Atrocity: an affluent clan stripped of its properties and sent into exile, an entire family fed piece by piece to the sharks because a son had dared compare Trujillo to Adolf Hitler before a terrified audience of his peers, a suspicious assassination in Bonao of a well-known unionist. Abelard listened to these horrors tensely, and then after an awkward silence would change the subject. He simply didn’t wish to dwell on the fates of Unfortunate People, on the goings-on in Peaksville. He didn’t want those stories in his house. The way Abelard saw it — his Trujillo philosophy, if you will — he only had to keep his head down, his mouth shut, his pockets open, his daughters hidden for another decade or two. By then, he prophesied, Trujillo would be dead and the Dominican Republic would be a true democracy.
Abelard, it turned out, needed help in the prophecy department. Santo Domingo never became a democracy. He didn’t have no couple of decades, either. His luck ran out earlier than anyone expected.



THE BAD THING
Nineteen forty-five should have been a capital year for Abelard and Family. Two of Abelard’s articles were published to minor acclaim, one in the prestigious — and the second in a small journal out of Caracas, and he received complimentary responses from a couple of Continental doctors, very flattering indeed. Business in the supermercados couldn’t have been better; the Island was still flush from the war boom and his managers couldn’t keep anything on the shelves. The fincas were producing and reaping profits; the worldwide collapse of agricultural prices was still years off Abelard had a full load of clients, performed a number of tricky surgeries with impeccable skill; his daughters were prospering (Jacquelyn had been accepted at a prestigious boarding school in Le Havre, to begin the following year — her chance to escape); his wife and mistress were pouring on the adoration; even the servants seemed content (not that he ever really spoke to them). All in all, the good doctor should have been immensely satisfied with himself. Should have ended each day with his feet up, un cigarro in the comer of his mouth, and a broad grin creasing his ursine features.
It was — dare we say it? — a good life.
Except it wasn’t.
In February there was another Presidential Event (for Independence Day!) and this time the invitation was explicit. For Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral and wife and daughter Jacquelyn. The daughter Jacquelyn part had been underlined by the party’s host. Not once, not twice, but three times. Abelard nearly fainted when he saw the damn thing. Slumped back at his desk, his heart pushing up against his esophagus. Stared at the vellum square for almost a whole hour before folding it and placing it inside his shirt pocket. The next morning he visited the host, one of his neighbors. The man was out in his corral, staring balefully as some of his servants were trying to get one of his stallions to stud. When he saw Abelard his face darkened. What the hell do you want from me? The order came straight from the Palacio. When Abelard walked back to his car he tried not to show that he was shaking.
Once again he consulted with Marcus and Lydia. (He said nothing of the invitation to his wife, not wanting to panic her, and by extension his daughter. Not wanting even to say the words in his own house.)
Where the last time he’d been somewhat rational, this go-around he was fuera de serie, raved like a madman. Waxed indignant to Marcus for nearly an hour about the injustice, about the hopelessness of it all (an amazing amount of circumlocution because he never once directly named who it was he was complaining about). Alternated between impotent rage and pathetic self-pity. In the end his friend had to cover the good doctor’s mouth to get a word in edgewise, but Abelard kept talking. It’s madness! Sheer madness! I’m the father of my household! I’m the one who says what goes!
What can you do? Marcus said with no little fatalism. Trujillo’s the president and you’re just a doctor. If he wants your daughter at the party you can do nothing but obey.
But this isn’t human! When has this country ever been human, Abelard? You’re the historian. You of all people should know that.
Lydia was even less compassionate. She read the invite and swore a co?o under her breath and then she turned on him. I warned you, Abelard. Didn’t I tell you to send your daughter abroad while you had the chance? She could have been with my family in Cuba, safe and sound, but now you’re jodido. Now He has his Eye on you.
I know, I know, Lydia, but what should I do? Jesú Cristo, Abelard, she said tremulously. What options are there. This is Trujillo you’re talking about.
Back home the portrait of Trujillo, which every good citizen had hanging in his house, beamed down on him with insipid, viperous benevolence.
Maybe if the doctor had immediately grabbed his daughters and his wife and smuggled them all aboard a boat in Puerto Plata, or if he’d stolen with them across the border into Haiti, they might have had a chance. The Plátano Curtain was strong but it wasn’t that strong. But alas, instead of making his move Abelard fretted and temporized and despaired. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, paced the halls of their house all night long and all the weight he regained these last months he immediately lost. (If you think about it, maybe he should have heeded his daughter’s philosophy: Tarde venientibus ossa.) Every chance he got he spent with his daughters. Jackie, who was her parents’ Golden Child, who already had memorized all the streets in the French Quarter and who that year alone had been the object of not four, not five, but twelve marriage proposals. All communicated to Abelard and his wife, of course. Jackie knowing nothing about it. But still. And Astrid, ten years old, who took more after their father in looks and nature; plainer, the jokester, the believer, who played the meanest piano in all of the Cibao and who was her big sister’s ally in all things. The sisters wondered about their father’s sudden attentiveness: Are you on vacation, Papi? He shook his head sadly. No, I just like spending time with you is all.
What’s the matter with you? his wife demanded, but he refused to speak to her. Let me be, mujer. Things got so bad with him that he even went to church, a first for Abelard (which might have been a really bad idea since everybody knew the Church at that time was in Trujillo’s pocket). He attended confession almost every day and talked to the priest but he got nothing out of it except to pray and to hope and to light some f*cking stupid candles. He was going through three bottles of whiskey a day.
His friends in Mexico would have grabbed their rifles and taken to the interior (at least that’s what he thought they would have done) but he was his father’s son in more ways than he cared to admit. His father, an educated man who had resisted sending his son to Mexico but who had always played ball with Trujillo. When in 1937 the army had started murdering all the Haitians, his father had allowed them to use his horses, and when he didn’t get any of them back he didn’t say nothing to Trujillo. Just chalked it up as the cost of doing business. Abelard kept drinking and kept fretting, stopped seeing Lydia, isolated himself in his study, and eventually convinced himself that nothing would happen. It was only a test. Told his wife and daughter to prepare for the party. Didn’t mention it was a Trujillo party. Made it seem like nothing was amiss. Hated himself to his core for his mendacity, but what else could he have done?
Tarde venientibus ossa.
It probably would have gone off without a hitch too, but Jackie was so excited. Since it was her first big party, who’s surprised that it became something of an event for her? She went shopping for a dress with her mother, got her hair done at the salon, bought new shoes, and was even given a pair of pearl earrings by another of her female relatives. Socorro helped her daughter with every aspect of the preparation, no suspicions, but about a week before the party she started having these terrible dreams. She was in her old town, where she’d grown up before her aunt adopted her and put her in nursing school, before she discovered she had the gift of Healing. Staring down that dusty frangipani-lined road that everybody said led to the capital, and in the heat-rippled distance she could see a man approaching, a distant figure who struck in her such dread that she woke up screaming. Abelard leaping out of bed in panic, the girls crying out in their rooms. Had that dream almost every damn night that final week, a countdown clock.
On T-minus-two Lydia urged Abelard to leave with her on a steamer bound for Cuba. She knew the captain, he would hide them, swore it could be done. We’ll get your daughters afterward, I promise you.
I can’t do that, he said miserably. I can’t leave my family. She returned to combing her hair. They said not another word.
On the afternoon of the party, as Abelard was dolefully tending to the car, he caught sight of his daughter, in her dress, standing in the sala, hunched over another one of her French books, looking absolutely divine, absolutely young, and right then he had one of those epiphanies us lit majors are always forced to talk about. It didn’t come in a burst of light or a new color or a sensation in his heart. He just knew. Knew he just couldn’t do it. Told his wife to forget about it. Said same to daughter. Ignored their horrified protestations. Jumped in the car, picked up Marcus, and headed to the party.
What about Jacquelyn? Marcus asked.
She’s not coming.
Marcus shook his head. Said nothing else.

At the reception line Trujillo again paused before Abelard. Sniffed the air like a cat. And your wife and daughter?
Abelard trembling but holding it together somehow. Already sensing how everything was going to change. My apologies, Your Excellency. They could not attend.
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.



CHISTE APOCALYPTUS
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.


IN MY HUMBLE OPINION
I t 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.


THE FALL
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.



ABELARD IN CHAINS
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.
Abelard was driven very quickly to Santiago (everyone he passed on the road made sure to look away at the sight of the VW bug) and taken to the Fortaleza San Luis. The sharp edge of his fear turned knife once they pulled inside that notorious place. Are you sure this is correct? Abelard was so frightened his voice quaked. Don’t worry, Doctor, Numero Dos said, you are where you belong. He’d been silent so long Abelard had almost forgotten that he could speak. Now it was Numero Dos who was smiling and Numero Uno who focused his attention out the window.
Once inside those stone walls the polite SIM officers handed him over to a pair of not-so-polite guards who stripped him of his shoes, his wallet, his belt, his wedding band, and then sat him down in a cramped, hot office to fill out some forms. There was a pervasive smell of ripe ass in the air. No officer appeared to explain his case, no one listened to his requests, and when he began to raise his voice about his treatment the guard typing the forms leaned forward and punched him in the face. As easily as you might reach over for a cigarette. The man was wearing a ring and it tore open Abelard’s lip something awful. The pain was so sudden, his disbelief so enormous, that Abelard actually asked, through clutched fingers, Why? The guard rocked him again hard, carved a furrow in his forehead. This is how we answer questions around here, the guard said matter-of-factly, bending down to be sure his form was properly aligned in the typewriter. Abelard began to sob, the blood spilling out between his fingers. Which the typing guard just loved; he called in his friends from the other offices. Look at this one! Look at how much he likes to cry!
Before Abelard knew what was happening he was being shoved into a general holding cell that stank of malaria sweat and diarrhea and was crammed with unseemly representatives of what Broca might have called the ‘criminal class’. The guards then proceeded to inform the other prisoners that Abelard was a homosexual and a Communist — That is untrue! Abelard protested — but who is going to listen to a gay comunista? Over the next couple of hours Abelard was harassed lovely and most of his clothes were stripped from him. One heavyset cibae?o even demanded his underwear, and when Abelard coughed them up the man pulled them on over his pants. Son muy cómodos, he announced to his friends. Abelard was forced to hunker naked near the shit pots; if he tried to crawl near the dry areas the other prisoners would scream at him — Quédate ahí con la mierda, maricón — and this was how he had to sleep, amidst urine, feces, and flies, and more than once he was awakened by someone tickling his lips with a dried turd. Pre-occupation with sanitation was not high among the Fortalezanos. The deviants didn’t allow him to eat, either, stealing his meager allotted portions three days straight. On the fourth day a one-armed pickpocket took pity on him and he was able to eat an entire banana without interruption, even tried to chew up the fibrous peel, he was so famished.
Poor Abelard. It was also on day four that someone from the outside world finally paid him attention. Late in the evening, when everybody else was asleep, a detachment of guards dragged him into a smaller, crudely lit cell. He was strapped down, not unkindly, to a table. From the moment he’d been grabbed he’d not stopped speaking. This is all a misunderstanding please I come from a very respectable family you have to communicate with my wife and my lawyers they will be able to clear this up I cannot believe that I’ve been treated so despicably I demand that the officer in charge hear my complaints. He couldn’t get the words out of his mouth fast enough. It wasn’t until he noticed the electrical contraption that the guards were fiddling with in the comer that he fell quiet. Abelard stared at it with a terrible dread, and then, because he suffered from an insatiable urge to taxonomize, asked, What in God’s name do you call that?
We call it the pulpo, one of the guards said.
They spent all night showing him how it worked.

It was three days before Socorro could track down her husband and another five days before she received permission from the capital to visit. The visiting room where Socorro awaited her husband seemed to have been fashioned from a latrine. There was only one sputtering kerosene lamp and it looked as though a number of people had taken mountainous shits in the comer. An intentional humiliation that was lost on Socorro; she was too overwrought to notice. After what felt like an hour (again, another se?ora would have protested, but Socorro bore the shit-smell and the darkness and the no chair stoically), Abelard was brought in handcuffed. He’d been given an undersized shirt and an undersized pair of pants; he was shuffling as though afraid that something in his hands or in his pockets might fall out. Only been inside a week but already he looked frightful. His eyes were blackened; his hands and neck covered in bruises and his tom lip had swollen monstrously, was the color of the meat inside your eye. The night before, he had been interrogated by the guards, and they had beaten him mercilessly with leather truncheons; one of his testicles would be permanently shriveled from the blows.
Poor Socorro. Here was a woman whose lifelong preoccupation had been calamity. Her mother was a mute; her drunk father frittered away the family’s middle-class patrimony, one tarea at a time, until their holdings had been reduced to a shack and some chickens and the old man was forced to work other people’s land, condemned to a life of constant movement, poor health, and broken hands; it was said that Pa Socorro had never recovered from seeing his own father beaten to death by a neighbor who also happened to be a sergeant in the police. Socorro’s childhood had been about missed meals and cousin-clothes, about seeing her father three, four times a year, visits where he didn’t talk to anybody; just lay in his room drunk.
Socorro became an ‘anxious’ muchacha; for a time she thinned her hair by pulling it, was seventeen when she caught Abelard’s eye in a training hospital but didn’t start menstruating until a year after they were married. Even as an adult, Socorro was in the habit of waking up in the middle of the night in terror, convinced that the house was on fire, would rush from room to room, expecting to be greeted by a carnival of flame. When Abelard read to her from his newspapers she took special interest in earthquakes and fires and floods and cattle stampedes and the sinking of ships. She was the family’s first catastrophist, would have made Cuvier proud.
What had she been expecting, while she fiddled with the buttons on her dress, while she shifted the purse on her shoulder and tried not to unbalance her Macy’s hat? A mess, un toyo certainly, but not a husband looking nearly destroyed, who shuffled like an old man, whose eyes shone with the sort of fear that is not easily shed. It was worse than she, in all her apocalyptic fervor, had imagined. It was the Fall.
When she placed her hands on Abelard he began to cry very loudly, very shamefully. Tears streamed down his face as he tried to tell her all that had happened to him.
It wasn’t long after that visit that Socorro realized that she was pregnant. With Abelard’s Third and Final Daughter.
Zafa or fukú?
You tell me.

There would always be speculation. At the most basic level, did he say it, did he not? (Which is another way of asking: Did he have a hand in his own destruction?) Even the family was divided. La Inca adamant that her cousin had said nothing; it had all been a setup, orchestrated by Abelard’s enemies to strip the family of their wealth, their properties, and their businesses. Others were not so sure. He probably had said something that night at the club, and unfortunately for him he’d been overheard by the Jefe’s agents. No elaborate plot, just drunken stupidity. As for the carnage that followed: que se yo — just a lot of bad luck.
Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard’s daughter, but when he couldn’t snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family’s ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened.
So which was it? you ask. An accident, a conspiracy, or a fukú? The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you’ll have to decide for yourself. What’s certain is that nothing’s certain. We are trawling in silences here. Trujillo and Company didn’t leave a paper trail — they didn’t share their German contemporaries’ lust for documentation. And it’s not like the fukú itself would leave a memoir or anything. The remaining Cabrals ain’t much help, either; on all matters related to Abelard’s imprisonment and to the subsequent destruction of the clan there is within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations, that sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction. A whisper here and there but nothing more.
Which is to say if you’re looking for a full story, I don’t have it. Oscar searched for it too, in his last days, and it’s not certain whether he found it either.
Let’s be honest, though. The rap about The Girl Trujillo Wanted is a pretty common one on the Island.↓
≡ Anacaona, a.k.a. the Golden Flower. One of the Founding Mothers of the New World and the most beautiful Indian in the World. (The Mexicans might have their Malinche, but we Dominicans have our Anacaona.) Anacaona was the wife of Caonabo, one of the five caciques who ruled our Island at the time of the ‘Discovery’. In his accounts, Bartolomé de las Casas described her as ‘a woman of great prudence and authority, very courtly and gracious in her manner of speaking and her gestures’. Other witnesses put it more succinctly: the chick was hot and, it would turn out, warrior-brave. When the Euros started going Hannibal Lecter on the Tainos, they killed Anacaona’s husband (which is another story). And like all good warrior-women she tried to rally her people, tried to resist, but the Europeans were the original fukú, no stopping them. Massacre after massacre after massacre. Upon being captured, Anacaona tried to parley, saying: ‘Killing is not honorable, neither does violence redress our honor. Let us build a bridge of love that our enemies may cross, leaving their footprints for all to see’. The Spanish weren’t trying to build no bridges, though. After a bogus trial they hung brave Anacaona. In Santo Domingo, in the shadow of one of our first churches. The End.
A common story you hear about Anacaona in the DR is that on the eve of her execution she was offered a chance to save herself: all she had to do was marry a Spaniard who was obsessed with her. (See the trend? Trujillo wanted the Mirabal Sisters, and the Spaniard wanted Anacaona.) Offer that choice to a contemporary Island girl and see how fast she fills out that passport application. Anacaona, however, tragically old-school, was reported to have said, Whitemen, kiss my hurricane ass! And that was the end of Anacaona. The Golden Flower. One of the Founding Mothers of the New World and the most beautiful Indian in the World.
As common as krill. (Not that krill is too common on the Island but you get the drift.) So common that Mario Vargas Llosa didn’t have to do much except open his mouth to sift it out of the air. There’s one of these belaco tales in almost everybody’s hometown. It’s one of those easy stories because in essence it explains it all. Trujillo took your houses, your properties, put your pops and your moms in jail? Well, it was because he wanted to f*ck the beautiful daughter of the house! And your family wouldn’t let him!
Shit really is perfect. Makes for plenty of fun reading.
But there’s another, less-known, variant of the Abelard vs. Trujillo narrative. A secret history that claims that Abelard didn’t get in trouble because of his daughter’s culo or because of an imprudent joke.
This version contends that he got in trouble because of a book.
(Cue the theremin, please.)
Sometime in 1944 (so the story goes), while Abelard was still worried about whether he was in trouble with Trujillo, he started writing a book about — what else? — Trujillo. By 1945 there was already a tradition of ex-officials writing tell-all books about the Trujillo regime. But that apparently was not the kind of book Abelard was writing. His shit, if we are to believe the whispers, was an expose of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the president — that he was supernatural, that he was not human — may in some ways have been true. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!
I only wish I could have read that thing. (I know Oscar did too.) That shit would have been one wild mother-f*cking ride. Alas, the grimoire in question (so the story goes) was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. No copies survive. Not his wife or his children knew about its existence, either. Only one of the servants who helped him collect the folktales on the sly, etc., etc. What can I tell you? In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow. It was one of those fictions with a lot of disseminators but no believers. Oscar, as you might imagine, found this version of the Fall very very attractive. Appealed to the deep structures in his nerd brain. Mysterious books, a supernatural, or perhaps alien, dictator who had installed himself on the first Island of the New World and then cut it off from everything else, who could send a curse to destroy his enemies — that was some New Age Lovecraft shit.
The Lost Final Book of Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral. I’m sure that this is nothing more than a figment of our Island’s hypertrophied voodoo imagination. And nothing less. The Girl Trujillo Wanted might be trite as far as foundation myths go but at least it’s something you can really believe in, no? Something real.
Strange, though, that when all was said and done, Trujillo never went after Jackie, even though he had Abelard in his grasp. He was known to be unpredictable, but still, it’s odd, isn’t it?
Also strange that none of Abelard’s books, not the four he authored or the hundreds he owned, survive. Not in an archive, not in a private collection. Not a one. All of them either lost or destroyed. Every paper he had in his house was confiscated and reportedly burned. You want creepy? Not one single example of his handwriting remains. I mean, OK, Trujillo was thorough. But not one scrap of paper with his handwriting? That was more than thorough. You got to fear a motherf*cker or what he’s writing to do something like that.
But hey, it’s only a story, with no solid evidence, the kind of shit only a nerd could love.


THE SENTENCE
No matter what you believe: in February 1946, Abelard was officially convicted of all charges and sentenced to eighteen years. Eighteen years! Gaunt Abelard dragged from the courtroom before he could say a word. Socorro, immensely pregnant, had to be restrained from attacking the judge. Maybe you’ll ask, Why was there was no out cryin the papers, no actions among the civil rights groups, no opposition parties rallying to the cause? Nigger, please: there were no papers, no civil rights groups, no opposition parties; there was only Trujillo. And talk about jurisprudence: Abelard’s lawyer got one phone call from the Palacio and promptly dropped the appeal. It’s better we say nothing, he advised Socorro. He’ll live longer. Say nothing, say everything — it didn’t matter. It was the Fall. The fourteen-room house in La Vega, the luxurious apartment in Santiago, the stables in which you could comfortably billet a dozen horses, the two prosperous supermercados and the string off fíncas vanished in the detonation, were all confiscated by the Trujillato and ended up dispersed among the Jefe and his minions, two of whom had been out with Abelard the night he said the Bad Thing. (I could reveal their names but I believe you already know one of them; he was a certain trusted neighbor.) But no disappearance was more total, more ultimate, than Abelard’s.
Losing your house and all your properties, that was par for the course with the Trujillato — but the arrest (or if you’re more into the fantastic: that book) precipitated an unprecedented downturn in the family fortune. Tripped, at some cosmic level, a lever against the family. Call it a whole lot of bad luck, outstanding karmic debt, or something else. (Fukú?) Whatever it was, the shit started coming at the family something awful and there are some people who would say it’s never ever stopped.


FALLOUT
The family claims the first sign was that Abelard’s third and final daughter, given the light early on in her father’s capsulization, was born black. And not just any kind of black. But black black — kongo-black, shango-black, kali-black, zapote-black, rekha-black — and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen.
You want a real first sign?
Not two months after giving birth to the third and final daughter (who was named Hypatia Belicia Cabral) Socorro, perhaps blinded by her grief: by her husband’s disappearance, by the fact that all her husband’s family had begun avoiding them like, well, a fukú, by postpartum depression, stepped in front of a speeding ammunition truck and was dragged nearly to the front of La Casa Amarilla before the driver realized something was wrong. If she wasn’t dead on impact she was certainly dead by the time they pried her body from the truck’s axles.
It was the very worst kind of luck, but what could be done? With a dead mom and a dad in prison, with the rest of the family scarce (and I mean Trujillo-scarce), the daughters had to be divvied up among whoever would take them. Jackie got sent to her wealthy godparents in La Capital, while Astrid ended up with relatives in Sanjuan de la Maguana.
They never saw each other or their father again.
Even those among you who don’t believe in fukú’s of any kind might have wondered what in Creation’s name was going on. Shortly after Socorro’s horrible accident, Esteban the Gallo, the family’s number-one servant, was fatally stabbed outside a cabaret; the attackers were never found. Lydia perished soon after, some say of grief: others of a cancer in her womanly parts. Her body was not found for months. After all, she lived alone.
In 1948, Jackie, the family’s Golden Child, was found drowned in her godparents’ pool. The pool that had been drained down to its last two feet of water. Up to that point she’d been unflaggingly cheerful, the sort of talkative negra who could have found a positive side to a mustard-gas attack. Despite her traumas, despite the circumstances around her separation from her parents, she disappointed no one, exceeded all expectations. She was number one in her class academically, beating out even the private-school children of the American Colony, so off-the-hook intelligent she made a habit of correcting her teachers’ mistakes on exams. She was captain of the debate team, captain of the swim team, and in tennis had no equal, was f*cking golden. But never got over the Fall or her role in it, was how people explained it. (Though how odd is it that she was accepted to medical school in France three days before she ‘killed herself’ and from all evidence couldn’t wait to be gone from Santo Domingo.)
Her sister, Astrid — we scarcely knew you, babe — wasn’t much luckier. In 1951, while praying in a church in San Juan, where she lived with her tíos, a stray bullet flew down the aisle and struck her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. No one knew where the bullet had come from. No one even recalled hearing a weapon discharge.
Of the original family quartet, Abelard lived the longest. Which is ironic since nearly everyone in his circle, including La Inca, believed the government when they announced in 1953 that he was dead. (Why did they do this? Because.) It was only after he died for real that it was revealed that he’d been in Nigüa prison all along. Served fourteen straight years in Trujillo’s justice. What a nightmare.↓
≡ Nigüa and El Pozo de Nagua were death camps — Ultamos — considered the worst prisons in the New World. Most niggers who ended up in Nigüa during the Trujillato never left alive, and those who did probably wished they hadn’t. The father of one of my friends spent eight years in Nigüa for failing to show proper deference toward the Jefe’s father, and he once spoke of a fellow prisoner who made the mistake of complaining to his jailers about a toothache. The guards shoved a gun in his mouth and blew his brains into orbit. I bet it don’t hurt now, the guards guffawed. (The one who actually committed the murder was known thereafter as El Dentista.) Nigüa had many famous alumni, including the writer Juan Bosch, who would go on to become Exiled Anti-Trujillista Number One and eventually president of the Dominican Republic. As Juan Isidro Jiménes Grullón said in his book Una Gestapo en América, ‘es mejor tener cien niguas en un pie que un pie en Nigüa’.
A thousand tales I could tell you about Abelard’s imprisonment — a thousand tales to wring the salt from your mother-f*cking eyes — but I’m going to spare you the anguish, the torture, the loneliness, and the sickness of those fourteen wasted years, spare you in fact the events and leave you with only the consequences (and you should wonder, rightly, if I’ve spared you anything).
In 1960, at the height of the clandestine resistance movement against Trujillo, Abelard underwent a particularly gruesome procedure. He was manacled to a chair, placed out in the scorching sun, and then a wet rope was cinched cruelly about his forehead. It was called La Corona, a simple but horribly effective torture. At first the rope just grips your skull, but as the sun dries and tightens it, the pain becomes unbearable, would drive you mad. Among the prisoners of the Trujillato few tortures were more feared. Since it neither killed you nor left you alive. Abelard survived it but was never the same. Turned him into a vegetable. The proud flame of his intellect extinguished. For the rest of his short life he existed in an imbecilic stupor, but there were prisoners who remembered moments when he seemed almost lucid, when he would stand in the fields and stare at his hands and weep, as if recalling that there was once a time when he had been more than this. The other prisoners, out of respect, continued to call El Doctor. It was said he died a couple of days before Trujillo was assassinated. Buried in an unmarked grave somewhere outside of Nigüa. Oscar visited the site on his last days. Nothing to report. Looked like every other scrabby field in Santo Domingo. He burned candles, left flowers, prayed, and went back to his hotel. The government was supposed to have erected a plaque to the dead of Nigüa Prison, but they never did.


THE THIRD AND FINAL DAUGHTER
What about the third and final daughter, Hypatia Belicia Cabral, who was only two months old when her mother died, who never met her father, who was held by her sisters only a few times before they too disappeared, who spent no time inside Casa Hatüey, who was the literal Child of the Apocalypse?
What about her? She was not as easy to place as Astrid or Jackie; she was a newborn, after all, and, well, the scuttlebutt around the family has it that as she was so dark no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her. To make matters worse, she was born bakiní — underweight, sickly. She had problems crying, problems nursing, and no one outside the family wanted the dark child to live. I know it’s taboo to make this accusation, but I doubt that anybody inside the family wanted her to live, either. For a couple of weeks it was touch and go, and if it hadn’t been for a kindly dark-skinned woman named Zoila who gave her some of her own baby’s breast milk and held her for hours a day she probably wouldn’t have made it. By the end of her fourth month the baby seemed to be staging a comeback. She was still bakiní central, but she was starting to put on weight, and her crying, which before had sounded like a murmur from the grave, was growing more and more piercing. Zoila (who had become a guardian angel of sorts) stroked the baby’s mottled head and declared: Another six months, mi’jita, and you’ll be mas fuerte que Lílis.
Beli didn’t have six months. (Stability was not in our girl’s stars, only Change.) Without any warning a group of Socorro’s distant relatives showed up and claimed the child, tore her clean out of Zoila’s arms (the very same relatives Socorro had happily put behind her when she married Abelard). I suspect these people hadn’t actually intended to take care of the girl for any length of time, were only doing it because they expected some monetary reward from the Cabrals, and when no loot was forthcoming, the Fall was total, the brutos passed the girl on to some even more distant relatives on the outskirts of Azua. And here’s where the trail gets funky. These people in Azua seemed to be some real wack jobs, what my moms calls salvages. After only a month of caring for the unhappy infant, the moms of the family disappeared one afternoon with the baby, and when she returned to her village the baby didn’t. She told her vecinos that the baby had died. Some people believed her. Beli, after all, had been ailing for a while. The tiniest little negrita on the planet. fukú, part three. But most folks figured that she had sold the girl to some other family. Back then, as now, the buying and selling of children, common enough.
And that’s exactly what happened. Like a character in one of Oscar’s fantasy books, the orphan (who may or may not have been the object of a supernatural vendetta) was sold to complete strangers in another part of Azua. That’s right — she was sold. Became a criada, a restavek. Lived anonymously among the poorest sectors on the Island, never knowing who her real people were, and subsequently she was lost from sight for a long long time.↓
≡ I lived in Santo Domingo only until I was nine, and even I knew criadas. Two of them lived in the callejón behind our house, and these girls were the most demolished, overworked human beings I’d known at that time. One girl, Sobeida, did all the cooking, all the cleaning, fetched all the water, and took care of two infants for a family of eight — and chickie was only seven years old! She never went to school, and if my brother’s first girlfriend, Yohana, hadn’t taken the time — stolen behind her people’s back — to teach her her ABCs, she wouldn’t have known nada. Every year I came home from the States, it was the same thing; quiet hardworking Sobeida would stop in for a second to say a word to my abuela and my mother (and also to watch a couple of minutes of a novela) before running off to finish her next chore. (My mother always brought her a gift of cash; the one time she brought her a dress, her ‘people’ were wearing it the next day.) I tried to talk to her, of course Mr. Community Activist — but she would skitter away from me and my stupid questions. What can you two talk about? my moms demanded. La probrecita can’t even write her own name. And then when she was fifteen, one of the callejón idiots knocked her up, and now, my mother tells me, the family has got her kid working for them too, bringing in the water for his mother.


THE BURNING
The next time she appears is in 1955. As a whisper in La Inca’s ear.
I think we should be very clear and very honest about La Inca’s disposition during the period we have been calling the Fall. Despite some claims that she was living in exile in Puerto Rico during the Fall, La Inca was in fact in Baní, isolated from her family, mourning the death of her husband three years earlier. (Point of clarification for the conspiracy-minded: his death occurred before the Fall, so he was definitely not a victim of it.) Those early years of her mourning had been bad; her hubby the only person she had ever loved, who had ever really loved her, and they’d been married only months before he passed. She was lost in the wilderness of her grief: so when word came down that her cousin Abelard was in Big Trouble with Trujillo, La Inca, to her undying shame, did nothing. She was in such pain. What could she have done? When news reached her of the death of Socorro and the dispersal of the daughters, she still, to her everlasting shame, did nothing. Let the rest of the family figure it out. It wasn’t until she heard that both Jackie and Astrid had passed that she finally pulled herself out of her malaise long enough to realize that dead husband or no dead husband, mourning or no mourning, she had failed utterly in her responsibility toward her cousin, who had always been kind to her, and who had supported her marriage when the rest of the family did not. This revelation both shamed and mortified La Inca. She got herself cleaned up and went looking for the Third and Final Daughter — but when she got to the family in Azua that had bought the girl, they showed her a little grave, and that was it. She had powerful suspicions about this evil family, about the girl, but since she wasn’t a psychic, or a CSI, there was nothing she could do. She had to accept that the girl had perished, and that it was, in part, her fault. One good thing about that shame and that guilt: it blew her out of her mourning. She came back to life. Opened up a string of bakeries. Dedicated herself to serving her customers. Every now and then would dream about the little negrita, the last of her dead cousin’s seed. Hi, tía, the girl would say, and La Inca would wake up with a knot in her chest.
And then it was 1955. The Year of the Benefactor. La Inca’s bakeries were kicking ass, she had reestablished herself as a presence in her town, when one fine day she heard an astonishing tale. It seems that a little campesina girl living in Outer Azua had tried to attend the new rural school the Trujillato had built out there but her parents, who weren’t her parents, didn’t want her to attend. The girl, though, was immensely stubborn, and the parents who weren’t her parents flipped when the girl kept skipping out on work to attend classes, and in the ensuing brawl the poor muchachita got burned, horribly; the father, who was not her father, splashed a pan of hot oil on her naked back. The burn nearly killing her. (In Santo Domingo good news might travel like thunder, but bad news travels like light.) And the wildest part of the story? Rumor had it that this burned girl was a relative of La Inca!
How could that be possible? La Inca demanded. Do you remember your cousin who was the doctor up in La Vega? The one who went to prison for saying the Bad Thing about Trujillo? Well, fulano, who knows fulano, who knows fulano, said that that little girl is his daughter!
For two days she didn’t want to believe. People were always starting rumors about everything in Santo Domingo. Didn’t want to believe that the girl could have survived, could be alive in Outer Azua, of all places!↓
≡ Those of you who know the Island (or are familiar with Kinito Mendez’s oeuvre) know exactly the landscape I’m talking about. These are not the campos that your folks rattle on about. These are not the guanábana campos of our dreams. Outer Azua is one of the poorest areas in the DR; it is a wasteland, our own homegrown sert?o, resembled the irradiated terrains from those end-of-the-world scenarios that Oscar loved so much — outer Azua was the Outland, the Badlands, the Cursed Earth, the Forbidden Zone, the Great Wastes, the Desert of Glass, the Burning Lands, the Doben-al, it was Salusa Secundus, it was Ceti Alpha Six, it was Tatooine. Even the residents could have passed for survivors of some not-so-distant holocaust. The poor ones — and it was with these infelices that Beli had lived often wore rags, walked around barefoot, and lived in homes that looked like they’d been constructed from the detritus of the former world. If you would have dropped Astronaut Taylor amongst these folks he would have fallen to the ground and bellowed, You finally did it! (No, Charlton, it’s not the End of the World, it’s just Outer Azua.) The only non-thorn non-insect non-lizard life-forms that thrived at these latitudes were the Alcoa mining operations and the region’s famous goats (los que brincan las Himalayas y cagan en la bandera de Espa?a).
Outer Azua was a dire wasteland indeed. My moms, a contemporary of Belicia, spent a record-breaking fifteen years in Outer Azua. And while her childhood was far nicer than Beli’s she nevertheless reports that in the early fifties these precincts were full of smoke, inbreeding, intestinal worms, twelve-year-old brides, and full on whippings. Families were Glasgow-ghetto huge because, she claims, there was nothing to do after dark and because infant mortality rates were so extreme and calamities so vast you needed a serious supply of reinforcements if you expected your line to continue. A child who hadn’t escaped a close brush with Death was looked at askance. (My mom survived a rheumatic fever that killed her favorite cousin; by the time her own fever broke and she regained consciousness, my abuelos had already bought the coffin they expected to bury her in.)
For two nights she slept poorly, had to medicate herself with marijuana, and finally, after dreaming of her dead husband and as much to settle her own conscience as anything, La Inca asked her neighbor and number one dough-kneader, Carlos Moya (the man who had once kneaded her dough, before running off and getting married) to drive her to where this girl was supposed to live. If she is my cousin’s daughter I will know her just by looking at her, she announced. Twenty-four hours later La Inca returned with an impossibly tall, impossibly skinny half-dead Belicia in tow, La Inca’s mind firmly and permanently set against both campos and their inhabitants. Not only had these savages burned the girl, they proceeded to punish her further by locking her in a chicken coop at night! At first they hadn’t wanted to bring her out. She can’t be your family, she’s a prieta. But La Inca insisted, used the Voice on them, and when the girl emerged from the coop, unable to unbend her body because of the burn, La Inca had stared into her wild furious eyes and seen Abelard and Socorro staring back at her. Forget the black skin — it was her. The Third and Final Daughter. Thought lost, now found.
I am your real family, La Inca said forcefully. I am here to save you.
And so, in a heartbeat, by a whisper, were two lives irrevocably changed. La Inca installed Beli in the spare room in her house where her husband had once taken his naps and worked on his carvings. Filed the paperwork to give the girl an identity, called in the doctors. The girl’s burns were unbelievably savage. (One hundred and ten hit points minimum.) A monster glove of festering ruination extending from the back of her neck to the base of her spine. A bomb crater, a world-scar like those of a hibakusha. As soon as she could wear real clothes again, La Inca dressed the girl and had her first real photo taken out in front of the house.
Here she is: Hypatia Belicia Cabral, the Third and Final Daughter. Suspicious, angry, scowling, uncommunicative, a wounded hungering campesina, but with an expression and posture that shouted in bold, gothic letters: DEFIANT.
Darkskinned but clearly her family’s daughter. Of this there was no doubt. Already taller than Jackie in her prime. Her eyes exactly the same color as those of the father she knew nothing about.



FORGET ME NAUT
Of those nine years (and of the Burning) Beli did not speak. It seems that as soon as her days in Outer Azua were over, as soon as she reached Baní, that entire chapter of her life got slopped into those containers in which governments store nuclear waste, triple-sealed by industrial lasers and deposited in the dark, uncharted trenches of her soul. It says a lot about Beli that for forty years she never leaked word one about that period of her life: not to her madre, not to her friends, not to her lovers, not to the Gangster, not to her husband. And certainly not to her beloved children, Lola and Oscar. Forty years. What little anyone knows about Beli’s Azua days comes exclusively from what La Inca heard the day she rescued Beli from her so-called parents. Even today La Inca rarely saying anything more than Casi la acabaron.
In fact, I believe that, barring a couple of key moments, Beli never thought about that life again. Embraced the amnesia that was so common throughout the Islands, five parts denial, five parts negative hallucination. Embraced the power of the Untilles. And from it forged herself anew.


SANCTUARY
But enough. What matters is that in Baní, in La Inca’s house, Belicia Cabral found Sanctuary. And in La Inca, the mother she never had. Taught the girl to read, write, dress, eat, behave normally. La Inca a finishing school on fast-forward; for here was a woman with a civilizing mission, a woman driven by her own colossal feelings of guilt, betrayal, and failure. And Beli, despite all that she’d endured (or perhaps because of it), turned out to be a most apt pupil. Took to La Inca’s civilizing procedures like a mongoose to chicken. By the end of Sanctuary’s first year, Beli’s rough lines had been kneaded out; she might have cursed more, had more of a temper, her movements more aggressive and unrestrained, had the merciless eyes of a falcon, but she had the posture and speech (and arrogance) of una muchacha respetable. And when she wore long sleeves the scar was only visible on her neck (the edge of a larger ruination certainly, but greatly reduced by the cut of the cloth).This was the girl who would travel to the U.S. in 1962, whom Oscar and Lola would never know. La Inca the only one to have seen Beli at her beginnings, when she slept fully dressed and screamed in the middle of the night, who saw her before she constructed a better self one with Victorian table manners and a disgust of filth and poor people.
Theirs, as you might imagine, was an odd relationship. La Inca never sought to discuss Beli’s time in Azua, would never refer to it, or to the Burning. She pretended it didn’t exist (the same way she pretended that the poor slobs in her barrio didn’t exist when they, in fact, were overrunning the place). Even when she greased the girl’s back, every morning and every night, La Inca only said, Síentese aquí, se?orita. It was a silence, a lack of probing, that Beli found most agreeable. (If only the waves of feeling that would occasionally lap her back could be so easily forgotten.) Instead of talking about the Burning, or Outer Azua, La Inca talked to Beli about her lost, forgotten past, about her father, the famous doctor, about her mother, the beautiful nurse, about her sisters Jackie and Astrid, and about that marvelous castle in the Cibao: Casa Hatüey.
They may never have become best friends — Beli too furious, La Inca too correct — but La Inca did give Beli the greatest of gifts, which she would appreciate only much later; one night La Inca produced an old newspaper, pointed to a photograph: This, she said, is your father and your mother. This, she said, is who you are.
The day they opened their clinic: so young, both of them looking so serious.
For Beli those months truly were her one and only Sanctuary, a world of safety she never thought possible. She had clothes, she had food, she had time, and La Inca never ever yelled at her. Not for nothing, and didn’t let anybody else yell at her either. Before La Inca enrolled her in Colegio EI Redentor with the richies, Beli attended the dusty, fly-infested public school with children three years younger than her, made no friends (she couldn’t have imagined it any other way), and for the first time in her life began to remember her dreams. It was a luxury she’d never dared indulge in, and in the beginning they seemed as powerful as storms. She had the whole variety, from flying to being lost, and even dreamt about the Burning, how her ‘father’s’ face had turned blank at the moment he picked up the skillet. In her dreams she was never scared. Would only shake her head. You’re gone, she said. No more.
There was a dream, however, that did haunt her. Where she walked alone through a vast, empty house whose roof was being tattooed by rain. Whose house was it? She had not a clue. But she could hear the voices of children in it.
At first year’s end, the teacher asked her to come to the board and fill in the date, a privilege that only the ‘best’ children in the class were given. She is a giant at the board and in their minds the children are calling her what they call her in the world: variations on La Prieta Quemada or La Fea Quemada. When Beli sat down the teacher glanced over her scrawl and said, Well done, Senorita Cabral! She would never forget that day, even when she became the Queen of Diaspora.
Well done, Senorita Cabral! She would never forget. She was nine years, eleven months. It was the Era of Trujillo.