The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

someone.

She was very guapa, I said casually. Abuela snorted. Guapa soy yo. Your mother was a diosa.

But so cabeza dura. When she was your age we never got along. I didn’t know that, I said. She was cabeza dura and I was…exigente. But it all turned out for the best, she sighed. We have you and your brother and that’s more than anyone could have hoped for, given what came before. She plucked out one photo. This is your mother’s father, she offered me the photo. He was my cousin, and—

She was about to say something else and then she stopped.

And that’s when it hit with the force of a hurricane. The feeling. I stood straight up, the way my mother always wanted me to stand up. My abuela was sitting there, forlorn, trying to cobble together the right words and I could not move or breathe. I felt like I always did at the last seconds of a race, when I was sure that I was going to explode. She was about to say something and I was waiting for whatever she was going to tell me. I was waiting to begin.

THREE The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral 1955-1962

LOOK AT THE PRINCESS

Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral:

A girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked who, like her yet-to-be-born daughter, would come to exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise—the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.

UNDER THE SEA

She lived in those days in Bani. Not the frenzied Bani of right now, supported by an endless supply of DoYos who’ve laid claim to most of Boston, Providence, New Hampshire. This was the lovely Bani of times past, beautiful and respectful. A city famed for its resistance to blackness, and it was here, alas, that the darkest character in our story resided. On one of the main streets near the central plaza. In a house that no longer stands. It was here that Beli lived with her mother-aunt, if not exactly content, then certainly in a state of relative tranquility. From 1951 on, ‘hija’ and ‘madre’ running their famous bakery near the Plaza Central and keeping their fading, airless house in tip- top shape. (Before 1951, our orphaned girl had lived with another foster family, monstrous people if the rumors are to be believed, a dark period of her life neither she nor her madre ever referenced. Their very own pagina en blanco.)

These were the Beautiful Days. When La Inca would recount for Beli her family’s illustrious history while they pounded and wrung dough with bare hands (Your father! Your mother! Your sisters! Your house!) or when the only talk between them was the voices on Carlos Moya’s radio and the sound of the butter being applied to Beli’s ruined back. Days of mangoes, days of bread. There are not many surviving photos from that period but it’s not hard to imagine them—arrayed in front of their immaculate house in Los Pescadores. Not touching, because it was not their way. Respectability so dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequena that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it. Theirs was the life of the Good People of Sur. Church twice a week, and on Fridays a stroll through Bani’s parque central, where in those nostalgic Trujillo days stickup kids were nowhere to be seen and the beautiful bands did play. They shared the same sagging bed, and in the morning, while La Inca fished around blindly for her chancletas, Beli would shiver out to the front of the house, and while La Inca brewed her coffee, Beli would lean against the fence and stare. At what? The neighbors? The rising dust? At the world?

Hija, La Inca would call. Hija, come here!

Four, five times until finally La Inca walked over to fetch her, and only then did Beli come. Why are you shouting? Beli wanted to know, annoyed. La Inca pushing her back toward the house: Will you listen to this girl! Thinks herself a person when she’s not!

Beli, clearly: one of those Oya-souls, always turning, allergic to tranquilidad. Almost any other Third World girl would have thanked Dios Santisimo for the blessed life she led: after all, she had a madre who didn’t beat her, who (out of guilt or inclination) spoiled her rotten, bought her flash clothes and paid her bakery wages, peanuts, I’ll admit, but that’s more than what ninety-nine percent of other kids in similar situations earned, which was nathan. Our girl had it made, and yet it did not feel so in her heart. For reasons she only dimly understood, by the time of our narrative, Beli could no longer abide working at the bakery or being the ‘daughter’ of one of the ‘most upstanding women in Bani’. She could not abide, period. Everything about her present life irked her; she wanted, with all her heart, something else. When this dissatisfaction entered her heart she could not recall, would later tell her daughter that it had been with her all her life, but who knows if this is true? What exactly it was she wanted was never clear either: her own incredible life, yes, a handsome, wealthy husband, yes, beautiful children, yes, a woman’s body, without question. If I had to put it to words I’d say what she wanted, more than anything, was what she’d always wanted throughout her Lost Childhood: to escape. From what was easy to enumerate: the bakery, her school, dull-ass Bani, sharing a bed with her madre, the inability to buy the dresses she wanted, having to wait until fifteen to straighten her hair, the impossible expectations of La Inca, the fact that her long-gone parents had died when she was one, the whispers that Trujillo had done it, those first years of her life when she’d been an orphan, the horrible scars from that time, her own despised black skin. But where she wanted to escape to she could not tell you. I guess it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been a princess in a high castle or if her dead parents’ former estate, the glorious Casa Hatuey, had been miraculously restored from Trujillo’s Omega Effect. She would have wanted out.

Every morning the same routine: Hypatia Belicia Cabral, ven aca!

You ven aca, Beli muttered under her breath. You.

Beli had the inchoate longings of nearly every adolescent escapist, of an entire generation, but I ask you: So fucking what? No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated. This was a country, a society, that had been designed to be virtually escape-proof. Alcatraz of the Antilles. There weren’t any Houdini holes in that Platano Curtain. Options as rare as Tainos and for irascible dark-skinned flacas of modest means they were rarer still. (If you want to cast her restlessness in a broader light: she was suffering the same suffocation that was asphyxiating a whole generation of young Dominicans. Twenty-odd years of the Trujillato had guaranteed that. Hers was the generation that would launch the Revolution’ but which for the moment was turning blue for want of air. The generation reaching consciousness in a society that lacked any. The generation that despite the consensus that declared change impossible hankered for change all the same. At the end of her life, when she was being eaten alive by cancer, Beli would talk about how trapped they all felt. It was like being at the bottom fan ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.)

But what could she do? Beli was a girl, for fuck’s sake; she had no power or beauty (yet) or talent or family that could help her transcend, only La Inca, and La Inca wasn’t about to help our girl escape anything. On the contrary, mon frere, La Inca, with her stiff skirts and imperious airs, had as her central goal the planting of Belicia in the provincial soil of Bani and in the inescapable fact of her Family’s Glorious Golden Past. The family Beli had never known, whom she had lost early. (Remember, your father was a doctor, a doctor, and your mother was a nurse, a nurse.) La Inca expected Beli to be the last best hope of her