The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

was convinced she would one day own, furnishing it in her mind, room by room by room. Her madre wanted her to bring back Casa Hatuey, a history house, but Beli’s house was new and crisp, had no history at all attached to it. In her favorite Maria Montez daydream, a dashing European of the Jeans Pierre Aumont variety (who happened to look exactly like Jack Pujols) would catch sight of her in the bakery and fall madly in love with her and sweep her off to his chateau in France.v

^{? Maria Montez, celebrated Dominican actress, moved to the U.S. and made more than twenty-five films between 1940 and 1951, including Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Cobra Woman, and my personal favorite, Siren of Atlantis. Crowned the ‘Qyeen of Technicolor’ by fans and historians alike. Born Maria Africa Gracia Vidal on June 6, 1912, in Barahona, bit her screen name from the famous nineteenth-century courtesan Lola Montez (herself famous for fucking, among others, the part-Haitian Alexandre Dumas). Maria Montez was the original J. Lo (or whatever smoking caribena is the number- one eye-crack of your time), the first real international star the DR had. Ended up marrying a Frenchie (sorry, Anacaona) and moving to Paris after World War II. Drowned alone in her bathtub, at the age of thirty-nine. No sign of struggle, no evidence of foul play. Did some photo ops for the Trujillato every now and then, but nothing serious. It should be pointed out that while in France, Maria proved to be quite the nerd. Wrote three books. Two were published. The third manuscript was lost after her death.}

(Wake up, girl! You’re going to burn the pan de agua!)

She wasn’t the only girl dreaming like this. This jiringonza was in the air, it was the dreamshit that they fed girls day and night. It’s surprising Beli could think of anything else, what with that heavy rotation of boleros, canciones, and versos spinning in her head, with the Listin Diario’s society pages spread before her. Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who’s been abandoned by family, husband, children, and fortune believes in God. Belicia was, if it was possible, even more susceptible to the Casanova Wave than many of her peers. Our girl was straight boy- crazy. (To be called boy-crazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericana to cinders.) She stared at the young bravos on the bus, secretly kissed the bread of the buenmosos who frequented the bakery, sang to herself all those beautiful Cuban love songs.

(God save your soul, La Inca grumbled, if you think boys are an answer to anything.)

But even the boy situation left a lot to be desired. If she’d been interested in the niggers in the barrio our Beli would have had no problems, these cats would have obliged her romantic spirit by jumping her lickety-split. But alas, La Inca’s hope that the rarified private airs of Colegio El Redentor would have a salutary effect on the girl’s character (like a dozen wet-belt beatings or three months in an unheated convent) had at least in this one aspect borne fruit, for Beli at thirteen only had eyes for the Jack Pujolses of the world. As is usually the case in these situations, the high-class boys she so desired didn’t reciprocate her interest—Beli didn’t have quite enough of anything to snap these Rubirosas out of their rich-girl reveries.

What a life! Each day turning on its axis slower than a year. She endured school, the bakery, La Inca’s suffocating solicitude with a furious jaw. She watched hungrily for visitors from out of town, threw open her arms at the slightest hint of a wind and at night she struggled Jacob-like against the ocean pressing down on her.

KIMOTA!

So what happened? A boy happened.

Her First.

NUMERO UNO

Jack Pujols of course: the school’s handsomest (read: whitest) boy, a haughty slender melnibonian of pure European stock whose cheeks looked like they’d been knapped by a master and whose skin was unflawed by scar, mole, blemish, or hair, his small nipples were the pink perfect ovals of sliced salchicha. His father was a colonel in the Trujillato’s beloved air force, a heavy duty player in Bani (would be instrumental in bombing the capital during the revolution, killing all those helpless civilians, including my poor uncle Venicio), and his mother, a former beauty queen of Venezuelan proportions, now active in the Church, a kisser of cardinal rings and a socorro of orphans. Jack, Eldest Son, Privileged Seed, Hijo Bello, Anointed One, revered by his female family members—and that endless monsoon—rain of praise and indulgence had quickened in him the bamboo of entitlement. He had the physical swagger of a boy twice his size and an unbearable loudmouthed cockiness that he drove into people like a metal spur. In the future he would throw his lot in with the Demon Balaguerv and end up ambassador to Panama as his reward, but for the moment he was the school’s Apollo, its Mithra.

^{? Although not essential to our tale, per se, Balaguer is essential to the Dominican one, so therefore we must mention him, even though I’d rather piss in his face. The elders say, Anything uttered for the first time summons a demon, and when twentieth century Dominicans first uttered the word freedom en masse the demon they summoned was Balaguer. (Known also as the Election Thief—see the 1966 election in the DR—and the Homunculus.) In the days of the Trujillato, Balaguer was just one of El Jefe’s more efficient ring wraiths. Much is made of his intelligence (he certainly impressed the Failed Cattle Thief) and of his asceticism (when he raped his little girls he kept it real quiet). After Trujillo’s death he would take over Project Domo and rule the country from 1960 to 1962, from 1966 to 1978, and again from 1986 to 1996 (by then dude was blind as a bat, a living mummy). During the second period of his rule, known locally as the Twelve Years, he unleashed a wave of violence against the Dominican left, death-squading hundreds and driving thousands more out of the country. It was he who oversaw?initiated the thing we call Diaspora. Considered our national ‘genius’, Joaquin Balaguer was a Negrophobe, an apologist to genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself, famously ordering the death of journalist Orlando Martinez. Later, when he wrote his memoirs, he claimed he knew who had done the foul deed (not him, of course) and left a blank page, a pagina en blanco, in the text to be filled in with the truth upon his death. (Can you say impunity?) Balaguer died in 2002. The pagina is still blanca. Appeared as a sympathetic character in Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. Like most homunculi he did not marry and left no heirs.}

The teachers, the staff: the girls, the boys, all threw petals of adoration beneath his finely arched feet: he was proof positive that God—the Great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy!—does not love his children equally.

And how did Beli interact with this insane object of attraction? In a way that is fitting of her bullheaded directness: she would march down the hallway, books pressed to her pubescent chest, staring down at her feet, and, pretending not to see him, would smash into his hallowed vessel.

Caramb—, he spluttered, wheeling about, and then he’d see it was Belicia, a girl, now stooping over to recover her books, and he bent over too (he was, if nothing, a caballero), his anger diffusing, becoming confusion, irritation. Caramba, Cabral, what are you, a bat? Watch. Where. You’re. Going.

He had a single worry line creasing his high forehead (his ‘part,’ as it became known) and eyes of the deepest cerulean. The Eyes of Atlantis. (Once Beli had overheard him bragging to one of his many female admirers: Oh, these ol’ things? I inherited them from my German abuela.)

Come on, Cabral, what’s your difficulty?

It’s your fault! she swore, meant in more ways than one.

Maybe she’d see better, one of his lieutenants cracked, if it was dark out. It might as well have been dark out. For all intents and purposes she was invisible to him.

And would have stayed invisible too if the summer of sophomore year she’d not hit the biochemical jackpot, not experienced a Summer of Her Secondary Sex Characteristics, not been transformed utterly (a terrible beauty has been born). Where before Beli had been a gangly ibis of a girl, pretty in a typical