The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

sort of way, by summer’s end she’d become un mujeron total, acquiring that body of hers, that body that made her famous in Bani. Her dead parents’ genes on some Roman Polanski shit; like the older sister she had never met, Beli was transformed almost overnight into an underage stunner, and if Trujillo had not been on his last erections he probably would have gunned for her like he’d been rumored to have gunned for her poor dead sister. For the record, that summer our girl caught a cuerpazo so berserk that only a pornographer or a comic-book artist could have designed it with a clear conscience. Every neighborhood has its tetua, but Beli could have put them all to shame, she was La Tetua Suprema: her tetas were globes so implausibly titanic they made generous souls pity their bearer and drove every straight male in their vicinity to reevaluate his sorry life. She had the Breasts of Luba (35DDD). And what about that supersonic culo that could tear words right out of niggers’ mouths, pull windows from out their mother-fucking frames? A culo que jalaba mas que una junta de buey. Dios mio! Even your humble Watcher, reviewing her old pictures, is struck by what a fucking babe she was.v

^{? My shout-out to Jack Kirby aside, it’s hard as a Third Worlder not to feel a certain amount of affinity for Datu the Watcher; he resides in the hidden Blue Area of the Moon and we DarkZoners reside (to quote Glissant) on ‘la face cachee de la Terre’ (Earth’s hidden face).}

Ande el diablo! La Inca exclaimed. Hija, what in the world are you eating!

If Beli had been a normal girl, being the neighborhood’s most prominent tetua might have pushed her into shyness, might even have depressed the shit out of her. And at first Beli had both these reactions, and also the feeling that gets delivered to you by the bucket for free during adolescence: Shame. Sharam. Verguenza. She no longer wanted to bathe with La Inca, a huge change to their morning routine. Well, I guess you’re grown enough to wash yourself La Inca said lightly. But you could tell she was hurt. In the close darkness of their wash closet, Beli circled disconsolately around her Novi Orbis, avoiding her hypersensitive nipples at all costs. Now every time she had to head outside, Beli felt like she was stepping into a Danger Room filled with men’s laser eyes and women’s razor whispers. The blasts of car horns enough to make her fall over herself. She was furious at the world for this newly acquired burden, and furious at herself.

For the first month, that is. Gradually Beli began to see beyond the catcalls and the Dios mio asesina and the y ese tetatorio and the que pechonalidad to the hidden mechanisms that drove these comments. One day on the way back from the bakery, La Inca muttering at her side about that day’s receipts, it dawned on Beli: Men liked her! Not only did they like her, they liked her a fucking lot. The proof was the day that one of their customers, the local dentist, slipped her a note with his money, and it said, I want to see you, as simple as that. Beli was terrified, scandalized, and giddy. The dentist had a fat wife who ordered a cake from La Inca almost every month, either for one of her seven children or for her fifty-some cousins (but most likely for her and her alone). She had a wattle and an enormous middle-aged ass that challenged all chairs. Beli mooned over that note like it was a marriage proposal from God’s hot son, even though the dentist was bald and paunchier than an OTB regular and had a tracery of fine red veins all over his cheeks. The dentist came in as he always did but now his eyes were always questing, Hello, Snorita Beli! his greeting now fetid with lust and threat, and Beli’s heart would beat like nothing she’d ever heard. After two such visits she wrote, on a whim, a little note that said simply, Yes, you can pick me up at the park at tal-and-tal time, and passed it back to him with his change and by hook and crook arranged to be walking with La Inca through the park at the very moment of the assignation. Her heart going like crazy; she didn’t know what to expect but she had a wild hope, and just as they were about to leave the park, Beli spotted the dentist sitting in a car that was not his, pretending to read the paper but looking forlornly in her direction. Look, Madre, Beli said loudly, it’s the dentist, and La Inca turned and homeboy threw the car frantically into gear and tore out of there before La Inca could even wave. How very strange! La Inca said.

I don’t like him, Beli said. He looks at me.

And now it was his wife who came to the bakery to pick up the cakes. Y El dentista? Beli inquired innocently. That one’s too lazy to do anything, his wife said with no little exasperation.

Beli, who’d been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent over the moon by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring. Like stumbling into the wizard Shazam’s cave or finding the crashed ship of the Green Lantern! Hypatia Belicia Cabral finally had power and a true sense of self. Started pinching her shoulders back, wearing the tightest clothes she had. Dios mio, La Inca said every time the girl headed out. Why would God give you that burden in this country of all places!

Telling Beli not to flaunt those curves would have been like asking the persecuted fat kid not to use his recently discovered mutant abilities. With great power comes great responsibility… bullshit. Our girl ran into the future that her new body represented and never ever looked back.

HUNT THE LIGHT KNIGHT

Now fully, ahem, endowed, Beli returned to El Redentor from summer break to the alarm of faculty and students alike and set out to track down Jack Pujols with the great deliberation of Ahab after you-know-who. (And of all these things the albino boy was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?) Another girl would have been more subtle, drawn her prey to her, but what did Beli know about process or patience? She threw everything she had at Jack. Batted her eyes so much at him that she almost sprained her eyelids. Put her tremendous chest in his line of sight every chance she got. Adopted a walk that got her yelled at by the teachers but that brought the boys and the male faculty a-running. But Pujols was unmoved, observed her with his deep dolphin eyes and did nothing. After about a week of this, Beli was going out of her mind, she had expected him to fall instantly, and so, one day, out of shameless desperation, she pretended to accidentally leave buttons on her blouse open; she was wearing this lacy bra she stole from Dorea (who had acquired quite a nice chest herself). But before Beli could bring her colossal cleavage to bear—her very own wave-motion gun—Wei, blushing deeply, ran over and buttoned her up.

You showing!

Jack drifting disinterestedly away.

She tried everything, but no dice. Before you know it Beli was back to banging into him in the hall. Cabral, he said with a smile. You have to be more careful.

I love you! she wanted to scream, I want to have all your children! I want to be your woman! But instead she said, You be careful.

She was morose. September ended and, alarmingly enough, she had her best month at the school. Academically. English was her number-one subject (how ironic). She learned the names of the fifty states. She could ask for coffee, a bathroom, the time, where the post office was. Her English teacher, a deviant, assured her that her accent was superb, superb. The other girls allowed him to touch them, but Beli, now finely attuned to masculine weirdness, and certain that she was worthy only of a prince, sidled out from under his balmy hands.

A teacher asked them to start thinking about the new decade. Where would you like to see yourself: your country, and our glorious president in the coming years? No one understood the question so he had to break it down into two simple parts.

One of her classmates, Mauricio Ledesme, got in serious trouble, so bad that his family had to spirit him out of the country. He was a quiet boy who sat next to one of the Squadron, stewing always in his love for her. Perhaps he thought he’d impress her. (Not that far-fetched, for soon comes the generation who’s number-one ass-getting technique will not be to Be Like Mike, but to Be Like Che.) Perhaps he’d just had enough. He wrote in the crabbed handwriting of a future poet-revolutionary: I’d like to see our country be a democracia like the United States. I wish we would stop having dictators. Also I believe that it was Trujillo who killed Galindez.v

^{? Much in the news in those days, Jesus de Galindez was a Basque supernerd and a Columbia University grad student who had written a rather unsettling doctoral dissertation. The topic? Lamentably, unfortunately, sadly: the era of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. Galindez, a loyalist in the Spanish Civil War, had firsthand knowledge of the regime; he had taken refuge in Santo Domingo in 1939, occupied high positions therein, and by his departure in 1946 had developed a lethal allergy to the Failed Cattle Thief, could conceive for himself no}