The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

both in their forties.

Pujols might have been a bitch-ass rat, but Beli’s reaction was one for the history books. Not only was our girl not embarrassed by what had happened, even after being shaken down by the rector and the nun and the janitor, a holy triple-team, she absolutely refused to profess her guilt! If she had rotated her head around 360 degrees and vomited green-pea soup it would have caused only slightly less of an uproar. In typical hard-headed Beli fashion, our girl insisted that she’d done nothing wrong, that, in fact, she was well within her rights.

I’m allowed to do anything I want, Beli said stubbornly, with my husband.

Pujols, it seems, had promised Belicia that they would be married as soon as they’d both finished high school, and Beli had believed him, hook, line, and sinker. Hard to square her credulity with the hardnosed no- nonsense femme-matador I’d come to know, but one must remember: she was young and in love. Talk about fantasist: the girl sincerely believed that Jack would be true.

The Good Teachers of El Redentor never squeezed anything close to a mea culpa from the girl. She kept shaking her head, as stubborn as the Laws of the Universe themselves—No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No NoNo No No No No No No No No No No No No No. Not that it mattered in the end. Belicia’s tenure at the school was over, and so were La Incas dreams of re-creating, in Beli, her father’s genius, his magis (his excellence in all things).

In any other family such a thing would have meant the beating of Beli to within an inch of her life, beating her straight into the hospital with no delay, and then once she was better beating her again and putting her back into the hospital, but La Inca was not that kind of parent. La Inca, you see, was a serious woman, an upstanding woman, one of the best of her class, but she was incapable of punishing the girl physically. Call it a hitch in the universe, call it mental illness, but La Inca just couldn’t do it. Not then, not ever. All she could do was wave her arms in the air and hurl laments. How could this have happened? La Inca demanded. How? How?

He was going to marry me! Beli cried. We were going to have children! Are you insane? La Inca roared. Hija, have you lost your mind?

Took a while for shit to calm down—the neighbors loving the whole thing (I told you that blackie was good for nothing!)—but eventually things did, and only then did La Inca convoke a special session on our girl’s future. First La Inca gave Beli tongue-lashing number five hundred million and five, excoriating her poor judgment, her poor morals, her poor every thing, and only when those preliminaries were good and settled did La Inca lay down the law: You are returning to school. Not to El Redentor but somewhere nearly as good. Padre Billini.

And Beli, her eyes still swollen from Jack-loss, laughed. I’m not going back to school. Not ever.

Had she forgotten the suffering that she had endured in her Lost Years in the pursuit of education? The costs? The terrible scars on her back? (The Burning.) Perhaps she had, perhaps the prerogatives of this New Age had rendered the vows of the Old irrelevant. However, during those tumultuous post- expulsion weeks, while she’d been writhing in her bed over the loss of her ‘husband,’ our girl had been rocked by instances of stupendous turbidity. A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli’s first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve. Never again would she follow any lead other than her own. Not the rector’s, not the nuns’, not La Inca’s, not her poor dead parents’. Only me, she whispered. Me.

This oath did much to rally her. Not long after the back-to-school showdown, Beli put on one of La Inca’s dresses (was literally bursting in it) and caught a ride down to the parque central. This was not a huge trip. But, still, for a girl like Beli it was a precursor of things to come.

When she returned to the house in the late afternoon she announced: I have a job! La Inca snorted. I guess the cabarets are always hiring.

It was not a cabaret. Beli might have been a puta major in the cosmology of her neighbors but a cuero she was not. No: she had landed a job as a waitress at a restaurant on the parque. The owner, a stout well-dressed Chinese by the name of Juan Then, had not exactly needed anyone; in fact he didn’t know if he needed himself: Business terrible, he lamented. Too much politics. Politics bad for everything but politicians.

No excess money. And already many impossible employees. But Beli was not willing to be rejected. There’s a lot I can do. And pinched her shoulder blades, to emphasize her ‘assets’.

Which for a man any less righteous would have been an open invitation but Juan simply sighed: No obligated be without shame. We try you up. Probationary period. Can’t promises build. Political conditions give promises no hospitality.

What’s my salary?

Salary! No salary! You a waitress, you tips.

How much are they?

Once again the glumness. It is without certainy.

I don’t understand.

His brother Jose’s bloodshot eyes glanced up from the sports section. What my brother is saying is that it all depends.

And here’s La Inca shaking her head: A waitress. But, hija, you’re a baker’s daughter, you don’t know the first thing about waitressing!

La Inca assumed that because Beli had of late not shown any enthusiasm for the bakery or school or for cleaning she’d devolved into a zangana. But she’d forgotten that our girl had been a criada in her first life; for half her years she’d know nothing but work. La Inca predicted that Beli would call it quits within a couple of months, but Beli never did. On the job our girl, in fact, showed her quality: she was never late, never malingered, worked her sizable ass of. Heck, she liked the job. It was not exactly President of the Republic, but for a fourteen-year-old who wanted out of the house, it paid, and kept her in the world while she waited for—for her Glorious Future to materialize.

Eighteen months she worked at the Palacio Peking. (Originally called EI Tesoro de—, in honor of the Admiral’s true but never-reached destination, but the Brothers Then had changed it when they learned that the Admiral’s name was a fuku! Chinese no like curses, Juan had said.) She would always say she came of age in the restaurant, and in some ways she did. She learned to beat men at dominoes and proved herself so responsible that the Brothers Then could leave her in charge of the cook and the other waitstaff while they slipped out to fish and visit their thick-legged girlfriends. In later years Beli would lament that she had ever lost touch with her ‘chinos’. They were so good to me, she moaned to Oscar and Lola. Nothing like your worthless esponja of a father. Juan, the melancholic gambler, who waxed about Shanghai as though it were a love poem sung by a beautiful woman you love but cannot have. Juan, the shortsighted romantic whose girlfriends robbed him blind and who never mastered Spanish (though in later years when he was living in Skokie, Illinois, he would yell at his Americanized grandchildren in his guttural Spanish, and they laughed at him, thinking it Chinese). Juan, who taught Beli how to play dominoes, and whose only fundamentalism was his bulletproof optimism: If only Admiral come to our restaurant first, imagine the trouble that could be avoided! Sweating, gentle Juan, who would have lost the restaurant if not for his older brother Jose, the enigmatic, who hovered at the periphery with all the menace of a ciclon; Jose, the bravo, the guapo, his wife and children dead by warlord in the thirties; Jose, who protected the restaurant and the rooms above with an implacable ferocity. Jose, whose grief had extracted from his body all softness, idle chatter, and hope. He never seemed to approve of Beli, or any of the other employees, but since she alone wasn’t scared of him (I’m almost as tall as you are!), he reciprocated by giving her practical instructions: You want to be a useless woman all your life? Like how to hammer nails, fix electrical outlets, cook chow fun and drive a car, all would come in good use when she became the Empress of Diaspora. (Jose would acquit himself bravely in the revolution, fighting, I must regretfully report, against the pueblo, and would die in 1976 in Adanta, cancer of the pancreas, crying out his wife’s name, which the nurses confused for more Chinese gobbledygook—extra emphasis, in their minds, on the gook.)

And then there was Lillian, the other waitress, a squat rice tub, whose rancor against the world turned to glee only when humanity exceeded in its venality, brutality, and mendacity even her own expectations. She didn’t take to Beli at first, thought her competition, but eventually would treat Beli more or less with courtesy: She was the first woman our girl met who read the paper. (Herson’s biblio-mania would remind her always of Lillian. How’s the world keeping? Beli asked her. Jodido, was always her answer.) And Indian Benny, a quiet, meticulous waiter