And look how well you’ve treated me. Look how well. Maybe people are right, La Inca despaired. Maybe you are cursed.
Beli laughed. You might be cursed, but not me.
Even the chinos had to respond to Beli’s change in attitude. We have you go, Juan said.
I don’t understand.
He licked his lips and tried again. We have to you go.
You’re fired, Jose said. Please leave your apron on the counter.
The Gangster heard about it and the next day some of his goons paid the Brothers Then a visit and what do you know if our girl wasn’t immediately reinstated. It wasn’t the same no more, though. The brothers wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t spin no stories about their youth in China and the Philippines. After a couple of days of the silent treatment Beli took the hint and stopped showing up altogether.
And now you don’t have a job, La Inca pointed out help fully.
I don’t need a job. He’s going to buy me a house.
A man whose own house you yourself have never visited is promising to buy you a house? And you believe him? Oh, hija. Yessir: our girl believed. After all, she was in love! The world was coming apart at the seams—Santo Domingo was in the middle of a total meltdown, the Trujillato was tottering, police blockades on every corner—and even the kids she’d gone to school with, the brightest and the best, were being swept up by the Terror. A girl from El Redentor told her that Jack Pujols’s little brother had gotten caught organizing against El Jefe and the colonel’s influence could not save the boy from having an eye gouged out with electric shocks. Beli didn’t want to hear it. After all, she was in love! In love! She wafted through her day like a woman with a concussion. It’s not like she had a number for the Gangster, or even an address (bad sign number one, girls), and he was in the habit of disappearing for days without warning (bad sign number two), and now that Trujillo’s war against the world was reaching its bitter crescendo (and now that he had Beli on lock), the days could become weeks, and when he reappeared from ‘his business’ he would smell of cigarettes and old fear and want only to fuck, and afterward he would drink whiskey and mutter to himself by the love-motel window. His hair, Beli noticed, was growing in gray.
She didn’t take kindly to these disappearances. They made her look bad in front of La Inca and the neighbors, who were always asking her sweetly, Where’s your savior now, Moses? She defended him against every criticism, of course, no brother has had a better advocate, but then took it out on his ass upon his return. Pouted when he appeared with flowers; made him take her to the most expensive restaurants; pestered him around the clock to move her out of her neighborhood; asked him what the hell he’d been doing these past
During one of the Gangster’s longer absences, Beli, bored and desperate to escape the schadenfreude in her neighbors’ eyes, took it upon herself to ride the Blue Ball Express one last time in other words, she checked in on her old flames. Ostensibly she wanted to end things in a formal way, but I think she was just feeling down and wanted male attention. Which is fine. But then she made the classic mistake of telling these Dominican hombres about the new love of her life, how happy she was. Sisters: don’t ever ever do this. It’s about as smart as telling the judge who’s about to sentence you that back in the day you fingerfucked his mother. The car dealer, always so gentle, so decorous, threw a whiskey bottle at her, screaming, Why should I be happy for a stupid stinking mona! They were in his apartment on the Malecon—at least he showed you his house, Constantina would later crack—and if he had been a better righty she would have ended up brained, perhaps raped and killed, but his fastball only grazed her and then it was her turn on the mound. She put him away with four sinkers to the head, using the same whiskey bottle he’d thrown at her. Five minutes later, panting and barefoot in a cab, she was pulled over by the Secret Police, tipped off because they’d seen her running and it was only when they questioned her that she realized that she was still holding the bottle and it had bloody hair on one of its edges, the car dealer’s straight blond hair.
(
To his credit, Arquimedes acquitted himself in a more mature fashion. (Maybe because she told him first and had not yet grown flip.)
What have you been up to? the Gangster asked the next time he appeared.
Nothing, she said, throwing her arms around his neck, absolutely nothing.
A month before it all blew up, the Gangster took Beli on a vacation to his old haunts in Samana. Their first real trip together, a peace offering prompted by a particularly long absence, a promissory note for future trips abroad. For those capitalenos who never leave the 27 de Febrero or who think Gualey is the Center of the Universe: Samana es una chuleria. One of the authors of the King James Bible traveled the Caribbean, and I often think that it was a place like Samana that was on his mind when he sat down to pen the Eden chapters. For Eden it was, a blessed meridian where mar and sol and green have forged their union and produced a stubborn people that no amount of highfalutin prose can generalize.v
? In my first draft, Samana was actually Jarabacoa, but then my girl Leonie, resident expert in all things Domo, pointed out that there are no beaches in Jarabacoa. Beautiful rivers but no beaches. Leonie was also the one who informed me that the perrito (see first paragraphs of chapter one, ‘Ghetto Nerd at the End of the World’) wasn’t popularized until the late eighties, early nineties, but that was one detail I couldn’t change, just liked the image too much. Forgive me, historians of popular dance, forgive me!
The Gangster was in high spirits, the war against the subversives was going swell, it seemed. (We got ‘em on the run, he gloated. Very soon all will be well.)
As for Beli, she remembered that trip as the nicest time she’d ever had in the DR. She would never again hear the name
Three photos from that trip, and in every one she’s smiling.
They did all the stuff we Dominicans love to do on our vacations. They ate pescado frito and waded in the rio. They walked along the beach and drank rum until the meat behind their eyes throbbed. It was the first time ever that Beli had her own space totally under her control, so while the Gangster dozed restfully in his hamaca she busied herself with playing wife, with creating a preliminary draft of the household they would soon inhabit. Mornings she would subject the cabana to the harshest of scourings and hang boisterous profusions of flowers from every beam and around every window, while her bartering produce and fish from the neighbors resulted in one spectacular meal after another—showing off the skills she acquired during the Lost Years—and the Gangster’s satisfaction, the patting of his stomach, the unequivocal praise, the soft emission of gases as he lay in the hamaca, it was music to her ears! (In her mind she became his wife that week in every sense but the legal.)
She and the Gangster even managed to have heart-to-hearts. On the second day, after he showed her his old home, now abandoned and hurricane-ruined, she asked: Do you ever miss having a family?
They were at the only nice restaurant in the city, where EI Jefe dined on his visits (they’ll still tell you that). You see those people? He pointed toward the bar. All those people have families, you can tell by their faces, they have families that depend on them and that they depend on, and for some of them this is good, and for some of them this is bad. But it all amounts to the same shit because there isn’t one of them who is free. They can’t do what they want to do or be who they should be. I might have no one in the world, but at least I’m free.
She had never heard anyone say those words.
I want to be like you, she told the Gangster days later when they were eating crabs she had cooked in an
