The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

You have to rise.

My baby, Beli wept. Mi hijo precioso.

Hypatia, your baby is dead.

No, no, no, no, no. It pulled at her unbroken arm. You have to rise now or you’ll never have the son or the daughter.

What son? she wailed. What daughter?

The ones who await.

It was dark and her legs trembled beneath her like smoke.

You have to follow.

It rivered into the cane, and Beli, blinking tears, realized she had no idea which way was out. As some of you know, cane-fields are no fucking joke, and even the cleverest of adults can get mazed in their endlessness, only to reappear months later as a cameo of bones. But before Beli lost hope she heard the creature’s voice. She (for it had a woman’s lilt) was singing! In an accent she could not place: maybe Venezuelan, maybe Colombian. Sueno, sueno, sueno, como tu te llamas. She clung unsteadily to the cane, like an anciano clinging to a hammock, and, panting, took her first step, a long dizzy spell, beating back a blackout, and then her next. Precarious progress, because if she fell she knew she would never stand again. Sometimes she saw the creature’s chabine eyes flashing through the stalks. Yo me llamo sueno de la madrugada. The cane didn’t want her to leave, of course; it slashed at her palms, jabbed into her flank and clawed her thighs, and its sweet stench clogged her throat.

Each time she thought she would fall she concentrated on the faces of her promised future—her promised children—and from that obtained the strength she needed to continue. She pulled from strength, from hope, from hate, from her invincible heart, each a different piston driving her forward. Finally, when all were exhausted, when she began to stumble headfirst, heading down like a boxer on his last legs, she stretched her uninjured arm out and what greeted her was not cane but the open world of life. She felt the tarmac under her bare broken feet, and the wind. The wind! But she had only a second to savor it, for just then an unelectrified truck burst out of the darkness in a roar of gears. What a life, she mused, all that lucha only to be run over like a dog. But she wasn’t flattened. The driver, who later swore he saw something lion-like in the gloom, with eyes like terrible amber lamps, slammed on the brakes and halted inches from where a naked blood-spattered Beli tottered.

Now check it: the truck held a perico ripiao conjunto, fresh from playing a wedding in Ocoa. Took all the courage they had not to pop the truck in reverse and peel out of there. Cries of, It’s a baka, a ciguapa, no, a haitiano! silenced by the lead singer, who shouted, It’s a girl! The band members lay Beli among their instruments, swaddled her with their chacabanas, and washed her face with the water they carried for the radiator and for cutting down the klerin. Down the band peered, rubbing their lips and running nervous hands through thinning hair.

What do you think happened?

I think she was attacked.

By a lion, offered the driver.

Maybe she fell out of a car.

It looks like she fell under a car.

Trujillo, she whispered.

Aghast, the band looked at one another.

We should leave her.

The guitarrista agreed. She must be a subversive. If they find her with us the police will kill us too. Put her back on the road, begged the driver. Let the lion finish her.

Silence, and then the lead singer lit a match and held it in the air and in that splinter of light was revealed a blunt-featured woman with the golden eyes of a chabine. We’re not leaving her, the lead singer said in a curious cibaena accent, and only then did Beli understand that she was saved.v

^{? The Mongoose, one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its greatest travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Mrica and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, a.k.a. the Caribbean. Since its earliest appearance in the written record—675 H.C.E., in a nameless scribe’s letter to AshurBanipal’s father, Esarhaddon—the Mongoose has proven itself to be an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies. Believed to be an ally of Man. Many Watchers suspect that the Mongoose arrived to our world from another, but to date no evidence of such a migration has been unearthed.}

FUKU VS. ZAFA

There are still many, on and off the Island, who offer Beli’s near-fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the House Cabral was indeed victim of a high-level fuku, the local version of House Atreus. Two Truji-lios in one lifetime—what in carajo else could it be? But other heads question that logic, arguing that Beli’s survival must be evidence to the contrary. Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of cane-fields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a ‘mother’ with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything, say these heads, it is that our Beli was blessed.

What about the dead son? The world is full of tragedies enough without niggers having to resort to curses for explanations.

A conclusion La Inca wouldn’t have argued with. To her dying day she believed that Beli had met not a curse but God out in that cane-field.

I met something, Beli would say, guardedly.

BACK AMONG THE LIVING

Touch and go, I tell you, until the fifth day. And when at last she returned to consciousness she did so screaming. Her arm felt like it had been pinched off at the elbow by a grindstone, her head crowned in a burning hoop of brass, her lung like the exploded carcass of a pinata—Jesu! Cristo! She started crying almost immediately, but what our girl did not know was that for the last half-week, two of the best doctors in Bani had tended her covertly; friends of La Inca and anti-Trujillo to the core, they set her arm and plastered it, stitched shut the frightening gashes on her scalp (sixty puntos in all), doused her wounds with enough Mercurochrome to disinfect an army, injected her with morphine and against tetanus. Many late nights of worry, but the worst, it seemed, was over. These doctors, with a spiritual assist from La Inca’s Bible group, had performed a miracle, and all that remained was the healing. (She is lucky that she is so strong, the doctors said, packing their stethoscopes. The Hand of God is upon her, the prayer leaders confirmed, stowing their Bibles.) But blessed was not what our girl felt. After a couple of minutes of hysterical sobbing, of re-adjusting to the fact of the bed, to the fact of her life, she lowed out La Inca’s name.

From the side of the bed the quiet voice of the Benefactor: Don’t talk. Unless it’s to thank the Savior for your life. Mama, Beli cried. Mama. They killed my bebe, they tried to kill me—And they did not succeed, La Inca said. Not for lack of trying, though. She put her hand on the girl’s forehead.

Now it’s time for you to be quiet. For you to be still.

That night was a late-medieval ordeal. Beli alternated from quiet weeping to gusts of rabia so fierce they threatened to throw her out of the bed and reopen her injuries. Like a woman possessed, she drove herself into her mattress, went as rigid as a board, flailed her good arm around, beat her legs, spit and cursed. She wailed—despite a punctured lung and cracked ribs—she wailed inconsolably. Mama, me mataron a mi hijo. Estoy sola, estoy sola. Sola? La Inca leaned close. Would you like me to call your Gangster?

No, she whispered.

La Inca gazed down at her. I wouldn’t call him either.

That night Beli drifted on a vast ocean of loneliness, buffeted by squalls of despair, and during one of her