The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

intermittent sleeps she dreamt that she had truly and permanently died and she and her child shared a coffin and when she finally awoke for good, night had broken and out in the street a grade of grief unlike any she’d encountered before was being uncoiled, a cacophony of wails that seemed to have torn free from the cracked soul of humanity itself Like a funeral song for the entire planet.

Mama, she gasped, mama.

Mama!

Tranquilisate, muchacha.

Mama, is that for me? Am I dying? Dime, mama.

Ay, hija, no seas ridicula. La Inca put her hands, awkward hyphens, around the girl. Lowered her mouth to her ear: It’s Trujillo. Gunned down, she whispered, the night Beli had been kidnapped. No one knows anything yet. Except that he’s dead.v

^{? They say he was on his way for some ass that night. Who is surprised? A consummate culocrat to the end. Perhaps on that last night, El Jefe, sprawled in the back of his Bel Air, thought only of the routine pussy that was awaiting him at Estancia Fundacion. Perhaps he thought of nothing. Who can know? In any event: there is a black Chevrolet fast approaching, like Death itself, packed to the rim with U.S.-backed assassins of the higher classes, and now both cars are nearing the city limits, where the streetlights end (for modernity indeed has its limits in Santo Domingo), and in the dark distance looms the cattle fairgrounds where seventeen months before some other youth had intended to assassinate him. El Jefe asks his driver, Zacharias, to turn on the radio, but—how appropriate—there is a poetry reading on and off it goes again. Maybe the poetry reminds him of Galindez.}

^{Maybe not.}

^{The black Chevy flashes its lights innocuously, asking to pass, and Zacharias, thinking it’s the Secret Police, obliges by slowing down, and when the cars come abreast, the escopeta wielded by Antonio de la Maza (whose brother—surprise, surprise—was killed in the Galindez cover-up—which goes to show that you should always be careful when killing nerds, never know who will come after you) goes boo-ya! And now (so goes the legend) El Jefe cries, Cono, me hirieron! The second shotgun blast hits Zacharias in the shoulder and he almost stops the car, in pain and shock and surprise. Here now the famous exchange: Get the guns, El Jefe says. Vamos a pelear. And Zacharias says: No, Jefe, son mucho, and El Jefe repeats himself: Vamos a pelear. He could have ordered Zacharias to turn the car back to the safety of his capital, but instead he goes out like Tony Montana. Staggers out of the bullet-ridden Bel Air, holding a.38 in his hand. The rest is, of course, history, and if this were a movie you’d have to film it in John Woo slow motion. Shot at twenty-seven times—what a Dominican number—and suffering from four hundred hit points of damage, a mortally wounded Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina is said to have taken two steps toward his birthplace, San Cristobal, for, as we know, all children, whether good or bad, eventually find their way home, but thinking better of it he turned back toward La Capital, to his beloved city, and fell for the last time. Zacharias, who’d had his mid-parietal region creased by a round from a.357, got blown into the grass by the side of the road; miracle of miracles, he would survive to tell the tale of the ajustamiento. De la Maza, perhaps thinking of his poor, dead, set-up brother, then took Trujillo’s.38 out of his dead hand and shot Trujillo in the face and uttered his now famous words: Este guaraguao ya no comera mas pollito. And then the assassins stashed El Jefe’s body—where? In the trunk, of course.}

^{And thus passed old Fuckface. And thus passed the Era of Trujillo (sort of).}

^{I’ve been to the neck of road where he was gunned down many many times. Nothing to report except that the guagua from Haina almost always runs my ass over every time I cross the highway. For a while, I hear, that stretch was the haunt of what El Jeffe worried about the most: los maricones.}

LA INCA, IN DECLINE

It’s all true, plataneros. Through the numinous power of prayer La Inca saved the girl’s life, laid an A-plus zafa on the Cabral family fuku (but at what cost to herself?). Everybody in the neighborhood will tell you how, shortly after the girl slipped out of the country, La Inca began to diminish, like Galadriel after the temptation of the ring—out of sadness for the girl’s failures, some would say, but others would point to that night of Herculean prayer. No matter what your take, it cannot be denied that soon after Beli’s departure La Inca’s hair began to turn a snowy white, and by the time Lola lived with her she was no longer the Great Power she had been. Yes, she had saved the girl’s life, but to what end? Beli was still profoundly vulnerable. At the end of The Return of the King, Sauron’s evil was taken by ‘a great wind’ and nearly ‘blown away,’ with no lasting consequences to our heroes;v but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily.

^{? ‘And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent; for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell’.}

Even after death his evil lingered. Within hours of El Jefe dancing bien pegao with those twenty-seven bullets, his minions ran amok—fulfilling, as it were, his last will and vengeance. A great darkness descended on the Island and for the third time since the rise of Fidel people were being rounded up by Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, and a good plenty were sacrificed in the most depraved fashion imaginable, the orgy of terror—funeral goods for the father from the son. Even a woman as potent as La Inca, who with the elvish ring of her will had forged within Bani her own personal Lothlorien, knew that she could not protect the girl against a direct assault from the Eye. What was to keep the assassins from returning to finish what they’d started? After all, they had killed the world-famous Mirabal Sisters,v who were of Name; what was to stop them from killing her poor orphaned negrita?

^{? And where were the Mirabal Sisters murdered? In a cane-field, of course. And then their bodies were put in a car and a crash was simulated! Talk about two for one!}

La Inca felt the danger palpably, intimately. And perhaps it was the strain of her final prayer, but each time La Inca glanced at the girl she could swear that there was a shadow standing just behind her shoulder which disappeared as soon as you tried to focus on it. A dark horrible shadow that gripped her heart. And it seemed to be growing.

La Inca needed to do something, so, not yet recovered from her Hail Mary play, she called upon her ancestors and upon Jesu Cristo for help. Once again she prayed. But on top of that, to show her devotion, she fasted. Pulled a Mother Abigail. Ate nothing but one orange, drank nothing but water. After that last vast expenditure of piety her spirit was in an uproar. She did not know what to do. She had a mind like a mongoose but she was not, in the end, a worldly woman. She spoke to her friends, who argued for sending Beli to the campo. She’ll be safe there. She spoke to her priest. You should pray for her.

On the third day, it came to her. She was dreaming that she and her dead husband were on the beach where he had drowned. He was dark again as he always was in summer.

You have to send her away.

But they’ll find her in the campo.

You have to send her to Nueva York. I have it on great authority that it is the only way.

And then he strutted proudly into the water; she tried to call him back, Please, come back, but he did not listen.

His otherworldly advice was too terrible to consider. Exile to the North! To Nueva York, a city so foreign she herself had never had the ovaries to visit. The girl would be lost to her, and La Inca would have failed her great cause: to heal the wounds of the Fall, to bring House Cabral back from the dead. And who knows what might happen to the girl among the yanquis? In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a pais overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinverguenceria as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes. How La Inca wrestled with herself those long nights! But which side was Jacob and which side was the Angel? After all, who was to say that the Trujillos would remain in power much longer? Already the necromantic power of El Jefe was waning and in its place could be felt something like a wind. Rumors flew as thick as ciguas, rumors that the Cubans were preparing to invade, that the