The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Cabrals were, as you might have guessed, members of the Fortunate People. Summers they ‘borrowed’ a cousin’s cabana in Puerto Plata and decamped there for a period of no less than three weeks. Abelard’s two daughters, Jacquelyn and Astrid, swam and played in the surf (often suffering Mulatto Pigment Degradation Disorder, a.k.a. tans) under the watchful gaze of their mother, who, unable to risk no extra darkness, remained chained to her umbrella’s shadow—while their father, when not listening to the news from the War, roamed the shoreline, his face set in tense concentration. He walked barefoot, stripped down to his white shirt and his vest, his pant legs rolled, his demi-afro an avuncular torch, plump with middle age. Sometimes a fragment of a shell or a dying horseshoe crab would catch Abelard’s attention and he’d get down on all fours and examine it with a gem- cutter’s glass so that to both his delighted daughters, as well as to his appalled wife, he resembled a dog sniffing a turd.

There are still those in the Cibao who remember Abelard, and all will tell you that besides being a brilliant doctor he possessed one of the most remarkable minds in the country: indefatigably curious, alarmingly prodigious, and especially suited for linguistic and computational complexity. The viejo was widely read in Spanish, English, French, Latin, and Greek; a collector of rare books, an advocate of outlandish abstractions, a contributor to the Journal of Tropical Medicine, and an amateur ethnographer in the Fernando Ortiz mode. Abelard was, in short, a Brain—not entirely uncommon in the Mexico where he had studied but an exceedingly rare species on the Island of Supreme General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. He encouraged his daughters to read and prepared them to follow him into the Profession (they could speak French and read Latin before they were nine), and so keen was he about learning that any new piece of knowledge, no matter how arcane or trivial, could send his ass over the Van Allen belt. His parlor, so tastefully wallpapered by his father’s second wife, was hangout number one for the local todologos. Discussions would rage for entire evenings, and while Abelard was often frustrated by the poor quality—nothing like at the UNAM—he would not have abandoned these evenings for anything. Often his daughters would bid their father good night only to find him the next morning still engaged in some utterly obscure debate with his friends, eyes red, hair akimbo, woozy but game. They would go to him and he would kiss each in turn, calling them his Brillantes. These youthful intelligences, he often boasted to his friends, will best us all.

The Reign of Trujillo was not the best time to be a lover of Ideas, not the best time to be engaging in parlor debate, to be hosting tertulias, to be doing anything out of the ordinary, but Abelard was nothing if not meticulous. Never allowed contemporary politics (i.e., Trujillo) to be bandied about, kept shit on the abstract plane, allowed anybody who wanted (including members of the Secret Police) to attend his gatherings. Given that you could get lit up for even mispronouncing the Failed Cattle Thief’s name, it was a no-brainer, really. As a general practice Abelard tried his best not to think about EI Jefe at all, followed sort of the Tao of Dictator Avoidance, which was ironic considering that Abelard was unmatched in maintaining the outward appearance of the enthusiastic Trujillista.v

^{? But what was even more ironic was that Abelard had a reputation for being able to keep his head down during the worst of the regime’s madness—for unseeing, as it were. In 1937, for example, while the Friends of the Dominican Republic were perejiling Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans and Haitian- looking Dominicans to death, while genocide was, in fact, in the making, Abelard kept his head, eyes, and nose safely tucked into his books (let his wife take care of hiding his servants, didn’t ask her nothing about it) and when survivors staggered into his surgery with unspeakable machete wounds, he fixed them up as best as he could without making any comments as to the ghastliness of their wounds. Acted like it was any other day.}

Both as an individual and as the executive officer of his medical association he gave unstintingly to the Partido Dominicano; he and his wife, who was his number-one nurse and his best assistant, joined every medical mission that Trujillo organized, no matter how remote the campo; and no one could suppress a guffaw better than Abelard when El Jefe won an election by 103 percent! What enthusiasm from the pueblo! When banquets were held in Trujillo’s honor Abelard always drove to Santiago to attend. He arrived early, left late, smiled endlessly, and didn’t say nothing. Disconnected his intellectual warp engine and operated strictly on impulse power. When the time came, Abelard would shake El Jefe’s hand, cover him in the warm effusion of his adoration (if you think the Trujillato was not homoerotic, then, to quote the Priest, you got another thing coming), and without further ado fade back into the shadows (a la Oscar’s favorite movie, Point Blank). Kept as far away from El Jefe as possible—he wasn’t under any delusion that he was Trujillo’s equal or his buddy or some kind of necessary individual—after all, niggers who messed with Him had a habit of ending up with a bad case of the deads. It didn’t hurt that Abelard’s family was not totally in the Jefe’s pocket, that his father had cultivated no lands or negocios in geographic or competitive proximity to the Jefe’s own holding. His Fuckface contact was blessedly limited.v

^{? He wished that could also have been the case with his Balaguer contact. In those days the Demon Balaguer had not yet become the Election Thief; was only Trujillo’s Minister of Education—you can see how successful he was at that job—and any chance he got to corner Abelard, he did. He wanted to talk to Abelard about his theories—which were four parts Gobineau, four parts Goddard, and two parts German racial eugenics. The German theories, he assured Abelard, were all the rage on the Continent. Abelard nods. I see. (But, you ask, who was the smarter? No comparison. In a Tables and Ladders match, Abelard, the Cerebro del Cibao, would have 3D’d the ‘Genio de Genocidio’ in about two seconds flat.)}

Abelard and the Failed Cattle Thief might have glided past each other in the Halls of History if not for the fact that starting in 1944, Abelard, instead of bringing his wife and daughter to Jefe events, as custom dictated, began to make a point of leaving them at home. He explained to his friends that his wife had become ‘nervous’ and that Jacquelyn took care of her but the real reason for the absences was Trujillo’s notorious rapacity and his daughter Jacquelyn’s off-the-hook looks. Abelard’s serious, intellectual oldest daughter was no longer her tall awkward flaquita self; adolescence had struck with a fury, transforming her into a young lady of great beauty. She had caught a serious case of the hips-ass-chest, a condition which during the mid-forties spelled trouble with a capital T to the R to the U to the J to the illo.

Ask any of your elders and they will tell you: Trujillo might have been a Dictator, but he was a Dominican Dictator, which is another way of saying he was the Number-One Bellaco in the Country. Believed that all the toto in the DR was, literally, his. It’s a well-documented fact that in Trujillo’s DR if you were of a certain class and you put your cute daughter anywhere near El Jefe, within the week she’d be mamando his ripio like an old pro and there would be nothing you could do about it! Part of the price of living in Santo Domingo, one of the Island’s best-known secrets. So common was the practice, so insatiable Trujillo’s appetites, that there were plenty of men in the nation, hombres de calidad y posicion, who, believe it or not, offered up their daughters freely to the Failed Cattle Thief. Abelard, to his credit, was not one of them; as soon as he realized what was what—after his daughter started stopping traffic on Calle El Sol, after one of his patients looked at his daughter and said, You should be careful with that one—he pulled a Rapunzel on her ass and locked her in. It was a Brave Thing, not in keeping with his character, but he’d only had to watch Jacquelyn preparing for school one day, big in body but still a child, goddamn it, still a child, and the Brave Thing became easy.

Hiding your doe-eyed, large-breasted daughter from Trujillo, however, was anything but easy. (Like keeping the Ring from Sauron.) If you think the average Dominican guy’s bad, Trujillo was five thousand times worse. Dude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass; if the procurement of ass had been any more central to the Trujillato the regime would have been the world’s first culocracy (and maybe, in fact, it was). In this climate, hoarding your women was tantamount to treason; offenders who didn’t cough up the muchachas could easily find themselves enjoying the invigorating charm of an eight-shark bath. Let us be clear: Abelard was taking an enormous risk. It didn’t matter that he was upper-class, or that he’d prepared the groundwork well, going as far as having a friend diagnose his wife as manic, then letting the word leak through the elite circles in which he ran. If Trujillo and Company caught wind of his duplicity they’d have him in chains (and Jacquelyn on her back) in two seconds flat. Which was why every time El Jefe shuffled down the welcome line, shaking hands, Abelard expected him to exclaim in that high shrill voice of his, Dr. Abelard Cabral, where is that delicious daughter of yours? I’ve heard so much about her from your neighbors. It was enough to make Abelard febrile.

His daughter Jacquelyn of course had absolutely no idea what was at stake. Those were more innocent times, and she was an innocent girl; getting raped by her Illustrious President was the furthest thing from her excellent mind. She of his two daughters had inherited her father’s brains. Was studying French religiously because she’d decided to imitate her father and go abroad to study medicine at the Faculte de Medecine de Paris. To