The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Communist—That is untrue! Abelard protested—but who is going to listen to a gay comunista? Over the next couple of hours Abelard was harassed lovely and most of his clothes were stripped from him. One heavyset cibaeno even demanded his underwear, and when Abelard coughed them up the man pulled them on over his pants. Son muy comodos, he announced to his friends. Abelard was forced to hunker naked near the shit pots; if he tried to crawl near the dry areas the other prisoners would scream at him—Quedate ahi con la mierda, maricon—and this was how he had to sleep, amidst urine, feces, and flies, and more than once he was awakened by someone tickling his lips with a dried turd. Pre-occupation with sanitation was not high among the Fortalezanos. The deviants didn’t allow him to eat, either, stealing his meager allotted portions three days straight. On the fourth day a one-armed pickpocket took pity on him and he was able to eat an entire banana without interruption, even tried to chew up the fibrous peel, he was so famished.

Poor Abelard. It was also on day four that someone from the outside world finally paid him attention. Late in the evening, when everybody else was asleep, a detachment of guards dragged him into a smaller, crudely lit cell. He was strapped down, not unkindly, to a table. From the moment he’d been grabbed he’d not stopped speaking. This is all a misunderstanding please I come from a very respectable family you have to communicate with my wife and my lawyers they will be able to clear this up I cannot believe that I’ve been treated so despicably I demand that the officer in charge hear my complaints. He couldn’t get the words out of his mouth fast enough. It wasn’t until he noticed the electrical contraption that the guards were fiddling with in the comer that he fell quiet. Abelard stared at it with a terrible dread, and then, because he suffered from an insatiable urge to taxonomize, asked, What in God’s name do you call that?

We call it the pulpo, one of the guards said.

They spent all night showing him how it worked.

It was three days before Socorro could track down her husband and another five days before she received permission from the capital to visit. The visiting room where Socorro awaited her husband seemed to have been fashioned from a latrine. There was only one sputtering kerosene lamp and it looked as though a number of people had taken mountainous shits in the comer. An intentional humiliation that was lost on Socorro; she was too overwrought to notice. After what felt like an hour (again, another senora would have protested, but Socorro bore the shit-smell and the darkness and the no chair stoically), Abelard was brought in handcuffed. He’d been given an undersized shirt and an undersized pair of pants; he was shuffling as though afraid that something in his hands or in his pockets might fall out. Only been inside a week but already he looked frightful. His eyes were blackened; his hands and neck covered in bruises and his tom lip had swollen monstrously, was the color of the meat inside your eye. The night before, he had been interrogated by the guards, and they had beaten him mercilessly with leather truncheons; one of his testicles would be permanently shriveled from the blows.

Poor Socorro. Here was a woman whose lifelong preoccupation had been calamity. Her mother was a mute; her drunk father frittered away the family’s middle–class patrimony, one tarea at a time, until their holdings had been reduced to a shack and some chickens and the old man was forced to work other people’s land, condemned to a life of constant movement, poor health, and broken hands; it was said that Pa Socorro had never recovered from seeing his own father beaten to death by a neighbor who also happened to be a sergeant in the police. Socorro’s childhood had been about missed meals and cousin-clothes, about seeing her father three, four times a year, visits where he didn’t talk to anybody; just lay in his room drunk.

Socorro became an ‘anxious’ muchacha; for a time she thinned her hair by pulling it, was seventeen when she caught Abelard’s eye in a training hospital but didn’t start menstruating until a year after they were married. Even as an adult, Socorro was in the habit of waking up in the middle of the night in terror, convinced that the house was on fire, would rush from room to room, expecting to be greeted by a carnival of flame. When Abelard read to her from his newspapers she took special interest in earthquakes and fires and floods and cattle stampedes and the sinking of ships. She was the family’s first catastrophist, would have made Cuvier proud.

What had she been expecting, while she fiddled with the buttons on her dress, while she shifted the purse on her shoulder and tried not to unbalance her Macy’s hat? A mess, un toyo certainly, but not a husband looking nearly destroyed, who shuffled like an old man, whose eyes shone with the sort of fear that is not easily shed. It was worse than she, in all her apocalyptic fervor, had imagined. It was the Fall.

When she placed her hands on Abelard he began to cry very loudly, very shamefully. Tears streamed down his face as he tried to tell her all that had happened to him.

It wasn’t long after that visit that Socorro realized that she was pregnant. With Abelard’s Third and Final Daughter.

Zafa or fuku?

You tell me.

There would always be speculation. At the most basic level, did he say it, did he not? (Which is another way of asking: Did he have a hand in his own destruction?) Even the family was divided. La Inca adamant that her cousin had said nothing; it had all been a setup, orchestrated by Abelard’s enemies to strip the family of their wealth, their properties, and their businesses. Others were not so sure. He probably had said something that night at the club, and unfortunately for him he’d been overheard by the Jefe’s agents. No elaborate plot, just drunken stupidity. As for the carnage that followed: que se yo—just a lot of bad luck.

Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard’s daughter, but when he couldn’t snatch her, out of spite he put a fuku on the family’s ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened.

So which was it? you ask. An accident, a conspiracy, or a fuku? The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you’ll have to decide for yourself. What’s certain is that nothing’s certain. We are trawling in silences here. Trujillo and Company didn’t leave a paper trail—they didn’t share their German contemporaries’ lust for documentation. And it’s not like the fuku itself would leave a memoir or anything. The remaining Cabrals ain’t much help, either; on all matters related to Abelard’s imprisonment and to the subsequent destruction of the clan there is within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations, that sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction. A whisper here and there but nothing more.

Which is to say if you’re looking for a full story, I don’t have it. Oscar searched for it too, in his last days, and it’s not certain whether he found it either.

Let’s be honest, though. The rap about The Girl Trujillo Wanted is a pretty common one on the Island.v

^{? Anacaona, a.k.a. the Golden Flower. One of the Founding Mothers of the New World and the most beautiful Indian in the World. (The Mexicans might have their Malinche, but we Dominicans have our Anacaona.) Anacaona was the wife of Caonabo, one of the five caciques who ruled our Island at the time of the ‘Discovery’. In his accounts, Bartolome de las Casas described her as ‘a woman of great prudence and authority, very courtly and gracious in her manner of speaking and her gestures’. Other witnesses put it more succinctly: the chick was hot and, it would turn out, warrior-brave. When the Euros started going Hannibal Lecter on the Tainos, they killed Anacaona’s husband (which is another story). And like all good warrior-women she tried to rally her people, tried to resist, but the Europeans were the original fuku, no stopping them. Massacre after massacre after massacre. Upon being captured, Anacaona tried to parley, saying: ‘Killing is not honorable, neither does violence redress our honor. Let us build a bridge of love that our enemies may cross, leaving their footprints for all to see’. The Spanish weren’t trying to build no bridges, though. After a bogus trial they hung brave Anacaona. In Santo Domingo, in the shadow of one of our first churches. The End.}

^{A common story you hear about Anacaona in the DR is that on the eve of her execution she was offered a chance to save herself: all she had to do was marry a Spaniard who was obsessed with her. (See the trend? Trujillo wanted the Mirabal Sisters, and the Spaniard wanted Anacaona.) Offer that choice to a contemporary Island girl and see how fast she fills out that passport application. Anacaona, however, tragically old-school, was reported to have said, Whitemen, kiss my hurricane ass! And that was the end of Anacaona. The Golden Flower. One of the Founding Mothers of the New World and the most beautiful Indian in the World.}

As common as krill. (Not that krill is too common on the Island but you get the drift.) So common that Mario Vargas Llosa didn’t have to do much except open his mouth to sift it out of the air. There’s one of these belaco tales in almost everybody’s hometown. It’s one of those easy stories because in essence it explains it