2007 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (10 page)

Beli snorted. You must be crazy! You’re too stupid! And Dorea would lower her head. Stare at her own broad feet. Dusty in their chancletas. La Inca talked about Beli becoming a female doctor (You wouldn’t be the first, but you’d be the best!), imagined her hija raising test tubes up to the light, but Beli usually passed her school days dreaming about the various boys around her (she had stopped staring at them openly after one of her teachers had written a letter home to La Inca and La Inca had chastised her, Where do you think you are? A brothel? This is the best school in Baní, muchacha, you’re ruining your reputation!), and if not about the boys then about the house she was convinced she would one day own, furnishing it in her mind, room by room by room. Her madre wanted her to bring back Casa Hatüey, a history house, but Beli’s house was new and crisp, had no history at all attached to it. In her favorite María Montez daydream, a dashing European of the Jeans Pierre Aumont variety (who happened to look exactly like Jack Pujols) would catch sight of her in the bakery and fall madly in love with her and sweep her off to his chateau in France.↓

≡ María Montez, celebrated Dominican actress, moved to the U.S. and made more than twenty-five films between 1940 and 1951, including
Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Cobra Woman
, and my personal favorite,
Siren of Atlantis
. Crowned the ‘Qyeen of Technicolor’ by fans and historians alike. Born María Africa Gracia Vidal on June 6, 1912, in Barahona, bit her screen name from the famous nineteenth-century courtesan Lola Montez (herself famous for fucking, among others, the part-Haitian Alexandre Dumas). María Montez was the original J. Lo (or whatever smoking caribeña is the number-one eye-crack of your time), the first real international star the DR had. Ended up marrying a Frenchie (sorry, Anacaona) and moving to Paris after World War II. Drowned alone in her bathtub, at the age of thirty-nine. No sign of struggle, no evidence of foul play. Did some photo ops for the Trujillato every now and then, but nothing serious. It should be pointed out that while in France, María proved to be quite the nerd. Wrote three books. Two were published. The third manuscript was lost after her death.

(Wake up, girl! You’re going to burn the pan de agua!)

She wasn’t the only girl dreaming like this. This jiringonza was in the
air
, it was the dreamshit that they fed girls day and night. It’s surprising Beli could think of anything else, what with that heavy rotation of boleros, canciones, and versos spinning in her head, with the
Listin Diario’s
society pages spread before her. Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who’s been abandoned by family, husband, children, and fortune believes in God. Belicia was, if it was possible, even more susceptible to the Casanova Wave than many of her peers. Our girl was
straight boy-crazy
. (To be called boy-crazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericana to cinders.) She stared at the young bravos on the bus, secretly kissed the bread of the buenmosos who frequented the bakery, sang to herself all those beautiful Cuban love songs.

(God save your soul, La Inca grumbled, if you think
boys
are an answer to
anything
.)

But even the boy situation left a lot to be desired. If she’d been interested in the niggers in the barrio our Beli would have had no problems, these cats would have obliged her romantic spirit by jumping her lickety-split. But alas, La Inca’s hope that the rarified private airs of Colegio El Redentor would have a salutary effect on the girl’s character (like a dozen wet-belt beatings or three months in an unheated convent) had at least in this one aspect borne fruit, for Beli at thirteen only had eyes for the Jack Pujolses of the world. As is usually the case in these situations, the high-class boys she so desired didn’t reciprocate her interest — Beli didn’t have quite enough of anything to snap these Rubirosas out of their rich-girl reveries.

What a life! Each day turning on its axis slower than a year. She endured school, the bakery, La Inca’s suffocating solicitude with a furious jaw. She watched hungrily for visitors from out of town, threw open her arms at the slightest hint of a wind and at night she struggled Jacob-like against the ocean pressing down on her.

So what happened? A boy happened.

Her First.

Jack Pujols of course: the school’s handsomest (read: whitest) boy, a haughty slender melnibonian of pure European stock whose cheeks looked like they’d been knapped by a master and whose skin was unflawed by scar, mole, blemish, or hair, his small nipples were the pink perfect ovals of sliced salchicha. His father was a colonel in the Trujillato’s beloved air force, a heavy duty player in Baní (would be instrumental in bombing the capital during the revolution, killing all those helpless civilians, including my poor uncle Venicio), and his mother, a former beauty queen of Venezuelan proportions, now active in the Church, a kisser of cardinal rings and a socorro of orphans. Jack, Eldest Son, Privileged Seed, Hijo Bello, Anointed One, revered by his female family members — and that endless monsoon — rain of praise and indulgence had quickened in him the bamboo of entitlement. He had the physical swagger of a boy twice his size and an unbearable loudmouthed cockiness that he drove into people like a metal spur. In the future he would throw his lot in with the Demon Balaguer↓ and end up ambassador to Panama as his reward, but for the moment he was the school’s Apollo, its Mithra.

≡ Although not essential to our tale, per se, Balaguer is essential to the Dominican one, so therefore we must mention him, even though I’d rather piss in his face. The elders say,
Anything uttered for the first time summons a demon
, and when twentieth century Dominicans first uttered the word
freedom
en masse the demon they summoned was Balaguer. (Known also as the Election Thief — see the 1966 election in the DR — and the Homunculus.) In the days of the Trujillato, Balaguer was just one of El Jefe’s more efficient ring wraiths. Much is made of his intelligence (he certainly impressed the Failed Cattle Thief) and of his asceticism (when
he
raped his little girls he kept it real quiet). After Trujillo’s death he would take over Project Domo and rule the country from 1960 to 1962, from 1966 to 1978, and again from 1986 to 1996 (by then dude was blind as a bat, a living mummy). During the second period of his rule, known locally as the Twelve Years, he unleashed a wave of violence against the Dominican left, death-squading hundreds and driving thousands more out of the country. It was he who oversaw/initiated the thing we call Diaspora. Considered our national ‘genius’, Joaquin Balaguer was a Negrophobe, an apologist to genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself, famously ordering the death of journalist Orlando Martinez. Later, when he wrote his memoirs, he claimed he knew who had done the foul deed (not him, of course) and left a blank page, a página en blanco, in the text to be filled in with the truth upon his death. (Can you say
impunity?
) Balaguer died in 2002. The página is still blanca. Appeared as a sympathetic character in Vargas Llosa’s
The Feast of the Goat
. Like most homunculi he did not marry and left no heirs.

The teachers, the staff: the girls, the boys, all threw petals of adoration beneath his finely arched feet: he was proof positive that God — the Great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! — does not love his children equally.

And how did Beli interact with this insane object of attraction? In a way that is fitting of her bullheaded directness: she would march down the hallway, books pressed to her pubescent chest, staring down at her feet, and, pretending not to see him, would smash into his hallowed vessel.

Caramb —, he spluttered, wheeling about, and then he’d see it was Belicia, a girl, now stooping over to recover her books, and he bent over too (he was, if nothing, a caballero), his anger diffusing, becoming confusion, irritation. Caramba, Cabral, what are you, a bat? Watch. Where. You’re.
Going
.

He had a single worry line creasing his high forehead (his ‘part,’ as it became known) and eyes of the deepest cerulean. The Eyes of Atlantis. (Once Beli had overheard him bragging to one of his many female admirers: Oh, these ol’ things? I inherited them from my German abuela.)

Come on, Cabral, what’s your difficulty?

It’s your fault! she swore, meant in more ways than one.

Maybe she’d see better, one of his lieutenants cracked, if it was dark out. It might as well have been dark out. For all intents and purposes she was invisible to him.

And would have stayed invisible too if the summer of sophomore year she’d not hit the biochemical jackpot, not experienced a Summer of Her Secondary Sex Characteristics, not been transformed utterly (
a terrible beauty has been born
). Where before Beli had been a gangly ibis of a girl, pretty in a typical sort of way, by summer’s end she’d become un mujerón total, acquiring that body of hers, that body that made her famous in Baní. Her dead parents’ genes on some Roman Polanski shit; like the older sister she had never met, Beli was transformed almost overnight into an underage stunner, and if Trujillo had not been on his last erections he probably would have gunned for her like he’d been rumored to have gunned for her poor dead sister. For the record, that summer our girl caught a cuerpazo so berserk that only a pornographer or a comic-book artist could have designed it with a clear conscience. Every neighborhood has its tetúa, but Beli could have put them all to shame, she was La Tetúa Suprema: her tetas were globes so implausibly titanic they made generous souls pity their bearer and drove every straight male in their vicinity to reevaluate his sorry life. She had the Breasts of Luba (35DDD). And what about that supersonic culo that could tear words right out of niggers’ mouths, pull windows from out their mother-fucking frames? A culo que jalaba más que una junta de buey. Dios
mío!
Even your humble Watcher, reviewing her old pictures, is struck by what a fucking babe she was.↓

≡ My shout-out to Jack Kirby aside, it’s hard as a Third Worlder not to feel a certain amount of affinity for Datu the Watcher; he resides in the hidden Blue Area of the Moon and we DarkZoners reside (to quote Glissant) on ‘
la face cachee de la Terre
’ (Earth’s hidden face).

Ande el diablo! La Inca exclaimed. Hija, what in the world are you
eating!

If Beli had been a normal girl, being the neighborhood’s most prominent tetúa might have pushed her into shyness, might even have depressed the shit out of her. And at first Beli had both these reactions, and also the feeling that gets delivered to you by the bucket for free during adolescence:
Shame. Sharam. Vergüenza
. She no longer wanted to bathe with La Inca, a huge change to their morning routine. Well, I guess you’re grown enough to wash yourself La Inca said lightly. But you could tell she was hurt. In the close darkness of their wash closet, Beli circled disconsolately around her Novi Orbis, avoiding her hypersensitive nipples at all costs. Now every time she had to head outside, Beli felt like she was stepping into a Danger Room filled with men’s laser eyes and women’s razor whispers. The blasts of car horns enough to make her fall over herself. She was furious at the world for this newly acquired burden, and furious at herself.

For the first month, that is. Gradually Beli began to see beyond the catcalls and the
Dios mío asesina
and the
y ese tetatorío
and the
que pechonalidad
to the hidden mechanisms that drove these comments. One day on the way back from the bakery, La Inca muttering at her side about that day’s receipts, it dawned on Beli: Men liked her! Not only did they like her, they liked her a fucking lot. The proof was the day that one of their customers, the local dentist, slipped her a note with his money, and it said, I want to see you, as simple as that. Beli was terrified, scandalized, and giddy. The dentist had a fat wife who ordered a cake from La Inca almost every month, either for one of her seven children or for her fifty-some cousins (but most likely for her and her alone). She had a wattle and an enormous middle-aged ass that challenged all chairs. Beli mooned over that note like it was a marriage proposal from God’s hot son, even though the dentist was bald and paunchier than an OTB regular and had a tracery of fine red veins all over his cheeks. The dentist came in as he always did but now his eyes were always questing, Hello, Senorita Beli! his greeting now fetid with lust and threat, and Beli’s heart would beat like nothing she’d ever heard. After two such visits she wrote, on a whim, a little note that said simply, Yes, you can pick me up at the park at tal-and-tal time, and passed it back to him with his change and by hook and crook arranged to be walking with La Inca through the park at the very moment of the assignation. Her heart going like crazy; she didn’t know what to expect but she had a wild hope, and just as they were about to leave the park, Beli spotted the dentist sitting in a car that was not his, pretending to read the paper but looking forlornly in her direction. Look, Madre, Beli said loudly, it’s the dentist, and La Inca turned and homeboy threw the car frantically into gear and tore out of there before La Inca could even wave. How very strange! La Inca said.

I don’t like him, Beli said. He looks at me.

And now it was his wife who came to the bakery to pick up the cakes. Y El dentista? Beli inquired innocently. That one’s too lazy to do anything, his wife said with no little exasperation.

Beli, who’d been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent
over the moon
by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring. Like stumbling into the wizard Shazam’s cave or finding the crashed ship of the Green Lantern! Hypatia Belicia Cabral finally had power and a true sense of self. Started pinching her shoulders back, wearing the tightest clothes she had. Dios
mío
, La Inca said every time the girl headed out. Why would God give you that burden in this country of all places!