2007 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (14 page)

How much Beli knew about the Gangster we will never know. She claims that he only told her he was a businessman. Of course I believed him. How was I supposed to know different?

Well, he certainly was a businessman, but he was also a flunky for the Trujillato, and not a minor one. Don’t misunderstand: our boy wasn’t no ring wraith, but he wasn’t no orc either.

Due partially to Beli’s silence on the matter and other folks’ lingering unease when it comes to talking about the regime, info on the Gangster is fragmented; I’ll give you what I’ve managed to unearth and the rest will have to wait for the day the páginas en blanco finally speak.

The Gangster was born in Samaná at the dawn of the twenties, the fourth son of a milkman, a bawling, worm-infested brat no one thought would amount to na’, an opinion his parents endorsed by turning him out of the house when he was seven. But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person’s character. By the time the Gangster was twelve this scrawny, unremarkable boy had shown a resourcefulness and fearlessness beyond his years. His claims that the Failed Cattle Thief had ‘inspired’ him brought him to the attention of the Secret Police, and before you could say SIM-salabim our boy was infiltrating unions and fingering sindicatos left and right. At age fourteen he killed his first ‘comunista,’ a favor for the appalling Felix Bernardino↓ and apparently the hit was so spectacular, so fucking
chunky
, that half the left in Baní immediately abandoned the DR for the relative safety of Nueva York. With the money he earned he bought himself a new suit and four pairs of shoes.

≡ Felix Wenceslao Bernardino, raised in La Romana, one of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar. Was consul in Cuba when the exiled Dominican labor organizer Mauricio Báez was mysteriously murdered on the streets of Havana. Felix was also rumored to have had a hand in the failed assassination of Dominican exile leader Angel Morales (the assassins burst in on his secretary shaving, mistook the lathered man for Morales, and shot him to pieces). In addition, Felix and his sister, Minerva Bernardino (first woman in the world to be an ambassador before the United Nations), were both in New York City when Jesús de Galíndez mysteriously disappeared on his way home at the Columbus Circle subway station. Talk about
Have Gun, Will Travel
. It was said the power of Trujillo never left him; the fucker died of old age in Santo Domingo, Trujillista to the end, drowning his Haitian workers instead of paying them.

From that point on, the sky was the limit for our young villain. Over the next decade he traveled back and forth to Cuba, dabbled in forgery, theft, extortion, and money laundering — all for the Everlasting Glory of the Trujillato. It was even rumored, never substantiated, that our Gangster was the hammer-man who slew Mauricio Baez in Havana in 1950. Who can know? It seems a possibility; by then he’d acquired deep contacts in the Havana underworld and clearly had no compunction about slaying motherfuckers. Hard evidence, though, is scarce. That he was a favorite of Johnny Abbes and of Porfirio Rubirosa there can be no denying. He had a special passport from the Palacio, and the rank of major in some branch of the Secret Police.

Skilled our Gangster became in many a perfidy, but where our man truly excelled, where he smashed records and grabbed gold, was in the flesh trade. Then, like now, Santo Domingo was to popóla what Switzerland was to chocolate. And there was something about the binding, selling, and degradation of women that brought out the best in the Gangster; he had an instinct for it, a talent — call him the Caracaracol of Culo. By the time he was twenty-two he was operating his own string of brothels in and around the capital, owned houses and cars in three countries. Never stinted the Jefe on anything, be it money, praise, or a prime cut of culo from Colombia, and so loyal was he to the regime that he once slew a man at a bar simply for pronouncing El Jefe’s mother’s name wrong. Now here’s a man, El Jefe was rumored to have said, who is
capaz
.

The Gangster’s devotion did not go unrewarded. By the mid-forties the Gangster was no longer simply a well-paid operator; he was becoming an alguien — in photos he appears in the company of the regime’s three witchkings: Johnny Abbes, Joaquin Balaguer, and Felix Bernardino — and while none exists of him and El Jefe, that they broke bread and talked shit cannot be doubted. For it was the Great Eye himself who granted the Gangster authority over a number of the Trujillo-family’s concessions in Venezuela and Cuba, and under his draconian administration the so-called bang-for-the-buck ratio of Dominican sexworkers trebled. In the forties the Gangster was in his prime; he traveled the entire length of the Americas, from Rosario to Nueva York, in pimpdaddy style, staying at the best hotels, banging the hottest broads (never lost his sureño taste for the morenas, though), dining in four-star restaurants, confabbing with arch-criminals the world over.

An inexhaustible opportunist, he spun deals everywhere he went. Suitcases of dollars accompanied him back and forth from the capital. Life was not always pleasant. Plenty of acts of violence, plenty of beat-downs and knifings. He himself survived any number of gank-attempts, and after each shoot-out, after each drive-by, he always combed his hair and straightened his tie, a dandy’s reflex. He was a true gangster, gully to the bone, lived the life all those phony rap acts can only rhyme about.

It was also in this period that his long dalliance with Cuba was formalized. The Gangster might have harbored love for Venezuela and its many long-legged mulatas, and burned for the tall, icy beauties of Argentina, and swooned over Mexico’s incomparable brunettes, but it was Cuba that clove his heart, that felt to him like home. If he spent six months out of twelve in Havana I’d call that a conservative estimate, and in honor of his predilections the Secret Police’s code name for him was MAX GOMEZ. So often did he travel to Havana that it was more a case of inevitability than bad luck that on New Year’s Eve 1958, the night that Fulgencio Batista sacó piés out of Havana and the whole of Latin America changed, the Gangster was actually partying with Johnny Abbes in Havana, sucking whiskey out of the navels of underage whores, when the guerrillas reached Santa Clara. It was only the timely arrival of one of the Gangster’s informants that saved them all. You better leave now or you’ll all be hanging from your huevos! In one of the greatest blunders in the history of Dominican intelligence, Johnny Abbes almost didn’t make it out of Havana that New Year’s Eve; the Dominicans were literally on the last plane smoking, the Gangster’s face pressed against the glass, never to return.

When Beli encountered the Gangster, that ignominious midnight flight still haunted him. Beyond the financial attachment, Cuba was an important component to his prestige — to his manhood, really — and our man could still not accept the fact that the country had fallen to a rabble of scurvied students. Some days he was better than others, but whenever the latest news reached him of the revolution’s activities he would pull his hair and attack the nearest wall in sight. Not a day passed when he did not fulminate against Batista (That ox! That peasant!) or Castro (The goat-fucking comunista!) or CIA chief Allen Dulles (That effeminate!), who had failed to stop Batista’s ill-advised Mother’s Day Amnesty that freed Fidel and the other moncadistas to fight another day. If Dulles was right here in front of me I’d shoot him dead, he swore to Beli, and then I’d shoot his mother dead.

Life, it seemed, had struck the Gangster a dolorous blow, and he was uncertain as to how to respond. The future appeared cloudy and there was no doubt he sensed his own mortality and that of Trujillo in the fall of Cuba. Which might explain why, when he met Beli, he jumped on her stat. I mean, what straight middle-aged brother has not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy. And if what she often said to her daughter was true, Beli had some of the finest pussy around. The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas, and while the upper-class boys might have had their issues with her, the Gangster was a man of the world, had fucked more prietas than you could count. He didn’t care about that shit. What he wanted was to suck Beli’s enormous breasts, to fuck her pussy until it was a mango-juice swamp, to spoil her senseless so that Cuba and his failure there disappeared. As the viejos say, clavo saca clavo, and only a girl like Beli could erase the debacle of Cuba from a brother’s mind.

At first Beli had her reservations about the Gangster. Her ideal amor had been Jack Pujols, and here was this middle-aged Caliban who dyed his hair and had a thatch of curlies on his back and shoulders. More like a third-base umpire than an Avatar of her Glorious Future. But one should never underestimate what assiduity can accomplish — when assisted by heaping portions of lana and privilege. The Gangster romanced the girl like only middle-aged niggers know how: chipped at her reservation with cool aplomb and unself-conscious cursí — ness. Rained on her head enough flowers to garland Azua, bonfires of roses at the job and her house. (It’s romantic, Tina sighed. It’s vulgar, La Inca complained.) He escorted her to the most exclusive restaurants of the capital, took her to the clubs that had never tolerated a non-musician prieto inside their door before (dude was that powerful — to break. the injunction against
black
), places like the Hamaca, the Tropicalia (though not, alas, the Country Club, even he didn’t have the juice). He flattered her with top-notch muelas (from what I heard he paid a couple of grad-school Cyranos to churn ‘em out). Treated her to plays, movies, dances, bought her wardrobes of clothes and pirate chests of jewelry, introduced her to famous celebrities, and once even to Ramfis Trujillo himself — in other words, he exposed her to the fucking world (at least the one circumscribed by the DR), and you’d be surprised how even a hardheaded girl like Beli, committed as she was to an idealized notion of what love was, could find it in her heart to revise her views, if only for the Gangster.

He was a complicated (some would say comical), affable (some would say laughable) man who treated Beli very tenderly and with great consideration, and under him (literally and metaphorically) the education begun at the restaurant was completed. He was un hombre bien social, enjoyed being out and about, seeing and being seen, and that dovetailed nicely with Beli’s own dreams. But also un hombre conflicted about his past deeds. On the one hand, he was proud of what he’d accomplished. I made myself he told Beli, all by myself I have cars, houses, electricity, clothes, prendas, but when I was a niño I didn’t even own a pair of shoes. Not one pair. I had no family. I was an orphan. Do you understand?

She, an orphan herself understood profoundly.

On the other hand, he was tormented by his crimes. When he drank too much, and that was often, he would mutter things like, If you only knew the diabluras I’ve committed, you wouldn’t be here right now. And on some nights she would wake up to him crying. I didn’t mean to do it! I didn’t mean it!

And it was on one of those nights, while she cradled his head and brushed away his tears, that she realized with a start that she loved this Gangster.

Beli in love! Round Two! But unlike what happened with Pujols, this was the real deal: pure uncut unadulterated love, the Holy Grail that would so bedevil her children throughout their lives. Consider that Beli had longed, hungered, for a chance to be
in
love and to be loved back (not very long in real time but a forever by the chronometer of her adolescence). Never had the opportunity in her first lost childhood; and in the intervening years her desire for it had doubled over and doubled over like a katana being forged until finally it was sharper than the truth. With the Gangster our girl finally got her chance. Who is surprised that in the final four months of her relationship with him there would be such an outpouring of affect? As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiations, loved atomically.

As for the Gangster, he normally would have tired right quick of such an intensely adoring plaything, but our Gangster, grounded by the hurricane winds of history, found himself reciprocating. Writing checks with his mouth that his ass could never hope to cover. He promised her that once the troubles with the Communists were over he would take her to Miami and to Havana. I’ll buy you a house in both places just so you can know how much I love you!

A house? she whispered. Her hair standing on end. You’re lying to me!

I do not lie. How many rooms do you want?

Ten? she said uncertainly.

Ten is nothing. Make it twenty!

The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should have arrested him for it. And believe me, La Inca considered it. He’s a panderer, she declaimed. A thief of innocence! There’s a pretty solid argument to be made that La Inca was right; the Gangster was simply an old chulo preying on Beli’s naïveté. But if you looked at it from, say, a more generous angle you
could
argue that the Gangster adored our girl and that adoration was one of the greatest gifts anybody had ever given her. It felt unbelievably good to Beli, shook her to her core. (
For the first time I actually felt like I owned my skin, like it was me and I was it
.) He made her feel guapa and wanted and safe, and no one had ever done that for her. No one. On their nights together he would pass his hand over her naked body, Narcissus stroking that pool of his, murmuring, Guapa, guapa, over and over again. (He didn’t care about the burn scars on her back: It looks like a painting of a ciclón and that’s what you are, mi negrita, una tormenta en la madrugada.) The randy old goat could make love to her from sunup to sundown, and it was he who taught her all about her body, her orgasms, her rhythms, who said, You have to be bold, and for that he must be honored, no matter what happened in the end.

This was the affair that once and for all incinerated Beli’s reputation in Santo Domingo. No one in Baní knew exactly who the Gangster was and what he did (he kept his shit hush-hush), but it was enough that he was a man. In the minds of Beli’s neighbors, that prieta comparona had finally found her true station in life, as a cuero. Old-timers have told me that during her last months in the DR Beli spent more time inside the love motels than she had in school — an exaggeration, I’m sure, but a sign of how low our girl had fallen in the pueblo’s estimation. Beli didn’t help matters. Talk about a poor winner: now that she’d vaulted into a higher order of privilege, she strutted around the neighborhood, exulting and heaping steaming piles of contempt on everybody and everything that wasn’t the Gangster. Dismissing her barrio as an ‘infierno’ and her neighbors as ‘brutos’ and ‘cochinos,’ she bragged about how she would be living in Miami soon, wouldn’t have to put up with this un-country much longer. Our girl no longer maintained even a modicum of respectability at home. Stayed out until all hours of the night and permed her hair whenever she wanted. La Inca didn’t know what to do with her anymore; all her neighbors advised her to beat the girl into a blood clot (You might even have to kill her, they said regretfully), but La Inca couldn’t explain what it had meant to find the burnt girl locked in a chicken coop all those years ago, how that sight had stepped into her and rearranged everything so that now she found she didn’t have the strength to raise her hand against the girl. She never stopped trying to talk sense into her, though.