2007 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (18 page)

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 fukú (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;↓ 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 Baní her own personal Lothlórien, 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,↓ 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 Jesú 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 país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüenceria 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 Marines had been spotted on the horizon. Who could know what tomorrow would bring? Why send her beloved girl away? Why be
hasty?

La Inca found herself in practically the same predicament Beli’s father had found himself in sixteen years earlier, back when the House of Cabral had first come up against the might of the Trujillos. Trying to decide whether to act or to stay still.

Unable to choose, she prayed for further guidance — another three days without food. Who knows how it might have turned out had not the Elvises come calling? Our Benefactor might have gone out exactly like Mother Abigail. But thankfully the Elvises surprised her as she was sweeping the front of the house. Is your name Myotis Toribio? Their pompadours like the backs of beetles. African muscles encased in pale summer suits, and underneath their jackets the hard, oiled holsters of their fire-arms did creak.

We want to speak to your daughter, Elvis One growled.

Right now, Elvis Two added.

Por supuesto, she said and when she emerged from the house holding a machete the Elvises retreated to their car, laughing.

Elvis One: We’ll be back, vieja.

Elvis Two: believe us.

Who was that? Beli asked from her bed, her hands clutching at her nonexistent stomach. No one, La Inca said, putting the machete next to the bed. The next night, ‘no one’ shot a peephole clean through the front door of the house.

The next couple of nights she and the girl slept under the bed, and a little bit later in the week she told the girl: No matter what happens I want you to remember: your father was a doctor, a
doctor
. And your mother was a nurse.

And finally the words: You should leave.

I want to leave. I hate this place.

The girl by this time could hobble to the latrine under her own power. She was much changed. During the day she would sit by the window in silence, very much like La Inca after her husband drowned. She did not smile, she did not laugh, she talked to no one, not even her friend Dorca. A dark veil had closed over her, like nata over cafe.

You don’t understand, hija. You have to leave
the country
. They’ll kill you if you don’t.

Beli laughed.

Oh, Beli; not so rashly, not so rashly: What did you know about states or diasporas? What did you know about Nueba Yol or unheated ‘old law’ tenements or children whose self-hate short-circuited their minds? What did you know, madame, about
immigration?
Don’t laugh, mi negrita, for your world is about to be changed. Utterly. Yes: a terrible beauty is etc., etc. Take it from me. You laugh because you’ve been ransacked to the limit of your soul, because your lover betrayed you almost unto death, because your first son was never born. You laugh because you have no front teeth and you’ve sworn never to smile again.

I wish I could say different but I’ve got it right here on tape. La Inca told you you had to leave the country and you laughed. End of story.

She would remember little of the final months beyond her anguish and her despair (and her desire to see the Gangster dead). She was in the grips of the Darkness, passed through her days like a shade passes through life. She did not move from the house unless forced; at last they had the relationship La Inca had always longed for, except that they didn’t speak. What was there to say? La Inca talked soberly about the trip north, but Beli felt like a good part of her had already disembarked. Santo Domingo was fading. The house, La Inca, the fried yuca she was putting into her mouth were already gone — it was only a matter of allowing the rest of the world to catch up. The only time she felt close to her old sense was when she spotted the Elvises lurking in the neighborhood. She would cry out in mortal fear, but they drove off with smirks on their faces. We’ll see you soon. Real soon. At night there were nightmares of the cane, of the Faceless One, but when she awoke from them La Inca was always there. Tranquila, hija. Tranquila.

(Regarding the Elvises: What stayed their hand? Perhaps it was the fear of retribution now that the Trujillato had fallen. Perhaps it was La Inca’s power. Perhaps it was that force from the future reaching back to protect the third and final daughter? Who can know?)

La Inca, who I don’t think slept a single day during those months. La Inca, who carried a machete with her everywhere. Homegirl was bout about it. Knew that when Gondolin falls you don’t wait around for the balrogs to tap on your door. You make fucking moves. And make moves she did. Papers were assembled, palms were greased, and permissions secured. In another time it would have been impossible, but with El Jefe dead and the Plátano Curtain shattered all manner of escapes were now possible. La Inca gave Beli photos and letters from the woman she’d be staying with in a place called El Bronx. But none of it reached Beli. She ignored the pictures, left the letters unread, so that when she arrived at Idlewild she would not know who it was she should be looking for. La pobrecita.

Just as the standoff between the Good Neighbor and what remained of Family Trujillo reached the breaking point, Beli was brought before a judge. La Inca made her put ojas de mamón in her shoes so he wouldn’t ask too many questions. Homegirl stood through the whole proceedings, numb, drifting. The week before, she and the Gangster had finally managed to meet in one of the first love motels in the capital. The one run by los chinos, about which Luis Díaz sang his famous song. It was not the reunion she had hoped for. Ay, mi pobre negrita, he moaned, stroking her hair. Where once was lightning now there was fat fingers on straight hair. We were betrayed, you and I. Betrayed horribly! She tried to talk about the dead baby but he waved the diminutive ghost away with a flick of his wrist and proceeded to remove her enormous breasts from the vast armature of her bra. We’ll have another one, he promised. I’m going to have two, she said quietly. He laughed. We’ll have fifty.

The Gangster still had a lot on his mind. He was worried about the fate of the Trujillato, worried that the Cubans were preparing to invade. They shoot people like me in the show trials. I’ll be the first person Che looks for.

I’m thinking of going to Nueva York.

She had wanted him to say, No, don’t go, or at least to say he would be joining her. But he told her instead about one of his trips to Nueba Yol, a job for the Jefe and how the crab at some
Cuban
restaurant had made him sick. He did not mention his wife, of course, and she did not ask. It would have broken her.

Later, when he started coming, she tried to hold on to him, but he wrenched free and came on the dark ruined plain of her back.

Like chalk on a blackboard, the Gangster joked.

She was still thinking about him eighteen days later at the airport. You don’t have to go, La Inca said suddenly, just before the girl stepped into the line. Too late.

I want to.

Her whole life she had tried to be happy, but Santo Domingo…FUCKING SANTO DOMINGO had foiled her at every turn. I never want to see it again.

Don’t talk that way.

I never want to see it again.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

Don’t leave like this. Toma, for the trip. Dulce de coco.

On the line to passport control she would throw it away but for now she held the jar.

Remember me. La Inca kissed and embraced her. Remember who you are. You are the third and final daughter of the Family Cabral. You are the daughter of a doctor and a nurse.

Last sight of La Inca: waving at her with all her might, crying.

More questions at passport control, and with a last contemptuous flurry of stamps, she was let through. And then the boarding and the preflight chitchat from the natty dude on her right, four rings on his hand — Where are you going? Never-never land, she snapped — and finally the plane, throbbing with engine song, tears itself from the surface of the earth and Beli, not known for her piety, closed her eyes and begged the Lord to protect her.

Poor Beli. Almost until the last she half believed that the Gangster was going to appear and save her. I’m sorry, mi negrita, I’m so sorry, I should never have let you go. (She was still big on dreams of rescue.) She had looked for him everywhere: on the ride to the airport, in the faces of the officials checking passports, even when the plane was boarding, and, finally, for an irrational moment, she thought he would emerge from the cockpit, in a clean-pressed captain’s uniform — I tricked you, didn’t I? But the Gangster never appeared again in the flesh, only in her dreams. On the plane there were other First Wavers. Many waters waiting to become a river. Here she is, closer now to the mother we will need her to be if we want Oscar and Lola to be born.

She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s last light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorías, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.