2007 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (27 page)

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 all
. Trujillo took your houses, your properties, put your pops and your moms in jail? Well, it was because he wanted to fuck the beautiful daughter of the house! And your family wouldn’t let him!

Shit really is perfect. Makes for plenty of fun reading.

But there’s another, less-known, variant of the Abelard vs. Trujillo narrative. A secret history that claims that Abelard didn’t get in trouble because of his daughter’s culo or because of an imprudent joke.

This version contends that he got in trouble because of a book.

(Cue the theremin, please.)

Sometime in 1944 (so the story goes), while Abelard was still worried about whether he was in trouble with Trujillo, he started writing a book about — what else? — Trujillo. By 1945 there was already a tradition of ex-officials writing tell-all books about the Trujillo regime. But that apparently was not the kind of book Abelard was writing. His shit, if we are to believe the whispers, was an expose of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the president — that he was supernatural, that he was not human — may in some ways have been
true
. That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!

I only wish I could have read that thing. (I know Oscar did too.) That shit would have been one wild mother-fucking ride. Alas, the grimoire in question (so the story goes) was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. No copies survive. Not his wife or his children knew about its existence, either. Only one of the servants who helped him collect the folktales on the sly, etc., etc. What can I tell you? In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow. It was one of those fictions with a lot of disseminators but no believers. Oscar, as you might imagine, found this version of the Fall very very attractive. Appealed to the deep structures in his nerd brain. Mysterious books, a supernatural, or perhaps alien, dictator who had installed himself on the first Island of the New World and then cut it off from everything else, who could send a curse to destroy his enemies — that was some New Age Lovecraft shit.

The Lost Final Book of Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral. I’m sure that this is nothing more than a figment of our Island’s hypertrophied voodoo imagination. And nothing less. The Girl Trujillo Wanted might be trite as far as foundation myths go but at least it’s something you can really believe in, no? Something real.

Strange, though, that when all was said and done, Trujillo never went after Jackie, even though he had Abelard in his grasp. He was known to be unpredictable, but still, it’s odd, isn’t it?

Also strange that none of Abelard’s books, not the four he authored or the hundreds he owned, survive. Not in an archive, not in a private collection. Not a one. All of them either lost or destroyed. Every paper he had in his house was confiscated and reportedly burned. You want creepy? Not one single example of his handwriting remains. I mean, OK, Trujillo was thorough. But not one scrap of paper with his handwriting? That was more than thorough. You got to fear a motherfucker or what he’s writing to do something like that.

But hey, it’s only a story, with no solid evidence, the kind of shit only a nerd could love.

No matter what you believe: in February 1946, Abelard was officially convicted of all charges and sentenced to eighteen years. Eighteen years! Gaunt Abelard dragged from the courtroom before he could say a word. Socorro, immensely pregnant, had to be restrained from attacking the judge. Maybe you’ll ask, Why was there was no out cryin the papers, no actions among the civil rights groups, no opposition parties rallying to the cause? Nigger, please: there were no papers, no civil rights groups, no opposition parties; there was only Trujillo. And talk about jurisprudence: Abelard’s lawyer got one phone call from the Palacio and promptly dropped the appeal. It’s better we say nothing, he advised Socorro. He’ll live longer. Say nothing, say everything — it didn’t matter. It was the Fall. The fourteen-room house in La Vega, the luxurious apartment in Santiago, the stables in which you could comfortably billet a dozen horses, the two prosperous supermercados and the string off fíncas vanished in the detonation, were all confiscated by the Trujillato and ended up dispersed among the Jefe and his minions, two of whom had been out with Abelard the night he said the Bad Thing. (I could reveal their names but I believe you already know one of them; he was a certain trusted neighbor.) But no disappearance was more total, more ultimate, than Abelard’s.

Losing your house and all your properties, that was par for the course with the Trujillato — but the arrest (or if you’re more into the fantastic: that book) precipitated an unprecedented downturn in the family fortune. Tripped, at some cosmic level, a lever against the family. Call it a whole lot of bad luck, outstanding karmic debt, or something else. (Fukú?) Whatever it was, the shit started coming at the family something awful and there are some people who would say it’s never ever stopped.

The family claims the first sign was that Abelard’s third and final daughter, given the light early on in her father’s capsulization, was born black. And not just any kind of black. But
black
black — kongo-black, shango-black, kali-black, zapote-black, rekha-black — and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen.

You want a real first sign?

Not two months after giving birth to the third and final daughter (who was named Hypatia Belicia Cabral) Socorro, perhaps blinded by her grief: by her husband’s disappearance, by the fact that all her husband’s family had begun avoiding them like, well, a fukú, by postpartum depression, stepped in front of a speeding ammunition truck and was dragged nearly to the front of La Casa Amarilla before the driver realized something was wrong. If she wasn’t dead on impact she was certainly dead by the time they pried her body from the truck’s axles.

It was the very worst kind of luck, but what could be done? With a dead mom and a dad in prison, with the rest of the family scarce (and I mean Trujillo-scarce), the daughters had to be divvied up among whoever would take them. Jackie got sent to her wealthy godparents in La Capital, while Astrid ended up with relatives in Sanjuan de la Maguana.

They never saw each other or their father again.

Even those among you who don’t believe in fukú’s of any kind might have wondered what in Creation’s name was going on. Shortly after Socorro’s horrible accident, Esteban the Gallo, the family’s number-one servant, was fatally stabbed outside a cabaret; the attackers were never found. Lydia perished soon after, some say of grief: others of a cancer in her womanly parts. Her body was not found for months. After all, she lived alone.

In 1948, Jackie, the family’s Golden Child, was found drowned in her godparents’ pool. The pool that had been drained down to its last two feet of water. Up to that point she’d been unflaggingly cheerful, the sort of talkative negra who could have found a positive side to a mustard-gas attack. Despite her traumas, despite the circumstances around her separation from her parents, she disappointed no one, exceeded all expectations. She was number one in her class academically, beating out even the private-school children of the American Colony, so off-the-hook intelligent she made a habit of correcting her teachers’ mistakes on exams. She was captain of the debate team, captain of the swim team, and in tennis had no equal, was fucking golden. But never got over the Fall or her role in it, was how people explained it. (Though how odd is it that she was accepted to medical school in France three days before she ‘killed herself’ and from all evidence couldn’t wait to be gone from Santo Domingo.)

Her sister, Astrid — we scarcely knew you, babe — wasn’t much luckier. In 1951, while praying in a church in San Juan, where she lived with her tíos, a stray bullet flew down the aisle and struck her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. No one knew where the bullet had come from. No one even recalled hearing a weapon discharge.

Of the original family quartet, Abelard lived the longest. Which is ironic since nearly everyone in his circle, including La Inca, believed the government when they announced in 1953 that he was dead. (Why did they do this? Because.) It was only after he died for real that it was revealed that he’d been in Nigüa prison all along. Served fourteen straight years in Trujillo’s justice. What a nightmare.↓

≡ Nigüa and El Pozo de Nagua were death camps — Ultamos — considered the worst prisons in the New World. Most niggers who ended up in Nigüa during the Trujillato never left alive, and those who did probably wished they hadn’t. The father of one of my friends spent eight years in Nigüa for failing to show proper deference toward the Jefe’s father, and he once spoke of a fellow prisoner who made the mistake of complaining to his jailers about a toothache. The guards shoved a gun in his mouth and blew his brains into orbit. I bet it don’t hurt now, the guards guffawed. (The one who actually committed the murder was known thereafter as El Dentista.) Nigüa had many famous alumni, including the writer Juan Bosch, who would go on to become Exiled Anti-Trujillista Number One and eventually president of the Dominican Republic.
As
Juan Isidro Jiménes Grullón said in his book
Una Gestapo en América
, ‘es mejor tener cien niguas en un pie que un pie en Nigüa’.

A thousand tales I could tell you about Abelard’s imprisonment — a thousand tales to wring the salt from your mother-fucking eyes — but I’m going to spare you the anguish, the torture, the loneliness, and the sickness of those fourteen wasted years, spare you in fact the events and leave you with only the consequences (and you should wonder, rightly, if I’ve spared you anything).

In 1960, at the height of the clandestine resistance movement against Trujillo, Abelard underwent a particularly gruesome procedure. He was manacled to a chair, placed out in the scorching sun, and then a wet rope was cinched cruelly about his forehead. It was called La Corona, a simple but horribly effective torture. At first the rope just grips your skull, but as the sun dries and tightens it, the pain becomes unbearable, would drive you mad. Among the prisoners of the Trujillato few tortures were more feared. Since it neither killed you nor left you alive. Abelard survived it but was never the same. Turned him into a vegetable. The proud flame of his intellect extinguished. For the rest of his short life he existed in an imbecilic stupor, but there were prisoners who remembered moments when he seemed almost lucid, when he would stand in the fields and stare at his hands and weep, as if recalling that there was once a time when he had been more than this. The other prisoners, out of respect, continued to call El Doctor. It was said he died a couple of days before Trujillo was assassinated. Buried in an unmarked grave somewhere outside of Nigüa. Oscar visited the site on his last days. Nothing to report. Looked like every other scrabby field in Santo Domingo. He burned candles, left flowers, prayed, and went back to his hotel. The government was supposed to have erected a plaque to the dead of Nigüa Prison, but they never did.

What about the third and final daughter, Hypatia Belicia Cabral, who was only two months old when her mother died, who never met her father, who was held by her sisters only a few times before they too disappeared, who spent no time inside Casa Hatüey, who was the literal Child of the Apocalypse?

What about her? She was not as easy to place as Astrid or Jackie; she was a newborn, after all, and, well, the scuttlebutt around the family has it that as she was so dark no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her. To make matters worse, she was born bakiní — underweight, sickly. She had problems crying, problems nursing, and no one outside the family wanted the dark child to live. I know it’s taboo to make this accusation, but I doubt that anybody inside the family wanted her to live, either. For a couple of weeks it was touch and go, and if it hadn’t been for a kindly dark-skinned woman named Zoila who gave her some of her own baby’s breast milk and held her for hours a day she probably wouldn’t have made it. By the end of her fourth month the baby seemed to be staging a comeback. She was still bakiní central, but she was starting to put on weight, and her crying, which before had sounded like a murmur from the grave, was growing more and more piercing. Zoila (who had become a guardian angel of sorts) stroked the baby’s mottled head and declared: Another six months, mi’jita, and you’ll be mas fuerte que Lílis.

Beli didn’t have six months. (Stability was not in our girl’s stars, only Change.) Without any warning a group of Socorro’s distant relatives showed up and claimed the child, tore her clean out of Zoila’s arms (the very same relatives Socorro had happily put behind her when she married Abelard). I suspect these people hadn’t actually intended to take care of the girl for any length of time, were only doing it because they expected some monetary reward from the Cabrals, and when no loot was forthcoming, the Fall was total, the brutos passed the girl on to some even more distant relatives on the outskirts of Azua. And here’s where the trail gets funky. These people in Azua seemed to be some real wack jobs, what my moms calls salvages.
After
only a month of caring for the unhappy infant, the moms of the family disappeared one afternoon with the baby, and when she returned to her village the baby didn’t. She told her vecinos that the baby had died. Some people believed her. Beli, after all, had been ailing for a while. The tiniest little negrita on the planet. fukú, part three. But most folks figured that she had sold the girl to some other family. Back then, as now, the buying and selling of children, common enough.