- •The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- •It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these ‘superstitions’. In fact, it’s better than fine — it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.
- •The moronic inferno
- •Oscar is brave
- •Oscar comes close
- •I’d kill him first.
- •Amor de pendejo
- •It was Ana. Standing in his foyer, wearing a full-length leather, her trigueña skin blood-charged from the cold, her face gorgeous with eyeliner, mascara, foundation, lipstick, and blush.
- •Oscar in love
- •I feel it, you say, too loudly. Lo siento.
- •I always hated obvious dreams like that. I still do.
- •La chica de mi escuela
- •It’s your fault! she swore, meant in more ways than one.
- •I don’t like him, Beli said. He looks at me.
- •Hunt the light knight
- •I love you! she wanted to scream, I want to have all your children! I want to be your woman! But instead she said, You be careful.
- •I’m allowed to do anything I want, Beli said stubbornly, with my husband.
- •El hollywood
- •The gangster we’re all looking for
- •I do not lie. How many rooms do you want?
- •I don’t need a job. He’s going to buy me a house.
- •It was La Inca who saw it first. Well, you finally did it. You’re pregnant. No I’m not, Beli rasped, wiping the fetid mash from her mouth. But she was.
- •Revelation
- •In the shadow of the jacaranda
- •I don’t know who in carajo—
- •Hesitation
- •La inca, the divine
- •Choice and consequences
- •Fukú vs. Zafa
- •I met something, Beli would say, guardedly.
- •Back among the living
- •La inca, in decline
- •I want to leave. I hate this place.
- •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.
- •The last days of the republic
- •I’m thinking of going to Nueva York.
- •It was pretty horrible. As for punkboy, apparently dude jumped right out the window and ran all the way to George Street. Buttnaked.
- •I’d be sure to have ugly daughters.
- •I mean someone, Abelard said darkly.
- •Santo domingo confidential
- •The bad thing
- •I know, I know, Lydia, but what should I do? Jesú Cristo, Abelard, she said tremulously. What options are there. This is Trujillo you’re talking about.
- •Chiste apocalyptus
- •If the stories are to be believed, it all had to do with a joke.
- •The fall
- •Abelard in chains
- •It wasn’t long after that visit that Socorro realized that she was pregnant. With Abelard’s Third and Final Daughter.
- •The sentence
- •Fallout
- •The third and final daughter
- •The burning
- •I am your real family, La Inca said forcefully. I am here to save you.
- •Forget me naut
- •Sanctuary
- •Oscar takes a vacation
- •The condensed notebook of a return to a nativeland
- •It was also reported that Oscar drooled on himself and didn’t wake up for the meal or the movie, only when the plane touched down and everybody clapped.
- •La beba
- •I don’t need your help. And she ain’t a puta.
- •A note from your author
- •The girl from sabana iglesia
- •Oscar at the rubicon
- •I got one, he said. She’s the girlfriend of my mind.
- •Last chance
- •Oscar gets beat
- •Clives to the rescue
- •Close encounters of the caribbean kind
- •It wasn’t completely egregious, he said. I still had a few hit points left.
- •Part III
- •I might partake. Just a little, though. I would not want to cloud my faculties.
- •Curse of the caribbean
- •The last days of oscar wao
- •On a super final note
- •Veidt says: ‘I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end’. And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: ‘In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends’.
- •The final letter
- •Acknowledgments
- •Table of Contents
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.