The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Part II

It was worse than she, in all her apocalyptic fervor, had imagined.

A surgeon’s income was a fine thing but Abelard’s portfolio (if such things existed in those days) was the real source of the family wealth: from his hateful, cantankerous father (now dead) Abelard had inherited a pair of prosperous super-mercados in Santiago, a cement factory, and titles to a string of fincas in the Septrionales.

He walked barefoot, stripped down to his white shirt and his vest, his pant legs rolled, his demi-afro an avuncular torch, plump with middle age.

Often his daughters would bid their father good night only to find him the next morning still engaged in some utterly obscure debate with his friends, eyes red, hair akimbo, woozy but game.

But then, miracle of miracles, El Jefe had crinkled his porcine face and laughed, Abelard had laughed too, and El Jefe moved on.

But the rain season turned to hot season and the clinic filled with the hapless, the wounded, the afflicted, and when after four months nothing happened Abelard almost let out a sigh of relief.

Trujillo was certainly formidable, and the regime was like a Caribbean Mordor in many ways, but there were plenty of people who despised El Jefe, who communicated in less-than-veiled ways their contempt, who resisted.

All in all, the good doctor should have been immensely satisfied with himself. Should have ended each day with his feet up, un cigarro in the corner of his mouth, and a broad grin creasing his ursine features.

Waxed indignant to Marcus for nearly an hour about the injustice, about the hopelessness of it all (an amazing amount of circumlocution because he never once directly named who it was he was complaining about).

Back home the portrait of Trujillo, which every good citizen had hanging in his house, beamed down on him with insipid, viperous benevolence.

But alas, instead of making his move Abelard fretted and temporized and despaired.

Made it seem like nothing was amiss. Hated himself to his core for his mendacity, but what else could he have done?

No, four weeks after the party, Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral was arrested by the Secret Police. The charge? “Slander and gross calumny against the Person of the President.”

Abelard had always imagined the SIM to be filled with lowlifes and no-reading reprobates but the two officers who locked him in their car were in fact polite, less like sadistic torturers than vacuum-cleaner salesmen.

Upon being captured, Anacaona tried to parley, saying: “Killing is not honorable, neither does violence redress our honor. Let us build a bridge of love that our enemies may cross, leaving their footprints for all to see.”

I’m sure that this is nothing more than a figment of our Island’s hypertrophied voodoo imagination.

Gaunt Abelard dragged from the courtroom before he could say a word.

But black black—kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapoteblack, rekhablack—and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact.

In 1960, at the height of the clandestine resistance movement against Trujillo, Abelard underwent a particularly gruesome procedure.

The father of one of my friends spent eight years in Nigiia 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.

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 poor ones—and it was with these infelices that Beli had lived—often wore rags, walked around barefoot, and lived in homes that looked like they’d been constructed from the detritus of the former world.

At the end of his first year, Nataly, who used to sneak whiskey during breaks, who introduced him to Sandman and Eightball, and who borrowed a lot of money from him and never paid it back, transferred to Ridgewood—Yahoo, she said in her usual deadpan, the suburbs—and that was the end of their friendship.

If there’s a goodness part of my brain, it’s like somebody had absconded with it.

He wasn’t svelte by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t Joseph Conrad’s wife no more, either.

(It was an unprecedented change in fortune, as though his threadbare Skein of Destiny had accidentally gotten tangled with that of a doper, more fortunate brother.)

The gates of his heart had swung open and he felt light on his feet, he felt weightless, he felt lithe.

But he knew, with lapidary clarity, that he wasn’t going to stop. He loved Ybon.

Their flashlight newly activated, they walked him into the cane—never had he heard anything so loud and alien, the susurration, the crackling, the flashes of motion underfoot (snake? mongoose?), overhead even the stars, all of them gathered in vainglorious congress.

But, O, you almost got yourself killed.
It wasn’t completely egregious, he said. I still had a few hit points left.