The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Part I

His adolescent nerdliness vaporizing any iota of a chance he had for young love.

He was like all boys: beautiful and callow, and like an insect he couldn’t sit still.

There weren’t any Houdini holes in that Platano Curtain. Options as rare as Tainos and for irascible dark-skinned flacas of modest means they were rarer still.

But despite the girl’s admirable lineage, Beli herself had not grown up in her parents’ upper-class milieu.

And Beli did everything possible to represent her school as a paradise where she cavorted with the other Immortals, a four-year interval before the final Apotheosis.

Like most homunculi he did not marry and left no heirs.

The Good Teachers of El Redentor never squeezed anything close to a mea culpa from the girl.

And then there was Lillian, the other waitress, a squat rice tub, whose rancor against the world turned to glee only when humanity exceeded in its venality, brutality, and mendacity even her own expectations.

The customers’ attention was exhilarating and she in turn gave the boys something that most men can never get enough of—ribbing, solicitous mothering from an attractive woman.

It must have dismayed La Inca to see how drastically her “daughter” was changing, for Beli, the girl who never used to speak in public, who could be still as Noh, displayed at Palacio Peking a raconteur’s gift for palaver that delighted a great many of the all-male clientele.

Beli picked up her taza and wiped the table in one perfunctory motion.

Let us summon back from the abyss two sapos in particular: the Fiat dealer, bald, white, and smiling, a regular Hipolito Mejfa, but suave and cavalier and so enamored of North American baseball that he risked life and limb to listen to games on a contraband shortwave radio.

A corpulent accountant put his hand out and for the next two hours Beli forgot her awkwardness, her wonderment, her trepidation, and danced.

Handsome in that louche potbellied mid-forties Hollywood producer sort of way, with pouched gray eyes that had seen (and didn’t miss) much.

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.

Life, it seemed, had struck the Gangster a dolorous blow, and he was uncertain as to how to respond.

As the viejos say, clavo saca clavo, and only a girl like Beli could erase the debacle of Cuba from a brother’s mind.

But one should never underestimate what assiduity can accomplish—when assisted by heaping portions of lana and privilege.

Ostensibly she wanted to end things in a formal way, but I think she was just feeling down and wanted male attention.

For Eden it was, a blessed meridian where mar and sol and green have forged their union and produced a stubborn people that no amount of highfalutin prose can generalize.

The Gangster was in high spirits, the war against the subversives was going swell, it seemed.

The next day the protective bubble about their idyll finally burst and the troubles of the real world came rushing in.

Let’s go, Elvis One said, twisting her arm behind her back and, with the help of his partner, dragging her across the park to where a car sat baleful in the sun.

His face was a dead rictus and in it shone everything he had lost.

We postmodern platanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion.

Through the numinous power of prayer La Inca saved the girl’s life, laid an A-plus zafa on the Cabral family fuku (but at what cost to herself?).

The black Chevy flashes its lights innocuously, asking to pass, and Zacarias, thinking it’s the Secret Police, obliges by slowing down, and when the cars come abreast, the escopeta wielded by Antonio de la Maza (whose brother—surprise, surprise—was killed in the Galindez cover-up—which goes to show that you should always be careful when killing nerds, never know who will come after you) goes boo-ya!

More questions at passport control, and with a last contemptuous flurry of stamps, she was let through.

Got him to start watching his diet and to stop talking crazy negative—I am ill-fated, I am going to perish a virgin, I’m lacking in pulchritude—at least while I was around, I did.

At first, dude just stared at her from afar and moaned about her “ineffable perfection.”