The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - By Junot Diaz Page 0,58

As some of you know, cane-fields are no fucking joke, and even the cleverest of adults can get mazed in their endlessness, only to reappear months later as a cameo of bones. But before Beli lost hope she heard the creature’s voice. She (for it had a woman’s lilt) was singing! In an accent she could not place: maybe Venezuelan, maybe Colombian. Sueño, sueño, sueño, como tú te llamas. She clung unsteadily to the cane, like an anciano clinging to a hammock, and, panting, took her first step, a long dizzy spell, beating back a blackout, and then her next. Precarious progress, because if she fell she knew she would never stand again. Sometimes she saw the creature’s chabine eyes flashing through the stalks. Yo me llamo sueño de la madrugada. The cane didn’t want her to leave, of course; it slashed at her palms, jabbed into her flank and clawed her thighs, and its sweet stench clogged her throat.

Each time she thought she would fall she concentrated on the faces of her promised future — her promised children — and from that obtained the strength she needed to continue. She pulled from strength, from hope, from hate, from her invincible heart, each a different piston driving her forward. Finally, when all were exhausted, when she began to stumble headfirst, heading down like a boxer on his last legs, she stretched her uninjured arm out and what greeted her was not cane but the open world of life. She felt the tarmac under her bare broken feet, and the wind. The wind! But she had only a second to savor it, for just then an unelectrified truck burst out of the darkness in a roar of gears. What a life, she mused, all that lucha only to be run over like a dog. But she wasn’t flattened. The driver, who later swore he saw something lion-like in the gloom, with eyes like terrible amber lamps, slammed on the brakes and halted inches from where a naked blood-spattered Beli tottered.

Now check it: the truck held a perico ripiao conjunto, fresh from playing a wedding in Ocoa. Took all the courage they had not to pop the truck in reverse and peel out of there. Cries of, It’s a baká, a ciguapa, no, a haitiano! silenced by the lead singer, who shouted, It’s a girl! The band members lay Beli among their instruments, swaddled her with their chacabanas, and washed her face with the water they carried for the radiator and for cutting down the klerín. Down the band peered, rubbing their lips and running nervous hands through thinning hair.

What do you think happened?

I think she was attacked.

By a lion, offered the driver.

Maybe she fell out of a car.

It looks like she fell under a car.

Trujillo, she whispered.

Aghast, the band looked at one another.

We should leave her.

The guitarrista agreed. She must be a subversive. If they find her with us the police will kill us too. Put her back on the road, begged the driver. Let the lion finish her.

Silence, and then the lead singer lit a match and held it in the air and in that splinter of light was revealed a blunt-featured woman with the golden eyes of a chabine. We’re not leaving her, the lead singer said in a curious cibaeña accent, and only then did Beli understand that she was saved.↓

≡ The Mongoose, one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its greatest travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Mrica and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, a.k.a. the Caribbean. Since its earliest appearance in the written record — 675 H.C.E., in a nameless scribe’s letter to AshurBanípal’s father, Esarhaddon — the Mongoose has proven itself to be an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies. Believed to be an ally of Man. Many Watchers suspect that the Mongoose arrived to our world from another, but to date no evidence of such a migration has been unearthed.

FUKÚ VS. ZAFA

There are still many, on and off the Island, who offer Beli’s near-fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the House Cabral was indeed victim of a high-level fukú, the local version of House Atreus. Two Truji-líos in one lifetime — what in carajo else could it be? But other heads question that logic, arguing that Beli’s survival must be evidence to the contrary. Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of cane-fields with a frightening roster of