The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - By Junot Diaz Page 0,59

injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a ‘mother’ with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything, say these heads, it is that our Beli was blessed.

What about the dead son? The world is full of tragedies enough without niggers having to resort to curses for explanations.

A conclusion La Inca wouldn’t have argued with. To her dying day she believed that Beli had met not a curse but God out in that cane-field.

I met something, Beli would say, guardedly.

BACK AMONG THE LIVING

Touch and go, I tell you, until the fifth day. And when at last she returned to consciousness she did so screaming. Her arm felt like it had been pinched off at the elbow by a grindstone, her head crowned in a burning hoop of brass, her lung like the exploded carcass of a piñata — Jesú! Cristo! She started crying almost immediately, but what our girl did not know was that for the last half-week, two of the best doctors in Baní had tended her covertly; friends of La Inca and anti-Trujillo to the core, they set her arm and plastered it, stitched shut the frightening gashes on her scalp (sixty puntos in all), doused her wounds with enough Mercurochrome to disinfect an army, injected her with morphine and against tetanus. Many late nights of worry, but the worst, it seemed, was over. These doctors, with a spiritual assist from La Inca’s Bible group, had performed a miracle, and all that remained was the healing. (She is lucky that she is so strong, the doctors said, packing their stethoscopes. The Hand of God is upon her, the prayer leaders confirmed, stowing their Bibles.) But blessed was not what our girl felt. After a couple of minutes of hysterical sobbing, of re-adjusting to the fact of the bed, to the fact of her life, she lowed out La Inca’s name.

From the side of the bed the quiet voice of the Benefactor: Don’t talk. Unless it’s to thank the Savior for your life. Mama, Beli cried. Mama. They killed my bebe, they tried to kill me — And they did not succeed, La Inca said. Not for lack of trying, though. She put her hand on the girl’s forehead.

Now it’s time for you to be quiet. For you to be still.

That night was a late-medieval ordeal. Beli alternated from quiet weeping to gusts of rabia so fierce they threatened to throw her out of the bed and reopen her injuries. Like a woman possessed, she drove herself into her mattress, went as rigid as a board, flailed her good arm around, beat her legs, spit and cursed. She wailed — despite a punctured lung and cracked ribs — she wailed inconsolably. Mama, me mataron a mi hijo. Estoy sola, estoy sola. Sola? La Inca leaned close. Would you like me to call your Gangster?

No, she whispered.

La Inca gazed down at her. I wouldn’t call him either.

That night Beli drifted on a vast ocean of loneliness, buffeted by squalls of despair, and during one of her intermittent sleeps she dreamt that she had truly and permanently died and she and her child shared a coffin and when she finally awoke for good, night had broken and out in the street a grade of grief unlike any she’d encountered before was being uncoiled, a cacophony of wails that seemed to have torn free from the cracked soul of humanity itself Like a funeral song for the entire planet.

Mama, she gasped, mama.

Mama!

Tranquilisate, muchacha.

Mama, is that for me? Am I dying? Dime, mama.

Ay, hija, no seas ridícula. La Inca put her hands, awkward hyphens, around the girl. Lowered her mouth to her ear: It’s Trujillo. Gunned down, she whispered, the night Beli had been kidnapped. No one knows anything yet. Except that he’s dead.↓

≡ They say he was on his way for some ass that night. Who is surprised? A consummate culocrat to the end. Perhaps on that last night, El Jefe, sprawled in the back of his Bel Air, thought only of the routine pussy that was awaiting him at Estancia Fundación. Perhaps he thought of nothing. Who can know? In any event: there is a black Chevrolet fast approaching, like Death itself, packed to the rim with U.S.-backed assassins of the higher classes, and now both cars are nearing the city limits, where the streetlights end (for modernity