The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - By Junot Diaz Page 0,63

staying with in a place called El Bronx. But none of it reached Beli. She ignored the pictures, left the letters unread, so that when she arrived at Idlewild she would not know who it was she should be looking for. La pobrecita.

Just as the standoff between the Good Neighbor and what remained of Family Trujillo reached the breaking point, Beli was brought before a judge. La Inca made her put ojas de mamón in her shoes so he wouldn’t ask too many questions. Homegirl stood through the whole proceedings, numb, drifting. The week before, she and the Gangster had finally managed to meet in one of the first love motels in the capital. The one run by los chinos, about which Luis Díaz sang his famous song. It was not the reunion she had hoped for. Ay, mi pobre negrita, he moaned, stroking her hair. Where once was lightning now there was fat fingers on straight hair. We were betrayed, you and I. Betrayed horribly! She tried to talk about the dead baby but he waved the diminutive ghost away with a flick of his wrist and proceeded to remove her enormous breasts from the vast armature of her bra. We’ll have another one, he promised. I’m going to have two, she said quietly. He laughed. We’ll have fifty.

The Gangster still had a lot on his mind. He was worried about the fate of the Trujillato, worried that the Cubans were preparing to invade. They shoot people like me in the show trials. I’ll be the first person Che looks for.

I’m thinking of going to Nueva York.

She had wanted him to say, No, don’t go, or at least to say he would be joining her. But he told her instead about one of his trips to Nueba Yol, a job for the Jefe and how the crab at some Cuban restaurant had made him sick. He did not mention his wife, of course, and she did not ask. It would have broken her.

Later, when he started coming, she tried to hold on to him, but he wrenched free and came on the dark ruined plain of her back.

Like chalk on a blackboard, the Gangster joked.

She was still thinking about him eighteen days later at the airport. You don’t have to go, La Inca said suddenly, just before the girl stepped into the line. Too late.

I want to.

Her whole life she had tried to be happy, but Santo Domingo…FUCKING SANTO DOMINGO had foiled her at every turn. I never want to see it again.

Don’t talk that way.

I never want to see it again.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

Don’t leave like this. Toma, for the trip. Dulce de coco.

On the line to passport control she would throw it away but for now she held the jar.

Remember me. La Inca kissed and embraced her. Remember who you are. You are the third and final daughter of the Family Cabral. You are the daughter of a doctor and a nurse.

Last sight of La Inca: waving at her with all her might, crying.

More questions at passport control, and with a last contemptuous flurry of stamps, she was let through. And then the boarding and the preflight chitchat from the natty dude on her right, four rings on his hand — Where are you going? Never-never land, she snapped — and finally the plane, throbbing with engine song, tears itself from the surface of the earth and Beli, not known for her piety, closed her eyes and begged the Lord to protect her.

Poor Beli. Almost until the last she half believed that the Gangster was going to appear and save her. I’m sorry, mi negrita, I’m so sorry, I should never have let you go. (She was still big on dreams of rescue.) She had looked for him everywhere: on the ride to the airport, in the faces of the officials checking passports, even when the plane was boarding, and, finally, for an irrational moment, she thought he would emerge from the cockpit, in a clean-pressed captain’s uniform — I tricked you, didn’t I? But the Gangster never appeared again in the flesh, only in her dreams. On the plane there were other First Wavers. Many waters waiting to become a river. Here she is, closer now to the mother we will need her to be if we want Oscar and