The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - By Junot Diaz Page 0,79

fea, a malcriada, to change seats, but she didn’t.

She put her hand on mine and left it there. When the woman in front turned around and said: Tell that girl of yours to be quiet, she said, Tell that culo of yours to stop stinking.

I felt sorriest for the viejo next to us. You could tell he’d been visiting his family. He had on a little fedora and his best pressed chacabana. It’s OK, muchacha, he said, patting my back. Santo Domingo will always be there. It was there in the beginning and it will be there at the end.

For God’s sake, my mother muttered, and then closed her eyes and went to sleep.

FIVE

Poor Abelard 1944-1946

THE FAMOUS DOCTOR

When the family talks about it at all — which is like never they always begin in the same place: with Abelard and the Bad Thing he said about Trujillo.↓

≡ There are other beginnings certainly, better ones, to be sure — if you ask me I would have started when the Spaniards ‘discovered’ the New World — or when the U.S. invaded Santo Domingo in 1916 — but if this was the opening that the de Leóns chose for themselves, then who am I to question their historiography?

Abelard Luis Cabral was Oscar and Lola’s grandfather, a surgeon who had studied in Mexico City in the Lazaro Cardenas years and in the mid-1940’s, before any of us were even born, a man of considerable standing in La Vega. Un hombre muy serio, muy educado y muy bien plantado.

(You can already see where this is headed.) In those long-ago days — before delincuencia and bank failures, before Diaspora — the Cabrals were numbered among the High of the Land. They were not as filthy-rich or as historically significant as the Ral Cabrals of Santiago, but they weren’t too shabby a cadet branch, either. In La Vega, where the family had lived since 1791, they were practically royalty, as much a landmark as La Casa Amarilla and the Rio Camu; neighbors spoke of the fourteen-room house that Abelard’s father had built, Casa Hatüey↓, a rambling oft-expanded villa eclectic whose original stone core had been transformed into Abelard’s study, a house bounded by groves of almonds and dwarf-mangos; there was also the modern Art Deco apartment in Santiago, where Abelard often spent his weekends attending the family businesses; the freshly refurbished stables that could have comfortably billeted a dozen horses; the horses themselves: six Berbers with skin like vellum; and of course the five full-time servants (of the rayano variety).

≡ Hatüey, in case you’ve forgotten, was the Taino Ho Chi Minh. When the Spaniards were committing First Genocide in the Dominican Republic, Hatüey left the Island and canoed to Cuba, looking for reinforcements, his voyage a precursor to the trip Maximo Gomez would take almost three hundred years later. Casa Hatüey was named Hatüey because in Times Past it supposedly had been owned by a descendant of the priest who tried to baptize Harney right before the Spaniards burned him at the stake. (What Hatüey said on that pyre is a legend in itself: Are there white people in Heaven? Then I’d rather go to Hell.) History, however, has not been kind to Harney. Unless something changes ASAP he will go out like his camarada Crazy Horse. Coffled to a beer, in a country not his own.

While the rest of the country in that period subsisted on rocks and scraps of yuca and were host to endless coils of intestinal worms, the Cabrals dined on pastas and sweet Italian sausages, scraped Jalisco silver on flatware from Beleek. 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 supermercados in Santiago, a cement factory, and titles to a string of fincas in the Septrionales.

The Cabrals were, as you might have guessed, members of the Fortunate People. Summers they ‘borrowed’ a cousin’s cabana in Puerto Plata and decamped there for a period of no less than three weeks. Abelard’s two daughters, Jacquelyn and Astrid, swam and played in the surf (often suffering Mulatto Pigment Degradation Disorder, a.k.a. tans) under the watchful gaze of their mother, who, unable to risk no extra darkness, remained chained to her umbrella’s shadow — while their father, when not listening to the news from the War, roamed the shoreline, his face set in tense concentration.