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By Root 2070 0

more, had more of a temper, her movements more aggressive and unrestrained, had the merciless eyes of a falcon, but she had the posture and speech (and arrogance) of una muchacha respetable. And when she wore long sleeves the scar was only visible on her neck (the edge of a larger ruination certainly, but greatly reduced by the cut of the cloth).This was the girl who would travel to the U.S. in 1962, whom Oscar and Lola would never know. La Inca the only one to have seen Beli at her beginnings, when she slept fully dressed and screamed in the middle of the night, who saw her before she constructed a better self one with Victorian table manners and a disgust of filth and poor people.

Theirs, as you might imagine, was an odd relationship. La Inca never sought to discuss Beli’s time in Azua, would never refer to it, or to the Burning. She pretended it didn’t exist (the same way she pretended that the poor slobs in her barrio didn’t exist when they, in fact, were overrunning the place). Even when she greased the girl’s back, every morning and every night, La Inca only said, Síentese aquí, señorita. It was a silence, a lack of probing, that Beli found most agreeable. (If only the waves of feeling that would occasionally lap her back could be so easily forgotten.) Instead of talking about the Burning, or Outer Azua, La Inca talked to Beli about her lost, forgotten past, about her father, the famous doctor, about her mother, the beautiful nurse, about her sisters Jackie and Astrid, and about that marvelous castle in the Cibao: Casa Hatüey.

They may never have become best friends — Beli too furious, La Inca too correct — but La Inca did give Beli the greatest of gifts, which she would appreciate only much later; one night La Inca produced an old newspaper, pointed to a photograph: This, she said, is your father and your mother. This, she said, is who you are.

The day they opened their clinic: so young, both of them looking so serious.

For Beli those months truly were her one and only Sanctuary, a world of safety she never thought possible. She had clothes, she had food, she had time, and La Inca never ever yelled at her. Not for nothing, and didn’t let anybody else yell at her either. Before La Inca enrolled her in Colegio EI Redentor with the richies, Beli attended the dusty, fly-infested public school with children three years younger than her, made no friends (she couldn’t have imagined it any other way), and for the first time in her life began to remember her dreams. It was a luxury she’d never dared indulge in, and in the beginning they seemed as powerful as storms. She had the whole variety, from flying to being lost, and even dreamt about the Burning, how her ‘father’s’ face had turned blank at the moment he picked up the skillet. In her dreams she was never scared. Would only shake her head. You’re gone, she said. No more.

There was a dream, however, that did haunt her. Where she walked alone through a vast, empty house whose roof was being tattooed by rain. Whose house was it? She had not a clue. But she could hear the voices of children in it.

At first year’s end, the teacher asked her to come to the board and fill in the date, a privilege that only the ‘best’ children in the class were given. She is a giant at the board and in their minds the children are calling her what they call her in the world: variations on La Prieta Quemada or La Fea Quemada. When Beli sat down the teacher glanced over her scrawl and said, Well done, Senorita Cabral! She would never forget that day, even when she became the Queen of Diaspora.

Well done, Senorita Cabral! She would never forget. She was nine years, eleven months. It was the Era of Trujillo.

SIX

Land of the Lost

1992-1995

THE DARK AGE

After graduation Oscar moved back home. Left a virgin, returned one. Took down his childhood posters — Star Blazers, Captain Harlock — and tacked up his college ones — Akira and Terminator 2. Now that Reagan and the Evil Empire had ridden off into never-never land, Oscar didn’t dream about the end no more. Only about the Fall.