Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [38]
That’s all it took. The next day both he and the teacher were gone. No one saying nothing.↓
≡ Reminds me of the sad case of Rafael Yepez: Yepez was a man who in the thirties ran a small prep school in the capital, not far from where I grew up, that catered to the Trujillato’s lower-level ladroncitos. One ill-starred day Yepez asked his students to write an essay on the topic of their choice — a broad-minded Betances sort of man was this Yepez — and unsurprisingly, one boy chose to compose a praise song to Trujillo and his wife, Dona Maria. Yepez made the mistake of suggesting in class that other Dominican women deserved as much praise as Dona María and that in the future, young men like his students would also become great leaders like Trujillo. I think Yepez confused the Santo Domingo he was living in with another Santo Domingo. That night the poor schoolteacher, along with his wife, his daughter, and the entire student body were rousted from their beds by military police, brought in closed trucks to the Fortress Ozama, and interrogated. The pupils were eventually released, but no one ever heard of poor Yepez or his wife or his daughter again.
Beli’s essay was far less controversial. I will be married to a handsome wealthy man. I will also be a doctor with my own hospital that I will name after Trujillo.
At home she continued to brag to Dorea about her boyfriend, and when Jack Pujols’s photo appeared in the school newspaper she brought it home in triumph. Dorea was so overwhelmed she spent the night in her house, inconsolable, crying and crying. Beli could hear her loud and clear.
And then, in the first days of October, as the pueblo was getting ready to celebrate another Trujillo Birthday, Beli heard a whisper that Jack Pujols had broken up with his girlfriend. (Beli had always known about this girlfriend, who attended another school, but do you think she cared?) She was sure it was just a rumor, didn’t need any more hope to torture her. But it turned out to be more than rumor, and more than hope, because not two days later Jack Pujols stopped Beli in the hallway as though he were seeing her for the very first time. Cabral, he whispered, you’re beautiful. The sharp spice of his cologne like an intoxication. I know I am, she said, her face ablaze with heat. Well, he said, burying a mitt in his perfectly straight hair.
The next thing you know he was giving her rides in his brand-new Mercedes and buying her helados with the knot of dollars he carried in his pocket. Legally he was too young to drive, but do you think anybody in Santo Domingo stopped a colonel’s son for anything? Especially the son of a colonel who was said to be one of Ramfis Trujillo’s confidants? ↓
≡ By Ramfis Trujillo I mean of course Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Martinez, El Jefe’s first son, born while his mother was still married to another man, un cubano. It was only after the cubano refused to accept the boy as blood that Trujillo recognized Ramfis as his own. (Thanks, Dad!) He was the ‘famous’ son that El Jefe made a colonel at the age of four and a brigadier general at the age of nine. (Lil’ Fuckface, as he is affectionately known.) As an adult Ramfis was famed for being a polo player, a fucker of North American actresses (Kim Novak, how could you?), a squabbler with his father, and a frozen-hearted demon with a Humanity Rating of 0, who personally directed the indiscriminate torture-murders of 1959 (the year of the Cuban Invasion) and 1961 (after his father was assassinated, Ramfis personally saw to the horror torture of the conspirators). (In a secret report filed by the US consul, currently available at the JFK Presidential Library, Ramfis is described as ‘imbalanced,’ a young man who during his childhood amused himself by blowing the heads off chickens with a.44 revolver.) Ramfis fled the country