Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [39]
AMOR!
It wasn’t quite the romance she would later make it out to be. A couple of talks, a walk on the beach while the rest of the class was having a picnic, and before she knew it she was sneaking into a closet with him after school and he was slipping it to her something terrible. Let’s just say that she finally understood why the other boys had given him the nickname Jack the Ripio; he had what even she knew to be an enormous penis, a Shiva-sized lingam, a destroyer of worlds. (And the whole time she’d thought they’d been calling him Jack the Ripper. Duh!) Later, after she’d been with the Gangster, she would realize how little respect Pujols had for her. But since she had nothing to compare it to at the time she assumed fucking was supposed to feel like she was being run through with a cudass. The first time she was scared shitless and it hurt bad (4d10), but nothing could obliterate the feeling she had that finally she was on her way, the sense of a journey starting, of a first step taken, of the beginning of something big.
Afterward she tried to embrace him, to touch his silken hair, but he shook off her caresses. Hurry up and get dressed. If we get caught my ass will be in the fire.
Which was funny because that’s exactly how her ass felt.
For about a month they scromfed in various isolated corners of the school until the day a teacher, acting on an anonymous tip from a member of the student body, surprised the undercover couple in flagrante delicto in a broom closet. Just imagine: Beli butt naked, her vast scar like nothing anybody had seen before, and Jack with his pants puddled around his ankle.
The scandal! Remember the time and the place: Baní in the late fifties. Factor in that Jack Pujols was the number-one son of the Blessed B — í clan, one of Baní’s most venerable (and filthy rich) families. Factor in that he’d been caught not with one of his own class (though that might have also been a problem) but with the scholarship girl, una prieta to boot. (The fucking of poor prietas was considered standard operating procedure for elites just as long as it was kept on the do-lo, what is elsewhere called the Strom Thurmond Maneuver.) Pujols of course blamed Beli for everything. Sat in the office of the rector and explained in great detail how she had seduced him. It wasn’t me, he insisted. It was her! The real scandal, however, was that Pujols was actually engaged to that girlfriend of his, the half-in-the-grave Rebecca Brito, herself a member of Baní’s other powerful family, the R —, and you better believe Jack getting caught in a closet with una prieta kebabbed any future promise of matrimony. (Her family very particular about their Christian reputation.) Pujols’s old man was so infuriated/humiliated that he started beating the boy as soon as he laid hands on him and within the week had shipped him off to a military school in Puerto Rico where he would, in the colonel’s words, learn the meaning of duty. Beli never saw him again except once in the Listin Diario and by then they were both in their forties.
Pujols might have been a bitch-ass rat, but Beli’s reaction was one for the history books. Not only was our girl not embarrassed by what had happened, even after being shaken down by the rector and the nun and the janitor, a holy triple-team, she absolutely refused to profess her guilt! If she had rotated her head around 360 degrees and vomited green-pea soup it would have caused only slightly less of an uproar. In typical hard-headed Beli fashion, our girl insisted that she’d done nothing wrong, that, in fact, she was well within her rights.
I’m allowed to do anything I want, Beli said stubbornly, with my husband.
Pujols, it seems, had promised Belicia that they would be married as soon as they’d both finished high school, and