Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [40]
The Good Teachers of El Redentor never squeezed anything close to a mea culpa from the girl. She kept shaking her head, as stubborn as the Laws of the Universe themselves — No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No NoNo No No No No No No No No No No No No No. Not that it mattered in the end. Belicia’s tenure at the school was over, and so were La Incas dreams of re-creating, in Beli, her father’s genius, his magis (his excellence in all things).
In any other family such a thing would have meant the beating of Beli to within an inch of her life, beating her straight into the hospital with no delay, and then once she was better beating her again and putting her back into the hospital, but La Inca was not that kind of parent. La Inca, you see, was a serious woman, an upstanding woman, one of the best of her class, but she was incapable of punishing the girl physically. Call it a hitch in the universe, call it mental illness, but La Inca just couldn’t do it. Not then, not ever. All she could do was wave her arms in the air and hurl laments. How could this have happened? La Inca demanded. How? How?
He was going to marry me! Beli cried. We were going to have children! Are you insane? La Inca roared. Hija, have you lost your mind?
Took a while for shit to calm down — the neighbors loving the whole thing (I told you that blackie was good for nothing!) — but eventually things did, and only then did La Inca convoke a special session on our girl’s future. First La Inca gave Beli tongue-lashing number five hundred million and five, excoriating her poor judgment, her poor morals, her poor every thing, and only when those preliminaries were good and settled did La Inca lay down the law: You are returning to school. Not to El Redentor but somewhere nearly as good. Padre Billini.
And Beli, her eyes still swollen from Jack-loss, laughed. I’m not going back to school. Not ever.
Had she forgotten the suffering that she had endured in her Lost Years in the pursuit of education? The costs? The terrible scars on her back? (The Burning.) Perhaps she had, perhaps the prerogatives of this New Age had rendered the vows of the Old irrelevant. However, during those tumultuous post-expulsion weeks, while she’d been writhing in her bed over the loss of her ‘husband,’ our girl had been rocked by instances of stupendous turbidity. A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli’s first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve. Never again would she follow any lead other than her own. Not the rector’s, not the nuns’, not La Inca’s, not her poor dead parents’. Only me, she whispered. Me.
This oath did much to rally her. Not long after the back-to-school showdown, Beli put on one of La Inca’s dresses (was literally bursting in it) and caught a ride down to the parque central. This was not a huge trip. But, still, for a girl like Beli it was a precursor of things to come.
When she returned to the house in the late afternoon she announced: I have a job! La Inca snorted. I guess the cabarets are always hiring.
It was not a cabaret. Beli might have been a puta major in the cosmology of her neighbors but a cuero she was not. No: she had landed a job as a waitress at a restaurant on the parque. The owner, a stout well-dressed Chinese by the name of Juan Then, had not exactly needed anyone; in fact he didn’t know if he needed himself: Business terrible, he lamented. Too much politics. Politics bad for everything but politicians.
No excess money. And already many impossible employees. But Beli was not willing to be rejected. There’s a lot I can