Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [41]
Which for a man any less righteous would have been an open invitation but Juan simply sighed: No obligated be without shame. We try you up. Probationary period. Can’t promises build. Political conditions give promises no hospitality.
What’s my salary?
Salary! No salary! You a waitress, you tips.
How much are they?
Once again the glumness. It is without certainy.
I don’t understand.
His brother José’s bloodshot eyes glanced up from the sports section. What my brother is saying is that it all depends.
And here’s La Inca shaking her head: A waitress. But, hija, you’re a baker’s daughter, you don’t know the first thing about waitressing!
La Inca assumed that because Beli had of late not shown any enthusiasm for the bakery or school or for cleaning she’d devolved into a zángana. But she’d forgotten that our girl had been a criada in her first life; for half her years she’d know nothing but work. La Inca predicted that Beli would call it quits within a couple of months, but Beli never did. On the job our girl, in fact, showed her quality: she was never late, never malingered, worked her sizable ass of. Heck, she liked the job. It was not exactly President of the Republic, but for a fourteen-year-old who wanted out of the house, it paid, and kept her in the world while she waited for — for her Glorious Future to materialize.
Eighteen months she worked at the Palacio Peking. (Originally called EI Tesoro de —, in honor of the Admiral’s true but never-reached destination, but the Brothers Then had changed it when they learned that the Admiral’s name was a fukú! Chinese no like curses, Juan had said.) She would always say she came of age in the restaurant, and in some ways she did. She learned to beat men at dominoes and proved herself so responsible that the Brothers Then could leave her in charge of the cook and the other waitstaff while they slipped out to fish and visit their thick-legged girlfriends. In later years Beli would lament that she had ever lost touch with her ‘chinos’. They were so good to me, she moaned to Oscar and Lola. Nothing like your worthless esponja of a father. Juan, the melancholic gambler, who waxed about Shanghai as though it were a love poem sung by a beautiful woman you love but cannot have. Juan, the shortsighted romantic whose girlfriends robbed him blind and who never mastered Spanish (though in later years when he was living in Skokie, Illinois, he would yell at his Americanized grandchildren in his guttural Spanish, and they laughed at him, thinking it Chinese). Juan, who taught Beli how to play dominoes, and whose only fundamentalism was his bulletproof optimism: If only Admiral come to our restaurant first, imagine the trouble that could be avoided! Sweating, gentle Juan, who would have lost the restaurant if not for his older brother José, the enigmatic, who hovered at the periphery with all the menace of a ciclón; José, the bravo, the guapo, his wife and children dead by warlord in the thirties; José, who protected the restaurant and the rooms above with an implacable ferocity. José, whose grief had extracted from his body all softness, idle chatter, and hope. He never seemed to approve of Beli, or any of the other employees, but since she alone wasn’t scared of him (I’m almost as tall as you are!), he reciprocated by giving her practical instructions: You want to be a useless woman all your life? Like how to hammer nails, fix electrical outlets, cook chow fun and drive a car, all would come in good use when she became the Empress of Diaspora. (José would acquit himself bravely in the revolution, fighting, I must regretfully report, against the pueblo, and would die in 1976 in Adanta, cancer of the pancreas, crying out his wife’s name, which the nurses confused for more Chinese gobbledygook — extra emphasis, in their minds, on the gook.)
And then there was Lillian, the other waitress, a squat rice tub, whose rancor against the world turned to glee only when humanity exceeded in its venality, brutality, and mendacity even