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By Root 2055 0

woman in the world, to have the brothers jumping out of windows in her wake, when Belicia Cabral fell in love she stayed in love. Despite the trove of men, handsome, plain, and ugly, who marched into the restaurant intent on winning her hand in marriage (or at least in fuckage), she never had a thought for anyone but Jack Pujols. Turns out that in her heart our girl was more Penelope than Whore of Babylon. (Of course La Inca, who witnessed the parade of men muddying her doorstep, would not have agreed.) Beli often had dreams where Jack returned from military school, dreams where he’d be waiting for her at the job, spilled out at one of the tables like a beautiful bag of swag, a grin on his magnificent face, his Eyes of Adantis on her at last, only on her. I came back for you, mi amor. I came back.

Our girl learned that even to a chooch like Jack Pujols she was true.

But that didn’t mean she reclused herself entirely from the world of men. (For all her ‘fidelity’ she would never be a sister who liked being without male attention.) Even in this rough period, Beli had her princes-in-waiting, brothers willing to brave the barbed-wired minefields of her affections in the hopes that beyond that cruel midden Elysium might await. The poor deluded chumps. The Gangster would have her every which way, but these poor sapos who came before the Gangster, they were lucky to get an abrazo. Let us summon back from the abyss two sapos in particular: the Fiat dealer, bald, white, and smiling, a regular Hipólito Mejia, but suave and cavalier and so enamored of North American baseball that he risked life and limb to listen to games on a contraband shortwave radio. He believed in baseball with the fervor of an adolescent and believed also that in the future Dominicans would storm the Major Leagues and compete with the Mandes and the Marises of the world. Marichal is only the beginning, he predicted, of a reconquista. You’re crazy, Beli said, mocking him and his ‘jueguito’. In an inspired stroke of counterprogramming, her other paramour was a student at the UASD — one of those City College types who’s been in school eleven years and is always five credits shy of a degree. Student today don’t mean na’, but in a Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the Fall of Arbenz, by the Stoning of Nixon, by the Guerrillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs — in a Latin America already a year and half into the Decade of the Guerrilla — a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. Such a student was Arquimedes. He also listened to the shortwave, but not for Dodgers scores; what he risked his life for was the news leaking out of Havana, news of the future. Arquimedes was, therefore, a student, the son of a zapatero and a midwife, a tirapiedra and a quemagoma for life. Being a student wasn’t a joke, not with Trujillo and Johnny Abbes↓ scooping up everybody following the foiled Cuban Invasion of 1959.

≡ Johnny Abbes Garcia was one of Trujillo’s beloved Morgul Lords. Chief of the dreaded and all-powerful secret police (SIM), Abbes was considered the greatest torturer of the Dominican People ever to have lived. An enthusiast of Chinese torture techniques, Abbes was rumored to have in his employ a dwarf who would crush prisoners’ testicles between his teeth. Plotted endlessly against Trujillo’s enemies, the killer of many young revolutionaries and students (including the Maribal Sisters). At Trujillo’s behest Abbes organized the plot to assassinate the democratically elected president of Venezuela: Rómulo Betancourt! (Betancourt and T-zillo were old enemies, beefing since the forties, when Trujillo’s SIMians tried to inject Betancourt with poison on the streets of Havana.) The second attempt worked no better than the first. The bomb, packed into a green Olds, blew the presidential Cadillac clean out of Caracas, slew the driver and a bystander but failed to kill Betancourt! Now that’s really gangster! (Venezolanos: Don’t ever say we don’t have