Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [47]
Where?
To El Hollywood.
But we have to change—
Don’t worry, I brought everything.
And before you know it she was standing over his table.
One of his dinner companions said: Hey, Dionisio, isn’t that the girl que te dío una pela last week? The bailer nodded glumly. His buddy looked her up and down. I hope for your sake she’s not back for a rematch. I don’t think you’ll survive.
What are you waiting for, the bailer asked. The bell?
Dance with me. Now it was her turn to grab him and drag him onto the pista.
He might have been a dense slab of tuxedo and thew, but he moved like an enchantment. You came looking for me, didn’t you?
Yes, she said, and only then did she know.
I’m glad you didn’t lie. I don’t like liars. He put his finger under her chin. What’s your name? She tore her head away. My name is Hypatia Belicia Cabral. No, he said with the gravity of an old-school pimp. Your name is Beautiful.
THE GANGSTER WE’RE ALL LOOKING FOR
How much Beli knew about the Gangster we will never know. She claims that he only told her he was a businessman. Of course I believed him. How was I supposed to know different?
Well, he certainly was a businessman, but he was also a flunky for the Trujillato, and not a minor one. Don’t misunderstand: our boy wasn’t no ring wraith, but he wasn’t no orc either.
Due partially to Beli’s silence on the matter and other folks’ lingering unease when it comes to talking about the regime, info on the Gangster is fragmented; I’ll give you what I’ve managed to unearth and the rest will have to wait for the day the páginas en blanco finally speak.
The Gangster was born in Samaná at the dawn of the twenties, the fourth son of a milkman, a bawling, worm-infested brat no one thought would amount to na’, an opinion his parents endorsed by turning him out of the house when he was seven. But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person’s character. By the time the Gangster was twelve this scrawny, unremarkable boy had shown a resourcefulness and fearlessness beyond his years. His claims that the Failed Cattle Thief had ‘inspired’ him brought him to the attention of the Secret Police, and before you could say SIM-salabim our boy was infiltrating unions and fingering sindicatos left and right. At age fourteen he killed his first ‘comunista,’ a favor for the appalling Felix Bernardino↓ and apparently the hit was so spectacular, so fucking chunky, that half the left in Baní immediately abandoned the DR for the relative safety of Nueva York. With the money he earned he bought himself a new suit and four pairs of shoes.
≡ Felix Wenceslao Bernardino, raised in La Romana, one of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar. Was consul in Cuba when the exiled Dominican labor organizer Mauricio Báez was mysteriously murdered on the streets of Havana. Felix was also rumored to have had a hand in the failed assassination of Dominican exile leader Angel Morales (the assassins burst in on his secretary shaving, mistook the lathered man for Morales, and shot him to pieces). In addition, Felix and his sister, Minerva Bernardino (first woman in the world to be an ambassador before the United Nations), were both in New York City when Jesús de Galíndez mysteriously disappeared on his way home at the Columbus Circle subway station. Talk about Have Gun, Will Travel. It was said the power of Trujillo never left him; the fucker died of old age in Santo Domingo, Trujillista to the end, drowning his Haitian workers instead of paying them.
From that point on, the sky was the limit for our young villain. Over the next decade he traveled back and forth to Cuba, dabbled in forgery, theft, extortion, and money laundering — all for the Everlasting Glory of the Trujillato. It was even rumored, never substantiated, that our Gangster was the hammer-man who slew Mauricio