Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [61]
No, she whispered.
La Inca gazed down at her. I wouldn’t call him either.
That night Beli drifted on a vast ocean of loneliness, buffeted by squalls of despair, and during one of her intermittent sleeps she dreamt that she had truly and permanently died and she and her child shared a coffin and when she finally awoke for good, night had broken and out in the street a grade of grief unlike any she’d encountered before was being uncoiled, a cacophony of wails that seemed to have torn free from the cracked soul of humanity itself Like a funeral song for the entire planet.
Mama, she gasped, mama.
Mama!
Tranquilisate, muchacha.
Mama, is that for me? Am I dying? Dime, mama.
Ay, hija, no seas ridícula. La Inca put her hands, awkward hyphens, around the girl. Lowered her mouth to her ear: It’s Trujillo. Gunned down, she whispered, the night Beli had been kidnapped. No one knows anything yet. Except that he’s dead.↓
≡ They say he was on his way for some ass that night. Who is surprised? A consummate culocrat to the end. Perhaps on that last night, El Jefe, sprawled in the back of his Bel Air, thought only of the routine pussy that was awaiting him at Estancia Fundación. Perhaps he thought of nothing. Who can know? In any event: there is a black Chevrolet fast approaching, like Death itself, packed to the rim with U.S.-backed assassins of the higher classes, and now both cars are nearing the city limits, where the streetlights end (for modernity indeed has its limits in Santo Domingo), and in the dark distance looms the cattle fairgrounds where seventeen months before some other youth had intended to assassinate him. El Jefe asks his driver, Zacharias, to turn on the radio, but — how appropriate — there is a poetry reading on and off it goes again. Maybe the poetry reminds him of Galíndez.
Maybe not.
The black Chevy flashes its lights innocuously, asking to pass, and Zacharias, thinking it’s the Secret Police, obliges by slowing down, and when the cars come abreast, the escopeta wielded by Antonio de la Maza (whose brother — surprise, surprise — was killed in the Galíndez cover-up — which goes to show that you should always be careful when killing nerds, never know who will come after you) goes boo-ya! And now (so goes the legend) El Jefe cries, Coño, me hirieron! The second shotgun blast hits Zacharias in the shoulder and he almost stops the car, in pain and shock and surprise. Here now the famous exchange: Get the guns, El Jefe says. Vamos a pelear. And Zacharias says: No, Jefe, son mucho, and El Jefe repeats himself: Vamos a pelear. He could have ordered Zacharias to turn the car back to the safety of his capital, but instead he goes out like Tony Montana. Staggers out of the bullet-ridden Bel Air, holding a.38 in his hand. The rest is, of course, history, and if this were a movie you’d have to film it in John Woo slow motion. Shot at twenty-seven times — what a Dominican number — and suffering from four hundred hit points of damage, a mortally wounded Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina is said to have taken two steps toward his birthplace, San Cristobal, for, as we know, all children, whether good or bad, eventually find their way home, but thinking better of it he turned back toward La Capital, to his beloved city, and fell for the last time. Zacharias, who’d had his mid-parietal region creased by a round from a.357, got blown into the grass by the side of the road; miracle of miracles, he would survive to tell the tale of the ajustamiento. De la Maza, perhaps thinking of his poor, dead, set-up brother, then took Trujillo’s.38 out of his dead hand and shot Trujillo in the face and uttered his now famous words: Éste guaraguao ya no comerá mas pollito. And then the assassins stashed El Jefe’s body — where? In the trunk, of course.
And thus passed old Fuckface. And thus passed the Era of Trujillo (sort of).
I’ve been to the neck of road where he was gunned down many many