Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [65]
Don’t talk that way.
I never want to see it again.
She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
Don’t leave like this. Toma, for the trip. Dulce de coco.
On the line to passport control she would throw it away but for now she held the jar.
Remember me. La Inca kissed and embraced her. Remember who you are. You are the third and final daughter of the Family Cabral. You are the daughter of a doctor and a nurse.
Last sight of La Inca: waving at her with all her might, crying.
More questions at passport control, and with a last contemptuous flurry of stamps, she was let through. And then the boarding and the preflight chitchat from the natty dude on her right, four rings on his hand — Where are you going? Never-never land, she snapped — and finally the plane, throbbing with engine song, tears itself from the surface of the earth and Beli, not known for her piety, closed her eyes and begged the Lord to protect her.
Poor Beli. Almost until the last she half believed that the Gangster was going to appear and save her. I’m sorry, mi negrita, I’m so sorry, I should never have let you go. (She was still big on dreams of rescue.) She had looked for him everywhere: on the ride to the airport, in the faces of the officials checking passports, even when the plane was boarding, and, finally, for an irrational moment, she thought he would emerge from the cockpit, in a clean-pressed captain’s uniform — I tricked you, didn’t I? But the Gangster never appeared again in the flesh, only in her dreams. On the plane there were other First Wavers. Many waters waiting to become a river. Here she is, closer now to the mother we will need her to be if we want Oscar and Lola to be born.
She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s last light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorías, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.
She awakened just as in her dreams some ciegos were boarding a bus, begging for money, a dream from her Lost Days. The guapo in the seat next to her tapped her elbow.
Senorita, this is not something you’ll want to miss. I’ve already seen it, she snapped. And then, calming herself, she peered out the window. It was night and the lights of Nueva York were everywhere.
FOUR
Sentimental Education
1988-1992
It started with me. The year before Oscar fell, I suffered some nuttiness of my own; I got jumped as I was walking home from the Roxy. By this mess of New Brunswick townies. A bunch of fucking morenos. Two a.m., and I was on Joyce Kilmer for no good reason. Alone and on foot. Why? Because I was hard, thought I’d have no problem walking through the thicket of young guns I saw on the corner. Big mistake. Remember the smile on this one dude’s face the rest of my fucking life. Only second to his high school ring, which plowed a nice furrow into my cheek (still got the scar). Wish I could say I went down swinging but these cats just laid me out. If it hadn’t been for some Samaritan driving by the motherfuckers probably would have killed me. The old guy wanted to take me to Robert Wood Johnson, but I didn’t have no medical, and besides, ever since my brother had died of leukemia I hadn’t been hot on doctors, so of course I was like: No no no. For having just gotten my ass kicked I actually felt pretty good. Until