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By Root 2115 0

the week she’d be mamando his ripio like an old pro and there would be nothing you could do about it! Part of the price of living in Santo Domingo, one of the Island’s best-known secrets. So common was the practice, so insatiable Trujillo’s appetites, that there were plenty of men in the nation, hombres de calidad y posición, who, believe it or not, offered up their daughters freely to the Failed Cattle Thief. Abelard, to his credit, was not one of them; as soon as he realized what was what — after his daughter started stopping traffic on Calle El Sol, after one of his patients looked at his daughter and said, You should be careful with that one — he pulled a Rapunzel on her ass and locked her in. It was a Brave Thing, not in keeping with his character, but he’d only had to watch Jacquelyn preparing for school one day, big in body but still a child, goddamn it, still a child, and the Brave Thing became easy.

Hiding your doe-eyed, large-breasted daughter from Trujillo, however, was anything but easy. (Like keeping the Ring from Sauron.) If you think the average Dominican guy’s bad, Trujillo was five thousand times worse. Dude had hundreds of spies whose entire job was to scour the provinces for his next piece of ass; if the procurement of ass had been any more central to the Trujillato the regime would have been the world’s first culocracy (and maybe, in fact, it was). In this climate, hoarding your women was tantamount to treason; offenders who didn’t cough up the muchachas could easily find themselves enjoying the invigorating charm of an eight-shark bath. Let us be clear: Abelard was taking an enormous risk. It didn’t matter that he was upper-class, or that he’d prepared the groundwork well, going as far as having a friend diagnose his wife as manic, then letting the word leak through the elite circles in which he ran. If Trujillo and Company caught wind of his duplicity they’d have him in chains (and Jacquelyn on her back) in two seconds flat. Which was why every time El Jefe shuffled down the welcome line, shaking hands, Abelard expected him to exclaim in that high shrill voice of his, Dr. Abelard Cabral, where is that delicious daughter of yours? I’ve heard so much about her from your neighbors. It was enough to make Abelard febrile.

His daughter Jacquelyn of course had absolutely no idea what was at stake. Those were more innocent times, and she was an innocent girl; getting raped by her Illustrious President was the furthest thing from her excellent mind. She of his two daughters had inherited her father’s brains. Was studying French religiously because she’d decided to imitate her father and go abroad to study medicine at the Faculté de Médecine de Paris. To France! To become the next Madame Curie! Hit the books night and day, and would practice her French with both her father and with their servant Esteban El Gallo, who’d been born in Haiti and still spoke a pretty good frog.↓

≡ After Trujillo launched the 1937 genocide of Haitian and Haitian-Dominicans, you didn’t see that many Haitian types working in the DR. Not until at least the late fifties. Esteban was the exception because (a) he looked so damn Dominican, and (b) during the genocide, Socorro had hidden him inside her daughter Astrid’s dollhouse. Spent four days in there, cramped up like a brown-skinned Alice.

Neither of his daughters had any idea, were as carefree as Hobbits, never guessing the Shadow that loomed on the horizon. On his days off, when he wasn’t at the clinic or in his study, writing, Abelard would stand at his rear window and watch his daughters at their silly children’s game until his aching heart could stand it no more.

Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa.

To the latecomers are left the bones.

He spoke of these matters to only three people. The first, of course, was his wife, Socorro. Socorro (it must be said here) was a Talent in her own right. A famous beauty from the East (Higüey) and the source of all her daughters’ pulchritude, Socorro had looked in her