Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [85]
I have seen you here often, Doctor, but lately without your wife. Have you divorced her? I am still married, Your Enormity. To Socorro Hernandez Batista.
That is good to hear, El Jefe said, I was afraid that you might have turned into un maricón. Then he turned to the lambesacos and laughed. Oh, Jefe, they screamed, you are too much.
It was at this point that another nigger might have, in a fit of cojones, said something to defend his honor, but Abelard was not that nigger. He said nothing.
But of course, El Jefe continued, knuckling a tear from his eye, you are no maricón, for I’ve heard that you have daughters, Dr. Cabral, una que es muy bella y elegante, no?
Abelard had rehearsed a dozen answers to this question, but his response was pure reflex, came out of nowhere: Yes, Jefe, you are correct, I have two daughters. But to tell you the truth, they’re only beautiful if you have a taste for women with mustaches.
For an instant El Jefe had said nothing, and in that twisting silence Abelard could see his daughter being violated in front of him while he was lowered with excruciating slowness into Trujillo’s infamous pool of sharks. But then, miracle of miracles, El Jefe had crinkled his porcine face and laughed, Abelard had laughed too, and El Jefe moved on. When Abelard returned home to La Vega late that evening he woke his wife from a deep slumber so that they could both pray and thank the Heavens for their family’s salvation. Verbally, Abelard had never been quick on the draw. The inspiration could only have come from the hidden spaces within my soul, he told his wife. From a Numinous Being.
You mean God? his wife pressed.
I mean someone, Abelard said darkly.
AND SO?
For the next three months Abelard waited for the End. Waited for his name to start appearing in the ‘Foro Popular’ section of the paper, thinly veiled criticisms aimed at a certain bone doctor from La Vega — which was often how the regime began the destruction of a respected citizen such as him — with disses about the way your socks and your shirts didn’t match; waited for a letter to arrive, demanding a private meeting with the Jefe, waited for his daughter to turn up missing on her trip back to school. Lost nearly twenty pounds during his awful vigil. Began to drink copiously. Nearly killed a patient with a slip of the hand. If his wife hadn’t spotted the damage before they stitched, who knows what might have happened? Screamed at his daughters and wife almost every day. Could not get it up much for his mistress. But the rain season turned to hot season and the clinic filled with the hapless, the wounded, the afflicted, and when after four months nothing happened Abelard almost let out a sigh of relief.
Maybe, he wrote on the back of his hairy hand. Maybe.
SANTO DOMINGO CONFIDENTIAL
In some ways living in Santo Domingo during the Trujillato was a lot like being in that famous Twilight Zone episode that Oscar loved so much, the one where the monstrous white kid with the godlike powers rules over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of the world, a town called Peaksville. The white kid is vicious and random and all the people in the ‘community’ live in straight terror of him, denouncing and betraying each other at the drop of a hat in order not to be the person he maims or, more ominously, sends to the corn. (After each atrocity he commits whether it’s giving a gopher three heads or Baníshing a no longer interesting playmate to the corn or raining snow down on the last crops — the horrified people of Peaksville have to say, It was a good thing you did, Anthony. A good thing.)
Between 1930 (when the Failed Cattle Thief seized power) and 1961 (the year he got blazed) Santo Domingo was the Caribbean