Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz [93]
Poor Socorro. Here was a woman whose lifelong preoccupation had been calamity. Her mother was a mute; her drunk father frittered away the family’s middle-class patrimony, one tarea at a time, until their holdings had been reduced to a shack and some chickens and the old man was forced to work other people’s land, condemned to a life of constant movement, poor health, and broken hands; it was said that Pa Socorro had never recovered from seeing his own father beaten to death by a neighbor who also happened to be a sergeant in the police. Socorro’s childhood had been about missed meals and cousin-clothes, about seeing her father three, four times a year, visits where he didn’t talk to anybody; just lay in his room drunk.
Socorro became an ‘anxious’ muchacha; for a time she thinned her hair by pulling it, was seventeen when she caught Abelard’s eye in a training hospital but didn’t start menstruating until a year after they were married. Even as an adult, Socorro was in the habit of waking up in the middle of the night in terror, convinced that the house was on fire, would rush from room to room, expecting to be greeted by a carnival of flame. When Abelard read to her from his newspapers she took special interest in earthquakes and fires and floods and cattle stampedes and the sinking of ships. She was the family’s first catastrophist, would have made Cuvier proud.
What had she been expecting, while she fiddled with the buttons on her dress, while she shifted the purse on her shoulder and tried not to unbalance her Macy’s hat? A mess, un toyo certainly, but not a husband looking nearly destroyed, who shuffled like an old man, whose eyes shone with the sort of fear that is not easily shed. It was worse than she, in all her apocalyptic fervor, had imagined. It was the Fall.
When she placed her hands on Abelard he began to cry very loudly, very shamefully. Tears streamed down his face as he tried to tell her all that had happened to him.
It wasn’t long after that visit that Socorro realized that she was pregnant. With Abelard’s Third and Final Daughter.
Zafa or fukú?
You tell me.
There would always be speculation. At the most basic level, did he say it, did he not? (Which is another way of asking: Did he have a hand in his own destruction?) Even the family was divided. La Inca adamant that her cousin had said nothing; it had all been a setup, orchestrated by Abelard’s enemies to strip the family of their wealth, their properties, and their businesses. Others were not so sure. He probably had said something that night at the club, and unfortunately for him he’d been overheard by the Jefe’s agents. No elaborate plot, just drunken stupidity. As for the carnage that followed: que se yo — just a lot of bad luck.
Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard’s daughter, but when he couldn’t snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family’s ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened.
So which was it? you ask. An accident, a conspiracy, or a fukú? The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you’ll have to decide for yourself. What’s certain is that nothing’s certain. We are trawling in silences here. Trujillo and Company didn’t leave a paper trail — they didn’t share their German contemporaries’ lust for documentation. And it’s not like the fukú itself would leave a memoir or anything. The remaining Cabrals ain’t much help, either; on all matters related to Abelard’s imprisonment and to the subsequent destruction of the clan there is within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations, that sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction. A whisper here and there but nothing more.
Which is to say if you’re looking for a full story, I don’t have it. Oscar searched for it too, in his last days, and it