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Nelson Pardo who was so stupid he thought the moon was a stain that God had forgotten to clean. (He’ll get to it soon, he assured his whole class.)
Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.
(Later when he thought about it he realized that these very cousins could probably have gotten him laid if only he’d bothered to hang out with them. But you can’t regret the life you didn’t lead.)
You know, she said finally, we colored folks talk plenty of shit about loving our children but we really don’t. She exhaled. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t.
It’s never the changes we want that change everything.
All my life I’d been swearing that one day I would just disappear. And one day I did.
That’s white people for you. They lose a cat and it’s an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon.
She was on the ground, bald as a baby, crying, probably a month away from dying, and here I was, her one and only daughter. And there was nothing I could do about it.
he was proof positive that God—the Great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy!—does not love his children equally.
as stubborn as the Laws of the Universe themselves—No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No. Not that it mattered in the end.
Business terrible, he lamented. Too much politics. Politics bad for everything but politicians.
But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person’s character.
Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.
We postmodern plátanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion.
Take it from me. You laugh because you’ve been ransacked to the limit of your soul, because your lover betrayed you almost unto death, because your first son was neverborn. You laugh because you have no front teeth and you’ve sworn never to smile again.
The real irony was that you never met a kid who wanted a girl so fucking bad. I mean, shit, I thought I was into females, but no one, and I mean no one, was into them the way Oscar was. To him they were the beginning and end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel. Homes had it bad; couldn’t so much as see a cute girl without breaking into shakes. Developed crushes out of nothing—must have had at least two dozen high-level ones that first semester alone.
O, it’s against the laws of nature for a dominicano to die without fucking at least once.
And that was that was that was that. The end of our big experiment.
These days I have to ask myself: What made me angrier? That Oscar, the fat loser, quit, or that Oscar, the fat loser, defied me? And I wonder: What hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be?
Regretting all the books he would never write.
Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.
That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.
One thing you can count on in Santo Domingo. Not the lights, not the law. Sex.
Coño, pero tú sí eres fea.
You always think with your parents that at least at the very end something will change, something will get better. Not for us.
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
(Who says that we Third World people are inefficient?)
This is your chance. If blue pill, continue. If red pill, return to the Matrix.
When you’re sixteen a body like this is free; when you’re forty—pffft!—it’s a full-time occupation.
But if I’ve learned anything in my travels it’s that a person can get used to anything.
Veidt says: “I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.” And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: “In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”
