The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

by Junot Díaz

there was something in the seamlessness with which she switched between these aspects that convinced him that both were masks, that there existed a third Ana, a hidden Ana who determined what mask to throw up for what occasion but who was otherwise obscure and impossible to know.

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.

Later she’d want to put that on his gravestone but no one would let her, not even me.

authorship

unlike every other girl in his secret cosmology,

When that thing happened to me when I was eight and I finally told her what he had done, she told me to shut my mouth and stop crying, and I did exactly that, I shut my mouth and clenched my legs, and my mind, and within a year I couldn’t have told you what that neighbor looked like, or even his name.

burst out. I couldn’t help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change.

vs. oscar

looked at the girl in the mirror for a long time. All I knew was that I didn’t want to see her ever again. I

Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow.

apocalypse

He stayed in his room, though sometimes he would lamely try to ask me what was going on. Nothing. You can tell me, Lola, he said, and I could only laugh. You need to lose weight, I told him.

misdirection - oscar focused inward on himself, oblivious to the pain around him, convinced his poor luck is the result of a curse, etc. - his sister fully aware of the reality of what’s going on, unable to look away, and protective of oscar — but, tragically, oscar internalizes this misdirection — it makes him spiral further inward

He was like all boys: beautiful and callow, and like an insect he couldn’t sit still.

and since I wasn’t helping, nothing around the house was getting done.

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.

a particularly Jersey malaise—the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.

For reasons she only dimly understood, by the time of our narrative, Beli could no longer abide working at the bakery or being the “daughter” of one of the “most upstanding women in Baní.” She could not abide, period. Everything about her present life irked her; she wanted, with all her heart, something else. When this dissatisfaction entered her heart she could not recall, would later tell her daughter that it had been with her all her life, but who knows if this is true? What exactly it was she wanted was never clear either: her own incredible life, yes, a handsome, wealthy husband, yes, beautiful children, yes, a woman’s body, without question. If I had to put it to words I’d say what she wanted, more than anything, was what she’d always wanted throughout her Lost Childhood: to escape.

she was suffering the same suffocation that was asphyxiating a whole generation of young Dominicans. Twenty-odd years of the Trujillato had guaranteed that. Hers was the generation that would launch the Revolution, but which for the moment was turning blue for want of air. The generation reaching consciousness in a society that lacked any. The generation that despite the consensus that declared change impossible hankered for change all the same.

the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli’s first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve. Never again would she follow any lead other than her own. Not the rector’s, not the nuns’, not La Inca’s, not her poor dead parents’. Only me, she whispered. Me.

But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person’s character.

country had fallen to a rabble of scurvied students.

Rw perspective also a generational resentment

or CIA chief Allen Dulles (That effeminate!),

Masc and politics

The future appeared cloudy and there was no doubt he sensed his own mortality and that of Trujillo in the fall of Cuba. Which might explain why, when he met Beli, he jumped on her stat. I mean, what straight middle-aged brother has not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy.

Masc

But if you looked at it from, say, a more generous angle you could argue that the Gangster adored our girl and that adoration was one of the greatest gifts anybody had ever given her. It felt unbelievably good to Beli, shook her to her core. (For the first time I actually felt like I owned my skin, like it was me and I was it.) He made her feel guapa and wanted and safe, and no one had ever done that for her. No one.

love

he would pass his hand over her naked body, Narcissus stroking that pool of his,

love vs. narcissism ?

was he who taught her all about her body, her orgasms, her rhythms, who said, You have to be bold, and for that he must be honored, no matter what happened in the end.

Beli didn’t want to hear it. After all, she was in love! In love! She wafted through her day like a woman with a concussion.

love — blinding, all-consuming

You see those people? He pointed toward the bar. All those people have families, you can tell by their faces, they have families that depend on them and that they depend on, and for some of them this is good, and for some of them this is bad. But it all amounts to the same shit because there isn’t one of them who is free. They can’t do what they want to do or be who they should be. I might have no one in the world, but at least I’m free. She had never heard anyone say those words. I’m free wasn’t a popular refrain in the Era of Trujillo. But it struck a chord in her, put La Inca and her neighbors and her still-up-in-the-air life in perspective. I’m free. I want to be like you, she told the Gangster days later when they were eating crabs she had cooked in an achiote sauce. He had just been telling her about the nude beaches of Cuba. You would have been the star of the show, he said, pinching her nipple and laughing. What do you mean, you want to be like me? I want to be free. He smiled and chucked her under the chin. Then you will be, mi negra bella.

family/love -- unfreedom, incompatible w/ freedom

and in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she’d not even had her own name. And it was into that loneliness that she was sliding, and it was here that she would dwell forever, alone, black, fea, scratching at the dust with a stick, pretending that the scribble was letters, words, names.

isolation/alienation

And now we arrive at the strangest part of our tale. Whether what follows was a figment of Beli’s wracked imagination or something else altogether I cannot say. Even your Watcher has his silences, his páginas en blanco.

authorship

But no matter what the truth, remember: Dominicans are Caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena.

dominican identity

who offer Beli’s near-fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the House Cabral was indeed victim of a high-level fukú, the local version of House Atreus. Two Truji-líos in one lifetime—what in carajo else could it be? But other heads question that logic, arguing that Beli’s survival must be evidence to the contrary. Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of canefields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a “mother” with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything, say these heads, it is that our Beli was blessed.

Gunned down, she whispered, the night Beli had been kidnapped.

but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after death his evil lingered

Within hours of El Jefe dancing bien pegao with those twenty-seven bullets, his minions ran amok—fulfilling, as it were, his last will and vengeance. A great darkness descended on the Island and for the third time since the rise of Fidel people were being rounded up by Trujillo’s son, Ramfis, and a good plenty were sacrificed in the most depraved fashion imaginable, the orgy of terror funeral goods for the father from the son.

In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.

u.s. vs d.r.

She was much changed. During the day she would sit by the window in silence, very much like La Inca after her husband drowned. She did not smile, she did not laugh, she talked to no one, not even her friend Dorca. A dark veil had closed over her, like nata over café.

alienation

Oh, Beli; not so rashly, not so rashly: What did you know about states or diasporas? What did you know about Nueba Yol or unheated “old law” tenements or children whose self-hate short-circuited their minds? What did you know, madame, about immigration? Don’t laugh, mi negrita, for your world is about to be changed. Utterly. Yes: a terrible beauty is etc., etc. 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.

immigration

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.

love/pining

Later, when he would describe it, he would call it the Golden Mongoose, but even he knew that wasn’t what it was. It was very placid, very beautiful. Gold-limned eyes that reached through you, not so much in judgment or reproach but for something far scarier. They stared at each other—it serene as a Buddhist, he in total disbelief—and then the whistle blew again and his eyes snapped open (or closed) and it was gone.

It was the curse that made me do it, you know. I don’t believe in that shit, Oscar. That’s our parents’ shit. It’s ours too, he said.

inheritance / dominican identity

You’re right, she said, turning the page irritably. Why would anyone want to go anywhere when they have New Jersey?

freedom wanderlust

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.

want you to remember where you come from.

dominican identity

Coño, pero tú sí eres fea.

Plátano maduro no se vuelve verde. Even at the end

if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

freedom – impossible

And that’s what I guess these stories are all about.

The curse, some of you will say. Life, is what I say. Life.

fate

OK, muchacha, he said, patting my back. Santo Domingo will always be there. It was there in the beginning and it will be there at the end.

While the rest of the country in that period subsisted on rocks and scraps of yuca and were host to endless coils of intestinal worms, the Cabrals dined on pastas and sweet Italian sausages, scraped Jalisco silver on flatware from Beleek. A surgeon’s income was a fine thing but Abelard’s portfolio (if such things existed in those days) was the real source of the family wealth:

(often suffering Mulatto Pigment Degradation Disorder, a.k.a. tans) under the watchful gaze of their mother, who, unable to risk no extra darkness, remained chained to her umbrella’s shadow—while

racism/w.s.