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Abelard was, in short, a Brain—not entirely uncommon in the México where he had studied but an exceedingly rare species on the Island of Supreme General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.
The Reign of Trujillo was not the best time to be a lover of Ideas, not the best time to be engaging in parlor debate, to be hosting tertulias, to be doing anything out of the ordinary,
and didn’t say nothing. Disconnected his intellectual warp engine and operated strictly on impulse power.
Ask any of your elders and they will tell you: Trujillo might have been a Dictator, but he was a Dominican Dictator, which is another way of saying he was the Number-One Bellaco in the Country.
dominican identity
Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.
He spoke of it as well with his mistress, Señora Lydia Abenader, one of the three women who had rejected his marriage offer upon his return from his studies in México; now a widow and his number-one lover, she was the woman his father had wanted him to bag in the first place, and when he’d been unable to close the deal his father had mocked him as a half-man even unto his final days of bilious life (the third reason he’d gone after Socorro).
dominican identity // masculinity
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.
Between 1930 (when the Failed Cattle Thief seized power) and 1961 (the year he got blazed) Santo Domingo was the Caribbean’s very own Peaksville, with Trujillo playing the part of Anthony and the rest of us reprising the role of the Man Who Got Turned into Jack-in-the-Box. You might roll your eyes at the comparison, but, friends: it would be hard to exaggerate the power Trujillo exerted over the Dominican people and the shadow of fear he cast throughout the region. Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor;* not only did he lock the country away from the rest of
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It was widely believed that at any one time between forty-two and eighty-seven percent of the Dominican population was on the Secret Police’s payroll. Your own fucking neighbors could acabar con you just because you had something they coveted or because you cut in front of them at the colmado. Mad folks went out in that manner, betrayed by those they considered their panas, by members of their own families, by slips of the tongue.
there were plenty of people who despised El Jefe, who communicated in less-than-veiled ways their contempt, who resisted. But Abelard was simply not one of them. Homeboy wasn’t like his Mexican colleagues who were always keeping up with what was happening elsewhere in the world, who believed that change was possible. He didn’t dream of revolution, didn’t care that Trotsky had lived and died not ten blocks from his student pension in Coyoacán; wanted only to tend his wealthy, ailing patients and afterward return to his study without worrying about being shot in the head or thrown to the sharks.
class — upper class acquiescence to fascism
Abelard listened to these horrors tensely, and then after an awkward silence would change the subject. He simply didn’t wish to dwell on the fates of Unfortunate People, on the goings-on in Peaksville. He didn’t want those stories in his house. The way Abelard saw it—his Trujillo philosophy, if you will—he only had to keep his head down, his mouth shut, his pockets open, his daughters hidden for another decade or two. By then, he prophesied, Trujillo would be dead and the Dominican Republic would be a true democracy.
even the servants seemed content (not that he ever really spoke to them).
class — SOLITUDE
When has this country ever been human, Abelard? You’re the historian. You of all people should know that.
Dominican Republic
(If you think about it, maybe he should have heeded his daughter’s philosophy: Tarde venientibus ossa.)
The next week two atomic eyes opened over civilian centers in Japan and, even though no one knew it yet, the world was then remade. Not two days after the atomic bombs scarred Japan forever, Socorro dreamed that the faceless man was standing over her husband’s bed, and she could not scream, could not say anything, and then the next night she dreamed that he was standing over her children too.
From the moment he’d been grabbed he’d not stopped speaking. This is all a misunderstanding please I come from a very respectable family you have to communicate with my wife and my lawyers they will be able to clear this up I cannot believe that I’ve been treated so despicably I demand that the officer in charge hear my complaints. He couldn’t get the words out of his mouth fast enough. It
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.
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.
there is within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations, that sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction.
In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow.
Oscar, as you might imagine, found this version of the Fall very very attractive. Appealed to the deep structures in his nerd brain.
oscar’s nerdiness emphatically Dominican — inherited
(I could reveal their names but I believe you already know one of them; he was a certain trusted neighbor.)
but the arrest (or if you’re more into the fantastic: that book) precipitated an unprecedented downturn in the family fortune. Tripped, at some cosmic level, a lever against the family. Call it a whole lot of bad luck, outstanding karmic debt, or something else. (Fukú?) Whatever it was, the shit started coming at the family something awful and there are some people who would say it’s never ever stopped.
no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerde-main was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen.
dominicans and Race
Oscar visited the site on his last days. Nothing to report. Looked like every other scrabby field in Santo Domingo. He burned candles, left flowers, prayed, and went back to his hotel. The government was supposed to have erected a plaque to the dead of Nigüa Prison, but they never did.
she was so dark no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her.
race
(Stability was not in our girl’s stars, only Change.)
Here she is: Hypatía Belicia Cabral, the Third and Final Daughter. Suspicious, angry, scowling, uncommunicative, a wounded hungering campesina, but with an expression and posture that shouted in bold, gothic letters: DEFIANT. Darkskinned but clearly her family’s daughter. Of this there was no doubt. Already taller than Jackie in her prime. Her eyes exactly the same color as those of the father she knew nothing about.
Beli never thought about that life again. Embraced the amnesia that was so common throughout the Islands, five parts denial, five parts negative hallucination. Embraced the power of the Untilles. And from it forged herself anew.
memory — amnesia
Taught the girl to read, write, dress, eat, behave normally. La Inca a finishing school on fast-forward; for here was a woman with a civilizing mission, a woman driven by her own colossal feelings of guilt, betrayal, and failure.
class
Took to La Inca’s civilizing procedures like a mongoose to chicken.
Inca the only one to have seen Beli at her beginnings, when she slept fully dressed and screamed in the middle of the night, who saw her before she constructed a better self, one with Victorian table manners and a disgust of filth and poor people.
class
Inca never sought to discuss Beli’s time in Azua, would never refer to it, or to the Burning. She pretended it didn’t exist (the same way she pretended that the poor slobs in her barrio didn’t exist when they, in fact, were overrunning the place).
amnesiac memory — and Class
They may never have become best friends—Beli too furious, La Inca too correct—but La Inca did give Beli the greatest of gifts, which she would appreciate only much later; one night La Inca produced an old newspaper, pointed to a fotograph: This, she said, is your father and your mother. This, she said, is who you are.
memory/identity/inheritance — the greatest of gifts
There was a dream, however, that did haunt her. Where she walked alone through a vast, empty house whose roof was being tattooed by rain. Whose house was it? She had not a clue. But she could hear the voices of children in it.
the older brothers all seemed to have acquired the Innsmouth “look” in the past five years, and there were a grip more kids of color—but some things (like white supremacy and people-of-color self-hate) never change: the same charge of gleeful sadism that he remembered from his youth still electrified the halls.
How demoralizing was that? Every day he watched the “cool” kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the Indian, the Arab, the immigrant, the strange, the feminino, the gay—and in every one of these clashes he saw himself. In the old days it had been the white kids who had been the chief tormentors, but now it was kids of color who performed the necessaries.
race / W.S.
to his sister, who had abandoned Japan to come to New York to be with me.
And there were pictures of Oscar’s mom and dad. Young. Taken in the two years of their relationship. You loved him, he said to her. She laughed. Don’t talk about what you know nothing about.
He saw himself falling through the air. He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: an old bitter dork. Saw himself at the Game Room, picking through the miniatures for the rest of his life. He didn’t want this future but he couldn’t see how it could be avoided, couldn’t figure his way out of it. Fukú.
fate vs. autonomy
inheritance
she aborted it because I was cheating on her with some girl.
narrator lola’s husband ?
Santo Domingo summers…well, Santo Domingo summers have their own particular allure, even for one as nerdy as Oscar. Every summer Santo Domingo slaps the Diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can;
dominican identity
— pilgrimage
after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he’d gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn’t dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he’d explained to people a hundred times that he’d been separated from his sister at birth,
immigrant (dominican) identity
the mind-boggling poverty, the
the mind-boggling poverty,
after he stopped being dismayed that everybody called him gordo (and, worse, gringo), after
(She didn’t have the Nuevo Mundo wannabe American look of the majority of his neighbors.)
(Oscar peeped the astrology books under the bed and a collection of Paulo Coelho’s novels. She followed his gaze and said with a smile, Paulo Coelho saved my life.)
there was something slightly detached about her too; as though (Oscar’s words now) she were some marooned alien princess who existed partially in another dimension;
alienation/isolation
recognized and was thankful for, as though she relished the short bursts of attention she provoked from men, but not anything sustained.
freedom” = isolation
