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(They’d known only her photo and her money the whole time she’d been in Europe, and when she’d finally returned to the Island they were little men and she didn’t have the heart to tear them from the only family they’d ever known. That would have made me roll my eyes, but Oscar bought it hook, line, and sinker.)
freedom = alienation
Maybe we should get married, he said once, not joking, and she said, I’d make a terrible wife.
he even got to see her in a couple of her notorious “moods,” when her alien-princess part pushed to the fore and she became very cold and uncommunicative, when she called him an idiot americano for spilling his beer.
Outside the boyfriends, foreign and domestic, outside her psychiatrist sister in San Cristóbal and her ailing mother in Sabana Iglesia, her life seemed as spare as her house. Travel light, was all she ever said about the house when he suggested he buy her a lamp or anything, and he suspected that she would have said the same thing about having more friends.
freedom = isolation
Oscar woke up in his overly air-conditioned room and realized with unusual clarity that he was heading down that road again. The road where he became so nuts over a girl he stopped thinking. The road where very bad things happened. You should stop right now, he told himself. But he knew, with lapidary clarity, that he wasn’t going to stop. He loved Ybón. (And love, for this kid, was a geas, something that could not be shaken or denied.)
love
there was only a lone man sitting in his rocking chair out in front of his ruined house and for a moment Oscar could have sworn the dude had no face,
And yet this world seemed strangely familiar to him; he had the overwhelming feeling that he’d been in this very place, a long time ago. It was worse than déjà vu, but before he could focus on it the moment slipped away,
history/generational repetition
Oscar remembers having a dream where a mongoose was chatting with him. Except the mongoose was the Mongoose. What will it be, muchacho? it demanded. More or less? And for a moment he almost said less. So tired, and so much pain—Less! Less! Less!—but then in the back of his head he remembered his family. Lola and his mother and Nena Inca. Remembered how he used to be when he was younger and more optimistic. The lunch box next to his bed, the first thing he saw in the morning. Planet of the Apes. More, he croaked. —————————, said the Mongoose, and then the wind swept him back into darkness.
If they noticed the similarities between Past and Present they did not speak of it.
Only later, during his last days, would he actually remember one of those dreams. An old man was standing before him in a ruined bailey, holding up a book for him to read. The old man had a mask on. It took a while for Oscar’s eyes to focus, but then he saw that the book was blank. The book is blank. Those were the words La Inca’s servant heard him say just before he broke through the plane of unconsciousness and into the universe of the Real.
One day while watching his mother tear sheets off the beds it dawned on him that the family curse he’d heard about his whole life might actually be true. Fukú. He rolled the word experimentally in his mouth. Fuck you. His mother raised her fist in a fury but La Inca intercepted it, their flesh slapping. Are you mad? La Inca said, and Oscar couldn’t tell if she was talking to his mother or to him.
For some reason Oscar couldn’t see her face, it was a blur, she had retreated completely into that other plane of hers.
SOME ADVICE Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
freedom = isolation
Got through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line “and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls” and he had to stop, his head and heart hurting too much.
race
Also getting ready to move from Paterson. Wanting to put the past behind him, start a new life. Was trying to decide what he would take with him. Was allowing himself only ten of his books, the core of his canon (his words), was trying to pare it all down to what was necessary. Only what I can carry. It seemed like another odd Oscar thing, until later we would realize it wasn’t.
freedom / isolation
It’s the Ancient Powers, Oscar said grimly. They won’t leave me alone.
This is my home. Your real home, mi amor. A person can’t have two?
They drove past a bus stop and for a second Oscar imagined he saw his whole family getting on a guagua, even his poor dead abuelo and his poor dead abuela, and who is driving the bus but the Mongoose, and who is the cobrador but the Man Without a Face, but it was nothing but a final fantasy,
notice that Oscar’s hands are seamless and the book’s pages are blank. And that behind his mask his eyes are smiling. Zafa. Sometimes, though, I look up at him and he has no face and I wake up screaming.
I’d finally try to say words that could have saved us. —————————.
the page is blank
Could have been my daughter if I’d been smart, if I’d been———.
the page is blank — and Fate
One day, though, the Circle will fail. As Circles always do. And for the first time she will hear the word fukú. And she will have a dream of the No Face Man. Not now, but soon. If she’s her family’s daughter—as I suspect she is—one day she will stop being afraid and she will come looking for answers.
How
And maybe, just maybe, if she’s as smart and as brave as I’m expecting she’ll be, she’ll take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it. That is what, on my best days, I hope. What I dream.
*** the page is blank — Family Inheritance
also, the role of writing — someone to FILL IN THE PAGE, of learning, improving on Past, growing past it, progressing, overcoming
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.”
In that letter he talked about his investigations and the new book he was writing, a book that he was sending under another cover. Told her to watch out for a second package. This contains everything I’ve written on this journey. Everything I think you will need. You’ll understand when you read my conclusions. (It’s the cure to what ails us, he scribbled in the margins. The Cosmo DNA.) Only problem was, the fucking thing never arrived! Either got lost in the mail or he was slain before he put it in the mail, or whoever he trusted to deliver it forgot.
the page is blank, the answers to our questions unlearned, the suffering/scrambling eternal
He wrote that he couldn’t believe he’d had to wait for this so goddamn long. (Ybón was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.) He wrote: So this is what everybody’s always talking about! Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!
which goes to show that you should always be careful when killing nerds, never know who will come after you)
a mortally wounded Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina is said to have taken two steps toward his birthplace, San Cristóbal, for, as we know, all children, whether good or bad, eventually find their way home, but thinking better of it he turned back toward La Capital, to his beloved city, and fell for the last time.
For a while, I hear, that stretch was the haunt of what El Jefe worried about the most: los maricones.
