The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

their immaculate house in Los Pescadores. Not touching, because it was not their way. Respectability so dense in la grande that you’d need a blowtorch to cut it, and a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequeña that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it. Theirs was the life of the Good People of Sur. Church twice a week, and on Fridays a stroll through Baní’s parque central, where in those nostalgic Trujillo days stickup kids were nowhere to be seen and the beautiful bands did play. They shared the same sagging bed, and in the morning, while La Inca fished around blindly for her chancletas, Beli would shiver out to the front of the house, and while La Inca brewed her coffee, Beli would lean against the fence and stare. At what? The neighbors? The rising dust? At the world?
    Hija, La Inca would call. Hija, come here!
    Four, five times until finally La Inca walked over to fetch her, and only then did Beli come.
    Why are you shouting? Beli wanted to know, annoyed.
    La Inca pushing her back toward the house: Will you listen to this girl! Thinks herself a person when she’s not!
    Beli, clearly: one of those Oyá-souls, always turning, allergic to tranquilidad. Almost any other Third World girl would have thanked Dios Santísimo for the blessed life she led: after all, she had a madre who didn’t beat her, who (out of guilt or inclination) spoiled her rotten, bought her flash clothes and paid her bakery wages, peanuts, I’ll admit, but that’s more than what ninety-nine percent of other kids in similar situations earned, which was nathan. Our girl had it made , and yet it did not feel so in her heart. 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. From what was easy to enumerate: the bakery, her school, dull-ass Baní, sharing a bed with her madre, the inability to buy the dresses she wanted, having to wait until fifteen to straighten her hair, the impossible expectations of La Inca, the fact that her long-gone parents had died when she was one, the whispers that Trujillo had done it, those first years of her life when she’d been an orphan, the horrible scars from that time, her own despised black skin. But where she wanted to escape to she could not tell you. I guess it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been a princess in a high castle or if her dead parents’ former estate, the glorious Casa Hatüey, had been miraculously restored from Trujillo’s Omega Effect. She would have wanted out.
    Every morning the same routine: Hypatía Belicia Cabral, ven acá!
    You ven acá, Beli muttered under her breath. You.
    Beli had the inchoate longings of nearly every adolescent escapist, of an entire generation, but I ask you: So fucking what? No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated. This was a country, a society, that had been designed to be virtually escape-proof. Alcatraz of the Antilles. There weren’t any Houdini holes in that Plátano Curtain. Options as rare as Tainos and for irascible darkskinned flacas of modest means they were rarer still. (If you want to cast her restlessness in a broader light: 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. At the end of her life, when she was being