The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

banging into him in the hall. Cabral, he said with a smile. You have to be more careful.

    I love you! she wanted to scream, I want to have all your children! I want to be your woman! But instead she said, You be careful.
    She was morose. September ended and, alarmingly enough, she had her best month at the school. Academically. English was her number-one subject (how ironic). She learned the names of the fifty states. She could ask for coffee, a bathroom, the time, where the post office was. Her English teacher, a deviant, assured her that her accent was superb, superb . The other girls allowed him to touch them, but Beli, now finely attuned to masculine weirdness, and certain that she was worthy only of a prince, sidled out from under his balmy hands.
    A teacher asked them to start thinking about the new decade. Where would you like to see yourself, your country, and our glorious president in the coming years? No one understood the question so he had to break it down into two simple parts.
    One of her classmates, Mauricio Ledesme, got in serious trouble, so bad that his family had to spirit him out of the country. He was a quiet boy who sat next to one of the Squadron, stewing always in his love for her. Perhaps he thought he’d impress her. (Not that far-fetched, for soon comes the generation who’s number-one ass-getting technique will not be to Be Like Mike, but to Be Like Che.) Perhaps he’d just had enough. He wrote in the crabbed handwriting of a future poet-revolutionary: I’d like to see our country be a democracía like the United States. I wish we would stop having dictators. Also I believe that it was Trujillo who killed Galíndez. 11

    That’s all it took. The next day both he and the teacher were gone. No one saying nothing. 12
    Beli’s essay was far less controversial. I will be married to a handsome wealthy man. I will also be a doctor with my own hospital that I will name after Trujillo .

    At home she continued to brag to Dorca about her boyfriend, and when Jack Pujols’s photo appeared in the school newspaper she brought it home in triumph. Dorca was so overwhelmed she spent the night in her house, inconsolable, crying and crying. Beli could hear her loud and clear.
    And then, in the first days of October, as the pueblo was getting ready to celebrate another Trujillo Birthday, Beli heard a whisper that Jack Pujols had broken up with his girlfriend. (Beli had always known about this girlfriend, who attended another school, but do you think she cared?) She was sure it was just a rumor, didn’t need any more hope to torture her. But it turned out to be more than rumor, and more than hope, because not two days later Jack Pujols stopped Beli in the hallway as though he were seeing her for the very first time. Cabral, he whispered, you’re beautiful . The sharp spice of his cologne like an intoxication. I know I am, she said, her face ablaze with heat. Well, he said, burying a mitt in his perfectly straight hair.
    The next thing you know he was giving her rides in his brand-new Mercedes and buying her helados with the knot of dollars he carried in his pocket. Legally, he was too young to drive, but do you think anybody in Santo Domingo stopped a colonel’s son for anything? Especially the son of a colonel who was said to be one of Ramfis Trujillo’s confidants? 13

AMOR !
     
    I t wasn’t quite the romance she would later make it out to be. A couple of talks, a walk on the beach while the rest of the class was having a picnic, and before she knew it she was sneaking into a closet with him after school and he was slipping it to her something terrible. Let’s just say that she finally understood why the other boys had given him the nickname Jack the Ripio; he had what even she knew to be an enormous penis, a Shiva-sized lingam, a destroyer of worlds. (And the whole time she’d thought they’d been calling him Jack the Ripper. Duh!) Later, after she’d been with the Gangster, she would realize how little respect Pujols had for her. But since she had nothing to compare it to at the time she assumed fucking was supposed to feel like she was being run through with a cutlass. The first time she was scared shitless and it hurt bad (4d10), but nothing could obliterate the feeling she had that finally she was on her way, the sense of a journey starting, of a first step taken, of the beginning of something big.
    Afterward she tried to embrace him, to touch his silken hair, but he shook off her