The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

caresses. Hurry up and get dressed. If we get caught my ass will be in the fire.
    Which was funny because that’s exactly how her ass felt.
    For about a month they scromfed in various isolated corners of the school until the day a teacher, acting on an anonymous tip from a member of the student body, surprised the undercover couple in flagrante delicto in a broom closet. Just imagine: Beli butt naked, her vast scar like nothing anybody had seen before, and Jack with his pants puddled around his ankle.
    The scandal! Remember the time and the place: Baní in the late fifties. Factor in that Jack Pujols was the number-one son of the Blessed B——í clan, one of Baní’s most venerable (and filthy-rich) families. Factor in that he’d been caught not with one of his own class (though that might have also been a problem) but with the scholarship girl, una prieta to boot. (The fucking of poor prietas was considered standard operating procedure for elites just as long as it was kept on the do-lo, what is elsewhere called the Strom Thurmond Maneuver.) Pujols of course blamed Beli for everything. Sat in the office of the rector and explained in great detail how she had seduced him. It wasn’t me, he insisted. It was her! The real scandal, however, was that Pujols was actually engaged to that girlfriend of his, the half-in-the-grave Rebecca Brito, herself a member of Baní’s other powerful family, the R——, and you better believe Jack getting caught in a closet with una prieta kebabbed any future promise of matrimony. (Her family very particular about their Christian reputation.) Pujols’s old man was so infuriated/humiliated that he started beating the boy as soon as he laid hands on him and within the week had shipped him off to a military school in Puerto Rico where he would, in the colonel’s words, learn the meaning of duty. Beli never saw him again except once in the Listín Diario and by then they were both in their forties.
    Pujols might have been a bitch-ass rat, but Beli’s reaction was one for the history books. Not only was our girl not embarrassed by what had happened, even after being shaken down by the rector and the nun and the janitor, a holy triple-team, she absolutely refused to profess her guilt! If she had rotated her head around 360 degrees and vomited green-pea soup it would have caused only slightly less of an uproar. In typical hardheaded Beli fashion, our girl insisted that she’d done nothing wrong, that, in fact, she was well within her rights.
    I’m allowed to do anything I want, Beli said stubbornly, with my husband.
    Pujols, it seems, had promised Belicia that they would be married as soon as they’d both finished high school, and Beli had believed him, hook, line, and sinker. Hard to square her credulity with the hardnosed no-nonsense femme-matador I’d come to know, but one must remember: she was young and in love . Talk about fantasist: the girl sincerely believed that Jack would be true.
    The Good Teachers of El Redentor never squeezed anything close to a mea culpa from the girl. She kept shaking her head, as stubborn as the Laws of the Universe themselves—No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No No. Not that it mattered in the end. Belicia’s tenure at the school was over, and so were La Inca’s dreams of re-creating, in Beli, her father’s genius, his magis (his excellence in all things).
    In any other family such a thing would have meant the beating of Beli to within an inch of her life, beating her straight into the hospital with no delay, and then once she was better beating her again and putting her back into the hospital, but La Inca was not that kind of parent. La Inca, you see, was a serious woman, an upstanding woman, one of the best of her class, but she was incapable of punishing the girl physically. Call it a hitch in the universe, call it mental illness, but La Inca just couldn’t do it. Not then, not ever. All she could do was wave her arms in the air and hurl laments. How could this have happened? La Inca demanded. How? How ?
    He was going to marry me! Beli cried. We were going to have children!
    Are you insane ? La Inca roared. Hija, have you lost your mind ?
    Took a while for shit to calm down—the neighbors loving the whole thing (I told you that blackie was good for nothing!)—but eventually