The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

had slipped her grasp not even God had enough caracaracol to bring her back. Every now and then La Inca would appear at the restaurant. She’d sit alone, erect as a lectern, all in black, and between sips of tea would watch the girl with a mournful intensity. Perhaps she hoped to shame Beli into returning to Operation Restore House of Cabral, but Beli went about her work with her customary zeal. It must have dismayed La Inca to see how drastically her “daughter” was changing, for Beli, the girl who never used to speak in public, who could be still as Noh, displayed at Palacio Peking a raconteur’s gift for palaver that delighted a great many of the all-male clientele. Those of you who have stood at the corner of 142nd and Broadway can guess what it was she spoke: the blunt, irreverent cant of the pueblo that gives all dominicanos cultos nightmares on their 400-thread-count sheets and that La Inca had assumed had perished along with Beli’s first life in Outer Azua, but here it was so alive, it was like it had never left: Oye, parigüayo, y qué pasó con esa esposa tuya? Gordo, no me digas que tú todavía tienes hambre?
    Eventually there came a moment when she’d pause at La Inca’s table: Do you want anything else?
    Only that you would return to school, mi’ja.
    Sorry. Beli picked up her taza and wiped the table in one perfunctory motion. We stopped serving pendejada last week.
    And then La Inca paid her quarter and was gone and a great weight lifted off Beli, proof that she’d done the right thing.
    In those eighteen months she learned a great deal about herself. She learned that despite all her dreams to be the most beautiful woman in the world, to have the brothers jumping out of windows in her wake, when Belicia Cabral fell in love she stayed in love. Despite the trove of men, handsome, plain, and ugly, who marched into the restaurant intent on winning her hand in marriage (or at least in fuckage), she never had a thought for anyone but Jack Pujols. Turns out that in her heart our girl was more Penelope than Whore of Babylon. (Of course La Inca, who witnessed the parade of men muddying her doorstep, would not have agreed.) Beli often had dreams where Jack returned from military school, dreams where he’d be waiting for her at the job, spilled out at one of the tables like a beautiful bag of swag, a grin on his magnificent face, his Eyes of Atlantis on her at last, only on her. I came back for you, mi amor. I came back .
    Our girl learned that even to a chooch like Jack Pujols she was true.
    But that didn’t mean she reclused herself entirely from the world of men. (For all her “fidelity” she would never be a sister who liked being without male attention.) Even in this rough period, Beli had her princes-in-waiting, brothers willing to brave the barbed-wired minefields of her affections in the hopes that beyond that cruel midden Elysium might await. The poor deluded chumps. The Gangster would have her every which way, but these poor sapos who came before the Gangster, they were lucky to get an abrazo. Let us summon back from the abyss two sapos in particular: the Fiat dealer, bald, white, and smiling, a regular Hipólito Mejía, but suave and cavalier and so enamored of North American baseball that he risked life and limb to listen to games on a contraband shortwave radio. He believed in baseball with the fervor of an adolescent and believed also that in the future Dominicans would storm the Major Leagues and compete with the Mantles and the Marises of the world. Marichal is only the beginning, he predicted, of a reconquista. You’re crazy, Beli said, mocking him and his “jueguito.” In an inspired stroke of counterprogramming, her other paramour was a student at the UASD—one of those City College types who’s been in school eleven years and is always five credits shy of a degree. Student today don’t mean na’, but in a Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the Fall of Arbenz, by the Stoning of Nixon, by the Guerrillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs—in a Latin America already a year and half into the Decade of the Guerrilla—a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. Such a student was Arquimedes. He also listened to the shortwave, but not for Dodgers scores; what he risked his life for was the news leaking out of Havana, news of the future. Arquimedes was,