The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

for the day the páginas en blanco finally speak.
    The Gangster was born in Samaná at the dawn of the twenties, the fourth son of a milkman, a bawling, worm-infested brat no one thought would amount to na’, an opinion his parents endorsed by turning him out of the house when he was seven. But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person’s character. By the time the Gangster was twelve this scrawny, unremarkable boy had shown a resourcefulness and fearlessness beyond his years. His claims that the Failed Cattle Thief had “inspired” him brought him to the attention of the Secret Police, and before you could say SIM-salabím our boy was infiltrating unions and fingering sindicatos left and right. At age fourteen he killed his first “comunista,” a favor for the appalling Felix Bernardino, 16 and apparently the hit was so spectacular, so fucking chunky , that half the left in Baní immediately abandoned the DR for the relative safety of Nueva York. With the money he earned he bought himself a new suit and four pairs of shoes.
    From that point on, the sky was the limit for our young villain. Over the next decade he traveled back and forth to Cuba, dabbled in forgery, theft, extortion, and money laundering—all for the Everlasting Glory of the Trujillato. It was even rumored, never substantiated, that our Gangster was the hammerman who slew Mauricio Báez in Havana in 1950. Who can know? It seems a possibility; by then he’d acquired deep contacts in the Havana underworld and clearly had no compunction about slaying motherfuckers. Hard evidence, though, is scarce. That he was a favorite of Johnny Abbes and of Porfirio Rubirosa there can be no denying. He had a special passport from the Palacio, and the rank of major in some branch of the Secret Police.
    Skilled our Gangster became in many a perfidy, but where our man truly excelled, where he smashed records and grabbed gold, was in the flesh trade. Then, like now, Santo Domingo was to popóla what Switzerland was to chocolate. And there was something about the binding, selling, and degradation of women that brought out the best in the Gangster; he had an instinct for it, a talent—call him the Caracaracol of Culo. By the time he was twenty-two he was operating his own string of brothels in and around the capital, owned houses and cars in three countries. Never stinted the Jefe on anything, be it money, praise, or a prime cut of culo from Colombia, and so loyal was he to the regime that he once slew a man at a bar simply for pronouncing El Jefe’s mother’s name wrong. Now here’s a man, El Jefe was rumored to have said, who is capaz .
    The Gangster’s devotion did not go unrewarded. By the mid-forties the Gangster was no longer simply a well-paid operator; he was becoming an alguien—in photos he appears in the company of the regime’s three witchkings: Johnny Abbes, Joaquín Balaguer, and Felix Bernardino—and while none exists of him and El Jefe, that they broke bread and talked shit cannot be doubted. For it was the Great Eye himself who granted the Gangster authority over a number of the Trujillo family’s concessions in Venezuela and Cuba, and under his draconian administration the so-called bang-for-the-buck ratio of Dominican sexworkers trebled. In the forties the Gangster was in his prime; he traveled the entire length of the Americas, from Rosario to Nueva York, in pimpdaddy style, staying at the best hotels, banging the hottest broads (never lost his sureño taste for the morenas, though), dining in four-star restaurants, confabbing with arch-criminals the world over.

    An inexhaustible opportunist, he spun deals everywhere he went. Suitcases of dollars accompanied him back and forth from the capital. Life was not always pleasant. Plenty of acts of violence, plenty of beatdowns and knifings. He himself survived any number of gank-attempts, and after each shoot-out, after each drive-by, he always combed his hair and straightened his tie, a dandy’s reflex. He was a true gangster, gully to the bone, lived the life all those phony rap acts can only rhyme about.
    It was also in this period that his long dalliance with Cuba was formalized. The Gangster might have harbored love for Venezuela and its many long-legged mulatas, and burned for the tall, icy beauties of Argentina, and swooned over México’s incomparable brunettes, but it was Cuba that clove his