The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

spent more time inside the love motels than she had in school—an exaggeration, I’m sure, but a sign of how low our girl had fallen in the pueblo’s estimation. Beli didn’t help matters. Talk about a poor winner: now that she’d vaulted into a higher order of privilege, she strutted around the neighborhood, exulting and heaping steaming piles of contempt on everybody and everything that wasn’t the Gangster. Dismissing her barrio as an “infierno” and her neighbors as “brutos” and “cochinos,” she bragged about how she would be living in Miami soon, wouldn’t have to put up with this un-country much longer. Our girl no longer maintained even a modicum of respectability at home. Stayed out until all hours of the night and permed her hair whenever she wanted. La Inca didn’t know what to do with her anymore; all her neighbors advised her to beat the girl into a blood clot (You might even have to kill her, they said regretfully), but La Inca couldn’t explain what it had meant to find the burnt girl locked in a chicken coop all those years ago, how that sight had stepped into her and rearranged everything so that now she found she didn’t have the strength to raise her hand against the girl. She never stopped trying to talk sense into her, though.
    What happened to college?
    I don’t want to go to college.
    So what are you going to do? Be a Gangster’s girlfriend your whole life? Your parents, God rest their souls, wanted so much better for you.
    I told you not to talk to me about those people. You’re the only parents I have.
    And look how well you’ve treated me. Look how well. Maybe people are right, La Inca despaired. Maybe you are cursed.
    Beli laughed. You might be cursed, but not me.
    Even the chinos had to respond to Beli’s change in attitude. We have you go, Juan said.
    I don’t understand.
    He licked his lips and tried again. We have to you go.

    You’re fired, José said. Please leave your apron on the counter.
    The Gangster heard about it and the next day some of his goons paid the Brothers Then a visit and what do you know if our girl wasn’t immediately reinstated. It wasn’t the same no more, though. The brothers wouldn’t talk to her, wouldn’t spin no stories about their youth in China and the Philippines. After a couple of days of the silent treatment Beli took the hint and stopped showing up altogether.
    And now you don’t have a job, La Inca pointed out helpfully.
    I don’t need a job. He’s going to buy me a house.
    A man whose own house you yourself have never visited is promising to buy you a house? And you believe him? Oh, hija.
    Yessir: our girl believed.
    After all, she was in love! The world was coming apart at the seams—Santo Domingo was in the middle of a total meltdown, the Trujillato was tottering, police blockades on every corner—and even the kids she’d gone to school with, the brightest and the best, were being swept up by the Terror. A girl from El Redentor told her that Jack Pujols’s little brother had gotten caught organizing against El Jefe and the colonel’s influence could not save the boy from having an eye gouged out with electric shocks. Beli didn’t want to hear it. After all, she was in love! In love! She wafted through her day like a woman with a concussion. It’s not like she had a number for the Gangster, or even an address (bad sign number one, girls), and he was in the habit of disappearing for days without warning (bad sign number two), and now that Trujillo’s war against the world was reaching its bitter crescendo (and now that he had Beli on lock), the days could become weeks, and when he reappeared from “his business” he would smell of cigarettes and old fear and want only to fuck, and afterward he would drink whiskey and mutter to himself by the love-motel window. His hair, Beli noticed, was growing in gray.
    She didn’t take kindly to these disappearances. They made her look bad in front of La Inca and the neighbors, who were always asking her sweetly, Where’s your savior now, Moses? She defended him against every criticism, of course, no brother has had a better advocate, but then took it out on his ass upon his return. Pouted when he appeared with flowers; made him take her to the most expensive restaurants; pestered him around the clock to move her out of her neighborhood; asked him what the hell he’d been doing these past x days; talked about the weddings she read about in the Listín , and just so you