The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

she mused, all that lucha only to be run over like a dog. But she wasn’t flattened. The driver, who later swore he saw something lion-like in the gloom, with eyes like terrible amber lamps, slammed on the brakes and halted inches from where a naked blood-spattered Beli tottered.
    Now check it: the truck held a perico ripiao conjunto, fresh from playing a wedding in Ocoa. Took all the courage they had not to pop the truck in reverse and peel out of there. Cries of, It’s a baká, a ciguapa, no, a haitiano! silenced by the lead singer, who shouted, It’s a girl! The band members lay Beli among their instruments, swaddled her with their chacabanas, and washed her face with the water they carried for the radiator and for cutting down the klerín. Down the band peered, rubbing their lips and running nervous hands through thinning hair.
    What do you think happened?
    I think she was attacked.
    By a lion, offered the driver.
    Maybe she fell out of a car.
    It looks like she fell under a car.
    Trujillo , she whispered.
    Aghast, the band looked at one another.
    We should leave her.
    The guitarrista agreed. She must be a subversive. If they find her with us the police will kill us too.
    Put her back on the road, begged the driver. Let the lion finish her.
    Silence, and then the lead singer lit a match and held it in the air and in that splinter of light was revealed a blunt-featured woman with the golden eyes of a chabine. We’re not leaving her, the lead singer said in a curious cibaeña accent, and only then did Beli understand that she was saved. 18

FUKú VS. ZAFA
     
    T here are still many, on and off the Island, who offer Beli’s near-fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the House Cabral was indeed victim of a high-level fukú, the local version of House Atreus. Two Truji-líos in one lifetime—what in carajo else could it be? But other heads question that logic, arguing that Beli’s survival must be evidence to the contrary. Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of canefields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a “mother” with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything, say these heads, it is that our Beli was blessed.
    What about the dead son?
    The world is full of tragedies enough without niggers having to resort to curses for explanations.
    A conclusion La Inca wouldn’t have argued with. To her dying day she believed that Beli had met not a curse but God out in that canefield.
    I met something, Beli would say, guardedly.

BACK AMONG THE LIVING
     
    T ouch and go, I tell you, until the fifth day. And when at last she returned to consciousness she did so screaming . Her arm felt like it had been pinched off at the elbow by a grindstone, her head crowned in a burning hoop of brass, her lung like the exploded carcass of a piñata—Jesú Cristo! She started crying almost immediately, but what our girl did not know was that for the last half-week, two of the best doctors in Baní had tended her covertly; friends of La Inca and anti-Trujillo to the core, they set her arm and plastered it, stitched shut the frightening gashes on her scalp (sixty puntos in all), doused her wounds with enough Mercurochrome to disinfect an army, injected her with morphine and against tetanus. Many late nights of worry, but the worst, it seemed, was over. These doctors, with a spiritual assist from La Inca’s Bible group, had performed a miracle, and all that remained was the healing. (She is lucky that she is so strong, the doctors said, packing their stethoscopes. The Hand of God is upon her, the prayer leaders confirmed, stowing their Bibles.) But blessed was not what our girl felt. After a couple of minutes of hysterical sobbing, of readjusting to the fact of the bed, to the fact of her life, she lowed out La Inca’s name.
    From the side of the bed the quiet voice of the Benefactor: Don’t talk. Unless it’s to thank the Savior for your life.
    Mamá, Beli cried. Mamá . They killed my bebé, they tried to kill me—
    And they did not succeed, La Inca said. Not for lack of trying, though. She put her hand on the girl’s forehead.
    Now it’s time for you to be quiet. For you to be still.
    That night was a late-medieval ordeal. Beli alternated from quiet weeping to gusts of rabia so fierce they threatened to throw her out of the bed