The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

demon they summoned was Balaguer. (Known also as the Election Thief—see the 1966 election in the DR—and the Homunculus.) In the days of the Trujillato, Balaguer was just one of El Jefe’s more efficient ringwraiths. Much is made of his intelligence (he certainly impressed the Failed Cattle Thief) and of his asceticism (when he raped his little girls he kept it real quiet). After Trujillo’s death he would take over Project Domo and rule the country from 1960 to 1962, from 1966 to 1978, and again from 1986 to 1996 (by then dude was blind as a bat, a living mummy). During the second period of his rule, known locally as the Twelve Years, he unleashed a wave of violence against the Dominican left, death-squading hundreds and driving thousands more out of the country. It was he who oversaw/initiated the thing we call Diaspora. Considered our national “genius,” Joaquín Balaguer was a Negrophobe, an apologist to genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself, famously ordering the death of journalist Orlando Martínez. Later, when he wrote his memoirs, he claimed he knew who had done the foul deed (not him, of course) and left a blank page, a página en blanco, in the text to be filled in with the truth upon his death. (Can you say impunity ?) Balaguer died in 2002. The página is still blanca. Appeared as a sympathetic character in Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat . Like most homunculi he did not marry and left no heirs.
     
    10 . My shout-out to Jack Kirby aside, it’s hard as a Third Worlder not to feel a certain amount of affinity for Uatu the Watcher; he resides in the hidden Blue Area of the Moon and we DarkZoners reside (to quote Glissant) on “ la face cachée de la Terre ” (Earth’s hidden face).
     
    11 . Much in the news in those days, Jesús de Galíndez was a Basque supernerd and a Columbia University grad student who had written a rather unsettling doctoral dissertation. The topic? Lamentably, unfortunately, sadly: the era of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. Galíndez, a loyalist in the Spanish Civil War, had firsthand knowledge of the regime; he had taken refuge in Santo Domingo in 1939, occupied high positions therein, and by his departure in 1946 had developed a lethal allergy to the Failed Cattle Thief, could conceive for himself no higher duty than to expose the blight that was his regime. Crassweller describes Galíndez as “a bookish man, a type frequently found among political activists in Latin America … the winner of a prize in poetry,” what we in the Higher Planes call a Nerd Class 2. But dude was a ferocious leftist, despite the dangers, gallantly toiling on his Trujillo dissertation.
     
What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar–Ovid war they’ve had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Death-stroke, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seemed destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like .
Long story short: upon learning of the dissertation, El Jefe first tried to buy the thing and when that failed he dispatched his chief Nazgul (the sepulchral Felix Bernardino) to NYC and within days Galíndez got gagged, bagged, and dragged to La Capital, and legend has it when he came out of his chloroform nap he found himself naked, dangling from his feet over a cauldron of boiling oil , El Jefe standing nearby with a copy of the offending dissertation in hand. (And you thought your committee was rough.) Who in his right mind could ever have imagined anything so fucking ghastly? I guess El Jefe wanted to host a little tertulia with that poor doomed nerd. And what a tertulia it was, Dios mío! Anyway Galíndez’s disappearance caused an uproar in the States, with all fingers pointing to Trujillo, but of course he swore his innocence, and that was what Mauricio was referring to. But take heart: For every phalanx of nerds who die there are always a few who succeed. Not long after that horrific murder, a whole pack of revolutionary nerds ran aground on a sandbar on the southeast coast of Cuba. Yes, it was Fidel and Revolutionary Crew, back for a