The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

P. Daddy knew exactly what kind of creature he was dealing with.) No Dominican believes that Abbes died in that blast. He is said to still be out there in the world, waiting for the next coming of El Jefe, when he too will rise from the Shadow.
     
    15 . A favorite hangout of Trujillo’s, my mother tells me when the manuscript is almost complete.
     
    16 . Felix Wenceslao Bernardino, raised in La Romana, one of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar. Was consul in Cuba when the exiled Dominican labor organizer Mauricio Báez was mysteriously murdered on the streets of Havana. Felix was also rumored to have had a hand in the failed assassination of Dominican exile leader Angel Morales (the assassins burst in on his secretary shaving, mistook the lathered man for Morales, and shot him to pieces). In addition, Felix and his sister, Minerva Bernardino (first woman in the world to be an ambassador before the United Nations), were both in New York City when Jesus de Galíndez mysteriously disappeared on his way home at the Columbus Circle subway station. Talk about Have Gun, Will Travel . It was said the power of Trujillo never left him; the fucker died of old age in Santo Domingo, Trujillista to the end, drowning his Haitian workers instead of paying them.
     
    17 . In my first draft, Samaná was actually Jarabacoa, but then my girl Leonie, resident expert in all things Domo, pointed out that there are no beaches in Jarabacoa. Beautiful rivers but no beaches. Leonie was also the one who informed me that the perrito (see first paragraphs of chapter one, “GhettoNerd at the End of the World”) wasn’t popularized until the late eighties, early nineties, but that was one detail I couldn’t change, just liked the image too much. Forgive me, historians of popular dance, forgive me!
     
    18 . The Mongoose, one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its greatest travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Africa and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, a.k.a. the Caribbean. Since its earliest appearance in the written record—675 B.C.E., in a nameless scribe’s letter to Ashurbanipal’s father, Esarhaddon—the Mongoose has proven itself to be an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies. Believed to be an ally of Man. Many Watchers suspect that the Mongoose arrived to our world from another, but to date no evidence of such a migration has been unearthed.
     
    19 . They say he was on his way for some ass that night. Who is surprised? A consummate culocrat to the end. Perhaps on that last night, El Jefe, sprawled in the back of his Bel Air, thought only of the routine pussy that was awaiting him at Estancia Fundación. Perhaps he thought of nothing. Who can know? In any event: there is a black Chevrolet fast approaching, like Death itself, packed to the rim with U.S.-backed assassins of the higher classes, and now both cars are nearing the city limits, where the streetlights end (for modernity indeed has its limits in Santo Domingo), and in the dark distance looms the cattle fairgrounds where seventeen months before some other youth had intended to assassinate him. El Jefe asks his driver, Zacarías, to turn on the radio, but—how appropriate—there is a poetry reading on and off it goes again. Maybe the poetry reminds him of Galíndez.
     
Maybe not.
The black Chevy flashes its lights innocuously, asking to pass, and Zacarías, thinking it’s the Secret Police, obliges by slowing down, and when the cars come abreast, the escopeta wielded by Antonio de la Maza (whose brother—surprise, surprise—was killed in the Galíndez cover-up—which goes to show that you should always be careful when killing nerds, never know who will come after you) goes boo-ya! And now (so goes the legend) El Jefe cries, Coño, me hirieron! The second shotgun blast hits Zacarías in the shoulder and he almost stops the car, in pain and shock and surprise. Here now the famous exchange: Get the guns, El Jefe says. Vamos a pelear. And Zacarías says: No, Jefe, son mucho, and El Jefe repeats himself: Vamos a pelear. He could have ordered Zacarías to turn the car back to the safety of his capital, but instead he goes out like Tony Montana. Staggers out of the bullet-ridden Bel Air, holding a.38 in his hand. The rest is, of course, history, and if this were a movie you’d have to film it in John Woo slow motion. Shot at twenty-seven times—what a Dominican number—and