The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

alone, I said. Don’t you have any shame?
    My mother shook her head sadly, looked at La Inca. You didn’t teach her anything.
    La Inca didn’t blink. I taught her as well as I could.
    And then the big moment, the one every daughter dreads. My mother looking me over. I’d never been in better shape, never felt more beautiful and desirable in my life, and what does the bitch say?
    Coño, pero tú sí eres fea.
    Those fourteen months—gone. Like they’d never happened.
     
    Now that I’m a mother myself I realize that she could not have been any different. That’s who she was. Like they say: Plátano maduro no se vuelve verde. Even at the end she refused to show me anything close to love. She cried not for me or for herself but only for Oscar. Mi pobre, hijo, she sobbed. Mi pobre, hijo. You always think with your parents that at least at the very end something will change, something will get better. Not for us.
     
    I probably would have run. I would have waited until we got back to the States, waited like paja de arroz, burning slow, slow, until they dropped their guard and then one morning I would have disappeared. Like my father disappeared on my mother and was never seen again. Disappeared like everything disappears. Without a trace. I would have lived far away. I would have been happy, I’m sure of it, and I would never have had any children. I would let myself grow dark in the sun, no more hiding from it, let my hair indulge in all its kinks, and she would have passed me on the street and never recognized me. That was the dream I had. But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
    And that’s what I guess these stories are all about.
    Yes, no doubt about it: I would have run. La Inca or not, I would have run.
    But then Max died.
    I hadn’t seen him at all. Not since the day of our breakup. My poor Max, who loved me beyond words. Who said I’m so lucky every time we fucked. It was not like we were in the same circles or the same neighborhood. Sometimes when the peledista drove me to the moteles I could swear that I saw Max zipping through the horrendous traffic of the midday, a film reel under his arm (I tried to get him to buy a backpack but he said he liked it his way). My brave Max, who could slip between two bumpers the way a lie can slide between a person’s teeth.
    What happened was that one day he miscalculated—heartbroken, I’m sure—and ended up being mashed between a bus bound for the Cibao and one bound for Baní. His skull shattering in a million little pieces, the film unspooling across the entire street.

    I only heard about it after they buried him. His sister called me.
    He loved you best of all, she sobbed. Best of all.
    The curse, some of you will say.
    Life, is what I say. Life.
    You never saw anybody go so quiet. I gave his mother the money I’d taken from the peledista. His little brother Maxim used it to buy a yola to Puerto Rico and last I heard he was doing good for himself there. He owned a little store and his mother no longer lives in Los Tres Brazos. My toto good for something after all.
    I will love you always, my abuela said at the airport. And then she turned away.
    It was only when I got on the plane that I started crying. I know this sounds ridiculous but I don’t think I really stopped until I met you. I know I didn’t stop atoning. The other passengers must have thought I was crazy. I kept expecting my mother to hit me, to call me an idiota, a bruta, a fea, a malcriada, to change seats, but she didn’t.
    She put her hand on mine and left it there. When the woman in front turned around and said: Tell that girl of yours to be quiet, she said, Tell that culo of yours to stop stinking.
    I felt sorriest for the viejo next to us. You could tell he’d been visiting his family. He had on a little fedora and his best pressed chacabana. It’s OK, muchacha, he said, patting my back. Santo Domingo will always be there. It was there in the beginning and it will be there at the end.
    For God’s sake, my mother muttered, and then closed her eyes and went to sleep.

FIVE
     

Poor Abelard 1944–1946
     
     

THE FAMOUS DOCTOR
     
    W hen the family talks about it at all—which is like never—they always begin in the same place: with Abelard and the Bad Thing he said about Trujillo. 22
    Abelard Luis Cabral was Oscar and Lola’s grandfather, a surgeon who had studied in Mexico City in the Lázaro Cárdenas