The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

best us all.
    The Reign of Trujillo was not the best time to be a lover of Ideas, not the best time to be engaging in parlor debate, to be hosting tertulias, to be doing anything out of the ordinary, but Abelard was nothing if not meticulous. Never allowed contemporary politics (i.e., Trujillo) to be bandied about, kept shit on the abstract plane, allowed anybody who wanted (including members of the Secret Police) to attend his gatherings. Given that you could get lit up for even mispronouncing the Failed Cattle Thief ’s name, it was a no-brainer, really. As a general practice Abelard tried his best not to think about El Jefe at all, followed sort of the Tao of Dictator Avoidance, which was ironic considering that Abelard was unmatched in maintaining the outward appearance of the enthusiastic Trujillista. 24 Both as an individual and as the executive officer of his medical association he gave unstintingly to the Partido Dominicano; he and his wife, who was his number-one nurse and his best assistant, joined every medical mission that Trujillo organized, no matter how remote the campo; and no one could suppress a guffaw better than Abelard when El Jefe won an election by 103 percent! What enthusiasm from the pueblo! When banquets were held in Trujillo’s honor Abelard always drove to Santiago to attend. He arrived early, left late, smiled endlessly, and didn’t say nothing . Disconnected his intellectual warp engine and operated strictly on impulse power. When the time came, Abelard would shake El Jefe’s hand, cover him in the warm effusion of his adoration (if you think the Trujillato was not homoerotic, then, to quote the Priest, you got another thing coming ), and without further ado fade back into the shadows (à la Oscar’s favorite movie, Point Blank ). Kept as far away from El Jefe as possible—he wasn’t under any delusion that he was Trujillo’s equal or his buddy or some kind of necessary individual—after all, niggers who messed with Him had a habit of ending up with a bad case of the deads. It didn’t hurt that Abelard’s family was not totally in the Jefe’s pocket, that his father had cultivated no lands or negocios in geographic or competitive proximity to the Jefe’s own holding. His Fuckface contact was blessedly limited. 25
    Abelard and the Failed Cattle Thief might have glided past each other in the Halls of History if not for the fact that starting in 1944, Abelard, instead of bringing his wife and daughter to Jefe events, as custom dictated, began to make a point of leaving them at home. He explained to his friends that his wife had become “nervous” and that Jacquelyn took care of her but the real reason for the absences was Trujillo’s notorious rapacity and his daughter Jacquelyn’s off-the-hook looks. Abelard’s serious, intellectual oldest daughter was no longer her tall awkward flaquita self; adolescence had struck with a fury, transforming her into a young lady of great beauty. She had caught a serious case of the hips-ass-chest, a condition which during the mid-forties spelled trouble with a capital T to the R to the U to the J to the illo.
    Ask any of your elders and they will tell you: Trujillo might have been a Dictator, but he was a Dominican Dictator, which is another way of saying he was the Number-One Bellaco in the Country. Believed that all the toto in the DR was, literally, his. It’s a well-documented fact that in Trujillo’s DR if you were of a certain class and you put your cute daughter anywhere near El Jefe, within the week she’d be mamando his ripio like an old pro and there would be nothing you could do about it! Part of the price of living in Santo Domingo, one of the Island’s best-known secrets. So common was the practice, so insatiable Trujillo’s appetites, that there were plenty of men in the nation, hombres de calidad y posición, who, believe it or not, offered up their daughters freely to the Failed Cattle Thief. Abelard, to his credit, was not one of them; as soon as he realized what was what—after his daughter started stopping traffic on Calle El Sol, after one of his patients looked at his daughter and said, You should be careful with that one—he pulled a Rapunzel on her ass and locked her in . It was a Brave Thing, not in keeping with his character, but he’d only had to watch Jacquelyn preparing for school one day, big in body but still a child, goddamn it, still a child, and the Brave Thing became easy.
    Hiding your doe-eyed,