The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Daughter.
    Zafa or Fukú?
    You tell me.
     
    There would always be speculation. At the most basic level, did he say it, did he not? (Which is another way of asking: Did he have a hand in his own destruction?) Even the family was divided. La Inca adamant that her cousin had said nothing; it had all been a setup, orchestrated by Abelard’s enemies to strip the family of their wealth, their properties, and their businesses. Others were not so sure. He probably had said something that night at the club, and unfortunately for him he’d been overheard by the Jefe’s agents. No elaborate plot, just drunken stupidity. As for the carnage that followed: que sé yo—just a lot of bad luck.
    Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard’s daughter, but when he couldn’t snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family’s ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened.
    So which was it? you ask. An accident, a conspiracy, or a fukú? The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you’ll have to decide for yourself. What’s certain is that nothing’s certain. We are trawling in silences here. Trujillo and Company didn’t leave a paper trail—they didn’t share their German contemporaries’ lust for documentation. And it’s not like the fukú itself would leave a memoir or anything. The remaining Cabrals ain’t much help, either; on all matters related to Abelard’s imprisonment and to the subsequent destruction of the clan there is within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations, that sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction. A whisper here and there but nothing more.
    Which is to say if you’re looking for a full story, I don’t have it. Oscar searched for it too, in his last days, and it’s not certain whether he found it either.

    Let’s be honest, though. The rap about The Girl Trujillo Wanted is a pretty common one on the Island. 29 As common as krill. (Not that krill is too common on the Island but you get the drift.) So common that Mario Vargas Llosa didn’t have to do much except open his mouth to sift it out of the air. There’s one of these bellaco tales in almost everybody’s hometown. It’s one of those easy stories because in essence it explains it all . Trujillo took your houses, your properties, put your pops and your moms in jail? Well, it was because he wanted to fuck the beautiful daughter of the house! And your family wouldn’t let him!

    Shit really is perfect. Makes for plenty of fun reading.
    But there’s another, less-known, variant of the Abelard vs. Trujillo narrative. A secret history that claims that Abelard didn’t get in trouble because of his daughter’s culo or because of an imprudent joke.
    This version contends that he got in trouble because of a book.
    (Cue the theremin, please.)
    Sometime in 1944 (so the story goes), while Abelard was still worried about whether he was in trouble with Trujillo, he started writing a book about—what else?—Trujillo. By 1945 there was already a tradition of ex-officials writing tell-all books about the Trujillo regime. But that apparently was not the kind of book Abelard was writing. His shit, if we are to believe the whispers, was an exposé of the supernatural roots of the Trujillo regime! A book about the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which Abelard argued that the tales the common people told about the president—that he was supernatural, that he was not human—may in some ways have been true . That it was possible that Trujillo was, if not in fact, then in principle, a creature from another world!
    I only wish I could have read that thing. (I know Oscar did too.) That shit would have been one wild motherfucking ride. Alas, the grimoire in question (so the story goes) was conveniently destroyed after Abelard was arrested. No copies survive. Not his wife or his children knew about its existence, either. Only one of the servants who helped him collect the folktales on the sly, etc., etc. What can I tell you? In Santo Domingo a story is not a story unless it casts a supernatural shadow. It was one of those fictions with a lot of disseminators but no believers. Oscar, as you might imagine, found this version of the Fall very very attractive. Appealed to the deep structures in his nerd brain. Mysterious books, a supernatural, or perhaps alien, dictator who had installed himself on the