The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

sent to her wealthy godparents in La Capital, while Astrid ended up with relatives in San Juan de la Maguana.
    They never saw each other or their father again.
    Even those among you who don’t believe in fukús of any kind might have wondered what in Creation’s name was going on. Shortly after Socorro’s horrible accident, Esteban the Gallo, the family’s number-one servant, was fatally stabbed outside a cabaret; the attackers were never found. Lydia perished soon after, some say of grief, others of a cancer in her womanly parts. Her body was not found for months. After all, she lived alone.
    In 1948, Jackie, the family’s Golden Child, was found drowned in her godparents’ pool. The pool that had been drained down to its last two feet of water. Up to that point she’d been unflaggingly cheerful, the sort of talkative negra who could have found a positive side to a mustard-gas attack. Despite her traumas, despite the circumstances around her separation from her parents, she disappointed no one, exceeded all expectations. She was number one in her class academically, beating out even the private-school children of the American Colony, so off-the-hook intelligent she made a habit of correcting her teachers’ mistakes on exams. She was captain of the debate team, captain of the swim team, and in tennis had no equal, was fucking golden. But never got over the Fall or her role in it, was how people explained it. (Though how odd is it that she was accepted to medical school in France three days before she “killed herself ” and from all evidence couldn’t wait to be gone from Santo Domingo.)
    Her sister, Astrid—we scarcely knew you, babe—wasn’t much luckier. In 1951, while praying in a church in San Juan, where she lived with her tíos, a stray bullet flew down the aisle and struck her in the back of the head, killing her instantly. No one knew where the bullet had come from. No one even recalled hearing a weapon discharge.
    Of the original family quartet, Abelard lived the longest. Which is ironic since nearly everyone in his circle, including La Inca, believed the government when they announced in 1953 that he was dead. (Why did they do this? Because.) It was only after he died for real that it was revealed that he’d been in Nigüa prison all along. Served fourteen straight years in Trujillo’s justice. What a nightmare. 30 A thousand tales I could tell you about Abelard’s imprisonment—a thousand tales to wring the salt from your motherfucking eyes —but I’m going to spare you the anguish, the torture, the loneliness, and the sickness of those fourteen wasted years, spare you in fact the events and leave you with only the consequences (and you should wonder, rightly, if I’ve spared you anything).
    In 1960, at the height of the clandestine resistance movement against Trujillo, Abelard underwent a particularly gruesome procedure. He was manacled to a chair, placed out in the scorching sun, and then a wet rope was cinched cruelly about his forehead. It was called La Corona, a simple but horribly effective torture. At first the rope just grips your skull, but as the sun dries and tightens it, the pain becomes unbearable, would drive you mad. Among the prisoners of the Trujillato few tortures were more feared. Since it neither killed you nor left you alive. Abelard survived it but was never the same. Turned him into a vegetable. The proud flame of his intellect extinguished. For the rest of his short life he existed in an imbecilic stupor, but there were prisoners who remembered moments when he seemed almost lucid, when he would stand in the fields and stare at his hands and weep, as if recalling that there was once a time when he had been more than this. The other prisoners, out of respect, continued to call him El Doctor. It was said he died a couple of days before Trujillo was assassinated. Buried in an unmarked grave somewhere outside of Nigüa. Oscar visited the site on his last days. Nothing to report. Looked like every other scrabby field in Santo Domingo. He burned candles, left flowers, prayed, and went back to his hotel. The government was supposed to have erected a plaque to the dead of Nigüa Prison, but they never did.

THE THIRD AND FINAL DAUGHTER
     
    W hat about the third and final daughter, Hypatía Belicia Cabral, who was only two months old when her mother died, who never met her father, who was held by her sisters only a few times before they too disappeared, who spent no