The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

time inside Casa Hatüey, who was the literal Child of the Apocalypse? What about her? She was not as easy to place as Astrid or Jackie; she was a newborn, after all, and, well, the scuttlebutt around the family has it that as she was so dark no one on Abelard’s side of the family would take her. To make matters worse, she was born bakiní—underweight, sickly. She had problems crying, problems nursing, and no one outside the family wanted the darkchild to live. I know it’s taboo to make this accusation, but I doubt that anybody inside the family wanted her to live, either. For a couple of weeks it was touch and go, and if it hadn’t been for a kindly darkskinned woman named Zoila who gave her some of her own baby’s breastmilk and held her for hours a day she probably wouldn’t have made it. By the end of her fourth month the baby seemed to be staging a comeback. She was still bakiní central, but she was starting to put on weight, and her crying, which before had sounded like a murmur from the grave, was growing more and more piercing. Zoila (who had become a guardian angel of sorts) stroked the baby’s mottled head and declared: Another six months, mi’jita, and you’ll be más fuerte que Lílis.
    Beli didn’t have six months. (Stability was not in our girl’s stars, only Change.) Without any warning a group of Socorro’s distant relatives showed up and claimed the child, tore her clean out of Zoila’s arms (the very same relatives Socorro had happily put behind her when she married Abelard). I suspect these people hadn’t actually intended to take care of the girl for any length of time, were only doing it because they expected some monetary reward from the Cabrals, and when no loot was forthcoming, the Fall was total, the brutos passed the girl on to some even more distant relatives on the outskirts of Azua. And here’s where the trail gets funky. These people in Azua seemed to be some real wack jobs, what my moms calls salvages. After only a month of caring for the unhappy infant, the moms of the family disappeared one afternoon with the baby, and when she returned to her village the baby didn’t. She told her vecinos that the baby had died. Some people believed her. Beli, after all, had been ailing for a while. The tiniest little negrita on the planet. Fukú, part three. But most folks figured that she had sold the girl to some other family. Back then, as now, the buying and selling of children, common enough.
    And that’s exactly what happened. Like a character in one of Oscar’s fantasy books, the orphan (who may or may not have been the object of a supernatural vendetta) was sold to complete strangers in another part of Azua. That’s right—she was sold. Became a criada, a restavek. Lived anonymously among the poorest sectors on the Island, never knowing who her real people were, and subsequently she was lost from sight for a long long time. 31

THE BURNING
     
    T he next time she appears is in 1955. As a whisper in La Inca’s ear.
    I think we should be very clear and very honest about La Inca’s disposition during the period we have been calling the Fall. Despite some claims that she was living in exile in Puerto Rico during the Fall, La Inca was in fact in Baní, isolated from her family, mourning the death of her husband three years earlier. (Point of clarification for the conspiracy-minded: his death occurred before the Fall, so he was definitely not a victim of it.) Those early years of her mourning had been bad; her hubby the only person she had ever loved, who had ever really loved her, and they’d been married only months before he passed. She was lost in the wilderness of her grief, so when word came down that her cousin Abelard was in Big Trouble with Trujillo, La Inca, to her undying shame, did nothing. She was in such pain. What could she have done? When news reached her of the death of Socorro and the dispersal of the daughters, she still, to her everlasting shame, did nothing. Let the rest of the family figure it out. It wasn’t until she heard that both Jackie and Astrid had passed that she finally pulled herself out of her malaise long enough to realize that dead husband or no dead husband, mourning or no mourning, she had failed utterly in her responsibility toward her cousin, who had always been kind to her, and who had supported her marriage when the rest of the family did not. This revelation both shamed and mortified La Inca. She got herself cleaned up and went