The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

about.

FORGET-ME-NAUT
     
    O f those nine years (and of the Burning) Beli did not speak. It seems that as soon as her days in Outer Azua were over, as soon as she reached Baní, that entire chapter of her life got slopped into those containers in which governments store nuclear waste, triple-sealed by industrial lasers and deposited in the dark, uncharted trenches of her soul. It says a lot about Beli that for forty years she never leaked word one about that period of her life: not to her madre, not to her friends, not to her lovers, not to the Gangster, not to her husband. And certainly not to her beloved children, Lola and Oscar. Forty years . What little anyone knows about Beli’s Azua days comes exclusively from what La Inca heard the day she rescued Beli from her so-called parents. Even today La Inca rarely saying anything more than Casi la acabaron .
    In fact, I believe that, barring a couple of key moments, Beli never thought about that life again. Embraced the amnesia that was so common throughout the Islands, five parts denial, five parts negative hallucination. Embraced the power of the Untilles. And from it forged herself anew.

SANCTUARY
     
    B ut enough. What matters is that in Baní, in La Inca’s house, Belicia Cabral found Sanctuary. And in La Inca, the mother she never had. Taught the girl to read, write, dress, eat, behave normally. La Inca a finishing school on fast-forward; for here was a woman with a civilizing mission , a woman driven by her own colossal feelings of guilt, betrayal, and failure. And Beli, despite all that she’d endured (or perhaps because of it), turned out to be a most apt pupil. Took to La Inca’s civilizing procedures like a mongoose to chicken. By the end of Sanctuary’s first year, Beli’s rough lines had been kneaded out; she might have cursed more, had more of a temper, her movements more aggressive and unrestrained, had the merciless eyes of a falcon, but she had the posture and speech (and arrogance) of una muchacha respetable. And when she wore long sleeves the scar was only visible on her neck (the edge of a larger ruination certainly, but greatly reduced by the cut of the cloth). This was the girl who would travel to the U.S. in 1962, whom Oscar and Lola would never know. La Inca the only one to have seen Beli at her beginnings, when she slept fully dressed and screamed in the middle of the night, who saw her before she constructed a better self, one with Victorian table manners and a disgust of filth and poor people.

    Theirs, as you might imagine, was an odd relationship. La Inca never sought to discuss Beli’s time in Azua, would never refer to it, or to the Burning. She pretended it didn’t exist (the same way she pretended that the poor slobs in her barrio didn’t exist when they, in fact, were overrunning the place). Even when she greased the girl’s back, every morning and every night, La Inca only said, Siéntese aquí, señorita. It was a silence, a lack of probing, that Beli found most agreeable. (If only the waves of feeling that would occasionally lap her back could be so easily forgotten.) Instead of talking about the Burning, or Outer Azua, La Inca talked to Beli about her lost, forgotten past, about her father, the famous doctor, about her mother, the beautiful nurse, about her sisters Jackie and Astrid, and about that marvelous castle in the Cibao: Casa Hatüey.
    They may never have become best friends—Beli too furious, La Inca too correct—but La Inca did give Beli the greatest of gifts, which she would appreciate only much later; one night La Inca produced an old newspaper, pointed to a fotograph: This, she said, is your father and your mother. This, she said, is who you are.
    The day they opened their clinic: so young, both of them looking so serious.
    For Beli those months truly were her one and only Sanctuary, a world of safety she never thought possible. She had clothes, she had food, she had time, and La Inca never ever yelled at her. Not for nothing, and didn’t let anybody else yell at her either. Before La Inca enrolled her in Colegio El Redentor with the richies, Beli attended the dusty, fly-infested public school with children three years younger than her, made no friends (she couldn’t have imagined it any other way), and for the first time in her life began to remember her dreams. It was a luxury she’d never dared indulge in, and in the beginning they seemed as powerful as storms. She had the whole variety, from flying