The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

to being lost, and even dreamt about the Burning, how her “father’s” face had turned blank at the moment he picked up the skillet. In her dreams she was never scared. Would only shake her head. You’re gone, she said. No more.
    There was a dream, however, that did haunt her. Where she walked alone through a vast, empty house whose roof was being tattooed by rain. Whose house was it? She had not a clue. But she could hear the voices of children in it.
    At first year’s end, the teacher asked her to come to the board and fill in the date, a privilege that only the “best” children in the class were given. She is a giant at the board and in their minds the children are calling her what they call her in the world: variations on La Prieta Quemada or La Fea Quemada. When Beli sat down the teacher glanced over her scrawl and said, Well done, Señorita Cabral! She would never forget that day, even when she became the Queen of Diaspora.
    Well done, Señorita Cabral!
    She would never forget. She was nine years, eleven months. It was the Era of Trujillo.

    22 . There are other beginnings certainly, better ones, to be sure—if you ask me I would have started when the Spaniards “discovered” the New World—or when the U. S. invaded Santo Domingo in 1916—but if this was the opening that the de Leóns chose for themselves, then who am I to question their historiography?
     
    23 . Hatüey, in case you’ve forgotten, was the Taino Ho Chi Minh. When the Spaniards were committing First Genocide in the Dominican Republic, Hatüey left the Island and canoed to Cuba, looking for reinforcements, his voyage a precursor to the trip Máximo Gómez would take almost three hundred years later. Casa Hatüey was named Hatüey because in Times Past it supposedly had been owned by a descendant of the priest who tried to baptize Hatüey right before the Spaniards burned him at the stake. (What Hatüey said on that pyre is a legend in itself: Are there white people in Heaven? Then I’d rather go to Hell.) History, however, has not been kind to Hatüey. Unless something changes ASAP he will go out like his camarada Crazy Horse. Coffled to a beer, in a country not his own.
     
    24 . But what was even more ironic was that Abelard had a reputation for being able to keep his head down during the worst of the regime’s madness—for unseeing, as it were. In 1937, for example, while the Friends of the Dominican Republic were perejiling Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans and Haitian-looking Dominicans to death, while genocide was, in fact, in the making, Abelard kept his head, eyes, and nose safely tucked into his books (let his wife take care of hiding his servants, didn’t ask her nothing about it) and when survivors staggered into his surgery with unspeakable machete wounds, he fixed them up as best as he could without making any comments as to the ghastliness of their wounds. Acted like it was any other day.
     
    25 . He wished that could also have been the case with his Balaguer contact. In those days the Demon Balaguer had not yet become the Election Thief; was only Trujillo’s Minister of Education—you can see how successful he was at that job—and any chance he got to corner Abelard, he did. He wanted to talk to Abelard about his theories —which were four parts Gobineau, four parts Goddard, and two parts German racial eugenics. The German theories, he assured Abelard, were all the rage on the Continent. Abelard nods. I see. (But, you ask, who was the smarter? No comparison. In a Tables and Ladders match, Abelard, the Cerebro del Cibao, would have 3D’d the “Genio de Genocidio” in about two seconds flat.)
     
    26 . After Trujillo launched the 1937 genocide of Haitian and Haitian-Dominicans, you didn’t see that many Haitian types working in the DR. Not until at least the late fifties. Esteban was the exception because (a) he looked so damn Dominican, and (b) during the genocide, Socorro had hidden him inside her daughter Astrid’s dollhouse. Spent four days in there, cramped up like a brown-skinned Alice.
     
    27 . Anthony may have isolated Peaksville with the power of his mind, but Trujillo did0the same with the power of his office! Almost as soon as he grabbed the presidency,0the Failed Cattle Thief sealed the country away from the rest of the world—a forced0isolation that we’ll call the Plátano Curtain. As for the country’s historically fluid0border with Haiti—which was more baká than border—the Failed