The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Nigüa.”
     
    31 . I lived in Santo Domingo only until I was nine, and even I knew criadas. Two of them lived in the callejón behind our house, and these girls were the most demolished, overworked human beings I’d known at that time. One girl, Sobeida, did all the cooking, all the cleaning, fetched all the water, and took care of two infants for a family of eight —and chickie was only seven years old! She never went to school, and if my brother’s first girlfriend, Yohana, hadn’t taken the time—stolen behind her people’s back—to teach her her ABCs, she wouldn’t have known nada. Every year I came home from the States, it was the same thing; quiet hardworking Sobeida would stop in for a second to say a word to my abuelo and my mother (and also to watch a couple of minutes of a novela) before running off to finish her next chore. (My mother always brough her a gift of cash; the one time she brought her a dress, her “people” were wearing it the next day.) I tried to talk to her, of course—Mr. Community Activist—but she would skitter away from me and my stupid questions. What can you two talk about? my moms demanded. La probrecita can’t even write her own name. And then when she was fifteen, one of the callejón idiots knocked her up, and now, my mother tells me, the family has got her kid working for them too, bringing in the water for his mother.
     
    32 . Those of you who know the Island (or are familiar with Kinito Méndez’s oeuvre) know exactly the landscape I’m talking about. These are not the campos that your folks rattle on about. These are not the guanábana campos of our dreams. Outer Azua is one of the poorest areas in the DR; it is a wasteland, our own homegrown sertão, resembled the irradiated terrains from those end-of-the-world scenarios that Oscar loved so much—Outer Azua was the Outland, the Badlands, the Cursed Earth, the Forbidden Zone, the Great Wastes, the Desert of Glass, the Burning Lands, the Doben-al, it was Salusa Secundus, it was Ceti Alpha Six, it was Tatooine. Even the residents could have passed for survivors of some not-so-distant holocaust. The poor ones—and it was with these infelices that Beli had lived—often wore rags, walked around barefoot, and lived in homes that looked like they’d been constructed from the detritus of the former world. If you would have dropped Astronaut Taylor amongst these folks he would have fallen to the ground and bellowed, You finally did it! (No, Charlton, it’s not the End of the World, it’s just Outer Azua.) The only non-thorn non-insect non-lizard life-forms that thrived at these latitudes were the Alcoa mining operations and the region’s famous goats (los que brincan las Himalayas y cagan en la bandera de España).
     
Outer Azua was a dire wasteland indeed. My moms, a contemporary of Belicia, spent a record-breaking fifteen years in Outer Azua. And while her childhood was far nicer than Beli’s she nevertheless reports that in the early fifties these precincts were full of smoke, inbreeding, intestinal worms, twelve-year-old brides, and full-on whippings. Families were Glasgow-ghetto huge because, she claims, there was nothing to do after dark and because infant mortality rates were so extreme and calamities so vast you needed a serious supply of reinforcements if you expected your line to continue. A child who hadn’t escaped a close brush with Death was looked at askance. (My mom survived a rheumatic fever that killed her favorite cousin; by the time her own fever broke and she regained consciousness, my abuelos had already bought the coffin they expected to bury her in.)

SIX
     

Land of the Lost 1992–1995
     
     

THE DARK AGE
     
    A fter graduation Oscar moved back home. Left a virgin, returned one. Took down his childhood posters— Star Blazers, Captain Harlock —and tacked up his college ones— Akira and Terminator 2. Now that Reagan and the Evil Empire had ridden off into never-never land, Oscar didn’t dream about the end no more. Only about the Fall. He put away his Aftermath! game and picked up Space Opera.
    These were the early Clinton years but the economy was still sucking an eighties cock and he kicked around, doing nada for almost seven months, went back to subbing at Don Bosco whenever one of the teachers got sick. (Oh, the irony!) He started sending his stories and novels out, but no one seemed interested. Still, he kept trying and kept writing. A year later the substituting turned