The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

and paquetes, and pilots fear for their planes—overburdened beyond belief—and for themselves; restaurants, bars, clubs, theaters, malecones, beaches, resorts, hotels, moteles, extra rooms, barrios, colonias, campos, ingenios swarm with quisqueyanos from the world over. Like someone had sounded a general reverse evacuation order: Back home, everybody! Back home! From Washington Heights to Roma, from Perth Amboy to Tokyo, from Brijeporr to Amsterdam, from Lawrence to San Juan; this is when basic thermodynamic principle gets modified so that reality can now reflect a final aspect, the picking-up of big-assed girls and the taking of said to moteles; it’s one big party; one big party for everybody but the poor, the dark, the jobless, the sick, the Haitian, their children, the bateys, the kids that certain Canadian, American, German, and Italian tourists love to rape—yes, sir, nothing like a Santo Domingo summer. And so for the first time in years Oscar said, My elder spirits have been talking to me, Ma. I think I might accompany you. He was imagining himself in the middle of all that ass-getting, imagining himself in love with an Island girl. (A brother can’t be wrong forever, can he?)
    So abrupt a change in policy was this that even Lola quizzed him about it. You never go to Santo Domingo.
    He shrugged. I guess I want to try something new.

THE CONDENSED NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO A NATIVELAND
     
    F amily de León flew down to the Island on the fifteenth of June. Oscar scared shitless and excited, but no one was funnier than their mother, who got done up like she was having an audience with King Juan Carlos of Spain himself. If she’d owned a fur she would have worn it, anything to communicate the distance she’d traveled, to emphasize how not like the rest of these dominicanos she was. Oscar, for one, had never seen her looking so dolled-up and elegante. Or acting so comparona. Belicia giving everybody a hard time, from the check-in people to the flight attendants, and when they settled into their seats in first class (she was paying) she looked around as if scandalized: These are not gente de calidad!
    It was also reported that Oscar drooled on himself and didn’t wake up for the meal or the movie, only when the plane touched down and everybody clapped.
    What’s going on? he demanded, alarmed.
    Relax, Mister. That just means we made it.
    The beat-you-down heat was the same, and so was the fecund tropical smell that he had never forgotten, that to him was more evocative than any madeleine, and likewise the air pollution and the thousands of motos and cars and dilapidated trucks on the roads and the clusters of peddlers at every traffic light (so dark, he noticed, and his mother said, dismissively, Maldito haitianos) and people walking languidly with nothing to shade them from the sun and the buses that charged past so overflowing with passengers that from the outside they looked like they were making a rush delivery of spare limbs to some far-off war and the general ruination of so many of the buildings as if Santo Domingo was the place that crumbled crippled concrete shells came to die—and the hunger on some of the kids’ faces, can’t forget that—but also it seemed in many places like a whole new country was materializing atop the ruins of the old one: there were now better roads and nicer vehicles and brand-new luxury air-conditioned buses plying the longer routes to the Cibao and beyond and U.S. fast-food restaurants (Dunkin’ Donuts and Burger King) and local ones whose names and logos he did not recognize (Pollos Victorina and El Provocón No. 4) and traffic lights everywhere that nobody seemed to heed. Biggest change of all? A few years back La Inca had moved her entire operation to La Capital—we’re getting too big for Baní—and now the family had a new house in Mirador Norte and six bakeries throughout the city’s outer zones. We’re capitaleños, his cousin, Pedro Pablo (who had picked them up at the airport), announced proudly.
    La Inca too had changed since Oscar’s last visit. She had always seemed ageless, the family’s very own Galadriel, but now he could see that it wasn’t true. Nearly all her hair had turned white, and despite her severe unbent carriage, her skin was finely crosshatched with wrinkles and she had to put on glasses to read anything. She was still spry and proud and when she saw him, first time in nearly seven years, she put her hands on his shoulders and