The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Yunior returns as the narrator as the setting shifts to the Dominican Republic in the 1950s. Here, he stylizes himself as a semi-omniscient storyteller akin to Uatu the Watcher, a character from the The Fantastic Four and other Marvel Comics.

When Belicia is only a few weeks old, her father, Abelard Cabral, is imprisoned by the Trujillo regime. The family is broken apart, and Belicia ends up an orphan in the care of a string of abusive foster parents. At the age of nine, Belicia is finally recovered by her father’s cousin La Inca, a widow who raises the girl as her daughter. When La Inca finds Belicia, the girl is locked in a chicken coop with horrific, life-threatening burns on her back.

After young Belicia recovers, the two live in Baní, where La Inca owns and operates a successful bakery. Through Belicia, La Inca hopes to recapture the glory of the Cabral family name. She pulls strings to have Belicia sent to El Redentor, one of the city’s top private schools, and constantly reminds the girl that her father was one of the most respected doctors in the Dominican Republic. Belicia, with the same restlessness that will afflict her daughter a generation later, resists La Inca’s efforts to transform her into a proper gentlewoman. Moreover, Belicia’s dark skin makes her feel like an outcast among the light-skinned sons and daughters of the Trujillo regime’s elite who attend El Redentor.

As La Inca dreams of Belicia becoming a doctor, Belicia can think of nothing but boys—particularly her classmate Jack Pujols, the son of one of Trujillo’s top air force colonels. Handsome and cocky, Jack will later align himself with the murderous dictator Joaquín Balaguer, Yunior points out. Belicia is invisible to Jack until her sophomore year, when she undergoes puberty and acquires, in Yunior’s words, “that body that made her famous in Baní” (91).

Before long, Jack is giving Belicia rides in his Mercedes and having sex with her in the supply closet at El Redentor. This goes on for a month until a teacher discovers them in the closet. Scandal erupts, as Belicia learns that Jack is engaged to the daughter of another prominent family in Baní. Jack’s father sends him to military school in Puerto Rico, and Belicia loses her scholarship, ending La Inca’s hopes of transforming her adoptive daughter into a respected member of the community worthy of the Cabral family name.

From this point forward, Belicia adopts a fiercely defiant streak of independence. Rather than return to school, she gets a job as a waitress at a local Chinese restaurant run by the Then Brothers, Juan and José. As much as this decision upsets La Inca, she can never exercise a firm hand against Belicia, in large part because of the pity and shame she felt upon first discovering her close to death in the chicken coop.

After 18 months at the restaurant, during which Belicia continues to pine for Jack despite numerous suitors, she befriends a new waitress named Constantina. One night, Belicia accompanies Constantina to a dance club. There, a handsome, well-dressed man in his thirties whom Yunior refers to as “the Gangster” asks to buy Belicia a drink. When she turns away, the Gangster grabs her arm and asks, “Where are you going, morena?” (115)—“morena” being a slang term for a dark-skinned Dominican woman. Outraged, Belicia shrieks and erupts into a flurry of violence, throwing anything she can get her hands on and hitting him repeatedly with her fists. When she is done, the Gangster points to his lips and says, “You missed a spot” (116).

Over the next few days, Belicia complains about the man’s rudeness nonstop until Constantina points out her fixation. Shortly thereafter, Belicia insists on returning to the club, where she quickly finds the Gangster and asks him to dance.

Yunior writes that the Gangster rose from poverty to become a significant player in Trujillo’s regime by infiltrating unions and killing his first “communist” by the age of 14. From there, he worked on behalf of a series of Trujillo flunkies, engaging in theft, extortion, forgery, money laundering, and assassination. By 22, he operated brothels across the country, trafficking in women from Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela. At the time he meets Belicia, the gangster is reeling from Fidel Castro’s revolution and the fall of Cuba’s US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, an ally of Trujillo’s.

Although the Gangster’s age gives Belicia pause, she falls hard for his tenderness and attentiveness in bed, particularly relative to Jack. Moreover, he takes her to all the nicest restaurants and introduces her to all the major political figures in Baní. His promises—like that they he will buy a 10-room house for them to live in together—blind her to the troubling fact that she has never been to his home and that they never meet for sex anywhere other than motels.

As Trujillo begins to lose his grip on the country, forcing the Gangster to be away for longer periods of time, Belicia learns she is pregnant. The Gangster is less than thrilled about this news, an attitude which makes more sense to Belicia when she finally learns he is married. What’s more, the Gangster is married to Trujillo’s sister, a woman who is nearly as feared and pitiless as Trujillo himself.

Two days after learning that a young woman is pregnant with her husband’s baby, Trujillo’s sister—known as “La Fea” or “the ugly woman”—sends two of her henchmen to grab Belicia and take her to an abortionist. As the henchmen try to force her into a car, Belicia sees José and shouts to him. José and a group of others from the restaurant fight off the henchmen, and Belicia escapes.

Rather than go into hiding, Belicia deceives herself into believing the Gangster will save her. A few days later, the henchmen go to her house, handcuff her, and force her into a car before La Inca can intervene. Frightened and devastated, La Inca collapses to her knees before a portrait of La Virgen de Altagracia, the patron saint of the Dominican Republic, and prays like she has never prayed before. She is soon joined by over a dozen other women in her neighborhood.

Meanwhile, the henchmen drive Belicia to the canefields outside town. On the way, she sees a Man Without a Face standing outside the car. Once in the canefields, the henchmen beat Belicia within an inch of her life, breaking her clavicle, her humerus, and five of her ribs. She suffers internal bleeding, a collapsed lung, and several knocked-out teeth. Yunior infers that the henchmen also raped her, but that is impossible to know because Belicia would never talk about something like that.

Yunior admits that he cannot vouch for what happens next. Belicia wakes up alone in the canefields in excruciating pain. A mongoose with golden eyes appears and guides her to the main road by singing to her in a woman’s voice. On the road, she is discovered by a troupe of merengue musicians. They bring her back to town, where La Inca, through her connections within the medical community, secures the best doctors to come to her house and treat Belicia. After five days in a coma, Belicia wakes up screaming at the loss of her baby. That same night, Trujillo is gunned down by assassins, an act of zafa Yunior likens to the demise of Sauron, the main antagonist of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series.

Over the next few months, La Inca makes all the necessary arrangements to have Belicia sent to New York. Although the henchmen occasionally emerge with vague threats, they never attack her, perhaps because they fear retribution after the fall of Trujillo. Belicia and the Gangster meet one last time in a motel, where they have sex and he encourages her to move to New York.

Eighteen days later, Belicia is on a plane. The stranger sitting next to her will later become her husband and Lola and Oscar’s father. He, too, will break her heart, leaving her after three years.