bakery, La Inca’s suffocating solicitude with a furious jaw. She watched hungrily for visitors from out of town, threw open her arms at the slightest hint of a wind and at night she struggled Jacob-like against the ocean pressing down on her.
KIMOTA!
So what happened? A boy happened.
Her First.
NÚMERO UNO
Jack Pujols of course: the school’s handsomest (read: whitest) boy, a haughty slender melnibonian of pure European stock whose cheeks looked like they’d been knapped by a master and whose skin was unflawed by scar, mole, blemish, or hair, his small nipples were the pink perfect ovals of sliced salchicha. His father was a colonel in the Trujillato’s beloved air force, a heavy duty player in Baní (would be instrumental in bombing the capital during the revolution, killing all those helpless civilians, including my poor uncle Venicio), and his mother, a former beauty queen of Venezuelan proportions, now active in the Church, a kisser of cardinal rings and a socorro of orphans. Jack, Eldest Son, Privileged Seed, Hijo Bello, Anointed One, revered by his female family members — and that endless monsoon — rain of praise and indulgence had quickened in him the bamboo of entitlement. He had the physical swagger of a boy twice his size and an unbearable loudmouthed cockiness that he drove into people like a metal spur. In the future he would throw his lot in with the Demon Balaguer↓ and end up ambassador to Panama as his reward, but for the moment he was the school’s Apollo, its Mithra.
≡ Although not essential to our tale, per se, Balaguer is essential to the Dominican one, so therefore we must mention him, even though I’d rather piss in his face. The elders say, Anything uttered for the first time summons a demon , and when twentieth century Dominicans first uttered the word freedom en masse the demon they summoned was Balaguer. (Known also as the Election Thief — see the 1966 election in the DR — and the Homunculus.) In the days of the Trujillato, Balaguer was just one of El Jefe’s more efficient ring wraiths. Much is made of his intelligence (he certainly impressed the Failed Cattle Thief) and of his asceticism (when he raped his little girls he kept it real quiet). After Trujillo’s death he would take over Project Domo and rule the country from 1960 to 1962, from 1966 to 1978, and again from 1986 to 1996 (by then dude was blind as a bat, a living mummy). During the second period of his rule, known locally as the Twelve Years, he unleashed a wave of violence against the Dominican left, death-squading hundreds and driving thousands more out of the country. It was he who oversaw/initiated the thing we call Diaspora. Considered our national ‘genius’, Joaquin Balaguer was a Negrophobe, an apologist to genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself, famously ordering the death of journalist Orlando Martinez. Later, when he wrote his memoirs, he claimed he knew who had done the foul deed (not him, of course) and left a blank page, a página en blanco, in the text to be filled in with the truth upon his death. (Can you say impunity? ) Balaguer died in 2002. The página is still blanca. Appeared as a sympathetic character in Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat . Like most homunculi he did not marry and left no heirs.
The teachers, the staff: the girls, the boys, all threw petals of adoration beneath his finely arched feet: he was proof positive that God — the Great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! — does not love his children equally.
And how did Beli interact with this insane object of attraction? In a way that is fitting of her bullheaded directness: she would march down the hallway, books pressed to her pubescent chest, staring down at her feet, and, pretending not to see him, would smash into his hallowed vessel.
Caramb —, he spluttered, wheeling about, and then he’d see it was Belicia, a girl, now stooping over to
KIMOTA!
So what happened? A boy happened.
Her First.
NÚMERO UNO
Jack Pujols of course: the school’s handsomest (read: whitest) boy, a haughty slender melnibonian of pure European stock whose cheeks looked like they’d been knapped by a master and whose skin was unflawed by scar, mole, blemish, or hair, his small nipples were the pink perfect ovals of sliced salchicha. His father was a colonel in the Trujillato’s beloved air force, a heavy duty player in Baní (would be instrumental in bombing the capital during the revolution, killing all those helpless civilians, including my poor uncle Venicio), and his mother, a former beauty queen of Venezuelan proportions, now active in the Church, a kisser of cardinal rings and a socorro of orphans. Jack, Eldest Son, Privileged Seed, Hijo Bello, Anointed One, revered by his female family members — and that endless monsoon — rain of praise and indulgence had quickened in him the bamboo of entitlement. He had the physical swagger of a boy twice his size and an unbearable loudmouthed cockiness that he drove into people like a metal spur. In the future he would throw his lot in with the Demon Balaguer↓ and end up ambassador to Panama as his reward, but for the moment he was the school’s Apollo, its Mithra.
≡ Although not essential to our tale, per se, Balaguer is essential to the Dominican one, so therefore we must mention him, even though I’d rather piss in his face. The elders say, Anything uttered for the first time summons a demon , and when twentieth century Dominicans first uttered the word freedom en masse the demon they summoned was Balaguer. (Known also as the Election Thief — see the 1966 election in the DR — and the Homunculus.) In the days of the Trujillato, Balaguer was just one of El Jefe’s more efficient ring wraiths. Much is made of his intelligence (he certainly impressed the Failed Cattle Thief) and of his asceticism (when he raped his little girls he kept it real quiet). After Trujillo’s death he would take over Project Domo and rule the country from 1960 to 1962, from 1966 to 1978, and again from 1986 to 1996 (by then dude was blind as a bat, a living mummy). During the second period of his rule, known locally as the Twelve Years, he unleashed a wave of violence against the Dominican left, death-squading hundreds and driving thousands more out of the country. It was he who oversaw/initiated the thing we call Diaspora. Considered our national ‘genius’, Joaquin Balaguer was a Negrophobe, an apologist to genocide, an election thief, and a killer of people who wrote better than himself, famously ordering the death of journalist Orlando Martinez. Later, when he wrote his memoirs, he claimed he knew who had done the foul deed (not him, of course) and left a blank page, a página en blanco, in the text to be filled in with the truth upon his death. (Can you say impunity? ) Balaguer died in 2002. The página is still blanca. Appeared as a sympathetic character in Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat . Like most homunculi he did not marry and left no heirs.
The teachers, the staff: the girls, the boys, all threw petals of adoration beneath his finely arched feet: he was proof positive that God — the Great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! — does not love his children equally.
And how did Beli interact with this insane object of attraction? In a way that is fitting of her bullheaded directness: she would march down the hallway, books pressed to her pubescent chest, staring down at her feet, and, pretending not to see him, would smash into his hallowed vessel.
Caramb —, he spluttered, wheeling about, and then he’d see it was Belicia, a girl, now stooping over to
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