Considered our national "genius," Joaquín 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 Martínez. Later, when he wrote his memoirs, he claimed to have known who had done the foul deed (not him, of course) and left a blank page, a página en blanco [blank page], in the text to be filled in with the truth upon his death. (1.3.5.1)

Beli, who'd been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent over the moon by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. [...]. Hypatía Belicia Cabral finally had power and a true sense of self. Started pinching her shoulders back, wearing the tightest clothes she had. Dios mío, La Inca said every time the girl headed out. (1.3.5.15)

The next thing you know he was giving her rides in his brand-new Mercedes and buying her helados [ice cream] with the knot of dollars he carried in his pocket. Legally, he was too young to drive, but do you think anybody in Santo Domingo stopped a colonel's son for anything? Especially the son of a colonel who was said to be one of Ramfis Trujillo's confidantes? (1.3.6.13)

Johnny Abbes Garía was one of Trujillo's beloved Morgul Lords. [...]. After Trujillo's death, Abbes [...] ended up working for that other Caribbean nightmare, the Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Wasn't nearly as loyal to Papa Doc as he was to Trujillo—after an attempted double-cross Papa Doc shot Abbes and his family and the blew their f***ing house up. (I think P. Daddy knew exactly what kind of creature he was dealing with.) No Dominican believes that Abbes died in that blast. He is said to still be out there in the world, waiting for the next coming of El Jefe, when he too will rise from the Shadow. (1.3.7.40)

The world was coming apart at the seams—Santo Domingo was in the middle of a total meltdown, the Trujillato was tottering, police blockades at every corner—and even the kids she'd gone to school with, the brightest and the best, were being swept up in the Terror. (1.3.9.40)

It's true. The Gangster's wife was—drumroll, please—Trujillo's f***ing sister! Did you really think some street punk from Samaná was going to reach the upper echelons of the Trujillato on hard work alone? Negro, please—this ain't a f***ing comic book! (1.3.14.1)

The Mongoose, one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its greatest travelers. Accompanied humanity out of Africa and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, a.k.a. the Caribbean. Since its earliest appearance in the written record—675 B.C.E., in a nameless scribe's letter to Ashurbanipal's father, Esarhaddon—the Mongoose has proven itself to be an enemy of kingly chariots, chains, and hierarchies. (1.3.18.38)

De la Maza, perhaps thinking of his poor, dead, set-up brother, then took Trujillo's .38 out of his dead hand and shot Trujillo in the face and uttered his now famous words: Éste guaraguao ya no comerá mas pollito [This hawk will not eat any more chicken]. And then the assassins stashed El Jefe's body—where? In the trunk, of course. (1.3.20.17)

In the days of the Trujillato, Belaguer was just one of El Jefe's more efficient ringwraiths. Much is made of his intelligence (he certainly impressed the Failed Cattle Thief) and of his asceticism (when he raped 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). (1.3.5.1)

Let me tell you, True Believers: in the annals of Dominican piety there has never been prayer like this. The rosaries cabling through La Inca's fingers like line flying through a doomed fisherman's hands. And before you could say Holy! Holy! Holy! she was joined by a flock of women, young and old [...]." (1.3.17.3)

And now we arrive at the strangest part of our tale. Whether what follows was a figment of Beli's wrecked imagination or something else altogether I cannot say. Even your Watcher has his silences, his páginas en blanco [blank pages]. [...]. So as Beli was flitting in and out of life, there appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt. This one was quite large for its species and placed its intelligent little paws on her chest and stared down at her. (1.3.18.15)

There are still many, on and off the Island, who offer Beli's near-fatal beating as irrefutable proof that the house of Cabral was indeed victim of a high-level fukú, the local version of House Atreus. Two Truji-líos in one lifetime—what in carajo [the f***] else could it be? But other heads question that logic, arguing that Beli's survival must be evidence to the contrary. Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of canefields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a "mother" with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything, say these heads, it is that our Beli was blessed. (1.3.19.1)

Before there was an American story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatía Belicia Cabral.

a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her

so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked

who, like her yet-to-be-born daughter, would come to exhibit a particularly Jersey malaise—the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres. (1.3.1.1-1.3.1.4)

The Gangster romanced the girl like only middle-aged n*****s know how: chipped at her reservation with cool aplomb and unself-conscious cursí-ness. Rained on her head enough flowers to garland Azua, bonfires of roses at the job and her house. [...]. He escorted her to the most exclusive restaurants of the capital, took her to the clubs that had never tolerated a nonmusician prieta [black girl] inside their door before [...]. (1.3.9.12)

[La Inca:] You don't understand, hija [daughter]. You have to leave the country. They'll kill you if you don't.

Beli laughed.

Oh, Beli; not so rashly, not so rashly: What did you know about states or diasporas? What did you know about Nueba Yol [New York] or unheated "old law" tenements or children whose self-hate short-circuited their minds? What did you know, madame, about immigration? Don't laugh, mi negrita [my little dark one], for your world is about to be changed. (1.3.21.23-1.3.21.25)

She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day's last light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn't yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorías, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. (1.3.22.22)

Our girl had it made, and yet it did not feel so in her heart. For reasons she only dimly understood, by the time of our narrative, Beli could no longer abide working at the bakery or being the "daughter" of one of the "most upstanding women in Baní." She could not abide, period. Everything about her present life irked her; she wanted, with all her heart, something else. (1.3.2.7)

Beli had the inchoate longings of nearly every adolescent escapist, of an entire generation, but I ask you: So f***ing what? No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated. This was a country, a society, that had been designed to be virtually escape-proof. Alcatraz of the Antilles. There weren't any Houdini holes in that Plátano Curtain. (1.3.2.10)

And would have stayed invisible too if the summer of sophomore year she'd not hit the biochemical jackpot, not experienced a Summer of Her Secondary Sex Characteristics, not been transformed utterly (a terrible beauty has been born). Where before Beli had been a gangly ibis of a girl, pretty in a typical sort of way, by summer's end she'd become un mujerón total [full-grown woman], acquiring that body of hers that made her famous in Baní. (1.3.5.9)

Later, after [Beli'd] been with The Gangster, she would realize how little respect Pujols had for her. But since she had nothing to compare it to at this time she assumed f***ing was supposed to feel like she was being run through with a cutlass. The first time she was scared s***less and it hurt bad (4d10), but nothing could obliterate the feeling she had that finally she was on her way, the sense of a journey starting, of a first step taken, of the beginning of something big. (1.3.7.1)