The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Book 2, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

The Famous Doctor. Yunior takes over the narration again, offering yet another possible start to the sad tale of Oscar Wao with Oscar’s maternal grandfather Abelard Cabral. A footnote explains that this is the beginning that the de Leóns always use for themselves, even though several more beginnings (going as far back as the Spanish “discovery” of America) are possible.

Abelard was a surgeon and his family was very well-to-do, living in a mansion called Casa Hatüey and enjoying the luxury of an elite social standing in the DR. Abelard’s two daughters, Astrid and Jacquelyn, enjoy the summer at their ranch house on the beach, but Abelard’s wife must avoid getting a tan at all costs because her skin is already so dark.

Abelard’s reputation as a scholar, and his interests in studying languages, rare books, and inventions, mark him as eccentric in Dominican society. He encourages his daughters to study and holds evenings of discussion and debate in his parlor, despite the danger in appearing revolutionary during the reign of Trujillo. A footnote explains that Abelard was skilled at keeping his head down to stay out of trouble, never speaking out against any of Trujillo’s atrocities and quietly helping stitch up machete victims without ever asking how these men were injured. Abelard fakes enthusiasm for Trujillo when he must and tries to stay out of his way as much as possible. Another footnote laments that Abelard could not stay away from Balaguer, Trujillo’s right hand man, who always wanted to discuss theories of German racial eugenics and asked for Abelard’s medical perspective.

Unfortunately for Abelard, his oldest daughter Jacquelyn blossoms into a beauty who might dangerously capture Trujillo’s attention. According to Yunior, one of Trujillo’s most “Dominican” qualities was that he believed all beautiful women on the island belonged to him to do with as he pleased. Abelard reacts “bravely” by not immediately handing Jacquelyn over to Trujillo, but instead locks her in the house. Trujillo’s spies make it unlikely that Jacquelyn will remain unfound, but Abelard remains hopeful.

Jacquelyn (Jackie) knows none of the danger she is in and blissfully studies French with her father and their Haitian servant. Yunior compares the Cabral women to Hobbits, blissfully unaware of Sauron. Jackie starts each morning by writing out “Tarde venientibus ossa” (To the latecomers are left the bones).

Abelard shares his worries for their daughter with three people. First, he tells his wife, Socorro, who is both an incredible beauty and an intelligent nurse capable of helping Abelard with surgery. Socorro ignores the fact that Trujillo may be a problem, but keeps Jacquelyn out of sight anyway. Abelard also tells his mistress, Lydia Abenader, a woman who had previously rejected Abelard’s offer of marriage but sleeps with him now that she is a widow. Finally, Abelard accidentally tells his neighbor Marcus Applegate Román, one night as they are driving home together from a presidential event. It is dangerous to tell Marcus, as no one in these times can be trusted not to go to the Secret Police with news of treason, but Marcus just tells Abelard to have uglier daughters. Lydia tells Abelard to send his daughter to Cuba, but Abelard is too scared to take any course of action.

A year passes, and Abelard attends another event in honor of the president. Trujillo stops him, joking that he might become a maricón (gay man) if he doesn’t bring his wife to these events. Abelard is terrified already, but Trujillo goes further, asking if the rumors of Abelard’s beautiful daughter are true. Abelard thinks quickly and responds that his daughter is only beautiful if women with mustaches are considered attractive. Luckily, Trujillo laughs instead of accusing Abelard of treason. When Abelard gets home, his wife thanks God for the inspiration, but Abelard is not so sure where the impulse to lie came from.

And So? For three months, Abelard waits for Trujillo to ask about his family again. The worry affects his health, his job, his family life, and his sex life with his mistress. Another month passes and Abelard lets himself think they may be safe.

Santo Domingo Confidential. Yunior compares living in Santo Domingo during Trujillo’s regime to a “Twilight Zone” episode. Each citizen must pretend that every action the president makes is good, no matter how terrible he becomes. His spy network, control over his people, and ability to isolate his country from the rest of the world—which Yunior calls the “Plátano Curtain” (plátano means banana or plantain)—were practically unparalleled. A footnote shares an anecdote about a graduate student who, on an exam, reduced all of world history to the Dominican Republic during the era of Trujillo, yet passed the exam simply because he had mentioned Trujillo. Yunior also explains the culture of secrecy among Dominicans during this age, because it was impossible to tell if anyone was a member of the Secret Police and ready to throw their neighbors into state prison for treason on a whim. All of this power is attributed to Trujillo’s evil deal with fukú.

Despite the intense fear that Trujillo inspired, Yunior reminds us that there were people who resisted. Abelard, however, has no designs for revolution and simply wants to tend his patients and care for his family in peace. Whenever anyone begins talking about atrocities Trujillo is committing, Abelard politely changes the subject. Abelard predicts that they all just have to stay out of trouble for a couple decades, wait for Trujillo to die, and then help the DR become a true democracy. Yunior informs us that all of these predictions will be false, as Abelard’s luck swiftly changes.

The Bad Thing. In 1945, everything seems to be going well for Abelard. His daughter Jacquelyn is set to leave for a boarding school in Le Havre, France, the next year and will soon be safe from Trujillo’s attention. Yet that February, Abelard receives an invitation to a Presidential Event that specifically calls for his wife and oldest daughter to come as well. He rants and raves to Marcus and Lydia, but keeps it a secret from his wife to avoid causing her panic. Marcus fatalistically advises Abelard to let Trujillo have Jacquelyn, while Lydia blames Abelard for not sending Jacquelyn away when he had the chance. Instead of smuggling his family away now, Abelard waits and worries more.

Abelard starts drinking to cope with the stress of Trujillo’s invitation. Yunior speculates that other Latin American revolutionaries might have overthrown Trujillo then and there, but that Abelard was not that kind of man. Yunior repeats Jacquelyn’s motto: Tarde venientibus ossa (to the latecomers are left the bones). Abelard eventually convinces himself that Trujillo is only testing his loyalty and that everything will be fine if he tells his family nothing and they all just go to the party. Jacquelyn is incredibly excited, but Socorro starts having terrible dreams of a man with no face.

Two days before Trujillo’s party, Lydia tries to convince Abelard to leave with her for Cuba, but he refuses to leave his family. The night of the party, Abelard has an epiphany as he brings the car around and sees his daughter through the window, finally realizing that he can’t deliver his daughter into Trujillo’s reach. He leaves for the party without his wife and daughter. Marcus silently shakes his head as they drive there. As they go through the receiving line, Trujillo asks Abelard why Jacquelyn is not there. Abelard simply says she could not attend, and Trujillo dismisses him. No one at the party will look at him afterwards.

Chiste Apocalyptus (Apocalyptic Gossip). A month after the party, the Secret Police arrest Abelard for slander. The story is that Abelard had drinks with some friends a few days after the party, and then asked them to help him move a chest of drawers he had bought for his wife from the roof of his Packard to the trunk. When they opened the trunk, Abelard allegedly made a joke saying, “No bodies here, Trujillo must have cleaned them out for me.”

In My Humble Opinion. Yunior interjects to say that he thinks this story is completely false, but that it still cost Abelard his life.

The Fall. Abelard spends the night after the (supposed) trunk incident with Lydia, comforting her after she mistakenly thought she was pregnant. Lydia continues to try to convince Abelard to run away with her, but Abelard will never leave his daughters or his safe, predictable life. Yet two weeks later (and two weeks after the US bombed Japan, as Yunior informs us), Socorro dreams of the man with no face standing over her husband, and the next night she sees him standing over their children.

Abelard in Chains. The Secret Police arrest Abelard, refusing to even let him leave a note for his wife and family. At first, the Secret Police (who Yunior calls “SIMians,” despite admitting that this nickname doesn’t actually fit the time period) are polite to Abelard, assuring him that there has been a small misunderstanding that will soon be cleared away. Abelard tries to remain calm, but cannot as he imagines his family taken and raped, and his house burned to the ground.

The Secret Police take Abelard to the Forteleza San Luis, a notorious prison in Trujillo’s regime. The officers take all of Abelard’s possessions and force him to fill out forms in an office. When Abelard tries to complain about how he has been treated, the guard punches him the mouth. When Abelard asks, “Why?” the guard punches him again in the forehead. Abelard begins to cry, and is taken to a general holding cell. The other prisoners harass him for being a gay communist, stealing his clothes and forcing him to sit near the bathroom corner of the cell. They also steal his food for three days, finally allowing him a banana on the fourth. On the fourth day, the guards take him out of the cell, ignoring all of his questions and declarations of good family reputation, and torture him with an electrical machine called the “pulpo” (octopus).

A week later, Socorro finally finds out where Abelard is being held and receives permission to see him. She waits in a latrine room, an intentional humiliation that she bears stoically, and waits to see Abelard. He looks horrific when they bring him out, covered in wounds from the guards and the other prisoners. Socorro, already an anxious woman due to her hard childhood, tries to comfort Abelard as best she can. After the visit, Socorro realizes she is pregnant with their third and final daughter. Yunior asks whether this is a sign of fukú (curse) or zafa (blessing).

Many people speculate whether Abelard actually said anything treasonous about Trujillo. La Inca insists that Abelard did nothing wrong, and was simply framed by enemies of the family, while others say that he probably said something in a moment of drunken stupidity. Still others say that Trujillo put a fukú on the whole family when Abelard denied access to his daughter, causing the whole mess. Yunior remains agnostic, telling us to decide for ourselves what to believe because there are no official memoirs from Trujillo to ask for documentation. However, Yunior does say that the story about keeping a daughter away from Trujillo is too common on the island (and a footnote explains the origin of the myth: an Indian woman named Anacaona who refused to sleep with a Spaniard and brought destruction on herself and her people), and that it too easily explains all the misfortune.

The last possible reason for Abelard’s curse alleges that he wrote a book exposing the supernatural roots of Trujillo’s rise to power. This angered Trujillo enough to arrest Abelard and destroy every book he ever wrote or owned. Yunior explains that this version of Abelard’s fall was Oscar’s personal favorite, as it is closest to the fantasy books that Oscar loved. Yunior also thinks it is strange that Trujillo never went after Jacquelyn, even when Abelard was in prison, and that not a single example of Abelard’s handwriting remains.

The Sentence. No matter why Abelard was sent to prison, he was sentenced to 18 years in February 1946. All of Abelard’s possession are distributed to Trujillo’s minions, including to Marcus – as Yunior reveals that Marcus was one of the men who helped accuse Abelard of slander, even through Abelard considered Marcus his best friend. From then on, the curse left no one in the Cabral family line alone.

Fallout. The first sign of the curse was the birth of Abelard’s third daughter, who was born with pitch-black skin. Socorro committed suicide two months after Beli was born, and the three Cabral daughters were sent away to relatives. Lydia, Abelard’s mistress, died of either grief or cancer soon after. In 1948, Jacquelyn was found dead in her godparents’ pool, having allegedly drowned herself, and her younger sister Astrid was shot in the head in a church in 1951. Abelard actually lived the longest (except for Beli), languishing in a Dominican death camp for 14 years before he died. Yunior refuses to tell us more of Abelard’s experiences, to spare us the pain. Abelard was left brain-dead by a torture called “La Corona,” (the crown) and he died a few days before Trujillo was assassinated.

The Third and Final Daughter. Yunior now circles back to Beli’s fate in all of this madness. Beli was left with a wet-nurse after everyone in the family refused to take a child with such dark skin. When Beli is four months old, Socorro’s relatives come back to claim the baby, then pass her off to other relatives when they realize that all the Cabral fortune has vanished. Beli is then sold to another family in the poorest neighborhood of Santo Domingo as a “criada,” a workhorse maid. Yunior tells in a footnote of a criada he knew when he was little, who did all the housework and was not allowed to attend school. Beli, lost and unaware of who her family is, disappears.

The Burning. In 1955, La Inca hears rumors that the last Cabral daughter is still alive. La Inca was too grief-stricken from the death of her own husband to care for Jacquelyn or Astrid when their mother died, but she has since recovered and opened up a string of bakeries in Baní. The rumor says that this last Cabral daughter was a maid for a family who didn’t want her to attend school, and that her “parents” burned her back with hot oil when she continued to skip work to go to class.

Yunior describes Outer Azua, the neighborhood that Beli now lives in, as the biggest wasteland and the poorest neighborhood in all of the Dominican Republic. La Inca knows she has to rescue this child if she really is the last Cabral, and goes to check out the rumors. La Inca sees Beli’s eyes and knows immediately that Beli is a Cabral. She returns with Beli and begins to raise her, making sure that Beli knows everything about her family’s elite roots.

Forget-Me-Naut. Beli never speaks of the nine years she spent in Outer Azua, preferring to start anew in Baní. Yunior suspects that she never thought about that life at all, embracing the “amnesia” of the island in order to recreate herself.

Sanctuary. La Inca becomes the mother that Beli never had, and makes sure she gets a proper education and comports herself with behavior fit for the family she once belonged to. La Inca never asks about Beli’s life in Outer Azua, speaking instead of the pride of Beli’s ancestors and her real parents. Beli flourishes in this sanctuary, even relishing the small rural school she attends. Beli never knows what Trujillo did to her family and, at this point, she has no idea what is in store for her own life.