Beli Cabral's Heartbreaks

Beli’s Heartbreaks

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a book that deeply focuses on the past and present. The book goes back and forth between the two. If the reader just read the parts of the book that talked about the present, they would not understand why everyone in the DR feared Trujillo, or they might not understand why some characters act the way the act in the present.

At the beginning, one of the first characters we meet is Beli Cabral.

At first, she seems like a rude unloving mother. We get a better understanding of Beli by how Lola describes her. Lola spends a lot of time describing how big her mother’s breast are, as if that’s the only good quality she thinks her mother has. “One of the wonders of the world.” (51) She then goes on to say how even with her mother’s one good quality her farther still left her. “But given the fact that he ran off on her after their third year of marriage, it seemed in the end he could.

” (52) One time Lola, tries to run away from her, in the process she knocks Beli down. Beli begins to cry and Lola can’t help but fill sorry for her. So, she turns around to help her and then she finds out Beli was faking the whole thing. Beli then grabs Lola and says “Ya te tengo, she said jumping triumphantly to her feet.” This makes Beli look like an uncaring and maybe terrible mother for tricking and scaring her daughter like that.

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It may also make her look like some kind of monster in some ways. Like how in some books monsters like to hide and grab and scare people at the last minute. This might hint at that there were some “monsters” Beli had to deal with in her past.

Then there is another time when Beli tells Lola “Cono pero tu si eres fea”. This might relate back to when Beli was younger and undeveloped. People thought Beli was ugly when she was younger. Beli might be telling Lola this because she was told the same thing when she was younger. Chapter three is all about Beli’s past, we find out by just reading the title “The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral” that this character has probably had a rough and difficult time in her youth years. If this does not convince someone that Beli is a troubled character then the second paragraph of the chapter should. “This was the lovely Bani of times past, beautiful and respectful. A city famed for its resistance to blackness, and it was here, alas, that the darkest character in our story resided.” (78) It is describing Bani, the town Beli grew up in, a beautiful and respectful place. A place that resisted darkness and did not have the fear of Trujillo. Yet it says it is the place where our darkest character lived. To say that Beli is the darkest character after knowing what Oscar is going through is really foreshadowing what Beli will encounter and the type of person she is.

We then learn what may had been the first of many heartbreaks Beli had to endure. “Before 1951, our orphaned girl had lived with another foster family, monstrous people if the rumors are to be believed, a dark period of her life neither she nor madre ever referenced. There very own pagina en bianco.” Finding out that she is an orphan might explain why it seems like she is never happy even though she had a good life living with her aunt. It says her foster family was “monstrous”, this could relate back to the beginning of the book where Beli acted monster like to Lola. It also says “pagina en bianco” which means blank page and it says this was a part of her life she did not even reference too. Her life with her foster parents was so bad that this part in her life was now blank. It was too hard to think about so Beli might had blocked out that part in her life making it a “blank page.”

The chapter then goes on to say how nice the atmosphere is where Beli is living. “Theirs was the life of the Good People of Sur. Church twice a week, and on Fridays a stroll through Bani’s parquet central, where in those nostalgic Trujillo days stickup kids were nowhere to be seen and the beautiful bands did play.” (78) With a place as nice as this it makes the reader wonder why Beli would want to leave Bani. She was in a churchly place and Trujillo’s fear that ran through most of the DR did not seem to matter in the town of Bani.

However, Beli was not satisfied with Bani. “Beli, clearly: one of those Oya-souls, always turning, allergic to tranquilidad. Almost any other Third World girl would have thanked Dios Santisimo for the blessed life she led: after all, she had a madre who didn’t beat her, who spoiled her rotten…. Our girl had it made and yet it did not feel so in her heart.” (79) This basically sums up just how good Beli had it, especially with the word “made” being in italics. It even goes on to say how her aunt did not beat her which foreshadows that she will get beaten in the future. Even though she had what every girl in her position dreamed of, she wanted more. I think if Beli had not have been so greedy her life might had turned out better. She should have been happy with what she had instead of getting herself into a lot of trouble later in her youth years.