This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!

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Navigate the Summary Parts: Part 1: Oscar's childhood Part 2: Sister Lola's story Part 3: Mom Beli's story Part 4: Narrator Yunior's story Part 5: Grandpa Abelard's story Part 6: Oscar in love Part 7: Conclusion

Summary of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Pages 76 -165:

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Chapter 3. The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral 1955-1962. (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  Beli grows up with La Inca, a baker, who takes the place of her mother but is really a cousin on her father's side. Beli's father and mother, a doctor and a nurse, were killed when she was a year old by the dictator Trujillo's men. Beli ended up with a foster family who abused her and set her on fire, leaving a huge scar on her back. Beli remembers little or nothing of these years. Rescued when she was nine years old by La Inca, she grows up spoiled but self-conscious about her dark skin. She wants to escape her boring life and become the wife of a doting rich man.

At thirteen, Beli gets put in a good school where she fends off ridicule through sheer meanness.  Beli is a terrible student and spends her time day-dreaming about good-looking Jack Pujols, a snotty boy who reeks of entitlement because his dad is a colonel with Trujillo's regime.  Jack ignores Beli until his own girlfriend breaks up with him and Beli happens to develop a pair of enormous breasts.  They get caught having sex in a broom closet at school.  Jack gets packed off to military school in Puerto Rico. Beli continues to believe for weeks and weeks his promise to marry her so that they can have lots of children.

Heartbroken, Beli takes a job at a restaurant run by two Chinese brothers Jose and Juan Then. She works hard, never knowing that they've tricked her out of a salary by telling her that waitresses work only for tips.  She's so sexy that clouds of besotted men hang around her like flies, but she treats them all with contempt.

One night she goes with a girlfriend to El Hollywood nightclub and meets the Gangster, a hard-bitten guy in his forties who's high up in the Trujillo administration. He wants to buy her a drink and grabs her arm when she brushes him off. She flies into a tantrum and throws things at him.  They become a couple because she wants a rich man to pamper her, and he's feeling his mortality after barely escaping the fall of Cuba to the Communists. The narrator fills us in on the Gangster's main line of business, prostitution (page 121): "There was something about the binding, selling, and degradation of women that brought out the best in the Gangster; he had an instinct for it, a talent."

Beli falls in love with the Gangster.  He promises to build her big houses in Miami and Havana.  Beli gets a horrible attitude and struts around the neighborhood, heaping contempt upon everyone.  Soon, she thinks, she'll be swept off by the Gangster for a better life. The Chinese brothers get tired of her attitude and fire her. The Gangster sends some guys to threaten them, and they rehire her but treat her coldly so she quits.  The Gangster takes her on vacation to a beach house in Samana, but then leaves with no explanation as he often does, stranding her to get home on her own. 

Then Beli realizes she's pregnant. It turns out the Gangster is already married.  His wife, the evil sister of the dictator Trujillo, waylays Beli in the park and tells her two goons to seize Beli and haul her off to the doctor for a forcible abortion.  The Chinese brothers and all their customers rush out of the restaurant and scare off the wife and her goons, rescuing Beli.  However, Beli makes the mistake of going straight home to La Inca's house. The goons come for Beli again, and she goes out to the car, thinking it's the Gangster come for her at last.  The goons grab her and drive off.

The neighbors inform La Inca that the secret police have kidnapped Beli, and La Inca starts praying.  Meanwhile the goons drive Beli to a remote cane field where they beat and rape her and leave her for dead. She loses her baby.  A mysterious spirit guide known as the Mongoose helps Beli get to the road where a truckload of horrified musicians pick her up and return her to La Inca.

La Inca and other women pray over Beli who gets medical care from some of La Inca's anti-Trujillo friends. Beli wakes up to hear the news that Trujillo has been assassinated.  Even so, the secret police goons keep coming around and threatening to grab Beli again while Beli and La Inca dither and wonder what they should do.  Finally La Inca decides to send Beli by herself to New York City.  On Beli's flight there, she sits next to a man who will turn out to be her husband for the next two years before he breaks her heart and dumps her, leaving her a single mother with two children.
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