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This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!
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Summary of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Pages 211 - 261:
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Chapter 5. Poor Abelard. 1944-1946. (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Abelard Cabral is a wealthy surgeon who studied in Mexico; he has a wife Socorro who is a brilliant nurse, a devoted mistress named Lydia, and two beautiful daughters named Jacquelyn and Astrid.
The Cabrals prosper as Abelard pretends to be the admiring friend of the dictator Trujillo while avoiding him and ignoring his atrocities as much as possible. But then older daughter Jacquelyn grows up enough to turn into a great beauty. Trujillo, who helps himself to every beautiful woman in the Dominican Republic, starts demanding that Abelard bring wife and daughter to various social functions.
Abelard stalls as long as possible under the pretense that Socorro is so neurotic she cannot go to public functions. He complains about Trujillo to his neighbor Marcus. He ignores his mistress Lydia's advice to send his daughters to safety in Cuba or Europe. He withholds information about the family's predicament from his wife and daughters. Finally he explicitly disobeys a direct order from Trujillo and attends a crucial social function on his own, as usual, without his wife and daughters.
Four weeks later, the secret police arrest Abelard supposedly for making a joke about Trujillo. The neighbor Marcus helps to turn him in. Abelard is hauled off to prison, tortured, given a mock-trial, and sentenced to 14 years in a hellhole of a prison. Eventually a torture session turns him into an imbecile and he lives like that for a few more years and then dies.
Wife Socorro, who was pregnant, has her third daughter Belicia (Beli). Trujillo's goons confiscate all of the Cabral assets. The older daughters get sent to live with various relatives where they soon meet with freak accidents (due to the family curse) and die. Socorro dies in a traffic accident. Even poor Lydia the mistress dies of unknown causes. Abelard lives the longest.
Daughter Beli gets farmed out to horrible relatives of Socorro. They pass her to even more distant relatives living in the most destitute part of the Dominican Republic. There she gets burned on her back with hot oil and locked in a chicken coop as punishment. Eventually La Inca, cousin to Abelard, tracks down Beli, now nine years old, and adopts her as a daughter.
Interestingly enough, our narrator Yunior raises the possibility that the dictator Trujillo destroyed Abelard not because of his beautiful daughter but because Abelard had been writing a book intended to expose the evil supernatural underpinnings of Trujillo's power. Needless to say, both Yunior and Oscar would have loved to have read this book. No one knows the real story. But Yunior points out that the beautiful daughter was never pursued after Abelard's arrest whereas Trujillo's goons destroyed every last scrap of Abelard's writing.
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