One thing I took note of in Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the appearance of faceless men.
The first instance is on page 135, when Beli is returning from the vacation
with the Gangster that was cut short. She is sitting in a car, looking out at a
pueblito, and suddenly sees a man she “could have sworn […] had no face.” Because of the italics, I
took note of this phrase immediately – and six pages later, it appears again: a
cop sitting in a car who “didn’t have a
face” (141). Once again, the italics belong to Díaz. After tracking the occurrence
of characters lacking faces, I came to the conclusion that this phrase
symbolized a character’s apathy towards the cruelty of events that they had the
possibility to influence.
Beli is the first to see characters
that seem to have no face. While the first man she encounters in the pueblito is never mentioned again, one might theorize that he is the man who alerts La
Fea to Beli’s affair with her husband. He is mentioned only a few pages before the woman is notified that there is "news about" her husband (140). The second man merely sits in the cop
car while the two Elvises attempt to abduct Beli, doing nothing to try and stop what is happening. Both of these men either
participate or implicitly allow the horror of the Trujillo Era to continue
unopposed.
This theory is corroborated when a faceless
man also appears while Oscar, in a similar situation, is being beaten in the
cane field. When he is being taken by Grod and Grundy, Oscar looks out hoping
for “some U.S. Marines out for a stroll” that would save him – but unlike Beli,
who had her chinos, there is only a “dude [who] had no face” (298). Later,
Oscar believes that “he was being beaten by three men, not two, that the
faceless man from in front of the colmado was joining them” (299). The sometimes-presence
of the faceless man during Oscar’s beating means that while he is not one of
the men physically beating Oscar, by sitting by and letting the men take him
away he is a participant in the cruelty nevertheless.
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