Sometimes he was overwhelmed at the thought that if Johnny Abbes arrested him, he would have the only one who could identify everyone involved. He was determined not to be captured alive, to save the last bullet for himself. And he had also taken the precaution of concealing in the hollow heel of his shoe a strychnine-based poison pill prepared for him by a pharmacist in Moca, who thought it was for killing a wild dog that had been wreaking havoc in the henhouses on the ranch. They wouldn’t get him alive, he wouldn’t give Johnny Abbes the pleasure of watching him writhe in the electric chair. When Trujillo was dead, it would be a real pleasure to finish off the head of the SIM. There would be more than enough volunteers. Most likely, when he found out about the Chief’s death, Abbes would disappear. He must have made plans; he had to know how much he was hated, how many people wanted revenge. Not only the opposition; ministers, senators, members of the military said so openly.
Antonio lit another cigarette and smoked, biting down on the tip to relieve his tension. Traffic had stopped altogether; for some time not a truck or a car had passed in either direction.
The truth was, he said to himself, exhaling smoke from his mouth and nose, he didn’t give a shit what happened later. The crucial thing was what happened now. Seeing him dead so he would know that his life had not been useless, that he hadn’t passed through this world like a worthless creature.
“That bastard is never coming, damn it,” a furious Tony Imbert exclaimed beside him.
The third time that Urania insists he take a mouthful, the invalid opens his mouth. When the nurse returns with the glass of water, Señor Cabral is relaxed and, as if distracted, docilely accepts the mouthfuls of pap his daughter offers him, and drinks half a glass of water in little sips. A few drops roll down to his chin. The nurse wipes his face carefully.
“Good, very good, you ate up your fruit like a good boy,” she congratulates him. “You’re happy with the surprise your daughter gave you, aren’t you, Señor Cabral?”
The invalid does not deign to look at her.
“Do you remember Trujillo?” Urania asks the nurse point-blank.
The woman stares at her, disconcerted. She is wide in the hips, sour-looking, with prominent eyes. Her hair, dyed a rusty blond, is dark at the roots. At last she responds:
“How would I remember? I was only four or five when he was killed. I don’t remember anything except what I heard in my house. I know your papa was a very important man in those days.”
Urania nods.
“Senator, minister, everything,” she murmurs. “But, in the end, he fell into disgrace.”
The old man looks at her in alarm.
“Well, I mean”—the nurse is trying to be agreeable—“he might have been a dictator and everything else they say about him, but people seemed to live better back then. Everybody had jobs and there wasn’t so much crime. Isn’t that right, señorita?”
“If my father can understand you, he must be happy to hear you say that.”
“Of course he understands me,” says the nurse, who is already at the door. “Don’t you, Señor Cabral? Your papa and I have long conversations. All right, just call if you need me.”
She goes out, closing the door.
Perhaps it was true that because of the disastrous governments that came afterward, many Dominicans missed Trujillo now. They had forgotten the abuses, the murders, the corruption, the spying, the isolation, the fear: horror had become myth. “Everybody had jobs and there wasn’t so much crime.”
“There was crime, Papa.” She looks into the invalid’s eyes, and he begins to blink. “Maybe there weren’t so many thieves breaking into houses, or so many muggers on the streets grabbing wallets, watches, and necklaces. But people were killed and beaten and tortured, people disappeared. Even the people closest to the regime. His son, for instance, the handsome Ramfis, he committed endless abuses. How you trembled at the thought of him noticing me!”
Her father did not know, because Urania never told him, that she and her classmates at Santo Domingo Academy, and perhaps all the girls of her generation, dreamed about Ramfis. With his thin mustache in the style of a Mexican movie star, his Ray-Ban sunglasses, his well-tailored suits and the variety of uniforms he wore as head of the Dominican Air Force, his big dark eyes and athletic build, his solid-gold watches and rings and his Mercedes-Benzes, he seemed favored by the gods: rich, powerful, good-looking, healthy, strong, happy. You remember it very clearly: when the sisters couldn’t see or hear you, you and your classmates showed one another your collections of photographs of Ramfis Trujillo, in civilian clothes, in uniform, in a bathing suit, wearing a tie, a sport shirt, a tuxedo, a riding habit, leading the Dominican polo team, or sitting at the controls of his plane. You pretended you had seen him, talked to him at the club, the exhibition, the party, the parade, the charity fair, and when you dared to say it—all of you blushing, nervous, knowing it was a sin in word and thought and that you’d have to confess it to the chaplain—you whispered to each other how wonderful, how marvelous it would be to be loved, kissed, embraced, caressed by Ramfis Trujillo.
“You can’t imagine how often I dreamed about him, Papa.”
Her father does not laugh. He gives another little start and opens his eyes wide when he hears the name of Trujillo’s older son. His favorite, and for that very reason, his greatest disappointment. The Father of the New Nation would have liked his firstborn—“Was he his son, Papa?”—to have his appetite for power, to be as energetic and as much of an executive as he was. But Ramfis had inherited none of his virtues or defects, except, perhaps, his frenzied fornicating, his need to take women to bed to convince himself of his own virility. He lacked political ambition, any kind of ambition; he was indolent, prone to depression and neurotic introversion, besieged by complexes, anxieties, and tortuous mood swings, when his behavior zigzagged between hysterical outbursts and long periods of ennui that he drowned in drugs and alcohol.
“Do you know what the Chief’s biographers say, Papa? That he became like that when he found out his mother wasn’t married to Trujillo when he was born. They say he began to suffer from depression when he learned that his real father was Dr. Dominici, or the Cuban Trujillo had killed, Doña María Martínez’s first lover, back when she never dreamed she’d be the Bountiful First Lady and was just another fast-living party girl they called Españolita. You’re laughing? I don’t believe it!”
He may be laughing. Or it may merely be his facial muscles relaxing. In any case, this is not the face of someone enjoying himself but of a person who has just yawned or howled and is left slack-jawed, with eyes half closed, nostrils dilated, gullet wide, revealing a dark, toothless hole.
“Do you want me to call the nurse?”
The invalid closes his mouth, puffs out his face, and recovers his attentive, alarmed expression. He remains motionless, shrunken and waiting. Urania is distracted by the sudden clamor of shrieking parrots that fills the bedroom, then stops as suddenly as it began. The brilliant sun shines on roofs and windowpanes and begins to heat the room.
“Do you know something? Despite all the hatred I had, and still have, for your Chief, and his family, and everything that smells of Trujillo, when I think of Ramfis or read something about him, I can’t help feeling sad; I’m sorry for the man.”
He had been a monster like everyone else in that family of monsters. What else could he have been, being his father’s son, brought up and educated as he was? What else could the son of Heliogabalus, or Caligula, or Nero have been? What else could a boy have been who, at the age of seven, was named a colonel in the Dominican Army by decree—“Did you present him in Congress or was it Senator Chirinos, Papa?”—and promoted at the age often to general, in a public ceremony the diplomatic corps was obliged to attend at which all the top-ranking military paid him homage? Etched in Urania’s mind is a photograph in the album that her father kept in an armoire in the living room—can it still be there?—showing the elegant Senator Agustín Cabral (“Or were you a minister then, Papa?”), wearing an impeccable swallowtail coat under a brutal sun, bent in a respectful bow as he greets the boy in the general’s uniform, who, standing on a small canopied podium, has just reviewed the troops and is accepting congratulations from a line of ministers, legislators, and ambassadors. At the rear of the platform, the smiling faces of the Benefactor and the Bountiful First Lady, his proud mama.
“What else could he have been but the parasite, drunkard, rapist, good-for-nothing, criminal, mentally unbalanced man he was? My friends and I at Santo Domingo didn’t know any of that when we were in love with Ramfis. But you knew, Papa. That’s why you were so afraid he would notice me and take a liking to your little girl, that’s why you looked the way you did the time he kissed me and paid me a compliment. I didn’t understand a thing!”
The invalid blinks, two times, three times.
Because unlike her classmates whose girlish hearts throb for Ramfis Trujillo and who invent what they have seen with him and said to him, who pretend he has smiled at them and complimented them, it really did happen to Urania. During the inauguration of the outstanding event held to celebrate twenty-five years of the Trujillo Era, the Fair for Peace and Brotherhood in the Free World, which began on December 20, 1955, and would run through 1956, and cost—“No one ever knew the exact amount, Papa”—between twenty-five and seventy million dollars, between a fourth and a half of the national budget. Those images are very vivid to Urania, the excitement and feeling of wonder flooding the entire country because of that memorable fair: Trujillo was throwing himself a party, and he brought to Santo Domingo (“To Ciudad Trujillo, excuse me, Papa”) Xavier Cugat’s orchestra, the chorus line from the Lido in Paris, the American skaters of the Ice Capades, and, on the 800,000 square meters of the fairground, he erected seventy-one buildings, some of marble, alabaster, and onyx, to house the delegations from the forty-two countries of the Free World that attended, a choice collection of personalities, notably President Juscelino Kubitschek of Brazil and the purple figure of Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York. The crowning events of the commemoration were the promotion of Ramfis to the rank of lieutenant general, for outstanding service to the nation, and the enthroning of Her Gracious Majesty Angelita I, Queen of the Fair, who arrived by boat, announced by all the sirens in the Navy and all the bells in all the churches of the capital, wearing her crown of precious jewels and her delicate gown of tulle and lace created in Rome by the Fontana sisters, two celebrated modistes who used forty-five meters of Russian ermine to create the costume with a train three meters long and a robe that copied the one worn by Elizabeth II of England at her coronation. Among the ladies-in-waiting and the pages, wearing an exquisite long dress of organdy, and silk gloves, and carrying a bouquet of roses, among the other girls and boys who are the cream of Dominican society, is Urania. She is the youngest attendant in the court of young people who escort Trujillo’s daughter, under a triumphant sun and through the crowd that applauds the poet and Chief of Staff, Don Joaquin Balaguer, when he sings the praises of Her Majesty Angelita I and places the Dominican people at the feet of her grace and beauty. Feeling very much a young lady, Urania listens to her father, in formal attire, as he reads a panegyric to the accomplishments of these twenty-five years, achieved thanks to the tenacity, vision, and patriotism of Trujillo. She is immensely happy. (“I was never so happy again as I was that day, Papa.”) She believes she is the center of attention. Now, in the very center of the fair, they unveil the bronze statue of Trujillo, in a morning coat and academic robes, professorial diplomas in his hand. Suddenly—like a gold ribbon around that magical morning—Urania discovers Ramfis Trujillo at her side, looking at her with his silken eyes, wearing his full-dress uniform.
“And who is this pretty young thing?” The brand-new lieutenant general smiles at her. Urania feels warm, slender fingers lifting her chin. “What’s your name?”
“Urania Cabral,” she stammers, her heart pounding.
“How pretty you are, and more important, how pretty you’re going to be,” and Ramfis bends over and his lips kiss the hand of the girl who hears the congratulatory clamor of sighs and jokes from the other pages and ladies-in-waiting of Her Majesty Angelita I. The Generalissimo’s son has walked away. She cannot contain her joy. What will her friends say when they find out that Ramfis, Ramfis himself, has called her pretty, touched her cheek and kissed her hand, as if she really were a young lady.
“How appalled you were when I told you, Papa. How furious you were. It’s funny, isn’t it?”
Her father’s anger at learning that Ramfis had touched her made Urania suspect for the first time that everything might not have been as perfect in the Dominican Republic as everyone said, especially Senator Cabral.
“What’s the harm in his telling me I’m pretty and kissing my hand, Papa?”
“All the harm in the world,” and her father raises his voice, frightening her, for he never reprimands her with that admonishing forefinger raised above his head. “Never again! Listen carefully, Uranita. If he approaches you, run away. Don’t greet him, don’t talk to him. Get away. It’s for your own good.”
“But, but…” The girl is utterly bewildered.
They have just returned from the Fair for Peace and Brotherhood in the Free World, she still has on the exquisite dress of a lady-in-waiting in the entourage of Her Majesty Angelita I, and her father still wears the tailcoat in which he delivered his speech before Trujillo, President Blacky Trujillo, diplomats, ministers, guests, and the thousands upon thousands of people flooding the flag-draped avenues, streets, and buildings of the fair. Why is he acting like this?
“Because Ramfis, that boy, “that man is…evil.” Her father makes an effort not to say everything he would like to. “With girls, with little girls. Don’t repeat this to your friends at school. Or to anybody. I’m telling you because you’re my daughter. It’s my obligation. I have to take care of you. For your own good, Uranita, do you understand? Yes, you do, you’re so intelligent. Don’t let him near you, don’t let him talk to you. If you see him, run over to me. If you’re with me, he won’t do anything to you.”
You don’t understand, Urania. You’re as pure as a lily, no wickedness in you yet. You tell yourself that your father is jealous. He doesn’t want anybody else to kiss you or say you’re pretty, only him. Senator Cabral’s reaction indicates that by this time the handsome Ramfis, the romantic Ramfis, has begun to do those nasty things to little girls, big girls, and women that will enhance his reputation, a reputation every Dominican male, highborn or low, aspires to. Great Cocksman, Horny-as-a-Goat, Tireless Fucking Machine. You’ll start to hear about it soon, in the classrooms and courtyards of Santo Domingo, the academy for upper-class girls, with its Dominican sisters from the United States and Canada, modern uniforms, students who don’t look like novices because they dress in pink, blue, and white and wear thick socks and saddle shoes (black and white), which gives them a sporty, contemporary air. But not even they are safe when Ramfis goes on his forays, alone or with his cronies, hunting for a sweet piece of ass on the streets, in the parks, clubs, bars, or private houses of his great Dominican fiefdom. How many Dominican women did the good-looking Ramfis seduce, abduct, and rape? He doesn’t give native girls Cadillacs or mink coats, the gifts he presents to Hollywood stars after he fucks them or in order to fuck them. Because, in contrast to his prodigal father, the elegant Ramfis is, like Doña María, a miser. He fucks Dominican girls free of charge, for the honor of their being fucked by the crown prince, the captain of the nation’s invincible polo team, the lieutenant general, the head of the Air Force.