Again the invalid raises and lowers his shoulders, and blinks, and becomes lethargic. He lowers his eyelids and curls up, ready for a little nap.
It’s true, you’ve never felt hatred for Ramfis, Radhamés, or Angelita, nothing like what Trujillo and the Bountiful First Lady still inspire in you. Because, somehow, the three children have paid in degradation or violent deaths for their part in the family’s crimes. And you’ve never been able to avoid a certain benevolent feeling toward Ramfis. Why, Urania? Perhaps because of his emotional crises, his depressions and fits of madness, the mental instability his family always concealed and which, following the murders he ordered in June 1959, obliged Trujillo to commit him to a psychiatric hospital in Belgium. In all of Ramfis’s actions, even the cruelest, there was something caricatured, fraudulent, pathetic. Like his spectacular gifts to the Hollywood actresses Porfirio Rubirosa fucked free of charge (when he wasn’t making them pay him). Or the way he had of botching the plans devised for him by his father. Hadn’t it been grotesque, for instance, when Ramfis ruined the reception given in his honor by the Generalissimo to compensate for his failure at Fort Leavenworth? He had the Congress—“Did you propose the law, Papa?”—name Ramfis Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, and, on his return, he was to be recognized as such at a military review on the Avenida, at the foot of the obelisk. Everything was arranged, and the troops in formation, on that morning when the yacht
Angelita
, which the Generalissimo sent to pick him up in Miami, entered the port on the Ozama River, and Trujillo himself, accompanied by Joaquín Balaguer, went to the docking berth to welcome him and drive him to the parade. What astonishment, what disappointment, what confusion overwhelmed the Chief when he boarded the yacht and discovered the calamitous condition, the slobbering incapacity in which a shipboard orgy had left poor Ramfis. He could barely stand, he was incapable of speaking. His slack, recalcitrant tongue emitted grunts instead of words. His bulging eyes were glassy, his clothes streaked with vomit. And his cronies, and the women who accompanied them, were in even worse shape. Balaguer described it in his memoirs: Trujillo turned white and trembled with indignation. He ordered the cancellation of the military parade and Ramfis’s swearing-in as Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, before he left, he picked up a glass and proposed a toast meant as a symbolic slap in the face of the worthless drone (his inebriation prevented him from understanding): “Here’s to work, the only thing that will bring prosperity to the Republic.”
Urania is overcome by another attack of hysterical laughter, and the invalid opens his eyes in terror.
“Don’t be afraid.” Urania becomes serious. “I can’t help laughing when I imagine the scene. Where were you at that moment, when your Chief discovered his boy drunk, surrounded by his drunken whores and buddies? On the platform on the Avenida, dressed in your morning coat, waiting for the new Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces? What explanation was given? The parade is canceled because General Ramfis is suffering from delirium tremens?”
She laughs again under the profound gaze of the invalid.
“A family to laugh at and cry over, not to be taken seriously,” Urania murmurs. “Sometimes you must have been ashamed of all of them. And felt fear and remorse, when you allowed yourself to, though that kind of audacity would be kept very secret. I’d like to know what you would have thought of the melodramatic fates met by the Chief’s darling children. Or the sordid story of the final years of Doña María Martínez, the Bountiful First Lady, the terrible, the vengeful, who screamed her demand that Trujillo’s assassins have their eyes put out and be skinned alive. Do you know that in the end she was eroded by arteriosclerosis? That the grasping woman secretly got all those millions and millions of dollars away from the Chief? And had all the numbers to the secret accounts in Switzerland and hid them from her children? With good reason, no doubt. She was afraid they’d steal her millions and bury her in an old-age home, where she’d spend her final years not being any trouble to them. She, with her hardening arteries, was the one who had the last laugh. I would have given anything to see the Bountiful First Lady in Madrid, stupefied by misfortune and losing her memory, but maintaining, from the depths of her avarice, enough lucidity not to reveal to her dear children the numbers of the Swiss accounts. And to see the efforts the poor things made—in Madrid, in the house of homely, stupid Radhamés, or in Miami, in Angelita’s house, before she turned to mysticism—to have her remember where she had scribbled them down or hidden them. Can you picture it, Papa? How they must have hunted, and pulled open, and broken, and slashed, looking for the hiding place. They took her to Miami, they brought her back to Madrid. And they never found it. She took her secret to the grave. What do you think of that, Papa? Ramfis managed to squander a few million that he got out of the country in the months following his father’s death, because the Generalissimo (was this true, Papa?) insisted on not taking a penny out of the country in order to oblige his family and followers to die here, to face the consequences. But Angelita and Radhamés were out on the street. And thanks to her hardening arteries, the Bountiful First Lady died poor too, in Panama, where Kalil Haché buried her, taking her to the cemetery in a taxi. She left the family’s millions to the Swiss bankers! To cry over or to laugh at, but in no case to be taken seriously. Isn’t that so, Papa?”
She laughs again, until tears come to her eyes. As she dries them, she struggles against a fragment of depression growing inside her. The invalid observes her, accustomed to her presence. He no longer seems interested in her monologue.
“Don’t think I’ve become a hysteric,” she says with a sigh. “Not yet, Papa. What I’m doing now, digging up the past, rooting around in memories, is something I never do. This is my first vacation in years. I don’t like vacations. When I was a girl here, I used to like them. But I never did again, not after I went to Adrian, thanks to the sisters. I’ve spent my life working. I never took a vacation at the World Bank. Or at the law firm in New York. I don’t have time to go around giving monologues on Dominican history.”
It’s true, your life in Manhattan is exhausting. Every hour is accounted for, starting at nine, when you walk into your office at 47th and Madison. By then you’ve run for three-quarters of an hour in Central Park, if the weather is good, or done aerobics at the Fitness Center on the corner, where you have a membership. Your morning is a series of interviews, reports, discussions, consultations, research in the archives, working lunches in a private dining room at the office or at a nearby restaurant, and your afternoon is just as busy and frequently does not end until eight. Weather permitting, you return home on foot. You prepare a salad and open a container of yogurt before watching the news on television, you read for a while and go to bed, so tired that the letters in the book or the images on the screen begin to dance before ten minutes have passed. There is always one trip a month, sometimes two, within the United States or to Latin America, Europe, or Asia; and recently to Africa as well, where some investors are finally daring to risk their money, and for that they come to the firm for legal advice. That’s your specialty: the legal aspect of financial operations in companies anywhere in the world. A specialty you came to after working for many years in the Legal Department of the World Bank. The trips are more fatiguing than your days in Manhattan. Flying five, ten, twelve hours, to Mexico City, Bangkok, Tokyo, Rawalpindi, or Harare, and going immediately to give or listen to reports, discuss figures, evaluate projects; changing landscapes and climates, from heat to cold, from humidity to drought, from English to Japanese, Spanish, Urdu, Arabic, and Hindi, using interpreters whose mistakes can cause erroneous decisions. Which is why her five senses are always alert, in a state of concentration that leaves her drained, so that at the inevitable receptions she can barely stifle her yawns.
“When I have a Saturday and Sunday to myself, I’m happy to stay home, reading Dominican history,” she says, and it seems to her that her father nods. “A rather peculiar history, it’s true. But I find it restful. It’s my way of not losing my roots. Even though I’ve lived there twice as long as I lived here, I haven’t turned into a gringa. I still talk like a Dominican, don’t I, Papa?”
Is there an ironic little glimmer in the invalid’s eyes?
“Well, more or less a Dominican, one from up there. What do you expect from somebody who has lived more than thirty years with gringos, who goes for weeks without speaking Spanish? Do you know, I was sure I’d never see you again? I wasn’t going to come back, not even to bury you. It was a firm decision. I know you’d like to know why I changed my mind. Why I’m here. The truth is, I don’t know. I did it on impulse. I didn’t think much about it. I asked for a week’s vacation and here I am. I must have come for something. Maybe it was you. To find out how you were. I knew you were sick, that after the stroke it was no longer possible to talk to you. Would you like to know what I’m feeling? What I felt when I came back to the house of my childhood? When I saw the ruin you’ve become?”
Her father is paying attention again. He is waiting, with curiosity, for her to continue. What do you feel, Urania? Bitterness? A certain melancholy? Sadness? The old anger reborn? “The worst thing is that I don’t think I feel anything,” she thinks.
The front doorbell rings. It keeps chiming, vibrating in the heat-filled morning.
The hair that was missing on his head jutted aggressively out of his ears in jet-black clumps, a kind of grotesque compensation for the baldness of the Constitutional Sot. Had he given him that nickname too, before he rebaptized him, in his heart of hearts, as the Walking Turd? Probably. Since his youth he had been good at making up nicknames. Many of the savage labels he stamped on people became part of their very flesh and eventually replaced their real names. That’s what had happened to Senator Henry Chirinos. No one in the Dominican Republic, except for the newspapers, called him by name; they used only his devastating epithet: the Constitutional Sot. He had the habit of stroking the greasy bristles that nested in his ears, and though the Generalissimo, obsessed with cleanliness, had forbidden him to do so in his presence, he was doing it now, and, to make matters worse, he was alternating one revolting act with another: smoothing the hairs in his nose. He was nervous, very nervous. The Benefactor knew why: he was bringing him a negative report on his enterprises. But responsibility for things going badly did not lie with Chirinos; it was the fault of the sanctions imposed by the OAS, which were strangling the country.
“If you keep picking at your nose and ears, I’ll call in the adjutants and put you behind bars,” he said in a bad temper. “I’ve forbidden you to do those disgusting things here. Are you drunk?”
The Constitutional Sot started in his chair, which faced the Benefactor’s desk. He moved his hands away from his face.
“I haven’t had a drop of alcohol,” he apologized in confusion. “You know I don’t drink during the day, Chief. Just in the evening, and at night.”
He wore a suit that the Generalissimo thought of as a monument to bad taste: grayish green, with glints of iridescence; like everything he put on, it looked as if he had squeezed his fat body into the suit with a shoehorn. Jiggling on his white shirt was a bluish tie with yellow dots, where the harsh gaze of the Benefactor detected grease spots. He thought with distaste that he had gotten the stains while eating, because Senator Chirinos ate by taking enormous mouthfuls, wolfing them down as if he feared his neighbors would snatch away his plate, and chewing with an open mouth, spraying a shower of food all around him.
“I swear there’s not a drop of alcohol in my body,” he repeated. “Just the black coffee I had for breakfast.”
Probably it was true. When he saw him come into the office a moment ago, balancing his elephantine body and advancing very slowly, testing the floor before putting down his foot, he thought he was intoxicated. No; he must have somatized all his drinking; even when he was sober, he carried himself with the trembling uncertainty of an alcoholic.
“You’re pickled in alcohol: even when you don’t drink you look drunk,” he said, examining him from head to foot.
“It’s true,” Chirinos quickly acknowledged, making a theatrical gesture. “I am a
poète maudit
, Chief. Like Baudelaire and Rubén Darío.”
He had ashen skin, a double chin, thin, greasy hair, and little eyes set deep behind puffy lids. His nose, flattened since the accident, was like a boxer’s, and his almost lipless mouth added a perverse quality to his brash ugliness. He had always been so disagreeably ugly that ten years earlier, after the car crash that he miraculously survived, his friends thought plastic surgery would improve his looks. It only made them worse.
That he was still a man trusted by the Benefactor, a member of his narrow circle of intimates that included Virgilio Álvarez Pina, Paíno Pichardo, Egghead Cabral (now in disgrace), or Joaquín Balaguer, was proof that when it was time to choose his collaborators, the Generalissimo did not let himself be guided by personal likes or dislikes. In spite of the repugnance his physical appearance, slovenliness, and bad manners always inspired in the Chief, from the beginning of his regime Henry Chirinos had been favored with the delicate tasks that Trujillo entrusted to people who were not only reliable but capable. And he was one of the most capable of the men accepted into that exclusive club. An attorney who served as a constitutionalist, while still very young he had been, along with Agustín Cabral, the principal author of the Constitution ordered by Trujillo in the early days of the Era, and of all the amendments made since then. He had also composed the most important institutional and ordinary laws, and written almost all the legal decisions adopted by the Congress to legitimize the needs of the regime. There was no one like him for giving, in parliamentary speeches filled with Latin phrases and quotations that were often in French, the appearance of juridical necessity to the most arbitrary decisions of the Executive, or for refuting, with devastating logic, every proposal that Trujillo disapproved of. His mind, organized like a legal code, immediately found a technical argument to provide a veneer of legality to any decision made by Trujillo, whether it was a ruling by the Treasury or the Supreme Court, or a law passed by Congress. A good part of the legal web of the Era had been spun by the perverse skill of this great pettifogger (that’s what he had been called once, in Trujillo’s presence, by Senator Agustín Cabral, his close friend and enemy within the circle of favorites).
Because of these attributes, the perpetual parliamentarian Henry Chirinos had been everything one could be during the thirty years of the Era: deputy, senator, Minister of Justice, member of the Constitutional Tribunal, ambassador plenipotentiary and chargé d’affaires, governor of the Central Bank, president of the Trujillonian Institute, member of the Central Council of the Dominican Party, and, for the past few years, the position that required the greatest confidence, supervisor of the Benefactor’s business operations. As such, Agriculture, Commerce, and Finance were subordinate to him. Why entrust such enormous responsibility to a confirmed alcoholic? Because, in addition to being a shyster, he knew about economics. He had done well as the head of the Central Bank, and in Finance, for a few months. And because, in recent years, due to ambushes from all sides, the Benefactor needed someone in the post who was absolutely reliable and could be told about the family’s entanglements and disputes. And for that, this alcoholic greaseball was invaluable.
How did it happen that an uncontrollable drinker had not lost his skill in legal intrigue, or his capacity for work, the only one, perhaps, after the fall into disgrace of Anselmo Paulino, that the Benefactor could compare to his own? The Walking Turd could work ten or twelve hours without stopping, drink himself blind, and the next day be in his office in Congress, in the Ministry, or in the National Palace, fresh and lucid, dictating legal reports to the stenographers or expounding with florid eloquence on political, legal, economic, and constitutional matters. Besides all that, he wrote acrostic, celebratory poems, historical articles and books, and was one of the best-sharpened pens used by Trujillo to distill the poison of “The Public Forum” in
El Caribe
.
“How are the businesses doing?”
“Very badly, Chief.” Senator Chirinos took a deep breath. “At this rate, they’ll soon be at death’s door. I’m sorry to tell you this, but you don’t pay me to deceive you. If the sanctions aren’t lifted soon, it’ll be catastrophic.”
He opened his bulky briefcase, took out rolls of papers, and notebooks, and proceeded to analyze the principal enterprises, beginning with the plantations of the Dominican Sugar Corporation and continuing with Dominican Air, the cement factory, the lumber companies and the sawmills, the import-export offices and commercial establishments. The music of names and figures lulled the Generalissimo, who was barely listening: Atlas Commercial, Caribbean Motors, Tobacco Products S.A., Dominican Cotton Consortium, Chocolate Manufacturing Company, Dominican Footwear Manufacturers, Granulated Salt Distributors, Vegetable Oil Processors, Dominican Cement Factory, Dominican Record Production, Dominican Battery Factory, Sack and Cordage Company, Read Iron Works, El Marino Iron Works, Dominican-Suisse Manufacturing, Dairy Processing, Altagracia Liquor Industries, National Glass Industries, National Paper Industries, Dominican Mills, Dominican Paints, Retreading Plant, Quisqueya Motors, Salt Refinery, Dominican Textile Mills, San Rafael Insurance, Real Estate Corporation,
El Caribe
newspaper. The Walking Turd left for last the businesses in which the Trujillo family had minority interests, barely mentioning that there was no “positive movement” here either. He said nothing that the Benefactor did not already know: what was not paralyzed by a lack of investment and replacement parts was operating at a third, even a tenth, of capacity. The catastrophe had already arrived, in spades. But at least—the Benefactor sighed—what the gringos thought would be the final blow had not succeeded: cutting off his supply of oil and replacement parts for cars and planes. Johnny Abbes García had arranged for fuel to come in through Haiti, crossing the border as contraband. The surchargé was high but the consumer didn’t pay for it; the regime was absorbing the subsidy. The State could not tolerate this hemorrhaging for much longer. Because of the restrictions on foreign currency and the paralysis of exports and imports, its economic life had come to a standstill.
“Practically speaking, there is no income in any of the enterprises, Chief. Only expenditures. Since they were flourishing before, they can survive for now. But not indefinitely.”
He sighed melodramatically, as he did when he gave a funeral eulogy, another of his great specialties.
“Let me remind you that not a single worker, farmer, or employee has been laid off, even though the economic war has gone on for more than a year. These enterprises provide sixty percent of the jobs in the country. Think of how serious this is. Trujillo cannot go on supporting two-thirds of Dominican families when all of his businesses are half paralyzed because of the sanctions. And so…”
“And so…”
“Either you give me authorization to reduce personnel in order to cut costs, hoping for better times…”
“Do you want an explosion of thousands of unemployed workers?” Trujillo categorically cut him off. “Add a social problem to the ones I already have?”
“There is an alternative, one that has been used in exceptional circumstances,” Senator Chirinos replied with a Mephistophelian little smile. “And isn’t this one? Well, then. The State, in order to guarantee employment and economic activity, assumes control of strategic enterprises. The State nationalizes, say, a third of manufacturing firms and a half of farming and livestock enterprises. There are still enough funds for that in the Central Bank.”
“What the hell do I gain by that?” an irritated Trujillo interrupted. “What do I gain if dollars move from the Central Bank to an account in my name?”
“What you gain is that from now on, the damage signified by three hundred enterprises operating at a loss doesn’t come out of your pocket, Chief. I repeat, if this goes on, they’ll all be bankrupt. My advice is technical. The only way to avoid the dissolution of your patrimony because of the economic blockade is to transfer the losses to the State. It isn’t good for anybody if you’re ruined, Chief.”
Trujillo had a feeling of fatigue. The sun was growing hotter, and like all visitors to his office, Senator Chirinos was perspiring. From time to time he wiped his face with a blue handkerchief. He too would have liked the Generalissimo to have an air conditioner. But Trujillo detested the fake air that chilled you, the false atmosphere. He tolerated only a fan, on extremely hot days. Besides, he was proud of being the man-who-never-sweats.
He was silent for a moment, meditating, and his face soured.
“You’re another one who thinks, in the back of your piggish brain, that I take over farms and businesses for profit,” he said in a weary tone. “Don’t interrupt. If you don’t know me yet, after so many years at my side, what can I expect from the rest? They believe I’m interested in power in order to get rich.”
“I know very well that isn’t so, Chief.”
“Do you need me to explain it again, for the hundredth time? If those businesses didn’t belong to the Trujillo family, those jobs wouldn’t exist. And the Dominican Republic would still be the backward African country it was when I picked it up and put it on my shoulders. You haven’t realized that yet.”
“I realize that perfectly, Chief.”
“Are you stealing from me?”
Chirinos gave another start, and the ashen color of his face darkened. He blinked in alarm.
“What are you saying, Chief? As God is my witness…”
“I know you aren’t,” Trujillo reassured him. “And why don’t you steal, even though you have the power to make or break us financially? Out of loyalty? Maybe. But more than anything else, out of fear. You know that if you steal from me and I find out, I’d turn you over to Johnny Abbes, and he’d take you to La Cuarenta, sit you on the Throne, and burn you to a crisp before he threw you to the sharks. All the things that tickle the overheated imaginations of the head of the SIM and the little team he’s put together. That’s why you don’t steal from me. And that’s why the managers, administrators, accountants, engineers, veterinarians, foremen, et cetera, et cetera, in the companies you oversee, that’s why they don’t steal from me either. That’s why their work is conscientious and efficient, that’s why the enterprises have prospered and multiplied and turned the Dominican Republic into a modern, prosperous country. Do you understand?”
“Of course, Chief.” The Constitutional Sot gave another start. “You’re absolutely right.”
“On the other hand,” Trujillo continued, as if he hadn’t heard him, “you’d steal everything you could lay your hands on if you were doing the work you do for the Vicini family, the Valdéz family, the Armenteros family, instead of the Trujillo family. And you’d steal even more if the enterprises belonged to the State. Then you’d really line your pockets. Now can your brain grasp the reason for all the businesses, all the land, all the livestock?”
“To serve the nation, I know that better than anybody, Excellency,” Senator Chirinos swore. He was frightened, and Trujillo could see it in the way he clutched the briefcase tight against his belly, and the increasingly unctuous manner in which he spoke. “I didn’t mean to suggest anything to the contrary, Chief. God forbid!”