“You would,” Trujillo replied sarcastically. “That’s why you took your miserable pesos to Panama, figuring I wouldn’t last forever, that one of the conspiracies might succeed. You’ve given yourself away, asshole.”
“I’ll repatriate my savings this afternoon,” Chirinos protested, gesticulating. “I’ll show you the deposit slips from the Central Bank. Those savings have been in Panama a long time. My diplomatic missions allowed me to put something away. For cash outlays on the trips I make in your service, Chief. I’ve never padded the expenses the position required.”
“You’re scared, you think what happened to Egghead might happen to you.” Trujillo was still smiling. “It’s a joke. I’ve forgotten the secret you told me. Come on, tell me some gossip before you go. Bedroom gossip, not politics.”
The Walking Turd smiled with relief. But as soon as he began telling him that the talk of Ciudad Trujillo right now was the beating the German consul gave his wife because he thought she was cheating on him, the Benefactor became distracted. How much money had his closest collaborators taken out of the country? If the Constitutional Sot had done it, they all had. Was it only four hundred thousand he had tucked away? It had to be more. All of them, in the darkest corner of their souls, had lived in fear that the regime would collapse. Bah, they were trash. Loyalty was not a Dominican virtue. He knew that. For thirty years they had worshiped him, applauded him, deified him, but the first time the wind changed, they would reach for their daggers.
“Who invented the slogan of the Dominican Party, using the initials of my name?” he asked unexpectedly. “Rectitude, Liberty, True Work, Morality. Was it you or Egghead?”
“Yours truly, Chief,” Senator Chirinos exclaimed proudly. “On the tenth anniversary. It caught on, and twenty years later it’s on all the streets and squares in the country. And in the overwhelming majority of the homes.”
“It ought to be in the minds and memories of Dominicans,” said Trujillo. “Those words summarize everything I’ve given them.”
And at that moment, like the blow of a club to his head, he was seized by doubt. By certainty. It had happened. Dissembling, not listening to the praises of the Era that Chirinos had embarked on, he lowered his head, as if concentrating on an idea, focused his eyes, and looked, filled with anxiety. His bones turned to water. There it was: the dark stain covered his fly and part of his right leg. It must have been recent, it was still damp, at this very moment his insensible bladder was still leaking. He didn’t feel it, he wasn’t feeling it. A lashing rage shook him. He could dominate men, bring three million Dominicans to their knees, but he could not control his bladder.
“I can’t listen to any more gossip, I don’t have time,” he lamented, not looking up. “Go on and take care of Lloyds, don’t let them pay that money to Ramfis. Tomorrow, at the same time. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Chief. If you’ll permit me, I’ll see you this afternoon, on the Avenida.”
As soon as he heard the Constitutional Sot close the door, he called Sinforoso. He told him to bring another suit, also gray, and a change of underwear. He stood, and moving quickly, bumping into a sofa, he locked himself in the bathroom. He felt faint with disgust. He took off the trousers, shorts, and undershirt soiled by his involuntary urination. His shirt was not stained, but he took it off as well and then sat on the bidet. He soaped himself carefully. As he was getting dried he cursed once again the dirty trick his body was playing on him. He was waging war against many enemies, he could not constantly be distracted by his fucking bladder. He sprinkled talcum powder on his genitals and between his legs, and sat down on the toilet to wait for Sinforoso.
His meeting with the Walking Turd had left him troubled. What he told the senator was true: unlike his hoodlum brothers, and the Bountiful First Lady, an insatiable vampire, and his children, parasites sucking him dry, he had never cared very much about money. He used it in the service of power. Without money he would not have been able to make his way at first, for he had been born into a very modest family in San Cristóbal, which meant that as a boy he had to get what he needed, any way he could, to dress decently. Later, money helped him to be more efficient, to remove obstacles, to buy, attract, or bribe the people he needed and punish those who interfered with his work. Unlike María, who, when they were still lovers, thought up the idea of a laundry for constabulary guards and since then dreamed only of hoarding money, he liked to give it away.
If he hadn’t been like that, would he have given gifts to the people, those countless presents every October 24, so that Dominicans could celebrate the Chief’s birthday? How many millions of pesos had he spent over the years on sacks of caramels, chocolates, toys, fruits, dresses, trousers, shoes, bracelets, necklaces, soft drinks, blouses, records, guayaberas, brooches, magazines for the interminable processions that came to the Palace on the Chief’s birthday? And how many more on gifts for his compadres and godchildren at the collective baptisms in the Palace chapel, when, for the past three decades, once and even twice a week, he became godfather to at least a hundred infants? Millions and millions of pesos. A productive investment, of course. An inspiration, in the first year of his government, that came from his profound knowledge of Dominican psychology. To establish that relationship, to be compadres with a campesino, a laborer, a craftsman, a merchant, was to guarantee the loyalty of the poor man and poor woman whom he embraced after the baptism of his godchild and whom he presented with two thousand pesos. Two thousand when times were good. As the list of his godchildren grew to twenty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred a week, the gifts—due in part to howls of protest from Doña María and also to the decline in the Dominican economy following the Fair for Peace and Brotherhood in the Free World in 1955—had gradually shrunk to fifteen hundred, a thousand, five hundred, two hundred, a hundred pesos for each godchild. Now, the Walking Turd was insisting that the collective baptisms be suspended or the gift be symbolic, a loaf of bread or ten pesos for each godchild, until the sanctions ended. Damn the Yankees!
He had founded enterprises and established businesses to create jobs and progress for the country and have the resources to give away presents left and right and keep the Dominicans happy.
And with his friends, collaborators, employees, hadn’t he been as magnificent as Petronius in
Quo Vadis?
He had showered them with money, giving generous gifts for birthdays, weddings, births, jobs well done, or simply to show that he knew how to reward loyalty. He had presented them with pesos, houses, land, stocks, he had made them partners in his farms and enterprises, he had created businesses for them so they could earn good money and not plunder the State.
He heard a discreet knock at the door. Sinforoso, with the suit and underwear. He handed them over with lowered eyes. He had been with him more than twenty years; he had been his orderly in the Army, and the Chief had promoted him to majordomo and taken him to the Palace. He feared nothing from Sinforoso. He was deaf, dumb, and blind regarding everything that had to do with Trujillo, and he had the sense to know that where certain intimate subjects were concerned, such as his involuntary urinations, the slightest betrayal would deprive him of all he had—a house, a little cattle farm, a car, a large family—and, perhaps, even his life. The suit and underwear, hidden in a bag, would not attract anyone’s attention, for the Benefactor was in the habit of changing clothes several times a day in his private office.
He dressed while Sinforoso—husky, his hair in a crew cut, impeccably groomed in his uniform of black trousers, white shirt, and white jacket with gold buttons—picked up the clothing scattered on the floor.
“What should I do with those two terrorist bishops, Sinforoso?” he asked as he was buttoning his trousers. “Expel them from the country? Send them to jail?”
“Kill them, Chief,” Sinforoso answered without hesitation. “Everybody hates them, and if you don’t do it, the people will. Nobody can forgive the Yankee and the Spaniard who came to this country to bite the hand that feeds them.”
The Generalissimo had stopped listening. He would have to reprimand Pupo Román. That morning, after receiving Johnny Abbes and the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and of the Interior, he had gone to San Isidro Air Base to meet with the heads of the Air Force. And he saw something that turned his stomach: right at the entrance, a few meters from the guard post, under the flag and seal of the Republic, a pipe was spewing out filthy black water that had formed a quagmire at the edge of the highway. He ordered the car to stop. He got out and walked to the spot. It was a pipe carrying thick, stinking sewage—he had to put his handkerchief over his nostrils—and, of course, it had attracted a swarm of flies and mosquitoes. The waste kept flowing, inundating the area, poisoning the air and soil of the leading Dominican garrison. He felt rage, burning lava flooding his body. He controlled his first impulse, to return to the base and curse the officers who were present and demand if this was the image they were trying to give to the Armed Forces: an institution overrun by stinking water and vermin. But he immediately decided that he had to take the warning to the head man. And make Pupo Román in person swallow a little of the liquid shit pouring out of that sewage pipe. He decided to call him right away. But when he got back to his office, he forgot to do it. Was his memory beginning to fail, just like his bladder? Damn. The two things that had responded best throughout his whole life were failing now that he was seventy.
When he was clean and dressed, he returned to his desk and picked up the telephone that communicated automatically with Armed Forces headquarters. It did not take long to hear the voice of General Román:
“Yes, hello? Is that you, Excellency?”
“Come to the Avenida this afternoon,” he said, very curtly, by way of greeting.
“Of course, Chief.” General Román sounded alarmed. “Would you prefer me to come right now to the Palace? Has something happened?”
“You’ll find out what’s happened,” he said, slowly, imagining the nervousness of his niece Mireya’s husband, on hearing how dryly he spoke to him. “Any news?”
“Everything normal, Excellency,” General Román said hurriedly. “I was receiving the routine regional reports. But if you prefer…”
“On the Avenida,” he cut him off. And hung up.
It cheered him to imagine the sizzling questions, suppositions, fears, suspicions he had put into the head of that asshole who was the Minister of the Armed Forces. What did they say about me to the Chief? What gossip, what slander have my enemies told him? Have I fallen into disgrace? Did I fail to carry out one of his orders? He would be in hell until the evening.
But this thought occupied him for only a few seconds, and once again the humiliating memory of the girl filled his mind. Anger, sadness, nostalgia mixed together in his spirit and kept him in a state of turmoil. And then it occurred to him: “A cure equal to the disease.” The face of a beautiful woman, exploding with pleasure in his arms, thanking him for the joy he had given her. Wouldn’t that erase the frightened little face of that idiot? Yes: he’d go tonight to San Cristóbal, to Mahogany House, and wipe away the affront in the same bed and with the same weapons. This decision—he touched his fly in a kind of exorcism—raised his spirits and stiffened his resolve to continue with the day’s schedule.
“What’s new with Segundo?” asked Antonio de la Maza.
Leaning against the steering wheel, Antonio Imbert replied, not turning around:
“I saw him yesterday. They let me visit him every week now. A short visit, half an hour. Sometimes the fucking warden of La Victoria decides to cut the visits to fifteen minutes. Just to be a son of a bitch.”
“How is he?”
How could someone be who, trusting in a promise of amnesty, left Puerto Rico, where he had a good job working for the Ferré family in Ponce, and returned to his country only to discover that they were waiting to try him for the alleged crime of a unionist that had been committed in Puerto Plata years earlier, and sentence him to thirty years in prison? How could a man feel who, if he had killed, did it for the regime, and was repaid by Trujillo’s leaving him to rot in a dungeon for the past five years?
But this was not his answer, because Imbert knew that Antonio de la Maza had not asked the question out of interest in his brother Segundo but only to break the interminable waiting. He shrugged:
“Segundo has balls. If he’s having a tough time he doesn’t show it. Sometimes he even gets a kick out of cheering me up.”
“You didn’t tell him anything about this.”
“Of course not. To be on the safe side, and not to give him false hopes. Suppose it fails?”
“It won’t fail,” Lieutenant García Guerrero interjected from the back seat. “The Goat is coming.”
Was he? Tony Imbert looked at his watch. He still might come, no reason to lose hope. He never lost patience, and hadn’t for many years. When he was young he did, unfortunately, and that led him to do things he regretted with every cell in his body. Like the telegram he sent in 1949, crazed with anger at the landing of anti-Trujillistas, led by Horacio Julio Ornes, on the beach at Luperón in the province of Puerto Plata, when he was governor. “Give the order and I’ll burn Puerto Plata, Chief.” The words he regretted most in his life. He saw them printed in every newspaper, for the Generalissimo wanted all Dominicans to know how much of a dedicated, fanatical Trujillista the young governor was.
Why did Horacio Julio Ornes, Félix Córdoba Boniche, Tulio Hostilio Arvelo, Gugú Henríquez, Miguelucho Feliú, Salvador Reyes Valdéz, Federico Horacio, and the rest choose Puerto Plata on that long-ago June 19 in 1949? The expedition was a resounding failure. One of the two invading airplanes could not even fly the distance and returned to the island of Cozumel. The Catalina, carrying Horacio Julio Ornes and his companions, landed on the water near the muddy coast of Luperón, but before the expeditionary force could climb out, a Coast Guard cutter fired on the plane and destroyed it. In a few hours Army patrols captured the invaders. That permitted the kind of farcical show Trujillo liked so much. He granted amnesty to the prisoners, including Horacio Julio Ornes, and in a show of power and magnanimity allowed them to go into exile again. But as he was making this gesture of generosity for the outside world, the governor of Puerto Plata, Antonio Imbert, and his brother, Major Segundo Imbert, military commander of the province, were stripped of their rank, imprisoned, and beaten, and a merciless reprisal was carried out against supposed accomplices, who were arrested, tortured, and often shot in secret. “Accomplices who weren’t accomplices,” he thinks. “They thought everybody would rise up when they saw them land. In fact, nobody was with them.” Too many innocents had to pay for their fantasy.
How many innocents would have to pay if tonight’s plan failed? Antonio Imbert was not as optimistic as Amadito or Salvador Estrella Sadhalá when they learned from Antonio de la Maza that General José René (Pupo) Román, head of the Armed Forces, was involved in the plot, they became convinced that once Trujillo was dead, everything would go like clockwork: the military, obeying Román’s orders, would detain the Goat’s brothers, kill Johnny Abbes and the die-hard Trujillistas, and install a civilian-military junta. The people would take to the streets and, overjoyed at gaining their freedom, exterminate the
caliés
. Would things turn out that way? Disillusionment, ever since the stupid ambush to which Segundo fell victim, had made Antonio Imbert allergic to premature enthusiasm. He wanted to see Trujillo’s corpse lying at his feet; the rest of it mattered less to him. Ridding the country of that man was the main thing. When that obstacle was out of the way, even if things didn’t go so well at first, at least a door would be opened. And that justified what they were doing tonight, even if none of them survived.
No, Tony had not said a word about the conspiracy to his brother Segundo on his weekly visits to him at La Victoria. They talked about the family, about baseball and boxing, and Segundo told him stories about the prison routine, but they avoided the only important topic. On his last visit, as he was saying goodbye, Antonio whispered: “Things are going to change, Segundo.” A word to the wise. Had he guessed? After a series of crushing blows, Segundo, like Tony, had gone from enthusiastic Trujillista to a man disaffected with the regime to conspirator, and long ago had concluded that the only way to put an end to the tyranny was by killing the tyrant; everything else was useless. You had to eradicate the person in whom all the strands of the dread spiderweb converged.
“What would have happened if the bomb had exploded on Máximo Gómez when the Goat was taking his walk?” Amadito fantasized.
“Trujillista fireworks in the sky,” replied Imbert.
“I could have been one of the firecrackers if I had been on duty,” the lieutenant said with a laugh.
“I would have sent a huge wreath of roses to your funeral,” said Tony.
“What a plan,” Estrella Sadhalá remarked. “Blowing up the Goat and all his cronies. Heartless!”
“Well, I knew you wouldn’t be part of his escort,” said Imbert. “Besides, when that happened I hardly knew you, Amadito. Now I would have to give it a little more thought.”
“That’s a relief,” said the lieutenant, thanking him.
They had been waiting on the road to San Cristóbal for more than an hour, and had tried several times to have a conversation, or to joke, as they were doing now, but those efforts had petered out and each man enclosed himself again in his own torments, hopes, or memories. At one point Antonio de la Maza turned on the radio, but as soon as he heard the honeyed voice on the Voice of the Tropics announcing a program on spiritualism, he turned it off.
Yes, in the failed plan to kill the Goat two and a half years earlier, Antonio Imbert had been prepared to blow up, along with Trujillo, many of the toadies who escorted him every afternoon on his walk from the house of Doña Julia, the Sublime Matriarch, along Máximo Gómez and the Avenida, to the obelisk. Weren’t the men who accompanied him the dirtiest and most bloodstained? It would be a service to the country to eradicate so many of his henchmen at the same time as the tyrant.
He prepared the assault alone, not even telling his best friend, Salvador Estrella Sadhalá, because even though Turk was an anti-Trujillista, Tony was afraid he would disapprove because of his Catholicism. He planned it and thought it out in his own mind, bringing to it all the resources at his disposal, convinced that the fewer the people involved, the greater its chances for success. Not until the final stage did he include in his project two boys from what would later be called the June 14 Movement; at that time, it was a clandestine group of young professionals and students trying to organize in order to take action, though they didn’t know what kind, against tyranny.
His plan was simple and practical. It took advantage of the maniacal discipline that Trujillo brought to his routine activities, in this case his evening walk along Máximo Gómez and the Avenida. He studied the terrain carefully, going back and forth along the avenue lined with the residences of the regime’s top men, past and present. The ostentatious house of Héctor (Blacky) Trujillo, his brother’s puppet president for two terms. The pink mansion of Mama Julia, the Sublime Matriarch, whom the Chief visited every afternoon before setting out on his walk. The house of Luis Rafael Trujillo Molina, nicknamed Kid, who was mad for cockfights. And the houses of General Arturo (Razor) Espaillat, and of Joaquín Balaguer, the current puppet president, which stood next to the nuncio’s residence. The elegant dwelling that once belonged to Anselmo Paulino was now one of Ramfis Trujillo’s houses. The mansion of the Goat’s daughter, the beautiful Angelita, and her husband, Colonel Luis José (Pechito) León Estévez. The residence of the Cáceres Troncoso family, and the palatial home of the Vicini tycoons. Adjoining Máximo Gómez was a ball field that Trujillo built for his sons across from Radhamés Manor and the lot once occupied by the house of General Ludovino Fernández, whom the Goat had ordered killed. Separating the mansions were large open spaces filled with weeds and protected by green-painted wire fences erected along the edge of the sidewalk. On the right side of the street, where the entourage always walked, there were vacant lots surrounded by the same wire fencing, which Antonio Imbert had spent many hours studying.
He chose the piece offence that started at Kid Trujillo’s house. On the pretext of replacing part of the fencing around Ready-Mix, the cement factory where he was manager (it belonged to Paco Martínez, the Bountiful First Lady’s brother), he bought several do/en meters of wire fencing and the metal poles that were placed every fifteen meters to hold the fence taut. He verified personally that the poles were hollow and could be filled with sticks of dynamite. Since Ready-Mix owned two quarries on the outskirts of Ciudad Trujillo, from which raw materials were extracted, it was easy for him, on his periodic visits, to take away sticks of dynamite and hide them in his own office: he always came in before anyone else and left after the last employee had gone home.
When everything was ready, he told his plan to Luis Gómez Pérez and Iván Tavares Castellanos. Younger than he, they were at the university, studying law and engineering, respectively. They belonged to his cell of the clandestine anti-Trujillista groups; after observing them for many weeks, he decided they were serious, trustworthy, and eager to take action. Both accepted enthusiastically. They agreed not to say a word to their comrades, with whom they met in groups of eight or ten, always in a different location, to discuss the best way to mobilize the people against the dictatorship.
With Luis and Iván, who turned out to be even better than he had hoped, Tony filled the poles with sticks of dynamite, and placed the caps after testing them with a remote control. To be certain of their timing, they practiced in the empty lot of the factory after the workers and clerical staff had left, to see how long they needed to take down a piece of existing fence and put up a new one, replacing the old posts with ones full of dynamite. Less than five hours. Everything was ready on June 12. They planned to act on June 15, when Trujillo returned from a trip to Cibao. They had at their disposal a dump truck that would knock down the piece of fence at dawn, so they would have a pretext—wearing the blue overalls of Municipal Services—to replace it with the armed one. They marked two points, each less than fifty paces from the explosion, where, with Imbert to the right and Luis and Iván to the left, they would activate the remote controls in quick succession, the first blast to kill Trujillo at the moment he passed in front of the poles, and the second to make sure he was dead.
And then, on June 14, 1959, the eve of the day they had decided on, in the mountains of Constanza, it happened—the unexpected landing of an airplane from Cuba, painted with the colors and insignia of the Dominican Air Force and carrying anti-Trujillista guerrillas, followed a week later by landings on the beaches of Maimón and Estero Hondo. The arrival of that small detachment, which included the bearded Cuban comandante Delio Gómez Ochoa, sent a chill down the spine of the regime. It was a rash, uncoordinated attempt. The clandestine groups had absolutely no information regarding what was being prepared in Cuba. The support of Fidel Castro for the uprising against Trujillo had been, since the fall of Batista six months earlier, an obsessive topic at their meetings. They counted on that help in every plan they put together and then took apart, and for which they were amassing hunting rifles, revolvers, old shotguns. But no one Imbert knew was in touch with Cuba or had any idea that June 14 would see the arrival of dozens of revolutionaries; after putting the handful of guards at the Constanza airport out of commission, they fled to the nearby mountains, only to be hunted down like rabbits in the days that followed, and killed on the spot or taken to Ciudad Trujillo, where, on Ramfis’s orders, almost all of them were murdered (but not the Cuban Gómez Ochoa and his adopted son, Pedrito Mirabal, whom the regime, in another of its theatrical gestures, returned some time later to Fidel Castro).
And no one could have suspected the magnitude of the repression the government would unleash after the landing. In the ensuing weeks and months, it intensified rather than subsided. The
caliés
seized all suspects and took them to the SIM, where they were subjected to torture—castration, bursting their eardrums, gouging out their eyes, sitting them on the Throne—to force them to name names. La Victoria, La Cuarenta, and El Nueve were overflowing with young people of both sexes—students, professionals, and office workers—many of them the children or relatives of men in the government. Trujillo was dumbfounded: was it possible that the children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews of the people who had benefited most from the regime were plotting against him? They were shown no consideration despite their family names, white faces, and middle-class trappings.
Luis Gómez Pérez and Iván Tavares Castellanos fell into the hands of the
caliés
of the SIM on the morning of the day scheduled for the attack. With his customary realism, Antonio Imbert knew he had no possibility of seeking asylum: all the embassies were surrounded by lines of uniformed police, soldiers, and
caliés
. He calculated that, under torture, Luis, Iván, or anyone else from the clandestine groups would mention his name and the
caliés
would come for him. Then, just as he did tonight, he knew exactly what to do: welcome them with lead. He would try to send a few of them into the next world before he was cut to ribbons. He was not going to let them pull out his nails with pliers, cut out his tongue, or sit him in the electric chair. Kill him, yes; abuse him, never.