Urania listens gravely, her eyes encourage Lucinda to go on but her mind is in Michigan, at Siena Heights, reliving those years of obsessive, redemptive study. The only letters she read and answered were from Sister Mary. Affectionate, discreet letters that never mentioned what had happened, though if Sister Mary had—she was the only person in whom Urania had confided, the one who came up with the brilliant solution of getting her out of there and sending her to Adrian, the one who threatened Senator Cabral until he agreed—she would not have been angry. Would it have been a relief to unburden herself occasionally in a letter to Sister Mary, to mention the phantom that gave her no peace?
Sister Mary wrote to her about the school, she told her about the great events and turbulent months that followed the assassination of Trujillo, the departure of Ramfis and the rest of the family, the changes in government, the violence and disorder in the streets, she expressed interest in her studies and congratulated her on her academic achievements.
“How is it you never got married?” Lucindita undresses her with a look. “It couldn’t be for lack of opportunity. You still look good. I’m sorry, but you know, Dominican women are very nosy.”
“I really don’t know why,” Urania says with a shrug. “Maybe I didn’t have the time, Lucinda. I’ve always been too busy; first studying, then working. I’m used to living alone and couldn’t share my life with a man.”
She hears herself talking and can’t believe what she’s saying. Lucinda, on the other hand, doesn’t doubt what she hears.
“Girl, you did the right thing.” She grows sad. “You tell me what good it did me to get married. Pedro, that bum, left me with two little girls. One day he moved out and never sent a penny. I’ve had to raise two girls doing the most boring things: renting houses, selling flowers, giving classes to drivers, and they’re really fresh, you have no idea. I never studied for anything, it was the only work I could find. I wish I were like you, Uranita. You have a profession and earn a living in the capital of the world, you have an interesting job. You’re better off not being married. But you must have had your share of affairs, right?”
Urania feels her cheeks burning, and her blush makes Lucinda laugh:
“Aha, aha, look at you. You have a lover! Tell me about him. Is he rich? Good-looking? Gringo or Latino?”
“A gentleman with graying temples, very elegant,” Urania improvises. “Married, with children. We see each other on weekends, if I’m not traveling. A nice relationship, with no commitments.”
“Girl, I’m so jealous!” Lucinda claps her hands. “It’s my dream. An old man who’s rich and distinguished. I’ll have to go to New York to find one, here all the old men are disasters: fat as pigs and dead broke.”
In Adrian she couldn’t avoid attending some parties, going out with boys and girls, pretending to flirt with some freckled farmer’s son who talked about horses or dangerous climbs up snow-covered mountains in winter, but she would return to the dormitory so exhausted by all the pretending she had to do that she looked for reasons to avoid diversion. She developed a repertory of excuses: exams, projects, visits, ailments, pressing deadlines for turning in papers. During her years at Harvard, she didn’t recall ever going to a party, or a bar, or dancing, not even once.
“Manolita had terrible luck in her marriage too. Not because her husband was a womanizer, like mine. Esteban wouldn’t harm a fly. But he’s useless, he loses every job he gets. Now he’s working at one of the tourist hotels they built in Punta Canas. He earns a miserable salary, and my sister sees him maybe once or twice a month. Is that what you call a marriage?”
“Do you remember Rosalía Perdomo?” Urania interrupts.
“Rosalía Perdomo?” Lucinda searches her memory, half closing her eyes. “The truth is, I don’t…Oh, sure! The Rosalía who had that trouble with Ramfis Trujillo? Nobody ever saw her again. They must have sent her overseas.”
Urania’s admission to Harvard Law School was celebrated at Siena Heights as a great event. Until she had been accepted, she hadn’t realized how much prestige the university had in the United States, how reverently everyone referred to those who had graduated, studied, or taught there. It happened in the most natural way; if she had planned it, it couldn’t have been easier. She was in her last year. The guidance counselor, after congratulating her on her academic work; asked what professional plans she had, and Urania replied, “I like the law.” “A career where you can earn a lot of money,” Dr. Dorothy Sallison responded. But Urania had said “law” because it was the first thing that came to mind, she could have just as easily said medicine, economics, or biology. You had never thought about your future, Urania; you were so paralyzed by the past it never occurred to you to think about what lay ahead. Dr. Sallison reviewed various options with her and they chose four prestigious universities: Yale, Notre Dame, Chicago, and Stanford. One or two days after completing the applications, Dr. Sallison called her: “Why not Harvard too? You have nothing to lose.” Urania remembers traveling to interviews, the nights in religious hostels, arranged for by the Dominican sisters. And the joy of Dr. Sallison, the nuns, and her classmates as she received acceptances from all the universities, including Harvard. They gave her a party, where she was obliged to dance.
Her six years in Adrian allowed her to survive, something she thought she would never be able to do. Which is why she was still profoundly grateful to the Dominican sisters. And yet Adrian, in her memory, was a somnambulistic, uncertain time, the only concrete thing the infinite hours in the library, when she worked to keep from thinking.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, was different. There she began to live again, to discover that life was worth living, that studying was not only therapy but a joy, the most glorious of diversions. How she had relished the classes, the lectures, the seminars! Overwhelmed by the abundance of possibilities (in addition to studying law, she audited a course in Latin American history, a seminar on the Caribbean, a series on Dominican social history), she found there were not enough hours in the day or weeks in the month to do everything that appealed to her.
Years of intensive work, and not only intellectual. In her second year at Harvard, her father let her know, in one of those letters she never answered, that in view of how badly things were going, he found himself obliged to cut the five hundred dollars a month he was sending her down to two hundred. She obtained a student loan, and her studies were assured. But to meet her frugal needs, in her free hours she worked as a cashier at a supermarket, a waitress at a Boston pizzeria, a clerk at a pharmacy, and—her least tedious job—as a companion and reader to a paraplegic millionaire of Polish origin, Mr. Melvin Makovsky, to whom, from five to eight in the evening, in his Victorian brownstone house on Massachusetts Avenue, she read voluminous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels (
War and Peace, Moby Dick, Bleak House, Pamela
) and who, after she had been his reader for three months, unexpectedly proposed marriage.
“A paraplegic?” Lucinda’s large eyes open wide.
“Seventy years old,” Urania says. “And very rich. He proposed marriage, that’s right. So I could keep him company and read to him, that’s all.”
“You were a fool, Urania.” Lucindita was scandalized. “You would have inherited a fortune, you’d be a millionaire.”
“You’re right, it would have been a terrific deal.”
“But you were young, idealistic, and you believed a girl should marry for love.” Her cousin makes her explanations easy. “As if any of that lasts. I missed a chance too, with a doctor who was rolling in money. He was crazy about me. But he was dark-skinned, they said his mother was Haitian. I’m not prejudiced, but suppose my child was a throwback and came out black as coal?”
She liked studying so much, she felt so happy at Harvard, that she planned to complete a Ph.D. and go into teaching. But she didn’t have the money. Her father was in an increasingly difficult situation, in her third year he cut off her already reduced monthly allowance, and she needed to get a degree and begin earning money as soon as she could to pay off her student loans and support herself. The prestige of Harvard Law School was immense; when she began to send out applications, she was called to a good number of interviews. She decided on the World Bank. She was sorry to leave; during her years in Cambridge, she acquired her “perverse hobby”: reading and collecting books on the Trujillo Era.
In the shabby living room there is another photograph of her graduation—a morning of brilliant sun that lit up the Yard, festive with canopies, elegant clothing, the many-colored mortarboards and robes of professors and graduates—identical to the one that Senator Cabral has in his bedroom. How did he get it? She certainly didn’t send it to him. Of course, Sister Mary. She’d sent this photograph to Santo Domingo Academy. For, until the nun’s death, Urania maintained a correspondence with her. That charitable soul must have kept Senator Cabral informed about Urania’s life. She remembers Sister Mary looking at the sea, leaning against the stone balustrade on the top floor of the academy building facing southeast—off-limits to students, it was where the nuns lived; at that distance, from the courtyard where the two German shepherds, Badulaque and Brutus, raced around the tennis courts, the volleyball courts, and the swimming pool, her lean silhouette seemed smaller.
It’s hot, and she drips perspiration. She has never felt anything like this volcanic heat even in steamy New York summers, which are offset by the chill of air conditioning. This was a different kind of heat: the heat of her childhood. And she had never heard that extravagant symphony of blowing horns, voices, music, barking, squealing brakes, which came in through the windows and obliged her and her cousin to raise their voices.
“Is it true that Johnny Abbes put Papa in prison when they killed Trujillo?”
“Didn’t he tell you about it?” her cousin asks in surprise.
“I was already in Michigan,” Urania reminds her.
Lucinda nods, with an apologetic half-smile.
“Of course he did. Those men went crazy. Ramfis, Radhamés, the Trujillistas. They began killing and locking up people left and right. Well, I really don’t remember much about it. I was a little girl and didn’t care anything about politics. Uncle Agustín had been distanced from Trujillo, and they must have thought he was involved in the plot. They held him in that awful prison, La Cuarenta, the one that Balaguer tore down, there’s a church there now. My mama went to talk to Balaguer, to plead with him. They kept him locked up for a few days until they proved he wasn’t part of the conspiracy. Later, the President gave him a miserable little job that seemed like a joke: as an official in the Civil Government of the Third District.”
“Did he say anything about how he was treated in La Cuarenta?”
Lucinda exhales smoke that hides her face for a moment.
“Maybe to my parents, but not to me or Manolita, we were very young. It hurt Uncle Agustín that they thought he could have betrayed Trujillo. For years he protested the injustice that had been done to him.”
“The Generalissimo’s most loyal servant,” mocks Urania. “For a man capable of committing monstrous crimes for Trujillo to be suspected of complicity with his assassins—that really was an injustice!”
She stops because of the reproach she sees on her cousin’s round face.
“I don’t know why you talk about monstrous crimes,” she murmurs in astonishment. “Maybe my uncle was wrong to be a Trujillista. Now they say he was a dictator and all. Your father served him in good faith. Even though he held such high posts, he didn’t take advantage of them. Did he? He’s spending his final years as poor as a dog; without you, he’d be in an old-age home.”
Lucinda tries to control the irritation that has overwhelmed her. She takes a final drag on her cigarette, and since she has no place to put it out—there are no ashtrays in the dilapidated living room—she tosses it out the window into the withered garden.
“I know very well that my papa didn’t serve Trujillo out of self-interest.” Urania cannot avoid a trace of sarcasm. “That doesn’t seem extenuating to me. It’s more like an aggravating circumstance.”
Her cousin looks at her, uncomprehending.
“The fact that he did what he did out of admiration, out of love for him,” Urania explains. “Of course he must have been offended when Ramfis, Abbes García, and the rest suspected him. He almost went mad with despair when Trujillo turned his back on him.”
“Well, maybe he was wrong,” her cousin repeats, her eyes begging her to change the subject. “At least recognize that he was a very decent man. He didn’t make accommodations, like so many others, who went on living the good life with every government, especially the three run by Balaguer.”
“I wish he had served Trujillo out of self-interest, to steal or have power,” Urania says, and again she sees perplexity and displeasure in Lucinda’s eyes. “Anything, rather than seeing him whimper because Trujillo wouldn’t grant him an audience, because letters appeared in ‘The Public Forum’ insulting him.”
It is a persistent memory, one that tormented her in Adrian and in Cambridge, in somewhat attenuated form stayed with her through all her years at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and that still assaults her in Manhattan: the helpless Senator Agustín Cabral pacing frantically in this very living room, asking himself what intrigue had been mounted against him by the Constitutional Sot, the unctuous Joaquín Balaguer, the cynical Virgilio Álvarez Pina, or Paíno Pichardo, to make the Generalissimo wipe out his existence overnight. Because what existence could a senator and ex-minister have when the Benefactor did not answer his letters or permit him to appear in Congress? Was the history of Anselmo Paulino repeating itself in him? Would the
caliés
come for him in the middle of the night and bury him in some dungeon? Would
La Nación
and
El Caribe
come out with vile reports of his thefts, embezzlements, betrayals, crimes?
“Falling into disgrace was worse for him than if they had killed the person he loved best.”