Her cousin listens to her with increasing discomfort.
“Was that why you got so angry, Uranita?” she says at last. “Over politics? But I remember very clearly that you had no interest at all in politics. When those two girls nobody knew came in at midyear, for example. Everybody said they were
caliesas
and nobody talked about anything else, but you were bored by political gossip and told us all to shut up.”
“I’ve never been interested in politics,” Urania agrees. “You’re right, why talk about things that happened thirty years ago?”
The nurse appears on the stairs. She comes down drying her hands on a blue cloth.
“All cleaned up and powdered like a baby,” she announces. “You can go up whenever you want. I’m going to prepare Don Agustín’s lunch. Can I fix something for you too, señora?”
“No, thank you,” says Urania. “I’m going back to the hotel to shower and change.”
“Well, tonight you’ll come to the house for supper. You’ll give my mama such a nice surprise. I’ll call Manolita too, she’ll be so happy.” Lucinda puts on a mournful face. “You’ll be shocked, Uranita. Do you remember how big and pretty the house was? Only half of it is left. When Papa died, we had to sell the garden along with the garage and the servants’ quarters. Well, enough of that. Seeing you has made me remember my childhood. We were happy then, weren’t we? It never occurred to us that everything would change, that lean years would come. Well, I’m going, Mama hasn’t had her lunch yet. You’ll come for supper, won’t you? You won’t disappear for another thirty-five years? You must remember the house, on Calle Santiago, about five blocks from here.”
“I remember it very well.” Urania stands and embraces her cousin. “This neighborhood hasn’t changed at all.”
She accompanies Lucinda to the front door and says goodbye with another hug and a kiss on the cheek. When she sees her walking away in her flowered dress, along a street boiling in the sun, where the response to frantic barking is the cackling of hens, she is filled with anguish. What are you doing here? What have you come to find in Santo Domingo, in this house? Will you go to have supper with Lucinda, Manolita, and Aunt Adelina? The poor thing must be a fossil, just like your father.
She climbs the stairs, slowly, putting off seeing him again. She is relieved to find him asleep, huddled in his chair; his eyes are wrinkled, his mouth open, and his rachitic chest rises and falls in a rhythmic pattern. “Just a piece of a man.” She sits on the bed and contemplates him. Studies him, reads him. They imprisoned him too, when Trujillo died. Believing he was one of the Trujillistas who conspired with Antonio de la Maza, General Juan Tomás Díaz and his brother Modesto, Antonio Imbert, and company. How frightening and how frightful for you, Papa. She had learned many years later, in a passing reference in an article about the events of 1961 in the Dominican Republic, that her father had also been caught in the dragnet. But she never knew the details. As far as she could remember, Senator Cabral did not allude to the experience in the letters she never answered. “That anyone could imagine, even for a second, that you planned to assassinate Trujillo, must have hurt you as much as falling into disgrace without knowing why.” Did Johnny Abbes himself interrogate him? Ramfis? Pechito León Estévez? Did they sit him on the Throne? Was her father linked in some way to the conspirators? True, he had made superhuman efforts to regain Trujillo’s favor, but what did that prove? Many conspirators kissed Trujillo’s ass until moments before they killed him. It very well might be that Agustín Cabral, a good friend of Modesto Díaz, had been informed of the plan. Even Balaguer knew about it, according to some. If the President of the Republic and the Minister of the Armed Forces had heard about it, why not her father? The conspirators knew that the Chief had ordered the fall from grace of Senator Cabral several weeks earlier; nothing strange about their thinking of him as a possible ally.
From time to time her father emits a quiet snore. When a fly settles on his face, he drives it away, not waking, with a movement of his head. How did you find out they had killed him? On May 30, 1961, you were already in Adrian. She was beginning to shake off the heaviness, the exhaustion that kept her disengaged from the world and from herself, in a kind of somnambulism, when the sister in charge of the dormitory came to the room that Urania shared with four other girls and showed her the headline in the newspaper she held in her hand:
TRUJILLO KILLED
. “I’ll lend it to you,” she said. What did you feel? She would swear she felt nothing, that the news slid over her without piercing her consciousness, like everything else she heard and saw around her. It’s possible you didn’t even read the article, didn’t look past the headline. She recalls, however, that days or weeks later, in a letter from Sister Mary, there were details about the crime, about the
caliés
breaking into the academy to take away Bishop Reilly, about the lawlessness and uncertainty they were living through. But not even that letter from Sister Mary could pull her out of the profound indifference to everything and everyone Dominican into which she had fallen and from which she was freed only years later, by a course on Antillean history at Harvard.
This sudden decision to come to Santo Domingo, to visit your father, does it mean you’re cured? No. You must have felt happy, been moved, at seeing Lucinda again, she was so close to you, your companion in rounds of vermouth, and at the matinees at the Olimpia and Elite movie theaters, on the beach or at the Country Club, and you must have felt sorry for the apparent mediocrity of her life, her lack of hope that it would improve. No. She didn’t make you happy, she didn’t move you, she didn’t make you feel sorry. She bored you because of that sentimentality and self-pity you find so objectionable.
“You’re an iceberg. You really don’t seem Dominican. I’m more Dominican than you are.” Well, well; imagine remembering Steve Duncan, her colleague at the World Bank. 1985 or 1986? Around then. They had been in Taipei that night, having supper together in the Grand Hotel, shaped like a Hollywood pagoda, where they were staying; through its windows the city looked like a blanket of fireflies. For the third, fourth, or tenth time, Steve proposed marriage and Urania, more categorically than before, told him no. Then, in surprise, she saw Steve’s ruddy face contort. She couldn’t contain her laughter.
“Don’t tell me you’re going to cry, Steve. For love of me? Or have you had too much whiskey?”
Steve did not smile. He sat looking at her for a long time, without answering, and then he said those words: “You’re an iceberg. You really don’t seem Dominican. I’m more Dominican than you are.” Well, well; the redhead fell in love with you, Urania. Whatever happened to him? A wonderful person, with a degree in economics from the University of Chicago, his interest in the Third World encompassed its problems of development, its languages, and its women. He finally married a Pakistani, an official of the Bank in the area of communications.
Are you an iceberg, Urania? Only with men. And not with all of them. With those whose glances, movements, gestures, tones of voice announce a danger. When you can read, in their minds or instincts, the intention to court you, to make advances. With them, yes, you do make them feel the arctic cold that you know how to project around you, like the stink skunks use to frighten away an enemy. A technique you handle with the mastery you’ve brought to every goal you set for yourself: studies, work, an independent life. “Everything except being happy.” Would she have been happy if, applying her will, her discipline, she had eventually overcome the unconquerable revulsion and disgust caused by men who desired her? You could have gone into therapy, seen a psychologist, an analyst. They had a remedy for everything, even finding men repugnant. But you never wanted to be cured. On the contrary, you don’t consider it a disease but a character trait, like your intelligence, your solitude, your passion for doing good work.
Her father’s eyes are open, and he looks at her with a certain fear.
“I was thinking about Steve, a Canadian at the World Bank,” she says in a quiet voice, scrutinizing him. “Since I didn’t want to marry him, he told me I was an iceberg. An accusation that would offend any Dominican woman. We have a reputation for being ardent, unbeatable in love. I earned a reputation for being just the opposite: prudish, indifferent, frigid. What do you think of that, Papa? Just now, for my cousin Lucinda, I had to invent a lover so she wouldn’t think badly of me.”
She falls silent because she notices that the invalid, shrinking in his chair, seems terrified. He no longer shakes off the flies that walk undisturbed across his face.
“A subject I would have liked us to talk about, Papa. Women, sex. Did you have affairs after Mama died? I never noticed anything. You didn’t seem like a womanizer. Did power satisfy you so much you didn’t need sex? It happens, even in this hot country. It happened to our perpetual President, Don Joaquín Balaguer, didn’t it? A bachelor at the age of ninety. He wrote love poems, and there are rumors he had a daughter he never recognized. I always had the impression that sex never interested him, that power gave him what other men got in bed. Was that the case with you, Papa? Or did you have discreet adventures? Did Trujillo invite you to his orgies at Mahogany House? What happened there? Did the Chief, like Ramfis, amuse himself by humiliating his friends and courtiers, forcing them to shave their legs, shave their bodies, make themselves up like old queens? Did he do those charming things too? Did he do them to you?”
Senator Cabral has turned so pale that Urania thinks: “He’s going to faint.” To let him recover, she moves away. She goes to the window and looks out. She feels the strength of the sun on her head, on the feverish skin of her face. She is sweating. You ought to go back to the hotel, fill the tub with bubbles, take a long, cool bath. Or go down and dive into the tiled pool and then try the Dominican buffet at the restaurant in the Hotel Jaragua, they’ll have beans with rice and pork. But you don’t feel like doing that. You’d rather go to the airport, take the first plane to New York, and resume your life at the busy law firm, and in your apartment at 73rd and Madison.
She sits down again on the bed. Her father closes his eyes. Is he sleeping or pretending to sleep because of the fear you inspire in him? You’re giving the poor invalid a bad time. Is that what you wanted? To frighten him, inflict a few hours of terror on him? Do you feel better now? Weariness has overwhelmed her, and since her eyes are beginning to close, she gets to her feet.
In a mechanical way she goes to the large armoire of dark wood that takes up one whole wall of the room. It is half empty. On wire hangers she sees a dark gray suit, yellowing like the skin of an onion, and a few shirts, washed but not ironed; two of them are missing buttons. Is this all that is left of the wardrobe of the President of the Senate, Agustín Cabral? He had been an elegant man. Meticulous in his person and dress, the way the Chief liked men to be. What had happened to his dinner jackets, his dress tails, his dark suits made of English worsted, the white ones of finest linen? The servants must have stolen them, the nurses, the impoverished relatives.
Weariness is stronger than her will to stay awake. Finally, she lies down on the bed and closes her eyes. Before she falls asleep, she thinks that the bed smells of old man, old sheets, very old dreams and nightmares.
“A question, Excellency,” said Simon Gittleman, flushed from the glasses of champagne and wine, or, perhaps, emotion. “Of all the steps you have taken to make this country great, which was the most difficult?”
He spoke excellent Spanish, with a very faint accent, nothing like the caricatured language full of errors and incorrect intonations mouthed by so many gringos who had paraded through the offices and reception rooms of the National Palace. Simon’s Spanish had improved a good deal since 1921, when Trujillo, a young lieutenant in the National Guard, was accepted as a student at the Officers’ Training School at Haina and had the Marine as an instructor; back then, he mouthed a barbaric Spanish peppered with curses. Gittleman had asked the question in so loud a voice that conversations stopped and twenty heads—curious, smiling, grave—turned toward the Benefactor, waiting for his reply.
“I can answer your question, Simon.” Trujillo adopted the measured, hollow voice he used on solemn occasions. He fixed his eyes on the crystal chandelier with the petal-shaped bulbs, and added: “The second of October 1937, in Dajabón.”
Rapid glances were exchanged among the guests at the luncheon given by Trujillo for Simon and Dorothy Gittleman, following the ceremony in which the former Marine received the Juan Pablo Duarte Order of Merit. When Gittleman expressed his thanks, his voice broke. Now, he tried to guess what His Excellency was alluding to.
“Ah, the Haitians!” His slap on the table made the fine crystal goblets, platters, glasses, and decanters ring. “The day Your Excellency decided to cut the Gordian knot of the Haitian invasion.”
Everyone had glasses of wine, but the Generalissimo drank only water. He was solemn, absorbed in his memories. The silence thickened. Hieratic and theatrical, the Generalissimo raised his hands and showed them to his guests:
“For the sake of this country, I have stained these with blood,” he stated, emphasizing each syllable. “To keep the blacks from colonizing us again. There were tens of thousands of them, and they were everywhere. If I hadn’t, the Dominican Republic would not exist today. The entire island would be Haiti, as it was in 1840. The handful of white survivors would be serving the blacks. That was my most difficult decision in thirty years of government, Simon.”
“We followed your orders and traveled the entire length of the border.” The young deputy Henry Chirinos leaned over the enormous map displayed on the President’s desk and pointed: “If this continues, there will be no future for the Dominican Republic, Excellency.”
“The situation is more serious than you were told, Excellency.” The slender index finger of the young deputy Agustín Cabral caressed the dotted red line that moved in S curves from Dajabón down to Pedernales. “Thousands and thousands of them, working on plantations, in empty fields, in settlements. They’ve displaced Dominican laborers.”
“They work free of charge, not for wages, but for food. Since there’s nothing to eat in Haiti, a little rice and beans is plenty for them. They cost less than donkeys and dogs.”
Chirinos made a gesture and let his friend and colleague continue:
“Talking to the ranchers and plantation owners is useless, Excellency,” Cabral explained. “They reply by patting their pockets. What do I care if they’re Haitians if they can harvest the cane and work for almost nothing? Patriotism won’t make me go against my own interests.”
He stopped speaking and looked at Deputy Chirinos, who took up the argument:
“All through Dajabón, Elías Piña, Independencia, and Pedernales, instead of Spanish all you hear are the African grunts of Creole.”
He looked at Agustín Cabral, who resumed speaking immediately:
“Voodoo, Santería, African superstitions are uprooting the Catholic religion that, like language and race, distinguishes our nationality.”
“We’ve seen parish priests weeping in despair, Excellency,” young Deputy Chirinos said, his voice quavering. “Pre-Christian savagery is taking over the country of Diego Colón, Juan Pablo Duarte, and Trujillo. Haitian sorcerers have more influence than priests, medicine men more than pharmacists and physicians.”
“The Army didn’t do anything?” Simon Gittleman took a sip of wine. One of the white-uniformed waiters quickly refilled his glass.
“The Army does what the Chief orders, Simon, you know that.” Only the Benefactor and the former Marine were speaking. The others listened as their heads turned from one to the other. “The gangrene had moved very high. Montecristi, Santiago, San Juan, Azua, they were all teeming with Haitians. The plague was spreading and no one did anything. They were waiting for a statesman with vision, one whose hand would not tremble.”
“Imagine a hydra with countless heads, Excellency.” Young Deputy Chirinos’s poetic turns of phrase were accompanied by extravagant gestures. “These laborers steal work from Dominicans who, in order to survive, sell their little plots of ground, their farms. Who buys the land? The newly prosperous Haitians, naturally.”
“It is the second head of the hydra, Excellency,” young Deputy Cabral specified. “They take work from nationals and, piece by piece, appropriate our sovereignty.”
“And our women too.” His voice thickened, and young Henry Chirinos gave off a whiff of lechery: his reddish tongue appeared like a snake between his thick lips. “Nothing attracts black flesh more than white. Haitian violations of Dominican women are an everyday occurrence.”
“Not to mention robberies and attacks on property,” insisted young Agustín Cabral. “Gangs of criminals cross the Masacre River as if there were no customs, checkpoints, or patrols. The border is like a sieve. The gangs demolish villages and farms like swarms of locusts. Then they drive the livestock back into Haiti, along with everything they can find to eat, wear, or adorn themselves with. That region is no longer ours, Excellency. We have lost our language there, our religion, our race. It now forms part of Haitian barbarism.”
Dorothy Gittleman barely spoke Spanish and must have been bored with this conversation regarding something that occurred twenty-four years earlier, but she nodded very seriously from time to time, looking at the Generalissimo and her husband as if following every syllable of what they were saying. She had been seated between the puppet president, Joaquín Balaguer, and the Minister of the Armed Forces, General José René (Pupo) Román. She was a small, fragile, upright old woman rejuvenated by the pink tones of her summer dress. During the ceremony, when the Generalissimo had said that the Dominican people would not forget the solidarity displayed by the Gittlemans during this difficult time, when so many governments were stabbing them in the back, she too had shed a few tears.
“I knew what was going on,” Trujillo declared. “But I wanted proof, so there would be no doubts. I didn’t make a decision even after I received an on-site report from the Constitutional Sot and Egghead. I decided to go there myself. I traveled the length of the border on horseback, accompanied by volunteers from the University Guard. I saw it with my own eyes: they had invaded us again, just as they had in 1822. Peacefully, this time. Could I allow the Haitians to remain in my country for another twenty-two years?”
“No patriot would have allowed it,” exclaimed Senator Henry Chirinos, raising his glass. “Least of all Generalissimo Trujillo. A toast to His Excellency!”
Trujillo continued as if he hadn’t heard:
“Could I allow what happened during those twenty-two years of occupation to happen again, allow blacks to murder, rape, and cut the throats of Dominicans, even in churches?”
Seeing the failure of his toast, the Constitutional Sot wheezed, drank some wine, and began to listen again.
“During the entire trip along the border with the University Guard, the cream of our youth, I examined the past,” the Generalissimo continued, with increasing emphasis. “I recalled the slaughter in the church at Moca. The burning of Santiago. The march to Haiti by Dessalines and Cristóbal, with nine hundred prominent men from Moca who died along the way or were given as slaves to the Haitian military.”
“More than two weeks since we presented our report and the Chief hasn’t done a thing.” Young Deputy Chirinos was agitated. “Is he going to make a decision, Egghead?”
They had both accompanied Trujillo on his trip along the border, with the hundred volunteers from the University Guard, and they had just reached the city of Dajabón, breathing more heavily than their horses. The two of them, despite their youth, would have preferred to rest their saddle-weary bones, but His Excellency was holding a reception for Dajabón society and they would never offend him. There they were, suffocating with the heat in their stiff-collared shirts and tunics, in the decorated town hall, where Trujillo, as fresh as if he had not been riding since dawn, and wearing an impeccable blue-and-gray uniform studded with medals and gold braid, moved among the various groups with a glass of Carlos I in his right hand, accepting their tributes. Then he caught sight of a young officer in dust-covered boots who burst into the flag-draped room.
“You showed up at that gala reception, sweating and in your field uniform.” The Benefactor abruptly turned his gaze toward the Minister of the Armed Forces. “What disgust I felt!”
“I came to make a report to the head of my regiment, Excellency,” General Román said in confusion, after a silence during which his memory struggled to identify that long-ago episode. “Last night a gang of Haitian criminals slipped across the border. Early this morning they attacked three farms in Capotillo and Parolí and stole all the cattle. And left three men dead.”
“You risked your career, appearing before me in that condition,” the Generalissimo reproached him with retroactive irritation. “All right. It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. The Ministers of War and Government, and all the military present, come here. The rest of you, please step aside.”
He had raised his thin, piercing voice to a hysterical pitch, as he used to when he gave instructions in the barracks. He was obeyed immediately, in the midst of voices buzzing like wasps. The military formed a dense circle around him; gentlemen and ladies withdrew to the walls, leaving an empty space in the center of the room decorated with streamers, paper flowers, and little Dominican flags. A resolute President Trujillo gave the order:
“Beginning at midnight, the forces of the Army and the police will proceed to exterminate without mercy every person of Haitian nationality who is in Dominican territory illegally, except for those on the sugar plantations.” He cleared his throat and his gray gaze moved around the circle of officers: “Is that clear?”
The heads nodded, some with an expression of surprise, others with glints of savage joy in their eyes. They clicked their heels when they left.
“Head of the Dajabón Regiment: detain and put on bread and water the officer who presented himself here in that disgraceful condition. Let the party continue. Enjoy yourselves!”
On Simon Gittleman’s face, admiration mixed with nostalgia.
“His Excellency never hesitated when it was time to act,” said the former Marine to the entire table. “I had the honor of training him at the school in Haina. From the first moment I knew he would go far. But I never imagined it would be this far.”
He laughed, and amiable chuckles echoed him.
“They never trembled,” Trujillo repeated, displaying his hands again. “Because I gave the order to kill only when it was absolutely necessary for the good of the country.”
“I read somewhere, Your Excellency, that you ordered the soldiers to use machetes, not guns. Was that to save ammunition?” Simon Gittleman asked.
“To sugarcoat the pill, anticipating international reaction,” Trujillo corrected him slyly. “If they only used machetes, the operation could appear to be a spontaneous action by campesinos, without government intervention. We Dominicans are lavish, we’ve never skimped on anything, least of all ammunition.”
The entire table celebrated the witticism with laughter. Simon Gittleman as well. But then he returned to the same subject.
“Is it true about the parsley, Your Excellency? That to distinguish Dominicans from Haitians you made all the blacks say
perejil?
And the ones who couldn’t pronounce it properly had their heads cut off?”
“I’ve heard that story.” Trujillo shrugged. “It’s just idle gossip.”
He lowered his head, as if a profound thought suddenly demanded a great effort of concentration. It hadn’t happened; his eyes were still sharp and they did not detect the telltale stain on his fly or between his legs. He gave a friendly smile to the former Marine:
“Like the stories about the number of dead,” he said mockingly. “Ask the people sitting at this table and you’ll hear all kinds of figures. For example, you, Senator, how many were there?”
Henry Chirinos’s dark face came to attention, swelling with satisfaction at being the first one the Chief asked.
“Difficult to know.” He gestured, as he did when giving speeches. “It has been greatly exaggerated. Between five and eight thousand, at most.”
“General Arredondo, you were in Independencia at the time, cutting throats. How many?”
“About twenty thousand, Excellency,” replied the obese General Arredondo, who looked caged inside his uniform. “In the Independencia zone alone there were several thousand. The senator underestimated the number. I was there. No less than twenty thousand.”
“How many did you kill personally?” the Generalissimo joked, and another wave of laughter ran around the table, making the chairs creak and the crystal sing.
“What you said about idle gossip is the absolute truth, Excellency,” the rotund officer said with a start, and his smile turned into a grimace. “Now they blame everything on us. False, all false. The Army obeyed orders. We began to separate the illegals from the others. But the people wouldn’t let us. Everybody began to hunt down Haitians. Campesinos, merchants, and officials revealed their hiding places, and they hung them and beat them to death. They burned them, sometimes. In many places, the Army had to intervene to stop the excesses. There was a lot of resentment against them for their thieving and plundering.”