In a pause between cars she races across the road. Instead of making a half-turn and returning to the Jaragua, her steps, not her will, lead her around the Hispaniola and back along Independencia, an avenue that, if memory serves, starts here, with a double line of leafy laurels whose tops meet over the road, cooling it, until it divides in two and disappears in the middle of the colonial city. How many times did you stroll, holding your father’s hand, in the murmuring shade of the laurels along Independencia? The two of you would come down to the avenue from César Nicolás Penson and walk to Independencia Park. In the Italian ice-cream parlor, on the right, at the beginning of El Conde, you would eat coconut, mango, or guava ice cream. How proud you felt holding that gentleman’s hand—Senator Agustín Cabral, Minister Cabral. Everybody knew who he was. They would approach him, hold out their hands, doff their hats, bow, and police and soldiers would click their heels when they saw him pass by. How you must have missed those years of importance, Papa, when you became just another poor devil in the crowd. They were satisfied with insulting you in “The Public Forum,” but they didn’t put you in jail, like Anselmo Paulino. It was what you feared most, wasn’t it? That one day the Chief would give the order: Egghead goes to jail! You were lucky, Papa.
After three-quarters of an hour she still has a long way to go to reach the hotel. If she had taken money, she would go into a cafeteria to have breakfast and rest. She constantly has to wipe perspiration from her face. The years, Urania. At forty-nine one is no longer young. No matter what shape you’re in compared with other women. But you’re not ready yet to be tossed out with the trash, judging by the looks that come from right and left and rest on her face and body, the insinuating, greedy, brazen, insolent looks of males accustomed to undressing all the females on the street with their eyes and thoughts. “Forty-nine years that really become you, Uri,” said Dick Litney, her colleague and friend from the office, in New York, on her birthday, a bold statement that no man in the firm would have allowed himself to make unless he, like Dick that night, had two or three whiskeys under his belt. Poor Dick. He blushed and became confused when Urania froze him with one of those slow looks she had used for thirty-five years to confront the gallantries, sudden off-color jokes, witticisms, allusions, or unwelcome moves from men, and sometimes women.
She stops to catch her breath. She feels her heart beating wildly, her chest rising and falling. She is at the corner of Independencia and Máximo Gómez, in a crowd of men and women waiting to cross. Her nose registers a range of odors as great as the endless variety of noises hammering at her ears: the oil burned by the motors of the buses and escaping through their exhausts, tongues of smoke that dissipate or remain floating over the pedestrians; smells of grease and frying from a stand where two pans sputter and food and drinks are for sale; and that dense, indefinable, tropical aroma of decomposing resins and underbrush, of perspiring bodies, an air saturated with animal, vegetable, and human essences protected by a sun that delays their dissolution and passing. A hot odor that touches some intimate fiber of memory and returns her to childhood, to multicolored heartsease hanging from roofs and balconies, to this same Avenida Máximo Gómez. Mother’s Day! Of course. May with its brilliant sun, its torrential downpours, its heat. The girls from Santo Domingo Academy selected to bring flowers to Mama Julia, the Sublime Matriarch, progenitor of the Benefactor and the example and symbol of Dominican motherhood. They came from school in a bus, wearing their immaculate white uniforms and accompanied by Mother Superior and Sister Mary. You burned with curiosity, pride, affection, respect. You were going to represent the school in the house of Mama Julia. You were going to recite for her the poem “Mother and Teacher, Sublime Matriarch,” which you had written, memorized, and recited dozens of times in front of the mirror, in front of your classmates, in front of Lucinda and Manolita, in front of Papa, in front of the sisters, and which you had silently repeated to yourself to be sure you would not forget a single syllable. When the glorious moment arrived in Mama Julia’s large pink house, you were disconcerted by the military men, ladies, aides, delegations crowded into gardens, rooms, corridors, overwhelmed by emotion and tenderness, and when you stepped forward to within a meter of the old lady smiling benevolently from her rocking chair and holding the bouquet of roses Mother Superior had just presented to her, your throat constricted and your mind went blank. You burst into tears. You heard laughter, encouraging words from the ladies and gentlemen who surrounded Mama Julia. The Sublime Matriarch smiled and beckoned to you. Then Uranita composed herself, dried her tears, stood up straight, and firmly, rapidly, but without the proper intonation, recited “Mother and Teacher, Sublime Matriarch,” in an unbroken rush. They applauded. Mama Julia stroked Uranita’s hair, and her mouth, puckered into a thousand wrinkles, kissed her.
At last the light changes. Urania continues on her way, protected from the sun by the shade of the trees along Máximo Gómez. She has been walking for an hour. It is pleasant to move under the laurels, to see the shrubs with the little red flowers and golden pistils, either cayenne or Christ’s blood, to be lost in her own thoughts, lulled by the anarchy of voices and music, yet alert to the uneven places, potholes, depressions, irregularities in the sidewalk, where she is constantly on the verge of stumbling or stepping on garbage that stray dogs root through. Were you happy back then? You were, when you went with a group of students from Santo Domingo Academy to bring flowers to the Sublime Matriarch on Mother’s Day and recite the poem for her. Though when the protective, beautiful figure of her own childhood vanished from the small house on César Nicolás Penson, perhaps the very notion of happiness also disappeared from Urania’s life. But your father and aunts and uncles—especially Aunt Adelina and Uncle Aníbal, and your cousins Lucindita and Manolita—and old friends did everything possible to fill your mother’s absence with pampering and special treats so you wouldn’t feel lonely or deprived. Your father was both father and mother during those years. That’s why you loved him so much. That’s why it hurt you so much, Urania.
When she reaches the rear entrance of the Jaragua, a wide, barred gate for cars, stewards, cooks, chambermaids, porters, she doesn’t stop. Where are you going? She hasn’t made any decision. Her mind, concentrating on her girlhood, her school, the Sundays when she would go with her Aunt Adelina and her cousins to the children’s matinee at the Cine Elite, hasn’t even considered the possibility of not going into the hotel to shower and have breakfast. Her feet have decided to continue. She walks unhesitatingly, certain of the route, among pedestrians and cars impatient for the light to change. Are you sure you want to go where you’re going, Urania? Now you know that you’ll go, even though you may regret it.
She turns left onto Cervantes and walks toward Bolívar, recognizing as if in a dream the one- and two-story chalets with fences and gardens, open terraces and garages, which awaken in her a familiar feeling, these deteriorating images that have been preserved, somewhat faded, chipped along the edges, made ugly with additions and patchwork, small rooms built on flat roofs or assembled at the sides, in the middle of the gardens, to house offspring who marry and cannot live on their own and come home to add to the families, demanding more space. She passes laundries, pharmacies, florist shops, cafeterias, plaques for dentists, doctors, accountants, and lawyers. On Avenida Bolívar she walks as if she were trying to overtake someone, as if she were about to break into a run. Her heart is in her mouth. You’ll collapse at any moment. When she reaches Rosa Duarte she veers left and begins to run. But the effort is too much and she walks again, more slowly now, very close to the off-white wall of a house in case she becomes dizzy again and has to lean on something until she catches her breath. Except for a ridiculously narrow four-story building where the house with the spiked fence used to be, the house that belonged to Dr. Estanislas, who took out her tonsils, nothing has changed; she would even swear that the maids sweeping the gardens and the fronts of the houses are going to greet her: “Hello, Uranita. How are you, honey? Girl, how you’ve grown. Mother of God, where are you off to in such a hurry?”
The house hasn’t changed too much either, though she recalled the gray of its walls as intense and now it’s dull, stained, peeling. The garden is a thicket of weeds, dead leaves, withered grass. Nobody has watered or pruned it in years. There’s the mango. Was that the flamboyán? It must have been, when it had leaves and flowers; now, it’s a trunk with bare, rachitic branches.
She leans against the wrought-iron gate that opens to the garden. The flagstone path has weeds growing through the cracks and is stained by mildew, and at the entrance to the terrace there is a defeated chair with a broken leg. The yellow cretonne-covered furniture is gone. And the little polished glass lamp in the corner that lit the terrace and attracted butterflies during the day and buzzing insects at night. The little balcony off her bedroom no longer is covered by mauve heartsease: it is a cement projection stained with rust.
At the back of the terrace, a door opens with a long groan. A woman in a white uniform stares at her curiously.
“Are you looking for someone?”
Urania cannot speak; she is too agitated, too shaken, too frightened. She remains mute, looking at the stranger.
“Can I help you?” the woman asks.
“I’m Urania,” she says at last. “Agustín Cabral’s daughter.”
He woke, paralyzed by a sense of catastrophe. He blinked in the dark, immobilized, imprisoned in a web, about to be devoured by a hairy insect covered with eyes. At last he managed to stretch his hand toward the bedside table where he kept the revolver and the loaded submachine gun. But instead of a weapon he grasped the alarm clock: ten to four. He exhaled. Now, at last, he was fully awake. Nightmares again? He still had a few minutes: he was obsessive about punctuality and did not get out of bed before four o’clock. Not a minute before, not a minute after.
“I owe everything I am to discipline,” he thought. And discipline, the polestar of his life, he owed to the Marines. He closed his eyes. The entrance tests at San Pedro de Macorís for the Dominican National Police, a force the Yankees decided to create in the third year of the occupation, were very hard. He passed with no difficulty. During training, half of the candidates were eliminated. He relished every exercise demanding agility, boldness, audacity, or stamina, even the brutal ones that tested your will, your obedience to a superior, plunging into mudholes with a full field pack or surviving in the wild, drinking your own urine and chewing on stalks, weeds, grasshoppers. Sergeant Gittleman gave him the highest rating: “You’ll go far, Trujillo.” And he had, thanks to the merciless discipline of heroes and mystics taught to him by the Marines. He thought with gratitude of Sergeant Simon Gittleman. A loyal, disinterested gringo in a country of hagglers, bloodsuckers, and assholes. Had the United States had a more sincere friend than Trujillo in the past thirty-one years? What government had given them greater support in the UN? Which was the first to declare war on Germany and Japan? Who gave the biggest bribes to representatives, senators, governors, mayors, lawyers, and reporters in the United States? His reward: economic sanctions by the OAS to make that nigger Rómulo Betancourt happy, to keep sucking at the tit of Venezuelan oil. If Johnny Abbes had handled things better and the bomb had blown off the head of that faggot Rómulo, there wouldn’t be any sanctions and the asshole gringos wouldn’t be handing him bullshit about sovereignty, democracy, and human rights. But then he wouldn’t have discovered that in a country of two hundred million assholes, he had a friend like Simon Gittleman. Capable of initiating a personal campaign in defense of the Dominican Republic from Phoenix, Arizona, where he had been in business since his retirement from the Marines. And not asking for a cent! There still were men like that in the Marines. Not asking, not charging for anything! What a lesson for those leeches in the Senate and the House of Representatives he’d been feeding for years; they always wanted more checks, more concessions, more decrees, more tax exemptions, and now, when he needed them, they pretended they didn’t know him.
He looked at the clock: four minutes to go. A magnificent gringo, that Simon Gittleman! A real Marine. Indignant at the offensive against Trujillo by the White House, Venezuela, and the OAS, he gave up his business in Arizona and bombarded the American press with letters, reminding everyone that during all of the Trujillo Era the Dominican Republic had been a bulwark of anti-Communism, the best ally of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Not satisfied with that, he funded—out of his own damn pocket!—support committees, paid for publications, organized conferences. And to set an example, he came to Ciudad Trujillo with his family and rented a house on the Malecón. This afternoon Simon and Dorothy would have lunch with him in the Palace, and the ex-Marine would receive the Juan Pablo Duarte Order of Merit, the highest decoration the Dominican Republic could bestow. A real Marine, yes sir!
Four sharp, now it was time. He turned on the lamp on the night table, put on his slippers, and got up, without the old agility. His bones ached and he felt pains in his leg and back muscles, the way he had a few days ago at Mahogany House, on that damn night with that anemic little bitch. He ground his teeth in annoyance. He was walking to the chair where Sinforoso had laid out his sweat suit and gym shoes when a suspicion stopped him cold. Anxiously he inspected the sheets: the ugly grayish stain befouled the whiteness of the linen. It had leaked out, again. Indignation erased the unpleasant memory of Mahogany House. Damn it! Damn it! This wasn’t an enemy he could defeat like the hundreds, the thousands he had confronted and conquered over the years, buying them, intimidating them, killing them. This lived inside him, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. It was destroying him at precisely the time he needed to be stronger and healthier than ever. That skinny little cunt had brought him bad luck.
He found his jockstrap, shorts, and undershirt, immaculately washed and ironed, along with his exercise shoes. He dressed with great effort. He never had needed much sleep: when he was a young man in San Cristóbal, when he was the head of the rural guards on the Boca Chica sugar plantation, four or five hours had been enough, even if he had been drinking and fucking till dawn. His ability to recover physically with a minimum of sleep contributed to his aura of superiority. Not anymore. He woke exhausted and couldn’t sleep for even four hours; two or three at the most, and those plagued by nightmares.
The night before, he lay sleepless, in the dark. Through the window he could see the tops of trees and a piece of sky studded with stars. From time to time, in the clear night, he heard the chatter of those old biddies, night owls declaiming poems by Juan de Dios Peza, Amado Nervo, Rubén Darío (which made him suspect that among them was the Walking Turd, who knew Darío by heart), Pablo Neruda’s
Twenty Poems of Love
, and the risqué stanzas of Juan Antonio Alix. And, of course, the verses of Doña María, the Dominican writer and moralist. He laughed aloud as he climbed on the stationary bike and began to pedal. His wife had ended up taking herself seriously, and periodically would organize literary evenings in the skating rink at Radhamés Manor and bring in actresses to recite dumb-ass poems. Senator Henry Chirinos, who passed himself off as a poet, would participate in these soirees, feeding his cirrhosis at public expense. To ingratiate themselves with María Martínez, those bitches, just like Chirinos himself, had memorized entire pages of her
Moral Meditations
or speeches from her theater piece,
False Amity
. They recited them, and then the biddies applauded. And his wife—for that fat, stupid old woman, the Bountiful First Lady, was his wife—had taken the business about being a writer and moralist seriously. And why not? Didn’t the newspapers, the radio, the television say so? Wasn’t
Moral Meditations
, with a prologue by the Mexican José Vasconcelos, required reading in the schools, and wasn’t it reprinted every two months? Hadn’t
False Amity
been the greatest stage hit in the thirty-one years of the Trujillo Era? Hadn’t the critics and reporters, the university professors, priests, and intellectuals, praised her to the skies? Didn’t they devote a seminar to her at the Trujillonian Institute? Hadn’t her concepts been acclaimed by the bishops, those traitorous crows, those Judases, who after living out of his wallet were talking now, just like the Yankees, about human rights? The Bountiful First Lady was a writer and a moralist. No thanks to her, but to him, like everything else that had happened in this country for the past three decades. Trujillo could turn water into wine and multiply loaves of bread if he fucking well felt like it. He reminded María of this during their last argument: “You forget you didn’t write that shit, you can’t even write your name without making grammatical mistakes, it was that Galician traitor José Almoina, paid by me. Don’t you know what people say? That the first letters of
False Amity
, F and A, stand for Find Almoina.” He laughed again, open, joyful laughter. His bitterness had vanished. María burst into tears—“How you humiliate me!”—and threatened to complain to Mama Julia. As if his poor ninety-six-year-old mother was in any shape for family arguments. Like his own brothers and sisters, his wife was always running to the Sublime Matriarch to cry on her shoulder. To make peace, he’d had to cross her palm again. What Dominicans whispered was true: the writer and moralist was a grasping, avaricious soul. And had been from the time they were lovers. When she was still a girl she’d thought of setting up a special laundry for the uniforms of the Dominican National Police, and made her first money.
Pedaling warmed his body. He felt in shape. Fifteen minutes: enough. Another fifteen of rowing before he began the day’s battle.
The rowing machine was in a small adjoining room filled with exercise equipment. He had begun rowing, and then a horse’s whinny vibrated in the silence of dawn, long and musical, like a joyful paean to life. How long since he’d ridden? Months. He had never tired of it, after fifty years it still excited him, like his first sip of Carlos I Spanish brandy or his first sight of the naked, white, voluptuous body of a woman he desired. But this thought was poisoned by the memory of the skinny little thing that son of a bitch had managed to get into his bed. Did he do it knowing he would be shamed? No, he didn’t have the balls for that. She probably told him about it and gave him a good laugh. It must be making the rounds now of all the gossipmongers in the coffee shops along El Conde. He trembled with mortification and rage as he rowed in a steady rhythm. He was sweating now. If they could see him! Another myth they repeated about him was: “Trujillo never sweats. In the worst heat of summer he puts on those woolen uniforms, with a velvet three-cornered hat and gloves, and you never see a drop of sweat on his forehead.” He didn’t sweat if he didn’t want to. But when he was alone, when he was doing his exercises, he gave permission to his body to perspire. Recently, during this difficult time, with so many problems, he had denied himself his horses. Maybe this week he’d go to San Cristóbal. He’d ride alone, under the trees, along the river, like in the old days, and feel rejuvenated. “Not even a woman’s arms are as affectionate as the back of a chestnut.”
He stopped rowing when he felt a cramp in his left arm. He wiped his face and looked down at his pants, at his fly. Nothing. It was still dark outside. The trees and shrubs in the gardens of Radhamés Manor were inky stains under a clear sky crowded with twinkling lights. What was that line of Neruda’s that the moralist’s babbling friends liked so much? “And stars tremble blue in the distance.” Those old women trembled when the dreamed that some poet would scratch their itch. And all they had near at hand was Chirinos, that Frankenstein. Again he laughed out loud, something that did not happen very often these days.
He undressed and, wearing slippers and a robe, went to the bathroom to shave. He turned on the radio. They read the newspapers on the Dominican Voice and Caribbean Radio. Until a few years ago the news bulletins had begun at five. But when his brother Petán, the owner of the Dominican Voice, found out that he woke at four, he moved the newscasts up an hour. The other stations followed suit. They knew he listened to the radio while he shaved, bathed, and dressed, and they were painstakingly careful.
The Dominican Voice, after a jingle for El Conde Hotel Restaurant announcing a night of dancing to Los Colosos del Ritmo under the direction of Maestro Gatón and featuring the singer Johnny Ventura, highlighted the Julia Molina Widow of Trujillo Prize to the Most Prolific Mother. The winner, Doña Alejandrina Francisco, who had twenty-one living children, declared when she received the medal with the portrait of the Sublime Matriarch: “My twenty-one children will give their lives for the Benefactor if they are asked to.”
“I don’t believe you, bitch.”
He had brushed his teeth and now he was shaving as meticulously as he always had, ever since he was a kid in a shantytown in San Cristóbal. Back when he didn’t even know if his poor mother, to whom the entire country now paid homage on Mother’s Day (“A well-spring of loving-kindness and mother of the preeminent man who governs us,” said the announcer), would have beans and rice that night to feed the eight mouths in her family. Cleanliness, caring for his body and his clothing, had been, for him, the only religion he practiced faithfully.
After another long list of visitors to the home of Mama Julia, to whom they would pay their respects on Mother’s Day (poor old woman, serenely receiving a caravan of schools, associations, institutes, unions, and thanking them in her faint little voice for their flowers and courtesy), the attacks began on Bishops Reilly and Panal, “who neither were born under our sun nor suffered under our moon” (“Nice,” he thought), “and who meddle in our civil and political life, overstepping the bounds into the terrain of the criminal.” Johnny Abbes wanted to go into Santo Domingo Academy and drag the Yankee bishop out of his refuge. “What can happen, Chief? The gringos will protest, naturally. Haven’t they protested everything for a long time now? Galíndez, Murphy the pilot, the Mirabal sisters, the attempt on Betancourt, and a thousand other things. It doesn’t matter if the dogs bark in Caracas, Puerto Rico, Washington, New York, Havana. What happens here is what matters. The crows in their cassocks won’t stop conspiring until they’ve been scared out of it.” No. It wasn’t time yet to settle the score with Reilly or that other son of a bitch, that shitty little Spaniard Bishop Panal. The time would come, they would pay. His instincts never deceived him. For now he wouldn’t touch a hair on their heads, even if they kept fucking with him, like they’d been doing since Sunday, January 24, 1960—a year and a half already!—when the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter was read at every Mass, inaugurating the campaign of the Catholic Church against the regime. Backbiters! Crows! Eunuchs! Doing that to him, a man who had been decorated in the Vatican by Pius XII with the Great Cross of the Papal Order of St. Gregory. On the Dominican Voice, Paíno Pichardo, in a speech delivered the night before in his capacity as Minister of the Interior and Religious Practice, recalled that the state had spent sixty million pesos on the Church, whose “bishops and priests are now doing so much harm to the Catholic faithful of the Dominican Republic.” He turned the dial. On Caribbean Radio they were reading a letter of protest from hundreds of workers because their signatures had not been included on the Great National Manifesto “against the disturbing machinations of Bishop Thomas Reilly, a traitor to God, Trujillo, and his own manhood, who, instead of remaining in his diocese of San Juan de la Maguana, ran like a scared rat to hide in Ciudad Trujillo behind the skirts of American nuns at Santo Domingo Academy, a vipers’ nest of terrorism and conspiracy.” When he heard that the Ministry of Education had deprived Santo Domingo Academy of its accreditation because “the foreign nuns were in collusion with the terrorist plotting of the Bishops of San Juan de la Maguana and La Vega against the State,” he turned back to the Dominican Voice in time to hear the announcer report another victory for the Dominican polo team in Paris, where, “on the beautiful field of Bagatelle, after defeating the Leopards five to four and dazzling the assembled connoisseurs, it was awarded the Aperture Cup.” Ramfis and Radhamés, the most applauded players. A lie, to beguile Dominicans. And him. In the pit of his stomach he felt the rush of acid that attacked every time he thought about his sons, those successful failures, those disappointments. Playing polo in Paris and fucking French girls while their father was fighting the battle of his life!