Yes, of all the outrages committed by Petán, the one he would never forgive was that stupid fight with the head of the Army General Staff. The giant Vázquez Rivera had been Trujillo’s good friend since they trained together in Haina; he possessed an uncommon strength that he cultivated by practicing every sport. He was one of the officers who contributed to the realization of Trujillo’s dream: transforming the Army, born of the small National Police, into a professional, disciplined, efficient force, a replica in miniature of the U.S. Army. And then, when it had been accomplished, the stupid fight. Petán held the rank of major and served in the leadership of the Army General Staff. He disobeyed an order when he was drunk, General Vázquez Rivera reprimanded him, and Petán became insulting. The giant took off his insignia, pointed to the courtyard, and suggested they forget about rank and resolve the matter with their fists. It was the most ferocious beating of Petán’s life, and with it he paid for all the ones he had given to so many poor bastards. Saddened, but convinced that the family’s honor obliged him to act as he did, Trujillo demoted his friend and sent him to Europe on a merely symbolic mission. A year later, the Intelligence Service informed him of the resentful general’s subversive plans: he was visiting garrisons, meeting with former subordinates, hiding arms on his small farm in Cibao. He had him arrested, sent to the military prison at the mouth of the Nigua River, and some time later secretly condemned to death by a military tribunal. To drag him to the gallows, the commander of the fortress had to use twelve prisoners serving sentences for common crimes. So there would be no witnesses to the titanic end of General Vázquez Rivera, Trujillo ordered the twelve outlaws shot. Despite the time that had passed, he sometimes felt, as he did now, a certain nostalgia for that companion of his heroic years, the one he had to sacrifice because Petán was an imbecile and a troublemaker.
Simon Gittleman was explaining that the committees he had established in the United States had begun collecting money for a major campaign: that very day they would publish full-page advertisements in
The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and all the publications that were attacking Trujillo and supporting the OAS sanctions, to refute the accusations and argue in favor of reopening relations with the Dominican regime.
Why had Simon Gittleman asked about Agustín Cabral? He made an effort to control the irritation that overpowered him as soon as he thought about Egghead. There could be no evil intent. If anyone admired and respected Trujillo, it was the former Marine, dedicated body and soul to defending his regime. He must have mentioned the name through an association of ideas, when he saw the Constitutional Sot and recalled that Chirinos and Cabral were—in the eyes of someone who was not privy to the workings of the regime—inseparable companions. Yes, they had been. Trujillo often gave them joint assignments. As he had in 1937, when he named them Director General of Statistics and Director General of Migration and sent them to travel along the border and report on the infiltration of Haitians. But the friendship between the two men was always relative: it ceased as soon as consideration or flattery from the Chief came into play. It amused Trujillo—an exquisite, secret game that he could permit himself—to observe the subtle maneuvers, the secretive stabbings, the Florentine intrigues devised against one another by the Walking Turd and Egghead, but also by Virgilio Álvarez Pina and Paíno Pichardo, Joaquín Balaguer and Fello Bonnelly, Modesto Díaz and Vicente Tolentino Rojas, and everyone else in his close circle—to displace a comrade, move ahead, be closer to and deserve greater attention, a closer hearing, more jokes, from the Chief. “Like women in a harem competing to be the favorite,” he thought. And in order to keep them always on the alert, to keep them from becoming moth-eaten and to avoid routine and ennui, he alternated them on the list, sending one, then the other, into disgrace. He had done it with Cabral: distanced him, made him aware that everything he was, everything he was worth, everything he had, he owed to Trujillo, that without the Benefactor he was nobody. A trial he had forced all his collaborators, close or distant, to endure. Egghead had handled it badly and become desperate, like a woman in love abandoned by her man. Because he wanted to straighten things out too soon, he was making serious mistakes. He would have to swallow a lot more shit before he came back into existence.
Could it be that Cabral, knowing Trujillo was going to decorate the former Marine, had begged Gittleman to intercede on his behalf? Was that the reason he had mentioned, in so inopportune a way, the name of someone who was out of favor with the regime, as every Dominican who read “The Public Forum” knew? Well, perhaps Simon Gittleman didn’t read
El Caribe
.
His blood froze: urine was coming out. He felt it, he thought he could see the yellow liquid pouring out of his bladder without asking permission of that useless valve, that dead prostate incapable of containing it, then moving toward his urethra, running merrily through it and coming out in search of air and light, through his underwear, his fly, the crotch of his trousers. He felt faint. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, shaken by indignation and impotence. Unfortunately, instead of Virgilio Álvarez Pina, he had Dorothy Gittleman on his right and Simon on his left, and they couldn’t help him. Virgilio could. He was president of the Dominican Party, but, in fact, since Dr. Puigvert, brought in secret from Barcelona, had diagnosed the damn infection in his prostate, his really important function had been to act quickly when one of these acts of incontinence occurred, to spill a glass of water or wine on the Benefactor and then beg a thousand pardons for his clumsiness, or, if it happened on a podium or during a parade, to place himself like a screen in front of the stained trousers. But the imbeciles in charge of protocol had placed Virgilio Álvarez four seats away. Nobody could help him. When he stood up he would suffer the horrific mortification of letting the Gittlemans and some of the guests see that he had pissed in his pants without realizing it, like an old man. Rage kept him from moving, from pretending he was going to take a drink and spilling the glass or pitcher that was in front of him.
Very slowly, looking around with a distracted air, he began to move his right hand toward the glass full of water. Very, very slowly, he drew it toward him until it was on the edge of the table, so that the slightest movement would tip it over. Suddenly he remembered that the first daughter born in Aminta Ledesma to his first wife, Flor de Oro—that mad little thing with the body of a woman and the soul of a man who changed husbands as often as she changed shoes—habitually wet her bed until she was in high school. He had the courage to take another peek at his trousers. Instead of the mortifying sight, the stain he was expecting, he discovered—his sight was still formidable, just like his memory—that his fly and pant legs were dry. Completely dry. It had been a false impression, motivated by his fear, his panic at “passing water,” as they said about women in labor. He was overwhelmed by happiness and optimism. The day, which had begun with bad humor and gloomy presentiments, had just become beautiful, like the coastline when the sun came out after a storm.
He stood, and, like soldiers obeying a command, everyone followed suit. As he bent down to help Dorothy Gittleman to her feet, he decided, with all the strength of his soul: “Tonight, in Mahogany House, I’ll make a girl cry out, the way I did twenty years ago.” It seemed to him that his testicles were coming to a boil and his penis beginning to stiffen.
Salvador Estrella Sadhalá was thinking that he would never see Lebanon, and the thought depressed him. From the time he was a boy he had dreamed that one day he would visit Upper Lebanon, and Basquinta, the town, perhaps a village, that had been the home of the Sadhalá family and from which, at the end of the last century, his mother’s forebears had been expelled for being Catholics. Salvador grew up hearing from Mama Paulina about the adventures and misfortunes of the prosperous merchants the Sadhalás had been in Lebanon: how they lost everything, how Don Abraham Sadhalá and his family suffered as they fled the persecutions the Muslim majority inflicted on the Christian minority. They wandered half the world, faithful to Christ and the Cross, until they landed in Haiti and then moved to the Dominican Republic. They settled in Santiago de los Caballeros, and by working with the family’s proverbial dedication and honesty, became prosperous and respected again in their adopted country. Though he saw little of his maternal relatives, Salvador, bewitched by the stories of Mama Paulina, always felt himself to be a Sadhalá. Which is why he had dreamed of visiting the mysterious Basquinta that he never found on maps of the Middle East. Why was he certain now that he would never set foot in the exotic country of his ancestors?
“I think I fell asleep,” he heard Antonio de la Maza say from the back seat. He saw him rubbing his eyes.
“You all fell asleep,” said Salvador. “Don’t worry, I’m keeping an eye on the cars coming from Ciudad Trujillo.”
“So am I,” said Lieutenant Amado García Guerrero, sitting beside him. “It looks like I’m sleeping because I don’t move a muscle and blank out my mind. It’s a relaxation technique I learned in the Army.”
“Are you sure he’s coming, Amadito?” Antonio Imbert, sitting at the wheel, challenged him. Turk could hear his tone of reproach. How unfair! As if Amadito were to blame if Trujillo canceled his trip to San Cristóbal.
“Yes, Tony,” grumbled the lieutenant, with fanatical certainty. “He’s coming.”
Turk was no longer so sure; they had been waiting for an hour and a quarter. And probably had lost another day, filled with enthusiasm, anguish, and hope. At the age of forty-two, Salvador was one of the oldest of the seven men stationed in the three cars that lay in wait for Trujillo on the highway to San Cristóbal. He didn’t feel old, not at all. His strength was still as remarkable as it had been when he was thirty, and, on the Los Almácigos farm, they said that Turk could kill a donkey with a single punch behind the ear. The power of his muscles was legendary, and known by all those who had put on gloves to box with him in the ring at the Santiago Reformatory, where, thanks to his efforts to teach them sports, he had achieved remarkable results with delinquent and homeless boys. Kid Dynamite came from there, a Golden Gloves winner who became a boxer well known throughout the Caribbean.
Salvador loved the Sadhalá family and was proud of his Arab-Lebanese blood, but the Sadhalás had not wanted him to be born; they had put up fierce opposition when his mother, Paulina, told them she was being courted by Piro Estrella, a mulatto, a soldier, and a politician, three things—Turk smiled—that gave the Sadhalás the chills. The family’s resistance drove Piro Estrella to run off with Mama Paulina, take her to Moca, drag the priest to the church at gunpoint, and force him to marry them. Over time, the Sadhalás and the Estrellas reconciled. When Mama Paulina died, in 1936, there were ten Estrella Sadhalá children. General Piro Estrella fathered another seven in his second marriage, so that Turk had sixteen legitimate siblings. What would happen to them if they failed tonight? Above all, what would happen to his brother Guaro, who knew nothing about any of this? General Guarionex Estrella Sadhalá had been head of Trujillo’s military adjutants and was currently commander of the Second Brigade in La Vega. If the plot failed, the reprisals against him would be savage. But why would it fail? It had been carefully prepared. As soon as his superior, General José René (Pupo) Román, informed Guarionex that Trujillo was dead and a civilian-military junta was taking power, he would place all the military forces in the north at the service of the new regime. Would it really happen? Discouragement, brought on by waiting, overwhelmed Salvador again.
Half closing his eyes, not moving his lips, he prayed. He did this several times a day, aloud when he woke up and went to bed, in silence the rest of the time. Our Fathers and Hail Marys, but also prayers he improvised according to circumstances. Since his youth he had been in the habit of involving God in his large and small problems, confiding his secrets and asking advice. He begged Him to let Trujillo come, begged that His infinite grace would at last permit them to kill the executioner of Dominicans, the Beast who had now turned his fierce wrath against the Church of Christ and its shepherds. Until recently, Turk had been indecisive about putting Trujillo to death, but since he had received the sign, he could speak to the Lord about tyrannicide with a clear conscience. The sign had been the words read to him by His Holiness’s nuncio.
It was because of Father Fortín, a Canadian priest residing in Santiago, that Salvador had the conversation with Monsignor Lino Zanini, and because of that, he was here now. For many years, Father Cipriano Fortín had been his spiritual adviser. Once or twice a month they had long conversations in which Turk opened his heart and his conscience to him; the priest would listen, answer his questions, and express his own doubts. Imperceptibly, political matters began to replace personal ones in their conversations. Why did the Church of Christ support a regime stained with blood? How could the Church shelter with its moral authority a leader who committed abominable crimes?
Turk remembered Father Fortín’s embarrassment. He ventured explanations that did not even convince himself: render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Does such a separation even exist for Trujillo, Father? Doesn’t he go to Mass, doesn’t he receive the blessing and the consecrated host? Aren’t there Masses, Te Deums, benedictions for all the government’s actions? Don’t bishops and priests sanctify acts of tyranny every day? What circumstances allowed the Church to abandon the faithful and identify in this way with Trujillo?
Ever since his childhood, Salvador had known how difficult, how impossible it sometimes was to subject his daily behavior to the commandments of his religion. His principles and beliefs, though firm, had not stopped him from drinking or chasing women. He could never atone enough for having fathered two children out of wedlock before he married Urania Mieses. These errors shamed him, and he had attempted to rectify them, though he had not placated his conscience. Yes, it was very difficult not to offend Christ in one’s daily life. He, a poor mortal marked by original sin, was proof of man’s innate weaknesses. But how could the Church inspired by God make the mistake of supporting a cruel, merciless man?
Until sixteen months ago—he would never forget that day: Sunday, January 24, 1960—when the miracle occurred. A rainbow in the Dominican sky. January 21 had been the festival of the country’s patron saint, Our Lady of Altagracia, and also the date of the most extensive roundup of June 14 members. The Church of Altagracia, on that sunlit morning in Santiago, was packed. Suddenly, from the pulpit, in a firm voice, Father Cipriano Fortín began to read—shepherds of Christ were doing the same in every Dominican church—the Pastoral Letter that shook the Republic. It was a hurricane, even more dramatic than the famous San Zenón storm in 1930, at the beginning of the Trujillo Era, that wiped out the capital city.
In the darkness of the automobile, Salvador Estrella Sadhalá, immersed in the memory of that glorious day, smiled. Hearing Father Fortín read, in his lightly French-accented Spanish, each sentence of the Pastoral Letter that drove the Beast mad with rage, seemed a response to his doubts and anguish. He knew the text so well—after hearing it he had read the letter, which was secretly printed and distributed all over the country—he had almost memorized it. A “shadow of sorrow” marked the festival of the Dominican Virgin. “We cannot remain oblivious to the deep suffering that afflicts so many Dominican homes,” the bishops said. Like St. Peter, they wanted “to weep with those who weep.” They recalled that “the root and foundation of all rights lie in the inviolate dignity of the human person.” A quotation from Pius XII evoked the “millions of human beings who continue to live under oppression and tyranny,” for whom “nothing is secure: not their homes, their property, their liberty, nor their honor.”
Each sentence made Salvador’s heart beat faster. “To whom does the
right to life
belong but to God alone, Creator of life?” The bishops emphasized that from this “primordial right” all others spring: the right to have a family, to work, to transact business, to immigrate (wasn’t this a condemnation of the infamous system of having to request police permission each time you left the country?), and the right to one’s good name and to not be slandered “on trivial pretexts or in anonymous denunciations…for base and despicable motives.” The Pastoral Letter reaffirmed that “all men have the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and free association….” The bishops were sending up prayers “in this time of affliction and uncertainty” that there might be “harmony and peace” and that there might be established in the nation “the sacred rights of human brotherhood.”
Salvador was so moved that when he left the church he could not even talk about the Pastoral Letter with his wife or the friends who had gathered at the entrance, stammering with surprise, enthusiasm, or fear at what they had just heard. There was no possible confusion: the Pastoral Letter came from Archbishop Ricardo Pittini and was signed by the five bishops in the country.
Mumbling an excuse, he left his family and, like a sleepwalker, returned to the church. He went to the sacristy. Father Fortín was removing his chasuble. He smiled: “You’re proud of your Church now, Salvador, aren’t you?” He could not speak. He gave the priest a long embrace. Yes, the Church of Christ had finally come over to the side of the victims.
“The reprisals will be terrible, Father Fortín,” he murmured.
They were. But with the regime’s perverse capacity for intrigue, it concentrated its revenge on the two foreign bishops and ignored those born on Dominican soil. Monsignor Thomas F. Reilly, in San Juan de la Maguana, an American, and Monsignor Francisco Panal, in La Vega, a Spaniard, were the targets of the ignominious campaign.
In the weeks following the jubilation of January 24, 1960, Salvador considered, for the first time, the need to kill Trujillo. Initially the idea horrified him: a Catholic had to respect the Fifth Commandment. And yet he returned to it, irresistibly, every time he read in
El Caribe
or
La Nación
, or heard on the Dominican Voice, the attacks against Monsignor Panal and Monsignor Reilly: they were agents of foreign powers, sellouts to Communism, colonialists, traitors, vipers. Poor Monsignor Panal! Accusing a priest of being a foreigner when he had spent thirty years doing his apostolic work in La Vega, where he was loved equally by opposing factions. The calumnies hatched by Johnny Abbes—who else could concoct such vileness?—which Turk heard from Father Fortín and the human tom-tom, did away with his scruples. The final straw was the act of sacrilege mounted against Monsignor Panal in the church in La Vega, where the bishop was saying twelve o’clock Mass. The nave was crowded with parishioners, and when Monsignor Panal was reading the day’s lesson from Scripture, a gang of heavily made-up, half-naked prostitutes burst into the church and, to the stupefied amazement of the worshipers, approached the pulpit, hurled insults and recriminations at the aged bishop, and accused him of having fathered their children and engaging in sexual perversions. One of them grabbed the microphone and howled: “Recognize the babies you gave us, don’t let them die of starvation.” When some people finally reacted and tried to remove the whores from the church and protect the bishop, who was staring in disbelief, the
caliés
stormed in—about twenty hoodlums armed with clubs and chains—and attacked the parishioners mercilessly. The poor bishops! They painted their houses with insults. In San Juan de la Maguana, they dynamited the van that Monsignor Reilly used to drive around his diocese, and bombarded his house every night with dead animals, urine, live rats, until he was forced to take refuge in Ciudad Trujillo, in the Santo Domingo Academy. The indestructible Monsignor Panal continued to resist threats, slanders, and insults in La Vega. An old man made of the stuff of martyrs.
It was during this time that Turk came to Father Fortín’s house, his large, heavy face transformed.
“What’s the matter, Salvador?”
“I’m going to kill Trujillo, Father. I want to know if I’ll go to hell.” He broke down. “It can’t go on. What they’re doing to the bishops, to the churches, that disgusting campaign on television, on the radio, in the papers. It has to stop, and the only way is to cut off the hydra’s head. Will I go to hell?”
Father Fortín calmed him down. He offered him coffee he had just prepared, he took him out for a long walk along the laurel-lined streets of Santiago. A week later he announced that the papal nuncio, Monsignor Lino Zanini, would grant him a private audience in Ciudad Trujillo. Turk felt intimidated when he presented himself at the nunciature’s elegant mansion on Avenida Máximo Gómez. From the very first moment, this prince of the Church put the timid giant, constrained by the shirt and tie he had worn for his audience with the Pope’s representative, at ease.
How elegant Monsignor Zanini was, how well-spoken! No doubt he was a real prince. Salvador had heard many stories about the nuncio, and liked him because they said Trujillo hated him. Was it true that Perón had left the country, after spending seven months here as an exile, when he learned of the arrival of His Holiness’s new nuncio? Everybody said he had hurried to the National Palace: “Be careful, Excellency. With the Church you can’t win. Remember what happened to me. It wasn’t the military that overthrew me, it was the priests. This nuncio the Vatican is sending you is like the one they sent me when my difficulties with the crows began. Watch out for him!” And the former Argentine dictator packed his bags and fled to Spain.