“Is Dr. Quintanilla in his office?” His secretary nodded, and he rose to his feet. “Tell him I’m on my way to see him.”
“It can’t be that you don’t remember, Uranita,” her Aunt Adelina admonished her. “You were fourteen years old. It was the most serious thing that had happened in the family, even worse than the accident that killed your mother. And you didn’t know anything about it?”
They’d had coffee and tea. Urania tried a mouthful of arepa. They sat around the dining-room table, talking in the wan light of a small floor lamp. The Haitian servant, as silent as a cat, had cleared the table.
“I remember how Papa suffered, of course I do, Aunt Adelina,” Urania explains. “I forget the details, the daily incidents. He tried to hide it from me at first. ‘There are some problems, Uranita, they’ll be resolved soon.’ I didn’t imagine that from then on my life would turn upside down.”
She feels the eyes of her aunt, her cousins, her niece, burning into her. Lucinda says what they are all thinking:
“Some good came out of it for you, Uranita. You wouldn’t be where you are now if it hadn’t. But for us, it was a disaster.”
“And most of all, for my poor brother,” her aunt says accusingly. “They stabbed him in the back and left him to bleed for another thirty years.”
A parrot shrieks above Urania’s head, startling her. She hadn’t realized it was there until now; the bird is agitated, moving from side to side on its wooden bar inside a large cage with heavy blue bars. Her aunt, cousins, and niece burst into laughter.
“This is Samson.” Manolita introduces him. “He’s upset because we woke him. He’s a sleepyhead.”
The parrot helps to ease the atmosphere.
“I’m sure if I understood what he was saying, I’d learn a lot of secrets,” Urania jokes, pointing at Samson.
Senator Agustín Cabral is in no mood for smiling. He responds with a solemn nod to the honeyed greeting of Dr. Jeremías Quintanilla, Vice President of the Senate; he has just burst into his office, and with no preliminaries, he rebukes him:
“Why have you canceled the meeting of the Senate executive committee? Isn’t that the responsibility of the President? I demand an explanation.”
The heavy, cocoa-colored face of Senator Quintanilla nods repeatedly, while his lips, in a cadenced, almost musical Spanish, attempt to placate him:
“Of course, Egghead. Don’t be angry. Everything except death has a reason.”
A plump man in his sixties, with puffy eyelids and a wet mouth, he is wearing a blue suit and a glistening tie with silver stripes. He smiles persistently, and Agustín Cabral sees him remove his glasses, wink at him, roll his eyes, revealing the gleaming whites, then step toward him, take his arm, and pull him as he says, very loudly:
“Let’s sit here, we’ll be more comfortable.”
He doesn’t lead him to the heavy, tiger-foot chairs in his office but to a balcony with half-opened doors. He obliges him to go out with him so they can talk in the open air, across from the droning hum of the ocean, away from indiscreet ears. The sun is strong; the brilliant morning is ablaze with engines and horns from the Malecón, and the voices of street peddlers.
“What the hell’s going on, Monkey?” Cabral whispers.
Quintanilla is still holding his arm and is now very serious. In his eyes he can detect a vague feeling of solidarity or compassion.
“You know very well what’s going on, Egghead, don’t be stupid. Didn’t you realize that three or four days ago the papers stopped calling you a ‘distinguished gentleman’ and demoted you to ‘señor’?” Monkey Quintanilla murmurs in his ear. “Didn’t you read
El Caribe
this morning? That’s what’s going on.”
For the first time since reading the letter in “The Public Forum,” Agustín Cabral is afraid. It’s true: yesterday or the day before somebody at the Country Club joked that the society page in
La Nación
had deprived him of “distinguished gentleman,” which was usually a bad omen: those kinds of warnings amused the Generalissimo. This was serious. A storm. He had to use all his experience and intelligence not to drown in it.
“Did the order to cancel the meeting of the executive committee come from the Palace?” he whispers. The Vice President, leaning over, has his ear against Cabral’s mouth.
“Where else would it come from? There’s more. All committees in which you participate are canceled. The directive says: ‘Until the status of the President of the Senate is regularized.’”
He is silent. It has happened. The nightmare is happening, the one that came periodically to drag down his triumphs, his ascent, his political achievements: he has been estranged from the Chief.
“Who sent it to you, Monkey?”
Quintanilla’s chubby face tightens in alarm, and Cabral finally understands Monkey’s agitation. Is the Vice President going to say he cannot commit an act of such disloyalty? Abruptly, he makes his decision:
“Henry Chirinos.” He takes his arm again. “I’m sorry, Egghead. I don’t think there’s much I can do, but if I can, you can count on me.”
“Did Chirinos tell you what I’m accused of?”
“He only gave me the order and made a speech: ‘I know nothing. I am the humble messenger of a higher decision.’”
“Your papa always suspected that the schemer was Chirinos, the Constitutional Sot,” Aunt Adelina recalls.
“That fat repulsive nigger was one of the people who made the best accommodation,” Lucindita interrupts. “From Trujillo’s bed and board to Balaguer’s minister and ambassador. Do you see what kind of country this is, Uranita?”
“I remember him very well, I saw him in Washington a few years ago, when he was ambassador,” says Urania. “He often came to the house when I was little. He seemed like one of Papa’s intimate friends.”
“And Aníbal’s, and mine,” adds Aunt Adelina. “He would come here with all his flattery, he’d recite his poems for us. He was always quoting books, pretending to be educated. He invited us to the Country Club once. I didn’t want to believe he had betrayed his lifelong friend. Well, that’s what politics is, you make your way over corpses.”
“Uncle Agustín had too much integrity, he was too good, that’s why they turned on him.”
Lucindita waits for her to corroborate this, to protest the injustice done to him. But Urania does not have the strength to pretend. She merely listens, with an air of regret.
“But my husband, may he rest in peace, behaved like a gentleman, he gave your papa all his support.” Aunt Adelina gives a sarcastic little laugh. “What a Quixote he was! He lost his job at the Tobacco Company and never found work again.”
Samson the parrot lets loose another flood of shouts and noises that sound like curses. “Quiet, lazybones,” Lucindita scolds him.
“Just as well we haven’t lost our sense of humor, girls,” exclaims Manolita.
“Find Senator Henry Chirinos and tell him I want to see him right away, Isabel,” Senator Cabral says as he enters his office. And addressing Paris Goico: “Apparently he’s the one who cooked up this mess.”
He sits down at his desk, prepares to review again the day’s schedule, but becomes aware of his circumstances. Does it make sense to sign letters, resolutions, memoranda, notes, as the President of the Senate of the Republic? It’s doubtful he still is. The worst thing would be to show signs of discouragement to his subordinates. Put the best face on a bad situation. He picks up the papers and is beginning to reread the first page when he notices that Parisito is still there. His hands are trembling:
“President Cabral, I wanted to tell you,” he stammers, devastated by emotion. “Whatever happens, I’m with you. In everything. I know how much I owe you, Dr. Cabral.”
“Thank you, Goico. You’re new to this world, and you’ll see things that are worse. Don’t worry. We’ll weather the storm. And now, let’s get to work.”
“Senator Chirinos is expecting you at his house, Senator Cabral.” Isabelita is speaking as she comes into the office. “He answered himself. Do you know what he said? ‘The doors of my house are open day and night to my great friend Senator Cabral.’”
When he leaves the Congress building, the guards salute him as usual. The black, funereal car is still there. But his assistant, Lieutenant Humberto Arenal, has disappeared. Teodosio, the driver, opens the door for him.
“Senator Henry Chirinos’s house.”
The chauffeur nods, not saying a word. Later, when they are driving along Avenida Mella, on the edge of the colonial city, he looks at him in the rearview mirror and says:
“Since we left Congress, we’ve been followed by a Beetle full of
caliés
, Senator.”
Cabral turns around: fifteen or twenty meters behind them is one of the unmistakable black Volkswagens of the Intelligence Service. In the blinding morning light he can’t tell how many
caliés
are inside. “Now I’m escorted by people from the SIM instead of my assistant,” he thinks. As the car enters the crowded, narrow streets of the colonial city, lined with little one- and two-story houses with bars at the windows and stone entrances, he tells himself that the matter is even graver than he supposed. If Johnny Abbes is having him followed, he may have decided to arrest him. The story of Anselmo Paulino repeated. What he had feared so much. His brain is a red-hot forge. What did he do? What had he said? What mistake did he make? Whom had he seen recently? They were treating him like an enemy of the regime. Him, him!
The car stopped at the corner of Salomé Ureña and Duarte, and Teodosio opened the door for him. The Beetle parked a few meters behind them but no
calié
got out. He was tempted to go over and ask them why they were following the President of the Senate, but he restrained himself: what good would it do to challenge some poor bastards who were only obeying orders?
Senator Henry Chirinos’s old two-story house with its little colonial balcony and jalousied windows resembled its owner; time, age, and neglect had deformed it and made it asymmetrical; it had widened excessively in the middle, as if it had grown a belly and were about to explode. A long time ago it must have been a solid, noble house; now it was dirty, neglected, and seemed on the verge of collapse. Splotches and stains defaced the walls, and spiderwebs hung from the roof. The door was opened as soon as he knocked. He climbed a lugubrious, groaning staircase with a greasy banister, and on the first landing the butler opened a creaking glass door: he recognized the large library, the heavy velvet drapes, the tall cases filled with books, the thick, faded carpet, the oval pictures, and the silvery threads of cobwebs catching the beams of sunlight that penetrated the shutters. It smelled of age and rank humors, and the heat was infernal. He remained standing and waited for Chirinos. The number of times he had been here, over so many years, for meetings, agreements, negotiations, conspiracies, all in the service of the Chief.
“Welcome to your house, Egghead. A sherry? Sweet or dry? I recommend the fino amontillado. It’s chilled.”
Wearing pajamas and wrapped in a flamboyant green flannel robe with silk binding that accentuated the rotundity of his body, with a huge handkerchief in the pocket, and on his feet, backless bedroom slippers misshapen by his bunions, Senator Chirinos smiled at him. His uncombed, thinning hair, the mucus on his puffy face, his purplish lids and lips, the dried saliva at the corners of his mouth, revealed to Senator Cabral that he had not yet bathed. He allowed him to pat his shoulder and lead him to the ancient easy chairs with silk antimacassars over the backs, without responding to the effusions of his host.
“We’ve known each other for many years, Henry. We’ve done many things together. Good things, and some bad. No two people in the regime have been as close as you and I. What’s going on? Why did the sky start falling in on me this morning?”
He had to stop talking because the butler came in, an old, bent mulatto as ugly and slovenly as his employer, carrying a glass decanter into which he had poured the sherry, and two glasses. He left them on the table and hobbled out of the room.
“I don’t know.” The Constitutional Sot touched his own chest. “You probably don’t believe me. You probably think I’ve schemed, instigated, provoked what’s happening to you. By my mother’s memory, the most sacred thing in this house, I don’t know. Since I found out yesterday afternoon, I’ve been utterly dumbfounded. Wait, wait, a toast. To this mess being resolved quickly, Egghead!”
He spoke with animation and emotion, with his heart in his hand and the sugary sensibility of heroes on the radio soap operas that HIZ imported, before the Castro revolution, from CMQ in Havana. But Agustín Cabral knew him: he was a first-rate actor. It might be true or false, he had no way to find out. He took a small, unwilling sip of sherry, for he never drank alcohol in the morning. Chirinos smoothed the hairs in his nostrils.
“Yesterday, at a meeting with the Chief, he suddenly ordered me to instruct Monkey Quintanilla, as Vice President of the Senate, to cancel all meetings until the vacancy in the Presidency had been filled,” he continued, gesticulating. “I don’t know, I thought you had an accident, a heart attack. ‘What happened to Egghead, Chief?’ ‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ he replied, with that gruffness that freezes your bones. ‘He’s no longer one of us, he’s gone over to the enemy.’ I couldn’t ask any more questions, his tone was categorical. He sent me to carry out his order. And this morning, like everyone else, I read the letter in ‘The Public Forum.’ Again, I swear to you on the memory of my sainted mother: that’s all I know.”
“Did you write the letter in ‘The Public Forum’?”
“I write Spanish correctly,” the Constitutional Sot said in indignation. “That ignoramus committed three syntactical errors. I’ve marked them.”
“Who was it, then?”
The fat-enclosed eyes of Senator Chirinos poured out compassion as they looked at him:
“What the hell difference does it make, Egghead? You’re one of the intelligent men in this country, don’t play dumb with me, I’ve known you since you were a boy. The only thing that matters is that for some reason you’ve made the Chief angry. Talk to him, ask his forgiveness, give him explanations, promise to make amends. Regain his confidence.”