He picked up the glass decanter, refilled his glass, and drank. There was less noise from the street than at Congress. Because of the thick colonial walls, or because the narrow streets in the center of the city discouraged cars.
“Ask his forgiveness, Henry? What have I done? Don’t I devote my days and nights to the Chief?”
“Don’t tell me. Convince him. I already know. Don’t be discouraged. You know how he is. Basically, a magnanimous man. A deep sense of justice. If he weren’t suspicious, he wouldn’t have lasted thirty-one years. There’s been a mistake, a misunderstanding. It ought to be resolved. Ask him for an audience. He knows how to listen.”
As he spoke, he waved his hand, savoring every word his ashen lips expelled. He looked even more obese seated than when he was standing: his enormous belly had pushed open his robe and pulsated in a rhythmic ebb and flow. Cabral imagined those intestines dedicated, for so many hours a day, to the arduous task of absorbing and digesting the masses of food swallowed by that voracious maw. He regretted being here. Did he think the Constitutional Sot would help him? If he hadn’t actually devised this, in his heart of hearts he was celebrating it as a great victory over someone who, despite all appearances, had always been his rival.
“Thinking it over, racking my brains,” Chirinos added, with a conspiratorial air, “I think the reason may be the disappointment the Chief felt when the bishops refused to proclaim him Benefactor of the Catholic Church. You were on the commission that failed to achieve that.”
“There were three of us, Henry! Balaguer, and Paíno Pichardo too, as Minister of the Interior and Religious Practice. The negotiations took place months ago, right after the Pastoral Letter. Why would I get all the blame?”
“I don’t know, Egghead. In fact, it seems pretty farfetched. I can’t see any reason either why you should fall into disgrace. Sincerely, after all, we’ve been friends for so many years.”
“We’ve been something more than friends. We’ve been together, behind the Chief, in every decision that transformed this country. We’re living history. We set traps for each other, gave each other low blows, played dirty tricks to gain an advantage. But total annihilation seemed out of the question. This is different. I can end up ruined, discredited, in prison. Without knowing why! If you’ve cooked this up, congratulations. It’s a masterpiece, Henry!”
He had risen to his feet. He spoke calmly, impersonally, almost didactically. Chirinos stood up too, leaning on one of the arms of the chair to hoist his weight. They were very close, almost touching. Cabral saw a quotation from Tagore in a small, square frame on the wall, between the shelves of books:
An open book is a mind that speaks; closed, a friend who waits; forgotten, a soul that forgives; destroyed, a heart that weeps
. “He’s pretentious in everything he does, touches, says, and feels,” he thought.
“Frankness deserves frankness in return.” Chirinos brought his face close to Agustín Cabral, who was dazed by the stink that accompanied his words. “Ten years ago, five years ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated to concoct anything that got you out of the way, Agustín. And you would have done the same to me. Including annihilation. But now? To what end? Do we have some account left to settle? No. We’re no longer in competition, Egghead, you know that as well as I do. How much oxygen is left to a dying cause? For the last time: I have nothing to do with what’s happening to you. My hope, my wish, is that you resolve it. Difficult days are coming, and it’s to the regime’s advantage if you’re there to help withstand the onslaught.”
Senator Cabral nodded. Chirinos patted his shoulder.
“If I go down to the
caliés
who are waiting for me and tell them what you’ve said, that the regime is suffocating, that it’s a dying cause, you’ll be keeping me company,” he murmured, instead of saying goodbye.
“You won’t do that.” The great dark mouth of his host laughed. “You’re not like me. You’re a true gentleman.”
“What happened to him?” Urania asks. “Is he still alive?”
Aunt Adelina laughs, and the parrot Samson, who seemed to be asleep, reacts with another series of shrieks. When he stops, Urania can hear the rhythmic creak of the rocking chair where Manolita is sitting.
“Weeds don’t die,” her aunt explains. “He’s still in his lair in the colonial city, at the corner of Salomé Ureña and Duarte. Lucindita saw him a little while ago, walking with a cane in Independencia Park, in his house slippers.”
“Some kids were running after him and shouting: ‘The bogeyman, the bogeyman!’” Lucinda laughs. “He’s uglier and more repulsive than ever. He must be over ninety, right?”
Have they had enough after-dinner conversation so that she can leave? Urania hasn’t felt comfortable all night. She’s been tense, waiting for the attack. This is the only family she has left and she feels more distant from them than from the stars. And she’s beginning to be irritated by Marianita’s large eyes constantly staring at her.
“Those were terrible days for the family.” Aunt Adelina keeps harping on the same subject.
“I remember my papa and Uncle Agustín whispering together in this living room,” says Lucindita. “And your papa was saying: ‘But my God, what could I have done to the Chief to make him treat me this way?’”
She is silenced by a dog barking wildly near the house; two more, five more, respond. Through a small skylight in the ceiling, Urania can see the moon: round, yellow, splendid. There were no moons like that in New York.
“What upset him most was your future if something happened to him.” Aunt Adelina’s look is heavy with reproach. “When they took over his bank accounts, he knew it was hopeless.”
“His bank accounts!” Urania nods. “That was the first time my papa talked to me about it.”
She was already in bed and her father came in without knocking. He sat at the foot of her bed. In shirtsleeves, very pale, he looked thinner, more fragile, older. He hesitated over every syllable.
“This business is going very badly, darling. You have to be prepared for anything. So far, I’ve kept the gravity of the situation from you. But, today, well, you must have heard something at school.”
The girl nodded solemnly. She wasn’t worried; her confidence in him was limitless. How could anything bad happen to a man who was so important?
“Yes, Papa, there were letters against you in ‘The Public Forum,’ accusing you of crimes. Nobody will believe it, it’s so silly. Everybody knows you’re incapable of doing bad things.”
Her father embraced her, through the quilt.
It was more serious than slanders in the newspaper. They had removed him from the Presidency of the Senate. A congressional committee was looking into mismanagement and misuse of public funds during his tenure as minister. For days the Beetles of the SIM had been following him; there was one outside the front door right now, with three
caliés
inside. This past week he had received notifications of expulsion from the Trujillonian Institute, the Country Club, the Dominican Party, and this afternoon, when he went to withdraw money from the bank, the final blow. The manager, his friend Josefo Heredia, informed him that his two accounts had been frozen for the duration of the congressional investigation.
“Anything can happen, Uranita. They can confiscate this house, throw us out on the street. Even into prison. I don’t mean to frighten you. Maybe nothing will happen. But you ought to be prepared. And be brave.”
She listened to him, stunned; not because of what he was saying but because of the weakness of his voice, the hopelessness of his expression, the fear in his eyes.
“I’ll pray to the Virgin,” she said. “Our Lady of Altagracia will help us. Why don’t you talk to the Chief? He’s always liked you. He’ll give an order, and everything will be settled.”
“I’ve requested an audience and he won’t even respond, Uranita. I go to the National Palace and the secretaries and aides barely greet me. And President Balaguer doesn’t want to see me, and neither does the Minister of the Interior; that’s right, Paíno Pichardo. I’m the living dead, my dear. Maybe you’re right, maybe the only thing we can do is trust in the Virgin.”
His voice broke. But when the girl sat up to embrace him, he regained his composure. He smiled at her:
“You had to know about this, Uranita. If anything happens to me, go to your aunt and uncle. Aníbal and Adelina will take care of you. It may be a test. Sometimes the Chief does things like this, to test his collaborators.”
“Accusing a man like him of mismanagement,” Aunt Adelina says with a sigh. “Except for that little house on Gazcue, he never had anything. No estates, no companies, no investments. Except for his savings, the twenty-five thousand dollars he doled out to you while you were studying up there. The most honorable politician and the best father in the world, Uranita. And, if you’ll permit some interference in your private life from this doddering old aunt, you didn’t act properly with him. I know you support him and pay for the nurse. But do you know how much you made him suffer when you wouldn’t answer a single letter or come to the phone when he called? Aníbal and I often saw him crying over you, right here in this house. Now, after so much time has gone by, Urania, can I ask why?”
Urania reflects, enduring the censorious look of the old woman bent like a hook in her chair.
“Because he wasn’t as good a father as you think, Aunt Adelina,” she says at last.
Senator Cabral had the taxi drop him at the International Clinic, four blocks from the Intelligence Service, which was also located on Avenida México. When he was about to give the address to the driver, he felt a strange rush of shame and embarrassment, and instead of telling him to go to the SIM, he mentioned the clinic. He walked the four blocks slowly; the domains of Johnny Abbes were probably the only important places in the regime he had never visited, until now. The Beetle full of
caliés
followed him openly, in slow motion, right next to the sidewalk, and he could see the turning heads and alarmed expressions of passersby when they became aware of the emblematic Volkswagen. He recalled that when he was on the Budget Committee in Congress, he argued in favor of the appropriation to import the hundred Beetles in which Johnny Abbes’s
caliés
now cruised the entire country looking for enemies of the regime.
At the drab, anonymous building, uniformed and plainclothes police armed with submachine guns, guarding the entrance behind barbed wire and sandbags, let him pass without searching him or demanding identification. Inside, César Báez, one of Colonel Abbes’s adjutants, was waiting for him. Husky, pockmarked, with curly red hair, he offered a sweating hand and led him along narrow corridors, where men with pistols in holsters hanging over their shoulders or dangling under their armpits were smoking, arguing, or laughing in smoke-filled cubicles that had bulletin boards covered with memos on the walls. It smelled of sweat, urine, and feet. A door opened. There was the head of the SIM. Cabral was surprised at the monastic spareness of the office, the walls bare of pictures or posters except for the one behind the colonel, which was a portrait in parade uniform—three-cornered feathered hat, his chest gleaming with medals—of the Benefactor. Abbes García, in civilian clothes, wore a short-sleeved summer shirt and had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. In his hand he held the red handkerchief that Cabral had seen so often.
“Good morning, Senator.” He extended a soft, almost feminine hand. “Have a seat. We have few amenities here, you must forgive us.”
“I’m grateful to you for seeing me, Colonel. You’re the first. No one, not the Chief or President Balaguer, not a single minister, has replied to my requests for an audience.”
The small, somewhat hunchbacked, potbellied figure nodded. Above the double chin, thin mouth, and flabby cheeks, Cabral could see the colonel’s deep-set, watery eyes darting like quicksilver. Could he be as cruel as they said?
“Nobody wants to risk contagion, Señor Cabral,” Johnny Abbes said coldly. It occurred to the senator that if snakes could talk, they would have that same, sibilant voice. “Falling into disgrace is an infectious disease. How can I help you?”
“Tell me what I’m accused of, Colonel.” He paused to take a breath and appear more composed. “My conscience is clear. Since the age of twenty I’ve devoted my life to Trujillo and to the country. There’s been some mistake, I swear it.”
The colonel silenced him with a movement of the soft hand holding the red handkerchief. He put out his cigarette in a brass ashtray:
“Don’t waste your time giving me explanations, Dr. Cabral. Politics is not my field, I’m concerned with security. If the Chief refuses to see you because he’s unhappy with you, write to him.”
“I already have, Colonel. I don’t even know if they’ve given him my letters. I took them to the Palace personally.”
Johnny Abbes’s bloated face distended slightly:
“Nobody would hold back a letter addressed to the Chief, Senator. He’s probably read them, and if you’ve been sincere, he’ll respond.” He paused, constantly watching him with his nervous eyes, and added, rather defiantly: “I see you’ve noticed the color of my handkerchief. Do you know the reason? It’s a Rosicrucian teaching. Red is a good color for me. You probably don’t believe in Rosicrucianism, you must think it’s primitive superstition.”
“I don’t know anything about the Rosicrucian religion, Colonel. I have no opinion in that regard.”
“Now I don’t have the time, but when I was a young man I read a lot about Rosicrucianism. I learned a number of things. How to read a person’s aura, for example. Right now yours is the aura of someone scared to death.”
“I am scared to death,” Cabral replied immediately. “For days your men have been following me constantly. Tell me, at least, if you’re going to arrest me.”
“That doesn’t depend on me,” said Johnny Abbes, casually, as if the matter were not important. “If I’m ordered to, I will. The escort is to discourage you from seeking asylum. If you try that, then my men will arrest you.”
“Asylum? But, Colonel, seeking asylum, as if I were an enemy of the regime? I’ve been a part of the regime for thirty years.”