“These things, if they’re not done right, it’s better not to do them at all,” he heard him say. “Do you know who Zacarías de la Cruz is? The Chief’s chauffeur. I just talked to him in the Marión Hospital. He’s in worse shape than you, riddled with bullets from head to toe. But he’s alive. You see, things didn’t work out. You’re fucked. You’re not going to die either. You’re going to live. And tell me everything that happened. Who else was with you on the highway?”
Pedro Livio was sinking, floating, at any moment he would begin to vomit. Hadn’t Tony Imbert and Antonio said that Zacarías de la Cruz was dead as a doornail too? Was Abbes García lying to make him give up names? How stupid they had been. They should have made sure the Goat’s driver was dead.
“Imbert said that Zacarías was dead,” he protested. Curious being yourself and someone else at the same time.
The face of the head of the SIM bent over him. He could feel his breath, heavy with tobacco. His eyes were dark, with yellow flecks. He wished he had the strength to bite those flaccid cheeks. Spit on them, at least.
“He was wrong, he’s only wounded,” said Abbes García. “Which Imbert?”
“Antonio Imbert,” he explained, gnawed by anxiety. “Does that mean he lied to me? Shit, oh shit!”
He could hear footsteps, a movement of bodies, those present crowding around his bed. The smoke blurred their faces. He felt asphyxiated, as if they were stamping on his chest.
“Antonio Imbert and who else?” Colonel Abbes García said in his ear. His skin crawled when he thought that this time he’d put the cigarette out in his eye and blind him. “Is Imbert in charge? Did he organize this?”
“No, no leaders,” he stammered, fearful he wouldn’t have the strength to finish the sentence. “If there were, it would be Antonio.”
“Antonio who?”
“Antonio de la Maza,” he explained. “If there were, it would be him, sure. But there aren’t any leaders.”
There was another long silence. Had they given him sodium pentothal, is that why he was talking so much? But pentothal made you sleepy and he was wide awake, overexcited, eager to tell, to pull out the secrets chewing at him inside. He’d go on answering whatever they asked, damn it. There were murmurs, footsteps on the tiles. Were they leaving? A door opening, closing.
“Where are Imbert and Antonio de la Maza?” The head of the SIM exhaled a mouthful of smoke and it seemed to Pedro Livio that it went into his throat and nose and down to his guts.
“Looking for Pupo, where the hell else would they be?” Would he have the energy to finish the sentence? The astonishment of Abbes García, General Félix Hermida, and Colonel Figueroa Carrión was so great that he made a superhuman effort to explain what they didn’t understand: “If he doesn’t see the Goat’s body, he won’t lift a finger.”
They had opened their eyes wide and were scrutinizing him with suspicion and dread.
“Pupo Román?” Abbes García had certainly lost his confidence now.
“General Román Fernández?” Figueroa Carrión repeated.
“The head of the Armed Forces?” an agitated General Félix Hermida asked in a shrill voice.
Pedro Livio was not surprised when the hand came down again and put out the lit cigarette in his mouth. An acrid taste of tobacco and ash on his tongue. He did not have the strength to spit out that stinking, burning piece of trash scraping against his gums and palate.
“He’s fainted, Colonel,” he heard Dr. Damirón Ricart murmur. “If we don’t operate, he’ll die.”
“The one who’s going to die is you if you don’t revive him,” replied Abbes García with muted rage. “Give him a transfusion, whatever, but wake him up. This man has to talk. Revive him or I’ll fill you with all the lead in this revolver.”
If they were talking like that, he wasn’t dead. Had they found Pupo Román? Shown him the body? If the revolution had started, Abbes García, Félix Hermida, and Figueroa Carrión wouldn’t be standing around his bed. They’d be arrested or dead, like Trujillo’s brothers and nephews. He tried in vain to ask them to explain why they weren’t arrested or dead. His stomach didn’t hurt; his eyelids and mouth felt on fire because of the cigarette burns. They gave him an injection, they made him inhale from a piece of cotton that smelled of menthol, like Salems. He discovered a bottle filled with serum next to his bed. He could hear them and they thought he couldn’t.
“Can it be true?” Figueroa Carrión seemed more terrified than surprised. “The Armed Forces Minister involved in this? It’s impossible, Johnny.”
“Surprising, absurd, inexplicable,” Abbes García corrected him. “Not impossible.”
“But why, what for?” General Félix Hermida’s voice rose. “What can he hope to gain? He owes everything he is to the Chief, everything he has. This asshole is just throwing out names to confuse us.”
Pedro Livio twisted around, trying to sit up so they would know he wasn’t groggy or dead, and that he had told the truth.
“You can’t still believe this is one of the Chief’s tricks to find out who’s loyal and who’s not, Félix.”
“Not anymore,” General Hermida acknowledged sadly. “If these sons of bitches have killed him, what the hell’s going to happen here?”
Colonel Abbes García slapped his forehead:
“Now I understand why Román made an appointment with me at Army Headquarters. Of course he’s involved in this! He wants people close to the Chief near him so he can lock them up before the coup. If I had gone, I’d be dead by now.”
“I can’t believe it, damn it,” General Félix Hermida repeated.
“Send SIM patrols to close Radhamés Bridge,” ordered Abbes García. “Don’t let anybody in the government, particularly Trujillo’s relatives, cross the Ozama or get anywhere near the December 18 Fortress.”
“The Minister of the Armed Forces, General José René Román, Mireya Trujillo’s husband,” General Félix was saying to himself, mindlessly. “I don’t understand anything about anything anymore, damn it.”
“Believe it until he proves himself innocent,” said Abbes García. “Hurry and warn the Chief’s brothers. Have them meet in the National Palace. Don’t mention Pupo yet. Tell them there are rumors of assassination attempts. Hurry! How is he? Can I question him?”
“He’s dying, Colonel,” Dr. Damirón Ricart declared. “As a physician, my duty…”
“Your duty is to shut up unless you want to be treated like an accomplice.” Again Pedro Livio saw at close range the face of the head of the SIM. “I’m not dying,” he thought. “The doctor lied so he won’t keep putting butts out on my face.”
“General Román ordered the Chief killed?” Again, in his nose and mouth, the colonel’s pungent breath. “Is that true?”
“They’re looking for him to show him the body,” he heard himself shout. “That’s how he is: seeing is believing. And the briefcase too.”
The effort left him exhausted. He was afraid that at this very moment the
caliés
were putting out cigarettes on Olga’s face. Poor girl, what a shame. She’d lose the baby, she’d curse the day she ever married ex-Captain Pedro Livio Cedeño.
“What briefcase?” asked the head of the SIM.
“Trujillo’s,” he replied immediately, articulating clearly. “Covered with blood outside and full of pesos and dollars inside.”
“With his initials?” the colonel insisted. “The initials RLTM in gold?”
He couldn’t answer, his memory was betraying him. Tony and Antonio found it in the car, they opened it and said it was full of Dominican pesos and dollars. Thousands and thousands. He noticed the agitation of the head of the SIM. Ah, you son of a bitch, the briefcase convinced you it was true, they had killed him.
“Who else is in this?” Abbes García asked. “Give me names. So you can go to the operating room and have the bullets taken out. Who else?”
“Did they find Pupo?” he asked, excited, speaking quickly. “Did they show the body to him? And to Balaguer?”
Again Colonel Abbes García’s jaw dropped. There he was, openmouthed with astonishment and apprehension. In some obscure way, he was winning the game.
“Balaguer?” he said slowly, syllable by syllable, letter by letter. “The President of the Republic?”
“Of the civilian-military junta,” explained Pedro Livio, struggling to control his nausea. “I was against it. They say it’s necessary, to reassure the OAS.”
This time, he didn’t have time to turn his head and vomit on the floor. Something warm and viscous ran down his neck and dirtied his chest. He saw the head of the SIM move away in disgust. He had severe stomach cramps, and his bones felt cold. He couldn’t talk anymore. After a while the colonel’s face hung over him again, grimacing with impatience, looking at him as if he wanted to drill into his skull and find out the whole truth.
“Joaquín Balaguer too?”
He could resist his gaze for only a few seconds. He closed his eyes, he wanted to sleep. Or die, it didn’t matter. Two or three times he heard the question: “Balaguer? Balaguer too?” He didn’t answer or open his eyes. Not even when the intense burning on his right earlobe made him shrink away. The colonel had put out his cigarette and now he was twisting it and breaking it inside his ear. He did not scream, he did not move. Turned into an ashtray for the head of the
caliés
, Pedro Livio, that’s how you ended up. Bah, what the hell. The Goat was dead. Sleep. Die. From the deep pit into which he was falling, he could still hear Abbes García: “A plaster saint like him had to be plotting with the priests. It’s a conspiracy of the bishops allied with the gringos.” There were long silences interspersed with murmurs and, at times, the timid pleading of Dr. Damirón Ricart: if they didn’t operate, the patient would die. “But what I want is to die,” thought Pedro Livio.
People running, hurried footsteps, a door slamming. The room was crowded again, and among the recent arrivals was Colonel Figueroa Carrión:
“We found a denture on the highway, near His Excellency’s Bel Air. His dentist, Dr. Fernando Camino Certero, is examining it now. I woke him myself. In half an hour he’ll make his report. At first glance, he thought it was the Chief’s.”
His voice was mournful. As was the silence in which the others listened to him.
“You didn’t find anything else?” Abbes García bit off every word.
“An automatic pistol, forty-five caliber,” said Figueroa Carrión. “It will take a few hours to verify the registration. There’s an abandoned car, about two hundred meters from the attack. A Mercury.”
Pedro Livio told himself that Salvador had been right to get angry with Fifí Pastoriza for leaving his Mercury on the highway. They would identify the owner and soon the
caliés
would be putting out butts on Turk’s face.
“Did he say anything else?”
“Balaguer, no less.” Abbes García whistled. “Do you realize what that means? The head of the Armed Forces and the President of the Republic. He mentioned a civilian-military junta, with Balaguer at the head to reassure the OAS.”
Colonel Figueroa Carrión came out with another “Damn!”
“It’s a plan to throw us off the track. Involve important people, compromise everybody.”
“Maybe, we’ll see,” said Colonel Abbes García. “One thing’s sure. A lot of people are involved, high-level traitors. And the priests, of course. We have to get Bishop Reilly out of Santo Domingo Academy. Whether he’s willing to leave or not.”
“Will we take him to La Cuarenta?”
“They’ll look for him there as soon as they find out. San Isidro is better. But wait, this is touchy, we have to talk it over with the Chief’s brothers. If there’s one person who can’t be in on the conspiracy, it’s General Virgilio García Trujillo. Go and tell him personally.”
Pedro Livio heard the footsteps of Colonel Figueroa Carrión moving away. Had he been left alone with the head of the SIM? Was he going to put out more cigarettes on him? But that wasn’t what tormented him now. It was realizing that even though they had killed the Chief, things hadn’t turned out as planned. Why hadn’t Pupo and his soldiers taken power? What was Abbes García doing, ordering the
caliés
to arrest Bishop Reilly? Was this bloodthirsty degenerate still in command? He continued to hover over him; he couldn’t see him but there was that hot breath in his nose and mouth.
“A couple more names and I’ll let you rest,” he heard him say.
“He doesn’t hear or see you, Colonel,” Dr. Damirón Ricart pleaded. “He’s in a coma.”
“Then operate,” said Abbes García. “And listen carefully, I want him alive. It’s his life or yours.”
“You can’t take much from me,” Pedro Livio heard the doctor say with a sigh. “I have only one life, Colonel.”
“Manuel Alfonso?” Aunt Adelina lifts her hand to her ear, as if she had not heard, but Urania knows the old woman has excellent hearing and is dissembling while she recovers from the shock. Lucinda and Manolita stare at her too, their eyes very wide. Only Marianita does not seem to be affected.
“Yes, him, Manuel Alfonso,” Urania repeats. “A name worthy of a Spanish conquistador. Did you know him, Aunt Adelina?”
“I saw him once or twice.” The old woman nods, both intrigued and offended. “What does he have to do with the outrageous things you’ve said about Agustín?”
“He was the playboy who got women for Trujillo,” Manolita recalls. “Isn’t that right, Mama?”
“Playboy, playboy,” shrieks Samson. But this time only her tall, skinny niece laughs.
“He was very good-looking, an Adonis,” says Urania. “Before the cancer.”
He had been the handsomest Dominican of his generation, but in the weeks, perhaps months, since Agustín Cabral had seen him, the demigod whose elegance and grace made girls turn around to look at him had become a shadow of himself. The senator could not believe his eyes. He must have lost ten or fifteen kilos; emaciated, wasted, he had deep shadows around eyes that had always been proud and smiling—the gaze of a pleasure-taker, the smile of a victor—and now were lifeless. He had heard about the small tumor under his tongue that the dentist happened to find when Manuel, who was still ambassador in Washington, went for his annual cleaning. The news, they said, affected Trujillo as much as if they had discovered a tumor in one of his children, and he remained glued to the telephone during the operation at the Mayo Clinic, in the United States.
“I’m so sorry to bother you when you’ve just come home, Manuel.” Cabral stood up when he saw him come into the small room where he was waiting.
“My dear Agustín, how nice.” Manuel Alfonso embraced him. “Can you understand me? They had to take out part of my tongue. But with some therapy I’ll speak normally again. Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly, Manuel. I don’t notice anything strange in your voice, I assure you.”
It wasn’t true. The ambassador spoke as if he were chewing pebbles, or was tongue-tied, or had a stammer. The faces he made indicated the effort each word cost him.
“Have a seat, Agustín. Some coffee? A drink?”
“Nothing, thank you. I won’t take up much of your time. Again I apologize for bothering you when you’re recuperating from surgery. I’m in a very difficult situation, Manuel.”
He stopped speaking, embarrassed. Manuel Alfonso put a friendly hand on his knee.
“I can imagine, Egghead. A small country, a huge hell: I even heard the rumors in the United States. You’ve been stripped of the Presidency of the Senate and they’re investigating your management of the ministry.”
Illness and suffering had drastically aged the Dominican Apollo whose face, with its perfect white teeth, had intrigued Generalissimo Trujillo on his first official trip to the United States, causing the fortunes of Manuel Alfonso to experience a sudden upturn, as if he were Snow White touched by a magic wand. But he was still an elegant man, dressed like the fashion model he had been in his youth, when he was a Dominican immigrant in New York: suede loafers, cream-colored velour trousers, an Italian silk shirt, and a smart scarf around his neck. A gold ring sparkled on his little finger. He was meticulously shaved, perfumed, and combed.
“I’m so grateful that you’ve received me, Manuel.” Agustín Cabral recovered his poise: he had always been contemptuous of men who felt sorry for themselves. “You’re the only one. I’ve become a pariah. Nobody wants to see me.”
“I don’t forget services rendered, Agustín. You were always generous, you supported all my nominations in Congress, you did me a thousand favors. I’ll do what I can. What are the charges against you?”
“I don’t know, Manuel. If I knew, I could defend myself. So far no one will tell me what crime I’ve committed.”
“Yes, very much so, all our hearts beat faster when he was nearby,” Aunt Adelina admits impatiently. “But what connection can he have with what you’ve said about Agustín?”
Urania’s throat has become dry, and she takes a few sips of water. Why do you insist on talking about this? What’s the point?
“Because Manuel Alfonso was the only one of all his friends who tried to help Papa. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, any of you.”
The three women look at her as if they thought her unbalanced.
“Well, no, I didn’t know that,” murmurs Aunt Adelina. “He tried to help him when he fell into disgrace? Are you sure?”
“As sure as I am that my papa didn’t tell you or Uncle Aníbal about the steps Manuel Alfonso took to get him out of his difficulty.”
She stops speaking because the Haitian servant comes into the dining room. She asks, in hesitant, lilting Spanish, if they need her or if she can go to bed. Lucinda dismisses her with a wave of her hand: go on, then.
“Who was Manuel Alfonso, Aunt Urania?” Marianita’s barely audible voice inquires.
“A personality, Marianita. Good-looking, from an excellent family. He went to New York to make his fortune and ended up modeling clothes for designers and expensive stores, and appearing on billboards with his mouth open, advertising Colgate, the toothpaste that refreshes and cleans and makes your teeth sparkling white. Trujillo, on a trip to the United States, learned that the handsome young man on the signs was a Dominican hustler. He sent for him and he adopted him. He made him a person of consequence. His interpreter, because he spoke perfect English; his instructor in protocol and etiquette, because he was professionally elegant; and, an extremely important function, the one who selected his suits, ties, shoes, hose, and the New York tailors who dressed him. He kept him up-to-date on the latest trends in men’s fashions. And helped him design his uniforms, one of the Chief’s hobbies.”
“Most of all, he picked his women,” Manolita interrupted. “Isn’t that right, Mama?”
“What does all of this have to do with my brother?” She shakes a small, angry fist.
“Women were the least of it,” Urania continues to inform her niece. “Trujillo couldn’t care less because he had all of them. But clothes and accessories, he cared a great deal about them. Manuel Alfonso made him feel exquisite, refined, elegant. Like that Petronius in
Quo Vadis?
he was always quoting.”
“I haven’t seen the Chief yet, Agustín. I have an audience this afternoon, at his house, at Radhamés Manor. I’ll find out what it is, I promise.”
He had let him speak without interrupting, limiting himself to nodding and waiting when the senator’s spirits fell and bitterness or anguish affected his voice. He told him what had happened, what he had said, done, and thought since the first letter appeared in “The Public Forum” ten days earlier. He poured out his heart to this considerate man, the first who had shown him sympathy since that terrible day; he told him the intimate details of his life, devoted, since the age of twenty, to serving the most important man in Dominican history. Was it fair of him to refuse to listen to someone who had lived in him and for him for the past thirty years? He was prepared to recognize his errors, if he had committed any. To examine his conscience. To pay for his mistakes, if any existed. But the Chief had to at least grant him five minutes.
Manuel Alfonso patted him again on the knee. The house, in a new neighborhood, Arroyo Hondo, was enormous, surrounded by a park, and furnished and decorated in exquisite taste. Infallible in detecting hidden possibilities in people—a faculty that always amazed Agustín Cabral—the Chief had done a good job of gauging the former model. Manuel Alfonso could move easily in the diplomatic world, thanks to his amiability and his gift for dealing with people, and obtain advantages for the regime. He had done so on all his assignments, especially the last one, in Washington, during the most difficult period, when Trujillo stopped being the spoiled darling of Yankee governments and became an embarrassment attacked by the press and many in Congress. The ambassador raised his hand to his face, in a gesture of pain.
“From time to time, it’s like a whiplash,” he apologized. “It’s passing now. I hope the surgeon told me the truth. That they found it in time. A ninety percent guarantee of success. Why would he have lied? The gringos are brutally frank, they don’t have our delicacy, they don’t sugarcoat the pill.”
He stops speaking, because another grimace convulses his devastated face. He reacts immediately, becomes serious, philosophizes:
“I know how you feel, Egghead, what you’re going through. It’s happened to me a couple of times in my twenty-some years of friendship with the Chief. It didn’t go as far as it has with you, but there was a distancing on his part, a coldness I couldn’t explain. I remember my worry, the solitude I felt, the sensation of having lost my compass. But everything was resolved, and the Chief honored me again with his confidence. It must be intrigue on the part of some envious man who can’t forgive your talent, Agustín. But, as you already know, the Chief is a just man. I’ll speak to him this afternoon, you have my word.”
Cabral rose to his feet, very moved. There were still decent people left in the Dominican Republic.
“I’ll be at home all day, Manuel,” he said, shaking his hand warmly. “Don’t forget to tell him that I’m prepared to do anything to regain his confidence.”
“I thought of him as a Hollywood star, Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn,” says Urania. “I was very disappointed when I saw him that night. He wasn’t the same person. They had cut out half his throat. He looked like anything but a Don Juan.”
Her Aunt Adelina, her cousins, her niece, listen in silence, exchanging glances. Even the parrot Samson seems interested, for he hasn’t silenced her with his screeching for some time.
“You’re Urania? Agustín’s little girl? How you’ve grown, and how pretty you are! I’ve known you since you were in diapers. Come over here, my girl, and give me a kiss.”
“He dribbled when he talked, he looked retarded. He was very affectionate with me. I couldn’t believe that this human wreck was Manuel Alfonso.”
“I have to talk with your papa,” he said, taking a step toward the interior of the house. “You really are pretty. You’ll break a lot of hearts. Is Agustín home? Go on, call him.”
“He had spoken to Trujillo and had come to our house from Radhamés Manor to report on what he had done. Papa couldn’t believe it. ‘The only one who didn’t turn his back on me, the only one who offered his hand,’ he kept repeating.”
“Didn’t you just dream that Manuel Alfonso did anything for him?” Aunt Adelina exclaims, disconcerted. “Agustín would have told Aníbal and me right away.”
“Let her go on, don’t interrupt so much, Mama,” Manolita intervenes.
“That night I made a promise to Our Lady of Altagracia if she would help my papa out of his difficulty. Can you imagine what it was?”
“That you’d enter a convent?” Her cousin Lucinda laughs.
“That I’d remain a virgin the rest of my life.” Urania laughs.
Her cousins and her niece laugh too, but unwillingly, hiding their embarrassment. Aunt Adelina remains serious, not taking her eyes off her and not hiding her impatience: what else, Urania, what else?
“That child has grown so big and so pretty,” Manuel Alfonso repeats as he drops into an armchair across from Agustín Cabral. “She reminds me of her mother. The same languid eyes as your wife, Egghead, the same slim, graceful body.”
He thanks him with a smile. He has brought the ambassador to his study instead of receiving him in the living room, so that the girl and the servants won’t hear. He thanks him again for taking the trouble to come in person instead of calling him. The senator speaks in a rush, feeling his heart coming out with each word. Was he able to talk to the Chief?
“Of course, Agustín. I promised you I would, and I did. We talked about you for almost an hour. It won’t be easy. But you mustn’t lose hope. That’s the main thing.”
He wore an impeccably tailored dark suit, a white shirt with a starched collar, and a white-flecked blue tie held in place by a pearl. The top of a white silk handkerchief peeked out of the breast pocket of his jacket, and since he had raised his trousers slightly when he sat down to keep them from losing their crease, his blue hose, without a single wrinkle, was visible. His shoes gleamed.
“He’s very unhappy with you, Egghead.” It seemed that the wound from his surgery was bothering him, because from time to time he contorted his lips in a strange way, and Agustín Cabral could hear his dentures click. “It’s not anything concrete but a number of things that have piled up over the past few months. The Chief is exceptionally perceptive. Nothing escapes him, he detects the smallest changes in people. He says that since this crisis began, since the Pastoral Letter, since the problems with the OAS unleashed by the monkey Betancourt and the rat Muñoz Marín, you’ve been growing cold. You haven’t shown the devotion he expected.”
The senator nodded: if the Chief noticed it, perhaps it was true. Nothing premeditated, of course, and certainly not due to any lessening of his admiration and loyalty. Something unconscious, fatigue, the tremendous tension of this past year, the hemispheric conspiracy against Trujillo by the Communists and Fidel Castro, the priests, Washington and the State Department, Figueres, Muñoz Marín, and Betancourt, economic sanctions, the despicable actions of the exiles. Yes, yes, it was possible that, unintentionally, his dedication to his work, the Party, the Congress, had flagged.
“The Chief doesn’t accept discouragement or weakness, Agustín. He wants us all to be like him. Tireless, a rock, a man of iron. You know that.”
“And he’s right.” Agustín Cabral banged his fist on his small desk. “Because he is the way he is, he has made this country. He is always in the saddle, Manuel, as he said in the campaign of 1940. He has a right to demand that we emulate him. I disappointed him without realizing it. Perhaps because I didn’t succeed in persuading the bishops to proclaim him Benefactor of the Church? He wanted that as compensation after the villainy of the Pastoral Letter. I formed part of the commission, along with Balaguer and Paíno Pichardo. Was it that failure, do you think?”