The saddest day of his odyssey was also the happiest. On November 18, as the departure of Ramfis was being announced, it was reported on television that the six assassins of the Chief (four killers and two accomplices) had fled after murdering the three soldiers escorting them back to La Victoria prison following a reconstruction of the crime. Sitting in front of the television screen, he lost control and burst into tears. So, then, his friends—Turk, his dearest friend—had been killed, along with three poor guards who provided the alibi for the farce. Of course, the bodies would never be found. Señor Cavaglieri handed him a glass of cognac:
“Take heart, Señor Imbert. Just think, soon you’ll see your wife and daughter. This is coming to an end.”
A short while later, there was an announcement of the imminent departure of the Trujillo brothers and their families. This really was the end of his confinement. For the moment at least, he had survived the hunt in which, with the exception of Luis Amiama—he soon learned that he had spent six months hiding in a closet for many hours a day—practically all of the principal conspirators, along with hundreds of innocents, among them his brother Segundo, had been killed or tortured, or still languished in prison.
The day after the Trujillo brothers left the country, a political amnesty was declared. The jails began to open. Balaguer announced a commission to investigate what had happened to the “executioners of the tyrant.” From that day on, radio, television, and the newspapers stopped calling them assassins; executioners, their new designation, would soon become heroes, and not long after that, streets, squares, and avenues all over the country would begin to be renamed for them.
On the third day, very discreetly—the Cavaglieris would not even allow him to take the time to thank them for what they had done, and all they asked was that he not reveal their identity to anyone, so as not to compromise their diplomatic status—he left his confinement at dusk and appeared, alone, at his house. For a long time he, Guarina, and Leslie embraced, unable to speak. They examined one another and found that while Guarina and Leslie had lost weight, he had gained five kilos. He explained that in the house where he had been hiding—he could not tell them where—they ate a lot of spaghetti.
They could not speak for too long. The ruined house of the Imberts began to fill up with bouquets of flowers and relatives, friends, and strangers, who came to embrace him, congratulate him, and—sometimes, trembling with emotion, their eyes brimming with tears—to call him a hero and thank him for what he had done. Suddenly, a military man appeared among the visitors. He was an aide-de-camp to the President of the Republic. After the obligatory greetings, Major Teofronio Cáceda told him that he and Don Luis Amiama—who had also just emerged from his hiding place, incredibly enough, the house of the current Minister of Health—were invited to the National Palace at noon tomorrow to be received by the Head of State. And, with a complicitous little laugh, he informed him that Senator Henry Chirinos had just introduced in Congress (“Yes, sir, the same Trujillo Congress”) a law naming Antonio Imbert and Luis Amiama three-star generals in the Dominican Army for extraordinary services to the Nation.
The next morning, accompanied by Guarina and Leslie—the three of them in their best clothes, though Antonio’s were too tight—he kept his appointment at the Palace. A swarm of photographers greeted them, and a military guard in dress uniforms presented arms. In the waiting room he met Luis Amiama, a very slim, somber man with an almost lipless mouth who would be his inseparable friend from that time on. They shook hands and agreed to meet, after their audience with the President, to visit the wives (the widows) of all the conspirators who had died or disappeared, and to tell each other their own adventures. At that point, the door to the office of the Head of State opened.
Smiling, wearing an expression of deep joy, as the photographers’ cameras flashed, Dr. Joaquín Balaguer walked toward them, arms opened wide.
“Manuel Alfonso came for me right on time,” says Urania, staring at nothing. “The cuckoo clock in the living room was sounding eight o’clock when he rang.” Her Aunt Adelina, her cousins Lucinda and Manolita, her niece Marianita, avoid one another’s eyes so as not to increase the tension; breathless and frightened, they look only at her. Samson is dozing, his curved beak buried in his green feathers.
“Papa hurried to his room, on the pretext of going to the bathroom,” Urania continues coldly, almost legalistically. “ ‘Bye-bye, sweetheart, have a good time.’ He didn’t have the courage to say goodbye while he was looking me in the eye.”
“You remember all those details?” Aunt Adelina moves her small, wrinkled fist, without energy or authority now.
“I forget a good number of things,” Urania replies briskly. “But I remember everything about that night. You’ll see.”
She remembers, for example, that Manuel Alfonso was dressed in sports clothes—sports clothes for a party given by the Generalissimo?—a blue shirt with an open collar, a light cream-colored jacket, loafers, and a silk scarf hiding his scar. In his peculiar voice he said that her pink organdy dress was beautiful, that her high-heeled shoes made her look older. He kissed her on the cheek: “Let’s hurry, it’s getting late, beautiful.” He opened the car door for her, had her go in first, sat down beside her, and the chauffeur in uniform and cap—she remembered his name: Luis Rodríguez—pulled away.
“Instead of going down Avenida George Washington, the car took an absurd route. It went up Independencia and drove across the old city, taking its time. Not true that it was getting late; it was still too early to go to San Cristóbal.”
Manolita extends her hands, leans her plump body forward.
“But if you thought it was strange, didn’t you say anything to Manuel Alfonso about it? Nothing at all?”
Not at first: nothing at all. It was very strange, of course, that they were driving through the old city, just as it was strange that Manuel Alfonso had dressed for the Generalissimo’s party as if he were going to the Hipódromo or the Country Club, but Urania didn’t ask the ambassador anything. Was she beginning to suspect that he and Agustín Cabral had told her a lie? She remained silent, half listening to the awful, ruined speech of Manuel Alfonso, who was telling her about parties long ago for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in London, where he and Angelita Trujillo (“She was a young girl at the time, as beautiful as you are”) represented the Benefactor of the Nation. She was concentrating instead on the ancient houses that stood wide open, displaying their interiors, their families out on the streets—old men and women, young people, children, dogs, cats, even parrots and canaries—to enjoy the cool evening after the burning heat of the day, chatting from rockers, chairs, or stools, or sitting in the doorways or on the curbs of the high sidewalks, turning the old streets of the capital into an immense popular get-together, club, or festival, to which the groups of two or four domino players—always men, always mature—sitting around tables lit by candles or lanterns, remained totally indifferent. It was a show, like the scenes of small, cheerful grocery stores with counters and shelves of white-painted wood, overflowing with cans, bottles of Carta Dorada, Jacas, and Bermúdez cider, and brightly colored boxes, where people were always buying things; Urania preserved a very vivid memory of this spectacle that had perhaps disappeared or was dying out in modern Santo Domingo, or perhaps existed only in the rectangle of streets where centuries earlier a group of adventurers came from Europe, established the first Christian city in the New World, and gave it the melodious name of Santo Domingo de Guzmán. The last night you would see that show, Urania.
“As soon as we were on the highway, perhaps when the car was passing by the place where they killed Trujillo two weeks later, Manuel Alfonso began…” A sound of disgust interrupts Urania’s story.
“What do you mean?” asks Lucindita after a silence. “Began to what?”
“To prepare me.” Urania’s voice is firm again. “To soften me up, frighten me, charm me. Like the brides of Moloch, pampered and dressed up like princesses before they were thrown in the fire, into the mouth of the monster.”
“So you’ve never met Trujillo, you’ve never talked to him,” Manuel Alfonso exclaims with delight. “It will be the experience of a lifetime, my girl!”
Yes, it would. The car moved toward San Cristóbal under a star-filled sky, surrounded by coconut palms and silver palms, along the shores of the Caribbean Sea crashing noisily against the reefs.
“But what did he say to you?” urges Manolita, because Urania has stopped speaking.
He described what a perfect gentleman the Generalissimo was in his treatment of ladies. He, who was so severe in military and governmental matters, had made the old proverb his philosophy: “With a woman, use a rose petal.” That’s how he always treated beautiful girls.
“How lucky you are, dear girl.” He was trying to infect her with his enthusiasm, an emotional excitement that distorted his speech even further. “To have Trujillo invite you personally to his Mahogany House. What a privilege! You can count on your fingers the girls who have deserved something like this. I’m telling you, girl, believe me.”
And then Urania asked him the first and last question of the night:
“Who else has been invited to this party?” She looks at her Aunt Adelina, at Lucindita and Manolita: “Just to see what he would say. By now I knew we weren’t going to any party.”
The self-assured male figure turned toward her, and Urania could see the gleam in the ambassador’s eyes.
“No one else. It’s a party for you. Just for you! Can you imagine? Do you realize what it means? Didn’t I tell you it was something unique? Trujillo is giving you a party. That’s like winning the lottery, Uranita.”
“And you? What about you?” her niece Marianita exclaims in her barely audible voice. “What were you thinking, Aunt Urania?”
“I was thinking about the chauffeur, about Luis Rodríguez. Just about him.”
How embarrassed you were for that chauffeur in his cap, a witness to the ambassador’s hypocritical talk. He had turned on the car radio, and two popular Italian songs—“Volare” and “Ciao, Ciao, Bambina”—were playing, but she was sure he didn’t miss a word of the ploys Manuel Alfonso was using to cajole her into feeling happy and fortunate. A party that Trujillo was giving just for her!
“Did you think about your papa?” Manolita blurts out. “Did you think my Uncle Agustín had, that he…?”
She stops, not knowing how to finish. Aunt Adelina’s eyes reproach her. The old woman’s face has collapsed, and her expression reveals profound despair.
“Manuel Alfonso was the one who thought about Papa,” says Urania. “Was I a good daughter? Did I want to help Senator Agustín Cabral?”
He did it with the subtlety acquired in his years as a diplomat responsible for difficult missions. And wasn’t this an extraordinary opportunity for Urania to help his friend Egghead climb out of the trap set for him by perpetually envious men? The Generalissimo might be hard and implacable when it came to the country’s interests. But at heart he was a romantic; with a charming girl his hardness melted like an ice cube in the sun. If she, being the intelligent girl she was, wanted the Generalissimo to extend a hand to Agustín, to return his position, his prestige, his power, his posts, she could achieve it. All she had to do was touch Trujillo’s heart, a heart that could not deny the appeals of beauty.
“He also gave me some advice,” says Urania. “What things I shouldn’t do because they annoyed the Chief. It made him happy when girls were tender, but not when they exaggerated their admiration, their love. I asked myself: ‘Is he really saying these things to me?’”
They had entered San Cristóbal, a city made famous because the Chief had been born there, in a modest little house next to the great church that Trujillo had constructed, and to which Senator Cabral had taken Uranita on a visit, explaining the biblical frescoes painted on the walls by Vela Zaneti, an exiled Spanish artist to whom the magnanimous Chief had opened the doors of the Dominican Republic. On that trip to San Cristóbal, Senator Cabral also showed her the bottle factory and the weapons factory and the entire valley watered by the Nigua. And now her father was sending her to San Cristóbal to beg the Chief to forgive him, to unfreeze his accounts, to make him President of the Senate again.
“From Mahogany House there is a marvelous view of the valley, the Nigua River, the horses and cattle on the Fundación Ranch,” Manuel Alfonso explained in detail.
The car, after passing the first guard post, began to ascend the hill; at the top, using the precious wood of the mahogany trees that were beginning to disappear from the island, the house had been erected to which the Generalissimo withdrew two or three days a week to have his secret assignations, do his dirty work, and negotiate risky business deals with complete discretion.
“For a long time the only thing I remembered about Mahogany House was the rug. It covered the entire room and had a gigantic national seal, in full color, embroidered on it. Later, I remembered other things. In the bedroom, a glass-doored closet filled with uniforms of every style, and above them, a row of military hats and caps. Even a Napoleonic two-cornered hat.”
She does not laugh. She looks somber, with something cavernous in her eyes and voice. Her Aunt Adelina does not laugh, and neither does Manolita, or Lucinda, or Marianita, who has just come back from the bathroom, where she went to vomit. (She heard her retching.) The parrot is still sleeping. Silence has fallen on Santo Domingo: no car horns or engines, no radios, no drunken laughter, no barking of stray dogs.
“My name is Benita Sepúlveda, come in,” the woman said to her at the foot of the wooden staircase. Advanced in years, indifferent, and yet with something maternal in her gestures and expression, she wore a uniform, and a scarf around her head. “Come this way.”
“She was the housekeeper,” Urania says, “the one responsible for placing fresh flowers in all the rooms, every day. Manuel Alfonso stayed behind, talking to the officer at the door. I never saw him again.”
Benita Sepúlveda, pointing with a plump little hand at the darkness beyond the windows protected by metal grillwork, said “that” was a grove of oaks, and in the orchard there were plenty of mangoes and cedars; but the most beautiful things on the place were the almond and mahogany trees that grew around the house and whose perfumed branches were in every corner. Did she smell them? Did she? She’d have a chance to see the countryside—the river, the valley, the sugar mill, the stables on the Fundación Ranch—early in the morning, when the sun came up. Would she have a Dominican breakfast, with mashed plantains, fried eggs, sausage or smoked meat, and fruit juice? Or just coffee, like the Generalissimo?
“It was from Benita Sepúlveda that I learned I was going to spend the night there, that I would sleep with His Excellency. What a great honor!”
The housekeeper, with the assurance that comes from long practice, had her stop on the first landing and go into a spacious, dimly lit room. It was a bar. It had wooden seating all around it, the backrests against the wall, leaving ample room for dancing in the center; an enormous jukebox; and shelves behind the bar crowded with bottles and different kinds of glasses. But Urania had eyes only for the immense gray rug, with the Dominican seal, that stretched from one end of the huge space to the other. She barely noticed the portraits and pictures of the Generalissimo—on foot and on horseback, in military uniform or dressed as a farmer, sitting at a desk or standing behind a lectern and wearing the presidential sash—that hung on the walls, or the silver trophies and framed certificates won by the dairy cows and thoroughbred horses of the Fundación Ranch, intermingled with plastic ashtrays and cheap decorations, still bearing the label of Macy’s in New York, that adorned the tables, sideboards, and shelves of the monument to kitsch where Benita Sepúlveda left her after asking if she really didn’t want a nice glass of liqueur.
“I don’t think the word ‘kitsch’ existed yet,” she explains, as if her aunt or cousins had made some observation. “Years later, whenever I heard it or read it, and knew what extremes of bad taste and pretension it expressed, Mahogany House always came to mind. A kitsch monument.”
And she herself was part of the kitsch, on that hot May night, with her debutante’s pink organdy party dress, the silver chain with the emerald and the gold-washed earrings that had belonged to her mama and that Papa allowed her to wear on the special occasion of Trujillo’s party. Her disbelief made what was happening unreal. It seemed to her she wasn’t really that girl standing on a branch of the national seal, in that extravagant room. Senator Agustín Cabral had sent her, a living offering, to the Benefactor and Father of the New Nation? Yes, she had no doubt at all, her father had arranged this with Manuel Alfonso. And yet, she still wanted to doubt.
“Somewhere, not in the bar, somebody put on a Lucho Gatica record. ‘Bésame, bésame mucho, como si fuera esta noche la última vez.’”
“I remember.” Manolita, embarrassed at interrupting, apologizes with a grimace: “They played ‘Bésame Mucho’ all day, on the radio, at parties.”
Standing next to a window that let in a warm breeze and a dense aroma of fields, grass, trees, she heard voices. The damaged one of Manuel Alfonso. The other, high-pitched, rising and falling, could only be Trujillo’s. She felt a prickle at the back of her neck and on her wrists, where the doctor took her pulse, an itch that always came when she had exams, and even now, in New York, before she made important decisions.
“I thought about throwing myself out the window. I thought about getting down on my knees, begging, crying. I thought I had to clench my teeth and let him do whatever he wanted, so I could go on living and take my revenge on Papa one day. I thought a thousand things while they were talking down below.”
In her rocking chair, Aunt Adelina gives a start, opens her mouth. But says nothing. She is as white as a sheet, her deep-set eyes filled with tears.
The voices stopped. There was a parenthesis of silence; then, footsteps climbing the stairs. Had her heart stopped beating? In the dim light of the bar, the silhouette of Trujillo appeared, in an olive-green uniform, without a jacket or tie. He held a glass of cognac in his hand. He walked toward her, smiling.