The narrow little eyes of the invalid want to open wide, want to be round.
“My dear, there are things you can’t know, can’t understand yet. I’m here to know them for you, to protect you. I love you more than anything in the world. Don’t ask me why, but you have to forget about this. You weren’t at Froilán’s house. You didn’t see his wife. And certainly, certainly not the person you dreamed you saw. For your own good, sweetheart. And mine. Don’t repeat it, don’t tell anybody about it. You promise? Never? Not anybody? You swear?”
“I swore,” says Urania. “But not even that was enough to make me suspect anything. Not even when you threatened the servants that if they repeated the girl’s fairy tale they would lose their jobs. That’s how innocent I was. By the time I discovered why the Generalissimo paid visits to their wives, ministers could no longer do what Henríquez Ureña did. Like Don Froilán, they had to resign themselves to wearing horns. And gain something from it since they had no alternative. Did you? Did the Chief visit my mother? Before I was born? When I was too little to remember? He visited them when the wives were beautiful. My mother was beautiful, wasn’t she? I don’t remember him coming here, but he might have before I was born. What did my mother do? Did she accept it? Did she feel happy, proud of the honor? That was the norm, wasn’t it? Good Dominican women were grateful when the Chief deigned to fuck them. You think that’s vulgar? But that was the verb your beloved Chief used.”
Yes, that one. Urania knows, she has read it in her extensive library on the Era. At night, after a few glasses of Carlos I Spanish brandy, Trujillo, so careful, refined, elegant in his speech—a snake charmer when he set his mind to it—would suddenly come out with the filthiest words, talk the way they talk on a sugar plantation, in the bateys, among the stevedores on the Ozama, in the stadiums or brothels, talk the way men talk when they need to feel more macho than they really are. At times the Chief could be savagely vulgar, repeating the harsh curses of his youth, when he was a plantation overseer in San Cristóbal or a guard in the constabulary. His courtiers celebrated them as enthusiastically as the speeches written for him by Senator Cabral or the Constitutional Sot. He even boasted of the “cunts he had fucked,” something his courtiers also celebrated even when that could make them potential enemies of Doña María Martínez, the Bountiful First Lady, and even when those cunts were their wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters. It wasn’t an exaggeration of an overheated Dominican imagination, uncontrollably heightening virtues and vices and embellishing real anecdotes until they became fantasies. Some stories were invented, enhanced, colored by this fierce vocation of her compatriots. But the story of Barahona had to be true. Urania hadn’t read it, she had heard it (feeling nauseated), told by someone who was always close, very close, to the Benefactor.
“The Constitutional Sot, Papa. Yes, Senator Henry Chirinos, the Judas who betrayed you. I heard it from his own filthy mouth. Are you surprised I was with him? As an official of the World Bank I couldn’t avoid it. The director asked me to represent him at the reception given by our ambassador. I mean, the ambassador of President Balaguer. Of the democratic civilian government of President Balaguer. Chirinos made out better than you did, Papa. He got you out of the way, he never fell into disfavor with Trujillo, and in the end he changed direction and adjusted to democracy even though he had been as much of a Trujillista as you. There he was, in Washington, uglier than ever, puffed up like a toad, tending to his guests and drinking like a sponge. Allowing himself the luxury of entertaining his companions with anecdotes about the Trujillo Era. He of all people!”
The invalid has closed his eyes. Has he fallen asleep? His head rests against the back of the chair and his wrinkled, empty mouth hangs open. He looks thinner and more vulnerable this way; through his bathrobe, she catches a glimpse of his hairless chest, the white skin and prominent bones. His breathing is regular. She notices only now that her father wears no socks; his insteps and ankles are those of a child.
He hasn’t recognized her. How could he have imagined that this official of the World Bank, who has given him the director’s greetings in English, is the daughter of Egghead Cabral, his former colleague and crony? Urania manages to keep her distance from the ambassador after the greeting demanded by protocol, exchanging banalities with people who are obliged to be there, as she is, because of their positions. After a time, she prepares to leave. She approaches the circle listening to the ambassador of the democratic country, but what he is saying stops her cold. Ashen, spotted skin, the maw of an apoplectic beast, a triple chin, his elephantine belly about to burst out of the tight blue suit with its fancy vest and red tie, Ambassador Chirinos says it happened in Barahona, toward the end, when Trujillo, in one of those acts of bravado he was so fond of, announced that in order to set an example and activate Dominican democracy, he, who was retired from government (he had set up his brother Héctor Bienvenido, nicknamed Blacky, as puppet president) would declare his candidacy not for the presidency but for an obscure provincial governorship. And as an opposition candidate!
The ambassador of the democratic country snorts, takes a breath, observes the effect of his words with tiny eyes that are too close together. “Think of it, ladies and gentlemen,” he says ironically: “Trujillo, a candidate opposed to his own regime!” He smiles and continues, explaining that in the election campaign, Don Froilán Arala, one of the Generalissimo’s right-hand men, delivered a speech urging the Chief to declare not for the governorship but for what he still was in the hearts of the Dominican people: President of the Republic. Everyone thought Don Froilán was following the Chief’s instructions. Not so. Or, at least—Ambassador Chirinos empties his glass of whiskey with a malicious glint in his eyes—not so that night, for it might also be true that Don Froilán had done as the Chief ordered and the Chief changed his mind and decided to go on with the farce for a few more days. He would do that sometimes, even if it made his most talented collaborators look ridiculous. Don Froilán Arala’s head might display a pair of baroque horns, but it also boasted exceptional brains. The Chief penalized him for his hagiographic speech as he usually did: by humiliating him where it hurt most, in his honor as a man.
All of the local elite were at the reception given for the Chief by the leaders of the Dominican Party of Barahona. They danced and drank. Suddenly, when it was very late, the Chief, feeling very good, before a huge audience composed exclusively of men—military from the local garrison, ministers, senators, and deputies who were accompanying him on the campaign tour, governors, political leaders—whom he had been regaling with recollections of his first campaign tour three decades earlier, and adopting that sentimental, nostalgic look he put on suddenly at the end of parties, as if succumbing to an attack of weakness, exclaimed:
“I have been a well-loved man. A man who has held in his arms the most beautiful women in this country. They have given me the energy to go on. Without them, I never could have done what I did.” (He raised his glass to the light, examined the liquid, confirmed its transparency, the sharpness of its color.) “Do you know which was the best of all the cunts I fucked?” (“Forgive me, my friends, for the vulgarity,” the diplomat apologized, “I’m quoting Trujillo exactly.”) (He paused again, inhaled the bouquet of his glass of brandy. The silvery head looked for and found, in the circle of gentlemen listening to him, the fat, livid face of the minister. And he concluded:) “Froilán’s wife!”
Urania grimaces in disgust, as she had on the night when she heard Ambassador Chirinos add that Don Froilán had smiled heroically, laughed, celebrated with the others the Chief’s witticism. “White as a sheet, not fainting, not falling down with a heart attack,” declared the diplomat.
“How was it possible, Papa? How could a man like Froilán Arala, cultured, educated, intelligent, accept that? What did he do to all of you? What did he give you that turned Don Froilán, Chirinos, Manuel Alfonso, you, all his right- and left-hand men, into filthy rags?”
You don’t understand, Urania, though there are many things about the Era that you’ve come to understand; at first, some of them seemed impenetrable, but after reading, listening, investigating, thinking, you’ve come to understand how so many millions of people, crushed by propaganda and lack of information, brutalized by indoctrination and isolation, deprived of free will and even curiosity by fear and the habit of servility and obsequiousness, could worship Trujillo. Not merely fear him but love him, as children eventually love authoritarian parents, convincing themselves that the whippings and beatings are for their own good. But what you’ve never understood is how the best-educated Dominicans, the intellectuals of the country, the lawyers, doctors, engineers, often graduates of very good universities in the United States or Europe, sensitive, cultivated men of experience, wide reading, ideas, presumably possessing a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, men of feeling and scruples, could allow themselves to be as savagely abused (they all were, at one time or another) as Don Froilán Arala was that night in Barahona.
“Too bad you can’t speak,” she repeats, returning to the present. “We’d try to understand it, together. What made Don Froilán maintain a slavish loyalty to Trujillo? He was loyal to the end, like you. He didn’t take part in the conspiracy, and neither did you. He went on licking the hand of the Chief who boasted in Barahona that he had fucked his wife. The Chief who kept him traveling through South America as Chancellor of the Republic, visiting governments from Buenos Aires to Caracas, from Caracas to Rio or Brasília, from Brasília to Montevideo, from Montevideo to Caracas, just so he could go on fucking our beautiful neighbor in peace.”
It is an image that has pursued Urania for a long time, one that makes her laugh and makes her indignant. The image of the Era’s Minister of Foreign Affairs getting in and out of planes, traveling to South American capitals, obeying the peremptory orders that waited for him at every airport so he would continue his hysterical journey, pestering governments for inane reasons. Just to keep him from returning to Ciudad Trujillo while the Chief was screwing his wife. Crassweller himself, the best-known biographer of Trujillo, mentioned it. So everybody knew, including Don Froilán.
“Was it worth it, Papa? Was it for the illusion that you were wielding power? Sometimes I think it wasn’t, that success was secondary. That you, Arala, Pichardo, Chirinos, Álvarez Pina, Manuel Alfonso, really liked getting dirty. That Trujillo pulled a vocation for masochism up from the bottom of your souls, that you were people who needed to be spat on and mistreated and debased in order to be fulfilled.”
The invalid looks at her without blinking, without moving his lips or the small hands resting on his knees. Like a mummy, a small embalmed man, a wax doll. His robe is faded, threadbare in places. It must be very old, bought ten or fifteen years ago. There’s a knock on the door. She says “Come in,” and the nurse appears, carrying a plate with pieces of mango cut into half-moon shapes and some mashed apple or banana.
“At midmorning I always give him some fruit,” she explains from the door. “The doctor says his stomach shouldn’t be empty for too long. Since he barely eats, I have to feed him three or four times a day. At night, just some broth. May I?”
“Yes, come in.”
Urania looks at her father and his eyes remain on her; they don’t move to look at the nurse even when she sits in front of him and begins to give him little spoonfuls of food.
“Where are his dentures?”
“We had to take them out. He’s gotten so thin they made his gums bleed. For what he eats, broth, cut-up fruit, purees, things from the blender, he doesn’t need them.”
For a long while they are silent. When the invalid finishes swallowing, the nurse brings the spoon up to his lips and waits patiently for the old man to open his mouth. Then, delicately, she gives him the next mouthful. Does she always do this? Or is her delicacy due to the presence of his daughter? No question. When she’s alone with him she must scold him and pinch him, like nannies with babies who don’t talk yet, when their mothers can’t see them.
“Give him a few mouthfuls,” says the nurse. “He wants you to. Isn’t that right, Don Agustín? You want your daughter to give you this nice food, don’t you? Yes, yes, he’d like that. Give him a few mouthfuls while I go downstairs for his glass of water. I forgot it.”
She places the half-empty plate in Urania’s hands, who accepts it mechanically, and she goes out, leaving the door open. After hesitating a few moments, Urania brings the spoon that holds a slice of mango up to his mouth. The invalid, who has still not taken his eyes off her, closes his mouth, clenching his lips like a difficult child.
“Good morning,” he replied.
Colonel Johnny Abbes had placed on his desk the daily morning report on the previous night’s events, along with warnings and suggestions. He liked reading them; the colonel didn’t waste time on stupid shit, like the former head of the SIM, General Arturo R. Espaillat (Razor), a graduate of West Point who’d bored him with his lunatic strategies. Had Razor worked for the CIA? They assured him he had. But Johnny Abbes couldn’t confirm it. If there was anybody not working for the CIA it was the colonel: he hated the Yankees.
“Coffee, Excellency?”
Johnny Abbes was in uniform. Though he made an effort to wear it with the correctness Trujillo demanded, he could not do more than his flaccid, misshapen physique allowed. Fairly short, with a protruding belly that complemented his dewlaps, and a prominent chin divided by a deep cleft. His cheeks were flabby too. Only his cruel, shifting eyes revealed the intelligence behind the physical calamity. He was thirty-five or thirty-six years old but looked like an old man. He hadn’t gone to West Point or to any military academy; he wouldn’t have been admitted, for he lacked a soldier’s physique and a military vocation. He was what Gittleman, the Benefactor’s instructor when he was a Marine, would have called “a toad in body and soul”: no muscles, too much fat, and an excessive fondness for intrigue. Trujillo made him a colonel overnight when, in one of those inspirations that marked his political career, he decided to name him head of the SIM to replace Razor. Why did he do it? Not because Abbes was cruel but because he was cold: the iciest individual Trujillo had ever known in this country of hot bodies and souls. Was it a fortunate decision? Recently the colonel had made errors. The failed attempt on the life of President Betancourt was not the only one; he had also been wrong about the supposed uprising against Fidel Castro by Commanders Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and William Morgan, which had turned out to be a trick by the Beard to draw Cuban exiles to the island and capture them. The Benefactor was thoughtful as he turned the pages of the report and sipped his coffee.
“You insist on pulling Bishop Reilly out of Santo Domingo Academy,” he murmured. “Sit down, have some coffee.”
“If you’ll permit me, Excellency?”
The colonel’s melodious voice dated from his youth, when he had been a radio announcer commenting on baseball, basketball, and horse races. From that period, he had kept only his fondness for esoteric reading—he admitted he was a Rosicrucian—the handkerchiefs he dyed red because, he said, it was a lucky color for an Aries, and his ability to see each person’s aura (all of it bullshit that made the Generalissimo laugh). He settled himself in front of the Chief’s desk, holding a cup of coffee in his hand. It was still dark outside, and the office was half in shadow, barely lit by a small lamp that enclosed Trujillo’s hands in a golden circle.
“That abscess must be lanced, Excellency. Our biggest problem isn’t Kennedy, he’s too busy with the failure of his Cuban invasion. It’s the Church. If we don’t put an end to the fifth columnists here, we’ll have problems. Reilly serves the purposes of those who demand an invasion. Every day they make him more important, while they pressure the White House to send in the Marines to help the poor, persecuted bishop. Don’t forget, Kennedy’s a Catholic.”
“We’re all Catholics,” Trujillo said with a sigh. And demolished the colonel’s argument: “That’s a reason not to touch him. It would give the gringos the excuse they’re looking for.”
Though there were times when the colonel’s frankness displeased Trujillo, he tolerated it. The head of the SIM had orders to speak to him with absolute sincerity even when it might offend his ears. Razor didn’t dare use that prerogative in the way Johnny Abbes did.
“I don’t think we can go back to our old relationship with the Church, that thirty-year idyll is over,” Abbes said slowly, his eyes like quicksilver in their sockets, as if searching the area for ambushes. “They declared war on us on January 24, 1960, with their Bishops’ Pastoral Letter, and their goal is to destroy the regime. A few concessions won’t satisfy the priests. They won’t support you again, Excellency. The Church wants war, just like the Yankees. And in war there are only two options: surrender to the enemy or defeat him. Bishops Panal and Reilly are in open rebellion.”
Colonel Abbes had two plans. One, to use the
paleros—
thugs armed with clubs and knives led by Balá, an ex-convict in his service—as a shield while the
caliés
rioted, pretending to be recalcitrant groups that had broken away from large protest demonstrations against the terrorist bishops in La Vega and at Santo Domingo Academy, and killed the prelates before the police could rescue them. This formula was risky; it might provoke an invasion. The advantage was that the death of the two bishops would paralyze the rest of the clergy for a long time to come. In the other plan, the police rescued Panal and Reilly before they could be lynched by a mob, and the government deported them to Spain and the United States, arguing that this was the only way to guarantee their safety. Congress would pass a law establishing that all priests who exercised their ministry in the country had to be Dominicans by birth. Foreigners or naturalized citizens would be returned to their own countries. In this way—the colonel consulted a notebook—the Catholic clergy would be reduced by a third. The minority of native-born priests would be manageable.
He stopped speaking when the Benefactor, whose head had been lowered, looked up.
“That’s what Fidel Castro did in Cuba.”
Johnny Abbes nodded:
“There the Church started out with protests too, and ended up conspiring to prepare the way for the Yankees. Castro threw out the foreign priests and took drastic measures against the ones who were left. What happened to him? Nothing.”
“
So far
” the Benefactor corrected him. “Kennedy will send the Marines to Cuba any day now. And this time it won’t be the kind of mess they made last month at the Bay of Pigs.”
“In that case, the Beard will the fighting,” Johnny Abbes agreed. “And it isn’t impossible that the Marines will land here. And you’ve decided that we’ll the fighting too.”
Trujillo gave a mocking little laugh. If they had to die fighting the Marines, how many Dominicans would sacrifice themselves with him? The soldiers would, no doubt about that. They proved it during the invasion sent by Fidel on June 14, 1959. They fought well, they wiped out the invaders in just a few days, in the mountains of Costanza, on the beaches of Maimón and Estero Hondo. But the Marines…
“I won’t have many with me, I’m afraid. The rats running away will raise a dust storm. But you won’t have a choice, you’ll have to the with me. Wherever you go you’ll face jail, or assassination by the enemies you have all over the world.”
“I’ve made them defending the regime, Excellency.”
“Of all the men around me, the only one who couldn’t betray me, even if he wanted to, is you,” an amused Trujillo insisted. “I’m the only person you can get close to, the only one who doesn’t hate you or dream about killing you. We’re married till death do us part.”
He laughed again, in a good humor, examining the colonel the way an entomologist examines an insect difficult to classify. They said a lot of things about Abbes, especially about his cruelty. It was an advantage for somebody in his position. They said, for example, that his father, an American of German descent, found little Johnny, still in short pants, sticking pins into the eyes of chicks in the henhouse. That as a young man he sold medical students cadavers he had robbed from graves in Independencia Cemetery. That though he was married to Lupita, a hideous Mexican, hard as nails, who carried a pistol in her handbag, he was a faggot. Even that he had gone to bed with Kid Trujillo, the Generalissimo’s half brother.
“You’ve heard what they say about you,” he said, looking him in the eye and laughing. “Some of it must be true. Did you like poking out chickens’ eyes when you were a kid? Did you rob the graves at Independencia Cemetery and sell the corpses?”
The colonel barely smiled.
“The first probably isn’t true, I don’t remember doing it. The second is only half true. They weren’t cadavers, Excellency. Bones and skulls washed up to the surface by the rain. To earn a few pesos. Now they say that as head of the SIM, I’m returning the bones.”
“And what about you being a faggot?”
The colonel didn’t become upset this time either. His voice maintained a clinical indifference.
“I’ve never gone in for that, Excellency. I’ve never gone to bed with a man.”
“Okay, enough bullshit,” he cut him off, becoming serious. “Don’t touch the bishops, for now. We’ll see how things develop. If they can be punished, we’ll do it. For the moment, just keep an eye on them. Go on with the war of nerves. Don’t let them sleep or eat in peace. Maybe they’ll decide to leave on their own.”
Would the two bishops get their way and be as smug as that black bastard Betancourt? Again he felt his anger rise. That rat in Caracas had gotten the OAS to sanction the Dominican Republic and pressured the member countries to break off relations and apply economic pressures that were strangling the nation. Each day, each hour, they were damaging what had been a brilliant economy. And Betancourt was still alive, the standard-bearer of freedom, displaying his burned hands on television, proud of having survived a stupid attempt that never should have been left to those assholes in the Venezuelan military. Next time the SIM would run everything. In his technical, impersonal way, Abbes explained the new operation that would culminate in the powerful explosion, set off by remote control, of a device purchased for a king’s ransom in Czechoslovakia and stored now at the Dominican consulate in Haiti. It would be easy to take it from there to Caracas at the opportune moment.
Ever since 1958, when he decided to promote him to the position he now held, the Benefactor had met every day with the colonel, in this office, at Mahogany House, wherever he might be, and always at this time of day. Like the Generalissimo, Johnny Abbes never took a vacation. Trujillo first heard about him from General Espaillat. The former head of the Intelligence Service had surprised him with a precise, detailed report on Dominican exiles in Mexico City: what they were doing, what they were plotting, where they lived, where they met, who was helping them, which diplomats they visited.
“How many people do you have in Mexico to be so well informed about those bastards?”
“All the information comes from one person, Excellency.” Razor gestured with professional satisfaction. “He’s very young. Johnny Abbes García. Perhaps you’ve met his father, a half-German gringo who came here to work for the electric company and married a Dominican. The boy was a sports reporter and something of a poet. I began to use him as an informant on people in radio and the press, and at the Gómez Pharmacy gatherings that the intellectuals attend. He did so well I sent him to Mexico City on a phony scholarship. And now, as you can see, he’s gained the confidence of the entire exile community. He gets on well with everybody. I don’t know how he does it, Excellency, but in Mexico he even got close to Lombardo Toledano, the leftist union leader. Imagine, the ugly broad he married was secretary to that Red.”
Poor Razor! By talking so enthusiastically, he began to lose the directorship of the Intelligence Service that he had trained for at West Point.
“Bring him here, give him a job where I can watch him,” Trujillo ordered.
That was how the awkward, unprepossessing figure with the perpetually darting eyes had appeared in the corridors of the National Palace. He occupied a low-level position in the Office of Information. Trujillo studied him at a distance. From the time he had been very young, in San Cristóbal, he had followed those intuitions which, after a simple glance, a brief chat, a mere allusion, made him certain a person could be useful to him. That was how he chose many of his collaborators, and he hadn’t done too badly. For several weeks Johnny Abbes García worked in an obscure office, under the direction of the poet Ramón Emilio Jiménez, along with Dipp Velarde Font, Querol, and Grimaldi, writing supposed letters from readers to “The Public Forum” in the paper
El Caribe
. Before putting him to the test, he waited for a sign, not knowing exactly what form it would take. It came in the most unexpected way, on the day he saw Johnny Abbes in a Palace corridor conversing with one of his ministers. What did the meticulous, pious, austere Joaquín Balaguer have to talk about with Razor’s informant?
“Nothing in particular, Excellency,” Balaguer explained when it was time for his ministerial meeting. “I did not know the young man. When I saw him so absorbed in his reading, for he was reading as he walked, my curiosity was piqued. You know how much I love books. I could not have been more astonished. He cannot be in his right mind. Do you know what he was enjoying so much? A book about Chinese tortures, with photographs of those who had been decapitated and skinned alive.”
That night he sent for him. Abbes seemed so overwhelmed—with joy, fear, or both—by the unexpected honor that he could hardly get the words out when he greeted the Benefactor.
“You did good work in Mexico,” he said in the sharp, high-pitched voice that, like his gaze, had a paralyzing effect on his interlocutors. “Espaillat told me about it. I think you can take on more serious tasks. Are you interested?”
“Anything Your Excellency desires.” He stood motionless, his feet together, like a student in front of his teacher.
“Did you know José Almoina in Mexico? A Galician who came here with the Republican exiles from Spain.”
“Yes, Excellency. I mean, only by sight. But I did know many people in the group he meets with in the Café Comercio. They call themselves ‘Dominican Spaniards.’”
“This individual published a book attacking me,
A Satrapy in the Caribbean
, that was paid for by the Guatemalan government. He used an alias, Gregorio Bustamante. Then, to throw us off the track, he had the gall to publish another book in Argentina,
I Was Trujillo’s Secretary
, and this time he used his own name and praised me to the skies. That was several years ago, and he feels safe there in Mexico. He thinks I’ve forgotten that he defamed my family and the regime that fed him. There’s no statute of limitations on crimes like that. Do you want to take care of it?”