“The order stands,” he repeated in a tone that allowed no discussion.
“As you wish, Excellency.”
He looked into the colonel’s eyes—Abbes immediately lowered them—and he skewered him, with a humorous barb:
“Do you think the Fidel Castro you admire so much walks the streets like me, without protection?”
The colonel shook his head.
“I don’t believe Fidel Castro is as romantic as you are, Excellency.”
Romantic? Him? Maybe with some of the women he had loved, maybe with Lina Lovatón. But, outside the sentimental arena, in politics, he had always felt classical. Rational, serene, pragmatic, with a cool head and a long view.
“When I met him, in Mexico, he was preparing the expedition of the
Granma
. They thought he was a crazed Cuban, an adventurer not worth taking seriously. From the very first, what struck me was his total lack of emotion. Even though in his speeches he seems tropical, exuberant, passionate. That’s for his audience. He’s just the opposite. An icy intelligence. I always knew he’d take power. But allow me to clarify something, Excellency. I admire Castro’s personality, the way he’s been able to play the gringos for fools, allying himself with the Russians and the Communist countries and using them against Washington, like the bumpers on a car. But I don’t admire his ideas, I’m not a Communist.”
“You’re a capitalist through and through,” Trujillo said mockingly, with a sardonic laugh. “Ultramar did very well, importing products from Germany, Austria, and the socialist countries. Exclusive distributorships never lose money.”
“Something else to thank you for, Excellency,” the colonel admitted. “The truth is, I never would have thought of it. I never had any interest in business. I opened Ultramar because you ordered me to.”
“I prefer my collaborators to make a profit instead of stealing,” the Benefactor explained. “Profits help the country, they create jobs, produce wealth, raise the morale of the people. But stealing demoralizes it. I imagine that since the sanctions things are going badly for Ultramar too.”
“Practically paralyzed. I don’t care, Excellency. Now my twenty-four hours a day are dedicated to keeping our enemies from destroying this regime and killing you.”
He spoke without emotion, in the same opaque, neutral tone he normally used to express himself.
“Should I conclude that you admire me as much as you do that asshole Castro?” Trujillo asked, searching out those small, evasive eyes.
“I don’t admire you, Excellency,” Colonel Abbes murmured, lowering his eyes. “I live for you. Through you. If you’ll permit me, I am your watchdog.”
It seemed to the Benefactor that when Abbes García said these words, his voice had trembled. He knew Abbes was in no way emotional, not fond of the effusiveness that was so frequent in the mouths of his other courtiers, and so he continued to scrutinize him with his knifelike gaze.
“If I’m killed, it will be by someone very close, a traitor in the family, so to speak,” he said, as if talking about someone else. “For you, it would be a great misfortune.”
“And for the country, Excellency.”
“That’s why I’m still in the saddle,” Trujillo agreed. “Otherwise I would have retired, as I was advised to do by my Yankee friends who were sent down here by President Eisenhower: William Pawley, General Clark, Senator Smathers. ‘Go down in history as a magnanimous statesman who turned the helm over to younger men.’ That’s what Roosevelt’s friend Smathers told me. It was a message from the White House. That’s why they came. To ask me to leave and to offer me asylum in the United States. ‘Your patrimony will be safe there.’ Those assholes confuse me with Batista, with Rojas Pinilla and Pérez Jiménez. They’ll only get me out when I’m dead.”
The Benefactor became distracted again, thinking about Guadalupe, Lupe to her friends, the fat, mannish Mexican Johnny Abbes married during that mysterious, adventurous period of his life in Mexico when he was sending detailed reports to Razor on the activities of the Dominican exiles, and at the same time frequenting revolutionary circles, like the one made up of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the July 26 Cubans, who were preparing the expedition of the
Granma
, and people like Vicente Lombardo Toledano, closely connected to the Mexican government, who had been his protector. The Generalissimo had never had time to question him calmly about that period in his life, when the colonel discovered his vocation and talent for espionage and clandestine operations. A juicy life, no doubt about it, full of anecdotes. Why had he ever married that awful woman?
“There’s something I always forget to ask you,” he said with the vulgarity he used when speaking to his collaborators. “How did you ever marry such an ugly woman?”
He did not detect the slightest sign of surprise on Abbes García’s face.
“It wasn’t for love, Excellency.”
“I always knew that,” said the Benefactor, smiling. “She isn’t rich, so you didn’t do it for money.”
“It was gratitude. Lupe saved my life once. She’s killed for me. When she was Lombardo Toledano’s secretary and I had just come to Mexico. Thanks to Vicente I began to understand politics. Much of what I’ve done wouldn’t have been possible without Lupe, Excellency. She doesn’t know the meaning of fear. And until now her instincts have never failed.”
“I know she’s tough, and knows how to fight, and carries a pistol and goes to whorehouses like a man,” said the Generalissimo, in excellent humor. “I’ve even heard that Puchita Brazobán saves girls for her. But what intrigues me is that you’ve been able to make babies with that freak.”
“I try to be a good husband, Excellency.”
The Benefactor began to laugh, the sonorous laughter of other days.
“You can be amusing when you want to be,” he congratulated him. “So you took her out of gratitude. And you can get it up whenever you want to.”
“In a manner of speaking, Excellency. The truth is, I don’t love Lupe and she doesn’t love me. At least not in the way people understand love. We’re united by something stronger. Dangers shared shoulder to shoulder, staring death in the face. And lots of blood, on both of us.”
The Benefactor nodded. He understood what he meant. He would have liked to have a wife like that hag, damn it. He wouldn’t have felt so alone when he had to make certain decisions. It was true, there were no ties like blood. That must be why he felt so tied to this country of ingrates, cowards, and traitors. Because in order to pull it out of backwardness, chaos, ignorance, and barbarism, he had often been stained with blood. Would these assholes thank him for it in the future?
Again he felt demoralized and crushed. Pretending to check his watch, he glanced out of the corner of his eye at his trousers. No stain at all on the crotch or on his fly. Knowing that did not raise his spirits. Again the memory of the girl at Mahogany House crossed his mind. An unpleasant episode. Would it have been better to shoot her on the spot, while she was looking at him with those eyes? Nonsense. He never had fired a gun gratuitously, least of all for things in bed. Only when there was no alternative, when it was absolutely necessary to move this country forward, or to wash away an insult.
“If you’ll permit me, Excellency.”
“Yes?”
“President Balaguer announced last night on the radio that the government would free a group of political prisoners.”
“Balaguer did what I ordered him to do. Why?”
“I’ll need a list of those who’ll be freed. So we can give them haircuts, shave them, dress them in decent clothes. I imagine they’ll be interviewed by the press.”
“I’ll send you the list as soon as I look it over. Balaguer thinks these gestures are useful in diplomacy. We’ll see. In any case, he made a good presentation.”
He had Balaguer’s speech on his desk. He read the underlined paragraph aloud: “The work of His Excellency Generalissimo Dr. Rafael L. Trujillo Molina has achieved a solidity that allows us, after thirty years of peaceful order and consecutive leadership, to offer America an example of the Latin American capacity for the conscious exercise of true representative democracy.”
“Nicely written, isn’t it?” he remarked. “That’s the advantage of having a well-read poet as President of the Republic. When my brother was in office, the speeches Blacky gave could put you to sleep. Well, I know you can’t stand Balaguer.”
“I don’t mix my personal likes or dislikes with my work, Excellency.”
“I’ve never understood why you don’t trust him. Balaguer is the most inoffensive of my collaborators. That’s why I’ve put him where he is.”
“I think his manner, his being so discreet, is a strategy. Deep down he isn’t a man of the regime, he works only for Balaguer. Maybe I’m wrong. As for the rest of it, I haven’t found anything suspicious in his conduct. But I wouldn’t put my hands to the fire for his loyalty.”
Trujillo looked at his watch. Two minutes to six. His meeting with Abbes García did not last more than an hour unless there were exceptional circumstances. He stood, and the head of the SIM followed suit.
“If I change my mind about the bishops, I’ll let you know” he said by way of dismissal. “Have the plan ready, in any case.”
“It can be put into effect the moment you decide. With your permission, Excellency.”
As soon as Abbes García left the office, the Benefactor went to look at the sky through the window. Not a glimmer of light yet.
“Ah, now I know who it is,” said Antonio de la Maza.
He opened the car door, still holding the sawed-off rifle in his hand, and climbed out onto the highway. None of his companions—Tony, Estrella Sadhalá, and Amadito—followed him; from inside the vehicle they watched his robust silhouette, outlined against shadows the faint moonlight barely illuminated, as he moved toward the small Volkswagen that had parked near them, its headlights turned off.
“Don’t tell me the Chief changed his mind,” Antonio exclaimed by way of greeting as he put his head in the window and brought his face up close to the driver and only occupant, a man in a suit and tie, gasping for breath and so fat it didn’t seem possible he could have gotten into the car, where he seemed trapped.
“Not at all, Antonio,” Miguel Ángel Báez Díaz reassured him, his hands clutching the wheel. “He’s going to San Cristóbal no matter what. He’s been delayed because after his walk on the Malecón he took Pupo Román to San Isidro Air Base. I came to put your mind at ease, I could imagine how impatient you were. He’ll show up any minute now. Be ready.”
“We won’t fail, Miguel Ángel, I hope you people won’t either.”
They talked for a moment, their faces very close together, the fat man holding the wheel and De la Maza constantly looking toward the road from Ciudad Trujillo, afraid the automobile would suddenly materialize and he wouldn’t have time to get back to his car.
“Goodbye, good luck with everything,” said Miguel Ángel Báez Díaz.
He drove away, heading back to Ciudad Trujillo, his headlights still turned off. Standing on the road, feeling the cool air and listening to the waves breaking a few meters away—he felt drops on his face and scalp, where his hair was beginning to thin—Antonio watched the car disappear in the distance, blending into the night where the lights of the city and its restaurants, filled with people, were twinkling. Miguel Ángel seemed confident. There was no doubt, then: he would come, and on this Tuesday, May 30, 1961, Antonio would at last fulfill the vow he had sworn on the family ranch in Moca, before his father, his brothers and sisters, his brothers- and sisters-in-law, four years and four months ago, on January 7, 1957, the day they buried Tavito.
He thought about how close the Pony was, and how good it would be to have a glass of rum with lots of ice, sitting on one of the rush-bottomed stools at the little bar, as he had so often in recent days, and feel the alcohol going to his head, distracting him, distancing him from Tavito and the bitterness, the frustration, the fever that had been his life since the cowardly murder of his younger brother, the one closest to him, the one he loved best. “Especially after the terrible lies they made up about him, to kill him a second time,” he thought. He returned slowly to the Chevrolet. It was a brand-new car that Antonio had imported from the United States and souped up and refined, explaining at the garage that as a landowner, and the manager of a sawmill in Restauración, on the Haitian border, he spent a good part of the year traveling and needed a faster, more reliable car. The time had come to test out this late-model Chevrolet, capable, thanks to adjustments to the cylinders and engine, of reaching two hundred kilometers an hour in a few moments, something the Generalissimo’s automobile was in no condition to do. He sat down again next to Antonio Imbert.
“Who was it?” said Amadito from the back seat.
“Those are things you don’t ask,” muttered Tony Imbert without turning around to look at Lieutenant García Guerrero.
“It’s no secret now,” said Antonio de la Maza. “It was Miguel Ángel Báez. You were right, Amadito. He’s definitely going to San Cristóbal tonight. He was delayed, but he won’t leave us hanging.”
“Miguel Ángel Báez Díaz?” Salvador Estrella Sadhalá whistled. “He’s involved too? You couldn’t ask for more. He’s the ultimate Trujillista. Wasn’t he vice president of the Dominican Party? He’s one of the men who walk every day with the Goat along the Malecón, kissing his ass, and go with him every Sunday to the Hipódromo.”
“He walked with him today too.” De la Maza nodded. “That’s why he knows he’s coming.”
There was a long silence.
“I know we have to be practical, that we need them,” Turk said with a sigh. “But I swear it makes me sick that somebody like Miguel Ángel is our ally now.”
“Now the saint, the puritan, the little Ángel with clean hands has been heard from.” Imbert made an effort to joke. “You see now, Amadito, why it’s better not to ask, better not to know who else is in this?”
“You talk as if all of us hadn’t been Trujillistas too, Salvador,” Antonio de la Maza growled. “Wasn’t Tony governor of Puerto Plata? Isn’t Amadito a military adjutant? Haven’t I managed the Goat’s sawmills in Restauración for the past twenty years? And the construction company where you work, doesn’t it belong to Trujillo too?”
“I take it back.” Salvador patted De la Maza’s arm. “I talk too much and say stupid things. You’re right. Anybody could say about us what I just said about Miguel Ángel. I didn’t say anything and you didn’t hear anything.”
But he had said it, because despite his serene, reasonable air that everyone liked so much, Salvador Estrella Sadhalá was capable of saying the cruelest things, driven by a spirit of justice that would suddenly take possession of him. He had said them to Antonio, his lifelong friend, in an argument when De la Maza could have shot him. “I wouldn’t sell my brother for a couple of bucks.” Those words, which kept them apart, not seeing or talking to each other for more than six months, came back to Antonio from time to time like a recurring nightmare. Then he had to have a lot of rum, one drink after the other. Though with inebriation came those blind rages that made him belligerent and drove him to provoke a fight, punching and kicking anybody near him.
He had turned forty-seven a few days earlier and was one of the oldest in the group of seven men stationed on the highway to San Cristóbal, waiting for Trujillo. In addition to the four in the Chevrolet, Pedro Livio Cedeño and Huáscar Tejeda Pimentel sat two kilometers further on, in a car lent by Estrella Sadhalá, and a kilometer past them, alone in his own vehicle, was Roberto Pastoriza Neret. Their plan was to cut Trujillo off, and in a barrage of fire from the front and the rear, leave him no escape. Pedro Livio and Huáscar must be as edgy as the four of them. And Roberto even worse, with no one to talk to and keep up his spirits. Would he come? Yes, he would come. And the long calvary that Antonio’s life had been since the murder of Tavito would end.
The moon, round as a coin and accompanied by a blanket of stars, gleamed and turned the crests of the nearby coconut palms silver; Antonio watched them sway to the rhythm of the breeze. In spite of everything this was a beautiful country, damn it. It would be even more beautiful after they had killed the devil who in thirty-one years had violated and poisoned it more than anything else it had suffered in its history of Haitian occupation, Spanish and American invasions, civil wars, battles among factions and caudillos, and in all the catastrophes—earthquakes, hurricanes—that had assailed Dominicans from the sky, the sea, or the center of the earth. More than anything else, what he could not forgive was that just as he had corrupted and brutalized this country, the Goat had also corrupted and brutalized Antonio de la Maza.
He hid his turmoil from his companions by lighting another cigarette. Without removing the cigarette from his lips, he exhaled smoke from his mouth and nose, caressing the sawed-off rifle, thinking about the steel-reinforced bullets prepared especially for tonight’s business by his Spanish friend Bissié, whom he had met through another conspirator, Manuel de Ovín Filpo, and who was a weapons expert and a magnificent shot. Almost as good as Antonio de la Maza, who, since childhood, on the family land at Moca, had always amazed parents, brothers and sisters, relatives, and friends with his shooting. That was why he occupied the privileged seat, to the right of Imbert: so he could shoot first. The group, who argued so much about everything, agreed immediately on that: Antonio de la Maza and Lieutenant García Guerrero, the best marksmen, should carry the rifles supplied to the conspirators by the CIA and sit on the right so they could hit the target with their first shot.
One of the things that made Moca and his family proud was that from the very beginning—1930—the De la Mazas had been anti-Trujillista. Naturally. In Moca everyone, from the most privileged landowner to the poorest peon, was Horacista, because President Horacio Vázquez came from Moca and was the brother of Antonio’s mother. Starting on the first day, the De la Mazas viewed with suspicion and antipathy the intrigues employed by the brigadier general at the head of the National Police—created by the Americans during the occupation, it became the Dominican Army when they left—Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, to bring down Don Horacio Vázquez and, in 1930, in the first crooked elections in his long history of electoral fraud, have himself elected President of the Republic. When this occurred, the De la Mazas did what patrician families and regional caudillos traditionally did when they didn’t like the government: they took to the mountains with men armed and financed out of their own pockets.
For almost three years, with short-lived intervals of peace, from the time he was seventeen until he was twenty, Antonio de la Maza—an athlete, a tireless horseman, a passionate hunter, high-spirited, bold, and in love with life—along with his father, uncles, and brothers, fought Trujillo’s forces with guns, though without much effect. Gradually Trujillo’s men dissolved the armed bands, inflicting some defeats but above all buying off their lieutenants and supporters until, weary and almost ruined, the De la Mazas finally accepted the government’s peace offers and returned to Moca to work their semi-abandoned land. Except for the indomitable, pigheaded Antonio. He smiled, remembering his stubbornness at the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1933 when, with fewer than twenty men, among them his brothers Ernesto and Tavito, who was still a boy, he attacked police stations and ambushed government patrols. The times were so unusual that despite the military activity, the three brothers could almost always sleep at their family home in Moca several days a month. Until the ambush on the outskirts of Tamboril, when the soldiers killed two of his men and wounded Ernesto, and Antonio himself.
From the Military Hospital in Santiago he wrote to his father, Don Vicente, saying that he regretted nothing and asking that the family please not humble itself by asking Trujillo for clemency. Two days after giving the letter to the head nurse, along with a generous tip to make sure it reached Moca, an Army van came to take him, handcuffed and with a guard, to Santo Domingo. (The Congress of the Republic would not change the name of the ancient city until three years later.) To the surprise of young Antonio de la Maza, the military vehicle, instead of depositing him in prison, took him to Government House, which in those days was near the old cathedral. They removed his handcuffs and’led him to a carpeted room, where he found General Trujillo, in uniform, and impeccably shaved and combed.
It was the first time he had seen him.
“You need balls to write a letter like this.” The Head of State made it dance in his hand. “You’ve shown that you have them, making war on me for almost three years. That’s why I wanted to see your face. Is it true what they say about your marksmanship? We ought to compete some time and see if it’s better than mine.”
Twenty-eight years later, Antonio recalled that high-pitched, cutting voice, that unexpected cordiality diluted by a touch of irony. And those penetrating eyes whose gaze he—with all his pride—could not endure.
“The war is over. I’ve put an end to the power of the regional caudillos, including the De la Mazas. Enough shooting. We have to rebuild the country, which is falling to pieces. I need the best men beside me. You’re impulsive and you know how to fight, don’t you? Good. Come and work with me. You’ll have a chance to do some shooting. I’m offering you a position of trust in the military adjutants assigned to guard me. That way, if I disappoint you one day, you can put a bullet in me.”
“But I’m not a soldier,” stammered the young De la Maza.
“From this moment on you are,” said Trujillo. “Lieutenant Antonio de la Maza.”
It was his first concession, his first defeat at the hands of that master manipulator of innocents, fools, and imbeciles, that astute exploiter of men’s vanity, greed, and stupidity. For how many years did he have Trujillo less than a meter away? Just like Amadito these past two years. You would have spared the country, and the De la Maza family, so much tragedy if you had done then what you’re going to do now. Tavito would certainly still be alive.
Behind him he could hear Amadito and Turk talking; from time to time, Imbert became involved in the conversation. It probably didn’t surprise them that Antonio remained silent; he never had much to say, although his taciturnity had deepened into muteness since the death of Tavito, a cataclysm that affected him in a way he knew was irreversible, turning him into a man with a single fixed idea: killing the Goat.
“Juan Tomás’s nerves must be in worse shape than ours,” he heard Turk say. “Nothing’s more horrible than waiting. But is he coming or not?”
“Any minute now,” Lieutenant García Guerrero pleaded. “Trust me, damn it.”
Yes, at this moment General Juan Tomás Díaz must have been in his house in Gazcue biting his nails, asking himself if it had finally happened, the thing that Antonio and he had dreamed about, stroked, plotted, kept alive and secret for precisely four years and four months. That is, since the day when, following that damn interview with Trujillo, and with Tavito’s body recently buried, Antonio jumped in his car and at a hundred twenty kilometers an hour drove to see Juan Tomás on his ranch in La Vega.
“For the sake of twenty years of friendship, help me, Juan Tomás. I have to kill him! I have to avenge Tavito!”
The general put his hand over his friend’s mouth. He looked around, indicating with a gesture that the servants could hear them. He took him behind the stables, where they usually did target practice.