The Feast of the Goat (23 page)

“Turk, Amadito, cover us,” said Antonio de la Maza. “Tony, let’s finish it.”

Almost at the same time—his eyes were beginning to make out profiles and silhouettes in the tenuous bluish light—he saw two crouching figures running toward Trujillo’s automobile.

“Don’t fire, Turk,” said Amadito; with one knee on the ground, he aimed his rifle. “We have them. Keep an eye open. We don’t want him to get past if he tries to run away.”

For five, eight, ten seconds, the silence was absolute. As if in a nightmare, Salvador noticed that on the lane to his right, two cars were speeding toward Ciudad Trujillo. A moment later, another explosion of rifle and revolver fire. It lasted a few seconds. Then the booming voice of Antonio de la Maza filled the night:

“He’s dead, damn it!”

He and Amadito began to run. Seconds later, Salvador stopped, craned his head over the shoulders of Tony Imbert and Antonio de la Maza, who, one with a lighter and the other with matches, were examining the blood-soaked body dressed in olive green, the face destroyed, that lay on the asphalt in a puddle of blood. The Beast was dead. He did not have time to give thanks to God, he heard the sound of running and was certain he heard shots, there, behind Trujillo’s car. Without thinking, he raised his revolver and fired, convinced they were
caliés
or military adjutants coming to the aid of the Chief, and very close by he heard the moans of Pedro Livio Cedeño, who had been hit by his bullets. It was as if the earth had opened up, as if, from the bottom of the abyss, he could hear the sound of the Evil One laughing at him.

“You really don’t want a little more arepa?” Aunt Adelina insists affectionately. “Go on, have some. When you were little, every time you came to the house you asked for corn cake. Don’t you like it anymore?”

“Of course I like it, Aunt Adelina,” Urania protests. “But I’ve never eaten so much in my life. I won’t be able to sleep a wink.”

“All right, we’ll just leave it here in case you want a little more later,” says a resigned Aunt Adelina.

Her firm voice and mental lucidity contrast with how decrepit she looks: bent, almost bald—patches of scalp can be seen through her white hair—her face puckered into a thousand wrinkles, dentures that shift when she eats or speaks. She is a shrunken little woman, half lost in the rocking chair where Lucinda, Manolita, Marianita, and the Haitian maid settled her after carrying her downstairs. Her aunt was determined to have supper in the dining room with her brother Agustín’s daughter, who had suddenly reappeared after so many years. She speaks energetically, and in her small, deep-set eyes there is a flashing intelligence. “I never would have recognized her,” thinks Urania. Or Lucinda, and certainly not Manolita, whom she last saw when she was eleven or twelve and who is now a prematurely aged matron with wrinkles on her face and neck, and hair badly dyed a rather vulgar blue-black. Marianita, Lucinda’s daughter, must be about twenty: thin, very pale, her hair almost in a crew cut, and melancholy eyes. She doesn’t stop looking at Urania, as if she were under a spell. What has her niece heard about her?

“I can’t believe it’s you, that you’re really here.” Aunt Adelina fixes her penetrating eyes on her. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

“Well, Aunt Adelina, here I am. It makes me so happy.”

“Me too, darling. You must have made Agustín even happier. My brother had resigned himself to never seeing you again.”

“I don’t know, Aunt Adelina.” Urania puts up her defenses, foresees recriminations and indiscreet questions. “I spent all day with him, and I don’t think he even recognized me.”

Her two cousins react in unison:

“Of course he recognized you, Uranita,” declares Lucinda.

“He can’t speak, so it’s hard to tell,” Manolita concurs. “But he understands everything, his mind still works.”

“He’s still Egghead,” says Aunt Adelina with a laugh.

“We know because we see him every day,” Lucinda continues. “He recognized you, and your coming back made him happy.”

“I hope so, Lucinda.”

A silence that is prolonged, glances that cross the old table in the narrow dining room, with a china closet that Urania vaguely recognizes, and religious pictures on faded green walls. Nothing is familiar here either. In her memory, the house of her Aunt Adelina and Uncle Aníbal, where she came to play with Manolita and Lucinda, was large, bright, elegant, and airy; this is a cave crowded with depressing furniture.

“Breaking my hip separated me from Agustín forever.” She shakes her small fist, the fingers deformed by sclerosis. “Before it happened, I used to spend hours with him. We had long conversations. He didn’t need to talk for me to understand what he wanted to say. My poor brother! I would have brought him here. But where would I put him, in this rat hole?”

She speaks angrily.

“The death of Trujillo was the beginning of the end for the family,” Lucindita says with a sigh. And then she becomes alarmed. “I’m sorry, Urania. You hate Trujillo, don’t you?”

“It started before that,” Aunt Adelina corrects her, and Urania becomes interested in what she is saying.

“When, Grandma?” Lucinda’s oldest daughter asks in a thin little voice.

“With the letter in ‘The Public Forum,’ a few months before they killed Trujillo,” Aunt Adelina declares; her eyes pierce the emptiness. “In January or February of 1961. We gave the news to your papa, early in the morning. Aníbal was the first to read it.”

“A letter in ‘The Public Forum’?” Urania is searching, searching through her memories. “Ah, yes.”

“I assume it’s nothing important, a foolish mistake that will be straightened out,” his brother-in-law said on the phone; he sounded so agitated, so vehement, so false, that Senator Agustín Cabral was taken aback: what was wrong with Aníbal? “Haven’t you read
El Caribe?
”

“They’ve just brought it in, I haven’t opened it yet.”

He heard a nervous little cough.

“Well, there’s a letter, Egghead.” His brother-in-law tried to be casual, lighthearted. “It’s all nonsense. Clear it up as soon as you can.”

“Thanks for calling me.” Senator Cabral said goodbye. “My love to Adelina and the girls. I’ll stop by to see them.”

Thirty years in the highest echelons of political power had made Agustín Cabral a man familiar with imponderables—traps, ambushes, trickery, betrayals—and so, learning there was a letter attacking him in “The Public Forum,” the most widely read, and widely feared, section in
El Caribe
because it was fed from the National Palace and served as a political barometer for the entire country, did not unnerve him. It was the first time he had appeared in the infernal column; other ministers, senators, governors, or officials had been burned in its flames, but not him, until now. He went back to the dining room. His daughter, in her school uniform, was eating breakfast: mangú—plantain mashed with butter—and fried cheese. He kissed the top of her head (“Hi, Papa”), sat down across from her, and while the maid poured his coffee, he slowly, carefully opened the folded paper lying on a corner of the table. He turned the pages until he reached “The Public Forum”:

“I have to run, Papa,” Senator Cabral heard, and without a single gesture that would belie his apparent calm, he moved the newspaper aside to kiss the girl. “I won’t be on the school bus, I’m staying to play volleyball. Some friends and I will walk home.”

“Be careful at the intersections, Uranita.”

He drank his orange juice and had an unhurried cup of steaming, freshly brewed coffee, but did not taste the mangú or fried cheese or toast with honey. Again he read every word, every syllable, of the letter in “The Public Forum.” It undoubtedly had been fabricated by the Constitutional Sot, a pen pusher who delighted in sneak attacks but only when ordered by the Chief; nobody would dare to write, let alone publish, a letter like this without Trujillo’s authorization. When was the last time he saw him? The day before yesterday, on his walk. He hadn’t been called to walk beside him, the Chief spent the whole time talking to General Román and General Espaillat, but he greeted him with the customary civility. Or did he? He sharpened his memory. Had he noticed a certain hardness in that fixed, intimidating gaze, which seemed to tear through appearances and reach deep into the soul of the person he was scrutinizing? A certain dryness when he responded to his greeting? The beginning of a frown? No, he didn’t remember anything unusual.

The cook asked if he’d be home for lunch. No, only for supper, and he nodded when Aleli suggested the menu. When he heard the official car of the Senate Presidency pulling up to the door of his house, he looked at his watch: exactly eight o’clock. Thanks to Trujillo, he had discovered that time is gold. Like so many others, since his youth he had made the Chief’s obsessions his own: order, exactitude, discipline, perfection. Senator Agustín Cabral had said it in a speech: “Thanks to His Excellency, the Benefactor, we Dominicans have discovered the wonders of punctuality.” Putting on his jacket, he went out to the street: “If I had been dismissed, the official car would not have come for me.” His assistant, Humberto Arenal, an Air Force lieutenant who had never hidden his connections to the SIM, opened the door for him. His official car, with Teodosio at the wheel. His assistant. There was nothing to worry about.

“He never found out why he fell into disgrace?” Urania asks in astonishment.

“Never with any certainty,” Aunt Adelina explains. “There were plenty of suppositions, but that’s all. For years Agustín asked himself what he had done to make Trujillo so angry overnight. And turn a man who had served him his whole life into a pariah.”

Urania observes Marianita’s disbelief as she listens to them.

“They sound like things that happened on another planet, don’t they, Marianita?”

The girl blushes.

“It’s just that it seems so incredible, Aunt Urania. Like something in
The Trial
, the Orson Welles movie they showed at the Cinema Club. Anthony Perkins is tried and executed, and he never finds out why.”

Manolita has been fanning herself with both hands, but she stops in order to interject:

“They said he fell into disgrace because somebody made Trujillo believe it was Uncle Agustín’s fault that the bishops refused to proclaim him Benefactor of the Catholic Church.”

“They said a thousand things,” exclaims Aunt Adelina. “The doubt was the worst part of his calvary. The family was being ruined and nobody knew what Agustín had been accused of, what he had done or failed to do.”

No other senator was there when Agustín Cabral entered the Senate at a quarter past eight, as he did every morning. The guards gave him the proper salute, and the ushers and clerks he passed in the halls on the way to his office said good morning with their usual effusiveness. But the uneasiness felt by his two secretaries, Isabelita and Paris Goico, a young lawyer, was reflected in their faces.

“Who died?” he joked. “Are you worried about the letter in ‘The Public Forum’? We’ll clear up that nasty business right now. Call the editor of
El Caribe
, Isabelita. At home—Panchito doesn’t go to his office before noon.”

He sat down at his desk, glanced at the pile of documents, his correspondence, the day’s schedule prepared by the efficient Parisito. “The letter was dictated by the Chief,” he thought. A little snake slid down his spine. Was it one of those melodramas that amused the Generalissimo? In the midst of tensions with the Church and a confrontation with the United States and the OAS, was he in the mood for one of his bravura performances from the past, when he had felt all-powerful, unthreatened? Was this the time for circuses?

“He’s on the line, Don Agustín.”

He picked up the receiver and waited a few seconds before speaking.

“Did I wake you, Panchito?”

“What an idea, Egghead.” The journalist’s voice sounded normal. “I’m up at the crack of dawn, like a capon rooster. And I sleep with one eye open, just in case. What’s up?”

“Well, as you can imagine, I’m calling about the letter this morning in ‘The Public Forum,’” Senator Cabral said hoarsely. “Can you tell me anything about it?”

The answer came in the same light, jocular tone, as if they were talking about something trivial.

“It came recommended, Egghead. I wasn’t going to print something like that without checking. Believe me, given our friendship, it didn’t make me happy to publish it.”

“Yes, yes, sure,” he murmured to himself. He mustn’t lose his composure for a single instant.

“I intend to rectify the slander,” he said softly. “I haven’t been dismissed from anything. I’m calling you from the office of the President of the Senate. And that alleged committee investigating my management of the Ministry of Public Works, that’s another lie.”

“Send me your rectification right away,” Panchito replied. “I’ll do everything I can to publish it, it’s the least I can do. You know the esteem I have for you. I’ll be at the paper from four o’clock on. My love to Uranita. Take care of yourself, Agustín.”

As soon as he hung up, he began to have his doubts. Had he done the right thing in calling the editor of
El Caribe?
Wasn’t it a false move that betrayed his concern? What else could Panchito have said? He received letters for “The Public Forum” directly from the National Palace and printed them, no questions asked. He looked at his watch: a quarter to nine. He had time; the meeting of the Senate executive committee was at nine-thirty. He dictated his rectification to Isabelita with the same austere clarity he used in all his writing. A brief, dry, fulminating letter: he continued as President of the Senate and no one had questioned his scrupulous management at the Ministry of Public Works, entrusted to him by the regime presided over by that eponymous Dominican, His Excellency Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, Benefactor and Father of the New Nation.

When Isabelita left to type the letter, Paris Goico came into the office.

“The meeting of the Senate executive committee has been canceled, Don Agustín.”

He was young and didn’t know how to dissemble; his mouth hung open and his face was livid.

“Without consulting me? By whom?”

“The Vice President of the Senate, Don Agustín. He just told me so himself.”

He weighed what he had just heard. Could it be a separate incident, unrelated to the letter in “The Public Forum”? Parisito waited in distress, standing beside the desk.