He spent the hours of the new day peering out the windows, watching for the jeep. There was nothing to eat in the house, but he wasn’t hungry. His occasional drinks of distilled water seemed to fill his stomach. But he was tormented by solitude, boredom, lack of news. If there were only a radio at least! He resisted the temptation to go out and walk to some inhabited place and find a newspaper. Control your impatience, boy, Toño Sánchez would come soon.
He didn’t come until the third day. He appeared at noon on June 2, the day that Amadito, faint with hunger and desperate for news, turned thirty-two. Toño was no longer the easygoing, effusive, self-confident man who had brought him here. He was pale, devoured by anxiety, unshaven, and stammering. He handed him a thermos of hot coffee and some sausage and cheese sandwiches, which Amadito wolfed down as he heard the bad news. His picture was in all the papers and was shown frequently on television, along with those of General Juan Tomás Díaz, Antonio de la Maza, Estrella Sadhalá, Fifí Pastoriza, Pedro Livio Cedeño, Antonio Imbert, Huáscar Tejeda, and Luis Amiama. Pedro Livio Cedeño had been taken prisoner, and he had given them up. They were offering huge amounts of pesos to anyone with information about them. There was a fierce persecution of everyone suspected of being anti-Trujillista. Dr. Durán Barreras had been arrested the night before; Toño thought that if he was tortured, he’d betray them all in the end. It was extremely dangerous for Amadito to stay here.
“I wouldn’t stay even if it was safe, Toño,” the lieutenant said. “I’d rather be killed than have to spend another three days alone like this.”
“Where will you go?”
He thought of his cousin Máximo Mieses, who had a place along the Duarte highway. But Toño discouraged him: the highways were full of patrols and they were searching every vehicle. He’d never get to his cousin’s farm without being recognized.
“You have no idea what’s going on.” Toño Sánchez was in a rage. “Hundreds of people have been arrested. They’ve gone crazy, looking for all of you.”
“They can go to hell,” said Amadito. “Let them kill me. The Goat’s gone and they can’t bring him back. Don’t worry, brother. You’ve done a lot for me. Can you get me to the highway? I’ll go back to the capital on foot.”
“I’m scared, but not so scared that I’d leave you out in the cold, I’m not that much of a bastard,” said Toño, who had calmed down. He patted him on the shoulder. “Let’s go, I’ll take you. If they catch us, you put a gun to my head, okay?”
He settled Amadito in the back of the jeep, under a piece of canvas, on top of which he placed some coils of rope and gasoline cans that slammed against the hunched-over lieutenant. The position gave him cramps and made the pain in his foot worse; every pothole in the road battered his shoulders, back, and head. But he never let go of his .45; he held it in his right hand, with the safety off. Whatever happened, they wouldn’t take him alive. He wasn’t afraid. In fact, he didn’t have much hope of getting out of this. But it didn’t matter. He hadn’t felt this kind of serenity since that disastrous night with Johnny Abbes.
“We’re coming up on the Radhamés Bridge,” he heard a terrified Toño Sánchez say. “Don’t move, don’t make a sound, there’s a patrol.”
The jeep stopped. He heard voices, footsteps, and after a pause, friendly exclamations: “Hey, it’s you, Toñito.” “What’s up, compadre?” They authorized him to continue without searching the car. They must have been in the middle of the bridge when he heard Toño Sánchez again:
“The captain was my friend Skinny Rasputín. Shit, what a piece of luck! My balls are still up around my ears, Amadito. Where should I drop you?”
“On Avenida San Martín.”
A short while later, the jeep braked to a stop.
“I don’t see caliés anywhere, now’s a good time,” Toño said. “God be with you, boy.”
The lieutenant lifted off the canvas and the cans and jumped to the sidewalk. A few cars were passing, but he saw no pedestrians except for a man with a stick who was walking away, his back to him.
“God bless you, Toño.”
“And be with you,” Toño Sánchez repeated, pulling away.
Aunt Meca’s little one-story house—made of wood, with a fence, no garden, but surrounded by pots of geraniums in the windows—was about twenty meters away, which Amadito strode across, limping, not concealing his revolver. As soon as he knocked the door opened. Aunt Meca didn’t have time to be astonished, because the lieutenant rushed in, moving her aside and closing the door behind him.
“I don’t know what to do, where to hide, Aunt Meca. It’ll be for one or two days, until I can find a safe place.”
His aunt kissed and embraced him, affectionate as always. She didn’t seem as frightened as Amadito had feared.
“They must have seen you, honey. How could you come in broad daylight? My neighbors are raging Trujillistas. You’re covered with blood. And those bandages? Are you wounded?”
Amadito peered at the street through the curtains. There were no people on the sidewalks. Doors and windows across the street were closed.
“Ever since the news broke I’ve been praying to St. Peter Claver for you, Amadito, he’s such a miraculous saint,” his Aunt Meca said, cradling his face in her hands. “When they showed you on television and in El Caribe, some of my neighbors came to ask me questions, to see what they could find out. I hope they haven’t seen you. You look awful, honey. Do you want anything?”
“Yes, Aunt Meca,” he said with a laugh, caressing her white hair. “A shower and something to eat. I’m starving.”
“And it’s your birthday!” Aunt Meca recalled, and hugged him again.
She was a small, energetic old woman, with a resolute expression and deep, kind eyes. She had him take off his pants and shirt, so she could wash them, and while Amadito showered—it was a pleasure fit for the gods—she heated up all the leftovers in the kitchen. Wearing his shorts and undershirt, the lieutenant found a banquet spread on the table: fried green plantains, fried sausage, rice, deep-fried pieces of chicken. He ate with good appetite, listening to his Aunt Meca’s stories. How it upset the family when they learned he was one of Trujillo’s assassins. The caliés had come to the houses of three of her sisters in the middle of the night, asking about him. They hadn’t come here yet.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to sleep for a while, Aunt Meca. I’ve barely closed my eyes for days. I was too bored. I’m happy to be here with you.”
She led him to her bedroom and had him lie down on her bed, under an image of St. Peter Claver, her favorite saint. She closed the shutters to darken the room, and said that while he was napping, she would wash and iron his uniform. “And we’ll think of a place where you can hide, Amadito.” She kissed him repeatedly on his brow and head: “And I thought you were such a good Trujillista, honey.” He fell asleep immediately. He dreamed that Turk Sadhalá and Antonio Imbert were calling him repeatedly: “Amadito, Amadito!” They were trying to tell him something important, but he couldn’t understand their gestures or words. It seemed to him he had just closed his eyes when he felt someone shaking him. There was Aunt Meca, so pale and frightened he felt sorry for her, and guilt-ridden for having involved her in this.
“They’re here, they’re here,” she said in a strangled voice, crossing herself. “Ten or twelve Beetles, honey, and lots of caliés.”
He was lucid now and knew perfectly well what to do. He made the old woman lie down on the floor, behind the bed, against the wall, at the feet of St. Peter Claver.
“Don’t move, don’t get up no matter what,” he told her. “I love you very much, Aunt Meca.”
He had the .45 in his hand. Barefoot, dressed only in his regulation khaki undershirt and shorts, he hugged the wall and crept to the front door. He peered through the curtains, staying out of sight. It was an overcast afternoon, and in the distance he could hear a bolero. Black SIM Volkswagens filled the street. At least twenty caliés armed with submachine guns and rev
olvers were surrounding the house. Three men were at the door. One of them pounded it with his fist, making the wood quiver, and shouted at the top of his voice:
“We know you’re in there, García Guerrero! Come out with your hands up or you’ll die like a dog!”
“Not like a dog, no,” he murmured. As he opened the door with his left hand, he fired with his right. He managed to empty the clip of his pistol and saw the man who had urged him to surrender fall, bellowing, shot in the middle of the chest. But, annihilated by an untold number of bullets from submachine guns and revolvers, he did not see that in addition to killing one calié, he had wounded two others before dying himself. He did not see how his body was tied—the way hunters tie down deer killed in the Cordillera Central—to the roof of a Volkswagen, and how Johnny Abbes’s men, who were inside the Beetle, held on to his ankles and wrists and displayed him to bystanders in Independencia Park, through which his killers drove in triumph, while other caliés entered the house, found Aunt Meca where he had left her, more dead than alive, and shoving and spitting at her, took her to SIM headquarters, at the same time that a greedy mob, under the mocking or impassive eyes of the police, began to loot the house, making off with everything the caliés hadn’t stolen first, and after looting the house they destroyed it, tore down the walls, demolished the roof, and finally burned it until, at nightfall, there was nothing left but ashes and charred rubble.
18
When one of the military adjutants showed Luis Rodríguez, Manuel Alfonso’s chauffeur, into the office, the Generalissimo stood to receive him, something he did not do even with the most important people.
“How is the ambassador?” he asked with concern.
“Just fair, Chief.” The chauffeur put on an appropriate expression and touched his own throat. “A lot of pain, again. This morning he had me bring the doctor so he could give him an injection.”
Poor Manuel. It wasn’t fair, damn it. That a man who had devoted his life to caring for his body, to being handsome and elegant, to resisting the perverse law of nature that everything had to grow ugly, should be punished like this, where it would most humiliate him: in the face that had radiated life, grace, and health. He would have been better off dying on the operating table. When he saw him in Ciudad Trujillo after his operation at the Mayo Clinic, the Benefactor’s eyes had filled with tears. Manuel had been ravaged. And he could hardly understand him now that they had cut out half his tongue.
“Give him my best.” The Generalissimo examined Luis Rodríguez; dark suit, white shirt, blue tie, polished shoes: the best-dressed black in the Dominican Republic. “What’s the news?”
“Very good, Chief.” Luis Rodríguez’s large eyes flashed. “I found the girl, no problem. Whenever you say.”
“Are you sure it’s the same one?”
The large dark face, with its scars and mustache, nodded several times.
“Absolutely sure. The one who gave you flowers on Monday, for the San Cristóbal Youth Group. Yolanda Esterel. Seventeen years old. Here’s her picture.”
It was a photograph from a student ID, but Trujillo recognized the languid eyes, the mouth with the plump lips, the hair hanging loose to her shoulders. The girl had led the parade of students, carrying a large photograph of the Generalissimo, past the raised platform in the main park of San Cristóbal, and then came up on the dais to present him with a bouquet of roses and hydrangeas wrapped in cellophane. He remembered her plump, rounded body, her small breasts moving suggestively inside her blouse, her flaring hips. A tingling in his testicles raised his spirits.
“Take her to Mahogany House, around ten,” he said, repressing those fantasies that were wasting his time. “My best regards to Manuel. Tell him to take care of himself.”
“Yes, Chief, I’ll tell him. I’ll bring her there a little before ten.”
He left, bowing. On one of the six telephones on his lacquered desk, the Generalissimo called the guard post at Mahogany House so that Benita Sepúlveda would have the rooms perfumed with anise and filled with fresh flowers. (It was an unnecessary precaution, for the housekeeper, knowing he might appear at any moment, always kept Mahogany House shining, but he never failed to let her know ahead of time.) He ordered the military adjutants to have the Chevrolet ready and to call his chauffeur, aide-de-camp, and bodyguard, Zacarías de la Cruz, because tonight, after his walk, he was going to San Cristóbal.
He was enthusiastic at the prospect. Could she be the daughter of that school principal in San Cristóbal who recited a poem by Salomé Ureña ten years ago, during one of his political visits to his native city, and excited him so much with the shaved armpits she displayed during her performance that he left the official reception in his honor when it had just begun and took her to Mahogany House? Terencia Esterel? That was her name. He felt another gust of excitement imagining that Yolanda was the teacher’s daughter or younger sister. He walked quickly, crossing the gardens between the National Palace and Radhamés Manor, and hardly listened to what one of the adjutants in his escort was telling him about repeated calls from the Minister of the Armed Forces, General Román Fernández, who was at his disposal in the event His Excellency wished to see him before his walk. Ah, the call this morning had scared him. He’d be even more scared when he rubbed his damn nose in it and showed him the puddle of filthy water.
He entered his rooms at Radhamés Manor like a whirlwind. His everyday olive-green uniform was waiting for him, laid out on the bed. Sinforoso was a mind reader. He hadn’t told him he was going to San Cristóbal, but the old man had prepared the clothes he always wore to the Fundación Ranch. Why this everyday uniform for Mahogany House? He didn’t know. The passion for rituals, for the repetition of gestures and actions, that he’d had since he was young. The signs were favorable: no urine stains on his underwear or trousers. His irritation with Balaguer for daring to object to the promotion of Lieutenant Victor Alicinio Peña Rivera had faded. He felt optimistic, rejuvenated by a lively tingle in his testicles and the expectation of holding in his arms the daughter or sister of that Terencia of happy memory. Was she a virgin? This time he wouldn’t have the unpleasant experience he’d had with the skinny bitch.
He was glad he would spend the next hour smelling the salt air, feeling the sea breeze, watching the waves break against the Avenida. The exercise would help him wash away the bad taste most of the afternoon had left in his mouth, something that rarely happened to him: he had never been prone to depression or any of that bullshit.
As he was leaving, a maid came to tell him that Doña María wanted to give him a message from young Ramfis, who had called from Paris. “Later, later, I don’t have time.” A conversation with the tedious old penny-pincher would ruin his good mood.
Again he crossed the gardens of Radhamés Manor at a lively pace, impatient to get to the ocean. But first, as he did every day, he stopped at his mother’s house on Avenida Máximo Gómez. At the entrance to Doña Julia’s large pink residence, the twenty or so men who would accompany him were waiting, privileged persons who, because they escorted him every evening, were envied and despised by those who had not achieved that signal honor. Among the officers and civilians crowded together in the gardens of the Sublime Matriarch, who parted into two lines to let him pass, “Good afternoon, Chief,” “Good afternoon, Excellency,” he acknowledged Razor Espaillat, General José René Román—what concern in the poor fool’s eyes!—Colonel Johnny Abbes García, Senator Henry Chirinos, his son-in-law Colonel León Estévez, his hometown friend Modesto Díaz, Senator Jeremías Quintanilla, who had just replaced Agustín Cabral as President of the Senate, Don Panchito, the editor of El Caribe, and, almost invisible among them, the diminutive President Balaguer. He did not shake hands with anyone. He went to the second floor, where Doña Julia usually sat in her rocker at dusk. The aged woman seemed lost in her chair. As small as a midget, she stared at the sun’s fireworks display as it sank behind the horizon in an aura of red clouds. The ladies and servants surrounding his mo
ther moved aside. He bent down, kissed the parchment cheeks of Doña Julia, and caressed her hair tenderly.
“You like the sunset a lot, don’t you, Ma?”
She nodded, smiling at him with sunken but still nimble eyes, and the tiny claw that was her hand brushed his cheek. Did she recognize him? Doña Altagracia Julia Molina was ninety-six years old and her mind must be like soapy water in which memories dissolved. But instinct would tell her that the man who came punctually to visit her every afternoon was someone she loved. She had always been a very good woman, this illegitimate daughter of Haitian immigrants to San Cristóbal, whose features he and his siblings had inherited, something that never failed to mortify him despite his great love for her. Sometimes, however, at the Hipódromo, the Country Club, or Fine Arts, when he saw all the aristocratic Dominican families paying him homage, he would think mockingly: “They’re licking the ground for a descendant of slaves.” How was the Sublime Matriarch to blame for the black blood that ran in her veins? Doña Julia had lived only for her husband, Don José Trujillo Valdez, an easygoing drinker and womanizer, and for her children, never thinking of herself, always putting herself last in everything. He constantly marveled at this tiny woman who never asked him for money, or clothes, or trips, or property. Nothing, not ever. He had to force everything on her. Congenitally frugal, Doña Julia would have continued to live in the modest little house in San Cristóbal where the Generalissimo had been born and spent his childhood, or in one of the huts where her Haitian ancestors had died of hunger. The only thing Doña Julia ever asked of him was compassion for Petán, Blacky, Peepee, Aníbal, his slow-witted, incorrigible brothers, whenever they did something wrong, or for Angelita, Ramfis, and Radhamés, who, from the time they were children, had hidden behind their grandmother to soften their father’s wrath. And Trujillo would forgive them, for Doña Julia’s sake. Did she know that hundreds of streets, parks, and schools in the Republic were named Julia Molina Widow of Trujillo? In spite of being adored and celebrated, she was still the silent, invisible woman Trujillo remembered from his childhood.
The Feast of the Goat Page 35