The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [104]
Each sentence made Salvador’s heart beat faster. “To whom does the right to life belong but to God alone, Creator of life?” The bishops emphasized that from this “primordial right” all others spring: the right to have a family, to work, to transact business, to immigrate (wasn’t this a condemnation of the infamous system of having to request police permission each time you left the country?), and the right to one’s good name and to not be slandered “on trivial pretexts or in anonymous denunciations…for base and despicable motives.” The Pastoral Letter reaffirmed that “all men have the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and free association….” The bishops were sending up prayers “in this time of affliction and uncertainty” that there might be “harmony and peace” and that there might be established in the nation “the sacred rights of human brotherhood.”
Salvador was so moved that when he left the church he could not even talk about the Pastoral Letter with his wife or the friends who had gathered at the entrance, stammering with surprise, enthusiasm, or fear at what they had just heard. There was no possible confusion: the Pastoral Letter came from Archbishop Ricardo Pittini and was signed by the five bishops in the country.
Mumbling an excuse, he left his family and, like a sleepwalker, returned to the church. He went to the sacristy. Father Fortín was removing his chasuble. He smiled: “You’re proud of your Church now, Salvador, aren’t you?” He could not speak. He gave the priest a long embrace. Yes, the Church of Christ had finally come over to the side of the victims.
“The reprisals will be terrible, Father Fortín,” he murmured.
They were. But with the regime’s perverse capacity for intrigue, it concentrated its revenge on the two foreign bishops and ignored those born on Dominican soil. Monsignor Thomas F. Reilly, in San Juan de la Maguana, an American, and Monsignor Francisco Panal, in La Vega, a Spaniard, were the targets of the ignominious campaign.
In the weeks following the jubilation of January 24, 1960, Salvador considered, for the first time, the need to kill Trujillo. Initially the idea horrified him: a Catholic had to respect the Fifth Commandment. And yet he returned to it, irresistibly, every time he read in El Caribe or La Nación, or heard on the Dominican Voice, the attacks against Monsignor Panal and Monsignor Reilly: they were agents of foreign powers, sellouts to Communism, colonialists, traitors, vipers. Poor Monsignor Panal! Accusing a priest of being a foreigner when he had spent thirty years doing his apostolic work in La Vega, where he was loved equally by opposing factions. The calumnies hatched by Johnny Abbes—who else could concoct such vileness?—which Turk heard from Father Fortín and the human tom-tom, did away with his scruples. The final straw was the act of sacrilege mounted against Monsignor Panal in the church in La Vega, where the bishop was saying twelve o’clock Mass. The nave was crowded with parishioners, and when Monsignor Panal was reading the day’s lesson from Scripture, a gang of heavily made-up, half-naked prostitutes burst into the church and, to the stupefied amazement of the worshipers, approached the pulpit, hurled insults and recriminations at the aged bishop, and accused him of having fathered their children and engaging in sexual perversions. One of them grabbed