The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [109]
“Heads down, get down,” said Amadito. “They’re going to shoot.”
The glass in the window on his left shattered. Salvador felt pinpricks on his face and neck, and was thrown forward by the car’s braking. The Biscayne screeched, swerved, drove off the road before it stopped. Imbert turned off the headlights. Everything was in darkness. Salvador heard shouts around him. When had he, Amadito, Tony, and Antonio jumped onto the highway? The four of them were out of the car, hiding behind the fenders and open doors, firing toward Trujillo’s car, toward where it ought to be. Who was shooting at them? Was someone else with the Goat besides the driver? Because, no doubt about it, somebody was firing, the bullets resonated all around, chinked as they pierced the metal of the car, and had just wounded one of his friends.
“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.
13
“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