The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [11]
After another long list of visitors to the home of Mama Julia, to whom they would pay their respects on Mother’s Day (poor old woman, serenely receiving a caravan of schools, associations, institutes, unions, and thanking them in her faint little voice for their flowers and courtesy), the attacks began on Bishops Reilly and Panal, “who neither were born under our sun nor suffered under our moon” (“Nice,” he thought), “and who meddle in our civil and political life, overstepping the bounds into the terrain of the criminal.” Johnny Abbes wanted to go into Santo Domingo Academy and drag the Yankee bishop out of his refuge. “What can happen, Chief? The gringos will protest, naturally. Haven’t they protested everything for a long time now? Galíndez, Murphy the pilot, the Mirabal sisters, the attempt on Betancourt, and a thousand other things. It doesn’t matter if the dogs bark in Caracas, Puerto Rico, Washington, New York, Havana. What happens here is what matters. The crows in their cassocks won’t stop conspiring until they’ve been scared out of it.” No. It wasn’t time yet to settle the score with Reilly or that other son of a bitch, that shitty little Spaniard Bishop Panal. The time would come, they would pay. His instincts never deceived him. For now he wouldn’t touch a hair on their heads, even if they kept fucking with him, like they’d been doing since Sunday, January 24, 1960—a year and a half already!—when the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter was read at every Mass, inaugurating the campaign of the Catholic Church against the regime. Backbiters! Crows! Eunuchs! Doing that to him, a man who had been decorated in the Vatican by Pius XII with the Great Cross of the Papal Order of St. Gregory. On the Dominican Voice, Paíno Pichardo, in a speech delivered the night before in his capacity as Minister of the Interior and Religious Practice, recalled that the state had spent sixty million pesos on the Church, whose “bishops and priests are now doing so much harm to the Catholic faithful of the Dominican Republic.” He turned the dial. On Caribbean Radio they were reading a letter of protest from hundreds of workers because their signatures had not been included on the Great National Manifesto “against the disturbing machinations of Bishop Thomas Reilly, a traitor to God, Trujillo, and his own manhood, who, instead of remaining in his diocese of San Juan de la Maguana, ran like a scared rat to hide in Ciudad Trujillo behind the skirts of American nuns at Santo Domingo Academy, a vipers’ nest of terrorism and conspiracy.” When he heard that the Ministry of Education had deprived Santo Domingo Academy of its accreditation because “the foreign nuns were in collusion with the terrorist plotting of the Bishops of San Juan de la Maguana and La Vega against the State,” he turned back to the Dominican Voice in time to hear the announcer report another victory for the Dominican polo team in Paris, where, “on the beautiful field of Bagatelle, after defeating the Leopards five to four and dazzling the assembled connoisseurs, it was awarded the Aperture Cup.” Ramfis and Radhamés, the most applauded players. A lie, to beguile Dominicans. And him. In the pit of his stomach he felt the rush of acid that attacked every time he thought about his sons, those successful failures, those disappointments. Playing polo in Paris and fucking French girls while their father was fighting the battle of his life!
He dried his face. His blood turned to vinegar whenever he thought of his sons. By God, it wasn’t his fault. His line was healthy, he was a sire of thoroughbreds. The proof was there, in the children his seed had created in other wombs, in the belly of Lina Lovatón, for instance: robust, energetic men, a thousand times more deserving of the place occupied