The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [110]
“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”:
To the Editor:
I am writing out of civic duty to protest the affront to Dominican citizens and to the unrestricted freedom of expression which the government