The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [113]
He weighed what he had just heard. Could it be a separate incident, unrelated to the letter in “The Public Forum”? Parisito waited in distress, standing beside the desk.
“Is Dr. Quintanilla in his office?” His secretary nodded, and he rose to his feet. “Tell him I’m on my way to see him.”
“It can’t be that you don’t remember, Uranita,” her Aunt Adelina admonished her. “You were fourteen years old. It was the most serious thing that had happened in the family, even worse than the accident that killed your mother. And you didn’t know anything about it?”
They’d had coffee and tea. Urania tried a mouthful of arepa. They sat around the dining-room table, talking in the wan light of a small floor lamp. The Haitian servant, as silent as a cat, had cleared the table.
“I remember how Papa suffered, of course I do, Aunt Adelina,” Urania explains. “I forget the details, the daily incidents. He tried to hide it from me at first. ‘There are some problems, Uranita, they’ll be resolved soon.’ I didn’t imagine that from then on my life would turn upside down.”
She feels the eyes of her aunt, her cousins, her niece, burning into her. Lucinda says what they are all thinking:
“Some good came out of it for you, Uranita. You wouldn’t be where you are now if it hadn’t. But for us, it was a disaster.”
“And most of all, for my poor brother,” her aunt says accusingly. “They stabbed him in the back and left him to bleed for another thirty years.”
A parrot shrieks above Urania’s head, startling her. She hadn’t realized it was there until now; the bird is agitated, moving from side to side on its wooden bar inside a large cage with heavy blue bars. Her aunt, cousins, and niece burst into laughter.
“This is Samson.” Manolita introduces him. “He’s upset because we woke him. He’s a sleepyhead.”
The parrot helps to ease the atmosphere.
“I’m sure if I understood what he was saying, I’d learn a lot of secrets,” Urania jokes, pointing at Samson.
Senator Agustín Cabral is in no mood for smiling. He responds with a solemn nod to the honeyed greeting of Dr. Jeremías Quintanilla, Vice President of the Senate; he has just burst into his office, and with no preliminaries, he rebukes him:
“Why have you canceled the meeting of the Senate executive committee? Isn’t that the responsibility of the President? I demand an explanation.”
The heavy, cocoa-colored face of Senator Quintanilla nods repeatedly, while his lips, in a cadenced, almost musical Spanish, attempt to placate him:
“Of course, Egghead. Don’t be angry. Everything except death has a reason.”
A plump man in his sixties, with puffy eyelids and a wet mouth, he is wearing a blue suit and a glistening tie with silver stripes. He smiles persistently, and Agustín Cabral sees him remove his glasses, wink at him, roll his eyes, revealing the gleaming whites, then step toward him, take his arm, and pull him as he says, very loudly:
“Let’s sit here, we’ll be more comfortable.”
He doesn’t lead him to the heavy, tiger-foot chairs in his office but to a balcony with half-opened doors. He obliges him to go out with him so they can talk in the open air, across from the droning hum of the ocean, away from indiscreet ears. The sun is strong; the brilliant morning is ablaze with engines and horns from the Malecón, and the voices of street peddlers.
“What the hell’s going on, Monkey?” Cabral whispers.
Quintanilla is still holding his arm and is now very serious. In his eyes he can detect a vague feeling of solidarity or compassion.
“You know very well what’s going on, Egghead, don’t be stupid. Didn’t you realize that three or four days ago the papers stopped calling you a ‘distinguished gentleman’ and demoted you to ‘señor’?” Monkey Quintanilla murmurs in his ear. “Didn’t you read El Caribe this morning? That’s what’s going on.”
For the first time since reading the letter in “The Public Forum,” Agustín Cabral is afraid. It’s true: yesterday or the day before somebody at the Country Club joked that the society page in La Nación had deprived