The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [115]
When he leaves the Congress building, the guards salute him as usual. The black, funereal car is still there. But his assistant, Lieutenant Humberto Arenal, has disappeared. Teodosio, the driver, opens the door for him.
“Senator Henry Chirinos’s house.”
The chauffeur nods, not saying a word. Later, when they are driving along Avenida Mella, on the edge of the colonial city, he looks at him in the rearview mirror and says:
“Since we left Congress, we’ve been followed by a Beetle full of caliés, Senator.”
Cabral turns around: fifteen or twenty meters behind them is one of the unmistakable black Volkswagens of the Intelligence Service. In the blinding morning light he can’t tell how many caliés are inside. “Now I’m escorted by people from the SIM instead of my assistant,” he thinks. As the car enters the crowded, narrow streets of the colonial city, lined with little one- and two-story houses with bars at the windows and stone entrances, he tells himself that the matter is even graver than he supposed. If Johnny Abbes is having him followed, he may have decided to arrest him. The story of Anselmo Paulino repeated. What he had feared so much. His brain is a red-hot forge. What did he do? What had he said? What mistake did he make? Whom had he seen recently? They were treating him like an enemy of the regime. Him, him!
The car stopped at the corner of Salomé Ureña and Duarte, and Teodosio opened the door for him. The Beetle parked a few meters behind them but no calié got out. He was tempted to go over and ask them why they were following the President of the Senate, but he restrained himself: what good would it do to challenge some poor bastards who were only obeying orders?
Senator Henry Chirinos’s old two-story house with its little colonial balcony and jalousied windows resembled its owner; time, age, and neglect had deformed it and made it asymmetrical; it had widened excessively in the middle, as if it had grown a belly and were about to explode. A long time ago it must have been a solid, noble house; now it was dirty, neglected, and seemed on the verge of collapse. Splotches and stains defaced the walls, and spiderwebs hung from the roof. The door was opened as soon as he knocked. He climbed a lugubrious, groaning staircase with a greasy banister, and on the first landing the butler opened a creaking glass door: he recognized the large library, the heavy velvet drapes, the tall cases filled with books, the thick, faded carpet, the oval pictures, and the silvery threads of cobwebs catching the beams of sunlight that penetrated the shutters. It smelled of age and rank humors, and the heat was infernal. He remained standing and waited for Chirinos. The number of times he had been here, over so many years, for meetings, agreements, negotiations, conspiracies, all in the service of the Chief.
“Welcome to your house, Egghead. A sherry? Sweet or dry? I recommend the fino amontillado. It’s chilled.”
Wearing pajamas and wrapped in a flamboyant green flannel robe with silk binding that accentuated the rotundity of his body, with a huge handkerchief in the pocket, and on his feet, backless bedroom slippers misshapen by his bunions, Senator Chirinos smiled at him. His uncombed, thinning hair, the mucus on his puffy face, his purplish lids and lips, the dried saliva at the corners of his mouth, revealed to Senator Cabral that he had not yet bathed. He allowed him to pat his shoulder and lead him to the ancient easy chairs with silk antimacassars over the backs, without responding to the effusions of his host.
“We’ve known each other for many years, Henry. We’ve done many things together. Good things, and some bad. No two people in the regime have been as close as you and I. What’s going on? Why did the sky start falling in on me this morning?”
He had to stop talking because the butler came in, an old, bent mulatto as ugly and slovenly as his employer, carrying a glass decanter into which he had poured the sherry, and two glasses. He left them on