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By Root 1279 0

When he built the house where he lived with his sisters, on Máximo Gómez, next to the nuncio’s residence, Trujillo had the Walking Turd write a letter to “The Public Forum” that ridiculed their proximity and asked what kind of relationship existed between the diminutive lawyer and the envoy of His Holiness. Because of his reputation for piety and his excellent relations with the priests, he entrusted him with designing the regime’s policy toward the Catholic Church. He did it very well; until Sunday, January 24, 1960, when the Pastoral Letter from those bastards was read in every parish, the Church had been a solid ally. The Concordat between the Dominican Republic and the Vatican, which Balaguer negotiated and Trujillo signed in Rome, in 1954, provided formidable support for his regime and his own presence in the Catholic world. The poet and legal scholar must have suffered because of this year-and-a-half-long confrontation between the government and the crows. Could he really be so devout? He always maintained that the regime had to get along with the bishops, the priests, the Vatican, for pragmatic, political reasons, not religious ones: the approbation of the Catholic Church legitimized the actions of the regime to the Dominican people. What had happened to Perón must not happen to Trujillo: Perón’s government began to crumble when the Church turned against him. Was he right? Would the hostility of those eunuchs in cassocks be the end of Trujillo? Before he let that happen, Panal and Reilly would be fattening the sharks at the bottom of the cliffs.

“I’m going to say something that will please you, Mr. President,” he said abruptly. “I don’t have time to read the bullshit intellectuals write. All those poems and novels. Matters of state are too demanding. Even though he’s worked so many years with me, I’ve never read anything by Marrero Aristy. I didn’t read Over, or the articles he wrote about me, or his Dominican History. And I haven’t read the hundreds of books dedicated to me by poets, playwrights, and novelists. I haven’t even read the stuff my wife writes. I don’t have time for that, or for seeing movies, or listening to music, or going to the ballet or to cockfights. And I’ve never trusted artists. They’re spineless and have no sense of honor, they tend to be traitors and are very servile. I haven’t read your verses or essays either. I barely opened your book on Duarte, The Christ of Liberty, that you sent to me with such an affectionate dedication. But there’s one exception. A speech you gave seven years ago. At the Fine Arts, when you were inducted into the Academy of the Language. Do you remember it?”

The little man had turned even brighter red. He radiated an exalted light of indescribable joy:

“ ‘God and Trujillo: A Realistic Interpretation,’” he murmured, lowering his lids.

“I’ve read it many times,” said the high-pitched, mellifluous voice of the Benefactor. “I know whole paragraphs by heart, like poems.”

Why this revelation to the puppet president? It was a weakness, and he never gave in to them. Balaguer could boast about it, feel important. Things weren’t going so well that he could afford to to lose another collaborator in so short a time. It reassured him to recall that perhaps the greatest attribute of this puny little man was that not only did he know what was advisable but, even more important, he ignored what was inadvisable. He would not repeat this, in order not to earn the homicidal enmity of the other courtiers. Balaguer’s speech had moved him deeply and often led him to wonder if it might not express a profound truth, one of those unfathomable divine decisions that mark the destiny of a people. That night, the Benefactor had paid little attention to the opening paragraphs of the address read by the new academician, dressed in a cutaway coat worn with little flair, from the stage of the Theater of Fine Arts. (He wore tails too, as did all the men in the audience; the ladies, glittering with jewels and diamonds, were in long dresses.) It seemed like a summary of Dominican history starting