The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [129]
Another of Balaguer’s virtues was knowing when not to speak, when to become a sphinx before whom the Generalissimo could permit himself to vent his feelings. Trujillo fell silent. He listened, trying to hear the sound of the metallic surface, with its parallel foaming lines, that he glimpsed through the windows. But he could not hear the murmur of the ocean, it was drowned out by the noise of car engines.
“Do you think Ramón Marrero Aristy betrayed us?” he asked abruptly, turning toward the quiet presence, the other participant in the conversation. “Do you think he gave information to that gringo from The New York Times so he could attack us?”
Dr. Balaguer never failed to be surprised by Trujillo’s sudden compromising and dangerous questions, which trapped other men. He had a solution for these occasions:
“He swore he did not, Excellency. With tears in his eyes, sitting right where you are sitting, he swore to me on his mother and all the saints that he was not Tad Szulc’s informant.”
Trujillo reacted with an irritated gesture:
“Was Marrero going to come here and confess he had sold out? I’m asking your opinion. Did he betray us or not?”
Balaguer also knew when he could not avoid taking the leap: another of his virtues that the Benefactor recognized.
“With sorrow in my heart, because of the intellectual and personal esteem I felt for Ramón, I believe he did, that he was the one who talked to Tad Szulc,” he said in a very low, almost inaudible voice. “The evidence was overwhelming, Excellency.”
He had reached the same conclusion. During thirty years in government—and before that, when he was a constabulary guard, and even earlier, as an overseer on a sugar plantation—he had become accustomed to not wasting time looking back and regretting or celebrating decisions he had already made, but what happened with Ramón Marrero Aristy, that “ignorant genius,” as Max Henríquez Ureña had called him, that writer and historian for whom he had developed real affection, showering him with honors, money, and posts—columnist and editor of La Nación and Minister of Labor—and whose History of the Dominican Republic, in three volumes, he had paid for out of his own pocket, sometimes came to mind and left him with the taste of ashes in his mouth.
If there was anyone for whom he would have put his hands to the fire, it was the author of the most widely read Dominican novel at home and abroad—Over, about the La Romana sugar plantation—which had even been translated into English. An unshakable Trujillista; as editor of La Nación he proved it, defending Trujillo and the regime with clear ideas and bold prose. An excellent Minister of Labor, who got along wonderfully with unionists and employers. Which is why, when the journalist Tad Szulc of The New York Times announced that he was coming to the Dominican Republic to write a series of articles about the country, he entrusted Marrero Aristy with the task of accompanying him. He traveled everywhere with Szulc and arranged the interviews he asked for, including one with Trujillo. When Tad Szulc returned to the United States, Marrero Aristy escorted him as far as Miami. The Generalissimo never expected the articles in The New York Times to be an apology for his regime. But he also did not