The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [13]
He put on his shorts, undershirt, and socks, which Sinforoso had folded the night before and placed next to the closet, beside the hanger with the gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie with white flecks that he would wear this morning. How did Bishop Reilly spend his days and nights inside Santo Domingo Academy? Fucking the nuns? They were hideous, some had hair on their faces. He remembered Angelita studying at that school, the one for decent people. His granddaughters too. The nuns had worshiped him until the Pastoral Letter. Maybe Johnny Abbes was right and it was time to act. Since the manifestos, articles, and protests on radio and television, in various institutions, and in the Congress hadn’t taught them a lesson, strike the blow. The people did it! Overran the guards placed there to protect the foreign bishops, broke into Santo Domingo Academy and the bishop’s palace in La Vega, dragged the gringo Reilly and the Spaniard Panal out by the hair, and lynched them. Avenged the insult to the nation. Regrets and excuses would be sent to the Vatican, to the Holy Father John Asshole—Balaguer was a master at writing them—and the punishment of a handful of those responsible, chosen from among common criminals, would be exemplary. Would the other crows learn their lesson when they saw the bishops’ bodies drawn and quartered by popular wrath? No, it wasn’t the right time. He wouldn’t give Kennedy an excuse for making Betancourt, Muñoz Marín, and Figueres happy by ordering an invasion. Keep a cool head and proceed with caution, like a Marine.
But the dictates of reason did not convince his glands. He had to stop dressing, blinded by a rage that flooded his entire body, a river of lava rising to his brain, which seemed to be on fire. He closed his eyes and counted to ten. Rage was bad for the government and bad for his heart, it would give him a coronary. The other night, in Mahogany House, it had brought him to the verge of an attack. He began to regain his composure. He always knew how to control his anger, when he had to: dissimulate, pretend to be cordial and affectionate with the worst human trash, the widows, children, brothers and sisters of traitors, if necessary. That’s why he had been carrying the weight of a country on his shoulders for almost thirty-two years.
He was involved in the complicated task of securing his socks with garters so there would be no wrinkles. Now, how pleasant it was to give free rein to his rage when there was no risk to the State, when he could give rats, toads, hyenas, snakes what they deserved. The bellies of sharks bore witness to the fact that he had not denied himself the pleasure. Wasn’t the Galician traitor José Almoina a corpse in Mexico? And the Basque Jesús de Galíndez, another serpent who bit the hand that fed him? And Ramón Marrero Aristy, who thought that because he was a famous author he could write articles in The New York Times against the government that paid for his drunken binges, his books, his whores? And the three Mirabal sisters who played at being Communist heroines, weren’t they there too, proof that when he let loose the flood of his rage no dam could contain it? Even Valeriano and Barajita, the crazy couple on El Conde, could testify to that.
He sat holding his shoe, remembering the celebrated pair. A real institution in the colonial city. They lived under the laurels in Colón Park, between the arches of the cathedral, and when they were most affluent