The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [134]
“I looked over the list of prisoners the government is going to release,” he said, in a more neutral tone. “Except for that professor from Montecristi, Humberto Meléndez, there’s no objection. Go ahead. Have the families come to the National Palace on Thursday afternoon. They’ll meet the freed prisoners there.”
“I’ll begin the process immediately, Excellency.”
The Generalissimo rose to his feet and indicated to the puppet president, who was about to do the same, that he should remain seated. He wasn’t leaving yet. He wanted to stretch his legs. He took a few steps away from the desk.
“Will this new release of prisoners placate the Yankees?” he said. “I doubt it. Henry Dearborn will go on encouraging conspiracies. There’s another one in the works, according to Abbes. Even Juan Tomás Díaz is involved.”
The silence he heard behind him—he heard it, like a heavy, clammy presence—took him by surprise. He whirled around to look at the puppet President: there he was, absolutely still, observing him with his beatific expression. He did not feel reassured. Those intuitions of his had never lied. Could it be that this microscopic creature, this pygmy, knew something?
“Have you heard anything about this new conspiracy?”
He saw him shake his head vigorously.
“I would have reported it right away to Colonel Abbes García, Excellency. As I have always done whenever I hear rumors of anything subversive.”
He took two or three more steps, in front of the desk, not saying a word. No, if there was one man in the regime incapable of being involved in a plot, it was the circumspect President. He knew that without Trujillo he would not exist, that the Benefactor was the sap that gave him life, that without him he would vanish forever from politics.
He walked to one of the large windows. For a long while he observed the sea in silence. The clouds had covered the sun and the grayness of the sky and air was streaked with silver; the dark blue water reflected it in places. A small boat moved across the bay, heading for the mouth of the Ozama River; a fishing boat, it must have finished for the day and was returning to dock. It left a foaming wake, and though he could not see them at this distance, he imagined the gulls endlessly shrieking and beating their wings. He looked forward with anticipation to the hour-and-a-half walk he would take, after visiting his mother, along Máximo Gómez and the Avenida, smelling the salt air, soothed by the waves. Don’t forget to ream out the head of the Armed Forces for that broken pipe at the entrance to the air base. Let Pupo Román stick his nose in that stinking puddle, then see if the Generalissimo ever finds anything so disgusting again at the front gate of a military installation.
He left the office of President Joaquín Balaguer without saying goodbye.
15
“If we’re in this shape when we’re together, imagine how Fifí Pastoriza feels all by himself,” said Huáscar Tejeda, leaning against the steering wheel of the heavy black four-door Oldsmobile 98 parked at kilometer seven on the highway to San Cristóbal.
“What the hell are we doing here?” raged Pedro Livio Cedeño. “It’s a quarter to ten. He isn’t coming!”
He squeezed the semiautomatic M-1 carbine on his lap as if he wanted to break it. Pedro Livio was prone to angry outbursts; his bad temper had ruined his military career: he had been cashiered when he was a captain. By then he already knew that his temper had made him so many enemies, he would never move up through the ranks. He was sorry to leave the Army. He had attended a military academy in the United States and graduated with outstanding grades. But the temper that made him blaze like a torch when somebody called him Nigger, and lash out with his fists for any reason at all, put a brake on his promotions in the Army despite his excellent service record. He was expelled for pulling his revolver on a general who admonished him, as an officer, for undue fraternization with the troops. And yet