The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [135]
“Impatience is a killer too, Nigger,” Huáscar Tejeda said, attempting a joke.
“Nigger’s the whore who bore you.”
Tejeda Pimentel tried to laugh, but his friend’s immoderate response saddened him. Pedro Livio was hopeless.
“I’m sorry,” he heard him apologize a moment later. “My nerves are shot, it’s the damned waiting.”
“We all feel the same way, Nigger. Shit, I called you Nigger again. Are you going to insult my mother a second time?”
“Not this time.” Pedro Livio laughed, finally.
“Why does ‘Nigger’ make you so angry? You know it’s an affectionate name.”
“I know, Huáscar. But in the United States, at the academy, when the cadets or the officers called me Nigger they weren’t being affectionate, they were racists. I had to make them respect me.”
A few vehicles drove past on the highway, heading west, toward San Cristóbal, or east, toward Ciudad Trujillo, but not Trujillo’s Chevrolet Bel Air, followed by Antonio de la Maza’s Chevrolet Biscayne. Their instructions were simple: as soon as they saw the two cars, which they would recognize by Tony Imbert’s signal—flashing the headlights three times—they would cut off the Goat’s car with the heavy black Oldsmobile. And he, with the semiautomatic M-1 carbine, for which Antonio had given him extra ammunition, and Huáscar, using his Smith & Wesson 9 mm Model 39 with nine shots, would lay down as much lead in front of the car as Imbert, Amadito, Antonio, and Turk were firing from behind. The Goat would not get past them, but if he did, Fifí Pastoriza, at the wheel of Estrella Sadhalá’s Mercury, two kilometers to the west, would be there to cut him off again.
“Does your wife know about tonight, Pedro Livio?” asked Huáscar Tejeda.
“She thinks I’m at Juan Tomás Díaz’s house, watching a movie. She’s pregnant and…”
He saw a speeding car race by, followed at less than ten meters by another car that, in the dark, looked like Antonio de la Maza’s Biscayne.
“It’s them, isn’t it, Huáscar?” He tried to see through the blackness.
“Did you see the headlights flash?” Tejeda Pimentel shouted in excitement. “Did you see them?”
“No, they didn’t signal. But it’s them.”
“What shall we do, Nigger?”
“Drive, drive!”
Pedro Livio’s heart had begun to pound with a fury that hardly allowed him to speak. Huáscar turned the Oldsmobile around. The red taillights of the two automobiles were speeding away, and soon they’d lose sight of them.
“It’s them, Huáscar, it has to be them. Why the hell didn’t they signal?”
The red lights had disappeared; all they saw in front of them was the cone of light from the headlights of the Oldsmobile and a pitch-black night: the clouds had just covered the moon. Pedro Livio—his semiautomatic carbine pointed out the window—thought about his wife, Olga. How would she react when she learned that her husband was one of Trujillo’s assassins? Olga Despradel was his second wife. They got along wonderfully, because Olga—unlike his first wife, with whom domestic life had been hell—had infinite patience with his explosions of anger; when he was raging she avoided contradicting him or arguing with him, and she kept the house so neat and clean it made him happy. What a surprise for her. She thought he wasn’t interested in politics, though lately he had been very close to Antonio de la Maza, General Juan Tomás Díaz, and Huáscar Tejeda, all of them notorious anti-Trujillistas. Until a few months ago, whenever his friends began to criticize the regime, he would be as silent as a sphinx and nobody could pull an opinion out of him. He didn’t want to lose his administrative position at the Dominican Battery Factory, which belonged to the Trujillo family. The company had been doing very well until business took a nosedive because of the sanctions.
Naturally, Olga knew that Pedro Livio resented the regime because his first wife,