The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [141]
“How is he?” Abbes asked the doctor in a slow, well-modulated voice.
“It’s very serious, Colonel,” replied Dr. Damirón Ricart. “The bullet must be near the heart, in the epigastrium. We gave him medication to control the hemorrhaging so we could operate.”
Many of them had cigarettes, and the room filled with smoke. How he wanted to smoke, to inhale one of those mentholated Salems, with their cooling aroma, that Huáscar Tejeda smoked and Chana Díaz always offered in her house.
Above him, brushing against him, was the bloated face, the tortoise eyes with drooping lids, of Abbes García.
“What happened to you?” he heard him say softly.
“I don’t know.” He regretted his answer, it couldn’t be dumber. But nothing else occurred to him.
“Who shot you?” Abbes García insisted, impassively.
Pedro Livio Cedeño remained silent. Incredible that in all these months of planning Trujillo’s execution, they had never thought about a situation like the one he was in now. About some alibi, some excuse, for handling an interrogation. “What assholes!”
“An accident,” and again he regretted making up something so stupid.
Abbes García did not become impatient. There was a bristling silence. Pedro Livio felt the heavy, hostile glances of the men around him. The ends of their cigarettes reddened when they raised them to their mouths.
“Tell me about the accident,” said the head of the SIM, in the same tone of voice.
“I was leaving a bar and somebody shot me, from a car. I don’t know who it was.”
“What bar?”
“El Rubio, on Calle Palo Hincado, near Independencia Park.”
In a few minutes the caliés would find out he had lied. Suppose his friends, when they broke the agreement to give the coup de grâce to anyone who was wounded, had done him no favor at all?
“Where’s the Chief?” asked Johnny Abbes. A certain amount of emotion had filtered into his questioning.
“I don’t know.” His throat was beginning to close; he was losing strength again.
“Is he alive?” asked the head of the SIM. And he repeated: “Where is he?”
Although he felt dizzy again, as if he were going to faint, Pedro Livio noticed that beneath his tranquil appearance, the head of the SIM was boiling with agitation. The hand that carried the cigarette to his mouth moved awkwardly, trying to find his lips.
“In hell, I hope, if there is a hell,” he heard himself say. “That’s where we sent him.”
Abbes García’s face, somewhat obscured by smoke, did not change expression this time either; but he opened his mouth, as if he needed air. The silence had thickened. He had to lose all his strength, finally pass out.
“Who?” he asked, very gently. “Who sent him to hell?”
Pedro Livio did not respond. Abbes García was looking into his eyes and Pedro Livio held his gaze, remembering his childhood in Higüey, when they played who-would-blink-first at school. The colonel’s hand lifted, took the lit cigarette from his mouth, and with no change of expression he put it out on his face, near his left eye. Pedro Livio did not scream, he did not moan. He closed his eyes. The heat was intense; there was a smell of singed flesh. When he opened them, Abbes García was still there. It had begun.
“These things, if they’re not done right, it’s better not to do them at all,” he heard him say. “Do you know who Zacarías de la Cruz is? The Chief’s chauffeur. I just talked to him in the Marión Hospital. He’s in worse shape than you, riddled with bullets from head to toe. But he’s alive. You see, things didn’t work out. You’re fucked. You’re not going to die either. You’re going to live. And tell me everything that happened. Who else was with you on the highway?”
Pedro Livio was sinking, floating, at any moment he would begin to vomit. Hadn’t Tony Imbert and Antonio said that Zacarías de la Cruz was dead as a doornail too? Was Abbes García lying to make him give up names? How stupid they had been. They should have made sure the Goat’s driver was dead.
“Imbert said that Zacarías was dead,” he protested. Curious being yourself