The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [146]
She stops speaking because the Haitian servant comes into the dining room. She asks, in hesitant, lilting Spanish, if they need her or if she can go to bed. Lucinda dismisses her with a wave of her hand: go on, then.
“Who was Manuel Alfonso, Aunt Urania?” Marianita’s barely audible voice inquires.
“A personality, Marianita. Good-looking, from an excellent family. He went to New York to make his fortune and ended up modeling clothes for designers and expensive stores, and appearing on billboards with his mouth open, advertising Colgate, the toothpaste that refreshes and cleans and makes your teeth sparkling white. Trujillo, on a trip to the United States, learned that the handsome young man on the signs was a Dominican hustler. He sent for him and he adopted him. He made him a person of consequence. His interpreter, because he spoke perfect English; his instructor in protocol and etiquette, because he was professionally elegant; and, an extremely important function, the one who selected his suits, ties, shoes, hose, and the New York tailors who dressed him. He kept him up-to-date on the latest trends in men’s fashions. And helped him design his uniforms, one of the Chief’s hobbies.”
“Most of all, he picked his women,” Manolita interrupted. “Isn’t that right, Mama?”
“What does all of this have to do with my brother?” She shakes a small, angry fist.
“Women were the least of it,” Urania continues to inform her niece. “Trujillo couldn’t care less because he had all of them. But clothes and accessories, he cared a great deal about them. Manuel Alfonso made him feel exquisite, refined, elegant. Like that Petronius in Quo Vadis? he was always quoting.”
“I haven’t seen the Chief yet, Agustín. I have an audience this afternoon, at his house, at Radhamés Manor. I’ll find out what it is, I promise.”
He had let him speak without interrupting, limiting himself to nodding and waiting when the senator’s spirits fell and bitterness or anguish affected his voice. He told him what had happened, what he had said, done, and thought since the first letter appeared in “The Public Forum” ten days earlier. He poured out his heart to this considerate man, the first who had shown him sympathy since that terrible day; he told him the intimate details of his life, devoted, since the age of twenty, to serving the most important man in Dominican history. Was it fair of him to refuse to listen to someone who had lived in him and for him for the past thirty years? He was prepared to recognize his errors, if he had committed any. To examine his conscience. To pay for his mistakes, if any existed. But the Chief had to at least grant him five minutes.
Manuel Alfonso patted him again on the knee. The house, in a new neighborhood, Arroyo Hondo, was enormous, surrounded by a park, and furnished and decorated in exquisite taste. Infallible in detecting hidden possibilities in people—a faculty that always amazed Agustín Cabral—the Chief had done a good job of gauging the former model. Manuel Alfonso could move easily in the diplomatic world, thanks to his amiability and his gift for dealing with people, and obtain advantages for the regime. He had done so on all his assignments, especially the last one, in Washington, during the most difficult period, when Trujillo stopped being the spoiled darling of Yankee governments and became an embarrassment attacked by the press and many in Congress. The ambassador raised his hand to his face, in a gesture of pain.
“From time to time, it’s like a whiplash,” he apologized. “It’s passing now. I hope the surgeon told me the truth. That they found it in time. A ninety percent guarantee of success. Why would he have lied? The gringos are brutally frank, they don’t have our delicacy, they don’t sugarcoat the pill.”
He stops speaking, because another grimace convulses his devastated face. He reacts immediately, becomes serious, philosophizes:
“I know how you feel, Egghead, what you’re going through. It’s happened to me a couple of times in my twenty-some years of friendship with the Chief. It