The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [149]
“I’ve never been a drunkard, never lost control of my actions,” he says. “But I’ve always known how to enjoy life. Even when I was wondering if I would eat the next day, I knew how to derive pleasure from small things: a good drink, a good cigar, a landscape, a well-cooked dish, a woman who bends her waist gracefully.”
He laughs nostalgically, and Cabral follows suit, unwillingly. How can he get him back to the only thing that matters? To be courteous, he controls his impatience. He hasn’t had a drink for days, and two or three sips go to his head. Still, after refilling Manuel Alfonso’s glass, he also fills his own.
“Nobody would think you ever had money problems, Manuel.” He tries to flatter him. “I always think of you as elegant, lavish, extremely generous, paying for everyone.”
The former model, swirling his glass, nods, and is gratified. The light from the chandelier shines directly down on his face, and only now does Cabral notice the sinuous scar that twists around his throat. Difficult, for someone so proud of his face and body, to have been cut up like that.
“I know what it means to go hungry, Egghead. As a young man, in New York, I even slept in the streets like a tramp. There were many days when my only meal was a plate of beans or a roll. Without Trujillo, who knows what would have happened to me? I always liked women, but I never could play the gigolo, like our good Porfirio Rubirosa. I probably would have ended up as a bum on the Bowery.”
He drinks what is left in his glass in one swallow. The senator fills it again.
“I owe him everything. What I have, what I became.” With his head lowered, he contemplates the ice cubes. “I’ve rubbed elbows with ministers and presidents of the most powerful countries, I’ve been invited to the White House, played poker with President Truman, gone to the Rockefellers’ parties. The tumor was removed at the Mayo Clinic, the best in the world, by the best surgeon in the United States. Who paid for the operation? The Chief, of course. Do you understand, Agustín? Like our country, I owe everything to Trujillo.”
Agustín Cabral regretted all the times, when in the familiarity of the Country Club or Congress or an outlying estate, in a circle of intimate friends (he believed they were intimate), he had laughed at jokes about the former Colgate model who owed his high diplomatic posts, and his position as Trujillo’s adviser, to the soaps, talcs, and perfumes he ordered for His Excellency and his good taste in choosing the ties, suits, shirts, pajamas, and shoes worn by the Chief.
“I also owe him everything I am and everything I’ve accomplished, Manuel,” he declared. “I understand you very well. And that’s why I’m prepared to do anything to regain his friendship.”
Manuel Alfonso looked at him, his head craning forward. He did not say anything for a long time but continued to scrutinize him, as if weighing, millimeter by millimeter, the seriousness of his words.
“Then let’s get to work, Egghead!”
“He was the second man, after Ramfis Trujillo, to flirt with me and pay me compliments,” says Urania. “Telling me I was pretty, I looked like my mama, what nice eyes. I had already gone to parties with boys, and danced. Five or six times. But no one had ever talked to me like that. Because Ramfis’s compliments were paid to a little girl. The first man who flirted with me as if I were a woman was my uncle, Manuel Alfonso.”
She has said all this very quickly, with mute fury, and none of her relatives asks any questions. The silence in the small dining room is like the one that precedes the thunder in a violent summer storm. A distant siren cuts through the night. Samson paces nervously along his wooden bar, ruffling his feathers.
“He seemed like an old man to me, the mangled way he talked made me laugh, the scar on his neck scared me.” Urania wrings her hands. “Why would he bother to flirt with me, why just then? But afterward I thought a good deal about all the compliments he paid me.”
She falls silent again, exhausted. Lucinda asks a question—“You were fourteen, weren