The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [158]
“We know you’re in there, García Guerrero! Come out with your hands up or you’ll die like a dog!”
“Not like a dog, no,” he murmured. As he opened the door with his left hand, he fired with his right. He managed to empty the clip of his pistol and saw the man who had urged him to surrender fall, bellowing, shot in the middle of the chest. But, annihilated by an untold number of bullets from submachine guns and revolvers, he did not see that in addition to killing one calié, he had wounded two others before dying himself. He did not see how his body was tied—the way hunters tie down deer killed in the Cordillera Central—to the roof of a Volkswagen, and how Johnny Abbes’s men, who were inside the Beetle, held on to his ankles and wrists and displayed him to bystanders in Independencia Park, through which his killers drove in triumph, while other caliés entered the house, found Aunt Meca where he had left her, more dead than alive, and shoving and spitting at her, took her to SIM headquarters, at the same time that a greedy mob, under the mocking or impassive eyes of the police, began to loot the house, making off with everything the caliés hadn’t stolen first, and after looting the house they destroyed it, tore down the walls, demolished the roof, and finally burned it until, at nightfall, there was nothing left but ashes and charred rubble.
18
When one of the military adjutants showed Luis Rodríguez, Manuel Alfonso’s chauffeur, into the office, the Generalissimo stood to receive him, something he did not do even with the most important people.
“How is the ambassador?” he asked with concern.
“Just fair, Chief.” The chauffeur put on an appropriate expression and touched his own throat. “A lot of pain, again. This morning he had me bring the doctor so he could give him an injection.”
Poor Manuel. It wasn’t fair, damn it. That a man who had devoted his life to caring for his body, to being handsome and elegant, to resisting the perverse law of nature that everything had to grow ugly, should be punished like this, where it would most humiliate him: in the face that had radiated life, grace, and health. He would have been better off dying on the operating table. When he saw him in Ciudad Trujillo after his operation at the Mayo Clinic, the Benefactor’s eyes had filled with tears. Manuel had been ravaged. And he could hardly understand him now that they had cut out half his tongue.
“Give him my best.” The Generalissimo examined Luis Rodríguez; dark suit, white shirt, blue tie, polished shoes: the best-dressed black in the Dominican Republic. “What’s the news?”
“Very good, Chief.” Luis Rodríguez’s large eyes flashed. “I found the girl, no problem. Whenever you say.”
“Are you sure it’s the same one?”
The large dark face, with its scars and mustache, nodded several times.
“Absolutely sure. The one who gave you flowers on Monday, for the San Cristóbal Youth Group. Yolanda Esterel. Seventeen years old. Here’s her picture.”
It was a photograph from a student ID, but Trujillo recognized the languid eyes, the mouth with the plump lips, the hair hanging loose to her shoulders. The girl had led the parade of students, carrying a large photograph of the Generalissimo, past the raised platform in the main park of San Cristóbal, and then came up on the dais to present him with a bouquet of roses and hydrangeas wrapped in cellophane. He remembered her plump, rounded body, her small breasts moving suggestively inside her blouse, her flaring hips. A tingling in his testicles raised his spirits.
“Take her to Mahogany House, around ten,” he said, repressing those fantasies that were wasting his time. “My best regards to Manuel. Tell him to take care of himself.”
“Yes, Chief, I’ll tell him. I’ll bring her there a little before ten.”
He left, bowing. On one of the six telephones on his lacquered desk, the Generalissimo called the guard post at Mahogany House so that Benita Sepúlveda