The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [179]
From that moment on, he was in a somnambulistic state. Time was eclipsed, or, rather, instead of moving forward it spun around in a monomaniacal repetition that depressed and infuriated him. He would not leave that state again in the four and a half months of life he had remaining, if what he had deserved to be called life and not hell, nightmare. Until October 12, 1961, he did not have a clear notion of chronology but did have an idea of mysterious eternity, which had never interested him. In the sudden attacks of lucidity that reminded him he was alive, that it hadn’t ended, he tortured himself with the same question: why, knowing that this was waiting for you, why didn’t you act as you should have? The question hurt him more than the tortures he faced with great courage, perhaps to prove to himself that cowardice was not the reason he had acted so indecisively on that endless night of May 31, 1961.
Incapable of making sense of his actions, he fell into contradictions and erratic initiatives. He ordered his brother-in-law, General Virgilio García Trujillo, to dispatch four tanks and three infantry companies from San Isidro, where the armored divisions were stationed, to reinforce the December 18 Fortress. But immediately after that he decided to leave the Fortress and go to the Palace. He instructed the head of the Army General Staff, the young General Tuntin Sánchez, to keep him informed regarding the search. Before he left he called Américo Dante Minervino, at La Victoria. He categorically ordered him to immediately liquidate, with absolute secrecy, the prisoners Major Segundo Imbert Barreras and Rafael Augusto Sánchez Saulley, and to make the bodies disappear, for he feared that Antonio Imbert, a member of the action group, might have told his brother about his involvement in the conspiracy. Américo Dante Minervino, accustomed to these kinds of missions, asked no questions: “Understood, General.” He bewildered General Tuntin Sánchez by telling him to inform the SIM, Army, and Air Force patrols participating in the search that persons on the lists of “enemies” and “the disaffected,” which had been distributed to them, ought to be terminated at the first sign of resisting arrest. (“We don’t want prisoners who’ll be used to unleash international campaigns against our country.”) His subordinate made no comment. He would transmit your instructions exactly, General.
As he left the Fortress to go to the Palace, the lieutenant of the guard informed him that two civilians in a car, one of whom claimed to be his brother Ramón (Bibín), had come to the entrance demanding to see him. Following his orders, he had obliged them to leave. He nodded, not saying a word. That meant his brother was in on the plot, that Bibín too would have to pay for his doubts and evasions. Sunk in a kind of hypnosis, he thought his inaction could be due to the fact that although the body of the Chief might be dead, his soul, spirit, whatever you called it, still enslaved him.
At the National Palace he found confusion and desolation. Almost the entire Trujillo family had gathered there. Petán, in riding boots and with a submachine gun slung over his shoulder, had just arrived from his fiefdom in Bonao and was pacing back and forth like a cartoon cowboy. Héctor (Blacky), sitting on a sofa, rubbed his arms as if he were cold. Mireya, and his mother-in-law Marina, were consoling Doña María,