The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [183]
Dr. Balaguer nodded gently, his expression not changing in the slightest.
“For great ills, great remedies,” he murmured cryptically. And, standing up, he walked to the door of his office and went out without saying goodbye.
Román remained there, not knowing what to do. He chose to go to his own office. At two-thirty in the morning he drove Mireya, who had taken a tranquilizer, to the house in Gazcue. There he found his brother Bibín forcing the soldiers on guard to drink from a bottle of Carta Dorada that he brandished like a flag. Bibín, the idler, the drinker, the rake, the wastrel, good-natured Bibín could barely stand. He practically had to carry him to the upstairs bathroom on the pretext that he would help him vomit and wash his face. As soon as they were alone, Bibín burst into tears. He contemplated his brother with infinite sadness in his tear-filled eyes. A thread of spittle hung from his lips like a spiderweb. Lowering his voice, choking up, he said that he, Luis Amiama, and Juan Tomás had spent the night looking for him all over the city and became so desperate they even cursed him. What happened, Pupo? Why didn’t he do anything? Why did he hide? Wasn’t there a Plan? The action group did their part. They brought him the body as he had asked.
“Why didn’t you do your part, Pupo?” Sighs shook his chest. “What’s going to happen to us now?”
“There was a problem, Bibín. Razor Espaillat showed up, he saw everything. There was nothing I could do. Now…”
“Now we’re fucked,” Bibín said hoarsely, swallowing mucus. “Luis Amiama, Juan Tomás, Antonio de la Maza, Tony Imbert, all of us. But especially you. You, and then me, because I’m your brother. If you love me at all, shoot me right now, Pupo. Fire that submachine gun, make the most of my being drunk. Before they do it. For the sake of what you love best, Pupo.”
At that moment, Álvaro knocked at the bathroom door: they had just discovered the Generalissimo’s body in the trunk of a car at the house of General Juan Tomás Díaz.
He did not close his eyes that night, or the next one, or the one after that, and, probably, in four and a half months did not experience again what sleep had once been for him—resting, forgetting about himself and others, dissolving into a nonexistence from which he returned restored, his energy renewed—although he did lose consciousness often, and spent long hours, days, nights in a mindless stupor without images or ideas, with a firm desire for death to come and free him. Everything mixed up and scrambled, as if time had turned into a stew, a jumble in which before, now, and afterward had no logical sequence but were recurrent. He clearly remembered the sight, when he reached the National Palace, of Doña María Martínez de Trujillo bellowing before the corpse of the Chief: “Let the blood of his assassins run until the last drop!” And, as if it came next, but it could have happened only a day later, the svelte, uniformed, impeccable figure of Ramfis, pale and rigid, leaning without bending over the carved coffin, contemplating the painted face of the Chief, and murmuring: “I won’t be as generous as you were with our enemies, Papa.” It seemed to him that Ramfis was talking not to his father but to him. He gave him a hard embrace and groaned in his ear: “What an irreparable loss, Ramfis. It’s good we have you.”
He saw himself immediately after that, in his parade uniform, the inseparable M-1 submachine gun in his hand, in the crowded church in San Cristóbal, attending the funeral rites for the Chief. Some lines from the address by a much larger President Balaguer—“Here, ladies and gentlemen, split by a flash of treacherous lightning, lies the powerful oak that for more than thirty years defied all thunderbolts and emerged victorious from every storm”—brought tears to his eyes. He listened, sitting next to a stony Ramfis, who was surrounded by bodyguards carrying submachine