The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [187]
“A few hours, perhaps a day if I double the serum. But in his condition, he won’t survive another shock. It’s incredible that he’s lasted four months, General.”
“Move away, then. I won’t let him die a natural death. Stand behind me, you don’t want any cartridges to hit you.”
With great joy, General José René Román felt the final burst of gunfire.
21
When Dr. Marcelino Vélez Santana, who had gone out for news, came back to the airless attic of Dr. Robert Reid Cabral’s little Moorish-style house, where they had already spent two days, to place a sympathetic hand on Turk’s shoulder and tell him that the caliés had stormed his house on Mahatma Gandhi and taken away his wife and children, Salvador Estrella Sadhalá decided to turn himself in. He was sweating, gasping for breath. What else could he do? Let those savages kill his wife and children? They were certainly being tortured. He felt too much anguish to pray for his family. That was when he told his companions in the hideout what he was going to do.
“You know what that means, Turk,” Antonio de la Maza argued with him. “They’ll abuse and torture you in the most barbaric way before they kill you.”
“And they’ll go on hurting your family in front of you, to make you betray everybody,” insisted General Juan Tomás Díaz.
“Nobody will make me open my mouth, even if they burn me alive,” he swore with tears in his eyes. “The only one I’ll name is that stinking Pupo Román.”
They asked him not to leave the hiding place before they did, and Salvador agreed to stay one more night. The thought of his wife and children—fourteen-year-old Luis and Carmen Elly, who had just turned four—in the dungeons of the SIM, surrounded by sadistic thugs, kept him awake all night, gasping for breath, not praying, not thinking about anything else. Remorse gnawed at his heart: how could he have exposed his family like this? And the guilt he felt for shooting Pedro Livio Cedeño moved to the middle distance. Poor Pedro Livio! Where was he now? What horrors had been done to him?
On the afternoon of June 4, he was the first to leave Reid Cabral’s house. He hailed a cab at the corner and gave the address, on Calle Santiago, of the engineer Feliciano Sosa Mieses, his wife’s cousin, with whom he had always been good friends. All he wanted was to find out if he had any news of her and the children, and the rest of the family, but that was impossible. Feliciano himself opened the door, and when he saw him, he made a gesture—Vade retro!—as if the devil were standing in front of him.
“What are you doing here, Turk?” he exclaimed, furious. “Don’t you know I have a family? Do you want them to kill us? Get away! For the sake of everything you hold dear, get out of here!”
He closed the door with an expression of fear and revulsion that left Salvador not knowing what to do. He went back to the cab, feeling a depression that turned his bones to water. Despite the heat, he was dying of cold.
“You’ve recognized me, haven’t you?” he asked the driver, when he was already in his seat.
The man, who wore a baseball cap pulled down to his eyebrows, did not turn around to look at him.
“I recognized you when you got in,” he said very calmly. “Don’t worry, you’re safe with me. I’m anti-Trujillista too. If we have to run, we’ll run together. Where do you want to go?”
“To a church,” said Salvador. “It doesn’t matter which one.”
He would put himself in the hands of God and, if possible, make confession. After he had unburdened his conscience, he would ask the priest to call the guards. But after driving toward the center of town for a short time, along streets where the shadows were deepening, the driver warned him:
“That guy turned you in, señor. There are the caliés.”
“Stop,” Salvador ordered. “Before they kill you too.”
He crossed himself and got out of the cab, holding up his hands to indicate to the men with submachine guns and pistols in the Volkswagens that he would offer no resistance. They put him in handcuffs that bit into his wrists and pushed him into the back seat