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By Root 1086 0

seen, heard, and experienced in El Nueve. Of all the statements his cellmates made, the one indelibly etched into Salvador’s brain was the story told by a sobbing Modesto Díaz. For the first few weeks he had been in a cell with Miguel Ángel Báez Díaz. Turk remembered his surprise on May 30 when this individual appeared in his Volkswagen on the San Cristóbal highway to assure them that Trujillo, with whom he had walked along the Avenida, would come, which was how Salvador learned that this powerful man among the Trujillista faithful was also part of the conspiracy. Abbes García and Ramfis, infuriated with him because he had been so close to Trujillo, were present for all the sessions of electric shocks, beatings, and burnings inflicted on him, and ordered the SIM doctors to revive him so the torture could continue. After two or three weeks, instead of the usual plate of foul-smelling corn mush, a pot with pieces of meat was brought to them in their cell. Miguel Ángel Báez and Modesto gulped it down, choking, eating with both hands until they were full. A short time later the jailer came in. He confronted Báez Díaz: General Ramfis Trujillo wanted to know if eating his own son didn’t make him sick. From the floor, Miguel Ángel insulted him: “You can tell that filthy son of a bitch for me that I hope he swallows his tongue and poisons himself.” The jailer started to laugh. He left and came back, and from the door he showed them the head of a boy, holding it up by the hair. Miguel Ángel Báez Díaz died a few hours later, in Modesto’s arms, of a heart attack.

The image of Miguel Ángel recognizing the head of Miguelito, his oldest son, obsessed Salvador; he had nightmares in which he saw Luisito and Carmen Elly decapitated. He would scream in his sleep, annoying his cellmates.

Unlike his friends, several of whom had tried to end their lives, Salvador was determined to resist until the end. He had reconciled himself with God—he prayed day and night—and the Church forbade suicide. Besides, it wasn’t easy to kill oneself. Huáscar Tejeda made the attempt with a tie he stole from one of the jailers (who kept it folded in his back pocket). He tried to hang himself but failed, and because he tried, his punishment intensified. Pedro Livio Cedeño tried to get himself killed by provoking Ramfis in the torture chamber: “son of a bitch,” “bastard,” “motherfucker,” “your slut of a mother La Españolita worked in a whorehouse before she was Trujillo’s girlfriend,” and he even spat on him. Ramfis did not fire the shots he longed for: “Not yet, not so fast. That’ll come at the end. You have to keep paying first.”

The second time Salvador Estrella Sadhalá learned the date, it was October 9, 1961. They had him put on trousers, and again he climbed the stairs to the room where the sunlight hurt his eyes and brought joy to his skin. Ramfis was there, pale and impeccable in his uniform of a four-star general, with that day’s El Caribe in his hand: October 9, 1961. Salvador read the large headline: “Letter from General Pedro A. Estrella to General Ramfis, son of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.”

“Read this letter your father sent me.” Ramfis handed him the paper. “He talks about you.”

Salvador, his wrists cut by handcuffs, grasped El Caribe. He felt vertigo and an indefinable mixture of revulsion and sadness, but he read the entire letter. General Piro Estrella called the Goat “the greatest of all Dominicans,” boasted of having been his friend, bodyguard, and protégé, and alluded to Salvador with vile epithets; he spoke of “the felony of a son gone astray” and of “my son’s treason when he betrayed his protector” and his own family. Worse than the insults was the final paragraph: his father thanked Ramfis, with bombastic servility, for giving him money to help him survive the confiscation of the family’s property because of his son’s participation in the assassination.

He returned to his cell sick with disgust and shame. He did not hold up his head again, although he attempted to hide his demoralization from his companions. “It isn’t Ramfis, it’s my father