The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [206]
One night, after eating his usual austere supper, with his sisters, of chicken broth, white rice, salad, and milk pudding, the President fainted when he stood to go up to bed. He lost consciousness for only a few seconds, but Dr. Félix Goico warned him: if he continued working at this pace, before the end of the year his heart or his brain would explode like a grenade. He had to rest more—since the death of Trujillo he had slept no more than three or four hours a night—exercise, and relax on weekends. He forced himself to spend five hours a night in bed, and after lunch he would walk, though far from Avenida George Washington, to avoid compromising associations; he would go to the former Ramfis Park, renamed for Eugenio María de Hostos. And to ease his spirit, for several hours on Sundays following Mass he would read romantic or Modernist poems, or the Castilian classics of the Golden Age. On occasion some irate citizen would insult him on the street—“Balaguer, the paper doll!”—but most of the time people offered a greeting: “Good afternoon, Mr. President.” He would thank them ceremoniously, tipping his hat, which he was in the habit of wearing pulled down all the way to his ears so the wind would not blow it off.
On October 2, 1961, when he announced in the General Assembly of the United Nations, in New York, that “in the Dominican Republic an authentic democracy and a new set of circumstances are being born,” he acknowledged, before approximately one hundred delegates, that the Trujillo dictatorship had been an anachronism that had savagely infringed rights and freedoms. And he asked the free nations to help him restore law and liberty to the Dominicans. A few days later, he received a bitter letter from Doña María Martínez, in Paris. The Bountiful First Lady complained that the President had drawn an “unjust” picture of the Trujillo Era, omitting “all the good things my husband also did, and that you yourself praised so highly over the course of thirty-one years.” But it wasn’t María Martínez who troubled the President; it was Trujillo’s brothers. He learned that Petán and Blacky had held a stormy meeting with Ramfis, demanding to know whether he was going to allow that little weakling to go to the UN and insult his father. The time had come to get him out of the National Palace and put the Trujillo family back in power, which is what the people were demanding! Ramfis replied that if he led a coup, an invasion by the Marines would be inevitable: John Calvin Hill had told him so personally. The only chance for holding on to anything was to close ranks behind the fragile legality of the President. Balaguer was skillfully maneuvering to get the OAS and the State Department to lift sanctions. And to achieve this he was obliged to give speeches like the one at the UN, which were contrary to his convictions.
But at the meeting he had with the chief executive shortly after Balaguer returned from New York, Trujillo’s son displayed much less tolerance. His animosity was so intense that a rupture seemed inevitable.
“Are you going to keep attacking Papa the way you did in the General Assembly?” Sitting on the chair that the Chief had occupied during their last interview, only hours before he was killed, Ramfis spoke without looking at him, his eyes fixed on the sea.
“I have no alternative, General,” the President said mournfully. “If I want them to believe that everything is changing, that the country is opening to democracy, I must make a self-critical examination of the past. It is painful for you, I know. It is