The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [219]
“He also gave me some advice,” says Urania. “What things I shouldn’t do because they annoyed the Chief. It made him happy when girls were tender, but not when they exaggerated their admiration, their love. I asked myself: ‘Is he really saying these things to me?’”
They had entered San Cristóbal, a city made famous because the Chief had been born there, in a modest little house next to the great church that Trujillo had constructed, and to which Senator Cabral had taken Uranita on a visit, explaining the biblical frescoes painted on the walls by Vela Zaneti, an exiled Spanish artist to whom the magnanimous Chief had opened the doors of the Dominican Republic. On that trip to San Cristóbal, Senator Cabral also showed her the bottle factory and the weapons factory and the entire valley watered by the Nigua. And now her father was sending her to San Cristóbal to beg the Chief to forgive him, to unfreeze his accounts, to make him President of the Senate again.
“From Mahogany House there is a marvelous view of the valley, the Nigua River, the horses and cattle on the Fundación Ranch,” Manuel Alfonso explained in detail.
The car, after passing the first guard post, began to ascend the hill; at the top, using the precious wood of the mahogany trees that were beginning to disappear from the island, the house had been erected to which the Generalissimo withdrew two or three days a week to have his secret assignations, do his dirty work, and negotiate risky business deals with complete discretion.
“For a long time the only thing I remembered about Mahogany House was the rug. It covered the entire room and had a gigantic national seal, in full color, embroidered on it. Later, I remembered other things. In the bedroom, a glass-doored closet filled with uniforms of every style, and above them, a row of military hats and caps. Even a Napoleonic two-cornered hat.”
She does not laugh. She looks somber, with something cavernous in her eyes and voice. Her Aunt Adelina does not laugh, and neither does Manolita, or Lucinda, or Marianita, who has just come back from the bathroom, where she went to vomit. (She heard her retching.) The parrot is still sleeping. Silence has fallen on Santo Domingo: no car horns or engines, no radios, no drunken laughter, no barking of stray dogs.
“My name is Benita Sepúlveda, come in,” the woman said to her at the foot of the wooden staircase. Advanced in years, indifferent, and yet with something maternal in her gestures and expression, she wore a uniform, and a scarf around her head. “Come this way.”
“She was the housekeeper,” Urania says, “the one responsible for placing fresh flowers in all the rooms, every day. Manuel Alfonso stayed behind, talking to the officer at the door. I never saw him again.”
Benita Sepúlveda, pointing with a plump little hand at the darkness beyond the windows protected by metal grillwork, said “that” was a grove of oaks, and in the orchard there were plenty of mangoes and cedars; but the most beautiful things on the place were the almond and mahogany trees that grew around the house and whose perfumed branches were in every corner. Did she smell them? Did she? She’d have a chance to see the countryside—the river, the valley, the sugar mill, the stables on the Fundación Ranch—early in the morning, when the sun came up. Would she have a Dominican breakfast, with mashed plantains, fried eggs, sausage or smoked meat, and fruit juice? Or just coffee, like the Generalissimo?
“It was from Benita Sepúlveda that I learned I was going to spend the night there, that I would sleep with His Excellency. What a great honor!”
The housekeeper, with the assurance that comes from long practice, had her stop on the first landing and go into a spacious, dimly lit room. It was a bar. It had wooden seating all around it, the backrests against the wall, leaving ample room for dancing in the center; an enormous jukebox; and shelves behind the bar crowded with bottles and different kinds of glasses.