The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [227]
“It won’t be like before, will it, Uranita?” Manolita embraces her. “We’ll write, you’ll answer our letters. Once in a while you’ll come for a vacation, visit your family. Won’t you, Urania?”
“Absolutely,” Urania agrees, embracing her in turn. But she isn’t sure. Perhaps, once she’s left this house, this country, she’ll prefer to forget this family again, these people, her past; she’ll regret coming here and talking the way she did tonight. Or maybe not. Maybe she’ll want to rebuild somehow the connection with these remnants of her family. “Can I call a cab at this hour?”
“We’ll drive you.” Lucindita stands up.
When Urania leans over to embrace her Aunt Adelina, the old woman clutches at her, digging her sharp fingers, curved like talons, into her. She seemed to have regained her composure but now she is agitated again, with an anguished look of astonishment in her sunken eyes, surrounded by wrinkles.
“Perhaps Agustín didn’t know,” she stammers with difficulty, as if her dentures were loose. “Manuel Alfonso could have deceived my brother, he was basically very naive. Don’t be so angry with him, Urania. He’s had a lonely life, he’s suffered a lot. God teaches us to forgive. For the sake of your mother, she was such a good Catholic.”
Urania tries to calm her: “Yes, yes, Aunt Adelina, whatever you say, don’t be upset, I beg you.” Her two daughters stand by the old woman, trying to soothe her. Finally she grows calmer and shrinks into her chair, her face contorted.
“Forgive me for telling you these things.” Urania kisses her on the forehead. “It was stupid. But it’s been burning in me for so many years.”
“She’ll be all right now,” says Manolita. “I’ll stay with her. You did the right thing by telling us. Please write, and call us once in a while. Let’s not lose touch again, Urania.”
“I promise,” says Urania.
She walks with her to the door and says goodbye as they stand beside Lucinda’s old car, a secondhand Toyota parked at the entrance. When she embraces her again, Manolita’s eyes are filled with tears.
In the car, on the way to the Hotel Jaragua, as they drive along the deserted streets of Gazcue, Urania is tormented. Why did you do it? Are you going to feel different, free of all the incubi that have sucked out your soul? Of course not. It was a weakness, a fall into the kind of sentimentality and self-pity you’ve always hated in other people. Were you hoping they’d feel sorry for you, pity you? Is that the satisfaction you wanted?
And then—sometimes it’s a cure for depression—she finally thinks of Johnny Abbes García. She heard the story years ago, from Esperancita Bourricaud, a colleague of hers at the World Bank who had been assigned to Port-au-Prince, where the former head of the SIM had settled after traveling through Canada, France, and Switzerland—he never set foot in Japan—in the golden exile imposed on him by Balaguer. Esperancita and the Abbes Garcías were neighbors. He went to Haiti as an adviser to President Duvalier. But, after a time, he began to plot against his new chief, supporting the subversive plans of Colonel Dominique, the Haitian dictator’s son-in-law. Papa Doc resolved the problem in ten minutes. In the middle of the morning, Esperancita saw about twenty Tonton Macoutes climb out of two vans and storm her neighbors’ house, guns blazing. Ten minutes, that’s all. They killed Johnny Abbes, they killed Johnny Abbes’s wife, they killed Johnny Abbes’s two young children, they killed Johnny Abbes’s two servants, and they also killed Johnny Abbes’s chickens, rabbits, and dogs. Then they set fire to the house and left. Esperancita Bourricaud needed psychiatric help when she returned to Washington. Is that the death you would have wanted for Papa? Are you filled with rancor and hatred, as Aunt Adelina said? She feels empty—again.
“I’m very sorry about that scene, all the melodrama, Lucindita,” she says at the door of the Jaragua. She has to speak loudly because the music playing in the casino on the ground floor drowns out her voice.