The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [42]
He thought about how close the Pony was, and how good it would be to have a glass of rum with lots of ice, sitting on one of the rush-bottomed stools at the little bar, as he had so often in recent days, and feel the alcohol going to his head, distracting him, distancing him from Tavito and the bitterness, the frustration, the fever that had been his life since the cowardly murder of his younger brother, the one closest to him, the one he loved best. “Especially after the terrible lies they made up about him, to kill him a second time,” he thought. He returned slowly to the Chevrolet. It was a brand-new car that Antonio had imported from the United States and souped up and refined, explaining at the garage that as a landowner, and the manager of a sawmill in Restauración, on the Haitian border, he spent a good part of the year traveling and needed a faster, more reliable car. The time had come to test out this late-model Chevrolet, capable, thanks to adjustments to the cylinders and engine, of reaching two hundred kilometers an hour in a few moments, something the Generalissimo’s automobile was in no condition to do. He sat down again next to Antonio Imbert.
“Who was it?” said Amadito from the back seat.
“Those are things you don’t ask,” muttered Tony Imbert without turning around to look at Lieutenant García Guerrero.
“It’s no secret now,” said Antonio de la Maza. “It was Miguel Ángel Báez. You were right, Amadito. He’s definitely going to San Cristóbal tonight. He was delayed, but he won’t leave us hanging.”
“Miguel Ángel Báez Díaz?” Salvador Estrella Sadhalá whistled. “He’s involved too? You couldn’t ask for more. He’s the ultimate Trujillista. Wasn’t he vice president of the Dominican Party? He’s one of the men who walk every day with the Goat along the Malecón, kissing his ass, and go with him every Sunday to the Hipódromo.”
“He walked with him today too.” De la Maza nodded. “That’s why he knows he’s coming.”
There was a long silence.
“I know we have to be practical, that we need them,” Turk said with a sigh. “But I swear it makes me sick that somebody like Miguel Ángel is our ally now.”
“Now the saint, the puritan, the little Ángel with clean hands has been heard from.” Imbert made an effort to joke. “You see now, Amadito, why it’s better not to ask, better not to know who else is in this?”
“You talk as if all of us hadn’t been Trujillistas too, Salvador,” Antonio de la Maza growled. “Wasn’t Tony governor of Puerto Plata? Isn’t Amadito a military adjutant? Haven’t I managed the Goat’s sawmills in Restauración for the past twenty years? And the construction company where you work, doesn’t it belong to Trujillo too?”
“I take it back.” Salvador patted De la Maza’s arm. “I talk too much and say stupid things. You’re right. Anybody could say about us what I just said about Miguel Ángel. I didn’t say anything and you didn’t hear anything.”
But he had said it, because despite his serene, reasonable air that everyone liked so much, Salvador Estrella Sadhalá was capable of saying the cruelest things, driven by a spirit of justice that would suddenly take possession of him. He had said them to Antonio, his lifelong friend, in an argument when De la Maza could have shot him. “I wouldn’t sell my brother for a couple of bucks.” Those words, which kept them apart, not seeing or talking to each other for more than six months,