The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [45]
“For the sake of twenty years of friendship, help me, Juan Tomás. I have to kill him! I have to avenge Tavito!”
The general put his hand over his friend’s mouth. He looked around, indicating with a gesture that the servants could hear them. He took him behind the stables, where they usually did target practice.
“We’ll do it together, Antonio. To avenge Tavito and so many other Dominicans for the shame we carry inside us.”
Antonio and Juan Tomás had been close friends since the time De la Maza had been one of the Benefactor’s military adjutants. The only good thing he could remember of the two years when as a lieutenant, then as a captain, he shared the Generalissimo’s life, accompanying him on his trips into the interior, on his departures from Government House to go to the Congress, the Hipódromo, receptions and performances, political meetings and amorous trysts, visits and appointments with associates, allies, and cronies, public, private, and ultrasecret meetings. Without ever becoming a staunch Trujillista, as Juan Tomás was back then, and though secretly harboring some of the rancor every Horacista felt toward the person who had ended the political career of President Horacio Vázquez, Antonio could not resist the magnetism that radiated from the tireless man who could work for twenty hours and then, after two or three hours of sleep, begin at dawn the next day as fresh as an adolescent. The man who, according to popular legend, did not sweat, did not sleep, never had a wrinkle on his uniform, his tuxedo, or his street clothes, and who, during the years Antonio was part of his iron guard, had, in effect, transformed this country. Not only because of the highways, bridges, and industries he built, but also because in every sphere—political, military, institutional, social, economic—he was amassing such extraordinary power that all the dictators the Dominican Republic had endured in its entire history as a republic—including Ulises Heureaux (Lilís), who had once seemed so merciless—were pygmies compared to him.
In Antonio’s case, respect and fascination never turned into admiration, never became the abject, servile love other Trujillistas professed for their leader. Including Juan Tomás, who, since 1957, had explored with him all the possible ways they could rid the Dominican Republic of the figure who was crushing it and sucking it dry, but in the 1940s was a fanatical follower of the Benefactor, capable of committing any crime for the man whom he considered the nation’s savior, the statesman who had returned to Dominican control the customs service formerly administered by the Yankees, resolved the problem of foreign debt to the United States and earned the title, granted to him by the Congress, of Restorer of Financial Independence, and created a modern, professional Armed Forces, the best-equipped in the Caribbean. During those years, Antonio would not have dared to speak ill of Trujillo to Juan Tomás Díaz, who scaled the ranks of the Army until he became a three-star general and obtained command of the Military Region of La Vega, where he was caught off guard by the invasion of July 14, 1959, which was the beginning of his fall into disgrace. After that happened, Juan Tomás no longer had any illusions about the regime. When they were alone, when he was sure nobody could hear him, when they were hunting in the hills of Moca or La Vega, during family dinners on Sundays, he confessed to Antonio that everything mortified him—the assassinations, the disappearances, the tortures, the precariousness of life, the corruption, the surrender of body, soul, and conscience