The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [48]
Antonio did not allow him to joke. Without raising his voice or attracting the attention of nearby tables, with muted fury at so much innocence, he tried to make him understand:
“Don’t you get it, asshole? This is serious. The Galíndez kidnapping has put Trujillo in a very delicate situation with the Yankees. Everybody involved in the kidnapping is at risk. Murphy and you are very dangerous witnesses. And you maybe more than Murphy. Because you’re the one who took Galíndez to the Fundación Ranch, to Trujillo’s own house. Where’s your head?”
“I didn’t take Galíndez,” his brother insisted, and he clinked his glass against Antonio’s. “I took some guy I didn’t know, and he was dead drunk. I don’t know anything. Why don’t you trust the Chief? Didn’t he trust me with a really important mission?”
When they said goodbye that night, at the door of Tavito’s house, he had finally, on the insistence of his older brother, said okay, he would think over his suggestion. And not to worry: he’d keep his mouth shut.
It was the last time Antonio saw him alive. Three days after their conversation, Murphy disappeared. When Antonio came back to Ciudad Trujillo, Tavito had been arrested. He was being held incommunicado in La Victoria. Antonio went in person to request an audience with the Generalissimo, but the Chief would not receive him. He tried to speak to Colonel Cobián Parra, head of the SIM, but he had become invisible, and shortly afterward, on Trujillo’s orders, a soldier killed him in his office. In the next forty-eight hours, Antonio called or visited all the leaders and high officials in the regime whom he knew, from the President of the Senate, Agustín Cabral, to the president of the Dominican Party, Álvarez Pina. All of them had the same uneasy expression, all of them said that the best thing he could do, for his own security and theirs, was to stop calling and seeing people who could not help him and whom he was also putting in danger. “It was like banging your head against the wall,” Antonio later told General Juan Tomás Díaz. If Trujillo had received him, he would have begged, he would have gone down on his knees, anything to save Tavito.
Not long after this, at dawn, a SIM car carrying armed caliés in civilian clothes stopped at the door of Tavito de la Maza’s house. They took his body out of the vehicle and carelessly threw it into the heartsease in the little garden at the entrance. And as they were driving away they yelled at Altagracia, who had come to the door in her nightgown and was looking at the corpse in horror:
“Your husband hung himself in jail. We brought him back so you could give him a decent burial.”
“But not even that was the worst thing,” thought Antonio. No, seeing Tavito’s corpse, the rope of his alleged suicide still around his neck, his body tossed out like a dog’s at the entrance to his house by the thuggish killers who were the caliés of the SIM, that wasn’t the worst. Antonio had repeated this to himself dozens, hundreds of times over these four and a half years, as he devoted his days and nights, and the remnants of lucidity and intelligence he still possessed, to planning the revenge that—God willing—would become a reality tonight. The worst had been Tavito’s second death just days after the first one, when, making use of its entire informational and publicity apparatus—El Caribe and La Nación, the Dominican Voice television and radio stations, the radio stations of the Voice of the Tropics and Caribbean Radio, and a dozen small regional newspapers and radio stations—the regime, in one of its cruelest masquerades, published a letter allegedly written by Octavio de la Maza explaining his suicide. His remorse for having killed with his own hands his friend and colleague at Dominican Airlines, the pilot Murphy!