Angelita, nothing like what Trujillo and the Bountiful First Lady still inspire in you. Because, somehow, the three children have paid in degradation or violent deaths for their part in the family’s crimes. And you’ve never been able to avoid a certain benevolent feeling toward Ramfis. Why, Urania? Perhaps because of his emotional crises, his depressions and fits of madness, the mental instability his family always concealed and which, following the murders he ordered in June 1959, obliged Trujillo to commit him to a psychiatric hospital in Belgium. In all of Ramfis’s actions, even the cruelest, there was something caricatured, fraudulent, pathetic. Like his spectacular gifts to the Hollywood actresses Porfirio Rubirosa fucked free of charge (when he wasn’t making them pay him). Or the way he had of botching the plans devised for him by his father. Hadn’t it been grotesque, for instance, when Ramfis ruined the reception given in his honor by the Generalissimo to compensate for his failure at Fort Leavenworth? He had the Congress—“Did you propose the law, Papa?”—name Ramfis Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, and, on his return, he was to be recognized as such at a military review on the Avenida, at the foot of the obelisk. Everything was arranged, and the troops in formation, on that morning when the yacht Angelita, which the Generalissimo sent to pick him up in Miami, entered the port on the Ozama River, and Trujillo himself, accompanied by Joaquín Balaguer, went to the docking berth to welcome him and drive him to the parade. What astonishment, what disappointment, what confusion overwhelmed the Chief when he boarded the yacht and discovered the calamitous condition, the slobbering incapacity in which a shipboard orgy had left poor Ramfis. He could barely stand, he was incapable of speaking. His slack, recalcitrant tongue emitted grunts instead of words. His bulging eyes were glassy, his clothes streaked with vomit. And his cronies, and the women who accompanied them, were in even worse shape. Balaguer described it in his memoirs: Trujillo turned white and trembled with indignation. He ordered the cancellation of the military parade and Ramfis’s swearing-in as Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And, before he left, he picked up a glass and proposed a toast meant as a symbolic slap in the face of the worthless drone (his inebriation prevented him from understanding): “Here’s to work, the only thing that will bring prosperity to the Republic.”
Urania is overcome by another attack of hysterical laughter, and the invalid opens his eyes in terror.
“Don’t be afraid.” Urania becomes serious. “I can’t help laughing when I imagine the scene. Where were you at that moment, when your Chief discovered his boy drunk, surrounded by his drunken whores and buddies? On the platform on the Avenida, dressed in your morning coat, waiting for the new Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces? What explanation was given? The parade is canceled because General Ramfis is suffering from delirium tremens?”
She laughs again under the profound gaze of the invalid.
“A family to laugh at and cry over, not to be taken seriously,” Urania murmurs. “Sometimes you must have been ashamed of all of them. And felt fear and remorse, when you allowed yourself to, though that kind of audacity would be kept very secret. I’d like to know what you would have thought of the melodramatic fates met by the Chief’s darling children. Or the sordid story of the final years of Doña María Martínez, the Bountiful First Lady, the terrible, the vengeful, who screamed her demand that Trujillo’s assassins have their eyes put out and be skinned alive. Do you know that in the end she was eroded by arteriosclerosis? That the grasping woman secretly got all those millions and millions of dollars away from the Chief? And had all the numbers to the secret accounts in Switzerland and hid them from her children? With good reason, no doubt. She was afraid they’d steal her millions and bury her in an old-age home, where she’d spend her final years not